IX Twentieth Century Original ANNUAL TWENTIETH Article BULLETIN CENTURY OF HISTORICAL Annual ABHL Blackwell Oxford, © 0066-3832 90 The Historical Bulletin UK Publishing, of Association Historical Ltd. Literature LITERATURE (i) British History Keith Laybourn General: biography, reference and wide-ranging There have been a few substantial biographies in 2004, although they have been largely of left-wing figures. Two stand out. M. Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (Merlin, 2003, £15.95) deals with a socialist academic of international standing who wrote two seminal works Parliamentary Socialism (1961) and The State of Capitalist Society (1969) whilst working at the London School of Economics. Miliband was a founder of New Left Review and Socialist Register and by 1965 had come to the conclusion that the Labour Party could not be converted to socialism. He sought to develop alternative strategy but by the end of the Thatcher era had come to the view that social democracy was the only alternative to Thatcher’s conservatism. H. Purcell has also written The Last English Revolutionary: a Biography of Tom Wintringham 1898–1949 (Sutton). a book on a political figure from a rich East Riding of Yorkshire landholding family who joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, although he became disenchanted with the CPGB over its conduct of the Spanish Civil War. Wintringham was one of the founders of the wartime ‘Dad’s army’ where he became, as George Orwell suggested, ‘a notable voice stemming the tide of defeatism’ and with Tom Driberg, and others, was a member of the Common Wealth Party. Purcell has also written, ‘Tom Wintringham: Revolutionary Patriot’ (Hist. Today, 54) Otherwise, there is a A. Adonis and K. Thomas (eds), Roy Jenkins – A Retrospective (OUP, £18.99) which is a collection of recollections about Jenkins from people who knew him. This includes interesting personal information of Jenkins, the son of a miner’s leader, Arthur Jenkins, who was an MP and PPS to Clement Attlee, and some interesting reflections by David Cannandine. However, one awaits Adonis’s forthcoming biography on Jenkins. J. Milling, ’Leading the White Collar Union: Clive Jenkins, the Management of Trade Union Officers, and the Politics of the British Labour Movement (International R. of Social Hist’, 49) also does a good job in examining the growth of white-collar unionism and focuses upon Clive Jenkins, the charismatic leader of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS). One should not overlook S. Pederson, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (Yale U.P., £25) which examines the life of Rathbone (1872–1946) who was at the forefront of social policy in the early twentieth century and the writer of The Disinherited Family (1924). Also, missed from the 2003 list, there are P. Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: 1950 –1957 (Macmillan, 2003, £25), J. Person, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis (Macmillan, 2003, £47.50), D.R. Thorpe, Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon 1897–1973 (Chatto & Windus, 2003, £25), B. Maddox, Maggie: The First Lady (Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, £18.99) and last, but not least, J. Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, Vol. Two: The Iron Lady (Jonathan Cape, 2003, £25). There have been a large number of more wide-ranging publications covering a disparate array of subjects. B. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (OUP, £25) examines the varied responses to Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and goes beyond the static atmospheres of a nation besotted with Kipling, Elgar and Mafeking Night. There is also an original set of essays, with a different twist, in P.D. Morgan and S. Hawkins (eds), Black Experience © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 134 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE and the Empire (OUP, £30). J. Benson, The Working Class in Britain (I.B. Tauris, 2003, pbk £14.95) offers an excellent examination of the wages, incomes, cost of living and the actions of the working class which has now been revised and published in paperback. M.J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850– 1980 (CUP, £40, pbk £14.99) is a second edition of his book on the English ambivalence towards industrial society. A.J. Reid, United We Stand: A History of Britain’s Trade Unions (Allen Lane, £25) looks at the development of trade unionism in fiftyyear cycles, covering the periods 1770–1820, 1820s–1870s, 1870s–1920s and 1920 – 1970s. It is useful, and is complemented by profiles of some of the prominent trade union leaders at various points, but is perhaps a little too comparmentalized. The General Strike of 1926 does not fit in easily with the heyday of trade unions in the 1950 and 1960s. The most impressive of these is P. Ward, Britishness since 1870 (Routledge) which, in contrast to many other books on the subject, argues that Britishness and the union is not collapsing but constantly reforming and reshaping. There is also a touch of Ward’s approach in E. Maziereska, S. Sydney-Smith and J.K. Walton, Relocating Britishness (Manchester U.P., £50). Also worth reading in this vein is T. Kushner, We Europeans? Mass Observation, Race and British Identity in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, Ashgate, £50). Pre-War and First World War For 2004 there has only been one pre-1914 study which has caught my attention. This is M. Brodie, The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London 1885–1914 (OUP, £50), an iconoclastic examination if the political views of the poor in the East End of London which challenges the view that the residents of the East End of London were poor slum dwellers, apathetic in politics and prone to populist support for imperialism and protectionism, and were racist. Indeed, the poor of the East End of London emerge far more prosperous than they are usually presented as being and likely to vote for the Labour Party and the Liberals just as much as the Conservatives at the end of the Edwardian era. Last year publications on the Great War focused upon the home front. This year the main studies have concentrated more with the war front. I.F.W. Beckett, Ypres. The First Battle 1914 (Pearson Education, £19.99) is an excellent study of the first great battle of the Great War, examining the importance of Ypres to the British army. A. Fletcher, ‘An Officer on the Western Front’ (Hist. Today, 54) offers a brief popular article in which Anthony Fletcher, the famous social historian, examines the wartime correspondence of his grandfather who was killed shortly before the end of the War. T. Bowman, Irish Regiments in the Great War: Discipline and morale (Manchester U.P., pbk £12.95) goes beyond the 312 cases of soldiers being ‘shot-at-dawn’ to examine the treatment of some of the thousands of soldiers who faced courts martial through a study of the Irish regiments. Examining the experience of the 10th (Irish), 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions he suggests that most cases were of a minor nature and argues that execution only occurred when there was a need to instil discipline. There is also a welcome re-issuing of R. Graves’s 1929 classic autobiography Good-Bye to All That (Berghahn Books, £14.95) which was for many years published in a Penguin edition. This includes a perceptive introduction by R.P. Graves. Also, though more broad-ranging, is G. Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the impact of 1914–18 (Berghahn Books, £50, pbk £15), which was advertised for 2003 and came out in 2004, examines through a number of articles the relative minutiae of war through a study if the impact of shellshock, the role on women, the problems of refugees and other issues within a British and European context. There is also J.K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars; Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (CUP, £45) which examines the impact of the Great War upon post-war memories. Political history since 1918 There was a resurgence of interest in British fascism last year but this has all but disappeared in 2004. The only really significant publication © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 135 is R. Moore-Colyar, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”: Jarian Jenks, Organicism, the Right and the British Union of Fascists (J. of Contemp. Hist., 40) which offers a re-examination of the rural policy of the British Union of Fascists and looks at the career of Jarian E.F. Jenks (1899–1963) a leading figure on the Soil Association between 1947 and his death in 1963. It is the Conservative Party which has drawn most interest. P. Williamson continues his fascination with Baldwin in ‘Baldwin’s reputation: politics and history, 1937–1947’ (Hist. J., 47) in which he argues that despite the persistence of the ‘myth’ that Baldwin failed to re-arm Britain the reality is that he did rather more than is suggested by a myth of indolence which legitimised the Churchillian age of the Second World War. There is also P. Williamson and E. Baldwin (eds), Baldwin Papers: A Conservative Statesman, 1908 –1947 (CUP, £75) which offers a very good introduction to the papers, now deposited in Cambridge University Library, and sheds new light on the General Strike of 1926, the events of 1931 and the Abdication crisis of 1936. C. Berthezene, ‘Creating Conservative Fabians: The Conservative Party, Political Education and the Founding of Ashridge College’ (P. and Pr., 182) incisively reflects upon attempts to overcome the vie of Lord Eustace Percy, the first director of the Conservative Research Department, that ‘Conservatism was intellectually a lost cause’ and the general feeling that ‘The very idea of Conservative intellectuals has often seemed to be an oxymoron.’ Nevertheless, Stanley Baldwin and the Conservative Party pushed for the formation of the Bonar Law Memorial College at Ashridge in Hertfordshire which effectively became the Fabian Society of the Right pushing forward a Conservative ideology to set against the Socialist theory of society. The emerging ideology does not appear to have given the Conservative governments a clear approach according to G. O’Hare’s article, ‘“Intractable, Obscure and Baffling”: The Incomes Policy of the Conservative Government, 1957–1964’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) which suggests that the Conservative government’s incomes policy was driven by a desire to control inflation and end the ‘stop-go’ pattern of economic development but failed largely because of departmentalism. However, R. Stevens, ‘The Evolution of Privatisation as an Electoral Policy, c. 1970 – 1990’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) examines the evolution of privatisation, the most enduring political and economic feature of Thatcherism which, in the long run was a product of new Conservative ideology and old Gladstonian Liberalism. The substantial revival of publications on Irish history, reported for 2003, has continued. F. Campbell, ‘The Social Dynamism of Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland 1898–1918’ (P and Pr., no. 182) examines the roots of the emergence of Sinn Fein in the 1918 general election as has E. Sasson, Peare’s Patriots: St. Erda and the Cult of Boyhood (Cork U.P., £30). A.F. Parkinson, Belfast’s Unholy War: The Trouble of the 1920s (Four Courts P., £24.95) deals with the years 1920 –2 which saw a level of political and sectarian violence in Belfast not exceeded until the 1970s. Parkinson shows how it was often children and innocent shoppers who were the victims of this violence during the formative years of the Northern Irish Government. E. O’Kane, ‘Anglo-Irish Relations and the Northern Ireland Peace Process: From Exclusion to Inclusion’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) suggests that the British government moves from a position of excluding the Republican movement from the peace process to one of inclusion in the 1990s because it detected a strand of republicanism which was prepared to consider the political, rather than the military, route to settlement. M. Cunningham, ‘Apologies in Irish Politics: A Commentary and Critique’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) suggests that Tony Blair’s apology for British policy in Ireland in the 1840s was not really an apology when compared with the IRA’s apology for the injustices it committed. There is also a second edition of J. Loughlin, The Ulster Question since 1945 (Palgrave, £16.99), an excellent brief study of the events relating to Northern Ireland since 1945. Foreign policy and diplomacy has probably received more exposure than any other topic in 2004, not least because of a special edition on the subjects edited by Gaynor © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 136 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE Johnson in Contemporary British History, 18. Johnson provides an introduction on ‘The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century’ in which she notes that foreign policy and diplomacy are not the same thing. Z. Steiner, ‘The Foreign and Commonwealth: Resistance and Adaptation to Changing Times’ stresses the importance of the expanding role of the Office of the Prime Minister. T.G. Otte, ‘The Old Diplomacy: Reflections on the Foreign Office before 1914’ suggests that the Old diplomacy of Britain’s concern for a European equilibrium and the maintenance of British global interest was not all that British foreign policy was about. G. Johnson, ‘Preparing for Office: Lord Curzon as Acting Foreign Secretary, January to October 1919’ suggests that Curzon worked well with A.J. Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, during this period whilst Balfour was involved in the Paris Peace Conference. A. Sharp. ‘Adapting to a New World: British Foreign Policy in the 1920s’, offers a critical analysis of the Curzon and the Foreign Office in their relations with France, Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union. Sequentially, B.J.C. McKechnie, ‘The Foreign Office, 1930–1939: Present Interest and National Security’ suggests that Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, ran British foreign policy along the lines of old diplomacy but that this changed when Neville Chamberlain took over direct personal charge of foreign policy, which undermined British interest abroad. McKechnie argues that British foreign policy often worked better when British attitudes gradually evolved to the protection of British interests. P. Neville continues with his work on Sir Nevile Henderson in his article ‘The Foreign Office and Britain’s Ambassador to Berlin, 1933–39’, in which he deals with the problems of the British Ambassador to Berlin and their relations with the Foreign office. It is apparent that Sir Nevile Henderson saw himself as the personal envoy of Neville Chamberlain. There is also John Charmley’s essay on ‘Splendid Isolation to Finest Hour as a Global Power, 1900–1980’ charts Britain’s move from isolation to commitment. Relations with the United States also figure prominently as they did in 2003. K. Ruane and J. Ellison,’ Managing the Americans: Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and the Pursuit of Power-by-Proxy in the 1950s’ suggests that the Attlee Labour government attempted to use the United States by supporting the policies they felt they regarded as good, and subsequent Conservative governments seem to have done much the same although the European dimension began to emerge in the 1960s. This leads nicely on to S. Greenwood, ‘“Not the “General Will” but the Will of the General’: The Impact of the Paris Embassy to the British” Great Debate’ on Europe, Summer 1960’ examines the way in which Lord Gladwyn, the British ambassador to France, felt that General De Gaulle would be an ally in Britain’s application to join the Six. There are also two other articles: A.J.K. Bailes, ‘Reflections on Thirty Years of the Diplomatic Service’ and K. Hamilton, ‘Accommodating Diplomacy: The Foreign Office and Commonwealth Office and the Debate over Whitehall Redevelopment’ and, in another volume of Contemporary British History, D. Bourantonis and E. Johnson, ‘Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Introduction of the Atomic Energy in the United Nation: Discord and Co-operation in 1945’ deals with the debate about whether or not the issue of atomic energy should be deals with by the General Assembly of the United Nation (the American position) or the Security Council (the Russian position). Britain tried to find an enterprise on this although it favoured the use of the Security Council. T.C. Imlay, ‘A Re-assessment of Anglo-French Strategy during the Phony War, 1939 – 40’ (E.H.R., 119) suggests what whilst the British and French went to war in 1930 with a long-war strategy they were more adaptable that has been supposed in the Phony War period before returning to a long-war views after the fall of France. M.T. Thornhill, ‘Britain, the United States and the Rise of an Egyptian Leader: The Politics and Diplomacy of Nasser’s consolidation of Power, 1952’ (E.H.R., 119), deals with Colonel Gamel Abdul-Nasser who emerged to power in 1952 as leader of the Wafd party which was strengthened in 1954 with the end of British occupation in India, which was endorsed by support from the American embassy. Two years later the Suez War made him an Arab hero, paving the way for the Nasserite revolution. M. Got, © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 137 ‘Britain and Israel Before and After the Six-Day War, June 1967: From Support to Hostility’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18), as the title suggests, indicates the way in which relations between Britain and Israel changed fundamentally as a result of this war. There is also G.W. Sand, Defending the West: The Truman-Churchill Correspondence, 1945–1960 (Praeger, £39.99) which deals with, in one volume, many of the letters between Truman and Churchill which have been published separately in several other volumes. It contains letters, one dated 12 May 1945, from Churchill to Truman in which Churchill first used the phrase ‘iron curtain’, a term which came into public usage after Churchill’s Fulton speech of 5 March 1946. The Second World War has produced a mixed bag of offerings. J. Gardiner, Wartime Britain 1939 –1945 (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) examines the diaries, letters and reminiscences of the half the army who never left Britain and the civilian population during the Second World War. There is M.H. Folly, The Palgrave Atlas of the Second Word War (Palgrave, £14.99) and S.P. Mackenzie, The Colditz Myth: British and Commonwealth Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (OUP, £20) which examines what it was like to be a ‘Kriegie’. Also, one should not forget that 1944 saw the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day and almost cottage industry of publications on the topic. There is Dan van der Vat, D-Day: The Greatest Invasions – A People’s History (Bloomsbury, £20)’; A. Williams, D-Day to Berlin (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) and R. Holmes, The D-Day Experience From the invasion to the Liberation of Paris (Carlton Books. Imperial War Museum, £30) and Jane Penrose (ed.), The D-Day Companion (Osprey, £20). Last but not least, there is also an important and innovative article by M. Connolly and W. Miller, ‘British Courts Martial in North Africa 1940–3’, examines the decision by Auchinleck, Montgomery and Alexander to impose discipline on to the British Eight Army by setting harsh examples through court martial proceedings. The disquieting aspect is those court martialled, whose sentences often averaged 2.7 years, did not necessarily receive fair trials. The most iconoclastic of these is, however, a book published in 2003. It is R. Mackay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale during the Second World War (Manchester U.P., 2003) which argues that Angus Calder and recent revisionist authors have exaggerated the extent to which wartime unity and patriotism was mythologized. Drawing largely from Mass Observation, Mackay argues that there was great optimism in the possibility of victory by the British public. M. Connelly, We Can Take It: Britain and Meaning of the Second World War (Longman, £19.99) would qualify this and feels that Britain has for too long lives of its finest hour. For the post-war years there is a reminder of the peace protests of the 1960s. S. Carroll, ‘ “I was arrested at Greenham in 1962”: Investigating the Oral Narratives of Women in the Anti-Nuclear Committee of 100’ (Oral Hist., 32) examines the experiences of six women connected with the Committee of 100 (1961–8) who were campaigning for British unilateral disarmament, using non-violent direct action. There is also T. Buchanan, ‘Amnesty International in Crisis, 1966 –7’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) reveals the problems of Amnesty International, formed in 1961, when it was divided as a result of its penetration by British Intelligence and revelations that it had provided secret financial support for the families of detainees in Rhodesia. Also for the post-war period is R. Toye, ‘Churchill and Britain’s “Financial Dunkirk” (20th Century British Hist., 15) examines the way in which Churchill sought to help the post-war Labour government by giving Conservative approval to the U. S. Loan for Britain, although it caused some dissension within his party. Economic and social history since 1918 One of the best books of the year is C. Chinn, Better Betting with a Decent Feller: A Social History of Bookmaking (Aurum, £16.99), which is an updated and substantial rewriting of a book which Chinn first published in 1991. It is a superb history of the conflict between gambling and the antigambling movement, much information on illegal bookmaking being drawn from a wide range of interviews which Chinn conducted with bookmakers in the late 1980s. © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 138 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE It particularly stresses the hypocrisy of a legal system which made off-course readymoney gambling by the working classes a criminal offence until 1961 whilst legalising essentially middle-class off course credit betting and on-course betting. There is also D. Miers, Regulating Commercial Gambling: Past, Present and Future (OUP, £70, pbk £30), which examines the origins of and recent developments in betting, gaming and lotteries and does provide a path through the complex laws on gaming. Studies on working-class life and the British way of life have become less common in recent years. However, there are two new and significant contributions to our reading. First, J. Klein, ‘“Moving On”, “Men and the Changing”: Character of Interwar WorkingClass Neighbourhoods: From the Files of the Manchester and Liverpool City Police’ (J. of Social Hist., 38) suggests that there was very little change in the nature of neighbourhoods and working-class life during the inter-war years. In addition, A. Rosen, The Transformation of British Life 1950 –2000: A Social History (Manchester U.P., 2003, £9.99) examines the rapid social transformation of lives that occurred in the fifty-five years after the end of the Second World War and is a useful book for undergraduates. G.O. Hara, ‘ “We are Faced Everywhere with a Growing Population”: Demographic Change and the British State, 1955–1964’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) complements this work. The working classes were, of course, often considered to be in need of help by a settlement movement which sought to live amongst them and improve their lot, and often wished to take them back to some golden age of workingclass life. N. Vall, ‘Cultural Improvements in North-East England, 1920–1960: Polishing the Pitmen’ (Northern Hist., 39) deals with the settlement movement in the North of England, focusing upon Bensham Grove, Seaham Harbour and the Spennymoor settlements. On the social side of the Second World War although S. O. Rose pursues her previous research interests in Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939 –1945 (OUP, £17.99) which examines what it means to be British and Jewish during the war, and also examines the experiences of American GIs, on which Rose has written some important articles. M. Harrison, Medicine and Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second World War (OUP, £45) examines the way in which the British army moved towards ensuring that there were proper health and medical provisions available for troops as the War continued. Discipline and cleanliness were apparently as important as penicillin and DDT, in the medical contribution to winning the War. Publications on British social habits and health investigations have been less common than in previous years. Nevertheless, R. Davidson and G. Davis, ‘“A Field for Private Members”: The Wolfenden Committee and Scottish Homosexual Law Reform, 1950 – 1967’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) deals with a committee which dealt with Prostitution and Homosexual offences between 1954 and 1957 and suggests that the Scottish laws were less innovative than in England and Wales. Sex education seems to reflect these problems in J. Hampshire and J. Lewis, ‘“The Ravages of Permissiveness”: Sex Education and the Permissive Society (20th Century British Hist., 15). There is also P. Shapely, D. Tanner and A. Willing, ‘Civic Culture and Housing Policy in Manchester 1945–79’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) looks at the relationship between civic and political discourses and local discourses. V. Berridge and S. Blume (eds) have also produced an excellent, and timely, contribution on the social inequalities of health in the 1980s in Social Inequality Before and After the Black Report (Frank Cass, 2003, £17.50). The workings of local government and central government have been examined in some very good publications this year. S. King, ‘“We Are To Be Trusted”: Female Poor Law Guardians and the Development of the New Poor Law: The Case of Bolton, England 1880–1906’ (International R. of Social Hist., 49) is a particularly useful addition to our knowledge for it examines the diary of Mary Haslan, who started her poor law activities on the workhouse visiting committee. R. Michie and P. Williamson, The British Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century (CUP, £60) is a collection of essays on the named subject. A. Woods, ‘ “Flames and fears on the farms”: © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 139 controlling foot and mouth disease in Britain, 1892–2001’ (Hist. Research., 77) examines how and why the Victorian policy of treating foot and mouth outbreaks with a policy of slaughter which governments have continued to operate into the twenty-first century. B. Penrose, ‘Medical Monitoring and Silicosis in Metal Mines: 1910–1940’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) deals with the monitoring of a dangerous and ultimately fatal disease. R. Davidson, ‘The “Sexual State”: Sexuality and Scottish Governance. 1950– 1980’ (J. of Modern Hist., 13) examines the way in which legal and moral issues have defined and re-define ‘dangerous sexualities’. The study of consumption and the rise of entertainment and leisure continue to provoke attention. L. Black, ‘Which craft? In Post War Britain: The Consumer’s Association and the Politics of Affluence’ (Albion, 36) examines the politics of consumption in Britain after the Second World War which saw the emergence of then magazine Which in 1957 and Motoring Which in 1962. It is a development beyond Black’s book The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain? which was published in 2003. M. Huggins and J.K. Walton, The Teesside Seasides between the Wars: Redcar and its neighbours 1919 –31 (Middlesbrough, University of Teesside, 2003, £5.95) is a short, but useful, pamphlet). J. Williams, who has become increasingly productive in recent years, has just produced Entertaining the Nation: A Social History of British Television (Sutton, £20), which examines the trends in the development of television and suggests that television is more a gatherer of existing information rather than an innovative force for change. The economic failure of British governments are highlighted in number of works. G.T. Johannesson, ‘How “cod war” came: the origins of the Anglo-Icelandic fishing dispute, 1958 –1961’ (Hist. Research, 72) examines the origins of the Cod War between Britain and Iceland which occurred between 1958 and 1961 and suggests that that the British government lost because of a lack of innovation and foresight. H. Pemberton, ‘Relative Decline and British economic policy in the 1960s’ (Hist. J., 47) suggests that Britain’s economic decline has often been blamed upon the fragmentation of Britain’s economic institutions but this article suggests that this was due to strong government refusing to recognise the need for change. R. Ray, ‘No Secrets Between “Special Friends”: America’s Involvement in British Economic Policy, October 1964–Apil 1965’ (History, 89) suggests that the special relationship survived despite the ill-feeling between Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson. N. Woodward, The Management of the British Economy 1945–2001 (Manchester U.P., £49.99, pbk £15.99) also examines the active role played by British governments. Labour history Interest in the Labour Party has lulled since the celebrations of the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 2000 but will undoubtedly rise as we reach the centenary of the Labour Party in 2006. Nevertheless, there are four publications that ought to be noted. J. Nuttall, ‘Tony Crosland and the Many Falls and Rises in British Social Democracy’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) traces the decline of the ideas of Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956). J. Tomlinson, ‘The Labour party and the capitalist firm, c. 1950–1970’ (Hist. J., 47) is a perceptive article which examines the way in which the structure of the capitalist firm was examined by the Labour Party within its attitude towards tackling the need for economic growth, partly in response to the president of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson’s, pronouncement in the late 1940s that between private industry and the Attlee Labour Government there is ‘almost a vacuum in socialist thought’. There is another take in Labour’s incomes policy by G. O’Hara in ‘“Planned Growth of Incomes” or “Emergency Gimmick”? The Labour Party, The Social Partners and Incomes Policy, 1964 –1970’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) which argues that the Government was confused about the reasons for the incomes policy it adopted and both the trade unions and employers were sceptical of it. Coming right up to date R. Toye, ‘“The Smallest Party in History”? New Labour in Historical Perspective’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) challenges the view of Steven Fielding that New © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 140 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE Labour under Tony Blair has been faithful to Labour’s past. Toye suggests that this is not the case and that Fielding has concentred upon the Parliamentary Labour Party rather than the Labour Party. To Toye, New Labour is a small, but influential, party which exists alongside Old Labour. This should be measured against J. E. Cronin, New Labour’s Pasts: The Labour Party and its Discontents (Pearson, £25) which deals with New Labour activities in the 1950s argues that New Labour was not really necessary in 1994 because of Labour’s revival. Notions of citizenship, rights and roles are examined by B. Beaven and J. Griffiths in ‘Urban Elites, Socialists and Notions of Citizenship in an Industrial Boomtown, Coventry, c. 1870–1914’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) which examines the emergence of social citizenship schemes in Coventry. M. Thomas, ‘No-one telling us what to do? Anarchist schools in Britain, 1892–2001’ (Hist. Research, 72) deals with the libertarian schools anarchists developed. The current intense and raging debate amongst historians of Communist history, which pits the ‘realists’, who emphasise the independence of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from Moscow, against the ‘essentialists’, who stress the continuing influence of Moscow’s (and Stalinism) has gone a round further this year with a spate of replies and rejoinders to the Labour History Review Special Issue, volume 68, number 1 which was produced in 2003 and reported upon in the last volume. Nina Fishman restates her realist’ position and replies to Alan Campbell and John McIlroy in ‘A First Revisionist Replies to Her Revisionists’ and also in ‘CPGB History at the Centre of Contemporary History: A Rejoinder to Alan Campbell and John McIlroy’ (Labour Hist. R., 69). James Eaden and David Renton, ‘Comment: The Inner-Party Critics’ focus upon the 1920s as a vital period in the history of the CPGB in which the Party depended upon Moscow even though there were many critics of the Moscow line, some of whom remained within the Party and some of whom left. A. Thorpe, ‘Communist Party History: A Reply to Campbell and McIlroy’ briefly defends his ‘realist’ position. And again, briefly, in ‘CPGB History at the Centre of Contemporary History 2001: A Rejoinder’, Alan Campbell and John McIlroy, ‘A Reply to Critics’, provide a very useful 4,000 word article to reply to many of the criticisms that have been raised in the other contributions. Polemical discussion is not to everyone’s taste but in this case anyone following through the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain will find these short articles illuminating. Further fuel is added to this debate by G. Andrews, Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism, 1964–1991 (Lawrence and Wishart, 2004), the sixth and final volume in what might be described as the ‘official history’ of the CPGB. Coloured by a sympathy with the Eurocommunists, Andrews traces the decline of the CPGB, particularly through its association with the trade union movement which itself was declining in the 1980s. He is also of the view that the failure of the CPGB cannot be seen simply in terms of the influence of Moscow and feels that British communists were largely responsible for their own failings. At heart then this is a ‘realist’ interpretation which is, of course, what one would expect from someone with Eurocommunist sympathies. The essentialist versus realist debate also raged in 20th Century Britain, vol. 15. A. Campbell, J. McIlroy, B. McLaughlin and J. Halstead, ‘The International Lenin School: A Response to Cohen and Morgan, challenges the article produced in volume 13 (2002) by Giden Cohen and Kevin Morgan, and rejects the notion that the link between the Comintern and the national affiliates was tenuous. Indeed, Campbell and the other authors suggest that their was a lasting influence upon British communism through the Lenin school. G. Cohen and K. Morgan, ‘British Students at the International Lenin School 1924 –1937’: A Reflection of Method, Results and Conclusion’ is as the title describes it. Pursuing other, less controversial issues, K. Hunt and Matthew Worley, ‘Rethinking British Communist Party Women in the 1920s’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) examines the experience of women in the CPGB during the 1920s and argues that many of the feelings about the changing position of women in society were evidence within the ranks of the Communist © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 141 Party. In addition, J.L. Heppell, ‘A Rebel, not a Rabbi: Jewish Membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) suggests that the experiences of second-generation Jews in Britain led many to join the CPGB. G. Powell, ‘Turning Off the Power: The Electrical Trades Union and the Anti-Communist Crusade 1957–1961’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) examines the celebrated case of the conflict between the Communists and the ‘right’ within the ETU and places it within the context dictated by a Communist commitment to Moscow. J. Callaghan and M. Phythian, ‘State Surveillance of the CPGB Leadership: 1920s–1950s’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) examines newly de-classified files on the surveillance of the CPGB leadership which reveals that the public display of support for Moscow hid some internal doubts and divisions. J. Callaghan, ‘Industrial Militancy 1945 –1979: The Failure of the British Road to Socialism’ (20th Century Socialism, 15) examines the CPGB’s post-war industrial policy of wage militancy and exposes the confused rationale which led to its failure. A.J.P. Taylor, the famous historian, once said that the two most important events of the inter-war years were the general strike of 1926 and the Spanish Civil War of 1936 – 1939. Both have been dealt with in impressive publications in 2004. R. Maguire, ‘Reassessing the British Government’s Emergency Organisation on “Red Friday”, 31 July 1925’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) maintains that the Government preparations for the threatened General Strike were not sufficient and that this was the reason for the nine-month subsidy to the coal industry rather than the suggestion that Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, was attempting to avoid conflict and maintain consensus within the nation. L. Mates, ‘Britain’s Popular Front? The Case of the Tyneside Foodship Campaign, 1938–1939’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) suggests that the whilst the popular front against fascism failed between 1935 and 1938 it is clear that there was a potential for it as soon through the Tyneside foodship campaign during the Spanish Civil War. Yet the best of the lot is J. McIlroy, A. Campbell and K. Gildert (eds), Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout: The Struggle for Dignity (Cardiff, U. Wales P.) an excellent collection on the seven-month coal miners’ lockout out 1926 which was the basis of the general strike. Unlike the general strike it has attracted very little scholarly attention until this book which offers a collection of essays which deal with the lockout as it operated in different coalfield m the policing of the dispute, the role of women and the actions of the revolutionaries. There are some excellent essays here, not least those written by McIlroy and Campbell. There is also a pioneering contribution by Quentin Outram on ‘Class Warriors: The Coalowners’, are rarely touched upon topic. Feminism, Women’s history, gender and immigration Labour History Review, vol. 69: 2 is a special issue dealing with ‘Working-Class Masculinities in Britain to the Present’ edited by Eileen Janes Yeo. R. Johnstone and A. MacIvor, ‘Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies: Masculinity in the Clydeside Heavy Industries, c. 1930s–1970s’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) deals with the way in which working in tough industries such as coal mining iron and steel and shipbuilding industries built up and reinforced masculine identities, even to the risk of health in terms of heavy drinking and smoking. Pat Ayers, ‘Work, Culture and Gender: The Making of Masculinities in Post-War Liverpool’ examines the shaping of masculinities in post-war Liverpool and suggests that the restructuring of the local Labour market did little to challenge women in the workplace or at home. A. Hughes, ‘Representations and Counter-Representations of Domestic Violence on Clydeside between the two World Wars’ suggests that dominant view of working-class males beating their wives in inadequate given that there is a need to examine the situation within the middle classes and a need to recognise that the victims were male as well as female. E.J. Yeo, herself, has written ‘ “The Boy is the Father of the Man”: Moral Panic over Working-Class Youth, 1850 to the Present’, examines the constant panic over working-class youth and its needs at fifty-year intervals. Karen Hunt, ‘ “Strong Minds, Great Hearts, True Faith and Ready Hands”? © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 142 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE Exploring Socialist Masculinities before the First World War’, examines the iconography and representation of socialist masculinity in the light of the Oscar Wilde court cases of 1895. She examines the ideas of John Tosh on the dominant characteristics of nineteenth-century masculinity being home/independence, work and all-male associations and she stresses how these ideas influences the cartoons and iconography of socialist groups, who often represented men as production and women as distribution and consumption. In other words, it was men, and women, who created production and wealth. Another twist is given on this subject by J. Hinton in ‘“The Tale of Sammy Spree”: Gender and the Secret Dynamic of the 1940s British Corporatism’ (Hist. Workshop., 58). This was a poem about a public spirited engineering worker who demanded energy-saving activities on the shop floor in the winter of 1946/1947 when the fuel was running out. It stressed the need to save fuel, assumed that working men often accepted that need but that wives often sabotaged the moves. In fact, Hinton stresses that women were just as likely as men to behave as responsible citizens. Women’s history continues to thrive, though perhaps not in the way that it once did. J. Purvis assesses the development of women’s history over thirty years current state of ‘Women’s History Today’ (Hist. Today, 54) discussing the work of the Journal of Women’s History, formed in 1989 by Christie Farman, and Women’s History Review, formed by Purvis herself in 1992. S. Todd, ‘Poverty and Aspiration: Young Women’s Entry into Employment in Inter-War England’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) examines the employment opportunities for women during the inter-war years. S. Austin, ‘“A Good Job for a Girl;”: The Career Biographies of Women Graduates at the University of Liverpool 1945’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) and P. Thane, ‘Girton Graduates: earning and learning 1920s–1980s’ (Women’s Hist. R., 13) both suggest that highly educated women were often confined to school teaching jobs. Most women did not have even these opportunities and we are reminded of this by E. Keily and M. Leane, ‘What Would I Be Doing at Home All Day: the narrative of Irish married women’s working lives 1936–1960’ (Women’s Hist. R., 15) which examines Irish women in three counties in Ireland who often combined house-bound motherhood with part-time and, occasionally, full-time participation in the Labour market. There has been a revival of interest of immigration from the doldrums of 2003, although it is mainly within the context of émigrés from the terror of Nazism and Stalinism. D. Snowman, ‘The Hitler émigrés: the cultural impact on Britain of refugees from Nazism’ (Hist. Research, 72) examines the way in which many of Hitler’s émigrés became journalists. T. Lane, Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain (Palgrave, £45) examines the exodus of eastern Europeans to Britain at the end of the Second World War and is drawn very largely from interviews with those who fled eastern Europe and detailed descriptions of the brutalities of Nazi and Soviet occupation. IX Original ANNUAL Twentieth Twentieth Article Century BULLETIN Century OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE 90 (ii) European History R. Gerald Hughes Reference, survey and international One of the most interesting books published in this area in 2004 was R.D. Anderson’s European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914 (OUP, £55.00). In a wide-ranging volume, Anderson demonstrates how the development of European universities can illuminate the societies within which they developed. It is certainly clear that the development of the university has been increasingly dominated by the inexorable rise of the state across Europe. More narrowly focussed, Walter Rüegg’s edited volume, A History of the University in Europe (CUP, © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 143 £85.00), is essentially concerned with how universities evolved as teaching and research institutions over the centuries. A good starting point for the study of Europe’s ‘Age of Empire’ is provided by H.L. Wesseling’s volume, The European Colonial Empires 1815 –1919 (Pearson/Longman, £16.99). Carole Fink has produced a work on ethnicity and nationalism in modern Europe with a striking contemporary resonance in Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878 –1938 (CUP, £45.00). William I. Hitchcock’s The Struggle for Europe: The History of the Continent since 1945 (Profile, £9.99) is a wide-ranging work that is satisfying at a number of levels: whether in discussing the legacies of the two World Wars, or the challenges posed by European integration, Hitchcock maintains the reader’s interest throughout with lively and witty prose. Hitchcock’s account of the post-war era stresses the positives in the European past and outlines exactly why he believes the continent can look forward to the future with no small amount of optimism. A useful companion to Hitchcock’s book is Noël O’Sullivan’s European Political Thought since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, £16.99). The relative dearth of literature in this area hitherto makes this an extremely useful work. Covering the political spectrum across the continent, O’Sullivan offers a concise, yet sophisticated, interpretative history of European political thought from 1945 to the present. Desmond Dinan, Europe Recast: A History of European Union (Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99) provides the undergraduate market with a readable history stretching back to the 1940s. Paul Dukes, Paths to a New Europe: From Premodern to Postmodern Times (Palgrave Macmillan, £17.99) sets matters in a wider socio-cultural perspective, tracing the evolution of Europe back over the centuries. A valuable piece of social history is Marjatta Rahikainen’s wide-ranging Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Ashgate, £45.00). Gunnar Skogmar’s The United States and the Nuclear Dimension of European Integration (Palgrave Macmillan, £45.00) stresses the necessity of viewing European integration through a prism where the ‘nuclear umbrella’ remains very much in the forefront of the analysis. Guasconi M. Eleonora, L’Europa tra continuità e cambiamento: Il vertice dell’Aja del 1969 e il rilancio della costruzione europea (Polistampa, $20) analyses the Aja summit of 1969, outlining its significance and part in the the first steps to the economic and monetary union of the EEC. Romano Sergio, Europa, storia di un’idea (Longanesi, 15.50$) traces the ‘idea’ of Europe in an imaginative fashion while the collection edited by A. De Bernardi and P. Ferrari, Antifascismo e identità europea (Carocci, 35.78$), argues for an identification of anti-Fascism with modern European identity. The appearance of Wolfram Kaiser and Helmut Wohnout, Political Catholicism in Europe 1918 –1945, Volume 1 (Routledge, £20.99) and Michael Gehler and Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy in Europe Since 1945, Volume 2 (Routledge, £20.99) will finally begin to redress the almost complete lack of scholarly literature on European Christian democracy in English. On a darker note, Eric D. Weitz and Angelica Fenner (eds), Fascism and Neofascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, £42.50) explores historical fascism and the contemporary radical right in a wide range of countries from a number of different perspectives. Paul W. Schroeder draws on his many years of diligent scholarship to question fundamental assumptions about the international system from Napoleon to the present day in Systems, Stability, and Statecraft (Palgrave Macmillan, £42.50). Michael S. Neiberg, War and Society in Europe, 1898 to the Present (Routledge, £18.99) and Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History (Routledge, £13.99) provide useful undergraduate introductory texts for the study of war. Similarly useful are Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott (eds), The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the First World War and Martin H. Folly, The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, £14.99). On a deeper level, highly recommended is the superb Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig work, Decisions for War, 1914 –1917 (CUP, £12.99). This book dissects, in © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 144 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE forensic fashion, the actions and motives of the powers during the First World War. If one wishes to try and emulate the great historians of the First World War then one might do worse than to start with the comprehensive Robin Higham’s edited volume (complied with the assistance of Dennis E. Showalter) entitled Researching World War I: A Handbook, (Greenwood, 2003, $79.95/£45.99). Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, Penser la Grande Guerre: Un essai d’historiographie (Seuil, 9.50$) is an ambitious book that seeks to assess the major historiographical issues arising from the study of the First World War. The book’s range is undoubtedly broad and it specifically addresses political, military, social, economic, and cultural history. All of these are, roughly speaking, seen to have passed through three phases. The first phase occurred in the decades immediately following 1918; the second phase took place around and about the 1960s (the Fischer debate being a notable example) whilst the third phase has taken place over the last fifteen years or so. In addition to the ability of the authors to make sense of the main lines of historiographical evolution, the book is of extreme utility to the student not least because of its very extensive (multilingual) bibliography and voluminous references. N. Ferguson’s ‘Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat’ (War in History, 11/2), demonstrates that in the Second World War, as compared to 1914 –18, the extreme difficulty in turning overwhelming strategic and tactical advantage into causing German and Japanese soldiers to surrender. Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (Allen Lane, £25/$59.95) will further cement his reputation as one of the finest historians of twentieth century European history. Overy’s book is a superb piece of scholarship, offering a systematic and detailed comparative analysis of the two most infamous dictatorships in history. The book is eminently readable and Overy is meticulous in demonstrating differences, as well as similarities, between the two systems. Gordon Martel (ed.), The World War Two Reader (Routledge, £19.99) is an excellent volume that provides a complete and up-to-date overview of the most recent historiography on World War Two. Max Hastings’ Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944– 45 (Macmillan, £25) is a well-written and impressively researched account that slips easily between battlefronts and between ordinary soldiers, leaders and generals in an engaging manner. Peter Davies’ Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two (Pearson, £19.99) offers a synthesis of the history of collaboration in the Second World War in Europe in a survey-type arrangement that undergraduate students will find userfriendly. (Actually, it’s rather surprising that no one has used Davies’ title for a book on collaboration before now). Shlomo Aronson’s, Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews (CUP, £48.00) examines the interaction between the Nazi state, Jewish organisations seeking to ‘rescue’ their brethren and the Allies. The subject of ‘rescue’ continues to invite controversy but Aronson’s book demonstrates that, whatever the actions of the Western allies, the fate of the majority of the Jews of Europe was sealed by 1942– 3. Steve Hochstadt’s Sources of the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, £17.50) is a collection of original Holocaust documents and sources that will give the reader greater insight into both perpetrator and victim alike. Dan Stone’s edited volume, The Historiography of the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, £90.00) provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Holocaust historiography written by some of the foremost scholars in the field globally. Nicole A Dombrowski’s edited volume, Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted with or without Consent (Routledge, £15.99), is extremely comprehensive and wide-ranging and will, surely, become a standard teaching text. Jussi M. Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (OUP, £18.00) is an excellent teaching book with more than enough material to provide researchers with any number of excellent leads on virtually all aspects of the global struggle after 1945. The large number of books on memory/memorialisation is added to by William Kidd and Brian Murdoch (eds), Memory and Memorials: The Commemorative Century (Ashgate, $99.95/£52.50) while the © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 145 bourgeoning academic fields of intelligence history/intelligence studies and terrorism are well served by Len Scott and Peter Jackson (eds), Understanding Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century: Journeys in Shadows (Routledge, £18.99) and Michael Kronenwetter, Terrorism: A Guide to Events and Documents (Greenwood, $55.00/£31.99). Two other reference works are worthy of mention here simply for the incredible amount of material they provide in well-organised fashion: John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle (eds), Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement (Greenwood, $75.00/£42.99) and Richard A. Gabriel, Empires at War: A Chronological Encyclopedia, three volumes (Greenwood, $225.00/£125.00). France and the Low Countries Martin Evans and Emmanuel Godin, France 1815 – 2003 is part of series entitled ‘Modern History for Modern Languages’ aimed at undergraduates (Arnold, £12.99/$29.95) and provides an admirable introductory text. Timothy Baycroft’s Culture, Identity and Nationalism: French Flanders in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Boydell, $75.00/£45.00) facilitates our understanding of how regionalism and centralising nation-building have played a crucial role in the shaping of the modern French state. Barnett Singer and John Langdon, Cultured Force: Makers and Defenders of the French Colonial Empire (Wisconsin U.P., $45.00). This is a highly engaging but controversial book – spanning intellectual history, biography, the history of France and military/imperial history. Singer and Langdon argue that while empire certainly had its dark side, its builders were sophisticated men who balanced admiration for their subject peoples with an occasionally brutal hand to those who threatened imperial stability. Georges Connes, a French soldier, was taken prisoner at the Battle of Verdun and his A POW’s Memoir of the First World War: The Other Ordeal, ed. Lois Davis Vines (Berg, £15.99) offers a fascinating insight into the thoughts of an internationalist and pacifist caught in the cataclysm of the First World War. This is both an interesting portrait of the ordinary person at war as well as a revealing piece of social commentary on the French state at a time of terrible upheaval. The controversies that continue to dominate the legacy of the French Third Republic are re-visited by Matt Perry, ‘Sans Distinction de Nationalité’? The French Communist Party, Immigrants and Unemployment in the 1930s’ (European Hist. Q., 34/2) and Norman Ingram, ‘Repressed Memory Syndrome: Interwar French Pacifism and the Attempt to Recover France’s Pacifist Past’ (French History, 18/3). Bertrand Taithe’s review article, ‘Should the Third Republic Divide us Least?’ (French Hist., 18/2), provides us with a comprehensive synthesis of recent debates on the constitutional arrangement that lasted from the Franco-Prussian War until the Second World War and guided France to victory in 1918. Peter Jackson’s review article, ‘Returning to the Fall of France: recent work on the causes and consequences of the “Strange Defeat” of 1940’ (Modern and Contemporary France, 12/4) and Talbot C. Imlay’s article ‘A Reassessment of Anglo-French Strategy during the Phony War, 1939 –1940’ (E. H. R., 119/481), are both essential reading for those seeking to understand the catastrophe that overtook France in 1940. Vichy is again the subject of a great deal of scholarship. Alain Decaux’s Morts pour Vichy: Darlan, Pucheu, Pétain, Laval (Pocket, 6.60$) investigates the destinies of four powerful men whose ultimate fate was superimposed with that of the ill-fated Vichy regime (Darlan was assassinated, Pucheu and Laval executed as traitors and Petain died in prison). The post-1945 years are admirably addressed by Michael Kelly’s Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France After the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, £47.50) and Hilary Footitt’s, War and Liberation in France: Living with the Liberators (Palgrave Macmillan, £45.00). Footitt conveys the chaos, uncertainty and brutality of the end of German rule in France (and the creation of the Fourth Republic) in lucid fashion. Claudia Moisel’s Frankreich und die deutschen Kriegsverbrecher: Politik und Praxis der Strafverfolgung nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Wallstein, 42.00$) is a superb book focussing on the French efforts at bringing German war criminals to justice after the Second World War. Moisel has © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 146 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE managed to bridge the historiographical gap over French policy towards Nazi war criminals and the effect of such processes upon relations with the newly established Federal Republic of Germany in compelling fashion. Unsurprisingly, given what we know of history of the British and American zones of occupation, justice seems to have made only limited headway in French-occupied Germany. A volume based on a series of academic conferences held to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the 1962 Accords d’Evian – Yves Michaud et al. (eds), La Guerre d’Algérie (1954 –1962), Odile Jacob, $23 – offers a number of excellent pieces of the Algerian War. These include: M. Winock, ‘La France et l’Algérie: 130 ans d’aveuglement’; M. Vaïsse, ‘Guerre et diplomatie: victoire militaire, défaite diplomatique?’; G. Pervillé, ‘Terrorisme et guérilla: de la Toussaint rouge à la tragédie des Harkis’; J. Verdes-Leroux, ‘Les Pieds noirs’; R. Branche, ‘L’armée, la torture et la République’; M. Harbi, ‘Bilan d’une guerre d’indépendance’; H. Rousso, ‘La guerre d’Algérie dans la mémoire des Français’. Benjamin Stora has produced two fine introductory volumes on French Algeria in his Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale (1830–1954), (La Découverte, $8.50) and Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962), (La Découverte, 8.50$). Rémi Kauffer retells one of the darkest chapters in the violent end of French Algeria in vivid fashion in his OAS: Histoire d’une guerre franco-française (Seuil, 22.50$). While this volume actually appeared in 2002, the impact of this book merits its inclusion here. Antoine d’Abbundo has produced a fascinating book (J’ai vécu la guerre d’Algérie: 1954–1962, Bayard, 9.90$) based on the candid recollections of four participants in the Algerian War: a French conscript; an FLN recruit; a Harki and a Pied Noir. This is a welcome addition to this genre, of which one of the best recent examples is Martin S. Alexander, Martin Evans and J.F.V. Keiger (eds), The Algerian War and the French Army, 1954 –62: Experiences, Images, Testimonies (Palgrave, 2002, £52.50). As background text, a useful summary of political developments in the French state is provided by Nicholas Atkin’s Fifth French Republic (Palgrave Macmillan, £17.99). Jean-Pierre Dormois’ The French Economy in the Twentieth Century (CUP, £9.99) is a very useful textbook that examines the spectacular transformation that the French economy has undergone over the past century. Maurice Vaïsse, ‘A Certain Idea of Peace in France from 1945 to the Present Day’ (French Hist., 18/3), posits that the end of the Algerian War in 1962 actually seperated war from peace in French society. From 1945 to 1962 the three big issues confronting France – Cold War, Imperial wars and the German question – Vaïsse argues, continued to dominate the political agenda. Maurice Vaïsse, La paix au XXe siècle (Belin, $22.95) is a thoughtful work that reflects of the fact that the arrival of the twentieth century seemed set to herald an era of global pacifism. Yet, the cataclysm of the Great War destroyed the stability of the international system and the Second World War seemed to portend even greater strife. While the threat of nuclear war in the Cold War paradoxically engendered an eventual ‘balance of terror’, Vaïsse raises disturbing questions regarding weapon proliferation and looming instability for the twenty first century. In tackling the long-standing debates about the role of Gentiles in the rescue of Jews during the Second World War, Bob Moore’s ‘The Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Belgium, France and the Netherlands’ (Australian Journal of Politics & History, 50/3), examines how the notion of a tradition of ‘rescue’ derived, in the case of Belgium, from the German occupation of 1914–18, and in the Netherlands from long-standing rural traditions of ‘Good Samaritanism’. Gerald Aalders’ Nazi Looting: The Plunder of Dutch Jewry during the Second World War (Berg, £16.99) is a welcome, if somewhat belated, translation of Roof: De ontvreemding van joodse bezit tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (SDU Uitgevers, 1999). Aalders’ work is divided into two sections – with the first section discussing German looting in general with particular focus on the extraction of so-called ‘occupation costs’. Given the recent furore over Swiss banks and their role in the 1940s, Aalders’ book has much to tell us about the advantages of © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 147 adopting national perspectives when examining the systematic Nazi looting of Europe. Ebert Anne-Katrin’s ‘Cycling towards the nation: the use of the bicycle in Germany and the Netherlands, 1880–1940’ (European R. of Hist., 11/3), argues that the bicycle came to inhabit a particular place in Dutch society, symbolising an important facet of national identity, whilst in Germany the bicycle had long been regarded as somewhat obsolescent. For this reviewer, this revelation cast new light on contemporary references amongst Dutch football fans to the German confiscation of bicycles during the occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War. Italy and the Iberian Peninsula The disaster of the Sicilian earthquake of 1908 is vividly narrated by Giorgio Boatti in La terra trema: Messina 28 dicembre 1908: I trenta secondi che cambiarono l’Italia, non gli italiani (Mondadori, 18.50$). Boatti’s book tells us a great deal about the Italian state before the First World War as well as offering historical and contemporary insights into perceptions of Sicily (and the South generally) held in Rome and Northern Italy generally. Philip Morgan’s highly readable introductory survey of Italian Fascism appears in its second edition: Italian Fascism, 1915–1945, 2nd edn., Palgrave Macmillan, £16.99. Paul O’Brien’s Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist (Berg, £16.99) is a closely argued study of Mussolini’s speeches, writings and his war diary. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, O’Brien demonstrates that the image of the socialist disillusioned by the experience of war is inaccurate. In actual fact, Mussolini was anti-socialist and anti-democratic by the autumn of 1914, long before Italy entered the war in May 1915. Romano Sergio’s Giovanni Gentile: Un filosofo al potere negli anni del Regime (Longanesi, 19.00$) is an interesting re-working of the influence of the neo-Hegelian Idealist and self-procalaimed ‘philosopher of Fascism’, who ghostwrote the 1932 work A Doctrine of Fascism for Mussolini. J. Femia posits a fascinating, if not entirely convincing, case for Machiavelli as being the precursor of Fascism in ‘Machiavelli and Italian Fascism’ (Hist. of Political Thought, 25/1). Richard Bosworth is intent on demonstrating the inherent resistance to Fascist ideology in his ‘War, Totalitarianism and ‘Deep Belief ’ in Fascist Italy, 1935– 43’ (European Hist. Quarterly, 34/4). Roger Griffin seeks to put the Mussolini era in context with his ‘Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism’ (Social Hist. of Medicine, 17/1). Mussolini realised the value of football to his project as Simon Martin demonstrates in his Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini (Berg, £50/£16.99). R. De Felice, Autobiografia del fascismo: Antologia di testi fascisti 1919 –1945 (Einaudi, $13.52) catalogues the testimonies of Italians – of all backgrounds – on the Mussolini years. Nicholas Farrell’s Mussolini: A New Life (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £15.99) is to be treated with extreme caution. Signally, the author lives in Mussolini’s birthplace, Predappio – as he proudly announces on the dust jacket – and seems as determined as the Duce’s granddaughter, Alessandra, to rescue and defend the dictator’s (deservedly) tarnished reputation. Of particular interest for a number of historical fields of study is the illuminating special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 9/3, edited by Marta Petrusewicz, which casts new light on Italy’s dark past in the realm of ‘war crimes’. The best articles in this special issue are Michele Battini, ‘Sins of memory: reflections on the lack of an Italian Nuremberg and the administration of international justice after 1945’; Filippo Focardi and Lutz Klinkhammer, ‘The question of Fascist Italy’s war crimes: the construction of a self-acquitting myth (1943 –1948)’; H. James Burgwyn, ‘General Roatta’s war against the partisans in Yugoslavia: 1942’ and Nicola Labanca, ‘Colonial rule, colonial repression and war crimes in the Italian colonies’. This special issue is of high quality and will be of interest to historians of the Second World War, Europe and Empire. Such issues are often re-awakened in Italy by events in their wartime ally, Germany, and one of the signal events of post-war retribution against what the journalist William L. Shirer termed the ‘gangster masters of the New Order’ is © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 148 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE examined in Manuela Consonni’s fascinating, ‘The Impact of the “Eichmann Event” in Italy, 1961’ (The J. of Israeli Hist., 23/1). Ten members of the Italian resistance to the Nazis and Mussolini’s Salò Republic between 1943 and 1945 tell their stories in G. Albanese and M. Borghi (eds), Nella Resistenza: Vecchi e giovani a Venezia sessant’ anni dopo (Nuova Dimensione, 14.00$). Chris Ross, Spain 1812– 2004 (2nd edn.) forms part of the ‘Modern History for Modern Languages’ series (Arnold, £14.99) and alongside Simon Barton’s A History of Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99) is a good starting point for students of that country. The new edition of Michael Alpert’s A New International History of the Spanish Civil War (Palgrave Macmillan, £18.99) confirms its place as one of the superior concise histories of that conflict. Sandra Souto Kustrìn provides an illuminating insight into the troubled society that allowed Franco the opportunity to achieve power in her ‘Taking the Street: Workers’ Youth Organizations and Political Conflict in the Spanish Second Republic’ (European Hist. Q., 34/2). An episode exemplifying the intersection between the individual, the national and the international spheres in the Spanish Civil War is the subject of Josie McLellan’s ‘The Politics of Communist Biography: Alfred Kantorowicz and the Spanish Civil War’ (German Hist., 22/4). The debate as to whether Kantorowicz (a German Commuinist) was a selfless member of the International Brigades or a Stalinist functionary is entirely representative of so many episodes of a war in which ambiguity seems to have been an almost inherent dimension. By means of a close analysis of the Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975, Walther L. Bernecker demonstrates how and why historians have slowly moved away from the notion of a Spanish Sonderweg in his ‘Spaniens Übergang von der Diktatur zur Demokratie: Deutungen, Revisionen Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung’ (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52/4). Contributing to this debate, Jesús Millán and María Cruz Romeo pose the question ‘Was the liberal revolution important to modern Spain? Political cultures and citizenship in Spanish history’ (Social Hist., 29/3). Further exploring the obfuscatory effects of the fragmentation of Spanish society in the 1930s is Stephen Jacobson’s highly readable review article, ‘The head and heart of Spain’: new perspectives on nationalism and nationhood’ (Social Hist., 29/3). Germany and Austria Once again, the history of Germany in the twentieth century has received an almost unimaginable weight of attention from historians globally. Two of the better surveys are: Peter Wende, History of Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99) and David G. Williamson, Germany since 1815 (Palgrave Macmillan, £18.99). Frank W. Thackeray’s edited volume, Events That Changed Germany (Greenwood, $65.00/£36.99), seeks to assess and interpret key moments in the evolution of the modern German state. The ten events selected for this useful teaching book are: ‘The Revolutions of 1848, 1848 –1849’; ‘The Unification of Germany’; ‘Industrialization’; ‘The Pursuit of Weltpolitik’; ‘World War I’; ‘The Collapse of the Weimar Republic’; ‘The Hitler Experience’; ‘World War II’; ‘West Germany’s, Economic and Political Miracle’; and ‘The Reunification of Germany’ in 1989–1990. Ronald Speirs and John Breuilly (eds), Germany’s Two Unifications: Anticipations, Experiences, Responses (Palgrave Macmillan, £58.00) provides us with an interesting exercise in comparative history. Benjamin Carter Hett, Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin (Harvard U.P., $35/£22.95/$32.30) is a useful addition to the existing social-historical research into crime in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany. Richard E. Frankel’s lively Bismarck’s Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898 –1945 (Berg, £16.99) examines the legacy of the ‘Iron Chancellor’ – particularly for politicians on the Right – following his death in 1898. The centrality of militarism in the recent German past is examined by Ute Frevert’s study of conscription in her A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (Berg, £50/£16.99). © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 149 Terence Zuber, German War Planning 1891–1914: Sources and Interpretations, (Boydell, £50.00) makes available in English translation many of the documents concerning German war planning before 1914 that, having survived the Second World War, were then locked away for over forty years by the East German state. It makes for fascinating reading and Zuber has succeeded admirably in his task of bringing these revelations concerning late Imperial Germany to a wider audience. Thomas Boghardt’s Spies of the Kaiser (Palgrave Macmillan, £54.00) utilises new archival sources in outlining German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era in a lucid fashion. Roger Chickering’s Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (CUP, £14.95) is an excellent volume that analyses the impact of the First World War and all sections of German society. Maureen Healy’s Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (CUP, £45.00/$75.00) is a genuinely superb book. As well as being a detailed history of a society at war, it is a very human book – charting the disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire against the background of the line of the Viennese population. László Péter’s article ‘R.W. SetonWatson’s Changing Views on the National Question of the Habsburg Monarchy and the European Balance of Power’ (The Slavonic and East European R., 82/3) is an interesting piece that charts the evolution of the views of the famous historian from a proHabsburg stance to his eventual embrace of the disintegration of the Monarchy based on support for the idea of national self-determination. One of the best general histories of Weimar Germany – Eberhard Kolb’s The Weimar Republic (Routledge, £18.99) – appears in a welcome second edition. Jonathan Wright’s excellent study of the man often seen as Weimar’s best hope, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (OUP, £26.00) appears in paperback. Both of these books must surely appear on every undergraduate reading list of inter-war Germany and Europe. Raffael Scheck’s, Mothers of the Nation: Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany (Berg, £50/£16.99/$26.95) makes an important contribution to the political history of the Weimar period. Ellen Kennedy’s, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Duke U.P., $22.95) seeks to put Schmitt in long-term context for the considerable body with a renewed interest in Schmitt amongst scholars of jurisprudence, history, political science and philosophy. The interest in Schmitt is witnessed by the re-publication of his major works and this year sees the emergence of his Legality and Legitimacy, translated and edited by Jeffrey Seitzer with a foreword by John P. McCormick (Duke U.P., $21.95). Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin, £25.00) represents the first in his trilogy of Nuziem and it is a magnificent achievement that elegantly examines the political, social, economic, cultural and artistic dimensions of Nazi Germany. Richard Bessel’s, Nazism and War (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £18.99) examines Nazism by concentrating on its essence – i.e. racial war. Even the years of peace (1933 –1939) were characterised by preparing for war and this book discharges its task well written, as it is, using the latest research. Michael H. Kater’s Hitler Youth (Harvard U.P., $27.95), in defiance of the accepted wisdom, contends that young people were not a central concern for Hitler, which led to certain structural and organizational weaknesses in the Hitler Youth. As a comprehensive volume of treating children and youth growing up between the Weimar Republic and a divided Germany, Kater’s book is an excellent starting point for students interested in the Hitler Youth. Two recent areas of heavy publishing activity coincide in Shelley Baranowski’s excellent Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (CUP, £40.00/$65.00) in which the author analyses the Nazi Leisure organisation, Kraft durch Freude (KdF ) in source-rich detail (over a dozen archives are utilised). Astrid M. Eckert, Glasplatten im märkischen Sand. Ein Beitrag zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der Tageseinträge und Diktate von Joseph Goebbels, (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52/3) and Michael Wildt, ‘Himmlers Terminkalender aus dem Jahr 1937’ (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52/4), are the result of the discovery of © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 150 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE fragments of Goebbels’ 1944 diary and Himmler’s daily appointments diary for 1937 in the Moscow archives. The Goebbels find adds to the already extensive works of the propaganda supremo while Himmler’s 1937 activities offer new insights into the construction of the SS State. Paradoxically, since historians began to realise that Nazi propaganda and post-war myth making had conspired to conceal the fact that the Gestapo was a small, indeed a chronically understaffed organisation, the number of published works on the Gestapo has increased dramatically. In his Die Gestapo war nicht allein . . . Politische Sozialkontrolle und Staatsterror im deutsch-niederländischen Grenzgebiet 1929 –1945 (Lit, 49.90$), Herbert Wagner brings not only the knowledge of a ‘local’ to his regional study, but the expertise of a former serving police officer and trained historian. His differentiated account stresses regionally specific ‘cultures of persecution’, and contextualises the work of the Gestapo not only in relation to voluntary denunciation, but also to the myriad of other Nazi agencies which contributed to the functioning of the Nazi terror. While Gestapo omnipresence was mythical, the widespread sense of being under surveillance was by no means without foundation, and the Gestapo’s own contribution to terror was very real. Nikolaus Wachsmann’s Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (Yale U.P., £30.00) demonstrates the complicity of thousands of ordinary civil servants in repression in Hitler’s Germany whilst the conclusion outlines the whitewashing of the past by the Federal Republic after 1949. In the crowded field of scholarship on Nazi medicine Paul Julian Weindling’s Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials (Palgrave Macmillan, £64.00) is likely to become a reference point given its cogent and lucid exposition of the tragic manner in which the medical profession compromised itself in the years 1933 – 45. Karl Cervik’s Kindermord in der Ostmark: Kindereuthanasie im Nationalsozialismus 1938 –1945 (Lit, 12.90$) is an efficient summary of the murder of children deemed ‘unworthy of life’ by the Nazi state in Austria. Adolf Eichmann is one of the most notorious figures in pantheon of Nazi evil as the organiser of the Final Solution. His notoriety endures not only because of his appalling crimes but, additionally, due to his dramatic abduction by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960, his trial and execution in Israel in 1961–2 and Hannah Arendt’s superlative Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). David Cesarani’s Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (Heinemann, £20.00) is a superior example of the genre of using a biographical approach to attempt to interpret the catastrophe of Nazi Germany. On the level of analysis by institutional means we have Harold James, The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank (CUP, £30.00/$40.00). In this well-written study, James notes that, in contrast to elements in the old elites – personified by Claus von Stauffenberg – business leaders did not participate in the Resistance. By abandoning moral obligations and subordinating their interests to those of the state, the bankers helped to ensure the survival of their institutions at the cost of engendering a legacy whereby their role in the years 1933 – 45 is viewed with almost universal suspicion. Ben Shepherd’s, War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Harvard U.P., £19.95) is an innovative book that seeks to steer a middle path between the post-war West German exoneration of the German soldier and the blanket condemnation of the recent past. Whilst in no way under-estimating the suffering caused by the German army in the USSR, Shepherd successfully demonstrates the wide variations in behaviour on the part of German officers and their soldiers – especially when they were able to exercise some autonomy in the field. Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943 (Chicago U.P., £14.00/$20.00) is a harrowing eye witness account of the dreadful fate of the bombing of Hamburg (and the firestorms that followed), translated here for the first time some fifty-eight years after its publication in German. Produced for the sixtieth anniversary of the ill-fated ‘Hitler bomb plot’, Peter Steinbach’s Der 20. Juli 1944: Gesichter des Widerstands (Siedler, 24.00$) provides an excellent picture of the internal politics of Germany as national catastrophe loomed. Arthur D. Kahn’s Experiment in Occupation: Witness to the Turnabout, Anti-Nazi War to Cold War, 1944 –1946 (Penn © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 151 State U.P., $45.00) is written by a former US official (in the OSS) and provides some interesting insights although the book repeats some rather outdated assertions. A fascinating account of that catastrophe as viewed from the very heart of the Reich appears in the shape of Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary, ed. Melissa Muller (Phoenix, £7.99). Junge was Hitler’s personal private secretary from 1942 until 1945 and the book was used as a source for Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall), much of which is told from her perspective. This is a fascinating book and is to be recommended not least because of its depiction of an ordinary woman living with the knowledge of intimate association with one of the most criminal regimes in history. James C. Van Hook’s Rebuilding Germany: The Creation of the Social Market Economy, 1945–1957 (CUP, £45.00) engages with the debates on the post-war Wirtschaftswunder and assesses the US contribution concluding that the West German state itself had a high degree of freedom to shape its own destiny. A further work on the post-war reconstruction of West Germany is provided by Armin Grünbacher’s Reconstruction and Cold War in Germany: The Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (1948–1961) (Ashgate, £50.00). Nomos’ history of the social politics of post-war Germany is indeed an ambitious undertaking (which is scheduled to appear in at least eleven volumes plus accompanying CD-ROMs containing, literally, thousands of documents). 2004 saw the publication of the eighth of these volumes – covering the GDR in the first twelve years of its existence (Dierk Hoffmann and Michael Schwartz (eds), Geschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutschland seit 1945. Band 8: 1949–1961: Deutsche Demokratische Republik: Im Zeichen des Aufbaus des Sozialismus, Nomos, $169). This meticulous volume is incredibly useful for detailed study of the social history of the GDR up to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. On a methodological and historiographical note, one might usefully refer here to Peter Lambert’s excellent chapter on ‘Social History in Germany’ in Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield (eds), Making History: An introduction to the history and practices of a discipline (Routledge, £16.99). Taken as a whole, this edited volume is an excellent tool for those seeking accessible but scholarly texts for the teaching of historiography at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Reinhard Grütz’s Katholizismus in der DDR-Gesellschaft 1960–1990: Kirchliche Leitbilder, theologische Deutungen und lebensweltliche Praxis im Wandel (Ferdinand Schöningh, 58$) looks at the forgotten Christian faith of the former GDR and examines Roman Catholics homogeneity (74 per cent of Roman Catholics in the GDR voted CDU in 1990) and their ability to survive extended state hostility after 1949. Peter Lange and Sabine Roß (eds), 17. Juni 1953 – Zeitzeugen berichten: Protokoll eines Aufstands (Lit, $19.90) documents eyewitness accounts of the abortive 1953 uprising whose commemoration became a part of the German collective memory so soon afterwards. Alan McDougall’s Youth Politics in East Germany: The Free German Youth Movement 1946–1968 (OUP, £55.00) is a meticulous work that seeks to analyse wider trends in the GDR (and the Soviet bloc) rather than simply narrate the history of the GDR’s youth movement. Setting books such as McDougall’s in context is Catherine Epstein’s excellent The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and their Century (Harvard U.P., £19.95). Such books provide a welcome reminder of the continuities in the history of German communism all too often passed over. On a related theme we have A. Krammer’s ‘The cult of the Spanish Civil War in East Germany’ (Journal of Contemporary History, 39/4). In an original take on post-war Germany, Paul Betts’ The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (California U.P., $50.00/ £32.50) makes the case for the crucial role played by industrial design in the construction of a democratic West German industrial culture to displace the unhappy legacy of dictatorship, militarism and war. Hartmut Berghoff’s Moderne Unternehmensgeschichte: Eine themen- und theorieorientierte Einführung (Ferdinand Schöningh, $17.90) aims to introduce a wider audience to the theory and themes of ‘modern business history.’ © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 152 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE It succeeds admirably. A history of a German industrial giant is re-told in Werner Abelshauser, Wolfgang von Hippel, Jeffrey Johnson and Raymond Stokes, German Industry and Global Enterprise: BASF: The History of a Company (CUP, £55.00). The recent near-obsession in the Federal Republic with the post-war legacy and Vergangenheitspolitik generally manifests itself again with Jeffrey Herf, ‘Politics and Memory in West and East Germany since 1961 and in Unified Germany since 1990’ (The Journal of Israeli History, 23/1); Bernard Linek, ‘Recent Debates on the Fate of the German Population in Upper Silesia 1945 –1950’ (German History, 22/3); Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘A Mastered Past? Prussia in Postwar German Memory’ (German History, 22/4); Jonathan Sperber, ‘17 June 1953: Revisiting a German Revolution’ (German Hist., 22/4); Donald Bloxham, ‘The Genocidal Past in Western Germany and the Experience of Occupation, 1945– 6’ (European Hist. Q., 34/2). Kimberly A. Redding’s Growing up in Hitler’s Shadow: Remembering Youth in Postwar Berlin (Praeger, £33.99) is based on a large number of interviews and provides fascinating insights into the lives of ordinary Berliners. Kerstin von Lingen’s Kesselrings letzte Schlacht: Kriegsverbrecherprozesse, Vergangenheitspolitik und Wiederbewaffnung: Der Fall Kesselring (Ferdinand Schöningh, $35.90) deals with the indictment of Field Marshal Kesselring as a war criminal after the Second World War. This thoughtful book tells us much about the manner in which the Federal Republic dealt with its Nazi past as does Bert-Oliver Manig’s book on the rehabilitation of the German soldier in the Adenauer era between 1949 and 1963: Die Politik der Ehre: Die Rehabilitierung der Berufssoldaten in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Wallstein, 48.00$). These two books build on earlier works, such as Norbert Frei’s Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (C.H. Beck, 1996) and Alaric Searle’s Wehrmacht Generals, West German Society, and the Debate on Rearmament (Praeger, 2003), and make a valuable contribution to the debates on memory and the past in Germany. A response to Nicolas Berg’s ‘handbook’ on the historiography of the Holocaust (Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und Erinnerung, ed. Ulrich Herbert and Lutz Raphael, Wallstein, 2003, 46.00$) by Irmtrud Wojak, ‘Nicolas Berg and the West German Historians’ (German History, 22, 1), demonstrates once more that historians do not need the ideologiocal divisons of the Historikerstreit to generate fierce debates about the German past. Y. Michal Bodemann’s thoughtprovoking and poignant book, A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait (Duke U.P., $23.95), focuses on the painful legacy of the Holocaust through an examination of one of the surviving Jewish families that elected to stay in Germany. Of course, the Nazi legacy is often intimately linked with the Leftist terror of the 1970s and Klaus Pflieger outlines the story of the most active of such groups in his Die Rote Armee Fraktion: RAF (Nomos, 19.80$). The life and work of Wehner von Braun is well–known but it is after forgotten that he was part of a little-known German space programme has been documented by Niklas Reinke in his Geschichte der deutschen Raumfahrtpolitik: Konzepte, Einflussfaktoren und Interdependenzen 1922– 2002 (Oldenbourg, $49.80). Reinke’s book represents an ambitious attempt to cover German space policy from the Weimar Republic until the present day (although the West German state after 1949 looms largest in the narrative). The superb series of documents relating to the foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany continues with the release of Institut für Zeitgeschichte im Auftrag des Auswärtigen Amtes (ed.), Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1973, 3 volumes (Oldenbourg, $188.00). These three volumes are of particular interest to scholars interested in GermanCzech relations (as 1973 saw the completion of the main business of Brandt’s Ostpolitik with the conclusion of an agreement between Bonn and Prague). The documentation published here is fascinating, particularly with regard to the question of the status of the Munich Agreement of 1938 (Bonn eventual successful in resisting Prague’s demand that it be declared null and void ab initio). Surely, no respectable university library would want to be without the complete run of this wonderful research tool. © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 153 The Federal Institute for Research on the German Past in the East releases its twelfth yearbook – Berichte und Forschungen: Jahrbuch des Bundesinstituts für ostdeutsche Kultur und Geschichte (Oldenbourg, 59.80$) – reporting on new projects, latest research and the general state of play in the field. The yearbook, reflecting the division of the Institute into the four specialist areas of history, literature/language, ethnicity, and art history, is particularly useful in bibliographic terms. This year also sees the latest release of the Interior Ministry’s series on innerGerman policy in the shape of Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik. VI. Reihe, Band 2: 1. Januar 1971 bis 31. Dezember 1972: Die Bahr-Kohl-Gespräche 1970–1973 (Oldenbourg, $89.80) which contains a large number of documents on the accompanying CD-ROM. The amount of official German publications is now quite incredible, growing year-on-year. The cabinet minutes for 1961 are published in the volume edited by Hartmut Weber, Kabinettsprotokolle der Bundesregierung, Band 13: 1960 (Oldenbourg, 49.80$). Hans Günther Hockerts (ed.), Koordinaten deutscher Geschichte in der Epoche des Ost-West-Konflikts (Oldenbourg, 59.80$) is a superior attempt to understand the evolution of historiography in Germany during the Cold War. Detlef Junker’s monumental two volume edited work, The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War: A Handbook (CUP, £130) is a must for anyone researching any aspect of German foreign policy or German-American relations to 1990. The phenomenon of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former the GDR – the inspiration for Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Goodbye Lenin!) is examined in the stimulating book edited by Thomas Goll and Thomas Beurer, Ostalgie als Erinnerungskultur? (Nomos, $24.00). On the other side of the coin is the study of the legal measures taken against former GDR border guards in Roman Grafe’s Deutsche Gerechtigkeit: Prozesse gegen DDR-Grenzschützen und ihre Befehlsgeber (Siedler, 24.90$). This is a fascinating and well-researched book that tells us much about contemporary Germany and the legacy that continues to dog the relationship between the former East and West German states. As a member of the (West) Berlin Senate declared of an unknown East German border guard in the 1960’s, ‘Murder remains murder – even if one is instructed to do so!’ The Balkans and Greece Dennis P. Hupchick’s Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99) finally makes a welcome appearance in paperback. Hupchick demolishes the enduring myths of ‘centuries-old hatreds’ in a detailed and balanced history of a millennium and a half which demonstrates the rich tapestry of inter-dependence woven by the interplay of Catholicism, Orthodox and Islam has been the norm in the Balkans. Hupchick’s book is a fantastic single volume history of the Balkan region and incredibly useful – not least because of the very extensive bibliographies sprinkling the text. Ulf Brunnbauer’s edited volume, (Re)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism (Lit, 29.90$) demonstrates that, despite the social and political upheavals of the last twenty years or so, recent historiography has been characterised by a high degree of continuity. Neven Budak’s excellent piece, ‘Post-socialist Historiography in Croatia since 1990’, is of particular interest for its discussion of the political and national pressure that have been regularly exerted on professional historians. Philip Carabott and Thanasis D. Sfikas (eds), The Greek Civil War: Essays on a Conflict of Exceptionalism and Silences (Ashgate, $99.95/£55.00) addresses a struggle that is curiously overlooked in European history despite its pivotal role in shaping the Cold War and US participation in that conflict. The book succeeds in establishing clearly the links between Greek and European developments in the 1940s. An even-more neglected dimension of Cold War history is addressed by Alfred J. Rieber in his ‘The Crack in the Plaster: Crisis in Romania and the Origins of the Cold War’ (The J. of Modern Hist., 76/1). Growing out of a conference of Serbian and Austrian scholars held in Belgrade in October 1996, the edited volume by Miroslav Jovanovid, Karl Kaser and Slobodan Naumovid, Between the Archives and the Field: A dialogue on historical anthropology of the Balkans (Lit, © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 154 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE 29.90$), brings together a number of interesting pieces informed by a more anthropologically informed history (although a couple of the pieces are rendered unreadable by worship at the feet of the post-modernist altar). Georgi Dimitrov (1882 –1949) was the most prominent Bulgarian Communist of the twentieth century and head of the Comintern (1935–1941). Drawing from Dimitrov’s extensive recounting of his frequent meetings with Stalin in his diary, Tzvetan Todorov has produced a fascinating portrait in ‘Stalin Close Up’ (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5/1). Todorov exploits the fact that Dimitrov meticulously recorded Stalin’s thoughts and opinions and has records the Soviet dictator’s opinions on matters including nationalism, the balance of power and the motivational potential of ideology. M. Edith Durham, author of Albania and the Albanians: Selected Articles and Letters, 1903–1944, ed. Bejtullah Destani (I.B. Tauris, £49.50), was one of the last of the breed of Victorian lady travellers, with a keen eye for detail and a perceptive political brain. Echoing Leon Trotsky’s opinions, her Balkan writing betrayed an increasingly hostile attitude towards Serbia and the Serbs. This collection makes for fascinating reading and there is, of course an irresitable tendency to place Durham’s views against contemporary views of the Serbs, given the the manner in which the tragedy of Yugoslavia unfolded in the 1990s. Sima M. Çirkoviç, The Serbs (Blackwell, £25.00) offers a rather more sympathetic picture of the Serbs stretching from the seventh century to the present day. Carole Rogel’s The Breakup of Yugoslavia and Its Aftermath, rev. edn. (Greenwood, $45.00/£25.99) is composed of seven essays, beginning with the Tito era, tracing the demise of the Yugoslav state in systematic fashion. The book includes two chapters that focus on the aftermath of the wars of succession and the current conditions in the former Yugoslavia. Erik J. Zurcher’s Turkey: A Modern History (I.B. Tauris, £15.99) appears in a welcome second edition. Zurcher traces the origins of modern Turkey from the reforms of the Ottoman Empire attempted in the late eighteenth century. The book offers crucial insights into Turkish nationalism by virtue of its discussion of the relationship between the reforms programmes of the Ottomans, the Young Turks and Kemalism. This is very useful introductory book and has an extensive bibliographical survey and a useful guide to the major figures in Turkish history. Russia and the Soviet Union Dennis J. Dunn, The Catholic Church and Russia: Popes, Patriarchs, Tsars and Commissars (Ashgate, £50.00) is a interesting text although this reviewer notes that the book’s failure to examine the relationship prior to the October Revolution might lead the reader to conclude that the Catholic Church’s problems with Russia began with their confrontation with Communism. In reality, the troubled relationship between the Church in Rome and between Russian Orthodoxy had much deeper roots than the October Revolution. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning’s Reforming the Tsar’s Army Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution (CUP, £45.00) argues that military reform was an essential part of the shaping of a modern state apparatus in Russia. The book is also extremely useful for those seeking to understand the history of the Red Army and its failures and successes – most notably in the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941– 45. St. Petersburg was built by Peter the Great as his, and Russia’s, ‘window on Europe’ and its first 300 years are celebrated in the lavish book by Arthur L. George and Elena George, St. Petersburg: the First Three Centuries (Sutton, £25.00) and in more sober fashion by the edited volume by Helmut Hubel, Joachim von Puttkamer and Ulrich Stettner, Ein europäisches Rußland oder Rußland in Europa? 