At the end of the Second World War, the countries of Western Europe found themselves in a state of economic and physical ruin and, in the cases of Germany, Italy and France, in a position of, at best, moral and political ambiguity and, at worst, outright bankrupcy. Only Britain emerged from the war with its political regime intact and its moral purpose vindicated, although paradoxically its economy was to prove the most severely wounded. Perhaps because of the very scale of the disaster, however, Western Europe embarked upon a process of reconstruction, aided financially by the Marshall Plan, which embodied grandiose ambitions for a radical rebirth. The Italian Communist Party's weekly magazine, for example, was called Rinascita, whilst the French Communist weekly Les Lettres Françaises celebrated a ‘new French “renaissance”, encompassing political life, urban redevelopment and a whole range of cultural development, which was seen, in the early days of the Liberation, as the legitimate reward and goal of the Resistance’. In Germany, the recognition of 1945 as constituting a Nullpunkt or Stunde Null, made possible the Kahlschlag, or clean sweep which would propel the new Republic towards democracy and prosperity. Even in Britain, there was the sense of the dawning of a new era, and if the Festival of Britain, in 1951, looked back to the Great Exhibition a century earlier and celebrated traditional British qualities, whilst also flexing the nation's industrial and military muscles, with the death of King George VI and the accession of his daughter, the country embarked, quite literally and self-consciously, on a ‘New Elizabethan’ age.

After 1945 the Italian tradition of feminine beauty was redefined in a democratic context in which women, for the first time, became full citizens. Faced with a far-reaching challenge from Hollywood, traditional criteria of beauty were first strenuously defended and then modified and commercialised. Beauty contests proved to be a vital vehicle in this transition, since they acted both as a forum for the reassertion of Italian beauty and as a vehicle for the displacement of old ideas centred on the face with a new concept based on the eroticised body. This transition became bound up with the ongoing political conflict between Catholics and the left for the moral and political leadership of the country. While both, with different emphases, championed ‘natural’ at the expense of American-style ‘manufactured’ beauty, competition led them to engage with, and in some way adopt, the sexualised beauty that was the hallmark of the role of the United States in furnishing new models for the consumer society that would develop rapidly in the later 1950s.

The early years of state television in Italy, which began transmission in 1954, have usually been viewed as crucial to the spread of mass culture through Italian society. In addition, these developments have essentially been seen in negative terms by historians and sociologists. This article explores these early years in detail for one, key, urban setting: Milan. Through an examination of the myriad and often hidden effects of television, the research attempts to draw out the contradictory and complicated impact of TV and its relationship with other media, the neighbourhood, the family, the home and daily life. The article also looks at the impact of one important quiz show in the 1950s and concludes with some reflections on the power of the media in the city in the 1990s.

Beginning with its first issue of 1945, Elle magazine was instrumental in changing the way the French saw female domesticity in the postwar period, infusing the domestic space with an aura of glamour and modernity. Newly glamorous female domesticity went hand-in-hand with images of women as voters and professionals, communicating to the magazine's readers that they could ‘have it all’ – but never to the exclusion of their primary identity as mothers and wives. This ultimately conservative postwar version of femininity came to be challenged in the early 1960s by Mademoiselle, a magazine that projected a reader unmarked by war memories and whose relationship to technology and modernity went beyond the home. Yet, Mademoiselle was grooming the fun-loving teenage girl as a consumer who would one day be a wife and mother as well; from one version of modernity to another, feminine destiny remained the same.

The 1950s were the heyday of cinema in Europe. Rather than competing with Hollywood studios, European film companies preferred to stick to old, well established recipes. Germany recycled one of its cultural traditions, Heimat. Despite the poverty of their plots and the weakness of their protagonists, the Heimatfilme succeeded by celebrating an unspoilt, soothing wilderness. The Italian counterpart of Heimatfilme was melodrama. If family dramas remained much appreciated in the Peninsula, the filmmakers were clever enough to shift their characters from an ill-defined epoch to the contemporary world. So, while urban Germany was pining for its wild, empty mountains, rural Italy was contemplating its domestic comforts to come. With the Carry On series, Britain was loyal to comedies, which filled the main part of the programmes. The plots – which merely dealt with private affairs – were humorous, harmless, always deprived of authentic social background. The European cinemas of the 1950s were directed towards large, mostly ‘popular’ audiences of people who used to leave their houses and gather in town centres on Saturday evenings. These cinemas did not produce any masterpieces but they were the most characteristic, and the most appreciated, form of entertainment in the middle of the century. It was not art, but it was ‘popular’ culture.

Although the processes of censorship as exercised over the stage and screen in 1950s Britain shared similar characteristics, there were vital differences in the way in which the governing authorities construed the audiences who frequented these entertainment media. Because cinemagoers constituted a mass audience and were considered to be more impressionable, the criteria of ‘quality’ applied by the British Board of Film Censors differed markedly to those put into effect for the theatre by the Lord Chamberlain's Office. The reception afforded both the play and film of I Am a Camera reveals the subtlety of approach adopted by the censors in each instance.

Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power. Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 364 pp., 8 colour plates, 92 b/w illustrations, £38, ISBN 0–520–08712–7.

Enrico Sturani, Mussolini. Un dictateur en cartes postales (Paris: Somogy, 1997), 240 pp., 284 colour illustrations, FF 189, ISBN 2–850–56292–0.

