For Mothers,Peace and Family: International (Non)‐Cooperation among Italian Catholic and Communist Women's Organisations during the Early Cold War

In July 1955, women from around the globe gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland for the World Congress of Mothers organised by the social‐communist Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). On the third day of four days of proceedings, an Italian housewife named Clotilde Cassigoli delivered an impassioned speech calling on women to unite across the divides of the Cold War, and cooperate to ensure that their children and grandchildren would not have to know the horrors of war she had witnessed in Florence at the end of the Second World War. Her plea ultimately went unheeded. This article analyses the national and international activities of Catholic and communist women's organisations between 1945 and 1956 to expand understandings of women's political involvement during the Cold War. My examination of the Italian case will show that during this era cooperation between the politically opposed women's groups was only possible in a limited framework. By interpreting the associations’ discourse of motherhood and peace through a Cold War lens, I show that the Italian women's leaders were successful at advancing their own objectives and making inroads into the homes of more Italian women while they simultaneously constructed a divisive Cold War international women's movement.     

Guerra civile: experience,memory and contrasting histories of the Resistance in Italy

This article examines the disagreement between two partisans turned historians, Nuto Revelli and Claudio Pavone, on the legitimacy of the term ‘civil war’ to describe the Italian Resistance of 1943–1945. ‘Civil war’ is a controversial term in Italian and European discussions of World War II. Accordingly, ‘civil war’ provokes a study of the intersection of ideology and ethics, experiential memory and history in postwar Europe. But why should Revelli and Pavone, two men who had been on the same side during the Resistance, see things so differently? This article demonstrates that each historian’s experience before and during World War II shaped their participation in the Resistance and their subsequent representation of it. Consequently, their divergent experiences offer an explanation as to why Pavone argues that the Resistance was a civil war and Revelli argues that it was not, without relativizing in political and ethical analysis.     

A path towards Fascism: nationalism and large-scale industry in Italy (1910–1923)

In the decade before World War I, close connections developed in Italy between the nationalists and major elements of large-scale industry. As the Italian Nationalist Association, founded in 1910, became the main political reference for industrialists, the ties between nationalism and the business community helped to undermine the liberal state and end the political system established by Giovanni Giolitti. During World War I, the Nationalist Association developed close links with the Ansaldo company and supported it in the ‘parallel wars’ of Italian capitalism. Ansaldo went bankrupt in 1921, but the nationalists were able to establish relations with other entrepreneurs. Their connection with large-scale industry lay behind Mussolini’s decision in 1923 to accept the Nationalist Association into the National Fascist Party. Nationalism not only ensured that important economic forces would support the Fascist regime but its ideology significantly contributed to the building of Mussolini’s dictatorship.     

Sender,those who have not returned: Carlo Salsa and his ‘Trenches’

Abstract

Carlo Salsa’s book ‘Trenches: A foot-soldier’s tales’ (Trincee. Confidenze di un fante, 1924) was one of many published in Italy after the end of the First World War. It describes the facts of the war as they were lived by officers and soldiers on the Italian front line. The article tries to compare the book with the contemporary war literature in Italy and in Europe, without forgetting the use of the international historiography on the matter. Thus, it is analysed the way an Italian author described to his readers the brutal carnage of the war in years when Fascism was the rising star in Italian policy and the censorship was becoming the more and more a thornily factor for every writer of those days. From this analysis it is possible to note the quality of the volume both from the literary point of view, and its historical value as a reliable testimony of the facts, stepping up our knowledge of what the war literature was for the Italian public opinion after the 1918. As it is possible to note, the book puts under test our notions of the role played by this kind of literature in shaping the Italian political life at the end of the 1910s and at the start of 1920s, when Italy was becoming a country lead by the Fascist regime.     

