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An Anti‐Fascist Alliance, 1934–42

Nicholas Owen

in The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885-1947

This chapter looks at the most successful effort to build an alliance of the kind described in the previous chapter: the anti-fascist alliance built by Jawaharlal Nehru and parts of the Labour left, ... More

This chapter looks at the most successful effort to build an alliance of the kind described in the previous chapter: the anti-fascist alliance built by Jawaharlal Nehru and parts of the Labour left, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, in the late 1930s. Nehru's greater success in alliance-building in Britain is analysed and explained, and the organizational consequences of his approach — in particular the growing strength of V. K. Krishna Menon's India League, and the anti-fascist agreement co-sponsored by Stafford Cripps in 1938 — are traced. The chapter goes on to examine and explain the difficulties Nehru encountered in delivering the Indian side of the bargain in the early years of the Second World War, the failure of the Cripps Mission in 1942, and the consequent fragmentation of metropolitan anti-imperialism.Less

Rise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex

Michael David-Fox

in Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941

This chapter traces Soviet cultural diplomacy through three radically divergent periods: the mid-1930s height of the Popular Front, the Great Terror and show trials from 1936–38, and the Nazi-Soviet ... More

This chapter traces Soviet cultural diplomacy through three radically divergent periods: the mid-1930s height of the Popular Front, the Great Terror and show trials from 1936–38, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939–41. Although the Soviet system for receiving foreigners that had emerged in the 1920s was not fundamentally reworked in the 1930s, prewar Stalinism was marked by sea-shifts in ideology and attitudes toward the outside world. The first was the rise of a “superiority complex,” in which virtually everything Soviet was deemed the best in the world, at least officially. The second was a decisive internal Soviet tilt, underway already at the height of European anti-fascism in the mid-1930s, away from the optimistic Soviet quest to engage and dominate Western cultural politics in favor of “vigilance,” ideological xenophobia, and the hunt for hidden enemies. During the Great Terror, international contacts that had previously brought prestige to Soviet cultural mediators suddenly became the grounds for mass physical annihilation as VOKS and Soviet international organizations were decimated; during the Pact period of Soviet cultural diplomacy, reduced to a shadow of its former self, became largely a matter of sending symbolic signals to the Nazis.Less

Early Exile Novels

Ailsa Wallace

in Hermynia Zur Mühlen: The Guises of Socialist Fiction

This chapter discusses the early exile literature that Zur Mühlen published after arriving in Austria, and how she continued to experiment with content and form in her search for a balance between ... More

This chapter discusses the early exile literature that Zur Mühlen published after arriving in Austria, and how she continued to experiment with content and form in her search for a balance between political instruction and entertainment that publishers would accept in that political climate. Contrary to much secondary literature, it contends that Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen is more than just a flawed Zeitroman, and examines the ways in which she alerted her readership to the dangers of the Third Reich and tried to promote resistance. Her humorous novel, Nora hat eine famose Idee shows how she continued to appropriate popular genres for a political purpose, and demonstrates the limitations of the Humoreske for this use. Ein Jahr im Schatten uses many familiar elements from her Mädchenliteratur to discuss the rise of fascism in Germany from an Austrian perspective. In these three early exile novels, her politics are defined by anti-fascism and by an increasing move from Communism towards the Catholic Left. In advocating resistance she continued to champion collective action, but this was founded on basic human decency and individual responsibility, rather than Communist politics.Less

Intelligence and the Rearmament Programmes of 1936

PETER JACKSON

in France and the Nazi Menace: Intelligence and Policy Making 1933-1939

This chapter discusses how intelligence was central to the formulation of the land and air rearmament programmes adopted by the Popular Front government in the late 1936. This decision was triggered ... More

This chapter discusses how intelligence was central to the formulation of the land and air rearmament programmes adopted by the Popular Front government in the late 1936. This decision was triggered by the support generated by the anti-Fascism in order to come up with a defence expenditure from the traditionally pacifist left.Less

