Europe Before and After Munich: Random Notes on Recent Publications

1939 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-228
Author(s):  
Sigmund Neumann

Munich marks the end of an epoch, a “turning point in history,” as Arnold J. Toynbee recently states in a most suggestive article. In fact, these decisive events were foreshadowed long before September 1938, by actions almost necessarily leading the road to Munich. If one can speak of the end of a period, one might better say: Hitler's march into the Rhineland, March 7, 1936, was the real water-shed between two political continents. Indeed what had been said about the World War, that it merely precipitated a development of political and social forces which were moulding the twentieth century, could be repeated of this greatest diplomatic upset of our time too. It had its roots in the history of post-War Europe, and it may be that even the more we win distance from this “water-shed of Munich” the clearer it will become that the currents of history are running in the same old beds and in the same directions as before September, 1938.

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 625
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Bandović

The museum course in the Museum of Prince Paul in Belgrade lasted from 1942 to 1944, initiated by Miodrag Grbić, one of the curators of the Museum. The whole generation of the post-war archaeologists, art historians, and architects stemmed from the lectures of Miodrag Grbić, Đorđe Mano Zisi, Milan Kašanin and Ivan Zdravković. The course became the turning point in the history of archaeology, a sort of parallel university in the occupied city. However, it should not be valorised isolated from other events in Belgrade during the World War II. The German authorities established new institutions in charge of heritage protection in the occupied Serbia – Kunst und Denkmalschutz, the department chaired by Baron Johann von Reiswitz. Himmler’s organization Ahnenerbe was also active in the region of Belgrade and Serbia. As part of its activities, Wilhelm Unverzagt, the director of the Berlin museum conducted the excavations at Kalemegdan. These excavations symbolically legitimized the German presence in Belgrade. On the other hand, the project became one of the topoi of the ideology of collaborationism. The students of the museum course acquired their practical training during these excavations.


Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.


1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke

‘Labour Comes of Age’, Kingsley Martin observed a few days after the party's electoral landslide of 1945. This might have been more precise if a chorus had added, sotto voce, ‘…And Comes Into an Inheritance’, for since the publication of Paul Addison's The road to 1945 (1975), the history of the Labour party during and after the war has been dominated by the notion of a political consensus forged during the Churchill coalition and left as a legacy to the Attlee government. According to Addison, it was the consensus of Keynes and Beveridge that shaped post-war politics rather than any distinctive contribution from Labour.


Author(s):  
Oskar Stanisław Czarnik

The subject of this article is an overview of Polish publishing in the exile during the World War II and first post-war years. The literary activity was mostly linked to the cultural tradition of the Second Polish Republic. The author describes this phenomenon quantitatively and presents the number of books published in the respective years. He also tries to explain which external factors, not only political and military, but also financial and organizational, affected publications of Polish books around the world. The subject of the debate is also geography of the Polish publishing. It is connected with a long term migration of different groups of people living in exile. The author not only points out the areas where Polish editorial activity was just temporary, but also the areas where it was long-lasting. The book output was a great assistance to Polish people living in diasporas, as well as to readers living in Poland. The following text is an excerpt of the book which is currently being prepared by the author. The book is devoted to the history of Polish publishing in exile.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 940-970
Author(s):  
Sonja Asal

While resistance to Enlightenment thought occurring in the eighteenth century is often framed by the concept of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, the term itself was not introduced before the twentieth century. The article first reconstructs the anti-Enlightenment polemic before and after the French Revolution to highlight that while the notion of Counter- Enlightenment is appropriate for the identification of hitherto unexplored strands of thought, in view of a broader and more differentiated approach to the intellectual history of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it does not allow for a substantial definition. Subsequently, the article examines the history of the concept in French, English and German linguistic contexts, the German sociology of the interwar period and discussions about the legacy of the Enlightenment after World War II, to retrace how the different iterations have to be understood as a key for the self-reflection of modern societies throughout the twentieth century.


2019 ◽  
pp. 62-66
Author(s):  
Serhiy Denysiuk

The history of Ukraine has got many examples of how different personalities were able to unite and direct their efforts in meaningful way for higher purpose. One of such interesting pages is an activity of Ukrainian Art movement (UAM) –unification of Ukrainian writers in emigration, who after the end of World War II turned up in camps for displaced persons in Germany and Austria. The leadership of union helped to create such climate in the organization that would maximize imaginative work and minimize confrontational points among its members. The peculiar quality check of the organization and its ability to withstand the devastating tendencies was a debate in UAM about relevant problems of searching for ways of development Ukrainian culture in emigration conditions. Its starting point was Y. Shevelov`s report «The styles of contemporary Ukrainian literature in emigration» (1945), which he pronounced at the First congress of organization. The reviewer proclaimed the mission of new organization - to create a nationwide and a sub-region writing, which can reach worldwide recognition. The main direction of its development Y. Shevelov determined the creation of deeply peculiar Ukrainian literary style. The idea of national-organic style has caused mixed reactions and criticism in the Ukrainian emigration environment. The national-organic style does not anticipate a forced imposition on his writers. This style does not mean an isolation of narrow national limits and departure from European influences and traditions. It includes only blind copying borrowed samples. Supplemented the concept of Y. Shevelov with his ideas such persons as I. Bagryany, Y. Kosach, I.Kosteckii and other representatives of UAM`s, who defended national origin in literature. The most irreconcilable opponent of Y. Shevelov and his theory of national-organic style became a literary scholar, critic, translator V. Derzhavin. There were several reasons for the conflict between these creative personalities among which, in particular, differences between generations, to which they belong. In the modern scientific literature one can come across for approval that a deepening conflict between Y. Shevelov and V. Derzhavin led to the split and termination of the organization activity. Such an estimate is untrue, because the real reason for the termination of the organization was hold at the 1948 a monetary reform in Germany and mass departure of Ukrainian emigrants from displaced persons camps to the other countries of the world. Well, conflicts, which took place in the history of Ukrainian Art Movement, did not lead to the division of the organization into hostile camps, as its members were united by the common purpose of creating new Ukrainian literature, that would take a worthy place in the world culture.


Author(s):  
Kaushik Roy
Keyword(s):  
The Real ◽  

Before the onset of global war in 1941, the war that engulfed the world between 1914 and 1918 was known as the World War or Great War. For example, The Real War, 1914–1918 was published by B.H. Liddell Hart in 1930 and expanded as A History of the World War 1914–1918...


Author(s):  
John J. W. Rogers ◽  
M. Santosh

Alfred Wegener never set out to be a geologist. With an education in meteorology and astronomy, his career seemed clear when he was appointed Lecturer in those subjects at the University of Marburg, Germany. It wasn’t until 1912, when Wegener was 32, that he published a paper titled “Die Entstehung der Kontinente” (The origin of the continents) in a recently founded journal called Geologische Rundschau. This meteorologist had just fired the opening shot in a revolution that would change the way that geologists thought about the earth. In a series of publications and talks both before and after World War I, Wegener pressed the idea that continents moved around the earth independently of each other and that the present continents resulted from the splitting of a large landmass (we now call it a “supercontinent”) that previously contained all of the world’s continents. After splitting, they moved to their current positions, closing oceans in front of them and opening new oceans behind them. Wegener and his supporters referred to this process as “continental drift.” The proposal that continents moved around the earth led to a series of investigations and ideas that occupied much of the 20th century. They are now grouped as a set of concepts known as “plate tectonics.” We begin this chapter with an investigation of the history of this development, starting with ideas that preceded Wegener’s proposal. This is followed by a section that describes the reactions of different geologists to the idea of continental drift, including some comments that demonstrate the rancorous nature of the debate. The next section discusses developments between Wegener’s proposal and 1960, when Harry Hess suggested that the history of modern ocean basins is consistent with the concept of drifting continents. We finish the chapter with a brief description of seafloor spreading and leave a survey of plate tectonics to chapter 2. Although Wegener is credited with first proposing continental drift, some tenuous suggestions had already been made. We summarize some of this early history from LeGrand (1988).


Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge

This book is about how a generation of writers and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century responded to the emergence of a new category of person in the world: the modern refugee whose history, as has recently become clear once more, is also the history of the changing meanings of political and national citizenship in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The introduction offers a critical review of how literary and legal history eventually ended up telling the same story about exile and statelessness in the post-war period: the exile, usually European, emerges as an individual of conscience and agency, a victim of persecution who, nonetheless, is of his time; and the exile’s others, the refugees, sometimes but usually not European, caught in the dehumanizing movements of mass displacement and whose existence is recognized neither by the humanism of human rights nor by literary history.


Author(s):  
Giovanni Iuzzolino ◽  
Guido Pellegrini ◽  
Gianfranco Viesti

In 150 years, the trends in regional disparities in economic development within Italy have differed depending on whether they are gauged by longitude or by latitude. The disparities between western and eastern regions first widened and then closed; the North-South gap, by contrast, remains the main open problem in the national history of Italy. This chapter focuses on the underlying causes of the turning points in regional disparities since national unification in 1861. The first came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with the industrialization of the so-called "industrial triangle". This was followed by the "failed new turn" during the interwar years: not only were the beginnings of convergence blocked, but the North-South gap, until then still natural, inevitably, was transformed into a fracture of exceptional dimensions. The second turning point, in the twenty years after the World War, produced the first substantial, lasting convergence between southern and northern Italy, powered by rising productivity and structural change in the South. The last turning point was in the mid-1970s, when convergence was abruptly halted and a protracted period of immobility in the disparity began.


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