Studies in Modern European History – serie

Named an Outstanding Academic Book for 1997 by CHOICE.Out of the Shadows demonstrates the importance of the role of women in the French Revolution. It traces the growth of female political awareness and depicts the determination of women of the working class to participate in the life of the new nation despite their government's obstinate denial of the rights of citizenship. The author examines in detail the grassroots involvement of women in the affairs of the country right up until the avalanche of repressive legislation passed in the spring of 1795.

Utilizing hitherto unexplored material that has become available only after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, this book examines the Monist philosophy of the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, and its role in stimulating the birth of Fascist ideology in Italy and France. Focusing on the relevance of evolutionary science, Fascist thought is revealed as intimately related to Haeckel's scientific Monism - an approach that differs from most interpretations that tend to voice skepticism about the existence of a specific intellectual origin for Fascist ideology.

Conflict and Diplomacy from the Great War to the Cold War begins with the weakening of the old European order in World War I – the challenge of communism and fascism to the established international system. The author examines the origins of World War II in Asia and Europe and the advent of global war following the German attack on the Soviet Union, as well as Japanese aggression in the Pacific. The middle chapters cover the period of Axis triumph to the turning points of El Alamein and Stalingrad. The prospect of Allied victory helped to bring the disintegration of the grand alliance and a return to the Soviet-Western rivalry, which existed prior to World War II. The final part of the book deals with the defeat of Japan and the controversy surrounding the atomic bomb.

Severe food shortages and unremitting hunger served as the background to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed. Hungry Moscow examines the impact of these food shortages on Moscow residents, focusing on the survival strategies they devised to overcome or minimize hunger. Also examined is the interplay between these short-term individual survival strategies and the formulation and development of long-term government policies by the Bolshevik government. Through the prisms of hunger and urban life, this book contributes to our understanding of important issues in early Soviet history, such as the relationship between central and local institutions, rationing, the growth of black markets, Bolshevik social policies, and the reordering of urban life during revolutionary times.

Ten authors from five countries present a variety of fresh analyses of the strategies Germans have adopted in coping with the Nazi past. Through historical, sociological, educational, and cultural approaches the unresolved tensions existing in German society – between the will to be accepted as an integral part of western civilization and to put the Nazi chapter in general and the Holocaust in particular behind, on the one hand, and an awareness of responsibility combined with recurring, sometimes sudden, manifestations of long-term results and implications of the past, on the other – are analyzed. Through its multifaceted approach, this book contributes to a better understanding of present-day German society and of Germany’s delicate relationships with both the United States and Israel.

Typically the gains in living standards and political rights of Europeans are presented as flowing from the good graces of industrial capitalism. In reality, as this book proves, it was the massive, militant struggle of millions of average persons who forced concessions such as the welfare state and free elections to Parliament. Without understanding the revolutionary vision and the pressure it placed on European rulers, it is difficult to understand contemporary society.

Following World War II, the American Military Tribunal indicted twenty-three Nazi doctors and administrators for performing agonizing and often fatal experiments on helpless concentration camp inmates. Using primarily court records, this book attempts to answer the following salient questions: What sort of medical experiments did the Nazi doctors perform? Who were their victims, and what was their fate? What, if any, were the medical results? What legal charges were brought against the doctors, and what was their defense? Who were the witnesses? Did the defendants try to reconcile their brutal acts with the Hippocratic Code never to do harm, or were they devoid of any medical ethics? Did they constitute dishonorable exceptions to a principled German medical profession, or were they symptomatic of a more widespread disregard for traditional medical ethics? In trying to answer these questions, Horst H. Freyhofer gives the reader the opportunity to follow the exchanges between prosecutors and defendants as well as the final reasoning of the court.

Although Belgium has only been an independent state since the 1830s, it has a long and complex past. This history is essential for understanding the complexities of issues that led to a devolution of the unitary Belgian state into a federation of linguistically based regions. In addition to the elements that contributed to Belgium’s particular political evolution, the history which is traced in this book is a composite of many themes of broad historical interest and importance. Belgium: A History covers the gamut of Belgian history through dramas of religious and cultural conflict, intense localism, state building, uneven development, divergent class interests, war and domination, and finally, integration into a larger European community.

