22 May 1972

The following is a brief extract from The History of the World: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad.

In October 1971 the UN General Assembly had recognized the People’s Republic as the only legitimate representative of China in the United Nations, and expelled the representative of Taiwan. This was not an outcome the United States had anticipated until the crucial vote was taken. The following February, there took place a visit by Nixon to China that was the first visit ever made by an American president to mainland Asia, and one he described as an attempt to bridge ‘sixteen thousand miles and twenty-two years of hostility.’

Post War Europe – Economic and Military Blocks (c) Helicon Publishing Ltd

When Nixon followed his Chinese trip by becoming also the first American president to visit Moscow (in May 1972), and this was followed by an interim agreement on arms limitation – the first of its kind – it seemed that another important change had come about. The stark, polarized simplicities of the Cold War were blurring, however doubtful the future might be.

Reprinted from THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2013 by O.A. Westad.

J. M. Roberts CBE died in 2003. He was Warden at Merton College, Oxford University, until his retirement and is widely considered one of the leading historians of his era. He is also renowned as the author and presenter of the BBC TV series ‘The Triumph of the West’ (1985). Odd Arne Westad edited the sixth edition of The History of the World. He is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has published fifteen books on modern and contemporary international history, among them ‘The Global Cold War,’ which won the Bancroft Prize.

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When the first Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast in 1956, the BBC was so late in entering that it missed the competition deadline, so it was first shown in my native England in 1957. Nonetheless, it seems as if this curious example of pan-European co-operation, which started with seven countries and is now up to 40, has been around forever. Certainly as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the contest created a degree of national fervour in Britain, and I suspect in most other parts of Europe. At its peak, it’s estimated to have drawn in around 600 million viewers worldwide.

The competition’s only seldom been part of the pop mainstream, and at the time when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were becoming world famous in the 1960s, Britain entered the bland sounds of Kathy Kirby and Matt Monroe instead. It took Britain’s first two wins, by Sandie Shaw in 1967 and Lulu in 1969 to bring about a convergence of pop culture and the more mainstream vocal entertainment of the contest. Meanwhile 1950s heart-throb and subsequent film-star Cliff Richard was controversially beaten into second place in 1968 with “Congratulations” — a song that has stood the test of time rather better than Spain’s winning “La La La,” (sung in Spanish by Massiel after the original Catalan entry by Joan Manuel Serrat was withdrawn by the Franco regime). Abba’s success with “Waterloo” in 1974 marks one of the few genuine moments when the contest reflected wider international taste. They aimed squarely at winning and did so, bringing their distinctive sound and utter professionalism to a vastly greater audience through their success in the competition. Some other acts were successfully launched on the world stage as a result of first being seen by an international audience during the finals, including early appearances by Julio Iglesias and Céline Dion.

Yet that is one of the reasons the contest is so fascinating. At a time when European monetary and political convergence is a burning question for governments, the Eurovision contest demonstrates just how varied approaches are to popular songs and entertainment across the continent, from Portugal to Azerbaijan, and from Norway to Israel. Dance moves, costumes, gestures, lyrics, and language convey insights into how other European countries go about the business of entertainment in a far more insightful way than almost any other television spectacular. Ukranian drag queen Verka Serduchka’s antics and lyrics upset Russia in 2007, but in 2006 Finnish heavy metal band Lordi took the world by storm in an over-the-top performance with latex masks, prosthetic beards and horns. Amazingly, they managed to convey rock and roll as a religion without alienating too many special interest groups.

Even back in the 1960s as we crouched round the flickering image of our black and white televisions, the voting system seemed arcane. It still does. The results can sometimes be skewed by blocs of countries who vote together for, one suspects, not entirely artistic reasons. Announced first in French and then English, the underdogs who only score “nil points” often become popular with the viewing audience for that very reason. Poor old Jemini gave the UK its first “nil points” in 2003, but in 1997 Portugal and Norway shared the ignominy of no votes at all, and in 1983 the same fate befell Turkey and Spain. Norway still holds the record for the greatest number of “nil points”. The term has entered the European vernacular, in many countries, describing a competitor who tries hard but with no hope of winning.

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So now this year’s contest is under way in Malmö, Sweden, what can we expect? The sheer number of competing countries now means two nights of semis before the final, which takes place this Saturday, 18 May 2013. The bookies are backing Denmark and Norway to triumph in this very Nordic contest, but I have a hunch that after Engelbert Humperdinck’s not entirely satisfactory entry last year, the Scandinavians will be given a run for their money by British entry Bonnie Tyler. A legend of 80s pop with her great hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Tyler is a Welsh singer who has the rare distinction of also topping the charts in France. She has also had hit records in Norway, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. When it comes to tactical voting, she’s potentially got a lot of different countries on her side! At least the title of her entry is a little more modest than Cliff Richard’s from 1968: it’s called “Believe In Me”.

Alyn Shipton is the author of Nilsson: The Life of a Singer Songwriter, to be published on July 18. He is also a critic for The Times in London and presents jazz programmes on BBC Radio.

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When I started researching the environmental history of Russia’s steppes, I planned my visits to archives and libraries for conventional historical research. But I wanted to get a sense of the steppe environment I was writing about, a context for the texts I was reading; I needed to explore the region. I was fortunate that several Russian and Ukrainian specialists agreed to take me along on expeditions and field trips to visit steppe nature reserves.

The scientists took the time to explain to a visiting historian how they conducted their research into the steppe environment: studying the flora, fauna, climate, and soil; monitoring human impact; and above all observing the interconnections between all of these. I learned, a little hesitantly, to identify the main wild grasses and that different types of plants grew on different types of soils. On one expedition, I was even permitted to help collect samples of soil for analysis (and carry them back to the expedition’s van).

On my first visit to the Rostov steppe nature reserve in the arid southeast of the region, I felt disorientated in a landscape of almost unbroken flatness that extended to the horizon with no shelter from the hot sun. Later, I visited more rolling countryside with a high steppe bisected by ravines and the valleys of steppe rivers, including the Don, Kuban’, Volga, and Dnepr. On my last visit, to the Askaniya Nova nature reserve in southern Ukraine, I explored the area of unploughed steppe that has been protected since the end of the nineteenth century and also the woodland park planted at around the same time.

In between the field trips, I was reading about expeditions of  naturalists and scientists to the steppes going back to the eighteenth century. I visited some of the locations they had and compared my impressions with theirs. Like me, visitors from outside the steppe — from the more humid, forested lands to the north and west — at first felt disorientated and exposed in the flat lands with no shelter.

The steppes have few trees (in spite of attempts to plant them), low and unreliable supplies of water (my spring and summer in Rostov coincided with a serious drought), burning hot sun and winds in the summer, but very fertile soil that yielded bumper harvests in good years. The lands to the northwest, in marked contrast, are heavily forested, have abundant supplies of water, especially in the spring when the snow melts, long, cold winters, and not very fertile soil. The steppes were conquered, settled, and ploughed up by people from the northwest who coveted their fertile soil and warmer climate, and expelled the indigenous, nomadic, population.

Not all farmers who worked the land or authorities who governed them appreciated the environment. When things went wrong, which they did periodically, bumper harvests were replaced by dust storms, crop failures, and famines. People agonised over who was to blame. Was it the farmers’ fault for ploughing up the steppe and felling the small areas of woodland? Or were the recurring droughts natural phenomena?

Over time, scientists came to understand the steppes environment, in particular the origins of its very fertile soils. Over time, moreover, they learned the need to work with the steppe environment, rather than against it, in order better to promote sustainable farming.

David Moon is Anniversary Professor, Department of History, University of York, UK, and the author of The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700-1914. He recorded a podcast ‘A transformed landscape: the steppes of Ukraine and Russia’ for the Exploring Environmental History podcast on his methodology. A specialist on Russian history, in recent years his research has focused on environmental history in a transnational context. He combines conventional historical research in archives and libraries with field work in the environments he studies. He has spent much of his career teaching at universities in the north of England and Scotland. He also has extensive experience of both Russia and the USA. While a postgraduate student at Birmingham University, he studied for a year at Leningrad State University in what was then the Soviet Union. He makes regular visits to Russia and Ukraine, including the steppe region, for research and field work. For more information listen to his podcast on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia.

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Image Credits:(1) The steppe at the Askaniya Nova nature reserve. Photo by David Moon. Do not reproduce without permission. (2) Feather grass blowing in the wind, southeastern Rostov region. Photo by Antonina Shamareva, Rostov Botanical Garden. Do not reproduce without permission. 

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It has been thirty years this month since the master forger Konrad Kujau had his fifteen minutes of fame. Kujau managed to fool Stern magazine in Germany and the Sunday Times into believing that Hitler had secretly kept a diary. On 25 April 1983, Stern went public with the sensational story that Hitler’s diaries – which Kujau had penned in the late 70s and early 80s – had surfaced and that the history of the century had to be rewritten. By 6 May, it had become clear that two of the most venerable German and British publications had become the laughing stock of their nations. While no-one still believes that Hitler kept a diary, many other untrue facts about Hitler have been surprisingly resilient:

1. Hitler was really called Schicklgruber.

Adolf Hitler as a child

Would Germans have been prepared to greet each other with a hearty ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ every day? Could Hitler have become a dictator if he had used his real name, Schicklgruber, or would this have been just too ridiculous aname for a dictator? These are the kind of questions that continue to be discussed regularly on internet discussion sites. They are, however, historically pointless questions, as Schicklgruber never was Hitler’s name. Hitler’s father had been born out of the wedlock to Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Yet he had changed his name to Hitler, the name of his step-father, who by all likelihood also was his biological father, well before Adolf Hitler was born. While the claim that Adolf Hitler was really called Adolf Schicklgruber is historical nonsense, it is nevertheless telling that people continue to spread the claim. It points to the urge of people to turn Hitler into an object of ridicule.

2. Hitler had a Jewish grandfather.

The idea that the nemesis of the Jews of Europe was, according the logic of his own Nuremberg laws, a ‘quarter-Jew’ himself dates back to the attempt of some of his opponents to prevent Hitler from coming to power. As Hitler’s father was born out of wedlock, the claim was that Hitler had been fathered by the head of the Jewish household for which Hitler’s grandmother Maria Anna had worked for a while.

If the results of the unethical DNA testing of Hitler’s Austrian and American relatives, carried out a few years ago by the Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders, are to be trusted, we now finally know for certain that the step-father of Hitler’s father was indeed his biological father and therefore Hitler did not have a Jewish grand-father. Yet what may be more important than the question of whether objectively speaking Hitler had a Jewish grandfather is what Hitler himself thought of the matter. It is likely Hitler feared being the grandson of a Jew, as he seems to have commissioned Hans Frank, his chief jurist, to look into the claim that he had Jewish ancestry in 1930.

3. Hitler fathered a child in World War I before losing one of his testicles.

Another ‘fact’ which was exposed as untrue by Jean-Paul Mulders, if his DNA testing is to be trusted, is the idea – only revived by a French news magazine last year – that Hitler fathered a child with a French woman during the First World War. Most other evidence also suggests that Hitler was neither heterosexual nor, as some claim, homosexual but asexual. Then again, German authorities seem to have made payments to Hitler’s French family during World War Two which is odd if no relationship of any kind had existed between Hitler and the mother of Hitler’s purported son.

The belief popularized by an English Second World War rhyme that Hitler had only one ‘ball’ was recently claimed to have finally proven to be true as a result of newly available testimony of a German medical orderly who claimed to have treated Hitler after being wounded in his groin. However, nothing in this story really adds up.

4. Hitler survived World War II.

If we are to believe recent news reports, Adolf and Eva Hitler escaped from Berlin in the eleventh hour, as the Russians were closing in. On board a submarine they made their way to Argentina, where they lived happily ever after until Hitler died of old age in the 1960s. The Hitler-escaped-to-Argentina story is only the latest tale in the saga that has tried to explain why, in 1945 and after, no Western investigators managed to locate Hitler’s corpse. Yet eyewitness testimony of several people exists that confirms that Hitler committed suicide and that his body was soaked with petrol before being burned. Furthermore, parts of Hitler’s skull and teeth are almost certainly held in a Russian repository. Even in the absence of eye-witness testimony and forensic evidence, Hitler’s psychological make-up makes it implausible to argue that he would have wanted to continue to live after his downfall at the hand of the allies.

Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler

5. Hitler himself was the most significant creator of untrue Hitler facts.

What Hitler told the world about how he had turned from a postcard painter into a fascist leader was seldom supported by true facts. A pathological and talented liar, Hitler told people whatever they wanted to hear and what was politically opportune. The core of his invented story were the four years that he served in the German Army on the Western Front. It was a story that he told so successfully that it was believed for almost a century after the end of the Great War. Hitler used it when he wanted to tell his core supporters that National Socialism had been born in the trenches of the First World War and that the war had made him. He also used it when he tried to broaden his appeal to a skeptical public in the late 1920s. And he used it in 1938 to court and fool Neville Chamberlain by telling the British prime minister a tall story of how a British soldier had saved his life in 1918. Many other canards of Hitler and untrue facts created by his propagandists persist to the present day. As the young historian Norman Domeier recently put it, “today’s perception of Nazi Germany by the public at large is still dominated by Nazi propaganda.”

Thomas Weber teaches European and international history at the University of Aberdeen and directs the Centre for Global Security and Governance. He is also Fritz Thyssen Fellow at Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Since earning his DPhil from the University of Oxford, he has held fellowships or has taught at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (2010).

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Image credits: Adolf Hitler, Kinderbild [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F051673-0059 / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de [Creative Commons Licence] via Wikimedia Commons

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Holocaust Remembrance Day was originally declared a state holiday in Israel in 1951. The date, the 27^th of the month of Nissan, was chosen in memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the United States, a week-long series of “Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust” was ratified by US Congress in 1979 to coincide with Yom HaShoah, which falls sometime during April or May. This year, it is held on 8 April 2013. In Israel, the United States, and Canada (which followed suit in 2000), Yom HaShoah remembrances are built on the sacred obligation to commemorate the martyrs and victims, to honor the survivors, and to pay respects to the liberators.

In Europe, on the other hand, Holocaust memory is inevitably bound up with troubling questions about perpetration and collaboration. For every life that was taken, someone pulled the trigger, someone watched, someone profited, and someone processed the paperwork. Wherever the Holocaust is commemorated in the European community, multiple layers of individual and corporate guilt are evoked. The presence of this guilt, even in the third and fourth generation, makes Holocaust remembrance awkward. The inability to come to terms with guilt for the Jewish genocide may explain why it took the European Union until 2013 to put the “International Holocaust Remembrance Day” on its official calendar.

Since 1945, European governments had developed various memorial strategies that gingerly sidestepped the problem of personal, institutional, and communal complicity and collusion in Nazi killing programs. Many constructed narratives of victimization and/or heroic resistance that were designed to alleviate moral qualms. The most infamous examples involved the governments of Austria, East Germany, and Poland, all of whom claimed victim status at the hands of (fascist) Nazi Germany. Such claims to victimization allowed individuals and institutions to deny responsibility for collaboration in the Holocaust. West Germany was the least successful in claiming the victim mantel—though not for lack of trying. Naturally, these victim narratives of oppression and powerlessness were not entirely wrong. But they obscured and falsified local histories of betrayal and persecution of Jews at the hand their Gentile Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, French, Austrian neighbors. No matter how much a country or particular persons suffered at the hands of the German Nazi regime, they could still be active in the brutalization of their Jewish neighbors.

The European Union declared 27 January its day of remembrance, following the 2005 resolution by the United Nations that also designated 27 January as “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.” Notably, this day does not follow the Jewish calendar, but marks the day of liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army in 1945.

One million people were killed in the extermination camp of Auschwitz; its name has become synonymous with the Nazi achievement of turning mass murder into an industrialized process using innovative technologies, such as gas chambers and crematories. At no other extermination site were so many people killed at the hands of so few. In Auschwitz, the inmates themselves were forced to become cogs in the machinery of death and recruited to perform the grueling labor of extermination. This death camp was explicitly designed to shield SS-personnel from the human costs of killing—although there was still unspeakable brutality committed by individuals. But the focus on Auschwitz allows European officials, once again, to sidestep local histories of collusion and complicity. In its extremity, Auschwitz allows disassociation and distancing from the human ordinariness of those who plan, administrate, and commit mass murder. Surely, the brutes in charge of that camp could not have been Ordinary Men, to quote Christopher Browning’s book, and could not have lived as ordinary businessmen, doctors, teachers, and policemen in the post-war world (which they did).

The Holocaust was not committed by an alien species of evil Nazis, who invaded, hijacked, and occupied various countries and forced their populations to stand by and watch the unfolding of genocide. On the contrary, the systematic murder of six million required the active participation of many people across Europe, who were convinced that discriminating, humiliating, disowning, ghettoizing, enslaving, deporting, and killing Jews was the proper and profitable thing to do. Unless their perspective and precise nature of culpable wrongdoing can be openly articulated, the memory of the Holocaust will continue to be affected and infected by denial and evasion. It is not possible to honor the victims without acknowledging the perpetrators. Their guilt manifests in the compulsive drive toward exculpation which seeps into and distorts national memorial strategies.

It may not be a bad thing that the world now observes two separate dates in remembrance of the Holocaust, one anchored in the Jewish calendar, the other rooted in the Western calendar of the liberation of Auschwitz. But unless we strive to connect the histories of victimization and perpetration and join in commemoration as descendants of Jewish victims and Gentile perpetrators, we will not be able to repair this rift or build a reconciled future.

Katharina von Kellenbach is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and author of Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings and the forthcoming The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators.

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Image credit: A lit Yom Hashoah candle in a dark room on Yom Hashoah. Photo by Valley2city, Wikimedia Commons.

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Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London and the author of A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. A leading authority on modern German history, her books include Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships, A Concise History of Germany, A History of Germany 1918-2000: The Divided Nation, German National Identity after the Holocaust, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, and The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. Fulbrook is also a Fellow of the British Academy, a former Chair of the German History Society, and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Foundation for the former Concentration Camps at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora.

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Christians today owe a tremendous debt to the Roman emperor Constantine. He changed the place of the Church in the Roman World, moving it through his own conversion from the persecuted fringe of the empire’s religious landscape to the center of the empire’s system of belief. He also tackled huge problems with the way Christians understood their community. The three most important things the church owed to Constantine were a roadmap for reuniting communities split by persecution, a universal definition of the Church’s teaching, and a fixed date for the celebration of Easter. His solutions to the second and third issues remain in place to this day.

Constantine dealt with all three of the Church’s major issues at the conference he summoned at the ancient city of Nicaea (modern Iznik in Turkey) in June of 325 AD. The issue of persecution stemmed from a period of bitter conflict with the imperial government that had ended just over ten years before the council convened, while the debate over the Church’s teaching had exploded a few years before Nicaea (the issue was Jesus’ humanity). The Easter question had been festering for centuries, and the problems were inextricably tied up with the fact that no one recorded the actual day of the Crucifixion.

All that people could know on the basis of Christian Scripture was that the crucifixion was linked to the celebration of Passover, which meant that it should come at some point in the spring. But when? Since the date of Passover, then as now, is celebrated in accordance with the Jewish calendar, the correlation with the Julian calendar used by Christians and most other inhabitants of the Roman Empire was always inexact. Some Christians believed that the best way to solve the problem was to celebrate Easter on the first day of Passover according to the Jewish calendar, another group held that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the opening of Passover, while yet another group felt that the timing of the Christian festival should not be determined by the timing of Passover and should instead be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox.

Emperor Constantine I, presenting a model of the city to Virgin Pary. Detail of the southwestern entrance mosaic in Hagia Sophia (Istanbul, Turkey). Photo by Myrabella. Creative Commons License.

The Easter story was extremely important to Constantine. Conscious as he was that he had been raised as a pagan, and that he had done things in his earlier life of which he was not proud (he never tells us what those things were), he felt that he had experienced a sort of moral resurrection when he became a Christian. He credited his extraordinary military career to God’s willingness to forgive his past sins and he wanted to make sure that he ruled in a way that would repay the benefits he believed his God had given him. In a sense there was nothing more obvious to Constantine than that Easter shouldn’t be connected with the festival of another faith. It should stand on its own in connection with the natural world. Hence he ordained that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday after the first New Moon of Spring.

The solution to the Easter issue had the added advantage of allowing him to make an important concession to the group whose definition of the Faith he was rejecting outright at Nicaea, the so-called Arian faction, named for the Egyptian priest who had aggressively preached a doctrine asserting the human aspect of Christ. Constantine liked his God, like his empire, to be completely united, which is what we see today in the Nicene Creed in the phrase “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” That desire for unity also enabled him to arrive at an acceptable solution to the divisions that had arisen out of the period of persecution as he essentially argued that the two sides should bury the hatchet and recognize each other as Christians first. That approach has not had nearly so much influence as his approach to Easter or to the Trinity.

Constantine was a complex and at times difficult man, a passionate one with a ferocious temper. But he was also a man who was able to recognize his own weaknesses. It may have been that self-knowledge which enabled him to come to the new faith he hoped would make him a better ruler, and gave him the ability to find and forge compromises to build a better and more unified society.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. His books include Constantine the Emperor, The Victor’s Crown, Emperors of Rome, and Ancient Rome: A New History.

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Soldiers, sailors, and airmen reflect the societies from which they come.  We should not be surprised therefore if they reflect vices as well as virtues; yet there is often hostility to anyone picking up on the vices of service personnel.  When putting together my recent book, I was denied permission to use a quotation from the memoir of an infantry lieutenant about theft by members of his platoon in Germany in 1945.  It might be asked: why was the information put in the memoir if it was not to be read?  It was not always thus.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries British soldiers were commonly looked upon as dangerous, dissipated and, at least when stationed at home, drunk.  It was also feared that demobilisation at the end of a war led to men trained in the use of weapons and brutalised by battlefield experience would turn to violence and robbery rather than the manual labour that was thought to suit their social origins.  There was a slight respite in these fears when Britain became and armed nation in the wars against the French Revolution and Napoleon, though this was subsequently offset by garbled accounts of the Duke of Wellington’s description of his men as ‘the scum of the earth enlisted for drink.’  Press reports of the horrors of the Crimean War brought a degree of sympathy for the soldiery and some amelioration of the suspicions about soldiers, yet at the end of the century Rudyard Kipling could contrast the ‘thin red line of ‘eroes when the drums begin to roll’ and the publican’s: ‘We serve no red-coats here.’

Jack Tar could, potentially, be as rough and rowdy as Tommy Atkins, but he was rarely criticised to the same extent.  Of course it would be quite wrong to label every pre-war Tommy as drunk and dissipated, but the two world wars appear to have moderated the critical attitudes.  The patriotic volunteers of 1914 and many of the young men conscripted in the last two years of war were from a very different social class, with very different expectations from the old volunteer army.  These were men who had never expected to serve in the army and who came from families that had never expected to see their young men in khaki.  Conscription during the Second World War, and its maintenance until the beginning of the 1960s, continued this moderation, and so too has the fact that recent conflicts involving an all professional army have been of suspect legality and questionable motivation.  When brave young men are losing their lives or returning from distant, unpopular wars severely disabled, the idea that anyone should point to some of them being criminal offenders appears to some to be offensive.

In 1946 the former president of the British Military Court in Jerusalem made a throwaway comment at a Rotary Club dinner.  When someone asked about theft by Palestinian Arabs, he replied that British soldiers were’ the biggest thieves in the world.’  A glance through the press during both world wars reveals soldiers involved in everything from petty theft to major black-market racketeering.  A glance through other sources shows them selling guns to insurgents in Ireland in 1921 and to Hagana in Israel in 1947.  Large numbers of young women in the ruins of continental Europe appear to have worn clothes styled and hand-made from British Army blankets; the blankets, along with cigarettes, army rations, chocolates were purchased with watches, cameras, jewellery, and sometimes their bodies.  British soldiers raped – though not as often, it seems, as soldiers from other armies; sometimes they robbed; occasionally they murdered.  They were paid to fight, and often they fought men on their own side.  There were regimental rivalries; rivalries between ships’ crews or ships from different home ports; above all their were rivalries with better-paid troops from the White Dominions and, above all, in both world wars there was hostility towards the over-paid, over-sexed Americans who were ‘over-here’.  At times the evidence reads like contemporary reports of fighting between rival street gangs.  But then servicemen recruited for the duration of a war knew that, once engaged with the acknowledged enemy of the state, they depended on their mates, on their new family of the platoon or company, the gun battery, their shipmates, their crew.

The notion of the brutalised veteran, returning home unable to settle back into civilian life and engaging in a life of robbery and violence was common after both world wars.  There appears to have been a slight increase in violence following both world wars, but this seems mainly to have been domestic violence as men responded to stories of their wives ‘carrying-on’ with others in their absence or lashed out when a noise or an incident reminded them of some aspect of their war experience.  A few self-harmed; the statistical evidence does not point to many suicides, but police officers and others could cover up a suicide to protect a family, especially if the man was a war hero.  A few others could not settle back into civilian and took to living rough.

Occasional outbursts of violence, loss of temper, self-harm, living rough are problems recognised among veterans of modern wars.  Criminal offending by servicemen, especially by young, poorly educated men, sometimes from broken homes, who finish up in the tough so-called ‘teeth-units’ that do the hard fighting in modern armies should not come as a great surprize.  No more so should the fraud and dodgy-dealings that is to be found among some administrative and logistics personnel. The armed services, as noted earlier, reflect the societies from which they come.  Governments, under pressure from different charities, are being forced to recognise the deleterious impact of military service on some young men.  The historical evidence suggests that government responses have improved, but there is still some way to go.  Governments boast about using evidence-based policy, the history of crime and the British armed services needs much more research; and it can certainly produce much significant evidence.

