Stefan Zweig was an Austrian-Jewish author and intellectual who fled Austro-fascism and Nazi Germany, and took his own life in Brazil in early 1942. The resurgence of interest in Zweig’s life in the last few decades has introduced new methods of interpretation of his life as a refugee. But many scholars have not acknowledged Zweig’s relationships he formed with South American intellectuals while in exile there. Instead, the primary focus has been on his identity as a European, and his subsequent suicide. This paper will argue that Zweig’s identity as a refugee included a radical re-interpretation of history and perspective of the world outside of Europe, which had been previously based upon nationalistic and Euro-centric interpretations. Zweig’s exile was one of not only spatial displacement, but was also one of historical displacement, and the physical and political realities in Brazil contributed to this aspect of his life as a refugee.

In August, 1944, the Allies embarked on one of the "two supreme operations of 1944," Operation Anvil/Dragoon. It is an operation that almost did not happen. Envisioned as a direct supporting operation of Overlord, Anvil soon ran into troubles. Other operations taking away resources away from Anvil in addition to opposition from the highest levels of Allied command threatened Anvil. This thesis chronicles the evolution of this debate, as well as shed light on one of the most overlooked and successful operations the Allies embarked on in World War II.

Most primitive mythologies recognize that suffering can provide an opportunity for growth, but Western man has developed a mythology in which suffering is considered evil. He conceives of some power in the universe which will oppose evil and abolish it for him; God, and more recently science an, technology, were the hoped-for saviors that would rescue him. Both have been disappointing as saviors, and Western culture seems paralyzed by its confrontation with a future which seems death-filled. The primitive conception of death as that through which one passes in initiatory suffering has been unavailable because the mythologies in which it was framed are outdated. However, some post-World-War-II novels are reflecting a new mythology which recognizes the threat of death as the terrifying face the universe shows during initiation. A few of these novels tap deep psychological sources from which mythical images traditionally come and reflect the necessity of the passage through the hell of initiation without hope of a savior. One of the best of these is Wright Morris's The Field of Vision, in which the Scanlon story is a central statement of the mythological ground ahead. This gripping tale uses the pioneer journey west to tell of the mysterious passage the unconscious can make through the ccntempoorary desert to win the bride of life. It serves as an illuminator and normative guide for evaluating how other novels avoid or confront the initiatory hell. By the Scanlon standard, some contemporary mythology is escapist. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle express the youthful desire to arrive almost automatically at a new age, either with help from a new Christ or through practicing a simplistic morality. Other novels tell of the agony of modern Grail questers who sense that a viable myth is possible, but cannot completely envision it nor accomplish the passage through the void to gain it. The hindrances in each case are powerful forces which exert control over society. These forces are scientific objectivity and racism in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and an unbeatable Combine which forces people to be rabbits and like it in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Thomas Pynchon's The Cring of Lot 49 makes clear thet the confining forces are sustained because the secret of life has been lost, and man needs protection from the void which he cannot face without the secret. Saul Bellow deals directly with mythologies in Mr. Sammler's Planet. On the one hand is the popular view which ignores what every man knows is right and asserts instead that whatever one wants, he should have. This view replaces the archetypal sustaining images with a myth of continuous progress which, now that progress has faltered, makes living seem overwhelmingly hopeless. However, Sammler believes that meaning is established in life even as it collapses. The good man is part of an elite which is unusually intelligent and discerning, able to develop the will to carry out the contract with life and to enjoy the mystic potency in living. The novels in this study indicate a trend toward a reformulation of the basic mythological structures of Western man. Possibly the belief is weakening that something from somewhere will save him from his given situation, and a mythology is emerging which tells of significant life in the common, discovered through an awareness of the archetypal consciousness.

A study of the phases of war present in Salinger's stories - "The Hang of It," "Personal Notes of an Infantryman," "Soft Boiled Sergeant," "Last Day of the Last Furlough," "Once a Week Won't Kill You," A Boy in France," "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," "The Stranger," "A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist at All," "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "A Girl I Knew," "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," and "For Esme - With Love and Squalor." The role of war in each of these stories follows a cycle that reflects Salinger's own war experience, as well as the very condition of war itself.

English version Subject: Pharmacy in the Czech lands between 1938/39 and 1945. Objective: Study of pharmacy in the Czech Lands between 1938 and 1945 and study of the pharmaceutical branches, especially pharmacy practice, pharmaceutical education, pharmaceutical industry and professional organizations during the World War II. Methods: Processing of the historical pharmaceutical press from Czech pharmaceutical museum in Kuks. Results: The financial situation of pharmaceutical staff between 1939 and 1945 was increased by pay rise and turnover rise in pharmacy. Short supply of ingredients was equalized by increase in drug production in pharmaceutical industry. University education of pharmacists was stopped by Germans in 1939. Jewish companies in pharmaceutical industry were impouded by german merchants. Conclusion: Business in pharmacy during the World War II was successful for pharmacy owners and their employees. Many pharmaceutical problems such as increase in pharmaceutical rates, build up of Pharmaceutical centre and particular unification of professional organizations was resolved.

