Chapter 1 offers a historical introduction as well as an overview of existing research in the field. It argues that by mapping out the trajectories of former volunteer soldiers, it is possible to see the many ways in which the Spanish Civil War and the broader anti-fascist engagement of the inter-war period could constitute a transformative experience and event; an event that expanded volunteers’ political horizons and gradually opened up possibilities for border-crossing political engagement in the post-war era. Thus, it sets the stage for the case studies constituting the main part of the book, showing that the political and military influence of the volunteers in Spain did not necessarily come to an end in 1938/1939 or even in 1945. In a few yet significant cases, it stretched across the globe far into the Cold War period.

Chapter 3 highlights the centrality of Spain in the development of a particular kind of ‘professional revolutionary’ deployed by the Comintern in the late 1930s and 1940s. It focuses on the life of the Italian communist Ilio Barontini and follows his long militancy within the anti-fascist front. Barontini, unlike most Europeans of his generation, had been confronted with violent fascism since the early 1920s. Nevertheless, the Spanish Civil War marks a watershed in his life, as it was in Spain that he refined his skills as a fighter. But Spain influenced Barontini’s trajectory in a political sense, too, as it was during the period of intense fighting at Guadalajara in early 1937 that fellow volunteers in the Italian brigade began to discuss the need to bring the anti-fascist fight to the colonial front as well. In the following years, Barontini went both to fight and to train new recruits in Ethiopia, France, and Italy. In this way, the chapter offers a glimpse of one way in which anti-fascism and anti-imperialism connected in this period.

Chapter 4 follows the trajectory of Ernst Frey and other European anti-fascists, who enlisted in the Vietnamese Army after defecting from the French Foreign Legion. It focuses on the complicated relationship between the soldiers who survived the anti-fascist struggles in Europe and the new generation of soldiers of the anti-colonial wars in the Global South. After 1945, many Spanish Civil War veterans followed events in Algeria and Indochina with great interest and sided with those fighting for national self-determination. Notwithstanding the visibility of both causes, notable armed support materialised only in Indochina, where foreign volunteers were initially well-received and saw their military influence grow much beyond what their modest careers in the French Foreign Legion might indicate. With time, however, they were also seen as a challenge to the nationalistic Vietnamese leadership, who, thanks largely to Chinese support from the early 1950s onwards, were radically altering their military structure, leaving little or no space for French Foreign Legion defectors.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

This chapter sketches the contexts, both broadly historical and more narrowly cultural, for Hemingway’s life and work from the 1910s through the 1950s, including the wars he experienced and the literary scenes that his work both shaped and was shaped by.

The civil war in Spain provoked deeper political thinking and involvement for Hemingway, and his political engagement shaped his writing about that war. Hemingway returned to his journalistic roots in the war reportage he wrote on the conflict, and experimented with dramatic form in his only play, The Fifth Column. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he absorbs, adapts, and rejects a romanticized view of the Spanish Civil War that had been developed and promulgated by European and American writers sympathetic (as Hemingway was) to the Spanish Republican cause, stripping from the realities of internecine conflict any potentially consoling significance of political commitment. The Second World War also drew Hemingway as a war correspondent (initially reluctant, he became an enthusiastic witness to, and even participant in, combat in France and Germany). On the basis of his wartime experience, he explored themes of forgiveness and grace in Across the River and into the Trees, a flawed novel whose purgatorial narrative is nevertheless an interesting experiment in fictional form.

Starting from the Russo-Japanese War until the height of the Cold War era, Schoenberg’s adult life coincided with various wars during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. This chapter explores how Schoenberg navigated these events by surveying his correspondences with friends and pupils, his own writings and brief analyses of two overtly political compositions, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41 (1942) and A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46 (1947). This chapter ends by considering the two war compositions as the composer’s statement and restatement against fascistic tendencies in Germany during World War II and, again, in the United States during the Cold War era.

Humor functions as a form of civic engagement and social protest in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Gertrude Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds (1947), novels that respond to the rise of fascism with complex satire. Despite a common view of Hurston and Stein as either apolitical or conservative, both authors reveal a keen understanding of conversion’s historical legacy in the justification of imperialism. The point both Hurston and Stein make is that humorous incongruity keeps the mind turning and, in the process, forestalls the “settling” of thought into place and “the fixation of belief” associated with totalitarianism. As outsiders for whom conversion—religious or secular—could mean a form of psychic death, they developed distinctive modes of ironic humor involving self-lacerating and self-satirizing critique.

Chapter 3 uses the most iconic figure in LFC’s pre-Shankly history, the Scottish winger Billy Liddell, as the jumping off point for a study of a club, and a city, in apparent post-war decline. Topics range from Liverpool’s early de-industrialisation to LFC’s local rivalry with the ‘Mersey Millionaires’, Everton.

Chapter 1 looks at the key factors behind post-war changes in political status, the motivations of local politicians involved in these negotiations and the impact of these changes on future steps to decolonise. In 1946, Martinique and Guadeloupe gained overseas department status to integrate them fully into the French Republic. Meanwhile, the West Indies Federation negotiations gave the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands the opportunity to reconsider their position within the British Empire. Both chose to become crown colonies with a more direct link to Britain. This chapter argues that these changes to political status were crucial to later attempts to negotiate greater autonomy. These changes were particularly significant for the French Antilles, as they would halt debates about independence for the following ten to fifteen years. In the British territories, crown colony status stabilised British rule and shifted the focus towards economic development.

This chapter explores the experiences of Italian emigrant veterans during the Fascist regime (1922–1943) and the Second World War. There were many contradictions in the Fascist treatment of emigrant veterans. On some occasions, they were fêted and lauded for their service. Unlike the Liberal state, Mussolini’s government highlighted the contribution of the emigrant soldiers during the Great War as exceptional and worthy of recognition, most notably at the landmark Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, held in Rome in 1932. However, on the whole, emigrant veterans did not become politically active once they returned abroad and were not the dominant standard-bearers for Fascism, and were often badly treated or ignored by the regime. Most of the Fascist government’s attention to the emigrants and the war surrounded the issue of wartime draft evaders, and new laws were passed in the 1920s to permit them to travel to Italy for short periods without being inducted into the Italian Army or otherwise punished. The outbreak of the Second World War upended the emigrant veterans’ lives once more, resulting in experiences of occupation, internment as enemy aliens or mobilization in the Italian or other armies.

This chapter reviews the Nazi plunder of art works, Judaica, and other cultural objects during and before the Second World War, showing how it operated as both a top-down and a bottom-up practice. It then traces the diverse efforts around the world to gain restitution or compensation for these plundered goods. Beginning with Allied efforts to locate and return stolen artworks during the closing days of the war (the so-called “Monuments Men”) and continuing through the evasive policies of Germany and Austria after the war, up to the renewed litigation, in Europe and America, starting in the 1990s, the chapter demonstrates the long and difficult road survivors and descendants walked to try to retrieve their stolen property. All too often such efforts failed.

The Introduction introduces broader structural aspects: the importance of war, process development and its determinants, the differences and similarities between Axis partners concerning the “Jewish question,” the fluidity of victim groups as defined or perceived by perpetrators; the links and variations among German/Axis mass atrocities (”final solution,” “euthanasia,” “ethnic cleansing,” Soviet POWs, “pacification”). It addresses controversies over the meaning of a “perpetrator” (referring also to the multiplicity of historic manifestations, functions, and usages introduced in the volume) and approaches to “becoming perpetrators”; it introduces correlation with other (partly artificial or otherwise problematic) categories such as “bystander,” “complicity,” and “rescuer” and their constructive engagement by the chapter authors.- outlines the organization of the volume into sections, the sequence of chapters, and raises to attention some of the key points to be considered in the different contributions.