The book focuses on the six major European countries and states that remained officially neutral throughout the Second World War, namely Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Vatican.
This edited volume is a sequel to, and a development of, The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016 (2016). It focuses on the six major European countries and states that remained officially neutral throughout the Second World War, namely Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Vatican.
Its transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach addresses complex questions pertaining to collective remembrance, national policies and politics, and intellectual as well as cultural responses to neutrality during and after the conflict. The contributions are from a broad range of scholars working across the disciplines of history, literature, film, media, and cultural studies. Their thought-provoking chapters challenge many assumptions about neutrality in the post-war European and global context, thereby filling a gap in the existing scholarship.
Common themes that run through the volume include the intertwined and dynamic links between neutrality and moral responsibility during and after the Second World War, the importance of memory politics and popular culture in shaping collective memories, and the impact of the Holocaust in shifting traditional perspectives on neutrality since the 1990s. This volume will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars interested in the field of memory studies, as well as non-specialist readers.
Foreword: The search for neutrality in wartime. Introduction: European
neutrals in World War II and after: A balancing act Section I: Ireland /
Éire.
1. No useful purpose? The Government Information Bureau (GIB) and
Irish neutrality
2. Forgotten Volunteers? Remembering and Recognising
veterans of the Second World War in the Republic of Ireland
3. The
Emergencys Improbable Frequency in Contemporary Irish Culture. Section II:
Portugal.
4. Portugal, World War II refugees and the Holocaust. History and
Memory
5. Portuguese Memorials of World War II, between Remembrance and
Oblivion
6. Memory works: The Changing Faces of Portugals Neutrality in
recent Portuguese feature films and documentaries (1992-2017). Section III:
Spain.
7. Diplomats in the fray. The struggle to establish the legacy of
Spanish foreign policy during the Second World War
8. From Sepharad to the
Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy. Facts and Fictions on Spain and the Holocaust
9.
Neutrality of Spain in World War II: The Filmic Construction of a Myth.
Section IV: Sweden.
10. Archives on Victims of Nazism in Sweden: From Oral
History to Cultural Memory or Oblivion
11. Sweden, the War and the Holocaust
in post-war memory
12. On remembrance and forgetting: the Second World War in
Swedish memory culture. Section V: Switzerland.
13. Switzerland and its
neutral stance during World War II: a past that won't go away
14. Memorials
of World War II and the Holocaust in Switzerland
15. Switzerland: The Policy
of Neutrality and the Uses and Abuses of World War II Memory. Section VI: The
Vatican.
16. The papacy, the Catholic World, and the memory of the Second
World War
17. Vatican diplomacy on the razors edge: preserving neutrality
and ecclesiastical heritage sites in Italy during World War II
18. Telling
children of neutral spaces in occupied Rome. Memories of the Church, the
Pope, and persecution. Afterword: The Shadow of the Second World War on
Neutral Europe.
Manuel Bragança is an Assistant Professor in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at University College Dublin. His publications include The Long Aftermath (2016, with Peter Tame), Ego-Histories of France and the Second World War (with Fransiska Louwagie, 2018), and Hitlers French Literary Afterlives (2019).
Peter Tame is an independent researcher, specialising in twentieth-century French literature and ideology. His principal publications include The Ideological Hero (1998), Isotopias: Places and Spaces in French War Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2015), Mnemosyne and Mars (2013), and The Long Aftermath (2016).
