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Paths out of the Apocalypse fundamentally rethinks some key debates in the scholarship on early 20th-century Central Europe, the First World War, violence, nationalism and modern European comparative social and cultural history, considering the population of the hinterland as an active subject that decisively shaped the outcomes of the war.
The essays collected in this volume form a multifaceted discourse on religious, philosophical, historical, ethnocultural and sociocultural, literary and linguistic issues. A multicultural approach to the problem of the soul allows the presentation of it on a microscale, focused on national and regional specificity, as well as on the macroscale, oriented toward universal values which can be observed in the cultures of peoples distant from each other in both time and space. The book consists of 28 chapters, addressing the fundamental themes of human existence, which find expression in cultural texts in both colloquial and artistic language, and which have a prominent place in anthropological, psychological, metaphysical and theological debates.
Bringing together a variety of evidence, such as princely correspondence, travelogues, financial accounts, chronicles, chivalric or Renaissance poems, this book examines marital travels of princely brides and grooms on a comparative trans-European scale. This book argues that these journeys were extraordinary events and were instrumental for dynastical and monarchical self-representation, and channelled aspirations and anxieties of princely houses when facing each other. Each such journey was a little earthquake that resonated across all layers of society. Hundreds of diplomats, envoys, aristocrats, city officials, low-status personnel, soldiers, artists, musicians, poets, and humanists were...
Nations Apart reconsiders the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia during World War II. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after the 1938 Munich Agreement is typically recalled in Czech historical memory as the beginning of a period of humiliation, occupation, and resistance. Against this narrative of victimhood, %Sustrov? argues that the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia witnessed the unexpected expansion of the Czech welfare state, a process driven by local nationalisms and which, in turn, contributed, inadvertently to the stability of Nazi governance. Through extensive research in Czech, German, and Swiss archives, Nations Apart demonstrates that ethnically exclusive Czech national ideology dominated politics and everyday life during Nazi rule. Illustrating similarities between the wartime 'Protectorate' and the occupation regimes in Western Europe, %Sustrov? sheds new light on occupied societies during WWII and on the ambiguous origins of welfare states in post-war Europe.
In 2017, during a conference held at the Historical Institute of the University of Wrocław, Poland, an international group of early career researchers and PhD students had the opportunity to discuss the process of transition in cities from early modern times to the present day. This book, arising from the discussions of that meeting, focuses on the social, economic, political and structural transformations of some cities in Europe, the Near East and Asia from the seventeenth century up to the contemporary era. The first part of the text, entitled “Facing the Other: Perception, Relations, (Co)existence” explores the attitudes of the locals towards newcomers to a city, as well as the coex...
This edited volume studies the logic of community formation and the common view of the past to show how various social bonds of communities functioned during the modern national era of East-Central Europe from the late eighteenth century until today and how multifaceted this group-building really was. Through an overview of selected examples of communities in East-Central European urban centres, mainly the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successor empires, the volume shows the potential of re-interpretation or adaptation of the past as a crucial tool for assuring social cohesion and for strengthening the image of group boundaries. It studies not only textual sources...
This monograph is a model essay on the functioning of a municipal German-language theatre, and it introduces a new view into research led by both theatre scientists and musicologists on the European scene. The book is conceived as social history of a citizen's cultural institution and interprets a wide range of problematic themes which we meet to this day in the everyday practice of municipal theatres.
This volume critically investigates how art historians writing about Central and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged with periodization. At the heart of much of their writing lay the ideological project of nation-building. Hence discourses around periodization – such as the mythicizing of certain periods, the invention of historical continuity and the assertion of national specificity – contributed strongly to identity construction. Central to the book’s approach is a transnational exploration of how the art histories of the region not only interacted with established Western periodizations but also resonated and ‘entangled’ with each other. ...
This study uses the Czech national movement in the Austrian Empire between the late 1820s and the late 1850s to examine the complex set of social, physical, physiological, and moral requirements through which women became crucial social and political actors responsible for the existence of modern national communities. Situated within the larger frameworks of public and private spheres, contemporary Czech discussions of the positionality of women, and an understanding of the categories of gender and “woman” as fluid concepts, this book analyzes how Czech nationalists—in relation to and in comparison with other nineteenth-century nationalist movements—proposed that women become the central agents of the process to guarantee the continuity of the nation.