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13632 results in Twentieth century European history

Page 157 of 682

  • 4 - The Weimar Gap

  • Brendan Karch, Louisiana State University
  • Book:
    Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland
    Published online:
    14 September 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 148-185

  • Summary

    A decade of democratic Weimar rule in Oppeln widened the gap between nationally instrumental Upper Silesians and increasingly radical activists. New democratic freedoms and regional autonomy offered greater protection of bilingual rights. New minority protections were effectively enforced by a League of Nations treaty. Polish nationalists falsely hoped these freedoms would finally allow Upper Silesians to awaken to their national identities. Instead, Polish associational life generally declined. Families rejected new Polish minority schools and catechism instruction. Polish nationalists’ regional electoral parties declined slowly into irrelevance. By 1932, many more Polish speakers voted for Hitler than for the Polish party. Polish activists, rather than question their tactics or appeal amid rapid decline, lashed out at Polish speakers as traitors. These activists found a shared affinity with the rising Nazis in lauding forced racial separation. The regional Polish turn toward racialist politics by the 1930s, while reflecting broader Central European trends, grew locally out of frustration with nationally instrumental Upper Silesians.

  • 3 - Breakdown

  • Brendan Karch, Louisiana State University
  • Book:
    Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland
    Published online:
    14 September 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 96-147

  • Summary

    During and after World War I, Upper Silesia suffered the most fundamental breakdown it had yet seen. Wartime Germany’s newly aggressive nationalism drove a handful of Upper Silesians to the Polish cause, but the vast majority served loyally in the Prussian army. Only German defeat and new Polish statehood in 1918 made it plausible to turn the Oppeln area into a Polish homeland. The Allies’ initial decision to cede nearly all of Upper Silesia to Poland in 1919 was reversed, amid German protest, in favor of a regional plebiscite. While the vote was intended to clarify national allegiances, the bloody campaign fight and chaotic French-led occupation under the League of Nations actually caused a retreat from national loyalties. A near-complete breakdown of communal order disillusioned Upper Silesians with nationalist politics. As plebiscite propaganda shows, Upper Silesians were expected to vote based on material security or cultural benefits, rather than a sense of national duty or belonging. Instead of democratically dividing populations into loyal Germans and Poles, the plebiscite increasingly convinced Upper Silesians of the need to avoid overt national commitment.

  • 1 - The Battle Before

  • Brendan Karch, Louisiana State University
  • Book:
    Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland
    Published online:
    14 September 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 23-57

  • Summary

    Until the 1930s, Germany, which ruled over Upper Silesia, relied on the appeal of education and economic integration to turn local Polish speakers into Germans. Polish activists sought to upset this pull toward German assimilation. A newspaper editor, Bronisław Koraszewski, arrived in the district capital Oppeln in 1890 intending to nationalize local Polish-speaking villagers. A small corps of Polish activists emerged around Koraszewski, capitalizing on popular discontent with the Catholic Center Party. A new Polish nationalist party recorded historic gains at the polls in 1903 and 1907, effectively dividing the local electorate into German and Polish camps. Yet these divisions proved fleeting and did not carry over to wider society. Koraszewski’s Polish-Catholic associations, founded in the 1890s, disbanded one by one after 1900. Bilingual practices continued in villages. After 1908, Polish nationalists’ electoral fortunes declined, socialism made new inroads, and the Center Party rebounded. Had World War I not radicalized the terms of national belonging, Koraszewski’s national ideal of making a Polish nation in Oppeln may have continued to fade.

  • 2 - Nationalism’s Debut

  • Brendan Karch, Louisiana State University
  • Book:
    Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland
    Published online:
    14 September 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 58-95

  • Summary

    Until the 1930s, Germany, which ruled over Upper Silesia, relied on the appeal of education and economic integration to turn local Polish speakers into Germans. Polish activists sought to upset this pull toward German assimilation. A newspaper editor, Bronisław Koraszewski, arrived in the district capital Oppeln in 1890 intending to nationalize local Polish-speaking villagers. A small corps of Polish activists emerged around Koraszewski, capitalizing on popular discontent with the Catholic Center Party. A new Polish nationalist party recorded historic gains at the polls in 1903 and 1907, effectively dividing the local electorate into German and Polish camps. Yet these divisions proved fleeting and did not carry over to wider society. Koraszewski’s Polish-Catholic associations, founded in the 1890s, disbanded one by one after 1900. Bilingual practices continued in villages. After 1908, Polish nationalists’ electoral fortunes declined, socialism made new inroads, and the Center Party rebounded. Had World War I not radicalized the terms of national belonging, Koraszewski’s national ideal of making a Polish nation in Oppeln may have continued to fade.

