National Identities for Export: East European Cultural Diplomacy in Inter-War Pittsburgh

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZSOLT NAGY
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
National Identities ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
University Of Pittsburgh ◽  
East European ◽  
National Image ◽  
The University ◽  
East Central European

AbstractThis article examines inter-war east-central European cultural diplomacy as played out in one apparently remote locale: the Nationality Rooms of the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. Here, a local project originally intended to pay homage to the various immigrants of the Steel City was transformed into a transatlantic project in which the Czechoslovak, Hungarian and Romanian governments (among others) each aimed to construct and propagate a national image abroad. A close looks at this particular ‘transnational construction site’ reveals a surprisingly complex entanglement of cultural production, the construction of national identities, and foreign policy. Battles over space and artistic content also lay bare the sense of competition, urgency and anxiety that, this article argues, characterised inter-war cultural diplomacy in east-central Europe.

The Jews and Nationality Conflicts in the Habsburg Lands

1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
Robert S. Wistrich
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Milan Kundera ◽  
World War ◽  
Color Tone ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past

There have been few areas of the world during the past 150 years that have been as shaped by Jewish influences as East Central Europe. The prominent Czech writer Milan Kundera observed seven years ago that in the years before Hitler, the Jews were the “intellectual cement,” the essentially cosmopolitan and integrative element that forged the spiritual unit of this region. It was this small nation par excellence which added the quintessentially European color, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, not to mention Cracow, Lemberg and Czernowitz further to the east. The Nazi mass murder of the Jews, to which Stalin added his own macabre postscript after World War II, brought about the disappearance of this fructifying Jewish leaven and crushed for forty years the independence of the smaller East European nations sandwiched between Russia and Germany. Since the European revolutions of 1989, these nations, re-emerging from a semi-totalitarian deep freeze, have been recovering their national identities and historical roots long repressed under Communist rule.

scholarly journals East-Central Europe in the Writing of James Clarence Mangan

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-26
Author(s):  
Sinéad Sturgeon
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Central European ◽  
East European ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The One ◽  
East Central European

Abstract This study explores the significance of East-Central Europe in a range of James Clarence Mangan’s poetry and prose from 1838–1847, focusing particularly on his depiction of Biedermeier Vienna (in the short story “The Man in the Cloak”), revolutionary uprisings in Poland and Albania (in the poems “Siberia” and “Song of the Albanian”), and his translations from the work of Bohemian-born Viennese poet Joseph Christian Freiherr von Zedlitz (1790–1862). I argue that Mangan’s interest in this region is twofold. On the one hand, it stems from the amenability of East-Central European culture and writing to the themes and tropes of the gothic, a genre central to Mangan’s imagination; on the other, from an underlying affinity in the historical position of the Irish and East-European poet in negotiating complex and contested politics of identity. While Mangan is a poet keenly conscious of “the importance of elsewhere,” and closely engaged in contemporary continental politics, I suggest that these European elsewheres also function as Foucauldian heterotopias, mythopoetic mirrors that enable the poet both to participate in Irish cultural nationalism and to register his dissent and distance from it.

scholarly journals CITIES AS CENTRES OF CREATIVITY IN THE EAST-CENTRAL EUROPEAN NATION BUILDING

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Béla Mester
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Public Philosophy ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Public ◽  
Hungarian Case ◽  
East Central European

This paper offers an overview of the philosophical reflections for the change of structure of the scholar public sphere in the 18th and 19th centuries, focussed on the Hungarian examples, with the idea of urbanity in the centre. After the overview of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Kantian and Herderian approaches, it will be discussed the Hungarian case, within and after the controversy on Immanuel Kant (1792–1822). The topic of urbanitas was often touched both as an ideal-typical environment of the philosophical activity, and the real environment of the authors under conditions of an industrialised machinery of the cultural production. The next topic is the specific features of the same turn of the structure of the scholar communication in East-Central Europe, where the change of the languages of the publications has characteristic consequences and the gap between the spheres of the school philosophy and the public philosophy was deeper. The features of the specialities of the philosophies of East-Central Europe in their self-understanding within the new context after the communicational turn is the last topic, focussed on the Hungarian case, especially on the usage of the concept of urbanity in the Hungarian creative discourse about the public philosophy, and national philosophy.

scholarly journals John Connelly's Long March through East European History

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Gary B. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
East Central ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

John Connelly, a member of the history faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, for the last quarter century, has produced what will surely stand as a landmark among grand syntheses on the modern history of Eastern Europe. The book title uses the geographical designation favored during the Cold War, but the subject is more precisely East Central Europe, a term that Connelly uses interchangeably with Eastern Europe to designate the lands lying between Germany and Austria in the west and the former components of the Soviet Union to the east.

Considering the Sub-Regional Cooperation in East-Central Europe – Some Conclusions on Integrating and Disintegrating Tendencies in the Sub-Regional Dialogue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacek Wieclawski
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Regional Cooperation ◽  
The European Union ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Ukrainian Crisis ◽  
Regional Interests ◽  
Visegrad Group ◽  
East Central European

This article discusses the problems of the sub-regional cooperation in East-Central Europe. It formulates the general conclusions and examines the specific case of the Visegrad Group as the most advanced example of this cooperation. The article identifies the integrating and disintegrating tendencies that have so far accompanied the sub-regional dialogue in East-Central Europe. Yet it claims that the disintegrating impulses prevail over the integrating impulses. EastCentral Europe remains diversified and it has not developed a single platform of the sub-regional dialogue. The common experience of the communist period gives way to the growing difference of the sub-regional interests and the ability of the East-Central European members to coordinate their positions in the European Union is limited. The Visegrad Group is no exception in this regard despite its rich agenda of social and cultural contacts. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict confirms a deep divergence of interests among the Visegrad states that seems more important for the future of the Visegrad cooperation than the recent attempts to mark the Visegrad unity in the European refugee crisis. Finally, the Ukrainian crisis and the strengthening of the NATO’s “Eastern flank” may contribute to some new ideas of the sub-regional cooperation in East-Central Europe, to include the Polish-Baltic rapprochement or the closer dialogue between Poland and Romania. Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v10i1.251  

scholarly journals Preface: The Historical Geography of the Hungarian Nation

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past ◽  
French And English ◽  
The Subject

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”

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