New Books in Eastern European Studies
Episodes
Christopher Browning, “Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp” (W. W. Norton, 2010)
18 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the fi...
Paul Mojzes, “Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011)
22 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence. Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more abou...
Mary Heimann, “Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed” (Yale UP, 2009)
27 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Americans love Prague. They visit and have even moved there in considerable numbers. They like the place for a lot of reasons. One is that Prague is a...
Eric Lohr, “Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union” (Harvard UP, 2012)
05 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Russians have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, it’s said they don’t much like foreigners. According to Eric Lohr‘s new book, Russian Citize...
R. M. Douglas, “Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War” (Yale UP, 2012)
14 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive num...
William Risch, “The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv” (Harvard UP, 2011)
11 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
During the Cold War few Westerners gave much thought to Western Ukraine, and its main city, Lviv. It was what happened in Moscow and St. Petersburg...
Mary Fulbrook, “A Small Near Town Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2012)
19 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well stud...
Pieter Judson, “Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria” (Harvard UP, 2006)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
What if much of what we think we know about nationalism and the spread of the national identity over the course of the nineteenth century were wrong? ...
Alexander Maxwell, “Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism” (Tauris Academic Studies, 2009)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
On 1 January 1993 Slovakia became an independent nation. According to conventional Slovak nationalist history that event was the culmination of a roug...
Kimberly Zarecor, “Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960” (Pittsburgh UP, 2011)
31 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I first went to the Soviet Union (in all my ignorance), I was amazed that everyone in Moscow lived in what I called “housing projects.” The R...
Melissa Caldwell, “Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside” (University of California Press, 2010)
15 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Russians’ dachas are regularly mentioned in a sentence or two in newspaper articles about life in Russia, and many of who have visited the lands of ...
Francis Tapon, “The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us” (WanderLearn, 2012)
15 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Most of the specialists in Eastern Europe I know first got truly interested in the region after a trip, which then triggered applications to grad scho...
David Crowley and Susan Reid, “Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Block” (Northwestern UP, 2010)
11 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
We all know socialism failed in Eastern Europe and that failure reflected two great shortcomings: a lack of democracy and an economic system that cons...
Mary Neuburger, “The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Cornell UP, 2004)
23 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Eastern Europe has never had the draw for scholars or tourists of France, Italy, Germany, or Great Britain, and within eastern Europe Bulgaria has inv...
Nathaniel Wood, “Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow” (Northern Illinois UP, 2010 )
23 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I began my graduate history, virtually all my fellow apprentice historians of eastern Europe were captivated by nationalism and focused their res...
Andrew Wilson, “Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship” (Yale UP, 2011)
02 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
A couple of weeks ago I took a bus from Warsaw and travelled east across the River Bug. The border took a long time to cross, but then this was no ord...
Gale Stokes, “The Walls Came Tumbling Down” (2nd Edition, Oxford UP, 2011)
09 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Europe may currently be in crisis and riven with divisions, but at least it’s a Europe of independent states. It was not always so. The Soviets domi...
Elizabeth Gowing, “Travels in Blood and Honey: Becoming a Beekeeper in Kosovo” (
25 Oct 2011
Contributed by Lukas
The hardest part of living in a foreign land is crossing that invisible divide between being an outsider and getting to know a country properly. An ol...
Timothy Snyder, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (Basic Books, 2011)
25 Oct 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as a far away land we know little about. He could have said it about any of the countries of east-central...
Richard C. Hall, “The Modern Balkans: A History” (Reaktion Books, 2011)
17 Jun 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Some parts of the world seem to suffer from rather too much history. The Balkans, that mountainous peninsula situated between the Black Sea and the Ad...
Matthew Kelly, “Finding Poland: From Tavistock to Hruzdowa and Back Again” (Jonathan Cape, 2010)
02 Jun 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Very little illustrates history as well as the personal story. For all of the wars, deportations and suffering of the mid Twentieth Century, it’s on...
Michael A. Reynolds, “Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
22 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us live in a world of nations. If you were born and live in the Republic of X, then you probably speak X-ian, are a citizen of X, and would gl...
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew” (Yale UP, 2009)
26 Mar 2010
Contributed by Lukas
I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But h...
Stephen Kotkin, “Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment” (Modern Library, 2009)
31 Dec 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Why did communism collapse so rapidly in Eastern Europe in 1989? The answer commonly given at the time was that something called “civil society,” ...
Padraic Kenney, “1989: Democratic Revolutions at the Cold War’s End” (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2009)
06 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black Death), 1517 (The Reformation), 1648 (The Peace of Westpha...
Timothy Snyder, “The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke” (Basic Books, 2008)
03 Jul 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Tim Snyder has written a great book. It’s called The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke (Basic, 2008). Of course it’s thoroughly ...