Nazi Leaks and Intrigues in Second World War Ankara: the Plot to Send Herbert Melzig to a Concentration Camp

This article excavates one of the stranger episodes that took place in the transnational microcosm of the German expatriate world in Ankara and Istanbul during the Second World War. ‘Professor’ Herbert Melzig's story, the ‘Melzig affair’, illustrates how this microcosm, with its very different constituent members - Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from Nazism, German pro-Nazi expatriates, and an extensive embassy and Nazi Party network - acted as a conduit in German–Turkish relations, albeit one that produced unexpected results. This ‘Melzig affair’ sheds new light on the German presence in Second World War Turkey as well as the so-called German ‘exile on the Bosporus’ as it has been (re-)constructed and used in recent years; it also contributes to our understanding of Turkish foreign policy during the Second World War, especially regarding Turkey's reluctance to join the war on Hitler's side. At the end of the Melzig affair stood the ‘leaking’ of an internal Ministry of Propaganda memorandum. It prepared the ground for further leaks of this nature and was one of the turning points of public opinion in Turkey against the Third Reich.     

Setting Moon and Rising Nationalism: Lugou Bridge as Monument and Memory

This paper examines Beijing’s Lugou Bridge (Marco Polo Bridge) in terms of monument and memory. With 800 years of history to its credit, this structure carries with it a select set of textual memories passed down from one dynasty to the next, and finally into the 20th century when its traditional associations of architectural and natural beauty were supplemented by its modern association with the beginning of the Anti‐Japanese War of Resistance (Second World War in China). With the opening of Sino‐Japanese diplomacy in the 1970s, the Chinese authorities began to accredit further significance to the bridge as a site of Chinese indignation over Japan’s perceived refusal to take responsibility for its wartime aggression. This point was driven home most forcefully through the construction of the Anti‐Japanese War Memorial Hall in 1985, and the continuing use of the site as a tool of diplomacy. Lugou Bridge, therefore, serves to demonstrate how political authority and cultural nationalism are constructed through the continuing appropriation of monumental artefacts and traditions.     

Colonising Italians: Italian Imperialism and Agricultural ‘Colonies’ in Australia, 1881–1914

The historiography of Australian imperialism before the First World War has often neglected a context wider than the relationship with Great Britain. Yet this era also implicated non-British governments and their emigrants. Despite their small numbers, Italian settlers are significant for highlighting Italy's empire-building and Australia's struggles for national and imperial unity. Italy's foreign policies after 1901 opened commercial opportunities across its diasporic networks, which included subsidising agricultural ‘colonies’ in Australia. The contemporary discourses of sectarianism and racism voiced before Federation articulated political and popular resistance against Italian immigrants. The rhetoric shifted after Federation as state governments examined the issue of land tenure for closer settlements (small agricultural farms), appealing to an argument about serving unemployed Australians before approving foreign settler schemes. The history leading up to two Italian projects in Western Australia and Queensland in 1907 allows reflections on Italy's diaspora colonisation and Australian responses to foreign imperialism.     

The Dog and Cat Massacre of September 1939 and the People's War

During the first week of the Second World War around 400,000 companion animals in London alone were killed at their owner's behest. This was not a state directive. Little is known of this event although details of what was called at the time the pet ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Cat and Dog Massacre’ were not suppressed. Far from the Home Front of the Second World War in Britain being a ‘People's War’, as popularly described, in different ways the animal–human relationship was prominent. The massacre – and subsequent animal–human relationships – tends to undermine the notion of both a positive and exclusively human ‘People's War’.     

From The Iron Curtain to Franco’s Spain: Right-Wing Central Europeans in Exile

After the Second World War, anti-communists of different backgrounds from Central and Eastern European countries decided to settle in Franco’s Spain, where they sought safety and a place to live during the Cold War. This article will provide an overview of their political profiles and assess the reasons these exiles chose Spain, a country excluded from the United Nations until 1955 and led by Francisco Franco. The article also shows how they settled in the dictatorship linked to the Nazis and Italian Fascists, and the ways in which they continued their struggles against Communism with public and private resources.     

‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany's Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War

This article analyses the impact of the First World War on Germany's homosexual emancipation movement. I argue that the war was a turning point for the nation's gay movement, as it provided a central ideal – comradeship – which altered the ways in which homosexual rights organisations defined homosexuality and masculinity. A militarised rhetoric permeated the language of gay rights groups in the 1920s, providing a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimise ‘friendship’ and secure civil rights. The article relies on the publications of three major homosexual rights organisations recently collected at the Schwules Archiv und Museum in Berlin.     

