The article discusses emotional politics in the radical left in West Germany from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The first part analyses radical left-wing critiques of capitalism during the 1970s that focused on the emotions that capitalism allegedly produced. The article argues that activists described an ‘emotional regime’ of capitalism, but in doing so effectively instituted an emotional regime within their own milieu which made the expression of certain negative feelings, such as fear, imperative. The article then discusses emotional practices radical left-wingers developed in order to overcome the alleged ‘emotional void’ of capitalism. The article's second part then focuses on the urban revolts of 1980–81 (mostly in Berlin). This revolt marked a decisive shift, as the centrality of fear, frustration and boredom was increasingly overshadowed by feelings of joy and ecstatic possibility. The article concludes by proposing that the alternative left contributed to the formulation of new emotional styles and norms in West German society at large.

This article examines the emotional standards and experiences connected with the entehno laiko music composed by Mikis Theodorakis that was immensely popular among left-wing Greek migrants, workers and students, living in West Germany in the 1960s and the early 1970s. Expanding on a body of literature that explores the transnational dimensions of protest movements in the 1960s and the 1970s, the article demonstrates that these transnational dimensions were not mutually exclusive with the fact that at least some of those protestors felt that they belonged to a particular nation. Drawing on the conceptual framework put forth by Barbara Rosenwein, it argues that the performance of these songs was conducive to the making of a (trans)national emotional community. On the one hand, for Greek left-wingers residing in West Germany and, after 1967, for Greek centrists too, the collective singing of music composed by Theodorakis initially served as a means of ‘overcoming fear’ and of forging committed militants who struggled for the social and political transformation of their country of origin. On the other, from the late 1960s onwards those migrants increasingly enacted this emotional community with local activists from West Germany as well.

Examining an ordinary town-planning decision made during an extraordinary period, this article highlights the interaction between the local urban redevelopment policy and the state policy of racial persecution in 1941. However, it argues that this interaction was far more complex than the implementation of an anti-Semitic ideology by two separate administrations to which it is usually reduced. Instead of trying to assess the ‘reality’ of the ‘representation’ of the housing area (îlot) as a ‘Jewish quarter’ the article takes as fact the notion that representations are realities, and vice versa, and attempts to understand if, and by what mechanisms, an ethno-religious characterisation of the îlot played a role in the redevelopment operations under consideration here.

In 1921 a memo from the Seine prefecture had been presented to the city council, identifying seventeen insanitary îlots in Paris as having above-average mortality rates from tuberculosis. These îlots were to be razed to the ground and rebuilt. The sixteenth îlot on the list was located in the southern section of the fourth arrondissement. This ‘îlot 16’ was apparently known as an area where the majority of its inhabitants were foreign Jews. In October 1941, when the persecution of the Jews was at its height, the Seine prefecture began a massive redevelopment of this urban space. The issue of areas of bad housing had been nagging at officials since the beginning of the century: but how are the actions of the Seine prefecture to be explained from 1941 onwards? Why, during the Second World War, were city officials so determined to prioritise, indeed to focus exclusively on, îlot 16? Why was it that a Paris construction project of a scale not seen since Baron Haussmann's time was planned at this point, when the actors themselves described the economic and political situation as unfavourable?

During the occupation of Ukraine, city mayors, raion chiefs and village elders played a substantial role in implementing occupation policies. Based in large part on primary sources from regional archives in Ukraine, the current article analyses the role of these local administrators, so far largely neglected in research on the occupation of Ukraine. Whatever their original motives were for joining the local administration (Hilfsverwaltung) – economic, nationalistic, or ethnic reasons, or a desire for better governance, local administrators nevertheless supported forced labour measures and the murder of the local Jewish population by identifying the local Jewish inhabitants, by administering the property of the murdered Jews or by facilitating Jewish forced labour duties. The article treats the city administration in Kamenets-Podol’sk in Podolia as a case study of the involvement of the local administration in the crimes committed under the occupation regime.

In Italy from the 1920s to the post-1945 period, soldiers’ autobiographical writings represented the ‘theatre of memory’ to the new generations: they handed down the meaning of intervention, mobilisation and sacrifice. They are characterised by two shared elements. The first one is the recurring theme of self-sacrifice. At the core of all war stories there is the experience of fighting and death; this is a liminal experience that fixes one's relation to war. The second one is the author's profile. The narrator of the ‘warrior phenomenon’ is almost invariably a young reserve officer, which means, in the majority of cases, a twenty-year old middle-class man, often a high-school graduate or a university student. The most powerful leitmotiv running through the mixed array of texts and genres that make up the ‘narrative field’ of the Great War is the metaphor of the military community as a ‘family’. Young officers, typically former students from a city background and interventionists at heart, consistently referred to their admission to the ‘family’ of soldiers at war as a life-changing transition: they had left behind their ordinary bourgeois existence, comfortable and safe (and therefore ‘unmanly’), to step into a new world, a dimension of death and suffering, but also comradeship and solidarity. Pure and unshakeable, genuine and disinterested, brotherhood in arms is so deeply felt that it borders on the intensity of a homoerotic relationship, although the latter is rarely made explicit.

