Browse

Historians often think of Russia before the 1860s in terms of conservative stasis, when the ‘gendarme of Europe’ secured order beyond the country’s borders and entrenched the autocratic system at home. This book offers a profoundly different vision of Russia under Nicholas I. Drawing on an extensive array of sources, it reveals that many of modern Russia’s most distinctive and outstanding features can be traced back to an inconspicuous but exceptional year. Russia became what it did, in no small measure, because of 1837. The catalogue of the year’s noteworthy occurrences extends from the realms of culture, religion, and ideas to those of empire, politics, and industry. Exploring these diverse issues and connecting seemingly divergent historical actors, Paul W. Werth reveals that the 1830s in Russia were a period of striking dynamism and consequence, and that 1837 was pivotal for the country’s entry into the modern age. From the romantic death of Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, in January to a colossal fire at the Winter Palace in December, Russia experienced much that was astonishing in 1837: the railway and provincial press appeared, Russian opera made its debut, Orthodoxy pushed westward, the first Romanov visited Siberia—and much else besides. The cumulative effect was profound. The country’s integration accelerated, and a Russian nation began to emerge, embodied in new institutions and practices, within the larger empire. The result was a quiet revolution, after which Russia would never be the same.

Wars have played a fundamental part in modern German history. Although infrequent, conflicts involving German states have usually been extensive and often catastrophic, constituting turning points for Europe as a whole. This volume is the first in a series of studies that explore how such conflicts were experienced by soldiers and civilians during wartime, and how they were subsequently imagined and understood during peacetime. Without such an understanding, it is difficult to make sense of the dramatic shifts characterizing the politics of Germany and Europe over the past two centuries. The studies argue that the ease—or reluctance—with which Germans went to war, and the far-reaching consequences of such wars on domestic politics, were related to soldiers’ and civilians’ attitudes to violence and death, as well as to long-term transformations in contemporaries’ conceptualization of conflict. Absolute War reassesses the meaning of military conflict for the millions of German subjects who were directly implicated in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Based on a re-reading of contemporary diaries, letters, memoirs, official correspondence, press reports, pamphlets, treatises, poems, and plays, it refocuses attention on combat and conscription as the central components of new forms of mass warfare. It concentrates, in particular, on the impact of violence, killing, and death on soldiers’ and civilians’ experiences and subsequent memories of conflict. War has often been conceived of as ‘an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds’, as Clausewitz put it, but the relationship between military conflicts and violent acts remains a problematic one.

The Aesthetics of Loss is a cultural history of German women’s art of the First World War that locates their rich visual testimony in the context of the civilian experience of war and wartime loss. Drawing on a fascinating body of visual sources produced throughout the war years, the book examines the thematic evolution of women’s art from expressions of support for the war effort to more nuanced and ambivalent testimonies of loss and grief. Many of the images are stark woodcuts, linocuts, and lithographs of great iconographical power that acted as narrative tools to deal with the novel, unsettling, and often traumatic experience of war. German female artists developed a unique aesthetic response to the conflict that both expressed emotional distress and allowed them to re-imagine the place of mourning women in wartime society. Historical codes of wartime behaviour and traditional rites of public mourning led female artists to redefine cultural practices of bereavement, question existing notions of heroic death and proud bereavement through art, and place grief at the centre of women’s war experiences. As a cultural, aesthetic, and thematic point of reference, German women’s art of the First World War has had a fundamental influence on the European memory and understanding of modern war.

This book deals with the transformation of Germany after the Second World War and the Holocaust into a Western, democratic, and therefore civilized country. It proceeds in three stages, beginning with the Allied post-war policies of demilitarization, denazification, and decartelization. In the second part, it concentrates on the Westernization, inner democratization and generational rebellion of the 1960s, concluding with a section on the repudiation of Communism, the return to normalcy, and the issue of immigration during the 1990s.