How does a state effectively mobilize its citizens for armed conflict? Why do citizens allow themselves to be placed in harm’s way? The military relationship between the state and its citizens, in terms of rights and obligations, remains as important today as it did when Europe first moved from under the shadow of the Ancien Régime. Reform in Revolutionary Times explores the evolution of the civil-military relationship during one of the more unique periods of modern European history. Born through revolution during the First World War, the Soviet state was plunged immediately into a civil war which included foreign intervention by American, British, French, Japanese, and Czech soldiers. The fires had not yet been extinguished when conflict with Poland further threatened its existence. Pragmatism vied with ideology, as the Soviets mobilized the population to unheard of levels through fundamental reforms, simply to survive these early years of revolution and war.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a judicial case involving the custody of two Jewish orphans mushroomed into a major crisis of Jewish-Christian relations in France. A New York Times journalist called this affair «the worst religious storm of post-war France». The Finaly Affair (1945-1953), which is best understood in the context of post-Vichy anti-Semitism, came about when Catholic fundamentalist beliefs came into conflict with France’s republican principles. This affair polarized the French nation and was transformed into a national crisis by the explosive power of the French press. It had lasting consequences for interfaith relations in France and for the French Jewish community. In the Shadow of Vichy captures this astonishing story of how the Church’s kidnapping of two Jewish children just after World War II helped to hasten the revolutionary changes of Vatican II.

French Urban Planning 1940-1968 explores the creation and progressive dismantling of France’s centralized, authoritarian system of urban and architectural planning. Established in the wake of World War II to facilitate the reconstruction and expansion of cities, this planning program led to the evolution of large suburban housing estates plagued by inter/intra family conflict, juvenile delinquency, and other social difficulties, which sociologists connected to poor planning and design. Critics began calling for the democratization of planning to remedy design problems, and the government of Charles de Gaulle started reforming planning procedures in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This book moves beyond technical and political issues to explore forces of religion, gender, and class that affected planning practices. Key critics and state officials emerged from the Catholic Left. Some were women from working-class backgrounds, and they manipulated gender stereotypes to insert working- and middle-class women into the design process. Sometimes in opposition, but often together, these reformers initiated the most significant change of architectural and urban planning until the introduction of François Mitterrand’s decentralization reforms in the 1980s. French Urban Planning 1940-1968 will appeal to scholars and students interested in architectural, urban, and social trends in twentieth-century France.

When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Moscow officials expected the British Navy to appear on the shore of Leningrad, fulfilling the Bolshevik nightmare of a concerted Capitalist plot. Instead, Prime Minister Winston Churchill reached out to promise support to the Kremlin and collaborate with Britain’s former archenemy. Fighting the Nazi menace together became the new priority, leading to unprecedented levels of cooperation between the two governments. In order to defeat the Nazis, Britain and the USSR shared intelligence and revealed operative secrets to each other, including those of the secretive security services. They helped with the dispatch of agents and even ran agents together, attempting to foil German counter-intelligence strategies. For much of the Cold War, crucial facts of this collaboration remained top secret. Based on recently declassified files, Dealing with the Devil explores this little known chapter of the Second World War. This study underscores the willingness of the USSR and Britain to join forces and disclose many of their closely guarded secrets. The book uses personnel files and other historical sources to reveal for the first time the activities of officers and agents on this «invisible front», recounting the actions of many brave men and women who risked their lives to defeat the Nazis.

This book is a history of the initiative, its projects and actors, notably the architect and planner Ernst May, and its achievements, set within the turbulent context of the Weimar decade. It chronicles its many accomplishments: the construction of housing settlements, innovations in construction and materials, the parks and garden colonies program, innovations in school, medical facility and church design, reforms in woman’s sphere, and a crafting of New Life culture. It examines the New Frankfurt am Main in light of the social and political debates that shaped it and the works it produced, and describes the relationship of work and theory to contemporary reform movements. Finally, the narrative underscores the gulf between the idyll of modernity and the political and social realities of life in a Germany on the brink of collapse.

