“Emaciated bodies, skeletons, phantom-like apparitions and post-apocalyptic landscapes – all of these are motifs that the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński (1929-2005) captured on canvas. All of these paintings have something ephemeral, other-worldly, something difficult to capture. Even if you take a closer look it is difficult to get a clear idea of what you are seeing.” Exhibition to be seen at the Phantastenmuseum in Vienna until 22 June >review & photos
(c) WIENINTERNATIONAL.AT 2013
A recent book by Colgate historian R.M. Douglas “has opened, or rather reopened, yet another tortured and largely ignored chapter of World War II, (…) whose specter is still dragging and clanking its chains” across Central and Eastern Europe.
>review (c) NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOK, 2013
“In many ways, Jonathan Sperber suggests, Marx was ‘a backward-looking figure,’ whose vision of the future was modeled on conditions quite different from any that prevail today (Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life
>review (c) NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 2013
“There must be what Mr Gladstone many years ago called a ‘blessed act of oblivion’. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past and look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years to come hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past. If Europe is to be saved from infinite misery, and indeed from final doom, there must be this act of faith in the European family, this act of oblivion against all crimes and follies of the past.” Winston Churchill (Zürich speech, 1946) However, Europe today seems to be rather built on the cultivation of trauma memory.
The Fiaker driving his horse-drawn carriage around Hofburg Palace, the café waiter serving a Melange, the local musicians entertaining guests at the local wine taverns (the Heuriger): stereotypical images that come up when you think of Vienna (and that are played on by the Austrian tourism industry). The exhibition Vienna Types – Cliché and Reality at the WienMuseum explains why, as it traces the stereotypoes back to the social history of the city. >full text
(c) wieninternational.at 2013 >German version
delirium clemens 