Contemporary European History最新文献

{"title":"Colonial Business in Postcolonial Germany: The Imperial Afterlives of C. Woermann, 1919–1945","authors":"Kim Sebastian Todzi","doi":"10.1017/s0960777324000171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777324000171","url":null,"abstract":"Situating itself at the intersection of colonial history, global history and business history, this article highlights the overlooked history of German colonial companies post-First World War. It argues for an ‘imperial afterlife’ through continued German corporate interests in African markets, emphasising the economic dimension of imperialism. Using C. Woermann as an example, it shows how the company adapted to the post-First World War global order, underwent organisational changes, and merged with National Socialist policies in Eastern Europe after 1939, revealing the adaptability of imperial enterprises.","PeriodicalId":504276,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141102168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Liberation, Re-Education, Democratisation: The Politics of Gratitude in German-American Relations after 1945","authors":"Katharina Gerund","doi":"10.1017/s0960777324000055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777324000055","url":null,"abstract":"The US-American presence in postwar Germany and its role in West Germany's re-education and democratisation have fuelled a discourse of gratitude that has lastingly shaped the transatlantic alliance. German politicians and other policy actors continue to rely on proclamations of ‘thankfulness’ as a means of what Todd Hall has termed ‘emotional diplomacy’. In the process, they affirm a collective memory of the postwar years that emphasises friendship and contains social conflicts, political tensions, and ambivalent affects. They draw on iconic tropes and powerful narratives – ranging from the GI handing out chewing gum to CARE packages and the ‘gift’ of democracy – which have cast German-American relations in terms of generosity, gift-giving, and gratitude. This article traces the roots of this discourse to (the popular memory of) the postwar moment and situates it vis-à-vis the multifaceted affective landscape of early postwar Germany with a specific focus on its gender logics and with an eye to its benefits and the risks it entails.","PeriodicalId":504276,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140241605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sexual Knowledge and Expertise in Europe's East: Transnational Exchanges","authors":"K. Líšková, Kate Fisher","doi":"10.1017/s0960777323000632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777323000632","url":null,"abstract":"East Central Europe played a crucial role in shaping the development of sexual science from the 1870s onwards. The life-histories of influential and well-known figures such as Sigmund Freud (born in Freiberg/Příbor), Magnus Hirschfeld (born in Kolberg/Kolobrzeg) and Karl Maria Kertbeny (born in Vienna, based in Budapest) reveal the imperial interconnectedness of East Central Europe with what would become Western Europe. By 1932, when the World League for Sexual Reform held its congress in Brno (following previous meetings in Berlin, London, Vienna, and Copenhagen), the society had established branches across the region, including Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. In that same year, Poland decriminalised homosexual acts. Yet, East Central Europe is often neglected in the history of sexology and little is known about how sexual science in these regions shaped, and was shaped by, global networks of knowledge production. Indeed, despite recent attempts to demonstrate the ways in which sexual science was a truly global enterprise, East Central Europe remains to be fully incorporated into our mapping of the global networks of sexological dialogue and exchange.1 This is especially true of scholarship on the period after the Second World War. Historians have tended to misconstrue the transnational nature of sexual science in East Central Europe both before and after 1945. First, the contribution of East Central Europeans to European cultures of scientific exchanges has been obscured by the tendency of much historical writing to focus on a small number of key pioneers (Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis). Second, it is assumed that East Central European sexual science was largely cut off from international networks of knowledge exchange after the Second World War following the onset of the Cold War.2 Third, there are preconceived notions that communist authoritarian governments, having curtailed political freedoms and economic entrepreneurialism, must have also taken a repressive stance against sexual expression.3 Fourth, the dominance of 1989 as the fundamental caesura has encouraged a periodisation that fails to draw enough attention to the shifts in transnational patterns of knowledge exchange around sexual politics during the period 1945 to 1989 and fails to identify key continuities that link the sexual politics of the contemporary world with those of the communist period. None of these assumptions can withstand scrutiny, as the articles in this forum reveal. Building on a recent boost in scholarly interest in the sexual histories of the region,4 we present a collection of papers that each detail the transnational connections of local sexual experts in creating sexual knowledge both before and during state socialism.5","PeriodicalId":504276,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139526720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Franco's Moroccans","authors":"Ali Al Tuma","doi":"10.1017/S0960777320000284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777320000284","url":null,"abstract":"Recent research into the Moroccan troops who fought in the Spanish Civil War has both drawn from and contributed to insights gained from new historiographical developments in the field of the Spanish conflict as well as other European twentieth-century conflicts. Studies examining the experiences and choices of low-level participants of the war, whether soldiers or civilians – on both the Francoist and republican sides – have increasingly shown that they were players in possession of a certain degree of agency, however limited. That agency allowed these low-level players, whether Spanish or Moroccan, to influence war events to a higher degree than previously thought possible, and has shown that mobilisation for and maintenance of the war effort depended on a certain mixture of coercion and negotiation, even within the more authoritarian Francoist camp. In the European context, the Moroccan participation in the 1936–9 war has its special characteristics, one of which is that its military significance weighed heavier than other colonial contributions to European battlefields between 1914 and 1945, and therefore the agency of Moroccans was more consequential. Nevertheless, it has much in common with other European experiences. A recent collaborative volume on British, French, Spanish and Dutch colonial armies in the first half of the twentieth century, Colonial Soldiers in Europe (2016), edited by Eric Storm and myself, has helped put the Moroccan–Spanish experience in European perspective. Similarities abound, not only in colonial soldiers’ experiences of fighting in foreign lands, but also between the various Western European attempts at controlling, i.e. limiting, the cultural and human consequences of this massive irruption of male warriors into the continent.","PeriodicalId":504276,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141202606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}