Beyond the landings: the reconstruction of Lower Normandy after June 1944

The image of Lower Normandy evoked by the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day was essentially that of a land scarred by invasion and destruction, making a heavy sacrifice for the liberation of Europe. Beaches, monuments, war cemeteries and museums help structure the process of remembering, but the restoration of farmland and the rebuilding of towns, villages and farmsteads are largely ignored. The spatial complexity of destruction and the frustrations of the emergency phase are revealed through archival records, with a labour force having to be assembled, explosives made safe, ruins cleared and shelter provided. Cooperation formed an essential element in the planning and rebuilding of towns and rural places; material improvement figured prominently in all these schemes. Permanent reconstruction began slowly in the late 1940s, gathered pace in the early 1950s, and reached conclusion in the early 1960s. Nonetheless, many who suffered material loss endured a decade or more in huts or overcrowded accommodation. A message of recovery and renaissance may be detected in the landscapes of Lower Normandy that is profoundly different from the battles, beaches and destruction conveyed by publications and the media.     

Workers, migrants, aliens or citizens? State constructions and discourses of identity among post-war European labour migrants in Britain

In this paper, I address a series of questions about migrant identities, assessing the continuities and contradictions between state discourses and those of migrants themselves. I address these questions through the lens of a largely neglected group of migrants, who were recruited by the British State in the immediately post-war period in response to post-war labour shortages. Whereas the recruitment of considerable numbers of labour migrants from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom from the late 1940s onwards is a well-documented part of the response to post-war labour shortages, earlier schemes to recruit people from refugee camps in Germany are less known. In this paper, I focus on women from Latvia, one of the Baltic states, who provide a particularly interesting insight into questions of identity as they both challenge common distinctions and assumptions in theories of migration—they came as independent single women for example. They are also a hybrid category in the sense they were both refugees and economic migrants with no previous attachments to the UK, unlike the other main groups of economic migrants at the time and earlier—Irish and Caribbean people—and the somewhat later migration from the Indian sub-continent. In this paper I show how these women challenged assumptions built into state policies at the time about assimilation and mothering future Britons through a strong and continuing commitment to the recreation of an imagined Latvian community in exile and the refusal of British identity.     

Alsace-Lorraine/Elsaß-Lothringen: destruction, revival and reconstruction in contested territory, 1939-1960

Alsace-Lorraine passed from French administration to German control for half a century after 1871, and again for the duration of World War II. Widespread material damage was inflicted in this contested territory in both world wars. The first wave of destruction in 1940 was inflicted by German forces, the second was caused by Allied bombers in 1944, and the final wave surrounded bitter fighting between German occupiers and American liberators in 1944-1945. Using archival sources and published accounts, this article examines the complex impact of destruction, very different in chronology from the more familiar story in Lower Normandy; the desperate challenge of coping with a wide range of emergencies that faced the reinstated French regime in the early years of peace; and the prolonged process of definitive reconstruction, which combined respect for traditional design with modern building techniques in some locations, such as the viticultural villages near Colmar, whilst adopting entirely modern approaches in other parts of Alsace-Lorraine.     

Introduction

Following the American landings at Utah beach, the Manche was the first département of mainland France to be completely liberated. Emergency tasks, including removal of debris and explosives, repair of buildings, restoration of farmland and provision of temporary shelters for survivors, occupied the middle years of the 1940s. Complex preparations for permanent reconstruction followed, with plans drawn up not only to rebuild but also to improve settlements and farmsteads. The major challenge was the administrative town of Saint-Lô where intricate property consolidation had to be completed before building the ‘new town’ could take shape. Cooperatives and other associations had a vital role to play in this reconstruction process that was hindered by problems of cash flow and shortages of building materials. Now, the activities of the emergency years have been forgotten and the results of reconstruction are simply accepted as elements of the ordinary landscapes of Lower Normandy.     

