Books by Friederike Kind-Kovács
This book sets out a new research agenda for the history of international broadcasting, and for r... more This book sets out a new research agenda for the history of international broadcasting, and for radio history more generally. It examines global and transnational histories of long-distance wireless broadcasting, combining perspectives from international history, media and cultural history, the history of technology, and sound studies. It is a genuinely co-written book, the result of more than five years of collaboration. Bringing together their knowledge of a wide range of different countries, languages, and archives, the co-authors show how broadcasters and states deployed international broadcasting as a tool of international communication and persuasion. They also demonstrate that by paying more attention to audiences, programmes, and soundscapes, historians of international broadcasting can make important contributions to wider debates in social and cultural history. Exploring the idea of a ‘wireless world’, a globe connected, both in imagination and reality, by radio, this book sheds new light on the transnational connections created by international broadcasting. Bringing together all periods of international broadcasting within a single analytical frame, including the pioneering days of wireless, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it reveals key continuities and transformations. It looks at how wireless was shaped by internationalist ideas about the use of broadcasting to promote world peace and understanding, at how empires used broadcasting to perpetuate colonialism, and at how anti-colonial movements harnessed radio as a weapon of decolonization.
In the aftermath of World War I, international organizations descended upon the destitute childre... more In the aftermath of World War I, international organizations descended upon the destitute children living in the rubble of Budapest and the city became a testing ground for how the West would handle the most vulnerable residents of a former enemy state.
Budapest's Children reconstructs how Budapest turned into a laboratory of transnational humanitarian intervention. Friederike Kind-Kovács explores the ways in which migration, hunger, and destitution affected children's lives, casting light on children's particular vulnerability in times of distress. Drawing on extensive archival research, Kind-Kovács reveals how Budapest's children, as iconic victims of the war's aftermath, were used to mobilize humanitarian sentiments and practices throughout Europe and the United States. With this research, Budapest's Children investigates the dynamic interplay between local Hungarian organizations, international humanitarian donors, and the child relief recipients.
In tracing transnational relief encounters, Budapest's Children reveals how intertwined postwar internationalism and nationalism were and how child relief reinforced revisionist claims and global inequalities that still reverberate today.
Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in t... more Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in the Cold War and challenges us to recognize gaps in the Iron Curtain. The book identifies a transnational undertaking that reinforced détente, dialogue, and cultural transfer, and thus counterbalanced the persistent belief in Europe’s irreversible division. It analyzes a cultural practice that attracted extensive attention during the Cold War but has largely been ignored in recent scholarship: tamizdat, or the unauthorized migration of underground literature across the Iron Curtain. Investigating the transfer of underground literature from the ‘Other Europe’ to Western Europe, the United States, and back illuminates the intertwined fabrics of Cold War literary cultures. Perceiving tamizdat as both a literary and a social phenomenon, the book focuses on how individuals participated in this border-crossing activity and used secretive channels to guarantee the free flow of literature. The image that emerges of this largely unknown cultural encounter transcends continuing perceptions of the artificial East-West divide, revealing that tamizdat contributed to the recreation of a transnational literary community.
Papers by Friederike Kind-Kovács
Contemporary European History, 2023
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
This book sets out a new research agenda for the history of international broadcasting, and for r... more This book sets out a new research agenda for the history of international broadcasting, and for radio history more generally. It examines global and transnational histories of long-distance wireless broadcasting, combining perspectives from international history, media and cultural history, the history of technology, and sound studies. It is a genuinely co-written book, the result of more than five years of collaboration. Bringing together their knowledge of a wide range of different countries, languages, and archives, the co-authors show how broadcasters and states deployed international broadcasting as a tool of international communication and persuasion. They also demonstrate that by paying more attention to audiences, programmes, and soundscapes, historians of international broadcasting can make important contributions to wider debates in social and cultural history. Exploring the idea of a ‘wireless world’, a globe connected, both in imagination and reality, by radio, this book...
