The nations of Central and Eastern Europe experienced a time of momentous change in the period following the Second World War. The vast majority were subject to Communism and central planning while events such as the Hungarian uprising and Prague Spring stood out as key watershed moments against a distinct social, cultural and political backcloth. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification and the break-up of the Soviet Union, changes from the 1990s onwards have also been momentous with countries adjusting to various capitalist realities. The volumes in this series will help shine a light on the experiences of this key geopolitical zone with many lessons to be learned for the future.
By Tibor Valuch
September 06, 2024
This book examines social change in Hungary, commencing with the period of late-stage socialism, the country’s immediate post-communist transition, its subsequent consolidation and the emergence of authoritarian leadership since 2010. The volume seeks to employ a longitudinal and comparative ...
By Iva Jelušić
September 01, 2024
This book analyzes how the cultural memory of women’s participation in the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle (1941–1945), especially female soldiers, was treated in socialist Yugoslavia’s popular printed press, and how it contributed to the creation of the figure of the Yugoslav New Woman. By ...
Edited
By Julie Deschepper, Antony Kalashnikov, Federica Rossi
July 05, 2024
This edited volume offers a unique exploration into the ways in which Soviet culture and experience of time was unique, examining the temporalities expressed in the world of socialist things: from the objects of everyday life to urban architecture. Grounding the analysis of Soviet ...
By Aleksandra Konarzewska
June 12, 2024
This book is a short introduction to Witold Gombrowicz’s life and work as one of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century literature and theatre, providing intertextual perspectives that allow readers to analyze his short stories, plays, and novels in broad contexts. Gombrowicz (1904-1969) ...
By Barbora Buzássyová
June 03, 2024
This book analyses the shifting patterns of Czechoslovak educational aid programmes for sub-Saharan African countries within the broader framework of the global debates on the nature of development aid in education discussed on the UNESCO grounds during the three “development decades.” Starting in ...
Edited
By Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, Joachim von Puttkamer, Immo Rebitschek
May 27, 2024
The field of biopolitics encompasses issues from health and hygiene, birth rates, fertility and sexuality, life expectancy and demography to eugenics and racial regimes. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive view on these issues for Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. ...
By Małgorzata Hanzl
May 27, 2024
Across a range of disciplines, urban morphology has offered lenses through which we can read the city. Reading the urban form, when conflated with ethnographic studies, enables us to return to past situations and recreate the long-gone everyday life. Urbanscapes – the artefacts of urban life – have...
By Przemysław Strożek
May 27, 2024
This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin. During the 1920s ...
By Dennis Deletant
May 27, 2024
This study challenges the rose-tinted view of the interwar period in Romanian history, which is often judged against the darkness of almost five decades of Communist rule. Romania, like several of the states of Eastern Europe, emerged from the First World War as it had entered it, as a ...
By Andriy Zayarnyuk, Ostap Sereda
May 27, 2024
This is the first synthetic book-length study in English of the Ukrainian nation-building during the "long" nineteenth century. The narrative follows the evolution of the Ukrainian intellectuals and their ideas from the Age of Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century and to the era of ...
By Mariusz Mazur
May 27, 2024
This book is the first study of the mentality of anti-Communist underground fighters and presents, especially, their thinking, ideals, stereotypes and customs. The models and psychological processes that the volume analyses are relevant not only to the Polish partisans, but also to members of other...
By David A. Norris
March 05, 2024
This volume focuses on Serbia’s need to manage change while preserving community identities, a narrative that avoids the common depiction of Serbian culture as a hostile struggle between modernizers supporting foreign models and traditionalists advocating forms of national cultural patrimony. ...