Gonda Van Steen – författare

This volume offers a critique of cultural and intellectual life in Greece during the dictatorship of 1967-1974, discussing how Greek playwrights, directors, and actors reconceived the role of culture in a state of crisis and engaged with questions of theater's relationship to politics and community. In the early 1970s, several bold new plays appeared, resonating with the concerns of Greek public and private life. The reinvigorated Greek stage displayed an extraordinary degree of historical consciousness and embraced revisionist cultural critique as well, leading to a drastic re-shaping of the Greek theatrical landscape.Stage of Emergency is the first study to focus on these particular theatrical developments of the so-called junta era, shedding light not only on the messages and impact of the plays themselves, but also on the politics of culture and censorship affecting the Greek public during this period.

Gonda Van Steen examines the productions of classical tragedies staged by political prisoners of the Greek Civil War (late 1940s to 1950s). She first explains the historical and political context in which these productions originated, the selections made by the prisoners, and the practical conditions under which the performances were mounted, devoting attention, too, to the prison authorities' acts of censorship. Her main focus, however, is on the interpretation that the political detainees gave to their productions and the rationale behind specific readings. The book includes the text of an adaptation of Antigone , in the original Greek and in English translation, written by Aris Alexandrou, one of the prisoners.

Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire explores two key historical episodes that have generally escaped the notice of modern Greece, the Near East, and their observers alike.

This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global Cold War. Greek-to-American adoptions and, regrettably, also their transactions and transgressions, provided the blueprint for the first large-scale international adoptions, well before these became a mass phenomenon typically associated with Asian children. The story of these Greek postwar and Cold War adoptions, whose procedures ranged from legal to highly irregular, has never been told or analyzed before. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece answers the important questions: How did these adoptions from Greece happen? Was there any money involved? Humanitarian rescue or kid pro quo? Or both? With sympathy and perseverance, Gonda Van Steen has filled a decades-long gap in our understanding, and provided essential information to the hundreds of adoptees and their descendants whose lives are still affected today.

This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global Cold War. Greek-to-American adoptions and, regrettably, also their transactions and transgressions, provided the blueprint for the first large-scale international adoptions, well before these became a mass phenomenon typically associated with Asian children. The story of these Greek postwar and Cold War adoptions, whose procedures ranged from legal to highly irregular, has never been told or analyzed before. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece answers the important questions: How did these adoptions from Greece happen? Was there any money involved? Humanitarian rescue or kid pro quo? Or both? With sympathy and perseverance, Gonda Van Steen has filled a decades-long gap in our understanding, and provided essential information to the hundreds of adoptees and their descendants whose lives are still affected today.

The previously unpublished memoir of social worker Charles Schermerhorn offers new and eye-opening source material pertaining to the epicenter of the early Cold War: northern Greece. This book brings this memoir to light to enrich the discussion about the Greek Civil War and the late 1940s, through the highly perceptive views of a firsthand observer of the turmoil. Schermerhorn’s writings speak most compellingly to the power of human agency amid adverse sociopolitical circumstances. His memoir takes a child-centered and social-historical approach to controversial events, filling a great void in our knowledge. This book looks at a single mid-twentieth-century crisis in multidimensional ways, as a moral, material, social, and institutional calamity that mobilized a motley crew of actors, from new humanitarian aid organizations to press agents, from soldiers to destitute repeat-refugees, from fledgling modern missionaries to foreign diplomats and economic strategists. It was Schermerhorn’s unique achievement to interact with them all, seeking common ground in the arduous task of trying to improve living conditions for children and rural families. But he also realized how easily foreign aid could become a tool of political power and expediency.Focusing on the Greek Civil War, this book will interest readers studying the Cold War, the heated peripheries of proxy wars, and the devastating social fallout of conflicts raging in areas hidden from public view. The global history of humanitarian crises is a burgeoning field, and Schermerhorn was the first to place Greek children and villagers, who themselves left hardly any sources behind, at the center of this urgent and ever-relevant debate.

The previously unpublished memoir of social worker Charles Schermerhorn offers new and eye-opening source material pertaining to the epicenter of the early Cold War: northern Greece. This book brings this memoir to light to enrich the discussion about the Greek Civil War and the late 1940s, through the highly perceptive views of a firsthand observer of the turmoil. Schermerhorn’s writings speak most compellingly to the power of human agency amid adverse sociopolitical circumstances. His memoir takes a child-centered and social-historical approach to controversial events, filling a great void in our knowledge. This book looks at a single mid-twentieth-century crisis in multidimensional ways, as a moral, material, social, and institutional calamity that mobilized a motley crew of actors, from new humanitarian aid organizations to press agents, from soldiers to destitute repeat-refugees, from fledgling modern missionaries to foreign diplomats and economic strategists. It was Schermerhorn’s unique achievement to interact with them all, seeking common ground in the arduous task of trying to improve living conditions for children and rural families. But he also realized how easily foreign aid could become a tool of political power and expediency.Focusing on the Greek Civil War, this book will interest readers studying the Cold War, the heated peripheries of proxy wars, and the devastating social fallout of conflicts raging in areas hidden from public view. The global history of humanitarian crises is a burgeoning field, and Schermerhorn was the first to place Greek children and villagers, who themselves left hardly any sources behind, at the center of this urgent and ever-relevant debate.

Greece at the Turning Point: Remembrances of US Foreign Service Families Living and Working in Postwar Greece is a collection of previously unpublished personal memoirs and extracts from private letters, which provides astonishing insight into the experiences of American experts tasked with implementing the Marshall Plan in Greece. Members of the American aid mission, a key division of the larger Marshall Plan across Europe, ushered the United States into its new role as a global superpower. They encountered war-torn Greece at a turning point and worked together to facilitate the reconstruction of a society devastated by the Axis Occupation of World War II and the Greek Civil War. Alongside the official mission, a quieter but equally demanding project unfolded: The work of the American spouses who built households amid scarcity and uncertainty.Marking the 80th anniversary of the Marshall Plan and coinciding with the contemporary retraction of US international aid programs, this collection offers a fresh, human-scale perspective on one of the Cold War’s most emblematic development efforts. The Greek experience exposes the frictions at the heart of such initiatives—between technical expertise and local knowledge, ambition and restraint, power and partnership—revealing how global policy was lived, negotiated, and reshaped in the intimacy of daily life.This book will engage policymakers as well as scholars and students of Cold War history and ideology, US foreign aid, diplomacy and memoir studies, and twentieth-century Greece.

Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire explores two key historical episodes that have generally escaped the notice of modern Greece, the Near East, and their observers alike.

From 1919 to 1922, Greece and Turkey fought a brutal war for Anatolia that reconfigured international politics. This volume examines the international, transnational and economic dimensions of that conflict and the bitter peace that formally ended it.Bringing together a diverse group of experts drawing on multiple archives and the latest scholarship, this volume analyses the complexities of peacemaking, the foundation of new nations through the violent ‘unmixing’ of peoples, the traumas of military mobilisation, and the remarkable revival of global capitalism on the ruins of old empires. Taken together, these essays will remind readers that the Great War did not end in 1919, and that the Greek-Turkish story is a critical element in the wider reshaping of twentieth-century international order.