Topographies of Fascism offers the first comprehensive exploration of how Spanish fascist writing – essays, speeches, articles, propaganda materials, poems, novels, and memoirs – represented and created space from the early 1920s until the late 1950s. Nil Santiáñez contends that fascism expressed its views on the state, the nation, and the society in spatial terms (for example, the state as a “building,” the nation as an “organic unity,” and society as the “people's community”), just as its adherents celebrated fascism in its architecture, public spectacles, and military rituals. While Topographies of Fascism centres on Spain, a nation that produced a large number of fascist texts focused on space, it also draws on works written by key German, Italian, and French fascist politicians and intellectuals. Ultimately, it provides an innovative model for analyzing the comparable yet often overlooked strategies of symbolic representation and production of space in fascist political and cultural discourse.

Topographies of Fascism offers the first comprehensive exploration of how Spanish fascist writing - essays, speeches, articles, propaganda materials, poems, novels, and memoirs - represented and created space from the early 1920s until the late 1950s. Nil Santiáñez contends that fascism expressed its views on the state, the nation, and the society in spatial terms (for example, the state as a "building," the nation as an "organic unity," and society as the "people's community"), just as its adherents celebrated fascism in its architecture, public spectacles, and military rituals. While Topographies of Fascism centres on Spain, a nation that produced a large number of fascist texts focused on space, it also draws on works written by key German, Italian, and French fascist politicians and intellectuals. Ultimately, it provides an innovative model for analyzing the comparable yet often overlooked strategies of symbolic representation and production of space in fascist political and cultural discourse.

What is fascism? Is it revolutionary? Or is it reactionary? Can it be both? Fascism is notoriously hard to define. How do we make sense of an ideology that appeals to streetfighters and intellectuals alike? That is overtly macho in style, yet attracts many women? That calls for a return to tradition while maintaining a fascination with technology? And that preaches violence in the name of an ordered society? In the new edition of this Very Short Introduction, Kevin Passmore brilliantly unravels the paradoxes of one of the most important phenomena in the modern world—tracing its origins in the intellectual, political, and social crises of the late nineteenth century, the rise of fascism following World War I, including fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, and the fortunes of 'failed' fascist movements in Eastern Europe, Spain, and the Americas. He also considers fascism in culture, the new interest in transnational research, and the progress of the far right since 2002. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The period spanning the two World Wars was unquestionably the most catastrophic in Europe's history. Despite such undeniably progressive developments as the radical expansion of women's suffrage and rising health standards, the era was dominated by political violence and chronic instability. Its symbols were Verdun, Guernica, and Auschwitz. By the end of this dark period, tens of millions of Europeans had been killed and more still had been displaced and permanently traumatized. If the nineteenth century gave Europeans cause to regard the future with a sense of optimism, the early twentieth century had them anticipating the destruction of civilization. The fact that so many revolutions, regime changes, dictatorships, mass killings, and civil wars took place within such a compressed time frame suggests that Europe experienced a general crisis. The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914-1945 reconsiders the most significant features of this calamitous age from a transnational perspective. It demonstrates the degree to which national experiences were intertwined with those of other nations, and how each crisis was implicated in wider regional, continental, and global developments. Readers will find innovative and stimulating chapters on various political, social, and economic subjects by some of the leading scholars working on modern European history today.

Berlin has been the focal scene of some of the most dramatic and formative events of the twentieth century. Through periods of decadence, fascism, war, partition and reunification, it has seen both extraordinary constraint and creativity. Andrew Webber explores the cultural topography of Berlin and considers the city as key capital of the twentieth century, reflecting its history, its traumas and its achievements. He shows how its spaces and buildings participate in the drama by analysing how they are represented in literature and film. Taking his methodology from Walter Benjamin, Webber presents bold readings of works synonymous with Berlin, with authors from Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka to Christa Wolf, and directors from Walther Ruttmann to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. Across this range of material, twentieth-century Berlin is seen to be as ambivalent as it is fascinating.

From the author of "Vichy France," a fascinating, authoritative history of fascism in all its manifestations, and how and why it took hold in certain countries and not in others. What "is" fascism? Many authors have proposed succinct but abstract definitions. Robert O. Paxton prefers to start with concrete historical experience. He focuses more on what fascists did than on what they said. Their first uniformed bands beat up "enemies of the nation," such as communists and foreign immigrants, during the tense days after 1918 when the liberal democracies of Europe were struggling with the aftershocks of World War I. Fascist parties could not approach power, however, without the complicity of conservatives willing to sacrifice the rule of law for security. Paxton makes clear the sequence of steps by which fascists and conservatives together formed regimes in Italy and Germany, and why fascists remained out of power elsewhere. Fascist regimes were strained alliances. While fascist parties had broad political leeway, conservatives preserved many social and economic privileges. Goals of forced national unity, purity, and expansion, accompanied by propaganda-driven public excitement, held the mixture together. War opened opportunities for fascist extremists to pursue these goals to the point of genocide. Paxton shows how these opportunities manifested themselves differently in France, in Britain, in the Low Countries, and in Eastern Europe-and yet failed to achieve supreme power. He goes on to examine whether fascism can exist outside the specific early-twentieth-century European setting in which it emerged, and whether it can reappear today. This groundbreaking book, based on alifetime of research, will have a lasting impact on our understanding of twentieth-century history.

This book—which is based on vast archival research and on a variety of primary sources—has filled a gap in Italy’s historiography on Fascism, and in European and world history about concentration camps in our contemporary world. It provides, for the first time, a survey of the different types of internment practiced by Fascist Italy during the war and a historical map of its concentration camps. Published in Italian (I campi del duce, Turin: Einaudi, 2004), in Croatian (Mussolinijevi Logori, Zagreb: Golden Marketing – Tehnička knjiga, 2007), in Slovenian (Fašistična taborišča, Ljublana: Publicistično društvo ZAK, 2011), and now in English, Mussolini’s Camps is both an excellent product of academic research and a narrative easily accessible to readers who are not professional historians. It undermines the myth that concentration camps were established in Italy only after the creation of the Republic of Salò and the Nazi occupation of Italy’s northern regions in 1943, and questions the persistent and traditional image of Italians as brava gente (good people), showing how Fascism made extensive use of the camps (even in the occupied territories) as an instrument of coercion and political control.