This article links two topics that are usually analyzed separately: civilian forced labor in today’s Austria during the Second World War and the situation and scope of action of DPs and refugees in ...post-war Austria. As the examples of “ways of migration” and the “link between accommodation and post-war strategies” of DPs in today’s Lower Austria show, it can be fruitful to extend analysis to both periods of time. Developments during the compelled movement of forced laborers created preconditions that additionally shaped the future of these people after the end of the war, giving them different possibilities and “freedoms of action”. They demonstrate a complexity of movements rather than simply “returning” to their places of origin, choosing alternatives such as emigration or remaining in Austria.
The article is a review of the childhood memories' book by Leonid Andreev's granddaughter O. Andreeva-Carlisle — the novella “An Island for Life,” first translated (by L. Shenderova-Fock) into ...Russian from English and French, the languages of the first publications. In the novel, the author recreates the five-year period (1939–1945) of her family's stay on the island of Oleron, occupied by the Nazis, reconstructs the “Russian world” of the diaspora, created by reading books, socializing with compatriots (G. Fedotov, M. Tsvetaeva, A. Remizov, etc.), and ardent interest in Russia. The review analyzes the genre of the book, which combines fidelity to fact with fictionalization of documentary material in the spirit of a girly story; it also reveals the “book code,” allowing the author to romanticize the narrative and present the events of the Resistance, in which the family was included, in an adventurous manner. It is demonstrated that the depicted events and the atmosphere in the village of Saint-Denis on the ocean coast are associated in the book with the artistic world of E.A. Poe, read aloud to the children by their father, Vadim, who lived as a child in Finland in a house on the Black River. The image of the author’s famous grandfather, the Russian writer Leonid Andreev, recreated from the stories, also merges with the notion of the American romantic Poe. The portrait of Leonid Andreev in the book appears mythologized, refracted by the prism of perception of his son Vadim and determined by the literary reputation of the writer himself.
Historical research can be enhanced by methods and resources from various disciplines, ranging from psychology to computer linguistics. With a creative and innovative perspective on »things we think ...we know«, Milan van Lange presents a computer-assisted historical investigation into the role of emotions in dealing with consequences of World War II in the Netherlands. By »emotion mining« digitised sources, van Lange shows where emotions were present and how they were expressed and discussed in the political engagement with people who experienced long-term effects of the war, such as former collaborators and war criminals, the resistance, and war victims.
Between 1941 and 1945, the Second World War changed the physical and moral geographies of Bengal, an important base for the British government. In 1943, a man-made famine resulted in the death of ...about four million peasants. The Bengal Famine has been the subject of intense scrutiny in terms of establishing the moral culpability of the colonial government and its provincial collaborators. This article revisits the wartime period and the famine as a moment of historical and social transformation. By examining the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association’s engagement with fascism, I argue that a new form of Bengali subjectivity emerged, one that recognized itself as part of a global collective, premised on its being forced to participate in the Second World War. I explore how this predicament led to reflection on the intellectual legacies of colonialism, including the promises of Enlightenment and the fraught universality of literature itself. By analysing selected works, I show how the Bengal Famine represented a moment of moral collapse that implicated both the imperial centres of power and the local colonial bourgeois class. A left-leaning intelligentsia had to struggle to find a language through which to express the inexpressible realities, local and global, of this genocide. What emerged was a tortured literature of complicity and conscience that decentred the peasantry. I argue that the historiographical problem of ‘peasant passivity’ is intrinsically tied to the literary and cultural production of the time, which made the peasant a symbol of social disintegration and moral transformation for the bourgeois middle class.
Between autumn 1943 and autumn 1944, the Wehrmacht's 2nd Panzer Army applied novel methods to stem the ever-growing tide of Yugoslavia's partisan movement. During the first two years of the uprising, ...the German doctrine for combating the guerrillas was based almost entirely on brute force; in battlefield terms, this amounted to persistent use of classic large-scale encirclement operations aimed at breaking particularly dangerous enemy concentrations. After it had become clear that this wasn't working, the Germans slowly began applying a more diversified approach in late 1943, including more reliance on small unit tactics, flexible operational planning, and subversive propaganda. Although initially successful, these methods came too late to make a strategic impact on the course of the Yugoslavia campaign. Furthermore, they could not offset the effects of Berlin's long-standing refusal to dedicate more resources to this secondary theater of war.
The South African Mine Workers’ Union, or MWU, was one of the most prominent white trade unions of 20th-century South Africa and active in one of the country’s key industries, namely gold mining. In ...the aftermath of the violent 1922 strike, the union’s executive was bureaucratised, which left the MWU vulnerable to corruption and maladministration. This gave rise to a protracted struggle for control of the union’s executive. In the 1930s and 1940s the strife within MWU ranks became entangled with the national struggle for political hegemony between the National Party and the United Party, as well as Afrikaner nationalism. At the outbreak of World War II the Smuts cabinet armed the state under War Measures’ Acts, which entitled it to a range of arbitrary powers, including powers to control strategic minerals, such as gold, and to curb industrial unrest. Naturally, the War Measures’ Acts had a significant effect on the doings of the MWU – in particular the struggle for political control of its executive. The struggle involved three official commissions of inquiry into the affairs of the MWU, two mining strikes and numerous court actions between the two competing factions within its ranks. As a result of the stipulations of the War Measures’ Acts pertaining to the mining industry, as well as those of the MWU constitution, a political impasse to solve the issue of democratic elections in the union arose. Therefore the War Measures’ Acts still had legal repercussions for the union three years after the cessation of hostilities. As such, the War Measures’ Acts influenced politics and elections in the MWU as late as 1948.
Several German Roma-Sinti families, members of a caravan of traveling artists, set off from central Germany to Istanbul, passing through the war-torn Balkans during 1942 to the end of January 1943 ...when they were arrested and transferred to the Red Cross camp in Niš. A few months later they were transferred to the Anhaltelager Dedinje in Belgrade (Banjički camp) from where, they were transported to the “Gypsy Camp” of Auschwitz in late June. Following the fate of this group of Roma (i. e. Sinti), the paper also discusses the racist policy of the National Socialist regime towards Roma and Sinti with the final consequence – their mass physical destruction, genocide (Pharrajmos).
The topic of this article, mostly based on the materials of the Military Archive and the Historical Archive of Belgrade, is the analysis of the private and everyday life of members of the Serbian ...State Guard. As in similar formations, the life of its members was strictly conditioned by its character, which meant that privacy was largely under the control of superior officers and the Command itself. This was especially true during the occupation, when the occupying authorities played a significant role in controlling the overall activities of the Guardsmen.
El surgimiento de la Comisión Económica para América Latina, CEPAL, en 1948, puede ser analizado como continuidad de la modalidad de conferencias y reuniones panamericanas que tuvieron lugar desde ...fin de siglo XIX, aunque su frecuencia aumentó de manera considerable en el contexto de la Segunda Guerra, la posguerra y Guerra Fría. En este trabajo nos detenemos especialmente en las discusiones sobre la economía latinoamericana que resultaron clave a la hora de replantear la economía global durante el período; y en lo que denominamos como "equipo de trabajo a distancia", compuesto por el argentino Raúl Prebisch, los mexicanos Daniel Cosío Villegas y Víctor Urquidi, y el belga nacionalizado estadounidense Robert Triffin, economistas que pensaron la región de manera conjunta, con activa participación en el período 1942-1949. Dentro del período resulta central la Primera Reunión de Expertos en Banca Central, México 1946. Keywords: Conferencias panamericanas, CEPAL- Segunda Guerra-Guerra Fría- América Latina
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