The rhythm of the history of human societies is determined by the constitution of the powers which organise them. Violence, persuasion, acquiescence might be adduced as the three stages of a broad schema whereby a coherent system of reference, based on rules which are respected by most (if not all) people, succeeds in establishing itself on a lasting basis of political constitution, civil law, and a legal system to govern systems of work and exchange. Individuals, whose primeval subjection was to the law of family, tribe or gens, do not readily submit to absorption into an entity which does not coincide with this original cell. Therefore, by definition, the history of the creation of political systems in Western societies must be set in a context of permanent tension between the interests of the individual, or the primordial group, and those of new institutions or bodies which are more abstract, and therefore harder to identify, recognise and, eventually, accept. But it is also the history of how peoples view the world, of their common points of reference: in short, a history of mental representations, which can partly be written by studying their translation into figurative images – into political iconography developed for purposes of mass propaganda.

Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought 1860–1945. Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 348 pp., £19.95, ISBN 0–521–57434 X.

Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography. The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 281 pp., £35, ISBN 0–521–15545–7.

Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, 704 pp., £50, ISBN 0–521–34343–7.

Alain Desrosières, La politique des grands nombres, histoire de la raison statistique (Paris: La Découverte, 1993), 437 pp., FF 220; ISBN 2–707–12253–X; English translation by Camille Naish, The Politics of Large Numbers. A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 416 pp., $45, ISBN 0–674–68932–1.

Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 641 pp., £22.95, ISBN 0–521–42397–X; French translation by B. Frumer, L'Hygiène de la race (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 301 pp., FF 160, ISBN 2–707–12706–X.

Over the last ten years a series of social historians have published studies of the link between the definition of scientific categories and the implementation of demographic policies in Europe. This discussion of the classification of populations in terms of social class, race or location (rural, urban, underprivileged areas) has complicated the traditional theories of the scientist and politician, Max Weber, and the student of ‘bio-power’, Michel Foucault. Now, historians of political ideas are finding living examples to illustrate recent advances in the sociology of science, establishing themselves at the interface between the history of human health and that of population policies. The aim is to throw light on the exchange between scientists and population management: among the themes to be treated are natalism, populationism, hygienism and eugenics.

Pamela Beth Radcliff, From Mobilisation to Civil War: The Politics of Polarisation in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 354 pp., £40, ISBN 0–521–56213–9.

Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain, 1875–1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 358 pp., $49.50, £35.00, ISBN 0–691–02656–4.

Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire 1898–1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 269 pp., £35.00, ISBN 0–198–20507–4.

Clare Mar-Molinero and Angel Smith, eds., Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competing and Conflicting Identities (Oxford/Washington, DC: Berg, 1996), 281 pp., £34.95, pb £14.95, ISBN 1–859–73175–9.

Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 314 pp., £40.00, $59.95, ISBN 0–521–59401–4.

Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: the Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (London: John Murray, 1998), 354 pp., £25, ISBN 0–719–55556–6.

During the long years of Francoism, Spanish historiography was dominated by a search for explanation. Against the regime's triumphalist account of the ‘essential’ Spain – resurgent in the form of the victorious general's authoritarian, confessional state – exiled intellectuals such as Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz and Américo Castro posed questions about the ‘problem’ of Spain, looking to the country's past to explain the political violence of the present. For those who won the Civil War of 1936–39, Spain's national destiny was to remain true to the imperial, Catholic legacy of the Habsburg monarchy. Eschewing modern ‘decadence’ and the false paths of secularism and democracy, Spain was to remain, according to Franco, the ‘spiritual reserve of the west’. Such a vision of history, in Mike Richards's words, ‘appropriated time itself in acknowledging no distinctions between past, present and future’ (Mar-Molinero and Smith, p. 152). To Francoist ideologues, both history and the nation were understood in terms of providential destiny: once understood, the national destiny would prove immutable.

A. J. Nicholls, The Bonn Republic: West German Democracy, 1945–1990 (London: Longman, 1997), 341 pp. ISBN 0–582–49230–0 PPR; 0582–4931–9 CSD. Hb £44. Pb £14.99.

Gerhard A. Ritter, Über Deutschland: Die Bundesrepublik in der deutschen Geschichte (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1998), 303 pp., DM 39 80, ISBN 3–406–44039–8.

Rebecca L. Boehling, A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reforms and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany, Monographs in German History 2 (Providence RI and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996). 301 pp., IBSN 1–571–81035–8.

Anne Sa'adah, Germany's Second Chance: Trust, Justice, and Democraticization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 352 pp., £24.95, ISBN 0–674–35111–8.

Volker Hentschel, Ludwig Erhard, die ‘Soziale Marktwirtschaft’ und das Wirtschaftswunder: Histo-risches Lehrstück oder Mythos. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1998), 95 pp., IBSN 3–416–02761–2.

Robert G. Moeller, ed., West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 462 pp., IBSN 0–472–09648–6 (hb), 0–472–06648–X (pb.). Peter James, ed., Modern Germany (London & New York: Routledge, 1998), 220 pp., IBSN 0–415–15034–5.

For those who for whatever reason acquire an interest, the study of Germany since 1945 has to begin somewhere. It is hard to conceive of a more elementary introduction than that edited by Peter James and comprising the contributions of colleagues in the Department of German at the University of Northumbria plus his own. Although ‘aimed at all those who have an interest in life and society in modern Germany’, it is basically an introductory text for first-year students of German Studies. According to the editor of the slim volume, ‘Clearly the text is not intended to be exhaustive’; although one of the contributions, according to the blurb, claims to provide an ‘in-depth treatment of Germany's coming to terms with its past’ - within sixteen pages!