Articles

Read more than 6000 articles in 35 languages from over 90 cultural journals and associates.

Cover for: Talking about my generation

Spaniards in their thirties have grown up in enviable circumstances: democracy, a generous state, material wellbeing. Now the crisis has returned them to a cruel reality: that they may have to live with less than their parents did. Whether they alter their expectations or try to stop the clock will be decisive, writes Ramón González Férriz.

‘O father, what have you done?’

Recovering the golden age of Yugoslavia's Roma music

Researching Yugoslav Roma music, Philip Knox and Nat Morris tour the Balkans in search of the real thing. They find it in Skopje, in the person of Esma Redzepova – the self-styled Queen of Gypsy music. From the ghetto to a Nobel prize nomination, Esma claims never to have produced “anything but Roma music of the utmost purity”.

Memory displaced

Re-reading Jean Améry's "Torture"

Jean Améry, writing in 1965, famously called torture “the essence of the Third Reich”. Why should Améry, the Holocaust survivor, have emphasized torture over the annihilation of the Jews? His choice can be understood in the context of French public debate on the Algerian war, argues Dan Diner.

The persistence of belief in witchcraft, illustrated by the tragic case of Kristy Bamu, stems from a notion within mainstream Christianity of evil as active, independent agent, argues Sarah Ditum. Yet is another battle against religion the best response?

In the UK, the use of “superinjunctions” to prevent media from publishing intimate details about the private lives of public figures has been widely condemned by free speech advocates, who see them as a privilege of the wealthy and inimical to the public interest. A recent parliamentary report has, however, endorsed the judgement of the British courts, even recommending that breaches of privacy by online media be “filtered”. Leading free speech expert Eric Barendt defends the report against its critics.

Cover for: Migration: Europe's absent history

Although migration has a long and varied history in Europe, it tends to be treated solely as a present-day issue. Why the reluctance to historicize the subject? Particularly since migration history offers a way to replace narrow, national narratives with one that is properly European.

Free speech advocates opposed to the prohibition of hate speech tend to underrate the harm hate speech causes, argues Jeremy Waldron. Where it exists, such legislation upholds a public good by protecting the basic dignitary order of society.

To argue for hate speech legislation on the basis that it protects the dignity of individuals is to confuse an interest with a fundamental right, argues Ivan Hare. Not only is legislation ineffective, it helps disseminate the very thing it intends to suppress.

Cover for: Günter Grass, antisemitism and the inflation of evil

Denunciation of Günter Grass’s poem “What must be said” typifies a fundamentalist understanding of antisemitism that operates outside the realm of fact, argues Antony Lerman. If the poem is so heinous, what response would ever be appropriate to genuine antisemitism?

Serbia’s neo-fascist political establishment is the target of Svetislav Basara’s satirical novel Mein Kampf, from which not even the country’s modernizing figures emerge unscathed. Not surprisingly, the reaction has been one of irritation, writes Ivan Telebar.

A beautifying lie?

Culture and kitsch @ London2012

The opening ceremony of the London Olympics, themed “The Isle of Wonders”, will offer a pastiche of national identity in which the darker sides of the British psyche are lost in a multiculturalist high-kitsch spectacular, anticipates Phil Cohen.

Gründerzeit City 2.1

A model on inner urban expansion as contribution to a compact green city

From tenement to prototype: the monumental apartment buildings of nineteenth-century residential districts, often former rental barracks, today offer potential for a form of “vertical densification” that goes beyond the loft extension, writes Ida Pirstinger.

Cover for: Another groundhog day in Greece?

The suicide of a pensioner outside the Greek parliament, the latest in a series, sums up the mood of a population confronted with the steady erosion of its rights. Victor Tsilonis wonders whether tomorrow will be just another day in Greece’s “predestined” future.

Cover for: Farmers in fairy-tale land

Farmers in fairy-tale land

Poland and the European crisis

Lack of truly political decision-making and the demise of philosophical objectivism have landed Europe in the situation it is in today, argues Marcin Krol. A lesson could be learned from Poland, where a tradition of economic liberalism and rural pragmatism has enabled the country to weather the crisis.

Cover for: The failure of European intellectuals?

Intellectuals have been accused of failing to restore a European confidence undermined by crisis. Yet calls for legitimating European narratives – combined with nostalgia for a golden age of Europeanism – remain faithful to the logic of nineteenth-century nation building, argues Jan-Werner Müller. What, then, should Europe’s intellectuals be doing?

Standards of evasion

Croatia and the "Europeanization of memory"

Poised on the verge of Union membership, Croatia has replaced the historical revisionism of the 1990s by a memory politics avowedly based on “European standards”. Yet are those standards met and, more to the point, is the Europeanization of memory synonymous with a critical approach to the national past?

« 1 120 121 122 123 124 184 »

Follow Eurozine