Suggested themes for the Central European Studies Certificate
The Iron Curtain cut Europe into east and west for more than 40 years, with lasting implications for how many people continue to conceive of Europe. While 30 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of Europe’s reintegration, the old east-west division turns out to be surprisingly persistent in people’s minds. This Cold War perception, supported by a certain organizational inertia of regionally organized funding streams in American academia, obfuscates actual regional subdivisions in Europe. When the Cold War divided Europe into east and west, the division cut right through the well-established subregion of Central Europe. Central Europe, which until then was a designated space on geographic maps and in the imagination of many contemporaries, gradually disappeared, only to return after the end of the Cold War.
Central Europe roughly describes the geographic space from Germany’s western to Russia’s western border today, and from the Baltic coast in the north to the Aegean and Black Sea in the south. Into the twentieth century, the region was shaped by multinational empires and states like the Habsburg Monarchy, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire as well as Prussia, which as a component of the German Reich preserved elements of a pre-national political order into the twentieth century. Some of the nation states that succeeded the collapse of empires at the end of the First World War to a degree continued with the imperial tradition of multiethnicity to integrate their diverse populations. This is certainly true for Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, but also for interwar Poland and Romania, nation-states where every third citizen did not identify with the titular nation.
Due to the long history of imperial, multiethnic rule, Central Europe preserved its linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity longer than other parts of Europe, which saw an earlier arrival of the nation state with its homogenizing, centralizing political agenda. Until today, Central Europe is the European region with the greatest degree of ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. It is the place where not only the Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic languages meet and intersect but also Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Prior to the Holocaust, Central Europe was the region with the greatest concentration of Jews in the world. Until today, Jewish culture is inseparably linked to its Central European historical legacy. The same can be said about Sinti and Roma, for whom Central Europe continues to be the place with the greatest concentration of their people in the world.
All regions and places in the world made and make their contributions to the development of human society. And yet Central European societies showed a degree of intellectual and cultural creativity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that calls for explanations and makes the study of this region particularly worthwhile and fascinating. It suffices to point to Humboldt, Marx, Freud, Einstein, and Kafka, or to people like Rahel Varnhagen, Theodor Herzl, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Nikola Tesla, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Béla Bartók, Walter Gropius, Jože Plečnik, Joseph Conrad, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugène Ionesco to recall the fundamental contributions Central Europeans made to the intellectual development of the modern world. They were shaped by their Central European upbringing and the specific political, social, and intellectual traditions they encountered in this region.
However, Central Europe has not only been a space of enormous creativity. It was also the place of unprecedented destructiveness and violence in the twentieth century. The Holocaust, whose victims and perpetrators were to a significant degree Central Europeans, has become the symbol for the breakdown of human civilization and the dark side of modernity. The region’s destructive potential was not unleashed against the Jews alone. The murder of European Jews is embedded in a regional history of ethnically motivated mass violence during the twentieth century that began with the Balkan Wars of 1912/1913, culminated in mass murder, mass deportation, and expulsion during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Tellingly, both the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” were coined with these Central European experiences in mind.
Studying Central Europe means studying a region with a particularly rich, complex, and difficult history, one that has made highly significant contributions to our modern world, in good and bad ways. It is a region that is also closely tied to Pittsburgh’s own history. Nineteenth and twentieth-century Pittsburgh was a place largely settled by immigrants from Central Europe, be it Germans, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, or Croats. It is no coincidence that Czechoslovakia, a quintessential Central European state, was founded in Pittsburgh in 1918.
The Central European Certificate provides a framework for the exploration of Central Europe as a region with a specific cultural tradition, historical experience, and set of issues that determine current affairs. To capture this regional specificity, the certificate program is built around the principal themes explored below, which students may explore more systematically in their courses, term papers and senior theses.
Empire, borderland and diversity
Central Europe was shaped into the twentieth century by multiethnic empires (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, Danish Empire, Swedish Empire, Russian Empire, Habsburg Monarchy, Prussia). These empires developed specific forms of political rule to integrate ethnically diverse populations, to cope with the national aspirations of its citizens since the nineteenth century, and to promote a state culture and ideology that aimed at bridging differences and create cohesiveness. The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia continued this political tradition to the end of the twentieth century, when all three dissolved into their national components.
Central Europe’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity is a result of the long history of imperial rule, as opposed to western Europe, where the homogenizing effects of the nation state could be felt from the beginning of the nineteenth century. A result of Central Europe’s diversity and the region's constantly changing borders is the phenomenon of borderlands, i.e., transit zones, spaces-in-between, shaped by overlapping, sometimes conflicting, influences of empires and nation states, inhabited by people with multiple cultural and national orientations. Among Central Europe’s quintessential borderlands are regions like Silesia, Galicia, Bukovina, Bosnia, or Dobruja. To be sure, borderlands are not specific to Central Europe, but Central Europe is particularly rich in borderlands.
Studying Central Europe means exploring places with diverging, hybrid, or ambiguous cultural and political identifications and richly layered historical legacies. They may engage with concepts of political and cultural integration of diverse societies and territories, from the promotion of an ethnically disinterested state cult, as in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire, or the Habsburg Monarchy, to the ideas of the Austro-Marxists around 1900, who developed innovative and still relevant concepts of political integration of multinational societies, to the supranational integration of the European Union, which, as some scholars argue, is informed by the historical experience of the multiethnic empires. Students will also engage with the reflection of multiethnicity in the region’s cultural production, especially in literature and film.
Possible courses: Nationalism (HIST 1046), Imperial Russia (HIST 301), Soviet Russia (HIST 302), The Rise of the German Empire (HIST 1132), Between Empires: Polish History Through Film (HIST 1220); World War II in Europe (HIST 187)
Migration and the transformation of society
From the Middle Ages into the first decades of the nineteenth century, people from the western part of Central Europe tended to migrate eastward and southeastward if they ran out of arable land and searched for new opportunities in the less populated regions of Europe. Ever since, the eastward migration gave way to a westward and northwestward migration. Migrations transform societies by introducing new experiences, languages, religions, and cultural forms. They may be a source of cultural enrichment as well as ethnic conflict, of economic growth and modernization as well as distributive conflicts.
Migration had an enormous impact on the societies of Central Europe. In fact, Central Europe is hard to understand without exploring the history of migration and its effects. It suffices to point to the vibrant Jewish culture throughout the region as a result of the expulsion of Jews from western Europe and Germany in the Middle Ages and the relative tolerance they found in Poland-Lithuania, the emergence of a German culture in the region’s cities and a Polish aristocratic culture in the countryside, or the strong presence of Polish speakers in Germany since the industrialization of the nineteenth century. Migration is a critical factor in shaping Central European societies in past and present, and a particularly rich field of study.
Pitt students have the privilege that they can explore these questions not only by focusing on Central Europe (and ideally participate in one of the Study Abroad programs), but also by tracing Central Europe's rich legacy in Pittsburgh itself, a Central European microcosm on US soil. Who can illustrate this better than Pittsburgh’s maybe most famous son Andy Warhol, the son of Ukrainian-speaking Lemkos, who immigrated to the US from Slovakia (at the time a part of Hungary)? Without understanding these Central European complexities, it is impossible to understand Pittsburgh's migration history and the way it shapes the city's society and cultural landscape until today.
Possible courses: Minorities in Postwar Germany (GER); Comparative European History: Migration (HIST 1108)
Nationalism, mass violence and collective memory
No other region in Europe experienced a comparable degree of mass violence during the twentieth century as Central Europe. The region was a focal point of two world wars and a long and destructive civil war following the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the place most affected by Nazi Germany's war of conquest and extermination, with Jews, Slavs, and Sinti and Roma as the primary target of Germany's genocidal policy, and the Holocaust as the most known genocide in history. Nazi Germany encouraged and inspired genocidal violence also by others, such as the mass murder of Serbs and Jews by the Ustashe regime in Croatia, Polish assaults on Jews, or Ukrainian attacks on Poles in Volyhnia. At the end of WWII, Central Europe saw a new wave of forced resettlement, ethnic cleansing, and mass rape, this time with Germans as the primary target. This mass violence dramatically changed the ethnic composition of Central European societies. It also left deep scars and traumas that have been passed down through generations.
The ethnic violence in the region has many causes. One critical cause was the implementation of a nation state model based on ethnic nationalism in a region whose diverse societies made it even harder than elsewhere to draw ethnic borders. The creation of nation states in Central Europe almost always divided citizens into majority and minority populations, with the latter often exposed to a policy of assimilation, under the condition of war and the breakdown of civilizational standards, also of expulsion and genocide.
Studying this aspect of the region’s experience can take various forms. Students may study the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions that may lead to mass violence against national minorities. But they can also explore how Central European societies have dealt with these traumatic experiences, be it in the field of politics, public history, literature, theater, or film. The reflection of this region’s historical traumas in the collective memories of its societies, as victims and perpetrators, is a critical aspect of understanding Central Europe and the importance that vergangenheitsbewältigung (“working through the past”), politics of the past, and reconciliation have for this particular region.
Possible courses: Ethno-National Violence (ANTH); Violence, Tolerance, and Dominance in Shared Religious Sites (ANTH); Nationalism (HIST 1046); The Holocaust in Context (HIST 1048); After Hitler: Retribution, Reconstruction, Reconciliation (HIST 1049); Between Empires: Polish History Through Film (HIST 1220); Holocaust Literature and Film (GER); Art in the Third Reich and Memorializations of the Holocaust (HAA 1455)
Democracy, authoritarianism and contested culture in Central Europe
Central Europe was deeply affected by the clash of political ideologies during the “Age of Extremes” (Eric Hobsbawm). Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism competed against each other in Central Europe after 1918. Most Central European societies experienced more than one phase of authoritarian rule, with Nazism and Stalinism as the most extreme forms of authoritarianism.
