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Battle for the Castle
After World War I, diplomats and leaders at the Paris Peace Talks redrew the map of Europe, carving up ancient empires and transforming Europe's eastern half into new nation-states. Drawing heavily on the past, the leaders of these young countries crafted national mythologies and deployed them at home and abroad. Domestically, myths were a tool for legitimating the new state with fractious electorates. In Great Power capitals, they were used to curry favor and to compete with the mythologies and propaganda of other insecure postwar states. The new postwar state of Czechoslovakia forged a reputation as Europe's democratic outpost in the East, an island of enlightened tolerance amid an increas...
Flag Wars and Stone Saints
In a new perspective on the formation of national identity in Central Europe, Wingfield analyzes what many historians have treated separately--the construction of the Czech and German nations--as a single phenomenon. Illustrations show how people absorbed, on many levels, visual clues that shaped how they identified themselves and their groups.
The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria
This study of prostitution addresses issues of female agency and experience, as well as contemporary fears about sexual coercion and the forced movement of girls/women, and police surveillance. Rather than treating prostitutes solely as victims or problems to be solved, as so often has been the case in much of the literature, Nancy M. Wingfield seeks to find the historical subjects behind fin-de-si cle constructions of prostitutes, to restore agency to the women who participated in commercial sex, illuminate their quotidian experiences, and to place these women, some of whom made a rational economic decision to sell their bodies, in the larger social context of late imperial Austria. Wingfie...
Other Fronts, Other Wars?
Other Fronts, Other Wars? goes beyond the Western Front geographically and delves behind the trenches focusing on the social and cultural history of the First World War: it covers front experiences in the Ottoman and Russian Armies, captivity in Japan and Turkey, occupation at the Eastern war theatre, medical history (epidemics in Serbia, medical treatment in Germany) and war relief (disabled soldiers in Austria). It studies the home front from the aspect of gender (loosing manliness), transnational comparisons (provincial border towns) and culture (home front entertainments in European metropoles) and gives insight on how attitudes were shaped through intellectual wars of scientists and thr...
Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918
Combining history of science and a history of universities with the new imperial history, Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space by Jan Surman analyzes the practice of scholarly migration and its lasting influence on the intellectual output in the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburg Empire and its successor states were home to developments that shaped Central Europe's scholarship well into the twentieth century. Universities became centers of both state- and nation-building, as well as of confessional resistance, placing scholars if not in conflict, then certainly at odds with the neutral international orientation of academe. By ...
World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction
Can it be ever possible to write about war in a work of fiction? asks a protagonist of one of Makine’s strongly metafictional and intensely historical novels. Helena Duffy’s World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction redirects this question at the Franco-Russian author’s fiction itself by investigating its portrayal of Soviet involvement in the struggle against Hitler. To write back into the history of the Great Fatherland War its unmourned victims — invalids, Jews, POWs, women or starving Leningraders — is the self-acknowledged ambition of a novelist committed to the postmodern empowerment of those hitherto silenced by dominant historiographies. Whether Makine succeeds at giving voice to those whose suffering jarred with the triumphalist narrative of the war concocted by Soviet authorities is the central concern of Duffy’s book.
Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland
Malgorzata Fidelis' study of female industrial workers in postwar Poland proves that women were central to the making of communist society.
The Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination, 1938-89
The Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination,1938-89 is the first critical inquiry into the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices in both main parts of former Czechoslovakia. The authors identify anti-Jewish prejudices over almost fifty years of the twentieth century, focusing primarily on the post-Munich period and the Second World War (1938–45), the post-war reconstruction (1945–48), as well as the Communist rule with both its thaws and returns to hardline rule (1948–89). It is a provocative examination of the construction of the image of ‘the Jew’ in the Czech and Slovak majority societies, the assigning of character and other traits – real or imaginary – to individuals or groups. The...
On the Verge of History
Rural women have not had a formative role in the public histories of Central Eastern Europe. Izabella Agárdi aims to correct that by concentrating on their life stories and their connections to general histories. She investigates how Hungarian-speaking, ordinary women in rural contexts born in the 1920s and 1930s remember and talk about the twentieth century they have experienced, and how, through their stories, they articulate historical change and construct themselves as historical subjects. In her analysis, Izabella Agárdi traces the interactions between micro- and macro- narratives as well as the specific tools women of this generation appropriate to talk about personal memories of their often traumatic past. From these stories, a particular mnemonic community emerges, one that speaks from a highly precarious position 'on the verge of history'. It is up to future generations whether these women's experiences will be remembered or forgotten.
Public Service Evolution in the 15 Post-Soviet Countries
A unique study of public service evolution in the 15 post-soviet countries from independence to date. It reveals the diversity in their transformation shaped by historical and cultural traditions and the soviet legacy they inherited, as well as by the impact of the political will of ruling elites, all of which influenced the socio-economic and governance models these countries adapted. Its value lays with the fact that it is a collaborative outcome of prominent practitioners, who actively participated in the transformation process, and leading scholars representing all 15 post-soviet countries. It is valuable addition to the body of knowledge of public administration, allowing for improved understanding of the complexity and depth of change that has taken place over the past 30 years. It provides an in-depth analysis of the public service reform process; a subject relevant to the countries of the Region and beyond.
