Central European History 51 (2018), 56–65.

© Central European History Society of the American Historical

Association, 2018
doi:10.1017/S0008938918000225

Habsburg History, Eastern European History …

Central European History?
Chad Bryant

ERMANY and all things German have long been the primary concern of Central

G European History (CEH), yet the journal has also been intimately tied to the lands
of the former Habsburg monarchy. As the editor stated in the first issue, published
in March 1968, CEH emerged “in response to a widespread demand for an American journal
devoted to the history of German-speaking Central Europe,” following the demise of the
Journal of Central European Affairs in 1964. The Conference Group for Central European
History sponsored CEH, as well as the recently minted Austrian History Yearbook (AHY).1
Robert A. Kann, the editor of AHY, sat on the editorial board of CEH, whose second
issue featured a trenchant review by István Deák of Arthur J. May’s The Passing of the
Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918. The third issue contained the articles “The Defeat of
Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the Balance of Power” by Kann, and Gerhard Weinberg’s
“The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the Balance of Power.” That same year, East
European Quarterly published its first issue.
CEH still claims as its focus the “history of Germany, Austria, and other German-speaking
regions of Central Europe from the medieval era to the present,” a slight reworking of
the original mandate to study the history of “German-speaking Central Europe.”2 These
parameters—echoes of Kulturträger and Mittleuropa aside—encompass two ancillary fields of
historical inquiry, Habsburg history and Eastern European history, which have remained
largely distinct from German history. Within each of these two ancillary fields, powerful
questions that emerged in the wake of World War I and later the establishment of
Soviet-style Communism in Europe have exercised an extraordinary gravitational pull on
Anglo-American scholarship. These predominant questions have long defined—and
bounded—Habsburg and Eastern European history.3 Recently, however, the fields of

I would like to thank Andrea Bohlman, Winson Chu, Oskar Czendze, Mira Markham, Michael Meng,
Zsolt Nagy, Michael Skalski, Larissa Stiglich, and Leah Valtin-Erwin, who provided many helpful com-
ments on earlier drafts of this essay.
1
“From the Editors” [Douglas Unfug], Central European History (CEH) 1, no. 1 (1968): 3. Reprinted in
this commemorative issue.
2
See https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/central-european-history. For detailed discussions of
the term Central Europe, as well as Mitteleuropa, see Henry Cord Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German Thought
and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1955); Jacques Le Rider, Mitteleuropa. Auf den Spuren eines
Begriffes (Vienna: Deuticke, 1994); Tony Judt, “The Rediscovery of Central Europe,” in Eastern Europe—
Central Europe—Europe, ed. Stephen Richards Graubard (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 23–58;
Peter Bugge, “The Use of the Middle: Mitteleuropa vs. Střední Evropa,” European Review of History: Revue
européenne d’histoire 6, no. 1 (1999): 15–35; Jan Křen, Dvě století střední Evropy (Prague: Argo, 2005).
3
These parameters, along with the emergence of distinct fields of inquiry, help to explain why “the per-
centage of articles [published in Central European History] devoted to Austria, the Habsburg lands (including
the successor states of the empire), as well as Switzerland decreased from almost 15 percent between 1968

