Search

It is still an unresolved question why it happened. But, literally in the closing moments of World War II, when the American and Soviet armies converged in central Germany, the impossible occurred. A stretch of German territory with roughly 500,000 inhabitants in the southwestern reaches of Saxony, from the foothills of the relatively industrialized Erzgebirge all the way to the borders with Czechoslovakia, roughly halfway between Chemnitz and Karlovy Vary, remained unoccupied by either the American or Soviet armies for more than five weeks, in some cases up to seven weeks. From 8 May 1945 until mid-June or even later, two Landkreise...

The moment of liberation in Western Europe forms the endpoint or the starting point of countless history books. For good reason. The final end of a murderous total war constitutes a logical marker in historians’ attempts to make sense of the past. This book takes a rather different approach. The moment of liberation is here understood as a roughly five-year-long period which formed a distinct era on both sides of 8 May 1945, the official date of the termination of hostilities in the European theatre of World War II. It includes the final months—indeed, up to two years—of war, occupation, and resistance, but also up to three years—depending on location and circumstance—of the post-liberation period....

Liberation Committees were most frequently local institutions of grassroots counterpower vis-à-vis traditional power brokers wishing to facilitate the smooth return to the status quo ante bellum or ante Mussolini. In factories, large offices, and rural areas characterized by the survival of semi-feudal production relations, the latter still a prominent feature in parts of rural Italy, Liberation Committees constituted prima facie challenges to the reestablishment of the dictatorial powers of proprietors and top-level managers. Nowhere did the competing social visions and political projects clash more thoroughly than in factories, offices, or the circumstances confronting landless labourers vis-à-vis traditional landed elites. Next to no serious attention has been devoted to this contentious feature of the moment of liberation until now. My description and analysis of Liberation Committees at the point of production reinforces the assessment of the moment of liberation as a transnational moment of crisis and opportunity when everything appeared possible.

No Western European country experienced liberation at such a slow pace as Italy. The Allied landing on Sicily occurred twenty months before the final liberation of Northern Italy in late April 1945. As a result, the evolution of antifascist resistance activism underwent a contradictory development unique in Western Europe. The official Roman government administering liberated Italy and Rome-based coordinating bodies of the resistance operating in the North performed the role of a break on the radical dynamic of antifascist activism in Italy’s North. In parts of Central and Northern Italy, the social power and political clout of Liberation Committees became all-important counterpowers to traditional political authorities, far exceeding the radical dynamics which had propelled French Liberation Committees into the limelight of their day. Virtually all of Northern Italy was liberated by antifascist activists in advance of the arrival of Allied troops moving north.

The challenges to traditional ante-bellum or ante-Mussolini ways of ruling and running societies were perhaps most visible in the area of fundamental changes affecting the most popular mass media at that time: newspapers. Virtually all across Europe, the vast majority of hitherto operating daily newspapers were shut down at the moment of liberation, and a new antifascist press often took over production facilities vacated by their compromised former owners. After some cursory glances at the politics of the post-liberation press in Germany and Italy, I then go into considerable detail in the case of France. For it was in France where the challenges to published opinion in the wake of Nazi occupation went further and deeper than anywhere else. In France, however, too, within very few years the power of money regained the upper hand, turning back the clock to the status quo ante bellum.

The moment of liberation in Western Europe spans several years before and after Victory in Europe Day. The roughly two years before 8 May 1945 witnessed the greatest extension of antifascist resistance activism, imparting an aura of radicalization to this period. It is possible to pinpoint specifically when the pressures of radical antifascist resistance activism broke out one last time in post-liberation Western Europe. In Belgium, tensions rose in conjunction with the attitudes of the new post-liberation government headed by the conservative Catholic Hubert Pierlot. In November 1947, first in Marseille but then also in Saint-Étienne, resistance activists defied the old political elite in militant actions which were the last of their kind in post-liberation France. In Italy, the assassination attempt on Palmiro Togliatti in 1948 marked the last stand of the radical resistance spirit, witnessing instances of quasi-urban insurrections in some of the traditional hotspots of antifascism in Italy.

Much attention has been rightfully devoted to the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 and—less so—the Allied landing on the Mediterranean coastline. This chapter focuses on the contribution by antifascist resistance activists to the liberation of France. It is often overlooked that much of Southern France south of the Loire and Lake Geneva was liberated to a significant extent by resistance units. Obviously, without the engagements responsible for the liberation of the Northern half of France by Allied troops, the resistance would not have been able to carry this out. Still, the liberation of roughly half of France by resistance groups had major consequences for the plans of French antifascists for post-liberation society. The most significant acts of defiance of the smooth return to the status quo ante bellum occurred precisely in those areas where the resistance had been largely responsible for the expulsion of German troops.

The article wishes to pay attention to two related, but analytically separate, features of the history of the Long Sixties in Western Europe. On the one hand, it focuses on a significant wave of progressive Catholicism which emerged in the wake of Vatican ii. Often just one or two years later, secular social movements likewise began to make their mark on European society in the proverbial Long Sixties culminating in the events of 1968. By virtue of the fact that Catholic activism often predate secular activism by a few years, Catholic activists often played disproportionate roles in the atmosphere of heightened social movement activity in many European societies, a moment sometimes referred to as the «spirit of 1968».

Ce que j’appelle la première vague du catholicisme de gauche (des années 1930 aux années 1950) est surtout marqué par une hégémonie francophone. À travers la Jeunesse Ouvrière Catholique (JOC), le Mouvement populaire des familles ou encore les prêtres-ouvriers, des années 1930 aux années 1950, même jusqu’aux années 1960, les théologiens et les mouvements apostoliques français et belges occupent le devant de la scène.

Wahrscheinlich ist es das wichtigste Ereignis der katholischen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil.[1] Nicht nur ist es das einzige Konzil des Jahrhunderts geblieben; vielmehr hat es die Entwicklungsrichtung des Katholizismus tiefgreifend beeinflusst und verändert – vergleichbar mit dem Reformations-Konzil von Trient (1545–1563). »L’esprit de Vatican II«, der Geist des Vaticanum II, ist natürlich sehr eng verknüpft mit dem, was während der drei Sitzungsjahre passiert ist. Aber dieser Geist ist recht schnell über das eigentliche Konzil hinausgewachsen und hat die Interpretation der gegensätzlich deutbaren konziliaren Kompromisse geprägt. Eng damit verbunden sind Terraingewinne einer Auslegungspraxis des katholischen Glaubens, die als Linkskatholizismus bezeichnet worden ist und sich auch selbst so bezeichnet hat.

This contribution starts out with a brief survey of key events in 'global 1968', which is defined as a social movement mobilization cycle lasting, approximately, from 1956 to 1976. After a discussion of key overall determinants engendering this particular moment of crises and opportunities, '1968' is then analyzed as the very first-ever transcontinental revolt, a tripartite rebellion linking up protest movements in various parts of the world: radical students and workers in First World countries, anti-bureaucratic dissident currents in the Second World; and national liberation movements in the Third World.

On sait que le concile Vatican II (1962-1965) a profondément modifié la direction dans laquelle le catholicisme évoluait, peut-être dans des proportions comparables au concile de Trente (1545-1563). L’esprit de Vatican II est, bien entendu, très étroitement lié à ce qui s’est passé pendant les quatre années des sessions conciliaires, mais il est devenu assez vite beaucoup plus que cela : une sorte de libre interprétation de ce que le concile avait proposé dans des termes parfois contradictoires. Cela tient notamment à ce que, à bien des égards, l’esprit de Vatican II est aussi le produit d’un demi-siècle de développement d’un catholicisme qu’on a dit ou qui s’est dit de gauche, et qui n’a cessé de se modifier alors que, traditionnellement, la majorité des fidèles accordait ses préférences à des formations politiques de droite.

The Second Wave of Western European Left Catholicism, c. 1965 – c. 1975, introduced manifold innovations in comparison to the First Wave, c. 1944 – c. 1954, in addition to reinforcing older traditions, such as the phenomenon of worker priests, which had served as the most visible and symbolic marker of progressive Catholicism in the immediate postwar era. Of the organizational novelties leaving their mark on the post-Vatican II era, it is probably fair to say that the emergence and powerful presence of radical priest associations, above all the Christian Solidarity International Congress, and the rise of spontaneous ecclesial communities, eventually best known by the term ‘base communities’, were the principal innovations. In addition, the specifically Catholic contribution to the European (and worldwide) student movements, as well as the specifically Catholic impetus behind radical working class practices in the Long Sixties were likewise unprecedented phenomena. There had been Catholic agitators in workers’ movements in the immediate postwar era, but such actions took a different form compared to Catholic working class activism in the Long Sixties, the latter period witnessing radical activity organized by Catholic trade unions, a feature with no parallel twenty years earlier. The rise of progressive, system-challenging radical student movements as such, not just the specifically Catholic battalions within those currents, was of course also a phenomenon entirely without precedent in European history. [First paragraph]

The Italian Communist Party (PCI) after 1943, writes Stephen Gundle, managed to construct “the last great left-wing subculture in Western Europe” (7). Given the unusual interest in “culture” in the broadest sense of the term exhibited by Palmiro Togliatti, the undisputed key figure in post-war Italian Communist politics, an English-language study of the PCI's cultural policies is thus highly welcome and long overdue. Stephen Gundle manages to present an informative and authoritative account, which is highly recommended for anyone interested in the politics of culture and the culture of politics within the European Left.

In the 1940s, under the combined impact of war, occupation, liberation, and cold war, a series of new departures in the realm of theology, party politics and apostolic missions left a profound imprint on European Catholicism. One of the products of this period of ebullience in European Catholicism was “Christian progressivism,” a tendency arising among the multiple branches of a fledgling Left Catholicism, then in its prime. Christian progressivism emerged out of the creative confluence of Catholic social movements and the communist experience. Nowhere in Western Europe was this phenomenon as prominent as in France.

When at Christmas 1933 the Belgian Workers' Party adopted the Plan de Man to guide its forward march to socialism, European critics of unfettered capitalist development listened carefully. Deeply worried by Hitler's legal rise to power, socialist activists and intellectuals were then searching for new answers to the crises of their day, and many believed that they had found a blueprint in the Plan. Inspired by the activist politician Hendrik de Man, a series of international plan conferences, assembling the entire spectrum of western European pro-socialist, non-Stalinist economists, met between September 1934 and October 1937. The changing nature of these debates exemplify the fate of European socialism in the mid-1930s, descending from optimistic belief in a democratic socialist future towards technocratic pragmatism in the space of thirty-seven months.

Toward the very end of his opus magnum, Sassoon cites the French philosopher Alain: “When I am asked whether the division between Left and Right still has any meaning, the first thought which comes to my mind is that the person who asks the question is not on the Left” (776). Sassoon never asks that question, and it shows throughout the text. He unabashedly states that after one hundred years of socialism, many reforms have been obtained but wage earners “have not increased their control over their conditions of work at a pace remotely comparable to the expansion of political democracy, the increase in material prosperity, the extension in social welfare, or the advance in science and technology” (758). Almost everyone still has to give up most basic rights when entering their place of employment. Likewise, in this postmodern age of the retreat from class as a category of analysis, Sassoon criticizes converts to identity politics, who assert that frequently re- and decomposing groups of people are “ephemerally constructed through discourse” (649), with such brief but unmistakable rejoinders as: “Classes were not disappearing; they were changing” (658). Sassoon's thoughts on neoliberalism and globalization may be gauged by his succinct comment that the most recent “unleashing of market forces as a solution to mass unemployment” should be regarded as “a monument to human folly” (456).

More than fifty years after the definitive end of the national socialist regime, there still exists not a single comprehensive survey of the fate of German social democracy under Hitler. This ‘white spot’ in German historiography stands in stark contrast to local and regional studies of the general resistance movement. One of the consequences of this lacuna is the belief in the relative continuity of social democratic politics and practice from Weimar through the Nazi years, with the SPD exile leadership in unchallenged control, so that in 1945 German social democracy could literally pick up its pieces and continue where it had left off before. And, indeed, by and large, the SPD of the immediate post-Second World War era did present a picture of harmonious continuity with the pre-Nazi era SPD. Yet what this image overlooks is the fact that for at least three important years, from 1933 to 1936, a crucial break occurred in SPD theory and practice, a break, however, which was barely discernible at the leadership level. A close look at the daily practice of the rank and file under- ground circles and the deliberations of exile groupings of the SPD strongly suggests that, instead of a steady slide towards moderation from the 1920s to the 1950s, from 1933 to 1936 a seemingly inexplicable-and thus far largely overlooked-wave of radicalization affected the surviving structures of the SPD.(Editor's presentation)