Postwar Experiences Research Articles

Schütz on self-alienation and homecoming in a warring world

Alfred Schütz, who joined the Austrian army at 17 years old as a lieutenant in 1917, faced traumatic experiences during the First World War that deeply influenced his later intellectual pursuits. This article examines how Schütz’s wartime and postwar experiences shaped his intellectual and political contribution to sociology. The trauma Schütz faced during and after the war profoundly influenced his views on the ethical competence and integrative capacities of common sense, particularly in his applied theory essays of the 1940s. Highlighting the modern crisis of alienation, Schütz’s works such as “The Stranger” and “The Homecomer” reflect his commitment to understanding and overcoming the estrangement and confusion that arise from social and spatial displacement and the ideology of irreconcilable alienness. Rather than treat what is missing from the biographical archive as an irretrievable loss or absence, the article reads parts of Schütz’s later writings for traces they bear of his unrepresented wartime and postwar experiences, and argues that his applied theory essays partly serve as a delayed response to his youthful traumas. Ultimately, Schütz’s insights into foreignness offer profound reflections on the interplay between historical events, personal experiences, and social theory.

The fi ght against the moral evil of war aft er 1945. Historical approach to the concept of post-war moralrevival of prof. Helena Radlińska

AbstractThe article was created on the basis of exploration conducted in accordance with the methodology of historical socio-pedagogical research. The initiator and promoter of this research was Helena Radlinska - the creator of Polish social pedagogy. Post-war experiences of moral crisis, to which prof. Helena Radlinska drew attention in the years 1946-1947, can today activate and inspire pedagogical communities, especially socio-pedagogical ones. Every war implies negative consequences in the economic and energy spheres. These processes are the subject of numerous analyses, debates and activities in the international arena. Much less attention is paid to the social effects of war. In this context, the selected subject of the moral evil of war appears to be an important and consistently relevant issue. It is therefore worth analysis, research, and discourse leading to corrective actions based on intentional influence in the sphere of moral education (moral upbringing). The aim of the article is to present the concept of counteracting the moral consequences of war as presented by Helena Radlińska. It may also be an encouragement for further scientific research aimed at searching for theoretical and methodical foundations for the practice of activities included in the field of upbringing, educational, caring, assistance and cultural activities, as well as promoting the culture of truth, goodness, and beauty in everyday social life of the 21st century.

Falling Leaves Not Returning to the Roots: Agency, Meaning and Complex Emotions in Chinese Women’s Narratives of Settling in Britain Since 1978

ABSTRACT Within the historiography of post-war migration to Britain, many authors have used oral history to explore women’s history of migration to and their lived experiences in Britain. However, current historiographical attention to the Chinese in Britain neglects post-war experiences, particularly those of women, and is yet to engage with rich oral history collections. Drawing on the voices of twelve women, this paper argues that, against the backdrop of relaxing exit controls in post-1978 China, women utilised socioeconomic resources and navigated accessible routes for crossing regional and national borders, displaying their will and resilience to use migration as a means of personal development, and, in some cases, showed pragmatism in seeking to emigrate. This paper expands the historiography of Chinese migration to Britain and adds to our understanding of gender and migration. It indicates that, despite their seeking personal development, Chinese women’s migration was conditioned by family responsibilities, and their narratives of migration incorporated consideration of family members. It highlights how changing policies in China enabled and motivated women’s migration to and permanent settlement in Britain. Teasing out these rationales helps us to rethink the history of ethnic minorities in Britain, moving beyond a (post)imperial framing.

Пионерский отряд «Каравелла» как контрпроект человека в условиях постконфликтной ситуации 1970‒1980-х годов

