History

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.

Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on 13 August 1961 18 million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. This new history rejects traditional, top‐down approaches to Cold War politics, exploring instead how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, ‘caught out’ by Sunday the Thirteenth. Party, police, and Stasi reports reveal why one in six East Germans fled the country during the 1950s, undermining communist rule and forcing the eleventh‐hour decision by Khrushchev and Ulbricht to build a wall along the Cold War's frontline. Did East Germans resist or come to terms with immurement? Did the communist regime become more or less dictatorial within the confines of the so‐called ‘Antifascist Defence Rampart’? Using film and literature, but also the GDR's losing battle against Beatlemania, Patrick Major's cross‐disciplinary study suggests that popular culture both reinforced and undermined the closed society. Linking external and internal developments, Major argues that the GDR's official quest for international recognition, culminating in Ostpolitik and United Nations membership in the early 1970s, became its undoing, unleashing a human rights movement which fed into, but then broke with, the protests of 1989. After exploring the reasons for the fall of the Wall and reconstructing the heady days of the autumn revolution, the author reflects on the fate of the Wall after 1989, as it moved from demolition into the realm of memory.

‘Being Soviet’ takes a refreshing and innovative approach to the crucial years between 1939 and 1953 in the USSR. It addresses two of the key recent debates concerning Stalinism. It answers the question ‘what was the logic and language of Soviet power?’ by shifting the focus away from Russian nationalism and onto Soviet identity. ‘Sovietness’ is explored via the newspapers, films, plays, and popular music of the era. Soviet identity, in relation to the outside world, provided a powerful frame of reference in the late‐Stalin years. ‘Being Soviet's’ most significant contribution lies in its novel answer to the question ‘How did ordinary citizens relate to Soviet power?’ It avoids the current Foucault‐inspired emphasis on ‘supporters’ and ‘resistors’ of the regime. Instead it argues that most Soviet citizens did not fit easily into either category. Their relationship with Soviet power was defined by a series of subtle ‘tactics of the habitat’ (Kotkin) that enabled them to stay fed, informed, and entertained in these difficult times. ‘Being Soviet’ offers a rich and textured discussion of those everyday survival strategies including rumours, jokes, hairstyles, music tastes, sexual relationships, and political campaigning. Each chapter finishes by exploring what this everyday behaviour tells us about the collective mentalité of Stalin‐era society. ‘Being Soviet’ focuses on the place of Britain and America within Soviet identity; their evolution from wartime allies to Cold War enemies played a vital role in redefining what it meant to be Soviet in Stalin's last years.

This book draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. The book tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor from the vantage of the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, the book shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of November 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; many others went underground and endured the terrors of nightly bombings and the even greater fear of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, this book takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Examining the development of a secular, purely material conception of human beings in the early Enlightenment, this book provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual culture of this period, and challenges certain influential interpretations of irreligious thought and the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Beginning with the debate on the soul in England, in which political and religious concerns were intertwined, and ending with the eruption of materialism onto the public stage in mid 18th‐century France, this book looks at attempts to explain how the material brain thinks without the need for an immaterial and immortal soul. It shows how this current of thinking fed into the later 18th‐century ‘Natural History of Man’, the earlier roots of which have generally been ignored. Although much attention has been paid to the atheistic French materialists, their link to the preceding period has been studied only partially, and the current interest in what is called the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ has helped to obscure rather than enlighten this history. By bringing out the importance of both Protestant theological debates and medical thinking in England, and by following the different debates on the soul in Holland and France, this book shows that attempts to find a single coherent strand of radical irreligious thought running through the early Enlightenment, coming to fruition in the second half of the 18th century, ignore the multiple currents which composed Enlightenment thinking.

Body by Weimar argues that male and female athletes fundamentally recast gender roles during Germany's turbulent post‐World War I years and established the basis for a modern body and modern sensibility that remain with us to this day. Athletes in the 1920s took the same techniques that were streamlining factories and offices and applied them to maximizing the efficiency of their own flesh and bones. Sportswomen and men embodied modernity — quite literally — in all of its competitive, time‐oriented excess and thereby helped to popularize, and even to naturalize, the sometimes threatening process of economic rationalization by linking it to their own personal success stories. Enthroned by the media as the new cultural icons, athletes radiated sexual empowerment, social mobility, and self‐determination. Champions in tennis, boxing, and track and field showed their fans how to be “modern,” and, in the process, sparked heated debates over the limits of the physical body, the obligations of citizens to the state, and the relationship between the sexes. If the images and debates in this book strike readers as familiar, it might well be because the ideal body of today — sleek, efficient, and equally available to men and women — received its first articulation in the fertile tumult of Germany's roaring twenties. After more than eighty years, we still want the Weimar body.

This book analyses the process by which class society developed in post-revolutionary France. Focusing on bourgeois men and on their voluntary associations, the book addresses the construction of class and gender identities. In their gentlemen's clubs, learned societies, musical groups, gardening clubs, and charitable associations, bourgeois Frenchmen defined a social order in which the atomised individuals of revolutionary law could find places for themselves in reconstituted social groups and hierarchies. The practices of sociability reflected a bourgeois view of society as harmonious rather than torn by conflict. The potentially universal virtues of bourgeois masculinity provided a basis for a consensus that could protect social order from the destructive competitiveness of French political life and the industrialising economy. The sociable interaction of male citizens was the crucial bridge between the destruction of France's old regime and the development of a mature industrial class society.