“I feel I am at the stage now of really learning something”: Esma Banner,Post‐Second World War Migration Worker and Photographer

Australian woman Esma Banner (1910–2001) was a keen amateur photographer who worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) between 1945 and 1951. While posted in Germany, Banner kept a diary, wrote over 100 letters to her family, kept official reports, took photographs and collected art and craft by Displaced Persons (DP). In particular, photography and family were important to her. She said in a letter home: “You are all always in my thoughts – every picture I take is for you”. This article primarily focuses on visual materials in Esma Banner's personal papers. Banner's collection substantially documents her professional relief work with UNRRA and the IRO, and through this, her interactions with other relief workers as well as displaced children and adults can be seen. Here Banner's photographs and albums are read alongside published materials, letters and diaries to reveal a range of political, personal and gendered understandings of post‐Second World War reconstruction work. The material also provides some insights into the experiences of forcibly displaced children and adults. Banner's photographs are used to reflect upon the place of visual and personal sources in writing histories of post‐Second World War reconstruction.     

Remembering Paul Schiemann (1876–1944)

Abstract

This paper explores how population displacement operated in Lithuania in the immediate post-WWI period. In 1918 the disintegration of the old imperial polity led to the emergence of a Lithuanian state. Beyond the field of battle, the struggle to maintain the independence of Lithuania was characterised by an intense process of state and nation-building. All this hectic activity was accompanied by population displacement on a scale first witnessed in 1915–16.

Unlike the military campaigns, these state-building efforts did not come to an end in 1920. My argument is that population displacement presented the Lithuanian authorities with an opportunity to claim and to establish Lithuanian refugees as potential members of a new nation-state, thereby defining its spatial, demographic and cultural boundaries. The newly formed Lithuania offered a potential political homeland for tens of thousands of war refugees of various ethnic groups who had lived in the former north-western provinces before 1914, but who were displaced by war. According to rough estimates, the total number of Lithuanian refugees who settled in the Russian interior stood at 550,000 at the beginning of 1918. My paper explores their fate in the post-war period as well as official policies of the new Lithuanian state adopted towards the refugees.

The logic of the homogenising national state required that the refugees had to be persuaded or forced to abandon their divergent and multiple identities born in exile and rooted down in the single space of the national homeland. Nevertheless, the spatial pattern of ‘the homeland’ was still in flux, due to the border wars between Lithuania, Soviet Russia and Poland in 1918–20. As a result, some refugees were excluded from the ranks of Lithuanian citizenry. Their difficult situation was further aggravated by famine in Russia in 1921, which called for cooperation between Soviet Russia, Lithuania, Poland and Latvia. Thus, on the one hand, the refugees served as a focus for the propaganda of the belligerent states, while on the other hand their uncontrollable movement compelled governments to co-operate.

The paper is based on two collections of primary documents: the files of the Lithuanian Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs.     

The Sovietization of Lithuania after WWII: modernization,transculturation, and the lettered city

ABSTRACT

This article approaches the Sovietization of the Baltics in the light of two critical notions developed by the noted Latin American critic Angel Rama: “narrative transculturation” and “the lettered city.” By revisiting key moments in the development of Soviet Lithuanian culture and intellectual class against a backdrop of forced collectivization, urbanization, and modernization, the article aims at a novel interpretation of what Sovietization meant in the Lithuanian context, the significance of de-Stalinization and cultural modernism during the Thaw in the 1960s, and the cultural preconditions for the emergence of the popular movement against Soviet rule in the late 1980s.     

Histories of Madness: the Abject Perspective of Italian Women in Australia

In this article it is my intention to present some of the findings of my PhD research, 1 in which I have considered Italian migrants’ material and discursive practices about the body, through the analysis of a corpus of more than 1,000 original letters written by Italian migrants to Lena Gustin, the editor of two columns in the Italian Australian‐language newspaper La Fiamma. The specific focus of this article is on letters written by Italian migrant women in which a psychological discomfort or a psychiatric disorder was expressed. Many of these women wrote more than one letter over a span of two or more years. Despite important events in their lives, such as pregnancy and divorce, or admission to or release from a psychiatric hospital, they essentially continued to repeat the same discourse in every letter, as if they were trapped in a situation from which it was impossible to escape — as if nobody was actually listening to what they were trying to say. This paper is an attempt to give back a voice to some of these women through my own personal and theoretical approach to their histories of madness and abjection.     

Letters to the President: participation beyond the public sphere in Argentina, 1989–1999

President Carlos Menem received thousands of letters from citizens during his two consecutive administrations (1989–1999). Most often Peronist and working class, they wrote to him to seek financial or material aid, praise, criticize, advise, communicate political opinions and invite correspondence. They injected their letters with intimate details of everyday life, their understandings of democracy, and their sense of the successes and failures of the state at meeting those criteria and forging a democratic identity for the Republic. This article provides contextualized readings of a sample of those letters in an effort to elucidate why their writers looked beyond the public sphere to express themselves, and chose the letter to the president as method. It argues that discursive participation in the public sphere remained elite-dominated, and mass mobilization did not provide the individualized results or political bonds that the letter writers sought. Furthermore, as an activity that Juan Perón had actively encouraged, writing to the president appeared an object lesson in good Peronist citizenship. The “mythical basis of the legitimacy” of Perón and his version of Justicialism had been his “direct contact with the people” (Plotkin). The letters reveal how citizens in the 1990s sought to reconstitute this imagined proximity with a Peronist president in a newly democratic context.     

Deserters,Converts, Cossacks and Revolutionaries: Russians in Iranian Military Service 1800–1920

Russians entered Iranian military service in this period in two waves, each wave characterizing a specific period in Iranian–Russian relations. The first was subaltern in origin and came in the form of the deserters from the Russian imperial army who fled to Tabriz in the early nineteenth century and who made a significant contribution to Iranian efforts to build a modern army. The second took place in the late nineteenth–early twentieth century and consisted of representatives of the tsarist military elite, Russian Cossack officers, who came to Iran between 1879 and 1920 and formed the Iranian Cossack Brigade, and their opposites, Caucasian revolutionaries who joined the constitutional movement in order to continue their struggle against the Russian imperial regime. The article raises a series of questions, not only about the extent of Russian influence suggested by the presence of Russian soldiers, but also about its character. Why did Iran place such a high value on Russian military expertise? Who were the Russians who served in the Iranian military? How were they received in Iran? What effect did Iranian society exercise on them and to what extent did the changes transforming Russia affect the roles they played in Iran?     

An Unsuitable Job for a Historian: Antoine-Henri Baron De Jomini,and his Governorship of Vilna,July–August 1812

This article discusses the less-known pages in the biography of a renowned military historian and theoretician, A.-H. Baron de Jomini, in his post as the Military Governor of the Lithuanian city of Vilna (Vilnius) during Napoléon's ill-fated 1812 Russian Campaign. It will argue that with the help of an integral approach and ‘microhistory’, there are enough data to permit us to reconstruct Jomini's activities in the region during July and August of 1812. Analysis of documents will show that Jomini failed not only because the local population became completely uninterested in the presence of French ‘liberators’, but also because in the higher echelons of the Grande Armée commanding officers in charge were more interested in personal ambition than carrying out their assigned duties.     

Die Evangelisch-Reformierte Kirche Litauens 1915–1940

Abstract

The article, based on church documents and publications of leading church members, traces the Renaissance of the Evangelical-Reformed (Calvinist) Church in the Lithuanian Republic during the interwar period from 1919 to the Soviet occupation in 1940, and includes historiographical background information.

Modern Lithuania is overwhelmingly and adamantly Roman Catholic. Few Lithuanians know that the Reformed Church was founded in 1555 in Vilnius (Wilna, Vilno) at the height of the Reformation in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the reign of Sigismund II Augustus and under the protection of Lithuania's chancellor Nicholas Radvila (Radziwi??) the Black. It was called Unitas Lituaniae, to distinguish it from the Reformed Church founded in Poland. It was given a carefully planned synodalpresbyterian structure which stood the test of time and withstood centuries of adversity during the Counter Reformation in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and, after the partitions, under Tsarist rule.

Purely ethnic Lithuanians resided in northern Lithuania in areas of Bir?ai (Birsen, pol. Birse) and Kedainiai (Kedainnen, Kiejdany), historical residences of the now extinct Protestant branch of the Radvila (Radziwi??) family. It is to this day a stronghold of Lithuanian Reformed Christianity.

At the time of Lithuanian Independence in 1918, the Church represented a small but tenacious minority which, reclaiming its historical name, vigorously reasserted its presence in the new Republic. With Vilnius falling under Polish control in 1919, the Church leadership chose Bir?ai as its new (temporary) center. In the first decade of Independence, the Reformed Lithuanians, despite their small number, were disproportionately represented in the professions and in government. Discriminatory tendencies did not appear until the thirties. The powerful Catholic Church, acting under its new Code of Canon Laws, revived historical theological hostilities and stereotypes and identified nationality with Catholicism. This shaped public opinion for years to come and was especially galling to Reformed Lithuanians, who were proud of their historical roots and their faith. These attitudes still exist and present a challenge for the future.     

On Political Terror during the Soviet Expansion into Lithuania, 1918–1919

This article deals with a noticeable anomaly of Bolshevik expansion in Lithuania during 1918–1919: the refusal of the Soviet authorities to resort to terror to subdue the local population in order to export the world revolution. The author argues that the Soviets avoided political terror in Lithuania because they did not treat the Lithuanians as a nation capable of sustaining their own state. In fact, anti-Bolshevik forces employed more terror than the Bolsheviks in their attempt to drive out the Reds and uproot Lithuanian support for the Communist regime. The Lithuanian left-wing government of Mykolas Sle?evi?ius sought to contain its radicalized military and to preserve a soft-handed relationship with the local Bolshevik government.     

The Lansdowne “Peace Letter” of 1917 and the Prospect of Peace by Negotiation with Germany

In late November 1917, Lord Lansdowne, one of the most senior of British Unionist politicians, wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph. The letter asked for the war aims of the Entente and the USA to be “coordinated” and suggested that a moderate revision of war aims might bring a negotiated peace nearer. The letter appeared to ally Lansdowne with the British Radicals, who had been close to President Wilson (until April 1917), and had argued for a negotiated peace to end the war since the autumn of 1916. The letter was ferociously denounced by the Northcliffe press, and by many of Lansdowne's Unionist colleagues. It was supposedly a “plea for surrender” and “a national misfortune”. Nevertheless, it touched off a series of new departures in the search for a negotiated settlement: House's visit to the inter Allied Conference in December, the Labour War Aims Memorandum, Lloyd George's Caxton Hall speech, Wilson's Fourteen Points Address, and the beginning of a public parley with the Central Powers in the replies of Hertling and Czernin in January 1918. The paper examines the possibilities for a negotiated peace during the winter of 1917–1918, that is, in the period between the publication of Lansdowne's famous letter and the sudden Versailles “Knockout Blow” Declaration of February 1918 which rejected out of hand any prospect of negotiation. The paper examines Wilson's ambiguous position in this debate, and in particular the evolution of moderate opinion inside Germany in reaction to these events. The paper suggests the unfortunate enfeeblement of moderate opinion in Germany in the face of the apparent triumph of “knockout blow” opinion in the Entente camp.     

‘No Allies’: The Lithuanian Taryba and The National Minorities 1916–1918

The call for ‘national self-determination’ exercised enormous moral attraction during and after the First World War but at the same time also caused tensions between individual national groups, especially in ethnically mixed East Central Europe. This article examines the function and importance that the Lithuanian Taryba attached to national minorities during its existence. It illustrates the problematic attitude of the Taryba concerning the minorities from the onset. The Lithuanian example obviously cannot be seen as unique in Eastern Europe. In that respect the founding fathers of the modern Lithuanian state hardly differed from the trend of their era.     

A Century After: The ‘Great DIET of Vilnius’ Revisited

The Vilnius assembly of December 1905 in Vilnius, the so-called ‘Great Diet’, is now seen as a watershed in the history of the Lithuanian national movement. The event was the culmination of socioeconomic changes as well as the growing assertiveness and political diversity of the Lithuanian national movement. The assembly radicalized village politics and encouraged the Lithuanian intelligentsia to formulate a vision of a future Lithuanian political entity. One enduring consequences of the Great Diet was increased acceptance of the idea of an independent state in which ethnic Lithuanians would assume the dominant role within a multinational framework.     

The Role of Professionals in Policy Reform: Cases from the City Level,São Paulo

A new generation of social policies in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America are being read by scholars as first and foremost the result of top‐down initiatives by state elites and technocrats. This article explores what role, if any, middle‐class professionals have played and how this role might be framed in analytical terms. The article examines the trajectory of two of the most important new social programs that target the poor in the city of São Paulo, Brazil: the family health program PSF and Renda Mínima. It compares the city‐level reform dynamics that have shaped the trajectory of the programs over 18 years. It finds that networks of reformist middle‐class professionals that traverse public and private institutions played a substantial role in the creation and evolution of the new programs.     

