New Books In Eastern European Studies

I don’t think it’s possible anymore for someone, even an academic with a specialty in the field, let alone an interested amateur, to read even a fraction of the literature written about the Holocaust. If you do a search for the word “Holocaust” on Amazon (as I just did), you get 18,445 results. That’s just in English, and just books available right now on Amazon. Admittedly this is a poor search strategy to use if constructing a bibliography, but it gives you a decent approximation of the challenge you face in trying to learn about the Holocaust. Dan Stone, then, has done the field a great service in writing his book Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2010. In this work, Stone attempts to provide a critical guide to the questions and interpretations most important to the field at this moment. In doing so, he summarizes an enormous amount of reading and learning into a couple hundred pages while offering his own thoughtful interpretations. This book is one of the first places to start if you

At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict not once but twice, the continent seemed to have changed its ways. It had spent the second half of the century building... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field: the intentionalist/functionalist discussion about when, why and how the Germans decided to annihilate the Jews of Europe, and the question of why individual perpetrators killed. His new book, then, seems like something of a departure. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (W. W. Norton, 2010), examines the labor camp at Starachowice, Poland. Starting before the Nazi invasion, Browning tracks the members of the Jewish community in the region throughout the war, from their initial encounters with Nazi presence through their deportation to Auschwitz to their eventual return (or not) to their homes after the war. The book engages deeply questions of survival, resistance and community and family in the life of the Jewish captives. But, as Browning suggests during the interview, the book is really a continuation of his previous strategy of using

I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence. Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more about the region than most people in the US about the region. Yet I was just as surprised as anyone else at the scale of the hatred and violence that erupted. With the part of the world I studied enduring atrocity after atrocity, I spent quite a bit of time wondering if graduate study in history was really the best profession to pursue. And I spent a lot of time devouring various accounts to try to understand how such violence could come out of what seemed like nowhere. Paul Mojzes‘ new book Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century(Rowman and Littlefield, 2011) ably addresses the second concern. A native of the region, Paul brings a deep understanding of the long-term roots of Balkan violence that many of the initial responses lacked. At the same time, he recognizes the significant changes that accompanied the twentieth century.  Moreove

Americans love Prague. They visit and have even moved there in considerable numbers. They like the place for a lot of reasons. One is that Prague is a very beautiful city. But another is that the Czech Republic has a widespread reputation in the U.S. (and more generally, I think) as a very liberal, democratic place. Czechs, we think, are different and long have been. In many ways, they are, of course. But as Mary Heimann suggests in her controversial book Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed (Yale UP, 2009; paperback, 2011), the Czechs (and Slovaks) were not as exceptional, historically speaking, as many think, and certainly not as exceptional as some historians have led us to believe. Czechoslovakia was not immune to some of the more harmful movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth century–strident nationalism, fascism, and communism among them. Sometimes Czech and Slovak leaders acted liberally and democratically; sometimes they did not. In that way, they were like all their European neighbors, that

Russians have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, it’s said they don’t much like foreigners. According to Eric Lohr‘s new book, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2012), this reputation is at once deserved and undeserved. It’s true that at various moments in Russian history, foreigners have not been permitted to enter Russia, let alone become citizens (or, in an earlier period, “subjects”) of the state. But, intermittently, the Russian state actively recruited foreigners, and especially foreign experts and capital, to aid in economic development. In the period after the Great Reforms, for example, the Russian state actively encouraged foreign investment and immigration. Late Imperial Russia seemed to be on a kind of glide path to a modern notion of citizenship. As Eric explains, all that ended with the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 (with catastrophic economic results). Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive numbers of Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies. The results, of course, were catastrophic. Fewer listeners are probably well informed about the Allied effort after the War to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling massive numbers of Germans. The results, as R. M. Douglasdemonstrates in his well-researched, even-handed book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (Yale University Press, 2012), were catastrophic. As many as 14 million Germans were displaced and somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million parished. Of course the Nazi and Allied “ethnic cleansings” (if that’s the right word) were not equivalent, a point that Douglas goes to great pains to emphasis. But the one is well known and the other is not. Until now. I urge you to read this book and find out what happened in this largely forgotten (and very disturbing) episode in th

During the Cold War few Westerners gave much thought to Western Ukraine, and its main city, Lviv. It was what happened in Moscow and St. Petersburg that really mattered, and so if one looked on a map one found city as Lvov, the Russian transliteration, rather than the Ukrainian that was native to the region. Consequently, beyond emigre circles the way in which Lviv became a center for an alternative way of looking at the world was largely ignored until the Soviet regime was falling apart. William Risch’s fascinating book The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Harvard UP, 2011) explores how Soviet rule was imposed in Lviv and Western Ukraine, and how despite Soviet ambitions, Lviv acquired its own identity that affected not just locals indigenous to the region but also people who moved to the city after it came under Soviet rule at the end of World War II. Drawing heavily on oral interviews, Risch tells an intriguing story of the unintended consequences of Soviet rule