Central European authoritarianism in the twentieth century not only inspired the theories of totalitarianism, developed to a significant degree by scholars coming from the region (Hannah Arendt, Carl Joachim Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzeziński, Carl Popper, etc.). It also produced the phenomenon of political dissent and resistance against authoritarian rule especially in those parts of Central Europe that experienced Soviet-style socialism, which generated innovative forms of political activism and cultural production under the conditions of state censorship.
The awareness of a possible regression into authoritarian rule is omnipresent in current Central European political culture. At the same time, the commemoration of the legacy of authoritarianism remains a deeply contested field. Political figures like Rosa Luxemburg, Josip Tito, Roman Dmowski, or Stepan Bandera can be associated with the fight for or against democracy and freedom, depending on one’s political standpoint. Understanding the intricacies of this part of Central Europe’s legacy and how it informs current political debates is part of studying the region’s political culture.
Possible courses: Nazi Culture (GER); Peace/Miliarism in German culture (GER); Green Germany (GER); Marx and Marxism (GER); From Marxist Thought to ‘Really Existing Socialism’ (HIST 1047); Soviet Russia (HIST 302); Between Empires: Polish History Through Film (HIST 1220); Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (HAA 1450); Berlin: A Divided City (GER)
Central Europe’s reintegration after the Cold War
When the Iron Curtain disappeared in 1990, the borders between the capitalist nations of the west and the post socialist ones of the east marked one of the world’s sharpest economic divisions. 30 years later, income disparities between the regions to the west and the east of the former Iron Curtain continue to be significant, despite the eastward enlargement of the European Union and the enormous investments into the infrastructure of its new member states. Lately, it also seems as if the political division lines between east and west have deepened again with the popularity of nationalism and “illiberal democracy” in some post socialist countries.
While the success of Europe’s postwar economic, political, and cultural integration is overall impressive, the economic and psychological challenges of reuniting the continent after the Cold War division proved larger than anticipated. Nowhere else can the complex social, economic, and cultural reintegration of Europe be studied so well as in Central Europe, the region for two generations having been defined by the Iron Curtain that cut it in two. Central Europe provides critical insights into the complexities of economic and political transformation processes as experienced after 1989. The picture that emerged is not uniform: high economic growth rates in some places, and stagnation in others; functioning parliamentary democracies here and oligarchies there, Euro-enthusiasm and Euroscepticism, and sometimes also the combination of economic success and illiberal democracy.
Possible courses: European Identity between History and European Cultural Policy (GER); After Hitler: Retribution, Reconstruction, Retribution in Postwar Europe (HIST 1049); Germany Today (GER)
“Central Europa”, “Mitteleuropa”, “East Central Europe”: The politics of geographic labels
“Central Europe” is not a self-evident and uncontested geographical label. The concept came into widespread use around 1900, when German geographers and geopoliticians introduced the label to define a predominantly German cultural space in Europe, distinguished from France and Britain in the west and Russia in the east. Central Europe stood for the geographic space defined by Germany and Austria-Hungary. Ever since the German politician Friedrich Naumann published his bestseller Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) in 1915, it was also associated with the idea of a German-led empire from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. In the mid-twentieth century, the Polish American historian Oscar Halecki challenged the exclusive association of “Central Europe” with the Germans. He introduced "East Central Europe" as a separate geographic space for the non-German, mostly Slavic nations of Central Europe.
With the Cold War and Europe’s division into east and west, “Central Europe” largely disappeared as a meaningful geographical concept. But it resurfaced toward the end of the Cold War, when the Czech novelist Milan Kundera triggered the Central Europe Debate with his famous essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1983). Kundera argued for the essentially occidental, non-Russian nature of the space Halecki had defined as East Central Europe. But he also delivered a catchword that German and Austrian intellectuals picked up in their search for a spatial legacy beyond Europe's east-west division. In the 2000s, leading Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian politicians and intellectuals used the concept “Central Europe” to distance their countries from the allegedly backward and authoritarian traditions of “the East” by emphasizing their historical and cultural connections to the countries and societies of “the West,” in this way externalizing communism and denying the indigenous roots of authoritarianism. Studying Central Europe means to be mindful of these politics of space and the strategies of “Othering” that often informs geographic labels such as “Central Europe.” It can also include studying the fascinating mental mapping processes in Central Europe.
Possible courses: HIST 0200 Between Hitler and Kafka: How Central Europe Shaped the Modern World (Core course); Cultures and Societies of Eastern Europe (ANTH)