Kurt Gritsch

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Kurt Gritsch (2018)

Kurt Gritsch (born June 21, 1976 in Meran , South Tyrol ) is an Italian historian and author. His main research interests are contemporary history , conflict research , media and reception history. He mainly publishes on recent conflicts, in particular the Kosovo war , the war in Ukraine , the civil wars in Syria and Libya and related topics such as labor migration and the causes of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe from 2015 .

Gritsch works at the University of Innsbruck and the Acadamia Engiadina . He writes regularly for the online magazine Telepolis .

Life

Kurt Gritsch studied history, German philology , ancient history and philosophy / media studies at the University of Innsbruck and the University of Rome III from 1995 to 2000 . In November 2000 he was awarded for a thesis on the subject of Peter Handke and "Justice for Serbia," the Magister Philosophiae , 2009, he received his doctorate at Michael Gehler at the University of Hildesheim with summa cum laude with a thesis entitled staging of a just war? NATO, media and intellectuals in the 'Kosovo War' 1999 , a discourse analysis on the Kosovo war.

Gritsch is married to the Italian dramaturge and author Selma Mahlknecht .

Positions

On the Kosovo conflict and the role of NATO

According to his own statements, Gritsch has been dealing with the Kosovo conflict since 1999. Based on a systematic evaluation of reporting in German print media such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Süddeutsche Zeitung , Die Zeit , Der Spiegel and Die Tageszeitung , he comes to the conclusion that the reporting was "largely controlled":

“It was noticeable that none of the five newspapers examined reported in a de-escalating manner at any time, as required, for example, by the UNESCO media declaration of 1978, but instead called for military intervention by NATO. For this purpose, a Yugoslav-Serbian enemy image was evidently built up very deliberately by building on the negative Yugoslavia image from the "Bosnia War". "

The comparison “Serbs = Nazis” allegedly launched by the American PR agency Ruder Finn during the Bosnian War in 1992 was then reactivated and culminated in the analogy “Milosevic = Hitler” in order to suggest that Serbia was “ethnic cleansing” Kosovo. Some media reports, such as the Račak massacre , later turned out to be one-sided, exaggerated and misleading.

The then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted in an initial statement on the bombing of Serbia that there could be situations in which the use of force to achieve peace was justified. The primary responsibility for peace would lie with the UN Security Council , even after the NATO charter . Gritsch interprets the media reporting, which he believes is tendentious, as a far-reaching narrative by means of which the UN should be discredited and instead NATO should be presented as a supposedly “more efficient solution organization”. This narrative exacerbated the conflict, prevailed and then served as a justification for the air strikes on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as part of Operation Allied Force . According to Gritsch, NATO ultimately succeeded in transforming itself from a purely defense alliance into an intervention alliance after the fall of the Iron Curtain , thereby ensuring its own continued existence. Many NATO members, including Germany and the United States in particular , had a great deal of self-interest in this process:

“NATO wanted to show that it still had a job after the end of the Cold War. The aim was to transform from a defensive to an intervention alliance. It also enabled individual members to make a profit: Germany, which was at war for the first time since 1945, gained room for maneuver in foreign policy. The USA achieved the greatest success. They achieved the solution of NATO from the veto area of ​​the UN Security Council. The UN should no longer be responsible for "world peace" in the future. The way to further wars in the 21st century was thus mapped out. "

Controversy about Peter Handke

See also: Peter Handke # 1996 to today, Serbia Controversy and Peter Handke # Appreciation and Criticism

Gritsch's first book, Peter Handke and “Justice for Serbia” , deals with the public controversy surrounding the Austrian writer Peter Handke after the publication of his travelogue A wintry journey to the rivers Danube, Save, Morawa and Drina or Justice for Serbia in the year 1996.

When Handke was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019, Gritsch's book was considered by Academy member Eric M. Runesson. In an article by Peter Maass in The Intercept , Gritsch and the German author Lothar Struck were accused of spreading conspiracy theories on the Bosnian war that had long been disproved with their books. Gritsch rejected this representation and emphasized in a statement that “his book does not represent a conspiracy theory, but only in a comparatively insignificant secondary aspect of the Handke reception the thesis discussed among scientists, that Ruder Finn contributed to the Serbian camps with the Holocaust to compare".

Publications

  • Peter Handke and “Justice for Serbia”. A reception story. StudienVerlag, Innsbruck 2009, ISBN 978-3-7065-4614-0 .
  • Staging a just war ?: Intellectuals, media and the "Kosovo War" 1999. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 2010, ISBN 978-3-487-14355-2 .
  • War for Kosovo: history, background, consequences. Paperback. innsbruck university press, Innsbruck 2016, ISBN 978-3-902936-83-7 .
  • Coming and going. Labor migration in South Tyrol. Monograph. Edition Raetia, Bozen 2016, ISBN 978-88-7283-567-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Detailed curriculum vitae and list of publications by Kurt Gritsch. University of Innsbruck, accessed on August 21, 2019 .
  2. ^ Academia Engiadina Samedan: Employees. Retrieved August 21, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Kurt Gritsch. Retrieved October 19, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Selma and Kurt. In: salto.bz. November 29, 2018, accessed January 23, 2019 .
  5. ↑ It started with a lie. In: NachDenkSeiten - The Critical Website. Retrieved October 15, 2019 (German).
  6. ^ Secretary-General deeply regrets Yugoslav rejection of political settlement; says Security Council should be involved in any decision to use force. In: United Nations Press Release, March 24, 1999. Accessed December 8, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Kurt Gritsch: When the Kosovo war began on March 24, 1999. Retrieved October 19, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Svenska Academies om criticism mot Nobel Pristagars: ”Finns olika bilder av Peter Handke”. October 12, 2019, accessed October 15, 2019 (Swedish).
  9. ↑ Handke debate: "This is where assertions are made that are proven in a circular argument". In: NachDenkSeiten - The Critical Website. Retrieved October 28, 2019 (German).
  10. ^ Peter Maass: Peter Handke Won the Nobel Prize After Two Jurors Fell for a Conspiracy Theory About the Bosnia War. The Intercept, November 14, 2019, accessed November 14, 2019.
  11. ↑ Falsification of history: Debate about revisionism in the Balkans - derStandard.de. Retrieved November 19, 2019 (Austrian German).
personal data
SURNAME Gritsch, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian historian and author
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1976
PLACE OF BIRTH Meran , South Tyrol