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, on the Isle of Man. On the basis of Winston Churchill’s notorious order, ‘collar the lot!’, all enemy aliens still at liberty in Britain were rounded up in June 1940, when invasion by Germany seemed very likely. My father, who had come to Britain from Germany in February 1938, was a class C ‘enemy alien’ (recognised as a genuine refugee, and officially designated a ‘friendly’ enemy alien). The classifications were made by wartime tribunals set up in Britain in 1939. Those classified ‘A’ were considered to be of highest risk, and likely Nazi sympathisers, and were
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
and work. And in those days too, there were the joys of the elegant Pittman’s shorthand, with its own compensatory aesthetic rewards.) And yet this life of efficiency has been paralleled – or perhaps it’s better to say occasionally interrupted – by repeated attempts at creativity. Over the years, I have from time to time taken piano and classical guitar lessons; enrolled in drawing classes; studied ballet and contemporary dance; joined creative writing groups and workshops. Nearly always, and even when my attempts were good enough, I managed to undermine this
following in his 1925 article ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing’ (Byt i kul’tura veshchi): ‘The construction of proletarian culture, that is, of a culture consciously organised by the working class, requires the elimination of that rupture between things and people that characterized bourgeois society.’52 Arvatov explained that as soon as class barriers fall, so do the divisions between labour and daily life and between production and consumption. In a bourgeois society, things are passive and static – merely ready-made objects to be rearranged (Arvatov
rooms, more windows and a larger garden, and it was in an area with many more trees. I had also recently moved from an inner-city lower-middle-class/working-class primary school to a solidly middle-class direct-grant girls’ high school, which in retrospect also somehow feels like a lightening, and a coming-into-colour. Colour (mainly blue) [ 75 ] [ 76 ] Class photograph, Temple primary school, Cheetham Hill, Manchester, c. 1951 Class photograph, Manchester High School for Girls, 1955. Austerity baby There is of course one obvious explanation for this
entry, which should have taught me that flattery gets you nowhere. A couple of years later, at my second primary school when I was eight or nine, my school report from Mr Hurst says ‘If I had a class full of Janets, what a wonderful class that would be’. I think my parents were very pleased with that one. It’s many years ago, but I am pretty sure that underneath the pleasure at such praise and, even more, at my parents’ approval, was an extremely faint, much suppressed, feeling of rebellion against this Compulsory Goodness. I wonder if I was rather envious when my
Nazis. In the same semester, my father also registered for a class on ‘selected phenomenological problems’ with the founder of phenomenology himself, Edmund Husserl (also dismissed by the Nazis some years later). Disappointingly, neither professor has signed the Anmeldungs-Buch. Austerity baby Arthur Wolff registration book, University of Freiburg Arthur Wolff class register, University of Freiburg, Summer 1923 [ 176 ] Jewish student fraternity, University of Freiburg, c. 1923-26 Arthur Wolff in fraternity uniform Austerity baby Later, pursuing his studies for
the figures wearing goggles to protect their delicate eyes from the ultraviolet light. Undisturbed by the glaring, pointed shafts of white light, they relax, play games, and enjoy meals while being exposed to the health-giving rays ‘all day long’. Timed exposures were apparently unnecessary. Dressed fashionably and with the latest haircuts, they were depicted as part of a social class affluent enough to afford the initial
devotees. They knew the latest ‘happenings’ in Rochester and conversations were interesting. Although I had the chance to talk to other elderly women who remembered Kathleen McEnery and recalled something of the Rochester of a certain class and cultural circle, I came too late to be able to encounter many recollections of ‘the golden age’. Elizabeth Holahan, ninety-seven years old when I interviewed her in 2002, was long-time President of Rochester Historical Society and life-long resident of Rochester. She had worked all her life as a house restorer, amongst other
arguing that one's social class overwhelmingly determines the means to migrate and means to publish alike. However, I argue that, despite his public profile, Nini's writing unequivocally conveys the transcendence of the EU border regime. Before leaving home, he tries to solidify his connections with the intellectual class with which he used to associate during university: “Dos días antes de mi partida quedé con algunos amigos para hacerme con direcciones que pudieran ser útiles si algo ocurría o necesitaba una pequeña ayuda económica en algún lugar del viejo continente