Introduction: ‘Unforgotten’

Fraser Raeburn

in Scots and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity, Activism and Humanitarianism

Despite the death of the last Scottish participant in the Spanish Civil War in 2012, and the absence of sustained scholarly interest, Scottish involvement in the Spanish Civil War has never been ... More

Despite the death of the last Scottish participant in the Spanish Civil War in 2012, and the absence of sustained scholarly interest, Scottish involvement in the Spanish Civil War has never been forgotten. This memory has been preserved through ongoing grassroots efforts to write about, commemorate and celebratethe activists and volunteers who gave their time, money and lives in defence of the Spanish Republic. Rather than recovering an otherwise ‘forgotten’ history, this book instead aims to offer new explanations and analysis of this passion for Spain that so clearly lives on today. As well as offering a new assessment of how far a particularly ‘Scottish’ response to the conflict existed, it contextualises this story within much wider narratives: the wider ideological struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, the transnational nature of interwar communist politics and culture as well as the modern phenomenon of foreign war volunteering.Less

Thinking and Acting

Fraser Raeburn

in Scots and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity, Activism and Humanitarianism

The motives of foreigners who fought in the Spanish Civil War has long fascinated historians. While recent work has been able to explore the complexities of individual motivation, efforts to explain ... More

The motives of foreigners who fought in the Spanish Civil War has long fascinated historians. While recent work has been able to explore the complexities of individual motivation, efforts to explain the scale of mobilisation still hinge on the anti-fascist beliefs of the volunteers. As well as exploring new ways of understanding the nature of volunteers’ anti-fascist beliefs, this chapter seeks to adapt and expand these frameworks, arguing that the best explanation for the scale of these mobilisations lies at the intersection of local and transnational communist political cultures. Not only did the belief systems of interwar communism lend themselves to these kinds of mobilisations, the nature of the recruitment process led to social as well as political impetus towards enlisting, leading to the dense recruitment among certain social-political networks observed in the previous chapter. This, it is suggested, offers a model for understanding the key pre-requisites for large-scale foreign fighter mobilisations.Less

Introduction to the Original Text

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

in Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

Jane Marcus outlines her methodology and focus on Nancy Cunard as a poet, contextualizing Cunard’s involvement in the poetry scene with canonical figures of modernism, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, ... More

Jane Marcus outlines her methodology and focus on Nancy Cunard as a poet, contextualizing Cunard’s involvement in the poetry scene with canonical figures of modernism, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Stephen Spender, and pointing to the ways in which she rejected the dominant aesthetic of her age. She also explores Cunard’s concern with whiteness through the influence of father figures, George Moore and Norman Douglas, from her childhood and young adulthood. Cunard’s engagement with Black culture, the compilation of the Negro Anthology, and her journalism devoted to anti-fascism and leftist political activism as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War and for the African American Associated Press are also considered here.Less

The Theory of Faculties

Cheri Lynne Carr

in Deleuze's Kantian Ethos: Critique as a Way of Life

Prior to Foucault’s articulation of anti-fascism as the Deleuzo-Guattarian ethical project, Deleuze described his work as a contestation of the “dogmatic” or “moral” image of thought. For this ... More

Prior to Foucault’s articulation of anti-fascism as the Deleuzo-Guattarian ethical project, Deleuze described his work as a contestation of the “dogmatic” or “moral” image of thought. For this contestation, Deleuze turned in Difference and Repetition to a Kantian notion of critique as the examination of the limits and powers of the faculties. Deleuze’s theory of faculties is a theory of how the subject is produced as an identity through active syntheses that are themselves the produce of passive syntheses. The critical analysis Deleuze undertakes in Difference and Repetition builds on the analysis of habit formation in the process of subjectivation insofar as it offers a method of analysis that is itself disruptive of habits and identities. Deleuze’s “immanent critique” describes in facultative passive synthesis not only the genesis of experience from sensibility, but the breakdown of experience in the violence of encounter. Critique reveals that the movement from the empirical to the transcendental or “heautonomous” forms of the faculties, which happens via an internalization of the violence of encounters that rupture ordinary experience, can be cultivated toward the ends of moving beyond the constraints of rule-governed, limited ways of thinking through the practice of critique itself.Less

The War Years, 1939–1945

Reynold Humphries

in Hollywood's Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History

The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The controversy that raged in America between partisans and adversaries of the country's ... More

The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The controversy that raged in America between partisans and adversaries of the country's participation in World War II was rendered more complex by the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and attitudes within America to Nazi Germany. If Americans were united from 1941–1945, films made in the period 1938–1940 showed that anti-fascism brought together filmmakers of very different political opinions. Before discussing certain war films, this chapter describes an event that occurred in September 1941 whose repercussions were revelatory of the political climate in America and were to return, in an inverted form, once the war was over: the Senate Sub-Committee War Films Hearings. The Sub-Committee was created at the request of two senators, the Democrat Burton Wheeler and the Republican Gerald Nye, to investigate what they saw as blatant propaganda films put out by Hollywood to support Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy and create a situation where the American public would support America entering the war.Less

Introduction

Reynold Humphries

in Hollywood's Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History

The ultra-conservative newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst published a doggerel which evokes the twin assumptions destined to become articles of faith for the Red-baiting Right after World War ... More

The ultra-conservative newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst published a doggerel which evokes the twin assumptions destined to become articles of faith for the Red-baiting Right after World War II: the equation of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal with Communism with the notion that the New Deal's radical supporters were acting at the Soviet Union's behest. Those who continue to justify witch-hunting are embarrassed by the prevalence of anti-Semitism amongst the Red-baiters of the period. It is necessary to address the question of fascism and anti-fascism in order to understand why Communists lost support after World War II. The Hollywood Reds did represent an immense danger, but not to American democracy. What they challenged was the status quo, the economic order, the power and profits of the few, worse: the ideological notion of American hegemony as going without saying. And this challenge started before the opposition to racism and fascism became the rallying cry of the forces of progress.Less

The Making of EP Thompson: family, anti-fascism and the 1930s

Scott Hamilton

in The Crisis of Theory: E.P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics

This chapter discusses Edward Palmer Thompson's family. The British intelligentsia did not enjoy a great deal of institutional and cultural autonomy. The incompleteness of Edward John's ... More

This chapter discusses Edward Palmer Thompson's family. The British intelligentsia did not enjoy a great deal of institutional and cultural autonomy. The incompleteness of Edward John's radicalisation was reflected in the books he wrote during the 1920s. He showed his ambivalent, conflicted attitude towards Britain and its Empire by rejecting the political positions of the Quit India movement established by his friends Nehru and Gandhi. Both Frank and Edward Palmer Thompson were powerfully influenced by their parents' interests and attitudes. They soon came to share their father's great love of literature, as well as some of his political views. The chapter then draws together some of the threads of the stories of Edward John and Frank Thompson, and relates them to the story of Edward Palmer Thompson. Thompson's historiographical positions ultimately defer to moral and political arguments which he pursued outside as well as inside the discipline of history.Less

‘Anti-Fascist Literature’ as Holocaust Literature?: The Holocaust in the Hungarian Socialist Literary Marketplace, 1956–1970

Richard S. Esbenshade

in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 31: Poland and Hungary: Jewish Realities Compared

This chapter shows the surprising presence and force of the Holocaust in the mass-market literature of the late 1950s and 1960s. A key issue is what effect ideology had on memory during a period when ... More

