This panel explores the role that art, music, and literature played in inspiring different and often competing visions of national identity and European reconstruction during the Second World War.

Operating in an increasingly globalized cultural economy, Europeans drew from national and transnational cultural products as they struggled to redefine their nation’s status in war-torn Europe. Indeed, already implicated in the struggle between modernity and traditionalism by centuries of cultural debate, forms like music, literature, art, and theatre stood as powerful symbols of both cosmopolitanism and nationalism. As such, they offered consumers and artists important rhetorical resources for promoting their visions of postwar reconstruction and national belonging. By attending to the ideologies embedded in these cultural forms, this panel seeks to trace out informal or previously deemed apolitical instantiations of the nation. In addition, overtly political works of art and literature reveal subtle tensions between the local and the global, the national and the transnational that complicated attempts to rebuild Europe.