Borderland of the Mind: The Free City of Danzig and the Sovereignty Question

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Clark
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
Free City Of Danzig ◽  
The Mind

The transformation of the Free City of Danzig after World War I both exemplified and contradicted the interwar borderland experience in Central Europe. Although Danzig was linked closely to the Second Polish Republic, cultural and diplomatic challenges to the city’s status played out in Berlin and Geneva. The vocabulary of sovereignty and reconciliation became a battleground between German nationalists and center-left politicians. This article analyzes diplomatic correspondence and propaganda pamphlets to argue that regions and cities become a metaphor for broader questions and concludes that borderlands, however permanent on the maps of treaty negotiators, are largely in the mind.

Jews in German Society: Prague, 1860–1914

1977 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary B. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
German Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Liberal Culture ◽  
Fertile Area

The development of social interaction between Jews and Gentiles offers a fertile area of research to historians of modern Central Europe. Examining the place of Jews in Gentile society, of course, furthers understanding of both the proponents and victims of political anti-Semitism. Yet such study is also needed to deepen our knowledge of the values and social structures that characterized German and Austrian liberal society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Too often in recent years historians have studied Central Europe in the half century before World War I merely to seek the roots of the traumatic events of the 1930s and 1940s. Consequently, the rise of the radical right and left has been examined in some detail, and historians have generally emphasized the fragility of liberal culture. One tends to assume that in the late nineteenth century few among the Central European middle classes took liberalism seriously enough to accept extensive or sustained Jewish participation in Gentile society, but in fact little systematic work has been done on the actual social relations between Jews and Gentiles.

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.

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.

The Making of a Slovak City: The Czechoslovak Renaming of Pressburg/Pozsony/Prešporok, 1918–19

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 205-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Bugge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Slovak Republic ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Future State ◽  
The Future ◽  
The City

Any modern atlas or encyclopedia will inform us that Bratislava is the capital of the Slovak Republic, the center of Slovak political and cultural life. But before World War I—or even toward the end of it in 1918—it was far from clear that the city could or should be defined as “Slovak,” to say nothing of a “Slovak capital”; that it was to belong to the future state of Czechoslovakia; or that it was to be called Bratislava. This essay will describe the processes that led to these outcomes, and how a name shift became a crucial instrument in the “Slovakization” of the city. In focusing also on the ways local and central actors responded to these political and symbolic transformations, I hope to shed new light on the complexity of collective identifications and allegiances, and on the significance of renaming as a catalyst for processes of nationalization in Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The Internment Camp at Terezín, 1919

1996 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 199-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Huebner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
World War ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Internment Camp ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
First Republic

Although the fortress at Terezín attained a dubious international distinction during World War II as the Nazi concentration camp. Theresienstadt, it already possessed a gloomy history as a place of imprisonment, having held Austrian political offenders since the first half of the nineteenth century. Gavrilo Princip had been confined there along with his fellow conspirators after assassinating Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo; the young man ultimately died in the garrison hospital. During World War I, Terezín became the largest prisoner-of-war camp in Bohemia, housing its mostly Russian prisoners in makeshift subcamps scattered outside the fortress. In 1919 the new Czechoslovak state employed some of these same facilities to intern various “suspicious elements” from Slovakia. Unfortunately the zeal with which the authorities took people into custody produced a flood of internees for which Terezín was ill prepared, and conditions in the debilitated Austrian camp soon threatened to provoke a public scandal. The circumstances of this rather unpleasant episode provide a revealing—though ambiguous—glimpse of the sterner side of the Czechoslovak First Republic, and by extension, post-Habsburg Central Europe.

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