Refugees Human Rights And Realpolitik

This book presents a multidimensional case study of international human rights in the immediate post-Second World War period, and the way in which complex refugee problems created by the war were often in direct competition with strategic interests and national sovereignty. The case study is the clandestine immigration of Jewish refugees from Italy to Palestine in 1945–1948, which was part of a British–Zionist conflict over Palestine, involving strategic and humanitarian attitudes. The result was a clear subjection of human rights considerations to strategic and political interests.

This special issue focusses on refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe in British colonies, dominions and overseas territories. It deals with aspects like internment, identity and cultural representation in not well-known destinations of forced migration like India, New Zealand, Canada or Kenya.

One woman’s national, political, ethnic, social, and personal identities impart an extraordinary perspective on the histories of Europe, Polish Jews, Communism, activism, and survival during the twentieth century. Tonia Lechtman was a Jew, a loving mother and wife, a Polish patriot, a committed Communist, and a Holocaust survivor. Throughout her life these identities brought her to multiple countries—Poland, Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel—during some of the most pivotal and cataclysmic decades of the twentieth century. In most of those places, she lived on the margins of society while working to promote Communism and trying to create a safe space for her small children. Born in Łódź in 1918, Lechtman became fascinated with Communism in her early youth. In 1935, to avoid the consequences of her political activism during an increasingly antisemitic and hostile political environment, the family moved to Palestine, where Tonia met her future husband, Sioma. In 1937, the couple traveled to Spain to participate in the Spanish Civil War. After discovering she was pregnant, Lechtman relocated to France while Sioma joined the International Brigades. She spent the Second World War in Europe, traveling with two small children between France, Germany, and Switzerland, at times only miraculously avoiding arrest and being transported east to Nazi camps. After the war, she returned to Poland, where she planned to (re)build Communist Poland. However, soon after her arrival she was imprisoned for six years. In 1971, under pressure from her children, Lechtman emigrated from Poland to Israel, where she died in 1996. In writing Lechtman’s biography, Anna Müller has consulted a rich collection of primary source material, including archival documentation, private documents and photographs, interviews from different periods of Lechtman’s life, and personal correspondence. Despite this intimacy, Müller also acknowledges key historiographical questions arising from the lacunae of lost materials, the selective preservation of others, and her own interpretive work translating a life into a life story.

Back in 1989, many anticipated that the end of the Cold War would usher in the ‘end of history’ characterized by the victory of democracy and capitalism. At the thirtieth anniversary of this momentous event, this book challenges this assumption. It studies the most recent era of contemporary European history in order to analyse the impact, consequences and legacy of the end of the Cold War for Western Europe. Bringing together leading scholars on the topic, the volume answers the question of how the end of the Cold War has affected Western Europe and reveals how it accelerated and reinforced processes that shaped the fragile (geo-)political and economic order of the continent today. In four thematic sections, the book analyses the changing position of Germany in Europe; studies the transformation of neoliberal capitalism; answers the question how Western Europe faced the geopolitical challenges after the Berlin Wall came down; and investigates the crisis of representative democracy. As such, the book provides a comprehensive and novel historical perspective on Europe since the late 1980s.

As fought in 1950s Berlin, the cold war was a many-headed monster. Winning stomachs with enticing consumption was as important as winning hearts and minds with persuasive propaganda. Demonstrators not only fought the police in the streets; they were swayed one way or another by cultural competition. Western espionage agencies waged brazen but surreptitious covert warfare, while the Stasi fought back with a campaign of targeted kidnapping. This book takes seriously a complex borderscape, which narrowed but did not stem the flow of people, ideas and goods over an open boundary. Assessing the licit and the illicit, the book stresses the messy and entwined nature of this war of a thousand cuts (or miniscule salami slices). While brinkmanship was orchestrated by the elites in Moscow and Washington, the effects of such intense psychological pressure were felt by ordinary Berliners, who sought to carry on with their mundane, but border-straddling everyday lives in spite of the ideological bifurcation.

People eat and drink very differently throughout their life. Each stage has diets with specific ingredients, preparations, palates, meanings and settings. Moreover, physicians, authorities and general observers have particular views on what and how to eat according to age. All this has changed frequently during the previous two centuries. Infant feeding has for a long time attracted historical attention, but interest in the diets of youngsters, adults of various ages, and elderly people seems to have dissolved into more general food historiography. This volume puts age on the agenda of food history by focusing on the very diverse diets throughout the lifecycle.

National indifference is one of the most innovative notions historians have brought to the study of nationalism in recent years. The concept questions the mass character of nationalism in East Central Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Ordinary people were not in thrall to the nation; they were often indifferent, ambivalent or opportunistic when dealing with issues of nationhood. As with all ground-breaking research, the literature on national indifference has not only revolutionized how we understand nationalism, over time, it has also revealed a new set of challenges. This volume brings together experienced scholars with the next generation, in a collaborative effort to push the geographic, historical, and conceptual boundaries of national indifference 2.0.

This volume provides the English-speaking reader with little-known perspectives of Central and Eastern European historians on the topic of the Russian Revolution. Whereas research into the Soviet Union’s history has flourished at Western universities, the contribution of Central and Eastern European historians, during the Cold War working in conditions of imposed censorship, to this field of academic research has often been seriously circumscribed. Bringing together perspectives from across Central and Eastern Europe alongside contributions from established scholars from the West, this significant volume casts the year 1917 in a new critical light.