The book "Rethinking Postwar Europe" offers an in-depth insight into the
largely unexplored topic of artistic practices in the 1940s and 1950s in
Europe which until recently had been obscured by ideologies of the Cold
War. Thanks to the authors' diverse methodological backgrounds, the
volume presents - for the first time - a comprehensive multilayered
narrative, focusing on the complexities and entanglements in the
artistic field. Instead of assessing the postwar period in the
traditional way as divided by the Iron Curtain, the contributions
investigate processes of contact, interaction, dissemination,
overlapping, and networking. Consequently, the analysis of a diversified
European modernism in both its aesthetic and its socio-political
dimension resonates with all the different case studies. In particular,
the volume looks at how artists developed, designed and (re)negotiated
identities and discourses, and sheds new light on the power of art - and
creative powers in general - in a postwar setting of mutilations,
losses, and devastations.