56

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 REFLECTIONS, RECKONINGS, AND REVELATIONS 57
inquiry have begun to blur, and new questions demand to be asked. It is now the time to
imagine a new field of inquiry, as well as a new set of questions, that might redefine
“Central European history.”
Not long before the end of World War I, Robert William Seton-Watson published, with
former Times correspondent Henry Wickham Steed and future Czechoslovak president Tomáš
Masaryk, the first issue of New Europe. Its declared purpose was to educate statesmen and the
general public about the lands of the Habsburg monarchy, and to work toward “the emanci-
pation of the subject races of central and south-eastern Europe from German and Magyar
control” as a counter to “the Pangerman [sic] project of ‘Central Europe’ and ‘Berlin-
Baghdad.’”4 “Emancipation” did come, thanks in large part to the lobbying efforts by
Seton-Watson and Masaryk. Present at the founding of a new field of historical study, these
and other well-placed men then presented an interpretation of Habsburg history intended
to legitimize the successor states.5 This interpretation held that the Habsburg monarchy had
been an anachronistic, repressive, backward entity whose fate had become entwined with
that of an aggressive Germany. More important, this interpretation held that the monarchy
had been a “prison-house of nations” that necessarily had to give way to nation-states.
Nations, coherent entities moving through history and possessing a common set of character-
istics, had struggled within this repressive structure, they argued, until their liberation in 1918.
Habsburg scholars have been wrestling with this interpretation ever since, and, in so doing,
have engaged two sets of interrelated questions. The first often took the form of an autopsy:
why did the monarchy collapse—or, more precisely, how might one understand the dynamics
of the Habsburg monarchy, and how might, or might not, those dynamics have led to the
monarchy’s demise? The momentum has been against interwar characterizations of the mon-
archy as brittle and doomed, beginning with Oszkár Jászi’s exploration of “centripetal” and
“centrifugal” forces at work within Austria-Hungary before 1914.6 After 1945, succeeding
generations of scholars added further nuance to our understanding of imperial politics and
rule.7 Others complicated prevailing notions about the monarchy’s alleged economic back-
wardness and military incompetence.8 The shift to social and cultural history in the 1960s and

and 1987 to less than 6 percent since 1990.” See Andrew I. Port, “Central European History since 1989:
Historiographical Trends and Post-Wende ‘Turns,’” CEH 48, no. 2 (2015): 238–48 (quote on p. 244).
Port’s article provides a superb overview of the various methodological “turns” that have defined
German history, and history more broadly, in the past decades. My focus, however, is on the predominant
research questions; this excludes, of course, discussion of a vast number of innovative, insightful works in our
fields.
4
Zsolt Nagy, Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918–1941 (Budapest:
Central European University [CEU] Press, 2017), 134.
5
Seton-Watson played a key role in the founding of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
and also cofounded the Slavonic Review. See R. B. Betts, “Robert William Seton-Watson, 1879–1951,” The
Slavonic and East European Review 30, no. 74 (1951): 252–55. Masaryk and other leaders of successor states also
supported publishing efforts in Great Britain, the United States, and France, and, beyond that, compli-
mented the efforts of Seton-Watson and others. See Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of
Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
6
Oszkár Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1929).
7
C. A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, 1790–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1968); Robert A. Kann, A
History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
8
David F. Good, The Economic Rise of the Hapsburg Empire, 1750–1914, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984); István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps,
1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

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 58 CHAD BRYANT

1970s encouraged a focus on the rise of modern political movements, mass politics, and even
modernity itself within the monarchy.9 Most recently, historians have begun to focus on the
experiences of World War I to pursue more doggedly the question of whether the monarchy
was doomed, or whether it dissolved primarily as a result of self-destructive domestic policies
and the strains of the war.10 The emerging consensus has been the latter, a consensus but-
tressed by recent scholarship that has emphasized the enduring, and perhaps surprising, via-
bility of the monarchy up through 1914.11
A second set of questions sought to trace out the rise of nations and nationalisms, often in
ways that challenged the “prison-house of nations” interpretation of Habsburg history.
Crucial here were the horrors of World War II. Whereas interwar Anglo-American scholars
had tended to equate nationalism with liberalism, with political determination being
grounded in a nation’s right to its own state—or collective rights within a state—post-
1945 scholars sought to understand the origins and pathologies of nationalism.
Primordialists ceded ground to constructivists, thus undermining the belief in the natural
existence—and rights—of nations.12 Hans Kohn’s intellectual history, published in 1944,
traced the origins of the Western (civic and democratic) and Eastern (ethnic and organic) var-
iants of nationalism that had allegedly divided the continent. Ernest Gellner’s postwar schol-
arship traced the emergence of a united, homogenous nation to modernizing forces and the
rise of the state.13 It is telling that both emerged from a Prague echoing with German-Jewish
attempts to understand nationalism and national belonging.14
Other historians turned more directly to the rise of nationalism within the Habsburg context.
Similar to Miroslav Hroch’s study of early nineteenth-century Czech national awakeners, Gary
Cohen’s work on Prague Germans demonstrated, among other things, that nationality was not
fate, but situational and a choice inspired, at least in part, by socioeconomic concerns.15 Jan Křen

