| 1. |
- Bortz, Olof
(författare)
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Early Reactions to Raul Hilberg's History of the Holocaust, 1961-7
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of contemporary history. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-0094 .- 1461-7250. ; 56:3, s. 745-765
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Raul Hilberg's landmark study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, was published in 1961. This article tells the story of the early response to Hilberg's book. For the first time, journalists, scholars, intellectuals and representatives of Jewish communities engaged in a debate about the history and political significance of the Holocaust. This debate preceded the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt's articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann and had more far-reaching consequences. Countless reviewers in the American press praised Hilberg's analysis of the bureaucratic administration of genocide. They noted his conclusion that all of German society was involved in the 'destruction process' and its implications for the contemporary West German leadership. Scholars also lauded Hilberg's book, although some of them criticized his inclusive perpetrator category and argued that he overlooked the importance of Nazi ideology and dictatorship. Hilberg's claim that Jewish victims abetted their persecutors gave rise to a debate in Jewish journals and newspapers. Writers and historians objected to Hilberg's purported ignorance of their experiences and of Jewish history. As this article shows, the reception of Hilberg's work marks a crucial step in the formation of the Holocaust as part of historical consciousness.
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| 2. |
- Byström, Mikael
(författare)
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When the State Stepped into the Arena : The Swedish Welfare State, Refugees and Immigrants 1930s-50s
- 2014
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Ingår i: Journal of contemporary history. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-0094 .- 1461-7250. ; 49:3, s. 599-621
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Immediately after the Second World War, the Swedish Social Democratic government launched a number of far-reaching social and economic programmes which led to the development of a modern welfare state. At the same time that social policy was increasingly focused towards developing a welfare system, its foreign policy developed in a new direction. The Swedish wartime refugee policy has been characterized as restrictive. But by the time the war had ended, there were approximately 185,000 refugees in Sweden. Most of those refugees went 'home' in 1945 but some of them stayed and in the early postwar years, foreigners were also 'imported' as workers as a result of labour shortages. One could say that Sweden's development into a country of immigration was contemporaneous with its development into a welfare state.
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| 3. |
- Götz, Norbert, et al.
(författare)
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Facing the Fascist Model : Discourse and the Construction of Labour Services in the USA and Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s
- 2006
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Ingår i: Journal of contemporary history. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-0094 .- 1461-7250. ; 41:1, s. 57-73
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As a reaction to the Great Depression of the 1930s, many countries introduced labour services. These institutions organized unemployed persons for unskilled work projects for the common good. Labour services focused on unemployed youth and had an explicit educational dimension. In the 1930s, nazi Germany offered the most important example of a labour service in practice. Therefore, all democratic countries with a labour service faced the problem of delimitation. This article examines the discussions and politics surrounding the labour services in the USA and Sweden against the backdrop of the ‘fascist model’. The transnational comparative study analyses how these two Western democracies reacted to this challenge. It demonstrates that the perceptions of the nazi labour service left a deep imprint on both democratic societies. Moreover, there are many parallels in the way in which the Third Reich impinged on their social policies in the 1930s and 1940s.
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| 4. |
- Hjorthén, Adam
(författare)
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Old World Homecomings : Campaigns of Ancestral Tourism and Cultural Diplomacy, 1945-66
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of contemporary history. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-0094 .- 1461-7250. ; 56:4, s. 1147-1170
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article examines the history of ancestral tourism and its development as a form of cultural diplomacy between 1945 and 1966. The phenomenon often referred to as 'roots tourism' has during the last decades increased in popularity, especially in Old World countries that historically have sent large numbers of people to North America. While previous scholarship has focused on its existential dimensions and its relation to the twenty-first century tourism and heritage economies, this article looks at how ancestral tourism grew out of European attempts at expanding the tourism industry after 1945. It studies the international spread of 'person-to-person' programs that sought to turn travelers into 'ambassadors', and the subsequent transformation of such initiatives into 'homecoming' campaigns through notions of co-descent, targeting Americans of European descent. By exploring the case of the 1966 Homecoming Year campaign in Sweden, the article shows that the attraction of ancestral tourism was grounded in its ability to combine economic and political incentives articulated in the Marshall Plan. It developed out of a liberal-democratic ideology that vested individual travelers with diplomatic agency. In the process, European tourist agencies calcified the notion that ancestral tourism served not only individual experiences, but also national economies and international relations.
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| 5. |
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| 7. |
- Martin, Benjamin George
(författare)
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'European Literature' in the Nazi New Order : The Cultural Politics of the European Writers' Union, 1941-3
- 2013
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Ingår i: Journal of contemporary history. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-0094 .- 1461-7250. ; 48:3, s. 486-508
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article examines the European Writers' Union, founded by Nazi Germany with representatives of 15 nations in October 1941, in the context of the history of the idea of European literature. It argues that this institution was a serious effort to re-order the international literary field into a European form, designed to help legitimate Nazi Germany's New Order Europe and to establish the cultural hegemony which German elites believed they alone deserved. Aware that what Pierre Bourdieu calls the literary field' had its own rules, the Nazis sought at Weimar to legitimate their bid to reorder European literary life by highlighting Germany's literary capital and by playing on the tensions within the interwar understanding of the concept of European literature. In this way, the European Writers' Union marked a historically significant intervention into the contested and high-stakes issue of what European literature' was. Drawing on work by scholars of comparative literature and cultural sociology, this article sets the Writers' Union in the transnational history of the literary field in twentieth-century Europe in order to interpret the rhetorical, ideological and practical strategies of what could be called the soft power' of Nazi Empire.
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| 8. |
- Nilsson, Mikael
(författare)
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Amber Nine : NATO's Secret Use of a Flight Path over Sweden and the Incorporation of Sweden in NATO's Infrastructure
- 2009
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Ingår i: Journal of contemporary history. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-0094 .- 1461-7250. ; 44:2, s. 287-307
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- All through the 1950s and 1960s NATO had secretly utilized a secret flight path, called Amber Nine, over the southwestern part of Sweden. The Swedish government condoned the frequent overflights, despite the fact that Sweden was at the time professing to follow a policy of neutrality in the power struggle between the two superpowers. This article argues that the frequent American use of Amber Nine should be viewed as a materialization of Sweden's consent to US hegemony, and that Amber Nine effectively made Swedish airspace and airports a part of NATO's infrastructure. It also makes the case that the arrangement contributed to the eradication of the credibility of Sweden's policy of neutrality, and that NATO's routine use of a flight path over Sweden, a non-NATO country, warrants a reinterpretation of Sweden's role in the Cold War on NATO's northern flank, as well as challenging the definition of the NATO alliance.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Nilsson, Mikael, 1976-
(författare)
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Credo and Totalitarianism : Attitudes to Communism, Nazism, Fascism, and the Franco and Salazar Regimes in a Swedish Catholic Journal, 1922–1945
- 2013
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Ingår i: Journal of contemporary history. - 0022-0094 .- 1461-7250.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article provides the first scholarly investigation of of the relationship between Swedish Catholicism and the totalitarian ideologies during the first half of the twentieth century. It shows that the journal viewed Communism very negatively; Nazism mostly negative, but occasionally in a positive way; Italian Fascism mostly positively; the authoritarian regimes in Spain and Portugal were portrayed in a very positive way. One tendency that was revealed by the study was that anti-Communism was in most cases combined with anti-Semitism. The journal never took a stand for, or defended, the Jews in Europe in their plight under National Socialism.
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