Ausgestrahlt: Die mediale Debatte um “Tschernobyl” in der Bundesrepublik und in Frankreich, 1986/87     Stephen Milder On 30 April 1986, France’s Antenne 2 evening news updated viewers as to the whereabouts of the ‘radioactive cloud’, which had been hovering over Europe since the meltdown at the Chernobyl reactor four days earlier. As meteorologist Brigitte Simonetta described how an Azores high would prevent the cloud from drifting further westward, a red stop sign appeared on the on-screen weather map, seemingly blocking the cloud from crossing the Franco-German frontier. In West Germany, meanwhile, popular newsmagazines like Der Spiegel and Stern used the black and neon yellow radiation hazard symbol and images of skulls and mushroom clouds to illustrate the nuclear fears invoked by the Chernobyl disaster. Superficially, at...

Nazism Across Borders: The Social Policies of the Third Reich and Their Global Appeal     Arnd Bauerkämper Historical studies of fascism have seen a revival in the last two decades. Apart from new investigations into the ideological claims and utopian visions of fascism, its transnational dimensions have increasingly received scholarly attention. Beyond comparative approaches (which remain valuable), historians have traced and analysed mutual perceptions as well as cross-border exchanges and transfers between fascist movements and regimes. At the same time, scholars have emphasized the limits and ambiguities of fascist internationalism, hindered as it was by the hyper-nationalism that fascists espoused. The Nazi dictatorship, in particular, by no means sought to cooperate with foreign fascists on equal terms, but instead aimed at supremacy and exploitation. Yet social policies...

Demokratie und Revolten: Die Entstehung der direkten Demokratie in der Schweiz     Marc H Lerner In Demokratie und Revolten, Rolf Graber effectively argues that the early modern Swiss republics and the nineteenth-century Swiss Confederation were convulsed with social and political unrest and it was this unrest, itself, that produced the particular style of direct democracy that is now available to Swiss citizens. For Graber, the history of democracy in Switzerland can only be understood as a history of protest. In setting out this argument, Graber challenges widespread myths about the Swiss political system. He rejects many outsiders’ perception of long-standing political tranquility and stability. Furthermore, he challenges internal conceptions of continuous long-term democratic development from either the early modern Landsgemeinden (popular assemblies) of the...

Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing Between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe     Julia Torrie

Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing Between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe
Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing Between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe . By Philip Morgan .  Oxford: Oxford University Press.  2018. Xviii +  366 pp. £20.00 (hardback).
Julia Torrie
German History, ghz063, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghz063
Published: 24 July 2019
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Issue Section: Book Review
At dinner in October 1941 with Fernand de Brinon, who served as the Vichy regime’s representative to the German High Command in Paris, German novelist Ernst Jünger made the acquaintance of French writer and actor Sacha Guitry. As Guitry and Jünger conversed about a third writer, Octave Mirbeau, Guitry reported that on his deathbed, Mirbeau had whispered to Guitry, ‘Ne collaborer jamais!’ ‘What he meant,’ Jünger later wrote in his diary, ‘was collaborating on comedies, for in those days, the word did not have the odor it does now’ (diary entry for 8 October 1941, A German Officer in Paris: The War Journals, 1941–45, New York, 2019). Even in...