9
Hans Mommsen, Die Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfrage im habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat (Vienna:
Europa-Verlag, 1963); Bruce M. Garver, The Young Czech Party, 1874–1901, and the Emergence of a Multi-
Party System (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978); John W. Boyer Political Radicalism in Late
Imperial Vienna: The Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1981); Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1979).
10
For an overview of the literature, see John Deak, “The Great War and the Forgotten Realm: The
Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War,” Journal of Modern History 86, no. 2 (2014): 336–80.
11
For an overview, see Pieter M. Judson, “‘Where Our Commonality Is Necessary …’: Rethinking the
End of the Habsburg Monarchy,” Austrian History Yearbook (AHY) 48 (2017): 1–21. See also Maureen
Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); Rudolf Kučera, Rationed Life: Science, Everyday Life, and Working-
Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands, 1914–1918 (New York : Berghahn, 2016).
12
For an overview of the emergence of nationalism studies after World War II, see Geoff Eley and Ronald
Gregor Suny, “Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation,”
in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Gregor Suny (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996): 3–38.
13
Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: MacMillan, 1944); Ernest Gellner, Nations and
Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
14
Karl Deutsch, another significant contributor to postwar nationalism studies, also grew up within
Prague’s German-Jewish milieu. See Martin Wein, History of the Jews of Bohemian Lands (Leiden: Brill,
2016), 3–8.
15
Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981); Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative
Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985).

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 REFLECTIONS, RECKONINGS, AND REVELATIONS 59
pointed to the key role that “professional nationalists” had played in mobilizing nationalism
within parties and associational life.16 More recently, historians have pointed to the surprising
persistence of national ambiguity, bilingualism, and side-switching within the monarchy.
Tara Zahra’s work argues that it was the presence of national indifference—just as much
as, if not more so than, national rivalry—that fueled Czech and German activism from the
late nineteenth-century onward.17 Other scholars have emphasized the ways in which
loyalty to the Habsburg regime and national loyalty were not necessarily at odds.18 The orig-
inal interpretations of nationalism as the monarchy’s downfall have now been turned inside
out, as witnessed most powerfully in Pieter Judson’s magisterial new history of the Habsburg
monarchy. Synthesizing a generation of research within a tightly woven interpretative
history, Judson argues that national activists were implicated in an empire whose “very insti-
tutions and administrative practices shaped nationalist efforts.”19 Rather than a “prison-house
of nations,” historians such as Judson, working in the Anglo-American tradition, understand
the monarchy as having been an incubator for various forms of nationalism that existed
within—and became dependent on—the empire, its institutions, and its practices.20
Just as Anglo-American writing on Habsburg history first emerged during World War I,
Anglo-American studies of Eastern Europe arose within the context of the Cold War.
Indeed, much of the field has depended, and continues to depend, on federal Title VI
area-studies funding established soon after the Soviet launch of Sputnik I in 1957. In
some instances, assumptions about Eastern European “backwardness” forged during the