The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new about it. But Mary Fulbrook has done precisely that in A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). In the book she examines the career of a single Nazi administrator in “the East”, Udo Klusa, in minute detail day by day, week by week, month by month while the Germans were improvising what became known as the “Holocaust.” Klausa was not a big wig; he was a functionary, a part of a (particularly awful) colonial machine. He believed in the Nazi mission to “Germanize” Poland, but he was by no means a “fanatical” Nazi. He followed orders (by our standards horrendous ones), but he did not do so mindlessly. He wanted to build a career, but he was not–apparently–willing to do anything to do so. Fullbrook investigates just how far Klausa was willing to go, what he found acceptable and

What if much of what we think we know about nationalism and the spread of the national identity over the course of the nineteenth century were wrong? This view is so widely accepted and ingrained in how we talk about the relationship between modernization and national identity that a different account is hard to imagine. Yet Pieter Judson has made a convincing case in Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Harvard University Press, 2006) that national conflict was not inexorably spreading from urban areas to the countryside. Indeed, he shows that villagers in mixed areas stubbornly resisted nationalist efforts to make them declare themselves once and for all as Germans, Czechs, Slovenes, or Italians depending on the region. The fact that we have thought otherwise stands as a triumph of nationalist propaganda, when nationalists began turning their attention to the countryside in 1880s, and made schoolhouses, rural demographic decline, and nationally oriented tourism a

On 1 January 1993 Slovakia became an independent nation. According to conventional Slovak nationalist history that event was the culmination of a roughly thousand year struggle. Alexander Maxwell argues quite differently in his book Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism (Tauris Academic Studies, 2009). Although focused primarily on the long nineteenth century and concluding with the interwar period, he shows just how much Slovak nationalism owes to unlikely contingencies, especially the dismantling of greater Hungary at the end of World War I. In so doing, he pays special attention to debates that shaped the standardization of Slovak, showing them to be far more complicated and more amorphous than has previously understood. Further, far from aspiring to independence, many of the steps that have since been portrayed as demonstrative of Slovak nationalist will in fact reflected Slovak intellectuals efforts to create a culturally pluralist Hungary. I enjoyed tal

When I first went to the Soviet Union (in all my ignorance), I was amazed that everyone in Moscow lived in what I called “housing projects.” The Russians called them “houses” (doma), but they weren’t houses as I understood them at all. They were huge, multi-story, cookie-cutter apartment blocks, one standing right next to the other for miles. “Why?” I asked myself. Kimberly Zarecor‘s wonderfulManufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960 (Pittsburgh UP, 2011) goes a long way in providing an answer, and it’s a surprising one. As she shows, socialism and architectural modernism were tightly linked even before the Second World War. This was true in the Soviet Union, of course, but it was also true throughout much of Europe–especially in Czechoslovakia. The avante guard of Czech architects were enthralled with modernism, just as they were (with some exceptions) enthralled with the promise of communism. They believed modernism provided a template for a truly socialist architecture, par

Russians’ dachas are regularly mentioned in a sentence or two in newspaper articles about life in Russia, and many of who have visited the lands of the former Soviet Union have visited dachas. Yet, just as Russians themselves treat dachas as an escape, outsiders tend to treat them as peripheral. Melissa Caldwell has stood that view on its head in her book Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside (University of California Press, 2010) by showing how even as dachas are a refuge from city life, they are central to Russian life. Not only do we learn about dachas and activities that fill days at the dacha like berry picking and mushrooming, we get a glimpse of Russian ideas of authenticity and the role of nature, as well as how the end of communism is changing Russian life. It is an engaging book, and it was a pleasure to speak with Melissa about dachas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of the specialists in Eastern Europe I know first got truly interested in the region after a trip, which then triggered applications to grad school, years spent reading books, and a year or two in the particular country or region of choice researching a dissertation. Francis Tapon‘s story is different. While he visited Prague in the late 1990s, it did not trigger an academic obsession. Still, he got interested enough in the region and the fact that he knew so little about it that he decided to devote several years traveling to every country to get to know the people. The result is The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us (WanderLearn, 2012), which is a travelogue tracking his travels starting in Finland and down through the Baltic states and Central Europe, and then the Balkans, and ultimately into the European Russia. He has some great stories, and if what he learns may not surprise specialists, his view is always fresh. Consequently I was happy to talk to him about his journeys and what h