Crisis in consciousness: The thought of Ernst Troeltsch

This article examines the ‘revolutionary liberal’ outlook expounded by the young Italian journalist and intellectual, Piero Gobetti, immediately following the First World War. It considers the historical evolution of his ‘agonistic’ liberalism according to which conflict rather than consensus serves as the basis of social and political renewal. The article traces the formation of Gobetti's thought from his idealist response to the crisis of the liberal state through to his endorsement of the communist revolutionaries in Turin and his denunciation of fascism as the continuation of Italy's failed tradition of compromise. Whilst Gobetti's views presently resonate with a growing interest in the agonistic dimension of politics, it is argued that his elitism and his understanding of liberalism as a ‘civic religion’ reveal challenging tensions in his thought.     

An airline at the crossroads of the world: Ariana Afghan Airlines,modernization, and the global Cold War

In 1957, the United States government provided funding for Pan American World Airways to purchase a 49% share in Afghanistan’s national airline, Ariana Afghan Airlines. While unusual in its scope, the arrangement was part of a broader program of US technical assistance, administered jointly by government agencies and private corporations, to newly formed airlines in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Between 1955 and 1965, technical assistance for commercial aviation was critical to the USA’s Cold War strategy to win ‘hearts and minds,’ and to contain Soviet influence, in the developing world. Using Ariana as a case study, this article examines what was at stake for the USA – politically, economically, and culturally – in aviation technical assistance projects. However, the article also argues that such projects should be seen as instances of ‘co‐production,’ in which recipients of technical assistance exploited superpower rivalries and actively shaped the airplane’s uses and meanings.     

Situating Local Events in Geo-Political Struggles between the British and Japanese Empires: The Politics of Zo Participation during the Second World War

The Indo-Burma frontier witnessed one of the fiercest battles of the Second World War. Geographically considered as ‘impenetrable’, the jungle-clad mountainous frontier was part of what was constitutionally known as the ‘Excluded Areas’ or ‘Scheduled Areas’ and directly administered by the governor of Burma. It was an important field for Christian missions, where combined colonial-missionary efforts, albeit not at all time, established Christianity and western education from the late nineteenth century. This article argues that, amid enticing propaganda from the Japanese, it was from these indigenous peoples of the Indo-Burma frontier that the British generated their ‘staunch allies’ who, as ‘irregulars’ or ‘levies’, gathered intelligence, worked behind the enemy lines, performed prodigies of valour and paid heavy prices for the cause of their colonial masters. However, at the end of the day, the British did not keep their promised to protect the interest of their staunch allies by undermining their constitutional status as ‘Scheduled Areas’ and rather compromised with the Burman nationalists. This article is a case study of the Zo (Chin) of Chin Hills in western Burma. It is an attempt to situate local events in the geo-political struggles between the British and Japanese empires and wider political implications in the context of building post-war Burma which has often been overlooked in existing historiography of the Second World War.     

Mythologising the Dominion Fighting Man: Australian and Canadian Narratives of the First World War Soldier, 1914–39

A stereotypical image of the nation's First World War soldiers—and a conventional understanding of their war experience and its meaning—is not a concept unique to the British Empire's former Pacific Dominions, but is also promulgated in other parts of the Empire. During the First World War and interwar period, Canada also saw the emergence of a ‘Myth of the Soldier’ that paralleled the Anzac legend in many ways. This article focuses on some of the similarities and differences in Australia and Canada's mythologising of their First World War soldiers, proposing that this process reflects aspects of identity formation common to settler societies within the British world.     

A queen without a sceptre: public opinion and the political-constitutional debate in Italy in the first fifty years of national unification

Italy's intellectual debate over the concept of ‘public opinion’ in the first fifty years after unification can be better understood if one starts from an analysis of the constitutional framework. The definition of the rights and duties of rulers and ruled was the most pressing concern for the liberal ruling class. It should be noted that a strong paternalistic element was always present in the Italian intellectual debate. This paternalistic approach emerges clearly in the official Catholic culture. The main difference between Catholic intellectuals and liberals was over the ‘public sphere’. Liberalism mistrusted the masses because they were prone to insubordination and easily manipulated by demagogy, but it also believed the masses could elevate themselves. The ruling class's culture was essentially a synthesis between ‘moderatismo’ and that section of Catholicism that was less closed to modernity. Public opinion was considered by many as ‘queen of the world’, but according to the Albertine constitutional statute, the king was more politically influent.     