The Wireless World
This chapter explores the idea that international broadcasting could promote direct contact and g... more This chapter explores the idea that international broadcasting could promote direct contact and genuine understanding among different peoples, thus encouraging peace. It explains how utopian wireless internationalist rhetoric, and the initiatives of organizations like the International Broadcasting Union and the League of Nations, conflicted with the reality of radio propaganda. It also discusses the opposed capitalist and communist internationalisms of the Cold War and their impact on international broadcasting. It considers the effect of empire and decolonization on internationalist thinking about the wireless world. It also examines the role of Western discourses about human rights and the free flow of information. Case studies examine Portuguese imperial and colonial broadcasting, and the role of Radio Luxembourg in broadcasting across Europe before and during the Second World War.
Biopolitics in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century, 2022
Friederike Kind-Kovács provides a borderline case between re-creational policies and the wider fi... more Friederike Kind-Kovács provides a borderline case between re-creational policies and the wider field of nutrition and hygiene. Her chapter addresses issues of preserving young life through nutritional policies. Due to mal- und undernourishment, the lives of children and infants in Hungary after the First World War were at stake – and with them, the promise for a future healthy Hungarian nation. Kind-Kovács shows how feeding programs by Both local governments and international relief organizations were an important biopolitical technique apparatus present at the social core of the nation at a point when humanitarians from Hungary, but especially from abroad, were in close cooperation over exploring the connection between diet and disease. The notion of food as ‘preventive medicine’ became a crucial factor in order to save both the Hungarian collective body and the individual bodies of children after the destitutions of the war.
The Wireless World: Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting, 2022
The Wireless World: Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting, 2022
The Wireless World: Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting, 2022
Romanian Journal of Population Studies
Autorin: Friederike Kind-Kovács Der Ausbruch der Covid-19-Pandemie in Deutschland und weltweit st... more Autorin: Friederike Kind-Kovács Der Ausbruch der Covid-19-Pandemie in Deutschland und weltweit stellt das Leben und die Arbeitswelt von Millionen Menschen auf den Kopf. Auch die Wissenschaft als global vernetzte Gemeinschaft ist hiervon auf eine ganz eigene Art betroffen. In einer fünfteiligen Reihe möchte „Denken ohne Geländer“ einen Einblick geben, wie sich der Lockdown konkret auf die Arbeit am Hannah-Arendt-Institut ausgewirkt hat. Die Reihe besteht aus Beiträgen von insgesam..
Slavic Review, 2017
Three years after Kostis Kornetis' Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Pol... more Three years after Kostis Kornetis' Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics, and the Long 1960s in Greece, another excellent monograph has been published with Berghahn Books, which engages with the post-dictatorial moment of the left-wing youth in Greece, specifically in the period between the collapse of the military junta in 1974 and the early 1980s. While Kornetis centered his attention more on left-wing student activism and the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the early 1970s, Nikolaos Papadogiannis investigates how left-wing collective action was framed by a variety of left-wing youth organizations throughout the 1970s, ranging from socialist, Eurocommunist, pro-Soviet, to Maoist circles. Major emphasis lies on the main socialist and communist youth organizations, the pro-Soviet Communist Youth of Greece (KNE) and the Eurocommunist Rigas Feraios (RF), whose role in shaping left-wing "youth culture" Papadogiannis is carefully uncovering in this densely written account. The author approaches the making and practicing of "youth culture" through the lens of leisure activities and sexual practices, questioning the definition of leisure as "non-obliged time" (2), and instead examining its "interconnections with politics, sexuality, and gender" (3). The author states that left-wing youth organizations were, in contrast to their right-wing counterparts, "actively engaged in the shaping" of their members' "leisure activities" (3). While the youth organizations were aiming to indoctrinate "not only their members, but the entirely of Greek Youth," the author rightfully observes that these organizations were yet "malleable entities" that became with the time gradually "involved in experimentations with the "relationship between the individual and the political collective" (16). Furthermore, as he convincingly argues, "1974" and the end of the dictatorship constituted nothing more than a "semi-rupture," in the sense that the mid-to-late 1970s "witnessed neither a continuation nor a substantial reconfiguration" of leisure and sexuality (277-78). The author also objects to a clear-cut definition of a unified, left-wing youth culture, and instead stresses the increasing heterogeneity of leisure activities among the left-wing youth. Throughout the book, the reader becomes engaged with a great diversity of leisure activities that were revolving around theater, writings, discussions, tourism, music, cinema, sexuality, student clubs, bars and pubs, and cultural associations. What might be considered the only "distinctive element" of "youth culture" was the young people's longing and search for "sociality, namely the formation of [young] peer groups" (8). Against this more general background, the author elaborates in the first two chapters how left-wing organizations slowly gained ground, especially since the 1960s, and actively engaged with impulses from the western "1968" counterculture and Soviet-type/Chinese youth cultures. Papadogiannis carefully outlines how Greek left-wing youth organizations in the post-authoritarian years succeeded in influencing broad masses to embrace left-wing cultural activities (279) and in spreading a Greek "progressive" youth culture (27), and a "progressive" way of life (65). In Chapter 3, the author outlines how left-wingers not only consumed "youth culture" but became significantly invested in the late 1970s in producing "progressive" cultural products, such as literature, theater, music, and cinema. Chapter 4 reproduces the ongoing diversification and de-politicization of the left-wing youth movement and their leisure pursuits in the late 1970s (189). The parties' institutionalized "youth culture" became more and more contested, as Papadogiannis uncovers in Chapter
East Central Europe, 2014
In recent years, historians have slowly lost interest in depicting the Cold War as a unique ideol... more In recent years, historians have slowly lost interest in depicting the Cold War as a unique ideological contest between the “real existing” socialist East and the capitalist West. In this spirit, this text examines the social practice of literary transfers, i.e., the exchange of literary works across borders. These transfers sought to physically restore an unraveled Europe that had come about as a result of the ideological and often personal division of Europe’s (and Germany’s) populations. Focusing on the practice of literary transfers across the Iron Curtain permits us to understand borders as symbolic spaces of the Cold War, although they had supposedly been hermetically sealed. Current research on opposition movements in Cold War Europe is still dominated by the widespread notion that oppositional phenomena in thegdrrepresent a research area distinct from other oppositional movements in the Eastern bloc. Possibly due to Germany’s singular dividedness, this perception has often l...
Slavic & East European Information Resources, 2015
... Bofena Karwowska, Czeslaw Milosz's Self-Presentation in Englîsh-Speaking Comi tr... more ... Bofena Karwowska, Czeslaw Milosz's Self-Presentation in Englîsh-Speaking Comi tri es, in: Canadian Slavonic Papers 40 (1998), S. 273 ... Andrzej Stanisiaw Kowalczyk, Jerzy Giedrocys Kultura und die Krise der europäischen Identität, in: Lukasz Galecki (Hrsg.), Die polnische ...
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Books by Friederike Kind-Kovács
Budapest's Children reconstructs how Budapest turned into a laboratory of transnational humanitarian intervention. Friederike Kind-Kovács explores the ways in which migration, hunger, and destitution affected children's lives, casting light on children's particular vulnerability in times of distress. Drawing on extensive archival research, Kind-Kovács reveals how Budapest's children, as iconic victims of the war's aftermath, were used to mobilize humanitarian sentiments and practices throughout Europe and the United States. With this research, Budapest's Children investigates the dynamic interplay between local Hungarian organizations, international humanitarian donors, and the child relief recipients.
In tracing transnational relief encounters, Budapest's Children reveals how intertwined postwar internationalism and nationalism were and how child relief reinforced revisionist claims and global inequalities that still reverberate today.
Papers by Friederike Kind-Kovács
Budapest's Children reconstructs how Budapest turned into a laboratory of transnational humanitarian intervention. Friederike Kind-Kovács explores the ways in which migration, hunger, and destitution affected children's lives, casting light on children's particular vulnerability in times of distress. Drawing on extensive archival research, Kind-Kovács reveals how Budapest's children, as iconic victims of the war's aftermath, were used to mobilize humanitarian sentiments and practices throughout Europe and the United States. With this research, Budapest's Children investigates the dynamic interplay between local Hungarian organizations, international humanitarian donors, and the child relief recipients.
In tracing transnational relief encounters, Budapest's Children reveals how intertwined postwar internationalism and nationalism were and how child relief reinforced revisionist claims and global inequalities that still reverberate today.