This article is a reassessment of F. G. Stambrook's well-known claim that Lord D'Abernon was the architect of German Locarno diplomacy. It suggests that Stambrook did not fully understand D'Abernon's relationship with the Luther–Stresemann government, and in particular it seeks to place German Locarno diplomacy within the wider context of German foreign policy in the period. It throws new light not only on the D'Abernon–von Schubert relationship but on the dynamic forces at work within the German Foreign Ministry. The article also contains a brief assessment of German relations with the United States.

This paper considers why political leaders and central bankers continued to adhere to the gold standard as the Great Depression intensified. We do not focus on the effects of the gold standard on the Depression, which have been documented elsewhere, but on the reasons why policy makers chose the policies they did. We argue that the mentality of the gold standard was pervasive and compelling to the leaders of the interwar economy. It was expressed and reinforced by the discourse among these leaders. It was opposed and finally defeated by mass politics, but only after the interaction of national policies had drawn the world into the Great Depression.

By analysing the Anglo-German talks about financial compensation for the cost of British troops in West Germany, this article seeks to clarify the linkages between Britain's security and European and monetary policies. The ideological commitment of British politicians to a reserve currency role for sterling had a deep impact on Britain's relations to Europe, particularly the Federal Republic. By consistently threatening to cut its military commitment on the Continent and by minimising it to a question of financial expediency, London failed to draw any political capital from its troops. This became very visible in the field of European integration. The conflict on currency issues and troop deployment was a crucial element in preventing closer relations between the Federal Republic and the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s.

The 1950s were the heyday of cinema in Europe. Rather than competing with Hollywood studios, European film companies preferred to stick to old, well established recipes. Germany recycled one of its cultural traditions, Heimat. Despite the poverty of their plots and the weakness of their protagonists, the Heimatfilme succeeded by celebrating an unspoilt, soothing wilderness. The Italian counterpart of Heimatfilme was melodrama. If family dramas remained much appreciated in the Peninsula, the filmmakers were clever enough to shift their characters from an ill-defined epoch to the contemporary world. So, while urban Germany was pining for its wild, empty mountains, rural Italy was contemplating its domestic comforts to come. With the Carry On series, Britain was loyal to comedies, which filled the main part of the programmes. The plots – which merely dealt with private affairs – were humorous, harmless, always deprived of authentic social background. The European cinemas of the 1950s were directed towards large, mostly ‘popular’ audiences of people who used to leave their houses and gather in town centres on Saturday evenings. These cinemas did not produce any masterpieces but they were the most characteristic, and the most appreciated, form of entertainment in the middle of the century. It was not art, but it was ‘popular’ culture.

After 1945 the Italian tradition of feminine beauty was redefined in a democratic context in which women, for the first time, became full citizens. Faced with a far-reaching challenge from Hollywood, traditional criteria of beauty were first strenuously defended and then modified and commercialised. Beauty contests proved to be a vital vehicle in this transition, since they acted both as a forum for the reassertion of Italian beauty and as a vehicle for the displacement of old ideas centred on the face with a new concept based on the eroticised body. This transition became bound up with the ongoing political conflict between Catholics and the left for the moral and political leadership of the country. While both, with different emphases, championed ‘natural’ at the expense of American-style ‘manufactured’ beauty, competition led them to engage with, and in some way adopt, the sexualised beauty that was the hallmark of the role of the United States in furnishing new models for the consumer society that would develop rapidly in the later 1950s.

Although the processes of censorship as exercised over the stage and screen in 1950s Britain shared similar characteristics, there were vital differences in the way in which the governing authorities construed the audiences who frequented these entertainment media. Because cinemagoers constituted a mass audience and were considered to be more impressionable, the criteria of ‘quality’ applied by the British Board of Film Censors differed markedly to those put into effect for the theatre by the Lord Chamberlain's Office. The reception afforded both the play and film of I Am a Camera reveals the subtlety of approach adopted by the censors in each instance.