Clive Emsley is Emeritus Professor, the Department of History, The Open University. He is the author of Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914.

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Image credit: Vintage engraving from 1861 of Uniform of the 1st Surrey Rifles from the British Army via Duncan1890, iStockphoto.

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Mike Rapport will be giving a free talk at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday 23 March 2013 at 1.15 p.m. to talk about The Napoleonic Wars. The Very Short Introductions ’soapbox’ talks will be running twice a day during the festival.

By Mike Rapport

Modern wars, someone once wrote, are fought by civilians as well as by armed forces. In fact, it is of course a truism to say that civilians are always affected by warfare in all periods of the past — as the families left behind, by the economic hardship, by the horrors of destruction, plunder, requisitioning, siege warfare, hunger, and worse. The involvement of civilians in modern wars, however, became more intense because, with the advent of ‘total war’, belligerent states began to mobilise the entire population and material resources of the country. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were an early example of the ways in which a modern war could grind millions of people up in its brutal cogs, whether as conscripts in the firing lines of Europe’s mass armies and navies, or as civilians caught in the path of the oncoming battalions and trapped in the crossfire of the fighting itself. At the Oxford Literary Festival on 24 March, I will be speaking about the non-combatants who, in one way or another, found themselves entangled in the wars.

Civilians were of course victims. Four years ago Karen Hagemann published a fine article on the civilian experience of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, the largest battle in European history before 1914. The local people started as horrified onlookers, as maimed, sick French troops retreated into the city to find treatment in makeshift military hospitals But soon the fighting arrived on their streets and doorsteps and they themselves became the victims. First, they suffered economically with the pillaging and requisitioning of tools, furniture, food and livestock. Then they found themselves under fire, huddling in churches and cellars to shelter — sometimes in vain — from the bursting shells, or they fled the carnage, carrying what they could on carts and wheelbarrows and dragging their terrified children along with them.

Yet this was a ‘people’s war’ not only because the conflict may have killed at least one million civilians (and very likely many, many more). It was also a ‘people’s war’ because the civilian population of all the belligerents mobilized behind the war effort. Economies were reoriented into supplying armies and navies, while the recruiting-sergeant and press-gang became all-too-familiar sights across Europe. In revolutionary France in 1793, the ‘mass levy’ of the entire population for the war effort gave men, women and children explicit roles to play in the mobilisation of all the nation’s resources for the sole purpose of fighting the war. Yet civilians also voluntarily engaged in the prosecution of the conflict. In France in the 1790s, communities collected money and valuables and presented them to the government as ‘patriotic donations’. Women played a pivotal role: in Germany, a ‘Women’s Association for the Good of the Fatherland’ raised money and collected valuables for the Prussian war effort against France in 1813: it boasted some 600 branches by 1815. In Britain, women raised subscriptions for the wounded, the widowed and collected materials and clothing for the troops: there were, again, hundreds of such organisations. In Spain, men and women joined bands of guerrillas to fight and plunder the French, although in many cases such actions appear to have been little different from banditry, since Spaniards suffered from these depredations too.

Yet it all shows that people were not simply coerced. They were stirred by propaganda fed to them by governments and by a media trying to convince them that the war was, variously, a struggle for survival, for liberty, for religion, for monarchy, or for the Emperor. The people themselves played a role in shaping the propaganda, in defining what the war was about. With an expansion in literacy in the eighteenth century, such popular support would have been impossible without an interaction between public opinion and governments. In the varieties and intensity of the civilian experience, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are a chilling anticipation of the ‘total wars’ of the twentieth century.

Dr Mike Rapport is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789-1799 (OUP, 2000), The Shape of the World: Britain, France and the Struggle for Empire (Atlantic, 2006), 1848, Year of Revolution (Little, Brown, 2008), and The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credit: Victory declaration after the battle of Leipzig, 1813 [Public Domain} via Wikimedia Commons

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on Thursday 21 March 2013 at 2 p.m. in a panel event with Clare Mulley, Chris Morgan Jones, and Mark Huband, to discuss ‘the spying game: reality and fiction’.

By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

The question is not what can membership in the European Union do for us in the UK, but what can we do for the EU? There is one way in which we British can strengthen the benefits of union. We can demand and nourish a European Intelligence Service (EIS). Forget the parochial moaning, the time is ripe for such an initiative.

In the last century it came to be accepted that effective intelligence can not only win wars and minimize civilian casualties, it can also help to prevent war — precisely the main aim of the EU, as its recent Nobel Prize confirmed. It further came to be accepted that intelligence liaison is important (two heads being better than one), and that the dominant cooperation was between the UK and USA. The Anglo-American arrangement contributed to the winning of two world wars and to the keeping of the Cold War peace.

But the ‘special intelligence relationship’ declined after the 1950s. The Cambridge Spy Ring and cover up undermined US faith in British intelligence. American administrations began to use the CIA to impose unilateral policies. Displeased with Prime Minister Edward Heath’s overtures to Europe, Henry Kissinger temporarily cut off privileged UK access to US intelligence information. Britain was broke, dependent on the Almighty Dollar, and powerless to resist these developments.

More recently, President Barack Obama performed his “pivot to the Pacific”, detaching America from it umbilical Old World ties. US interests demanded that and so does demography – Americans of European descent are about to become a minority in the USA. The idea that the relationship with Britain is special in the sense of being exclusive has for years been a cause of discreet mirth in Washington. And what’s the advantage of the US intelligence link? On present evidence, the CIA has gone into terminal decline. Demoted in the Washington hierarchy, it now specializes in drone attacks.

The EU already has some intelligence assets. The European Police Office, or Europol, is essentially an analytical intelligence agency. Thanks to French initiatives, the EU is developing a satellite intelligence capability. SITCEN is a small foreign intelligence analytical unit that reports to the External Action Service, the still-embryonic foreign affairs branch of the EU.

There are weaknesses in the current EU set-up. Member states hold the whip hand, and there is a lack of trust in the centre. Along with this goes weakness on the legislative side – we really shouldn’t trust a European intelligence service unless there is a stronger European parliament to oversee it. Neither Europol nor INTCEN have an intelligence collection facility. This means they can’t trade information with other bodies. Last and by no means least, continental Europe is, with honourable exceptions, shot through with racism. A good intelligence service must be cosmopolitan if it is to have the right expertise, and if people of all backgrounds are to trust it sufficiently to offer their cooperation.

We in Britain have something to offer. GCHQ is a major asset of a kind that the EU lacks and needs. We have experience and (setting aside the scandals that make such good stories in the press) a tradition of success in secret intelligence. We have a long way to go regarding racial tolerance, but it is a brutal truth that we can offer a better record than our continental cousins who do not even track inequalities – here, we can lead by example.

• Europol HQ, The Hague

   

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• Henry Kissinger

   

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• Ilkka Salmi, SITCEN Director

   

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• Rob Wainwright, Europol Director JPG

   

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In one crucial respect, we have already shown leadership. Since the 1990s, a remarkable number of British people have served in senior EU security and intelligence posts: Jonathan Faull as Director General of Justice and Home Affairs, Adrian Fortescue as his predecessor in the post, William Shapcott at SITCEN, Rob Wainwright as director of Europol, Aled Williams as president of Eurojust, and Catherine Ashton as High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy. We have expended our political capital getting our people into these security jobs as distinct from other posts.

To appreciate fully the positive side of a European agency, it is also wise to think negatively. Scotland may become independent. As recent parliamentary hearings confirmed, independence would necessitate a Scottish intelligence service. In the absence of an EU solution, the disaggregation of personnel with conflicting loyalties might well destroy all trust within and towards British intelligence.

Finally, the Americans. Setting aside Kissinger and other tantrums, it must be remembered that Washington has always wanted us to integrate with Europe. President Obama has recently reiterated the point. Furthermore, the Americans recognize the benefits of competitive intelligence estimates. If an alternative, trusted view of WMD had been expressed a decade ago, the world would have been saved a great deal of grief.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is the author of In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (OUP, 2013) and of earlier histories of the CIA and FBI. Born in Wales, he is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Edinburgh.

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Image credits: Europol HQ, The Hague © Europol; Henry Kissinger © NARA; Illka Salmi © SUPO; Rob Wainwright © Europol. Used with permission; all rights reserved. 

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Romans measured time in months but not in weeks. The Ides simply meant the middle day of a month and it functioned simply as a temporal navigation aid — one that looks clumsy to us. So one might make an appointment for two days before the Ides or for three days after the Kalends (the first day of the month) and so on. A man shouting from the back of the crowd “Beware the Ides of March!” must have sounded about as sane as a heckler yelling to a modern day politician that he should watch out for the third Tuesday in April.

But for us the Ides of March has only one meaning: the date in 44 BC when Julius Caesar was murdered by a crowd of senators led by his protégés Brutus and Cassius. Tyrannicide, treachery, pathos. And the cry “Beware the Ides of March!” is forever the warning that was ignored.

This we owe to William Shakespeare who made his murder the focal point of the tragedy Julius Caesar. The play is punchy and the action moves fast. It opens in the streets of Rome, where the people are preparing to welcome Caesar home in triumph after the defeat of his civil war rival Pompey. Meanwhile aristocrats mutter over the loss of freedom. Brutus agonizes, torn between his love for Caesar and his hatred of tyranny. The murder itself occurs at almost the exact center of the play. The outcome is briefly uncertain — will the Roman people hail Brutus and Cassius as liberators, or condemn them as murderers? Then Mark Antony, Caesar’s right-hand man, sways the crowd with a passionate funeral oration. The rest of the play follows the flight of the conspirators, their defeat in battle at Philippi, at the hands of Antony and Caesar’s heir Octavius, and their subsequent suicides. Brutus earns the shortest of obituaries from his enemies before Octavius’ closing lines “So call the field to rest, and let’s away, to part the glories of this happy day.”

The Ides themselves were not a happy day, according to Suetonius, one of Caesar’s ancient biographers. The Ides of March had been declared the Day of Parricide, and the senate was forbidden ever to meet again on that date. For things had not turned out as Brutus hoped. By Suetonius’ day it was possible to see Julius Caesar as the first of the Roman emperors, all of whom — beginning from Octavius — took Caesar’s name as a kind of title. An entire mythology had grown up of signs that had marked Caesar’s imminent death and even his subsequent transformation into a god. As Caesar’s wife Calpurnia puts it:

When beggars die there are no comets seen
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes

“Beware the Ides of March!” was just one prophesy among others that transformed Caesar’s murder from a sordid and ultimately pointless crime into an event of cosmic significance. The deaths of emperors (like their births, when viewed in retrospect) were always marked by omens. Emperors were absolute rulers in their lifetime and gods in waiting. How could their deaths be ordinary? And how could their murder even be justified?

Tyrannicide was no more popular under the reigns of Elizabeth I (when the play was first performed) or of her successor James (when it was first printed). Yet political murder and dilemmas like that of Brutus were definitely still on the agenda. Mary Queen of Scots, for example — Elizabeth’s cousin and James’ mother — had been executed for treason just a decade before Julius Caesar was first staged. These issues still mattered.

And Shakespeare’s audience knew this story in advance. A vast mass of the detail of this play, as of Antony and Cleopatra, was drawn from the Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, written by Suetonius’ contemporary Plutarch but first translated into English in 1579, a generation before Julius Caesar began to be performed. Plutarch’s Lives, which mined classical history for morally improving tales, were fantastically popular in the early modern period and indeed remained so well into the eighteenth century. Shakespeare’s audience knew from the start that Caesar would die, who would kill him, and even that young Octavius would turn out to be a greater tyrant than Caesar had ever tried to be.

So the soothsayer’s cry “Beware the Ides of March” was not a plot-spoiler. For Shakespeare this warning, and all the others, were devices to raise the tension and focus our attention on the pivotal moment of the murder. As in a thriller today, the excitement is in the obstacles put in the way of the plot. Caesar must die. But what if he listens to his wife’s terrible nightmares? or heeds the soothsayer’s warning? or reads the written warning pushed into his hand by Artemidorus “Delay not Caesar, read it instantly!” (Caesar does not.)

Shakespeare has transformed the signs of cosmic sympathy into mood music. His opening scenes are overshadowed by storms. And again before the death of Brutus there is another omen. Plutarch’s Life of Brutus tells how a monstrous figure had appeared in his tent before the final campaign. Asked its name, it replies “I am your evil demon, Brutus, and I will see you at Philippi!” then vanishes. Shakespeare tells the story almost word for word, but add the stage direction reads Enter the Ghost of Caesar. Brutus’ imminent tragedy points back to the Ides.

Shakespeare’s Renaissance audiences and readers knew the history of Rome as a history of violence. They were drawn more to the chaos of the Republic than to the imperial peace that followed it. And they certainly did not believe in closure. The story of Julius Caesar is not self-contained, and the conflicts are not resolved. It opens with two tribunes remembering how Pompey had once been just as much adored by the Roman people, as his conqueror was now. And Octavius’ last words remind us that Antony and Octavius would immediately fall out over how exactly to “part the glories” (that is to divide the spoils). There would be fresh civil wars, more treachery and many, many more murders to come. Beware the Ides of March!

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Rome: An Empire’s Story, Et Tu, Brute?: A Short History of Political Murder and editor of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Roman World.

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Image credits: La Morte di Cesare. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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My interest in the Cold War has developed over many years. In fact, as I look back, I would say that it began around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s when I was still in high school. Over the years, as a college student and then as a university professor, I began to look more closely at the vast literature that developed on the topic and to examine the bitter controversies that had raged since 1945. In the process, I stumbled upon several illuminating studies, but there was no one “school” of interpretation that I found satisfying. As with my other books (on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union), I wanted to find out for myself what really happened, what the Cold War was all about.

Why did I end up focusing on Stalin? He turned out to be the key figure at the epicenter of events when the East-West conflict began. However one might explain the motives behind his actions, it is clearly the case that his initiatives led to the Cold War. Moreover, by the time he died in March 1953, he had helped to create the communist world that seemed impervious to change, as well as the terms of engagement with the West. These configurations were all but frozen in place.

Where to begin an account of this fateful turn of events? I found that it is misleading at best to make a division, as we often do, between the end of the Second World War in May 1945 and the post-war period. Not only did the mayhem continue after VE-Day, but massive violence in the name of the communist cause occurred simultaneously with the years of the conflict against Nazism and spilled over into the post-war. There were savage retributions, multiple ethnic cleansing operations, and civil wars, which became entangled in the establishment of new communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Similarly in Asia, there is a seamless web of connections from the war against Japan to the Cold War.

As far back as August 1939, the Soviet Union, as Hitler’s ally, had begun to renew its mission, on hold since the early 1920s, to extend the communist Red Empire. According to Stalin, Hitler was unknowingly playing a revolutionary role by destroying old regimes and ruling classes. The Nazi invasion of the USSR in mid-1941 represented a setback, but Stalin still perceived possibilities for advancing the cause even when the capitalist British and Americans came forward with offers to help. What is remarkable is that his faith in the inevitability of world-wide communist revolutions never diminished. He was the master of disguise. When he spoke with his accidental allies he neither used the language of the Communist revolutionary, nor whispered of any aims for the post-war besides guarantees for the future security of the USSR. Who could argue with that?

Privately, Stalin never wavered in his hatred for all the capitalist countries, be they German, Japanese, British, or American. His strong immediate preference was to milk the wartime alliance for all it was worth. Yet he was always prepared to go over to the offensive for the Red cause, or to encourage others to do so. As he put it succinctly to Yugoslav comrades in 1948: “You strike when you can win, and avoid the battle when you cannot. We will join the fight when conditions favor us and not when they favor the enemy.”

The story that unfolded between the beginning of the Second World War and Stalin’s death exactly sixty years ago in 1953, is gripping, momentous, and tragic. The once seemingly impregnable Red Empire that he, along with millions of true believers, had created began to dissolve in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist in 1991. Although they all bristled with armies and their secret police forces were larger than ever, they barely fired a shot. It was as if there was nothing left to defend.

Now that the dust has settled, it turns out that political cultures, authoritarian traditions, and command economies do not change as quickly as regimes. So the nations over which Stalin and his disciples ruled for so long still carry the telltale signs of his curse. These include a penchant to tolerate a strongman at the top, fragile regard for the individual, and stunted civil societies. Although people will have to struggle for years to overcome these deficits, the indications are, in spite of setbacks, that they will succeed.

Robert Gellately is Earl Ray Beck Professor of History at Florida State University. His publications have been translated into over twenty languages and include the widely acclaimed Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: the Age of Social Catastrophe (2007), Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (2001), and The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (1990). His most recent work is Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War.

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Image credit: Yalta summit in February 1945. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives via Wikimedia Commons.

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When great powers decline it is often the case that financial troubles are a key component of the slide. The vertiginous decline of a state’s financial system under extreme pressure, year after year, not only saps the strength and volume of financial activity, it also proves extremely difficult to reverse, and the great risk is that a disastrous situation is worsened by misguided and ultimately catastrophic attempts on the part of a government to dig itself out of its hole. So great does the eventual debt become that there is little hope of repaying even a majority of the capital, even with decades of peace and low spending ahead. The protracted financial and economic crisis that began in the West in 2007 provides an appropriate contemporary backdrop for a fresh examination of the decline of France’s financial system in the early eighteenth century under just such a mountain of poorly-backed debt. In the final decades of the seventeenth century France had been the leading great power in the European states system, indeed the only superpower capable of projecting significant force on multiple war fronts. Yet within a quarter of a century it had lost this comparative international advantage, as its financial strength degenerated alongside its military power.

France got into such a terrible mess in the final two decades of Louis XIV’s reign. While war was the essential cause of heightened state spending, as the largest economy in Europe France should have been able to sustain a protracted and extensive conflict, but it could not. The underlying problem was the combination of two classic, fatal ingredients: a weak fiscal base, and a precarious and expensive credit system. The tax base was chronically enfeebled by vast numbers of exemptions and privileges that the government only began to tackle in 1695. But tentative attempts to make the elites — the top 2-3% — contribute more to the costs of the state would, over the following 90 years, prove politically contentious and divisive, sapping the legitimacy of the monarchy. As for the weakness of credit, this arose not just from the problem of weak fiscal backing and the fact much of it was supplied by those entrepreneurs charged with tax collection. It also stemmed from the inherent unreliability of a government dominated by an absolute monarch, which at times was willing to threaten dealers in the foreign exchange and public debt markets with prison and professional proscription for pricing financial instruments on a realistic but unfavourable basis. Compounding these issues were huge concerns over the undependable and sclerotic legal framework for lending money at interest. France was, in short, overregulated, but capriciously so.

In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) this system unravelled spectacularly. As tax yields declined the government pursued dangerous expedients, including the manipulation of the value of the coinage and the issuing of vast quantities of Mint bills: a hybrid of paper money and short-term credit notes. Furthermore, rather than relying overwhelmingly on well-organised advances on tax proceeds from leading tax collectors, the government turned the paymasters of the armed forces into state creditors on a giant scale. Louis XIV’s government became so dependent on these men and other entrepreneurs supplying the army and navy that they were able to make exorbitant demands. Some of them even penetrated the corridors of power as junior ministers, in an early form of military-industrial complex. All this came at a very high price indeed. The financiers and suppliers were rapacious, though they also needed to protect their own solvency and operations by ramping up costs as a form of insurance against arbitrary state management and the increasing number of revenue sources that were failing. These revenue failures played havoc with the system of appropriating revenue sources to expenditure, which was already being disastrously mismanaged by senior officials, and this earmarking chaos in turn threw the state even further into debt in a desperate attempt to keep the failing war effort going. This war effort was pursued much of the time beyond France’s borders, putting yet further strain on the state: Louis XIV needed vast amounts of foreign exchange to pay and supply his armies and allies in Spain, Italy, Bavaria, the Low Countries, and even Hungary. The volume of foreign currency required would naturally have pushed up its price, but the turbulent and deteriorating monetary and fiscal backdrop led international bankers to build astronomical costs into their exchange contracts for moving state money abroad. The failure to control their transactions, the separation of risky payment sources from their additional instruments of guarantee, and the short-selling of this paper precipitated a monumental crash of the exchange clearing system in early 1709 in Lyon, from which the city never really recovered.

By the time of Louis XIV’s death in 1715 French state debt had risen more than three-fold from the size it had been thirty years earlier, and much of that increase was down to a few short years between 1702 and 1708 — the early modern period may in many ways have seen a much slower pace of life than we experience, but financial crises could unfold roughly at a similar pace. The real danger is that it can take as long or far longer to effect a stabilisation and recovery, thus tempting governments into dangerous policy decisions to try to generate swift recoveries. In the years after 1715 the Regency government for the boy king Louis XV took exactly this course, seeking to liquidate much of the state debt by swallowing the snake-oil solution peddled by John Law of hitching debt to a national bank backed by vast speculation on the highly uncertain economic future of overseas trade and colonisation. The subsequent liquidation of Law’s System forced the government into inflicting enormous haircuts on creditors, further eroding confidence in the monarchy, while future generations were still saddled with levels of debt that the state machinery was not designed to cope with. It also condemned the French body politic to a series of destabilising political struggles over state finance that culminated in final breakdown and revolution.

Guy Rowlands is Director of the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews, and author of The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 2012). He is also the author of The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661-1701 (Cambridge, 2002), for which he was co-winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize (2002).

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Image credit: Louis XIV and His Family circa 1710. Wallace Collection. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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On Sunday, 29 March 1739, two young men, aspiring authors and student friends from Eton College and Cambridge, departed Dover for the Continent. The twenty-two year old Horace Walpole, 4th earl of Orford (1717–1797), was setting out on his turn at the Grand Tour. Accompanying him on the journey, which would take them through France to Italy, was Thomas Gray (1716–1771), future author of the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. The pair stayed abroad until September 1741, when an argument saw Gray return to England alone.

Travelling through Catholic domains, they would witness at arms-length one of the longest transfers of papal power in history, only four days shorter than the Interregnum, later imposed by the Napoleonic French, between the expulsion from the Papal States of Pius VI (who died 1799) and the election of Pius VII (14 March 1800). The on-going power struggle between the papacy and Catholic rulers of Europe, particularly with France, Spain and Portugal, had reached new levels of intensity — the latter two objecting in particular to unwelcome Jesuit interference in their treatment (read, “mistreatment”) of native populations in their overseas empires. The issue was still critical twenty years later, when Voltaire, under the pseudonym M. Demand, wrote to the Journal encyclopédique (1 April 1759), in the guise of identifying the real author of Candide, offering in partial evidence reports from the confrontations between Jesuits and colonial officials over their dealings with native populations in Paraguay.

The correspondence and journals of Gray and Walpole chart their travels, visits and discoveries across France and into Italy. The two young English travellers arrived in Florence on 16 December 1739, after a two days’ journey from Bologna across the Apennines. It was only two months before the ancient drama of papal passing and election would attract the attention of the world. Gray reported this news, when it came, to his friend Dr Thomas Wharton, writing on Saturday, 12 March 1740:

I conclude you will write to me; won’t you? oh! yes, when you know, that in a week I set out for Rome, & that the Pope is dead, & that I shall be (I should say, God willing; & if nothing extraordinary intervene; & if I’m alive, & well; & in all human probability) at the Coronation of a new one.

Clement XII (Papa Clemens duodecimus, born Lorenzo Corsini) had been pope from his election on 12 July 1730. He was the oldest person to become pope until Benedict XVI was elected in 2005. Clement died on 6 February 1740, and was eventually succeeded by Benedict XIV (Papa Benedictus quartus decimus, born Pròspero Lorenzo Lambertini), who was elected six months later on 17 August 1740. In a well-known anecdote of the election, Benedict is reported to have said to the cardinals: “If you wish to elect a saint, choose Gotti; a statesman, Aldrovandi; an honest man, me” (M. J. Walsh, Pocket Dictionary of Popes, London: Burns & Oates, 2006) — though as we will see from a contemporary report below, this is a rather colourless translation of the original.

A week later, Gray wrote to his mother Dorothy (Saturday, 19 March 1740):

The Pope is at last dead, and we are to set out for Rome on Monday next. The Conclave is still sitting there, and likely to continue so some time longer, as the two French Cardinals are but just arrived, and the German ones are still expected. It agrees mighty ill with those that remain inclosed: Ottoboni is already dead of an apoplexy; Altieri and several others are said to be dying, or very bad: Yet it is not expected to break up till after Easter. We shall lie at Sienna the first night, spend a day there, and in two more get to Rome. One begins to see in this country the first promises of an Italian spring, clear unclouded skies, and warm suns, such as are not often felt in England; yet, for your sake, I hope at present you have your proportion of them, and that all your frosts, and snows, and short-breaths are, by this time, utterly vanished. I have nothing new or particular to inform you of; and, if you see things at home go on much in their old course, you must not imagine them more various abroad. The diversions of a Florentine Lent are composed of a sermon in the morning, full of hell and the devil; a dinner at noon, full of fish and meager diet; and, in the evening, what is called a Conversazione, a sort of aſsembly at the principal people’s houses, full of I cannot tell what: Besides this, there is twice a week a very grand concert.

Two weeks later, after their arrival in Rome, Gray wrote another Saturday letter to his mother (2 April 1740):

St. Peter’s I saw the day after we arrived, and was struck dumb with wonder. I there saw the Cardinal d’Auvergne, one of the French ones, who, upon coming off his journey, immediately repaired hither to offer up his vows at the high altar, and went directly into the Conclave; the doors of which we saw opened to him, and all the other immured Cardinals came thither to receive him. Upon his entrance they were closed again directly. It is supposed they will not come to an agreement about a Pope till after Easter, though the confinement is very disagreeable.”