This study explores the usage of the memory of the bombings of Belgrade from WWII in the time period of Yugoslavia from 1995 until 2003. Considering that Belgrade was bombed by two opposing forces during WWII, once by Nazis in 1941, and the second time by the Allies in 1944, and due to the fact that the exploitation of memory of the two bombings was rather unequal during the Socialist Yugoslavia with the latter bombings being a taboo theme, I was interested in answering following questions: how the two memories were used in the times before, during and after the NATO Air Strikes of Yugoslavia, if the memory of the Allied bombings emerged in the public sphere and how it coexists with the one of the Nazi bombings. My primary sources are articles from "Politika" newspaper issues from commemoration dates during the research time frame from 1995 until 2003. The final conclusion shows the dominant usage of the memory of the Nazi bombings throughout the whole time frame even though we could witness the emergence of the memory of the Allied bombings.

7 The abstract I consider the works of Peter Sloterdijk in my thesis. I concentrate to Sloterdijk's way of understanding of the topic cynicism in the relationship to kynicism. At first I try to describe the topic cynicism which I consider as very important to understand Sloterdijk's way of understanding of the European history in the book Falls Europa erwacht. I try to explain, how the cynicism influences various parts of life, I consider particularly the military cynicism and the cynicism of power. I consider the political and philosophical vision of Europe in the second part of the thesis because the history of Europe and its state nowadays was influenced by the cynicism very strongly. I try to explain Sloterdijk's imagination of the way out from this situation.

The purpose of this study is to focus on the destiny of an unknown Jewish poet Ilse Weber (1903-1944). In the first part, the emergence of the Holocaust Literature is presented. The thesis then illustrates the history of the Jewish population in the Czech lands. The main attention is paid to the life and writings of Ilse Weber. She was born in Vítkovice near Ostrava and wrote in German, notably songs, fairy tales and theater pieces for children. During her imprisonment in the Terezín concentration camp she wrote around sixty poems, which were luckily saved. These writings describe the horror of her surroundings. Her husband and the older son survived the war, Ilse and the younger boy were sent to the gas chamber on arrival at Auschwitz in October 1944. In conclusion, the thesis argues that this forgotten poet was an admirable personality, who was able to grasp emotions and give hope to others in hard times. KEYWORDS Holocaust, World War II, literature, Jews, Terezín.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Mark Parillo / America forged a successful way of war that relied on adaptation, and this trait was not simply an adjunct to industrial might as a reason why the Allies won World War II. An American penchant for organization and corporate management allowed for mass production of war material, which clearly contributed to Axis defeat. However, to claim that the Axis Powers were merely overwhelmed by an avalanche of weapons and supply is reductionist. This dissertation contends that adaptability was as much an American way of war as mass production and overwhelming firepower. The particular nature of American adaptability and its contribution to Allied victory are exhibited in the Army’s use of animal power during a conflict synonymous with mechanized warfare and advanced technology. The application of pre-modern technology in a modern, machine-driven war was not archaic. On the contrary, the nature of American adaptability allowed the Army to move forward by retreating down a culturally constructed hierarchy of modernity and employing the traditional mode of animal transportation. The Army’s technological regression from motors to mules in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and China-Burma-India during World War II is the focus of this work. Americans possessed material abundance in campaigns across Western Europe and the Central Pacific in 1944 and 1945, as German and Japanese prisoners attested. Mountains of artillery shells, fuel, and food, however, did not exist in the backwater “sideshows.” American military success on the periphery was not due to material abundance, nor to a greater sense of determination. America won the backwater campaigns because the nature of American adaptability was cultivated over the centuries and converted from a way of life to an American way of war.

The French Quarter of New Orleans and its famous Bourbon Street receive millions of visitors each year and are the subjects of both scholarly study and the popular imagination. Bourbon Street’s history of striptease has largely been untouched by scholars. In the post-World War II period, nightclubs featuring striptease entertainment drew the attention of reform-minded city and police officials, who attempted to purge striptease from the city’s historic district in an effort to whitewash the city’s main tourist area and appeal to potential outside economic industrial opportunities. Through news articles, correspondence, tourism brochures, and published reports, this thesis explores how striptease endured on Bourbon Street despite various reform campaigns against it and shows that striptease was an integral part of the New Orleans tourist economy in the postwar period.