This article explores Nazi visions for a new monetary order in 1940 and compares these plans with European monetary integration after 1945. It shows how Nazi experts identified the same core monetary challenges facing Europe as Allied planners did during and after the Second World War, above all challenges stemming from the Great Depression and associated with the gold standard, international debts, capital scarcity and bilateral treaties. This comparison suggests a certain logic was inherent to reconstructing European monetary relations after the depression, insofar as few viable alternatives seemed open – either in 1940 or after 1945 – to some form of multilateral payment system that was divorced from gold, yet that still fixed Europe's currencies to one another. Ultimately, it argues that 1940 marks an important step in a longer process in which Europe moved away from territorial currencies toward a monetary union, and in doing so expanded the framework of fiat currency beyond national markets to encompass the continent.

This article examines how Spain's tourism industry was developed using European Union (EU) grants in the 1980s and 1990s, and how this strategy was later deployed to post-socialist Europe (illustrated using the case of Bulgaria). The article shows that peripheral modernisation was an important mission in the evolution of the EU and urban development for tourism played a major role in two successive post-dictatorial societies. Tourism was considered a key economic sector that addressed the reality of deindustrialisation and also served as a useful metaphor for intra-European mobility and the symbolic power of the leisure economy.

In the introduction to their excellent survey of the First World War in Central Europe, Our War (Nasza wojna), Polish historians Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny begin by wondering why the name of Przasnysz, a small Polish town north of Warsaw, carries today no connotations of misery or horror. In late 1914 and early 1915, they note, the Germans and Russians fought several ferocious battles in its vicinity, battles that ultimately claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties. And yet its name never became a part of the shared historical memory of the First World War. Przasnysz and its battles are long forgotten, not only, as might be expected, in Belgium, France and Great Britain, but also in Germany, Russia and the rest of Poland. This, Borodziej and Górny note, is symptomatic of the hold that the war's Western Front has exercised for generations on the imaginations of scholars and the wider public alike – even within the states that now occupy the territory on which the titanic clashes of the Russian, Austrian and German empires claimed millions of lives. To schoolchildren in Warsaw no less than to scholars in Great Britain and the United States, the First World War is synonymous with the trenches of Belgium and France, and with the haunted names of Ypres, Passchendaele and Verdun. But the evidence of Nasza wojna and the other three books under review here suggests that the Eastern Front is finally emerging as a subject of scholarly and popular interest. Moreover, these books illustrate that careful study of that Front has the potential to deepen our understanding of the war's complex dynamics and their impact on the states and societies that grappled with them. The sweeping conquests and extended occupations of ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse populations; the migration of ethnic hostilities from the front lines to the home fronts of multinational states; the profound divide between urban and rural experiences of the war; the ways in which military institutions adapted to the industrialised brutality of modern warfare and the ways that venerable but sprawling imperial state systems tried to come to grips with the war's demands are just a few of the themes addressed by the books under review here. The history of the period, and of modern European history in general, stands to be greatly enriched by a renewed interest in ‘the forgotten Great War’.

The ‘scientisation of the political’, understood as the increasing influence of social science within twentieth century (party) politics, provides insight into politicians’ conceptions of political representation and the shifts in those conceptions over time. Social science based knowledge exerted a profound effect on how parties approached political identity formation and on their perceptions of the electorate. Based on a Dutch case study, this article tracks the impact of electoral geography and mass psychology and, from the 1940s onwards, electoral research and polling data on party strategies, showing the important role played by party political think tanks which acted as hubs of social-scientific knowledge. Comparisons with British and West German political parties reveal the complex reception and negotiation of social scientific insights regarding the nature and behaviour of the electorate, as well as the persistence of ingrained stereotypes.

Food in the former Soviet Union remains serious political business. In the summer of 2014, in retaliation against Western sanctions imposed in response to the annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin's government decreed an odd brand of ‘self-sanctions’ by forbidding the importation of many foodstuffs from the United States and the European Union. Conservative supporters of President Putin sprang into action, exhorting Russian consumers to embrace the opportunity to develop Russian agriculture while Putin's opponents raised the spectre of late Soviet food shortages. Though starvation does not seem like a genuine threat to modern Russia, the fact that these questions are raised at all requires scholars of food to pay attention to Russia and scholars of Russia to view food as an important aspect of the country's history. Serious studies of food in the Soviet Union and under other socialist regimes are particularly worthy of attention since these socio-economic systems, paradoxically, were best known both for proclaiming an end to hunger and for presiding over chronic shortages if not outright famines.

