International, transnational and comparative perspectives

The Munich Crisis of 1938 had major diplomatic as well as personal and psychological repercussions. As much as it was a climax in the clash between dictatorship and democracy, it was also a People's Crisis and an event that gripped and worried the people around the world. The traditional approach has been to examine the crisis from the vantage points of high politics and diplomacy. Traditional approaches have failed to acknowledge the profound social, cultural and psychological impacts of diplomatic events, an imbalance that is redressed in this volume. Taking a range of national examples and using a variety of methods, The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People recreates the experience of living through the crisis in Czechoslovakia, Germany, France, Britain, Hungary, the Soviet Union and the USA.

Reviews

'This collection comes strongly recommended not just to those with a particular interest in the Munich Crisis and the Appeasement process of the 1930s but also to those more widely engaged with the history of popular opinion in a mass media age, the history of emotions, and comparative international history.'
Journal of British Studies, Volume 62, Issue 2 (April 2023)

Introduction
Julie V. Gottlieb, Daniel Hucker and Richard Toye
1 Czechoslovakia, Czecho-Slovakia and the Munich Agreement
Mary Heimann
2 A very long shadow: The Munich Agreement in post-war Czechoslovak communist propaganda, ideology and historiography, 1948-1989
Jakub Drábik
3 'Curs Yapping Round the Dying Stag', or the rituals of fractured societies: Hungary and Poland in the vortex of the Munich Crisis of 1938
Miklos Lojko
4 'What, No Chair for Me?' Russia's conspicuous absence from the Munich Conference
Gabriel Gorodetsky
5 Churchill, Munich, and the origins of the Grand Alliance
Richard Toye
6 Munich and the unexpected rise of American power
Andrew Preston
7 Mussolini, Munich, and the Italian people
Christian Goeschel
8 'England is pro-Hitler': German popular opinion during the Czechoslovakian Crisis, 1938
Karina Urbach
9 Munich and the masses: emotional inflammation, mental health and shame in Britain during the September crisis
Julie V. Gottlieb
10 Melanie Klein and the coming of World War Two: a clinical archive, 1938
Michal Shapira
11 The poet's perspective on the Munich Crisis: 'news that STAYS news'?
Helen Goethals
12 Public opinion, policymakers, and the Munich Crisis: adding emotion to international history
Daniel Hucker
13 France in the 'blue light' of Munich: popular agency, activity, and the reframing of history
Jessica Wardhaugh
Bibliography
Index

Editors

Julie V. Gottlieb is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield

Daniel Hucker is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nottingham

Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter