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Division is unearthed. The Blue Division was made up
of about 18,000 Spaniards who fought for Hitler's
cause in the anticommunist crusade on the Eastern
Front by an agreement made with the Spanish government soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union in
1941. A further agreement to send Spanish workers
was signed in August. Falangist intelligence reports tell
the story about the call-up made by propaganda vans,
which roamed those areas of Spain with the highest
unemployment in 1941 and the greatest extent of
hunger and disease. More than 1,600 people died of
typhus in Spain in 1941, and the director general of
health spoke of "medieval times." People would have
done anything for a meal. The Blue Division was
overwhelmingly Falangist, though it also included
many non-Falangist, middle-class Catholics. While arguing that this represented a popular rush to volunteer, however, the book eschews social analysis. Instead, the book is an exploration of an intermediate
component of state power, or rather, its most radical
(minority) element. It is clear that "volunteers"
stepped forward (or were found) for many reasons. It
is also clear that many Falangists volunteered out of
ideological conviction and wished to carry the antiCommunist crusade directly to Stalinist Russia. Later
they would be hugely disillusioned by the conservative
elitism of society under Franco.
Clearly, concentration on Franco's party does not
make this book "history from below" in any meaningful sense. This, of course, is not what it sets out to do,
but some consideration of the social aspect of the story
might have lessened the sense of Falangist-Nazi relations taking place in a vacuum. Bowen's account is
marred by a repeated tendency to make simplistic
assumptions about the social context of the events and
processes described. An example is his frequent assertion that the most pro-Nazi elements of the Falange
were "working-class," or that "working class"
Falangists adhered to particular party leaders (p. 45)
and were enamored of the National-Syndicalist "revolution" just as they were Hitler's social revolution. As
historians of Hitler's Germany long ago discovered in
examining the social base of Nazism, the application of
an undifferentiated concept of "working class" does
not lead very far. The typical Spanish industrial worker
or landless laborer was certainly no Falangist.
The problem is compounded by the manner in which
the research findings are arranged. The location of
some excellent archival material in the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (especially of the Interministerial Commission for the Sending of Workers to Germany) and the Servicio Hist6rico Militar is to be
commended. Often such material is well used. However, the repeated use of footnotes to mention obscure
documents in making the most anodyne and already
established points of fact becomes irksome. This is
particularly so when the use of secondary sources to
establish the basic contours and to support assertions
out of the blue is all but lacking. For example, the
author says of the situation in 1941 that "The Spanish
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Civil War had been long and bloody, and memories of
it were still fresh, leaving a strong anti-Communist
element in the Spanish population" (p. 106). There is
no footnote, but the proposition is far from unproblematic. Exhaustion, horror, and traumatization there
undoubtedly were. Whether people simply blamed
"communism" is much to be doubted, however. Bowen
essentially gets carried away by the rhetoric of his
Falangist witnesses who overplay their powers of mobilization (and of memory?), and there are few references to published accounts to lay the basic foundations. Indeed, Bowen's preferred historians seem to be
those once employed by Franco's own Ministry of
Information, like Ricardo de la Cierva.
MICHAEL RICHARDS
University of the West of England,
Bristol
PETER RUSSELL.
Prince Henry "the Navigator": A Life.
New Haven: Yale University Press. 2000. Pp. xvi, 448.
During the nineteenth century, the Portuguese first
began calling Prince Henry "the Navigator," and his
reputation was accordingly inflated. At about the same
time in the United States, Christopher Columbus
gained his celebrity. Columbus's ship has taken on
water recently, but Portugal remains deeply anchored
to Henry's personality and deeds. National pride prevents his homeland from dispelling popular myths that
Dom Henrique was a heroic imperialist of the modern
stripe, a mathematical prodigy, the founder of a school
for explorers, and a sailor of repute. Despite truisms
lodged in textbooks, Henry never moved to the solitude of Cape Sagres, did not invent the caravel, never
shipped out farther from the Algarve than Morocco,
and did not claim to be the far-sighted initiator of an
ocean passage to India.
This first biography published in English in more
than a century builds upon the base of the author's
seminal Prince Henry the Navigator: The Rise and Fall
of a Cultural Hero (1984) and the fruit of decades of
multinational research. Peter Russell's magisterial
study does not engage in debunking for its own sake
but in hopes of uncovering the conflicted individual
who is more interesting than the legendary peerless
hero. This biography could not be a life in the traditional sense because too little of its subject'S writing
survives to allow us to know Henry's inner being.
There is one newly uncovered letter in the appendix
that displays a young man with a sense of humor, a
storyteller's concern for details about the consummation of a marriage, and a connoisseur's appreciation
for pageantry. It certainly leaves one wishing more of
the same survived the wreck of time.
Prince Henry's career had previously been constructed primarily from the royal chronicles of Gomes
Eanes de Zunira, who wrote after events he describes
and always presents his subject as a Christian paragon
of chivalry and piety. Indeed, the future prince is
reported by his chronicler to have emerged from the
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womb on Ash Wednesday 1394, embracing a simulacrum of the Holy Cross! Russell's text sets before us
not a preordained culture hero but the third son of an
insignificant king who ruled a poverty-struck land.
Through self-actualization and a supreme sense of
self-worth, Henry overcame the handicap of his birth
order and limited resources. The prince, we learn, was
driven by a quest for personal fame and the need to
prop up his finances. He took Ceuta (1415), failed in a
major effort against the Canaries (1424), suffered a
debacle at Tangier (1437), conquered A1ca~er-Ceguer
(1458), and sent explorers to Africa in the 1430s
and 1440s for the landings that led to trade and
rapine.
These expansionist activities should not be classified
as Renaissance preoccupations, since the author's goal
in this study is "to reclaim Prince Henry and his
achievements for the Middle Ages" (p. 12). Dom
Henrique's ambitions are shown to be not that different from the ideological preoccupations of his contemporaries, save that he persisted whereas, when others
matured, they settled for local aspirations. One underestimated motivation in Henry's life is the key role
astrology played in setting out his path. His horoscope
cast him as a man with a great destiny, and he followed
his star. It is hard to categorize this interest as strictly
medieval, however, since an astrologer similarly
guided President Ronald Reagan, as his wife admits. It
might be better, therefore, to consign ongoing arguments over periodization to history's dustbin.
Dom Henrique is presented in this multilayered text
as a curious layman who sought to understand his
world through the window of aristocratic values. He
was the wealthiest magnate in Portugal, but he died, as
he lived, in substantial debt. Despite his trading proclivities, he was often willing to exacerbate his relations with Mricans by crusading as a soldier of the
Church Militant. Prince Henry cited with approval
Christ's declaration that he came to bring not peace
but a sword.
The sporadic voyages dedicated to exploration depended upon a lack of distractions, suddenly available
funding, and the prince's reputation, which attracted
navigators. Henry is shown not to be a Portuguese
patriot, since he would hire anyone-save a Castilian-to get a job done. Ca'da Mosto, his greatest
explorer, was a Venetian. The ships brought back
ivory, gold, cotton cloths, and black slaves. Henry's
explorers demonstrated, sinisterly, that instead of relying on a dribble from trans-Saharan caravan routes
controlled by Muslims, captives in vast quantities could
be transported on long sea voyages. Even when
stripped of the barnacles of myth, the prince's ships
made a substantial contribution to Europe's knowledge and taught it how to exploit Mrica's resources.
Once begun, Prince Henry's cursed inheritance lives
on.
This certainly must be rated the best volume about
the man and his times. In addition to celebrating this
masterful achievement, one must also admire Russell's
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openness in pointing out that the painting of the figure
in the well-known black cartwheel hat that dominates
the dust jacket quite possibly started its career as a
portrait of someone else.
MARVIN LUNENFELD
State University of New York,
Fredonia
LARS M. ANDERSSON. En jude ar en jude ar en
jude . .. : Representationen av 'juden" i svensk skamtpress omkring 1900-1930. [A Jew is a Jew is a Jew ... :
Representations of "Jews" in the Swedish Humor
Press ca. 1900-1930.] Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic
Press. 2000. Pp. 622.
Within a single year (1999-2000), three Swedish doctoral dissertations were published on topics pertaining
to Swedish anti-Semitism past and present. Lena Berggren's Nationell Upp/ysning: Drag i den svenska antisemitismens idehistoria [National Enlightenment: Aspects of the Ideological History of Swedish AntiSemitism] (1999) focuses on racially based antiSemitism found not only in fringe movements but
within established political parties in the period between the world wars. Henrik Bachner's Aterkomsten:
Antisemitism i Sverige efter 1945 [The Return: AntiSemitism in Sweden after 1945] (1999) analyzes the
manner in which anti-Zionism and a pro-Palestinian
stance have served to camouflage underlying antiSemitic sentiment in the postwar period. Lars M.
Andersson's magnum opus differs from the work of his
immediate predecessors in that Andersson does not
emphasize the overtly political or ideological dimensions of Swedish anti-Semitism but rather its manifestation in commonplace, everyday attitudes presumed
to be shared by large segments of the population.
Andersson has chosen humor magazines, widely
distributed during the first decades of the twentieth
century, to explore this thesis, arguing that the medium
of popular entertainment may provide insight into
prevailing norms and values that are otherwise difficult
to document. He has examined in detail the entire
publication runs of fourteen humor periodicals, selected to provide a representative geographic and
ideological cross-section during the designated time
period. His study demonstrates conclusively that cartoons and jokes caricaturing Jews-many of them to
contemporary eyes crudely anti-Semitic-were a common feature in the humor press regardless of place of
publication or political orientation, a staple element
cultivated by editors and illustrators and apparently
appreciated by readers, who sometimes sent in "Jewish
stories" of their own. The construction of a relatively
consistently portrayed Jewish "other" contributed, in
turn, to the creation of a norm for "Swedishness" that
was a significant feature of the modernization process
and an implicit underpinning of the welfare state.
In the introduction, Andersson provides a thorough
overview of the history of anti-Semitism, both in
Sweden and internationally. He posits that the phe-
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