300 Jahre St. Petersburg (Nomos, $36). Rex A. Wade (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches to the Russian Revolution of 1917 (Routledge, £17.99) brings together key texts to illustrate a number of new interpretive approaches and includes a very good bibliography. A touching book by John Van Der Kiste provides an interesting insight into what happens to history’s losers in The Romanovs 1818 –1959 (Sutton, £8.99). On a related theme, Catherine Andreyev and Ivan Savicky examine the Russians who fled to the capital of © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 155 new Czech state in the wake of the October Revolution in their Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora 1918–1938 (Yale U.P., £25.00). Alexander N. Yakovlev, a key architect of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of Perestroika in the 1980s, has produced a moving survey of the twentieth century in his A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (Yale U.P., £12). Erik-C. Landis has produced an interesting piece on post-revolutionary Russia in his ‘Waiting for Makhno: Legitimacy and Context in a Russian Peasant War’ (Past and Present, 183/1). Landis argues convincingly that the Tambov rebellion was exceptional both in terms of its organisation and in the political programme that it supposedly represented. The re-issuing of classic texts is desirable not least because of the manner in which new generations of students can be disabused of the notion that the latest text is always the best. In this vein the publication of E.H. Carr’s The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin 1917 –1929, with a new introduction by R.W. Davies (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99) is to be welcomed. Matthew Worley’s edited volume In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third Period (I.B. Tauris, £45.00) consists of fifteen essays assessing Communist prospects globally in the Comintern’s Third Period (which lasted from 1928 to 1935 approximately). Robert Service’s Stalin: A Biography (Macmillan, £25.00) is a weighty tome that is scrupulous in its assessment of the dictator’s life. Of course, there are gaps and great uncertainties over many aspects of Stalin’s life. Service is therefore rightly cautious and we are left to make our own assessments of the evidence over, for instance, the Kirov murder of 1934 and the circumstances of Stalin’s death in 1953. Stalin would surely be happy at having kept us guessing to the present day. The savagery and hedonistic lifestyle of Stalin and his entourage is brilliantly captured in Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him (Viking, £20). Rayfield’s book particularly focuses on Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky, Iagoda, Ezhov and Beria, establishing that these pople were not simply ideologically driven murderers but a squalid collection of sadists with few redeeming features. Rayfield’s is particularly effective in conveying how a skillful politician, with a superb intellect, was wedded to a criminality of diabolical cast in the person of Lavrenti Beria. This book is the ultimate antidote to contemporary Stalin-era nostaligia in Russia. Stanley G. Payne’s The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (Yale U.P., $35.00) is based on exhaustive archival work details and Soviet and Communist intervention in the Spanish revolution and subsequent war in Spain. Payne is particularly excellent on Soviet strategies, Comintern activities, and the role of the Communist party in the Iberian peninsular until the victory of Franco in April 1939. Payne’s book builds on earlier works – such as Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov, Spain betrayed: the Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (Yale U.P., 2001) – and is well deserving of its 2005 Marshall Shulman prize. Barry McLoughlin’s edited volume, Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union (Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99) provides a systematic treatment of the terror and is especially good in its integration of the latest historiographical developments. Oleg V. Khlevniuk’s The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Yale U.P., £25.00), is persuasive in arguing that political motivations and paranoia about potential enemies contributed no more to the expansion of the Gulag than the economic opportunities proffered by slave labour did. Sergej Slutsch’s article, ‘Stalins “Kriegsszenario 1939”: eine Rede, die es nie gab: die Geschichte einer Fälschung’ (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52/4), engages with the disputed history of Stalin’s famous 1939 speech – where he supposedly revealed the logic for his conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Slutsch carefully traces the motives behind the deliberate historical misrepresentations, and unintentional misunderstandings, that have dogged this affair ever since. The appalling suffering of the ordinary Soviet people in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ is conveyed beautifully in John Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich’s edited volume, Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941–1944 (Palgrave Macmillan, © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. 156 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE £54.00). M. Aust’s article, ‘Writing the Empire: Russia and the Soviet Union in Twentieth-Century Historiography’ (European R. of Hist., 10/2), suggests that the use of imperial history as a field of comparative history in is of particular utility in constructing Russia as a historical region. Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk’s Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (OUP, £26.99) demonstrates the inner logic of Stalin’s planning, arguing that his policy systematically sought to entrench the Soviet Union’s Superpower status. Having drawn upon new archives from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Wilfried Loth argues in his ‘The origins of Stalin’s note of 10 March 1952’ (Cold War Hist., 4/2), that the desire for a peace treaty over Germany was genuine on the part of the Soviet dictator. Thus the 10 March note was, in fact, a possible ‘missed opportunity’ and not simply a device designed to obstruct German integration with the West as has been hitherto widely assumed. The volume edited by Melanie Ilic, Susan Reid and Lynne Attwood, Women in the Khrushchev Era (Palgrave Macmillan, £55.00), utilises a wealth of newly released archival material and the latest secondary literature. The book explores a range of subjects including housing, space flight, women workers, cinema, religion and consumption. Simon Cosgrove’s Russian Nationalism and the Politics of Soviet Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, £52.50) takes the history of a single literary journal, Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary), over a single decade. The journal was created by Nikita Khrushchev in an attempt to harness aspects of Russian national felling and, as with so much Khrushchev planned, it turned out to be something of an interesting failure. This book demonstrates the ambivalent relationship between the state and Russian nationalism in the USSR; in the ultimate place the former was dependent upon the latter whilst, simultaneously, undermining the Soviet project it by its very articulation. The number of histories of former subject peoples of the Russian Empire/USSR increases year-on-year and this year sees the appearance of Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, Volume II: Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, $35/£19.99) and Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905 –1920: The Shaping of a National Identity in a Muslim Community (CUP, £18.99). Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic states Mark Pittaway, Eastern Europe: 1939– 2000 (Arnold, £12.99) offers a short, but non-patronising, introduction to the study of Eastern Europe. Given the current depth of ignorance about this region one cannot but applaud the appearance of such texts. Timothy Snyder’s The Reconstruction Of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569 –1999 (Yale U.P., £12.50) is a comparative historical study of four modern nationalist ideologies that emerged from an essentially common medieval notion of citizenship. The cults of leadership in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which flourished in the era of Stalinist domination between 1945 and 1953, are analysed in Balazs Apor, J.C. Behrends, P. Jones and E.A. Rees (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00). In Peter D. Stachura’s Poland, 1918 –1945: An Interpretive and Documentary History of the Second Republic (Routledge, £20.99), the popular notion that post-1918 Poland was essentially a reactionary European backwater, doomed from the outset – an archetypal ‘failed state’ if you will – is forcefully challenged. Stachura is a long-established authority on German history and his new book, undoubtedly written with a pro-Polish slant (but is no worse for that), will prove invaluable for all students of inter-war Europe and not just those seeking insight into the Polish state re-created after the First World War. The documents are incredibly useful in this book and Stachura brings another dimension to a number of debates on inter-war Europe. Stachura has also edited a fascinating volume on the exile enforced by the fourth partition of Poland in The Poles in Britain, 1940– 2000: From Betrayal to Assimilation (Routledge, £21.99). Anna warnowska serves up a useful article in her ‘Women’s political participation in inter-war Poland: opportunities and limitations’ © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association. TWENTIETH CENTURY 157 (Women’s Hist. R., 13/1). Anita J. Praxmowska’s Civil War in Poland 1942–1948 (Palgrave Macmillan, £47.50) is a startlingly original book based on its that the Polish state continued to find itself the victim of premise and the Soviets after, as well as before, the German attack on the USSR in June 1941. Praxmowska also provides us with the eminently readable A History of Poland (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99). Andrzej Paczkowski is one of Poland’s most eminent historians and his Po’7 wieku dziejo’w Polski (PWN, 1995) has been translated (and expanded) as The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom (Penn State U.P., $39.95). The understandable Polish focus on relations with Germany historically is examined in the fascinating articles by Michael G. Müller, ‘The Joint Polish-German Commission for the Revision of School Textbooks and Polish Views of German History’ (German Hist., 22/3) and Klaus Zernack and Karin Friedrich, ‘Developments in Polish Scholarship on German History, 1945– 2000’ (German Hist., 22/3). Occupied Poland was the epicentre of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews and Natalia Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography of the Holocaust – Between Silence and Public Debate’ (German History, 22/3), seeks to examine the legacy engendered by the Final Solution. Ulf Brunnbauer, Michael G. Esch and Holm Sundhaussen (eds), Definitionsmacht, Utopie, Vergeltung: ‘Ethnische Säuberungen’ im östlichen Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts (Lit, $29.90) offers a scholarly survey of the most prominent cases of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the violent history of twentieth century Eastern Europe. Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton U.P., $19.95) is a well-written book – but it does have a number of errors and tends to concentrate rather more on the last one hundred years at the expense of the rest of the, admittedly rather inspirational (as related here), story of the Hungarian people. Krisztián Ungváry’s Battle for Budapest: 100 Days in World War II (I.B. Tauris, £14.95) hails from the best tradition of military history, retelling the savage battle for the Hungarian capital in 1944 – 5 using a wealth of primary and secondary sources. Martin Mevius successfully demonstrates how the Hungarian Communists sought, and failed, to appropriate national symbols and Magyar heroes in his excellent Agents of Moscow: The Hungarian Communist Party and the Origins of Socialist Patriotism 1941–1953 (OUP, £55.00). Johanna Granville, The First Domino: International Decision Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956 (Texas A&M U.P., £35.50) reminds us of the manner in which Hungary was often a mere pawn after the Treaty of Trianon (as does László Borhi, ‘We Hungarian communists are realists’: János Kádár’s foreign policy in the light of Hungarian–US relations, 1957– 67’ (Cold War Hist., 4/2). In his The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Rowman and Littlefield, $79.00), Bradley F. Abrams challenges the conventional wisdom by denying that non-Communist forces in Czechoslovakia fought a courageous rearguard action before succumbing to the overwhelming forces of Communist Party organisation and Moscow-backed plotting. Abrams advances the idea that it was non-Communist Czechs (the study does not include Slovakia) who meet assisted the Communist take-over by their failure to prevent the Communist party from controlling the political agenda after the Second World War. Of course, as Abrams notes, the memory of the West’s betrayal at Munich in 1938 was sufficiently fresh in these years to soften the anti-Communism of many in the Czech lands. The book certainly makes a convincing case on the necessity of fundamentally revising our views on the Communist take-over of Czechoslovakia in 1948. Knud J.V. Jespersen’s History of Denmark (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99) provides a useful outline of Danish history of utility to the scholar and lay reader alike. Drawing extensively on oral histories and interviews, Thomas Lane’s poignant Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain (Palgrave, £45.00), provides a great deal of information on the lives of Europeans in the 1940s. Berit Nøkleby’s Gestapo: Tysk politi i Norge 1940– 45 [Gestapo: German Police in Norway 1940 – 45] (Aschehoug, NOK399/c. £34) reflects the inevitable over-spill of the intense scrutiny of the Gestapo that we have seen in Germany the last few years into the countries of occupied Europe. © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association.