Despite considerable evidence of the link between generational cohorts and mnemonic persistence in other social and historical contexts, existing research on memory in former state socialist countries tends to focus primarily on evidence of mnemonic change. In contrast, this article seeks to develop a more nuanced understanding of post-state-socialist memories, one capable of accounting for both mnemonic change and persistence. Methodologically, the article combines the analysis of personal memories across several generations with a reconstruction of the changing contours of everyday life in different historical periods, based on archival and secondary sources. To demonstrate the usefulness of such an approach, the article examines the memories of life at the Yugoslav border with Italy, as recounted by the inhabitants of the Slovenian border town of Nova Gorica in 2008.

Why did railway workers never sabotage the deportation trains? This article examines the role of French railway workers in the Holocaust by historicising the concept of railway professionalism. It argues that the actions and behaviour of French railwaymen, whether blue-collar, white-collar or Jewish, were rooted in long-standing professional identities and values which were difficult to shift, even during the occupation. So whereas the professionalism of Holocaust bureaucrat perpetrators is often demonised, this article points to its socio-cultural importance and offers a more nuanced interpretation of ‘perpetrators’ in the Holocaust.

This article details the origins of the human right to international asylum. While previous works locate its beginnings in East–West political conflict in the 1950s, I note the importance of American opposition to the Soviet invasion of Poland and the Baltic countries in 1939–40 and its later consequences for relief work with post-war Displaced Persons from those countries. Given that Eastern European states at the UN claimed to protect people displaced from these non-recognised territories, British and American delegates were forced to create a new refugee definition that allowed DPs to reject state protections and to seek asylum as refugees.

During 1941 the need for workers in Germany increased. As a result, the National Socialists requested allied and neutral countries to recruit volunteer workers. The total number of volunteers from these countries employed by the Nazis during the Second World War was similar to the total number of the civilian workers from occupied Poland. In spite of the better conditions offered to these volunteers and the efforts to indoctrinate them, the National Socialists failed to attract them to their cause. This article examines the reasons for this failure, taking as an example the case of the Spanish volunteers. The research is mainly based on the documents of the German-Spanish Society (Deutsch-Spanische Gesellschaft, DSG) of Berlin, which was the principal intermediary between the Spanish volunteers, and the National Socialist and Spanish authorities.

Using the case study of Montpellier, this article explores the relationship between local political actors and postcolonial minorities since the end of the Algerian War – particularly, the city's pied-noir, harki, Moroccan and Jewish populations. It examines the discourses used to secure the electoral allegiances of these groups and the myriad ways in which they laid claim to certain civic and political spaces. It employs diverse oral, archival and audio-visual sources to demonstrate how postcolonial minorities have gained important concessions from local authorities and how identity politics has developed under the Fifth Republic, despite France's strong republican tradition.

The Italian left has always perceived 1956 as an extraordinary year, because of the succession of international events that supposedly shocked many Italian militants and convinced them to abandon communism and the Italian Communist Party. On the contrary, this article claims that the real reasons for the crisis of communism in Italy had little to do with international events and must be found instead in the momentous economic and social changes that Italy was experiencing at the time. Unforgettable 1956 was therefore only a moment in a longer-term process that was destined to change communism in Italy. The article is based on previously unused documents now available at the Italian Communist Party Archive.

One of Leonid Brezhnev's primary goals when he acceded to party leadership in the Soviet Union was to restore Moscow's control over the world communist movement, severely undermined by the Sino-Soviet dispute. Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania was determined to prevent this, in order to consolidate his country's autonomy in the Communist bloc. The Sino-Soviet dispute offered the political and ideological framework for autonomy, as the Romanian Communists claimed their neutrality in the dispute. This article describes Ceauşescu's efforts to sabotage Brezhnev's attempts to have China condemned by an international meeting of Communist parties between 1967 and 1969. His basic ideological argument was that unity of world communism should have a polycentric meaning.

This article contributes to historiographical debates on political cultures, the construction of female citizenship and democracy development through an analysis of the construction of gender identities in socialist culture and working-class culture in Spain. From 1931, in the context of the Second Spanish Republic, socialist culture experienced a complex mixture of egalitarian proposals, collective actions and strategies to achieve the political mobilisation of women. This process reformulated in female terms many of the concepts historically present in this political culture: equality, freedom, secularism and citizenship.

This article challenges the currently dominant understanding of Italian Fascism as a ‘political religion’, arguing that this view depends upon an outdated model of secularisation and treats Fascism's sacralisation of politics in isolation from church–state relations, the Catholic Church itself and popular religious experience in Italy. Based upon an historiographical review and analysis of what we now know about secularisation and these other religious phenomena, the article suggests that only when we grasp Italian Fascist political religion in relation to secularisation properly understood, and treat it in the context of religious experience and its history as a whole can the nature of Italian Fascism be adequately grasped.

This article is about EEC trade policy-making in the GATT Kennedy Round negotiations. It questions whether the European Commission was decisive in terms of reaching an agreement in Brussels and then in Geneva, and whether the final outcome resembled the Commission's preferences. The article shows that in Brussels the Commission was able to make its preferences prevail only when these appealed to the Council of Ministers. In Geneva, member states pragmatically set limits to the actions of the Commission, guided by the principle of how they could enhance their trade interests. Eventually, they allowed the Commission to strengthen its role because this was in line with their interests.

Sexual policies were a core component of the National Socialist racial policies, both in the Altreich (territories considered part of Nazi Germany before 1938), as well as in the occupied territories. In occupied Poland the Germans imposed a ‘prohibition of contact’ (Umgangsverbot) with the local Polish population, a restriction that covered both social as well as sexual encounters. But this model of absolute racial segregation was never truly implemented. This paper attempts to show that there existed a wide range of sexual contacts between the occupiers and the local inhabitants, with the focus here being on consensual and forced contacts (sexual violence) as seen against the backdrop of National Socialist policies. This article positions itself at the intersection of the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte), the history of sexuality and the gender history of the German occupation of Poland – perspectives that have rarely been used with regard to this region.

How new states dealt with minority populations and developed (or failed to develop) strong and secure government institutions are significant research areas in the history of states born in the aftermath of the First World War. This article examines how Irish First World War veterans served as transitional figures during the state-building phase of the Irish Free State in the 1920s and 1930s. Though they are often presented as categorically maligned or forgotten victims of a period of rising nationalism, this article argues that the ex-servicemen, despite the imperial legacies they represented, were popularly supported during the 1920s and early 1930s, and even served as vehicles through which the Free State cemented its stability and defined its independence and obligations in the international and domestic arenas.

This article explores the pre-war background of the Swiss, Swedish and Danish men who volunteered for the Nazi Waffen-SS combat formation during the Second World War. Through a detailed biographical examination of officer corps volunteers, this article contradicts what I call the myth of the volunteers – a long-standing popular and to some extent scholarly interpretation that perceives the volunteers as lower-class, social outsiders of a criminally inclined or mentally unstable nature. Instead this article demonstrates that these men held a distinctly European outlook and were characterised by a high level of education, intellect and their strong personal character. Moreover, they had with few exceptions developed a longing for a radical reorganisation of the European political, social and economic landscape before joining the Waffen-SS. This longing was amplified by what these men perceived as a threat to the core of European civilisation coming not only from the Bolshevik East but also from the Anglo-Liberal West.

This article argues that squadrismo represented a central feature in the ideology and politics of Fascist Italy, influencing the whole period of the dictatorship. In the second half of the twenties, many squadristi became political prisoners, accused of being ‘bad Fascists’: it looked like the end of squadrismo. Despite punishments and (brief) periods of imprisonment, the squadristi actually continued to play an important part in the fascistisation of Italian society, in particular during the intransigent 1930s. By disciplining the blackshirts while continuing to make use of their particular skills, Fascism hoped to ‘tame the revolution’.

State projects aimed at technological innovation and social renewal were a widespread phenomenon in inter-war Europe. This is exemplified by the practice of internal colonisation – the construction of new settlements within state territories – in the Netherlands. This article examines one such case, the reclamation and colonisation of the Wieringermeer in the 1930s, in detail. In doing so, it reveals that the principle of state abstention, which prevailed throughout the inter-war period, was abandoned on reclaimed land. Politicians and experts perceived these territories as a clean slate on which they could experiment with new forms of government intervention. This article focuses on state policies of social planning and the technocratic governance of reclaimed land, and examines whether these could be reconciled with democratic notions of sovereignty and citizenship in the minds of the planners, the politicians and, last but not least, the pioneers themselves.