Interwar Research Articles

CONFERENCES HELD IN ROMANIA (1930-1942) ABOUT THE REFORMS AND MODERNITY OF THE STATE FOUNDED BY KEMAL ATATÜRK (OCTOBER 29, 1923). WITH THE OCCASION OF THE CENTENNIAL OF THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY

In our historiography, in the study of Romanian-Turkish relations, circumstantial in the interwar period, the call, in more detail, to contemporary testimonies can also be enriched by highlighting the public conferences held by personalities of scientific or public life (N. Batzaria, Gheorghe I. Brătianu, Petre Gheață, N. Iorga, Ion Gr. Periețeanu et al.), in Bucharest and in other cities of the country; they present to the Romanian reader, above all, the image of the modernizing achievements of the new Eurasian republican state – the Kemalist Turkey. This is the approach we propose, in summary, in the following lines.

Pro-Fascist Hesitations of Western “Democracies” in the Interwar Period and on the Eve of the Second World War: Revisiting the Need to Analyze the Essence of Ideologies in the Specific Context of Historical Socio-Political and Diplomatic Circumstances

The article provides examples of anti-sovietism motivated sympathies of Western political circles for fascist-type regimes in the interwar period. It is concluded that in order to combat the falsification of history and the distortion of information through the memory and identity politics implemented by a number of states, it is necessary to study and widely publicize the historical, socio-political and diplomatic circumstances of the policy of Western countries on the eve of the Second World War. An important condition for the fight against falsification of history and tendentious coverage of historical facts is to identify the real essence and conditions for the emergence of political regimes of the fascist type in a specific historical context, as well as to counteract attempts of modern interpretations of the essence of fascism, taken out of context and dictated by the tasks of the current political situation, propaganda and information warfare aimed at distorting the historical role of the Soviet Union and undermining the “soft” power and value sovereignty of the Russian Federation as a successor state.

International Law and International Relations: Quo Vadis?

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza poignantly reveal the inadequacy of the current international system in maintaining peace. The United Nations faces major limitations due to the absence of enforcement mechanisms and disagreement among permanent members of the Security Council. Stronger global cooperation to enhance the international system’s ability to prevent and resolve wars and conflicts seems like a utopia, but it is necessary for the sake of humanity. The world needs a reimagined international system that prioritizes diplomacy and mediation over military intervention. There is a pressing need for new visions of peace and a closer dialogue between International Law and IR. This review essay critically examines the dialogue between the two disciplines since the interwar period. It highlights that liberal internationalism constituted an important intersection point between the two disciplines during the interwar period. Although the two disciplines grew apart after World War II, the post-Cold War period has witnessed a renewed interdisciplinary dialogue. However, despite this dialogue, scholars of both disciplines lack conversations on novel visions of peace. The complex and evolving challenges of our time urgently require new perspectives on peace beyond mainstream theories and methods. The essay concludes by suggesting that scholars of both disciplines should combine their experience and perspectives to develop innovative ideas for peace.

Between Safed and Vienna: Chajim Bloch’s the Memoires of the Kabbalist Vital

Abstract In 1927, a small book titled Lebenserinnerungen des Kabbalisten Vital (The Memoires of the Kabbalist Vital) was published in Vienna. Its author was Chajim Bloch (1881–1973), a Rabbi, independent scholar, translator, author, and erstwhile forger. The book includes a German rendition of Sefer ha-Hezyonot (The Book of Visions), the memoirs and dream diary of the famous 16th century Kabbalist Hayyim Vital (1542–1620), along with introductions and postscripts written by Bloch himself, as well as by the esotericist and German nationalist Franz Spunda (1890–1963) and the Jewish-Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1944). The Memoires of the Kabbalist Vital sheds interesting light on Vienna’s interwar culture and the revival of interest in Kabbalah and Hasidism in the modern period. However, this intriguing book and its colorful author has received very little scholarly attention until now. This article delves into Bloch’s intellectual biography, with a focus on his rendition of The Book of Visions and its paratexts. It also explores some later accounts given by Bloch regarding the publication of the book. The article examines the various interconnected contexts of the translation and publication of the book, revealing interesting connections between Kabbalah, Western esotericism, psychoanalysis, and antisemitism in Vienna in the interwar period.

