Journals
2026 EN
Yadav Neha
The comic book industry in the United States of America, a juggernaut for two decades since its inception, found itself crumbling in the latter half of the 1950s. Comics historian David Hajdu notes that between 1954 and 1956, more than half the comic books on the newsstands disappeared and the number of titles published dropped from 650 to 250. What happened in the intervening period? A Congressional committee hearing on the relationship between entertainment and horror comics and juvenile delinquency. The transcript of the 1954 US Congressional Committee hearings consists of testimonials from child psychiatrists, newspaper editors, newspaper vendors, comic book publishers and distributors, and even a Member of Parliament from Canada; a repository of relevant editorials and news articles about comic books and their impact on children and teens from the preceding years; studies and comics surveys commissioned by various civic groups. My paper performs a close reading of the 1954 transcript as an archive of contemporary attitudes towards the comic book as a cultural object during a particularly fractious decade. My analysis of the transcript shows how the comic book almost became a Rorschach test for differing vested interests and came to reflect fears and anxieties associated with intersecting strands of emergent phenomena: McCarthyism and cultural censorship; the post-war economic boom; the appearance of teenagers as a distinct demographic category with an attendant teen culture, massive technological advancement within mass media; and accompanying debates around the suitability, advantages, and dangers of said media. The desire for near-absolute control over the content and circulation of comic books, I argue, arose not from a cultural affinity for censorship but out of pervasive paternalistic attitudes towards children’s literature. The hearings exemplify one of the most decisive and influential acts of governmental intervention vis-à-vis national reading habits, setting the context within which comic books are discussed to this day.
Journals
2026 DE
Leck Uwe
Nach Canberra 1988 war die IMO zum zweiten Mal in Australien zu Gast, vom 10. bis 20. Juli 2025 an der Sunshine Coast in Queensland.
Journals
2026 DE
Weigand Hans-Georg
Die Internationale Mathematik Olympiade (IMO) fand 2025 in Sunshine Coast in Australien, etwas nördlich von Brisbane statt. Es nahmen 635 Schülerinnen und Schüler aus 114 Ländern teil. Unter dem sechsköpfigen deutschen Team war auch Vladyslav Husynin (Vlad) vom Wirsberg-Gymnasium in Würzburg. Er ist kurz nach Kriegsbeginn 2022 von Kyjiw nach Deutschland umgezogen und hat das erste Jahr mit seiner Mutter und seinem Bruder in einer kleinen Ein-Zimmer-Wohnung in der Nähe von Würzburg verbracht. Er ist zunächst in eine Klasse für ukrainische Flüchtlinge gegangen, dann in eine reguläre 9. Klasse gewechselt und hat an verschiedenen Mathematikkursen und -wettbewerben teilgenommen. Bei der IMO in Australien hat er in der Einzelwertung eine Bronzemedaille gewonnen. In dem Interview, das ich mit ihm nach seiner Rückkehr aus Australien geführt habe, werden zum einen die Schwierigkeiten deutlich, denen ukrainische Schülerinnen und Schüler ausgesetzt sind, die nach Deutschland kommen, es wird aber auch deutlich, wie eine intensive Beschäftigung mit Mathematik zur Integration ausländischer Flüchtlinge beitragen kann.
Journals
2026 EN
Horb Yevhen
In October 1941, about 9,000 Mariupol Jews experienced the last minutes of their lives in anti-tank ditches in the village Ahrobaza. Within a year all that was repeated though on a smaller scale. However, at that time the main target was primarily the descendants of heterogeneous marriages. The proposed research is focused on Jewish children who managed to survive after shootings in Ahrobaza and avoid further extermination in Mariupol Gestapo torture chambers. I will focus on children’s understanding of life hazards and death as well as on the transformation thereof as a result of traumatic practices of genocide of Mariupol’s Jewish population. Children who were rescued or who escaped the Ahrobaza ditches on their own were forced to hide, lose touch with their homes and families, change their names, lie about their identity and become grown-up much earlier than their coevals before the war. Analysis of oral evidence to all those sufferings makes it possible to identify typical survival strategies of Jewish children in occupied Mariupol, to identify their dependence on types of traumatic experiences and to inscribe it into a broader context of social history of Jewish childhood under the conditions of Nazi occupation.
Journals
2026 EN
Frauhammer Krisztina · Pataricza Dóra
The immediate post-Holocaust period, especially the restart of children’s lives, remains an understudied part of Hungarian Holocaust history. Our article presents the Zionist children’s homes in post-war Szeged. Like most European Jewish cities, Szeged lost much of its Jewish population during the Holocaust. Szeged was the main deportation hub for villages and towns in the area. In June 1944, about 8,600 Jews were deported from Szeged over three days. The first train went to Auschwitz; most were murdered. The second train split between Auschwitz and the Strasshof labor camp. The third train went to Strasshof, where most survived. Thus, Szeged’s Jews, including children and the elderly, had an unusually high survival rate. This survival rate may help explain why five Zionist organizations in the city opened orphanages after the war. Residents included children from distant regions, locals, orphans, half-orphans, and even those from intact families. This variety reflects the many stories of Hungary’s “children of the Holocaust.” Both the makeup of these groups and their educational methods and aims were unusual. In this article, we present the distinctive features of these institutions, often referred to as orphanages. We use archival materials and testimonies to show their work.
Journals
2026 EN
Hillen Aiko
This study examines the experiences and roles of children and teenagers during the German occupation of north-eastern Belarus (1941–1944), with a particular focus on the Vitebsk Oblast. Drawing on nearly 50 oral history interviews and a wide range of archival sources, the paper explores how children were affected by violence, persecution, and forced labor, while also considering their limited scope for agency. The analysis is situated within the broader context of Soviet childhood policies, interethnic coexistence, and the impact of Nazi racial ideology. It shows how the occupation undermined interethnic relations, replacing them with ghettoisation, forced labor, and the extermination of Jewish children. This study explores children’s experiences between violence, compliance, and powerlessness within the context of occupation. The study highlights the ambiguous roles that children held under German occupation and the limited possibilities they had to make their own decisions. It focuses on how everyday life changed after the invasion and how living conditions worsened as the partisan war intensified from 1942. Using witness accounts that speak of survival, cooperation with occupiers, and personal loss. The study sheds new light on children’s wartime experiences and calls for their recognition as historical subjects.
Journals
2026 EN
Flaschka Monika J.
This article analyzes the events and recollections of child sexual abuse in Nazi-occupied territories during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Using testimonies of Jewish survivors from the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, this research first examines the difficulty in defining the category of ‘child,’ and then provides an explanation of what constitutes child sexual abuse. The testimonies are then analyzed to determine common themes in the testimonies of men and women, and from survivors of sexual abuse in different contexts, such as in hiding or in camps, for example. Finally, this research investigates the ways in which survivors understood the sexual abuse at the time it occurred, how they articulated it as adults, and what the effects of such sexual abuse were throughout their lives.
Journals
2026 EN
Podhurets Anna
The paper addresses conceptualization of the war in Ukraine from two geopolitical perspectives – of the combatant country (Ukraine) and the non-combatant European Union. While media coverage of the war is widespread, there remains a gap in understanding how narratives differ in their framing of distress experiencers (directly affected) and non-experiencers (external observers) across these contexts. A corpus-based verbal framing analysis of the European Union and Ukrainian (English-speaking) media outlets during the first four months of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 included: 1) a linguistic approach by identifying conceptual metaphors, and 2) a computer-assisted approach by extracting latent word clusters that constitute frames. The range and scope of conceptual metaphors reveal the framing of distress as an emotion, distress experience, and experiencers during the war, alongside divulging metaphorical frames connected to the economy, politics, or society. Language as a conduit, integrity and its loss, and mental event metaphors stand out in two corpora, uncovering positioning and values. In its turn, Topic Modelling enabled the identification of five frames (“international reaction to the war”, “refugees”, “economy”, “military actions”, and “food crisis”) that intersect in two corpora with a specific focus shift that has evaluative and attitudinal meaning. Computer-assisted frame identification in a broader context, in which distress narratives occur, helps us understand noticeable differences and striking similarities in conceptualizing the war in Ukraine from two perspectives.
Journals
2026 EN
Horbach Jens · Rammer Christian
After the beginning of the war in Ukraine, energy prices in Germany increased drastically. The paper analyses responses of German firms to this energy price shock. A variety of measures and reactions at the firm-level are explored, such as substituting machinery and equipment by less energy consuming alternatives, a change of energy suppliers, the use of digital technologies to reduce energy consumption, the introduction of energy management systems, relocation or closure of energy-intensive activities, or replacing fossil by other energy sources. The analysis is based on data from the German part of the Community Innovation Survey. The econometric results show that a high affectedness by the energy price shock in 2022 triggers the substitution of machinery and equipment by more energy efficient alternatives. This measure in turn is correlated to a decrease of electricity consumption and oil use, and it promotes the substitution of fossil energy sources by renewables. From a policy perspective, energy price shocks and politically induced higher energy prices can be advantageous for a shift of energy use towards higher levels of energy efficiency and a substitution of fossil energies by renewables. However, such shocks can lead to negative short-term economic consequences in energy-intensive firms.
Journals
2026 EN
Haidamachuk Olha
The article explores song preferences in stressful conditions. Favourite songs, embedded in a familiar songscape, resonate with cultural memory and the sense of belonging. Both individual and collective memories through a shared culture of hearing are based on “acoustic citizenship” (M. Sonevytsky), but challenged by war. How a disquieting tonality of war-stress and displacement influenced situational musical tastes of Ukrainians is the focus of this research. By analysing 13 interviews conducted in the Prisma Ukraїna: War, Migration, Memory project in 2022 I found out that 16 Ukrainian songs mentioned as favorites by Ukrainians displaced to Berlin due to the Russian-Ukrainian war included four groups: 1) Ukrainian folklore; 2) Ukrainian liberation-patriotic songs of the early 20th century; 3) Ukrainian hits of the Soviet period; 4) Ukrainian contemporary pop songs. While 3 short-term favorites ( Shchedryk, Chervona Kalyna, Stefaniya ) are also known to foreigners. Resonating with Ukrainians’ long-term memories through their native melos these short-term favorite songs are emotionally anchored in a familiar songscape. Against the background of anxiety, some Ukrainians followed a musical diet. The song keys unlock not only the respondents’ desired mood, their entangled belonging, shared Ukrainian-European song-spaces, polyphonic reasons of preference, but also the tonal palimpsests of tradition.