Why did domestic anticommunism convulse the United States of America during the early Cold War but barely ripple in the United Kingdom? Contemporaries and historians have puzzled over the dramatic difference in domestic politics between the USA and the UK, given the countries’ broad alignment on foreign policy toward Communism and the Soviet Union in that era. This article reflects upon the role played by trade unions in the USA and the UK in the development of each country's culture and politics of anticommunism during the interwar years. Trade unions were key sites of Communist organizing, and also of anticommunism, in both the USA and the UK, but their respective labor movements developed distinctively different political approaches to domestic and international communism. Comparing labor anticommunist politics in the interwar years helps explain sharp divergences in the politics of anticommunism in the USA and the UK during the Cold War.
This article explores the ambitious Bulgarian cultural program in the United States of America to interrogate the importance of culture in the Cold War dynamics of the 1970s. The case study is examined at two levels; first, in the framework of the expanding contacts between East and West, exploring the importance of cultural diplomacy in the context of détente, and second, at the level of the actual cultural interactions, analyzing the meaning of cultural contacts across national borders and ideological divides. This analysis integrates insights from diverse literatures: international history, transnational history, postcolonial studies, and anthropology. The goal is to showcase the role of a small state on the periphery during the Cold War, to engage the softer side of East–West interactions in a global context, and to emphasize how local communities and individuals creatively shaped the Cold War realities through their own actions. The article also engages contemporary debates about the meaning of these cultural encounters in the context of recent memory wars about the legacy of communism in Bulgaria. The end result is to depict the complex, multidirectional flow of ideas, people, and cultural products between East and West during the long 1970s and to trace their changing interpretations today.
This article examines George Benson’s early career as a political activist. By the early 1940s, with assistance from prominent businessmen, Benson reached millions of Americans in the non-metropolitan Midwest, West, and South in an effort to combat New Deal liberalism. Benson, who also served as President of the Church of Christ-affiliated Harding College in Arkansas, contradicts conventional wisdom regarding two distinguishing features of modern conservatism: its affinity with populist discourse and ‘western’ cultural precepts, and its incorporation of religious and economic conservatism. Historians portray these facets of conservatism as the product of the 1960s and 1970s or the postwar Sunbelt. Drawing on his experiences on the Oklahoma frontier, Benson re-orientated regional cultural tropes to create a populist critique of ‘big government’ as an affront to individualism and localism, and to suggest that corporate, consumer capitalism was the heir to self-reliant frontier traditions. Benson’s fusion of economic and religious conservatism departed from religious traditions that celebrated agrarian living and harbored reservations about modern capitalism. Benson demonstrates that the right’s subsequent successes in the Midwest, South and West necessitated a greater degree of cultural readjustment than has been recognized and that this readjustment derived from a generational adaptation to economic modernity.
Since the early 2000s, Polish society has undergone a significant ‘mnemonic awakening’; rediscovering traces of past Jewish presence in that country, critically examining the process of eradication of Jewish life and its subsequent erasure from collective memory, and attempting to recover some aspects of the Polish-Jewish past. Based on archival and ethnographic data, this article analyzes different modes of mnemonic practices that directly engage with Jewish absence. I show that for Jewish absence to even be noticed by contemporary Poles and potentially experienced by them as a void that deserves to be (re)filled, past Jewish presence is being brought back to life. I argue that this mnemonic creation of absence is part of a broader political project to expand Polish national identity beyond the narrow confines of Catholicism.
‘Presence and Absence of the Shoah in Strasbourg – A Regional Narrative’ tells a particularly Alsatian story of the absenting of Jews from the postwar narrative of the city of Strasbourg, and through it, the author explores the tension between regional specificity in a border region with a distinct local identity and a unique history, and a broader national narrative in France. Jews in postwar Strasbourg were absented from the narrative of the war through the double impulse of containment and universalisation. This article uses these double impulses to raise the question of the significance to the postwar of border regions in the making of national narratives.
France was massively affected by Nazi looting and plundering, and was also probably one of the most successful countries in securing the return of cultural property. Drawing on recently opened Archives, this article reflects on the entangled history of the ‘recovery’ of works of art in Soviet occupation zones, in Poland, Czechoslovakia and in the GDR, focusing on the French investigations in the East. The micro history of this fieldwork allows for an interpretation of looting and restitution as a transnational moment of political and memory construction. The article first presents the organization of missions in the changing landscape of Europe, leading to the beginning of an East-West relationship on the ground. Then it analyses French and Soviet visions of the notion of looting, restitution and cultural property and finally concludes by attempting to interpret a loss of memory.
