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The figure of Christopher Columbus was a key trope in the programming for the BBC's Latin American Service (LAS) and West Indian Service during the Second World War. This paper analyzes four dramas and one feature program from the 1940s that not only dramatize events from Columbus's life but also reflect the contemporary broadcast context by promoting British war interests and showcasing Latin American and Caribbean histories and geographies. These commemorative programs are broadly hagiographic, but they also reveal the BBC's awareness of how Latin American and West Indian audiences might variously respond to portrayals of Columbus and European colonization. Using radiogenic strategies including immersive aurality, the interplay of different historical narratives, and multivocality, these programs reveal the relationships between the BBC's institutional aims in overseas broadcasting and Latin American and West Indian program creators' literary and political goals. The portrayals of Columbus in the 1940s served an allegorical and ultimately propagandistic purpose, demonstrating the role of faith and perseverance amid turbulence and conflict, and inducing, by analogy, sympathy for Britain's war effort. The authors commissioned to write, produce, and deliver these dramas were not simply responding to propaganda guidelines; they were responding to the demands of the corporation and the war effort while also pursuing their own commitments and literary ambition. Ultimately, the scripts produced by the BBC for broadcast to the Americas reveal Columbus and his voyages as polysemic symbols of the regions' relationship to their past and their relationships to Europe in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, British jazz fans and critics looking to better understand the genre stimulated a demand for blues records; this market expanded further as first Trad jazz, then skiffle and British R&B launched a British blues revival. Major labels like Decca and Pye offered major US urban blues and soul artists, but the specialty market, dominated by connoisseurs interested in a wider variety of artists and eras, was underserved by the major labels. Thus, committed blues lovers took matters into their own hands. This paper will survey the turbulent independent blues record scene in Britain from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of labels with colorful names, shadowy origins, lofty goals, and often surprising founders. Dozens of British musicians, critics, and collectors founded labels, licensing (or bootlegging) materials for reissue, importing 45s from the United States and reselling them in Britain, or recording new material for exclusive release. Many of these small concerns, reissuing rarities and recordings by artists outside the commercial mainstream, were labors of love rather than serious commercial enterprises. Their limited-edition discs were marketed directly to their target audience, and label owners rarely did more than break even. Most only issued a handful of recordings, though in the process they revived the stalled careers of US blues singers, provided much-needed income and support to older artists, and introduced Britain to a wider variety of blues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 1940, 1,580 Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-controlled Europe survived a long journey to Haifa only to be deported by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine to the British colony of Mauritius. Using this case study, this article explores British perceptions of the Jewish Question during World War II. It builds on a transnational archive that includes British colonial records from Britain, Palestine, and Mauritius, together with memoirs, letters, diaries, and oral testimonies from the Jewish detainees and the local Mauritians who remember them. In doing so, it asks three interconnected questions: How did the British authorities perceive the Jews deported to Mauritius? How did the deportees perceive Mauritius, their new destination, and its local population? And how were the detainees received and perceived by Mauritians? This three-pronged inquiry invites an exploration of the ambiguity of attitudes toward Jewish refugees inside and outside British colonial frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the occupation of the Czech lands by Nazi Germany in March 1939, Czechs embraced domestic (and ignored German) movies more vigorously than they had before. This implies that the occupation caused notable changes in the mode of movie reception. After about 1942, however, the popularity of a portion of German production was increasing. This fact raises the question of whether cinemagoers' values and identities were undergoing significant change under the occupation. This paper focuses on Brno, a city with a long history of coexistence and rivalry between those who identified as Germans and as Czechs. I argue that watching a Czech movie became one of the behaviors that defined the Czech national identity. The later embrace of German entertainment by Czechs was accompanied by two strategies that redeemed watching the desired cinematic distraction from being an un-Czech behavior: by indexing the movies as not fully German due to the presence of non-German stars, and by a parallel redefinition of cinemagoers' Czech behavior from choosing Czech movies to choosing cinemas identified as non-German. These strategies represent culturally specific reactions by Czech audiences living in a nationally divided city to the distribution and exhibition practices applied during the occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Mandate period, the struggle for Palestine was essentially a demographic race between the Jewish minority and the Arab majority, with the Mandate authorities determining the rules of the game. While the proportion of Arabs to Jews at the end of WWI was 11:1, by the eve of WWII, it was approximately two-thirds Arabs to one-third Jews, and remained as such until the outbreak of the 1948 War, with 600,000 Jews in the country and twice as many Arabs. The primary source of growth in the Jewish population was immigration whereas the rate of growth among the Arabs was due almost exclusively to natural population increase. The article surveys and analyzes the role of demography in shaping the policy and practice of the three sides of the Palestine triangle from the formulation of the Balfour declaration in 1917 to the 1947 United Nations' partition resolution. The main contention is, that demographic calculations and estimations were behind the positions on the three main issues around which the conflict in Mandatory Palestine revolved: immigration, the establishment of institutions of representative self-government and the acquisition of land by Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do silences about intercommunal violence emerge and does their subsequent breaking lead to reconciliation in divided communities? By telling two stories of monuments built in northwest Bosnia after World War II, and the radical changes made to them since the war of 1992–95, this local history poses a question of global significance: Can memorials to the violent past ever create a "just memory," whereby they recall both our humanity and inhumanity, as well as both the humanity and inhumanity of "others" whom we may still see as enemies? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leader of the National Social Christian Party from 1934 to 1938, and of the National Unity Party of Canada from 1938 to 1967, Adrien Arcand is reputed to be the most virulent antisemitic propagandist in Canadian history. In publications he disseminated between 1929 and 1939 (Le Goglu, Le Miroir, Le Chameau, Le Patriote, Le Fasciste canadien, and Le Combat national), Arcand drew on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for his vilification of the Jewish people. Arrested in 1940 and imprisoned for the duration of the Second World War, he regained his freedom in 1945 and was able to resume his campaign of hateful propaganda against Jews with the full knowledge of the Canadian authorities. From which sources did Arcand draw his antisemitism, and how did he become the champion of antisemitism in Canada? This article attempts to explain this dark and enigmatic character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the circles of forgetting of the memory of Anikó (Hannah) Szenes (1921–1944) in Hungary, from the end of World War II through the illiberal turn in memory politics that began in the 2010s. This process of forgetting resulted in a canonized history of her life, highlighting different elements of her story in different periods while omitting other parts and condemning her to oblivion in postwar Hungary, her native land, where she spent 19 of her 23 years. These different memory circles are bound up with much-debated elements of twentieth-century Hungarian, European and Israeli history that intersect precisely in the narration of Szenes's tragically short life story. As a leftist, a Jew, a woman, a left-wing Zionist and a writer, Szenes was too much and too complex to digest for the traumatized postwar history of Hungarian Jewry, which rests on silencing and forgetting. I first present the methodological problems of gendered memory and then map the intersecting circles of forgetting of Szenes's life. I conclude by analyzing the memorial events in Hungary around the 100th anniversary of Szenes's birth in 2021 as an example of illiberal memory politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual reality (VR) is being established as a new medium for Holocaust memory. This article argues that VR experiences, which allow users to visit reconstructed campsites or even to temporarily take on the role of a victim, are changing conceptions of witnessing the Holocaust by simulating primary witnessing. It shows that such a simulation ties in with a wish for immediacy in recent Holocaust memory, as well as with the idea of VR as an “empathy machine,” with empathy being defined very narrowly as a mirroring of sensations and emotions. The article advocates that future VR experiences should be grounded in a more complex conception of empathy, one that highlights rather than collapses the social, racial and historical differences between individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrei Andreevich Vlasov, a Soviet general who sought to create a Russian Liberation Army under German auspices during World War II, has been the focal point of debates about wartime collaboration that reflect deep divides in memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Stalin era in post-Soviet Russia. Memory entrepreneurs in the literary world, the Orthodox Church and the historical profession have reappropriated Vlasov, inserting him in anti-Soviet historical narratives as a hero, symbol or martyr. Meanwhile, patriotic intellectuals in the Putin years have invoked Vlasov as a figure of national treachery and use him to discredit their political opponents. The debate over Vlasov points to the fractured and unproductive nature of national collective memory in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the stories by Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn (1880–1950), the leader of the Chabad Hasidic movement, this article explains the significance of nostalgia for the survival of Hasidic communities following the First and Second World Wars. By examining the social and performative function of these stories, it shows how Schneersohn’s nostalgic depictions of his lost ancestral home in Lubavitch translated into ideas, collective memories, tangible practices, and brick-andmortar institutions that helped him forge a new Chabad community in interwar Poland and safeguard its survival in 1940s America. The article also argues that the deployment of nostalgia in Schneersohn’s stories testifies to the realignment of the medium of the Hasidic story with contemporary trends in modern Jewish literature and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this autobiographical essay, I recall my childhood in Budapest after World War II, specifically the spring and summer of 1948, when I turned nine. My beloved grandmother left Hungary in the spring, and at the end of the summer my newfound cousin from Paris, whom I also loved, left as well. These losses, added to my traumatic memories of the last year of the war, induced a state of mourning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"[T]he bone-frame was made for / no such shock knit within terror": the first poem in H.D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall equates the human body to a bombed building, the word "frame" encapsulating the mutual implication of urban, human, and poetic structures in H.D.'s wartime poetry. In the writing of poets living and working in London during World War II, the civilian experience of war is not merely documented and alluded to; the Blitz also provides a pressing material reference to architectural metaphors used to figure poetic form. In the context of a number of wartime publications, civilian records, and postwar lyric theory, H.D's and T.S. Eliot's wartime works emerge as engaging with a number of such formal implications: the dissolution of architectural structures, the navigability of fragmented urban topographies, and patterns of continuity in the face of violently disrupted routines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zofia Szymańska was trained as a child psychiatrist in Paris before and during World War I. She practiced in revolutionary Russia and in interwar Warsaw. She survived the Warsaw Ghetto in hiding with nuns and after the war became a state employee in communist Poland. An examination of Szymańska's career both before and after World War II introduces us to the development of child welfare services; the transformation of philanthropy into professional social work; the training of psychiatrists, teachers and social workers; the participation of Jewish and Polish women in these fields; the history of crime among and punishment of juveniles; the history of special needs education among Jews and in Poland; aid provided to Jews during World War II; and connections between Catholic institutions and the state in postwar Poland. This outline of Szymańska's biography allows us to consider twentieth-century narratives of disruption and continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have long debated the relation between poetry and propaganda. Recently, scholars of twentieth-century literature have analyzed the propaganda produced by poets in both verse and prose during the two world wars. But surprisingly little has been said about the way poets echoed specific propagandist phrases in their writing to subject them to scrutiny, draw out their implications, and examine their effects. Some of the most striking examples of this technique can be found in the work of Randall Jarrell, a poet who held unusually complex views on propaganda, and who sought to critically analyze (rather than simply enforce or reject) the readymade phrases deployed in public discourse during World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years following World War II, representations of the Holocaust in Hebrew literature appeared primarily in memoirs, documentary texts, and memorial tomes, not in high literary works. Drawing on Alan Mintz's analysis of S. Y. Agnon's Buczacz stories, this article examines Hebrew translations from Yiddish literature in the 1940s and 1950s as a form of literary memorialization. Focusing on translations of David Bergelson's Yiddish stories, it traces how editors and translators carefully chose Yiddish literary texts to commemorate European Jewish life rather than recount Nazi atrocities. This literary mode of memorialization was quickly extended beyond the Holocaust to other catastrophes; namely, Stalin's crackdown on Soviet Jewish culture in the late 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia regarded the interpretation and the commemoration of World War II as one of the most important pillars of the ideology of "brotherhood and unity" and the socialist revolution. Accordingly, the issues of the civil war and the nationality and ethnic identity of the perpetrators and victims were suppressed. The article examines war memorials in the Yugoslav Federal Republic of Croatia to show that following the sociopolitical changes that occurred from the mid-1960s, these previously evaded issues became more prominent in public life and began to jeopardize the official policy of remembrance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nitza Ben-Dov's Ḥayyei milḥamah, a study of ten literary works depicting the wars of Israel over the past one hundred years, was awarded the 2018 Yitzhak Sadeh Israeli Prize for Military Literature. This article, taken from that study and translated by eminent literary scholar and biblical translator Robert Alter, examines Yehuda Amichai's Not of this Time, Not of this Place (1963) and its dual treatment of the legacies of World War II and the Israeli War of Independence. The bifurcated hero of Amichai's sprawling novel lives out two parallel but contradictory plots, one takes him to the Germany of his childhood, the other unfolds in Jerusalem. For the attentive reader, these seemingly oppositional stories coalesce through a network of wordplays, perceptions, recurrent images (skulls, amputated limbs), and intertextual references to Hillel the Elder and to Agnon's classic 1939 novel on the impossibility of returning home, A Guest for the Night. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During World War II, millions of refugees fled their homes and were displaced across Europe, central Asia, and the Middle East. In September 1939, Nazi and Soviet armies invaded Poland, resulting in countless individuals being deported or “resettled”—forcibly exiled to labor camps in Siberia and Soviet central Asia. This article examines the story of a large wave of Polish refugees granted amnesty by Iran after the Soviets allied with Great Britain in June 1941. Between 1941 and 1943, hundreds of thousands of Poles were allowed into Iran, where social and political conditions helped them rebuild their lives, establish thriving Polish institutions, and leave a lasting impact on Iranian urban culture. Polish exiles in Iran established newspapers, art galleries, cafés, orchestras, theaters, and salons that catered first and foremost to the Polish community but later became central to the myriad of Allied army soldiers stationed in Iran, as well as to the emerging Iranian urban middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kindly Ones (2006), a French novel written by the American author Jonathan Littell, explores the Holocaust from a perpetrator's point of view. The novel is replete with detailed historical analysis and intertextual references, but its narrative is also highly visual. From the perpetrator's gaze to the archive of perpetrator images that circulate in the text, the novel's visual objects are sites where violence is waged and imagined. Rather than depicting only the Holocaust and WWII, however, The Kindly Ones creates an alternative archive of images that brings this past into contact with Algeria, Vietnam, and 9/11. The novel not only offers images of war, it represents a 'war of images' that evinces post-9/11 anxieties about the power of images to produce, and not simply represent, violence. By visualizing previously imperceptible relations, this quintessential historical novel offers a model for historicizing the present, not the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vladimir Putin shows remarkable interest in history in general and World War II in particular. This article explores this historian-president's attempts to codify the memory of this war in an open attempt to transmit a useful past to the younger generation. It argues that top-down models of historical memory are of little explanatory value in the Russian situation. The president rides a wave of historical revisionism that he shapes at the same time. Putin's government successfully uses it to mobilize Russian society against critical minorities within and perceived enemies without. The far-reaching consequences of this politicization for the history of World War II are sketched in the final section of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Okinawan returnees from Micronesia, particularly the Marianas and Palau, struggle to maintain memorial services in the post-Pacific War period. Okinawans adopted two strategies to keep these services alive: incorporating younger people in both Okinawa and Micronesia, and maintaining close ties with local communities that assist their activities. Okinawans, through their marginalizing and traumatizing wartime experiences in Nan'yō Guntō (Micronesia), have adopted a broad perspective that transcends national boundaries. Their memorial practices are authentic and have the potential to overturn nationalist discourse, although they also risk absorption into Japan's national memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of World War II, thousands of European Jews who had found refuge in Palestine during the war sought to return to their countries of origin through a repatriation program launched by the Middle East office of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Their repatriation was a source of conflict between the Zionist leadership in Palestine and UNRRA. The former accused the latter of encouraging Jewish return to Europe, whereas UNRRA officials accused Zionists in the Yishuv of trying to prevent repatriation and of ostracizing those opting to return. The controversy derived from conflicting ideological and political considerations regarding the role of Jewish refugees in postwar reconstruction. Yet the positions of the quarreling parties were disconnected from those of repatriation applicants, who were determined to rebuild their lives outside Palestine but conceived of postwar reconstruction mainly in material and personal rather than ideological and political terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decentering the movie theater and rejecting tales of the postwar decline of American cinema, this book establishes the unmistakable rise of small cinema. Charles R. Achland, American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020) Reflecting the broad range of new scholarship in the history of cinema, the books included in this section have been selected by the editorial staff of I Film History i . Everyday Movies situates this within the technological ferment of the American film industry and establishes the commonplace idea that film technologies belonged in the lab, battlefield, classroom, home, and across industry. [Extracted from the article]