This article examines Weimar Germany's public controversy about the Republic's place in German history. In a period that was seen by many contemporaries as a time deprived of historical context, all political parties tried to legitimise their actions and aims through the construction of very different historical traditions. Based on a wide range of primary sources, the article seeks to analyse this ‘battle over the past’ within the broader context of Weimar's political culture and the Republic's struggle for survival.

Laura Marani Argnani was one of the most politically fanatical and dedicated of the leaders of the Fasci Femminili (the women's section of the Italian Fascist Party). She was FF provincial fiduciary in the northern province of Reggio Emilia from 1929 to 1940 and a PNF national inspectress from 1937. Marani Argnani is a particularly interesting figure, since the provincial federation she led was one of the most successful in Italy in terms of levels of membership and activities. This article focuses on her ideology, the reasons for her success and the motivation for her political activism.

This article conceptualises the dissemination by Nazi party and state institutions of racial categories of Germanness and Jewishness and the imposition of these categories on segments of the population as a form of linguistic violence. Centring on the Reich Kinship Office during the Second World War, the article argues that racial discourses were not static, but were constantly remade in the practices of the office's employees and their interaction with petitioners desperately seeking to escape persecution. The office's practices exemplify the competing discourses of Nazism, as employees saw the Kinship Office's discourses increasingly undermined by SS and police agencies and their growing power and more radical languages.

Danish nuclear policy was decided in the years 1949–60. The policies adopted by the Danish government in this period did not differ essentially from those of the other Western allies. For example, the government did not want the crucial decision of whether and when to use nuclear weapons to be made by the military. It should remain a political decision, in practice to be made by the US president. One distinctive Danish policy, however, was the decision not to allow storage of nuclear warheads on Danish soil ‘under the present circumstances’. The motives for this seemingly irresolute policy are discussed in this article.

Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 192 pp., $24.50 (hb), ISBN 0231127960.

Henry Laurens, Orientales II. La IIIe République et l'Islam (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2004), 376 pp., €29.00, ISBN 2271062071.

William E. Watson, Tricolor and Crescent: France and the Islamic World (London: Praeger, 2003), 295 pp., £31.99 (hb), ISBN 0275974707.

But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.

Michael Mann Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 429 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 052153856.

Robert O. Paxton The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 321 pp., £8.99 (pb), ISBN 0141014326.

Nancy Bermeo Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times. The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2003), 265 pp., £13.95 (pb), ISBN 0691089701.

Didier Musiedlack Mussolini (Paris: Presses de Sciences PO, 2005), 436 pp., €16.15, ISBN 2724608062.

Paul H. Lewis Latin Fascist Elites. The Mussolini, Franco and Salazar Regimes (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 209 pp., $85.95 (hb), ISBN 027597880X.

Omer Bartov Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 248 pp., (pb), ISBN 0801486815.

Doris L. Bergen War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 280 pp., $17.95 (pb), ISBN 0847696316.

Inga Clendinnen Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 238 pp., $15 (pb), ISBN 0521012694.

Debórah Dwork ed., Voices & Views. A History of the Holocaust (New York: Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, 2002), 687 pp., $44.95 (pb), ISBN 0970060211.

Cornelia Hecht Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz 2003), 432 pp., €32.00 (hb), ISBN 3801241378.

Dan Stone Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2003), 308 pp., $49.50 (hb), ISBN 0853034907.

Sue Vice Representing the Holocaust (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers), 280 pp., £17.50 (pb), £42.50 (hb), ISBN 0853034966.