Commentary: In Step with the Times: A Slovak Perspective

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 198-207
Author(s):  
M. Mark Stolarik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
North American ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Times

Paul robert magocsi has written a thought-provoking essay on the role of North American political diasporas from east central Europe before and after the seminal years of 1918 and 1989. While he showed that the pre-1918 diasporas had a major impact on the future of east central Europe during and after World War I, he found very little evidence of a similar impact before and after 1989. He suggested that we look closely at 1989 to see what, if any, impact such diasporas had at the end of the twentieth century.

Literary Reflections on Postimperial Violence in East-Central Europe after 1918: Wittlin – Hašek – Vančura

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1 (464)) ◽  
pp. 65-79
Author(s):  
Alfrun Kliems
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Rhetorical Figures ◽  
Remarkable Degree ◽  
World War I Novels ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Jaroslav Hasek

This paper discusses questions like the irony of history, the lack of illusions, and the prophecy of violence in three classic World War I novels by Jaroslav Hašek, Vladislav Vančura and Józef Wittlin, written in the decades after 1918. The novels have at least three aspects in common: first, the poetics of each is marked in a compressed way by the style of narrating the assassination in Sarajevo in 1918; second, three picaresque figures – Švejk, Řeka and Niewiadomski, respectively – standing in the centre of each novel; and, third, in addition to the war itself, each novel looks proleptically at its consequences, even if the narrated time does not extend to the end of the war. The paper tries to reflect on the novels as the literature of post-imperialist violence. Rhetorical figures of barbarization and self-barbarization, inversion of subject and object, fragmentation of space are particularly significant in the books, demonstrating the aesthetic processing of the reversal from euphoria, over the end of the war, to frustration, over the continuing violence. More specifically, these figures correspond with a remarkable degree with the unfulfilled peace after 1918.

The Stifled Renaissance of Urbanity: Urban Preservation and the Collapse of Czechoslovak and East German Socialism

2020 ◽  
pp. 009614422090888
Author(s):  
Matěj Spurný ◽  
Brian Ladd
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Inner Cities ◽  
East German

Concern with the decay or demolition of inner cities was an underappreciated factor contributing to the discontent preceding the revolutions of 1989 in east-central Europe. Although there has been some scholarly work on the topic, particularly on the German Democratic Republic (GDR), multinational studies are lacking. This examination of parallel developments in the GDR and Czechoslovakia identifies similar trajectories of discontent and activism in the two socialist states. It follows the evolution of architectural and planning theories and practices from the high point of postwar modernism to the widespread embrace of the very styles and districts once despised. By the 1980s, this acceptance of pre–World War I buildings, districts, and urban scale had pervaded expert circles and reached even the highest levels of party and government. However, both states’ failure to carry out policies that satisfied residents and defenders of old districts fueled the discontent that exploded in 1989.

Federalism in the Baltic: Interpretations of Self-Determination and Sovereignty in Estonia in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 237-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaarel Piirimäe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The Right

The objective of this article is to challenge the widespread interpretation of interwar East Central Europe as a hotbed of excessive nationalism, by establishing a longue durée of federalist thinking in Estonia in the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on personal continuities from the founding years of the Estonian Republic into the 1940s, it is possible to detect a remarkable persistence of ‘idealist’ visions about intra and interstate federalism that had been internalized by Estonian statesmen before and during the First World War and earlier. Apart from establishing the continuity of federalist thought the article analyzes the political discourse in which the concept of national self-determination was picked up. The primary framework for Estonian thinkers on nationality was the debate that developed within the all-Russian socialist movement in the context of the nationality problems of the multinational Western provinces and Congress Poland. The discourse on territorial and cultural autonomy within a federative Russia, demands that came to the fore in 1905, developed only after the idea of self-determination entered the thinking of Estonian radicals. Until late 1917, asserting the right to self-determination by no means meant separation from Russia. Even after 1917 Estonian politicians imagined the future republic as part of a regional league or union relinquishing part of its sovereignty to a supranational authority, plans that foundered on the incompatibility of national interests by 1920. Although the experience had not been encouraging, Baltic politicians resuscitated federalist concepts in the early period of the Second World War, as they tried to envisage a new structure for a cooperative and autonomous East Central Europe, within a restored Europe.

“Double transformations:” nation formation and democratization in interwar East Central Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 745-758
Author(s):  
Heidi Hein-Kircher ◽  
Steffen Kailitz
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
Nation Formation ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New States ◽  
Almost All ◽  
East Central European

Following the collapse of empires and the subsequent founding of self-determined nation-states, East Central Europe experienced a turning point after World War I. The new states had to transform themselves from branches of a multi-ethnic empire to independent nation-states, as well as from a system of monarchy to democracy at the same time. We argue that one cannot really understand why democracy failed in almost all East Central European states after World War I if one does not take into account the extreme challenges of this “double transformation” consisting of the interactions of the two tightly interwoven processes of nation formation and democratization. Therefore, we deem it necessary to develop a broader research program that addresses the complex interlacement of these two fundamental transformations of politics and society.

The Ukrainian Question between Poland and Czechoslovakia: The Lemko Rusyn Republic (1918-1920) and Political Thought in Western Rus'-Ukraine

1993 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Robert Magocsi
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Break Up ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

During the closing months of World War I in late 1918 and the break-up of the historic multinational empires that for centuries had ruled most of East Central Europe, it became common practice for the varying ethnolinguistic or national groups to form councils whose goals were to determine their group's political future. These national councils, as they came to be known, seemed to appear everywhere, but perhaps most frequently in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was not only the “large” former minorities like the Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes, Romanians, or Ukrainians who formed national councils, but many smaller groups acted in the same way. And, like the national councils of the larger groups who very soon created independent republics alone or in cooperation with their immediate neighbors, so, too, did some of these smaller groups proclaim their independence. Thus, in the newspapers of the time and scholarly monographs of today one can still find references to the Baranya, East Slovak, Hutsul, or Przemysl “republics” among others, which during the last few months of 1918 seemed to sprout up like mushrooms after a rainfall, but which for the most part ceased to exist when the borders of East Central Europe began to stabilize as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that opened its deliberations in early 1919.

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