New Books in Eastern European Studies

The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new state and mobilizing the population towards its ideological goals. In The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Scott Moranda explores how the Socialist Unity Party (SED) attempted to use tourism and landscape planning to reshape East Germans’ definition of their homeland. He also demonstrates the messy boundaries between state and society, in which East Germans refused to change patterns of pre-World War II nature activities such as hiking and camping; conservationists and the regime found common ground on concepts of landscape management; and environmentalism resulted in a fundamental break between society and the state. The People’s Landscape contributes to our understanding of East Germany’s environmental history as well as to our understanding of the nuances of the relationship between state and society under dictatorships. Scott Moranda is Associate Director of History at SUNY Cortland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017) Bruce O’Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest, Romania, where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism, O’Neill shows how the city’s homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work, a home to make, or money to spend, the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O’Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps, black labor markets and transit stations, detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation, from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest’s homeless, O’Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization in order to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement. Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree for Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic costumes. Her curiosity about how these musicians came to be performing during the protests led to her study of immigration, integration and identity in Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (Indiana University Press, 2014). Through interviews with hip hop musicians and African immigrants in Ukraine, Helbig explores multi-valent racial imaginaries connected with U.S. hip hop and black identity construction through music. She also traces how Africans and Ukrainians both construct these identities by conducting research in Uganda, the home country of a number of African Ukrainian musicians. Multimedia resources for Hip Hop Ukraine are available through Indiana University Press Ethnomusicology Multimedia. Adriana Helbig is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. She directs the Carpathian Music Ensemble and is affiliated faculty in Global Studies and the Center for Russian and East European Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar (SUNY Press, 2015), Geoffrey D. Claussen provides a thorough study of the life and work of one of the most influential figures in the history of Musar, the Jewish discipline for ethical development. Simḥah Zissel (1824-1898), also known as the Alter of Kelm, uniquely combined traditional Talmud study, contemplative exercises, Musar, and general studies curricula at his Talmud Torah in the Lithuanian town of Kelm. Professor Claussen, Lori and Eric Sklut Emerging Scholar in Jewish Studies, and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Elon University, breaks new ground in tracing the development and legacy of one of Musar’s great masters. This book is a welcome and needed addition to the study of the Musar movement and its seminal figures. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

What is the punk music scene like in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, or Mongolia? Who listens to punk in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans? What kind of venues host punk shows? Punk musician and writer Franz Nicolay explores these questions and much more in his Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar(The New Press, 2016). The book chronicles his various tours through Eastern Europe between May 2012 and July 2014. Traveling by himself in a rental car or by train with his wife, Nicolay explores cities and towns with small but devoted punk scenes and describes what he sees in Soviet post-industrial towns. Along the way, he learns what Russian punks think about the Pussy Riot controversy and he experiences first-hand political turmoil in the Ukraine. Blending travel memoir, cultural criticism, and popular music studies, Nicolay’s writing explores the life of a touring musician, the people that they encounter on tour, and his response to what he sees and experiences. The resulting book is insightful, funny, and essential for anyone who wants to learn more about punk in Eastern Europe and the life of a touring musician. Franz Nicolay is a New York musician, who has played with many acts, such as the Hold Steady, Against Me!, and the Dresden Dolls. He is a writer whose work appears at Slate.com and in the New York Times and teaches courses at Bard College. Fans can buy his music, explore his writing, and learn about his performances at his website. Richard Schur, professor of English at Drury University, is the host for this podcast episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17 At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia lay in ruins. Modernist architects believed they could build a new city that would match the modernization goals of the new communist government. In Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) , Brigitte Le Normand reveals the ideals that under girded these architects plans for Belgrade, along with the postwar realities that thwarted their attempts to foster a new society through a modernist built environment. She analyzes the political, social, and ideological implications of urban planning and the built environment, demonstrating how modernist architects were able to mold their ideal cityscape to fit Yugoslavia’s third way after the Tito-Stalin split and how market socialism created expectations that undermined their vision of social spaces. Her work demonstrates how architects and urban planners in Belgrade were part of a larger movement of modernism in postwar Europe and were affected by the movement away from modernism in the 1960s. Brigitte Le Normand is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012) provided a firm foundation for his reputation by exploring how imperial priorities shaped map-making of he dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and how these changed over the long century during which a fully independent Polish state did not exist. While focused primarily on Russian cartography is the primary focus of this work, Seegel places those developments in context with discussion of Polish nationalist map-making and a discussion of Habsburg map-making of the region as well. In so doing, he also offers intriguing portraits of the cartographers who ultimately made this research possible. It was a pleasure to interview him at last about this book and I invite you to listen to our discussion of his work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indian University Press, 2017), Andrew Sloin, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York, gives us a compelling and complex account of the fundamental changes in Jewish Life set in motion by the Bolshevik revolution. Sloin has written a social history at the grassroots level of Jewish society in Belorussia focusing on the intersections between Jewish radicalism, race and identity formation and political economy. It’s a unique and fascinating contribution to this field of study and a highly readable and insightful account of the transformations in Belorussian Jewish life in this period Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (Routledge, 2017), Macedonian researcher, peace-worker, and activist Ana Miskovska Kajevska analyses the way feminists in Belgrade and Zagreb reacted to the (post-)Yugoslav wars, with an emphasis on their discourses and activities regarding (sexual) war violence and on each other. Using a Bourdieu-based methodology supplemented by interviews, she challenges common assumptions that were not subject to scholarly debate before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

The Soviet Union under Stalin was very repressive. You could get sent to a GULAG (if not shot) for casually telling an “anti-Soviet” joke or pilfering ubiquitous “state property.” But, as James Heinzen points out in his excellent book The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953 (Yale University Press, 2016), official corruption–and bribery in particular–was rife. At every level of the Soviet system, top to bottom, and in every sector of the Soviet economy, ship building to medicine, people gave and took bribes. The Party knew about it, as did its judicial apparatus. Bribery was a fact of everyday Soviet life, even under Stalin. In The Art of the Bribe, Heinzen explains why bribery was intrinsic to Soviet culture, why bribery was an important and even necessary part of the Soviet system, and why the Party was more or less helpless to do anything about it even if it were interested in taking it on. The book is full of interesting and telling details–all based on first-ever archival research–that, together, amount to a kind of anthropology of bribery in the Soviet Union. Need I say that the book has relevance for understanding Putin’s Russia? Well, if I do, it does. “The more things change….” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies