New Books in Eastern European Studies

Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe (Basic Books, 2023), Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the region, demonstrating that Central Europe has always been more than merely the fault line between West and East. Even as Central European powers warred with their neighbors, the region developed its own cohesive identity and produced tremendous accomplishments in politics, society, and culture. Central Europeans launched the Reformation and Romanticism, developed the philosophy of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and advanced some of the twentieth century's most important artistic movements.Drawing on a lifetime of research and scholarship, The Middle Kingdoms tells as never before the captivating story of two thousand years of Central Europe's history and its enduring significance in world affairs.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Antony Kalashnikov's Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time (Cornell UP, 2023) analyzes Stalinist monument-building. From the 1930's through the Great Patriotic War, architectural monuments such as subway stations were designed to emphasize the perpetual endurance of the nation, regardless of the many crises of the period. The contemporary popularity of Stalinist-era architectural forms has endured. Why this should be so is a question worth pondering, and Monuments for Posterity does just that, in addition to offering a fresh reading of Stalinist architecture in its own time.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. 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 Global Sixties are well known as a period of non-conformist lifestyles, experimentation with consumer products and technology, counterculture, and leftist politics. While the period has been well studied in the West and increasingly researched for the Global South, young people in the "Second World" too were active participants in these movements. The Iron Curtain was hardly a barrier against outside influences, and young people from students and hippies to mainstream youth in miniskirts and blue jeans saw themselves as part of the global community of like-minded people as well as citizens of Eastern Bloc countries.Drawing on Polish youth magazines, rural people's diaries, sex education manuals, and personal testimonies, Malgorzata Fidelis follows jazz lovers, university students, hippies, and young rural rebels. In Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland (Oxford UP, 2022), Fidelis colorfully narrates their everyday engagement with a dynamically changing world, from popular media and consumption to counterculture and protest movements. She delineates their anti-authoritarian solidarities and competing visions of transnationalism, with the West as well as the ruling communist regime. Even as youth demonstrations were violently suppressed, Fidelis shows, youth culture was not. By the early 1970s, the state incorporated elements of Sixties culture into their official vision of socialist modernity.From the perspective of youth, Malgorzata Fidelis argues, the post-1989 transition in Poland from communism to liberal democracy, often dubbed as "the return to Europe," was less of a breakthrough and more of a continuation of trends in which they participated. Indeed, they had already created new modes of self-expression and cultural spaces in which ideas of alternative social and political organization became imaginable.Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Within the vast network of Nazi camps, Stutthof may be the least known beyond Poland. This book is the first scholarly publication in English to break the silence of Stutthof, where 120,000 people were interned and at least 65,000 perished. A Nazi Camp Near Danzigoffers an overview of Stutthof's history. It also explores Danzig's significance in promoting the cult of German nationalism which led to Stutthof's establishment and which shaped its subsequent development in 1942 into a Concentration Camp, with the full resources of the Nazi Reich.A Nazi Camp Near Danzig: Perspectives on Shame and on the Holocaust from Stutthof (Bloomsbury, 2022) shows how Danzig/Gdansk, generally identified as the city where the Second World War started, became under Albert Forster, Hitler's hand-picked Gauleiter, 'the vanguard of Germandom in the east' and with its disputed history, the poster city for the Third Reich. It reflects on the fact that Danzig was close enough to supply Stutthof with both prisoners - initially local Poles and Jews - as well as local men for its SS workforce. Throughout the study, Ruth Schwertfeger draws on the stories of Danziger and Nobel Prize winner, Günter Grass to consider the darker realities of German nationalism that even Grass's vibrant depictions and wit cannot mask. Schwertfeger demonstrates how German nationalism became more lethal for all prisoners, especially after the summer of 1944 when thousands of Jewish woman died in the Stutthof camp system or perished in the 'death marches' after January 1945. Schwertfeger uses archival and literary sources, as well as memoirs, to allow the voices of the victims to speak. Their testimonies are juxtaposed with the justifications of perpetrators. The book successfully argues that, in the end, Stutthof was no less lethal than other camps of the Third Reich, even if it was, and remains, less well-known. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Katarzyna Person and Johannes-Dieter Steinert's book Przemysłowa Concentration Camp: The Camp, the Children, the Trials (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) explores one of the most notorious aspects of the German system of oppression in wartime Poland: the only purpose-built camp for children under the age of 16 years in German-occupied Europe. The camp at Przemysłowa street, or the Polen-Jugendverwahrlager der Sicherheitspolizei in Litzmannstadt as the Germans called it, was a concentration camp for children. The camp at Przemysłowa existed for just over two years, from December 1942 until January 1945. During that time, an unknown number of children, mainly Polish nationals, were imprisoned there and subjected to extreme physical and emotional abuse. For almost all, the consequences of atrocities which they endured in the camp remained with them for the rest of their lives. This book focuses on the establishment of the camp, the experience of the child prisoners, and the post-war investigations and trials. It is based on contemporary German documents, post-war Polish trials and German investigations, as well as dozens of testimonies from camp survivors, guards, civilian camp staff and the camp leadership 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 A Sephardi Turkish Patriot: Gad Franco in the Turmoil of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (Hamilton Books, 2023), Anthony Gad Bigio explores the life of Gad Franco (1881–1954), a prominent Sephardi journalist, then a lawyer and a jurist, who worked relentlessly for the Jewish community’s belonging to the national Turkish polity, and for the consolidation of the rule of law. This historical biography, written by his grandson, takes the reader from fin-de-siècle Izmir, to the Istanbul of the Roaring Twenties and beyond, tracing his footsteps, including his opposition to Zionism, which he considered a threat to assimilation. The world of Sephardi Jewry, the convulsions and conflicts of the late Ottoman Empire, and the birth, ruthless consolidation, and promising reforms of the young Turkish Republic, provide the context to his intriguing life story. Inflamed by ethno-nationalism, the harassment of minorities deepened in the 1930s, peaking during World War II. By then a wealthy, respected Jewish community spokesperson and staunch Kemalist, Gad Franco was dealt an exemplary punishment in a shocking campaign to Turkify the economy, imposed on all minorities. His dramatic downfall at the hands of the Government shook his beliefs to the core. As their belonging to the nation had been so brutally denied, half of Turkish Jews migrated to Israel in the 1950s, putting an end to Gad Franco’s lifelong hopes of integration and acceptance.Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish 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

Ainsley Morse's book Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature (Northwestern UP, 2021) traces the history of the relationship between experimental aesthetics and Soviet children’s books, a relationship that persisted over the seventy years of the Soviet Union’s existence. From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children’s literature was taken unusually seriously—its quality and subject matter were issues of grave political significance. Yet, it was often written and illustrated by experimental writers and artists who found the childlike aesthetic congenial to their experiments in primitivism, minimalism, and other avant‑garde trends. In the more repressive environment following Stalin’s rise to power, experimental aesthetics were largely relegated to unofficial and underground literature, but unofficial writers continued to author children’s books, which were often more appealing than adult literature of the time.Word Play focuses on poetry as the primary genre for both children’s and unofficial literature throughout the Soviet period. Five case studies feature poets‑cum‑children’s writers—Leonid Aronzon, Oleg Grigoriev, Igor Kholin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Dmitri Prigov—whose unpublished work was not written for children but features lexical and formal elements, abundant humor, and childlike lyric speakers that are aspects of the childlike aesthetic. The book concludes with an exploration of the legacy of this aesthetic in Russian poetry today. Drawing on rich primary sources, Word Play joins a growing literature on Russian children’s books, connecting them to avant-garde poetics in fresh, surprising ways.Polina Popova is a Ph.D. student at the history department of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry (Academic Studies Press, 2023) represents an anthology of Avigdor Hameiri’s ten most compelling war stories and poetry. His war stories are unique, and different from his Hebrew writer contemporaries in that they mix the supernatural and macabre with war, pogroms, and antisemitism. These stories and poems reflect like no other the unique complexity of the Jewish soldier’s experience of the most vicious and shocking war the world had witnessed to date — the battles, the agony, the dilemmas faced by the Jewish soldier, bravery versus cowardice, the notion of imminent death, breaking the sixth commandment (Thou Shalt Not Murder), elements of pacifism (particularly involving camaraderie between the common soldiers on both sides of the battlefield and their shared hatred for rank), and more.Peter Appelbaum is a retired microbiologist who is spending his retirement years writing and translating books about Jewish history during World War I and the immediate post-war period. He is the recipient of the 2019 Rise Domb Porjes prize for his translation of Avigdor Hameiri’s Hell on Earth.Dan Hecht is a doctoral student at the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University who wrote an extensive Masters thesis on the writings of Avigdor Hameiri, focusing on his dual national loyalty to his Hungarian heritage and his Hebrew homeland. He is currently writing his PhD on the essayistic prose of Eliezer Steinmann. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Dženita Karić's new book Bosnian Hajj Literature: Multiple Paths to the Holy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) maps the diverse understandings of the hajj in relation to Islamic geography by Bosnian Muslim authors who wrote in different genres from the 16th to the 21st centuries. The study captures how hajj was imagined and constructed in relation to Islamic cosmology, rituals, Sufi saints, and political and temporal realities, while remaining unchanged in other ways. The book generatively theorizes geographies in relation to mobilities but also in relation to emotion, body, and embodiment, materiality, and the sacred. The book will be of interest to scholars of Bosnian studies, Islamic studies, and especially pilgrimage and ritual studies. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Pallavi Narayan's book Pamuk's Istanbul: The Self and the City (Routledge, 2022) reconstructs Istanbul through the prism of Orhan Pamuk’s fiction. It navigates the multiple selves and layers of Istanbul to present how the city has shaped the writings of Pamuk and has, in turn, been shaped by it. Through everyday objects and architecture, it shows how Pamuk transforms the city into a living museum where different objects converse along with characters to present a rich tapestry across space and time. Further, the monograph explores the formation of communal and literary identity within and around nation-building narratives informed by capitalism and modernization. The book also examines how Pamuk uses the postmodern city to move beyond its postmodern confines, and utilizes the theories and universes of Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Foucault to open up his fiction and radically challenge the idea of the novel. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, literary theory, museum studies, architecture, and cultural studies, and especially appeal to readers of Orhan Pamuk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies