Migrating Memories

Romanian Germans, mainly from the Banat and Transylvania, have occupied a place at the very heart of major events in Europe in the twentieth century yet their history is largely unknown. This east-central European minority negotiated their standing in a difficult new European order after 1918, changing from uneasy supporters of Romania, to zealous Nazis, tepid Communists, and conciliatory Europeans. Migrating Memories is the first comprehensive study in English of Romanian Germans and follows their stories as they move across borders and between regimes, revealing a very European experience of migration, minorities, and memories in modern Europe. After 1945, Romanian Germans struggled to make sense of their lives during the Cold War at a time when the community began to fracture and fragment. The Revolutions of 1989 seemed to mark the end of the German community in Romania, but instead Romanian Germans repositioned themselves as transnational European bridge-builders, staking out new claims in a fast-changing world.

Travel Writing, Literature, and Romance: Polixéna Wesselényi’s Travels in Italy and Switzerland

Polixéna Wesselényi’s Travels in Italy and Switzerland, the first travel narrative that was written by a woman in Hungary and Transylvania, is a work little known to the wider international public, as it was published in Hungarian in 1842, seven years after her tour. There are few travel narratives written by East-Central European women in the first half of the nineteenth century. This essay attempts to reflect upon Wesselényi’s personal motives, her intellect and literary craftsmanship, as well as the cultural constraints she had to encounter. The romantic nature of the relationship between Wesselényi, a married woman, and the fellow travel writer John Paget, is also mirrored by the text. Travels in Italy and Switzerland not only offers an insight into the relatively favourable situation of Transylvanian women of the aristocracy in the 1830s but also shows that it had the power to inspire the works of celebrated Hungarian novelists after its publication. Although Wesselényi’s style conforms to the picturesque and sentimental travel writing published by European women in the period, it justly demands a place for itself on the list of distinguished nineteenth-century European travel writing by women.

Studenci w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej: symetria czy asymetria planów życiowych? Studium przypadku Polski i Ukrainy

The article makes an attempt to analyse scope and timing prospects of students’ life goals in two East-Central European countries – Poland and Ukraine. These two countries were under similar socio-economic circumstances in the last decade of the past century, but nowadays the situation is totally different. The study was conducted in November and December 2019 using the authors’ survey questionnaire carried out on the sample of 658 university students from Lublin and Kyiv. Our research showed that symmetry in students’ life goals primarily occurred in the scope of goals and values, with a greater focus on family in the case of Ukrainian students and on material goods and business activity for Polish students. Asymmetry was observed in the term of planned implementation of particular life goals: Ukrainian students expected stabilisation based on family, children, and apartment ownership within 5 years from graduation and Polish students expected such stabilisation within 10 years after graduation. Moreover, more optimistic expectations for the future were observed in the case of Ukrainian students.

The National Mission

The chapter analyses Zionist reactions to the outbreak of the First World War throughout the region. The war challenged traditional strategies and represented a severe crisis, both for the international Zionist movement, which fell apart and took new shape, and for local branches, drained of many of their members who were now in uniform. Zionists had vastly differing expectations of the war, which changed as the front moved eastwards and the Central Powers conquered much of Poland and the Baltic. As part of this German conquest of the East, several German Zionist activists travelled the region and tried to establish themselves as a leading force amongst East European Jewry. Their perception and representation of East European Jewry related to the type of nation-building they wanted to implement there. This project, which was fundamentally a ‘civilizing mission’, played out differently in the varying German occupation regimes of the Generalgouvernement Warschau and Ober Ost, and had profound impacts on local communities and activists, as well as on subsequent events. The chapter details the specific impact of the war on East-Central European Jewish societies, analysing the different occupation regimes and their diverse policies towards the Jewish population. It also demonstrates how Zionist concepts of nation, civilization, and modernity were adapted to local conditions and the immediate struggle for survival.

Między zachodnim kolonializmem a wschodnim imperializmem. Dyskurs postkolonialny a trajektoria rozwojowa społeczeństw Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej w świetle nie-Marksowskiego materializmu historycznego

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a problem of applicability of postcolonial studies/postcolonial perspective to history of Polish society and wider — East Central Europe, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the first part, the main standpoints in Polish discussion are identified and the certain attempt of an application of categories of postcolonial studies are critically analyzed and discussed. Furthermore, in part two, the typology of social dominations (political, economic and cultural and variants of external subordinations) based on non-Marxian historical materialism is constructed in order in the chapter fourth to interpret the developmental trajectory of East-Central European societies. In the light of the presented interpretation, the ‘resolving ability’ of postcolonial perspective is too weak to be applied without essential modification to the history of societies living in this region of Europe, where the mosaic of different configurations of class domination shaped and evolved.

Vera Bácskai and her significance in the development of European urban history: a personal account

This account of Vera Bacskai's contribution to European urban history after 1990 is a personal narrative, written by a friend and collaborator. It argues that her role was multi-dimensional. It was founded on her major publications on Budapest and small towns, shedding a crucial East Central European light on European urbanization. It was underpinned by her participation in various international projects like the EU TEMPUS programme which created strong institutional bonds with Western universities as well as opportunities for Hungarian students through exchange programmes, international workshops and the like. Not least, she was a strong pillar in the construction of the European Association for Urban History. When she joined the committee in 1991, it was still an embryonic body. In 1996, she organized the successful and important Budapest conference. When she retired from EAUH in 2004, its conferences were attracting many hundreds of researchers, from across Europe and beyond.