Early Postwar Period Research Articles

Family, global conflict, and imperial migration: Paul Messi’s First World War

ABSTRACT The German Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, necessitating a re-negotiation of the legal and social status of its former imperial subjects. This article discusses the wartime experience of Paul Messi, a Cameroonian language assistant at the Colonial Institute, Hamburg. Messi moved to Germany in 1913 to succeed his uncle, Karl Atangana who had returned to Cameroon to become Paramount Leader of the Ewondo and Bane. Atangana had secured the position in Germany for his nephew along with providing him with a stipend. The outbreak of war saw Messi stranded in Hamburg, suffering from ill health and cut off from financial assistance. However, due to Atangana’s petitioning to the German government, his daughter Katharina, and Messi were reunited in Madrid before repatriation in 1919. The return to Cameroon was difficult, Messi, despite his desire to leave Germany, was treated as a suspect person by the French authorities. Focusing on Messi’s account of his experiences, this paper highlights how the war not only disrupted intra-empire familial connections but also how these connections enabled a negotiated return to Mandate Cameroon in the early post-war period.

Embedded hegemony and the evolution of the United States’ structural power

Whilst the United States’ (US) economic hegemony has existed continuously since the end of World War II, it has not been realised in the same way. In the early post-war period, the US’s hegemony rested on its dominance over gross world product and manufacturing output and exports. However, by the 1970s it began to transition to high-technology industries, services and foreign investment. Using a structural power analysis, this article argues that this transition in the economic foundations of US hegemony was not a reaction to an exogenous shift in the international division of labour, but was rather the result of the endogenous policies, decisions and priorities of the US. Moreover, the article illustrates how the interaction between the four aspects of structural power (security, production, finance and information) determined how these new hegemonic interests were embedded in international institutions and norms to better project US power globally. Through a historical analysis, the article demonstrates that the four aspects of structural power went from mutually reinforcing each other in the early post-war period to detracting from each other from the mid-1960s. This spurred a managed transition by the US from one embedded hegemonic order to another. The result was the construction of contemporary US embedded hegemonic order based on dollar hegemony (financial structural power) and the internationalisation of US corporate dominance (productive structural power), supported by the private ownership of knowledge by US corporations (informational structural power). The article also considers the implications of this analysis for current challenges to the contemporary hegemonic order.

Situating Cognitive Science after 1945

AbstractThe paper attempts to place the emergence of cognitive science (CS) as an interdisciplinary research program in historical context. A broad overview of the institutional and intellectual situations during the early postwar period is presented, focusing primarily on psychology and artificial intelligence (AI). From an institutional perspective, the paper shows that although computers and computer science were closely linked with weapons research during World War II, the postwar creation of cognitive science had no military connection, but was largely enabled by small grants from private foundations, though the RAND Corporation was involved to a limited extent. From an epistemic perspective, the paper shows: (1) that neobehaviourist learning theory was not replaced by, but flourished parallel to cognition-oriented psychology in the 1950s, because they were located in different sub-disciplines; (2) that the key theoretical inputs into CS were developed separately at first, and each group remained affiliated with the discipline or complex of disciplines from which it came. A certain tension remained at the core of the project between the machine dreams of the emerging AI community and the idea of autonomous mental processes central to cognitive psychology.

The archaeologist king: Paul of Greece and Greek heritage tourism (1952–54)

During the early post-war period, American economic intervention in Greece played a central role in transforming the country’s classical past into a modern tourist asset. As a result, Greek institutions and investors used ancient monuments to create the necessary infrastructure for the emerging tourist movement. The Greek monarchy actively participated in this modernization process by engaging in cultural experiences, which aimed to transform Greek heritage into a desirable tourist product for the western camp during the Cold War period. The Greek monarchy was at the centre of this sociocultural development engaging with the nationalist reflexes of Greek society. By embracing the discourse of ethnikofrosyni (‘national mindedness’), King Paul of Greece (1947–64) and Queen Frederica provided royal sanction for the nationalist uses of classical antiquities and Greece as a lieu de mémoire that could offer an exceptional experience to visitors. To strengthen these assertions, Paul assumed the role of the archaeologist and tour guide, showcasing the cosmopolitan allure Greek antiquities radiated and presenting Greece as a fashionable and appealing tourist destination. This article argues that the Greek monarchs’ intervention in the archaeological excavations at Mycenae (1952), as well as the royal cruise around Greek islands and monuments (1954) reflected the sociopolitical developments of the period and the monarchs’ engagement with the country’s cultural affairs.

