Search Results (10)

The aim of this article is to examine the use of kitsch elements in architecture as a tool of propaganda in the totalitarian regime of the Third Reich. The study employs a historical-interpretative research method. It begins by outlining the mechanisms through which kitsch was utilised within totalitarian systems, before proceeding to a detailed analysis of the role of kitsch in the state’s official architecture. The findings indicate that, although the architecture of the Third Reich was generally characterised by conventional architectural standards, it exhibited features of kitsch only to a marginal extent or in respects intrinsic to the architecture of political power. These features include a lack of artistic ambition, exaggerated monumentality and excessive repetition, clarity and unambiguity of message, and deliberate distortion of reality. The article also explains the purpose served by the incorporation of kitsch as a component of the propaganda embedded in the official architecture of the Third Reich. Full article

Using the social scientific theory of “weathering”, the case study presented here reveals the broader explanatory power of the theory. Arline Geronimus developed the concept to describe the impact of racist systems on marginalized populations. Based on more than four decades of empirical research, Geronimus posits that the cumulative impact of navigating the structural racism embedded in US institutions results in accelerated declines in health and premature aging. The historical case study of the Łódź ghetto demonstrates that Nazi persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust resulted in a similar process of weathering among Jews. From 1939 to 1945, German authorities systematically dispossessed and uprooted, purposely starved, and exploited for labor the tens of thousands of Jews held captive in the Łódź ghetto. Despite valiant Jewish efforts to ameliorate the hardships of life in the ghetto, the persistent onslaught of racist policies and degradation ultimately resulted in widespread weathering of the population on an individual and communal level. I propose that the concept of “weathering” developed by social scientists has broad interpretative power for understanding the personal and communal impact of white supremacist societies in a historical context. The case of the Łódź ghetto is instructive beyond what it reveals about the particular persecution of the Jews during the Third Reich. The abrupt imposition of a racist system of government, the steady escalation of antisemitic policies from oppression and exploitation to genocide, and the relatively short duration of the ghetto’s existence lays bare the cumulative effects of widespread individual weathering on the vitality of the community itself. In the Łódź ghetto, prolonged exposure to an environment governed by white supremacy also resulted in communal weathering. Full article

With the increasing demand for unmanned aircraft system (UAS) traffic management (UTM) airspace comes the need to ensure the safe operation and management of said airspace. One layer of defense against mid-air-collision and the ensuing third-party injury or fatality is the pre-flight separation assurance. This could be achieved by establishing the separation requirements for the UTM traffic based on the flight dynamics and communication navigation surveillance (CNS) performance that could be achieved in the airspace in question. A modified Reich collision risk model, typically used in civil aviation for separation minima evaluation, was used for the evaluation of the initial separation that would meet the target level of safety within a prescribed look-ahead time. This paper presents the parametric evaluation of using this physics-based and Monte Carlo-driven Reich collision risk model to evaluate the separation recommendation needed to achieve ${10}^{-7}$ mid-air-collision risk in UTM. The evaluation was conducted for an encounter pair consisting of identical ∼1.2 kg quadrotors with various encounter geometries, cruise velocities, navigation uncertainties, and communication latency. Full article

To integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the national airspace in a safe manner, a risk-based approach to the regulation of UAVs is adopted in many countries. Thus, the capacity to permit UAVs in urban airspace also needs to be evaluated in a risk-based sense. In this regard, this paper proposes a methodology to analyze the capacity of UAV corridors on the basis of third-party risk on the ground. By linking the collision rate of the corridor and the failure rates of UAVs with the number of fatalities on the ground, the capacity of the UAV corridor is derived to satisfy the target level of safety. To model the collision rate of UAVs in the corridor, the Reich collision risk model is utilized. Moreover, a ground risk map is generated to compute the third-party risk on the ground using the databases for Seoul, Korea. The results show that the failure rate of UAVs is the dominant factor for determining the capacity of the corridor, even if the number of corridors increases. The proposed methodology could be useful to manage the number of flights for applications where the UAV corridor is fixed and flight continues, such as package delivery. Full article

Intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews during the Third Reich occupied a dangerously ambiguous position. Although the 1935 Nuremberg Laws declared intermarriage illegal, the Jewish wife or husband was at first exempted from anti-Semitic persecution. After Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, their situation deteriorated dramatically. However, Nazi family law was applied inconsistently, leaving both spouses in states of uncertainty with regard to their marriages and children. This essay examines the representation of intermarriage in two films: the 2015 Italian film Max and Helene, and Redemption Road, a 2016 two-part German miniseries. With hybrid cinematic styles, narrative trajectories, and characterizations, these films dramatize the traumatic consequences of Nazi racial ideology and practices for two intermarried couples and their children. Spanning the years 1938 through the late 1940s, intermarriage in these films raises challenging questions about survival, reconciliation, and loss and the definition and achievement of legal, ethical, and emotional justice in the aftermath. Full article

