Assignment task:
This week you read Joanne Harris's historical novel Five Quarters of the Orange, which examines wartime Occupied Europe from a child's perspective. For children, collaboration with the occupiers often brought tangible rewards, such as food, candy, and more supplies most adult civilians, including their parents, were unable to access. Seen through this lens, our contemporary views of Second World War European collaborators fall apart, as it becomes clear this is much more complicated than we imagined. Occupied civilians faced difficult, often morally ambiguous choices, and - as you'll see later in the semester in Istvan Deak's masterful work Europe on Trial, the word "collaboration" itself only took on a negative cast after the German military was thoroughly defeated at the Battle of Stalingrad in late 1942. Interestingly as Deak also notes, this was also the exact time that organized - and spontaneous, unorganized - acts of resistance to Nazi German authority skyrocketed everywhere across Occupied Europe. In your view, and using Mazower's chapter to supply evidence, what does this suggest about the apparent ambivalence of many Europeans beyond Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1943 regarding Hitler's racial and genocidal New Order? Source needed; Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange, and Mazower, Chapter 5.