Books by Nikolaos Papadogiannis
Militant around the Clock? Left-wing youth politics, leisure and sexuality in post-dictatorship Greece, 1974-1981
During the 1970s, left-wing youth militancy in Greece intensified, especially after the collapse ... more During the 1970s, left-wing youth militancy in Greece intensified, especially after the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1974. This is the first study of the impact of that political activism on the leisure pursuits and sexual behavior of Greek youth, analyzing the cultural politics of left-wing organizations alongside the actual practices of their members. Through an examination of Maoists, Socialists, Euro-Communists, and pro-Soviet Communists, it demonstrates that left-wing youth in Greece collaborated closely with comrades from both Western and Eastern European countries in developing their political stances. Moreover, young left-wingers in Greece appropriated American cultural products while simultaneously modeling some of their leisure and sexual practices on Soviet society. Still, despite being heavily influenced by cultures outside Greece, left-wing youth played a major role in the reinvention of a Greek “popular tradition.” This book critically interrogates the notion of “sexual revolution” by shedding light on the contradictory sexual transformations in Greece to which young left-wingers contributed.
Papers by Nikolaos Papadogiannis
Tourism and Mobility in Europe since the Interwar period: Introduction
The social history of modern Greece: a roundtable
Social History
Contemporary European History
The ramifications of the UK referendum on EU membership, and its outcome, Brexit, are not confine... more The ramifications of the UK referendum on EU membership, and its outcome, Brexit, are not confined to the United Kingdom. Greece, a country with many historical connections to the UK, has also witnessed rancorous debates around it. In fact, Brexit has served as a canvas onto which various social and political groups in Greece have projected their own perceptions of the history of the United Kingdom. In this contribution I will discuss how Greek representations of the UK government and British society have developed in Greece throughout the postwar period. Brexit has altered these representations, highlighting the rise of the trope of the UK as 'victim', the questioning of the UK's openness to Greek professionals and students and the pervasiveness of anti-German rhetoric. At the same time Brexit has also functioned as a mirror for self-reflection in Greece, and debates around the similarities between the EU membership referendum in 2016 and the Greek bailout referendum in 2015 have raised important questions about referenda as tools of democracy. The UK has a long history of intervening in Greek political affairs. During the Greek War of Independence (1821-32), the UK supported the creation of an independent Greek state and subsequently meddled in Greek politics until the late 1940s. During the First World War and in the interwar years the UK supported the liberal political camp led by Eleftherios Venizelos. Towards the end of the Second World War British troops fought alongside Greek anticommunist forces against the military arm of the left-wing National Liberation Front in Athens in December 1944, roundly defeating the left-wing forces. From 1947, and especially in the context of the Truman Doctrine, the UK became less involved in Greek domestic affairs, as US influence grew. Nevertheless, Cyprus was administered by the UK from 1878 and became a British crown colony in 1925. During the 1950s a proportion of Greek Cypriots launched a campaign in favour of the unification of the island with Greece. This was matched with armed resistance against the British authorities. Those developments left their imprint on how the UK has been viewed in Greece as a political actor. The communist left, but also moderate left-wingers, were already critical of British imperialism during the interwar years. Their anti-British stance endured after 1945, when it was combined with a new anti-Americanism. Against the backdrop of tensions in Cyprus in the 1950s Greek right-wing and centrist forces also became increasingly sceptical of any UK involvement, but they were torn in their views. On the one hand, they approached the UK as a key ally of Greece inside the Western political and military institutions. On the other, they found it difficult to maintain their status as 'genuine patriots' while they appeared to be linked to Britain, which ruled Cyprus. Right-wing and centrist policy makers were careful, on the whole, and aimed to sustain amicable diplomatic relations between Greece and the United Kingdom. The Cypriot issue and other foreign policy matters did not cause any substantial rifts between the two countries. The Turkish military intervention in Cyprus in 1974 resulted in the spread of anti-American rather than anti-British sentiments in Greece, and critiques of the UK became less scathing than they had been in the 1950s. Nevertheless, the memory of what is often coined as the 'British aggression' in Cyprus never disappeared completely, and some main streets in
Militant Around the Clock?
Militant Around the Clock?
Historein
This article analyses the emergence and development of the study of gender in modern Greek histor... more This article analyses the emergence and development of the study of gender in modern Greek historiography in the broader sense, exploring works that incorporate, even to a minor extent, the gender factor. It shows that despite the manifold barriers that gender historians have faced, there has been a slow but steady process of diffusion of gender in modern Greek historiography in general. The article also shows that historical research on gender relations in Greece initially focused on the study of women, historicising, however, their relations with men. Thus, in line with what Kantsa and Papataxiarchis argue about the relevant scholarship at the international level, no linear transition from the study of women to the examination of gender relations occurred. What has transpired in the last two decades, however, is that the relevant historiography has gradually broadened to encompass a more systematic analysis of the (re)making of masculinities. It has also been enriched by the study...
