Browse

The Red Brigades were a far-left terrorist group in Italy formed in 1970 and active all through the 1980s. Infamous around the world for a campaign of assassinations, kidnappings, and bank robberies, the Red Brigades' most notorious crime was the kidnapping and murder of Italy's former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. In the late 1990s, a new group revived the name Red Brigades and killed a number of professors and government officials. The Red Brigades and their actions raise a host of questions about the motivations, ideologies, and mind-sets of people who commit horrific acts of violence in the name of a utopia. This book contends that the dominant logic of the Red Brigades was essentially eschatological, focused on purifying a corrupt world through violence. Only through revolutionary terror, Brigadists believed, could humanity be saved from the effects of capitalism and imperialism. The book's “subversive-revolutionary feedback theory” states that the willingness to mete out and suffer death depends on how far the terrorist has been incorporated into the revolutionary sect. The book makes clear that this political–religious concept of historical development is central to understanding all such self-styled “purifiers of the world.” From Thomas Müntzer's theocratic dream to Pol Pot's Cambodian revolution, all the violent “purifiers” of the world have a clear goal: to build a perfect society in which there will no longer be any sin and unhappiness and in which no opposition can be allowed to upset the universal harmony.

This book offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a “surfeit of Jewish memory” is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. The text explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds. It argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of “Never Again”: as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—because of who they are. The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s. The book also argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis.

This book leads readers along the Bulgarian–Ottoman caravan routes and into the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Sofia. It reveals how a remote country was drawn into global economic networks through tobacco production and consumption and in the process became modern. In writing the life of tobacco in Bulgaria from the late Ottoman period through the years of Communist rule, the book provides a fresh perspective on the genesis of modern Bulgaria itself. The tobacco industry comes to shape most of Bulgaria's international relations; it drew Bulgaria into its fateful alliance with Nazi Germany and in the postwar period Bulgaria was the primary supplier of smokes (the famed Bulgarian Gold) for the USSR and its satellites. By the late 1960s, Bulgaria was the number one exporter of tobacco in the world, with roughly one eighth of its population involved in production. The book visits the places where tobacco is grown to meet the merchants, the workers, and the peasant growers, most of whom are Muslim by the postwar period. Along the way, we learn how smoking and anti-smoking impulses influenced perceptions of luxury and necessity, questions of novelty, imitation, value, taste, and gender-based respectability. While the scope is often global, the book also explores the politics of tobacco within Bulgaria.

This book traces the fortunes of three French families in the municipality of Vannes, in Brittany—Galles, Jollivet, and Le Ridant—who rose to prominence in publishing, law, the military, public administration, and intellectual pursuits over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Revisiting complex issues of bourgeois class formation in France from the perspective of the interior lives of families, the book argues that the most durable and socially advantageous links forging bourgeois ascent were those of kinship. Economic success, though certainly derived from the virtues of hard work and intelligent management, was always underpinned by marriage strategies and the diligent intervention of influential family members. The examination of hundreds of personal letters opens up a whole world: the vicissitudes of courtship; the centrality of marriage; the depths of conjugal love; the routines of pregnancy and the drama of childbirth; the practices of child rearing and education; the powerful place of siblings; the role of kin in advancing the next generation; tragedy and deaths; the enormous contributions of women in all aspects of becoming bourgeois; and the pleasures of gathering together in intimate soirées, grand balls, country houses, and civic and political organizations. Family love bound it all together, and this is ultimately what this book is about, as four generations of rather ordinary provincial people capture our hearts.

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the “Whore of Babylon.” Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. This book shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the “New Morality” articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the “New Woman.” The book recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women's financial autonomy, and respectability. It highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), the book presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

In 1900, 2 percent of Bulgaria's population could be described as Greek, whether by nationality, language, or religion. The complex identities of the population became entangled in the growing national tensions between Bulgaria and Greece during the first half of the twentieth century. This book explores the shifting allegiances of this Greek minority in Bulgaria. Diverse social groups contested the meaning of the nation, shaping and reshaping what it meant to be Greek and Bulgarian during the slow transition from empire to nation-states in the Balkans. In these decades, the region was racked by a series of upheavals (the Balkan Wars, World War I, interwar population exchanges, World War II, and Communist revolutions). The Bulgarian Greeks were caught between the competing agendas of two states increasingly bent on establishing national homogeneity. Based on extensive research in the archives of Bulgaria and Greece, as well as fieldwork in the two countries, the book shows that the Greek population did not blindly follow Greek nationalist leaders but was torn between identification with the land of their birth and loyalty to the Greek cause. Many emigrated to Greece in response to nationalist pressures; others sought to maintain their Greek identity and traditions within Bulgaria; some even switched sides when it suited their personal interests. National loyalties remained fluid despite state efforts to fix ethnic and political borders. The lessons of a case such as this continue to reverberate wherever and whenever states try to adjust national borders in regions long inhabited by mixed populations.

