Post-war History Research Articles

Shaping and Reshaping Primo Levi: The Affiliative Postgeneration Biographic Novel

ABSTRACT Since 2005, Italy has witnessed a boom in the production of graphic life narratives dedicated to both well-known, internationally established public figures and victims of Italy’s post-war history, whose memory has only recently started to be negotiated. Some of these figures have even inspired several artists, who have approached the life narrative genre from different angles. A particularly striking case is that of Primo Levi, whose life and works are the subject of three graphic narratives. In this article, we explore the extent to which these narratives address the complex figure of Primo Levi and how the multimodal medium of the graphic narrative can extend the transgenerational reach of postmemory by negotiating the memory of first-generation Holocaust survivors.

IX. Die Juristische Fakultät der Universität Heidelberg im ersten Nachkriegsjahrzehnt – Forschungen und Berichte aus dem öffentlichen Recht

Summary This article aims to shed light on how the resumption of research and teaching in public law at the Faculty of Law in Heidelberg developed after the collapse of National Socialist rule. In particular, the personnel, research and teaching are examined. Thus, the history of Heidelberg University will be further elaborated in a specific field of research. Furthermore, the article provides another small building block for an overall picture of post-war history at the 16 law faculties in the early Federal Republic. The end of National Socialist rule did not lead to a “Stunde Null”; rather, university operations were resumed with remarkable speed within the existing institutional structures. After the horrors of the Second World War, the Heidelberg law faculty set out to reconnect with the Weimar era. On the other hand, the emerging new legal system created points of contact for future-oriented research and teaching.

Из архива профессора Д. П. Григорьева: письма профессора А. Я. Микея

This article completes the publication of the «Memories of Mineralogists» of the repressed Professor A. Ya. Mickey, found by the author in the Professor D. P. Grigoriev Archive, kept in the Russian Mineralogical Society. From the correspondence the motivations and life circumstances in which the texts were written become clear. A. Ya. Mickey’s letters are deciphered, attributed and briefly commented. The relevance of the article lies in the need to uphold the priorities of Russian science. The aim of the work is to cover as fully as possible the professional activities of repressed mineralogists as an important component of the history of Russian science. Mention of I. M. Beznarytny, A. K. Boldyrev, P. V. Bryantsev, V. I. Vernadsky, P. Groth, S. A. Zaborovsky, V. A. Zilbermints, L. L. Ivanov, E. P. Kastner, V. I. Kryzhanovsky, E. K. Lazarenko, N. I. Lebedev, A. V. Nechaev, I. I. Tanatar, V. V. Tikhomirov, E. K. Ustiev, N. M. Fedorovsky, G. K. Feldman, A. E. Fersman, P. N. Chirvinsky, and I. I. Shafranovsky should attract the attention of readers. Attention is drawn to the importance of personal archives in the study of the history of science. The of Professor D. P. Grigoriev Archive in letters and other documents reflects several decades of the pre-war and post-war history of Russian mineralogy.

“A Bloody Migrant Who Thinks He Can Run a Union”: The Case of Jerzy Bielski, a Migrant Trade Unionist in 1950s Australia

Jerzy Bielski, a Polish displaced person (DP) who resettled in Australia in 1949, was the first post-war migrant to work for an Australian trade union. He was recruited in 1951 by the Australian Workers Union (AWU) as a migrant unionist and, some years later, established his own migrant trade union: the New Citizens Council. The council faced heavy criticism from within the trade union movement, including by right-wing DPs who, acting as Cold War warriors, were instrumental in the Labor Party split in the mid-1950s. Ultimately, this article argues that migrant trade union activism has a longer post-war history than is commonly acknowledged.

