This article at the intersection of cultural studies of popular and memory culture deals with the genre of comics as an identity-forming (protest) medium and projection surface for the ideologised “culture war” between traditionalists and modernists in contemporary Poland. The analysis focuses on two historical comics that combine facts and imaginary and refer back to the Second World War, the communist period and the recent history of the Republic of Poland after 1989. The article juxtaposes two title heroes and their comic worlds, which represent opposite ends of the political spectrum and reveal the problem areas of Poland’s dividedness along the underlying canon of values and symbolic worlds: Jan Hardy, the national-conservative “cursed soldier”, and Likwidator, the relentless “anarcho-terrorist”. The characters and their adventures exemplify fundamental memory cultural, religious, nationalist and emancipatory discourses in Poland today. The focus of the analysis lies on the creation context and the (visual) language with its narrative-aesthetic intensifications, which illuminate Poland’s current state of conflict between national egoism and traditional “cultural patriotism” on the one hand and liberal value relativism with its progressive-emancipatory rhetoric on the other.
The article analyzes the development of new post-capitalist practices with their possible effects on the transformation of self-images and self-conceptions using the example of the economy for the common good. To this end, the connection between the current subject order, the present social crises and the complex entanglement of the prevailing mode of production and life is explained. A socio-ecological transformation would therefore also have to be linked to the emergence of an alternative subject culture which is oriented towards cooperation and community. The Association of Common Good Economy (Verein der Gemeinwohl-Oekonomie) and common good-oriented companies are used in this research as a space to observe social-cultural practices and new forms and conventions of cooperation in their acceptance and dissemination. On the one hand, it shows that these companies, with their values based on cooperation, social and global justice and ecological responsibility, and with their participatory organizational structures, offer opportunities for countercultural practices and make utopias tangible, so that social change and self-change are being made possible on a small scale. On the other hand, by means of detailed examples the inconsistencies of social-cultural practices and the hybrid mixture of subject forms become clear and comprehensible in their specific context.
The planning of urban districts involves ideas of how people in cities would like to and should best encounter each other. The term “encounter capacity”, which denotes social as well as material dimensions of enabling “social mix”, has emerged in the reflexive planning practice of Hamburg’s HafenCity to increase the realisation of encounters through planned public space. This article explores the conception and reality of encounter capacity. It is based on commissioned research in the districts of the urban development area which were completed in 2015. The term “multiplicity of encounters”, developed from ethnographic observation and borrowed from the work of Doreen Massey, refers to the multiplication of encounters within specific horizons of meaning: neighbourliness, eventfulness and trendiness. The high-priced housing and consumption possibilities, the image of an exclusive district and the group-specific rhythms of everyday life are selectively but never completely cancelled out by these factors.