Aid and Reconstruction of Heritage in the Context of Post-Conflict Societies

Reconstruction of destroyed heritage has been an important interest in the expenditure of international aid funds when confronting post-conflict situations. Prevention of destruction has also been of concern but with less success in the international conflict scene. However, when aid and reconstruction are the main objectives, the targets seldom agree with the realities of post-conflict politics and the rather slow process of societal restructuration. The often speedy need for “reconstruction” tends to be negative for the actual architectural heritage of a given society, and, as I underline here, often transgresses the delicate process of social healing. In this paper I will present problems and successes incurred in reconstruction strategies in post-conflict periods in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In sum, I will underline the strong correlation between interest and willingness to consider preservation of heritage and the solution to social, political and economic conflicts in post-war settings.     

Women and Work after the Second World War: A Case Study of the Jute Industry, Circa 1945-1954

This article examines the attempts by the Dundee jute industryto recruit women workers in the years circa 1945–1954.It locates its discussion of these attempts in the literatureon the impact of the Second World War on the participation ofwomen in the British labour market more generally, and the forcesdetermining that participation. It stresses the peculiaritiesof jute as a traditional major employer of women operating invery specific market conditions, but suggests that this casestudy throws light on the broader argument about the impactof war and early post-war conditions on women's participationin paid work.     

Urban Space and Civil War： Hefei, 1853-1854

Previous scholarship has made it abundantly clear that the Taiping War impacted urban hierarchies in the Yangzi delta region, wreaking havoc in economic, commercial, administrative, and cultural centers like Hangzhou, Suzhou, Yangzhou, Changzhou, and Wuxi, thereby hastening the rise of Shanghai. But how did this war affect cities beyond the core Jiangnan region？ In a case study of the prefectural city of Hefei （Luzhou）, this article explores the ways in which war led to the reconfiguration and reimagining of urban space, both through wartime destruction and the patronage of post-war reconstruction.     

Fragmentation and forgetting: Sarajevo’s Vijećnica

In this article I argue that the crisis of common collective heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina is negatively affecting continued peace building processes in the country through an examination of the reconstruction of Sarajevo’s Austro-Hungarian city hall – the Vije?nica. Without a state-level ministry of culture, heritage that attests to a common cultural past uniting the three major ethno-religious groups in the country has suffered immeasurably, especially in comparison to ethnically specific cultural heritage. After the Second World War, the Vije?nica began to embody shared collective memories through its function as the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Nacionalna i Univerzitetska Biblioteka Bosne i Hercegovine). The building’s destruction during the Siege of Sarajevo cemented its place within the Bosnian psyche as a collective memory institution, but its reconstruction is transforming the discourses surrounding the building and the collective memories it embodies. By investigating the reconstruction process and the post-war separation of the National and University Library from the Vije?nica, I show that common collective heritage matters for peace building, and that in Sarajevo, the decay and neglect of such institutions not only mirror the splintering dynamics of ethno-religious nationalism, but also perpetuate them.     

To not reinstate the past:

Abstract

Most interpretations stress a qualitative shift in colonial policy at the end of World War II, reflecting a major reorientation of outlook towards development, welfare and ultimately independence. There are, however, continuities before and after the war that call for a shift of emphasis.

Because the British Solomon Islands Protectorate is conventionally represented as an extreme case of backwardness and severity before the war, it should present the putative contrast sharply. On the contrary, the pre-war administration field staff had aspirations for a more progressive regime, but these were thwarted by the protectorate's poverty and were shelved by the eruption of the war. The war-time destruction prompted administrators to consider afresh the problems of colonial development, coinciding with Colonial Office demands for post-war development submissions. Proposals proved too ambitious for the limited imperial purse, but even the attenuated plans proved unrealistic given the acute shortages of material and human resources.

Thus, while ‘post-war thinking’ began well before the war, the era of ‘post-war development’ could not properly begin until several years after the end of the war.     

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.     

No Italian Stalingrads. The C.G.I.L. and the working class in the northern industrial heartlands, 1945-1955

ABSTRACT

This article challenges conventional wisdom on the northern Italian industrial heartlands during the first decade after the Second World War. For there still exists a certain mythology about the post-war proletarian north as a region that was both intensely political and united in purpose. What this article demonstrates is that the ‘industrial triangle’ of Genoa, Milan and Turin was far more divided than historians have assumed. By revisiting the manifold (wildcat) strikes, trade union demonstrations, and factory occupations of the early post-war years, it shows the industrial north to be divided along both social and geographical lines. In doing so, it sheds fresh light on the series of defeats that the main Italian trade union confederation (C.G.I.L.) suffered in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It argues that these defeats were due as much to the explicit politicization of labour struggles and their exclusive focus on the interests of skilled workers as to the hostile socio-political climate in which the C.G.I.L. had to operate.     

