Suchergebnisse

Ever since the ground-breaking historical mini-series Holocaust (1978), television has proven to play a major role in structuring the collective memory about the past.1 This medium has, moreover, displayed a capacity to trigger a collective rendering of, and coming to terms with, painful, hidden or forgotten aspects of the past. Media specialist Garry R. Edgerton has even argued that 'television is the principal means by which most people learn about history'.2 Even though such assertions might be tempered by today's predominance of social media – especially in generational terms – an inquiry into the politics of memory in popular television is still relevant for the field of public history, as well as for memory studies. This is particularly pertinent when representing dictatorship in the European South. Alongside public history projects of all kinds (including museums, memorials, commemorative plaques and practices), filmic representations (be it for cinematic or television use) structure the collective imaginary about the recent past. This essay briefly discusses TV shows that deal with and shape public understandings of the dictatorships in Spain (the final phase of Francoism, post-1968), Greece (the Colonels' dictatorship, post-1969) and Portugal (the final phase of the Estado Novo (New State), post-1968).

The July 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey caught the Greek Colonels (1967–74) off guard, as they proved entirely incapable of responding to the casus belli, partly provoked by their own actions. Greece remained technically in the state of military mobilisation for about four months and with the democratic transition well underway. This article catalogues the ways in which this conflict mobilised Greek civil society in unprecedented ways. Using oral testimonies, press clippings and three major documentaries of the time (Nikos Koundouros' The Songs of Fire, Michael Cacoyannis' Attila 74, and Nikos Kavoukidis' Testimonials), the article dissects the cultural resistances against the war in one of the most traumatic moments in contemporary Greek history. It analyses the gigantic concerts that took place in the largest stadiums of Athens to protest the war, next to mass demonstrations and popular films protesting the invasion. It argues that these cultural events and artifacts re-enacted facets of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the respective countercultural scene in the US of the late 1960s. The article concludes that these modes of cultural and political resistance activated post-authoritarian Greek civil society, renegotiating the parameters of political participation and partly resetting the agenda of the country's foreign policy following popular demand.

This article engages the argument that the 2008–2009 Great Recession forced a revisiting of the period of transitions in Spain, Greece, and Portugal as "political masterpieces," especially among a younger generation of activists. It argues that this radical reevaluation turned the conflicting generational recollections of the past into pivotal components of present political contestation. Moreover, it shows how the redeeming power of the transitions animates the political, cultural, and public discourse of young politicized people who, although (or precisely because) they have not experienced these events directly, keep returning to them to make sense of contemporary politics. The complex relations between past and present are analyzed using oral histories with the so-called Generation 2 of the transitions, namely people who have only "projective memories" of these events during the 1970. Especially relevant is the effects of their participation in the 2011 indignados movements.

L'article présente à partir des archives et de témoignages, les réactions de l'administration de la Fondation Hellénique de la Cité internationale universitaire de Paris face à la politisation des étudiants grecs, du début des années soixante jusqu'à la période de la dictature. L'occupation en 1968, les mobilisations de 1973 faisaient écho à la situation en Grèce même, tout en participant du mouvement étudiant en France.

Este artículo se centra en cómo la juventud ha sido considerada un poderoso elemento dentro de la cultura política griega desde los años setenta. Contempla, en particular, cómo el papel de los jóvenes ha sido ensalzado o demonizado visto, bien como una fuerza orientadora (por ejemplo, el movimiento estudiantil de 1973), bien como puramente destructivo para la sociedad griega (por ejemplo, durante las revueltas de 2008). El artículo se concentra en las formas en que el ascenso al poder de Syriza en 2015 y su manejo de las negociaciones con la troika han sido vistas como una muestra paradigmática del conjunto de Grecia actuando como los niños mimados de Europa.

Abstract

Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance Under The Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967–1974, Gonda Van Steen (2015)
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 400 pp., ISBN: 9780198718321, £80


To 'Provlima Neolaia'. Modernoi Neoi, Paradosi Kai Amfisvitisi Sti Metapolemiki Ellada (1964–1974)/'Youth as a Problem'. Modern Youths, Tradition and Contestation in Post-War Greece (1964–1974), Kostas Katsapis (2013)
Athens: Aprovleptes Ekdoseis, 607 pp., ISBN: 9789609984737, 18.00€

Nikolaos Papadogiannis. Militant around the Clock? Left-Wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974–1981. New York: Berghahn, 2015. x + 329 pp.

This article addresses the ways in which the Third World emerged as a new referent in Greece and Spain in the 'long 1960s'. It shows how 'Thirdworldism' emerged out of growing dissatisfaction with the Old Left's defeatism and the ways in which, by way of the Cuban and Vietnamese example, radicals started to conceive their countries as US colonies. It also compares the ways in which Greek and Iberian Jacobins – some of whom came together in Paris after May '68 – formed a radical student diaspora. Examining the impact of extra-European anti-imperialist violence on the discourse and action of the most radical organizations that espoused the 'armed struggle' in both countries, the article shows that whereas Greek militants used violence only symbolically, their counterparts in Spain went all the way. The article finishes with the espousal of thirdworldist rhetoric by a new student generation in Greece leading to the mass uprising of November 1973, and a brief look at the afterlives of ETA and PAK, two of the most vocal exponents of this tendency, after the demise of the respective authoritarian regimes.

