This essay focuses on the debate over Chamberlain’s attempts at ‘appeasement’ during his negotiations with the presidents of Germany, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, who would soon become the central European Axis powers in the Second World War. It specifically looks at two intertwined public protests in 1938 against Chamberlain’s plans to cede the German-speaking regions of Austria to Hitler, in exchange for Hitler not declaring all-out war in Europe. In addition to analysing Troilus and Cressida, directed by Michael Macowan in modern-day battle dress at the Westminster Theatre in London, this essay turns not only to Punch magazine’s review of the play in their October 1938 issue, but also to the other numerous cartoons, ironic poems, and satiric song lyrics that filled that issue, all clearly condemning Chamberlain’s reluctance, often called cowardice, to realize the consequences of agreeing to Hitler’s demands.

Chapter 2 explores the situation of chaplains from 1933 to 1939. Studies of Nazi Germany often neglect these years, but developments and decisions made at this time proved crucial. The chapter opens with a look at a chaplain who accompanied the Condor Legion to Spain during the Civil War. Pastor Keding’s account encapsulates the central insight of this chapter: during the first six years of Hitler’s rule, a loyal military chaplaincy emerged. The men appointed to serve the new Wehrmacht as military bishops, the Catholic Rarkowski and Protestant Dohrman, were old-fashioned patriots who brought credibility to the chaplaincy. Procedures for selecting chaplains were developed to prioritize keeping out men deemed potential troublemakers. The lingering perception that Christianity had contributed to Germany’s failure to win in 1918 put chaplains on the defensive and led them to try to prove and re-prove their effectiveness. Chaplains seized the opportunity presented by German rearmanent in 1935 to expand their numbers. They endorsed exclusion of Jews and celebrated German triumphs from remilitarization of the Rhineland to annexation of Austria. By September 1939 they were ready for war.

Set in Paris, Bolaño’s deeply contextualized novel, Monsieur Pain, takes place in a historical moment heightened with geopolitical tensions. The Spanish Civil War is raging, fascism is on the rise; Europe is looking back at the devastation of the Great War and forward to another world war. César Vallejo – the exiled Peruvian poet, a communist and supporter of the doomed Spanish Republic – is dying in Paris, stricken by incessant hiccups. Pierre Pain, a mesmerist who tries and fails to cure Vallejo, becomes drawn into a noirish intrigue he never manages to decipher. Layered upon this immediate context are other moments drawn from Bolaño’s own lived experience: the Cuban Revolution, the Latin-American liberation movements of the 1960s, the Tlatelolco massacre, Pinochet’s coup, the Dirty War in Argentina. Failure thus becomes the ultimate context of this novel, operating on multiple levels both within the diegesis and beyond: Pain’s failure implicitly points to all the defeats and betrayals of twentieth-century emancipatory projects; the novel sets readers up for failure by thwarting our efforts to navigate the dense intertextual web and by foreclosing resolution; and on the level of literary language the text admits and indeed announces its own failure as written expression.

The fascist counter-revolutions and reactionary insurgencies that disfigured Europe across the ‘Thirty Years War’ 1914–45 generated, in the realm of literature, art, music, and periodical publication, a complex culture of resistance in anti-fascism. More than the sum of its socialist, liberal democratic, Communist and feminist parts, anti-fascism formed a distinct cultural sphere in Europe and the United States, with its own newspapers, journals, publishing styles, and audiences. The links it forged between European and non-European poets and writers focused on the threat of fascism in Austria, Germany, and Italy, provoked, in turn, questions about the nature of European colonial war abroad, gender relations in democratic nations, and the sources of fascism’s strength. Paying particular attention to both the place of gender in the anti-fascist imagination, by way of a reading of Virginia Woolf, and the anti-colonial challenge anti-fascism faced, this chapter explores literary responses to fascism.

Modernity started with Darwin and probably reached its philosophical peak with Einstein. The appearance of modernity is associated with the rise of science as a dominant source of philosophical authority, and worldwide recognition of the rights of citizens, particularly women (the vote, birth control, etc.). For the first time, the orientation of philosophy was towards the future rather than the past, and ancient sources of knowledge, authority, and wisdom, were challenged. Some countries (e.g. Turkey under Ataturk) abandoned their past almost overnight. However, this is also the period of time when there were multiple challenges to the modern world view (based on democracy, the rights of citizens, and science). Religious reactionaries explicitly rejected modernity, whether it be in the form of creationist challenges to Darwinism or suppression of the burgeoning rights of women by the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions. Also, democracy as a model for government was challenged by fascism in the middle of the twentieth century, culminating in the mid-century wars of modernity: the Spanish Civil War and World War II. This chapter reviews the example of modern China, where the current government accepts some parts of traditional Western modernity while rejecting others.

This chapter explores Langston Hughes’s travels to Spain as a political correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. His journalism, featuring interviews with the Black volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, was just one genre in a significant body of literary production that he completed in Spain. His time in Spain was a culmination of political activities related to labor, antiracist, anticolonial, and antifascist causes. The chapter examines how literary collaborations with the Spanish avant-garde group the Generation of 1927, and specifically his relationships with Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, nurtured his production of original poetry, theater, and translations of Federico García Lorca’s Romancero gitano and Bodas de sangre. In Spain, Hughes experimented with multilingualism and intertextual adaptation across different mediums in order to show antifascist solidarity across linguistic, national, and racial boundaries.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal both get mixed reviews in song. The Dust Bowl hits the middle of the country, bringing to the fore not only Woody Guthrie and “Sis” Cunningham but also a stable of lesser-known “Dust Bowl Balladeers.” The Harlan County Wars continue in Kentucky, and the balladry proliferates. Sit-down strikes rock Detroit, and their songs resound. “We Shall Not Be Moved” becomes a Spanish-language anthem, and Rafael Hernández Marín sings of Puerto Rico’s Ponce Massacre. Abel Meeropol takes on lynching with his masterpiece, “Strange Fruit,” and Lead Belly damns the racism of the nation’s capital with his “Bourgeois Blues.” The Popular Front resurrects Lincoln as a working-class hero in song, and the fighters of the Lincoln Battalion in Spain march to their own battle tunes. The arenas of musical theater, dance, classical music, and jazz also become battlegrounds with Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles, William Grant Still’s Lenox Avenue, Helen Tamiris’s How Long, Brethren?, Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free?, and John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concerts. Marian Anderson transforms “America” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Paul Robeson sings a “Ballad for Americans” from coast to coast.

Chapter 3 explores the humanitarian work of the Australian communist Esme Odgers during the Spanish Civil War. Odgers’s story highlights the child sponsorship programme as a humanitarian technique through PLAN, which has yet to be fully discussed within the history of Spanish humanitarian aid. Odgers’s detailed letters written during the war offer unique insights into the material, social and psychological conditions under which humanitarian workers laboured, suggesting that humanitarian work was a multifaceted and unpredictable experience. An examination of this dimension allows for an exploration of emotions that humanitarian workers are expected to repress, and where the expression of individual emotions in the context of life and death is perceived as an indulgence. Further, a study of Odgers’s humanitarian efforts during the Spanish Civil War sheds light on the impact of these endeavours beyond Europe, extending our understanding of the global impact of the war. Odgers’s letters also reveal the trauma associated with dealing with the evacuation of children and reflects the psychological consequences of humanitarian work.

The aplication of the law of neutrality in a civil war setting was contingent upon the recognition of belligerency of the rebels. However, the experience of the Spanish Civil war with the ill-fated policy of non-intervention in favour of either side in the conflict has established the inadmissibility of neutrality in non-international armed conflicts. Thus, neutrality is not applied as a matter of principle and by virtue of the rule that in the event of a civil war, assistance is permissible to the government but not to the rebels.

From October 1936, Mexico waged a growing legal campaign at the League of Nations (‘the League’) in favour of the Spanish Republic in the context of the Spanish civil war. The Mexican delegate at the League, Narciso Bassols, repeatedly denounced the intervention of Italy and Germany in the armed conflict, challenging the view that the war in Spain should be described solely as an internal issue.

Chapter 3 turns to cultural expressions -- music, literature, art, and film -- to show the transnational manifestations of Mexico’s black radical tradition, especially as explored by caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, composer Carlos Chávez, and historian and novelist José Mancisidor. This complex geographic matrix, with cultural centers in Mexico City, Cuba, Harlem, and Spain, was more visible in the interdisciplinary threads of culture than in the dense footnotes of historicism. Music -- jazz, in particular -- came to symbolize the simultaneous recasting of postrevolutionary nationalism and blackness in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This chapter traces these cultural conversations from Mexico’s first encounters with jazz in New York City through its incorporation into the Marxist cultural politics of 1930s Mexico and then abroad again, as Mexican cultural producers working with African American and Afro-Cubanist (afrocubanista) intellectuals like Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén fought against global fascism in Mexico, New York City, and Spain.

Chapter 2 explains how the constructions of blackness in Mexican history and society described in Chapter 1 coalesced in the 1930s, when Mexican politics radicalized and Marxist historical materialism established a basis for new social justice initiatives and a revised national narrative. With class conflict animating Mexican historiography and political and economic reforms, African slaves and their descendants entered a national pantheon that embraced blackness for the first time. Amid this historiographic consensus, slave resistance, epitomized by the maroon community founded by Gaspar Yanga, laid the foundation for Mexican anticolonialism and independence, the liberal claim to racial egalitarianism, and the Mexican Revolution. Focusing on the 1930s, this chapter argues that historians and historically oriented intellectuals -- chiefly Andrés Molina Enríquez, Rafael Ramos Pedrueza, Alfonso Teja Zabre, and José Mancisidor -- celebrated black bellicosity within a broader cross-class rejection of racial exploitation. With a materialist scaffolding to construct blackness as Mexican, they depicted historical figures, such as José María Morelos and Emiliano Zapata, as African-descended national heroes, symbols of the 1910 Revolution, and political theorists who set the stage for socialism in the not too distant future.

Chapter 3 discusses how the Civil War dramatically interrupted plans for modernisation, forcing chemists to get involved in war, and the way in which violence, repression and exile divided the chemical community. In the three years of the Civil War, the Republican order progressively faded away and a new dictatorship gained power and social support. War dramatically changed chemists’ daily practices and brought division and suffering to a politically polarised community. Involvement from both sides in the production of chemical gases and chemists’ contributions to strategies of civil defence made the morality of chemistry ambiguous, serving different ideological purposes. Some chemists in the new regime became active repressors, whereas others suffered exile and marginalisation. Political ideology played a crucial role in the ways in which power relations were dramatically reshaped and rearranged, but personal rivalries and professional tensions were probably more important than those expressed in the historical actors’ own accounts. Despite certain tacit trends of continuity, dynamic fields such as physical chemistry, spectroscopy and early biochemistry, which had flourished in the 1930s, had now lost momentum and were reshaped and reorganised. The Spanish conflict profoundly changed contemporary perceptions of science, politics, industry and the military.