The History of the Greek Refugee Hospital of the Interwar Period in a General Hospital of Nikaia "Agios Panteleimon".

The Asia Minor Catastrophe caused the uprooting of thousands of Greeks from Asia Minor and their arrival in Greece. Especially in the areas around Piraeus, there was a large settlement of refugee populations. During that period, a small hospital was created, the "American Women's Hospital," by an initiative of the "American Women's Union," with the aim of treating and caring for suffering refugees. Within a decade, the hospital expanded and became a general hospital. In 1934, after the departure of the "American Women's Service" from Greece, it was renamed "Refugee Hospital of Nea Kokkinia," and then a year later (1935), it was renamed again to "Protypo Laiko Iatreio" (Model Public Clinic). In 1939, the construction of a larger hospital in Nea Kokkinia began. During World War II, the hospital managed to respond to the difficult conditions of the period and was renamed "General Hospital of Piraeus, Saporta Warehouse Building." After the war, in 1953, it was renamed to General Hospital of Piraeus "Queen Frederika." In 1986, it was renamed to Regional General Hospital of Nikaia "Damon Vassileiou" in honor of the Professor of Medicine of the University of Athens Damon Vassileiou who was one of the greatest Greek doctors. In 2001, it was renamed again to its current name General Hospital of Nikaia "Agios Panteleimon," becoming one of the largest hospitals in the Balkans.

Policja II Rzeczypospolitej - pomiędzy negacją a gloryfikacją. Historiografia i postulaty badawcze. Cz. 3 - Losy policjantów po 1 września 1939 roku i podsumowanie cyklu

This article concludes a series of three articles. The first two, published in 2022, were divided into time periods; 1) until 1989, and 2) since the 1990s. The present one discusses the issue of the fate of police officers after September 1, 1939, and includes a summary and research postulates. The timelines used in the series are not accidental, of course, as they had a significant impact on the way historiography devoted to public security organs was conducted in the interwar period. The literature that deals with pre‑war police is relatively rich in terms of quantity. However, it is worth examining it more carefully as several works raise a number of questions and doubts. Next to very good ones there are some that should not have been published. If we take a closer look at the style of narration in particular publications, we will notice that the authors in the vast majority limit themselves to describing and reporting facts, avoiding factual analysis. Many of the publications deviate from scientific standards, focusing their attention exclusively on creat-ing the preferred image of the public security organisation in a given period of time. Unfortu-nately, this is noticeable not only before 1989, but also later, when the negative image of the pre‑war police was replaced by its excessive glorification or even mythologisation. Despite the fact that more and more issues are raised and some of them are further developed, we still cannot consider the state of research that I am interested in as being satisfactory. The following issues still need to be highlighted and thoroughly investigated: 1) police biography; 2) issues of formation, socialisation and mentality; 3) the state of morale of the police corps; 4) participation in the Polish‑Soviet war; 5) participation in ensuring the internal security of the state; 6) police‑society relations, including the creation of the image of the police in culture texts; 7) police participation in the protection of state dignitaries; 8) international police co-operation; 9) the history of the police in the individual provinces; 10) women’s police service; 11) the functioning of police associations and cultural and educational activities; 12) war pre-parations; 13) the fate of police officers after September 1, 1939.

Głuchoniemcy w polskim dyskursie naukowym i publicznym od XVIII wieku do okresu PRL

The author analyses the history of scientific and public discourses growing around the phenom-enon of Głuchoniemcy (Deaf‑Germans) in Poland. In the literature, this term refers to the des-cendants of the German‑speaking colonists who settled in the Polish‑Ruthenian border in the mid‑fourteenth century. The history of interest in this phenomenon from the eighteenth to the twentieth century reflects the cultural changes and social tensions over time. These descendants of the German‑speaking colonists living in the Carpathian Foothills were mentioned for the first time in the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century as a regional phenomenon of cultural diversity. In the era of Romanticism, when the importance of national identity in Europe grew, so‑called Deaf Germans were portrayed as fully assimilated Polish settlers with only relics refer-ring to German culture. At the end of the nineteenth century, after the publication of Józef Szujski, they became the subject of a political debate and were placed in the context of peasant history. Finally, the socio‑political situation of the interwar period led to the term “Głuchoniemcy” being removed from scientific and public discourses for many decades. After World War II, the absence of the topic became permanent, still directly related to the Polish‑German antagonism that set the directions of scientific interests of ethnographers and historians in Poland. The article tries to answer the question about the course of these changes in the perception of Deaf Germans by looking for external causes as well as those resulting from the nature of the subject of interest.