Interwar Vienna was considered a bastion of radical socialist thought, and its reputation as “Red Vienna” has loomed large in both the popular imagination and the historiography of Central Europe. However, as this book shows, a “Black Vienna” existed as well; its members voiced critiques of the postwar democratic order, Jewish inclusion, and Enlightenment values, providing a theoretical foundation for Austrian and Central European fascist movements. Looking at the complex interplay between intellectuals, the public, and the state, the book argues that seemingly apolitical Viennese intellectuals, especially conservative ones, dramatically affected the course of Austrian history. While Red Viennese intellectuals mounted an impressive challenge in cultural and intellectual forums throughout the city, radical conservatism carried the day. Black Viennese intellectuals hastened the destruction of the First Republic, facilitating the establishment of the Austrofascist state and paving the way for Anschluss with Nazi Germany. Closely observing the works and actions of Viennese reformers, journalists, philosophers, and scientists, the book traces intellectual, social, and political developments in the Austrian First Republic while highlighting intellectuals' participation in the growing worldwide conflict between socialism, conservatism, and fascism. Vienna was a microcosm of larger developments in Europe—the rise of the radical right and the struggle between competing ideological visions. By focusing on the evolution of Austrian conservatism, the book complicates post-World War II narratives about Austrian anti-fascism and Austrian victimhood.

The region that is today the Republic of Macedonia was long the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It was home to a mix of peoples and faiths who had for hundreds of years lived together in relative peace. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, however, the region was periodically racked by bitter conflict that was different from previous outbreaks of violence. This book explains the origins of this shift from sporadic to systemic and pervasive violence through a social history of the “Macedonian Question.” The account begins in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin (1878), when a potent combination of zero-sum imperialism, nascent nationalism, and modernizing states set in motion the events that directly contributed to the outbreak of World War I and had consequences that reverberate to this day. Focusing on the experience of the inhabitants of Ottoman Macedonia during this period, the book shows how communal solidarities broke down, time and space were rationalized, and the immutable form of the nation and national identity replaced polyglot, fluid associations that had formerly defined people's sense of collective belonging. The region was remapped; populations were counted and relocated. An escalation in symbolic and physical violence followed, and it was through this process that nationalism became an ideology of mass mobilization among the common folk. The book argues that national differentiation was a consequence, and not the cause, of violent conflict in Ottoman Macedonia.

Yugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, and from the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted a consumerist lifestyle. This book explores how Yugoslavia became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. The book shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer culture. Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs worried about the contradiction between the population's embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders. The book argues that consumerism was one of the critical factors that held the multi-ethnic society together during the years of the Yugoslav “Good Life” of the 1960s and 1970s. With the economic downturn of the 1980s, however, the reliance on expanding consumerism ultimately led to bitter disillusionment, stripping the unique Yugoslav model of its legitimacy and priming the populace for mutual resentment, ethnic conflict, and war.

Friendship, an acquired relationship primarily based on choice rather than birth, lay at the heart of Enlightenment preoccupations with sociability and the formation of the private sphere. This book argues that Freemasonry is an ideal arena in which to explore the changing nature of male friendship in Enlightenment France. Freemasonry was the largest and most diverse voluntary organization in the decades before the French Revolution. At least 50,000 Frenchmen joined lodges, the memberships of which ranged across the social spectrum from skilled artisans to the highest ranks of the nobility. The book argues that men were attracted to Freemasonry because it enabled them to cultivate enduring friendships that were egalitarian and grounded in emotion. Drawing on scores of archives, including private letters, rituals, the minutes of lodge meetings, and the speeches of many Freemasons, the book reveals the thought processes of the visionaries who founded this movement, the ways in which its members maintained friendships both within and beyond the lodge, and the seemingly paradoxical place women occupied within this friendship community. Masonic friendship endured into the tumultuous revolutionary era, although the revolutionary leadership suppressed most of the lodges by 1794. The book not only examines the place of friendship in eighteenth-century society and culture but also contributes to the history of emotions and masculinity, and the essential debate over the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

In 1830, with France's colonial empire in ruins, Charles X ordered his army to invade Ottoman Algiers. Victory did not salvage his regime from revolution, but it began the French conquest of Algeria, which was continued and consolidated by the succeeding July Monarchy. This book explains why France chose first to conquer Algeria and then to transform it into its only large-scale settler colony. It also sheds light on policies whose long-term consequences remain a source of social, cultural, and political tensions in France and its former colony. The French expansion in North Africa was rooted in contests over sovereignty and male citizenship in the wake of the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century. The French monarchy embraced warfare as a means to legitimize new forms of rule, incorporating the Algerian army into royal iconography and public festivals. Colorful broadsides, songs, and plays depicted the men of the Arméed'Afrique as citizen soldiers. Social reformers and colonial theorists formulated plans to settle Algeria with European emigrants. The propaganda used to recruit settlers featured imagery celebrating Algeria's agricultural potential, but the male emigrants who responded were primarily poor, urban laborers who saw the colony as a place to exercise what they saw as their right to work. The book connects a wide-ranging culture of empire to specific policies of colonization during a pivotal period in the genesis of modern France.

