Out of ‘Common Humanity’: Humanitarianism,Compassion and Efforts in Australia to Assist Jewish Refugees in the 1930s

In June 1935, Edith Roll, a thirteen-year-old from Vienna, wrote to her Australian pen-pal, Jean Doig, aged ten. This correspondence was tragically short-lived. Edith Roll’s family was swept up in the murder and destruction of Jews in Europe. The efforts of Jean’s parents – the respected country doctor, Keith Doig, and his wife, Louie – who attempted but failed to assist Edith and her family, her father, Jakob Roll, her mother Emilie and brother Fritz, are examined in this article. To disregard their efforts as tangential to the history of refugees because they were unsuccessful means we miss an opportunity to explore the historically situated notions of compassion and empathy that can be at the centre of these endeavours. Drawing on personal letters rather than the views of government officials, this article examines the Doig family efforts and what inspired them, arguing that these are a vital part of the complex story of refugee and migration history.     

‘Hollywood is a Woman's Town’: Masculinity and the Leading Man in American Fan Magazines of the 1930s

In their address to a predominantly female readership, fan magazines of the 1930s asserted that Hollywood was one place in which women were not subordinated to men as female stardom was superior to that of male stardom. The magazines’ representations of male actors were both compliant with, and resistant to, the tough-guy image of hegemonic masculinity. The personas of most ‘leading men’ who led the supporting casts of female stars were represented as softer forms of masculinity than that of the majority of male stars. The on-screen hard forms of masculinity of male stars were softened by the magazines’ reports of their off-screen personas, and the personas of some actors were presented as a bipolar masculinity that combined soft and hard forms.     

‘How Time Flies’: Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1960s

Recent histories of human rights have identified the 1970s as the most decisive epoch in the birth of the modern rights era. These works have tended toward a parenthetic dismissal of the period 1948–70 as years of interregnum, of marginal impact to the ‘breakthrough’ moment which followed. This article argues for a more complex periodisation, and reclaims the importance of the 1960s. Far from an undifferentiated abyss, the two decades between the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1968 International Human Rights Year held their own shifts, integral to the evolution of modern human rights. A crucial transition in the status of the UDHR occurred across the mid-1960s, roughly aligned with the terminal years of liberal post-colonialism. Through a comparison of two hitherto neglected events in the history of human rights, the fifteenth and twentieth anniversary commemorations of the UDHR, in December 1963 and 1968, this article traces the trajectory of that transition. These commemorations, concentrated moments of explicit reflection on the meaning of human rights, encapsulated the gulf between the early and the late 1960s. In the space of five years, any vestigial consensus on the vision enunciated in 1948 was obliterated.     

Sports,Politics and Ethnicity in the North. Workers’ Sport in Western Finnmark in the Late 1930s

Abstract

Internationally, ethnicity in sports has become an independent field of research amongst sports historians focusing on phenomena such as colonialism, immigration and indigenous populations. Studies demonstrate that sports have simultaneously been able to assimilate different groups, promoting majority concepts of identity and majority values, and enable groups to fashion their own singular ethnic identities in contrast to those of majority societies. In Norwegian historical research, sport and ethnicity has been given only scarce attention. Norwegian sports historians have mainly seen Norway as an ethnically homogenous society where sport has played an essential part in creating a unifying national identity. A major concern for Norwegian sports history research has been the political split in Norwegian sports in the 1930s. Research on this event has mainly been occupied with the relationship between the Workers’ Sports Association (AIF) and the “bourgeois” National Sports Federation (NLI), and by AIF's significance as a political movement. Less attention, however, has been given to its cultural impact. This article investigates the establishment and function of AIF in the multi-ethnic area of West Finnmark, a geographically and politically peripheral region of Northern Norway, at the end of the 1930s. The town of Alta, the main focus of attention, was in the 1930s a small fiord community with an ethnically mixed population of indigenous Sámi, Kvens and Norwegians, sharp political divisions and a vibrant sporting milieu. Although the political division of Alta's sports establishment displays many of the traits that characterize similar events in the country at large, the ethnic factor brought another, important, dimension to it. This highly politicized period in Finnmark sports underlines the importance of sports as an arena for the construction and reinforcement of not only political identity, but also for the production of ethnic and local identities.     

The reasons of Europe: Edmund Husserl,Jan Patočka,and María Zambrano on the spiritual heritage of Europe*

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the genuinely philosophical engagement with the idea of Europe twentieth century philosophy. Here, especially phenomenology has developed a distinct tradition of conceiving Europe not as a geographical and political entity but rather as a ‘spiritual shape.’ Husserl, as the originator of this thought, traces this spiritual Europe back to Ancient Greece of the 7/6 century B.C. in which an unprecedented ‘theoretical attitude’ towards the world originated. Hence, Europe is conceived as a project of reason, of pure rationality while at the same time leaving out the constitutive dimension of religion. Furthermore, this non-historical philosophical genealogy proves itself to be an arbitrary but intentional genealogy whose intentions have to be put into critical reconsideration. In this article, I will introduce Pato?ka and Zambrano as important critiques of Husserl’s genealogy, or even potentially violent mono-genealogy, as Derrida has emphasized. Following Foucault, it is the aim of this article to put into question the myth of a single historical-political origin of Europe’s spiritual heritage and furthermore to pay attention to the transformations and conflictual relations between Europe’s different forms of reason and religion.     

‘Fighters without guns’: humanitarianism and military action in the aftermath of the Second World War

Abstract

This paper makes a contribution to the debate about the interplay between military action and humanitarian aid. It takes on the case study of post-World War Two Europe and in particular the activity carried out by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which offers a useful key for highlighting the entanglements between relief and reconstruction projects. It is from this perspective that the interaction between humanitarianism and military undertakings also acquires a special meaning, which recalls both the development of the international aid regime and the post-war history of Western countries. The matter will be addressed from two points of view. First to be analysed is the set of agreements stipulated by UNRRA and military authorities, for the zones under Allied administration after the liberation, but also with respect to specific areas of intervention, like the Displaced Persons Operations. The terms of the official agreements allow the delineation of the tasks actually assigned to the agency by the United Nations and the role of control and protection reserved for military organizations. Based on the formal agreements, it is already possible to reconstruct a vision of relief understood as the result of the inextricably linked action of military and humanitarian actors. Next, the interplay between different interpretations of activities to help civilians affected by the war will be examined. This section will focus on the personnel deployed by UNRRA, on their origins, and on duties they are called on to fulfil. People with extensive experience in the welfare sector were a substantial part of the personnel, but a significant number of UNRRA employees came from military ranks. This essay, therefore, has a twofold objective. It analyses the normative and institutional frame that shaped relief work in Liberated Europe. At the same time, it aims to uncover competition and cooperation between military and humanitarian actors in the field. The aim is to highlight how the co-construction of the aid operations between military and civilian personnel that occurred during the second post-war period followed a series of complex, nonlinear paths that conditioned the development of the humanitarian regime from within.     

Between cooperation and competitive bargaining: the Council of Europe,local and regional networking,and the shaping of the European Community’s regional policies, 1970s–90s

Abstract:

In many ways, the Council of Europe paved the way for European Community (EC) action in local and regional affairs. It was the first European organisation to establish a conference of local and regional authorities in 1957, in which local actors and associations were represented and tried to influence the shaping of European regional policies. This article analyses the links between the Council of Europe and the EC in the development of regional policies from the 1970s to the 1990s by focusing on three transmission vectors: through institutional cooperation between the two European organisations; through competitive bargaining among local and regional groups; and through intensive lobbying at EC level. It argues that the transfer of ideas was not so much achieved through cooperation between the organisations’ experts or political committees but rather by means of transregional networking promoting the idea that local and regional authorities had to be associated with the elaboration and implementation of European regional policy. From 1988, these networks shifted their attention away from the Council of Europe towards the EC because of the possibility to receive direct funding from the European Commission.     

‘The True Love of the People and the Motherland’: The concept of socialist patriotism,socialist nation and anti-nationalism in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s

In the late 1950s, the concept of socialist patriotism in Hungary was reformulated as a basic political concept in the ideology and propaganda of state socialism. The definite appropriation of Leninist contraposition of socialist patriotism and bourgeois nationalism became paramount in the second half of the 1950s because of the nationalist sentiments of the 1956 revolution. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Hungary. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counter-concept to set against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ which was characterised as a xenophobic sense of nation. From the late 1960s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy: supra-nationalism or cosmopolitanism. In the mid-1970s, a new ideological equilibrium was elaborated in Hungary between socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, which served the economic and political integration of the Eastern bloc countries. In this sense, socialist patriotism was meant to express a link with socialist political order, its achievements and its institutions, in contrast to the ethnic character and revanchist tendencies of nationalism.     

‘Save our NHS’: activism,information-based expertise and the ‘new times’ of the 1980s

This article examines activism in defence of the National Health Service (NHS), which emerges in the 1960s to defend local hospitals from closure. From the mid-1980s, a new form of campaigning developed, which sought to protect the Service nationally. Tracing this campaigning illuminates, first, that small groups played a significant role in negotiating political change, and in contributing to cultural change which, in turn, has become politically powerful. Second, this demonstrates that the 1980s were ‘new times’ in welfare politics, as Thatcher’s changes fostered voluntary interest in information-led expertise, and a new vision of the NHS as a significant, much valued, national institution.     

Tehran’s subway: gender,mobility, and the adaptation of the ‘proper’ Muslim woman

Tehran’s subway, the most affordable means of public transportation in the city, offers a useful context to study the relationship between women’s spatial mobility, the construction of self, and social production of space. This study focuses on Line 1 of Tehran’s subway that connects Tehran’s Bala Shahr (Northern Tehran) and Paeen Shahr (Southern Tehran) neighborhoods. This study draws upon 46 semi-structured interviews with women who were using subway Line 1 in the fall and winter of 2012. The average hour-long interviews examine how women’s emotional states as well as their perceptions of self and space vary as they traverse the city on Line 1. Representing a cultural as well as a spatial transect through the city, the perceptions of women on subway’s Line 1 convey the repudiation of the state’s attempt to promote a singular Muslim female identity. The findings suggest that similar to women’s perception of space, their gendered identities are constantly changing through the enhanced mobility that is facilitated by Tehran’s subway system. In contrast to what is presumed in the West, with a simple change in their hijab style or make-up, Iranian women innovatively negotiate contrasting spaces.     

‘Unity,stability, continuity’: heritage and the renovation of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, 1957–1969

Spain between 1957 and 1969 – the period in the history of the dictatorial regime of General Francisco Franco known as desarrollista (development‐guided) – presents a peculiar case of a state‐driven heritage industry. The present article examines the desarrollista policy aimed at creating and coordinating heritage tourism, focusing on periodical publications, official speeches, films and promotional materials. It looks at late‐Francoist heritage as a vehicle for achieving, simultaneously, an ideological and an economic effect. Economically, heritage was conceived as a tool for diversifying and individualising Spain’s tourism product in the Mediterranean market, and above all, for confronting the uneven territorial and seasonal distribution of ‘sun and beach tourism’. At the same time, ideologically, the models and uses of heritage examined here served the regime’s interest in securing the country’s territorial unity, maintaining the high profile of the Catholic Church, and re‐legitimising the Civil War (1936–1939) which had brought Franco to power.     

‘Poor heathens’, ‘Cone-headed natives’ and ‘Good water’: the production of knowledge of the interior of Australia through German texts from around the 1860s

This essay critically reviews the textual archive related to the two German mission stations in the South Australian Lake Eyre basin: the Lutheran Hermannsburg mission at Killalpaninna and the Moravian mission at Kopperamanna. The multiple entanglements of these stations far beyond their missionary activity become evident through examining distinctly religious material, such as mission journals, and secular texts, in German-language newspapers and scientific journals. These include entanglement in German domestic affairs as well as German diasporic politics; and in debates over scientific advancement and British colonial expansion.     

Mitterrand’s Europe: functions and limits of ‘European solidarity’ in French policy during the 1980s

Abstract

This paper explores the conceptualization and interpretation of ‘European solidarity’ by the French President François Mitterrand. It discusses the relevance of former concepts of foreign and European policy. It differentiates between a European idea and European institutions, also taking into account personal experiences. Finally, it analyses the correlation between different concepts such as ‘European solidarity’, ‘transatlantic solidarity’, ‘West European solidarity’ and ‘pan-European solidarity’.     

Bede, Æthelberht,and the ‘examples of the Romans’ in early medieval England

In Book II, Chapter 5 of the Historia ecclesiastica, Bede writes that the Kentish king Æthelberht had, ‘with the advice of his counsellors, established legal enactments according to the examples of the Romans.’ This article argues that Bede’s formulation serves as a means of characterizing the increasingly interventionist role played by early Kentish kings in making the laws issued in their names.