1st Edition

Memories of the Second World War in Neutral Europe, 1945–2023

Edited By Manuel Bragança, Peter Tame Copyright 2024
330 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

330 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

330 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This edited volume is a sequel to, and a development of, The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016 (2016). It focuses on the six major European countries and states that remained officially neutral throughout the Second World War, namely Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Vatican. Its transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach... Read more

Foreword: The Search for Neutrality in Wartime
Jay Winter

Introduction: European Neutrals in World War II and after: A Balancing Act
Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

Section I: Ireland / Éire.

1. ‘No useful purpose’? The Government Information Bureau (GIB) and Irish neutrality
Elspeth Payne and Conor Campbell

2. Forgotten Volunteers? Remembering and Recognising veterans of the Second World War in the Republic of Ireland
Bernard Kelly

3. The Emergency’s Improbable Frequency in Contemporary Irish Culture.
Anna Teekell

Section II: Portugal.

4. Portugal, World War II refugees and the Holocaust. History and Memory
Irene Flunser Pimentel

5. Portuguese Memorials of World War II, between Remembrance and Oblivion
Helena Pinto Janeiro

6. Memory works: The Changing Faces of Portugal’s Neutrality in recent Portuguese feature films and documentaries (1992-2017).
Pedro Aires Oliveira

Section III: Spain.

7. Diplomats in the fray. The struggle to establish the legacy of Spanish foreign policy during the Second World War
Emilio Sáenz-Francés and José Manuel Sáenz Rotko

8. From Sepharad to the Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy. Facts and Fictions on Spain and the Holocaust
Mario Martín Gijón

9. Neutrality of Spain in World War II: The Filmic Construction of a Myth.
Ana Luengo

Section IV: Sweden.

10. Archives on Victims of Nazism in Sweden: From Oral History to Cultural Memory or Oblivion
Johannes Heuman

11. Sweden, the War and the Holocaust in post-war memory
Pontus Rudberg

12. On remembrance and forgetting: the Second World War in Swedish memory culture. 
Eva Kingsepp

Section V: Switzerland.

13. Switzerland and its neutral stance during World War II: a past that won't go away
Georg Kreis

14. Memorials of World War II and the Holocaust in Switzerland
Fabienne Meyer

15. Switzerland: The Policy of Neutrality and the Uses and Abuses of World War II Memory.
Regula Ludi

Section VI: The Vatican.

16. The papacy, the Catholic World, and the memory of the Second World War
Gabriele Rigano

17. Vatican diplomacy on the razor’s edge: preserving neutrality and ecclesiastical heritage sites in Italy during World War II
Michela Morgante

18. Telling children of neutral spaces in occupied Rome. Memories of the Church, the Pope, and persecution.
Mara Josi

Afterword: The Shadow of the Second World War on Neutral Europe.
Neville Wylie

Biography

Manuel Bragança is an Assistant Professor in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at University College Dublin. His publications include The Long Aftermath (2016, with Peter Tame), Ego-Histories of France and the Second World War (with Fransiska Louwagie, 2018), and Hitler’s French Literary Afterlives (2019).

Peter Tame is an independent researcher, specialising in twentieth-century French literature and ideology. His principal publications include The Ideological Hero (1998), Isotopias: Places and Spaces in French War Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2015), Mnemosyne and Mars (2013), and The Long Aftermath (2016).