In this paper, we noticed that the existence of fixed points of F-contractions, in $\mathcal{F}$ -metric space, can be ensured without the third condition (F3) imposed on the Wardowski function $F:(0,\infty )\to \mathbb{R}$ . We obtain fixed points as well as common fixed-point results for Reich-type F-contractions for both single and set-valued mappings in $\mathcal{F}$ -metric spaces. To show the usability of our results, we present two examples. Also, an application to functional equations is presented. The application shows the role of fixed-point theorems in dynamic programming, which is widely used in computer programming and optimization. Our results extend and generalize the previous results in the existing literature. Full article

The othering of whole groups of people in a biopolitical discourse during the Third Reich has caused many to re-assess ethics that is based on specific categories. Adorno and Horkheimer reckoned with both Enlightenment as well as classical “humanist” discourses to question whether they imply structures that lead to fascism. In the wake of these arguments, classical humanist (or sometimes also called anthropocentric) ethics have also been criticized by philosophers such as Agamben, Derrida, and Wolfe. It is thus time to work on posthuman(ist) ethics that avoids the traps of a narrow human ethics and that is inclusive rather than exclusive. The short stories by postwar German author Wolfdietrich Schnurre, written in the wake of the Holocaust, reckon with a purely human-centered worldview and draw a bleak picture of an anthropocentrically structured and valued world. Under the surface that portrays a speciesist world, Schnurre employs a network of sub-discourses to “cave out” carno-phallogocentric discourses and point towards a different, post-human ethics. This paper examines how anthropocentric discourses of power lead to inhumane violence and how a different approach to the Other, based on empathy and shared vulnerability, might just move us beyond it. Full article

Between 1933 and 1945, the Notgemeinschaft deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland (often translated as “Emergency Society of German Scholars Abroad”) was the most important German aid agency for placing refugee scholars from Nazi Germany in new positions all over the world. Founded in Zurich in spring 1933, this unique, community-based self-help organisation is almost unknown in Switzerland today. In Germany, however, its history was investigated, albeit resulting in only a single paper more than 20 years ago. Based on recent work, the following article highlights the specific impact of three neuroscientists on the formation of the Notgemeinschaft: neuropathologist Philipp Schwartz, neurologist Erich Katzenstein, and neuropsychologist Kurt Goldstein. Full article

The research results now available clearly show that the connection between psychiatry, racial hygiene, and eugenics is much more complex than a discussion focussing on the Third Reich and the holocaust led us to suspect. After 1933, eugenic efforts in Germany merged with National Socialist dictatorship, were made to serve anti-Semitism and the racial politics of the government, and opened up new areas of political activity. As a social movement, eugenics was at the same time an expression of a belief in progress, which found a great echo in the workers’ movement, as well as a reaction to the fear of degeneration and decadence which became gradually more intensive at that time. Democratic countries, too, such as the Scandinavian Countries, Switzerland, and the United States, showed how a definition of democracy aiming for a healthy populace and theories of inheritance worked together and caused the race-based exclusion of cultural minorities. The author holds that the development of Eugenics in democratic countries is more important for the understanding of Eugenics as a science, for the close connection between psychiatry and Eugenics and for the present development of biological thinking. Beyond all social and political differences though, ideas of social “normality” and strategies of scientific legitimation are discernible that show that the eugenic measures implemented by the Nazi regime found a positive echo until the 1930s in most countries. As a matter of fact eugenic ideas garnered extensive support and Switzerland by no means was just a “Mitläufer” (a collaborator). The Swiss Civil Code of 1912 (Zivilgesetzbuch ZGB) already contained an article forbidding marriages of the so-called “feeble-minded”, at the famous Hygiene Exhibition at Dresden in 1911 Switzerland presented the section on sterilisation. Auguste Forel was one of the supporters if not inventors of the technique. However, the country did not implement policies based on Eugenics on a federal level or as part of a political programme: when the Federal Penal Law was introduced in 1942, any regulation of sterilisation was deliberately avoided for fear that this might lead to the downfall of the law. Even on the cantonal level, eugenic legislation was scarce: the 1928 Law on Sterilisation of the Canton of Vaud remained the only one and eugenic provisions in the Naturalisation Law as they existed in the Canton of Basel-Stadt were an exception. Nevertheless, the ideology of eugenics, based on the most varied objectives and motives, pervaded the concepts and imagination of federal and local authorities, political decision-makers and the medical profession. The article sets out to show how – despite the lack of a deliberate and national policies – eugenic measures were implemented in Switzerland. Its focus is on sterilisation and naturalisation procedures. The author’s thesis is that eugenic measures were able to gain such a wide and general acceptance in a democratic system like Switzerland and could even be forced on individuals because of three main reasons: – as a natural science Eugenics became widely accepted and could claim objective authority over politics; – it added to the authority of psychiatry as a science able to prevent mental disease and moral disorder; – eugenic measures showed a specific gender bias: because they not only applied to the minority groups of the “feeble-minded”, “morally deviant”, or “unfit” but also to the traditional “others”– women,that is – “othering-practices” thus becoming part of the process of setting up a national moral and gender order. These implications make eugenics not only an important field for historical research but as well in respect to present and future scientific and social development. Full article