New Books In Eastern European Studies

Jerzy Grotowsky and Tadeusz Kantor were influential in avant-garde theater in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, receiving high critical regard despite the fact that audiences could not understand the Polish language of the performances. In The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’ (Anthem Press, 2014), Magda Romanska bridges the disciplinary divides between theater studies and Slavic studies, between the history of Poland in the twentieth century and the history of avant-garde theatre, to place these works in a Polish and international context. Romanska asserts that critics and audiences in West, while appreciating the theater productions of Grotowski’s Akropolis and Kantor’s Dead Class, missed the “obscure, difficult, multi-layered, funny-sounding Polish glory, with all of the complex and convoluted contextual and textual details” of these works. She traces the Polish cultural and literary roots and the Jewish history and culture on which Kantor

Historians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.  We now know much more than we used to about the escalation of violence in 1941 and the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets.” The actions of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, in contrast, are less well known.But they are crucial to understanding the evolution of violence against Jews and others.JuergenMatthaus, Jochen Boehler, and Klaus-Michael Mallmann set out to fill this gap.Their work War, Pacification and Mass Murder, 1939:The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)–part of theUnited StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum’s excellent Documenting Life and Destruction series–sets carefully chosen documents into a richly described military and institutional context. By doing so, they illustratenot just what the Einsatzgruppen did, but how theiractions evolved over time, how they interacted withWehrmacht and political leaders and how this violence impacted people on the ground. In the

I’ll be leaving soon to take students on a European travel course. During the three weeks we’ll be gone, in addition to cathedrals, museums and castles, they’ll visit Auschwitz, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and a variety of other Holocaust related sights.  And I’ll ask them to think about what we can say about how people in East-Central Europe remember the Holocaust based on the places they’ve visited. This is not simply a matter of historical reckoning.  The responses to the recent op-ed by FBI director James Comey show how important the question is in contemporary politics.   They also show how limited our understanding of the dynamics of memory in Eastern Europe has been. My answers to the students’ questions will be enormously more sophisticated and thoughtful after having read the work of John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic.  Their recent edited collection titled Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (University of Nebraska Press, 20

In the late 1940s, tens of thousands of people – mostly young male peasants – streamed to southeastern Poland to help build Nowa Huta, the largest and most ambitious of Stalinist “socialist cities” in the new People’s Democracies. The town, built to house workers at the Lenin Steelworks (also under construction), was designed to implement economic and social change, but many of the plans went unfulfilled or even awry. In Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1949-1956 (Cornell University Press, 2014), Katherine Lebow provides a fascinating analysis at the expectations and experiences of the Communist Party planners, the nationally-minded architects, the rural youth, women and Roma who created Nowa Huta. She places the construction of Nowa Huta more broadly in Polish history, linking it to visions of modernization in the interwar period, as well as situating it in the context of post-war Europe. Lebow argues that, in the end, “utopian visions of a new town for the masses were a luxury tha

The period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries witnessed a mass migration which carried millions of Jews from central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to new lands. Hasia Diner’s new book, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (Yale University Press, 2015) examines this migration through the prism of the oft overlooked peddler. For the Jewish men arriving in the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America, peddling was among the most prevalent of professions. It allowed those without large amounts of capital to quickly start their own businesses. Jewish men took to the roads, selling household items door to door in small towns, rural areas, mining camps and on Indian reservations. In the process, these men learned about the languages and cultures of their new homelands. At the same time, peddlers were agents of change and modernization, introducing their customers to new products, tastes an

Major Zeman’s life is filled with action packed adventures. A young man finds his calling turning a collective farm into a shining example of agricultural efficiency.  Anna embraces her role as a single mother and as the woman behind the deli counter.  Two engineers show the world the high-quality of products from communist Czechoslovakia.  In The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell University Press, 2012), Paulina Bren uses these and other television serials to analyze the meaning and experience of “normalization” in post-1968 Czechoslovakia. With a source base that ranges from television scripts to communist party archives to dissident writings, Bren reveals how the Czechoslovak regime used television to communicate an official history of the Prague Spring and to define a “normal” life for its citizens. In doing so, Bren challenges the dichotomy of the active dissident and the passive “greengrocer” made famous by Vaclav Havel. The Greengrocer and His TV re

As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading about it in the newspaper the next day.The first genocidal conflict covered in real time, dozens of reporters covered the war from the front lines or from a Sarajevo under siege. Not surprisingly, the media coverage was accompanied by a flood of memoirs and histories trying to explain the wars to a population that, at least in the US, knew little to nothing about the region. These were valuable studies–informative, interesting and often emotionally shattering. Istill assign them in classes today. But histories of the present, to steal a phrase from Timothy Garton Ash, are always incomplete and impressionistic.They lack both the opportunity to engage primary sources and the perspective offered by distance. Twenty years on, we’re now in a position to begin to reexamine and rethink many of the conclusions drawn in the midst of the conflict. Robert J. Donia‘s new boo