The end of the Second World War had a profound impact on the societies involved, shaping their post-conflict situations. It is crucial to distinguish between two key concepts: the “post-war situation”, denoting the period following the cessation of hostilities and transition to peace, and the “post-conflict situation”, defined by how the parties involved in the conflict experience, understand, and respond to its progression and resolution. During this period, youth organizations worldwide embarked on projects aimed at preparing individuals for the new era after the war. However, by the early 1960s, society began to move away from immediate post-war expe-riences and focus on commemoration, constructing individual and collective memories. Children's organizations in many countries shifted from project-based approaches to operational ones, updating existing models for shap-ing successive generations. This shift ushered in a phase of “mass production” of individuals tailored to society's specific needs. Simultaneously, a new post-conflict situation emerged globally, marked by internal conflicts in the Warsaw Pact countries (for example, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968), as well as in Western nations (such as the late 1960s student movements). Against this backdrop, alternative approaches to human de-velopment gained traction. These counter-projects offered different perspectives on the education of the younger generation, challenging mainstream practices. One notable example of this was the Soviet pioneer group “Caravella”, distinguished by its passion, clear vision for the future, and the resources for implementing its social engineering project. This article reconstructs the social engineering project implemented within the “Caravella” group, examining its characteristics as a counter-project opposing the mainstream pioneer movement.

Give me Łódź: Jewish communal life in a Polish manufacturing city

ABSTRACT This article explores the development of the Jewish community of Łódź, Poland alongside changes in the city as a whole. From a small town at the start of the 19th century, it became a major hub for textile factories, urban labor, and intercultural encounters by the end of the century. Jews experienced and contributed to the changes as workers, factory owners, and chroniclers. The article will examine how aspects related to Łódź’s character and evolution contributed to the wartime and postwar experiences of Jews there, arguing that the city provides a unique and important perspective on modern Jewish history.

Narrating the Danube Swabian Identity and Experience from Women's Perspective

This article uses selected memoirs by American women who came from the Danube Swabian minority in present-day Hungary and Serbia (former Yugoslavia). The entire ethnic group was expelled from the region at the end of World War II. All five memoirs were published in the new millennium. This article examines how the narratives frame memories of a prewar happy childhood from young women’s perspective. The childhood memories are presented in stark contrast to the authors’ postwar experiences of expulsion, sexual violence, genocide, flight, and the eventual building of a new life in a new country. All narratives document the brutality with which the Danube Swabian communities were destroyed, particularly in Yugoslavia. Nostalgic overtones about a lost homeland intersect with a lasting feeling of being atopos—i.e., “of no place,” in exile and in the diaspora. While most of the narratives emphasize Danube Swabian victimhood, one narrative stands out in its attempt to create a more multidirectional approach to memory about World War II. agathas@uottawa.ca

“Extremely Depressed with a Hopeless Outlook”: The Experiences of Psychologically Traumatized Nursing Sisters During and After the First World War

During the First World War, 2,845 women served as nursing sisters with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. Although the majority of those who enlisted had pre-war training, these experiences did not prepare them for the severity of the injuries they treated, the relentless pace of the work, and the pressures of working within a warzone. How did these women cope with the traumas they witnessed during their service when they returned home? Of the 842 nursing sisters who applied for a pension, 143 (16.7%) reported ongoing mental and nervous illnesses. The postwar experiences of these women reveal some of the traumas and challenges that military nurses faced overseas and when they returned home.

