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In 1939 Nazis identified Polish citizens of German origin and granted them legal status as ethnic Germans of the Reich. After the war Poland did just the opposite: searched out Germans of Polish origin and offered them Polish citizenship. John Kulczycki’s account underscores the processes of inclusion and exclusion that mold national communities.
Contemporary Educational Researches: Theory and Practice in Education.
At the end of the Second World War, mass forced migration and population movement accompanied the collapse of Nazi Germany's occupation and the start of Soviet domination in East-Central Europe. Hugo Service examines the experience of Poland's new territories, exploring the Polish Communist attempt to 'cleanse' these territories in line with a nationalist vision, against the legacy of brutal wartime occupations of Central and Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The expulsion of over three million Germans was intertwined with the arrival of millions of Polish settlers. Around one million German citizens were categorised as 'native Poles' and urged to adopt a Polish national identity. The most visible traces of German culture were erased. Jewish Holocaust survivors arrived and, for the most part, soon left again. Drawing on two case studies, the book exposes how these events varied by region and locality.
This is a volume of scholarly essays that asks the question of the meaning of Europe by examining certain aspects of Central European history as well as issues dealing with the EU's enlargement into Central Europe that not only have an impact on the EU's development, but that also contribute to bringing about a definition of Europe that reflects the values and aspirations of all its citizens.
The first work that covers the post-Communist development of historical studies in six Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. A uniquely critical and qualitative analysis from a comparative and critical perspective, written by scholars from the region itself. Focusing on the first post-Communist decade, 1989–1999, the book offers a longer-term perspective that includes the immediate 'prehistory' of that momentous decade as well as its 'posthistoire'. The authors capture the spirit of 1989, that heady mix of elation, surprise, determination, and hope: l'ivresse du possible. This was the paradoxical beginning of Eastern European post-Communism: ushered in by 'anti-Utopian' revolutions, and slowly finding its course towards a bureaucratic, imitative, challenging, and anachronistic restoration of a capitalism that had changed almost beyond recognition when it had mutated into the negative double of Communism. Each individual chapter has numerous and detailed notes and references.
At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union unexpectedly found itself in control of a huge swathe of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system: communism. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. Applebaum describes in devastating detail how political parties, the church, the media, young people's organizations - the institutions of civil society on every level - were quickly eviscerated. She explains how the secret police...
Europe has a long history of state-led population displacement on ethnic grounds. The nationalist argument of ethnic homogeneity has been a crucial factor in the mapping of the continent. At no time has this been more the case than during and after the Second World War. Both under the aggressive expansionism of the Third Reich and after Germany's defeat, millions were brutally forced out of their homelands. Presenting a history from the top as well as the bottom, People on the Move reconstructs the complex map of forced population displacements that took place across Europe during and immediately after the Second World War.
“Family History of Fear has been in me for years. Along with this secret. From the instant I found out I was not who I thought I was.” Every family has its own history. Many families carry a tragic past. Like the author’s mother, many Poles did not tell their children a complete story of their wartime exploits—of the underground Home Army, the tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising, the civil war against the Communists. Years had to pass before the stories of suffering and heroism could be told. In Family History of Fear, Agata Tuszyńska, one of Poland’s most admired poets and cultural historians, writes of the stories she heard from her mother about her secret past. Tuszyńska, author of...
'A superb work of scholarship, full of riveting detail' Sunday Times A powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944. In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, due to deliberate policies unrelated to combat. Here, Timothy...