Research on the circulation of artworks between Europe and the Americas superficially examined the role played by Portugal-based individuals in the trade of looted art in the immediate postwar period. Since then, however, cultural studies have ignored the interactions between Portuguese museums and collectors, and refugees and expatriates involved in the trade, as well as the role played by Portugal in the transatlantic circulation of artworks. This article has two goals: first, to examine the lack of academic engagement in the study of the transactions and provenance of artworks in Portugal between 1933 and 1945; second, to ascertain the existence and demonstrate the utility of Portuguese sources in conducting this study, by focusing on what they reveal about art dealer Karl Buchholz. Through an outline of the main areas of research, this article discusses Portuguese academic practice and museum practice. It identifies and contextualizes biases and opens the door for academic attention to Nazi-era provenance research. Portuguese sources illustrating the activity of Karl Buchholz in Portugal between 1943–5 enable a reconstruction of the chronology of his exhibitions in Lisbon and a partial identification of the artworks exhibited.
This article questions how the return of cultural property from metropolitan centers of former colonial powers to the successor states of former colonies have been considered positive – if rare – examples of post-colonial redress. Highlighting UNESCO-driven publicity about the transfer of materials from the Netherlands to Indonesia, and tracing nearly 30 years of diplomacy between these countries, demonstrates that the return of cultural property depended on the ability of Dutch officials to vindicate the Netherlands’ historical and contemporary cultural roles in the former East Indies. More than anything, returns were influenced by the determination of Dutch officials to find and maintain a secure cultural role in Indonesia in the future. This article also considers how Dutch policies were initially independent from, but later coincided with, the anti-colonial activism that emerged within the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) around the issue of cultural property return to former colonies. Yet, rather than reveal a mediating role for UNESCO, this article re-positions the return debate within a broader framework of shifting post-colonial cultural relations negotiated bilaterally between the Netherlands – as a former colonial power – and the leaders of the newly independent state of Indonesia.
The Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in US policy during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. However, scholars have overly focused on the idea that the CIA promoted a global ‘jihad’. This article instead looks at knowledge-formation within the agency to understand US approaches to the conflict, and to Afghan society more generally. Drawing on recently declassified analyses and reporting from intra-agency departments, this article reveals that agency officials focused largely on the idea of ‘tradition’ to understand the organization and motivations of the Afghan resistance. This trope emphasized Afghanistan's historically ‘tribal’ and ethnically divided nature and presented a static view of an unchangeable, backwards society incapable of coordinating to counter the Soviet military presence. In this reading, officials actually downplayed in the importance of Islam to Afghan society, dismissing it as a potential political force in the region. Ultimately, this article reflects on CIA officials’ limitations in envisioning a post-invasion Afghanistan, finding explanations in their rigid views of Afghan political and social organization which prevented them from recognizing the invasion's potential to catalyze longer-term changes.
This article examines the espionage and propaganda networks established by former professional spies and other anticommunist activists in the interwar period in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. In both countries, conservatives responded to the growing power of labor in politics by creating and funding private groups to coordinate spying operations on union activists and political radicals. These British and US spies drew upon the resources of the government while evading democratic controls. The anti-labor groups also spread anti-radical propaganda, but the counter-subversive texts in the UK tended to highlight the economic threats posed by radicalism, while those in the USA appealed to more visceral fears. The leaders of these anti-labur networks established a transnational alliance with their fellow anticommunists across the Atlantic decades before the beginning of the Cold War.
Khrushchev's Secret Speech about Stalinist crimes in February evoked heated public responses in many parts of the USSR. In stark contrast, the momentous changes of 1956 evoked little controversy among inhabitants of Soviet Kazakhstan. De-Stalinization has mostly been studied as a state-led attempt to breathe a new life into communism, or a process in which the regime and its citizens negotiated the meanings of Soviet utopia after the traumas of Stalinism. But the Kazakhstani case suggests that state–society dynamics in 1956 were often shaped not so much by the revolutionary state and the practices of ‘searching for socialism’, but rather by the limited reach of utopian ideas, the weakness of Soviet structures in the provinces, and deep social and ethnic fragmentation.
Civilian morale has been a key topic for historians of wartime Britain. Understanding the government’s concern with maintaining the spirits of the civilian population has led to considerable analysis of wartime entertainment and recreation. Yet historians have had surprisingly little to say about the role of organized sport. This article remedies this situation by exploring the factors involved in the development of policy in relation to the three most popular spectator sports in wartime Britain: greyhound racing, horse racing and association football. It argues that while the government recognized the value of sport in sustaining morale, policy was never fixed. On the contrary, it was subject to a range of shifting considerations and interests related to public safety, war work, transport and public and political opinion, the relative importance of which varied throughout the conflict. The article also contends that social class played a key role in informing official policy and public attitudes towards sport, and in determining whose morale was prioritized on each occasion.
This article explores the development of policy in the Royal Air Force (RAF) relating to the use of Benzedrine, a potent amphetamine, by aircrews during the Second World War. This policy evolved from total prohibition in September 1939 to cautious approval for the use of the drug on operations in November 1942. Such caution reflected the subjective evidence available about Benzedrine, the media profile of the substance, and wider social and cultural factors relating to the use of drugs during this period. This challenges our understanding of drug history, demonstrating that while amphetamines were framed as a ‘miracle drug’, more nuanced, functional interpretations of the substance were in evidence.