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis

Reviewed by: In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis Kelly Anne Hammond (bio) In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia. Edited by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis. Hong Kong University Press, 2020. vi, 246 pages. $65.00, cloth; $40.00, E-book. Edited collections can be tricky. They often lack cohesion and feel like they are strung together by a theme that is either too broad or too narrow, or the quality of the chapters varies widely. Luckily, this is not the case with Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis's edited volume, In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia . The book presents cutting edge scholarship on many different facets of the underacknowledged and underrepresented continuities between the Japanese imperial project and the postimperial reconstruction throughout East Asia. Essentially, the book is a smorgasbord of postimperial history: there is something for everyone who is interested in the legacies of Japanese imperialism throughout East Asia. Although I do not have the space to review all the chapters, I hope that readers will be prompted by my review to check out the book and see what suits their own interests. This volume examines how political systems and society were rebuilt in the postwar period while simultaneously considering how the collapse of the Japanese empire impacted East Asia (p. 2). The postwar experiences of those living scattered throughout the remains of the defunct empire were varied, as were the processes of "deimperialization" (pp. 3–4). At its core, the edited volume examines the ways that the violence inflicted by imperial Japan informed both the tangible (political and military, especially) legacies as well as the postwar memories of people living throughout East Asia (p. 11). The book coalesces around two central themes. All the chapters address how "newly independent entities, or states reclaiming independence" successfully or unsuccessfully came to terms with Japan's imperial programs in their territories. The collection also investigates how postimperial Japan "worked to reframe" these new political, military, and civilian relationships within the new cold war geopolitics in East Asia (p. 15). For the authors, the "indelible mark" of the Japanese empire is all over East Asia, although it is not fully recognized, nor is it fully reconciled (p. 23). The chapters are divided into three thematic sections: "Collaboration and Dilemmas of Deimperialization" (four chapters); "Negotiating Past and Present in the Military and Political Realms" (three chapters); and "Returning to the Continent, Japan's Relations with New China" (two chapters). [End Page 247] When I started my PhD in 2008, Tim Brook had only recently published Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Harvard University Press, 2007). Although there is a cottage industry in French studies about Vichy and French collaboration with the Nazis, Brook's work was really the first monograph in English to deal with collaboration with the Japanese empire. Such studies have become more frequent and nuanced (see, for example: Jeremy Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: Where Total Empire Met Total War [Cornell University Press, 2020]; and A. Carly Buxton, Unthinking Collaboration: American Nisei in Transwar Japan [University of Hawai'i Press, 2022]). Yet, there is still a lot of work to do on the postwar legacies of these collaborators. Many of the chapters in this book (including Levidis's chapter on Kishi Nobusuke and the wartime antecedents of the Liberal Democratic Party [LDP]) are a step in this direction. Beyond the volume, Ernest Leung's recent article in Palladium (August 2021), "The School That Built Asia," echoes many of the points the authors in this section make about the legacies of wartime collaborators in postwar East Asian politics. In section 1, the authors are attempting to "[b]ring attention to spaces where imperial control ceased but was not really replaced" (p. 18). There were often conflicts about how to handle collaborators in postwar East Asia. The Tokyo War Crimes Trials were so different from Nuremburg (see Tim Brook's article "The Tokyo...

A concept analysis of nurses in conflicts after World War II.

We analysed nurses' experiences during military conflicts since World War II. Nurses have successfully reduced morbidity and mortality in populations affected by wars; despite centuries of nurses' global involvement in wars, there is limited knowledge about their experiences. We used Rodger's evolutionary concept analysis methodology to understand the antecedents, attributes, consequences, context and implications of nurses' war-related experiences. We analysed data from quantitative and qualitative research, media reports, editorials, historical reviews and published accounts of nurses' experiences in many locations, including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Korea, Kosovo, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Russia, Somalia, Ukraine and Vietnam. Two antecedent conditions preceded nurses' war involvement: actively responding to human suffering and having resources for readiness. Nurses were defined by five attributes: sacrifice, resourcefulness, tunnel-vision, survival mindset and comradery. We also found evidence for seven consequences; nurses saved lives (reduced morbidity and mortality), however, some nurses faced professional burnout/disillusionment, restricted practice authority, isolation and post-traumatic stress after war. In addition, growth and pacifism were consequences for some nurses who were exposed to war. The findings of our concept analysis illustrate how nurses have fulfilled critical life-saving roles, but some nurses' post-war experiences were debilitating, stigmatized and unsupported. We conclude that research about the resourcefulness, innovations and resiliency nurses have developed during wars is essential, and professional support mechanisms must be developed to prevent post-traumatic stress, burnout and attrition from the profession. Governments can use utilize the knowledge nurses developed during wars to expand emergency preparedness skillsets and promote nurses as the leaders of international efforts to promote peace. Patients, service users, caregivers and members of the public were not involved in conducting this concept analysis or preparing the manuscript. By understanding nurses' involvement with post-WWII conflicts, we have demonstrated the significant public health contributions, challenges and personal and professional growth experienced by nurses. Nurses' war-related knowledge should be utilized to innovate healthcare practices during disasters and to advise policymakers in developing, implementing and evaluating peace-promoting operations.

‘In spite of everything, life is still beautiful!’ war and postwar experiences in Estonia on the example of Oskar Nõmmela’s life story (1893–1969)

ABSTRACT This article formulates some key aspects of the experiences of Estonian men who served in World War I, and went through subsequent critical situations during and after World War II–including interrogation, imprisonment, and forced settlement. By focusing on the case study of Oskar Nõmmela (1893–1969), the article analyzes various coping mechanisms and strategies – especially those relating to interpersonal relationships – that were used in difficult situations. We investigate how successful or unsuccessful these strategies turned out to be in aiding Nõmmela to navigate between hope and despair; and how the strategies evolved throughout his life from one critical situation to another.

The Image of the Perception of the Japanese and Japan in the Pre-Revolutionary Experience of Artistic Reflection: The Genre Aspect

The relevance of the research is determined by the interest of modern literary criticism in the imagological aspects and the problem of developing a research strategy in relation to this kind of texts. The novelty of the work is defined by the genre approach to the study of the image of perception of Japan and the Japanese in Russian pre-revolutionary literature dedicated to the events of the Russian-Japanese war, the introduction of previously unknown texts into scientific circulation, a comparative analysis of narrative strategies that determine the genre specificity of each text. The purpose of the work is to explicate the genre originality of works on the RussianJapanese war, which determines the perspective of the pre-revolutionary artistic reception of the image of perception of Japan and the Japanese in Russia. The methodology is based on an interdisciplinary approach that underpins the imagological paradigm of research. The authors rely on Russian and Chinese works on the history of Japan, Russian-Japanese relations, ethnography of Japan, ethnopsychology, religious studies, on the broad context of imagological research; apply historical-literary, comparative-historical, immanent analysis methods. The complex research is based on modern works concerning the problems of genre studies. The article traces the path of transformation of perceptions of Japan and the Japanese in Russian literature since the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of 20th century which is determined by the genre task of the works: from the first travelogues to the jingoistic notes in periodicals and further to “pacifist” fiction and post-war artistic experiences – the spy and detective text by A. I. Kuprin, the military diaries by V. V. Veresaev, a children’s ethnographic story by I. I. Mitropolsky. We conclude that the tragic and inglorious experience of the Russian-Japanese war pushed the horizons of not only the scientific comprehension of Japan and the Japanese by Russian scientists but also giving development to various genres of Russian literature opened the artistic possibilities of new ethnocultural and ethnopsychological experiences of self-knowledge of Russianness and Russians.

Dziennik jako forma życia. Zapiski Józefa Hena. Genezy, genealogie, archiwa

The article discusses the impact of the experience of the Holocaust and the war on the form and issues of eight volumes of Józef Hen’s literary journals I am not Afraid of Sleepless Nights. The “long shadow” of these traumatic events shaped both the history of their delayed origins, the form of the notes, and their main themes. The poetics of these diaries is based on the structure of a collage, which, on the one hand, connects the past and present, and on the other, it combines the chronicle of everyday life with night-time meditations, memories and reflections on history, wartime and post-war experiences and the Jewish fate. Hen contrasts these devastating forces of the twentieth century with his own philosophy of life, which is a special form of Jewish vitalism. The diary thus becomes a symbolic form of survival in the form of a literary, autobiographical work. All the volumes of Hen’s journals seem to be permeated by the effort to record, preserve and perpetuate what is characterized by the fragility and susceptibility to the corrosion of time – that is, life itself. Ultimately, thanks to this effort, the trace of the author’s own presence is also preserved. The collage poetics of the record, resulting from “composing”, makes it part of the work itself. The subject is transformed in it into an idiomatic “gesture”, i.e., a trace of a constantly repeated expressive act, which seems to retain traces of the author’s expressive gestures, his preferences, choices and ways of seeing, and the modality of individual feeling recreated in the text. In a way, it can be said that, according to Hen, journals are written to preserve the specific literary composition of existence. A diary understood as a “form of life” preserves a certain inalienable ethical moment, contained both in the need to give a certain order to the biography and to save the life experience itself – in its various forms. While history and everyday life constitute a source of a constantly reborn fear in Hen’s diaries, as they seem to still emerge in the long shadow of the Holocaust and the possibility of its possible repetition recognized in many events, the very ability to transform them into a diaristic record counteracts it therapeutically. For despite the fact that life can be destroyed, thanks to writing – as Hen’s final lesson seems to sound – something can always remain and survive.

Half-freedom : post-war experiences of Liberated Hungarian Survivors of German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen (1945)

My goal is to explore how the members of the liberated Hungarian inmates lived in "half freedom" in German DP camp Hillersleben, and Swedish sanatoria camps right after the liberation of the concentration camps and from May to August 1945 until they first managed to leave their temporary camp dwellings. My narrative is based mostly on ego-documents of Hungarian survivors of Bergen-Belsen, which is part of a research project on the Hungarian inmates of Belsen and their liberation and return.

The Turkish Kadro pioneers of a Balkan Dependencia in the interwar period: rethinking underemployment, monetary policy, and technology

The Kadro movement-cum-journal (January 1932–January 1935) was formed by a few Turkish economists and intellectuals sensitive to Balkan affairs and with post-war revolutionary experiences in Moscow, Berlin, and Munich. The Kadro was first and foremost developmentalist, given the circumstances of an undeveloped country situated in an unstable region caught in the repercussions of the collapsing world market. It was an innovative cluster open to team work to put forward an international political economic perspective for advancing economic thought and policy during the Great Depression. It is thus among the precursors of Latin American dependency theory.

Sociodemographic Factors in Combat Compensation Seekers for Delayed-Onset PTSD.

Sociodemographic factors can sometimes be more contributory in relation to war-related stress-induced disorder treatment and compensation-seeking than health-related factors. However, their impact is often overlooked. This study explores a relationship between sociodemographic factors and diagnoses of combat-related stress-induced disorders in combat compensation seekers for delayed-onset PTSD (DOPTSD). Between June 2002 and August 2004, at the Regional Centre for Psychotrauma Zagreb, University Hospital Dubrava, the expert team evaluated subjects to diagnose DOPTSD and other comorbid illnesses. The study included 831 war veterans who experienced combat stress during the 1991-1995 Croatian war. They were subjects of psychiatric treatments before applying for compensation. The researchers derived results from data collected during the expert evaluation for compensation seeking, which included a structured diagnostic procedure. The diagnostic procedure included structured clinical interviews that also provided sociodemographic (age, sex, education, employment, marital status, number of children, and place of residence) and other data (heredity, medical history of physical and mental disorders, history of social functioning, combat-related and post-traumatic experiences, symptoms, their duration, intensity, and treatment). After the interview, the Clinical Global Impression Scale, the Clinician-Administrated PTSD Scale, and the Mississippi Scale for Combat-Related PTSD were applied. Final diagnoses of a lifetime or current PTSD and stress-related disorders according to the ICD-10 were established after fulfilling psychiatric and psychometric criteria. Multiple logistic regression determined independent contributions of sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, education, employment and marital status, and parental status), war (duty duration and physical disabilities from combat injuries), and post-war experiences (outpatient treatment duration and the number of hospitalizations) in predicting compensation eligibility. Better-educated combat compensation seekers were 2.23 times more likely to have eligible psychiatric diagnoses. Furthermore, married veterans were 2.22 times more likely to have eligible diagnoses than single compensation seekers. Likewise, hospitalization status was a risk factor concerning post-war experiences for eligible psychiatric diagnoses. Marriage and higher education are accounted for longer DOPTSD in the group of combat compensation seekers with diagnoses eligible for compensation as a protective factor. A higher number of hospitalizations was also predictive because of more severe PTSD symptomatology as a risk factor. Higher education, marriage, and the higher number of the hospitalizations contributing to war-related DOPTSD diagnoses eligible for compensation.

The Best Years of Our Lives

Hugo Friedhofer’s widely acclaimed score to Best Years of Our Lives successfully evokes an American sound that simultaneously universalizes and authenticates this story of post-war readjustment. He accomplishes this through harmonic and rhythmic approaches indebted to Aaron Copland, but also borrows stylistic devices from jazz, as filtered through the likes of George Gershwin and other concert composers who used the jazz idiom. Friedhofer’s specific use of leitmotif in this film emphasizes the common over the specific, further unifying three stories and generalizing shared post-war experiences.

Contexts behind differentiated responses to contract farming and large-scale land acquisitions in Central Mozambique: Post-war experiences, social relations, and power balance of local authorities

The question of whether or not contract farming (CF) can be an alternative pathway for agricultural commercialization in Africa has been discussed widely, particularly after the world-wide large-scale land acquisitions (LSLA) of 2008/9. This article attempts to reposition the discussions into local settings by illustrating context-specific pictures of external interventions including that of CF and LSLA, in a case of soybean project in Central Mozambique. Two villages under the same project were comparatively analyzed focusing on differentiated political reactions “from below”: the local people in one village were hesitant about participating in CF and resisted a CF company and LSLA, whereas the local people in the other village actively participated in CF, and incorporated LSLA into their livelihoods. The findings based on fieldwork suggest that in the former village, post-war experiences of rural revitalization, a self-supporting network based on matrilineal lineage, and overlapping roles of traditional and political authorities were a foundation for the resistance. In contrast, in the latter village, historically accumulated dependency on external interventions, social differentiation based on money-oriented capitalistic relations, and concentration of power on a local leader were a foundation of incorporation.

Revisiting Korean Slums in Postwar Japan: Tongne and Hakkyo in the Zainichi Memoryscape

Korean shantytowns existed in every large Japanese city from the postwar years through the late 1960s. Japanese people recall them as secluded, dirty, impoverished, and dangerous. To many scholars, their existence confirms the transwar continuity of Japanese oppression of underclass ethnic minorities. But zainichi Koreans who grew up in such slums, which they called tongne, offer inspirational stories and fond memories of living there. This article sheds light on Koreans’ postwar experiences by discussing the important sociopolitical functions of the tongne and their continuing symbolism among the zainichi population. Viewing the tongne as zainichi's postliberation place of origin and paying attention to the reproduction of its meanings in hakkyo (schools) helps us understand the uneven terrain of power relationships in zainichi society, including why the Chongryun exercised great cultural power at least until the 1970s.

Beyond East and West by John C. H. Wu

Reviewed by: Beyond East and West by John C. H. Wu Zhixi Wang Beyond East and West. By John C. H. Wu. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2018. Pp. xxv, 384. $27.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-10366-8.) Over the recent decades, while there has been a growing interest in the history of Chinese Catholicism, particularly in Late Ming and Early Qing, not enough scholarly attention in the English-speaking world has been given to Chinese Catholic elites in the twentieth century. Limited treatments include an edited book by Ruth Hayhoe and Lu Yongling on Ma Xiangbo (1840–1939), who founded the Jesuit Aurora University in Shanghai in 1903, and Ernest Brandewie contributed to a monograph in 2007 on Bishop Thomas Tian Gengxi (Tien Keng-hsin), S.V.D. (1890–1967), and Paul P. Mariani in 2011 on Bishop Ignatius Gong Pinmei (Kung Pinmei) (1901–2000). Given the scarcity of the academic outputs in the field, Chinese Catholic elites’ autobiographies, such as John C. H. Wu’s (Wu Jingxiong, 1899–1986) Beyond East and West, would be indispensable for us to hear Chinese Catholics’ authentic voices in a turbulent century. Originally published by Sheed and Ward—a Catholic publishing house—back in 1951 and republished by University of Notre Dame Press in 2018, Beyond East and West may be considered the only one of its kind in terms of not only the original language—English—this Chinese Catholic author used for writing but also the multiple identities he owned: Protestant-turned Catholic, professor of law, judge, lawyer, scholar (of jurisprudence, Chinese philosophy, literature, and religious studies), official of the Nationalist central government in the Republic of China, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Republic of China to the Vatican (1947–49), friend of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States), Oriental philosophical mentor to—and correspondence partner of— Thomas Merton (one of the most well-known Catholic writers of the twentieth [End Page 152] century), and a father of thirteen children. Wu was also known as the “Chinese [G. K.] Chesterton,” and this spiritual autobiography can be well named, this reviewer claims, as the Chinese Augustinian Confessions. While it consists of, as in the original edition, “A Note of Introduction” by the Catholic writer Francis Joseph Sheed (Sheed and Ward was named after him and his wife Maisie Ward), two main parts with twenty-one chapters plus a Prologue and an Epilogue, and Wu’s Explanations and Acknowledgments, this new edition also includes both a long, helpful Foreword by John Wu, Jr. (one of Wu’s sons), and an additional chapter, “European Reminiscences,” that was left out in the original edition for reasons of space. The book is arranged chronologically. It starts from the stories of Wu’s birth, childhood, earlier formative education, and marriage in Ningbo city around the turn of the twentieth century through the early Republican period (Chapters 1–6), before turning to his conversion to Methodism in 1917 during his studying at the Comparative Law School (at Shanghai) of the Methodist Soochow University (Chapter 7). As the narrative progresses, the reader will then follow him to the Michigan Law School at Ann Arbor and later to the University of Paris in the early 1920s (Chapters 8–9). Upon his return to China in the mid-1920s, Wu became a law professor in his Alma Mater, before being appointed a judge in the newly born “Shanghai Provisional Court” and then becoming a lawyer in the 1930s (Chapters 10–11). Wu’s almost two decades of drifting away from the Christian faith since his American period ended up converting to Catholicism in the winter of 1937 immediately following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (Chapters 12–15). The rest of the book then recounts his wartime and postwar experiences, religious and secular, in Hong Kong, Guilin, Chongqing, Shanghai, the Vatican City, and other more cities across Europe, up until the year 1949 when the Communist took over China (Chapters 16–21). Wu’s life was entangled between the East and the West, Chinese religions and Western Protestantism/Catholicism, the secular and the religious, the material and the spiritual...

German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century ed. by Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar

Reviewed by: German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century ed. by Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar M. Blake Morley German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp vii + 381. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0822966753. Twentieth-century Balkan history is often presented through the legacies of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. By the end of World War I, both empires ceased to exist. The essays in Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar's edited volume take up the question of Germany's involvement in southeastern Europe when this imperial void presented itself. This work brings to light an important chapter in Germany's destructive drive for power during the first half of the twentieth century while highlighting the ways that ethnic Germans from the Balkans and West Germany came to terms with this tragic history in the postwar period. The book is organized into an introductory essay that familiarizes the reader with the history of German-Balkan relations, followed by two sections of essays linked by the themes of war, empire, migration, and memory. The first section, titled "War and Empire in the Balkans," focuses on German-Balkan entanglements during the first half of the twentieth century and how actors [End Page 614] within the region negotiated Germany's political, economic, and military ambitions. David Hamlin opens this section with a challenge to Fritz Fischer's thesis that Germany's war aims during World War I reflected longstanding prewar ambitions for domination. Rather, Hamlin argues that German-Romanian relations during the war, which culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Bucharest in 1918, were dictated more by Germany's need to fortify its wartime domestic economy. Bernd Robionek's study of the economic cooperative Avis, an ethnic German organization in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, shows how attempts to fortify a local self-sufficient ethnic community aligned with Germany ultimately forced the cooperative into a double bind caught between the shifting economic demands and racial policies of the Nazi state and the complex realities of an ethnically diverse Yugoslavia. Christian Promitzer explores Germany's entanglements in the Balkans through the development of Nazi racial science (Rassenkunde), highlighting the often-overlooked links between SS racial policies and earlier anthropological studies of Serbian prisoners of war during World War I and German ethnographic research throughout southeastern Europe in the interwar period. Mirna Zakić's essay focuses on the "misremembering" of Prince Eugene of Savoy among ethnic Germans in the Serbian Banat as they sought to position themselves as equals in the Third Reich and how the Prince's image was put to work to support Nazi claims in the Balkans during the 1930s and 1940s. Mark Biondich's chapter on the Holocaust in southeastern Europe shows how the scale of genocidal violence in Croatia was not the result of Nazi policies alone but more so determined by preexisting anti-Jewish and anti-Serb domestic policies of the Ustaša, the Independent State of Croatia's (NDH) fascist regime. Closing out the first section of essays, Kateřina Králová and Jiří Kocián's analysis of Holocaust survivor testimonies demonstrates the inherent difficulties of overcoming traumatic memory and how this process is challenged by different attitudes toward German collective guilt and individual responsibility, attitudes ultimately determined by whether the survivor came from an occupied state or a collaborationist state in southeastern Europe. The second section, "Aftershocks and Memories of War," turns to the question of memory as the collected essays explore German-Balkan entanglements in the postwar period. Jannis Panagiotidis adds a global dimension to these entanglements by showing how Gottschee Germans utilized preexisting transcontinental business and familial networks in North America to negotiate the complexities of postwar migration and German identity. Gregor Kranjc's chapter continues the discussion on Gottscheer German postwar experiences by focusing on the ways individual traumatic memories of loss and suffering from different events before, during, and after World War II allowed members of the Gottscheer diaspora in the United States to develop a collective memory of victimization that occluded their own Nazi past. Similarly, Gaëlle Fisher's essay...