This volume brings together scholars from the fields of history, political science, political economy, historical sociology and cultural studies, to comment on the theoretical and empirical unsettling of democratic transitions at the time of the economic crisis. The volume links together transitions in time and space, reappraising the democratic processes in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s, the post-1989 transformations in Eastern Europe, the effects of Southern Cone democratisations and the 2011 revolts in the Arab worlds, resisting both temporal particularities and national exceptionalisms. It further showcases how even supposed model transitions came under attack during the current economic crisis, thus highlighting the incloncusive nature of these events and the strong interconnections between past and present.

A number of Greek feature films in the 1990s and early 2000s – from End of an Era to Uranya – created a standard depiction of the Colonels' dictatorship as an era filled with bittersweet adolescent memories. The Comedy of the Junta: The Light Side of a Dark Era, a recent documentary produced in April 2010 by Elias Kanellis, presented it as a laughable farce. More importantly, even, this period was treated as distant and definitely over. Almost from the onset of the economic crisis, we may say that there is a change of paradigm regarding the use of the junta and a radical departure from both the grotesque and the nostalgic view. Rather, its more brutal aspects began to be stressed in a thinly veiled attempt to highlight the continuities between past and present, the police violence and authoritarian practices of the 1967–74 era and that of the 2010–12 one – best encompassed in the popular slogan of the Indignados "The Junta did not end in '73". Typical examples are Fotos Lambrinos' television documentary series It's just a junta, will it pass? and Alinda Dimitrious's documentary The Girls of the Rain (2011). This article traces this shift and its poetics, focusing on various representative examples of both tendencies and the ways in which they sought to create a certain form of public memory.

1 Introduction (K. Kornetis, M.E. Cavallaro) -- Part I Conflicting Memory of Transition -- 2 Self-Portraits of the Past. Conflicting Narratives of the Spanish Transition in a Time of Crisis: the Academic, Political and Cultural Realms (2008-2016) (C. Gustrán, A. Quiroga) -- 3 The Legacy of the Portuguese Transition to Democracy (F. Raimundo, C. Almeida) -- 4 Public Memory of the Transitions in Greece and Spain (K. Kornetis) -- Part II Europeanism, Europeanization and Euroscepticism since the late 1970s -- 5 The Abduction of Europa: Europeanism and Euroscepticism in Greece, 1974-2015 (I. Balampanidis) -- 6 he Persistence of the Myth: Europeanism in Spain from the late Francoism to the Outbreak of the 2008 Economic Crisis (M.E. Cavallaro) -- 7 Parties, citizens and the eurozone crisis: How Europe has contributed to the resilience of the Portuguese party system (M. Lisi) -- Part III Uses of the Past by Grassroots Political Actors -- 8 Transition to Stability. The Greek Left in 1974 (K. Karpozilos) -- 9 From the 'Unfinished Revolution' to the 'Defence of the Revolution': Framing the Transition in Austerity-Era Portugal (T. Carvalho, P. Ramos Pinto) -- 10 How National Histories Shaped the Politics of Crisis: South European Contrasts (R.M. Fishman) -- 11 Conclusions (M.E. Cavallaro, K. Kornetis)

Preface / Guya Accornero -- Introduction / Kostis Kornetis, Eirini Kotsovili, Nikolaos Papadogiannis -- PART ONE. CONSUMPTION AND GENDER IN DICTATORSHIP AND DISCIPLINED DEMOCRACY. Gendering touristic Spain, 1950s-1970s / Moritz Glaser -- Basque national identities, youth culture and gender in the 1960s : beyond the farmhouse and the ye-yé / Amaia Lamikiz Jauregiondo -- Consumerism, gender diversity and moralization of sexuality in the Iberian 1960s / Rosa M. Medina-Domenech and Richard Cleminson -- Gender and consumer behavior : a portrait of Portugal in the 1960s / Inês Brasão -- Tourism, body and seaside recreational practices in postwar Greek society until 1974 / Michalis Nikolakakis -- PART TWO. CONSUMPTION AND GENDER THROUGH THE MOMENT OF TRANSITION. Representations of sexuality and gender in Portuguese cinema during the late Estado Novo and the Carnation Revolution / Érica Faleiro Rodrigues -- The Spanish housewives in transition (1959-1980) / Elena Díaz Silva -- Documenting post-authoritarian subcultures in the European South : the cases of Pedro Almodóvar's Pepi, Luci, Bom and Nikos Zervos's Dracula of Exarchia / Kostis Kornetis -- 'Naked Piazza' : male (homo)sexualities, masculinities and consumer cultures in Greece since the 1960s / Kostas Yannakopoulos -- PART THREE. CONSUMPTION AND GENDER BETWEEN THE TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS OF THE 2010s. Television culture and social change in post-revolutionary Portugal / Luís Trindade -- Leafing through the 1980s in Portuguese fashion magazines / Giulia Bonali -- Consuming the past as a televisual product : gender and consumption in Cuéntame cómo pasó/Tell Me How it Was / Abigail Loxham -- Audio-visual consumption in the Greek VHS era : social mobility, privatization and the VCR audiences in the 1980s / Ursula-Helen Kassaveti -- Revisiting the Greek 1980s through the prism of crisis / Panagiotis Zestanakis