This dissertation examines forms of collaboration among a small group of German-speaking artists and intellectuals between 1911 and 1941, illuminating the mechanics and meaning of their life and work together. The group, which included the writers Karin Michaëlis, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, the actress Helene Weigel, and the dramaturge Margarete Steffin, had its roots in turn-of-the-century Vienna and in Weimar Berlin, but found its fullest expression in southern Denmark, where most of its members spent the first six years of their exile from Nazi Germany. It argues that because of their commitments to socialism and their relative disinterest in liberal notions of singular authorship, these figures devised a system of intellectual cooperation that included co-writing, conversation, criticism, correspondence, editorial intervention, and performative experimentation. It prioritized notions of labor, rigor, mutual obligation, and togetherness over more conventional concerns about accreditation and authorship. Rejecting a model based on sex and competition between "Brecht's women" or on an asymmetrical friendship between Brecht and Benjamin, this dissertation shows that, during their exile in the area of southern Denmark around the Svendborg Sound (1933-1939), the group developed a stable division of labor and a daily routine which resisted hierarchy to a significant degree. Reaching across their differences in gender, ethnicity, health- and exile-status, and across their differing understandings of socialism, this group strove for a unity that would make good use of their dissimilarities. They sometimes failed to achieve this, however, because of discriminatory habits of mind and behavior. Their lapses into sexism or anti-semitism necessarily complicate an understanding of their priorities and limits, delineating the boundaries of the group and illuminating the difficulties of pushing against the norms of the Europe of the 1930s. A repertoire of care that included conversation, leisure, and the giving of advice, help, and gifts smoothed the way for productive intellectual collaboration as well as a sustainable daily life on the Svendborg Sound. Thus, this project raises questions about the study of intellectual history beyond the study of ideas and texts to incorporate the social, material, and spatial realities of every day life. / 2022-07-31T00:00:00Z

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This study examines the rise and fall of the modern Belarusian national movement during the quarter century between 1906, the year when the first Belarusian paper appeared, until its demise around 1931, as a result of political repression in the Soviet Union and Poland. While the first steps towards a modern, ethnic definition of the nation, were taken around the turn of the century era, the February Revolution and the German occupation energized the national movement. The 1920s Soviet nationalities policies brought about a Belarusian cultural renaissance, but also highlighted the difficulties of introducing new concepts of nationality in a relatively underdeveloped region. The results of these experimental policies were not what Moscow had expected. In the BSSR the local population often misunderstood the Soviet nationalities policies, resisting the new and unknown taxonomies. While the Belarusization had strengthened the nationally conscious elites in the republic, it failed to generate popular support for Soviet rule among the Belarusian peasantry. In Western Belarus, which was under Polish rule from 1921 to 1939, the peasantry was often alienated from the nationalist intelligentsia. After Pilsudski's coup d'etat established authoritarian rule in Poland in 1926, the Soviet government again became concerned about the threat of a Polish invasion. After a brief experimentation with liberalization of its nationalities policies, the Pilsudski's regime stepped up the efforts to Polonize Western Belarus. At the same time, from 1927 it suppressed, jailed and deported to the Soviet Union many leading Belarusian activists, accusing them for irredentism and pro-Soviet sentiments. By 1929-1930, opposition to unpopular Soviet polices brought the borderlands of the BSSR close to a popular uprising. This, in turn prompted Moscow to crack down on the national communists in Minsk. The purges of the BSSR elites were more thorough than in any other republic, leading to the demise of 90 per cent of the Belarusian intelligentsia. The national mobilization was interrupted. For the next six decades the Soviet Belarusian nation building was carried out from above, increasingly in the Russian language, and with little autonomy for the government in Minsk.

Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Robert Looney, Donald Abenheim. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-109). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-179).

Abstract not available.