A new masterpiece by the brilliant feuilletonist Jutta Voigt: clever and entertaining, she tells of the longing for a different life in the GDR. Artists, bohemians, those who failed in the face of real socialism - they all sought the right existence outside the control of the wrong system. At the center of Jutta Voigt's new book is a bohemian who pursued a fundamental interest: the other life....

Exile under palm trees. For centuries, the Cote d'Azur has been a magnet of longing for German writers and painters. Until 1933. After that, the coast with its poetic patina became the refuge of many German artists, and Sanary-sur-Mer became the spiritual center of emigration. Thomas Mann lived here, as did Lion Feuchtwanger, Ludwig Marcuse, Franz Werfel and Bruno Frank. Many artists who had...

August 1939. Shimmering heat in Central Europe. The grain is mowed. Holiday season. It might be carefree days, but there's something disturbing in the air. Some say a new war is imminent. The others swear the peace is safe. In this restless August, the world is watching the Obersalzberg. Adolf Hitler spends his summer here. From here he dares a risky game. Hauke Friederichs tells the story of...

Dietmar Schultke's meticulously researched depiction of the inner-German border and the Berlin Wall contains all relevant information about the bulwark between the two German states, which has been developed into a perfect barrier belt, and the GDR border regime, a time table and selected orders to the border troops of the GDR.

After the entry of the Red Army into Czechoslovak territory in 1945, Red Army authorities began to arrest and deport Czechoslovak citizens to labor camps in the Soviet Union. The regions most affected were Eastern and South Slovakia and Prague. The Czechoslovak authorities repeatedly requested a halt to the deportations and that the deported Czechoslovaks be returned immediately. It took a long...

The edited volume deals with the expansion and institutionalization of intellectual property norms in the twentieth century, with a European focus. Its thirteen chapters revolve around the transfer, adaptation and the ambivalence of legal transplants in the interface between national and international projects, trends and contexts. The first part discusses the institutionalization of copyright...

After the shock of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which Hungarians perceived as an unfair dictate, the leaders of the country found it imperative to change Hungary’s international image in a way that would help the revision of the post-World War I settlement. The monograph examines the development of interwar Hungarian cultural diplomacy in three areas: universities, the tourist industry, and the...

This book offers a detailed analysis of the construction, reception and eventual decline of the cult of the Hungarian Communist Party Secretary, Mátyás Rákosi, one of the most striking examples of orchestrated adulation in the Soviet bloc. While his cult never approached the magnitude of that of Stalin, Rákosi’s ambition to outshine the other “best disciples” and become the best of the best was...

Twenty years in the making, this collection presents 122 top-level Soviet, European and American records on the superpowers’ role in the annus mirabilis of 1989. Consisting of Politburo minutes; diary entries from Gorbachev’s senior aide, Anatoly Chernyaev; meeting notes and private communications of Gorbachev with George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand; and...

In an innovative effort to situate Baltic testimonies to the Gulag in the broader international context of research on displacement and memory, scholars from the Baltic States, Western Europe, Canada, and the United States seek answers to the following questions: Do different groups of deportees experience deportation differently? How do the accounts of women, children and men differ in their...

This book covers the full story of the Ustasha, a fascist movement in Croatia, from its historic roots to its downfall. The authors address key questions: In what international context did Ustasha terrorism grow and develop? How did this movement rise to power, and then exterminate hundreds of thousands of innocents? Who was Ante Pavelic, its leader? Was he a shrewd politician, able to exploit...

The collection of well-researched essays assesses the uses and misuses of history 25 years after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. As opposed to the revival of national histories that seemed to be the prevailing historiographical approach of the 1990s, the last decade has seen a particular set of narratives equating Nazism and Communism. This provides opportunities to exonerate...