Bombing the City
  • Civilian Accounts of the Air War in Britain and Japan, 1939–1945
  • Aaron William Moore
  • Published online:
    01 October 2018
    Print publication:
    18 October 2018
  • World War II is enshrined in our collective memory as the good war - a victory of good over evil. However, the bombing war has always troubled this narrative as total war transformed civilians into legitimate targets and raised unsettling questions such as whether it was possible for Allies and Axis alike to be victims of aggression. In Bombing the City, an unprecedented comparative history of how ordinary Britons and Japanese experienced bombing, Aaron William Moore offers a major new contribution to these debates. Utilising hundreds of diaries, letters, and memoirs, he recovers the voices of ordinary people on both sides - from builders, doctors and factory-workers to housewives, students and policemen - and reveals the shared experiences shaped by gender, class, race, and age. He reveals how it was that the British and Japanese public continued to support bombing elsewhere even as they experienced firsthand its terrible impact at home.

  • Aesthetic Form and Political Function: Representations of French Algerian and British Indian Troops in First World War Recruiting Posters

  • from Representing Race and Empire, 1900-1920
  • Edited by Ben Wellings, Shanti Sumartojo
  • Book:
    Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    27 September 2018, pp 131-148

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This chapter examines selected examples from collections of First World War posters from across British India and French Algeria. Current historiographies of colonial participation in the First World War provide an important cultural context for understanding why poster artists used stereotypes as a form of public mediation. The following analysis of aesthetic form and political function will use examples of propaganda posters that provide both a comparative and critical approach to the study of Empire, although remaining aware that the impact of propaganda can only be estimated because there are no known sources of precise measurement including recruitment figures themselves. Colonial troops and their representation in posters designed for the First World War are just one aspect of the effort introduced by wartime propagandists to secure recruits from distant shores as well as to maintain local morale in the face of conflict.

    Britain and France entered the First World War as allies under the 1904 Entente Cordiale. In the face of the large-scale loss of life, voluntary recruitment numbers in Britain had fallen by December 1915 and comparatively low popula–tion in France limited the rates of conscription. Consequently, each Empire turned to its colonial possessions to provide additional troops as a potential solution to recruitment problems. The use of colonial troops signified the power and control of Empire, and this was exemplified by their representation in posters of the First World War. However, the use of colonial troops had a range of implications for the future relationship of each Empire with its colonial dominions. Recruitment from colonial territories produced issues that were far-reaching and, including logistical, moral and ethical implications of colonial participation. The troops from British India, for example, served on the Western Front only in 1914-1915 (with some cavalry remaining until 1918), as there were concerns about pitting non-whites against white troops in battle. The deployment of mixed units in the French Army that included battalions of troupes indigènes saw the increased presence of French African troops in Europe. The physical presence of non-white troops in Europe prompted European public debate about race and the legiti–macy of their deployment.

  • Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary

  • Edited by Ben Wellings, Shanti Sumartojo
  • Book:
    Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    27 September 2018, pp 7-20

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In November 2016, at the halfway point of the First World War Centenary, a modest exhibition based on volunteer research and supported by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund opened in the London suburb of Wood Green. Far from the Western Front presented accounts of South Asian servicemen who served across the many theatres of war. It was only mounted for a few days, but it sought to complicate both the dominant British narrative of the First World War as trench warfare in France and Belgium, and common depiction of the British forces as white. By focusing on the ‘untold stories of South Asians whose crucial contribution shaped the First World War’ the exhibit sought to remind (or inform) visitors that ‘there was more to the First World War than the mud and trenches of Europe’. The exhibit rediscovered stories that sought to shift common perceptions of the Great War in London and introduce alternative threats and hardships into the collective memory of the War: ‘the threat of lions on patrol in East Africa, thirst in the 50 degree heat of the Sinai desert, and starvation at the Siege of Kut’.

    Yet if such broader experiences were common to many millions of people outside of Europe in 1914-1918, the representation of this aspect of the Great War was in a decidedly minor key in 2014-2018. David Olusoga argues that ‘the First World War has a unique characteristic that has – among another consequences – come to submerge the war's multinational, multi-ethnic and multiracial dimensions’. This book explores why this was the case and engages directly with the question of how race and empire were understood during the war, and how subaltern narratives were recognised, forgotten or commemo–rated one hundred years later. It shows why and how non-national narratives of region, race and empire were elided, forgotten and occasionally commemo–rated in particular ways at particular times and in particular places during the First World War centenary.

