Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Critical interpretations of the work of Mario Giacomelli often disagree as to whether he should be classified within the style of Italian neorealism. This thesis argues that Giacomelli's photography strikes a balance between realism and abstraction that is best explained as neorealist. Neorealist films such as Rome, Open City (1945) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) sought to capture the social realities of postwar Italy. The realism in these films is complicated however, subjecting postwar social actuality to the artistic initiative of the director. I seek to identify the filmic qualities in Giacomelli's work to clarify a connection to neorealism. Though Giacomelli physically manipulated his images, these manipulations give his images the appearance of a film. To reveal Giacomelli's connection to neorealism, I will investigate the cinematic qualities of mise-en-scene, montage and narrative. This thesis will argue that Giacomelli's photography stems from a cinematic approach that was first developed in neorealism.

This dissertation examines a key transformation in the history of Jewish nationalism in the 1940s - the decline of autonomist visions in Jewish national thought oriented toward Jewish life as a minority community in Eastern Europe, and the emergence of a Jewish ethnic-nation state in Palestine as the dominant mode of Jewish national expression. The main argument advanced in this dissertation is that this shift cannot be explained exclusively as a Jewish response to the Holocaust, but ought to situated as part of the larger process of the homogenization of the nation- state in East Central Europe during the war and in its immediate aftermath through genocide and ethnic cleansing, population transfers and the rejection of international norms regarding the protection of minorities. Drawing on a variety of archival and published sources in Hebrew, Yiddish and English, this study reconstructs the vibrant Jewish postwar planning scene in New- York, Palestine and London. From the start of the war tens of Jewish leaders and scholars, many whom had bee recent refugees from Europe, turned to plan for the Jewish future after the war. This dissertation examines how these Jewish leaders and thinkers grappled with the question of the future of the Jews as they debated whether Jews would be able reintegrate into Eastern Europe after the war, learned about the extermination of European Jewry and observed the ethnic transformation of the multiethnic East Central European landscape through wartime and postwar population transfers and ethnic cleansing.

The purpose of this study is to explore the past, present and future of the development of Western piano culture in Northeast Asia and the musical, social, political and economic facets thereof. Western piano was first introduced to general public as part of the Westernization process during and after World War II in Asia. During the second half of the twentieth century, Asian piano culture has experienced a period of rapid development and mass popularization along with dramatic cultural, economic and technical developments. Quantifiable evidences for this are given in the number of competition winners and graduates of prestigious institutions with Asian heritage. Piano sales and manufacture of Asian companies gives further testament to the popularity of piano in Asia. Finally, the paper acknowledges the achievements identified and suggests ways in which Asia could become a fully independent culture central for piano in the future, with a close look at factors such as the diversity and quality of education programs and syllabi, social norms formed as a result of rapid modernization, and the constituent ratio of Asian decision-makers in eminent music organization.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 128-135).

This dissertation is a study of Leningrad during World War II and the period of postwar restoration (1941-1950). Leningrad was besieged by the Germans for nearly nine-hundred days. As hundreds of thousands of people died from bombings, shelling, cold, and starvation, local authorities surprisingly instituted measures to ensure that the city’s historic monuments be safeguarded from destruction. When Leningrad was liberated in January 1944, a concerted effort was put into place to breath life into these damaged and destroyed monuments and to heal the wounds inflicted on the city. Instead of using the damage to modernize the city, Leningrad and Soviet authorities opted to privilege the country’s tsarist heritage. In the postwar period, municipal authorities proclaimed that restored monuments commemorate the determination and heroism shown by the people of Leningrad during the war. The memory of the blockade, it was argued, was a “red thread” that must run through and be inscribed in all restoration works. Although this dissertation is a local study of war and postwar restoration, it speaks to broader trends within the Soviet Union before, during, and after World War II. I argue that the care shown for Leningrad’s imperial monuments was the result of an ideological shift that began in the mid-1930s away from iconoclasm toward rehabilitating and respecting certain events and characters from the past. With international tensions rising in the 1930s, this turn to the past acted as a unifying force that had a tremendous influence on the patriotism shown during the war with the Nazis. In the postwar period, as the Soviet state began to redefine its image based on the myth of war and the country’s tsarist heritage, this patriotism was further promoted, resulting in a flurry of work throughout the Soviet Union to restore the vessels of the country’s past. Like many other modernizing states, the Soviet Union looked to its past to create a united and patriotic citizenry.

