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

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

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

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

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

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

Commentary: In Step with the Times: A Slovak Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of Communist Rule in East-Central Europe: A Four-Country Comparison

1991 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Batt
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Radical Reform ◽  
Country Comparison ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Systemic Crisis ◽  
East German

This article compares the patterns of breakdown of communist rule and the processes by which power was transferred to new ruling groups in four countries: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the GDR. In the countries covered in this paper, two paths to systemic crisis and breakdown are identified: the path of failed reform in Hungary and Poland, and the path of intransigent resistance to reform in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. The lesson of the Czechoslovak and East German experience was clearly that those regimes which totally rejected reform, because they saw it as incompatible with communist power, faced total and rapid collapse when confronted with the challenge of Gorbachev's perestroika and when deprived of the support of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’; but the experience of Poland and Hungary suggests that those regimes which embarked on reform were no more successful in preserving communist power — half-way reform turned out in many ways to be even worse than no reform at all, while radical reform, that is, reform which would bring about the intended economic results, in the end could not be achieved without sweeping away communist power. Gorbachev himself now seems to be impaled on the horns of this same dilemma in the Soviet Union.

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