european history CENTURY DICTATORS LIVING WITH 20TH


Professor James Clark from the Graduate School of Arts and Humanities asks: Is there anything new to say about the dictators?


THIS IS A QUESTION MANY of us will have asked ourselves when faced with yet another essay on how, when – and why for so long – did one, another, or indeed all of them hold on to power? Of course, we can talk about the


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individual personalities involved; in fact there is scarcely any intimate detail now that has not been documented in detail. We can narrate more-or-less every episode in their grim and gruesome progress, and we can cross-check the story with a whole shelf of DVD documentaries, which capture the drama as it unfolds. We can also sketch in the international scene, conscious, in the light of current events, that the politics of Europe have a global dimension. But how much do we know of what


it was like to live under these regimes? How different was daily life under dictatorship? Tis, of course, was the experience of many Europeans, not only in the build-up to World War II, but also during the Cold War. Some lived their whole lives in this environment. Was ordinary life possible?


Researchers at Bristol are leading a


study that aims to uncover their experiences. In part, it is a race against time, as those with first-hand memories of the mid-20th century are now very elderly. Dr Josie McLlellan has been interviewing those who experienced the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, as well as those who endured post-war Communism. Dr Juliana Fürst has been gathering memories of life under Stalin. Dr Tim Cole has been searching in Hungary for memories of the Jewish ghettoes and the experience of the Holocaust. It is only since the collapse of the Iron Curtain that it has become possible to do this research and many archives have only recently


From left: Spain’s Franco, Germany’s Hitler and Russia’s Stalin.


been opened. Dr Debbie Pinfold has been scouring the former East Germany in search of evidence of children’s lives under Communism. She has even found storybooks for children which reference the Communist regime under the cover of fairytales. Tis was not simple propaganda, she explains: “Some of these stories are surprisingly critical: one from the 1980s seems to anticipate the 1989 revolutions!” A picture is emerging of the daily


challenges that confronted people, of all ages, as they struggled through the ordinary demands of life under extraordinary restrictions of these regimes. Bristol students are discovering these insights direct from the research front line: these researchers have developed courses based on their work, bringing memories of Spain ’36, or the fairy stories of Cold War East


Germany into the classroom. Dr McLellan: “We now have a much


better understanding of how dictatorships used leisure and pleasure – from holidays and cars to cigarettes and nude photographs – to win the


support of their populations.”


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MORE INFO www.bristol. ac.uk/ history/ research/


bristol.ac.uk


Photos: Getty


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