1680 – Sobibor (2018)

timespace coordinates: The film is based on a real story that happened in 1943 in the Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. The main character of the movie is the Jewish-Soviet soldier Alexander Pechersky, who at that time was serving in the Red Army as a lieutenant. In October 1943, he was captured by the Nazis and deported to the Sobibor death camp, where Jews were being exterminated in gas chambers. In just three weeks, Pechersky was able to plan an international uprising of prisoners from Poland and Western Europe. This uprising led to the largest escape of prisoners from a Nazi death camp.

Sobibor (Russian: Собибор) is a 2018 Russian war drama film co-written, directed by and starring Konstantin Khabensky. The picture also stars Christopher Lambert and was released on 3 May 2018 in Russia. (wiki)

kinopoisk.ru

The uprising   /  Aftermath   /  imdb

1679 – The Grey Zone (2001)

timespace coordinates: October 1944, Jewish Sonderkommando XII in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp

he Grey Zone is a 2001 American war film, and Holocaust drama directed by Tim Blake Nelson and starring David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, and Daniel Benzali. It is based on the book Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account written by Dr. Miklós Nyiszli.

The title comes from a chapter in the book The Drowned and the Saved by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. (wiki)

imdb

1678 – The Accountant of Auschwitz (2018 documentary)

The Accountant of Auschwitz is a Canadian documentary film, produced by Ricki Gurwitz and Ric Esther Bienstock and directed by Matthew Shoychet. The film centres on lawyer Thomas Walther‘s prosecution in the 2010s of former Schutzstaffel agent Oskar Gröning, focusing in part on the ethical debate around whether there’s any useful purpose to be served in prosecuting an elderly man for crimes he committed 60 years earlier. (wiki)

Gröning decided to make his activities at Auschwitz public after learning about Holocaust denial. He openly criticised those who denied the events that he had witnessed and the ideology to which he had subscribed. Gröning was notable as a German willing to make public statements about his experience as an SS soldier, which were self-incriminating and which exposed his life to public scrutiny.

imdb   /   << 315 – Hannah Arendt (2012)

1677 – The Reader (2008)

timespace coordinates: Berlin, 1995 >> Neustadt West Germany, 1958

The Reader is a 2008 romantic drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and written by David Hare, based on the 1995 German (partly autobiographical) novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink. It stars Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, and David Kross. It was the last film for producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom died prior to its release.

The film tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a 15-year-old in 1958, has an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. She disappears only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp.  (wiki)

imdb

1676 – The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction (2016 book)

In 1905, a young Jewish immigrant from Luxembourg founded an electrical supply shop in New York. This inventor, writer, and publisher Hugo Gernsback would later become famous for launching the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. But while science fiction’s annual Hugo Awards were named in his honor, there has been surprisingly little understanding of how the genre began among a community of tinkerers all drawn to Gernsback’s vision of comprehending the future of media through making. In The Perversity of Things, Grant Wythoff makes available texts by Hugo Gernsback that were foundational both for science fiction and the emergence of media studies.

Wythoff argues that Gernsback developed a means of describing and assessing the cultural impact of emerging media long before media studies became an academic discipline. From editorials and blueprints to media histories, critical essays, and short fiction, Wythoff has collected a wide range of Gernsback’s writings that have been out of print since their magazine debut in the early 1900s. These articles cover such topics as television; the regulation of wireless/radio; war and technology; speculative futures; media-archaeological curiosities like the dynamophone and hypnobioscope; and more. All together, this collection shows how Gernsback’s publications evolved from an electrical parts catalog to a full-fledged literary genre.

The Perversity of Things aims to reverse the widespread misunderstanding of Gernsback within the history of science fiction criticism. Through painstaking research and extensive annotations and commentary, Wythoff reintroduces us to Gernsback and the origins of science fiction. (Goodreads)

Figure I.9. A Frank R. Paul caricature of The Electrical Experimenter newsroom from the April 1920 issue.

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Figure I.7. Howard V. Brown’s cover for the March 1923 Science and Invention and Frank R. Paul’s illustration to “Science in New Apartment House De Luxe,” Science and Invention, January 1922.

Figure I.13. Frank R. Paul’s original illustration of a logo for scientifiction, based on suggestions by readers A. A. Kaufman of Brooklyn, New York, Clarence Beck of West Bend, Wisconsin, and A. J. Jacobson of Duluth, Minnesota. Courtesy, Collection of Jim and Felicia Kreuzer, Grand Island, New York.

Figure I.10. Fifteen-year-old Kathleen Parkin, San Rafael, California, and the wireless set she constructed depicted in cover art by George Wall.

Basically this whole delightful book with incredible illustrations (like those by Frank R Paul’s of Amazing Stories glory see above) about the medium & milieu in which early ham, wirless, tekkie, Sci-Fi communities coalesced and mingled is all available to read online here.

1675 – The Time of Money by Lisa Adkins (2018 book)

Speculation is often associated with financial practices, but The Time of Money makes the case that it not be restricted to the financial sphere. It argues that the expansion of finance has created a distinctive social world, one that demands a speculative stance toward life in general.

Replacing a logic of extraction, speculation changes our relationship to time and organizes our social worlds to maximize the productive capacities of populations around flows of money for finance capital.

Speculative practices have become a matter of survival, and defining features of our age are hardwired to their operations—stagnant wages, indebtedness, the centrality of women’s earnings to the household, workfarism, and more. Examining five features of our contemporary economy, Lisa Adkins reveals the operations of this speculative rationality. Moving beyond claims that indebtedness is intrinsic to contemporary life and vague declarations that the social world has become financialized, Adkins delivers a precise examination of the relation between finance and society, one that is rich in empirical and analytical detail.

Read Excerpt: Money on the move (Chapter 1)

1674 – Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society by Daniel S Milo (2019 book)

In this spirited and irreverent critique of Darwin’s long hold over our imagination, a distinguished philosopher of science makes the case that, in culture as well as nature, not only the fittest survive: the world is full of the “good enough” that persist too.

Why is the genome of a salamander forty times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature? In this lively and wide-ranging meditation on the curious accidents and unexpected detours on the path of life, Daniel Milo argues that we ask these questions because we’ve embraced a faulty conception of how evolution–and human society–really works.

Good Enough offers a vigorous critique of the quasi-monopoly that Darwin’s concept of natural selection has on our idea of the natural world. Darwinism excels in accounting for the evolution of traits, but it does not explain their excess in size and number. Many traits far exceed the optimal configuration to do the job, and yet the maintenance of this extra baggage does not prevent species from thriving for millions of years. Milo aims to give the messy side of nature its due–to stand up for the wasteful and inefficient organisms that nevertheless survive and multiply.

But he does not stop at the border between evolutionary theory and its social consequences. He argues provocatively that the theory of evolution through natural selection has acquired the trappings of an ethical system. Optimization, competitiveness, and innovation have become the watchwords of Western societies, yet their role in human lives–as in the rest of nature–is dangerously overrated. Imperfection is not just good enough: it may at times be essential to survival. 

Read Excerpt: Natural Selection Can’t Explain This Bugs Bizzare Horn