This book connects two central problems encountered by the Federal Republic of Germany prior to reunification in 1990, both of them rooted in the Second World War. Domestically, the country had to integrate eight million expellees forced out of their homes in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the lost war. Externally, it had to reestablish relations with Eastern Europe, despite the burdens of the Nazi past, the expulsions, and the ongoing East–West struggle during the Cold War. This book shows how the long-term consequences of the expellee problem significantly hindered West German efforts to develop normal ties with the East European states. In particular, it emphasizes a point largely overlooked in the existing literature: the way in which the political integration of the expellees into the Federal Republic had unanticipated negative consequences for the country's Ostpolitik.

After signing an armistice agreement on 22 June 1940, Adolf Hitler placed the German army in charge of occupied France and ordered the military government to supervise the Vichy regime and maintain security. Viewing World War II as a struggle between nation‐states, the military commander in France, Otto von Stülpnagel, cultivated French support, placed industrial resources at the disposal of the German war effort, and maintained ‘security’ by capturing enemy soldiers and Allied spies. Initially barred from the Hexagon, Göring's Office of the Four Year Plan, Himmler's SS, and Ribbentrop's Foreign Office adopted an expanded definition of security, argued that the Reich had to combat the so‐called Jewish conspiracy to maintain order, and secured Hitler's favor. In conjunction with Alfred Rosenberg and the French government, they launched an anti‐Semitic campaign of defamation, discrimination, and despoliation. Hitler used assassinations as a pretext for genocide and ordered subordinates to answer resistance activity with deadly reprisals and massive deportations that focused on Jews. Stülpnagel condemned anti‐Semitic measures and disproportionate hostage executions as impolitic distractions and resigned his command. Astute political tactics helped the Himmler seize control of German security forces but alienated the military government and, later, the Vichy regime. With limited support from French and German colleagues, the SS could only deport 75,000 French Jews: Fritz Sauckel's labor organization impressed approximately 850,000 workers into the German war economy by cooperating with French and German colleagues. Accommodation explains divergent results of select German policies, clarifies the inner workings of the Nazi regime, and elucidates decisions made by Prime Ministers Pierre Laval and François Darlan.

In the Khrushchev era, Soviet citizens were newly encouraged to imagine themselves exploring the medieval towers of Tallinn’s Old Town, relaxing on the Romanian Black Sea coast, even climbing the Eiffel Tower. By the mid-1960s, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens each year crossed previously closed Soviet borders to travel abroad. This book explores the gradual integration of the Soviet Union into global processes of cultural exchange in which the Soviet Union after Stalin increasingly, if anxiously, participated in the transnational circulation of people, ideas, and items. The classic emblem of aggressive internationalism under Stalin was that of the hammer and sickle super-imposed on the world. Under Khrushchev, the new motif, as displayed on postal stamps, was of a Soviet jet touching down in Asia, Europe, and North America. The book begins with a domestic tour of the Soviet Union in late Stalinism, moving outwards in concentric circles to explore travel to the inner abroad of Estonia, to the near abroad of eastern Europe, and to the capitalist West. It returns home again with a discussion of Soviet films about foreign travel. All this is your World is situated at the intersection of a number of topics of current scholarly and popular interest: the history of tourism and mobility; the cultural history of international relations, specifically the Cold War; the history of the Soviet Union after Stalin. It also offers a new perspective on our view of the continent as a whole by exploring the Soviet Union’s relationship with both eastern and western Europe through, in this case, the experience of Soviet tourists.

