‘Dead dads’: memory narratives of war-related fatherlessness in Germany

After the Second World War, there were estimated to be around 20 million half-orphans in Europe. In Germany alone, 5.3 million soldiers killed in action left behind approximately 1.2 million widows, nearly 2.5 million half-orphans and about 100,000 complete orphans. This article examines how men and women from various social strata in western and eastern Germany remember their fathers who died in the war and in what way he has been stored in the family's collective memory. The analysis focuses on 30 life-history interviews with men and women from eastern and western Germany with various social and religious backgrounds, all of whom were born between 1935 and 1945 and had little or no memory of their fathers. The following questions are relevant: what memories did children have of their fathers, and what images of them were related by mothers and relatives? What individual, political, social and memory-cultural factors characterise a child's memory of her or his father? The article also analyses trans-generational transmissions and conflicts of how the father's past is remembered.     

‘And now imagine her or him as a slave,a pitiful slave with no rights’: child forced labourers in the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine

This article examines the various components of the image of Soviet children, who were deported to Nazi Germany during the Second World War to perform forced labour, within the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine. In her analysis, the author emphasises that throughout the Soviet period the topic of forced labour had mostly instrumental significance and was used for a variety of propaganda tasks: during the war, to mobilise the population to struggle against the enemy; in its aftermath, to underscore and contrast the essence and policies of the post-war Western ‘democracies’ and the USSR; and, from the late 1960s, to accuse capitalist countries, above all the Federal Republic of Germany, of preparing for undertakings such as a new war or an arms race. With the collapse of the USSR, the Ostarbeiters' ‘territory of memory’ enlarged dramatically. In the new climate of democratic transformation, there were socio-legal initiatives which aimed to regulate the status of forced labourers, and the first steps were taken towards institutionalising Ostarbeiter associations. This, in turn, facilitated the process of analysing the construction and presentation of the image of the child Ostarbeiter on the level of state-legal regulation, institutional support, public interest and scholarly research that is taking place in contemporary Ukraine.     

Children of Dutch Nazi collaborators

This article looks into what happened to the children of Dutch Nazi collaborators after the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945. The author first outlines the historical context in which these children lived and the manner in which they recounted and recorded their memories much later. In combination with new archival research on social-welfare policy and ‘re-education’ of former National Socialist youth, this puts the discourse that dominated the Dutch debate, that is, the discourse of the ‘innocent child’ harshly punished by society, in a different light. The framework of the innocent child being punished by a cruel society obscured our view of experiences that did not fit this mould. Furthermore, it made the values and norms that were current during the reconstruction period disappear from the picture: the bad memories of children of collaborators partly originate in policy that was considered normal in those days. This, however, should not obscure the impact of the vulnerable social position which these children experienced after the war.     

Icebreakers in Anglo-Russian Relations (1914–21)

Foreign supply to Russia in the First World War is familiar terrain, but although the present paper engages to some degree with the military, diplomatic, and especially economic aspects of the subject, its primary affiliations lie elsewhere. Its principal purpose is to discuss the icebreakers on which it concentrates not only just before but also just after Russia's withdrawal from the First World War, with a view to contrasting the first phase of the ships' history with the second and so highlighting the perennially ambivalent character of the Anglo-Russian relationship. On the way, it touches on questions of geography, English local history, environmental history, the history of technology, and, even, towards the end, Russian literary history.     

A Family Business: The Bartholomews of Edinburgh in the First World War

This article examines the lived experience of the Bartholomew family of Edinburgh during the course of the First World War. Families, as much as nations, empires and other communities, were important participants in the conflict that collapsed the boundaries between the various battlefronts and homefront like none before. The Bartholomews’ letters to one another were the chief means by which the shared experience of total war was mediated and constructed, as well as a vital source for ascertaining the role played by the family in their nation’s war effort. In them, we can see the way unpalatable truths were concealed beneath literary tropes, drawn from the language of glory and sacrifice, but also the way such sentiments were real and deeply felt to a generation not yet experienced in the cynicism and sarcasm that the war occasioned in the English language as much as the mind. These letters also represent a form of organically created propaganda that sustained the Bartholomews’ morale and commitment to the war effort, and also their collective identity as a family unit, despite the scattering of parents and siblings from Edinburgh, to Flanders, and northern Italy.     

How not to build a world wireless network: German–British rivalry and visions of global communications in the early twentieth century

Abstract

Edward Snowden’s revelations laid bare an unprecedented scale of state influence on communications technology. But government elites have frequently shaped technological development through their beliefs about potentially nefarious uses of communications. This article argues that beliefs about how other states or groups might use a technology can shape innovation. In particular, German visions about the British use of cables spurred German investment in developing wireless telegraphy. Germans imagined that the British were using cable technology to damage Germany’s reputation, spy on Germany and ‘poison’ neutral countries against the Central Powers. The German government and military at first created a colonial wireless network to bypass British cables. In World War I, however, they sought to establish a world wireless network. In the end, innovation was significantly shaped by how Germans imagined their enemies’ uses of communications technology.     

Contemporary Irish theatre,the new Playboy controversy,and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.     

江苏邳州梁王城遗址西周墓地出土人骨研究

江苏邳州梁王城遗址西周墓地出土了67例西周人骨,对其性别、年龄、人口寿命、体质类型、身高情况的分析特别是对颅骨形态特征的研究表明,梁王城西周组居民属于蒙古人种,具有中颅型结合高颅、狭颅的特点,同时具有狭额、高眶、阔鼻、正颌的面部特征,并且具有长狭的下颌。梁王城西周组居民的颅型与现代亚洲蒙古人种的东亚类型最为接近;面部特征与东亚类型、北亚类型比较接近;体质形态与河南、陕西、甘肃、青海出土的同时代人骨存在一定差异,但这种差异小于梁王城西周组与梁王城大汶口组、殷墟中小墓III组、滕州前掌大B组之间的差异。     

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.     

“With almost clean or at most slightly dirty hands”. On the self-denazification of German geography after 1945 and its rebranding as a science of peace

Since the 1980s there is an overall agreement that German academic and applied geography between 1933 and 1945 were closely linked to the ideology and practice of National Socialism. There is very little historical work, however, on how geography was reestablished in Germany after the end of National Socialism. This paper deals with West German geography after 1945 and the attempts to reestablish geography as a legitimate discipline within academia. Taking the influential paper by German geographer Carl Troll as a starting point, this paper deals, on the one hand, with the way geographers positioned geography in relation to National Socialism, and how they told the history of their recent past. It then asks what the defeat of Germany and the experiences of the war in general meant for how geographers in Germany thought about the relation between the discipline and politics. It is argued that a number of cleansing and legitimating strategies that freed geography from direct involvement with National Socialism, went hand in hand with a very quick adaption to the new world order and a rebranding of geography as a science of peace.