In his biography of Jozef Tiso, Catholic priest and president of independent Slovakia (1939-1944), James Ward provides a deeper understanding of a man who has been both honored and vilified since his execution as a Nazi collaborator in 1947. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2013) is also a fascinating look at Catholicism, nationalism and human rights as moral standards in 20th century East Central Europe. The book explores both the political and social contexts that shaped Tiso and the choices he made in attempts to shape the country in which he lived – whether Habsburg Hungary, interwar Czechoslovakia or a Slovak republic.  Ward reveals, as well, how the fight over Tiso’s legacy in post-communist Slovakia mirrored the polarization of Slovak politics at the end of the 20th century. Priest, Politician, Collaborator was the 2014 Honorable Mention for the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History from the Association for Slavic, East European

By the late 1960s, Bulgaria was the world’s number one exporter of tobacco, perhaps the pinnacle of the place of tobacco in the economic, social and political development of modern Bulgaria.  In Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Cornell University Press, 2012), Mary C. Neuberger deftly moves between tobacco production and practices of smoking, challenging assumptions about coffeehouses in the Ottoman empire, revealing the economic base of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, and demonstrating Bulgaria’s position between east and west in the Cold War. Neuberger’s engaging and detailed study begins in the late nineteenth century when Christian Slavs learned to smoke and to be Bulgarian in Ottoman coffeehouses.  She reveals how the interwar anti-smoking movement created an alliance between Protestant missionaries and local Communists. From World War I to the alliance with Nazi Germany in World War II to Bulgartabak’s negotiations with U.S. tobacco companies, Balkan Smoke de

Some say it should be a loose collection of sovereign nation states; others say it should aspire to be a kind of super-nation state itself. Or is it, in truth, a messy but workable mixture of a number of extremes, ideals and concepts? These are the type of questions that Mark Corner‘s new book The European Union: An Introduction (I. B. Tauris, 2014) seeks to both ask about the EU and tentatively answer. This is not just another routine tour around the institutions and functions of the European Union – instead, it’s a sharply written introduction to the EU that makes the reader understand it beyond the constraints of terms such as ‘nation state’. It’s also a very timely book, as the 28 member bloc is under scrutiny as never before, especially in the wake of both the euro crisis and the continent-wide rise of Eurosceptic parties. It’s a recommended read for anybody trying to make sense of one of the grandest twentieth-century projects that is still evolving and adapting to the world today. Learn more about your

The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) is an engaging new take on the empire that explores the tumultuous history of its final decades through the life of a single imperial person, the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War and, briefly – and strangely – became the de facto ruler of Mongolia in 1921. Following Baron Ungern through his youth and subsequent military career, the reader is treated to an adventure across Eurasian space. The first chapters take us into the peoples and politics of Russia’s western borders and the grand imperial capital of St. Petersburg. We then shift thousands of miles eastward to Siberia and the faraway territories where Russia bumped up aga

At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of many historians, we know quite a bit about Allied planning for the expulsion, when and how it took place, and the multitude of deaths that occurred as a result of it. We know much less about what happened to the expellees after the expulsion. Where did they go? What did they do? And, perhaps most interestingly, what did they think about their former Heimat? In The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Andrew Demshuk answers many of these questions and thereby sheds considerable light on post-war German history. He shows that though most of the expellees made good in West Germany, they still thought often about the “lost East.” Not surprisingly given the twists and turns of nostalgia, they created an idealized image of these territories, one without Nazis. Yet they also created a kind of coun

There is a lot of nasty mythology about Jews, but surely the most heinous and ridiculous is the bizarre notion that “they” (as if Jews were all the same) have long been in the habit of murdering Christian children, draining them of blood, and mixing said blood into Passover matzo. We know when and where the notion of “Blood Libel,” as this myth is conventionally called, appeared (12th-century England), but we don’t know why. Indeed, given the utter absurdity of the charge (Jews, of course, are forbidden to eat, drink, or consume blood in any way, shape, or form), it may be impossible for a rational mind to grasp. Even the Christian Church was vexed and, therefore, repeatedly condemned Blood Libels over the centuries that followed its appearance. Official religious disapproval–together with what might generically called “Enlightenment”–had some effect. By the late nineteenth century at the latest, clerical and civil authorities–not to mention “right-thinking people” everywhere–understood Blood Libel to be noth

What processes must take place in order for countries to radically redefine who is a citizen? Why was Russia able to finally remove ethnicity from internal passports after failing to do so during seven decades of Soviet rule? What led German leaders to finally grant guest workers from Southern and Eastern Europe the path to citizenship after nearly five decades? How was Turkey able to move beyond the assimilation-based model that had guided the Turkish republic for eight decades and move toward a multi-cultural society? In his book Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, Sener Akturk makes a carefully constructed argument for how states can redefine “regimes of ethnicity” through the confluence of three key processes – the rise of new counter-elites, the development of new discourses, and the emergence of hegemonic majorities, which together can give governments

