“For two years, Barbara Demick chronicled the trials of one Sarajevo street (ulica Logavina) during the Serbian siege. In her latest book, Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street, she catches up with the people she befriended.”
> Article by Barbara Demick (c) THE GUARDIAN, 2012
Photo: Laurent Van Der Stockt/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
A little lamb tries to escape back to its mother before being slaughtered.
Consider this photo next time you order one of those nicely pink meat dishes…
“During his long literary career, Günter Grass has been many things. Author, playwright, sculptor and, unquestionably, Germany’s most famous living writer. There is the 1999 Nobel prize and Grass’s broader postwar role as the country’s moral conscience – albeit a claim badly undermined in 2006 when it emerged that the teenage Grass had served in the Waffen SS. But at the ripe old age of 84, Grass has triggered a furious row with a poem criticising Israel.”
Article and English translation of the poem (c) THE GUARDIAN, 2012
Photo: Graeme Robertson
Original version of the poem (in German) (c) SZ, 2012
The brutal March 1943 massacre in the Belorussian village of Khatyn, commemorated in a 1969 memorial, has come to symbolize the horrors of the German occupation. Given the continuing centrality of the massacre to Belarusian memory politics, the details of the event remain under-studied. For political reasons, Soviet authorities and Ukrainian diaspora nationalists alike had an interest in de-emphasizing the central role of collaborators in carrying out the massacre. Using German military records, Soviet partisan diaries, and materials from Belorussian and Canadian legal cases, the author of this article revisits one of the most infamous, yet least understood war crimes committed on Soviet territory. > Article by Per Anders Rudling. Photo: statue of Iosif Kaminskii at Khatyn memorial site, Belorussia, ca. 1981. (c) Michael Gelb.
“How an Irish setter helped my family get through the Bosnian War.”
A literary essay in Cultural Kynological Studies by Aleksandar Hemon
“My sister and Veba remember the last time they took Mek and Don for a walk before the war started. It was April 1992, and there was shooting up in the hills around Sarajevo; a Yugoslav People’s Army plane menacingly broke the sound barrier above the city; the dogs barked like crazy. They said: ‘See you later!’ to each other as they parted, but would not see each other for five years.”
>read full text (c) GRANTA / Slate.com, 2012 (reblogged)
Quiz: is this a ‘real’ commercial or ironical concept art? Interesting for the cultural analyst is in any case the connection made between nationalism & commodity.
I owe this one to Mirna Zeman, Paderborn, who analyses such narratives.
“The Bijeljina massacre refers to the killings of Bosniak civilians by the Serbian paramilitary group Arkan’s Tigers during the Bosnian war. Almost all victims were killed more than three years before the Srebrenica genocide (April-May 1992) when Serbs forces were torching Bosniak villages and killing Bosnian Muslim civilians in eastern Bosnia (Bijeljina, Bratunac, Srebrenica, Zvornik, Foca). Arkan’s Tigers, under JNA command, invaded Bijeljina on 1 April 1992. Local courts have not filed a single war-crimes indictment.The Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo says some 1,040 people were killed in the town. Continue reading
Anja Salomonowitz’ film Spanien is “the story of the Moldavian refugee Sava, who, en route to Spain, ends up in Austria’s Weinviertel region and finds work and accommodation in a church in need of restoration. Here, he meets Magdalena, a woman marked by ‘love’, and begins a relationship with her, as well as coming across her vengeful ex-husband.” > text (c) wieninternational.at, 2012
delirium clemens 