    At its core is the argument that this process of remembering and forgetting has been conditioned in three important ways:

  • What gets commemorated and by whom in 2014-2018 is significantly condi–tioned by the demands of the nation-state within the dynamics of the interna–tional state system – in this sense commemoration is shaped horizontally;

  • From ‘Coolie’ to Transnational Agent: the ‘Afterlives’ of World War One Chinese Workers

  • from Rediscovering and Rehabilitating Empire, 2014-2018
  • Edited by Ben Wellings, Shanti Sumartojo
  • Book:
    Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    27 September 2018, pp 23-38

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In April 2010 China Central Television's international English-language channel (Channel Nine) broadcast a six-episode documentary in its series ‘New Frontiers’ hosted by Ji Xiaojun on the 130,000-plus Chinese workers recruited by the French and British governments during World War One. In portentous tones Ji Xiaojun boldly announced in the first episode that the World War One Chinese workers ‘stood shoulder to shoulder’ with British and French troops to combat German military aggression, and that in the process 20,000 of them were killed. Such a valuable contribution to the Allied victory, Ji continued, was not fully acknowledged by France and Britain until fifty years after the end of the war. Overall, the programme depicted the episode as a shining example of China's positive and beneficial interaction with the world predating the current era of China's ‘globalisation’ (in Chinese referred to as duiwai kaifang or ‘opening up to the outside world’) that is declared to have begun with the post-Mao market reforms launched in 1978-1980. In fact, the China Central Television (CCTV) programme signalled an extraordinary revival of interest in the story of World War One Chinese workers, which – notwithstanding the programme's reference to the tardy recognition of the Chinese workers’ contribution by Britain and France – had long been marginalised or completely ignored in China itself, a fact conveniently overlooked by the CCTV documentary.

    After briefly detailing the wartime role of the Chinese workers and the ways in which it was described by Chinese officials and intellectuals at the time, this chapter will explore the reasons why the entire episode of the allied recruitment of Chinese labour was completely ignored after 1949 in China, and why there has been such a resurgence of interest in the World War One Chinese workers in contemporary China. It is worth noting, however, that such a phenomenon paral–lels a similar ‘rediscovery’ in France today of the World War One Chinese workers. The predominantly Eurocentric approach to World War One that characterized much of French (and western) scholarship until relatively recently meant that in France it was not until 2010 that the first major international conference on the role and experiences of Chinese workers in wartime France was held, jointly organised by the University of the Littoral in Boulogne and In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, Belgium and resulting in a major French-language publication two years later.

  • ‘A Strange, New Race’: Eugenics and the Australian Soldier in the First World War

  • from Representing Race and Empire, 1900-1920
  • Edited by Ben Wellings, Shanti Sumartojo
  • Book:
    Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    27 September 2018, pp 93-106

  • Summary

    When Pierre Nora launched his study of the historical concept of ‘collective memory’ in France in the late 1970s, he emphasised the idea that a group's identity constantly integrates its sense of the past. When this memory is connoted as ‘national’ what is retained as the past is influenced by shifting politics of identity. One hundred years after the participation of a newly federated Commonwealth of Australia in the Great War, the different projects to commemorate the event will necessarily seek to apply a social ‘use’ of memory. Removed in time from the moment when military deeds were seen as essential for national emergence, in Australia the Great War has followed a historiographic trajectory from stories of imperial or colonial heroism, to contestation, controversy, revived national pride, but also shame and sorrow. Nevertheless, the tradition known as Anzac, marked by the annual public holiday Anzac Day, conceived of in 1916 as a future memory for Australians and New Zealanders, has remained central to the calendar. The centenary of the War has seen Australians strive to include some aspects or historical actors of the War ostensibly forgotten by the tradition. One can note a number of press articles and a TV series on the role of women as nurses and political organisers; there has also been sustained media coverage and a major play on Indigenous soldiers, as well as interesting emerging research on the multi-ethnic character of the Australian Imperial Force who fought through the four years of war. The official organisers of the centenary planned events to commemorate some of the lesser-known battles where Australians fought, while media debates over what some have perceived as an over use of war memory have abounded. The centenary has also witnessed a renewed fascination with the work and life of Australia's noted war correspondent and official historian, Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean. From the 2010 documentary Bean's Great War, to the biography by Ross Coulthart published in 2014, 3 to a commemorative stamp, Bean's key role in the Anzac tradition has not been forgotten. The website of the Australian War Memorial updated during the centenary commemorations, has always showcased the historical role played by Charles Bean, named on the site as a ‘founding father’ of this memorial that he himself imagined, an edifice that dominates the urban plan of the nation's capital.

Page 157 of 682