Browse

This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is the last surviving member of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent. His life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora.

This is a comprehensive study of the peace negotiations that ended the War of American Independence. It challenges traditional views and uses a wide range of sources to provide a detailed analysis of the treaties signed between Britain and France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States. The book shows that American independence, rather than being the important issue of the negotiations, was consistently subordinated to European balance of power considerations. It demonstrates the importance of personality and popular prejudice in determining foreign policy, and insights are offered into the personalities and objectives of the leading political figures of the time, including George III, Louis XVI, Benjamin Franklin, Lords Shelburne, Grantham and North, Charles James Fox, the Comte de Vergennes, John Jay, John Adams, Catherine the Great, and Frederick the Great. The result is a study of eighteenth-century diplomatic and political history that overturns previously established views.

This book examines the relationship between civilians and warfare from the start of the Thirty Years War to the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It interrogates received narratives of warfare that identify the development of modern ‘total’ war with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and instead considers the continuities and transformations in warfare over the course of 200 years. The book examines prisoners of war, the cultures of plunder, the tensions of billeting, and war-time atrocities throughout England, France, Spain, and the German territories. It also explores the legal practices surrounding the conduct and aftermath of war; representations of civilians, soldiers, and militias; and the philosophical underpinnings of warfare. The book probes what it meant to be a civilian in territories beset by invasion and civil war or in times when ‘peace’ at home was accompanied by almost continuous military engagement abroad. It shows civilians not only as anguished sufferers, but also directly involved with war: fighting back with shocking violence, profiting from war-time needs, and negotiating for material and social redress. Finally, the book shows us individuals and societies coming to terms with the moral and political challenges posed by the business of drawing lines between ‘civilians’ and ‘soldiers’.

Creolizing Europe aims to interrogate creolization as the decolonial, rhizomatic thinking necessary for understanding the social and cultural transformations set in motion through trans/national dislocations. It explores the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization for thinking through post/coloniality, raciality, and othering as both historical legacies and constitutive of European societies and epistemologies as it develops interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences and humanities. It juxtaposes US-UK debates on ‘hybridity’, ‘mixed race’, and the ‘Black Atlantic’ with Caribbean and Latin American theorizations of cultural mixing in order to engage with Europe as a permanent scene of Édouard Glissant’s creolization. Further, through a comparative methodology the focus on Europe is broadened in order to understand the role of Europe’s colonial past in the shaping of its post/migrant and diasporic present. ‘Europe’ becomes an expanded and contested term, unthinkable without reference to its historical legacies and possible futures. Although not all the contributions explicitly address Glissant’s approach to creolization, they all engage with aspects of his thinking in terms of the usefulness, transferability and limitations of creolization to the European context. This volume offers a significant contribution to European Studies, Post/Colonial Studies, Decolonial Studies and Cultural Studies by emphasizing that ‘race’ and ‘cultural mixing’ are central to theorizing Europe and by applying Glissantian perspectives to empirical work on diasporic spaces, conviviality, citizenship, aesthetics, racism, nation, gender, sexuality, representations and memory.

The patterns of unity and division that define Europe as a historical region have been discussed in some important works, but this complex set of questions merits a more sustained debate. The disappearance of the Cold War regimes reinforced visions of European unity, but it also brought older historical divisions back into focus. The enlargement of the European Union has posed new problems of integration across cultural and political borders rooted in historical experiences. At the same time, the core countries of the union have confronted issues that reveal the enduring importance of identities and divergences which antedate the project of integration. The progress of historical sociology has led to more active interest in the identities, structures, and boundaries of historical formations, geocultural as well as geopolitical. The main emphasis of this book is on the multiple but interrelated divisions that have shaped the course of European history and crystallised in different patterns during successive phases. The question of European unity is discussed extensively in the first section, and later chapters include references to the perceptions and interpretations of unity that have developed in different parts of a divided Europe. The book lays particular stress on one region, Central or East Central Europe, and the debates that have developed around it. This part of Europe has not only been the topic of the most intensive discussion of regional identity, and is also the source of the general theme of the book: the unity and the divisions of European history.

The world-famous French singer Édith Piaf (1915-63) was never just a singer. Dozens of biographies of her, of variable quality, have seldom got beyond the well known and usually contested ‘facts’ of her life. This book suggests new ways of understanding her. A ‘cultural history’ of Piaf means exploring her cultural, social and political significance as a national and international icon, looking at her shifting meanings over time, at home and abroad. How did she become a star and a myth? What did she come to mean in life and in death? What is her place in popular music yesterday and today? At the centenary of her birth and more than fifty years after her passing, why do we still remember her work and commemorate her through the work of others, from Claude Nougaro and Elton John to Ben Harper and Zaz, as well as in films, musicals, documentaries and tribute acts around the world? What does she mean today?

In the last quarter of the twentieth century a considerable number of Spanish films were involved in the task of essaying the nation, that is, of attempting to make it or make it over, of trying to reshape a national identity inexorably dictated by General Francisco Franco up to his death. The book explores four major issues in this regard: firstly, the filmic negotiations of the borders of the nation, focusing particularly on the debated and controversial development of Basque cinema vis-à-vis the films produced in the rest of Spain; secondly, the persistence of the old obsession with violence, thought of as an inescapable native trait, in a large amount of post-dictatorial films; thirdly, the newfound insatiable appetite for cinematic travelling, for going out and coming in through all possible variations of the road and travel movie genres; and, fourthly, the vindication of the mother qua a benign emblem of the land and its people, of the nation. There is a narrative in Spanish cinema, taken as a collective discourse, which ties together these four cinematic topoi and proposes a nation whose specificity must be precisely its impurity — difference within as essence — a hybrid nation located in temporal and spatial rendezvous of past and present, tradition and novelty, centre and margin, inside and outside, on and beyond.

This book examines the origins of the early French women’s press and traces the evolving representations of womanhood that appear over the first ninety years of women’s journals in France. It argues that this critically neglected medium offers a key source of information on French women’s personal and political aspirations by giving us a privileged insight into their everyday lives. The early women’s press represented an important means of allowing women to access and contribute to the key cultural, intellectual and political debates which dominated French society at the time and which directly influenced their position within it. This book highlights the political, feminist potential of this medium written by women for women. Through textual analyses of different ‘generic’ subsections, whether the literary journal, the fashion journal, the domestic press or more explicitly politicised outputs, this book challenges the critical commonplaces that have been applied to the women’s press, both in France and elsewhere. As the first comprehensive study in English of these origins, this book demonstrates the political richness of this medium and the key perspectives it gives us on female self-expression and on the everyday lives of women from across the class spectrum during this key historical period.

World War I saw almost 100,000 German Jews wear the uniform of the Imperial army; some 12,000 of these soldiers lost their lives in battle. Over the last century, public memory of their sacrifice has been very gradually subsumed into the much greater catastrophe of the Holocaust. This book focuses on the multifaceted ways in which these Jewish soldiers have variously been remembered and forgotten from 1914 through until the late 1970s. During and immediately after the conflict, Germany's Jewish population were active participants in a memory culture that honoured the war dead as national heroes. With the decline of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialists' rise to power, however, public commemoration of the Jewish soldiers gradually faded, as Germany's Jewish communities were systematically destroyed by the Nazi regime. It was only in the late 1950s that both Jews and other Germans began to rediscover and to re-remember this largely neglected group. By examining Germany's complex and continually evolving memory culture, this book studies both German and German-Jewish history. In doing so, it draws out a narrative of entangled and overlapping relations between Jews and non-Jews during the short twentieth century. The Jewish/non-Jewish relationship, it argues, did not end on the battlefields of World War I, but ran much deeper to extend through into the era of the Cold War.

This book explores the impact of psychological trauma, or ‘war neurosis’ in imperial, Weimar and Nazi Germany from the perspective of ordinary mentally disabled veterans of the First World War. War neurosis was a key topic in debates over the memory of the war, masculinity, and social deviance. This volume uses previously unexplored first-person accounts in order to focus on traumatized German war veterans. It follows these vulnerable members of society as they emerged from the trenches and pursued lives in work, family and politics as they experienced marginalization as burdens on the nation and terrifying reminders of the effects of mass violence. Traumatized veterans actively fought doctors who tried to de-emphasize or stigmatize mental wounds. Within the fragmented landscape of interwar politics, these men also struggled to find acceptance as legitimate victims of war. After the Nazi seizure of power, these men faced intensified attacks as ‘enemies of the nation,’ and they protested their status as ‘social outsiders’. They claimed recognition as normal men with authentic and socially vital perspectives on the traumatic effects of modern war. This book situates veterans’ words and experiences in the contemporary field of trauma studies, revealing a previously hidden vein of protest against the Nazi institutions and official memory of war. It exposes the universal problems faced by societies coping with war and the politics of the veterans’ long-term care.

This book examines several aspects of Spain's polemical Age of Reason, in particular the uncertain shifts in scientific ideas, the developing confusion of philosophical attitudes, the controversial movements in literary theories, the popular reactions to artistic practices, and the disturbed and disturbing variations in traditional beliefs and social attitudes. It takes as its model what it refers to as the middle-way enlightened man or ‘ilustrado’, who accepted much of the teachings of the new science and rationalist thinking, but remained skeptical of their accuracy and efficacy in addressing issues of fundamental importance.

This book explores Jewish refugee movements before, during and after the Holocaust, placing them in a longer history of forced migration from the 1880s to the present. It does not deny that there were particular issues facing Jews escaping from Nazism, but it emphasises that there are deeper trends that shed light on responses to and the experiences of these refugees and other forced migrants from war, poverty, genocide and ethnic cleansing. It argues that those interested in Holocaust studies and migration studies have much to learn from each other. This study focuses on three particular types of refugee movement – women, children and ‘illegal’ boat migrants. Whilst there is focus on British spheres of influence, the scope is global including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, South Asia and Australasia. The approach is historical but incorporates many different disciplines including geography, anthropology, cultural and literary studies and politics. State as well as popular responses are integrated and the auto/biographical practice of the refugees themselves are highlighted throughout this book. Films, novels, museums, heritage sites and memorials are incorporated in this study alongside more traditional sources allowing exploration of history and memory. Many neglected refugee movements are covered and themes such as gender, childhood, place, space, legality, the politics of naming, and performance add to its richness.

This volume brings together contributions by scholars from Britain, Germany, and the United States to present and reflect upon the latest research on the history of the Third Reich. The book provides a new approach to the history of Nazism's racial policy, its social policy, its planning for war and genocide, and its legacy. It shows how Nazism's radical ideological drive penetrated the most diverse areas of German society and everyday life. The book reminds us that the crimes of the Third Reich were ultimately born of the decisions of a political, military, and administrative leadership of singular ambition, drive, and brutality.

Epicentre of the French Revolution of 1789, erstwhile bastion of the skilled working class, centre of radical agitation, and, along with Pigalle and Montmartre, a focus for popular and raffish night-life in the early twentieth century, the Bastille area of Eastern Paris (also known as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine) is now an ethnically and socially mixed quartier that still bears the traces of its previous avatars. This book charts the history and cultural geography of this unique area of Paris, from the fortress and prison that gave the area its name to the building of the largest and costliest opera house in the world.