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 2 examines the history of Leo Kari and other Scandinavian volunteers in the International Brigades. It takes issue with the long-standing depiction of the voluntary army in Spain as ’Comintern mercenaries’ or as essentially the sole invention of international communism. In addition, the chapter follows the trajectories of different members of the resistance movements in Denmark and Norway and examines why historians have typically overlooked the fact that the core of World War II sabotage groups were nearly all former volunteers of the civil war who used their military expertise from Spain to position themselves as leaders of the resistance. Most former war volunteers were completely marginalised in the Cold War climate emerging after 1947–1948, yet some of them still insisted on a third military adventure. The anti-colonial struggles were seen as a new opening, as is evident from Leo Kari’s renewed efforts to mobilise a voluntary army for the Algerian war of liberation in the early 1960s.

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.

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.

The chapter delves into the significant collaboration of Spanish, Argentine, and Chilean fascists and traditionalists in the 1950s, particularly within the confines of the Institute of Hispanic Culture. This collaboration, despite its ultimate failure, marked a critical transitional phase between interwar fascism and the technocratic ideologies of the 1960s, laying the mythological foundations and networks that would later shape the book’s protagonists.

This chapter explores the intersection of antifascism and South American women’s activism in the context of the Spanish Civil War. The analysis focuses on Mi guerra de España (My Spanish War, 1976) by Argentine Mika Etchebéhère, an account of her experiences as a captain of a Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) militia, and the feminist political magazines Vida Femenina (Buenos Aires, 1933–42) and Acción Femenina (Santiago, 1922–39). From different genres such as the memoir, the essay, or the journal article, and from varied platforms including political and non-political associations and publications, women expressed their will to contribute to the global discussion and struggle against fascism.

This chapter tackles the question: What opportunities and liabilities did living, breathing veterans of 1930s Cuban antifascism present to Cuban revolutionary leaders beginning in 1959? It explores the convoluted, often transnational trajectories of individual antifascist Cubans from the 1930s forward. In so doing, it intervenes into the historiographies of both transnational antifascism and the Cuban Revolution, the former which has until recently mostly ignored Cuba and the latter which has mostly ignored antifascism. Individual human stories that demonstrate the multifaceted interactions of 1930s Cuban antifascism with the Cuban Revolution counter oversimplification, omission, politicization, and romanticization. The chapter concludes that historical memory of 1930s Cuban antifascism existed in post-1959 Cuba only to the extent to which it stood in explicit support of the Cuban Revolution, at least through the end of the twentieth century, and that it served ideological and pragmatic purposes

This chapter situates the emerging antifascism of Diego Rivera and other Mexican artists within the broader contexts of post-revolutionary Mexico, the rise of global fascism, and shifts of the global left. Their antifascism emerged slowly in the 1920s, subordinate to their sharp anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, but moved to the forefront from the mid-30s with the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, and as part of Popular Front strategies across the progressive left. Rivera’s antifascism, shaped by his Communist dissidence during the 1930s, most fully emerged in his US murals. His Portrait of America (1933) denounces US capitalism and imperialism, while addressing the urgency of proletarian unity against fascism. Pan American Unity (1940) reflects Rivera’s disgust with the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. It proposes a cultural and political alliance between Latin America and the once-imperial US as the only way to defeat the alliance of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms.

The introduction provides an overview of the volume’s key theoretical concepts and empirical cases. It emphasizes that there have been a variety of antifascisms in Latin America and the Caribbean that were not merely derivative of European antifascism or the product of European exiles. Rather, there were homegrown Latin American and Caribbean antifascist movements forged in the interplay between local, regional, and transnational processes. By placing Latin American and Caribbean antifascists in relation to the broader historiography on antifascism, the introduction illuminates their specific heterogeneous agendas, strategies, and styles as well as their class, racial, ethnic, and gendered dimensions. Latin American and Caribbean antifascists participated in exchanges from the Global South to the Global North and within the Global South. They resembled and yet differed from other Global South antifascisms regarding race and imperialism. The introduction ends by providing an overview of the chapters by placing them within the book’s theoretical framework.

Chapter 1 introduces the figure of the foreign fighter in the interwar period by focusing on the Spanish Civil War. It shows how the image of the nineteenth-century adventurer haunts the imaginary of the actors preoccupied with finding a legal status for the volunteers in Spain. This image is nonetheless constantly split in two: idealists and freebooters; heroes and opportunists; barbaric troops and brave highlanders. The chapter moves from the League to the Anglo-American doctrine, to domestic discussions and ends at The Hague in 1907. It is there that rules on foreign volunteers are codified in an international convention for the first time. The chapter further links the Brussels Conference of 1874 to those of Geneva in 1949 and offers a lens through which to understand how the shifting image of the adventurer reaches the decolonization period.

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.