History

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 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.

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.