16
Jan Křen, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft: Tschechen und Deutsche, 1780–1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996).
17
Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands,
1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); idem, “Imagined Noncommunities: National
Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93–119. See also Karl F. Bahm,
“Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Central
Europe,” AHY 29 (1998): 19–35; Eagle Glassheim, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian
Aristocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation:
Activists on the Language Frontier of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006);
Robert Nemes, “Obstacles to Nationalization on the Hungarian-Romanian Language Frontier,” AHY
43 (2012): 28–44; Pamela Ballinger, “History’s ‘Illegibles’: National Indeterminacy in Istria,” AHY 33
(2012): 116–37. For an example of “national indifference” beyond the monarchy, see James E. Bjork,
Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2008).
18
Daniel L. Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria,
1848–1916 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005); Deborah R. Coen, “Climate and
Circulation in Imperial Austria,” Journal of Modern History 82, no. 4 (2010): 839–75. See also Peter
Urbanitsch, “Pluralist Myth and Nationalist Realities: The Dynastic Myth of the Habsburg Monarchy—
A Futile Exercise in the Creation of Identity?,” AHY 35 (2004): 101–4.
19
Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016),
13. See also “An Imperial Dynamo? CEH Forum on Pieter Judson’s The Habsburg Empire: A New History,”
CEH 50, no. 2 (2017): 236–59.
20
See also Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Gary B. Cohen, “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics
of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914,” CEH 40, no. 2 (2007): 241–78;
Laurence Cole, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014). For an alternative interpretation of the relationship between nationalism and the monarchy,
see Jakub S. Beneš, Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria,
1890–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). One of the first calls for Habsburg historians to
take inspiration from recent work on Imperial Germany to probe the relationship between the administrative
state and political movements appeared in the pages of CEH: John Boyer, “Some Reflections on the
Problem of Austria, Germany, and Mitteleuropa,” CEH 22, no. 3/4 (1989): 301–16.

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 60 CHAD BRYANT

Enlightenment informed efforts to seek out the origins of Eastern European Communist rule
deep in the past.21 Predominant questions emerged over the course of Communist rule in the
region: How did the Communists assume power, and what were the mechanisms of rule?
How might one understand the 1956 upheavals in Poland and Hungary, and the 1968
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia? What explains the emergence of various dissident
movements, as well as Solidarity, and what were they hoping to achieve? Finally, how and
why did Communist rule collapse in 1989—and why so swiftly? Why did the end of
Communism play out so differently across the region?
Similar to the scholarship on Nazi Germany, studies drawing on various understandings
of totalitarian rule have, over time, given way to more nuanced understandings of the
dynamics of Communist rule, the relationship between state and society, as well as individual
agency and complicity. Rather than a system of rule uniformly imposed by an outside power,
scholars have asked how local Communist rulers “translated” Soviet Communism, as Molly
Pucci writes. Attention to specific contexts and local actors have demonstrated how, even in
the era of Stalinism, Communist rule differed greatly among the countries of the region.22
Other scholars have pointed to the many reasons citizens might have supported, or at least
tolerated, the establishment of Communist rule.23 Others, often drawing upon studies of con-
sumption and gender, have sought to capture the experience of life under Communism: they
go beyond seeing the peoples of Eastern Europe simply as victims of Communism, as objects
of rule, as collaborators, or as heroic dissidents.24 Historians have also complicated our Cold
War notions of what Eastern Europeans hoped to achieve in challenging Communist rule,
how they envisioned Communism, reform Communism, or post-Communism.25 Similar

21
On the origins and persistence of these assumptions, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of
Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
22
Molly Pucci, “Translating the State: Czechoslovakia’s Search for the Soviet Model of the Secret Police,
1945–52,” Kritika 18, no. 2 (2017): 317–44. See also John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of
East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000).
23
Jan Gross, “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of Communist
Regimes in East Central Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 3, no. 2 (1989): 198–214; Padraic
Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1997); Melissa K. Bokovoy, Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside,
1941–1953 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the
Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004);
Mark Pittaway, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Kevin McDermott, Communist Czechoslovakia,
1945–89: A Political and Social History (London: Palgrave, 2015).
24
Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern
Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová, eds.,
The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Jill
Massino, Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania
(New York: Berghahn, 2018). For an overview of the development of gender studies in Eastern Europe,
see Maria Bucur, “An Archipelago of Stories: Gender History in Eastern Europe,” American Historical
Review 113, no. 5 (2008): 1375–89. For a reinterpretation of the dissident movement, see Jonathan
Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
25
Melissa Feinberg, Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017); Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics,
1968–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Matĕj Spurný, Most do budoucnosti. Laboratoř
socialistické modernity na severu Čech (Prague: Karolinum, 2016); Jiří Šuk, Veřejné záchodky ze zlata. Konflikt

