Vol. 1 : A - I. - 164 p.

Иллюстрированная Энциклопедия фотографии девятнадцатого века, том 1, - справочник для всех интересующихся фотографией. Эта работа - результат исследований ведущих специалистов в данной области. Энциклопедия содержит более тысячи статей и около 200 изображений.

When I was first approached in February 1996 to ask whether I would be prepared to take on a new, part-time job as the British government's Special Representative for Cyprus, I had some idea of what I was being let in for, but not that it would last for seven years. Although I had never actually set foot on the island, I had, like many other British diplomats, bumped into the Cyprus problem from time to time during the 36 years of my professional career in the Diplomatic Service, which had ended the year before with my retirement from the post of UN ambassador in New York. I had been involved in the negotiations for a trade agreement between the European Community and Cyprus when Britain joined the EC in 1973; I had subsequently participated in the negotiations that developed this agreement into a customs union and, more relevant than either of these two experiences, I had a ringside seat for the last major attempt by the United Nations to negotiate a comprehensive settlement in 1992 and the subsequent, equally abortive, effort to agree a major package of Confidence-Building Measures on the island which had finally run into the sands in 1994. So I could not be said to be unaware of the singular intractability of the problem, nor of the capacity of the main players to spin out any negotiation until the Greek Kalends, nor of their preference for playing the blame game over making any serious effort to get to grips with the core issues in an attempt to reach a settlement. Why did I say yes? Partly, I suspect, out of a reluctance to quit entirely the scene of international diplomacy in which I had spent the whole of my professional life. Partly also, like a mountain climber drawn towards an unclimbed peak, simply because it was there. The Cyprus problem was certainly an unclimbed peak, said by many - particularly by those who had tried to climb it and failed - to be un-climbable; so there was an element of irresistible challenge. And then there were less personal reasons. The commitment given by the European Union in 1995 to open accession negotiations with Cyprus, divided or not, within six months of the end of the Inter- Governmental Conference which was drawing up the Amsterdam Treaty (in 1997), meant that we were sliding towards a parting of the ways which might either consolidate the division of the island or lead to its entering reunited into the European Union. It also had the potential to lead to a serious crisis in the relations between Turkey and the European Union and thus to a threat to the peace and stability of the Eastern Mediterranean. So the case for making a further determined attempt to reach a settlement was a serious one.

In this book I propose the thesis that a collective learning process took place after Hitler, bringing the Germans back from perpetrating unspeakable crimes to a sincere commitment to human rights. Unlike the intellectual preoccupation with German efforts to deal with the Nazi past (explored by Charles Maier and Jeffrey Herf), this investigation focuses primarily on the practical lessons that a disoriented people drew from their past misdeeds. My analysis pays particular attention to the relationship between the outside interventions of the United States and the Soviet Union and the inside insights of the minority of anti-Fascist Germans who were ready to make a new start. In an attempt to integrate both postwar histories, I contrast the Western consequences drawn from the catastrophe with the Eastern efforts to learn from disaster. Since the transformation was a drawn-out process, I concentrate here on three different stages of its development, starting with the postwar period, then focusing on the 1960s, and concluding with the 1990s. After exploring the alternative of Westernization, I settled on the concept of “civilization” as a standard for evaluating the metamorphosis of the Germans. While postcolonial critics have correctly condemned its misuse as justification for sexist and racist repression, several reasons support this terminological choice. First, prominent contemporaries, from Hannah Arendt to Franklin D. Roosevelt, used the notion of a German deviation from the values of Western civilization as a key argument. Second, in modifying the Sonderweg thesis, the Israeli-German historian Dan Diner suggested that the Holocaust constituted a rupture of common ethical norms, a veritable Zivilisationsbruch. Third, the surprising resurgence of the concept of “civil society” as a rejection of Communist dictatorship and as a characterization of voluntary social activism links the two dictatorships with each other. Therefore, “civilization” may serve as shorthand for the struggle for human rights.