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.     

The invisible war on nature: the Abyssinian war (1935–1936) in newsreels and documentaries in Fascist Italy

This contribution to the special issue focuses on newsreels and documentaries that were produced concerning the Second Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–1936), commonly known as the Abyssinian War. It aims to contextualise LUCE's filmic production on the war, so as to create a framework in which the institute can be understood not only as being part of a wider politics of propaganda in Fascist Italy, but as an example of a modern socio-technical organisation that enabled the discursive construction of East African nature as ‘Other’ and therefore helped to justify colonial war as a process of sanitised creative destruction aimed at replacing a previous, negative ‘first nature’ with a positive, Fascist and Italian ‘second nature’. The article draws on archival documents from Mussolini's government cabinet, and on LUCE documentaries and newsreels; these sources are used to create a background against which LUCE's concern with the Second Italo–Ethiopian War can be understood.     

‘Patriotic Femininity’: Women's Morals and Men's Morale During the Second World War

The Second World War was a period which witnessed struggles for the definitions of appropriate ‘patriotic’ feminine identities and behaviours as much as it placed demands on men and their masculinities. The disruption to normality led to a heightened sense of heterosexuality. There were contests for the definition of femininity, contests which contradicted the centrality of discourses constructing domesticity and passivity. The way history has been constructed the heroic myths of the Second World War are male, thus there is a need for other kinds of critical knowledge to provide an understanding of women's lives and another, feminine, kind of heroism.     

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

This article scrutinises attempts by the British Foreign and Colonial Office to control information in its colonies between 1946 and 1950. Several factors combined to alter the ground on which colonial officials operated in this period: an emerging ‘Cold War’ between Britain and its wartime Soviet ally, international debates about creating an enforceable catalogue of ‘human rights' and a heightened emphasis on public relations within British colonies as a strategy for imperial governance. These factors converged in the response of colonial officials to the writing of one of the most notorious anti-colonial activists in Britain at the time, George Padmore. By analysing British Colonial Office reports of Soviet propaganda in their colonies, the article suggests new analysis about some of the ways in which the rhetoric of the Cold War impacted on Britain's approach to empire after the Second World War.     

Kitchen Window Feminism: Sarah Macnaughtan,Wartime Care and the Authority of Experience in the South African and First World Wars

Sarah Macnaughtan, a wealthy novelist, used volunteer care work to claim the legitimacy of her wartime experience in the South African and First World Wars and to assert women's rights in the early twentieth-century British empire. Macnaughtan framed her caregiving experiences in both inherently domestic terms – ‘from a kitchen window’ – and as a justification for women's suffrage and participation in public life. Her example loosens a persistent binary between trained nurses and untrained wartime volunteers and highlights the importance of precedents set in the British empire to the feminist politics and caring practices of the First World War.     

‘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.     

Ornamental Constitutionalism in Africa: Kenyatta and the Two Queens

Evidence from the political career of Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya suggests that Africans took a constitutional rather than ‘ornamental’ view of the imperial monarchy. Far from accepting that majesty and aristocracy domesticated alien overrule, they expected the British monarchy to protect them against local colonial excess. Kenyatta's Gikuyu (Kikuyu) people had two grounds for this view. One was a sense of imperial history, in which land alienation in favour of white settlers was a form of oppression unthinkable in the days of Queen Victoria – a more equal past that the Crown ought to restore to them. The other was their projection on to the imperial stage of an indigenous sense of the reciprocal relations of advantage that should exist between wealthy patrons and loyal clients. Kenyatta's political strategy after the Second World War was conditioned by this Gikuyu constitutionalism.     

‘Part of Our Own Story’1: Representations of Indigenous Australians and Papua New Guineans within Australia Remembers 1945–1995 — the Continuing Desire for a Homogeneous National Identity

Throughout 1995 the Australia Remembers 1945–1995 programme sought to commemorate and celebrate Australia's involvement in the Second World War in ways which included all Australians and reflected the continuing potency of the Anzac legend. Indigenous Australians and Papua New Guineans were included in what became, essentially, an exercise in imagining a national past. Their inclusion in the national memory fostered by Australia Remembers 1945–1995 revealed ways in which Indigenous Australians' presence within the nation remains contested. Within Australia Remembers‘ commemorations of Pacific Islanders, Papua New Guineans remained constructed as ‘the other’, in ways which remained in essence colonialist.     

