A travelogue of an Israeli musicologist, descendant of German Jewish émigrés, her real and imaginary sonic journey roams between ruins and rubble in Germany and Israel/Palestine. She takes ruins as iconic, allegoric, and reverberating; partially resisting the ravages of time, enshrining sounds and memory. She deems rubble as formless, plain, and voiceless, devoid of identity, transient, and forgetful. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce by the Romans is her starting point, and the currently occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli armed forces is where she ends. The imaginary soundscapes she unfolds resonates forlorn heavenly voices, Nazi youth's ditties, Israeli pop songs, operatic voices, and redemptive and subversive German and Israeli oratorios.

The dual theatre complex of the Württembergische Staatstheater in Stuttgart sustained serious damage during the Second World War. While the larger theatre was eventually able to be repaired, the smaller theatre was destroyed, leading to a multi-phased and controversial process to determine how best to replace it. Many of Stuttgart's citizens publicly pleaded that the smaller theatre should be reconstructed according to its original design, in order to restore its historical beauty and its integrity with the complex. The company's Intendant and numerous architects, however, took a more modern approach that manifested in a variety of proposed designs, including that by Hans Volkart, which opened in 1962. Countering the binary represented by ‘faithful reconstruction’ on one end (Vienna, Munich) and by completely modern designs on the other (West Berlin, Cologne), the case of Stuttgart perhaps serves as a better metaphor for the compromises of continuity and change in post-war culture.

The sonic aftershocks of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti continue to reverberate throughout the cultural landscape, particularly within the relatively small but long-standing mizik klasik community. In this article, I analyse the sometimes divergent performances of a composition that commemorates that tragedy. Haitian-American composer Sydney Guillaume wrote ‘N'ap Debat’ (‘We're Hangin’ On’) from Los Angeles shortly after the earthquake. One performance of this work takes place far from the site of ruin, voiced by distant observers. The other performance happens in Haiti, sung by its survivors. Both performances transform rubble into ruin.

During the Second World War, the American composer George Rochberg served as an infantryman with the US Army in Europe. There, he witnessed first hand the aftermath caused by massive firebombing of the French countryside by both Allied and Axis bombers, an image that would remain with him for the remainder of his life. In his post-war writings, the rubbled city of Saint-Lô soon became a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture, which he believed had suffered a grave injury. This article considers how Rochberg reconstructed his wartime sketches – short miniatures composed during the European campaign – into material for his Sixth Symphony (1986). I argue that Rochberg clearly conceived of musical reconstruction as a means by which to symbolically confront the modernist forces he believed accountable for the decline of Western culture that he increasingly perceived towards the end of his life. The article ends with a cautionary epilogue to this time-worn narrative of rubble, reconstruction, and redemption that challenges Rochberg's false sense of moral superiority and the motivations of ‘rubble narratives’ more generally.

The 2014 film Whiplash depicts successful jazz drumming as an athletic exhibition of speed and endurance, in a manner that reflects its protagonist's idolization of Buddy Rich (1917–87). The crowd-pleasing virtuosity of Rich and Whiplash has drawn critics’ ire, but this article interrogates the ideas of musical authenticity that underpin their complaints, and offers a more productive analysis of the film's drum kit performances and their inspiration, informed by a range of jazz, film, and performance scholarship. Specific attention is drawn to the performances’ visual attractions. Whiplash's fast editing style and shots of exertion – grimacing, sweat, blood – give non-expert viewers a sense of drumming's physical and mental demands, and much the same is true of Rich's exaggerated movements and expressions, whether seen live or (as is commonly the case) amplified by a screen's mediation.

This article focuses on one section of the former Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria that incorporates diverse memory events after the political change in 1989. The article concentrates on the Hungarian region during the last nearly three decades and investigates the actors and the memories of the former historic period, which show a uniquely diverse set of realizations. Among others, two private museums about the Iron Curtain (established and managed by two former border guards) and a memorial park (commemorating only one day, established and managed by a civil organization) in comparison to the official narrative presented in the last room of the permanent exhibition at the Hungarian National Museum in the capital are subjects of this investigation. Besides the actual memory places and the actors (those who initiated, maintain, and visit these memory spots), their relationship and role in the formation of the regional identity are also analyzed. As theoretical background, the connection between heritage, museum, and memory; the notion of post-Soviet nostalgia; authenticity; and the importance of time are activated for the analysis and to disentangle the complexity of the chosen case study.

This article surveys nation-building in post-Soviet Azerbaijan over the country’s first quarter-century of restored independence. It examines the core dimensions of ethno-demographic and national minority issues, language policy, and the role of religion in the development of the state’s formal ideology Azerbaycançılıq (Azerbaijanism). The article highlights the nexus of nation-building and regime-building as a dominant trend over the last two decades, generating what we term “civic dominion”: the domination of a regime tradition, legitimated through the imagery and ideology of civic nationhood. Finally, the article considers the role of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict as a long-standing exception to the ostensibly civic ethos of post-Soviet Azerbaijani nation-building.

