Search

This article examines the role of websites as historical sources, using a comparative case study of Germany and Poland's respective lost territories after WWII and the border changes ordered by Stalin. The article proposes a methodology derived from the 'Toolbox' of the Oxford Internet Institute, which includes link and referral analysis plus sourcing of data about websites in past formats via the 'Wayback Machine' (archive.org). Its aim is to suggest ways in which historians can better assess the material function of these online sources within the wider taxonomy of historical discussion, in ways often taken for granted for traditional publications: for instance, noting ascribed provenance, prominence, age and stability as textual sources, in addition to their contents. The approach is tested through two websites each from Poland and Germany, construed as a pilot and spur to further investigation for application to other cases beyond where contentious episodes of 20th Century history are reframed to serve illiberal agendas, notably in Central Europe by parties such as Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary, or AfD in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slavery remained a problem for Central Europeans after the defeat of Napoleon. Concerns over White, Christian enslavement animated German-speaking European responses to the Greek Independence movement. As most antislavery advocates turned their attention to the increasing volume of the slaves traded between Africa and the New World, as well as the persistence and entrenchment of New World slavery, Central Europeans turned their attention to the Christian, Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The so-called 'Barbary Problem' (Barbareskenfrage) became enmeshed with the Eastern Question as Greeks revolted in Ottoman lands. Central Europeans had long viewed the domination of Christians in Islamic North Africa as the central problem of slavery until increased German migration and involvement in the New World brought new tensions to the ideas surrounding slavery. Greek insurrectionists against the Ottoman Empire breathed new life into older ideas about Christians enslaved in Islamic portions of Europe and Africa. Greek Independence gave Germans a bête noir closer to Europe than that of slavery in the Americas. Much of this interest owes to an enduring German philhellenic tradition which has been seldom analysed. Indeed, as Sue Marchand has written 'the obsession of the Schillerian German literary and scholarly elite with the ancient Greeks has become an accepted-if severely underanlaysed-cliché'. This paper uses archival documents to shed more light on how Central Europeans' interest and participation in the Greek War of Independence helped to revive old ideas about Christian enslavement at a time when New World slavery became the central concern of a broader European humanitarian protest against servitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central Europe around 1900 was marred with anxiety around the choice of career. This article weaves histories of education, labor, bureaucracy, and the social sciences to show how families reacted to changes in the labor market, including the opening of careers to talent and the mechanization of handicrafts. Parents found themselves unable to guide their children to a safe profession. Whereas previously, career choices were limited, changes in education and the labor market offered adolescents more options. Simultaneously, however, some occupations became endangered and others overcrowded. The erosion of labor stratification gave families the hope of social mobility but also upended their ontological security, as traditional roads to adulthood became impossible to follow. This article uses the discourse on career choice to write a history of this crisis. The discourse was born in early modern Europe to stop parents from forcing their children into a profession against the children's wishes. In nineteenth-century Europe, however, parents and schools weaponized this discourse against each other to widen or narrow access to advanced education. Social scientists concerned with the industrial labor force joined the conversation by turning career choice into a matter of scientific expertise. Finally, the article shows how voluntary associations pioneered the provision of vocational guidance before state intervention after World War I. Thus, the article traces a significant transformation in the transition to adulthood and offers a prehistory of vocational guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critical reading of Janek Wasserman's The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas. Wasserman depicts the evolution of the Austrian School from the 1860s until today, a particularly illuminating narrative for the readers of this journal. The breadth of portrayed economists, their cultural embeddedness in Austrian and US contexts, and the complexity of configurations across the school's generations create a rich and readable story. The last third of the book suffers from allegations about the ideological agenda and institutional power of the Austrian economists which sometimes lack sufficient substantiation. The paper indicates how both in their theorizing and in their political activities, the Austrian economists can be seen as reformers instead of revolutionaries, and as constitutionalists instead of anti-democrats. Despite these disagreements, Wasserman's portrayals evoke largely fair and challenging impulses both to scholars working in the Austrian research program and to those interested in the Austrian School's long history, regardless of one's ideological positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study is to describe the different political and social conditions of opposition activity in Hungary and Poland between 1956 and 1989, and to map the relations between the various Hungarian and Polish opposition groups. The author starts from the premise that after 1956 radically different political, economic and social conditions developed in the two countries. While in Poland the situation was relatively favourable for opposition activity, in Hungary the possibilities were limited and only in the late 1970s, and especially after the birth of the Polish Solidarity movement, did the scope for action increase. On the