Imperial Airs: Leo Amery,Air Power and Empire, 1873–1945

In January 1904, at a lecture by a famous geographer, only a few weeks after the first flight of the Wright brothers, a young journalist named Leo Amery argued that air power would become a major ingredient of world power. His prescient comment is often quoted, but only to be glossed over. This article elaborates on it. The origins of Amery's views on air power lay in his childhood, his experience covering the South African War and the ‘national efficiency’ movement of Edwardian Britain. His views developed through his service in a variety of government appointments, including Lloyd George's Cabinet in the First World War and Churchill's Cabinet in the Second World War, and he occasionally managed to get his ideas turned into actions. Thus contextualised, Amery's views on air power illuminate both the man and the times through which he lived.     

The Monument to Victory in Bolzano: desacralisation of a fascist relic

The Monument to Victory in Bolzano, raised to remember Italian soldiers who fell in the First World War and to celebrate the victory over the Austro-Hungarian army, was contested from the moment of its installation in 1928. The German-speaking inhabitants of Bolzano were offended by its expression of Italian patriotism and the monument continued to symbolise the antagonism between the Italian- and the German-speaking population in the period following the end of Second World War. The monument’s explicit fascist propaganda attracted strong polemical reactions and some political groups even asked for it to be demolished. A recently-opened permanent exhibition in the crypt of the monument explores the twentieth-century dictatorships of Italy and their impact on Bolzano. Its historicisation offers a new interpretation of the monument – not one based on a schism between the populations of Bolzano, but rather one proposing reconciliation. This historicisation happens through the contextualisation of the monument, an efficient tool for the ‘desacrilisation’ of politically charged buildings; by exposing the detested ideology that they represent, they are stripped of their original ‘sacred’ character. This process also shows that it is possible for controversial, politically significant structures to become legitimate parts of a country’s modern heritage.     

Fani Popova–Mutafova

The article explores the life and professional activities of Fanny Popova–Mutafova – the most prominent of the few writers of historical fiction in Bulgaria and one of the most prolific and published Bulgarian women authors of the interwar period. Her life spanned two epochs – the ‘bourgeois’ epoch prior to World War II, and that of the communist regime. While she was celebrated as one of the best and most productive writers and intellectuals in Bulgaria before 1944, the communist regime pronounced her ‘a people’s enemy’, held her responsible for ‘Great–Bulgarian chauvinism and fascism’, banned and destroyed her books and ruined her life. The story of her life is embedded in several decades of Bulgarian intellectual life and, besides giving an idea of a woman writer’s existence there at that time, reveals wider sociopolitical and ideological contexts in which various discourses affecting Bulgarian women were articulated.     

Europe at the crossroads of three worlds: alternative histories and connections of European solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–80s

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been growing interdisciplinary interest in the history of European solidarity movements that mobilized on behalf of the ‘Third World’ in the wake of the post-war decolonization process. Focusing on European campaigns against the Vietnam War and Pinochet’s Chile, this article aims at positioning these international solidarity movements in the broader history of North–South and East–West exchanges and connections in Europe during the Cold War. It explores some key ideas, actors and alternative networks that have remained little studied in mainstream accounts and public memories, but which are key to understanding the development of transnational activism in Europe and its relevance to broader fields of research, such as the history of Communism, decolonization, human rights, the Cold War and European identity. It delves into the impact of East–West networks and the Communist ‘First World’ in the discovery of the Third World in Western Europe, analyses the role of Third World diplomacy in this process, and argues how East–West and North–South networks invested international solidarity campaigns on ‘global’ issues with ideas about Europe’s past and present. Together, these networks turned resistance against the Vietnam War, human-rights violations in Pinochet’s Chile, and other causes in the Third World into themes for détente and pan-European cooperation across the borders of the Iron Curtain, and made them a symbol to build a common identity between the decolonized world and Europe. What emerges from this analysis is both a critique of West-centred narratives, which are focused on anti-totalitarianism, as well as an invitation to take North–South and East–West contacts, as well as the role of European identities, more seriously in the international history of human rights and international solidarity.     

