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On the Nazi trials in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and the place of the Holocaust in them: About 15 years after the end of the war, a second wave of trials against Nazi criminals occurred in many Eastern Bloc states, which followed a different logic than the ones immediately after the war. At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, the trials on the one hand obliged cooperation between East and West, on the other hand they were determined by the defensive attitude towards the respective opponent in the system conflict. Within the Eastern bloc, unity was to be demonstrated through a coordinated approach on the international stage, while at the same time national interests led to their own paths in criminal prosecution. The essays collected in this volume are devoted to the history of criminal trials on National Socialist crimes in Hungary, the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union after the "thaw" and ask about the preconditions and peculiarities of these proceedings. What rules applied to the trials? What goals did they pursue? And last but not least: What significance did the Holocaust have in the clarification of the crimes?

This volume addresses the dynamics of materiality over time and space. In cross-cultural, multi-temporal and interdisciplinary studies the authors examine how things gain meaning and status, generate a multitude of emotions, and feed into the propagation of myths, narratives and discourses. The book is divided according to four themes: soft objects, stoic stories, consuming and the collectable, and waste and technologies. The first section discusses the meanings of the lived environment on the individual and national levels. The second section provides specific examples on the role of things in identity construction. The third section focuses on historical and contemporary aspects of consumption and collecting. The phenomena under scrutiny in the fourth section are moral dilemmas associated with and representations of dirt/waste and advancements in science and technology. Presenting diverse case studies of material culture, the volume points to rich interdisciplinary approaches in cultural theory.

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von Almond, G. A.: The civic culture : political attitudes and democracy in five nations / G. A. Almond and S. Verba. - Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1963. + Almond, G. A.: The civic culture revisited / G. A. Almond and S. Verba. - London : Sage, 1989