Werner Abelshauser, Jan-Otmar Hesse and Werner Plumpe, eds., Wirtschaftsordnung, Staat und Unternehmen. Neue Forschungen zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2003), 392 pp., €29.80 (pb), ISBN 3898612597.

Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis 1923–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0198208006.

Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Economic War against the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 268 pp., £27.50 (hb), ISBN 0521803292.

Reinhard Spree, ed.,Geschichte der deutschen Wirtschaft im 20.Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 232 pp., €12,50 (pb), ISBN 3406475698.

Hans Erich Volkmann, Ökonomie und Expansion. Grundzüge der NS-Wirtschaftspolitik (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003), €39.80 (hb), ISBN 3486567144

Iginio Ariemma, La casa brucia. I Democratici di Sinistra dal PCI ai giorni nostri (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 225 pp., €12.39 (pb), ISBN 8831773798.

Nicola Rossi, Riformisti per forza. La sinistra italiana tra 1996 e 2006 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 168 pp., €10.50 (pb), ISBN 8815084312.

Antonio Tatò, Caro Berlinguer, Note e appunti riservati di Antonio Tatò a Enrico Berlinguer. 1969–1984 (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 336 pp., €14.50 (pb), ISBN 880616595X.

Michele Salvati, Il partito democratico. Alle origini di un'idea politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 138 pp., €8.00 (pb), ISBN 8815096647.

Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003), 436 pp., £18.99 (pb), ISBN 0415196167.

L. J. Butler, Britain and Empire. Adjusting to a Post-imperial World (London: Tauris, 2000), 249 pp., £14.99 (pb), ISBN 186064449X.

Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 248 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0333791800.

Nicola Labanca, Oltremare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 569 pp., pb, €20.00, ISBN 8815089594.

Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 332 pp., $60.00 (hb), ISBN 0521386632.

Emanuelle Sibeud, Une Science Impériale pour l'Afrique? (Paris: EHESS, 2002), 356 pp., €32.00, ISBN 2713217849.

Mary Sutphen and Bridie Andrews, eds., Medicine and Colonial Identity (London: Routledge, 2003), 160 pp., £58.00 (hb), ISBN 0415288800.

Youssef Chatani, Dissension among Allies: Ernest Bevin's Palestine Policy between Whitehall and the White House, 1945–1947 (London: Saqi Books, 2002), 156 pp., £25.00 (hb), ISBN 0–86356–999.

Moshe Gat, Britain and the Conflict in the Middle East, 1964–1967: The Coming of the Six-Day War (London: Praeger, 2003), 216 pp., £39.99 (hb), ISBN 0–27597–514–2.

Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East, 2nd edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 684 pp., £19.95 (pb), ISBN 1–86064–811–8.

Robert McNamara, Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East 1952–1967: From the Egyptian Revolution to the Six Day War (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 308 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0–71465–397–7.

Jonathan Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 252 pp., £52.50 (hb), ISBN 0–33398–451–X.

Isabel Vincent, Hitler's Silent Partners. Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice (New York: W. Morrow, 1997), 351 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0688154255.

Angelo M. Codevilla, Between the Alps and a Hard Place. Switzerland in World War II and the Rewriting of History (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000), 248 pp., $27.95, ISBN 089526238X.

Walther Hofer and Herbert R. Reginbogin, Hitler, der Westen und die Schweiz, 1936–1945 (Zürich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2001), 690 pp., €45.00, ISBN 3858239925.

Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War, Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War (Zürich: Pendo, 2002), 600 pp., €29.90, ISBN 3858426032.

Jakob Tanner and Sigrid Weigel, eds., Gedächtnis, Geld und Gesetz. Vom Umgang mit der Vergangenheit des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Zürich: Vdf Hochschulverlag, 2002), 380 pp., €29.90, ISBN 3728126586.

Neville Wylie, Britain, Switzerland, and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 394 pp., £55.00, ISBN 0198206909.