Contested Memories in the Border Town of Trieste: A Comparative Analysis of the Risiera di San Sabba and The Foiba di Basovizza

Abstract This article analyses the Risiera di San Sabba, the museum of the only Nazi concentration camp in Italy with a crematorium, and the Foiba di Basovizza, the prominent memorial commemorating the mass killing of Italians carried out by Yugoslav Partisans, examining how they exhibit Italian complicity with Nazi Germany and shed light on the politics of memory in Italy’s post-war history. Through a theoretical framework grounded on theories of nationalism, the argument that will be put forward is that the mentioned museums represent fascism as an alien object and Italians as victims/freedom fighters, neglecting Italy’s direct involvement in the Holocaust. Concluding remarks will suggest that the historical lack of critical analysis enabled the juxtaposition of the memory of the Holocaust with the Foibe, paving the ground for the proliferation of post-fascist historical accounts and their institutionalisation as manifest in Italy’s current political landscape.

Law’s Logistical Media: The Installation of the File System in the Postwar Japanese Prosecutor’s Office

AbstractThis article traces the fraught history of the file system’s adoption by the Japanese Public Prosecutor’s Office (PPO) from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, when the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ), the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, decentralized the PPO’s power and transformed it into a “democratic” judicial agency. This is also a postwar history of the introduction of Taylorism-derived scientific management to white collar office work and Weberian visions of bureaucratic rationality into government offices, as part of the democratization of public administration steered by various sections within GHQ. Among the key changes was a guarantee of the right to receive a “speedy trial.” The essay argues that, while that guarantee was meant to secure human-rights protections for the accused, the file system introduced to the PPO translated the constitutional imperative of the rights of the accused into the pursuit of efficient scientific management, in which democracy was an operationalized socio-technical achievement. This logistical channel led to the co-emergence of democracy and modern rational bureaucracy, with each evincing mutual cause and effect. American reforms invested technicality with the promise of “democracy,” but as this essay shows, senior Japanese officials envisioned it as a means to rebuild a centralized information network.

Liberation, Resettlement, and Looting in Postwar Memoirs from Poland

Abstract The postwar months and years in Central and Eastern Europe were marked by mass migrations caused by border changes, the return of many refugees and former prisoners to their homes, and many peoples’ search for new places to settle down in the wake of war. Population movements were often marked by a kind of social vacuum that was frequently characterized by lawlessness, plunder, and violence to which civilians were exposed. This article explores the historical and social processes at play in one case of postwar resettlement through an analysis of over one thousand memoirs written during the first three postwar decades in Poland. The memoirs were collected as part of three competitions held between 1956 and 1970. The analysis focuses on the experiences of migrants settling in western Poland in order to examine the phenomenon of mass robbery in its various forms. From both from an individual and institutional perspective, an exploration of the dynamics of looting reveals the complexity of settlement against the chaotic backdrop of the postwar period. As such, this analysis contributes to the postwar history of Poland and the scholarship on looting that accompanies armed conflicts.

Three policy perspectives on Japanese female employment

With a detailed historical analysis of postwar Japanese female employment, this article presents three underlying policy perspectives that shape the fact that women have less chance for high-quality employment despite the rising labor force participation rate. The three assumptions of women's role in policy-making are as follows: (1) women as housewives—dependent on males, do not earn a living salary and are thus marginalized in the labor market; (2) women as individuals pursuing gender equality should be treated without discrimination in the workplace; and (3) women as key drivers for economic growth can contribute to the solution to labor shortages. The postwar history of Japanese female employment is full of interaction among these three policy perspectives. Generally, it passes through phases of the dominance of the housewife perspective, the reformation from the equality perspective and the counterattack from the housewife perspective, as well as the mainstreaming of the economic actor perspective.

Historical institutionalism in action: Incremental prevalence of Transit-Oriented Development in Tokyo 1945-1982

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) increasingly refers to global practices integrating land-use planning, urban development, and transit today, but their historical experiences have received little attention from the discussion, not to mention any theoretical elaboration with institutional thinking. The literature identifies Tokyo as a global exemplar of TOD as a new term for enduring practice. However, why and how Tokyo’s practice uniquely relies on private railway conglomerates remains underexplored. This article elaborates on a historical institutionalist approach using an inductive process tracing technique to understand Tokyo’s postwar history from 1945 to 1982, emphasizing incremental changes induced by endogenous forces. The exploration takes precedent insights into the private railway conglomerate-led TOD practice as an informal institution of “standard operating practice” and refines them with postwar history and supplementary prewar episodes. It finds that contingent policy choices allowed conglomerates to dismantle their geographical and financial constraints from prewar regulations. The actions reinforced their institutional privilege in public affairs as a foundation for subversive railway privatization reforms from 1982 onward. The finding thus identifies a socio-political dimension of TOD shaped by agents across sectors, developing the current methodology in planning studies and contributing to the debates on defining TOD.