The origins of public relations in Greece: Tracing the missing link and excavating landmark cases

The purpose of this paper is to provide an historical narrative tracing precedents of Greek Public Relations (PR) practice as far back as the organizing of mega events in mid-nineteenth century culminating in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. The analysis documents that PR activities are interwoven with Greek governments’ initiatives aimed at tourism promotion. The paper is based on archival material and secondary sources. Access was granted to the special collections of the National Library of Greece and the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation. Moreover, the study interrogates the three landmark events that ushered in the emergence of professional public relations in Greece in the early postwar period and supplements with important information the conventional accounts. The analysis established a PR-Tourism and National image promotion nexus that runs continuously throughout the period under examination, from the emergence of PR activities in mid-nineteenth century up until the early 1950s. The findings are based on the available written records. This historical review does not purport to be exhaustive and comprehensive. Future research could identify more PR-like activities worthy of mention. The study provides a springboard for investigating the precedents of PR practice in the pre-professionalization era. This investigation calls for an interdisciplinary perspective. This paper is the first one to trace precedents of professional PR practice to the second half the nineteenth century and the interwar period in Greece. It shows the interconnection of PR-like activities with tourism and underscores the prominent position of state agencies in those activities.

Ottó Kornis, a Forgotten Author and Survivor of the Nazi Camps

In May 1944, at the age of 33, the lawyer and writer Ottó Kornis was crammed into a cattle car in his native Transylvanian town, Kolozsvár (in Romanian: Cluj; after 1974: Cluj-Napoca) with 72 of his fellow Jewish citizens, his parents included. They were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His parents were murdered upon arrival. Out of all the passengers in that cattle car, only he and four other Jews survived the hell of the death and forced labour camps. As soon as he returned home, he wrote a book about his experience titled Smoke ( Füst), which was published in November 1945 in Cluj by the Minerva Literary and Printing Institute and was one of the very first books about the Nazi camps. The present study deals with Kornis’ career and fate from the early years of his youth until his death at the age of 38, only four years after the end of the war. It is a microhistory that explores the career and work of a celebrated and award-winning, then completely forgotten author. His life story reveals the central problems that preoccupied most of the survivors who returned from the Nazi camps to multi-ethnic Transylvania; it also helps to document the literary memorialisation of the Holocaust during the early post-war period.

The Hegemonic Defense Strategy of the Hegemon -- US Containment Strategy from the Perspective of Geopolitics

Hegemony preservation is the main strategic goal of hegemonic countries in the hegemonic cycle. After the end of World War II, in order to confront the Soviet Union and its Allies behind it, the national security strategy of the United States in the early postwar period centered on containment . The goal of the containment strategy of the United States is to control the heart zone of the Eurasian continent. By examining the way of maintaining the hegemony of the United States, it can be seen that it is an important feature of the strategy of the United States to identify its opponents and formulate corresponding strategies. Geopolitics has had a profound impact on the foreign strategy of the United States to varying degrees, especially on the containment strategy of the United States after the war. It can be said that geopolitics has, in a sense, served as an important tool for America s global expansion.

The (New) American Political Tradition

The year 2023 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It—a bestselling book that captured the imagination of many of Hofstadter's fellow Americans in the early postwar period and, at the same time, defined the terms of argument for much of academic history for the next generation.1 It was also the book my high school teacher, Mr. Backfish, assigned in eleventh-grade Advanced Placement (AP) American History that helped transform me into a historian. So different was it from the dry, conventional textbook in both its riveting, sometimes acerbic prose and its unsentimental view of venerated figures in the American past. I still have my original copy (Figure 1).