The conflict between catholic rulers, their national churches and the papacy led to prolonged disagreements and manoeuvrings in the Conclave, as evidenced by this letter from Walpole and Gray to their schoolboy friend, then fellow of King’s College Cambridge (Rome, 14 May 1740):

Boileau’s Discord dwelt in a College of Monks. At present the Lady is in the Conclave. Cardinal Corsini has been interrogated about certain Millions of Crowns that are absent from the Apostolic Chamber; He refuses giving Account, but to a Pope: However he has set several Arithmeticians to work, to compose Summs, & flourish out Expenses, which probably never existed. Cardinal Cibo pretends to have a Banker at Genoa, who will prove that he has received three Millions on the Part of the Eminent Corsini. This Cibo is a madman, but set on by others. He had formerly some great office in the government, from whence they are generally rais’d to the Cardinalate. After a time, not being promoted as he expected, he resign’d his Post, and retir’d to a Mountain where He built a most magnificient Hermitage. There He inhabited for two years, grew tir’d, came back and received the Hat.

Other feuds have been between Card. Portia and the Faction of Benedict the Thirteenth, by whom He was made Cardinal. About a month ago, he was within three Votes of being Pope. he did not apply to any Party, but went gleaning privately from all & of a sudden burst out with a Number; but too soon, & that threw Him quite out. Having been since left out of their Meetings, he ask’d one of the Benedictine Cardinals the reason; who replied, that he never had been their Friend, & never should be of their assemblies; & did not even hesitate to call him Apostate. This flung Portia into such a Rage that He spit blood, & instantly left the Conclave with all his Baggage. But the great Cause of their Antipathy to Him, was His having been one of the Four, that voted for putting Coscia to Death; Who now regains his Interest, & may prove somewhat disagreable to his Enemies; Whose Honesty is not abundantly heavier than His Own. He met Corsini t’other Day, & told Him, He heard His Eminence had a mind to his Cell: Corsini answer’d He was very well contented with that He had. Oh, says Coscia, I don’t mean here in the Conclave; but in the Castle St. Angelo.

With all these Animosities, One is near having a Pope. Card. Gotti, an Old, inoffensive Dominican, without any Relations, wanted yesterday but two voices; & is still most likely to succeed. Card. Altieri has been sent for from Albano, whither he was retir’d upon account of his Brother’s Death, & his own Illness; & where He was to stay till the Election drew nigh. There! there’s a sufficient Competency of Conclave News, I think. We have miserable Weather for the Season; Coud You think I was writing to You by my fireside at Rome in the middle of May? the Common People say tis occasion’d by the Pope’s Soul, which cannot find Rest.

As the bickering and accusations continued, Gray returned to Florence, where he reported to his father Philip (10 July 1740):

The Conclave we left in greater uncertainty than ever; the more than ordinary liberty they enjoy there, and the unusual coolneſs of the season, makes the confinement leſs disagreeable to them than common, and, consequently, maintains them in their irresolution. There have been very high words, one or two (it is said) have come even to blows; two more are dead within this last month, Cenci and Portia; the latter died distracted; and we left another (Altieri) at the extremity: Yet nobody dreams of an election till the latter end of September. All this gives great scandal to all good catholics, and everybody talks very freely on the subject.

Finally, on Sunday, 21 August 1740, Gray wrote again to his mother with the news of the new pope’s election:

The day before yesterday arrived the news of a Pope; and I have the mortification of being within four days journey of Rome, and not seeing his coronation, the heats being violent, and the infectious air now at its height. We had an instance, the other day, that it is not only fancy. Two country fellows, strong men, and used to the country about Rome, having occasion to come from thence hither, and travelling on foot, as common with them, one died suddenly on the road; the other got hither, but extremely weak, and in a manner stupid; he was carried to the hospital, but died in two days. So, between fear and lazineſs, we remain here, and must be satisfied with the accounts other people give us of the matter. The new Pope is called Benedict XIV. being created Cardinal by Benedict XIII. the last Pope but one. His name is Lambertini, a noble Bolognese, and Archbishop of that city. When I was first there, I remember to have seen him two or three times; he is a short, fat man, about sixty-five years of age, of a hearty, merry countenance, and likely to live some years. He bears a good character for generosity, affability, and other virtues; and, they say, wants neither knowledge nor capacity. The worst side of him is, that he has a nephew or two; besides a certain young favourite, called Melara, who is said to have had, for some time, the arbitrary disposal of his purse and family. He is reported to have made a little speech to the Cardinals in the Conclave, while they were undetermined about an election, as follows: ‘Most eminent Lords, here are three Bolognese of different characters, but all equally proper for the Popedom. If it be your pleasures, to pitch upon a Saint, there is Cardinal Gotti; if upon a Politician, there is Aldrovandi; if upon a Booby, here am I.’ The Italian is much more expreſsive, and, indeed, not to be translated; wherefore, if you meet with any body that understands it, you may show them what he said in the language he spoke it. ‘Eminſsimi. Sigri. Ci siamo tré, diversi sì, mà tutti idonei al Papato. Si vi piace un Santo, c’ è l’Gotti; se volete una testa scaltra, e Politica, c’ è l’Aldrovandé;c se un Coglione, eccomi!’ Cardinal Coscia is restored to his liberty, and, it is said, will be to all his benefices. Corsini (the late Pope’s nephew) as he has had no hand in this election, it is hoped, will be called to account for all his villanous practices.”

Dr. Robert V. McNamee is the Director of the Electronic Enlightenment Project, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Electronic Enlightenment is a scholarly research project of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and is available exclusively from Oxford University Press. It is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas, and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century — reconstructing one of the world’s great historical “conversations”.

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Image Credit: (1) Print Collection portrait file, Thomas Gray, Portraits. Source NYPL Digital Gallery
(2) Print Collection portrait file, B, Pope Benedict XIV. Source NYPL Digital Gallery

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Ten years ago, at the Elysée Treaty’s 40th anniversary, Alain Juppé characterized France and Germany as the “privileged guardians of the European cohesion.” As the European Union’s key countries celebrated the 50th anniversary of their bilateral Treaty, Europe traverses a whole set of crises making the Franco-German “entente élémentaire” (Willy Brandt) appear as ever more important for providing or preserving European crisis management, decision-making, and, in whatever exact form: cohesion.

The endurance and the adaptability of the bilateral Franco-German connection—in spite of frequently dramatic domestic political changes (say changes of governments, parties in power, key personnel, economic rises, social upheavals, among others), regional European transformations (including widening and deepening European integration, the fall of the Iron Curtain, German unification), and wider international rupture or dynamism (such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, or burgeoning globalization)—is a remarkable feature of European politics of the past half-century. Different combinations of a variety of factors have nurtured both resilience and adaptability of this bilateral link over time, political domains, and specific issues:

• complementary (more often than identical) strategic and economic interests;
• an extraordinarily tight fabric of bilateral institutions and norms to lubricate intergovernmental cooperation;
• parapublic and transnational interconnections between the two countries civil societies to undergird public intergovernmental links;
• the basic strategic choice on both sides generally to handle bilateral differences with delicacy, circumspection, and patience to arrive at compromises in bilateral and European matters whenever possible;
• and, finally, what Stanley Hoffmann once called an “equilibrium of disequilibria”: an overall by and large balanced bilateral relationship that enabled France and Germany to exercise joint European leadership on a footing of relative equality.

In 1963, the Elysée Treaty crowned the period of Franco-German friendship following World War II. At the same time, the Treaty offered a frame for an emergent and lasting “special” bilateral relationship between France and Germany, and inserted the Franco-German connection at the very core of the evolving institutions and decision-making processes of the European Union and its various predecessors.

The signing of the treaty on 22nd January 1963. In the picture (sat at the table, left to right): Dr. Gerhard Schröder (Minister of Foreign Affairs), Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, President Charles de Gaulle, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, and Maurice Couve de Murville (French Foreign Minister). Source: This image was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv) as part of a cooperation project.

And very much in the spirit of its godfathers and signatories Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, the Elysée Treaty helped to base this novel sort of Franco-German relationship not only on an unusual set of bilateral intergovernmental institutionalization, but also on linkages and interchange among the French and Germans beyond and below the intergovernmental level. Most notably, the past 50 years have seen the emergence and flourishing of a massive set of publicly funded or organizationally supported “parapublic” institutions and institutionalization, such as the Franco-German Youth Office (with some 8 million participants in exchange programs since its foundation); some 2200 “twinnings” (jumelages, Partnerschaften) between French and German towns or regional entities; connections between high schools and universities; and, later, the creation of the Franco-German TV channel ARTE, and the framework of the Franco-German University.

To be sure, the Franco-German connection of the past five decades has experienced numerous disagreements, crises, or even phases of protracted tensions. In retrospect, the Gaullist period, with fundamental and seemingly insurmountable divergence in French and German strategic orientations, might appear as the most trying. And yet, neither this phase, nor various enduring differences in political or economic inclinations, nor a motley crew of disagreements, have either broken the bilateral connection or led it to degenerate into marginal relevance.

At the celebrations of the Elysée Treaty’s 50th anniversary, and the beginning of what France and Germany have baptized “the Franco-German year,” two developments threaten the continued endurance and political relevance of this bilateral relationship in Europe: on the one hand, the seemingly deep disparities across major policy fields during this period of severe crises; on the other, an apparently increasing gap in economic performance and competitiveness.

As for the former, most visibly perhaps, France and Germany have so far not succeeded in developing bilateral compromises so as to decisively help manage or overcome the Eurozone crisis. Or, for that matter, even to define a coherent approach in dealing with this crisis and its possible implications for the future of European governance in the monetary realm or beyond. In the policy fields of foreign, security, and defense—equally of supreme importance—France’s and Germany’s disparate strategic cultures persist, and their visions of the EU’s role in international politics and security continue to diverge, most strikingly perhaps when it comes to the use of military force. Some of the key questions in these domains—how to position oneself and to act in an often dangerous and violent world in which the most comfortable and comforting answers do not always suffice—continue especially to plague German elites.

Plaque commemorating the restoration of relations between Germany and France, showing Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle. Photo by Adam Carr, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

However, it is the seemingly ever worsening loss of economic performance and competitiveness on France’s side, the erosion of the domestic economic bases of France’s bilateral and European standing, and the growing bilateral asymmetry in power and influence between the two countries, that pose the greatest challenge for the future of the Franco-German connection and for the survival of the Eurozone. While it is hardly conceivable that the Franco-German relationship could be based on a France lastingly in the role of the junior partner, the European Union more than ever requires strong leadership in order to navigate through its arguably deepest set of crises since its emergence from the treaties of Paris and Rome. Neither German hegemony, nor frequently weakened or inchoate supranational European institutions, nor another bilateralism or minilateral grouping is available to act as a replacement for the joint Franco-German role at the core of Europe.

The ability of France to face the realities of decline, and the courage and political will of its leaders to comprehensively reform the social and economic model—no matter how painful or divisive domestically—are indispensable conditions for that the tremendous success story of the Franco-German connection in Europe to continue and blossom beyond the celebrations of the Elysée Treaty’s anniversary and the Franco-German year.

Ulrich Krotz and Joachim Schild are the authors of Shaping Europe: France, Germany, and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-First Century Politics. Ulrich Krotz is Professor at the European University Institute, where he holds the Chair in International Relations in the Political Science Department and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. Joachim Schild is Professor of Political Science at the University of Trier.

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On the 15^th of February 1944, Allied planes bombed the abbey at Monte Cassino as part of an extended campaign against the Axis forces. St. Benedict of Nursia established his first monastery, the source of the Benedictine Order, here around 529. Over four months, the Battle of Monte Cassino would inflict some 200,000 causalities and rank as one of the most horrific battles of World War II. This excerpt from Peter Caddick-Adams’s Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, recounts the bombing.

On the afternoon of 14 February, Allied artillery shells scattered leaflets containing a printed warning in Italian and English of the abbey’s impending destruction. These were produced by the same US Fifth Army propaganda unit that normally peddled surrender leaflets and devised psychological warfare messages. The monks negotiated a safe passage through the German lines for 16 February — too late, as it turned out. American Harold Bond, of the 36th Texan Division, remembered  the texture of the ‘honey-coloured Travertine stone’ of the abbey that fine Tuesday morning, and how ‘the Germans seemed to sense that something important was about to happen for they were strangely quiet’. Journalist Christopher Buckley wrote of ‘the cold blue on that late winter morning’ as formations of Flying Fortresses ‘flew in perfect formation with that arrogant dignity which distinguishes bomber aircraft as they set out upon a sortie’. John Buckeridge of 1/Royal Sussex, up on Snakeshead, recalled his surprise as the air filled with the drone of engines and waves of silver bombers, the sun glinting off their bellies, hove into view. His surprise turned to concern when he saw their bomb doors open — as far as his battalion was concerned the raid was not due for at least another day.