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 REFLECTIONS, RECKONINGS, AND REVELATIONS 61
to recent scholarship on the Habsburg monarchy, the most recent Anglo-American scholar-
ship on Eastern Europe has probed the origins of regime collapse, while cautioning against
seeing Communism’s demise as inevitable, or seeing Communist rule as uniformly ruinous,
harmful, and morally bankrupt. Recent scholarship in both fields has often questioned trium-
phal narratives that emerged shortly after regime collapse.
Much of the scholarship on the German Democratic Republic has shared many of the
same questions and methodological innovations as Eastern European history.26 It is thus sur-
prising that East German history and Eastern European history—despite these similarities,
and other similar phenomena deserving of intraregional study—have largely remained sep-
arate from each other.27 This unnatural separation will change, no doubt, especially as histo-
rians of Germany and Eastern Europe continue to embrace a “transnational turn,” paying
particular attention to cross-border flows and movements, or writing comparative and bor-
derland histories that escape the nation-state framework.28 Historians of the Cold War have

mezi komunistickým utopismem a ekonomickou racionalitou v předsrpnovém Československu (Prague: Prostor, 2016);
Michal Pullman, Konec experimentu. Přestavba a pád komunismu v Československu (Prague: Scriptorium, 2011);
Vítĕzslav Sommer, “Forecasting the Post-Socialist Future: Prognostika in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia,
1970–1989,” in The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics: Forging the Future, ed.
Jenny Anderson and Eglė Rindzevičiūtė (London: Routledge, 2015), 144–68; James Krapfl, Revolution
with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2013).
26
For an insightful overview, see Andrew I. Port, “The Banalities of East German Historiography,” in
Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler, ed. Mary Fulbrook and Andrew
I. Port (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 1–30.
27
See, however, Connelly, Captive University; Sheldon R. Anderson, A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc: Polish-
East German Relations, 1945–1962 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001); Volker Zimmermann, Eine sozia-
listische Freundschaft im Wandel. Die Beziehungen zwischen der SBZ/DDR und der Tschechoslowakei (1945–1969)
(Essen: Klartext, 2005); Daniel Logemann, Das polnische Fenster. Deutsch-polnische Kontakte im staatssozialisti-
schen Alltag Leipzigs 1972—1989 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012); David G. Tompkins, Composing the Party
Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University
Press, 2013); Kyrill Kunakhovich, “Reconstruction as Revolution: Cultural Life in Post-WWII Kraków
and Leipzig,” East European Politics and Societies 30, no. 3 (2016): 475–95.
28
For innovative works on migration and the movement of peoples, see Tara Zahra, The Great Departure:
Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2016); Keely Stauter-Halsted, “Sex at the Border: Trafficking as a Migration Problem in Partitioned
Poland,” in Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and
Eurasia, ed. Anika Walke, Jan Musekamp, and Nicole Svobodny (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2017), 164–87; Nancy M. Wingfield, “Destination: Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Constantinople;
‘White Slavers’ in Late Imperial Austria,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 2 (2011): 291–311. For
creatively wrought works of comparative history, see Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish
Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Eszter Bartha,
Alienating Labour: Workers on the Road from Socialism to Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary
(New York: Berghahn, 2013). For various iterations of borderland histories, see Muriel Blaive and
Berthold Molden, Grenzfälle. Österreichische und tschechische Erfahrungen am Eisernen Vorhang (Weitra:
Bibliothek der Provinz, 2009); Caitlin E. Murdock, Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the
Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870–1946 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Edith Sheffer,
Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011); Oksana Mykhed, “Not by Force Alone: Public Health and the Establishment of Russian Rule in
the Russo-Polish Borderland, 1762–85,” in Borderlands in World History, 1700–1914, ed. Paul Readman,
Cynthia Radding, and Chad Bryant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 123–42; Eagle Glassheim,
Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). For thoughtful discussions of the “transnational
turn,” see Jürgen Osterhammel, “Transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Erweiterung oder Alternative?,”