We all know socialism failed in Eastern Europe and that failure reflected two great shortcomings: a lack of democracy and an economic system that consistently fell short in providing its ostensible benefactors, the workers, with consumer goods from housing to fashion. Yet paradoxically the more ingrained these truths become the more obscure the complexities of life under socialism become.It is all fine and good to point to rational irrationality of the planned economy, and the lack of space for individual entrepreneurship, but that tells us only part of the story.Until their collapse socialist societies shaped how everyone from architects to vacationers lived their lives, and our ability to understand socialism, as well as how and why it ultimately failed so miserably, depends not just on understanding the great events, but also every day lives. Over a decade ago David Crowley and Susan Reid invited scholars to explore issues concerned with everyday life in post-war socialism. The result has been three edite

Eastern Europe has never had the draw for scholars or tourists of France, Italy, Germany, or Great Britain, and within eastern Europe Bulgaria has invariably been overshadowed by Poland and the former Habsburg territories in the north and the more volatile region of former Yugoslavia. Just because Bulgarian history has not been at the center of European events, however, does not mean its history is any less interesting or valuable for understanding how humans deal with change. Indeed, at a time when western Europe wonders how to deal with its immigrant Muslim minority, the experience of Bulgaria’s indigenous Muslim population offers a valuable perspective on how ideas about modernity and otherness get negotiated without necessarily leading to an all out clash of civilizations. Mary Neuburger demonstrates this well in her book The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Cornell University Press), which originally appeared in 2004 but is now available in paperback.

When I began my graduate history, virtually all my fellow apprentice historians of eastern Europe were captivated by nationalism and focused their research accordingly. Of particular interest was how people from nobles to peasants came to identify themselves as part of a common national identity as society modernized. Nathaniel Wood was as caught up in this trend as the rest of us, but as he began his research of the nascent boulevard press in Cracow, he discovered a quite different identity issue was of central concern, what it meant for Cracow and Cracovians that their city was becoming a metropolitan center. In Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow (Northern Illinois University Press, 2010) Wood tells an engaging story about how Cracow, a city associated more with the glories of its medieval past adapted to modernity, expanding its geographical boundaries, adopted to new transportation technologies like the electric tram and the car, and came to be seen by its citizens as p

A couple of weeks ago I took a bus from Warsaw and travelled east across the River Bug. The border took a long time to cross, but then this was no ordinary border – it was the border between the Europe of the modern world, of the EU (with all of its problems) and liberal democracy, and the Europe of the Soviet era and authoritarian rulers. I crossed the border into Belarus. Belarus has been getting a bad press since the middle of the last decade, when Condoleeza Rice famously labelled President Lukashenka ‘Europe’s last dictator’. Every so often news squeaks out about repression aimed at opposition figures, of currency devaluations and of curiosities like secret pipelines in stream beds that are used for smuggling vodka out into EU neighbours. This is clearly a country with some serious explaining to do. Andrew Wilson‘s book, Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship (Yale University Press, 2011), is timely. Some are predicting that Lukashenka’s time is finally coming to an end, and eyes in Minsk and Brest ar

Europe may currently be in crisis and riven with divisions, but at least it’s a Europe of independent states. It was not always so. The Soviets dominated Eastern Europe for nearly half a century following the defeat of the Nazis. And for most of that time it seemed Soviet domination would never end. Then, unexpectedly, the Berlin Wall was no more. Eastern European states that had limited experience with democracy and open society began feeling their way forward and aspiring to become full fledged members of Europe. Many now are. Gale Stokes first wrote about how this monumental transformation happened in the first edition of The Walls Came Tumbling Down in 1993. He has now updated that story (The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Collapse and Rebirth in Eastern Europe, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2011) to provide thorough and readable accounts of the brutal collapse of Yugoslavia and the coming of age of the former Soviet satellites and their accession to the European Union. By its nature, it is a compl

The hardest part of living in a foreign land is crossing that invisible divide between being an outsider and getting to know a country properly. An old foreign correspondent friend of mine said that the newspaper standard was that it always took at least two years and a lot of language learning. In reading Elizabeth Gowing‘s lovely and fascinating book it is obvious that she has found another way to cross that invisible divide and begin to really understand so much of what makes Kosovo and its people tick. Her secret is beekeeping. After her partner, Rob, gave her a beehive for her birthday, doors began to open into the recesses of Kosovan life – its connection to history, to tradition, to food and to the land. The result is Travels in Blood and Honey: Becoming a Beekeeper in Kosovo (Signal Books, 2011), which gets beyond the history books and allows us more insights into what is now Europe’s newest (disputed) country. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch