Tamara Scheer (2020) Language diversity and loyalty in the Habsburg army, 1868-1918

Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit den Sprachenregelungen in der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee (1868-1918). Insgesamt wurden rund 12 Sprachen anerkannt und die Soldaten hatten das Recht in ihrer Sprache ihren Wehrdienst abzuleisten. Der erste Teil behandelt die rechtlichen Regelungen für die Umsetzung der Sprachenrechte der Bevölkerung sowie ihren Einschränkungen. Teil 2 behandelt die Auswirkungen auf Offiziere, Unteroffiziere und Soldaten. Teil 3 fragt nach der Debatte und Kritik im öffentlichen Raum, v.a. den Parlamenten und Zeitungen, sowie der Umsetzung der Regelungen in den Garnisonen. Teil 4 widmet sich dem Ersten Weltkrieg.

Beáta Huszka (2021) Minorities as citizens: The legal advocacy of language rights by the Hungarian minority in Romania

This article investigates the assertion of language rights through legal mobilization by the Hungarian minority in Romania, thus examining this emergent kind of mobilization aimed at the claiming of rights, often rights recognized by law, but not enforced in practice. This incongruity between rights on paper and their execution provokes interethnic rivalry for the visibility of language and culture, in which the exclusive ownership of sovereignty is marked by the dominance of national language in physical spaces coined as ‘linguistic territoriality’ (Csergő, 2007), fostering parallel, monolingual public spheres. Applying Rancière’s theory to the case of the Hungarian minority in Romania, it is argued that civil society activists’ legal mobilization initiatives are a manifestation of ‘politics’ in the Rancièreian sense as they challenge the distribution of public spaces along ethnic lines through pushing forward their integrative vision of the same spaces—thus ‘seeking the litigious distribution of places and roles’ (Rancière, 2003, p. 201).

Wiktor Marzec (2021) ‘One of the oldest states in Europe has never suppressed any nation’. The minority treaty, nationalist indignation and the foundations of interwar ethnic democracy in Poland

This article investigates the internal impact of the Minority Treaty of Versailles, regulating minority rights and protection in the emerging interwar Polish state. The parliamentary debate on the Treaty was a critical juncture structuring the political sphere and arguably fostered the birth of ‘ethnic democracy’ in Poland. Performing a sequential analysis of the debate, I study the reconfiguration of political positions which locked the actors into their strategic entrenchments. Unexpectedly, the nationalist right defended the treaty because of their involvement in the Versailles negotiations. The left tried to delegitimize the treaty and simultaneously tip the scales of the domestic politics in favour of the minorities. This shifted the levers of implicit assumptions about the political community and effectively blocked the political efficacy of the treaty on the domestic level. Such refraction effects must be considered when one is studying convergence, diffusion and the role of international agreements and pressures.

Paweł Popieliński (2021)
Mniejszość niemiecka w III Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej (1989-2019) w procesie integracji ze społeczeństwem większościowym

Monografia „Mniejszość niemiecka w III Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej (1989-2019) w procesie integracji ze społeczeństwem większościowym” jest poświęcona analizie położenia Niemców w Polsce w ciągu trzech dekad oficjalnego istnienia mniejszości niemieckiej w III RP. Przedstawiono w niej współczesną mniejszość niemiecką, jej życie społeczno-kulturalne i politycznej, jej problemy i sukcesy oraz najważniejsze przekształcenia, które miały i mają wpływ na proces integracji mniejszości niemieckiej ze społeczeństwem większościowym. Analiza obejmuję nie tylko mniejszość niemiecką zamieszkującą na Górnym Śląsku, ale także w innych rejonach kraju. Zasadniczym celem autora było wskazanie i zaprezentowanie czytelnikowi uwarunkowań i dynamiki ruchu mniejszości niemieckiej oraz wspomnianego procesu integracji rozpatrywanych w kontekście społecznym, kulturowym i politycznym.

Aleksandra Grzymała-Kazłowska (2020)
Rethinking settlement and integration: Migrants’ anchoring in an age of insecurity

This monograph argues that well-established concepts in migration studies such as ‘settlement’ and ‘integration’ do not sufficiently capture the features of adaptation and settling of contemporary migrants. Instead, it proposes the integrative and transdisciplinary concept of anchoring, linking the notions of identity, adaptation and settling while overcoming the limitations of the established concepts and underlining migrants’ efforts at recovering their feelings of security and stability. Drawing on 80 in-depth interviews with Polish migrants in the UK and Ukrainian migrants in Poland, ethnographic and autobiographical research together with an analysis of Internet blogs and forums, the book presents the author’s original concept of anchoring, underpinned by a combination of sociological and psychological perspectives, as well as demonstrating its applications. The book aims not only to provide a theoretical and methodological contribution to better understanding and examining the processes of adaptation and settling among today’s migrants, but also to highlight practical implications useful for the better support of individuals facing changes and challenges in new, complex and fluid societies.

Samuel Foster (2021), Yugoslavia in the British Imagination. Peace, War and Peasants before Tito (Bloomsbury Academic)

Despite Britain entering the 20th century as the dominant world power, public discourses were imbued with a cultural pessimism and rising social anxiety. Through this study, Samuel Foster explores how this changing domestic climate shaped perceptions of other cultures, and Britain’s relationship to them, focusing on those Balkan territories that formed the first Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1941.

Yugoslavia in the British Imagination examines these connections and demonstrates how the popular image of the region’s peasantry evolved from that of foreign ‘Other’ to historical victim – suffering at the hand of modernity’s worst excesses and symbolizing Britain’s perceived decline. This coincided with an emerging moralistic sense of British identity that manifested during the First World War. Consequently, Yugoslavia was legitimized as the solution to peasant victimization and, as Foster’s nuanced analysis reveals, enabling Britain’s imagined (and self-promoted) revival as civilization’s moral arbiter.

Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival sources, this compelling transnational analysis is an important contribution to the study of British social history and the nature of statehood in the modern Balkans.

Ann Runfors (2021) Navigating the Radar: Descendants of Polish Migrants and Racialized Social Landscapes in Sweden

This article takes interest in descendants of white migrants in Sweden and their experiences of racialization. Although research on descendants in this category is rare, they are sometimes assumed to be unproblematically integrated into Swedish whiteness. The article contributes with an empirically based investigation of the subject by analysing in-depth interviews with an up till now almost non-researched group: people who grew up with Polish parents in Sweden. Inspired by critical race- and whiteness studies, it explores how they express being racialized, how the norms of Swedish whiteness surface in their narrations and how they negotiate these norms. The article makes visible a Swedish version of whiteness that requires on the one hand possession of materialized, physical whiteness, and on the other hand performative abilities, performative whiteness. It shows how these whiteness norms works for people in the special position of descendants to white migrants and that they–in contrast to their migrant parents–possess both these levels of whiteness. Still, they navigate a radar that could make them involuntarily visible and question their inclusion into Swedish whiteness. These results indicate that the Swedish version of whiteness is narrow and also raises questions regarding its change over time.

Izabella Main, Elżbieta M. Goździak, Leszek Nowak (2021) From Going Abroad to Settling Down… While Remaining Mobile? Polish Women in Norway Narrate Their Migration Experiences

This article analyses mobility of Polish women living transnational lives between Poland and Norway. The emphasis is on the emic (insider’s) versus etic (outsider’s) points of view regarding issues of migrant identity, mobility before arriving in Norway, and temporality, permanence, fluidity and settlement after moving to Norway. The article is based on an online survey of 485 Polish women and 126 ethnographic interviews with Polish women residing in Norway. The study findings suggest that while many Polish women are working and raising families in Norway, they maintain strong links to Poland and continue to be very mobile. The way they narrate their mobility and migration experiences are contrasted with categories devised by policy makers and scholars.

Deportacje Górnoślązaków do ZSRS w 1945 roku. Teka edukacyjna

W drugim wydaniu teki został zachowany podział na Materiały dla nauczyciela, Materiały dla ucznia oraz Karty. Nowym elementem, stanowiącym integralną część teki, jest płyta CD DVD. Materiały dla nauczyciela zawierają pięć scenariuszy lekcji, które mogą być wykorzystane na zajęciach z historii, języka polskiego, godzinie wychowawczej, lekcji regionalnej czy wiedzy o społeczeństwie w najwyższych klasach szkoły podstawowej i w szkołach ponadpodstawowych. Zachęcamy nauczycieli do okazjonalnego wykorzystania Dodatkowych ćwiczeń i małych projektów badawczych, fragmentów prac konkursowych (Kalejdoskop wydarzeń we wspomnieniach rodzin), a także unikatowego materiału ikonograficznego i map znajdujących się na Kartach oraz nagrań na płycie DVD dołączonej do teki (notacje, film Przemilczana tragedia). Dla osób planujących rozszerzenie zajęć poświęconych deportacjom polecamy propozycje wycieczek edukacyjnych oraz przykładowe tematy esejów. Zarówno uczniom, jak i nauczycielom zamierzającym pogłębić swoją wiedzę na temat wywózek zaproponowano odpowiednią bibliografię, natomiast podstawową wiedzę można zdobyć podczas lektury Wprowadzenia autorstwa dr. Dariusza Węgrzyna. Uzupełnienie wiedzy stanowią dwa kalendaria: Kalendarium wydarzeń oraz Kalendarium wkroczenia Armii Czerwonej na Górny Śląsk (styczeń – maj 1945 roku) oraz Wybór źródeł. Michał Skwara, prokurator OKŚZpNP IPN w Katowicach, omawia efekty prowadzonego śledztwa „w sprawie zbrodni komunistycznej, będącej jednocześnie zbrodnią przeciwko ludzkości, polegającej na deportacji mieszkańców Śląska – Górnego, Opolskiego i Cieszyńskiego, połączonej ze szczególnym udręczeniem”. Ważną rolę w upamiętnieniu tragicznych wydarzeń 1945 r. pełni Centrum Dokumentacji Deportacji Górnoślązaków do ZSRR w 1945 roku, które utworzono w 2015 r. w Radzionkowie we współpracy z ówczesnym Biurem Edukacji Publicznej IPN.

James Bjork (2020) Flexible Fatherlands: “Patriotism” among Polish-speaking German Citizens during World War I

This article examines the experiences of Polish-speaking subjects of the German Empire during World War I. Fighting for wartime empires tended to be retrospectively defined as involuntary service to a “foreign” cause. But the author of this article argues that it was very difficult to distinguish ostensibly passive “compliance” from ostensibly active “patriotism.” The apparent tensions between a German imperial agenda and Polish nationalism also proved to be highly navigable in practice, with German war aims often seen as not only reconcilable with but even conducive to the Polish national cause. Drawing on a recent wave of relevant historiography in English, German, and Polish, and incorporating further analysis of individual testimonies, the article explores the various ways in which “non-German” contributors to the German war effort tried to make sense of their awkward wartime biographies.