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 62 CHAD BRYANT

explored the “from below” connections across the region that informed, for example, Willy
Brandt’s Ostpolitik, environmentalist activism, and Communist-era mobility practices.29
Focus has also turned to Germans and German-speakers beyond the borders of twentieth-
century Germany—efforts that have, among other things, produced innovative insights
into the dynamics of interwar politics, as well as into Nazi rule and questions of collabora-
tion.30 The fall of Communism witnessed a renewed interest in the expulsion of Germans
from Eastern Europe, and groundbreaking urban histories have probed the effects that the
unmistakable absence of Germans has had on the cityscapes and cultures they left behind.31
Just as important, scholars who focus on the lands of Eastern Europe and the former
Habsburg monarchy have now adopted questions that are predominant within German
history. Nowhere is this development more obvious than in the realm of Holocaust
studies, as evidenced by the cohorts of recent research fellows at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum.32 The opening of the archives in Poland and elsewhere
has revealed how war in the East radicalized efforts to find a “solution” to the so-called

Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27 (2001): 464–79; Sebastian Conrad, “Doppelte Marginalisierung: Pläydoyer für
eine transnationale Perspektive auf die deutsche Geschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 145–69;
Philipp Ther, “Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and
Europe,” CEH 36, no. 1 (2003): 45–74; Michael Geyer, “Where Germans Dwell: Transnationalism in
Theory and Practice,” German Studies Association Newsletter 31, no. 2 (2006): 29–37.
29
Annika Frieberg, “Transnational Spaces in National Places: Early Activists in Polish-West German
Relations,” Nationalities Papers 38, no. 2 (2010): 213–26; Julia Ault, “Protesting Pollution: Environmental
Activism in East Germany and Poland, 1980–1990,” in Cold War Environmentalism in Capitalist and
Communist Countries, ed. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. McNeill (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming); also see the special issue “Crossing the Borders of Friendship: Mobility
across Communist Borders,” edited by Mark Keck-Szajbel and Dariusz Stola, in East European Politics and
Society 29, no. 1 (2015): 92–225.
30
Winson Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012);
Mark Cornwall, The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012); Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013); Eric Conrad Steinhart, The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Mirna Zakić, Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in
Yugoslavia in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
31
On the expulsions, see Norman M. Naimark, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Seattle:
University of Washington, 1998); Ana Siljak and Philipp Ther, eds., Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing
in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); R. M. Douglas, Orderly
and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2012); John J. Kulczycki, Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German
Borderlands, 1939–1951 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); David Gerlach, The Economy
of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of the German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2017). On the absence of Germans, see Jan Musekamp, Zwischen Stettin und
Szczecin. Metamorphosen einer Stadt von 1945 bis 2005 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010); Gregor Thum,
Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2011). For other innovative works on the region’s urban history, see, e.g., Cynthia
Paces, Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Nathaniel D. Wood, Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the
Making of Modern Cracow (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Alexander Vari, “Re-territo-
rializing the ‘Guilty City’: Nationalist and Right-wing Attempts to Nationalize Budapest during the
Interwar Period,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 4 (2012): 709–33; Mary Gluck, The Invisible
Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016).
32
See “Alphabetical List of Fellows and Scholars,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, at
https://www.ushmm.org/research/competitive-academic-programs/fellows-and-scholars/fellows-and-
scholars-by-name.

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 REFLECTIONS, RECKONINGS, AND REVELATIONS 63
Jewish question, for example, and how Eastern Europe acted as an experimental field for
techniques later deployed in industrial killing centers throughout the region.33 Despite
Communist-era and contemporary efforts to manipulate the history of the Holocaust, schol-
ars based within and outside the region have asked provocative, insightful questions about
local complicity.34 Thoughtful explorations of fateful choices, as well as innovative studies
of Jewish resistance, have increasingly focused on lives lived in Eastern Europe.35 Probing
scholarship has examined Jewish survivors and Eastern European memories of the
Holocaust across time.36
Fields of inquiry—composed of predominant questions within Habsburg, Eastern
European, or German history—will no doubt continue to intermingle, just as colleagues
from different regions and continents have greater opportunities for cooperation. Scholars
of the former Habsburg lands and Eastern Europe might take a cue from their colleagues
in German history, where Anglo-American-German cooperation and exchange have been
especially robust in recent decades. Other models might be found in intraregional partner-
ships and collaborative research projects that bring together scholars exploring common
research questions.37 One would also do well to listen to and take inspiration from the ques-
tions and research agendas being pursued by scholars in post-Communist Europe. In-country
scholars have, for example, done much to invigorate the field of Jewish history in the
region.38 Other historians there are producing innovative studies of the transition from
Communism, with an eye on the challenges, corruption, and disappointments that