Organizing the ‘people’s community’: the NSDAP and the ‘ethnic Germans’ in Nazi-occupied territories

ABSTRACT

This article refers to recent scholarly debates on the term ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft), which throughout the Third Reich remained rather vague and encompassed often contradictory purposes. It deals with the relations between the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) and some of the ‘ethnic German’ (volksdeutsche) organizations to exemplify how German society should be transformed into a ‘people’s community’ after 1933. Thus, it is necessary to analyse the ‘people’s community’ not by asking whether or not its different purposes were realized, but by examining its functions in the Nazi regime. This functional analysis of the ‘people’s community’ focuses on the NSDAP and its relations with ‘ethnic German’ organizations after 1933, primarily in Nazi-occupied territories during the Second World War. First, the article describes the NSDAP’s efforts to align the ‘Germans abroad’ (Auslandsdeutsche) after the seizure of power and to organize the German Front (Deutsche Front) in the Saar territories in 1934/35—an experience serving as a blueprint for the relations between the NSDAP and ‘ethnic German’ organizations during the Second World War. Second, it evaluates the creation of the Ethnic German Community (Volksdeutsche Gemeinschaft) in the General Government and its efforts to organize ‘ethnic Germans’. Third, it interprets the foundation of the German People’s Community (Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft) in Lorraine and its ongoing attempts to establish a racial hierarchy of ‘ethnic Germans’ over the autochthonous French population. Fourth, it looks at the connection between the Germanization of Lower Styria and the launch of the Styrian Homeland Union (Steirischer Heimatbund) as an ‘ethnic German’ movement. The article argues that the NSDAP’s operational routines regarding both the German population and the ‘ethnic Germans’ living in the occupied territories shaped the ‘people’s community’.     

Digging in the Dark: The Underground War on the Western Front in World War I

Throughout the First World War, with the trenches largely static, the combatants tried to break the deadlock by tunnelling under one another’s trenches. The Tunnelling Companies of the British Royal Engineers were engaged in a bitter struggle against German Pioneers that left both sides with heavy casualties. A project to determine the location of one particular act of heroism in that underground war has resulted in the erection of a monument to the Tunnellers at Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée in northern France.     

The institutional odyssey of the Italian Parliamentary Republic

This article examines the Italian foreign policy of the second Berlusconi government. The first section focuses on the episodes that critics have used to argue that, under the second Berlusconi government, there has occurred a process of ‘Americanization’ of Italian foreign policy, and provides an interpretation of their significance. The second section looks at these episodes against the historical background of Italian?–?American relations since the end of World War II and argues that, from this perspective, very little, if anything, has changed in Italian?–?American relations or Italian foreign policy in general.     

The technoscientists: a Swedish construction of basic research in World War II

The paper examines a group of engineers and scientists in Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s that worked to gain political support for what they called ‘technoscientific research’. Following their own terminology and the ideas of close relations between engineers, scientists, industries, and politics it implied, I call these actors ‘technoscientists’. Critical to their approach was the strategical use of the concept of ‘basic research’, constructed by the technoscientists to associate knowledge production with economic development and demarcate an area of responsibility for public support of industrial research. The technoscientists promoted this strategy by linking basic research to the technical exigencies caused by World War II and by integrating it with politics of welfare, defense, and trade. The technoscientists were thus important political reformers that laid the foundations of public support of science and technology before the 1950s and 1960s when science policy emerged as an institutionalized political practice in Sweden.     

War in the mental hospitals: sychiatry and clinical files (1940 – 52)

Abstract

Is there a connection between war and madness? How have psychiatrists responded to the problem of those ‘driven mad by war’? This article tries to answer these questions by drawing on clinical records for three Italian psychiatric hospitals in the period from 1940 to 1950. While these problems have been researched and debated for combatants during the World War I, in the case of the World War II, as this article shows, it is necessary to take into account the impact of war not only on soldiers but also on civilians who were equally involved in the trauma of war.