An analysis of Great Britain's campaigns to recycle books and paper reveals the paradoxes of wartime waste policies: destroying history and culture for the sake of reusing materials, and the impact of recycling on the war machinery's own wastefulness. Conscious of systematic recycling in Nazi Germany and its own dependence on imports, the British government established a salvage department only weeks after the outbreak of war. Beginning in 1940, this department required all large towns to collect recyclable materials. Salvage, beyond lessening shortages, served ideological and psychological aims, because reused materials were turned into weapons. This led to a critical redefinition of recycling as the war progressed. People who previously characterised the Third Reich's recycling programmes as typical fascist control now considered compulsory recycling in Great Britain wholly positive. However, protesters claimed the government was causing irreparable harm by salvaging items whose value far exceeded their worth as scrap. The harvesting of books, periodicals and manuscripts as ‘waste’ paper proved particularly contentious, with some arguing that their own government was adding to the destruction that bombs were causing to Great Britain's cultural inheritance.

In two critical periods of German history, namely during wartime Imperial Germany and the National Socialist era, the German state resorted to salvaging waste to mobilise both people and resources at home for the war effort. Waste recycling efforts were part of preparing the national economy as well as home front morale for ‘total’ war. Since domestic waste – the generation of which was largely an urban phenomenon before the advent of mass consumer society – has traditionally been defined as a female responsibility, urban women were seen as the main pillars of waste work. Collecting, separating and storing reusable leftovers became a pervasive element of their everyday lives, as well as those of schoolchildren. Moreover, in the case of the First World War, under the umbrella of the so-called National Women's Service (Nationaler Frauendienst or NFD), women's associations set up grass-roots local waste collections before the state discovered the potential of waste for its war mobilisation efforts from 1916 onwards. The article highlights this self-mobilisation in the case of food recycling. Furthermore, it explores the continuities and differences between First World War waste salvage and later Nazi waste policies. Claiming to have learnt their lessons from the salvage drives of the First World War, the Nazis aimed at a ‘total’ waste recovery at the latest from 1936 onwards and took a top-down approach to reach it; in contrast, waste salvage drives of the First World War had been dominated by local and often female initiatives.

At one time, plastics were claimed to be the material that would not only boost West Germany's economy but also its consumer democracy. However, in the 1970s plastics were redefined as an environmental and consumer hazard. Based on protest letters and other sources, this article explores why plastic came to be redefined and traces how it became an issue of public concern. Now, this iconic material had become symbolic once more, but for negative reasons. I argue that the issue of plastics gained considerable momentum due to their crucial role in creating modern mass consumption. I further argue that the shifting significance of plastics highlights a substantial change in West Germany's political culture. While the early social market economists based citizens’ social belonging around access to economic security and affluence rather than overtly political notions of participation, people started insisting on the political aspects of their group identity as consumers; they defined both consumer information and protection as rights of citizenship.

This article adopts a political approach to examine the reasons why Edward Heath's government wanted to upgrade Polaris and the reasons why they did so by way of a programme called Super Antelope, to improve the front-ends of the missiles against Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile defence, as opposed to the alternatives on offer. It argues that the political contexts within which Heath took the decision have been insufficiently understood, and shows that the acceptance of the ‘Moscow criterion’ – the understanding that Britain had to have the capability to destroy Moscow – by central government represented continuity in Britain's cold war stance.

In the wake of the Great Depression, Sweden and the other Nordic countries were widely perceived as a model region, a successful example of the ‘middle way’ between socialism and capitalism. Central to this idea were the Nordic co-operative movements, which became the focus of President Roosevelt's Inquiry on Co-operative Enterprise in Europe, conducted in 1936–7. Drawing mainly on the records of the Inquiry, the article explores the construction of the ‘middle way’ idea and examines the role of the Nordic co-operators in shaping international perceptions of the region, while also shedding new light on differences within the international co-operative movement during the same period.

This article argues that traditional conceptions of honour and the social practices based on them were both persistent yet at the same time very fragile and changeable amongst post-war German steel industrialists. After a brief overview of how bourgeois honour developed up to the early 1950s, a study of the honour court case of one of the leading men of heavy industry, Hermann Reusch of Gutehoffnungshütte, which ran from 1947 to 1949, will be presented. This is followed by a description of the ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Wirtschaftsvereinigung Eisen und Stahl to establish honour councils to enforce a price policy across the association. Both cases highlight the rapidly changing social and economic culture in West Germany in the early 1960s.

