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Recent research has revised earlier views about the role of veterans of World War One in paramilitary formations, radical nationalism and political extremism in inter-war Europe, yet there remain considerable gaps in our understanding of the role they played in the ‘successor states’ of the Habsburg Empire. Vanquished and Victorious provides an innovative comparative investigation of veterans in Austria and Czechoslovakia, two states whose wider political development was of crucial importance to the question of stability in Central Europe after 1918. While differing in terms of how successfully veterans reintegrated into post-war society, this volume shows that both countries incorporated elements of ‘cultures of victory and defeat’.
Paths out of the Apocalypse uses violence as a prism through which to investigate the profound social, cultural, and political changes experienced by (post-) Habsburg Central Europe during and immediately after the Great War. It compares attitudes toward, and experiences and practices of,physical violence in the mostly Czech-speaking territories of Bohemia and Moravia, the German-speaking territories that would constitute the Republic of Austria after 1918, and the mostly German-speaking region of South Tyrol. Based on research in national and local archives and copious secondaryliterature, the study argues that, in the context of total war, physical violence became a predominant means of co...
The First World War massively changed the scale and nature of the "military veteran question" in Europe. The enormous impact of mass deaths and destruction, the demise of old empires, and the rise of new nation states resulting from total war made the fate of ex-soldiers into a key issue that shaped all societies in interwar Europe. The unprecedented number of combatants, together with the severity and frequency of injuries incurred in industrialized warfare, meant that the relationship between ex-soldiers and the state became a crucial issue for all governments, raising major questions about welfare provisions, social policy, party politics and national memory cultures. While there has been...
Civil War in Central Europe argues that Polish independence after the First World War was forged in the fires of the post-war conflicts which should be collectively referred to as the Central European Civil War (1918-1921). The ensuing violence forced those living in European border regions to decide on their national identity - German or Polish.
This book examines how the Cold War had a far-reaching impact on theatre by presenting a range of current scholarship on the topic from scholars from a dozen countries. They represent in turn a variety of perspectives, methodologies and theatrical genres, including not only Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook, but also Polish folk-dancing, documentary theatre and opera production. The contributions demonstrate that there was much more at stake and a much larger investment of ideological and economic capital than a simple dichotomy between East versus West or socialism versus capitalism might suggest. Culture, and theatrical culture in particular with its high degree of representational power, was recognized as an important medium in the ideological struggles that characterize this epoch. Most importantly, the volume explores how theatre can be reconceptualized in terms of transnational or even global processes which, it will be argued, were an integral part of Cold War rivalries.
The national cinemas of Czechoslovakia and East Germany were two of the most vital sites of filmmaking in the Eastern Bloc, and over the course of two decades, they contributed to and were shaped by such significant developments as Sovietization, de-Stalinization, and the conservative retrenchment of the late 1950s. This volume comprehensively explores the postwar film cultures of both nations, using a “stereoscopic” approach that traces their similarities and divergences to form a richly contextualized portrait. Ranging from features to children’s cinema to film festivals, the studies gathered here provide new insights into the ideological, political, and economic dimensions of Cold War cultural production.
This volume provides the English-speaking reader with little-known perspectives of Central and Eastern European historians on the topic of the Russian Revolution. Whereas research into the Soviet Union’s history has flourished at Western universities, the contribution of Central and Eastern European historians, during the Cold War working in conditions of imposed censorship, to this field of academic research has often been seriously circumscribed. Bringing together perspectives from across Central and Eastern Europe alongside contributions from established scholars from the West, this significant volume casts the year 1917 in a new critical light.
A history of the largely forgotten peasant revolution that swept central and eastern Europe after World War I—and how it changed the course of interwar politics and World War II As the First World War ended, villages across central and eastern Europe rose in revolt. Led in many places by a shadowy movement of army deserters, peasants attacked those whom they blamed for wartime abuses and long years of exploitation—large estate owners, officials, and merchants, who were often Jewish. At the same time, peasants tried to realize their rural visions of a reborn society, establishing local self-government or attempting to influence the new states that were being built atop the wreckage of the...
Zehntausende Menschen protestierten am 12. September 1988 vor dem ungarischen Parlament gegen das Wasserkraftprojekt Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros. Was mit vereinzelten kritischen Stimmen in der Untergrundpresse begann, entwickelte sich innerhalb weniger Jahre zu einer schlagkräftigen Bewegung gegen den kommunistischen Megabau. Es war kein Zufall, dass sich unter den DemonstrantInnen zahlreiche ÖsterreicherInnen befanden. Die Donaubewegung bildete einen Kristallisationspunkt für Protest, der weit über die Grenzen Ungarns hinausreichte. Dies war die Leistung von einer Handvoll AktivistInnen, die es wagten, jenseits des Eisernen Vorhang nach Verbündeten zu suchen. Denn spätestens als bekannt wur...