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When Britain entered World War II on September 3, 1939, it was deemed a minor watershed in comparison with the Prague crisis. Of greater intellectual impact was Adolf Hitler's military breakthrough in the summer of 1940, after which only the most obdurate or the most apolitical could support non-resistance, and only the most optimistic or gullible could expect a satisfactory negotiated peace. A more gradual change of mood occurred after the Soviet Union and the United States entered the war during the second half of 1941, thereby improving the prospects of military victory.

This chapter describes Greiser's rise to power through the Nazi movement and his affair with Maria Koerfer. Through the Nazi Party, Greiser came to believe that he could achieve greatness for both himself and his nation. In 1934, he was already head of state in Danzig. He adopted a Nazi persona — bossy, churlish, and aggressive. He adopted the Nazi political agenda, loudly attacking parliamentary democracy, Social Democracy, Poles and Poland, and the League of Nations. In the early 1930s, his relationship with his wife, Ruth, soured. In 1934, Arthur started an affair with Maria Koerfer, a pianist. The romance between Greiser and Maria left a remarkable paper trail, dozens of letters that he wrote to her. Greiser's letters to Maria are key documents in understanding Greiser's personal and political trajectory; they reveal the man that Greiser had become by the mid–1930s, after almost five years in the Nazi movement.

This chapter discusses Greiser's tenure as Senate President in Danzig, including his rivalry with Forster. In November 1934, it seemed that Arthur Greiser, as a fanatical German nationalist and now senate president, would stop at nothing to Nazify Danzig. But curiously, as Danzig's chief executive, Greiser came to be seen as the face of Nazi moderation in the city. To his opponents, Greiser was nothing but a two-faced Nazi. The Greiser–Forster rivalry was a key factor in Danzig politics during the 1930s. Due to his conflict with Forster, Greiser cultivated contacts among high-ranking Nazis, including Himmler and Goring, who could protect him against the Gauleiter's machinations. Greiser learned an important political lesson. Never again would he position himself on the ‘moderate’ end of Nazi policy. As he saw in Danzig, the Nazi favored those who advocated more extreme positions.

This chapter explains where and when international territorial administration (ITA) was used before and during the UN missions in Kosovo and East Timor. In terms of plenary administration, it covers the League of Nations in the Saar and Letica; the UN in West Irian, South West Africa/Namibia, and Eastern Slavonia; the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in camps housing refugees and internally displaced people in various places; and the EU in Mostar. In terms of partial administration, it covers the League of Nations in Danzig; the UN in the Congo, Namibia, Cambodia, Western Sahara, Somalia, and Northern Iraq; the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Palestinian refugee camps in various places; UN material assistance programmes in various places; and the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia. It also covers the involvement of foreign nationals appointed by international entities on national institutions, including courts and tribunals, in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, East Timor, Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Sierra Leone; and the role of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in conducting elections in Bosnia and Kosovo.

This is the first of two chapters establishing the legal status of those territories where ITA projects have occurred, focusing on territories that were states or formed part of state territories for the duration of the administration projects taking place in them: the Saar between 1920 and 1935, the Free City of Danzig between 1920 and 1939, Memel in 1924, Leticia between 1933 and 1934, the Congo between 1960 and 1964, Somalia in 1993, Cambodia between 1991 and 1992, northern Iraq between 1996 and 2003; Bosnia and Herzegovina in general and Mostar in particular from 1994; Eastern Slavonia between 1996 and 1998, and Kosovo from 1999. It is argued that in no case did the international organizations involved enjoy sovereignty in the sense of title over the territories affected.

Dorothea Swarze was born into a family of German peasant colonists in present-day Poland. She practised extreme forms of self-punishment from an early age: beating herself with rods, whips, thistles, and thorny branches; scalding herself with candles and red hot iron. She moved to Danzig and then travelled widely before and after having children (eight of her nine infants died). In 1393 she was walled into a cell at Marienwerder, becoming the first anchoress of the Prussian frontier. Her cult, including all reports of her speaking, was controlled by the Teutonic Order. First acclaimed as a bulwark against pagan Lithuania, she is later taken up by the new, nineteenth-century Prussian state (inspiring the great Germanist and novelist, George Eliot). Later, under 1930s fascism, she becomes a bulwark against Bolshevism; her canonization in 1976 is opposed by Günter Grass but supported and celebrated by Josef Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI.

Contexts of European war, and approach to war, powerfully influence what The Book of Margery Kempe has to be when discovered in 1934. Margery is first marketed and reviewed as an English Joan of Arc, and discourses of hysteria, pathologization, and foreign influence immediately surrounded her Book. The hysterics read into Margery Kempe are largely those, the chapter argues, of her historical and publishing times: the 1430s, and the 1930s. Turning to the question of ‘what Margery wants’, the chapter proposes that she covets the seriousness of an enclosed religious, but yet aspires to travel. The late-life traveling of Book II, while suggesting parallels with Bridget of Sweden, is unsanctioned, and of indeterminate genre. Margery’s long London sojourn of 1433-4, coinciding with vigorously emergent London chronicling by the merchant élite, inspires to think that, as a worshipful woman of Lynn, her own life might be chronicled.

The Ligue des droits de l’homme went into freefall after 1937. It was not the Nazis who killed the Ligue, but rather the crisis which came to a head in 1937. In 1938 and 1939, the Ligue underwent a financial and membership crisis. The last two pre-war Congresses were rather tired affairs. The Munich crisis, the invasion of Prague, the question of Danzig, and the fall of France did not change the political/historical analysis of the minority which continued to explain the crises of 1938–40 through the lens of the Great War. The collaboration of some members of the minority during the Second World War was due to their dissenting position on the origins of the Great War. The Ligue’s papers were seized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg shortly after the Germans reached Paris in June 1940, eventually to be transported back to Berlin for analysis.

This chapter examines the works of Günter Grass to address the following questions: How did new vocabularies to describe and address the German past emerge in the postwar era? To what extent did writers introduce novel ways to see what had occurred during and subsequent to the Nazi era that allowed their readers to glimpse the shadow that futurity casts on the German present? How did fiction indicate the possibility of prospection, self-creation, and the formation of a new community? It argues that more effectively than any other writer of the postwar era, Grass introduced a new vocabulary that helped shape a German democratic and humanistic public discourse.

This chapter investigates the variable success of League interventions using induced devolution in three mediated intra-state conflicts in interwar Europe—the Åland Islands, Memel, and Danzig. In nested conflicts, devolution arrangements mostly succeed in de-escalating tensions on the ground if they also satisfy the relevant regional players. Once regional conflicts are effectively brokered, domestic spoilers can be managed far more effectively with modest concessions. Indeed, longitudinal analysis of the three cases shows that conflict on the ground was mostly driven by wider conflicts between the host and lobby states on the regional or bilateral level. Thus, resolving or containing conflict dynamics in the wider neighborhood should be a principal priority for peacemakers.

In this chapter the five towns of Aberdeen in Scotland, Kampen in the Netherlands, Lübeck in Germany, Reval (Tallinn) in Estonia and Danzig (Gdańsk) in Poland are introduced, by discussing their evolution, government, court system and trade, and subsequently compared. It is argued that although each of the five towns grew to be an important centre of trade in its own area, they were for a large part different as regards the way they were ruled, the power they exercised outside their boundaries and the laws to which they were subject.

In this chapter the manuscript collections of the towns of Aberdeen, Kampen, Lübeck, Danzig and Reval are analysed in order to determine which sea laws were at the courts' disposal and from what date. Following on from chapter 1, this analysis provides a more detailed investigation of the development and dissemination of the different law compilations and their manuscript copies. A comparison of the urban collections leads to the conclusion that there was no particular commonality in these. The main body of law in the towns of Kampen, Lübeck and Danzig is formed by compilations which originated in those towns and there is no written law which was available in all five towns in the later Middle Ages.

The first section of this chapter discusses the Scottish translation of the French Laws of Oléron, which have never before been studied. This section provides conclusions on when the translation was made and by what route the text was most likely disseminated to Scotland. The remainder of the chapter is dedicated to local developments in lawmaking in the towns of Kampen, Lübeck and Danzig. These three towns drew up sea laws whose use remained for the most part restricted to their respective courts. In this chapter these texts are compared to the laws considered closest to them in order to determine whether the contents of these laws were influenced by legal developments elsewhere. Some mutual influences can be detected, but, again, no uniformity existed between any of the law compilations as a whole.