This volume asserts that there was tacit cooperation in the Nazi extermination of the Jewish population of Europe by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Second World War. Although the Allies publicly recognized the Nazi massacre of the Jews in the London Declaration of December 17, 1942, the policies they pursued allowed the genocide to continue. They did so, the author claims, in three ways: (1) refusal to publicly and personally speak about and against the Nazi extermination of the Jews; (2) refusal to commit even one soldier, one plane, or one warship to any forcible opposition to the «Final Solution» throughout the Second World War; and (3) obstruction of Jewish escape from Hitler’s Europe. This book explores the motivation for the policies Churchill and Roosevelt pursued.

Army of the Sky addresses the development of military aviation from 1904 to 1914 in order to explore the relationship of modernization and Russian Imperial officer culture. Utilizing archival material, army reports, the military and popular press, published tracts, and comparative literature, this book explores the response to aviation within the tsarist military in the realm of hopes and fears, institutional adaptations, projects drafted to tap the power of the airplane, the politics of command, policies of recruitment and training to build a cadre of aviators, and the rituals that paid homage to this revolutionary new weapon. In contrast to a historiography which generally portrays aviation as incompatible with an extremely conservative, even backward, military culture, this study paints a far more complex and dynamic picture. Numerous tsarist officers recognized that the airplane presented both a serious challenge and a real opportunity: it exposed the limitations of Russia’s economic, technological, and infrastructural development while simultaneously offering a way to overcome them and a means to assert Russia’s development, pride, and place as a great European power despite heightening fears of failure. Army of the Sky illustrates further how disparate responses to this situation influenced tsarist officer culture. Although the concept of «modernization» remained framed around familiar binaries, aviation recast and infused with new meaning juxtapositions of Russia and the West, imitation and contamination, and the imperatives of progress and the legacies of backwardness. Aviation helped to remold prevailing paradigms of hierarchy, authority, deference, and duty. This volume concludes that the tsarist officer community ultimately offered unique opportunities to cultivate a culture of military aviation and thereby to master the challenge of modernization in a uniquely Russian, an Imperial Russian, manner. This book will be of great interest to historians of both the military and late Imperial Russia as well as aviation enthusiasts.

Through the last century, Catholic fraternity alumni have served as German chancellors, presidents, federal ministers, state executives, and leading voices in Germany’s parliament. They have played leading roles in the Catholic press, in Catholic youth groups, in Catholic civic associations, and in the German Catholic hierarchy. After World War II, Catholic fraternity alumni played founding roles in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), the two parties that led West Germany’s transition from its catastrophic defeat («zero hour») to the economic miracle (1949–1969). This book considers the ideas that many of these Catholic leaders encountered as college students or as active alumni in their fraternities in the fifteen years before Adolf Hitler came to power.

Gustave Hervé (1871–1944) seemed to have traditional Breton roots and a typical republican education. As a young socialist journalist and professor, he gained notoriety following a 1901 article which appeared to plant the tricolor in a dung pile. When French socialists unified in 1905, the Hervéistes were an influential minority. The antimilitarist movement called Hervéism gradually emerged as a quixotic crusade to unite revolutionaries against war and for socialism. Hervé soon founded a weekly newspaper, La Guerre Sociale. Over the next six years, press campaigns, trials, prison, demonstrations, strikes, and conspiratorial organizations maintained Hervé’s profile and sold newspapers. Ironically, Hervé advertised conspiracies, which suggests revolutionary theater more than practical politics. Among Hervé’s rivals, such theatrics often generated resentment. While Hervé’s movement succeeded as a media experience, his leftist competitors became jealous and skeptical. As revolutionary theater Hervéism might have been entertaining, but the actors and some of the audience often confused revolutionary art with political reality. By 1911 the ingenuous Hervé felt betrayed. His failure to unite revolutionaries began an evolution toward the nation and its traditional Catholic faith. Besides the international situation, one crucial determinant in Hervé’s evolution toward French national socialism sympathetic to fascism involved ongoing rivalries within the French Left. Hervé’s marginal interwar national socialist parties sought to employ patriotism and religion to solve French problems. By 1935 he attempted to draft Pétain to lead an authoritarian republic. Gradually losing hope in Pétain after the fall of France, the aging Hervé put his faith in Christian socialism.

Truber, Ungnad & Vergerio: Territorial Churches in the Habsburg/Ottoman Borderlands provides a critical study of Lutheran reformers in Krain, formerly a province along what is now the Croatian/Slovenian border, and acts as a case study for the rest of the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands. Focus is given to the Austrian Habsburgs, benefactors to the reformers, who sought to adopt Johannes Brenz’ Lutheran «territorial church» model that would provide the Habsburgs the means to expand their hegemony over the region for decades.During this time, there were three individuals who were integral in establishing this movement: reformer and Bible translator Primus Truber, Lutheran diplomat Peter Paul Vergerio, and Austrian nobleman Hans Ungnad, the latter of whom played a central role in transmitting Slavic translation of Biblical and Evangelical texts into Krain through his personal network, which continued to help grow the Habsburg sphere of influence and contributed to their larger goal – keeping the Ottomans out.All three men established networks of support including notable moderate Catholics and Swiss Reformed, relying on their networks integrally to spread their faith and financially support them. The use of the Lutheran «territorial church» model signifies an attempt to establish a Lutheran confession and church regulation in Slovenian and Croatian lands by making them loyal to the regional reformer responsible for instilling Godly virtue and the true faith.

Rosa Luxemburg was a Jew, a Pole, and a woman who considered herself to be a prophet of socialism - and only a citizen of the proletariat. She dedicated her life to fulfilling the noble dream of socialism in the belief that only socialism could bring true freedom and the end of oppression. Rosa Luxemburg and the Noble Dream covers her life as a theorist, writer, and revolutionary during the years prior to World War I. It concludes with the collapse of Germany during the war, Luxemburg's role in founding the German Communist party, and her execution following the Spartacist rebellion in January of 1919.

Spain and Portugal, which share the Iberian Peninsula, also share many experiences, including replacing long-standing dictatorships with democracies during 1974-1975. This book examines their parallel struggles during the last quarter of the twentieth century to create a new political, social, and cultural order. The first major study of how each country has dealt with its distinctive problems, Spain and Portugal Today focuses on socio-political change and new forces in literature and the arts. Placing the Iberian states in their European and global environment, this book is an essential source for all those who wish to understand the contemporary civilization of this vital and dynamic region.

This comprehensive legal history of the British Isles describes the growth and interaction of legal systems in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the seventeenth century to the present. Islands of Law undertakes to amend two gaps in historical writing by using legal history to illuminate the general narrative of events and by offering a new contribution to the recent direction of multinational historical study of the British Isles. The central thesis of the book contends that legal interaction was an important part of many major events, but where there were battles for survival in the seventeenth century, the processes of interaction have become more benign, though no less potent, in the twentieth century.

From the «Terror of the World» to the «Sick Man of Europe» sheds new light on the hotly debated issue of Orientalism by looking at the European images of the Ottoman Empire and society over three centuries. Through a careful examination of the European intellectual discourse, this book claims that there was no coherent and constant Europewide vision of the Turks until the eighteenth century and clearly demonstrates that the Age of Reason has not rendered reasonable images of the Turks. Indeed, once inspiring awe, the European opinion of Ottomans was held in contempt during this period.

Resistance, Imprisonment, and Forced Labor recalls the author’s struggle for survival as a prisoner and forced laborer following the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941. He describes a dizzying and fateful journey during which he worked with both pro-Western and Partisan forces and was variously imprisoned by Italian Fascists at Rab and the Nazis at Auschwitz and elsewhere. A theme that emerges is that civilians were as much participants and victims of the war as those on the battlefield. The author also describes the forced repatriation of Yugoslavs to Tito’s forces by the British after the war and the tragic consequences.

Although Belgium has only been an independent state since the 1830s, it has a long and complex past. This history is essential for understanding the complexities of issues that led to a devolution of the unitary Belgian state into a federation of linguistically based regions. In addition to the elements that contributed to Belgium’s particular political evolution, the history which is traced in this book is a composite of many themes of broad historical interest and importance. Belgium: A History covers the gamut of Belgian history through dramas of religious and cultural conflict, intense localism, state building, uneven development, divergent class interests, war and domination, and finally, integration into a larger European community.