April 9, 1940. Denmark is invaded by the Nazis with very little resistance. Hitler allows the legitimate government to remain in office and King Christian X to stay in the country. A puppet government is not formed, but the executive branch is placed under the tutelage and close surveillance of Berlin. In response to these events, in Washington, the career Danish ambassador Henrik Kauffmann (1888-1963) opposes from the outset what he considers a shameful pact with German fascism and decides to act independently of the orders from Copenhagen, where he will eventually be declared a traitor. Kauffmann, whose wife, Charlotte MacDougall (1900-1963), is closely connected to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, remains steadfast and seeks to convince Americans to support his act of rebellion. Initially, even Roosevelt is not convinced. The US initially wants to remain neutral in the war. But the rapid advance of the Nazi army in Europe and the danger of England also falling into their hands changed everything.

The novels of a man whose convictions have wavered are often better than those of a man with dogmatically unwavering convictions. In dissent, in divided passion, in ambivalent or bifurcated commitments, literature grows more powerful and lucid than in absolute certainty and militancy.

A specter is haunting Europe, and this time it is fascism. The rise of far-right parties, nostalgic for European fascist dictators—such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco—has led to a resurgence of historical revisionism and the whitewashing of dictatorships. In France, a mass held this November in honor of Marshal Pétain, the French head of state during the Vichy regime and a collaborator with the Nazis during the occupation, has caused a political earthquake. In Spain, the message of the right wing, and especially that of the far-right Vox party, which downplays Francoism and the thousands executed, the torture, and the exile, has borne fruit. The CIS (Spanish Center for Sociological Research) recently published a survey revealing that two out of ten young Spaniards believe the dictatorship was positive. Just a few days earlier, the former king published a statement in France. his memoir in which he praised the dictator without reservations and argued that "almost forty years of our history cannot be erased as if nothing happened."

The anti-war message that is the novel Nothing new in the westErich Maria Remarque's novel contains some of the most harrowing sentences about the cruelty of war ever written. Published in Catalan in 1930 (Edicions Aymà, translated by Joan Alavedra), Chapter VII reads: "The horror of the brow sinks into the deepest recesses of ourselves as soon as we turn our backs on it; we mock it with ignoble and ferocious jokes. [...] the troops, who organize dances as soon as they leave the firing zone, it's indecent talk."

"Hitler only had one…". Regarding the famous music from the film The Bridge over the River Kwai –a British military march composed in 1914, and which was adapted ad hoc For the David Lean and Alec Guinness film—during World War II and even many decades later, all British children grew up singing an irreverent song mocking the Nazi leader. The title: Hitler has only got one ball (Hitler only has one eggThe full lyrics say: "Hitler only has one testicle / Göring has two, but very small ones / Himmler has something similar / but poor Goebbels has none / Hitler only has one testicle / the other one is in the old Town Hall / his mother stole the other one / and now Hitler has none."

Strong gusts of wind shake the trees visible through the window of Richard Flanagan's office. The Australian writer reports to the ARA from Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, where he was born in 1961, grew up, and still lives. Tasmania is the backdrop for his latest book, Question 7 (Periscopio / Asteroide; Catalan translation by Míriam Cano), a skillful blend of memoir, historical and literary essay, and travel book. Starting with a visit by the author to the Japanese labor camp where his father was imprisoned during World War II, Flanagan not only reconstructs his life but also recalls the literary origins of the atomic bomb—it was first imagined by the visionary H.G. Wells—and denounces the colonial past that ended island nature, leading to a present in which there is perhaps no turning back.

"This is a miracle. We have discovered a great, previously unknown artist. The only Catalan and Spanish artist who worked extensively for British and Allied propaganda during the Second World War," says journalist Plácido Garcia-Planas, who curated the exhibition with historian Arnau González. Ink against Hitler, which can be seen at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) until January 11. The unknown artist is Mario Armengol Torrella (San Juan de las Abadesas, 1909–Nottingham, 1995), who worked for the British government from 1941 until the collapse of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945. He was much more useful to the Allies as a cartoonist. His drawings lay in boxes in the home of his son and two grandchildren for over thirty years. Now, for the first time, they can be seen by the Catalan public.

In the very long term, forgetting is inevitable and even reasonable: it's good for wounds to cauterize. It's quite another thing to shorten their time, to force forgetfulness out of self-interest. In political terms, forgetting then ceases to be reasonable and can easily transform into irresponsibility. Let me propose an extreme example. Caesar's campaign in ancient Ilerda, present-day Lleida, was a crucial episode in the Second Roman Civil War in 49 BC. It happened very close to my town, all of that, but I would be incapable of declaring myself a supporter of Caesar, his rival Pompey, or the Ilerget leaders. There, on the banks of the same river, the Segre, which the Romans called Sícoris (Verdaguer still speaks of the golden Sycoris), the beginning of the fall of Catalonia at the end of the Civil War also became effective. In January 1938, the Republican military defense had been decapitated in Seròs, seven kilometers from Granja de Escarpe, and Colonel Juan Perea ordered the abandonment of the line of fortifications. My mother came into the world a few days later, in the midst of that chaotic and desperate atmosphere. What happened next is sufficiently well known and assumed as their own... bysome generations. For others, this knowledge is beginning to feel very schematic, or at worst, nonexistent, as can be seen in certain nonsense spread today by the acne-stricken far right. Despite referring to the same place, this second oversight has no justification; we'll see in a thousand years.

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which marks its 80th anniversary this Wednesday and precipitated the end of World War II, was not an isolated or merely scientific decision: it was the result of a total war in the Pacific that, in its final stages, reached brutal levels. The Manila massacre in February 1945 left more than 100,000 civilians dead and a city—which had been one of the "pearls of the Orient"—reduced to ashes. Shortly after, in Okinawa, Japanese resistance turned suicidal, and the civilian population actively participated, even with massive kamikaze attacks. For the US military command, these episodes were a chilling warning of what an invasion of mainland Japan could entail.

Nobody knows where it is Boris Cyrulnik and there are only two hours left until, in theory, it offers a masterclass at CosmoCaixa in Barcelona. The renowned neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, and writer—who is about to turn 88—went for a walk after breakfast without picking up his cell phone. Every minute that passes grows uneasy among the EDAI organization, a leading entity in neurodevelopment and child and adolescent mental health, which has invited the author to participate in the fourth edition of the international congress they organize. Cyrulnik has pioneered the use of the term resilience applied to psychology: he himself had to put that capacity to resist and cope with traumatic situations to the test from a very young age. Born in Bordeaux in 1937, the son of a Jewish family originally from Poland, Cyrulnik lost his parents – both deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp – and had to flee from the Nazis and hide for almost three years, until the Second World War ended and his life ceased.

A group of citizens approached the Soviet World War II memorial located in the Tiergarten, the geographical and emotional heart of Berlin, at noon this Thursday to wave Ukrainian flags. A symbolic gesture that emphasizes the impact that the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the day of victory and the end of World War II on the continent, have had on European capitals. Paris, London, Berlin, The Hague, and Warsaw have commemorated the surrender of the Nazi army, keeping a close eye on Moscow and the Russian threat in the wake of the VE Day. Russian invasion of the neighboring country more than three years ago.

Perhaps more than ever, the protagonists of the Nazi rise to power continue to be the subject of analysis and debate. This is the case of Leni Riefenstahl (Berlin, 1902 - Pöcking, 2003), the quintessential filmmaker of the Third Reich, who stars in the documentary that opens the film. DocsBarcelona This Thursday, the very day that marks eight decades since the end of World War II in Europe. Riefenstahl, by Andres Veiel (Stuttgart, 1959), dives for nearly two hours into the archives of the director ofThe triumph of the will and Olympia, a collection of more than 700 boxes of documents, letters, films, and nearly 200,000 photographs. "It was a challenge because she was very manipulative, and before she died, she cleared the archive of incriminating documents, so things were missing," Veiel explains.

An admired actress and style icon, Audrey Hepburn has always been seen surrounded by glamour. Her childhood, one of the lesser-known episodes in her biography, is far from that image. War, famine, and a tyrannical, Nazi-sympathizing mother are three of the elements that shaped her youth, as explained in the graphic novel. Audrey's War (Planeta Cómic), written by Salva Rubio and illustrated by Loreto Aroca. The story begins when the actress receives the offer to play Anne Frank in the fictional film, a proposal that connects Hepburn with her own experiences during World War II in the Netherlands. Although Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, begged the actress to accept the project, she refused: she didn't want to relive the horrors of her childhood.

In June 2020, the publishing house Arcadia published a collection of texts by the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller (1929-2019) entitled The world, our world, translated by Joan Vergés and M. Vicenta Lucas. In relation to our immediate present, today, there is a chapter that seems especially relevant to me. It is called "The European metanarratives about freedom." Every culture rests on a set of foundational narratives that, over time, end up having an almost axiomatic value. They usually refer to the way in which we order our hierarchies of values. Because this would lead us to a ex cursus I will reduce it to an example. Most groups and specific people tend to value things like freedom and security positively, but not everyone interprets that freedom comes first and then security, or the other way around. This is just an example. Heller has in mind the two pillars of the Western tradition, the Judeo-Christian heritage and the Greco-Latin, and identifies some of these metanarratives in relation to freedom. The most remote, and also the most decisive when it comes to shaping a mentality, is the story of the Genesis Biblical: God makes us free because, otherwise, morality would be inconceivable. As for the Greco-Latin tradition, we are influenced by the events of Greek democracy or the Roman Republic, among others. All this has made us what we are. And now we must immediately add: for good and for...