Brigadier Lovett of 7th Indian Brigade was furious at the lack of warning: ‘I was called on the blower and told that the bombers would be  over in fifteen minutes… even as I spoke the  roar  [of  aircraft] drowned my voice as the first shower of eggs [bombs]  came down.’ At the HQ of the 4/16th Punjabis, the adjutant wrote: ‘We went to the door of the command post and gazed up… There we saw the white trails of many high-level bombers. Our first thought was that they were the enemy. Then somebody said, “Flying Fortresses.” There followed the whistle, swish and blast as the first flights struck at the monastery.’ The first formation released their cargo over the abbey. ‘We could see them fall, looking at this distance like little black stones, and then the ground  all around  us shook with gigantic shocks as they exploded,’ wrote Harold  Bond. ‘Where the abbey had been there was only a huge cloud of smoke and dust which concealed the entire hilltop.’

The aircraft which committed the deed came from the massive resources of the US Fifteenth and Twelfth Air Forces (3,876 planes, including transports and those of the RAF in theatre), whose heavy and medium bombardment wings were based predominantly on two dozen temporary airstrips around Foggia in southern Italy (by comparison, a Luftwaffe return of aircraft numbers in Italy on 31 January revealed 474 fighters, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft in theatre, of which 224 were serviceable). Less than an hour’s flying time from Cassino, the Foggia airfields were primitive, mostly grass affairs, covered with Pierced Steel Planking runways, with all offices, accommodation and other facilities under canvas, or quickly constructed out of wood. In mid-winter the buildings and tents were wet and freezing, and often the runways were swamped with oceans of mud which inhibited  flying. Among the personnel stationed there was Joseph Heller, whose famous novel Catch-22 was based on the surreal no-win-situation chaos of Heller’s 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, Twelfth Air Force, with whom he flew sixty combat missions as a bombardier (bomb-aimer) in B-25 Mitchells.

After the first wave of  aircraft struck Cassino monastery, a Sikh company of 4/16th Punjabis fell back, understandably, and a German wireless message was heard to announce: ‘Indian troops  with turbans are retiring’. Bond and his friends were astonished when, ‘now and again, between the waves of bombers, a wind would blow the smoke away, and to our surprise we saw the gigantic walls of the abbey still stood’. Captain Rupert Clarke, Alexander’s ADC, was watching with his boss. ‘Alex and I were lying out on the ground about 3,000 yards from Cassino. As I watched the bombers, I saw bomb doors open and bombs began to fall well short of the target.’ Back at the 4/16th Punjabis, ‘almost before the ground ceased to shake the telephones were ringing. One of our companies was within 300 yards of the target and the others within 800 yards; all had received a plastering and were asking questions with some asperity.’ Later, when a formation of B-25 medium bombers passed over, Buckley noticed, ‘a  bright  flame, such  as a  giant  might have produced by striking titanic matches on the mountain-side, spurted swiftly upwards at half a dozen points. Then a pillar of smoke 500 feet high broke upwards into the blue. For nearly five minutes it hung around the building, thinning gradually upwards.’

Nila Kantan of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps was no longer driving trucks, as no vehicles could get up to the 4th Indian Division’s positions overlooking the abbey, so he found himself portering instead. ‘On our shoulders we carried all the things up the hill; the gradient was one in three, and we had to go almost on all fours. I was watching from our hill as all the bombers went in and unloaded their bombs; soon after, our guns blasted the hill, and ruined the monastery.’ For Harold Bond, the end was the strangest, ‘then nothing happened. The smoke and dust slowly drifted away, showing the crumbled masonry with fragments of walls still standing, and men in their foxholes talked with each other about the show they had just seen, but the battlefield remained relatively quiet.’

The abbey had been literally ruined, not obliterated as Freyberg had required, and was now one vast mountain of rubble with many walls still remaining up to a height of forty or more feet, resembling the ‘dead teeth’ General John K. Cannon of the USAAF wanted to remove; ironically those of the north-west corner (the future target of all ground assaults through the hills) remained intact. These the Germans, sheltering from the smaller bombs, immediately occupied and turned into excellent defensive positions, ready to slaughter the 4th Indian Division when they belatedly attacked. As Brigadier Kippenberger observed: ‘Whatever had been the position before, there was no doubt  that the enemy was now entitled to garrison the ruins, the breaches in the fifteen-foot-thick walls were nowhere complete, and we wondered whether we had gained anything.’

Peter Caddick-Adams is a Lecturer in Military and Security Studies at the United Kingdom’s Defence Academy, and author of Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell and Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives. He holds the rank of major in the British Territorial Army and has served with U.S. forces in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

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Image credits: (1) Source: U.S. Air Force; (2) Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-2005-0004 / Wittke / CC-BY-SA; (3) Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J26131 / Enz / CC-BY-SA

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By Ann Saddlemyer

There had been rumours for months. When Dublin’s Abbey Theatre announced that John Millington Synge’s new play The Playboy of the Western World would be produced on Saturday, 26 January 1907, all were on alert. Controversy had followed Synge since the production of his first Wicklow play, The Shadow of the Glen, in which a bold, young, and lonely woman leaves a loveless May/December marriage to go off with a fine-talking Tramp who rhapsodizes over the freedom of the roads. Irish women wouldn’t do that!

In The Playboy the action takes place in a public house on the wild coast of Mayo, when a travel-stained stranger enters and is persuaded to tell his story. Impressed, the admiring on-stage audience thinks he must be very brave indeed to have killed his father, and in turn the young tramp blossoms into the daring rollicking hero they believe him to be – winning all the prizes at the races and the love of the publican’s daughter. But then his father, with a bandaged head, turns up seeking his worthless son who is not the courageous father-slayer after all. Disillusioned and angry at the loss of their hero, the onstage crowd turns brutally on Christy, who tries to prove that he is indeed capable of savage deeds, even attempting unsuccessfully to kill his father a third time. The play ends with father and son leaving together, dismissing the onstage audience with the words “Shut yer yelling for if you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you’re setting me now to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome, it’s worse maybe to go mixing with the fools of earth”.

Irish actors Sara Allgood (“Pegeen Mike”) and J. M. Kerrigan (“Shawn Keogh”), in ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, Plymouth Theatre, Boston, 1911.

Yet the playwright does not seem to have been aware of the response his play would cause, insisting that it was merely a comedy, an “extravaganza”, meant to entertain, and that “the story — in its ESSENCE — is probable, given the psychic state of the locality.” Not to this audience, who charged him with immorality, obscenity and blasphemy, “a sordid, squalid and repulsive picture of Irish life and character”, making a hero of “a foul-mouthed scoundrel and parricide”.

For three years Synge had painstakingly developed his original idea, producing more than a thousand typescript pages, drafts and scenarios, all the way to draft “K” before he finally hit on the brilliantly ambiguous final form. For a “playboy” may be an athlete, performer, seducer, trickster, manipulator, creator, hero, or all of the above; while “the western world” might refer to County Mayo, to the United States, or to this world as contrasted with that “eastern world” of folk and fairy tales — or to all. “What a blessing you did not go to version L, if Version K had such a disastrous effect!” a friend commented in the turbulent months that followed.

Like Christy’s own tale of slaying his Da, the story of his injuries to Ireland’s good name continued to grow with the years. When the Abbey theatre took the play on tour to the United States, the clash between the idea of a pure nationhood cherished by Irish immigrants and what they saw on stage was even more pronounced. In New York missiles were thrown on the stage, and a hundred police attempted to keep order. Lady Gregory, who led the tour, received death threats; Theodore Roosevelt’s presence at the second performance ensured a more sedate reception. But when the company arrived in Philadelphia all hell broke loose, and the players were hauled into court by an Irish-American patriot who accused the company and the play of indecency. The case was dismissed when the judge learned that the accusers had not read the text.

In the theatre individual response to what is clearly not real can quickly become an excuse for objecting to what is perceived to be real. Audiences have always felt justified in expressing their disapproval of what is staged, or attempted to be staged. In 18th century London theatre managers petitioned the King for a guard of soldiers; one manager engaged thirty prize-fighters as well. Destruction of scenery, benches and even musical instruments was all too common when the audience felt cheated; often foreign performers were pelted with rotten fruit and other missiles (and told to go home).

Patriotism was perhaps the most frequent cause, especially in Ireland where the stage Irishman, created by English dramatists, was a subject of mockery and ridicule, and where class, nationalism, and religion were inextricably entwined. In 1907 however the disturbance was premeditated, with members of the audience carrying in stink bombs, rotten vegetables, trumpets, whistles, and other paraphernalia. There was clearly an organized cabal determined to silence a work which is now considered a masterpiece of comedy, performed throughout the world and recently the centrepiece of a world tour.

Would such events happen today? We are much more accustomed to onstage violence; but censorship is still very much with us. Synge suggests that to hold a dream is better than to live with caution; the outsider serves to perpetuate the myth-making process while at the same time challenging it, introducing a heightened self-awareness which embraces community on both sides of the footlights. Thus the audience is caught off-guard, encouraged to enter the world of fantasy, then betrayed by a reality of a different sort — the dream itself can threaten if fulfilled; we are briefly dangled above two worlds at once.

Ann Saddlemyer has published extensively on Irish and Canadian theatre and edited the plays of Lady Gregory and the letters between the founding Directors of the Abbey Theatre. Her book Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. She has most recently edited W.B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters. She is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: From the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archive, Boston [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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The Duke of Wellington always has a traffic cone on his head. At least, he does when he is in Glasgow. Let me explain: outside the city’s Gallery of Modern Art on Queen Street, there is an equestrian statue of the celebrated general of the Napoleonic Wars. It was sculpted in 1840-4 by the Franco-Italian artist, Carlo Marochetti (1805-1867), who in his day was a dominant figure in the world of commemorative sculpture. Amongst his works is the statue of Richard the Lionheart, who has sat on his mount and held aloft his sword outside the Houses of Parliament since 1860.

Yet Glasgow’s lofty monument has been a magnet for pranksters –  ever since the 1980s, according to the BBC – who regularly scale the pedestal, Copenhagen’s (the horse’s) flanks and then, clinging onto the Iron Duke himself, crown him with an orange traffic cone. This has caused some controversy: the police warn that the acts of intrepid, late-night climbers (who, to be frank, may also have enjoyed the hospitality of the local hostelries) is an act of vandalism and is downright dangerous. The government-funded agency that oversees the care of the country’s historic buildings, Historic Scotland, acknowledges that embellishing Wellington with a modern piece of traffic paraphernalia is now a ‘longstanding tradition’, but emphasises that the statue is A-listed and so needs to be protected from damage – and there has indeed been damage: on different occasions, the general has lost a spur and his sword. Others argue that the ‘coning’ of Wellington is a worthy expression of the people’s sense of humour and that it is as much a part of the cityscape as its historic buildings and monuments. And indeed the statue has become iconic – not because it is a likeness of the Duke of Wellington, but because the general has a cone on his head: postcards proudly depicting this symbol of Glaswegian humour are easy to find.

This controversy sprang to mind when I was first putting together a proposal for writing a Very Short Introduction on the Napoleonic Wars. One of the reviewers very helpfully suggested that the book might consider a chapter on the conflict in historical memory and commemoration. When I came to write this, the final chapter, I considered opening it with an account of the ‘coning’ of the Duke of Wellington, but in the end I felt that such irreverence and jocularity sat rather uneasily with the content of the rest of the book, which tells a tale of aggression, international collapse, and human suffering. Yet the fact that the Duke still sits, as ever, with a garish point on his head – gravity making it lean at a jaunty angle – did make me wonder about how far the Napoleonic Wars (including, by extension, the French Revolutionary Wars from which they emerged – collectively the wars lasted from 1792 to 1815) have left a legacy that is embedded, visibly or otherwise, in our European cityscapes.

This might well be more obvious on the continent than in the British Isles, since there was a direct impact as armies rampaged across Europe – and there were therefore more sites clearly associated with Napoleonic conquest, European resistance to it, and later commemoration of the conflict. In Paris, the very same Marochetti was responsible for one of the reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the one depicting the Battle of Jemappes (one of the French Revolution’s early victories over the Austrians in 1792). The Arc was completed under the July Monarchy (1830-48), which worked hard to appropriate the Napoleonic legacy for its own political purposes. The same regime nearly awarded Marochetti the commission to create Napoleon’s tomb in the Church of the Invalides when his body was repatriated from Saint Helena. The sculptor, in fact, was producing models for this work as he was busy on Glasgow’s Wellington statue (giving the latter a pedigree that surely reinforces Historic Scotland’s mild-mannered point). Yet British towns and cities are also embedded with places that are connected with the French Wars – as barracks, as headquarters, as places of exile and refuge, as naval dockyards, as depots for PoWs, as sites of popular mobilization. Sometimes the associations are long-forgotten, sometimes they are commemorated.  The conflict is remembered in the monuments that ask us not to forget the carnage and in the individuals who are commemorated in stone and bronze. These may, like Glasgow’s Iron Duke, have become so much part of our urban environment that they are almost unnoticed unless they have a cone on their head, but the traces and memory of the French Wars in Britain’s towns and cities… now there’s a project!

Dr Mike Rapport is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789-1799 (OUP, 2000), The Shape of the World: Britain, France and the Struggle for Empire (Atlantic, 2006), 1848, Year of Revolution (Little, Brown, 2008), and The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image credit: Statue of Wellington, mounted. Outside the Gallery of Modern Art, Queen Street, Glasgow, Scotland [Author: Green Lane, Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia Commons]

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Science works in mysterious ways. Sometimes that’s even truer in the study of the origins of the human race.

Piltdown is a small village south of London where the skull of a reputed ancient human ancestor turned up in some gravel diggings a century ago. The find was made by Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur archaeologist, with an unusual knack for major discoveries. Shortly thereafter a lower jaw that fit the skull turned up and, voilá — the missing link between the apes and man had been found in the British Isles.

The Manchester Guardian headlined “The earliest man? Remarkable discovery in Sussex. A skull millions of years old.” The find was widely regarded as the most important of its time. The discovery of Piltdown Man made Europe, and especially Great Britain, the home of the “first humans”. The find fit the expectations of the time and resolved certain racist and nationalist biases against evidence for human ancestry elsewhere. Early humans had large brains and originated in Europe.

Piltdown Gang by John Cooke (1915). Back row: (left to right) F. O. Barlow, G. Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Front row: A. S. Underwood, Arthur Keith, W. P. Pycraft, and Sir Ray Lankester.

For 40 years this Piltdown Man was generally accepted as an important ancestor of the human race. Various authorities raised doubt and critiqued the evidence, but Piltdown kept its place in our early lineage until a curator at the British Museum, Kenneth Oakley, took a closer look. Oakley and several other scientists assembled incontrovertible evidence to the show that Piltdown was a forgery. The chemistry of the jaw and skull were different and could not have come from the same individual. The teeth of the lower jaw had been filed down to make them fit with the skull. The skull was human but the jaw came from an ape. The bones had been stained to enhance the appearance of antiquity. In 1953, Time magazine published this evidence gathered by Oakley and others. Piltdown was stricken from the record and placed in ignominy, a testimony to the gullibility of those scientists who see what they want to see.

Hoax, fraud, crime? Perhaps the designation is not so important, but the identity of the perpetrator appears to be. More than 100 books and articles have been written over the years, trying to solve the mystery of who forged Piltdown. Various individuals have been implicated, but the pointing finger of justice always returns to Charles Dawson. Dawson’s knack for finding strange and unusual things was more than just luck. His sense of intuition was fortified by a home workshop for constructing or modifying these finds before he put them in the ground. A recent book by Miles Russell, The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed, documents Dawson’s numerous other archaeological and paleontological “discoveries” that have been revealed as forgeries. As Russell noted, the case is closed. That fact, however, is not keeping British scientists from throwing a good bit of money and energy into the whodunit, using the latest scientific technology to try to unmask the culprit.

So, 100 years of Piltdown. Not exactly a cause for celebration — or is it? Science does work in mysterious ways. Although Piltdown misled the pursuit of our early human ancestors for decades, much good has come from the confusion. Greater care is exercised in the acceptance of evidence for early human ancestors. Scientific methods have moved to the forefront in the investigation of ancient human remains. The field of paleoanthropology — the study of early human behavior and evolution — has emerged wiser and stronger. The earliest human ancestors are now known to have come from Africa and begun to appear more than six million years ago. Evolution, after all, is about learning from our mistakes.

T. Douglas Price is Weinstein Professor of European Archaeology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Europe before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages; Principles of Archaeology; Europe’s First Farmers; and the leading introductory textbook in the discipline, Images of the Past.

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At the start of this year, the New York Times declared stay-at-home dads a new trend. The numbers are still miniscule compared to stay-at-home moms, but dads are increasingly visible on the internet, if not yet on the playground. There are SAHD blogs, forums for tips and support, and sites that help isolated dads find parenting groups (or all of the above in one place, like the National At-Home Dad Network). Throughout these venues and the mainstream media there are discussions about why men are staying at home with the kids (positive choice? forced by recession?), and what this trend implies about gender definition (is being a SAHD ‘masculine’?). Interestingly, these dads often describe what they’re doing in masculine terms — as an “epic adventure,” “not for the faint of heart.”

What is almost universally assumed in these discussions is that stay-at-home dads are new. They aren’t.

The so-called traditional notion of a father’s place being out in the world, bringing in an income, while the mother nurtures children into young adulthood developed in the western world alongside the industrial revolution, as new opportunities pulled many men out of the home and into offices. American and European periodicals and fiction from the first half of the nineteenth century responded to rapid and sometimes unsettling economic changes with idealized, comforting images of the mother as an “angel of the house” and the father as a confident breadwinner. The overwhelming ubiquity of such images has taught us to view these projections as “traditional,” universal roles. It seems to make intuitive sense: only women can bear children and breastfeed babies, after all. But the rest of childcare can, and over time often has, been done by others: servants, relatives, friends, neighbors, and sometimes fathers.

In the middle of the nineteenth century when images of idealized domesticity were most broadly promoted—when it was, in most parts of Europe and America, most costly for men or women to openly act against type—we still find men who loved being fathers and women who had ambitions in the public sphere. But do we see an actual stay-at-home dad who does not work outside the home, and who spends years nurturing his children while his wife brings home the bacon?

As it turns out — yes.

But to find him we do need to leave the middle-classes of western Europe and America. Those societies had restrictive property laws that prevented most married women from managing property on their own and inhibited women’s opportunities outside homemaking. At the same time, those societies enjoyed booming industrial economies where men could earn a good income in a great variety of occupations.

In Imperial Russia, by contrast, women enjoyed the right to manage their own property, and there was no commercial middle class in the western sense. A large majority of the Russian population were peasants, many of them enserfed. Nobles handled the government apparatus and the management of those vast peasant-filled lands. But very few Russian nobles were like the people you see in the latest remake of Anna Karenina, waltzing around ballrooms dripping jewels and getting entangled in sticky love affairs. The majority had only small to modest incomes. Middling-income nobles often struggled to make ends meet for their serf dependents as well as for themselves. One such Russian nobleman, Andrei Chikhachev, kept a diary about raising his two children. After his children were older, he wrote to newspapers about how ideally he and his wife had arranged their affairs, and argued that their peers who were not doing the same already should strive to do so.

Портрет А.С.Лошкарева с детьми. Крендовский Евграф Федорович. Via Wikimedia Commons.

While she was doing this, Andrei taught their two children their lessons up to the age of twelve, when they went to Moscow for formal schooling. He played with the children, invented games for them, and doted over their progress. He also carried out a rigorous program of self-study to qualify himself to instruct the children in catechism, history, geography, literature, and French (while an uncle taught them mathematics and tutors were brought in for German and Latin).

Childrearing was Andrei’s vocation, and far from being emasculated by it, he wrote of it as the ideal masculine role. He reasoned that raising a child was an intellectual and moral task, which is to say, an abstract task. Abstract thinking was, in Andrei’s mind, both inherently masculine, and existed outside the home in the metaphorical sense. While Natalia managed complex finances and gave Andrei an allowance, her work remained practical and within the “home” (which they understood as encompassing their scattered agricultural estates). Thus even through a mid-nineteenth century lens colored by the literature of domesticity, Andrei could understand his wife’s financial and management role as ideally feminine, and his own nurturing role as ideally masculine.

While Andrei and Natalia’s arrangement may not have been precisely typical, their friends and neighbors found nothing in it to raise their eyebrows about, which is a striking contrast to the attitudes of comparable privileged classes in, say, England or the United States in the same period. And given the fact that many Russian women did manage their own property, the arrangement may not have been as unusual as we think. The Chikhachevs likely came to their roles from the same reasons that some men are choosing to be stay-at-home-dads today; they were in debt and their society offered few lucrative opportunities for Andrei, but little in the way of obstacles to Natalia. The Chikhachevs’ story tells us, if nothing else, that the Victorian stereotype was always just a stereotype, and after two hundred years we can perhaps finally put it aside, and embrace a more flexible reality.

Katherine Pickering Antonova is the author of a microhistory about the Chikhachev family, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia. She teaches Russian history at Queens College, City University of New York. Read Katherine Pickering Antonova’s blog.

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In recent years German Christmas markets have been promoted to the English as the epitome of a traditional and authentic Christmas. As germany-christmas-market.org.uk suggests, “if you’re tired of commercialism taking over this holiday period and would like to get right away for a real traditional and romantic Christmas market you might want to consider heading to Germany.” If a trip to Germany is impossible, a visit to a German Christmas market nearer to home is more feasible. Beginning with Lincoln in 1982, German Christmas markets have appeared in a number of British towns and cities.

The Queen’s Christmas tree at Windsor Castle published in the Illustrated London News, 1848, and republished in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Philadelphia in December 1850. via Wikimedia Commons.

Pinpointing the precise moment when a ritual practice appears in a new culture for the first time is often difficult. One way of examining the cultural transfer of customs is to look at the activities of artistic and literary elites. The first reference to German Christmas customs to appear in England was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s account of the Christmas he spent in the German town of Ratzeburg in 1798. He described a Christmas Eve custom according to which children decorated the parlour with a yew bough, secured to a table, fastened little tapers to it, and then laid out presents for their parents (the children received their presents on Christmas Day). This account was published in the periodical The Friend in 1809, and was regularly reprinted during the first half of the nineteenth century. Reaction to it varied. Whilst Thomas de Quincey dismissed the “stage sentimentality” of a description which emphasized the potential of Christmas to promote much “weeping aloud for joy” on the part of parents touched by their children’s conduct, the poet Felicia Hemans took a great interest in German customs and attempted to imitate the tree ritual.

From 1840 a number of German Christmas stories for children were translated and published in England. These books emphasized the Christmas tree as being at the heart of a family-centred celebration, though by this time children were now the main recipients of seasonal gifts. The stories served as a reminder of the German origins of the Christmas tree, a fact which was often repeated when the tree was discussed in the popular press. For example, in his periodical Household Words, Charles Dickens described the tree as “that pretty German toy.” The majority of references to the German Christmas customs were not followed by any commentary of the significance of these origins. More occasionally, writers would eulogise the Germans as a simple, domestic and sentimental people, precisely the characteristics which were increasingly ascribed the festive English hearth. Consequently, the English were able to quickly adopt and naturalize the Christmas tree by making it palatable to the national story.

Despite growing Anglo-German rivalry in the years leading up to the First World War, the English view of the German Christmas persisted at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was played out in the press coverage of the famous Christmas truce of 1914, when British and German troops exchanged cigarettes and food, showed one another pictures of their families, and organised football matches. The best known image of the ceasefire appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1915, featuring a German soldier holding aloft a miniature tree as he approached two British soldiers; this was not only a symbol of peace but also of the values of domesticity and indulgence of childhood.

Whilst the Christmas truce has claimed a prominent place in the mythology of the Great War, it was followed by an abrupt change in Anglo-German relations, which were subsequently defined by anti-German propaganda, the legacy of Nazism, and post-war football rivalry. It is perhaps surprising then, that Germany should re-emerge as a spiritual home of the authentic and traditional Christmas in the English imagination. However, this is testimony to the inherent dynamic of nostalgia embedded in the festival. As I argue in Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, laments for the loss of Christmases past have been present in festive discourse since the early seventeenth century.

German customs play an important role in the development of the English Christmas, but this argument can only be taken so far. After all, in the nineteenth century the English were no strangers to domesticity and the romanticization of childhood. Furthermore, Christmas is a transnational festival, and all modern Christmases are the product of a multiplicity of cultural transfers.

Neil Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Gloucestershire. He is the author of “England and German Christmas Festlichkeit, c.1800–1914″ in German History, which is available to read for free for a limited time.

German History is renowned for its extensive range, covering all periods of German history and all German-speaking areas. Every issue contains refereed articles and book reviews on various aspects the history of the German-speaking world, as well as news items and conference reports. It is an essential journal for German historians and of major value for all non-specialists interested in the field.

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By Joyce Crick

This year, Thursday December 20^th is the 200^th anniversary of the publication of The Grimms’ Tales for Children and the Household, currently being celebrated world-wide. Just in time for Christmas.

But even after 200 years, English-speaking countries still seem to know little more about the brothers and their stories than as a brand name for films from Disney or Terry Gilliam. How many could we name off the cuff?  A dozen? Twenty?

