European History Quarterly

This article examines the impact of World War Two on marriages in Germany. It asks if wartime circumstances could reaffirm and strengthen emotional bonds within the context of the threat of losing one’s loved ones. Historical analysis to date suggests that separations often led to estrangement and a difficult period of re-adjustment after reunion. However, quoting from numerous letters sent between husbands and wives in wartime, this article demonstrates that the chaotic and often life-threatening reality reinforced the desirability of the private sphere. In one typical example, a soldier wrote to his wife ‘I want to sit hand in hand with you this evening and explain everything about the past days. You’ll probably laugh about the sitting hand in hand bit, but right now I can’t think of anything nicer’. This is just one of the many letters used in this article to analyse the impact of war on marital relations.

This article focuses on the anti-Jewish riots that took place in the spring and summer of 1898 in the western counties of the Habsburg province of Galicia, today divided between Poland and Ukraine. More than 5000 Polish peasants and townspeople were arrested, thousands were tried, and many received long prison sentences. An increasingly strident Catholic anti-Semitism, rumor, mass political mobilization, and actions urged and taken by the various levels of the Habsburg state — the central ministries in Vienna; the office of the Galician governor in the provincial capital of Lemberg; military and police forces on the ground; local officials in western Galicia — all affected the outbreak and course of the violence. The article argues that the riots were not simply a manifestation of rural backwardness, but rather should be understood in the context of the arrival of mass politics in the Habsburg countryside.

Between Easter 1933 and Easter 1934, Rome was the venue for two major and potentially rival efforts to seize history for popular use. The Roman Catholic Church, under the rule of Pope Pius XI, held a supernumerary Anno Santo, Holy Year or Jubilee, the first since the signature of the Lateran pacts with the Fascist regime in 1929. That agreement had formally ended the Pope’s ‘imprisonment in the Vatican’, permitting the Church publicly to deploy a greater array of Rome’s religious pasts than had been possible since the Risorgimento. Meanwhile, in October 1932, Mussolini’s dictatorship had opened its Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, there making with stridently modernist dynamism its own claims to carry Rome’s histories in its hands. Many ‘pilgrims’ in 1933—34 attended both Catholic and Fascist events. What, then, does this coincidence illustrate of the Fascist version of totalitarianism, to some historians a ‘political religion’ of span and depth, but one that was never able fully to master a Church that was at least as determined to claim that it best expressed transcendence and eternity?

After the end of the Civil War, the Franco regime tried to consolidate itself in the tragic socioeconomic context of the post-war years. How was it possible for a regime to establish and implant itself in spite of an economic crisis and a desperate and undernourished population? As this article demonstrates, a brutal policy of autarky underpinned the consolidation of Francoism. Through the daily mechanisms of autarky and the black market to which it gave rise, the ‘New State’ and its local representatives repressed their Civil War opponents on a daily basis. At the same time, the regime secured the consent of its local supporters by offering them the chance to feather their own nests. In this way, hunger formed the ballast of the new ship of state because the regime was able to force some into starvation while allowing others to profit through the control of much needed resources.