This chapter shows the surprising presence and force of the Holocaust in the mass-market literature of the late 1950s and 1960s. A key issue is what effect ideology had on memory during a period when often narrow limits on both narrative and language confined all public speech. Concretely, did squeezing Holocaust discourse into the box of 'anti-fascism' invalidate it as Holocaust memory? Post-Cold War historiographical approaches to communist (and other) ideologies have opened up, seeing them not, or not only, as 'false', 'propaganda', and so on but as a framework for discourse, with its own rules and limits, but also with a certain room for manoeuvre. Expanding the parameters of 'Holocaust literature', both in terms of whose experience and which periods are covered, permits a more integrated memory — one that is lacking in the 'memory wars' of the post-communist period. Given the starkness of the metaphors used to describe the allegedly barren landscape of Holocaust literature in socialist Hungary, it is worth examining more closely both the background in terms of Jewish identity and its effects on memory and the system of literary production and control after Stalinism.Less

Venice, Nazi-Fascist War and American Peace, 1940–1948

R.J.B. Bosworth

in Italian Venice: A History

This chapter examines Venice's experience during World War II, the alliance between Italy and Germany during the war, and the restoration of peace in the city by 1948. It considers the impact of the ... More

This chapter examines Venice's experience during World War II, the alliance between Italy and Germany during the war, and the restoration of peace in the city by 1948. It considers the impact of the war on Venice, particularly in the fields of art, architecture, leisure, and tourism. It also discusses politics in the city, including the rise of anti-Fascism. Finally, it describes the conditions in Venice in the post-war period, citing the establishment of welfare states as payment to the people for toppling Nazism and Fascism.Less

The Many Deaths of Post-War Venice, 1948–1978

R.J.B. Bosworth

in Italian Venice: A History

This chapter focuses on the theme of death in Venice in the years after World War II. Venice's official population in 1951 stood at 174,808. A decade later, the tally in old Venice had dropped to ... More

This chapter focuses on the theme of death in Venice in the years after World War II. Venice's official population in 1951 stood at 174,808. A decade later, the tally in old Venice had dropped to 137,150. By 2001 there were only 65,695 people in Venetia. After ten years, the urban population was down to 59,635. The chapter first describes the issues and concerns that preoccupied Venice during the first years of peace, including those relating to anti-Fascism, the Communist Party, and the social conditions that sustained it, tourism, and employment. It then considers the Christian Democrats who ruled the city, as well as city politics involving the Catholic Church. It also discusses the five-point plan proposed for Venice aimed at restoring damaged artworks and protecting the city from man-made pollutants, among other environmental initiatives.Less

Inspirations

James Mark, Nigel Townson, and Polymeris Voglis

in Europe's 1968: Voices of Revolt

This chapter uses oral history to uncover the range of political models that activists drew upon as inspiration for their own struggles. It examines the extent to which the tradition of the ... More

This chapter uses oral history to uncover the range of political models that activists drew upon as inspiration for their own struggles. It examines the extent to which the tradition of the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s and 1940s remained, or regained, importance in the socialization of activists of this generation, and ways in which new exemplars drawn from the ‘Third World’ revolutions against imperialism and colonialism in Latin America, Africa or Asia supplanted earlier models. Testimony is drawn from southern European dictatorships, the communist bloc and democratic west of Europe to compare ways in which, in very different political contexts, anti-fascism and anti-imperialism were harnessed to motivate and legitimate revolt.Less

Conclusion

R.J.B. Bosworth

in Italian Venice: A History

This book has challenged various notions about Venice, such as the claim that the Italian city's history offers little with which modern-day visitors can identify personally, or that its history is ... More

This book has challenged various notions about Venice, such as the claim that the Italian city's history offers little with which modern-day visitors can identify personally, or that its history is dead just like Venice itself. It has argued that Venice actually boasts copious histories, many of which are modern, and that the city has been subject to change like any other place. In other words, time has not stood still in Venice. From the years after 1866, when Venetians learned to live under the rule of liberalism, to the glamour and squalor of the belle époque, Venice has actually experienced the full impact of contemporary history. The book has also chronicled Venice's experience with totalitarianism through the years of Benito Mussolini's rule, as well as the disputes involving cosmopolitanism and nationalism, Fascism and anti-Fascism, and between particularists and defenders of the Catholic Church.Less