It isn’t as if they really went away. In its two centuries of existence, their collection of stories has been selected, reprinted, translated (into 160 languages!), deconstructed, illustrated, adapted for film and theatre, rewritten and remade again and again, from the brothers’ seemingly artless transcripts of stories told them by family friends or the tailor’s widow who came selling her garden produce, all the way to Shrek.

For one thing, the collection is more various and far bigger than the core of ‘magic’ stories we label Grimms’ Fairy Tales, following the style set by their earliest translators (it started at eighty-six in the two volumes of 1812 and 1815, but grew to two hundred and ten by the seventh edition of 1857!)  The presence of fables, tall tales, moralities, earthy — but not too earthy — comic anecdotes, and many literary borrowings changes the constellation we are familiar with. But it explains the brothers’ own title better.

For another, they are not strictly ‘fairy’ tales — at least, not in brother Wilhelm’s editions that followed the little book we are celebrating. There certainly were fairies at first, mainly Feen, having their origins in Perrault’s fées who did not dwell in the German countryside, but at the French court; but by the second edition of 1819 Wilhelm had banished them and any other words, like Prinzessin of such French pedigree. (He turned her into a ‘king’s daughter’.) He removed stories too: ‘Puss-in-Boots’, ‘Bluebeard’ from French sources, ‘The Hand with the Knife’ from Scottish. Why? They weren’t German enough. There is not a fairy left, not in the title and no longer in the stories themselves, though there is still enchantment of course, and plenty of wisewomen, godmothers, witches, and even a few warlocks. This points to another gap in our assumptions about the Grimms: their little book has an improbable but significant place in the much larger literary story of Romantic nationalism.

Jacob (foreground, right) and Wilhelm Grimm

Their collection had a double purpose, ultimately contradictory. For it was also on the cusp between mere antiquarianism and the new sciences of anthropology and historical philology.  This is where brother Jacob’s interests mainly lay. “To my mind the book was not written for children at all,” he wrote to Arnim. Wilhelm, though, became increasingly interested in the imaginative and educational possibilities of the collection as “a book for bringing up children.”

So even the handful of tales we do know, of lost children (more of them than just Hänsel and Gretel), strange transformations, talking animals, kings and princesses, tests and contests, rewards and fearsome punishments, journeys and homecomings, encounters in the threatening forest with wicked witches and helpful elves, were also at the beginning of a long afterlife not only in children’s imaginations but in scholarship as well. The collection turned out to hold far more possibilities than a simple publication of the tales the young men read in ancient tomes, or heard from their friends in the Hassenpflugs or the Wild girls next door or the tailor’s widow come selling her garden produce, or the curate in a neighbouring village, but rarely, it seems, direct from the mouth of the folk.

Jacob gradually left it to Wilhelm to edit the Tales to their seventh, final edition (1856-57), successively ‘enlarged and improved’ away from that first Christmas volume they had sent as a present to Arnim’s wife Bettina and their little son.  Wilhelm’s ‘improvements’ between the edition we are celebrating and the last were considerable: he removed any sign of a foreign source; he added dialogue to plain narrative; combined tales; with artless art he cultivated the tales’ characteristic naive tone, turning — another contradiction — natural poesy into art poetry; his typical readership was the good bourgeois family, so he moralized, bowdlerized — though not nearly as much as his first English translators did. In other words, he made them Grimm.

So leave your laptop and join the celebrations: on December 20^th choose an unfamiliar tale and read it aloud, preferably in the children’s corner of your endangered local children’s library — before the witches descend.

Joyce Crick taught German at University College London for many years. Since her retirement she has translated a variety of texts, including Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams for Oxford World’s Classics, which was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck prize in 2000, and Selected Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The tales gathered by the Grimm brothers are at once familiar, fantastic, homely, and frightening.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Image credit: Doppelporträt der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1855. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, neither the Atomic Bomb nor the Holocaust were on anybody’s agenda. Instead, the Nazi’s top aim was to rid German culture of perceived pollution. A priority was science, where paradoxically Germany already led the world. To safeguard this position, loud Nazi voices, such as Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard,  complained about a ‘massive infiltration of the Jews into universities’.

The first enactments of a new regime are highly symbolic. The cynically-named Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, published in April 1933, targeted those who had non-Aryan, ‘particularly Jewish’, parents or grandparents. Having a single Jewish grandparent was enough to lose one’s job. Thousands of Jewish university teachers, together with doctors, lawyers, and other professionals were sacked. Some found more modest jobs, some retired, some left the country. Germany was throwing away its hard-won scientific supremacy. When warned of this, Hitler retorted ‘If the dismissal of [Jews] means the end of German science, then we will do without science for a few years’.

Why did the Jewish people have such a significant influence on German science? They had a long tradition of religious study, but assimilated Jews had begun to look instead to a radiant new role-model. Albert Einstein was the most famous scientist the world had ever known. As well as an icon for ambitious young students, he was also a prominent political target. Aware of this, he left Germany for the USA in 1932, before the Nazis came to power.

How to win friends and influence nuclear people
The talented nuclear scientist Leo Szilard appeared to be able to foresee the future. He exploited this by carefully cultivating people with influence. In Berlin, he sought out Einstein.

Like Einstein, Szilard anticipated the Civil Service Law. He also saw the need for a scheme to assist the refugee German academics who did not. First in Vienna, then in London, he found influential people who could help.

Just as the Nazis moved into power, nuclear physics was revolutionized by the discovery of a new nuclear component, the neutron. One of the main centres of neutron research was Berlin, where scientists saw a mysterious effect when uranium was irradiated. They asked their former Jewish colleagues, now in exile, for an explanation.

The answer was ‘nuclear fission’. As the Jewish scientists who had fled Germany settled into new jobs, they realized how fission was the key to a new source of energy. It could also be a weapon of unimaginable power, the Atomic Bomb. It was not a great intellectual leap, so the exiled scientists were convinced that their former colleagues in Germany had come to the same conclusion. So, when war looked imminent, they wanted to get to the Atomic Bomb first. One wrote of ‘the fear of the Nazis beating us to it’.

Szilard, by now in the US, saw it was time to act again. He knew that President Roosevelt would not listen to him, but would listen to Einstein, and wrote to Roosevelt over Einstein’s signature.

When a delegation finally managed to see him on 11 October 1939, Roosevelt said “what you’re after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up”. But nobody knew exactly what to do. The letter had mentioned bombs ‘too heavy for transportation by air’. Such a vague threat did not appear urgent.

But in 1940, German Jewish exiles in Britain realized that if the small amount of the isotope 235 in natural uranium could be separated, it could produce an explosion equivalent to several thousand tons of dynamite. Only a few kilograms would be needed, and could be carried by air. The logistics of nuclear weapons suddenly changed. Via Einstein, Szilard wrote another Presidential letter. On 19 January 1942, Roosevelt ordered a rapid programme for the development of the Atomic Bomb, the ‘Manhattan Project’.

Across the Atlantic, the Germans indeed had seen the implications of nuclear fission. But its scientific message had been muffled. Key scientists had gone. Germany had no one left with the prescience of Szilard, nor the political clout of Einstein. The Nazis also had another priority. On 20 January, one day after Roosevelt had given the go-ahead for the Atomic Bomb, a top-level meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee outlined a “final solution of the Jewish Problem”. Nazi Germany had its own crash programme.

US crash programme – on 16 July 1945, just over three years after the huge project had been launched, the Atomic Bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert.

Nazi crash programme – what came to be known as the Holocaust rapidly got under way. Here a doomed woman and her children arrive at the specially-built Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination centre.

As such, two huge projects, unknown to each other, emerged simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The dreadful schemes forged ahead, and each in turn became reality. On two counts, what had been unimaginable no longer was.

Gordon Fraser was for many years the in-house editor at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. His books on popular science and scientists include Cosmic Anger, a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim Nobel scientist, Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror, and The Quantum Exodus. He is also the editor of The New Physics for the 21st Century and The Particle Century.

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Image credits: Atomic Bomb tested in the New Mexico desert. Photograph courtesy of  Los Alamos National Laboratory; Auschwitz-Birkenau, alte Frau und Kinder, Bundesarchiv Bild, Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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There has rarely been a more interesting time to study secession. It is not just that the number of separatist movements appears to be growing, particularly in Europe, it is the fact that the international debate on the rights of people to determine their future, and pursue independence, seems to be on the verge of a many change. The calm debate over Scotland’s future, which builds on Canada’s approach towards Quebec, is a testament to the fact that a peaceful and democratic debate over separatism is possible. It may yet be the case that other European governments choose to adopt a similar approach; the most obvious cases being Spain and Belgium towards Catalonia and Flanders.

However, for the meanwhile, the British and Canadian examples remain very much the exception rather than the rule. In most cases, states still do everything possible to prevent parts of their territory from breaking away, often using force if necessary.

It is hardly surprising that most states have a deep aversion to secession. In part, this is driven by a sense of geographical and symbolic identity. A state has an image of itself, and the geographic boundaries of the state are seared onto the consciousness of the citizenry. For example, from an early age school pupils draw maps of their country. But the quest to preserve the borders of a country is rooted in a range of other factors. In some cases, the territory seeking to break away may hold mineral wealth, or historical and cultural riches. Sometimes secession is opposed because of fears that if one area is allowed to go its own way, other will follow.

For the most part, states are aided in their campaign to tackle separatism by international law and norms of international politics. While much has been made of the right to self-determination, the reality is that its application is extremely limited. Outside the context of decolonisation, this idea has almost always taken a backseat to the principle of the territorial integrity of states. This gives a country fighting a secessionist movement a massive advantage. Other countries rarely want to be seen to break ranks and recognise a state that has unilaterally seceded.

When a decision is taken to recognise unilateral declarations of independence, it is usually done by a state with close ethnic, political or strategic ties to the breakaway territory.Turkey’s recognition of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are obvious examples. Even when other factors shape the decision, as happened in the case of Kosovo, which has been recognised by the United States and most of the European Union, considerable effort has been made by recognising states to present this as a unique case that should be seen as sitting outside of the accepted boundaries of established practice.

However, states facing a secessionist challenge cannot afford to be complacent. While there is a deep aversion to secession, there is always the danger that the passage of time will lead to the gradual acceptance of the situation on the ground. It is therefore important to wage a concerted campaign to reinforce a claim to sovereignty over the territory and prevent countries from recognising – or merely even unofficially engaging with – the breakaway territory.

At the same time, international organisations are also crucial battlegrounds. Membership of the United Nations, for example, has come to be seen as the ultimate proof that a state has been accepted by the wider international community. To a lesser extent, participation in other international and regional bodies, and even in sporting and cultural activities, can send the same message concerning international acceptance.

The British government’s decision to accept a referendum over Scotland’s future is still a rather unusual approach to the question of secession. Governments rarely accept the democratic right of a group of people living within its borders to pursue the creation of a new state. In most cases, the central authority seeks to keep the state together; and in doing so choosing to fight what can often be a prolonged campaign to prevent recognition or legitimisation by the wider international community.

James Ker-Lindsay is Eurobank EFG Senior Research Fellow on the Politics of South East Europe at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Foreign Policy of Counter Secession: Preventing the Recognition of Contested States (2012) and The Cyprus Problem: What Everyone Needs to Know (2011), and a number of other books on conflict, peace and security in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean.

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Image credit: Photograph of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus sign by James Ker-Lindsay. Do not reproduce without permission.

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We have selected a number of memorable, meaningful and moving quotes from the Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations to commemorate the fallen.
 

“We make war that we may live in peace.”
Aristotle 384-322 BC Greek philosopher

“Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering.”
Aeschylus c.525-456 BC Greek tragedian

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.”
Rupert Brooke 1887-1915 English poet

“Old soldiers never die.”
Proverb early 20^th century

“At eleven o’clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible war that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.”
David Lloyd George 1863-1945 British Liberal statesman, Prime Minister 1916-22

“Let war yield to peace, laurels to paeans.”
Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) 106-43 BC Roman statesman, orator, and writer

“And some there be, which have no memorial… and are become as though they had never been born…
But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten…
Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out.
Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
The Bible, Apocrypha (authorized version, 1611)

“When you go home, tell them of us and say,
‘For your tomorrow we gave our today.’”
Kohima memorial to the Burma campaign of the Second World War, from a poem by John Maxwell Edmonds

“Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”
John F. Kennedy 1917–63 US Democratic statesman and thirty-fifth president of the USA (1961–63)

“In war: resolution. In defeat: defiance. In victory: magnanimity. In peace: goodwill.”
Winston Churchill 1874–1965 Prime Minister 1940-45, 1951-55

The Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations fifth edition was published in October this year and is edited by Susan Ratcliffe. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations seventh edition was published in 2009 to celebrate its 70^th year. The ODQ is edited by Elizabeth Knowles.

The Oxford DNB online has made the lives of Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and Laurence Binyon free to access for a limited time. The ODNB is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,000 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 130 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @ODNB on Twitter for people in the news. The ODNB  also has a special free access area about the First World War, called Armistice lives.

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