other hand, the author argues that activity in opposition was not sufficient for the development of Hungarian-Polish relations, but that the political, ideological and generational differences of Hungarian opposition groups had a decisive influence on the relations. Thus, for the Hungarians, the worldview and political strategy of the opposition in Poland were more important than the only opposition’s behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the outbreak of the First Hussite Wars (spring 1420), the Hussite capital Prague faced—at least in theory—a total embargo on all trade and commerce. However, trade evidently continued in spite of this embargo. The present article systematically assesses our knowledge on this trade and highlights articles, geographical structures and agents of long-distance trade to and from the Czech metropolis during the war, thus furthering our knowledge about the economic history of early fifteenth-century Central Europe in general. Furthermore, the author uses the example of the anti-Hussite embargo to address important and hitherto largely-neglected methodological questions concerning the analysis of medieval trade prohibitions in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decade before the First World War saw a heightened level of social and political conflicts throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary. Strikes in pre-1914 central Europe have largely been examined as part of the development of the workers' movement, but much less often from the perspective of the employers and government elites. Their strategies to counteract "strike terrorism" included hiring replacement workers through private strikebreaking agents, who provided a variety of services such as recruitment, transportation, housing, and providing "willing workers" with weapons for their self-defense. The discourses around "strike terrorism," and the repressive strategies to counter it, are a lens through which we can look afresh at some of the most crucial issues in the history of central European empires in the prewar years, namely the structure of violence embedded in social conflicts, migration, growing political antagonism, and fears surrounding social democracy. This article analyzes the public debate around the protection of "willing workers" as well as concrete episodes of antilabor violence in a transnational framework. It offers a reassessment of social conflicts in the period following the 1905 social mobilizations in central Europe, and it explores the circulation of antilabor measures between Germany and Austria-Hungary, their radicalizing impact, and their connections with labor migration patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the three essays of the newly established JECES ―forum‖ in issue 2/2018, three colleagues posit contemporary East Central Europe as ―interwar period 2.0‖ and emphasize the significance of references to interwar history in contemporary memory politics.1 Their contributions point out the importance of these historical references for nation and state building after 1989/90 and for contemporary national identities. Building on this diagnosis, we would like to propose a methodological framework that looks at state-building in East Central Europe from a different perspective: by taking as an object of study the broad range of different—and often negative—views on the performance and capabilities of the states of East Central Europe from the nineteenth century until today. We argue that if we want to understand the various conflicts that affected—and continue to affect—the development of states in this region, we need to understand how views on states shape activities towards states. If we achieve this, we can challenge deeply entrenched narratives—both popular and historiographical—that center around the idea of the inevitable collapse of states in East Central Europe, be they the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg and Romanov Empires, the interwar states or the states of the Warsaw Pact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nicholas Roosevelt, journalist and diplomat, served during the Paris Peace Conference as a member of the Coolidge mission, which had Vienna as its seat and gathered information about Austria and the other countries in the neighborhood. By accident, Roosevelt was in Budapest when the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed in March 1919. Based upon his experiences in and out of Vienna, Roosevelt wrote diary entries that have never been published. The language of the diary is interesting, not difficult to read, and often humorous, although sometimes politically incorrect in the twenty-first-century sense, as it contains anti-Semitic opinion and sentiment of American superiority toward Central and Eastern European peoples. It gives sharp characterizations on leading figures of the era, from Coolidge to Károlyi, and from Dulles to Wilson. The material is important also since it reflects the private opinions of an American captain about the United States' role in the postwar world and in the process of peace making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the problem of why there was a constant demand for ennoblement in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe, even though those who aspired to it had little or no prospect of integration into the established feudal nobility. Nobility was first and foremost an ideological concept closely connected to power and rule. The Holy Roman emperors ennobled persons who exercised power precisely because, in the premodern social order, the exercise of power was a prerogative of the nobility. However, the newly ennobled had only their title in common with the old aristocratic families and rarely attained the other privileges enjoyed by these families. For this reason, the emperors' practice of ennoblement gradually reshaped the nobility as a whole and simultaneously the ideological notion of nobility. Certainly, ennoblement still served a strategic purpose in the context of social advancement. Particularly for civil servants and military officers, it was the most effective means of preserving their newly acquired status for their descendants and possibly establishing their families in a new bureaucratic and military hereditary elite, which in some places coexisted with the old