Powrót do ruin. O atrakcyjności niemieckiego powojnia

Return to the Ruins: The Appeal of Post-War Germany One of the most important dates in Germany’s postwar history was May 6, 1955, when the Federal Republic joined the North Atlantic Alliance, an event which perfectly reflected the dynamics of geopolitical changes that had taken place in the ten years since the end of World War II. The article focuses on the depictions of the German civilian population in selected motion pictures which, at least in theory, do not hold ordinary Germans responsible for war crimes. A look at the German war-torn landscape and its functionality will play an important role in the analysis, as it is against this background that the key plot lines are developed. Emphasis is placed on the allegorical and metaphorical significance of the ruins and their hidden meanings. The films under investigation are works created independently of German cinematography (except for two recent international co-productions). This is because the purpose of the analysis is to present the changing attitudes of filmmakers representing nations hostile to Germany until 1945 to the civilian population of ruined German cities. These attitudes, it is worth emphasizing, sometimes stand in opposition to the prescribed perception of Germany and Germans resulting from Cold War political realities and dictating that the nation be treated with sympathy, trust, friendship, and love as a new ally.

Cracow’s Glinik – World War II Executions Place, Forgotten over the Years and Restored to the Collective Memory. Preliminary Results of Archaeological-and-Exhumation Research

The article is the first English-language publication presenting the topic of one of the places of executions during World War II in Cracow, bearing the local name of Glinik. It was located in a clay mining site for a brick factory operating nearby before the War. Executions were carried out in Glinik from mid-November 1939, basically until the end of 1943. The victims were mainly brought from the Cracow prisons. In the post-War years, it was decided not to carry out exhumations in Glinik. Only several stone obelisks were erected there, and in 1967 a larger memorial was built to commemorate the victims shot in Glinik. The area was only granted the status of a war cemetery in 2012. In the years 2013–2015, exploration works were conducted in the area of Glinik using archaeological research methods. This work was focused on finding the exact location of the place of executions, carrying out exhumations and reburying of the human remains. As a result, 25 graves were located, and the remains of 125 people were excavated from these graves. In many cases, small artefacts were found with them. In only one case, was it possible to identify the remains by name, based on a found identity document. And she is the only certain identified victim of Glinik. The anthropological analysis showed that the vast majority of victims were men (114 persons), while there were 11 women. The cause of death in most cases was a gunshot to the head. All the skeletons were subjected to DNA tests, with the aim of possible future identification of the victims. Their remains were reburied in an interreligious ceremony in Glinik, in two mass graves in the foundation part of the existing monument there. An important stage in restoring the memory of those shot in Glinik were such undertakings as the renovation of the memorial in 2016–2017, which is the dominant feature of the war cemetery. One of these commemorative activities was also an exhibition devoted to the events in Glinik, organized at the Museum of the Home Army in Cracow in 2020, together with accompanying publications. In preparation, there is also a historical-and-archaeological monograph devoted to the war and post-war history of Glinik.

Akcja H-T 1951 r. Zarys problematyki

In 1951, the communist governments of Poland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics concluded an agreement to exchange some territories. Poland transferred lands located in the Hrubieszów and Tomaszów counties in the Lublin Voivodeship in the upper Bug basin (the so-called Grzęda Sokalska). The USSR gave up the area in the Bieszczady Mountains east of the upper reaches of the San River, including the town of Ustrzyki Dolne. The mentioned areas were part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Areas of 480 km2 for each side were exchanged. Poland and the USRS had to evict their citizens from the ceded areas and take away their movable property. Soviet Ukraine resettled 32,066 people. Poland over 14 thousand its citizens. Both sides had to provide care and state assistance to the displaced population. However, the grief for the lost „small homelands” remained among Poles and Ukrainians. Only a few managed to return to their hometowns in the Bieszczady Mountains after 1957, including: to Łobozewo, Teleśnica Oszwarowa and Polana. The return involved a change of citizenship. The exchange of some territories is sometimes referred to as “Action H-T”, from the first letters of the names of the Hrubieszów and Tomaszów counties from which Polish citizens were expelled. In turn, the term “Action-51” appears in Ukrainian literature. The border change made in 1951 was the largest in the post-war history of Poland.

