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In most European countries, the horrific legacy of 1939–45 has made it quite difficult to remember the war with much glory. Despite the Anglo-American memory narrative of saving democracy from totalitarianism and the Soviet epic of the Great Patriotic War, the fundamental experience of war for so many Europeans was that of immense personal losses and often meaningless hardships. The anthology at hand focuses on these histories between the victors: on the cases of Hungary, Estonia, Poland, Austria, Finland, and Germany and on the respective, often gendered experiences of defeat. The book’s chapters underline the asynchronous transition to peace in individual experiences, when compared to the smooth timelines of national and international historiographies. Furthermore, it is important to note that instead of a linear chronology, both personal and collective histories tend to return back to the moments of violence and loss, thus forming continuous cycles of remembrance and forgetting. Several of the authors also pay specific attention to the constructed and contested nature of national histories in these cycles. The role of these ‘in-between’ countries – and even more their peoples’ multifaceted experiences – will add to the widening European history of the aftermath, thereby challenging the conventional dichotomies and periodisations. In the aftermath of the seventieth anniversary of 1945, it is still too early to regard the post-war period as mere history, the memory politics and rhetoric of the Second World War and its aftermath are again being used and abused to serve contemporary power politics in Europe

second world war --- violence --- postwar period --- sex crimes --- europe

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Sometimes tragedies that have little to distinguish them from a wide range of similar events and which can make no claim to record numbers of casualties or destructive impact go down in history as fundamental and emblematic. This is the case of two of the airstrikes discussed in this volume: Barcelona and Dresden. Other tragedies, however, are sometimes obscured by circumstances elsewhere. This is the case of the “other Guernicas”: that is to say, the bombings of Otxandio, Durango and Elorrio in Biscay. They are good examples not only of the brutality inherent in all wars and of how methods of combat become increasingly barbaric as conflicts wear on but also of the way in which some circumstances push events to the forefront of history and make them emblematic.

Spanish Civil War, Spain, Second World War, Germany

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From 1945 to 1961, former Wehrmacht officers undertook thousands of historical studies on behalf of the US army. Shared points of view with the Americans and the advent of the Cold War enabled the German soldiers to develop a self-justifying interpretation of history that denied the German war of extermination. The Historical Division actively contributed to the transatlantic dissemination of this myth of the clean Wehrmacht.

Cold War --- German-American relations --- military history --- Second World War

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Princess Marie Adelheid of Lippe-Biesterfeld was a rebellious young writer who became a fervent Nazi. Heinrich Vogeler was a well-regarded artist who was to join the German Communist Party. Ludwig Roselius was a successful businessman who had made a fortune from his invention of decaffeinated coffee. What was it about the revolutionary climate following World War I that induced three such different personalities to collaborate in the production of a slim volume of poetry—entitled Gott in Mir—about the indwelling of the divine within the human?Gossman's study situates the poem in the ideological context that made the collaboration possible: pantheism, Darwinism, disillusionment with traditional liberal values, theosophy and völkisch religions, and Lebensreform. The study outlines the subsequent life of the Princess who, until her death in 1993, continued to support and celebrate the ideals and heroes of National Socialism. Brownshirt Princess provides deep insight into the sources and character of the "Nazi Conscience", and is invaluable reading for anybody interested in understanding German society during the inter-war and Nazi periods.

Nazism --- National Socialism --- German history --- German literature --- European history --- World War II --- Second World War --- poetry

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re complex as two parallel nationalist movements – one seeking higher Yugoslav unity, the other arguing for the separate political autonomy of ethnic groups – often complemented one another, but at other times were in open conflict. Moreover, the political and territorial ambitions entailed by the various ethnic nationalisms often collided with each other. Eventually, as elsewhere, a marriage of necessity brought the two together. Yugoslav communists had to acknowledge that nationalism was a potent political force. They thus continued searching for a political project that could successfully combine both social and national emancipation in the context of developed and often mutually exclusive national projects of neighbouring groups. In this chapter, I show how the Yugoslav communists ‘discovered’ the successful federalist formula for the socialist re unification of Yugoslavia after the Second World War as well as how, as with any ‘successful’ formula, its discovery was preceded by numerous fruitless experiments.

second world war --- federalism --- anti-fascism --- communists --- marxism --- national question --- josip broz tito