The inquiries into the agency of artworks, sensory experience and craftsmanship draw attention of art historians to previously little-studied artefacts, such as tin-glazed objects produced since the sixteenth century in various parts of Central Europe. The shift away from questions of attribution challenges the arbitrary choices made by international institutions to promote art of clearly identifiable individuals or artistic geniuses. The multisensory perspective levels the field and diverts the narrative from an idealized or supposedly universal aesthetic. It allows us to redefine the artistic output of specific communities and to highlight collaborative modes of production in early modern artisanal workshops. This article focuses on sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century ceramics produced in Moravia and discusses them from the multisensory perspective. The focus on the characteristics of the glazes, ecology of production and non-canonical artefacts underlines the specificity of the historic local art scene, or the visual culture to which these objects belonged. The aim is to challenge previous master narratives that remain nationalistic and ideological.
The current historical research is reinterpreting both the phenomenon of fascism and the Spanish Civil War from the perspectives of global history. Building on this area of historiographical innovation, this article focuses on a single 'global fascist actor': the hitherto nebulous figure of Roland E. Strunk (1892-1937), a Nazi journalist and spy who acted as informal emissary between Hitler and the Francoist rebels in the summer of 1936. By drawing on a broad range of primary sources, including untapped materials from German archives, the article situates Strunk in a much broader, and global, historical context. Observing Strunk's multifaceted experiences in the interwar period, the article establishes significant connections between the experience of Strunk in the Great War, the Sino-Japanese conflict, the Ethiopian war and the Spanish conflict. The article argues that reconstructing, in their full historical complexity, the biographical trajectories of transnational actors such as Strunk allows us to better understand the place of the Spanish Civil War within a broader European and, in fact, global history.
When the regions of Eupen, Sankt Vith and Malmedy switched from German to Belgian state sovereignty in the aftermath of the First World War, the local inhabitants who had served in the German army had welfare needs, demands or aspirations that could no longer be legitimated by means of war service and sacrifice for their nation-state. This article investigates how German soldiers became Belgian veterans. Challenging state-centred interpretations of how war veterans related to welfare, this article approaches these German-Belgian borderlands as a space shaped jointly by states, institutions and borderland veterans. Their interactions gave rise to a unique assemblage of Belgian public and German private welfare measures: a cross-border mixed economy of veteran welfare. The borderland veterans received higher financial benefits compensating for their disabilities from their new state than if their places of residence had remained within Germany, as Belgian state benefits were higher and German private welfare organizations sent additional benefits across the Western state border. Nevertheless, they resented that they could not attain identical financial recognition for their service as other Belgian veterans.
In Tito's Yugoslavia, antifascist veterans were both hailed as heroes in the public spaces of the state and entitled to generous welfare support. This was true also for the disabled veterans and their families. Sometimes the case for welfare on the part of disabled veterans and their families was clear-cut, but in other cases, where details of wartime service or family circumstances were less straightforward, the case for welfare needed to be adjudicated. Such ‘requests and complaints’ were from 1961 onwards handled by a special commission, a department of the amalgamated veteran association ‘SUBNOR’. Supplicants submitted letters of request to the commission outlining their justification for receiving support, based on wartime record and on physical or financial need in the postwar period. These letters collectively form a kind of biography of the disabled wartime generation and their experiences in the period of mature socialism in Yugoslavia. Appeals were often grounded in patriotic stories of wartime heroism and sacrifice, but they also spoke of the physical and economic difficulties of the postwar years. As time passed, applicants also complained of the fading memory and respect for their wartime generation, as well as the political and social crises that hit the state from the 1980s onwards. The letters to the Croatian commission also speak of the economic transformation of the region, economic migration into depopulated and industrializing borderlands, geographies of opportunity and also those of risk. This article analyses these requests from 1961 to 1988, helping to explain the transformation of welfare expectations on the part of a generation of war veterans and their families.