How and why to compare incomparables: The Great Gatsby and La Règle du jeu

Abstract Comparing The Great Gatsby with any of its adaptations invariably promotes the novel over its derivatives and is far less fertile than putting it alongside Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu. During the interwar period, these incomparable masterpieces exhibit strikingly similar plots to address the moral decline of the upper class. Renoir directly borrowed this template from Musset’s 1833 Les Caprices de Marianne, a hallmark of Romanticism. The competing forces of romantic desire, aristocratic values, and aesthetic modernism make these works comparably difficult to classify. The article introduces Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which had already been compared to The Great Gatsby and was also filmed at the outset of WWII. Watching Welles’ film beside Renoir’s confirms André Bazin’s view that cinema became modern at just this moment, by taking on a role comparable to that commanded by post-WWI American novels like Fitzgerald’s. And examining Renoir beside Fitzgerald highlights the styles and strategies of both masterpieces as they pursued a large public and an authentic social critique. The article concludes by enumerating reasons and ways to compare ‘original’ works that bear similarities, whether mythic and universal or historical and particular.

‘The Cheering Was Loud and Long’: Practical Feminism and the England Women’s Hockey Tour of Australia in 1927

Australian women’s hockey was the first women’s team sport to establish itself nationally in Australia and the first to play an international match – 1914 against England. In 1925, the All Australia Women’s Hockey Association (AAWHA) invited England to send a team to tour Australia. On October 26, 1926, Mysie Davy, the AAWHA’s international secretary, announced England’s acceptance to tour in 1927 to Sydney’s field hockey community at a fête at the Sydney Town Hall. After Davy’s announcement, it was reported that ‘the cheering was loud and long’. The 1927 English team toured Australia for nine weeks and played 19 matches, including three Test matches against Australia. In studying this tour, there is engagement with the concept of practical feminism introduced by feminist sport scholar Jean Williams in her analysis of the experiences of England’s national women’s field hockey touring teams during the inter-war years. Further, building upon Williams’ work by expanding the practical feminism analysis to cover the opportunities experienced by the English team and a cross-section of Australian women’s field hockey participants, the concept’s application to all levels of field hockey is broadened.

Bioarchaeological Research of The Home Army’s Soldiers From Raubiszki and Druzhyle Battles

This article covers the topic of Armia Krajowa’s soldiers and their manner-of-death. AK is a Polish underground military organization that was active during World War II and the post-war period until 1945. Since Vilnius region was occupied by Poland during the inter-war period (1920–1939), multiple historical events in which AK soldiers were fighting against German Nazis and Soviets took place in modern-day Lithuanian territories. Thus, a considerable number of single and mass burials of Polish partisans are uncovered in Lithuania. This research aims to reconstruct the manner-of-death of 9 AK partisans’ skeletal remains from two battles with the Soviets: Družiliai and Raubiškės. The results indicated a wide range of perimortal lesions sustained on the battlefield: perimortal fractures and gunshot wounds. The analysis also revealed pathological lesions that illustrated challenges individuals had faced in their daily partisanship – hard physical labor, malnutrition, non-specific stress.

Diplomacy Within the Security Framework in Turkey and Romania During the Interwar Period

Abstract This article aims to highlight shifting diplomatic positions in Turkey and Romania and their stances towards the League of Nations collective security network during the interwar period. It takes a comparative approach to demonstrate the diplomatic activity and strategic decision-making mechanism employed by two strategically important Balkan and Black Sea countries vis-à-vis the fragile international system from the 1920s onwards. The rising threat of revisionism and declining belief in the League’s sanctioning power gradually led these countries to set their differences in foreign policy aside and strengthened the idea of joint regional action in the 1930s. Supported by primary sources from different archives, this comparative study proposes a new outlook, by demonstrating the contribution made by the notions of external threat and common aggressor to changing foreign policy perspectives in both countries.

Reason, Emotion, and the Crisis of Democracy in British Philosophy of the 1930s

This article examines how British philosophers of the 1930s grappled with the relationship between reason, emotion, and democratic citizenship in the context of a perceived “crisis of democracy” in Europe. Focusing especially on Bertrand Russell, Susan Stebbing, and John Macmurray, it argues that philosophers working from diverse philosophical perspectives shared a sense that the crisis of democracy was simultaneously a crisis of reason and one of emotion. They tended to frame this crisis in terms of three interrelated concerns: first, as a problem of balancing or integrating reason and emotion; second, as a problem of the relationship between emotions and democratic citizenship; and third, as a problem of how to properly train or educate the emotions. Significantly, British philosophers addressed these issues most directly in writings for a non-professional audience, as they sought to translate their professional expertise into popular works that might rejuvenate democratic citizenship. This historical episode is a reminder of how philosophers were deeply engaged in the cultural politics of the interwar period and is a telling example of how personalist concerns were central to philosophy even as the “analytic revolution” was gathering steam.

Sources of Anti-Secularism in Modern Turkey: A Social History Approach

ABSTRACT The secular reforms the young Republic of Turkey launched during the interwar period were one of the most comprehensive modernization schemes in the world history. These extraordinary reforms have been considered as the sole maker of today’s Turkey. The political histories, focusing on formal politics, mostly reduced the social opposition to secularism to a few well-known hapless protests and rebellions. This article, however, argues that modern Turkey was the culmination of a more complicated process in which popular opposition to these reforms also shaped politics. It reveals that the daily life of ordinary people, particularly in rural areas, was rife with the anti-secular voices and attitudes by exploring non-elite public spheres and popular discursive strategies though which anti-secular opinions and attitudes were produced and expressed. Rather than seeing them as a result of clash between secularism and religion, it emphasizes the socio-economic reasons that lead to people’s negative response, primarily the loss of authority or economic advantages of some groups due to reforms. Finally this article offers that the roots of the Islamist politics of the following decades could be sought in this popular dissent, which subtly contested the secularism’s hegemony in daily life during the early republic.

How to be not economic: abundance and the history of strolling

ABSTRACT This essay offers an interpretation of the canonical history of strolling as a non-economic practice, that is, as a practice free of purpose and means. I consider strolling as a state of mind that discloses abundance in a similar way as rationality discloses scarcity. I inquire into the multiple facets of this state of mind by re-reading three phases in its literary and cultural history: the early modern artist-stroller of the nineteenth-century panoramic literature that finds its peak in Charles Baudelaire; the high modern consumer-stroller as described in the inter-war period, notably in the work of Walter Benjamin; and the late modern subversive stroller that is re-discovered in the mid-twentieth century by the Situationist Guy Debord among others. This interpretation both sheds light on the social preconditions of economic rationality as an organizing principle of a market society, as well as the potential to step out of this principle.

An Atlantis discovered: Riga’s Moskovskii forshtadt in the Russophone interwar imagination

ABSTRACT This article relates literary and journalistic representations of Riga’s historic Russophone neighborhood, the Moskоvskii forshtadt, to the interwar conversation on the future of ‘Russia’ outside of the Soviet Union. My analysis begins with a close reading of Georgii Ivanov’s sketch, ‘Moskovskii Forshtadt.’ I then contrast Ivanov’s sketch with local Latvian Russophone accounts of the forshtadt, published in the Riga newspapers Segodnya and Segodnya vecherom. In studying representations and discourses, I reveal how the discursive space generated by the forshtadt contains three different understandings of Russian nationhood in its diasporic, extraterritorial existence of the interwar period.