Scholars are increasingly turning to rock'n’roll and its many genres as a means of exploring the recent past. What is electrifying about popular music in all its myriad forms is that it becomes a channel for rethinking social relations and affective communities (those held together by emotional ties) in the post-war period. These new identities and unconventional groupings exploded onto national societies, and their emancipatory programmes and inventive scenes drove democratisation. Societal responses to rock'n’roll indicate that popular music and the spaces where it manifested were highly contested, confrontations that enable scholars to reconsider historical narratives from alternative perspectives. Perhaps most importantly, as an expressive genre both driving and recording change, popular music is uniquely positioned to initiate and then document, through its material output, the efforts by individuals to alter everyday life and, as such, is an ideal vehicle for exploring the tremendous transformations that society has undergone in the post-war era.

The long-running BBC sitcom, ’Allo ’Allo!, has been thoroughly criticised for its use of various racial, gendered and sexualised tropes, not to mention its cynical view of the French experience of the Second World War. This article, however, reassesses the programme in light of what it highlights about the lived experience of Anglo-American airmen who were forced to bale from their planes over Occupied France. It uses the comedic aspects of the programme to investigate escape and evasion training, the use of language, ‘fitting in’ and the prominence of peasants in the wartime lives of Anglo-American aircrews in France. The programme, rather than being just another example of Gaullophobia, accurately represents some elements of the Second World War in France. In addition, changes in the plot over its nine seasons suggest that the sitcom reflects broader British concerns, as well as the Anglo-French relationship.

It is striking the extent to which many liberals have seen themselves as figures on the margins of politics. This is partly an ideological issue. Of all the great ‘isms’ of the modern age, liberalism has had neither the historical certainty of the two great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, nor the reassuring hierarchical logic of conservatism. Most liberals have agonised about how much humans can achieve and have repeatedly stressed the fallibility of rational or democratic solutions, at least in comparison with more revolutionary ideologies like communism. But liberals’ sense of living on the margins is also a consequence of the context in which liberalism was born. In Europe, the spectre of the French Revolution – and, later, the Bolshevik Revolution – gave liberalism a specific flavour. Liberals were often keen on reform, but they always feared social upheaval. Time and again, liberals found themselves in power only to lose control of the pace of social change. In the worst cases – 1815, 1848 or 1917 spring to mind – this put the liberal cause back by generations. For much of modern European history, to be a liberal was to be in a perpetual state of siege.

What role did consumption, the mass media and popular culture play in post-war Eastern Europe? Did they help ‘normalise’ state socialism or rather inspire outlooks and desires incongruent with communist regimes’ goals? These questions are central to recent scholarship which has departed from conventional Cold War studies centred on narrowly-conceived political elites and modes of Soviet domination. Instead, using the lens of social and cultural history, scholars have turned to exploring Eastern European societies as independent subjects in their own right. Looking at workers, middle classes, women, tourists, hippies, shoppers, television audiences and other groups, this new body of work has questioned the impenetrability of the Iron Curtain and has highlighted Eastern European participation in broader European and global trends. Instead of enumerating failures of the socialist system from ‘economics of shortage’ to the depressing ‘greyness’ of apartment blocks, scholars now explore ‘pleasures in socialism’, including leisure, fashion and consumer culture. In place of preponderant societal resistance against the controlling state, they expose complex ways of appropriation, accommodation and identification with elements of state socialism by individuals and groups.

Rock'n'roll emerged in Hamburg in the unique spatial context of St. Pauli's entertainment district during a new phase of capitalist modernity around 1960 that granted youth unprecedented access to commercial venues catering to their new economic power. Crossing class, regional and national lines, young people used spaces free of parental supervision to create alternatives to the era's sexual conservatism and social conformity. This new youth presence worried local authorities: minors had to be shielded from the commercialised vice that was St. Pauli's stock in trade. This set up clashes between police, city officials, business leaders and social welfare agents on the one side, and club entrepreneurs and music fans on the other. Confrontations between these two camps constituted struggles over social discipline, youths’ right to public and commercial space, the meanings of democracy and the sexual morality of youth in a place known for license and excess.

When the angry homeowners of a popular Seattle neighbourhood recently decided to rise in protest against the impending changes in the urban development code, they claimed that their chief goal was to protect the district from turning into an ‘Eastern Bloc city’. If the City Council allowed the new legislation to pass, reported The Seattle Times, Seattle was ‘in danger of becoming the Soviet Warsaw or East Berlin of the Pacific Northwest’. ‘I've been to Poland’, one protester said, ‘I know what they [Polish cities] look like. They're bleak. They're dead.’

Recent empirical research into humour and memory attests to the fact that people remember better when they perceive a word, phrase or image to be humorous. When the proximity of multiple ethnic groups engenders jokes displaying diverse perspectives and what Henri Bergson described as ‘corrective’ satire, such jokes can help remedy racism and fear of the other. Taking a humorous or satirical stance allows artists and writers to explore alternatives to contemporary reality and to uncover truths overlooked or consciously elided by government and mass media discourse. Such is the case with the recent publications on humour discussed here. Although they vary widely by topic and time period, all focus on how power struggles, oppression and violence are represented by means of humour and satire, as well as by the not necessarily jocular but nevertheless related genres of comics and the graphic novel. Recent historical research demonstrates how these creative genres not only critique political events and figures but also preserve, in a sophisticated cultural format, their readers’ short-term everyday working memory and long-term cultural memory of prejudice, subjugation and mass murder. In these texts the authors spotlight how the primary source creators commented on historical events, incorporated historical artefacts in their works and generated countercultural memories that fill gaps in historical narratives from other sources.