This book explores ways of thinking, feeling, and talking about homosexuality in the 1970s, an influential decade sandwiched between the partial decriminalization of sex between men in 1969, and the arrival of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Moving beyond divided Cold War Berlin, this book also shines a light on the scores of lesser-known West German towns and cities that were home to a gay group by the end of the 1970s. Yet gay liberation did not take place only in activist meetings and on street demonstrations, but also on television, in magazine editorial offices, ordinary homes, bedrooms—and beyond. In considering all these spaces and individuals, this book provides a more complex account than previous histories, which have tended to focus only on a social movement and only on the idea of ‘gay pride’. By drawing attention to ambivalence, this book shows that gay liberation was never only about pride, but also about shame; characterized not only by hope, but also by fear; and driven forward not just by the pushes of confrontation, but also by the pulls of conformism. Ranging from the painstaking emergence of the gay press to the first representation of homosexuality on television, from debates over the sexual legacy of 1968 to the memory of Nazi persecution, The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation is the first English-language book to tell the story of male homosexual politics in 1970s West Germany. In so doing, this book changes the way we think about this key period in modern queer history.

This book explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It also focuses especially on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place, one defined by pure functionality and rationality—a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism. Employing methodologies from critical geography, urban, architectural, and environmental history, and everyday life, the book asks whether their experience was a radical break with their personal pasts and the German past. More directly: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings also sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes and no—as much as the East German state tried to create a completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the truth buried—literally—in the ground, which was that the urge to colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore, the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating, identical buildings, created a “panopticon”-like effect, enabling the Stasi to undertake more complete surveillance than they had previously.

This book examines the formulation of British and American policy between 1945 and 1955 towards one of the most hated regimes of the twentieth century. The Franco question, though apparently not of the first importance in the evolution of Cold War policy, nevertheless haunted British and American governments during this period. It posed a problem which epitomizes the difficulty of dealing with pariah regimes. As such, it highlights for historians the attempts of these two governments to straddle the contradictions inherent in the emerging dual system of the United Nations, or internationalism, on the one hand, and the older system of balance of power, played out by the super powers as the Cold War. Set as it is in the domestic and international context, it also exemplifies the problems faced today by individual governments and by the United Nations in dealing with questions of intervention or non-intervention in distasteful regimes.

Presenting a new departure on Holocaust testimony, this book combines analytical reflections by scholars from different backgrounds on the post-war memories of one survivor, Helen “Zippi” Tichauer. Born in Bratislava in 1918, she came to Auschwitz in spring 1942 in the second transport of Jewish women from Slovakia, and was one of the few early arrivals who survived Auschwitz and its evacuation. Against the background of Zippi's early post-war and later memories, this book raises key questions on the meaning and usages of survivor testimony. What do we know and how much can we understand, sixty years after the end of the Nazi era, about the workings of a Nazi death camp and the life of its inmates? How willing are scholars, students and the public to listen to and learn from the fascinating, yet often unwieldy, confusing, and discomforting experiences of a Holocaust survivor? How can those experiences be communicated to teach and educate without undue simplification and glossing over of problematic aspects inherent in both, the life stories and their current rendering? Written by expert Holocaust scholars, this book presents a new, multi-faceted approach toward Zippi's unique story combined with the analysis of key aspects of Holocaust memory, its forms and functions.

This book analyses the most divisive arguments about empire between Europe’s two leading colonial powers from the age of high imperialism to the post-war era of decolonization. Focusing on the domestic contexts underlying imperial rhetoric, Arguing About Empire adopts a case-study approach, treating key imperial debates as historical episodes to be investigated in depth. The episodes have been selected both for their chronological range, their variety, and, above all, their vitriol. Some were straightforward disputes; others involved cooperation in tense circumstances: the Tunisian and Egyptian crises of 1881–2, which saw France and Britain establish new North African protectorates, ostensibly in cooperation, but actually in competition; the Fashoda crisis of 1898, when Britain and France came to the brink of war in the aftermath of the British reconquest of Sudan; the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911—early tests of the Entente Cordiale, when Britain lent support to France in the face of German threats; the 1922 Chanak crisis, when that imperial entente broke down in the face of a threatened attack on Franco-British forces by Kemalist Turkey; World War II, which can be seen, in part, as an undeclared colonial war between the former allies, complicated by the division of the French Empire between de Gaulle’s Free French forces and those who remained loyal to the Vichy regime; the 1956 Suez intervention, when, far from defusing another imperial crisis, Britain colluded with France and Israel to invade Egypt—the culmination of imperial interference that began some eighty years earlier.

