I really enjoyed an article I found by chance today about Twain’s attempts to narrate and justify his conduct during the US Civil War. From the closing paragraph: My title, “Mark Twain, Traitor,” hails the Mark Twain who appears as such in his major work, whose text is constantly involved with the question of betrayal, [...]
In order to procrastinate a bit on my fellowship applications on this slow Friday evening, I’ve been poking through some old books found on Google Books in search for works on treason trials and definitions of treason (back when it was a crime against the royal person, rather than the nation at large). Lots of [...]
This afternoon, my last in Stavanger before I leave for Iceland and soon after Boston, I have been skimming through some old Norwegian memoirs from World War II. One interesting book entitled Med Guds ord i fiendeland: Fra Sjømannskirken i Hamburg 1940-45 (With God’s Word in an enemy land: From the seaman’s church in Hamburg [...]
One of the interesting catch phrases during the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945 is Quxian jiuguo (曲线救国) or “Saving the nation through twisted means” (In his book The Shanghai Badlands Frederic Wakeman translates it as “Saving the nation in a devious way”, 126). This was the phenomenon of Nationalist military agents or soldiers entering into the [...]
I was just skimming through the excellent Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940-45 by Gerhard Hirschfeld and found an interesting discussion about German policy towards the native fascist movements after the occupation of the Netherlands. (266-8) Apparently, the Germans concluded that the Quisling coup d’etat just before Norway’s capitulation actually [...]
I assumed that there hasn’t been much written on early postwar political retribution in Denmark, even in Danish scholarly literature. I found some mention in secondary Danish materials, but usually in the last chapter of books talking about the occupation of Denmark during WWII. That was before I discovered the over 800 page book by [...]
I have been collecting some materials on occupied Denmark and Norway in various languages from the Harvard libraries. I was flipping through a great book I found today called Parti og Plakat NS 1933-1945 which is a collection of some 250 propaganda posters from Norway’s Nasjonal Samling party (the Norwegian national socialists). I told my [...]