listischen KZ-Terrors beleuchtet, wie unter einem Mikroskop offengelegt und als totalitär, zutiefst inhuman entlarvt. Die Rezeption des Werks -in Frankreich hoch gelobt und einflussreich, in Deutschland kaum wahrgenommen -wäre eine eigene Untersuchung wert. Diese müsste auch die Frage beantworten, wieso es erst bzw. gerade jetzt auf Deutsch erscheint, während Übersetzungen in andere Sprachen bereits viel früher erfolgten. An dieser Stelle kann nur dafür plädiert werden, das Buch (in der nun

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... iegenden Übersetzung) zu lesen, dessen Titel -das "KZ-Universum--auch hier schon seit Langem eine Ikone ist. Freiburg Karin Orth Klaudiusz B o b o w s k i : The British Council and Poland in the 1940s -Cultural Propaganda. (Schriften zur Geschichtsforschung des 20. Jahrhunderts, Bd. 18.) Verlag Dr. Kovač. Hamburg 2019. 194 S. ISBN 978-3-339-10666-7. (EUR 88,90.) -This slim study examines a subset of the 30 volumes of the British Life and Thought series published between 1940 and 1948. The author groups the 16 volumes that were translated into Polish into four thematic clusters-the people, the state, social life, and art-and offers summaries of the content of the volumes. The reader encounters a snapshot of 1940s British life as expressed by a government agency that was set up to provide information about Great Britain. The wider meaning and importance of this effort is largely left unanalyzed. The British Life and Thought series was launched in the late 1930s by the British Council as a means of spreading knowledge about Great Britain. With the defeat of Poland in 1939 and the arrival of large numbers of Polish exiles in Britain, it would appear that a number of the pamphlets were translated into Polish as a means of educating these new arrivals. They were then also made available to Poles in Poland after 1945 through the British Council. Alongside the summaries, the author rather impressionistically tries to imagine what a contemporary Pole would have made of them, and consistently faults the booklets for not making more and better connections to Poland. But given that the volumes were written for a broad international audience and were apparently directly translated into Polish, it is unclear why this repeated criticism is relevant. The author also makes passing reference to the larger body of theoretical literature on propaganda, but does not invoke this literature to analyze the texts. He also does not offer insights on their reception beyond his own guesses. There is, for example, little sense of how widely the volumes were read by Poles in wartime British exile, and no information given on their circulation in postwar Poland. Occasional and brief references are made to related, fascinating topics, such as the strategy of the British