In turn, the article examines evidence from the operational context, including new data gathered from questionnaires and interviews with former Bomber Command aircrew and existing oral history material held by the Imperial War Museum. Both policy discussions and operational evidence allows for a re-evaluation of the arguments of Nicholas Rasmussen, who suggests the RAF made use of Benzedrine as a frontline ‘psychiatric medicine’. Such conclusions downplay the significance the RAF attached to the drug’s effects on wakefulness and concerns about the drug’s effects on wellbeing.
In May 1962 French museum administrators removed over 300 works of art from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Algiers and transported them, under military escort, to the Louvre in Paris. The artwork, however, no longer belonged to France. Under the terms of the Evian Accords it had become the official property of the Algerian state-to-be and the incoming nationalist government wanted it back. This article will examine not only the French decision to act in contravention of the Evian Accords and the ensuing negotiations that took place between France and Algeria, but also the cultural complexities of post-colonial restitution. What does it mean for artwork produced by some of France’s most iconic artists – Monet, Delacroix, Courbet – to become the cultural property of a former colony? Moreover, what is at stake when a former colony demands the repatriation of artwork emblematic of the former colonizer, deeming it a valuable part of the nation’s cultural heritage? The negotiations undertaken to repatriate French art to Algeria expose the kinds of awkward cultural refashioning precipitated by the process of decolonization and epitomizes the lingering connections of colonial disentanglement that do not fit neatly into the common narrative of the ‘end of empire'.
This article demonstrates how the evolution of US social sciences during the Cold War influenced French attempts to develop Algeria economically and socially. During a violent war of decolonization, French researchers drew from social psychology to inform development policies. Studying political trends through the lens of cultural and psychological factors transformed older understandings of social classification. Rather than being conceived in primarily biological terms, racial difference was increasingly defined in relationship to economic capacities. The Constantine Plan, introduced in 1958, exemplified the intimate link between social planning and the postwar social sciences. The article then studies attempts to develop the Sahara, where planners sought to determine which races would be able to work in the harsh conditions of the desert. Arguing that social planning in Algeria was not merely a ‘colonial’ phenomena, this article shows how development reflected the broader shifts in thinking about the economy and social organization that marked the 1950s and 1960s.
Education is largely absent in recent work on the history of development and modernization. Yet it was central to the political project of many leaders of decolonization and figured prominently in five-year plans and other development schemes. The article highlights the central role of education in concepts of development and social planning in the Middle East. This could take the form of central plans but also of statistical and computer-generated projections of future educational and manpower needs. After showing how different concepts of planning education were circulated at the level of international organizations, the article investigates the first Egyptian five-year plan. It looks at the Egyptian Institute of National Planning in Cairo, highlighting that Egyptian planners drew on a variety of different experts and institutions from the US and the Soviet Union to the GDR and India. While the late 1960s ushered in more scepticism toward formal planning and projection, the emphasis on expertise, knowledge and skills as central variables of modern societies has endured.
The Spanish ‘Blue Division' has received significant historiographical and literary attention. Most research has focused on diplomacy and the role of the Division in fostering diplomatic relations between Spain and Germany during the Second World War. However, the everyday experience of Spanish soldiers on the Eastern Front, the occupation policy of the Blue Division and its role in the Nazi war of extermination remain largely unexplored. It is commonly held that the Spanish soldiers displayed more benign behaviour towards the civilian population than did the Germans. Although this tendency can generally be confirmed, Spanish soldiers were known for stealing, requisitioning and occasional acts of isolated violence; and also for the almost complete absence of collective, organized retaliation. Yet how did Spanish soldiers perceive the enemy, particularly Soviet civilians? To what degree did the better behaviour of Spanish occupying forces towards the civilian population reflect a different view of the enemy, which differed from that of most German soldiers?
Who are to be the successors of European Jewry? This question faced Jewish leaders after the Holocaust, in terms both legal – inheriting heirless property – as well as spiritual – carrying forward Jewish culture. Looted Jewish property was never merely a matter of inheritance. Instead, disputes revolved around the future of Jewish life. While Jewish restitution organizations sought control of former communal property to use around the world, some German-Jewish émigrés and survivors in Germany sought to establish themselves as direct successors to former Jewish communities and institutions. Such debates set the stage and the stakes for mass archival transfer to Israel/Palestine in the 1950s. The fate of the German Jewish communal archives highlights the nature of postwar restitution debates as proxy for the issue of the continuation of Jewish culture and history, calling into question the nature of restitution itself. As opposed to policies of proportional allocation to meet the needs of radically diminished Jewish communities, wholesale transfer of archives reflected a belief in a radical rupture in German Jewish existence as well as Israel’s position as successor to European Jewry. The fate of the archives, which broke with archival practices of provenance, concretized and validated the historical rupture represented by the Holocaust.
Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s tens of millions of young people took part in the Communist Youth League’s ‘All-Union Tours around Sites of Military Glory’, visiting former battle sites, walking old partisan trails, uncovering soldiers’ remains, and meeting with war veterans. This was a prominent facet of the ‘cult’ that the Soviet regime built around the Second World War during the Brezhnev era, and it was also a crucial feature of work aimed at ensuring young people grew up to be good communists and loyal Soviet citizens. Based upon archival research conducted in several former Soviet republics and Russian regions, this article demonstrates that these tours and the wider war cult which they formed a part of were about much more than simply creating a new legitimizing myth for a system running out of ideological energy. They helped fulfil vital state tasks, like preparing youth for military conscription and caring for veterans, they served as a means of shaping young people’s outlook on their country and the world, and they helped knit together the social fabric of the country.
This article discusses art dealers who trafficked in looted art during the Third Reich and how they re-established networks and continued their trade in the postwar period. I argue that these dealers worked within a series of overlapping networks. A primary network was centered in Munich, with dealers such as Dr. Bruno Lohse (Göring’s art agent in Paris during the war); Maria Almas Dietrich, Karl Haberstock, Walter Andreas Hofer, and Adolf Wüster. These individuals worked closely with colleagues in Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein (states contiguous with Bavaria) in the postwar years. Many of the individuals in outer appendages of the networks had not been complicit in the Nazis’ plundering program, yet they trafficked in looted works and formed dealer networks that extended to Paris, London, and New York. Both the recently discovered Gurlitt cache – over 1400 pictures located in Munich, Salzburg, and Kornwestheim – and the annotated Weinmüller auction catalogues help illuminate aspects of these networks. Art dealers played a key role in the looting operations during the Third Reich and in the transfer of non-restituted objects in the postwar period. The current generation of the profession may be the key to advancing our understanding of a still incomplete history.
US attitudes towards restitution and the problem of looted antiquities have shifted since 1970, as pressure builds to change norms for the acquisition of unprovenanced artefacts that have fueled a transnational trade in stolen objects and the depredation of archaeological sites worldwide. This article traces several triggers for change and initial steps towards a revised policy while also cataloguing areas of resistance. It examines the mechanisms of US government policy for international heritage protection and suggests that domestic legislation of the 1990s protecting the heritage of Native Americans has played a significant role in changing museum attitudes and policies. The new transparency for indigenous artifacts has produced museum displays that address their ownership history, larger social context and the distinctly different values assigned them by various groups. For classical antiquities, in contrast, attention to aesthetics still trumps such vital contextual information. This article suggests a different approach, one that showcases the biography of the object, its various lives or contexts, and the way different stakeholders have valued it over time. By drawing attention to restitution and the looting of heritage sites, such an approach better explains the history of the work of art and the continued importance of antiquity today.
In 1945 Europe was a vast graveyard. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where the dead of the four occupying forces were spread across the country. As the allies worked through the postwar settlement with Germany, they considered another pressing question: How to treat the dead? The case of occupied Germany highlights different approaches to commemoration. Soviet officials commemorated the war dead as symbols of the collective sacrifice of the USSR in Eastern Europe, while the western allies desired to identify and rebury fallen soldiers to meet the expectations of their domestic audiences.
Despite these differences, the politics of the sacred surrounding the dead necessitated that the allies engage one another. As the occupation regimes of France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America embarked on their mission to retrieve their dead from the Soviet zone, USSR officials reacted with skepticism and hostility. But rather than rejecting what they viewed as attempts at espionage, Soviet officers traded the western dead for their own sacred mission – the chance to return living Soviet repatriates from the western zones of occupation. Even as animosity grew in the emerging Cold War, occupation officials made uneasy compromises across the iron curtain.
Government restrictions on reporting war and conflict have been the subject of much public and historic debate in two world wars and ever since. This article explores government press censorship in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel during the late 1960s and early 1970s, in respect of international media coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict. By examining the work of the Reuters news agency, the important international provider of media information, it assesses the impact on foreign reporting of government prepublication censoring systems and other forms of press restriction. It demonstrates that formal censoring of news became an increasingly hard task due to the availability and incessant development of alternative routes of news transfer. Nevertheless, it also shows that restrictions on press access and news gathering remained effectual, as did the general need to stay on terms with governments, especially in authoritarian states.
During the summer of 1975, a year after the Carnation Revolution, thousands of Portuguese men and women took to the streets in order to prevent what they feared could be a communist takeover. A military-led government had trumpeted the transition to socialism and the Armed Forces Movement was discussing the dissolution of the recently elected constitutional convention. This article offers a new account of the significance and political impact of the anti-communist rallies, demonstrations and riots during 1975 and provides an interpretation of the mechanisms by which anticommunist mobilization empowered moderate leaders and reversed the balance of power within the military, playing a crucial role in the triumph of electoral democracy.