In his wide-ranging and thought-provoking analysis of war and political violence in twentieth-century Europe, Ian Kershaw contrasts the immense violence wrought in Europe in the first half of the century with its relatively pacific history in the second half. Resisting the temptation to think of the violence of the first half of the century as a dysfunctional interruption to an underlying tale of economic, social and political progress, the author poses three astute questions concerning: (i) the causes of state-sponsored violence; (ii) the reasons why some states presided over low levels of violence while others presided over levels that ‘soared into the stratosphere’; and (iii) whether there was something qualitatively new – or ‘modern’ – about that violence. Kershaw describes his piece as ‘thinking aloud’ and I read it in that spirit. I find myself in broad agreement with what he has to say, although we probably disagree over matters of emphasis – for example in respect of the significance of violence perpetrated by European states in their colonies, or the propensity for violence of liberal democratic states. I suspect that there is more principled disagreement about the salience of ‘ideology’ in fomenting the mass violence of the twentieth century. I have organised my responses according to the three stages of his argument; I end by considering the nature of ‘peace’ in Europe in the second half of the century and by offering a few reflections on the conceptualisation of political violence.

-Your mother is a judge. It's her job to put a line through the past by passing sentence. I'm a historian. For me the past is a gold mine of surprises and possibilities.

-A gold mine?…A dunghill is more like it.

-Dunghills have their surprises too.

President Ion Iliescu [of Romania] has just announced the formation of an international expert commission charged with studying the history of the Holocaust in Romania between 1937 and 1951.

Historians are not judges. A historical commission is not a court of law.

I thank Steve Smith for his characteristically thoughtful and shrewd comments on my piece. And I am glad to note that he finds himself ‘in broad agreement’ with what I wrote.

This article takes the obvious link between war and political violence in twentieth-century Europe to ask three questions. Did the cause of such a massive upsurge in violence have roots extending beyond the technologies of modern warfare? What shapes the relative propensity of states and societies towards violence? And what is specifically ‘modern’ (other than the technology of destruction) about mass killing in the twentieth century? It finds answers in the use of popular sovereignty to justify unprecedented ethnic conflict, in a mix of ingredients linked to political culture and contested state legitimacy, and in the role of bureaucracy and technology in the orchestration of large-scale and state-sponsored violence.

Neven Andjelić, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The End of a Tragedy (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 228 pp., $34.95 (pb), ISBN 0-7146-8431-7.

Tom Gallagher, The Balkans after the Cold War. From Tyranny to Tragedy (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 256 pp., $114.95 (hb), ISBN 0-415-27763-9.

John Lampe and Mark Mazower, eds., Ideologies and National Identities. The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2004), 309 pp., $23.95 (pb), ISBN 9639241822.

James Pettifer, ed., The New Macedonian Question (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave and St. Martin's Press, 1999), 311 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0-333-92066-X.

Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation. The Attack on Yugoslavia (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 246 pp., $10.00 (pb), ISBN 1-85984-366-2.

Maria Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (London: Hurst & Co., 2004), 374 pp., £17.50 (pb), ISBN 1-850-65715-7.

Emerging from the obscurity of old-fashioned, specialised ‘area studies’, since 1989 the Balkans have attracted much attention from historians. The primary reason for that has been, tragically, the war in Yugoslavia and the emergence of a postwar order. Even the post-communist transitions (in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania) attracted less attention. Nevertheless, the field benefited substantially from the increased interest in the area, and lively debates took place on contested issues, sparked not least by hasty initial schemata (and stigmata) used by outside observers, such as ‘ancient hatreds’ and the like. Parallel to the attention paid to what was going on in Yugoslavia, and perhaps more productively in the long run, was the postmodern, postcolonial approach to Balkan history, inspired by Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans, which followed Edward Said's monumental Orientalism and appeared parallel to Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe. Such refreshing studies of Western representations of the region were later complemented by the internal perspective of how such representations were received, and coped with, in the region. A profusion of ‘cultural studies’ in the broadest sense followed, reflecting both the ongoing reshaping of Balkan identities and outside demand for such studies.

Alain Corbin, Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 359 pp., €8.69 (pb), ISBN 2080814532.

Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night. Music and the Great War (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), 598 pp., $49.95 (hb), ISBN 0520231589.

Jeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French. Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 266 pp., $21.95 (pb), ISBN 0822331373.

Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club. Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 388 pp., $55.00 (hb), ISBN 0226287351.

David Looseley, Popular Music in Contemporary France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 254 pp., $25.00 (pb), ISBN 1859736319.

Though undoubtedly thriving, the history of music is still a somewhat peripheral area of research which many historians dismiss as secondary. For many years publication in the subject remained the domain of two kinds of researchers, either musicologists – ‘insiders’ au fait with the technical vocabulary – or sociologists and practitioners of ‘cultural studies’ – ‘outsiders’ chiefly interested in the reception of musical phenomena and their role in the constitution of individual and collective identities. This division has become very blurred over the last few years, which have seen the emergence of a number of works with an interdisciplinary approach. But for most historians the history of music remains a largely unfamiliar theme which they struggle to include in any global social or cultural analysis. This struggle is apparent at two levels: first, the difficulty of developing guidelines to the historicity of musical events and, second, the difficulty of escaping the chronology of classical music, which is predicated on a succession of styles and composers. Based on these two points, this article will attempt to develop, through a transverse reading of certain recent works, some working hypotheses centring on the notion of a ‘landscape of sound’ or paysage sonore, as proposed some ten years ago by Alain Corbin, a notion which, it seems to me, may make a valuable contribution to rejuvenating the history of music.

Michel Lefebvre and Rémi Skoutelsky, Les Brigades Internationales. Images retrouvées (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003), 192 pp., €45.00 (hb), ISBN 2-02-052390-6.

Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 472 pp., £13.99 (pb), ISBN 0-521-45932-X.

Javier Rodrigo, Los campos de concentración franquistas. Entre la historia y la memoria (Madrid: Siete Mares, 2003), 251 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 84-933012-05.

Michael Seidman, A ras de suelo. Historia social de la República durante la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Alianza, 2003), 388 pp., €18.70 (pb), ISBN 84-206-3706-8 (English edition: Republic of Egos. A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 304 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0299178641).

The Spanish Civil War is among the most passionate conflicts of the long twentieth century, as one which arouses considerable emotion, in favour of either the Republican or the Francoist side. Its duration – far beyond what had been predicted in July 1936 by the military rebels and most international observers – together with its rapid conversion into an arena of international dispute between two opposing world-views, ‘fascism’ and ‘anti-fascism’, made it of long-standing interest for world public opinion. Moreover, its internationalisation made it appear as the prelude to the Second World War. The survival of the Francoist dictatorship until 1975 contributed to the fact that the first historical analyses of the Spanish Civil War had to be written abroad and by foreign scholars, mostly French and Anglophone. Even now the Spanish conflict continues to be a matter of interest for non-Spanish scholars, who rely on a long-standing tradition of scholarship on the topic.

Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill & Wang), 280 pp., $24.00, ISBN 0-8090-4643-1.

Jeremy Black, ed., War in the Modern World since 1815 (London: Routledge, 2003), 268 pp., £18.99, ISBN 0-415-25140-0.

Gail Braybon, ed., Evidence, History, and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 304 pp., £50.00, ISBN 1-57181-726-7.

Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds., The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 (Washington, DC, and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2003), 364 pp., $60.00, ISBN 0-521-81236-4.

Andrew Green, Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories, 1915–48 (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 200 pp., £19.99, ISBN 0-7146-8430-9.

John H. Morrow Jr, The Great War: An Imperial History (New York: Routledge, 2003), 352 pp., $27.50, ISBN 0-415-20439-9.

Mario Morselli, Caporetto, 1917: Victory or Defeat? (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 176 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-714-65073-0.

Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War, Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001), 318 pp., £7.99, ISBN 0-747-27157-7.

The powers of Europe fought the Great War for more than four years, but it took France fifteen years to write its official history, Germany nineteen years, and the United Kingdom an astonishing twenty-six years. These works, moreover, encompass only land operations and fill twenty-three extraordinarily detailed volumes for France, an equal number for Great Britain, and fourteen volumes for Germany. The time and energy needed to compile the thousands of necessary documents, organise that data, and construct the interpretations reflect both the enormity of the war itself and the difficulty of finding meaning in an event that so deeply shook the continent.

Anthony Alofsin, The Struggle for Modernism. Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 311 pp., $60.00 (hb), ISBN 0–393–730484.

Hélène Jannière, Politiques éditoriales et architecture ‘moderne’. L'émergence de nouvelles revues en France et en Italie (1923–1939) (Paris: Éditions Arguments, 2002), 377 pp., €24.50 (pb), ISBN 2–909109–26–7.

Paolo Nicoloso, Gli architetti di Mussolini. Scuole e sindacato, architetti e massoni, professori e politici negli anni del regime (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1999), 239 pp., €19.63 (pb), ISBN 88–464–1305–9.

Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains – In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945 (Henry Holt: New York, 2002) 524 pp., £20.00 (hb), ISBN 0-33-378230-5.

Michael Curtis, Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime (Arcade Publishing: New York, 2003) 419 pp., $27.95 (hb), ISBN: 1-55-970689-9.

Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 690 pp., £12.99 (pb), ISBN 0-19-925457-5.

Andrew Shennan, The Fall of France, 1940 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 181 pp., $22.99 (pb), ISBN 0-582-29081-3.

Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past. History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 136 pp., $29.95 (hb), ISBN 0-8122-3645-9.

Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia. The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2002), 330 pp., $27.95 (pb), ISBN 1-571-814965.

Pilar Ortuño Anaya, European Socialists and Spain: The Transition to Democracy (London: Palgrave, 2002), 273pp., $69.95 (hb), ISBN 0-333-94927-7.

Julio Crespo MacLennan, Spain and the Process of European Integration, 1957–85. Political Change and Europeanism (London: Palgrave, 2000), 240 pp., £52.50 (hb), ISBN 0-333-928865.

S. P. Mangen, Spanish Society after Franco: Regime Transition and the Welfare State (London: Palgrave, 2001), 254 pp., $65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-333-65462-5.

Luis Moreno, The Federalization of Spain (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 192 pp., £17.50 (hb), ISBN 0-714-681644.

Much has been written about the role of intellectuals in the Serbian nationalist movement of the last two or three decades. The quantity has generally been more noteworthy than the quality. Recently, however, some excellent work has appeared, notably by these three authors. Each is making important and original contributions to our understanding of the cultural and ideological context of Yugoslavia's demise.

The contributors to this section have produced three authoritative vignettes or ‘side-bars’ that enhance and add important corrective nuances to our understanding of Yugoslavia's disintegration and civil wars and especially the positions and roles of varieties of Serbian nationalism and nationalist intellectuals in the background to and the course of those events. Drawing on their previous work, which has established each of them as respected specialists on their respective and overlapping subjects, the authors also make use of more recently published and unpublished sources to offer fresh or revised perspectives and evaluations of the personalities, ideas and consequences of their subjects. The result is a coherent, conjoined triune analysis, with emphasis on individual and collective internal incoherencies and contradictions that constructively confound efforts to ascribe some kind of evolving consistency, continuity and coherence to the ideas, role and consequences of these intellectuals and the Serbian national ideas and programmes they shaped and often initiated.

Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience. Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 388 pp., £14.00 (pb), ISBN 1-57181-182-6.

Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigensinn in der Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999) 367 pp., €39.90 (hb), ISBN 3-412-13598-4.

Annegret Schüle, ‘Die Spinne’. Die Erfahrungsgeschichte weiblicher Industriearbeit im VEB Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001), 398 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 3-934565-87-5.

Patrick Major and Jonathan Osmond, eds., The Workers' and Peasants' State. Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 272 pp., £15.99 (pb), ISBN 0-7190-6289-6.

Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary. Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 331 pp., £19.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8078-5385-2.

The article compares the careers of two men, Dobrica Ćosić and Vojislav Koštunica, who gained prominence as dissident intellectuals in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and later served as presidents of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After outlining the main features of each man's dissident career, the article traces how one aspect of each's thought – his conception of the Serbian national interest – evolved during his transition from intellectual to political engagement. While highlighting differences in Ćosić's and Koštunica's political careers, the article emphasises similarities in their national thought. In conclusion, it considers some general aspects of the dominant Serbian response to Yugoslavia's dissolution.