Developing The World By Teaching Domestic Consumption: Swiss Supermarkets And The Emergence Of Development Aid Policies In The Early Postwar Period

In the early post-Second World War period, Migros of Switzerland was the first European retail business to adopt the American supermarket model. Its success, however, has not only been a matter of technological and logistical innovation. Migros’ founder, Gottlieb Duttweiler, was convinced that consumer education was part and parcel of a new style of selling consumption. This conviction was at the basis of a strategy entering foreign markets and of exporting the Migros model abroad. Similar to post-World War II economic rehabilitation programs, Duttweiler pursued an indigenous modernization agenda, based on a new principle of “rational consumption”—he did not hesitate to label this as a genuine version of entrepreneurial development aid. Against the backdrop of the establishment of Migros’ activities in Turkey, this article discusses the participation of entrepreneurs in the international development policies after the Second World War. The history of Migros Türk sheds light not only on the entrepreneurial approach to modernization policy, which was often different to that adopted in government programs, but also on how this influenced critical consumerism inside and outside Switzerland over the long term.

Post-WWI Balkan revival: The ancient Greek legacy in the Sokol movement 1919-1924

Statistical analysis of relevant resources reveals the expansion of the Yugoslav and Czech Sokol Movements from 1919 to 1924, a period after World War I marked by a cultural and economic crisis. The ideological orientation of the Balkan Sokol movement towards strengthening integral Yugoslavism and realizing ideas of cosmopolitanism coincides with the two main domestic and foreign political tendencies of the newly founded Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. This paper aims at defining the ancient Greek legacy inherent in the socio-political role of Sokolski glasnik [Sokol Gazette] in the early postwar period. The Sokol national movement, a sports and political organization based on 1919 foundations, lasted almost continuously until the beginning of World War II.

Taxonomical lives: The making of social divisions in the Swedish press during the golden age of social democracy, 1945–76

This article investigates the media lives of a particular class taxonomy in the Swedish press from 1945 to 1976. Invented by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 1911, the ‘social group division’ system was abandoned in the early post-war period. Around the same time, however, it gained popularity in Swedish culture and political debate. While earlier research has noted that such bureaucratic class taxonomies – as in several other Western countries – conditioned how actors understood and created new knowledge about the population, this process of wider circulation remains understudied. Using insights from literature on ‘the social life of methods’ and the history of knowledge, which underline that knowledge is transformed by and transforms the contexts it circulates in, I show that print media was an arena for circulating and producing new meaning around class taxonomies. Although editorials shunned the social group division for incorrectly representing Swedish society and creating artificial class boundaries, journalists used the taxonomy to explain social structures. Furthermore, by interviewing ‘typical’ members of the different social groups, journalists made the system relatable and personal for their readers. In this context, the social groups were imagined as cultural communities, sharing cultural behaviours and preferences. Lastly, I analyse usages of the social group division in letters to the editor, which reveal that people felt they were being classified and wanted to offer their views of society, using the taxonomy in ways the experts had not intended. This study thereby contributes to the history of social taxonomies and class languages in the post-war period.

The Changes in Japan's Economic Strength after World War II and Its Impact on Japan-US Bilateral Relations

After World War II, the bilateral relations between Japan and America has undergone ups and downs. In the early post-war period, the relationship between these two countries was very tense and unfriendly due to the hostile relation. However, after the policies of Japan and America changed when America started occupying and managing Japan, their relationship improved. Japan ushered in an economic miracle of 50 years after the war, one of the most essential reasons for it is the support of America. Also, the growth of the economy has brought Japan more opportunities to cooperate and negotiate with America, and the relationship between the two countries has shifted from unilateral support to competition through cooperation. This paper is mainly focusing on the Impact of Japan's Economy on Japan-US Bilateral Relations. In order to find out the process and changes of the Japan-US Bilateral Relations, this paper analyzed some references about this topic and found out that the economy has deeply influenced the relations between these two countries and Japan's economic miracle and stagnation made America restart locating the diplomatic relationship with Japan. This paper could help scholars have a better understanding of the influences of Japans economy on US-Japan Bilateral Relations.

The Transformation of Prewar Blues into Postwar Rhythm and Blues

Abstract The transformation of blues into rhythm and blues in the mid-twentieth century mirrored the experience of migrants who traveled from the South and adapted to bustling city life in the North and Midwest. When millions of Black Americans moved to cities during the Great Migration, traditional blues traveled with them, but the faster pace of urban life engendered new approaches to blues that reflected the new environment, and rhythm and blues emerged in the early postwar period as an urbanized transformation of the earlier genre. Rhythm and blues was loud, emphatically energetic, and, through greater use of new modern instruments, highly electrified. These attributes were, as many have observed, artistic responses to the new urban setting and marked a distinct divergence from the genre's prewar origins. What have received less attention than timbre, tempo, and volume, though, are the many new formal approaches that mark the new style: the urban environment engendered a corresponding creative explosion of new variants on the traditional twelve-bar form, many of them characterized by faster textual pacing, greater phrase-rhythmic density, and elaborate stylization. These transformations are the formal counterparts to the electrification and livelier tempos that mark the urbanization of blues and its metamorphosis into a new postwar genre, and they appear throughout the work of many pivotal rhythm and blues musicians, including Willie Dixon, Ruth Brown, Howlin' Wolf, Ray Charles, Big Mama Thornton, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, the main artists explored in this study.

Dealing with the post-war menace: Creating transnational film memories in the shadow of the Holocaust

Traditional scholarship in social film history views groups of films from a certain time period as encapsulations of the overriding national mindset of that time. However, film scholarship has challenged this notion of what sociologists term ‘collective memory’, insisting instead that a wider range of films be included and several ‘collective memories’ be formulated in order to broaden the understanding of time-specific societal beliefs. In addition, research in memory studies has challenged the insistence on ‘national memories’, preferring instead the exploration of ‘transnational memories’. Most prominent among transnational memory scholarship is the work being done on the Holocaust. This article examines four films produced in three different national cinemas from the early post-war period (1946–49), all of which deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust in some way. Analysing these four films (The Murderers Are among Us, Rotation, The Stranger and The Third Man) and these three national cinemas (East Germany, America and Great Britain) shows how a specific transnational event such as the Holocaust can produce several aesthetic and narrative signifiers internationally while also being specifically formulated to meet local, national sensibilities.

Regarding the question of the Soviet occupation of Austria. The main directions of the activities of the Red Army’s occupation policy in the late war and early post-war period (April-July 1945)160-176.

Regarding the question of the Soviet occupation of Austria. The main directions of the activities of the Red Army’s occupation policy in the late war and early post-war period (April-July 1945)160-176.

The regulation of international migration in the Cold War: a synthesis and review of the literature

ABSTRACT For a long time, research on international migration during the Cold War maintained that a rigid distinction existed between political emigration, generated by the ideological conflict between liberalism and communism, and labour migration, which was determined by transformations in the capitalist world economy. This article challenges that assumption on several grounds. It starts from the premise that the Cold War was primarily a competition between the capitalist and communist projects of development. It ascribes to this rivalry the establishment of the international system regulating migration as a terrain of ideological confrontation in the early postwar period, and its evolution into one of convergence over development strategies since the 1970s. It reviews both the literature on labour migration to/in Western Europe and the recent studies exploring how socialist Europe also relied on foreign labour recruitment to achieve development. It brings these findings in conversation with research that examines the expansion of economic cooperation between Eastern and Western Europe during the long 1970s. It shows that, in this context, the distinction between economic migrant and political refugee continued to justify the erection of wired walls, this time between an enlarging European Union and the Global South.

No Silence, but Whispers: Postwar Exhibitions on Nazi Crimes and the Shoah in Austria, 1945–1949

ABSTRACT Until the 1990s, the myth that Austria had been a victim of National Socialism reigned. Recent historiography has turned this discourse diametrically around, highlighting, among other things, the limited willingness of large segments of Austrian society after 1945 to address their guilt and responsibility for Nazi crimes. However, these issues have seldom been explored in depth. The exhibitions of the early postwar era shine light on precisely these tentative attempts. Those initiated by the Allies, aimed to confront the locals with Nazi crimes, were followed by local exhibitions, which were nevertheless unable to find a means of expression transcending a mere documentation of the horrors that had occurred. The Viennese exhibition Niemals vergessen! – a spectacular show from a curatorial perspective – already moved in a twilight zone between serious engagement with the subject and projecting guilt onto Germany. Yet the show’s motto − ‘We are all guilty!’ − demonstrates that such statements were possible in 1946 that would later become suppressed. This phase of direct confrontation with National Socialism ended with a watered-down attempt to stage an anti-racist exhibition at the Natural History Museum in 1949, although further exhibitions were mounted by resistance groups, albeit with different aims in mind. One reason for the failure of these early initiatives may have been the absence of an appropriate language with which to discuss the Holocaust, a form of ‘speechlessness’ in light of the dimensions of this crime. Not until 1965 would the Holocaust be exhibited to the Viennese public, in a traveling exhibition at the Chamber of Labor. The great silence that is presumed to have dominated in the early postwar period turns out to be no less of a myth: Whoever listened closely would at least have heard a whisper.