This dissertation is a study of Leningrad during World War II and the period of postwar restoration (1941-1950). Leningrad was besieged by the Germans for nearly nine-hundred days. As hundreds of thousands of people died from bombings, shelling, cold, and starvation, local authorities surprisingly instituted measures to ensure that the city’s historic monuments be safeguarded from destruction. When Leningrad was liberated in January 1944, a concerted effort was put into place to breath life into these damaged and destroyed monuments and to heal the wounds inflicted on the city. Instead of using the damage to modernize the city, Leningrad and Soviet authorities opted to privilege the country’s tsarist heritage. In the postwar period, municipal authorities proclaimed that restored monuments commemorate the determination and heroism shown by the people of Leningrad during the war. The memory of the blockade, it was argued, was a “red thread” that must run through and be inscribed in all restoration works. Although this dissertation is a local study of war and postwar restoration, it speaks to broader trends within the Soviet Union before, during, and after World War II. I argue that the care shown for Leningrad’s imperial monuments was the result of an ideological shift that began in the mid-1930s away from iconoclasm toward rehabilitating and respecting certain events and characters from the past. With international tensions rising in the 1930s, this turn to the past acted as a unifying force that had a tremendous influence on the patriotism shown during the war with the Nazis. In the postwar period, as the Soviet state began to redefine its image based on the myth of war and the country’s tsarist heritage, this patriotism was further promoted, resulting in a flurry of work throughout the Soviet Union to restore the vessels of the country’s past. Like many other modernizing states, the Soviet Union looked to its past to create a united and patriotic citizenry.

This dissertation examines how four postwar American writers, whose lives and fiction reveal a serious and sustained interest in religion and religious belief, treat screen media in their work. More specifically, it argues that Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Don DeLillo constitute a group of writers who espouse various forms of Catholic or crypto-Catholic belief. By allowing these writers to take seriously certain pre-modern ideas about metaphysical reality--namely, the possible existence of an immaterial, supernatural realm that transcends the physical, sensible world--these belief systems may have made them more attuned to the seemingly immaterial and supernatural properties of screen media.

This dissertation offers an intellectual and institutional history of party polarization and ideological realignment in the postwar United States. It treats the construction of an ideologically sorted party system as a political project carried out by conscious actors within and around the Democratic and Republican parties. The work of these activists, interest groups, and political elites helped to produce, by the last decades of the twentieth century, an unpredicted and still-continuing era of strong, polarized partisanship in American politics. In tracking their work, the dissertation also account for changing ideas about the party system over time, starting with an influential postwar scholarly doctrine that cast bipartisanship as a problem for which polarization would provide the solution. / History

My dissertation reconstructs sociopolitical new-beginning discourses pertaining to Bonn, the provisional West German capital, during the Federal Republic’s founding years. Combining approaches from history, cultural studies, and literary studies, I look at Bonn as a projection screen through which to explore the new-beginning discourses that challenged the FRG during its founding years. I argue that there exists a common pattern of contradiction throughout these discourses, as West Germans attempted to straddle the sociopolitical divides and contradictions between the Nazi past, and a now West-oriented future. With individual chapters addressing different cultural domains, my dissertation offers a cultural cross-section of how Bonn was instrumental in implementing a complex strategy for a new beginning in a post-fascist, war-torn society. Chapter one contextualizes the history of the search for a provisional capital of 1948/9 in symbolisms about Bonn that were seldom explicitly expressed, but which help explain the choice of Bonn as provisional capital, paying particular attention to the fact that it was a provincial city removed from the flashpoints of recent German history. The second chapter investigates city-planning debates about the Bonn federal district to highlight the dynamic ways in which West Germans negotiated the status of their provisional capital in relation to larger geopolitical questions of the Cold War and the division of Germany. Chapter three traces the complex genesis of the Neues Bauen-infused, modernist architecture employed by architect Hans Schwippert in the Bundeshaus and Palais Schaumburg renovations. It goes on to illustrate how the FRG’s early, official architectural stance is one based on contradiction and negotiation between two opposing conceptions of political architecture: the traditionalism of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Schwippert’s moderate modernism. The final chapter examines the spatial configurations of two “Bonn-novels,” Wolfgang Koeppen’s Das Treibhaus (1953) and Günter Weisenborn’s Auf Sand gebaut (1956) to argue that both “Bonn novels” portray the city as a topographical contradiction, divided between the “old Bonn” and the “political Bonn,” with corresponding, largely incompatible social spheres. Both novels exploit this characteristic to express a critique of the democratic process in Bonn. / text