The issue of duplicates and duplication in ethnographic collection is frequently regarded as a process that begins and ends in the museum as a fundamental act of the process of curating. In contrast, this article maintains, this practice occurred all along the chain of collecting, where indigenous artefacts operated as items of exchange in the context of the colonial encounter. Using the example of German New Guinea, the article maintains that epistemological concerns, as symbolic currency both in terms of inter-museum exchange and in terms of contributing to individual and institutional prestige, guiding ethnographic intuitions had little influence on colonial resident collectors. Colonial residents, who resented the heavy hand of colonial and museum officials in Berlin, infused duplication with their own desires, which included commercial gain or the conferment of the many German state decorations. The colonized indigenous population benefited from the increasing demand for their material culture, which provided valuable items and bargaining chips in the emerging colonial exchange. Duplicates are identified as doppelgängers to explore the political tensions that emerged in connection with duplication among museum officials and European and indigenous colonial residents.

This article situates the collecting practices of museums of natural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in dialogue with similar practices amongst societies in the Pacific by focusing on how European curators, dealers in natural history and Pacific Islanders shared a common fascination with Spondylus shells. In particular, this article examines the processes for turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens. Spondylus shells were crucial for regulating gift and commercial exchanges in the societies of both regions. Famously, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski claimed that these shells were an essential element of the gift-based kula exchange, which helped him distinguish Western capitalist society from less developed societies without commercial trade. Yet Spondylus shells were also collected and exchanged as gifts amongst British and European naturalists in this period, performing the same roles as in Melanesia. In addition, such gift exchanges could only come into being thanks to the actions of commercially motivated dealers, located both in the Pacific and in Europe, who were the suppliers of these shells both to Melanesian participants in the kula and to Western natural historians and collectors. These observations call into question earlier arguments that equate modernity with the rise of commercial capitalism. It is instead claimed that commercial and gift exchanges were intricately connected and reliant on each other throughout the period, whether in the worlds of Western museums or in Pacific archipelagos. The act of turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens was the key tool for regulating these exchanges.

The good of those who are worse off matters more to the overall good than the good of those who are better off does. But being worse off than one’s fellows is not itself bad; nor is inequality itself bad; nor do differences in well-being matter more when well-being is lower in an absolute sense. Instead, the good of the relatively worse-off weighs more heavily in the overall good than the good of the relatively better-off does, in virtue of the fact that the former are relatively worse off. This paper articulates and defends the view just described.

This article explores the political and discursive framing of the emerging project Holocaust Museum of Greece (HMG) based in Thessaloniki (announced in 2013). As an “in situ” Holocaust museum, the HMG could represent an important step toward recognizing Jewish suffering in a country where—compared with the rest of Europe—unprecedentedly high levels of antisemitic attitudes have been recorded over the past decade. Supported by a qualitative media analysis and supplemented with data from our online survey, we explore how HMG stakeholders and potential local visitors reflect on the project. Occurring amid contemporary endeavors in Holocaust commemoration and Greek-German reconciliation, we connect it with their persistence in combating far-right tendencies and antisemitism. Specifically, we investigate whose memory HMG stakeholders aim to display, how they reflect on dominant Greek historical narratives and whether they express a clear memory commitment and a genuine effort to produce a more integrated historical interpretation of the Holocaust in Greece.

The article is a critical investigation of the role played by the Palermo left-wing newspaper L'Ora in uncovering the Sicilian Mafia's urban affairs and property speculation during the sack of Palermo in the 1960s. It pays particular attention to L'Ora's complex narrative concerning the urban Mafia and the many obstacles that the newspaper encountered in its attempt to defend the city. The article aims to explain L'Ora's account of the Mafia as an intersection of violent crime, politics and business. This study uses investigative series and archival sources to explain the emergence of ‘antimafia’ as both concept and political practice in the urban history of Palermo.

This article tackles the issue of offshore tax sheltering from the perspective of normative political realism. Tax sheltering is a pressing contemporary policy challenge, with hundreds of billions in private assets protected in offshore trusts and shell companies. Indeed, tax sheltering produces a variety of empirical dilemmas that render it a distinctive challenge for global governance. Therefore, it is crucial for normative political theorists to confront this problem. A realist approach offers three distinct advantages, elaborated in the three subsequent sections of the article. First, it relaxes the theoretical burden by starting from the real practice of tax evasion rather than from an abstract theory of equality or justice. Second, this approach recognizes that sheltering is a political harm: a threat to the very maintenance of order, not just a problem of inequality or injustice. If politicians fail at such polity maintenance, realism's ethic of responsibility provides clear political reasons why they should be held accountable. Third, realism's focus on power and its acceptance of coercion open up new strategies for addressing the problem that would not be allowed by theories with a stronger emphasis on consensus.