New Books in Eastern European Studies

In Nazi Billionnaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (HarperCollins, 2022), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it.In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW—was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his arch-rival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz, and still control Porsche, Volkswagen, and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight—until now.In this landmark work of investigative journalism, David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave laborers, and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burned around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how America’s political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

After decades of rule by the National Liberal Party or one of its centre-right, mainstream rivals – usually either the Conservative Party or the National Peasant Party, – in December 1937 King Carol II appointed the antisemitic National Christian Party (PNC), led by Octavian Goga and A. C. Cuza to form a government, effectively ending the democratic consensus and Francophile orientation in Romanian politics. During their 45 days in power, Goga and Cuza introduced sweeping changes to basic civil rights for a large number of Romanian citizens, in particularly for Jews. As tensions between the right-wing parties became increasingly violent, Carol abolished parliamentary democracy entirely, introducing a royal dictatorship. Carol further extended the limitations on civil liberties begun under Goga and Cuza, ruling through a series of cabinets and bringing the country into German sphere of influence. The royal dictatorship collapsed in September 1940, giving way to the National Legionary State, in which General Ion Antonescu ruled as dictator alongside the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael, led by Horia Sima. Antonescu became the sole ruler of Romania after the Legion rebelled against him in January 1941, guiding the country through the Second World War and the Holocaust.Philippe Henri Blasen's La 'primaute' de la nation roumaine" et les 'etrangers': Les minorites et leur liberte du travail sous le cabinet Goga et la dictature royale (2022) represents the definitive work on both the Goga and Cuza government and the royal dictatorship to date. Blasen shows how these governments related to several different ethnic minorities, in particular to Saxons, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and Jews. He demonstrates that each of these minorities mobilized in new ways in order to meet the challenges of an overtly discriminatory regime, and that the regime was willing to negotiate with them. Antisemitism is consistently separated from policies towards Germans, Hungarians, and Ukrainians in the literature on this topic, but Blasen brings them together convincingly in a productive way. Finally, he moves beyond talking about undifferentiated ethnic minorities to engage with how government policies aimed at minorities impacted specific professions such as journalism, medicine, engineering, architecture, and free enterprise.Roland Clark is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Denisa Nesťáková and Katja Grosse-Sommer edited volumne If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust (Academic Studies Press, 2021) contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the “XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman” at Comenius University Bratislava in January 2019. The conference was organized against anti-gender narratives and related attacks on academic freedom and women’s rights currently all too prevalent in East-Central Europe. The papers presented at the conference and in this volume focus, to a significant extent, on this region. They touch upon numerous points concerning gendered experiences of World War II and the Holocaust. By purposely emphasizing the female experience in the title, we encourage to fill the lacunae that still, four decades after the enrichment of Holocaust studies with a gendered lens, exist when it comes to female experiences.Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

By 1990 the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. For forty years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Almost a hundred thousand Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed overnight.Ralph Hope’s The Grey Men: Pursuing the Stasi Into the Present (Oneworld, 2022) is the story of what they did next.Former FBI agent Ralph Hope uses present-day sources and access to Stasi records to track and expose ex-officers working everywhere from the Russian energy sector to the police and even the government department tasked with prosecuting Stasi crimes. He examines why the key players have never been called to account and, in doing so, asks if we have really learned from the past at all. He highlights a man who continued to fight the Stasi for thirty years after the Wall fell, and reveals a truth that many today don't want spoken.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

This succinct history of Germany will take you on an incredible journey through time spanning from the 1500s to the present. Focusing on Germany in detail and in a global context, Jeremy Black uncovers the complexity of the country's past as well as the challenges and strengths of its future. The history of Germany is intricately woven. Threaded in time through its struggles and triumphs with religion, industrialisation, enlightenment, politics, unification, and war.In A Brief History of Germany (Robinson, 2022), master historian Jeremy Black, MBE questions how the Germany we know today came to be, chronicling the events that shaped its past, present and future in a fascinating new way.From the fall of Rome in the 1500s to the enlightenment in the 1700s, from World War I and World War II to Germany post-unification, Black's writing will unlock the places and people that formed Germany and enrich your visit with stories of its society and culture.Concise yet explorative, A Brief History of Germany is an astonishing work from a renowned UK historian. Whether you are a long-term reader of Black's expansive history work or are interested in learning more ahead of a short city break or longer trip, this intriguing look at the history of Germany is an essential read. Published by Robinson Press.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

In her book Great Power Competition and the Path to Democracy: The Case of Georgia, 1991-2020 (University of Rochester Press, 2022), Zarina Burkadze argues that great power competition may distribute political power in a way that causes a democratic regime to emerge, supporting her argument with evidence from an impressive array of archival sources as well as from sixty-six interviews with state officials, opposition leaders, foreign diplomats, media and nongovernmental representatives, and other experts. While the case study of Georgia is the central concern of the narrative, the book’s final chapter provides an important cross-case comparison of democratization efforts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Ukraine.Zarina Burkadze is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Ilia State University. She did her postdoctoral studies as a Fulbright scholar at George Washington University and earned her doctoral degree in political science at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include democratization, democracy, and autocracy promotion.Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Contemporary Housing Struggles: A Structural Field of Contention Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) provides a comparative study of housing contention in Budapest and Bucharest in 2008-2021. The financialization of housing and the resulting inequalities, expulsions and social contention are a central characteristic of today’s capitalist crisis. These two East European cities that fall outside the usual focus of urban movements research provide an illuminating case of similar structural conditions governed by different political constellations at the national and local scales. Instead of searching for unilinear narratives connecting structural tensions to politicized claims, the book offers an in-depth contextual analysis of multiple forms of contention, their (often unintentional) interactions, and their broader political-structural background, including tensions surrounded by political silence. The authors analyze the two cases and their comparative lessons through what they propose as a “structural field of contention” approach to the multiple, interconnected ways in which structural tensions become (or not) politicized in today’s social movements. The book will appeal to everyone interested in today’s urban tensions and social movements.Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit her website or follow Anna on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Olga Bertelsen's In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine's Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s (Lexington Books, 2022) focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the movement, their persona friendships, formal and informal interactions, and the ways they dealt with repression and arrests. This study demonstrates that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the Kharkiv multi-ethnic community of writers and their mutual enrichment. Post-Khrushchev Kharkiv is analyzed as a political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s-1970s. Despite their various cultural and social backgrounds, the Kharkiv literati might be identified as a distinct bohemian group possessing shared aesthetic and political values that emerged as the result of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. Archival documents, diaries, and memoirs suggest that the 1960s-1970s was a period of intense KGB operations, "active measures" designed to disrupt a community of intellectuals and to fragment friendships, bonds, and support among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews along ethnic lines domestically and abroad.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Prime Minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau once gave a press conference while visiting Washington, during which he famously said: "Living next to [the United States] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt." For many of the countries in eastern Europe, this must also ring true, except that the elephant hasn’t necessarily been the same bedfellow. At different points, particularly over the last 2 centuries, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, have all caused smaller neighbors to be very nervous––with just cause.With the current situation in Eastern Europe, as Ukraine and potentially other nations fight for their right to exist, it seems a timely moment to talk to Tomek Jankowski about the recent release of the 2nd edition of his book, Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know about the History (and More) of a Region That Shaped Our World and Still Does, published by Academic Studies Press and New Europe Books. The book is a great hybrid – it can be read all the way through as a fast-paced and easily digestible tour through the history of a region most people in Western Europe and North America don’t know well, or it can be used as a reference text; a reader can dip into it to find answers to questions.In our far ranging conversation, we discuss the common dynamics and cultural legacies that we can see today as a result of the historical reality that many eastern European countries share. National identity is a complex and contested subject, no more so than in Eastern European where some nations have only existed for short periods of time or, in other cases, national sovereignty has come and gone depending on the era.In addition to the invasion of Ukraine, first in 2014 and then this year, many other nations that share border with Russia - the Baltic states, Finland, and Moldova – are also feeling increasingly vulnerable. Others, such as Serbia and Hungary, are offering either official or popular support for Russian’s aggression but it is a very contested issue. We discuss the roots of these various reactions.On the subject of Russia, Jankowski addresses why Putin has repeatedly framed the current war using the language and summoning the ghosts of the Soviet Union’s role in WWII. Even 80 years on. He reminds the listener of Russian sacrifices and losses in that war, explains how they were remembered and understood in the Soviet Union under Stalin, Khrushchev and later leaders, and how they are remembered and understood in Russia today.Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-host of the Lies Agreed Upon podcast and author of Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (IB Tauris, 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

"With the eurozone crisis going back to 2010, the refugee crisis that culminated in 2015, the crisis of the EU-Russia relationship going back to the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of 2013-14, to the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, the EU has struggled to live up to the expectations it raised both in relation to its own people and neighbouring countries. This is not an accident".Could this really be by design? In European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency (Hurst in the UK, OUP in the US, 2022), Stefan Auer argues that the EU's hybrid form – falling somewhere between a multinational state and a multilateral organisation – comes closest to the ideals of Germany, its most powerful member. This attempt to bypass politics has weakened the EU in the many emergencies it has faced over the last 15 years. Today, he says, "Europeans do not have the luxury of living in a politics-less world".Stefan Auer is an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, having previously taught in Melbourne and Dublin and twice held Jean Monnet chairs. A prolific contributor to political science journals, he won the 2005 UACES Best Book in European Studies prize for his Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe (Routledge, 2004).*The authors' own book recommendations are: After Europe by Ivan Krastev (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Time of the Magicians: The Great Decade of Philosophy, 1919-1929 by Wolfram Eilenberger (2022).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies