This article consists of interviews with five world experts on the memory of Fascism. Taking the centenary of the March on Rome as an opportunity to rethink the development of Italian collective ...memory, the five interviewees were asked to reflect on different aspects of the Italian memory of Fascism, addressing the dominant conceptualisations, limits, and transformations of the discourses used to narrate Fascism in Italian culture. The result of these conversations, which touch upon issues related to the memory of the Resistance, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and colonialism, is a rich overview of the main trends and current trajectories of Italian memory culture, which can help us imagine the future directions of the Italian memory of Fascism and enhance interventions in this field by memory scholars and memory activists.
The introduction of sport in captivity during the Second World War helped to transform the prisoner-of-war camp and the wider prison community into something more familiar. A significant aspect of ...this transformation was the physical recreation of playing fields in many camps. These fields had elements of familiarity which lessened the foreignness of the camp space. This article analyses how participation in sport helped New Zealand prisoners resist the strangeness of captivity. It also discusses how the men's sporting experiences extended beyond the playing fields and allowed their loved ones back at home to know that they were all right.
Alongside the well-known narratives of the mode rétro, which returned in the 1970s to the years of war and Occupation in France, there were texts that challenged simplistic notions of guilt and ...innocence through a virtuoso deployment of sarcasm and derision. Romain Gary’s La Danse de Gengis Cohn (1967), Albert Cohen’s Ô vous frères humains (1972) and Serge Gainsbourg’s album Rock Around the Bunker (1975) are all confronting the cruelty and abjection of a murderous anti-Semitism in intimate and disturbing ways. These are very different texts – a novel, an autofictional essay and an LP – but each one gives a powerful voice to the victim in these complex stories of hatred and fear. Derision enacts an aggressive dismantling of the stereotypes and tropes of the abject Other, exposing the vacuity of established pieties, the contradictions and hypocrisies at the heart of a rhetoric of superiority. Briefly situated in relation to earlier (Camus, Céline, Sartre) and later (Littell) narratives of derision relating to war and occupation centred on the perpetrator, a detailed critical and narrative analysis draws on Julia Kristeva’s analysis of abjection in order to identify what is at stake in these elaborate, stylised and unsettling texts where it is the abjected victim who is the subject of their own story.
El fotógrafo de Mauthausen
/
The Photographer of Mauthausen
(
Targarona 2018
) is the first feature film on Spaniards deported to Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War and represents a ...watershed moment for the country’s collective memory. The film focuses on Francesc Boix, a young Catalan photojournalist who spearheaded a clandestine operation to save photographic evidence of the Nazi’s crimes while a prisoner in Mauthausen. Despite its visual acuity, Targarona’s entry is a complicated addition to the canon of recent concentration camp films, given the director’s positioning of Boix as a macho hero and her counterfactual depictions of Mauthausen. By juxtaposing archival photography with stills from the film, this article traces the recreation of Boix’s experience, as well as how his story has had an enduring impact on the memory of all the Spanish and Catalan survivors of Mauthausen in Spain’s collective imagination.
Aunque España no entró en la Segunda Guerra Mundial, su postura osciló de la neutralidad a la no beligerancia a favor del Eje, y, de nuevo, a la neutralidad, cuando Alemania empezó a perder la guerra ...y fue conveniente alejarse. Esto se manifestó en la cobertura que los medios, y especialmente Radio Nacional de España -que tenía el monopolio informativo radiofónico- hizo tanto de la guerra como de la iniciativa política más comprometida del régimen: el envío de la División Azul. La cobertura de RNE también evolucionó, junto con la del resto de la guerra, de la glorificación de los divisionarios al silenciamiento.
The Second World War saw extraordinary movements of people, before, during and afterwards. Civilian internees are rarely considered part of this, and especially not those in South and Southeast Asia. ...Between December 1941 and May 1946, nearly 2700 Japanese civilians and colonial subjects from across Japan’s empire were interned in camps in British India. Mainly residents of Singapore and Malaya, these civilians were arrested and transferred by ship and train to India, where they were interned for all or part of the war. Their first ‘temporary’ camp was in Purana Qila, the Old Fort in New Delhi, from where some were repatriated to Japan in August 1942 as part of the Anglo-Japanese Civilian Exchange. The remaining civilians were moved to a more permanent camp at Deoli (Ajmer) in 1943. The internees experienced several hardships, including inadequate accommodation and disease. To date, little has been written about these internees and their journeys, especially in English. Weaving together archival sources, internee memoirs and non-English publications, this article seeks to reveal the experience of incarceration on internees in British India as forced migrants of war, and to consider reasons why the history of these internees remains largely invisible.
•We must learn from the past to understand present and future mineral criticality.•A one-time event can cause drastic changes in resources policies.•Using the Spanish case, it can be seen how ...strategic minerals affect the economy.•Tungsten and tin extraction in Spain is analyzed during First and Second World War.•Analysis of current situation of tungsten and tin projects and mines in Spain.
Modern living is heavily dependenton mining activities. Having a secure and stable supply of mineral resources has proven to be a key for societies, especially during periods of war. A total of 39 raw materials are identified as ‘strategic’ for the current European defense industry and 16 are additionally considered critical due to economic reasons and risks of supply by the European Commission. Any material can become critical if the demand exceeds supply and this is illustrated through a case study of tin and tungsten demand in Spain during the First World War and Second World War. Tungsten, identified as strategic, was extracted in Spain throughout 20th century, in the process becoming the most important supplier for Germany during Second World War. The extraction of tin has also had political implications, being the basic component used in the manufacturing tin cans. These cases may be used as a proxy for gauging how even a single mineral may boost economies and can be assimilated to current efforts being made across the world to secure supplies of raw materials.
This article analyzes the representational strategies used to show, narrate, and contextualize sexual violence during past military conflicts in Helke Sander’s 1992 documentary film BeFreier und ...BeFreite (Liberators Take Liberties) and Wojciech Tochman’s 2010 reportage Dzisiaj narysujemy śmierć (Today We’re Going to Draw Death). My comparative analysis of the formal strategies used by Sander and Tochman to effectively diminish various modes of “historical distance” serves to promote a discussion on the potential of each medium to evoke empathetic understanding of the trauma of wartime rape victims in the present.
The first book to present an analysis of Arab response to fascism and Nazism from the perspectives of both individual countries and the Arab world at large, this collection problematizes and ...ultimately deconstructs the established narratives that assume most Arabs supported fascism and Nazism leading up to and during World War II. Using new source materials taken largely from Arab memoirs, archives, and print media, the articles reexamine Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi responses in the 1930s and throughout the war.While acknowledging the individuals, forces, and organizations that did support and collaborate with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism focuses on the many other Arab voices that identified with Britain and France and with the Allied cause during the war. The authors argue that many groups within Arab societies—elites and non-elites, governing forces, and civilians—rejected Nazism and fascism as totalitarian, racist, and, most important, as new, more oppressive forms of European imperialism. The essays in this volume argue that, in contrast to prevailing beliefs that Arabs were de facto supporters of Italy and Germany—since "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"—mainstream Arab forces and currents opposed the Axis powers and supported the Allies during the war. They played a significant role in the battles for control over the Middle East.
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