Jim Bjork (2020) From Empires to Nation-State: Remaking the Roman Catholic Church in an Independent Poland

Roman Catholicism is most often imagined as an element of continuity in Poland’s turbulent history: even when a Polish state was absent from the map of Europe from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, a recognizably ‘Polish’ church has been presumed to provide a robust institutional anchor for the Polish nation. This article, however, argues that the creation of a ‘Polish’ Roman Catholic church was a belated and protracted process, one that was only getting started in the years following the achievement of Polish independence in 1918. The church’s ‘Polonization’ was only partially a matter of emancipation from imperial-era restrictions. It often also involved the defence and attempted extrapolation of laws, practices and institutions that had developed under the auspices of the German, Austrian or Russian states and that the Catholic hierarchy viewed as healthy and desirable building blocks for a future Polish church. These imperial precedents continued to provide crucial points of reference in ongoing debates about what ‘Polish’ Catholicism was and what it should become.

red. Adam Dziurok, Piotr Madajczyk i Sebastian Rosenbaum (2016). Władze komunistyczne wobec ludności niemieckiej w Polsce w latach 1945–1989

Przed 1989 r. badania nad historią Niemców w Polsce po II wojnie światowej podlegały ograniczeniom, wynikającym z uwarunkowań systemu komunistycznego. Jak pisze we wstępie do niniejszego tomu prof. Piotr Madajczyk, w PRL obowiązywała oficjalnie „doktryna głosząca, że wraz z zakończeniem wojny zamknął się proces formowania Polski jako państwa narodowego, w którym mniejszości etniczne mają znaczenie marginalne”. Przemiany lat dziewięćdziesiątych XX w. otworzyły przed historykami nowe perspektywy, co zaowocowało wieloma opracowaniami poświęconymi różnym zagadnieniom z dziejów polskich Niemców. Niniejszą książkę traktować można do pewnego stopnia jako podsumowanie dwudziestopięcioletniego dorobku historiografii, ale także ukazanie obecnego stanu badań dotyczących ludności niemieckiej, zamieszkującej Polskę w latach 1945–1989. W tomie zamieszczono referaty wygłoszone na konferencji „Władze komunistyczne wobec ludności niemieckiej w Polsce 1945–1989″, która odbyła się w dniach 28–29 listopada 2013 r. w Gliwicach.

Dosch, Jörn and Lakatos, Malvina. “South Tyrol and Åland: Collective Identity in the Interplay of Old and New Minorities.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20 (October 2020): 188– 207.

Across Europe, the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016 triggered debates about the openness of societies as well as the nature and flexibility of the collective national identity. The Finnish Åland Islands and the Italian province of South Tyrol enjoy an extensive degree of autonomy within otherwise unitary states, and have developed far‐reaching legal and other formal mechanisms for the protection of minorities. The respective statutes of autonomy guarantee the existence and use of Swedish and German, respectively, and thus protect the status of their bearers in relation to the majority population. We argue that the process of gaining and sustaining autonomy has, in turn, created a strong institutional basis for the formation of the collective identity. As a result, the Ålandic and South Tyrolean societies have been flexible and effective in their approach to the integration of migrants as new minority groups. At the same time, neither immigration in general nor the recent wave of refugees has had a pronounced impact on existing concepts of identity, let alone resulted in a change to the way identities are constructed in socio‐political terms.

Kamil Ruszała (2021) Galicyjski Eksodus. Uchodźcy z Galicji podczas I wojny światowej w monarchii Habsburgów 

Galicyjski Eksodus przedstawia zapominane doświadczenie uchodźstwa lat I wojny światowej. Autor dotarł do źródeł austriackich, czeskich, węgierskich, słoweńskich, ukraińskich i polskich, by ukazać sytuację od ucieczki i ewakuacji w poszczególnych latach wojny, poprzez pobyt na uchodźstwie, aż po kwestie powrotów czy pozostania w krajach sukcesyjnych po 1918 roku. To zarazem opowieść o relacji międzykulturowej mieszkańców tej samej monarchii, którym przyszło spotkać się dopiero w warunkach kryzysu wojennego, tuż przed agonią swojego państwa. Sytuacja ta pokazała, jak głęboko podzielone były światy trzech aktorów książki: uchodźców, ludności miejscowej oraz władzy, która musiała poradzić sobie z nieznanym dotychczas na taką skalę problemem. W książce opisano realia tego spotkania: próby gościnności czy sprawności aparatu biurokratycznego, chęć akceptacji, kwestie wykluczenia, tożsamości, samoorganizacji, a przede wszystkim – reakcje w konfrontacji każdej warstwy społecznej z azylantami.

Piotr Puchalski (2021) Emigrants into colonists: Settlement-oriented emigration to South America from Poland, 1918-1932

Starting in the late-nineteenth century, Polish national elites considered emigration a ‘necessary evil’ that alleviated local economic pressures. In the face of an exodus from all of the partitions, leaders of many political persuasions worked to channel the emigration of peasants towards destinations such as Paraná, where a ‘New Poland’ could be built. In the 1920s, the emerging inter-war Polish state created a sprawling emigration apparatus that adjusted the old policies to the new circumstances. This article traces the consecutive turns in the Polish government’s attitude towards emigration to South America, demonstrating the ways in which they mirrored broader European discourses and responded to systemic changes around the globe. Moreover, in line with the recent scholarship that points to the legacies of empire in inter-war Eastern Europe, the article also examines the relationship between the post-imperial nature of the nascent Polish state and its ‘colonial’ emigration policies.