33
Christopher R. Browning, with Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi
Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). For another influ-
ential reinterpretation of the Holocaust that places the lands of Eastern Europe at the center of analysis, see
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
34
Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Joanna B. Michlic and Antony Polonsky, eds., The Neighbors Respond:
The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); John
Connelly, “Why the Poles Collaborated So Little—And Why That Is No Reason for Nationalist Hubris,”
Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 771–81; Benjamin Frommer, “Verfolgung durch die Presse: Wie Prager
Büroberater und die tschechische Polizei die Juden des Protektorats Böhmen und Mähren isolieren
halfen,” in Leben und Sterben im Schatten der Deportation. Der Alltag der jüdischen Bevölkerung im
Großdeutschen Reich 1941–1945, ed. Doris Bergen, Andrea Löw, and Anna Hájková (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 2013), 137–50; Diana Dumitru, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust:
The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See also
“Polish Law Denies Reality of the Holocaust,” The Guardian, Feb. 5, 2018 (www.theguardian.com/
world/2018/feb/05/polish-law-denies-reality-of-holocaust).
35
See, e.g., Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg
Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
36
Karen Auerbach, The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw after the Holocaust (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013); John-Paul Himka and Joanna Michlic, eds., Bringing the Dark Past to Light:
The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013); Luba
Hédlová and Radka Šustrová, eds., Česká pamět’. Národ, dějiny a místa paměti (Prague: Academia, 2014);
Laura Brade and Ruth Holmes, “Troublesome Sainthood: Nicholas Winton and the Contested History
of Child Rescue in Prague, 1938–1940,” History and Memory 29, no. 1 (2017): 3–40.
37
A number of crucial nodes for intraregional cooperation have emerged since 1989, such as the Visegrad
Fund, the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, the German Historical Institute Warsaw, the Center for
Urban History of East-Central Europe in Lviv, the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, and the European
University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder.
38
Kateřina Čapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (New York:
Berghahn, 2012); Michal Frankl, “Prag ist nunmehr antisemitisch.” Tschechischer Antisemitismus am Ende des

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 64 CHAD BRYANT

emerged after 1989.39 More must also be done to support graduate students in the wake of
Title VI funding cuts, and to provide speaking and publishing opportunities for scholars from
the region. US-based scholars of Habsburg, Eastern European, and German history have a
duty to support scholars in the region, including their colleagues at Central European
University in Budapest, as well as those who dare to work outside dominant national narra-
tives or refuse to follow research agendas set by powerful institutes of national memory.
We, the readers of and contributors to CEH, also have an opportunity to create some-
thing new—to help constitute Central European history as a field of inquiry defined by a
new set of predominant questions.40 These might probe phenomena that followed collapse,
rather than how and why regimes collapsed. Taking a cue from our colleagues in the
region, we are now, almost thirty years after the fall of Communism, well-positioned to
step into the post-1989 era. Questions first devised by social scientists might be reworked.
How might we understand the various political trajectories within the region, as well as
the region’s integration into the European Union? How have the transitions from
Communism been experienced and understood across the region? When did the post-
Communist period end—or do the echoes, legacies, and everyday patterns of existence of
the Communist period, e.g., in gender relations, continue to exert themselves? How
might we understand present-day migration to the region—and the oftentimes violent reac-
tions that it provokes—within the arc of Communist and post-Communist history? We
might also ask questions related to the emergence of states and societies from the collapse
of imperial Germany and the Habsburg monarchy, remembering that, for many regions
east of the Rhine, the violence and upheavals of war did not end in 1918.41 With this
larger context in mind, we might also reconsider why only one liberal democracy (barely)
remained in the region by 1938. Along similar lines, we might ask disturbing questions
that speak to our shared political moment: Can mass politics exist free of the politics of
hate? How can liberal democracies, for all their messiness, resist the temptation of orderly
authoritarianism? 42