This essay revisits 1920s German debates over the illegitimate children of the Rhineland occupation to examine hitherto neglected fluctuations in the relationship between nationalism and racism in Weimar Germany. During the early 1920s, nationalist anxieties focused on the alleged racial ‘threats’ emanating from the mixed-race children of colonial French soldiers. After 1927, plans for the forced sterilisation and deportation of the mixed-race children were dropped; simultaneously, officials began to support German mothers’ paternity suits against French soldiers. This hitherto neglected shift in German attitudes towards the ‘Rhineland bastards’ sheds new light on the role of debates over gender and the family in the process of Franco–German rapprochement. It also enhances our understanding of the contradictory political potentials of popularised foreign policy discourses about women's and children's victimisation emerging from World War I.

Discussions about intermarriage between foreign Muslim men and German Christian women from the 1950s to the 1970s shaped concepts of Islam, gender and difference found in more recent integration debates. Those insisting on inherent incompatibilities between Germans and Turks since the 1970s have drawn on these tropes developed decades earlier. Yet the post-war context differed from the later period in three important ways: the Muslim foreigners were students and interns, not guestworkers; it was German Christian women (not foreign Muslim women in Germany) who were the presumed victims of Muslim men; and it was principally national church institutions that formulated the language about difference.

This article investigates the contested boundaries of the political within the working-class movements in Leipzig and Lyon at the end of the Weimar Republic and during the Popular Front. What the appropriate issues and places of politics should be was a question that was highly contested among the organisations of the local working-class movements in both cities. The article argues that an over-politicisation of the left-proletarian milieu in Leipzig contributed to the working-class movement's failure successfully to mobilise against the Nazis, while the dynamics of politicisation in Lyon helped the formation of the Popular Front in Lyon, but then contributed to its rapid collapse.

The article delves into the concealed origins of Heinrich Gerlach's 1957 Stalingrad novel. A German veteran and former Soviet POW, Gerlach claimed to have recovered the memory of his wartime experience through hypnosis, after the original script, which he wrote in captivity, was confiscated by Soviet authorities. The author discovered this manuscript, believed lost, in Russian archives. It reveals how Soviet political re-education efforts prompted Gerlach to compose a memoir revolving around questions of personal complicity and guilt in German wartime crimes. Gerlach removed these soul-searching passages, as well as any reference to the Soviet origins of his memoir, from the published novel, which he presented as a self-generated inquiry into the tragedy of German soldiers abandoned by Hitler.

This article examines the coverage by Radio Free Europe (RFE) of the show trial of Rudolf Slánský in 1952 and contrasts this coverage with documents on the response to the trial within Czechoslovakia. RFE aggressively portrayed the trial as a pack of lies and condemned its anti-Semitism as not authentically Czechoslovak. The response within Czechoslovakia was more much nuanced. Most publicly accepted the trial as valid and acted in ways that underscored that acceptance. Within this acceptance, however, they varied from the trial script and brought their own meanings to the story. Those meanings were not always ones that either RFE or Czechoslovak leaders would have recognised as true.

The idea of fascism spread quickly and transnationally in the inter-war era. Fascist groups identified themselves as sharing fundamental characteristics and ideas. At the same time, they distorted fascism for their own purposes, adapting it to their specific contexts. As a border region, Alsace provides a number of examples of fascist groups claiming solidarity with fascism, yet distinguishing themselves from each other. Looking at fascism as a transnational phenomenon provides insight into the evolution of fascist ideology and will help explain why it is so difficult to define.

The Sezione Operaie e Lavoranti a Domicilio dei Fasci Femminili (Section of the Fascist Women's Groups for Female Workers and Outworkers) is the only one of the three Italian Fascist Party organisations for adult women that has never been studied. Founded in 1937 and recruiting factory workers, outworkers and domestic servants, it achieved a membership of almost a million by the fall of the regime in 1943. A top-down organisation, run by the largely middle-class Fasci Femminili, it offered its membership a mix of social, educational and professional opportunities. This article explores its activities, its organisational structure, the messages it attempted to convey to its membership and the reasons why such large numbers of women joined.