Danielle Ross (2020) Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia

In Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia, Danielle Ross makes a major contribution to both the history of the Russian empire and to the history of its ethnic and religious minorities. She skillfully argues that the Kazan Tatars were both colonized and colonizers, suffering the consequences of their initial defeat at the hands of Ivan the Terrible in 1552 but also participating actively in Russia’s colonial expansion as interpreters, ambassadors, mediators, traders, and settlers. Most important, Ross does not portray them as mere puppets of Russian officials but as allies and, most interesting, as a colonizing force, creating its own spheres of religious and economic influence, its own geography, and its own hierarchies of subjected people.

Benny Morris, Dror Ze’evi (2019) The Thirty-Year Genocide. Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population.

The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, mass rape, and brutal abduction. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.

Revelatory and impeccably researched, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi’s account is certain to transform how we see one of modern history’s most horrific events.

R. Chris Davis (2019) Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood. A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945

Amid the rising nationalism and racial politics that culminated in World War II, European countries wishing to “purify” their nations often forced unwanted populations to migrate. The targeted minorities had few options, but as R. Chris Davis shows, they sometimes used creative tactics to fight back, redefining their identities to serve their own interests.

Davis’s highly illuminating example is the case of the little-known Moldavian Csangos, a Hungarian- and Romanian-speaking community of Roman Catholics in eastern Romania. During World War II, some in the Romanian government wanted to expel them. The Hungarian government saw them as Hungarians and wanted to settle them on lands confiscated from other groups. Resisting deportation, the clergy of the Csangos enlisted Romania’s leading racial anthropologist, collected blood samples, and rewrote a millennium of history to claim Romanian origins and national belonging—thus escaping the discrimination and violence that devastated so many of Europe’s Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other minorities. In telling their story, Davis offers fresh insight to debates about ethnic allegiances, the roles of science and religion in shaping identity, and minority politics past and present.

Mariusz Kałczewiak (2020). Polacos in Argentina. Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture.

Between the 1890s and 1930s, Argentina, following the United States and Palestine, became the main destination for Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews seeking safety, civil rights, and better economic prospects. In the period between 1918 and 1939, sixty thousand Polish Jews established new homes in Argentina. They formed a strong ethnic community that quickly embraced Argentine culture while still maintaining their unique Jewish-Polish character. This mass migration caused the transformation of cultural, social, and political milieus in both Poland and Argentina, forever shaping the cultural landscape of both lands.

In Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture, Mariusz Kalczewiak has constructed a multifaceted and in-depth narrative that sheds light on marginalized aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish studies and Polish Jewish Studies. Based on archival research, Yiddish travelogues on Argentina, and the Yiddish and Spanish-language press, this study recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina.

Freimüller, Tobias (2020). Frankfurt und die Juden. Neuanfänge und Fremdheitserfahrungen 1945–1990.

Auf dem Coverbild des als Habilitationsschrift eingereichten, jüngst im Wallstein Verlag erschienenen Buches von Tobias Freimüller ist im Vordergrund eine prächtige, aufwendig verzierte Chanukkia zu sehen. Der neunarmige Kerzenleuchter wird von zwei Frankfurter Herren bewundert: Georg Salzberger (1882–1975), Rabbiner der Vorkriegsgemeinde, sowie Werner Bockelmann (1907–1968), Oberbürgermeister der Stadt. Aufgenommen wurde das Foto im Jahr 1961 in Frankfurt auf der ersten Judaica-Ausstellung der noch jungen Bundesrepublik. Über die Gründe für eine solche Ausstellung gibt Freimüller in einem späteren Kapitel Aufschluss, indem er sie im Kontext eines Neubeginns jüdischen Lebens und des immer wieder aufbrechenden Antisemitismus in Deutschland einbettet. Damit nimmt der Autor eine Beziehungsgeschichte in den Fokus, die zwar durch den konzisen Titel „Frankfurt und die Juden. Neuanfänge und Fremdheitserfahrungen 1945–1990“ bereits angekündigt wird, für die aber auch sein Titelbild sinnbildlich steht. Das ausgewählte Foto gibt darüber hinaus aber auch Auskunft über Perspektive und Methode des Autors.

Mart Kuldkepp (2021). The political choices and outlooks of the Estonian Swedish national minority, 1917–1920

The Estonian Swedish national awakening did not start until the turn of the twentieth century, but by the 1917 Russian February Revolution, it was well underway. This article studies Estonian Swedish political choices and outlooks in the period that followed: 1917–1923. As Estonia went through tumultuous political changes, the leadership of the Swedish minority faced the task of formulating and carrying out a political strategy that would safeguard their national interests. This article discusses how they did it, while also asking why the strength and influence of Estonian Swedish politics soon began to decline despite earlier remarkable successes.

Petru Negura (2021). Nation-building and mass schooling of ethnic minorities on the Romanian and Soviet peripheries (1918–1940): a comparative study of Bessarabia and Transnistria

The paper examines the local responses to mass schooling in the rural areas of Romanian Bessarabia and Soviet Transnistria (1918–1940). Both Romania and the USSR aimed at deeply transforming the local populations. Romania implemented schooling to assimilate ethnic minorities within the model of a nationalizing state, while the USSR adopted an inconsistent nationalizing policy, determinedly imposing compulsory education for all children. The resistance to schooling among ethnic minorities was less intense in Transnistria than in Bessarabia. In both cases, the state authorities abandoned, in the late 1930s, the schooling in minority languages for the benefit of the titular nationalities.

Giuseppe Motta (2021). Rejection, accommodation, disillusion: the responses of Magyar intellectuals to the unification of Transylvania with Romania

This study examines the role of minority identity strategies in Transylvania within the context of competing nationalisms. The case of Magyar communities perfectly illustrates the great complexity of many contested regions after WWI. On the one hand, a substantial number of Transylvanian Hungarians maintained a solid connection with the official revisionist aims of the Hungarian government and showed a fierce and violent refusal to accept the end of historical Hungary. On the other, a minority of Transylvanian Hungarians tried to assume a different perspective of the past and develop new strategies of integration, focusing on the multicultural legacy of Transylvania in order to renew the cultural milieu of the community and offer new responses to changed conditions. This article conducts a historical examination of these responses, analyzing the interwar cultural experience of Magyar intellectuals in relation to categories such as minority rights, regionalism, or national indifference. It concludes that it was not exactly indifference that characterized the fight for the defence of minority rights or ideas such as Transylvanism. This, it is also argued, failed in providing an alternative representation of Transylvanian history and multiculturalism, and was thus unable to break the monopoly of nationalist imaginary.

Anca Filipovici (2021). ‘Faith and work for King and Country!’ Nationalization and covert Romanianization through the youth organization Straja Țării (1934–1940)

This study investigates the youth organization Straja Țării, created by King Carol II of Romania in the second interwar decade. The research will consider two levels of analyses: the organizational and ideological dimensions of Straja Țării within the national project of unification (1); the relation of the Jewish youth to Straja Țării (2). Although Straja included youngsters from ages 7 to 18, I will focus mainly on adolescents (above the age of 14), because they were a distinct instrumental group for radical political movements. The paper’s main argument is that by being packed in the formula of nation-building and strengthening, Straja Țării was rather an ineffective organization which served as a tool to consolidate the king’s power at both the internal and external level. In relation to ethnic minorities, Straja oscillated between recklessness, assimilation, and rejection, lacking any mechanism for integrating non-Romanians.

Christopher Wendt (2021) Formulating Germanness in the Banat: ‘Minority making’ among the Swabians from Dualist Hungary to interwar Romania

This article examines the shaping of a dominant discourse on Germanness among the Banat Swabians a German-speaking minority community over a long period of upheaval. Particularly following WWI debates over what it meant to be German gained significance as a means of political contestation and a way of mobilizing the Swabian community vis-à-vis the Romanian state. While appeals to belonging within a broader German nation were popularized the symbols developed to convey this affiliation showed particular local and regional understandings of Banat Swabian Germanness—a trend that only began to change in the 1930s as these symbols were appropriated by new challengers.

Stephan Stach (2021). The Polish-Ukrainian Bulletin in Piłsudski’s Poland — or, how to create space for dialogue and build trust in an authoritarian state

Historical works on Polish-Ukrainian relations in the interwar period mostly concern conflict history. The Polish-Ukrainian Bulletin, the subject of this article, was published from 1932 with the intention of contributing to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. In Poland, under the authoritarian regime of Józef Piłsudski, the journal created a space for a relatively free debate on common questions and helped to build mutual trust across national divisions. Around the journal, networks of Polish and Ukrainian political and social activists emerged. These networks played a crucial role in the conclusion of the Polish-Ukrainian Normalization Agreement of 1935.

Dina Danon (2020) The Jews of Ottoman Izmir A Modern History (Stanford University Press)

By the turn of the twentieth century, the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir had been home to a vibrant and substantial Sephardi Jewish community for over four hundred years, and had emerged as a major center of Jewish life. The Jews of Ottoman Izmir tells the story of this long overlooked Jewish community, drawing on previously untapped Ladino archival material. Dina Danon argues that while Jewish religious and cultural distinctiveness might have remained unquestioned in this late Ottoman port city, other elements of Jewish identity emerged as profound sites of tension, most notably those of poverty and social class. Through the voices of both beggars on the street and mercantile elites, shoe-shiners and newspaper editors, rabbis and housewives, this book argues that it was new attitudes to poverty and class, not Judaism, that most significantly framed this Sephardi community’s encounter with the modern age.

Lecture: Shared Soundscapes: The Legacy of Polish Jews in Music. 14 March (Sunday), 8PM CET/ 2PM EST / 11AM PST / 9PM Israel

In the popular imagination, Jewish music-making in historically Polish lands is generally envisioned as separate from the music of the surrounding population, each group occupying a distinctly different soundscape. But historical records buried in Polish archives tell a different story going back hundreds of years.These sources repeatedly show that there were many opportunities for interaction between Jews and their neighbors despite legal restrictions and intense competition. This lecture explores the legacy of Polish Jews in music by focusing on the circumstances that allowed Jewish and Christian musicians to make music together to learn from each other and share repertories and musical languages.

Broadcast live in English on POLIN Museum YouTube channel.

Amacher Korine, Aunoble Éric, Portnov Andrii (2020), Histoire partagée, mémoires divisées: Ukraine, Russie, Pologne

Déboulonnement de statues de Lénine en Ukraine ; réhabilitation du passé impérial et stalinien en Russie ; nouvelle « politique historique » officielle en Pologne : depuis la chute du communisme en 1989-1991, les questions mémorielles sont au centre de l’actualité polonaise, ukrainienne et russe. Elles alimentent les batailles géopolitiques en cours autour de l’ancrage européen de la Pologne ou de l’Ukraine, de l’annexion de la Crimée ou de la guerre dans le Donbass.
Or, la Russie, l’Ukraine et la Pologne sont liées par une histoire commune où les conflits font disparaître les cohabitations et la diversité humaine de ces territoires. En éclairant des espaces, des événements et des figures qui ont été l’objet de récits historiques divergents, voire conflictuels, cet ouvrage montre comment, de l’histoire à la mémoire, des « romans nationaux » antagonistes sont écrits.

Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov (eds.) (2021) Roma Voices in History. A Sourcebook

This ground-breaking OPEN-ACCESS book is an impressively extensive collection of primary historical sources in various languages that reflect the history of the Roma (formerly referred to as ‘Gypsies’ in local languages). The selection of the included materials reflects the authentic voice of the Roma themselves, and presents their visions and the specific goals pursued by the Roma civic emancipation movement. The source materials are published in original and translated in English, and are accompanied by explanatory notes and summarising comments discussing the specific historical realities and their interrelation to the Romani emancipatory movement in Central and Eastern Europe, thus presenting a comprehensive picture of the historical processes.

IMAGINING BOSNIAN MUSLIMS IN CENTRAL EUROPE Representations, Transfers and Exchanges Edited by František Šístek (2021)

As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. To a significant degree, the wider representations and perceptions of this population can be traced to the reports of Central European—and especially Habsburg—diplomats, scholars, journalists, tourists, and other observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounters with the West since the nineteenth century.

Lidia Zessin-Jurek, Katharina Friedla (red.) (2020) Syberiada Żydów polskich: losy uchodźców z zagłady

Wywózki w głąb zimnej Rosji sowieckiej to dla Polaków represja wpisująca się w długą historię syberyjskiego cierpienia doznawanego od wschodniego sąsiada. Polakom żydowskiego pochodzenia ta sama represja w czasie II wojny światowej zwielokrotniała szansę przetrwania. Około 80 procent wszystkich ocalałych polskich Żydów przeżyło Zagładę na nieokupowanych terenach Związku Radzieckiego. Żydowscy uchodźcy uciekający przed Hitlerem na wschód zostali w większości wciągnięci w tryby „syberyjskiej polityki” Stalina. Rola ZSRR była zatem w tej historii bardzo dwuznaczna. Najczęściej mówi się o „paradoksie historii”, który sprawił, że dzięki deportacjom większość uchodźców ocalała z piekła Holokaustu.

K. Čapková u.a. (Hrsg.) (2020): Zwischen Prag und Nikolsburg, Zwischen Prag und Nikolsburg. Jüdisches Leben in den böhmischen Ländern

Diese erste Gesamtgeschichte der Juden in den böhmischen Ländern von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart erscheint zunächst auf Deutsch. Die englische Originalfassung sowie eine tschechische und eine hebräische Übersetzung sollen folgen. Die deutsche Ausgabe wurde von Martina Niedhammer vom Collegium Carolinum in München betreut, die auch zu den neun Verfassern und Verfasserinnen des Sammelbandes gehört. Unter den Beitragenden forschen vier in den Vereinigten Staaten und drei in Prag. Das internationale Erscheinen des Werkes verweist nicht zuletzt auf die Weite der tschechisch-jüdischen Diaspora.

Asnake Kefale, Tomasz Kamusella, and Christophe Van der Beken Eurasian Empires as Blueprints for Ethiopia. From Ethnolinguistic Nation-State to Multiethnic Federation

This book is a contribution to the global history of the transfer of political ideas, as exemplified by the case of modern Ethiopia. Like many non-European nation-states, Ethiopia adopted a western model of statehood, that is, the nation-state. Unlike the postcolonial polities that have retained the mode of statehood imposed on them by their colonial powers, Ethiopia was never successfully colonized leaving its ruling elite free to select a model of ‘modern’ (western) statehood. In this, they followed different models ranging from Japan-inspired model of ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state to Soviet model of ethnolinguistic federalism. To this day the politics of modern Ethiopia is marked by the tension between these two opposed models of the essentially central European type of statehood.

Vadym Adadurov, Volodymyr Sklokin, eds. (2020) Imperial Identities in Ukrainian History (The Eighteenth and the First Half of the Nineteenth Century) [In Ukrainian]

This essay collection aims to challenge and revise the established historiographic stereotypes related to the impact of the imperial unification on collective identities of Ukrainians in the Habsburg and Russian Empires during the 18th and the first half of the 19th century. It examines interrelationships among imperial, (proto)national, regional and social levels of identification of various historical actors. Special attention is paid to Ukrainian sentiments and imperial ultra-patriotism of the Ukrainian elites as well as to the impact of the Enlightenment on the transformation of collective identities in the transition period of late 18th and early 19th century.

Krista A. Goff (2021) Nested Nationalism
Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus

Nested Nationalism is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of “their” republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow’s influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Goff pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders.

Agnieszka Kościańska (2021) Gender, Pleasure, and Violence. The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland

While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one’s gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence, Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists—experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators—not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes. By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities.

Editors: M. Dworczyk, R. Kuśnierz (2020). The Holodomor. Poland. Polish Victims 1932-1933. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe.

New Publication on the Holodomor.

Oksana Kis (2021). Survival as Victory. Ukrainian Women in the Gulag. Translated by Lidia Wolanskyj. Harvard University Press.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the GULAG in the 1940s and 1950s. Only about half of them survived. With this book, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners. Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience.

