following world war ii, german antifascists and nationalists in buenos aires believed theater was crucial to their highly politicized efforts at community-building, and each population devoted considerable resources to competing against its rival onstage. competing germanies tracks the paths of several stage actors from european theaters to buenos aires and explores how two of argentina's most influential immigrant groups, german nationalists and antifascists (jewish and non-jewish), clashed on the city's stages. covered widely in german- and spanish-language media, theatrical performances articulated strident nazi, antifascist, and zionist platforms. meanwhile, as their thespian representatives grappled onstage for political leverage among emigrants and argentines, behind the curtain, conflicts simmered within partisan institutions and among theatergoers. publicly they projected unity, but offstage nationalist, antifascist, and zionist populations were rife with infighting on issues of political allegiance, cultural identity and, especially, integration with their argentine hosts.

competing germanies reveals interchange and even mimicry between antifascist and nationalist german cultural institutions. furthermore, performances at both theaters also fit into contemporary invocations of diasporas, including taboos and postponements of return to the native country, connections among multiple communities, and forms of longing, memory, and (dis)identification. sharply divergent at first glance, their shared condition as cultural institutions of emigrant populations caused the antifascist free german stage and the nationalist german theater to adopt parallel tactics in community-building, intercultural relationships, and dramatic performance.

its cross-cultural, polyglot blend of german, jewish, and latin american studies gives competing germanies a wide, interdisciplinary academic appeal and offers a novel intervention in exile studies through the lens of theater, in which both victims of nazism and its adherents remain in focus.

unlike the benevolent orphan found in charlie chaplin's the kid or the sentimentalized figure of little orphan annie, the orphan in postwar eastern european cinema takes on a more politically fraught role, embodying the tensions of individuals struggling to recover from war and grappling with an unknown future under soviet rule. by exploring films produced in postwar hungary, the german democratic republic, czechoslovakia, romania, and poland, parvulescu traces the way in which cinema envisioned and debated the condition of the post-world war ii subject and the "new man" of soviet-style communism. in these films, the orphan becomes a cinematic trope that interrogates socialist visions of ideological institutionalization and re-education and stands as a silent critic of the system's shortcomings or as a resilient spirit who has resisted capture by the political apparatus of the new state.

the heart is an iconic symbol in the medieval and early modern european world. in addition to being a physical organ, it is a key conceptual device related to emotions, cognition, the self and identity, and the body. the heart is read as a metaphor for human desire and will, and situated in opposition to or alongside reason and cognition. in medieval and early modern europe, the "feeling heart" - the heart as the site of emotion and emotional practices - informed a broad range of art, literature, music, heraldry, medical texts, and devotional and ritual practices. this multidisciplinary collection brings together art historians, literary scholars, historians, theologians, and musicologists to highlight the range of meanings attached to the symbol of the heart, the relationship between physical and metaphorical representations of the heart, and the uses of the heart in the production of identities and communities in medieval and early modern europe.

sissi's world offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the habsburg empress elisabeth of austria. it investigates the myths, legends, and representations across literature, art, film, and other media of one of the most popular, revered, and misunderstood female figures in european cultural history.

sissi's world explores the cultural foundations for the endurance of the sissi legends and the continuing fascination with the beautiful empress: a bavarian duchess born in 1837, the longest-serving austrian empress, and the queen of hungary who died in 1898 at the hands of a crazed anarchist.

despite the continuing fascination with "the beloved sissi," the habsburg empress, her impact, and legacy have received scant attention from scholars. this collection will go beyond the popular biographical accounts, recountings of her mythic beauty, and scattered studies of her well-known eccentricities to offer transdisciplinary cultural perspectives across art, film, fashion, history, literature, and media.

the great slavic medieval epic, the igor tale, recounts the story of a russian prince who leads his men into battle against the mongols. in 1935, soviet scholar p.n. berkov began to compile a bibliography of western european translations of the poem, later followed by several soviet union biographies compiling the works on the epic that had appeared in the russian empire or the soviet union. here, cooper attempts to remedy the shortcomings of previous scholar work: to seriously survey the large body of non-soviet scholarship on the poem particularly western contributions to igor scholarship. originally published in 1978, cooper traces foreign scholarship and translations from 1900-1976 from a wide variety of western and some eastern nations including the united states, great britain, france, italy, poland, japan and many other countries. this title is a valuable resource for students of literature and slavic studies.

the material and intellectual presence of egypt is at the heart of western culture, religion and art from antiquity to the present. this volume aims to provide a long term and interdisciplinary perspective on egypt and its mnemohistory, taking theories on objects and their agency as its main point of departure. the central questions the book addresses are why, from the first millennium bc onwards, things and concepts egyptian are to be found in such a great variety of places throughout european history and how we can account for their enduring impact over time. by taking a radically object-oriented perspective on this question, this book is also a major contribution to current debates on the agency of artefacts across archaeology, anthropology and art history.

the spectators, also known as moral weeklies, were an important magazine genre which came into being in the early 18th century and which shaped european identity by developing the strategies of critical journalism and by popularizing the ideas and values of the age of enlightenment. investigating modes of storytelling in the spectators is an important starting point for a paradigmatic investigation of our historical, cultural and philosophical evolution since the enlightenment and the impact of these magazines on issues of identity in today's europe. in this collection on, we present a series of contributions which study english, french, spanish, italian, german, dutch, czech, polish and danish-norwegian periodicals.