19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Metropol, 2011); Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Antony Polonsky,
Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
39
Michal Kopeček and Piotr Wciślik, “Introduction: Towards an Intellectual History of Post-Socialism,”
in Thinking Through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central
Europe After 1989, ed. Michal Kopeček and Piotr Wciślik (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015), 1–38; Petr
Roubal, “Revolution by the Law: Transformation of the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly 1989–1990,”
Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino / Contributions to Contemporary History 55, no. 3 (2015): 60–68.
40
Here we might take inspiration from histories of twentieth-century Europe that have united both halves
of the continent within narratives that pursue a common set of questions regarding the rise and fall of non-
democratic ideologies, common efforts to recover from the destruction of World War II, or the various
forms of modernization at play across the continent. See, e.g., Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s
Twentieth Century (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1999); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
(New York: Penguin Press, 2005); Ian Kersaw, To Hell and Back, Europe 1914–1949 (New York: Viking,
2015); Konrad Hugo Jarausch, Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
41
Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Allen
Lane, 2016); Rudolf Kučera, “Exploiting Victory, Sinking into Defeat: Uniformed Violence in the
Creation of the New Order in Czechoslovakia and Austria, 1918–1922,” Journal of Modern History 88,
no. 4 (2016): 827–55.
42
For one contemporary effort to address a version of these questions, see Thomas Ort, Art and Life in
Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and His Generation, 1911–1938 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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 REFLECTIONS, RECKONINGS, AND REVELATIONS 65
Another set of questions might recast the study of nationalism in the region. What
explains the remarkable persistence of nationalism and the apparent need for national loyal-
ties? Here we might turn to the history of emotions to revisit questions first posed by Benedict
Anderson and trace out the various kinship and existential needs that “imagined” nations
fulfill.43 Can national loyalties and national thinking embrace difference while still providing
a sense of community, a sense of belonging? How might we imagine other, more just or
inclusive forms of community—and are such efforts practical? Here we might return to
the early nineteenth century, a time when intellectuals experimented with various national
visions, as well as with other visions of social organization, within the peculiar Central
European moment that followed the Napoleonic Wars.44 We might, recalling Kohn and
Gellner, listen to the echoes of the Prague Circle and their contemporaries elsewhere in
Central Europe, who struggled to create a sense of belonging amid national divisions and
rising xenophobia.45 These are all questions that concern historians of Germany and the
lands of post-Habsburg, post-Communist Europe. They are questions that scholars—as intel-
lectuals, citizens, and humanists—need to continue asking, as darker impulses threaten the
region and elsewhere. Unlike the various “grand” questions posed by our nineteenth-
century predecessors, they should possess an awareness that no definitive “solutions” or
“answers” can be found.46 Yet, these questions can inspire action in the United States and
Europe, while offering a better understanding of the past.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

43
Ute Frevert, ed., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling, 1700–2000
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015); Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2016).
44
Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988); Dominique Kirchner Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-
Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
These innovations and experimentations, which often involved everyday practices, were not restricted, of
course, to the intellectual classes. See, e.g., Robert Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Chad Bryant, “Strolling the Romantic City: Gardens,
Panoramas, and Middle-Class Elites in Early Nineteenth-Century Prague,” in Walking Histories,
1800–1914, ed. Chad Bryant, Arthur Burns, and Paul Readman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016),
57–86.
45
Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000); Gary B. Cohen, “Cultural Crossings in Prague, 1900: Scenes from Late
Imperial Austria,” AHY 45 (2014): 1–30. See also Ines Koeltzsch, Geteilte Kulturen. Eine Geschichte der tschechisch-
jüdisch-deutschen Beziehungen in Prag (1918–1938) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012).
46
Holly Case, “The ‘Social Question,’ 1820–1920,” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 3 (2016): 747–75.

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