This chapter discusses a number of issues concerning the administration of maritime justice. Firstly, it investigates who administered justice in the towns of Aberdeen, Kampen, Lübeck, Danzig and Reval, but also which court was competent and which law applied when parties of different ‘nationalities’ were involved in a single case. This was a regular occurrence, but it will be argued here that it rarely caused any problems and did not result in the coming into being of supra-national laws or courts. Secondly, the chapter considers in more detail the courts of Lübeck and Danzig, which functioned as a court of appeal for Reval and as a central maritime court for Prussia and Poland respectively. Finally, direct evidence for the use of the written laws in each of the urban courts is analysed and compared in order to establish whether the available manuscripts were actually used in court proceedings.

The aim of this final chapter is two-fold. Firstly, the decisions of the urban courts of Aberdeen, Kampen, Lübeck, Danzig and Reval in maritime matters are compared to the written regulations to gain additional insights into the question whether the written laws were utilised in the passing of judgement at the courts. It is concluded that the written laws were only utilised when any recent law compilations were available to the courts. Most of the time, the judges or juries used their common sense. Secondly, the verdicts in cases of shipwreck, jettison and ship collision are compared in order to establish whether a common practice of maritime law existed among the northern European towns. As in previous chapters, this commonality appears not to have existed.

Chapter six presents a case study of one of the most famous and influential academic couples of the era: Johann Christoph and Luise Adelgunde Viktorie Gottsched. In addition to Frau Gottsched’s successful career as an author, she was also an avid amateur musician. For much of her life, keyboard and lute playing served as a means of expressing optimism that human beings could improve themselves and the world around them by cultivating their unique rational faculties. In later years, as her relationship with her husband began to fray, her faith in rationalist philosophy suffered, and she endured a crisis of both body and spirit. This chapter presents an account her musical activities within the framework of her courtship and marriage. Though Bach was a neighbor and collaborator, the Gottscheds seem to have preferred the music of other composers.

“A Boy Named Sue,” a song composed by Shel Silverstein and performed by Johnny Cash, is about a boy’s displeasure for growing up as a kind of comic legend because he has a woman’s name, for which he has faced a life of mockery and abuse. It is some sort of a fable: a boy raised by a name and not by a father. The strange resonance of “A Boy Named Sue” had to be among the precedents informing “Thirteen,” another Cash song about a man born without any name at all. Written by Glenn Danzig , it is a composition that toys with the fault line separating tragedy and farce. One of the song’s lines is “Bad luck wind blowing at my back.” This chapter examines the lyrics of “Thirteen” and how the song embraces Cash’s “Man in Black” persona, as well as how his rendering evokes the complexities involving his own mythology.

Many recent commentators have seen the League of Nations as a ‘golden age’ of international minority rights commitments. This chapter argues, however, that the 1919–24 decisions of international diplomats were motivated less by a principled commitment to justice for minorities than by a particular conception of world order. This conception saw selective international supervision of minority protection as necessary to prevent interstate war and respond to the exigencies of a civilizational and power hierarchy amongst peoples and states, while also advancing the particular politico-economic interests of the Principal Allied Powers. The result was support for internationally guaranteed territorial autonomy for a few minorities, but rejection of the claims of others and of the entrenchment of universal minority rights in the League Covenant. The early years of the League minority protection system has lessons for today’s debates about the place of minority rights within the post-cold-war order.

Our three existing master narratives of the early Reformation in Poland are all over a century old and mutually contradictory, drawing on different sources to serve differing confessional and national/ist agendas. This chapter offers a fresh narrative of the impact of Lutheranism on the Polish composite monarchy to c.1540, synthesizing these older accounts and updating them with new research findings. This is a narrative in three parts: early signs (1517–24), the great Reformation year (1525), and aftershocks (1526–40). The chapter discusses the challenges of measuring ‘Lutheran’ sentiment, sets these Polish-Prussian events clearly in their comparative European context, and considers what implications they might have for that bigger, familiar tale. It stresses the precocity of Sigismund I’s monarchy, which saw the most far-reaching urban and violent Reformation in 1520s Europe (Danzig), a peasant Reformation rising, and Christendom’s first territorial-princely Reformation, in Ducal Prussia.