Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir in France. Eich, Richter, and B ll in Germany. Pavese, Levi, and Silone in Italy. These are among the defenders of human dignity whose lives and work are explored in this widely encompassing work. James D. Wilkinson examines for the first time the cultural impact of the anti-Fascist literary movements in Europe and the search of intellectuals for renewal--for social change through moral endeavor--during World War II and its immediate aftermath. It was a period of hope, Wilkinson asserts, and not of despair as is so frequently assumed. Out of the shattering experience of war evolved the bracing experience of resistance and a reaffirmation of faith in reason. Wilkinson discovers a spiritual revolution taking place during these years of engagement and views the participants, the engag s, as heirs of the Enlightenment. Drawing on a wide range of published writing as well as interviews with many intellectuals who were active during the 1940s, Wilkinson explains in the fullest context ever attempted their shared opposition to tyranny during the war and their commitment to individual freedom and social justice afterward. Wilkinson has written a cultural history for our time. His wise and subtle understanding of the long-range significance of the engages is a reminder that the reassertion of humanist values is as important as political activism by intellectuals.

The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the USSR and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for contextualizing and understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. During this time of 'crisis,' many contemporaries, especially intellectuals, felt they faced a momentous decision which could bring about a radically different future. The understanding of what Europe was and what it should be was questioned in a profound way, forcing Europeans to react. The idea of a specifically European unity finally became, at least for some, a feasible project, not only to avoid another war but to avoid the destruction of the idea of European unity. This volume reassesses the relationship between ideas of Europe and the European project and reconsiders the impact of long and short-term political transformations on assumptions about the continent's scope, nature, role and significance.

This book is about the global crisis and the right to resistance, about neoliberal biopolitics and direct democracy, about the responsibility of intellectuals and the poetry of the multitude. Using Greece as an example, Douzinas argues that the persistent sequence of protests, uprisings and revolutions has radically changed the political landscape. This new politics is the latest example of the drive to resist, a persevering characteristic of the human spirit. The EU and the IMF used Greece as a guinea pig to test the conditions of social reconstruction in times of crisis. But the manifold resistances turned the object of experimentation into a political subject and overturned the plans of elites. The idea and limits of democracy are redefined in the place of their birth.

In 1949, as Cold War tensions in Europe mounted, French intellectual and former Buchenwald inmate David Rousset called upon fellow concentration camp survivors to denounce the Soviet Gulag as a "hallucinatory repetition" of Nazi Germany's most terrible crime. In Political Survivors, Emma Kuby tells the riveting story of what followed his appeal, as prominent members of the wartime Resistance from throughout Western Europe united to campaign against the continued existence of inhumane internment systems around the world. The International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime brought together those originally deported for acts of anti-Nazi political activity who believed that their unlikely survival incurred a duty to bear witness for other victims. Over the course of the next decade, these pioneering activists crusaded to expose political imprisonment, forced labor, and other crimes against humanity in Franco's Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond. Until now, the CIA's secret funding of Rousset's movement has remained in the shadows. Kuby reveals this clandestine arrangement between European camp survivors and American intelligence agents. She also brings to light how Jewish Holocaust victims were systematically excluded from Commission membership – a choice that fueled the group's rise, but also helped lead to its premature downfall. The history that she unearths provides a striking new vision of how wartime memory shaped European intellectual life and ideological struggle after 1945, showing that the key lessons Western Europeans drew from the war centered on "the camp," imagined first and foremost as a site of political repression rather than ethnic genocide. Political Survivors argues that Cold War dogma and acrimony, tied to a distorted understanding of WWII's chief atrocities, overshadowed the humanitarian possibilities of the nascent anti-concentration camp movement as Europe confronted the violent decolonizing struggles of the 1950s.

Aufbau—a German-language weekly, published in New York and circulated nationwide—was an essential platform for the generation of refugees from Hitler and the displaced people and concentration camp survivors who arrived in the United States after the war. The publication served to link thousands of readers looking for friends and loved ones in every part of the world. In its pages Aufbau focused on concerns that strongly impacted this community in the aftermath of World War II: anti-Semitism in the United States and in Europe, the ever-changing immigration and naturalization procedures, debates about the designation of Hitler refugees as enemy aliens, questions about punishment for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes, the struggle for compensation and restitution, and the fight for a Jewish homeland. The book examines the columns and advertisements that chronicled the social and cultural life of that generation and maintained a detailed account of German-speaking cultures in exile. Peter Schrag is the first to present a definitive account of the influential publication that brought postwar refugees together and into the American mainstream.

"In addition to the huge list of written sources from samizdat works to recent essays, Falk's sources include interviews with many personalities of those events as well as videos and films."--Jacket.

"Adamson leads his readers through intricate debates with care and skill. Even the non-specialist reader will come away with an understanding of the stakes in modernist studies."—Mary Gluck, author of Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris "No serious student of the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century will be able to overlook this subtle and impassioned attempt to rethink its history: its far-reaching ambitions and its strategies for achieving them, its successes and its failures. Because of Adamson's distinctive perspective and the breadth of his research, I persistently found myself being forced to rethink the history of the European avant-garde and question some of my own assumptions and conclusions."—Robert Wohl, author of The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950