Semito-Hamitic or Afro-Asiatic consonantism and lexicon: Episodes of a comparative research II: The “old school” of Egypto-Semitic (Part 2: Post-war phase)

My retrospective survey on the past and present trends in the comparative research of Semito-Hamitic / Hamito-Semitic (SH / HS, resp.) or Afro-Asiatic (AA) phonology (first of all consonantism), root structure and lexicon has been segmented into eleven episodes according to diverse (often overlapping in time) trends. This series of studies is now under way and will be presented part by part in a series of papers. The present paper surveys the post-war history (second half of the 20th century) of a rather introverted and fossilized special branch of comparative studies that has been arbitrarily focusing on a forced comparison of just Semitic and Egyptian, which was split off for more than a whole century by now from mainstream Semito-Hamitic studies at the end of the 19th century.

Yugoslavia and the Restitution of Monetary Gold After the Second World War

During the Second World War, the Axis states looted a great deal of gold in various forms, both from individuals and countries. Following that war, the western allies established the Tripartite Gold Commission (TGC) to organize the restitution of monetary gold that had belonged to central banks in occupied Europe. One of the claimant countries was Yugoslavia. Drawing upon hitherto unused TGC records, the article examines the looting of Yugoslav monetary gold and its restitution via the TGC, which is a little-known episode in postwar history. Of the four Yugoslav claims submitted to the TGC in 1947, the majority were recognized as valid, yet the final adjudication was not published until 1958. The reasons for this protracted process of restitution and for the rejection of some of the Yugoslav claims are set out and note is made of the issue's recrudescence in the 1990s, when the TGC sought to distribute the final Yugoslav share. The break-up of Yugoslavia made this concluding allocation of gold a demanding task, and it did not end until 2004. By comparing it with other claimant countries, the article demonstrates that in some ways Yugoslavia was in a better position than the states behind the Iron Curtain.

Correction to: Sengo nihon no ‘kakushin’ seiryoku—teikō to suibō no seijishi (Reformists in Postwar Japan: A Postwar History of Opposition and Decline)

Correction to: <i>Sengo nihon no ‘kakushin’ seiryoku—teikō to suibō no seijishi</i> (Reformists in Postwar Japan: A Postwar History of Opposition and Decline)

Vision and practice: the 1967 Robson Report on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government

ABSTRACT This article critically evaluates a 1967 consultancy report on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) by Professor William A. Robson. Robson, a pioneer of public administration science based at the London School of Economics his whole academic life, provided an in-depth analysis of the state of the Japanese capital during its high-speed growth spurt and at the beginning of the socialist Minobe prefectural administration. While many of Robson's assessments and criticisms were poignant, his report failed to appreciate contextual intricacies as well as Tokyo's distinctive path of urban development. A re-reading of the report with this in mind expands our understanding of the Japanese capital's postwar history more than 50 years after the report's publication. Its critical assessment also contributes to our understanding of how urban knowledge ‘travels’ across geographies.

Heroes or Outcasts? The Long Saga of the State's Recognition of the Greek Resistance (1944–2006)

This article explores how the Greek state created and implemented the legislation relating to recognition of the National Resistance during three different transitional periods of the country's postwar history: civil war, dictatorship and democracy. The article's principal argument is that recognition served as the main tool for building consecutive national narratives not only of the resistance but also of Greekness, determining who was included in and excluded from the nation. By addressing one of the most loaded political issues in Greek society and politics in its entirety, this article revisits Greece's postwar history, highlighting the ruptures and continuities over a long period.