A FAREWELL TO ‘RURAL BLISS’

The article discusses health policies towards school children in Norway from 1900 until the Second World War. It is concerned with dominant definitions of health threats against children and the variables used in defining the groups conceived as most vulnerable to poor health. A distinct change took place in the period. Whereas in the early 1900s poor and working‐class children in urban surroundings were considered to be under severe threats, in the 1920s a less specific category of ‘children’ were conceived as threatened. Eventually rural children were singled out as the important target group for health measures. The shifts had medical as well as political motivations. Another prominent feature in the period was that poverty took on a new meaning in the dominant medical discourse on children: from having been conceived as a material reality impinging upon health, it came to be considered mainly a cultural problem. Especially medical officers within the social democratic camp contested this argument although they did not rule out education and cultural transformation as a means to promote children's health. Despite the conceptual shift, however, social benefits and equal access to health services – measures that lay at the heart of the post‐war welfare state – remained in the 1930s an essential part of promoting children's health.     

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’.     

Cougar figures,gender, and the performances of predation

This article considers how nonhuman animals are enrolled in the construction of gendered identities. Specifically, I interrogate two gendered figures with which I was repeatedly confronted over the course of researching cougar–human relationships on Vancouver Island, home to what is estimated to be North America's densest population of cougars. The first figure, Cougar Annie, was a woman ‘settler’ on western Vancouver Island, reputed to have killed over 100 cougars in her lifetime and now celebrated as a strong, independent female. The second figure is a contemporary trope, an older woman who expresses interest in younger men, known in slang speech as a ‘cougar’. Both figures are intimately bound to a third figure, the animal cougar, Puma concolor, whose material–semiotic relationship to humans both performs and is performed by ‘cougars’ and Cougar Annie. Haraway's conception of figures as embodied and performative mappings of power is central to this article's discussion, which lies at the intersection of animal studies, more-than-human geographies, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Methodologically, I draw on interviews and archival research to trace the historical and contemporary specificities of these two figures – Cougar Annie and ‘cougars’ – revealing how they are informed by, and simultaneously produce, uphold, and perform, gendered understandings of the relationship between humans and cougars, predator and prey, humans and animals, and culture and nature.     

Barracks Islam and Command Christianity: Religion in Britain’s West African Colonial Army (c.1900–1960)

Religion was an important and dynamic aspect of Britain’s West African colonial army. The religious composition of the force changed from primarily Muslim in the late nineteenth century to primarily traditionalist and Muslim during the early twentieth century to overwhelmingly Christian during and immediately after the Second World War. These changes reflected not only military requirements but also broader social trends. While Muslim religious life in the military reflected a ‘barracks Islam’ accommodated by British officers, a top-down form of command Christianity emerged from the 1940s. Appointed during the Second World War, military chaplains and imams encouraged recruiting and strengthened morale but the presence of black religious officials challenged the existing racial hierarchy.     

The image of the city in modern literature

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.

All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?

This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.

Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

HOUSING: FROM NIGHT WATCHMAN STATE TO WELFARE STATE

This paper illustrates and evaluates some of the features of the Danish and European research of the history of housing policy and relates these to the main results and perspectives in the author's doctoral thesis ‘Housing: From Night Watchman State to Welfare State – Construction and Housing Policy in three Danish Towns, 1850–1930’, 2006. The paper argues that the roots of the welfare state's housing policy are to be found in the far more prominent part which the public sector got to play in the Danish society as a result of the crises following World War I and the conjunctural repercussions throughout the 1920s.     

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.     

A False Start? British Perspectives on Italy’s Participation in the Early Phases of the European Economic Integration Process: The Case of the OEEC (1948–1952)

Abstract

This article examines how Anglo-Italian relationships unfolded in the aftermath of the Second World War within the framework of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). By analysing Italy’s participation in the early stages of the European integration process through the lens of British diplomacy, this contribution aims to shed new light on the international dimension of Rome’s post-1945 political and economic strategies. First, the article considers the main concerns that characterized Italy’s involvement in the OEEC activities between the late 1940s and the early 1950s: the promotion of the circulation of the intra- and extra-European manpower and the liberalization of trade and payments. Second, rather than making a ‘classic’ comparison between the divergent policies – particularly the internal and international economic programmes – that Britain and Italy pursued within the OEEC, this article highlights the extent to which an ‘asymmetry of power’ impacted Italy’s ability to realize its strategies. To conclude, the essay assesses how bilateral and multilateral relationships in the OEEC arena mutually contributed to the shaping of Italy and Britain’s patterns of post-WWII economic reconstruction.