Sown Without Care: Dutch Eugenicists and their Call for Optimising Developmental Conditions, 1919–1939

Summary This paper explains the coexistence of concerns about hereditary degeneration and opposition to reproductive intervention such as sterilisation in Dutch eugenic discourse during the interwar years. Based on an analysis of textbooks, periodical publications and printed lectures, I will show how eugenicists positioned themselves within the domain of public health by framing their domain of inquiry as a pivotal addition to curative medicine and sanitary reform. Dutch eugenicists rendered this symbiotic relationship conceptually plausible by combining criticism of genetic determinism and Lamarckian viewpoints on heredity. This paper explains how this conceptual constellation enabled Dutch eugenicists to claim that the combination of proper (eugenic) education and a healthy environment would stimulate individuals to behave socially responsibly and restrain from reproducing. By doing so, this essay contributes to the historiographical trend to comparatively analyse eugenics as a transnational phenomenon.

Māori and Field Hockey from 1900: More Than a Game?

Field hockey, introduced to New Zealand in the late nineteeth century, quickly became popular among North Island Māori communities, especially with women. While Māori did not seek to separate themselves from mainstream society, they nevertheless sought to create parallel sporting (and other cultural) institutions through which their culture, tribal connections, and ethnic identity might remain intact and flourish, a phenomenon that exists to this day. Analysis of Māori hockey from the 1900s to the present serves to draw attention to the sport’s highpoint of the inter-war period, and its resurgence in the 1990s with the establishment of a national Māori hockey association and tournaments. Because more Māori women played hockey than men, the women’s game features more prominently in the paper. The researchers use periodicals of the time for much of their key historical primary data, including Māori-language newspapers, with some interviews for the more contemporary developments, arguing that for Māori, hockey has never been merely a game played purely for physical enjoyment, but an opportunity to experience it as Māori, in a Māori cultural space.

Man-making and World-making on Two Wheels: Indian ‘Globe Cyclists’ in the Interwar Years

Abstract Around 20 cyclists from India embarked on long and arduous intercontinental journeys between 1923 and 1942 individually or in groups. Many of these ‘globe cyclists’, as they were often referred to by the Indian press, later wrote media articles and longer travelogues about their expeditions. This article examines the narratives of these long-distance cycling expeditions to argue that these journeys can illuminate new histories of the bicycle’s socio-cultural impact beyond the West, the self-fashioning of Indian cyclotourists as an example of complicit masculinity, and world tours as a novel form of anti-imperial counter-mobility. It does so by drawing on several historiographical subfields that have hitherto rarely been mobilized together, namely the histories of sports, masculinity, colonialism and decolonization, tourism, and (everyday) technology. The article focuses pars pro toto on the tours of Adi Hakim, Jal Bapasola, and Rustom Bhumgara (1923-1928) and Ramnath Biswas (1931-1940) that were strongly over-determined by the contexts of colonialism, anti-colonialism, and decolonisation, while nationalist masculinity represented another recurring trope.

The Interwar Period International Trade in Arms: A New Dataset

International weapons transfers send military capabilities, make arms production economically feasible, and construct security relations. They influence buyers’ and sellers’ foreign policies, domestic politics, and military spending behavior. However, data availability has limited their study to the bipolar Cold War and unipolar post-Cold War periods. We thus introduce the Interwar Period International Trade in Arms (IPITA) data, covering dyadic transfers of small arms, light weapons, ammunition, explosives, and major conventional weapons in the years 1920–1939. The IPITA data will offer new avenues to study the drivers, dynamics, and consequences of arms transfers, both in past and future multipolar systems.

The antinomies of Sam Morris: a life in the diaspora

This article attempts to recover the antinomies and contradictions of the life and work of Grenada-born Samson Uriah Morris (1908−1976), an educationalist, anti-colonialist and Black political activist, whose life was dedicated to both the movement for civil rights in Britain and the broader anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist struggle. His life ranged from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana and then back to Britain where he eventually became the deputy general secretary of the Community Relations Commission and Assistant High Commissioner for Grenada. Despite his role in the anti-racist struggles of the inter-war period he was seen as a somewhat conservative figure by a new generation of Black radicals in Britain by the late 1960s. The authors chart Morris’s biography, setting it against changing political forces, and suggest that he made an important contribution to the struggle against racism and imperialism and the project of ‘intellectual decolonisation’.