The history of Coca-Cola in Denmark in the early post-war years offers a fascinating case for studying the close links between Cold War politics, business interest and cultures of consumption. In the early 1950s, the well-organised Danish beverage industry lobbied effectively to protect their home market against the American soft-drink giant. The result was a special cola tax that made production of cola drinks unprofitable in Denmark. This tax came under growing pressure in the late 1950s and was eventually abandoned in 1959. Resistance to ‘America's advance’ continued after 1959 as the Coca-Cola Company came to face strong competition from the local Jolly Cola brand, produced by exactly the same business interests that had lobbied for the cola tax six years earlier.

As the regime collapsed in 1989/90, it became clear that an extreme right movement had already developed in East Germany. Its origins and development have been variously interpreted as, first, an outcome of the conditions the GDR, second, a result of the Wende, the great change, and third, an outcome of the unification process. This article integrates all three interpretations. It shows how a heterogeneous, politically diffuse skinhead milieu arose as the first extreme right cliques began to develop in the GDR; how, at the time of the Wende, it acquired a radically nationalistic political orientation; and how it became part of a pan-German ‘national opposition’ in the reunited Germany.

This article proposes a revision of the predominant view of southern Italians during the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 in Turin, one of the most remarkable moments of working-class mobilisation in modern European history. The representation of southern Italians as ‘primitive rebels’ and ‘spontaneous’ radicals has its roots in an earlier notion of southerners as social deviants and has obscured a much more complex historical reality. This image, endorsed by historians and popularised in fictional accounts, contradicts contemporary evidence which points to southerners’ singular mix of radicalism and conservatism, resistance and integration.

This article contributes to the literature of occupation, as well as to transnational history, by exploring the social history of the military government in the French Zone of Occupation in West Germany (ZFO). It uses the Zone as a case study to understand the construction of a French community abroad by looking at systems of buying and selling, and asks whether these systems were not in themselves constitutive of the very transformation of members of the military government into a ‘French community’. By investigating the insistence that French customers buy French goods at the économat, the shop restricted to their use, the article claims that gender, family and commercial practice helped to define home for members of the French administration in Germany.

The impact of the Sino-Japanese War on Britain has generally been overshadowed by the impact of the Spanish Civil War, which broke out a year earlier. Indeed, the only book on the subject, Arthur Clegg's Aid China (1989), is subtitled A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign. Yet, for a few months in the autumn of 1937, these two campaigns achieved a kind of parity in British public perception. British opinion was united in condemnation of the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities, and, at its peak, the ensuing campaign attracted a broader range of supporters than the movement in solidarity with the Spanish Republic. For instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury publicly criticised Japan's actions in a way that would have been unthinkable in the case of Franco's Spain. Moreover, some acts of solidarity with China (such as the refusal by British dockers to load Japanese ships) went beyond what the supporters of the Spanish Republic could hope to achieve. This article makes a comparison of the two campaigns, and examines the interconnections between them. It not only sheds new light on the ‘forgotten’ campaign for China, but also asks why Spain – unlike China – became the ‘Great Cause’ of the later 1930s.

In the 1970s, the West German extra-parliamentary Left struggled to respond effectively to left-wing terrorism and the state powers mobilised against it. This article argues that a shared conception of counter-violence as legitimate resistance helps explain the Left's ambivalent relationship to political violence and its solidarity with militants. The mounting strain on the projects and protest networks of student rebels, older leftists, anti-nuclear demonstrators and feminist activists, however, provoked debate and, eventually, change. Caught between terrorism and counter-terrorism, leftists revised assumptions upon which their commitment to resistance had rested – and reconceived resistance itself as part of everyday, mainstream politics.

Social scientific explanations of the role of European law associations in the making of a new European legal order argue that they were critical in empowering the European Court of Justice and defining the results of European legal integration. However, these approaches fail to highlight the complex context in which these associations evolved. By exploring the history of the French Association des juristes européens from 1951 to 1970 on the basis of comprehensive archival material, this paper provides a more contextualised understanding of what appears as a struggle with limited impact on the French reception of European law.