I imagine one of the greatest compliments an author of an historical monograph can receive is to hear that his or her book changed the way a subject is taught. I will do just that after reading Mark Levene‘s new two volume work The Crisis of Genocide (2 Vols. Devastation:  The European Rimlands, 1912-1938; Annihilation and The European Rimlands, 1938-1953) (Oxford University Press, 2014).  These books, a continuation of Mark’s earlier volumes titled Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, offer a rich and thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which the changing expectations and culture of the international system interacted with local events and personalities to drive mass violence.  The work is more analytical than narrative.  It is complex and requires careful attention to argument and evidence.  But it amply repays this effort with a reading of modern European history that made me rethink how I understood the period.  I learned much from the book about the details of violence in Anatolia and the Balk

When I was in graduate school, those of us who studied World War One commented regularly on the degree to which historians concentrated their attention on the Western front at the expense of the other aspects of the war. In the years since then (I won’t say how many), historians have worked hard to remedy this neglect.  Nevertheless, we still know much less about the Eastern Front than we do about events in France or even the homefronts of Western and Central Europe. Geoffrey Wawro‘s new book A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire (Basic Books, 2014), fills in an important part of this gap.  Wawro is most interested in understanding why the Empire chose to go to war despite (or perhaps because of) its many challenges and why it failed so immediately and drastically.  Decisions made by diplomats, soldiers and politicians in Vienna played a critical role in starting the war.  And decisions made by the leaders of the Monarchy’s army’s played just as important a ro

Thirty years after a trip to the GDR, Soviet cardiologist V.I. Metelitsa still remembered mistakenly trying to buy a dress for a ten-year-old daughter in a maternity shop: ‘In our country I couldn’t even imagine that such a specialized shop could exist’.” Well-stocked shops, attractive cafes, and medieval streets were among the many discoveries that Soviet citizens made in their trips abroad. After decades of closed borders and rumors of life abroad, the 1950s ushered in a new era — an era in which Soviet citizens would be able to participate in the transnational circulation of people, ideas, and items. In All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2011), Anne Gorsuch discusses the varied experiences of Soviet citizens traveling at home, to the “near abroad” of Estonia, and to Eastern and Western Europe, in the Khrushchev era. For many, this travel was no holiday but a purposeful excursion. Tourists were to learn about other parts of the world, but most i

We’ve talked before on the show about how hard it is to enter into the field of Holocaust Studies. Just six weeks ago, for instance, I talked with Dan Stone about his thoughtful work analyzing and critiquing the current state of our knowledge of the subject. This week is a natural follow-on to that interview. Peter Hayes and John Roth have edited a remarkable compilation of essays about the Holocaust. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010) surveys the field, but does so in a significantly different way than Stone. Hayes and Roth have recruited dozens of the brightest young researchers to offer a summary of and reflection on what we now know about many of the most important topics in Holocaust Studies. Each entry is relatively short (12-15 pages) and packed with information useful to newcomers and veterans alike. Each offers some sense of the trajectory of our knowledge and understanding of the topic. Almost all are immensely readable. If you are looking to get a comprehens

The first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye (Schocken, 2013) offers readers an encounter with the great Yiddish author himself. Dauber writes in the rhythm of the language of Sholem Aleichem – Mr. How Do You Do – brilliantly structuring the book as a drama, with an overture, five acts, and an epilogue in ten scenes. He assumes the voice of a theater impresario, talking to his audience, just as the author Sholem Aleichem did, narrating his stories and reading them to the crowds whom he loved to entertain. The author Sholem Aleichem, most famous for his Tevye stories that became Fiddler on the Roof, was no Tevye, but rather a sophisticated and educated cosmopolitan businessman and writer.  He possessed immense curiosity about every man, a unique ear for interesting stories, and the ability to connect with his audience; these

It takes two to tango, right? Indeed it does. But it’s also true that someone has got to ask someone else to dance before any tangoing is done. Beginning in the 1960s, the American intellectual elite argued–and seemed to really believe–that the United States either started the Cold War full stop or played a very important (and knowing) role in setting it in motion. That consensus (if it was a consensus) has been destroyed by the work of a raft of historians who, having gotten fresh access to materials from the Soviet side, are now offering fresh–and revisionist–interpretations of the beginnings of the Cold War. One such historian is Robert Gellately. In his new book Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Knopf, 2013), Gellately argues that Stalin saw the world in binary terms: there were capitalists and communists. ALL the capitalists were bad. This was obviously true of the Nazi Germans. But it was also true of his wartime allies, the Democratic Americans, British, and French. So when