At the end of the Second World War, the countries of Western Europe found themselves in a state of economic and physical ruin and, in the cases of Germany, Italy and France, in a position of, at best, moral and political ambiguity and, at worst, outright bankrupcy. Only Britain emerged from the war with its political regime intact and its moral purpose vindicated, although paradoxically its economy was to prove the most severely wounded. Perhaps because of the very scale of the disaster, however, Western Europe embarked upon a process of reconstruction, aided financially by the Marshall Plan, which embodied grandiose ambitions for a radical rebirth. The Italian Communist Party's weekly magazine, for example, was called Rinascita, whilst the French Communist weekly Les Lettres Françaises celebrated a ‘new French “renaissance”, encompassing political life, urban redevelopment and a whole range of cultural development, which was seen, in the early days of the Liberation, as the legitimate reward and goal of the Resistance’. In Germany, the recognition of 1945 as constituting a Nullpunkt or Stunde Null, made possible the Kahlschlag, or clean sweep which would propel the new Republic towards democracy and prosperity. Even in Britain, there was the sense of the dawning of a new era, and if the Festival of Britain, in 1951, looked back to the Great Exhibition a century earlier and celebrated traditional British qualities, whilst also flexing the nation's industrial and military muscles, with the death of King George VI and the accession of his daughter, the country embarked, quite literally and self-consciously, on a ‘New Elizabethan’ age.

The early years of state television in Italy, which began transmission in 1954, have usually been viewed as crucial to the spread of mass culture through Italian society. In addition, these developments have essentially been seen in negative terms by historians and sociologists. This article explores these early years in detail for one, key, urban setting:Milan. Through an examination of the myriad and often hidden effects of television, the research attempts to draw out the contradictory and complicated impact of TV and its relationship with other media, the neighbourhood, the family, the home and daily life. The article also looks at the impact of one important quiz show in the 1950s and concludes with some reflections on the power of the media in the city in the 1990s.

Beginning with its first issue of 1945, Elle magazine was instrumental in changing the way the French saw female domesticity in the postwar period, infusing the domestic space with an aura of glamour and modernity. Newly glamorous female domesticity went hand-in-hand with images of women as voters and professionals, communicating to the magazine's readers that they could ‘have it all’ –but never to the exclusion of their primary identity as mothers and wives. This ultimately conservative postwar version of femininity came to be challenged in the early 1960s by Mademoiselle, a magazine that projected a reader unmarked by war memories and whose relationship to technology and modernity went beyond the home. Yet, Mademoiselle was grooming the fun-loving teenage girl as a consumer who would one day be a wife and mother as well; from one version of modernity to another, feminine destiny remained the same.

The Empty Chair Crisis of 1965–66 has traditionally been seen as a constitutional crisis, caused by the different European visions of General de Gaulle and the Commission president, Hallstein. This article will argue, however, that the root cause of the crisis was a clash over the programme of the EEC and, at a deeper level, about the leadership of the Community. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, it will suggest, used the 1965 common agricultural policy negotiations to challenge the traditionally prominent position of the French. In response, de Gaulle had little choice other than to escalate the crisis and launch a six-month boycott of Community institutions.

This article attempts to explain the heated controversy sparked by Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling book Hitler's Willing Executioners, by comparing it with its most obvious precedent: the international furor in 1960–62 over William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Through such a comparison, the Goldhagen controversy emerges as a relatively shallow event, largely driven by the book's own weaknesses and by media hype, that provides little of value for a deeper historical understanding of the Holocaust. At the same time, however, Goldhagen's surprising popularity in Germany does, in fact, signal a possible shift in the Germans' long postwar struggle to ‘come to terms' with the Nazi past.

Portugal's presence in Guiné-Bissau through eleven years of intense guerrilla war was justified by the doctrine of ‘pluricontinentalim’. In this view concession to nationalist pressure in one part of the ‘indivisible state’ would lead inevitably to the collapse of the whole. The defence of Portuguese Guiné, therefore, was the price to be paid for the maintenance of the infinitely more valuable territories of Angola and Mozambique. While the Salazar regime was rigid in its adherence to this doctrine, some movement was detectable under his successor from 1968, Marcello Caetano. The governor-general in Guiné, General Spínola, was permitted to explore possibilities of negotiation. Politically insecure in the face of residual Salazarist power in the regime, however, Caetano abandoned this approach in 1972. This apparent loss of nerve would contribute to the overthrow of the Lisbon regime by its own military in 1974 – despite recently revealed secret talks between Lisbon and the Guinea nationalists on the very eve of the coup.

In September 1939, only a few weeks after the signature of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact, the British government made perhaps its strongest effort since the Bolshevik revolution to achieve a rapproachement with the Soviet Union. This effort was interrupted and almost ruined by the Finno-Soviet ‘Winter War’, but the British initiative resumed after the war ended in March 1940. The Soviet government, though not the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiskii, was cool to British overtures, thus reversing the inter-war pattern where Moscow had often been the first to ask for better Anglo-Soviet relations. The publication of many Soviet diplomatic papers permits a comparison between Soviet and British accounts of important diplomatic meetings, a comparison which illustrates both British and Soviet foreign policy during the early months of the Second World War.

The article looks critically at attempts to explain the rise of National Socialism in Germany by trying to identify a peculiarly German tradition of antimodernism or reactionary modernism (by, among others, Jeffrey Herf). By looking at different critiques of civilisation in imperial Germany, it tries to show that most of them accepted the necessity of modern technology. What was new about the so-called ‘reactionary modernists’ in the Weimar Republic was not their willingness to use modern technology, but the full acceptance of the fact that modern technology could only exist on the basis of large technological systems, industrial production and fundamental social and cultural changes. They demanded that Germans unreservedly embrace all aspects of modernity, though without giving up their conservative political ideals.

While the ‘reactionary modernists’ tried to arrange the whole of society in accordance with an alleged technological functionality, National Socialism was politically more successful, exactly because its attitude towards technology and modernity was less coherent. As National Socialism had a purely pragmatic and open attitude towards technology, it could accept without hesitation that its goals were only achievable through the use of modern means, but that the cultural and private sphere should compensate for the deficits of a public life characterised by hardship and instrumental reason.

A total of 5,500 Danes joined the Waffen SS during the Second World War. They served primarily on the Eastern Front, often fighting under appalling conditions. The article follows the volunteers in action and examines in detail the Frikorps Danmark (Danish Legion), which provided a significant number of anti-Bolshevik, non-Nazi volunteers for the Waffen SS. The article analyses the behaviour of these men and focuses on the issue of ideological commitment. How did they react mentally to the context they operated in, and to the fact that they became more and more alienated in their homeland as the war progressed?

This article reviews recent literature on comparative fascism. It first examines the definition of fascism (the fascist minimum). The discussion of comparative fascism that follows focuses on the relationship between fascists and conservatives. It also analyses the comparability of various fascisms and National Socialism.

French anarchists were careful to distinguish between the Popular Front's leaders - the politicians - and its working-class supporters. They enthused over ‘the fraternity, the solidarity and the strength of the working class’ manifested in the extra-parliamentary antifascist movement of 1934–35. They took an active, and in some respects a leading part, in that movement. This article assesses the French anarchists' contribution to the antifascist movement and their critique of ‘Popular Frontism’. It also asks to what extent the anarchist movement can be said to have succeeded or failed in its objectives, and examines the ideological debates which the experiences of 1936–39 provoked between different anarchist currents over revolutionary strategy and tactics.

During the 1980s economic policy in the UK increasingly embraced free-market economics. For many, this was a necessary shift which improved economic performance, whereas previous periods of increased intervention, such as the 1930s, had harmed the UK economy. This article takes an alternative perspective. It argues that economic revival in the 1930s was primarily policy-induced; whereas economic growth in the 1980s can be largely explained by the unintentional demand side-effects of policy, with many of the free-market policies having, at best, a neutral impact and, in some cases, harming the long-run growth potential of the economy.