Professor Nick Stargardt

The Cambridge History of the Second World War is an authoritative new account of the conflict that unfolded between 1939 and 1945. With contributions from a team of leading historians, the three volumes adopt a transnational approach to offer a comprehensive, global analysis of the military, political, sociological, economic and cultural aspects of the war. Volume 1 provides an operational perspective on the course of the war, examining strategies, military cultures and organisation and the key campaigns, whilst Volume 2 reviews the 'politics' of war, the global aspirations of the rival alliances, and the role of diplomacy. Volume 3 considers the war as an economic, social and cultural event, exploring how entire nations mobilized their economies and populations and dealt with the catastrophic losses that followed. The volumes conclude by considering the lasting impact of World War Two and the memory of war across different cultures of commemoration.

Objet de toutes les attentions des instances internationales et humanitaires, l’enfant-soldat est une figure incontournable dans la réflexion sur le phénomène guerrier actuel. À ce premier archétype est fréquemment associé un continent, l’Afrique. Le recours à des enfants raptés, exploités, abusés, drogués parfois, apparaît comme un sommet d'horreur et heurte les consciences. Bousculant les stéréotypes, ce livre remonte aux origines de la guerre moderne, en passant par les guerres mondiales, d’un continent à l’autre, pour livrer une analyse fouillée de la figure de l’enfant-soldat et de ses représentations. Le recours aux autres sciences humaines et sociales (sociologie, science politique, anthropologie) lui permet de s’émanciper d’une vision purement historique, afin de saisir la dimension contemporaine de ce phénomène dans toute sa complexité.

Nicholas Stargardt addresses the question of the remarkable resilience of the German state and society during the Second World War. Like Italy, German cities were subjected to massive Allied air raids from 1942 onwards, but there was no German equivalent to the strike-wave that swept northern and central Italy in the spring of 1943, and it is this comparison which is the starting point for Nicholas Stargardt’s analysis of how German society coped with the crises of this period. He argues that it was that society’s capacity to recover from crises which made it possible for the regime to go on fighting the war till the end. He proposes that the dynamic quality of these crises takes us beyond the conventional explanations of state-society in terms of coercion and consent, and into an exploration of the transformation of subjectivities and social values, in particular the moral and psychological power of fear and hope.