aristocracy. The central element of the new ideological concept was the notion of the nobility as a hereditary ruling class, both qualified for and entitled to the exercise of power on account of inherited superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When African American concert singers began to perform German lieder in central Europe in the 1920s, white German and Austrian listeners were astounded by the veracity and conviction of their performances. How had they managed to sing like Germans? This article argues that black performances of German music challenged audiences' definitions of blackness, whiteness, and German music during the transatlantic Jazz Age in interwar central Europe. Upon hearing black performers masterfully sing lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and others, audiences were compelled to consider whether German national identity was contingent upon whiteness. Some listeners chose to call black concert singers "Negroes with white souls," associating German music with whiteness by extension. Others insisted that the singer had sounded black and therefore un-German. Race was ultimately the filter through which people interpreted these performances of the Austro-German musical canon. This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that investigates how and when audiences began to associate classical music with whiteness. Simultaneously, it offers a musicological intervention in contemporary discourses that still operate under the assumption that it is impossible to be both black and German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of nation-building and secession tend to prioritize elite or broader nationalist activism when explaining the proliferation of nation-states. Yet, recent historical research reveals a major finding: the influence of great powers tended to eclipse nationalist mobilization for new states in Latin America, the Balkans, Anatolia, and Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on recent trends in historical research largely unknown in other fields, this article examines context, timing, and event sequencing to provide a new approach to multi-case research on nation-state proliferation. Major power recognition of new states in the Balkans also emerges as transformational for the post-World War I replacement of dynastic empires with nation-states in Europe. These findings suggest a shift of focus to the interplay of nationalist activism and great power policy for explaining the spread of nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the end of the fifteenth century, the massive expansion of syphilis had a distinct effect on the historical development of Europe. Due to this disease, firstly the numbers of the European population were reduced; thereafter, moral and ethical principles were significantly affected and the combat readiness of armies decreased. The disease forced new legislation which was of vital importance for the development of health services. The Czech Lands, located in Central Europe, were also no exception. The material presented summarises the available information on this disease obtained from written sources and from the study of direct evidence of skeletal remains from archaeological sites of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. Traces of syphilitic bone affliction have observed in almost every large early modern osteological collection to date. A number of currently documented palaeopathological findings of syphilitic changes in bones from the Czech Lands do not by a long stretch correspond to the data presented in literary sources on the mass occurrence of this disease. The submitted study aims to extend current knowledge in this area and thereby to complete a complex view of the development of syphilis in Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the politics of water infrastructure through the Large Technical Systems (LTS) literature, which examines human agency in the dynamics of complex sociotechnical systems. We take into account the transnational turn in LTS-studies in the past decade. Transnational analysis is about the mutual shaping of the international, national, and local. Accordingly, we look at how key system builders – historical agents envisioning and working on the entire sociotechnical system – identified and negotiated international, national, regional, and local politics through the design process. We do this for the intriguing case of the Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal, the so-called 'missing link' between the North, Baltic, and Black Seas, with a design history spanning wildly diverging paradigms of political rule – from imperialism to fascism, communism, and 'EU-ropeanism'.

The article presents the author's review of arts and revolution in Central Europe in the 20th century.

Volumes 38 to 47 of Central European History, which appeared from July 2004 to June 2014, represented years of fundamental transition in the life of the journal and of its sponsoring society: then the Conference Group for Central European History, now the Central European History Society. 1 This fundamental transition manifested itself in three forms: institutional formality, both of the journal and of the Conference Group / Society; publishing organization and technology — from the ways in which the editor produced the journal to the ways in which the audience consumed the scholarship it published; and, last but not least, the intellectual focus and content of the history of German speaking Central Europe that Central European History presented to scholars and students alike. Although the decade presented some unexpected and surprising challenges, all these transitions were already visible in July 2002 when I presented my proposal to become editor of Central European History to the Editor Search Committee, which consisted of Konrad Jarausch, Kees Gispen, and then-editor Kenneth Barkin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the philosophy and practices of censorship in Central Europe during the early 19th century. Topics covered include a petition written and circulated by Austrian dramatist Eduard Bauernfeld in 1845 on the conditions of Austrian censorship, a theory of human freedom developed by German poet Friedrich Schiller that is linked to the sovereignty of aesthetics, and the censorship regulations of 1810.

To understand how German and Austrian readers gained access to forbidden literature during the Restoration and Vormärz periods, one must enter the world of bookshops. Publishers and book merchants, this essay argues, completed the print circuit of forbidden political knowledge. They possessed numerous ways to circumvent the censorship regimes of central Europe. Networks of publishers, printers, book dealers and their agents provided clandestine channels through which they smuggled books from abroad and circulated banned domestic literature. Because bookshop owners enabled the hand-to-hand transfer of contraband material, their role in developing an oppositional political culture was crucial. They made possible transnational communication networks by providing urban spaces where a socially diverse readership contested censorship and reshaped civic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the role that the Dnipro River (formerly Dnieper River) plays in the discursive construction of Yurii Andrukhovych’s idea of East-Central Europe. In his essays ‘Like Fishes in Water’ (Yak ryby u vodi. 29 richkovykh pisen’, 2004) and ‘Atlas. Meditations’ (Atlas. Medytatsiyi, 2005), the author chooses to emphasize the Dnipro’s function as a border between two distinct regions of Ukraine. In his portrayal, the right bank (the western part of Ukraine) seems culturally traditional, whereas the left bank (the eastern part of Ukraine) appears to be uncultivated, proletarian, nomadic and generally an area of wilderness. The author concludes: ‘At least in the context involving this specific map the two Ukraines are divided’. Is this a hidden ideologization or a new mythologization of the Dnipro? Certainly, the conceptualization of the river transcends its mere physical dimensions and provides the landscape with a symbolic function. Andrukhovych’s essay volumes Disorientation on Location (Dezoriyentatsiya na mistsevosti, 1999), The Devil’s Hiding in the Cheese (Dyyavol khovayet’sya v syri, 2006) and The Lexicon of Intimate Cities (Leksykon intymnykh mist, 2016) provide additional insights into this imagined geography. The research presented in this article discusses Andrukhovych’s ideas with reference to the concept of ‘Two Ukraines’ by Mykola Riabchuk and ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ by Samuel Huntington. Central European discourse, post-colonial studies and geopoetical theory complement the discussion and enable its integration into a larger context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yurii Andrukhovych is one of the first writers in post-Soviet Ukraine who created their own concept of Central Europe with a particular focus on the historical region of Galicia as a legacy of the Habsburg Empire. The West Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivs’k, the author’s place of birth and residency, appears in his texts as a part of the historical region of Eastern Galicia and the embodiment of Andrukhovych’s vision of the region and, by extension, Central Europe. Showing the relationship of the city to the Habsburg monarchy while referencing his own family memories, Andrukhovych combines the pre-war history of the town with contemporary history. Thus, Ivano-Frankivs’k is depicted by the writer not only through the prism of its Habsburg era, but also through post-Soviet reality. Furthermore, in his first publications, the Habsburg history of Galicia represents the idea of belonging to European civilization as an alternative to the more recent totalitarian past, but Andrukhovych has always attempted to create a new image of modern Ivano-Frankivs’k rather than to reconstruct the Austro-Hungarian past of the region: the subjective and personalized Austrian past of the city is more akin to a point of reference and signpost to other perspectives. Both Ivano-Frankivs’k and Eastern Galicia are portrayed by the author as ambivalent and hybrid spaces. On the one hand it is a peripheral area between East and West; but, on the other hand, it is Andrukhovych’s personal part of Europe, where the processes and figures that shaped the continent gain an individual, unique dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Andrzej Stasiuk’s 2004 travelogue On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe as a work that questions the existing narratives about the region commonly referred to as ‘Central Europe’. The main argument is that by bringing forward an original interpretation of ruins and decay — theorized here as ‘heterotopias of decay’ — Stasiuk’s poetics of villages and small towns from forgotten corners of Europe invites an interrogation of the notion of Central Europe itself. The narrative’s dismissal of the very term ‘Central Europe’, because it disregards the mundane qualities of the everyday, is presented as an original contribution to the debates about this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study summarizes the information about Bohemia (and East Central Europe in general) that is given by the Western Frankish chronicles of the 10th and first half of the 11th centuries. These contributions were mostly omitted or refused by general majority of the Czech historiography. Recent changes of attitude to the relevance of these sources could bring a new view on these sources. The information about Bohemia contained in these sources could also help us to expose a possible relations and stereotypes about our region in Western Europe in the 10th and 11th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information is provided on the workshop titled "Heritage Studies and Socialism: Transnational Perspectives on Heritage in Eastern and Central Europe" from November 23-25, 2016. Topics, including the development of historical consciousness at the beginning of the 19th century, vernacular heritage in Hungary, industrial heritage preservation in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the impact of post-World War II reconstruction on historic preservation, are discussed.