Kathryn Ciancia (2020) On Civilization’s Edge. A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World

As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted an ethnic minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once civilized, modern, and Polish.

Harald Schäfer (2020) In der Mitte Europas – hessisch-polnische Beziehungen

2020 jährt sich die Übernahme der Patenschaft über die Harald Schäfer Landsmannschaft Weichsel-Warthe durch das Land Hessen und die Begründung der Partnerschaft zwischen der Wojewodschaft Wielkopolska und dem Bundesland Hessen zum 30. bzw. 20 Mal. Mit den Beiträgen dieses Buches sollen die vielfältigen Beziehungen Hessens zur ehemaligen Provinz Posen und Polen (speziell vor der Kulisse der Siedlungsgebiete der Deutschen in der Zweiten Polnischen Republik) dargestellt werden.

Dorota Litwin-Lewandowska (2020) The Polish Reason of State in Austria. The Poles in the Political Life of Austria in the Period of the Dual Monarchy (1867–1918)

The monograph describes the history of the Polish diaspora in the Habsburg monarchy in the historical, institutional, legal, political, and organizational context. In the period of the Dual Monarchy (1867–1918), the Poles who lived under the Austro-Hungarian regime sought to influence the fate of their nation and state primarily through an active involvement in parliamentary life and state administration. The study of the social and political activity of the Poles in the Austrian partition reveals their political heritage, which influenced not only the Polish idea of patriotism but also the formation of the Polish political culture rooted in the European tradition of parliamentarism and constitutionalism.

Jolanta Sikorska-Kulesza (2020)
Tolerated Evil. Prostitution in the Kingdom of Poland in the Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth century, state policy towards prostitution was primarily shaped by an assessment of its role in spreading venereal diseases. In this book, the author traces normative and organisational efforts of the authorities of the Kingdom of Poland, which sought to maintain control over prostitution and the health of women who offered paid sexual services. The author uses data collected by the police and medical authorities supervising legal and illegal prostitution to provide a demographic and sociological picture of the big-city and small-town market of sexual commerce. It was only in the early twentieth century when prostitution became an important subject of the Polish public debate, a process which is described in the book against the backdrop of the major issues and fears of the epoch.

See: https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/65709

Jeffrey Koerber (2020)
Borderland Generation: Soviet and Polish Jews Under Hitler

Despite their common heritage, Jews born and raised on opposite sides of the Polish-Soviet border during the interwar period acquired distinct beliefs, values, and attitudes. Variances in civic commitment, school lessons, youth activities, religious observance, housing arrangements, and perceptions of security deeply influenced these adolescents who would soon face a common enemy.<br><br> Set in two cities flanking the border, Grodno in the interwar Polish Republic and Vitebsk in the Soviet Union, <i>Borderland Generation</i> traces the prewar and wartime experiences of young adult Jews raised under distinct political and social systems.

Kai-Olaf Lang (2020)
Nachbarn in Alarm. Die Politik Polens und Litauens gegenüber Belarus

Polen und Litauen blicken gebannt auf Belarus. Viele Menschen verfolgen die Protestbewegung gegen die Wahlfälschung mit Sympathie. Im Aufstand gegen Lukašenkas autokratische Herrschaft sehen sie die Fortsetzung des eigenen Kampfes gegen die autoritäre Sowjetherrschaft. Polen und Litauen sind Bannerträger der Solidarität mit der belarussischen Bürgerbewegung. Die Regierungen haben die Grenzen für Bürger aus Belarus geöffnet und werben in der EU um Unterstützung. Hält sich der diskreditierte Diktator an der Macht, werden Warschau und Vilnius ihre Beziehungen mit dem Nachbarn auf ein Minimum reduzieren. Es wird allenfalls einen Dialog mit der Minsker Exekutive über technische Fragen wie Verkehr, Infrastruktur und die Sicherheit des Atomkraftwerks Astravec geben.

(Osteuropa 10-11/2020, S. 305–319)

See: https://www.zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/hefte/2020/10-11/nachbarn-in-alarm/

Rachel Manekin (2020)
The rebellion of the daughters: Jewish women runaways in Habsburg Galicia

An in-depth exploration of the flight of young Jewish women from their Orthodox homes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691194936/the-rebellion-of-the-daughters

Jan Fellerer, Robert Pyrah (eds.) (2020)
Lviv – Wrocław, Cities in Parallel? Myth, Memory and Migration, C. 1890-Present

After World War II, Europe witnessed the massive redrawing of national borders and the efforts to make the population fit those new borders. As a consequence of these forced changes, both Lviv and Wrocław went through cataclysmic changes in population and culture. Assertively Polish prewar Lwów became Soviet Lvov, and then, after 1991, it became assertively Ukrainian Lviv. Breslau, the third largest city in Germany before 1945, was in turn “recovered” by communist Poland as Wrocław. Practically the entire population of Breslau was replaced, and Lwów’s demography too was dramatically restructured: many Polish inhabitants migrated to Wrocław and most Jews perished or went into exile. The forced migration of these groups incorporated new myths and the construction of official memory projects.

Kamil Pietrasik (2020)
Uchodźcy czeczeńscy w Polsce w latach 1994-2000

Książka jest pierwszą tego rodzaju publikacją na rynku wydawniczym, która stanowi ogromne źródło wiedzy na temat uchodźstwa czeczeńskiego do Polski w okresie od połowy lat 90. XX w. do końca XX w. Przedstawiono w niej kompleksowo uwarunkowania uchodźców czeczeńskich w Polsce w latach 1994-2000. 