Historein
This article analyses the emergence and development of the study of gender in modern Greek histor... more This article analyses the emergence and development of the study of gender in modern Greek historiography in the broader sense, exploring works that incorporate, even to a minor extent, the gender factor. It shows that despite the manifold barriers that gender historians have faced, there has been a slow but steady process of diffusion of gender in modern Greek historiography in general. The article also shows that historical research on gender relations in Greece initially focused on the study of women, historicising, however, their relations with men. Thus, in line with what Kantsa and Papataxiarchis argue about the relevant scholarship at the international level, no linear transition from the study of women to the examination of gender relations occurred. What has transpired in the last two decades, however, is that the relevant historiography has gradually broadened to encompass a more systematic analysis of the (re)making of masculinities. It has also been enriched by the study...
Greek Urban Warriors: Resistance & Terrorism 1967–2014 by John Brady Kiesling
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2016
Greek Urban Warriors: Resistance & Terrorism 1967–2014 by John Brady Kiesling
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2016
“Keeping with Contemporary Times’: Social Tourism and West German Youth Hostel Organisations, 1950s-1980s”
This article examines the organizations that ran youth hostels in West Germany from the 1950s to ... more This article examines the organizations that ran youth hostels in West Germany from the 1950s to 1989. It analyses whether they reconfigured their aims and practices against the backdrop of the cultural, social and political transformations that West Germany underwent throughout its existence, especially concerning the establishment of strong ties with ‘Western’ countries and the spread of mass consumption. It argues that while the maintenance of discipline among guests by youth hostel personnel remained important in the operation of West German youth hostels throughout the period in question, the norms around which discipline revolved and the ways in which it was enforced increasingly became negotiated between the officials of these associations and the guests at youth hostels. This process does not fall into the category of the ‘cultural revolution’ that occurred in the ‘Long Sixties’, according to Arthur Marwick, but amounted to a protracted and cautious experimentation that lasted several decades. While the historiography of tourism has hitherto analysed either the explosion of commercial tourism or the spread of anti-commercial travel from the 1960s onwards, shifting youth hostel policies help illuminate a popular type of tourism, which growingly developed synergies with both those travel patterns, but yet remained distinct from them.
Keywords: Germany, tourism, youth
“Political travel across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s”
This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet... more This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet Communist youth groups, in an attempt to shed light on the transformation of European youth cultures beyond the ‘Americanisation’ story. It argues that the concept of the ‘black box’, employed by Rob Kroes to describe the influence of American cultural patterns on Western European youth, also applies to the reception of Eastern Bloc policies and norms by the Communists under study. Such selective reception was part of these groups’ efforts to devise a modernity alternative to the ‘capitalist’ one, an alternative modernity which tours across the Iron Curtain would help establish. Nevertheless, the organisers did not wish such travel to help eliminate American/Western influences on youth lifestyles entirely: the article analyses the excursions’ aims with regard to two core components of youth lifestyles in Western Europe since the 1960s, which have been affected by intra-Western flows, the spirit of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and transformations of sexual practices. The article also addresses the experience of the travellers in question, showing that they felt an unresolved tension: the tours neither served as a means of Sovietisation nor as an impulse to develop an openly anti-Soviet stance.
Keywords: Youth, travel, Communism, West Germany, Greece
From Coherence to Fragments: '1968' and the Making of Youth Politicisation in Greece in the 1970s
HISTOREIN, 2012
Between Angelopoulos and The Battleship Potemkin: Cinema and the Making of Young Communists in Greece in the Initial Post-dictatorship Period (1974-81)
European History Quarterly, 2012
The state of the art historiography of youth cultures in post-war Europe centres on ‘Americanizat... more The state of the art historiography of youth cultures in post-war Europe centres on ‘Americanization’ as a process of selective reception of American cultural products, including Hollywood cinema, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, this paradigm obscures the transnational appeal of French, Italian and Soviet cinema. By contrast, France and the USSR are presented in this article as significant points of reference, at least for young Greek Communists in the period from 1974 to 1981. The article also stresses the importance of Greek politically engaged films in the making of young Communists in the same period. In brief, this article argues that the relationship between the circulation and reception of films and the making of Communist youth identities in Greece in the initial post-dictatorship period (1974–1981) was connected with two intertwined processes: the construction and the challenging of a collective antifascist memory that revolved around left-wing partisan activity in Greece in the early 1940s, a memory that was also captured in the flourishing in the 1970s’ production of Greek politically engaged films, and the employment and subversion of the classification of Greek and non-Greek cinematic genres into ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ types in the cultural politics of the Greek Communist youth organizations.
Political travel across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s
European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 2016
‘The personal is political’: sexuality, gender and the Left in Europe during the 1970s
European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 2014
A (Trans)National Emotional Community? Greek Political Songs and the Politicisation of Greek Migrants in West Germany in the 1960s and early 1970s
Contemporary European History, 2014
Red and Purple? Feminism and young Greek Eurocommunists in the 1970s
European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 2014
“Red and Purple? The impact of second-wave Feminism on young Greek Eurocommunists in the 1970s”
“Migrants on vacation. The travel patterns of young Greek migrants residing in West Germany in the 1960s–1970s”
“Between joy and nostalgia: Greek political songs and the politicisation of Greek immigrants in West Germany in the 1970s”.
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Books by Nikolaos Papadogiannis
Papers by Nikolaos Papadogiannis
Keywords: Germany, tourism, youth
Keywords: Youth, travel, Communism, West Germany, Greece