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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.
‘struggle’ which J’accuse! proposed, any more than, at the same period, he favoured a confrontational response to the British Union of Fascists. The earliest refugees to reach Manchester did not do so through Laski’s mediation. They were German- Jewish industrialists anticipating a Nazi attack on their enterprises and German-Jewish academics dismissed from German universities. J’accuse had given a special place to Jewish academics, highlighting their contributions to German science and culture and depicting their harassment and dismissal as the most evident indication of
fair number of mixed marriages – marriages between Jewish and other faiths – existed. This one, between a Jewish academic and a German general’s daughter, was probably peaceful before Hitler but had become rather fraught after 1933. They needed a home help as she ran a very successful dressmakers’ business in their fairly substantial flat. They could allow a Jewish girl within the household, provided
law of April 1933 for ‘Restoration of a Professional Civil Service’ – colloquially known as the Berufsbeamtengesetz – excluded Jews from public employment. The Hochschule was a public university and Jewish academics were forced out. Koenigsberger found employment locally as a senior draughtsman at G. Kärger in Berlin, a manufacturer of high-precision tool-room lathes. Koenigsberger was reassured that he had nothing to fear from anti-Jewish laws. The owner's defence of his Jewish employees was to lead to his premature
In assessing the impact of William Beveridge's Voluntary action over the last sixty years, this book provides a reminder that the terms 'voluntary action' and 'voluntary sector' are both fluid and contestable. The book demonstrates that the influences of Beveridge and voluntary action now extend not only beyond the period of the original publication of his report but also outside Britain to the wider 'British world'. It places Beveridge in the world in which he wrote Voluntary action as well as exploring the ideas, philosophies and experiences that influenced his intellectual development up to, and during, the 1940s. Beveridge's background and motivations behind the themes contained in Voluntary action are explored in various contexts. The book also focusses on specific areas of voluntary action with special relevance today. It presents surveys of different national situations, focussing on the influence of voluntary action in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada in the aftermath of the publication of Beveridge's report. The situation that Beveridge set out to describe and analyse in 1948 has changed almost beyond recognition: the landscape in which voluntary action operates in the twenty-first century is now very different across all the countries surveyed in the book. Beveridge himself would probably have found it difficult to come to terms with some of these social changes and the challenges they have thrown up.
This work demonstrates that resistance to occupation by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Second World War has to be seen through a transnational, not a national, lens. It explores how people often resisted outside their country of origin because they were migrants, refugees or exiles who were already on the move. It traces their trajectories and encounters with other resisters and explores their experiences, including changes of beliefs, practices and identities. The book is a powerful, subtle and thought-provoking alternative to works on the Second World War that focus on single countries or on grand strategy. It is a ‘bottom up’ story of extraordinary individuals and groups who resisted oppression from Spain to the Soviet Union and the Balkans. It challenges the standard chronology of the war, beginning with the formation of the International Brigades in Spain and following through to the onset of the Cold War and the foundation of the state of Israel. This is a collective project by a team of international historians led by Robert Gildea, author of Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Faber & Faber, 2015). These have explored archives across Europe, the USA, Russia and Israel in order to unearth scores of fascinating individual stories which are woven together into themed chapters and a powerful new interpretation. The book is aimed at undergraduates and graduates working on twentieth-century Europe and the Second World War or interested in the possibilities of transnational history.
of rescue. It seems otherwise inexplicable that Jews were not represented on the Lancashire Industrial Development Council, which included so many representatives of the business community and local authorities, or that Manchester University’s mechanism of assisting displaced academics, like the Academic Assistance Council, was anxious not to define a major part of its task as the rescue of Jewish academics. The Jewishness of Hitler’s victims, however much the source of their persecution, was not seen as conducive to their rescue. Members of the Manchester Rotary
who gave it most thought was a German Jewish academic writing at the very end of the last century. His name was Georg Simmel and he was not at all sure that the general use of money had been all to the good.1 For one thing, it replaced the subjective appreciation of Betting in the dark87 objects, goods, services, with an objective valuation of them in terms of their monetary value, and in the process had often debased them. It quantified, as he put it, the qualitative. It equalized what was essentially unequal and not truly to be compared. At the same time, the use
per se, it ceased to be a targeted attack on fascism Spanish-style. The once apolitical Picasso’s conversion to Communism cannot be divorced from his experiences in France or his opposition to Francoism. That said, occupied Paris was not always inhospitable for ambitious artists and intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre was able to leave the Lyceé Pasteur and take up a professorship previously occupied by a Jewish academic at the Lyceé Concordet in the fashionable Opéra district. At a time of food shortages, the business of buying and selling modern art
on the run for four years. 10 Finally settling in New Hampshire, Sandy and Birdie change their names and pose as the widow and daughter of an invented Jewish academic called David Goldman. Two years later, Birdie flees New Hampshire in search of her father and sister, and finds them, at last, in California. Middlesex has a much broader geographical and temporal scope. From a contemporary (2001) vantage point, forty-one-year-old Cal, currently living in Berlin, narrates his life story. 11 Books 1 and 2 cover 1922 to 1960, describing Cal’s grandparents’ (who are