Suchergebnisse

It was less than a year since the Second Spanish Republic had been founded. In early December 1931 parliament, which had become the focal point of national politics with the elections to the Constituent Assembly, accepted the new constitution by an overwhelming majority after three months of lively debate, and elected the first democratic state president. In mid-December the right-wing Radical Party withdrew from the Republican/Socialist coalition, which was an advantage for the reform programme advocated by premier Manuel Azaña, and seemed to pave the way for reforms to be forced through. These were aimed, above all, at modernising the economy, establishing social justice in rural areas, continuing the process of democratisation and developing federal, decentralised structures. However, the first parliamentary session of the new year, with the new government, was certainly not dominated by the reform measures fought for with such determination. Rather the central theme of the opening session was a bloody incident in a small place in the south-west region of Extremadura which stirred up public opinion to an extreme degree in Spain during the first days of January 1932.

Inhaltsverzeichnis ; Volltext // Exemplar mit der Signatur: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- Z 88.1031-2/4

The introduction to this special section discusses the state of the art in recent historiography on peace movements during the 1970s and 1980s, and recent attempts to conceptualise Southern Europe as a geographical or political space.

The Spanish Civil War has been called the "quintessential expression" of the violent confrontation of the great ideologies in the Europe of the 1930s. Yet, historical research has so far paid all but no attention to the Spanish experience within the context of the wars of the 20th Century. This "age of total war" has been dominated like no other by the mass mobilization, military violence, mass killing and mass dying. The previous differentiation between civilian and military sectors collapsed while war itself dominated all human activity and almost all areas of experience, burning itself deep into the individual's memory and into collective identities. In this volume, reknown scholars from the US, Great Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany situate the Spanish Civil War in the context of total war by focussing on topics like military violence, war experience and the culture of war.