The Emergence of the Lithuanian Radical Right Movement, 1922–1927

The article discusses the origins and development of the interwar Lithuanian radical right-wing movement before the coup d’état of December 1926. During the second half of 1922, the first sporadic outbreaks of Lithuanian ultra-patriotism occurred. They were carried out by veterans of the independence wars and students – both representatives of the “tautininkai (patriotic) stream.” In parallel, during the period 1923–1927, another two separate groups started operating as right-wing political parties: the pro-fascist movement coordinated by the Christian Democrats, and the “Secret Officers Union” allied with the “Lithuanian Nationalist Union” (Tautininkai). These three groups and their interrelations comprised the core of the early Lithuanian radical right. By focusing on the destabilizing role of war veterans, the author is explicit about the connection between the war and the radicalization of politics in interwar Lithuania.     

Client‐ship and Citizenship in Latin America

This article explores the development of political relationships between people and politicians since around 1820 in Latin America. In particular, it develops the idea of client‐ship as a form of political agency and contrasts it to citizenship, linking both to 'natural' and 'historical' interpretations of inequality. The piece claims that client‐ship has dominated political relations and that its twin tools of charisma and votes‐for‐goods allows it to thrive today in the form of neo‐populism. In contrast, citizenship has been thwarted by the efforts of parties which control political agency by imposing norms of intellectual superiority and hierarchies of disdain. Throughout, I argue that issues of race, gender and class are central to political relationships which are the cultural terrain of power, and conclude that parties must begin to take citizens – and citizenship – seriously if they wish to avert a crisis of democracy.     

Language shift in Lithuania, 1850–1900: A reinterpretation

Abstract

The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of particularly intense linguistic change in Lithuania. This period has generally been viewed as one in which a shift was taking place among many speakers from Lithuanian to Polish, in such numbers that the very survival of the Lithuanian language was under threat. However, an alternate interpretation is possible when one considers that previous researchers failed to deal in sufficient complexity with important taxonomical, geographical, and sociological aspects of this alleged shift. This article proposes a reinterpretation of the sociolinguistic situation in Lithuania at that time, suggesting that the overall linguistic picture was much more stable than has often been supposed.     

Der musikalische und literarische Protest in “Spelemannen” von Harry Olt und Kalju Lepik

Abstract

In his novella on German-Lithuanian relations, which is the theme of Litauische Claviere, the East German writer Johannes Bobrowski (1917–1965) attributes a proto-Marxist dialectic outlook to the Lithuanian national poet Kristijonas Donelaitis, in that Donelaitis is presented by Bobrowski as a harsh critic of the injustices of 18th century Lithuanian society seen through the prism of a class struggle. As Bobrowski was writing at a time when writers were expected to conform to Party ideology, it is of interest to revisit the official interpretation of Donelaitis work during the Soviet era.     

The Saracens of the Baltic: Pagan and Christian Lithuanians in the Perception of English and French Crusaders to Late Medieval Prussia

This paper investigates the use of the term ‘Saracens’ to describe the Lithuanian opponents of the Western crusaders who took part in expeditions launched from Prussia by the Teutonic Order against the grand duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It presents a variety of evidence from narrative and documentary sources to demonstrate that this usage was derived from existing images of Muslim opponents and was reinforced by epic and romance literature. The use of the term Saracens, which by the fourteenth century had become a generic designation for pagans, was both a convenient way for Western crusaders to imbue the Prussian crusades with a value commensurate with campaigns in the Holy Land, but also to blacken their Lithuanian opponents even when they had abandoned paganism.     

Clientelism and Social Funds: Evidence from Chávez's Misiones

The latest president in Latin America to adopt social funds on a large scale as an integral part of his government program has been Hugo Chávez Frías of Venezuela. Based on the literature on clientelism and social funds in Latin America, this article finds that Venezuela's latest experiments with social funds were influenced by political variables. It uses empirical data from the distribution of resources for some of the subnational misiones programs to show how, given increased levels of electoral competition and weak institutional constraints, the government used these funds clientelistically, even while distributing oil income to the very poor. Chávez's misiones served two very different purposes: to manipulate the political context and to distribute funds directly to the low-income population.