Articles

Provincial life is typically seen in Polish literature as the antithesis of culture. Paradoxically, writes Malgorzata Litwinowicz, the Polish magic realist tradition derives precisely from the small town and the image of the shtetl as centre of the universe.

Its identity located somewhere between nostalgia and commerce, the dilapidated and the gentrified, the Central European city mixes languages, words and signs to form a style best described as radical eclecticism, writes Levente Polyák.

Bratislava, formerly Pressburg or Prespork, was historically a multi-national and multi-confessional city. When much of the old town was destroyed in the 1970s, the city’s cultural heritage was lost with it, regrets dissident, poet and writer Juraj Spitzer in a posthumously published article.

Could Obama have let the US default? Given that the debt ceiling compromise merely postpones the political conflict, providing a stopgap rather than a solution, the unthinkable might not have been so bad an option, conjectures George Blecher.

Democratic deficit, enlargement fatigue and ever more rescue funds: is there still a future for a common Europe? In a discussion in Eurozine’s series “Europe talks to Europe”, prominent intellectuals and opinion makers from western and eastern Europe diagnosed causes for the current malaise of the EU.

Lasting peace agreements after wars and civil wars were for a long time considered to be conditional upon damnatio memoriae – the deliberate and reciprocal forgetting of violence and injustice. However, the established amnesty clause is only realistic where certain rules were not broken during war. The First World War is beyond its scope of applicability, the extermination war of the National Socialists even more so. Where forgetting is impossible, remembering is all that remains. Such remembrance is inextricably and paradoxically linked to forgetting: only what has been remembered can actively be forgotten.

A self-proclaimed concept designer, Darius Miksys is sometimes called a practitioner of persuasion art, writes Virginija Januskeviciute. When writing a proposal for what was intended to be a solo-exhibition at the 54th Venice Biennale, he realized that the criteria for participating lent itself to the idea of a collection of Lithuanian national art and delegated participation to several other artists.

The approximately 300 000 Roma in the Czech Republic are the frontrunners in a Europe that is struggling to become multicultural, writes Karolina Ryvolová. Their culture exceeds the poverty in which they live and has a richness and variety that stems from a different set of historical roots.

Nightlife and its role in promoting and diffusing culture needs to be officially recognised, write two Geneva based activists. While the authorities of the Swiss city are indeed becoming more attuned to nocturnal culture, support tends to be limited to its commercial, mainstream variety.

The irony is not just that Breivik’s hatred of Islam should lead to a horror that many took to be Islamic, but also that nothing so resembles Breivik’s mindset as that of an Islamist jihadist, writes Kenan Malik.

Islamophobia has become the “defining mental state of the new Europe”, concentrated mainly in the image of the female Muslim immigrant. In a discourse mainly driven by feminists, writes Rita Chin, what began as the expression of concern for Turkish women and their problems in West German society became the articulation of boundaries between East and West, between feminist praxis and unreformed patriarchy.

Norway’s prime minister Jens Stoltenberg seems to have spoken for most of his countrymen when, responding to the attacks of 22 July, he said that “the Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation”. But this quiet call of defiance has been accompanied by severe critique of the harsh tone of public debate, especially on the Internet. Illiberal and intolerant opinions echoing those held by terrorist Anders Behring Breivik thrive on blogs and online forums, but also in the commentary fields of mainstream media. Knut Olav Åmås, culture and op-ed editor at Aftenposten, joins in the call for “more debate” – even if it is repellent and offensive. Conflicts in society must remain visible. That also goes for sensitive issues such as integration and multiculturalism.

Hazy though its contours might be, Greece’s economic crisis didn’t creep up from behind, writes Victor Tsilonis. The scandals littering Greek politics in recent decades indicate a chronic lack of accountability, culminating in the anti-constitutional approval of the EU/IMF loans.

New media are changing news production, but not in the way democratisation theorists hope, writes Tamara Witschge. The journalistic profession remains resistant to the “amateur”, defending values under threat yet shoring up existing relations of power.

Caught between publishing giants and small independents, the only asset available to authors is their copyright, argues Pirjo Hiidenmaa of the European Writers Council. This asset must not be weakened through digitization and the new ease with which content can be reproduced.

The most beautiful fairytale of the summer has turned into Norway’s worst nightmare, writes Prableen Kaur, vice chairperson of the Oslo labour youth organization. She was attending the annual summer camp on Utøya when they were attacked by Anders Behring Breivik. This is her account given just hours after she escaped.