Patrice M. Dabrowski (2020)
Reinforcing the border, reconfiguring identities: Polish initiatives in the Carpathians in the interwar period

Established in the wake of the First World War, the multiethnic Polish Second Republic was determined to secure its long southern border, formed by the Carpathian Mountains, which prior to the war had been the internal (porous) Habsburg frontier separating the province of Galicia from Hungary. The article presents a series of initiatives essentially emanating from the state (here, primarily the military authorities) in the 1930s.

Daniel St. Czachorowski (red.) (2020)
Tatarskie losy. Akta z sowieckich archiwów

Informujemy z przyjemnością, że ukazała się właśnie nowa publikacja, wydana staraniem Najwyższego Kolegium Muzułmańskiego MZR w RP. Nowa książka zatytułowana jest Tatarskie losy. Akta z sowieckich archiwów, zaś tłumaczeniem materiałów, ich opracowaniem i uzupełnianiem zajął się Daniel St. Czachorowski. Zebrane są w niej materiały śledcze, protokoły przesłuchań i zeznania wybitnych przedstawicieli polskiej społeczności tatarskiej okresu przedwojennego: Konstantego i Aleksandra Achmatowiczów, Olgierda Kryczyńskiego i Alego Ismaila Woronowicza. 

Poland and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Asymmetric Memories

This essay addresses the routes and disruptions of some basic historical stereotypes in Polish-Ukrainian relations. It argues that in modern times the Polish and Ukrainian national projects represented two competing political legitimacies: one based on historical borders and civilization, and the other based on the ethnographic composition of the population. 

R. Grundmann u.a. (Hrsg.) (2020): „Was soll aus uns werden?“. Zur Geschichte des Centralvereins deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland

Der Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV, 1893–1938), die mitgliederstärkste Organisation des deutschen Judentums, erregt seit dem Wiederauffinden des Archivs der Berliner CV-Zentrale in den 1990er-Jahren zunehmend die Aufmerksamkeit von internationalen Forscher/innen. Ein Großteil dieses Quellenkorpus lag den Autor/innen für diesen Sammelband digitalisiert vor. 

Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast, Uwe Rada (red.) (2020) Zapomniana granica. Polsko-niemieckie poszukiwanie śladów od Górnego Śląska po Bałtyk

W 1918 roku odzyskującą swoje miejsce na mapie niepodległą Polskę oddzieliła od Niemiec granica, przebiegająca przez ziemie dotychczasowego zaboru pruskiego. W tej postaci granica przetrwała do wybuchu II wojny światowej. Dziś tereny przygraniczne należą w całości do Polski, od Górnego Śląska po Gdynię.

Stefan Troebst, Magda Włostowska (2020)
Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia, Polska a Niemcy w Europie. Wybrane studia i eseje

Znaczną intensyfikację relacji między zjednoczonymi Niemcami a nową Polską od 1989 roku można zauważyć na płaszczyźnie nie tylko politycznej i kulturalnej, ale także nauk humanistycznych i nauk o społeczeństwie. W związku z tym wiele nowszych artykułów autora ukazało się w ostatnich latach w języku polskim.

Sławomir Buryła, Dorota Krawczyńska, Jacek Leociak (2020) Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939–1968)

Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939–1968) scrutinizes literary and documentary testimonies produced during or after the extermination of Jews in the Second World War and rooted in that historical, political, and anthropological context. Whether someone wrote a text during or after the war influenced the nature of what was communicated.

Michal Vit (2020) The EU’s Impact on Identity Formation in East-Central Europe Between 2004 and 2013. Perceptions of the Nation and Europe in Political Parties of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia

The Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia share similar experiences in the past, and a swift post-communist integration into the originally West European communities of democratic countries, as their “return to Europe.” Michal Vít explores how these three countries have been influenced by the new all-European environment for their independent national development.

Zbigniew Girzyński, Jarosław Kłaczkow, Tomasz Łaszkiewicz. Przemysław Olstowski (red.) (2020) „Zanim zbudowano Gdynię…” Wpływ odrodzenia państwa w 1918 roku na procesy modernizacyjne ziem polskich

Oddawany do rąk Czytelników zbiór studiów „Zanim zbudowano Gdynię…”. Wpływ odrodzenia państwa w 1918 roku na procesy modernizacyjne ziem polskich jest kolejnym już tomem z serii O Niepodległą i Jej Trwanie. Zamiarem jego inicjatorów było przyjrzenie się – wychodząc od przemian modernizacyjnych, jakie rozgrywały się na ziemiach polskich w okresie zaborów, aż po wybuch I wojny światowej, w wyniku której uległy one zahamowaniu – jak powstanie odrodzonego państwa polskiego wpłynęło na dalszy bieg tych procesów, szczególnie w pierwszych latach swego istnienia.

Małgorzata Fidelis, Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, Piotr Perkowski, Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz (2020) Kobiety w Polsce, 1945–1989: Nowoczesność – równouprawnienie – komunizm

Książka śledzi losy kobiet w Polsce lat 1945–1989 na szerokim tle komunizmu i historii powojennej Europy. Oparta o obszerną i najnowszą światową literaturę przedmiotu oraz kwerendy różnorodnych źródeł historycznych, zainteresuje czytelniczki i czytelników pragnących zapoznać się z historią kobiet w komunizmie i historią Polski, szeroko rozumianymi studiami nad problematyką genderową, historią feminizmu i historią społeczną.