Charlie Bertsch / 23 Mar 2023
All About the Heimat
Music as Politics in 1980s Germany
Teenagers were milling about. Bright colours shot off the portable mirror ball. The DJ stepped up to his console to cue the first track.(...)
WWII
The Battleground / 17 Mar 2023
Giorgia Meloni, Serial Racist
The ChatGPT Sessions, Volume 1
By community standards, his trip was a failure. Italian Jews protested Netanyahu's visit, and the community's leader, Noemi Di Segni, excoriated him for the settler pogrom in Hawara and for undermining Israeli democracy.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 18 Jan 2023
Sex Against Fascism
Dušan Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected
Serbian director Dušan Makavejev’s 1968 film Innocence Unprotected manages both to explore the legacy of wartime trauma seriously and to make fun of itself in the process. (...)
Charlie Bertsch / 17 Nov 2022
Neither the US nor Russia
Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars
Because Sergio Leone didn’t make films set in Europe or ones that obviously dealt with the continent’s problems, he has been excluded from the pantheon of its greatest postwar auteurs: Cocteau, Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Fassbinder, Truffaut, and Antonioni. (...)
John Foster / 10 Oct 2022
Surviving Fascism
Philosophy and Sociology, by Theodor Adorno
Looking back from a distance of more than half a century, 1960 appears almost as a period of calm.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 28 Sep 2022
The Work of Remembrance
Germany, Year Zero, Today
It’s hard to watch Roberto Rossellini’s 1948 film Germany, Year Zero to its conclusion. The mood is relentlessly bleak and the landscape bleaker still.(...)
John Foster / 24 Sep 2022
Can’t Forget Fascism
Mussolini in Myth and Memory, by Paul Corner
If the spin is correct, Giorgia Meloni won Italy’s election already.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 13 Jul 2022
Imagining a Different Future
Reconsidering Susan Sontag, Part II
Even as Susan Sontag’s celebrity has dimmed, the time she spent in battered Sarajevo in the 1990s, directing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot remains a touchstone in discussions of intellectual engagement.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 06 Jul 2022
Working Through History
Folk on Acid, by OOPUS
If you stumbled upon Estonian band OOPUS at a festival, where many different acts are on the schedule, it might take you a few minutes to realize how special they are.(...)
Natalie Sarkic-Todd / 04 Jun 2022
European History and the Ukraine War
The When Walls Talk Exhibit
Not long after it opened in 2017, I paid my first visit to the House of European History. (...)