‘In Search of Space’ explores the history of Krautrock, a futuristic musical genre that began in Germany in the late 1960s and flowered in the 1970s. Not usually explicitly political, Krautrock bore the unmistakable imprint of the revolt of 1968. Groups arose out of the same milieux and shared many of the same concerns as anti-authoritarian radicals. Their rebellion expressed, in an artistic way, key themes of the broader countercultural moment of which they were a part. A central theme, the article argues, was escape – escape from the situation of Germany in the 1960s in general, and from the specific conditions of the anti-authoritarian revolt in the Federal Republic in the wake of 1968. Mapping Krautrock's relationship to key locations and routes (both real and imaginary), the article situates Krautrock in relationship to the political and cultural upheavals of its historical context.

This paper argues that crosstown traffic in the East and West German punk subculture was an essential aspect of how popular music helped to challenge the political legitimacy of the East German government. West German punks frequently crossed the border to attend Eastern punk concerts, meet with friends and trade stories and experiences, connections that helped to foster a transnational community of alternative youths. These interactions denied official claims that punk was the result of capitalist decadence while undermining the East German government's efforts at cultivating a distinctive socialist identity. Nor were border crossings unidirectional, as Eastern punks made daring attempts to connect with their Western cousins. Writing for West German fanzines, appearing in the Western press and even managing to release Eastern recordings smuggled westwards, Eastern punks crossed the Iron Curtain and in so doing, worked to present an alternative vision of Eastern youth to the world and join the global punk scene.

It is a historiographical commonplace to portray France during the so-called Trente Glorieuses of economic expansion after the Liberation, especially during the last of those three decades ending in the 1973 oil crisis, as engaged heart and soul in a project of full-throttle modernisation. The Fifth Republic under Charles De Gaulle and Georges Pompidou rolled up its sleeves and set to work tackling the country's multifarious examples of historical backwardness. France ceased to be a nation of peasants, small-minded small business owners and bolshie workers, and instead dreamed of becoming one of confident technocrats, technicians and world-beating industrialists. Only after the end of the Trente Glorieuses, it is often assumed, did that dream of technologically based progress give way to greater scepticism, pessimism and environmental concern, for modernisation swept all before it until its assumptions were rudely challenged by the end of growth in October 1973 - or at least until they were by the political crisis of May 1968. While more critical perspectives on post-war modernisation are evident in recent historiography, notably on issues around planning in general and housing and the grands ensembles in particular, transport policy and the set of social experiences which it sought to shape have been relatively more marginal to our understanding. This review article seeks to explore how issues around transport, and their broader implications about the very nature of modern growth-oriented capitalist society, are leading the debate onto new terrain. The underlying purpose of several of the books under review is to cast doubt on the accepted narrative of the Trente Glorieuses. They do so, however, in two defiantly opposite directions: some defending the distinctly pro-car orientation of the post-war elites and others offering a more radical critique of this perspective.

The above quotations from two of the books under review here took me back to the early 1970s and my first weeks in Hungary. As a graduate student in sociology, struggling to get to grips with my surroundings, I distinctly remember thinking that what was needed was an anthropology for large-scale industrial society to explain their foreignness and remoteness. Everything in the metropolis of Budapest followed a different logic, and in the academic division of labour, anthropologists are those with the skills to interpret the meanings of societies which operate according to a logic different to that of industrialised West. But in those days anthropologists still tended to focus on pre-industrial societies outside Europe. I had not yet read The Good Soldier Švejk, but a Hungarian sociologist told me was that I would never understand communist Eastern Europe without reading Švejk. I did, and he was right.

Spaces have always had a central role in the formation and impact of youth cultures, beginning with the near spaces of everyday life – school, workplace, village, neighbourhood – where peers come together and cobble together their own styles out of the traditions of their elders and media information about the new. National space was an important element as well, as a container for traditions, but also as a communication space for negotiating the boundaries of the new. Finally, in the years after 1945, global space has gained enormous importance with national debates affected by events and trends from other world regions. That they did not displace national specificities, but that these rather perhaps came forward even more prominently than before, is particularly clear in those youth cultures in which transnational influences have been connected with national cultural preferences and formed into unique mixtures. In Germany there is also the fact that the country was divided, so that the already battered construct of a single national culture was dismantled even further while its heterogeneous components stood out, just like the disparate notions of an appropriate economic and political order. In this respect a focus on youth cultures in divided Germany after 1945 reveals unusually diverse manifestations of broader debates concerning the legitimacy of new styles among youth.