On the face of it, total war would seem to be fundamentally and entirely at odds with the very notion of individual freedom. Yet the relationship between the two was more complicated than that. From the beginning of World War I, much propagandistic effort went into stressing the voluntariness of military or quasi-military service. At the same time, imposing discipline on complex societies triggered major tensions, unintended effects, and subversive behaviors, allowing for some unexpected gains in personal independence. In general, military conflicts exacerbated disputes about the very meaning of freedom – both while they were being fought and when they were being anticipated or commemorated. This chapter discusses three issues: the extent to which military mobilization and enemy occupation created room for female independence, the ways in which contemporaries understood conscription and soldiers coped with it, and the various means by which Europeans endeavored to free themselves from military conflict, from muddling through to principled resistance under Nazi occupation or during the Cold War.

Theatre produced during the Second World War was not a historical ‘interval’, time did not stop for war, nor should the experiences of war be understood as a separate form of time. However, Justyna Biernat and Karolina Czerska have not interpreted specific theatre activities as within the historical contingencies of the avant-garde, nor within the conditions of modernism. Their aim is to illustrate the condition, motivation and assumptions of the people creating theatre in the years between 1939 and 1945 while Poland was occupied by foreign powers. Many directors and actors, who were leading figures on the Polish stages in the interwar period, joined the call for the boycott of theatres opened by the Nazi occupier. The authors delineate various and complicated trajectories: theatres operating in the General Government under the supervision of the German occupation authorities, secret theatres established by professional and amateur artists, the Secret Theater Council led by Bohdan Korzeniewski and Edmund Wierciński, the Underground State Institute of Theatre Art under the direction of Jadwiga Turowiczowa, army theatres, POW theatres and theatres created in camps and ghettos.

Małgorzata Leyko’s study of German theatre in Polish lands offers a transnational panorama that resists ‘methodological nationalism’. She interprets this history in various modes from coexistence and expansion to domination or inspiration. At different historical moments, theatre was the site of exclusion or the space of Polish–German exchange. German theatre cultures offered new models and artistic strategies, while during the Nazi occupation and the Second World War theatre was often a site of ideological indoctrination and complicity, or a refuge for those trapped and persecuted in ghettos and camps. Aleksandra Sakowska then demonstrates that Shakespeare has not been passively received by Polish culture. She argues that the process of translating Shakespeare into Polish has complicated and enriched plays like Hamlet and made them generative of new meanings, both within Polish territories and abroad. The multiple forms of translation and adaptation of Shakespeare over the centuries are not positioned as a purely ‘foreign influence’ or ‘cultural sociability’.

Chapter 1 situates the famine in its historical context and elaborates on other defining moments of the German occupation of the Netherlands. It explains how lessons learned from the First World War motivated the Dutch to prepare carefully for a new wartime food system. These preparations ensured that the agricultural transition to self-sufficiency was achieved in an orderly manner once the Netherlands was occupied. The new rationing apparatus and the Dutch bureaucrats involved were largely a continuation of the pre-war organisation of food supply and their adequate food governance prevented a serious shortage of food until September 1944.

Chapter 4 focuses on the strategies and policies of Dutch national food officials and the German civil authorities. While literature has traditionally focused on centralising attempts and the adverse effects of individual coping strategies on collective food security, this chapter demonstrates that the crisis also caused the Dutch and German authorities to act against their usual policies by consciously decentralising and delegating tasks to non-governmental agencies, as well as allowing certain forms of self-help.