Reverting to Restraint: A Keynesian Intermezzo and Neoliberalism in the Netherlands (1971–1977)

In line with recent studies revealing the role of neoliberalism in Dutch post-war history, this article highlights the influence of neoliberal ideas during the first half of the 1970s. In addition to a clear orientation towards supply-side economic policies and a firm tradition of fixed budgetary rules, the author emphasises the importance of Dutch monetarism in guiding Central Bank policies and prioritising monetary objectives such as price stability, fixed exchange rates and balance of payment equilibrium over Keynesian policy goals. A short-lived Keynesian intermezzo of countercyclical demand-management commenced in March 1974, after which rules-based, stability- and supply-side economic, financial and monetary policies started to regain the upper hand in 1976.

Из архива профессора Д. П. Григорьева: воспоминания об А. К. Болдыреве, В. А. Зильберминце, Л. Л. Иванове, В. И. Крыжановском, П. П. Сущинском и Н. М. Федоровском

The article publishes for the first time the memoirs of the Soviet mineralogist Prof. A. Ya. Mickey about the great Russian mineralogists and geologists A. K. Boldyrev, V. A. Zilbermints, L. L. Ivanov, V. I. Kryzhanovsky, P. P. Suschinsky and N. M. Fedorovsky, found by the author in the archive of Prof. D. P. Grigoriev, preserved at the Russian Mineralogical Society. All documents are transcribed, attributed and commented by the author. The relevance of the article lies in the necessity of defending priorities of the Russian science and technology. The purpose of the paper is to give a fullest coverage of professional and creative activities of the mentioned scientists as important episodes of the history of Russian mineralogy. The names of D. N. Artemyev, N. I. Bezborodko, V. I. Vernadsky, F. E. Dzerzhinsky, V. V. Dubyansky, A. V. Lavrsky, P. I. Lebedev, F. Yu. Levinson-Lessing, Ya. V. Samoylov, I. I. Tanatar, A. A. Tvalchrelidze, A. E. Fersman, E. S. Fedorov, P. N. Chirvinsky, and L. Ya. Yachevsky should appeal to a wide range of readers. The importance of personal archives in the study of the history of science is underlined. The archive of Professor D. P. Grigoriev in letters and other documents reflects a powerful layer of prewar and postwar history of Russian mineralogy. The article is dedicated to the 55th anniversary of the A. A. Chernov Museum of the N. P. Yushkin Institute of Geology.

Из архива профессора Д. П. Григорьева: к 160-летию со дня рождения В. И. Вернадского и 140-летию со дня рождения А. Е. Ферсмана

The article publishes previously unknown materials for the biographies of academicians V. I. Vernadsky and A. E. Fersman, found by the author in Professor D. P. Grigoriev’s archive, stored in the Russian Mineralogical Society. These are the memoirs of mineralogist A. Ya. Mikey, the autobiography of A. E. Fersman and his personal file, signed by academician V. A. Obruchev. All documents have been deciphered, annotated and commented on by the author. The relevance of the article is the need to defend the priorities of domestic science and technology. The purpose of the work is the fullest possible coverage of the professional and creative activities of V. I. Vernadsky and A. E. Fersman, the introduction of new documents into scientific circulation. These materials introduce information about the repressed Professor A. Ya. Mikey. The citation of famous scientists and travelers I. P. Aliber, A. I. Antipov, A. I. Brodsky, W. Wollaston, V. M. Goldschmidt, P. L. Dravert, L. L. Ivanov, V. I. Kryzhanovsky, S. M. Kurbatov, A. Lacroix, P. M. Leontovsky, G. M. Permikin, R. A. Prendel, K. Rosenbush, E. S. Fedorov, and L. A. Yachevsky should be interesting for a wide range of readers. Attention is drawn to the importance of personal archives in the study of the history of science. The archive of Professor D. P. Grigoriev in letters and other documents reflects a whole layer of pre- and post-war history of Russian mineralogy. The article is dedicated to the 160th anniversary of the birth of V. I. Vernadsky and the 140th anniversary of the birth of A. E. Fersman.