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Between 1933 and 1940, Manchester received between seven and eight thousand refugees from Fascist Europe. They included Jewish academics expelled from universities in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. Around two hundred were children from the Basque country of Spain evacuated to Britain on a temporary basis in 1937 as the fighting of the Spanish Civil War neared their home towns. Most were refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. As much as 95% of the refugees from Nazism were Jews threatened by the increasingly violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. The rest were Communists, Social Democrats, Pacifists, Liberals, Confessional Christians and Sudeten Germans. There have been several valuable studies of the response of the British government to the refugee crisis. This study seeks to assess the responses in one city—Manchester—which had long cultivated an image of itself as a ‘liberal city’. Using documentary and oral sources, including interviews with Manchester refugees, it explores the work of those sectors of local society that took part in the work of rescue: Jewish communal organisations, the Society of Friends, the Rotarians, the University of Manchester, secondary schools in and around Manchester, pacifist bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and industrialists from the Manchester region. The book considers the reasons for their choices to help to assesses their degree of success and the forces which limited their effectiveness.
through the barbed wire of British aliens legislation. Ultimately, that is, would-be refugees from Fascist Europe were dependent on the active goodwill of British people and institutions, including those of Manchester. In January 1939 the Manchester and Salford Woman Citizen, the organ of the Manchester branch of the Association of Women Citizens, provocatively entitled ‘Seasonal Illwill’, raised the issue of whether in Manchester there existed the degree of sympathy ‘for human suffering in any part of the world’ which would engender practical aid for the Jewish victims
incarcerated first as an ‘enemy alien’ by the Vichy government in 1939, and then as a degenerate artist by the Nazis in 1940 – meant that Carrington had no choice but to flee fascist Europe. Displaced and alone, Carrington suffered a psychological breakdown and was committed by her family to Santander psychiatric hospital, another form of exile according to Michel Foucault, 2 where she was declared ‘incurably insane’ 3 and treated with the convulsion-inducing drug, Cardiazol
Anglophobia in Fascist Italy traces the roots of Fascist Anglophobia from the Great War and through the subsequent peace treaties and its development during the twenty years of Mussolini’s regime. Initially, Britain was seen by many Italians as a ‘false friend’ who was also the main obstacle to Italy’s foreign policy aspirations, a view embraced by Mussolini and his movement. While at times dormant, this Anglophobic sentiment did not disappear in the years that followed, and was later rekindled during the Ethiopian War. The peculiarly Fascist contribution to the assessment of Britain was ideological. From the mid-1920s, the regime’s intellectuals saw Fascism as the answer to a crisis in the Western world and as irredeemably opposed to Western civilisation of the sort exemplified by Britain. Britain was described as having failed the ‘problem of labour’, and Fascism framed as a salvation ideology, which nations would either embrace or face decay. The perception of Britain as a decaying and feeble nation increased after the Great Depression. The consequence of this was a consistent underrating of British power and resolve to resist Italian ambitions. An analysis of popular reception of the Fascist discourse shows that the tendency to underrate Britain had permeated large sectors of the Italian people, and that public opinion was more hostile to Britain than previously thought. Indeed, in some quarters hatred towards the British lasted until the end of the Second World War, in both occupied and liberated Italy.
” ’, in Ernst Bruckmüller, et al. (eds), Bürgertum in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna: Böhlau, 1990), pp. 275–98. 23 On Czechoslovakia, for example, see the contributions in Mark Cornwall and R.J.W. Evans (eds), Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe 1918–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 24 Whiteside originally took the term ‘Pan-Germans’ from the translation of Alldeutsche (All-Germans), but also used the term in reference to the radical Young Liberals (Jungliberale) who supported Schönerer. See Whiteside, ‘The Germans as an Integrative Force
Baldoli demonstrated, the contacts between Italian and British Fascists were seen as part of such an initiative.8 What were the cultural reasons behind Mussolini’s attitude towards Britain in the context of his attempt to create a Fascist Europe? While Baldoli underlined that the attempt to establish a new Fascist European order seemed to develop particularly during the years preceding the Second World War – even though it had been evident from the beginning of the 1930s – the notion that Britain had fallen behind Fascist Italy in terms of political, social and economic
persecuted by local nationalists before being hunted down by Nazis. It was, in part, because Arendt was exercised by the plight of Jews in Europe, that she supported attempts to build a Jewish democratic state in Palestine. On the role of nationalists in murdering Jews, see Snyder, Black Earth and Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2009
on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 37–38. See also Mark Dimond, ‘The Sokol and Czech Nationalism,’ in Mark Cornwall and R.J.W. Evans (eds), Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe, 1918–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 185–205, p. 186. 35 A-Z , 16 July 1899, p. 4. 36 A-Z , 16 July 1899, p. 4. 37 A-Z , 16 July 1899, p. 4. 38 A-Z , 16 July 1899, p. 4. 39 A-Z , 16 July 1899, p. 4. 40 DVB , 16 July 1899, p. 9. 41 DVB , 16 July 1899, p. 9. 42
likely to endure, as, I suspect, is our interest in news media and how that citizenry is enlisted in political struggle. I doubt we have seen the end of productions which set the play in a resonant historical past such as Fascist Europe, but as such periods become more remote we will see more and more productions seeking more recent or contemporary analogues as a way of focusing the play’s political specificity
representations of electricity in the Dutch colonial world reveal the cultural associations between monarchy and empire that developed during the early twentieth century. Photographs of electric illuminations at celebrations for the royal House of Orange suggest that the iconography of modernity was not, contrary to David Cannadine's assertions, exclusively associated with fascist Europe between the 1920s and 1940s. Liberal imperialist nations such as the Netherlands also exploited the spectacularity of electricity, both to uphold their authoritarian colonial regimes abroad