A ‘New Angle of Vision’: British Imperial Reappraisal of Hong Kong during the Second World War

This paper examines the involvement of British officials at the Stanley Internment Camp in Hong Kong in the perpetuation of imperial ideals during the Second World War, as well as in the eventual restoration of British rule to the territory. It highlights the debates that were conducted within the camp on issues of post-war reconstruction, as well as the strategies that were devised by the internees in anticipation of the new social, economic and political orders of the post-war colonial world. The paper also highlights similar discussions that transpired within the Changi Camp in Singapore and the Lintang Camp in Sarawak (Borneo) as supplementary case studies. Remarkably, many of these ideas ran in parallel with secret planning in London, where Hong Kong and Malayan governments-in-exile conceived revamped colonial administrations following the envisaged defeat of the Japanese. A number of these wartime schemes were even implemented after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, with significant impact on the phase of post-war British imperial revival.     

From imperial revenants to Cold War victims: ‘red repatriates’ from the Soviet Union and the making of the new Japan, 1949–1952

When over half a million former Imperial Japanese Army soldiers returned home from long captivity in Soviet labour camps in the late 1940s, they brought back more than their memories of hardship and humiliation. In post-war society, the Siberian returnees were the uncomfortable remnants of the failed Japanese Empire; yet it was their brush with the communist enemy that caused suspicion and dragged them into the domestic political struggles. In this article, I use the experiences of Siberian internees as a lens to reconsider Japan’s formative post-war decade, when the onset of the Cold War eclipsed the inconvenient legacies of empire.     

Planning at the limit: immigration and post-war Birmingham

It is acknowledged that the post-war period of urban planning has played a significant role in the construction of Britain's cities. The plans themselves and the commentaries on these plans tend to illustrate this phase as predominately involving rehousing, the reorganization of land use and the containment of urban sprawl. Through a close, de-constructive reading of two plans instructive to the rebuilding of the City of Birmingham, this paper suggests that post-war reconstruction cannot be reduced to such domestic, localised issues. Instead, it demonstrates that although planners often elided any mention of immigration and promoted a notion of natural population increase, there remain traces of an uneven relationship with immigration operating at a number of scales in the documentation. The paper elucidates such traces and, in turn, works towards a reassessment of the literature on immigration and the city.     

The periphery revisited: Polish post-war historiography on the working class and the new global labour history

This paper explores the characteristics of post-war Polish historiography on the working class and relates it to current trends in global labour history. Although, in Poland, labour history never existed as a separate field, many historians focused their studies on either working-class history or the history of the workers’ movement. After 1945, Polish historiography was circumscribed by political and ideological considerations; however – except during the brief Stalinist period (1951–56) – Marxist methodology was not imposed or applied uncritically. In fact, discussions about the role of the working class in history that began after 1956 generated research interest in new groups of workers and labour relations. Much of this research concerns recently highlighted aspects of labour history, such as marginal groups of workers or free versus unfree labour. Polish historians’ reinterpretation of Marxist orthodoxy proceeded from their empirical studies of nineteenth-century Polish lands – at the periphery of Western capitalist development – as well as from their theoretical influences. This article argues that some aspects of the Polish historiography on the working class qualify it as part of labour history’s heritage, despite the historiography’s significant limitations.     

