Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930s

Large, history professor at Montana State University, illuminates the final years of the interwar period through eight dramatic episodes, each of key significance to the history of 20th-century Europe. He begins with an account of the 1934 collapse of Serge Stavisky's fraudulent financial empire in France, which led to widespread social and racial strife. This is followed by an analysis of the brutal suppression of the socialist uprising in Austria, Hitler's liquidation the following year of the Brown Shirt leadership and Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Large devotes a chapter to the little-known Jarrow Crusade of 1935 (led by ``Red Ellen'' Wilkinson, this protest march of unemployed shipyard workers became a symbol of Britain's industrial malaise in the '30s) and another to the destruction of Guernica by German aircraft during the Spanish Civil War. There is a chapter on the great purge in the mid-'30s in the Soviet Union when Stalin annihilated the Old Bolsheviks and much of the Red Army leadership. Finally, Large describes the Munich Conference of '38, the last major attempt by the West to keep the peace by ``appeasing'' the Fascist powers. Photos. (Jan.)