Scholarship on the cinematic representation of terrorism has grown increasingly sophisticated recently, deepening the debate about the mass media's relationship to political violence. This article contributes to this debate by taking a long view of Hollywood's treatment of terrorism and by examining, in particular, how US filmmakers' definition of terrorism has varied significantly from the early twentieth century through to the present day. The article focuses on a neglected film about Cuban terrorism made during the post-Second World War Red Scare, John Huston's We Were Strangers. Huston's thriller was the first Hollywood production that not only depicted terrorists as heroes but also appeared to justify the killing of innocent civilians for political purposes. By detailing the production of We Were Strangers, the article gives an insight into the obstacles that US filmmakers have typically met when touching on the subject of terrorism – obstacles that, in the case of We Were Strangers, helped hobble the film aesthetically and politically. By analysing the reception of We Were Strangers, the article points to the risks in jumping to conclusions about the impact that screen images of terrorism have had – or might now have – on critical and public opinion.
This article explores Weimar Germany's strategic use of German child distress to win US popular support for a revision of the Versailles treaty. Through the early 1920s German officials deliberately publicized the innocent suffering of German children to project German poverty and victimization and to communicate the unjust and untenable nature of the peace terms to the world, especially the powerful United States. At a time when the United States of America withdrew politically from Europe, its unprecedented humanitarian engagement overseas, including a German child-feeding program, seemed to offer a unique opportunity to mobilize empathy and support for the recent enemy among an otherwise hostile and uninterested US public. Though concerns over German international prestige were always prevalent, Germany’s restricted room of political manoeuvre repeatedly forced such strategic appeals to pity as the only option to garner US interest, sympathy and, ultimately, involvement in a revision of the peace terms, especially the reparations question. By focusing on this ‘diplomacy of pity’ the article sheds light on Weimar Germany's hopes and frustrations in engaging so important, and so elusive, a power as the United States of America in the early 1920s. The article’s focus on German ambitions with regard to US humanitarian aid also challenges the common notion of aid recipients as passive objects of foreign magnanimity. The way recipient nations construct and use their humanitarian narrative, the agency they assert, deserves much wider attention.
In 1943, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) launched one of the Allied intelligence services' biggest efforts to foster resistance within Nazi Germany in cooperation with Slovene partisans in the Carinthian borderland. The so-called Clowder Mission systematically supplied weapons and other military assistance to the partisans who, in summer and autumn 1944, offered the strongest – albeit often neglected by scholars – militant resistance within the borders of Nazi Germany. Although SOE's operational aim of externally fomenting Austrian separatist, patriotic resistance deeper inside the country failed, its strategic aim of assisting the separation of Austria from Germany and re-establishing an independent Austrian nation-state proved to be sound. At the same time, the Carinthian Slovene partisans fell short of attaining their political objectives. This article analyses the paradoxical results of British subversive politics towards Austria and Slovenia. It traces the impact of the SOE's agenda and the origins of the Moscow Declaration on the reestablishment of Austria, and elaborates on the character of British-Slovene cooperation, its success and its breakdown in the context of British subversive politics, inter-Allied rivalries and competition, and the geopolitics of resistance.
In the interwar period, Portuguese hygienists, agronomists and colonial administrators began to advocate the resettlement of Angola's rural native population into model villages as the ideal solution to many of the colony's hygienic, economic and societal problems. The plans for model villages in Angola were not exceptional in the interwar period. They were part of larger and transnational debates about rural development in colonial Africa and Asia. Although model villages mostly remained rather a utopian vision than a social reality, the debates and attempts were significant. While revealing how colonial actors envisioned the future order of the colony, they illustrate why colonial rural populations became a target of social engineering and how the constraints of colonial rule conditioned the implementation of such plans on the ground. The analysis of the interwar debates also contributes to a longue durée history of the villagization policy during the decolonization wars.
This article examines the publication of the famous ‘Hitler’s Table Talk’ and ‘The Testament of Adolf Hitler’ as well as the role of British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in this process, including his relationship with the Swiss banker Francois Genoud – the owner of the ‘original' manuscripts. The article is based on research utilizing Trevor-Roper's personal correspondence and papers; material that has never before been used to investigate this matter. Besides shedding light on many previously unknown details concerning the publication of these documents, the article shows how Trevor-Roper consistently failed to enlighten his readers about central source-critical problems connected to the documents he was validating. He did so on numerous occasions and through several editions of the sources, even though his personal correspondence shows that he was well aware of the problems. The article argues that Trevor-Roper chose not to reveal these problems in public so as not to upset his business relationship with Genoud so that he would gain access to further documents in Genoud's possession.
In the midst of their bitterly fought wars against anti-colonial guerrilla movements in Kenya and Algeria, British and French colonial authorities launched huge rural development programs. These plans were grounded on the effects of an extremely violent military practice: forced relocation of huge parts of the rural populations into strategic villages. Up to 2.5 million Algerians and 1.2 million Kenyans were affected by strategic resettlement, resulting in humanitarian crisis in both cases. The plans for socio-economic development and the military strategy of forced resettlement cannot be analysed separately. The implementation of socio-economic reforms in such a short time-span and to such an extent required the instruments of power of military force and the disciplinary spatial structure of the strategic villages. Mass relocations of civilians and its effects on the other hand were repeatedly justified with reference to the overall plans for socio-economic development and modernization.
In May 1937, British charities and political activists combined forces to evacuate nearly 4000 Basque children from Spain to the United Kingdom. The evacuation marks one of the great chapters in twentieth century refugee history. Once General Franco's supporters conquered the whole of the Basque Country in early July 1937, a battle developed over the repatriation of the children. The historiography of these watershed events has focused on the bombing of Guernica as the cause of the evacuation, the impact upon domestic British politics and the role of centre and left activists in the struggle over the repatriation of the children to Franco’s Spain. This article provides a fresh context by exploring the role of the children as symbols of Francoist violence behind the lines in the controversy over the evacuation. It also places the repatriation battle in the new framework of the Francoist removal of children from political opponents. It further examines the right-wing British activists who advocated repatriation and explores their entangled relationship with Spanish Francoists.
This article investigates the flooding of the Yugoslav film market by Hungarian features between 1939 and 1941, the impact of which continued well into 1942. This torrent and the simultaneous expansion of Hungary’s domestic market substantially influenced not only the Hungarian film industry, but surprisingly the cultural politics of southeastern Europe during the early imposition of the Nazi New Order. Viewing Hungarian cinematic success through the lens and rhetoric of cultural imperialism, the article examines the centrality of Jewish participation in and expulsion from Hungarian cultural production, Hungary’s perception of its role in southeastern Europe, and Nazi Germany’s understanding of Hungarian film as an existential threat to its European New Order. By ‘Europeanizing’ Hungary’s venture in Yugoslavia, the article opens new avenues of thought about the space afforded to small states in Nazi-dominated Europe. It explains how Hungary’s achievements in Yugoslavia reinvigorated a faltering industry and allowed Hungary’s film establishment the fantasy of perceiving itself, and being perceived by others, as possessing imperial prestige and power. It reveals the malleability of national identities, describing how these identities transformed when crossing borders. Finally, it demonstrates the importance of cultural politics in Nazi thinking, and that force and coercion were central to the New Order at an earlier stage than previously acknowledged.
This article examines the organizations that ran youth hostels in West Germany from the 1950s to 1989. It analyses whether they reconfigured their aims and practices against the backdrop of the cultural, social and political transformations that West Germany underwent throughout its existence, especially concerning the establishment of strong ties with ‘Western’ countries and the spread of mass consumption. It argues that while the maintenance of discipline among guests by youth hostel personnel remained important in the operation of West German youth hostels throughout the period in question, the norms around which discipline revolved and the ways in which it was enforced increasingly became negotiated between the officials of these associations and the guests at youth hostels. This process does not fall into the category of the ‘cultural revolution’ that occurred in the ‘Long Sixties’, according to Arthur Marwick, but amounted to a protracted and cautious experimentation that lasted several decades. While the historiography of tourism has hitherto analysed either the explosion of commercial tourism or the spread of anti-commercial travel from the 1960s onwards, shifting youth hostel policies help illuminate a popular type of tourism, which growingly developed synergies with both those travel patterns, but yet remained distinct from them.
This article is a study of the national holiday of 12 October, one of the most long-lasting and least transitory of the symbolic components of Spanish nationalism. Transnational in nature, this celebration of Spain’s existence constitutes an exception among similar national holidays, in that it is based upon the country’s role in the Americas and nostalgia for empire as founding elements of national identity. By analysing the changing ways in which this anniversary was celebrated in the course of the twentieth century, in rituals and language, the article highlights both the different imaginaries that were evoked and the roles played by particular actors and institutions in different stages of the construction of the national state and the definition of the regional and local identities of which it is composed. Our analysis of the progress of this celebration, from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present day, as first Fiesta de la Raza, then Día de la Hispanidad and now just ‘National Day’, suggests that its durability, which has been maintained for nearly a century, stems from the notably ductile nature of the myths associated with it. Adaptable to regimes and political challenges of varied kinds, this commemoration melds together the inheritance of liberalism, the national-Catholic tradition and ‘regionalized nationalism’, all of which have been key elements in Spanish political history in the twentieth century.
Between 1928 and 1933 Fritz Reinhardt trained 6000 propaganda speakers for the Nazi Party. He made it cheaper for the Party to train a speaker than to print a poster. Reinhardt allowed the NSDAP to project an image of strength, organization and coherence that no other political party in the Weimar Republic could match. Reinhardt’s promises were heard by more members of the electorate than those of any other Nazi, even Hitler. The speakers’ training course was taught by post. The material of the course beginning February 1931 has lain untouched in the archives since. Historians (such as Dietrich Orlow and Joachim Fest) who have made reference to the existence of the school, have dismissed it as ‘primitive’ and entailing only the learning by rote of stock phrases. This is not the case. Reinhardt expressly forbade his students from learning by rote. Rather they were required to learn Reinhardt’s line of reasoning and rephrase it in their own dialect using local issues to illustrate their points. This made the Nazis the most effective propagandists in the fractured polity of the Weimar Republic. This article shows how the speakers school taught and what it taught, in order to illustrate an, as of yet, un-described facet of Nazi electoral propaganda.
The Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate may be characterized as bourgeois and educated, similarly to bourgeois classes that have developed in the West in the Modern era. The bourgeois characteristics of the Palestinian-Arab middle class, and their influence on its historical trajectory during the Mandate era, have not been studied in depth yet. This article aims to focus on a local aspect of the rise of the middle class in the region in that period: the rise of the Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate, until the Palestinian-Arab Revolt (1936–9). The main hypothesis is that particular bourgeois social and cultural characteristics prevented the middle class full incorporation into the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, and even led to estrangement between the middle class and the national leadership, as well as members of lower strata, especially the villagers. Members of the middle class, mostly Christians but Muslims as well, espoused in their daily life modern habits, ideas, and customs, as a means to distinguish between themselves and other classes, similarly to their parallels in the West, and like their contemporaries elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, as has demonstrated by Watenpaugh. Those gaps reached their climax during the years of revolt.
In the early 1940s, the wave of North American fiction films dealing with the Second World War devoted unprecedented attention to Portugal, then a neutral nation under a fascist-inspired dictatorship led by António de Oliveira Salazar. This article analyses the underlying discourse about Portugal in the stories filmed by Hollywood during this period. It focuses on three key motifs, namely the portrayal of the country as an escape point for refugees, as a gathering ground for spies and as a safe haven from European war and oppression. Besides identifying common patterns in the narratives, the article seeks to contextualize them by taking into account the evolution of the scripts, as well as the feedback from the Production Code Administration and the Office of War Information. It also briefly contrasts the portrayal of Portugal with that of Spain, where a similar political regime was in place. It concludes that the combination of Hollywood’s formulaic narratives and Washington’s propaganda strategy resulted in a depiction of Portugal that was patronizing yet mostly benevolent, romanticizing local living conditions and dissociating the Salazar dictatorship from its fascist origins and practices.
The Pacific War is frequently characterized as a ‘race war’ and a ‘war without mercy’. The experience of Japanese prisoners on American submarines, however, suggests that hatred could often quickly be overcome once combatants spent time in close proximity. The confined space of submarines made a degree of interaction between prisoners and captors unavoidable. Through a series of case studies, the evidence suggests that submariners sometimes contravened the Geneva Convention in extracting work and obtaining information from prisoners. On the other hand, it appears that relations between prisoners and captors were for the most part amicable and at times mutually supportive. Although these relationships were manifestly unequal, occasionally prisoners exercised a degree of influence over submariners’ fates.
Italian decolonization has often been described as precocious, given Italy's loss of effective control over its colonies as a result of military defeat in the Second World War. In Libya, however, the projects of agrarian ‘demographic colonization’ that became a showpiece of fascist colonialism continued until 1960 and created persistent tensions between Italy and the independent Libyan state. This article examines a key aspect of Italy's protracted disengagement from Libya: the extended colonial twilight in which Italian farmers continued to work land under the aegis of the parastatal Italian National Social Security Institute. The analysis demonstrates that the fascist colonial project in Libya aimed to sedentarize not only rebellious Libyan pastoralists but also the restless Italian agrarians who formed the backbone of Italian mass emigration overseas. In placing families in planned rural settlements in Libya, the Institute and Italian state officials struggled to circumscribe the mobilities of these colonists. Even after 1945 and fascism's end, settlers possessed little freedom of movement, as demonstrated by the frequent obstacles to repatriation to Italy. Examining settlers' experiences reveals the complexity of the ‘long decolonization’ of Italian Libya, as well as how mobility became a key site of contest under fascism and beyond.
This article examines the history of French relief and assistance to Displaced Persons between 1945 and 1947 and the role of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in the French zone of occupation in Germany's South West. For French planners and humanitarian workers, the problem of ‘non repatriable’ DPs was much more than a humanitarian problem and was bound up with issues of domestic reconstruction, policies of occupation, culture and identity as much as the provision of medical aid and relief. Overall, by bringing together issues that have been kept separate in the historiography, this article illuminates the role of distinctive diplomatic strategies, economic requirements and cultural differences in shaping understandings and practices of refugee humanitarianism in the aftermath of the Second World War. It uncovers, in particular, the way relief was understood by the French as a vehicle for pursuing international leadership and as a means of restoring national prestige following years of defeat and foreign occupation.
During the 1950s and 1960s, television arrived in the West German countryside. All across Westphalia, elderly villagers recorded how their lives changed because of it. Their reports, solicited by ethnographers at a Münster folklore archive, allow unprecedented insight into TV’s impact on daily schedules, family routines, living rooms, neighbourly networks, local associations and church activities. This rare body of sources allows us to test the claims of media researchers about television’s early phase. It confirms that television accelerated the ongoing modernization, nationalization and politicization of rural society, rapidly reshaping village life. Only the patriarchal family – the decline of which contemporary ethnographers were most worried about – emerged unscathed.
Scholarship on Romani (Gypsy) migration has typically focused either on longue durée patterns of persecution and marginalization or on Roma migrants within Europe since the fall of communism. This article shows how the westward migration of Roma after the Second World War and during the early years of the Cold War breaks with several common assumptions about the history of displaced persons, refugees, and Roma alike. Contrary to claims about unbroken continuities in the persecution of European Roma, in the immediate postwar years officers of the International Refugee Organization used ‘Gypsy' as a privileged category that improved an applicant’s changes of getting support from the organization. Internationalization thus offered a brief respite from discrimination for one of the only ethnic refugee groups without its own lobby. This situation changed by the 1950s, when national refugee administrations replaced the earlier international refugee regimes established in the wake of the war. Roma became an exception at a time when West European governments were accepting asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe as part of their ongoing Cold War propaganda efforts. In this period government officials concerned with protecting national interests reverted to earlier classifications of ‘Gypsies' as nomads who were, by definition, not refugees.
This article examines the challenge of Chinese communism in East Germany in the 1960s. It shows how the Sino–Soviet Split and the Chinese Cultural Revolution endangered the public transcripts of East German state socialism by undermining its organizing metaphors and principles. Chinese cadres used their East Berlin embassy as a stage, showcase and megaphone for their dissenting vision of communism throughout the decade, winning some support from elderly communists, young anti-authoritarians and students from the Global South. Studying the East German campaign against what was known as ‘Mao Zedong Thought' sheds light on the transnational traffic of actors and ideas within the Second World in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. The official and vernacular response to the Maoist challenge suggests that East German ideology was constituted by a double demarcation in the 1960s, against Western social democracy and capitalism to its right and Chinese communism to its left.
This article reconsiders the birth of the Axis alliance between Japan, Germany, and Italy. Most scholarship correctly suggests that the Tripartite Pact was aimed at the United States of America. But existing scholarship largely neglects what is a surprising undercurrent in the diplomatic history of the Axis pact: the extent to which fears of German designs influenced Japanese leaders to join the Axis powers. As Germany gained ascendancy over much of Europe, many within Japan's foreign policy establishment began to fear that Berlin would seek to control French and Dutch colonies in East Asia.
This fear persuaded Japanese leaders to extend their new order to ‘Greater East Asia’ as a precondition to forging an alliance with Germany. In broadening the scope of its sphere of interest to ‘Greater’ East Asia, Japanese leaders sought to deny Germany a hegemonic position in Japan's backyard, and sought to make Japanese preeminence in East and Southeast Asia the precondition for creating any Berlin–Rome–Tokyo axis.
In December 1925, a group of Hungarian nationalists were caught trying to put into circulation a large quantity of counterfeit francs in a bid to weaken the French economy and fund irredentist action in Central Europe. This article uses this plot and police investigations to examine the central role of counterfeiting in international crime control and policing in interwar Europe and to make broader claims about interwar internationalism. Earlier Hungarian plots targeting neighboring states’ currencies had paved the way for the founding of the International Criminal Police Commission, today known as Interpol, and prompted European jurists to develop ideas about international criminal law. France initially used its investigations in 1925 as a tool of power politics, hoping to reshape the political order in Central Europe. Once this effort failed, France sought other means to assert authority in Europe, appealing to the League of Nations to draft an international convention on counterfeiting. The resulting convention laid the institutional and ideological bases for an expansion of international policing and law in the 1930s. The counterfeiting plot reveals the shifting power relations in 1920s Europe and points to the interconnections between ‘utopian’ internationalism and ‘realist’ security concerns on the continent.
This article analyzes the infusion of North American ideas, culture and experience into the Soviet society, and depicts immigrants as agents of social and cultural change. Having embodied North American representations of modernity, they introduced new working methods, values and routines, as well as novel forms of labor organization to Soviet Karelia. With the help of imported machinery, tools, and equipment, immigrants drastically increased the production rates at Karelia’s industries. Glorified and publicized by the Karelian government and the media, their labour shops, and farm communes became models to be emulated in Karelia and throughout the Soviet Union. North American Finns also came to play an important part in Soviet elites’ attempt to modernize the Soviet society, both economically and culturally. Although they were agents of cultural and technological change in their own right, immigrants’ social and ethnic identities were subsumed and appropriated by the Soviet state and Karelia’s cultural producers in attempts to promote a Soviet version (an alternative) of economic and cultural modernity. Their physical and intellectual movement across national borders shaped and reconstituted the Soviet path to modernization, even if for a short period of time. In the process, concepts of the local, the national and the modern (that is, the global), became increasingly entangled.