Traces of empire: Architectural heritage,imperial memory and post-war reconstruction in Sarajevo and Beirut

ABSTRACT

Beirut and Sarajevo share a long Ottoman past followed by urban expansion under the protectorate of further imperial rule – of the French and Habsburg Empires, respectively, as well as a recent experience of urban warfare, segregation, and post-war reconstruction. This article examines how the architectural heritage of empires in the two cities has been transformed, reimagined and mobilized through urban post-war reconstruction by a number of actors: local authorities and politicians, architects, international organizations and investors. Discussing the tensions between the memory of empire and contemporary nation-building processes, the essay argues that the politics of memory and amnesia surrounding the recent wars shape and reconfigure the memory and heritage of empire. Moreover, it reflects how the reshaping of urban space acts both as an arena and as an enhancer of the politics and practices of memory and amnesia.     

Transitions to Work: Masculine identities,youth inequality and labour market change

In this article, the initial transitions of white working-class male post-compulsory school leavers in two British cities are investigated. In the context of economic restructuring, the decline of manufacturing employment, and the rise in young women's educational achievements, it has been argued that poorly educated young men are increasingly disadvantaged in the labour market. Indeed, this may be the first generation of young men in the post-war period that will experience downward mobility compared to their fathers. In an earlier article, the author explored the labour market aspirations of white working-class boys living on peripheral local authority estates in Cambridge and Sheffield and in their final year at school. Despite the decline of manufacturing employment, they hoped to enter typically 'male' jobs in, for example, the car industry in both cities and in the steel industry in Sheffield. In this article, the author explores their labour market experiences in the year since they left school and their sense of themselves as masculine workers in the context of debates emphasising a growing 'crisis' of masculinity.     

The New Morality--Victor Gollancz, 'Save Europe Now'and the German Refugee Crisis, 1945-46

This article looks at the origins and development of a campaignin Britain in late 1945 to raise public awareness about deterioratingconditions in Central Europe and to rally support behind measuresto find a political solution at an inter-state level to theGerman refugee crisis and the expulsion of German populationsfrom Poland and Czechoslovakia seen to be contributing to it.It focuses on the activities of the publisher Victor Gollancz,who became closely associated with the issue of post-war Europeanrelief and reconstruction and the plight of Germany and itsrefugees. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, as wellas a comprehensive analysis of contemporary media, this articletraces the development of these initiatives as well as of publishedand parliamentary opinion on this issue. In doing so, it notonly brings to light a buried chapter in immediate post-warBritish history, it also raises important questions about thehierarchy of British interests in post-war Europe and shiftingattitudes towards Britain's former wartime allies in EasternEurope.     

Professionals’ and amateurs’ pasts: a decolonizing reading of post-war Romanian histories of gendered interwar activism

This article provides an illustration of a decolonial and gendered approach that can shape ‘new global labour histories’ by re-reading histories of Communist women’s interwar activism produced in state-socialist Romania with attention to the power context in which they were created and the clues about the work of social reproduction during the interwar that these histories provide. After discussing the main concepts and rationale in the first section, in the second section the author shows that women’s history and women historians were marginalized in Romania after 1958 despite promising post-war beginnings. She shows that this evolution was made possible by the symbiosis between nationalist historians and autochthonist politicians in search of a break with Stalinist policies. She then hones in, in the third part of the paper, on the content of the Revue des Etudés Sud-Est Européenes (RESEE) and two women’s history volumes, as publications issuing from the conditions described in the second part. With regard to the standalone volumes, the author shows that in this body of work, the interwar period is described as one of women’s increased activism within the social-democratic or Communist movements. On the other hand, the period is also described as one of worsening living conditions for proletarians. The intersection of these two narratives creates in this rather limited historiographical body the surprising effect of granting high visibility to reproductive labour.     

Mothers and children in post-war Europe: martyrdom and national reconstruction in Italy and Poland

References to family and nation abounded in post-war rhetoric and informed the painstaking process of (re)creating a normal life in the aftermath of devastation. Taking Italy and Poland as its main case studies, this article explores the connections that linked familial and national discourses in post-war Europe. It is argued that families did not simply provide a useful metaphor to talk about national communities, but represented a constitutive element of post-war reconstruction. References to the family as a place of civic and national resistance were modelled on earlier narratives of national and familial devotions, which found in the sacrifice of children (in the double meaning of young person and offspring) a central theme. Both in Poland and in Italy, the celebration of the sacrifice of young people and their mothers became a means of celebrating the nation, its suffering and its recovery.