Sustainable strategies to preserve tangible and intangible values in social housing rehabilitation: an Italian case study.


 
 
 The European social housing stock, built since the early post-war period, now needs major energy, structural and functional upgrading. The owners, almost always public bodies, are therefore called upon to adapt these buildings to the new regulations issued by the European Community. To reduce the costs of intervention, the preferred solution is that of a complete demolition and a subsequent reconstruction by using newly supplied materials, without considering the non-sustainability and social fallout of this choice. The contribution, starting from the hypothesis that more sustainable building rehabilitation interventions are possible, analyses which social and material supply aspects must be considered, and which design strategies can be applied to achieve the objective. First, the characteristics of social buildings in their historical evolution are summarized to understand their value in a broader non-economic sense. Subsequently, the requirements for a sustainable renovation of the existing social dwellings are analysed, and three, out of many other, design strategies are proposed. A case study is then presented and the application of the three strategies done through three Master thesis works is described. In conclusion, the results of the application of the strategies to the case study is analysed to assess whether it is possible to intervene on existing social housing complexes to achieve better results with a more sustainability-oriented perspective.
 
 

How can children's individuality be developed in schools?: the challenge of postwar ‘Free Study’(Jiyu kenkyū) subject in Japan

This paper explores the purpose and practice of the 'Free Study' (Jiyu kenkyū) subject piloted in elementary and junior high schools in the early postwar period of Japan, trying to obtain suggestions for the management of school curriculum and children's Free study. The specific research questions are as follows. First, why was Free Study subject, which was piloted from 1947 to 1951, chosen as a subject for the school curriculum and what were its goals? Second, how was Free Study practiced in each school? And third, what does it mean that Free Study was consequently abolished? 'Free Study' was a newly established subject that was designed to promote learning activities centered on life experiences and children's individuality and interests. It demanded a new teaching method that departed from one-way knowledge transfer classes and required collaboration with the local community outside the school. However, the school teachers experienced considerable difficulties in implementing Free Study due to the unique nature of the teaching methods and activities, resulting in a retreat to supplemental study time for other subjects. This is a case that demonstrates both the possibilities and limitations of empiricist educational activity development and the independent management of educational activities by students and raises the need for active collaboration with the local community and the participation of diverse actors in schools.

Gendering migration in a patriarchal society: assisted female migration from Greece during the early post-war period

ABSTRACT In 1954 the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) launched a program for the recruitment of domestic workers from Greece for Canada, Australia and New Zealand. ICEM gave single women of rural background and with scarce resources the opportunity to migrate and later sponsor the migration of their relatives. Furthermore, ICEM assisted them with orientation and language courses, training programs and loans, and oversaw their transportation and recruitment, as well as of their adjustment to work and life in economically and “culturally” developed countries. In doing so, the Committee tried to imbue women from the periphery of the “Free World” with “superior” western technical skills, cultural values and modern behavioral patterns that reproduced the dominant gender, ethnic, race and class prejudices of the destination countries. The article highlights the way receiving states expanded their capacity to control their borders and select the “qualities” of their foreign female workforce, by standardizing their skills, behaviors and rights. By comparing the implementation of the scheme in three British Commonwealth countries, it problematizes the role of the international organizations in the construction of labor patterns and the dissemination of hegemonic Western gendered economic, social and cultural scripts in a peripheral European country. It also explores the changes brought about by the ICEM in domestic work and women’s response to intergovernmental migration planning.