Since time immemorial Europe had been dominated by nobles and nobilities. In the 18th century their power seemed better entrenched than ever. But in 1790 the French revolutionaries made a determined attempt to abolish nobility entirely. ‘Aristocracy’ became the term for everything they were against, and the nobility of France, so recently the most dazzling and sophisticated elite in the European world, found itself persecuted in ways that horrified counterparts in other countries. This book traces the roots of the attack on nobility at this time, looking at intellectual developments over the preceding centuries, in particular the impact of the American Revolution. It traces the steps by which French nobles were disempowered and persecuted, a period during which large numbers fled the country and many perished or were imprisoned. In the end, abolition of the aristocracy proved impossible, and nobles recovered much of their property. Napoleon set out to reconcile the remnants of the old nobility to the consequences of revolution, and created a titled elite of his own. After his fall, the restored Bourbons offered renewed recognition to all forms of nobility. But 19th-century French nobles were a group transformed and traumatized by the revolutionary experience, and they never recovered their old hegemony and privileges. As the author shows, if the revolutionaries failed in their attempt to abolish nobility, they nevertheless began the longer term process of aristocratic decline that has marked the last two centuries.

The Nazis never won a majority in free elections, but soon after Hitler took power most Germans turned away from democracy and backed the Nazi regime. Hitler was able to win growing support even as he established the Gestapo and the concentration camps. Yet for over fifty years historians have disputed what the German people knew about these camps and in what ways they were involved in the persecution of ‘race enemies’, slave workers, and social outsiders. This book looks at these issues. The book aims to expose once and for all the subsequent consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary Germans in the terror. It shows that rather than hide their racist and repressive campaigns from the German people the Nazis trumpeted them in the national papers and on the streets. It reveals how they drew on popular images, cherished German ideals, and long-held phobias to win converts to their cause.

The Balkans have long served as a place of encounters among different peoples, religions, and civilizations, resulting in a rich cultural tapestry and mosaic of nationalities. But the Balkans have also been burdened by a traumatic post-colonial experience; the transition from failed empires to modern nation-states has been accompanied by large-scale political violence that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the permanent displacement of millions more. This book examines the origins of conflict in the Balkans, focusing on a number of interrelated themes, including the role of nationalism and national ideologies; modernity and state-building; the relationship between relative socio-economic backwardness and violence; and Great Power involvement. Treating the Balkan experiment as an integral part of the history of modern Europe, the book suggests that, when viewed in this comparative framework, political violence and ethnic cleansing were hardly unique to or fundamental characteristics of the Balkans. Political violence stemmed from modernity and the ideology of integral nationalism, employed by states dominated by democratizing and later authoritarian elites which were committed to national homogeneity. The political history of the Balkans since 1878 consists of democratizing states succumbing in the interwar era to dictatorships of the right, which in turn submitted at the end of the Second World War to dictatorships of the left. Throughout these successive periods the Balkan proponents of democratic governance, civil society, and multiculturalism were progressively marginalized. The history of revolution, war, political violence, and ethnic cleansing in the modern Balkans is therefore a narration on the travails of this marginalization.

This book examines how the United Kingdom government went about protecting the interests, lives, and well‐being of its prisoners of war (POWs) in Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The comparatively good treatment of British prisoners in Germany has largely been explained by historians in terms of rational self‐interest, reciprocity, and influence of Nazi racism, which accorded Anglo‐Saxon servicemen a higher status than other categories of POWs. By contrast, this book offers a more nuanced picture of Anglo‐German relations and the politics of prisoners of war. Based on British, German, United States, and Swiss sources, it argues that German benevolence towards British POWs stemmed from London's success in working through neutral intermediaries, notably its protecting power (the United States and Switzerland) and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to promote German compliance with the 1929 Geneva convention, and building and sustaining a relationship with the German government that was capable of withstanding the corrosive effects of five years of warfare. It expands our understanding of both the formulation and execution of POW policy in both capitals, and sheds new light on the dynamics in inter‐belligerent relations during the war. It suggests that, while the Second World War should be rightly acknowledged as a conflict in which traditional constraints were routinely abandoned in the pursuit of political, strategic, or ideological goals, in this important area of Anglo‐German relations, customary international norms were both resilient and effective.

Since 1918, Czechoslovakia has been known as East–Central Europe's most devoted democracy, an outpost of Western values in the East. While the country has had a more democratic experience than its neighbors, this book argues that the claim that Czechs are “native democrats,” devoted to liberal ideas, emerged from nationalist myth. Battle for the Castle tells the story of that myth's creation during the First World War, and how it was used to persuade the Great Powers to create Czechoslovakia out of pieces of Austria–Hungary. Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, the two academics crafting the myth and employing it for wartime propaganda, became Czechoslovakia's first president and foreign minister. They tried to use the myth to outmaneuver political opponents at home and Czechoslovakia's enemies abroad. Those enemies, and the European Great Powers, also conducted their own propaganda campaigns targeting Czechoslovakia as a symbol of the postwar order. At home, while proclaiming themselves the protectors of democracy, Masaryk and Beneš played political hardball through their powerful political machine, the Castle, and defended their legacy against their detractors. Nazi occupation in 1938 seemed to prove out the Castle myth's claims about pacifist Czechs and aggressive Germans. During the war, Beneš remade the myth to reflect changed international circumstances, particularly the Soviet Union's new power. After the war and the 1948 Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, the myth entered Anglo–American historiography of Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe. Within academic histories of Czechoslovakia—many of them written by Masaryk's students or Castle colleagues—the myth was transmuted into fact.

The collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 left all Austrians in a state of political, social, and economic turmoil, but Jews in particular found their lives shaken to the core. Although Jews’ former comfort zone suddenly disappeared, the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy also created room for cultural innovation and change. Jews eagerly took up the challenge to fill this void, becoming heavily invested in culture as a way to shape their new, but also vexed, self-understandings. By examining formative events in both Vienna and the provinces, this book demonstrates that an intensified marking of people, places, and events as “Jewish” accompanied the crises occurring in the wake of Austria-Hungary’s collapse, leaving profound effects on Austria’s cultural legacy. By examining the role Jewish difference played in the lives, works, and deeds of a broad range of Austrians, this study reveals how the social codings of politics, gender, and nation received a powerful boost when articulated using the terms of Jewish difference.

The Greek Christians expelled from Anatolia between 1912 and 1924 often spoke about earlier times when they ‘lived well with the Turks’. They yearned for the days when they worked and drank coffee together, participated in each other’s festivals, and even revered the same saints and miracle-working shrines. Historians have never given serious regard to such oral traditions, given the refugees had been victims of horrific ‘ethnic’ violence that appeared to reflect deep pre-existing animosities. This book considers the rationality of such unlikely nostalgic traditions, which happen to be common among refugees from dismembered multi-ethnic societies. It claims that intercommunality, a mode of everyday living based on the accommodation of cultural difference, normally played a stabilizing function within societies like the Ottoman Empire. Along with a genuine longing for lost homelands, the refugees were nostalgic for moral environments in which religious communities claimed to have lived in accordance with their respective religious and ethical values. Although these traditions depicted worlds that were implausibly pristine, the intention was to counter the dominant but spurious national narrative, which reviled Turks as irredeemable barbarians and dismissed these refugee histories of coexistence as pure fantasy. Drawing largely from an oral archive containing 5,000 interviews, the book investigates the mentalities, cosmologies and value systems of these ordinary Anatolians, and shows how their popular perspectives pose serious challenges to the historiography. The book also examines the role of political violence in destroying this Ottoman society, and the way it effectively transformed these Anatolians into Greeks and Turks.