Department stores in Germany, like their predecessors in France, Britain, and the United States, generated great excitement when they appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Their sumptuous displays, abundant products, architectural innovations, and prodigious scale inspired widespread fascination and even awe; at the same time, however, many Germans also greeted the rise of the department store with considerable unease. This book explores the complex German reaction to department stores and the widespread belief that they posed hidden dangers both to the individuals, especially women, who frequented them and to the nation as a whole. The book provides multiple perspectives on the department store, placing it in architectural, gender-historical, commercial, and psychiatric contexts. Noting that Jewish entrepreneurs founded most German department stores, the book argues that Jews and “Jewishness” stood at the center of the consumer culture debate from the 1880s, when the stores first appeared, through the latter 1930s, when they were “Aryanized” by the Nazis. German responses to consumer culture and the Jewish question were deeply interwoven, and the “Jewish department store,” framed as an alternative and threatening secular temple, a shrine to commerce and greed, was held responsible for fundamental changes that transformed urban experience and challenged national traditions in Germany’s turbulent twentieth century.

This book chronicles encounters between displaced persons in Europe and the Allied agencies who were tasked with caring for them after the Second World War. The struggle to define who was a displaced person and who was not was a subject of intense debate and deliberation among humanitarians, international law experts, immigration planners, and governments. What has not adequately been recognized is that displaced persons also actively participated in this emerging refugee conversation. Displaced persons endured war, displacement, and resettlement, but these experiences were not defined by passivity and speechlessness. Instead, they spoke back, creating a dialogue that in turn helped shape the modern idea of the refugee. As the book shows, what made a good or convincing story at the time tells us much about the circulation of ideas about the war, the Holocaust, and the Jews. Those stories depict the emerging moral and legal distinction between economic migrants and political refugees. They tell us about the experiences of women and children in the face of new psychological and political interventions into the family. Stories from displaced persons also tell us something about the enduring myth of the new world for people who longed to leave the old. The book focuses on those persons whose storytelling skills became a major strategy for survival and escape out of the displaced persons' camps and out of the Europe. Their stories are brought to life in the book, alongside a new history of immigration, statelessness, and the institution of the postwar family.

In the half-century before Poland's long-awaited political independence in 1918, anxiety surrounded the country's burgeoning sex industry. This is the first book to examine the world of commercial sex throughout the partitioned Polish territories, uncovering a previously hidden conversation about sexuality, gender propriety, and social class. The preoccupation with prostitution is situated in the context of Poland's struggle for political independence and its difficult transition to modernity. The Poles' growing anxiety about white slavery, venereal disease, and eugenics is traced by examining the regulation of the female body, the rise of medical authority, and the role of social reformers in addressing the problem of paid sex. The book argues that the sale of sex was positioned at the juncture of mass and elite cultures, affecting nearly every aspect of urban life and bringing together sharply divergent social classes in what had long been a radically stratified society. It captures the experiences of the impoverished women who turned to the streets and draws a vivid picture of the social milieu that shaped their choices. The book demonstrates that discussions of prostitution and its attendant disorders—sexual deviancy, alcoholism, child abuse, vagrancy, and other related problems—reflected differing visions for the future of the Polish nation.

In this biography of the infamous ideologue Erich Ludendorff, the author complicates the classic depiction of this German World War I hero. Erich Ludendorff created for himself a persona that secured his place as one of the most prominent (and despicable) Germans of the twentieth century. With boundless energy and an obsession with detail, Ludendorff ascended to power and solidified a stable, public position among Germany’s most influential. Between 1914 and his death in 1937, he was a war hero, a dictator, a right-wing activist, a failed putschist, a presidential candidate, a publisher, and a would-be prophet. He guided Germany’s effort in the Great War between 1916 and 1918 and, importantly, set the tone for a politics of victimhood and revenge in the postwar era. This book explores Ludendorff’s life after 1918, arguing that the strange or unhinged personal traits most historians attribute to mental collapse were, in fact, integral to Ludendorff’s political strategy. The book asserts that Ludendorff patterned himself, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, on the dragonslayer of Germanic mythology, Siegfried — hero of the epic poem The Nibelungenlied and much admired by German nationalists. The symbolic power of this myth allowed Ludendorff to embody many Germans’ fantasies of revenge after their defeat in 1918, keeping him relevant to political discourse despite his failure to hold high office or cultivate a mass following after World War I. The book reveals the influence that Ludendorff’s postwar career had on Germany’s political culture and radical right during this tumultuous era.

Public academic prize contests—the concours académique—played a significant role in the intellectual culture of Enlightenment France, with aspirants formulating positions on such matters as slavery, poverty, the education of women, tax reform, and urban renewal and submitting the resulting essays for scrutiny by panels of judges. This book draws on archives both in Paris and the provinces to show that thousands of individuals—ranging from elite men and women of letters, artisans, and peasants—participated in these intellectual competitions, a far broader range of people than has been previously assumed. The book contends that the Enlightenment in France can no longer be seen as a cultural movement restricted to a small coterie of philosophers or a limited number of printed texts. Moreover, the book demonstrates that the French monarchy took academic competitions quite seriously, sponsoring numerous contests on such practical matters as deforestation, the quality of drinking water, and the night-time illumination of cities. In some cases, the contests served as an early mechanism for technology transfer: the state used submissions to identify technical experts to whom it could turn for advice. Finally, the book shows how this unique intellectual exercise declined during the upheavals of the French Revolution, when voicing moderate public criticism became a rather dangerous act.

This book reveals the complex world of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris—the demimonde—by focusing on the professional mistresses who dominated it. These damesentretenues exchanged sex, company, and sometimes even love for being “kept.” Most of these women entered the profession unwillingly, either because they were desperate and could find no other means of support or because they were sold by family members to brothels or to particular men. A small but significant percentage of kept women, however, came from a theater subculture that actively supported elite prostitution. The book shows that in its business conventions, its moral codes, and even its sexual practices the demimonde was an integral part of contemporary Parisian culture. The book's primary sources include thousands of folio pages of dossiers and other documents generated by the Paris police as they tracked the lives and careers of professional mistresses. Rather than reduce the history of sex work to the history of its regulation, the book interprets materials in a way that unlocks these women's own experiences. It analyzes prostitution as a form of work, examines the contracts that governed relationships among patrons, mistresses, and madams, and explores the roles played by money, gifts, and—on occasion—love in making and breaking the bonds between women and men. The book explores elite prostitution not only as a form of labor and as a kind of business but also as a chapter in the history of emotions, marriage, and the family.

The cultural and material legacies of the Roman Republic and Empire in evidence throughout Rome have made it the “Eternal City.” Too often, however, this patrimony has caused Rome to be seen as static and antique, insulated from the transformations of the modern world. This book revises this perception, arguing that as both place and idea, Rome was strongly shaped by a radical vision of modernity imposed by Benito Mussolini's regime between the two world wars. Italian Fascism's appropriation of the Roman past—the idea of Rome, or romanità—encapsulated the Fascist virtues of discipline, hierarchy, and order; the Fascist “new man” was modeled on the Roman legionary, the epitome of the virile citizen-soldier. This vision of modernity also transcended Italy's borders, with the Roman Empire providing a foundation for Fascism's own vision of Mediterranean domination and a European New Order. At the same time, romanità also served as a vocabulary of anxiety about modernity. Fears of population decline, racial degeneration and revolution were mapped onto the barbarian invasions and the fall of Rome. Offering a critical assessment of romanità and its effects, the book explores the ways in which academics, officials, and ideologues approached Rome not as a site of distant glories but as a blueprint for contemporary life, a source of dynamic values to shape the present and future.

In the 1930s, the French Third Republic banned naturalized citizens from careers in law and medicine for up to ten years after they had obtained French nationality. In 1940, the Vichy regime permanently expelled all lawyers and physicians born of foreign fathers and imposed a two percent quota on Jews in both professions. On the basis of extensive archival research, this book finds that doctors and lawyers themselves, despite their claims to embody republican virtues, persuaded the French state to enact this exclusionary legislation. At the crossroads of knowledge and power, lawyers and doctors had long been dominant forces in French society: they ran hospitals and courts, doubled as university professors, held posts in parliament and government, and administered justice and public health for the nation. Their social and political influence was crucial in spreading xenophobic attitudes and rendering them more socially acceptable in France. The book traces the origins of this professional protectionism to the late nineteenth century, when the democratization of higher education sparked efforts by doctors and lawyers to close ranks against women and the lower classes in addition to foreigners. The legislatively imposed delays on the right to practice law and medicine remained in force until the 1970s, and only in 1997 did French lawyers and doctors formally recognize their complicity in the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime.