Teaching & Learning Guide for: Looking East: East Central European ‘Borderlands’ in German History and Historiography
Authors: Zahra Tara 
Published: June 2007

Focus Questions

How does the history of East Central European borderlands complicate traditional links (in both scholarship and politics) between nationality, ethnicity, language, and citizenship?

Historians, as the article suggests, are increasingly interested in ‘transnational’ history, or histories which seem to transcend national borders and nationalist frameworks. In the case of German history, does this trend seem more likely to ‘normalize’ Germany’s past, downplaying the role of the Holocaust, or to emphasize so‐called German ‘peculiarities’ or ‘pathologies’?

Author Recommends

* Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

This collection of theoretical essays suggests some of the dangers of what Brubaker calls ‘groupism’ in the social sciences‐assuming that historical subjects belonged to collectives they would not necessarily have identified with themselves.

* Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

A study of the relationships and intersections between local, imperial, and national loyalties in one Bohemian town between 1848–1948. King challenges many traditional assumptions about the development of nationalist politics in East Central Europe, particularly the idea that ‘ethnicities’ came before ‘nations.’ He shows how national affiliation in the Bohemian Lands typically reflected political choices rather than pre‐existing ethnic or cultural differences. Also excellent as a general narrative of East Central European political history in the 19th and 20th centuries.

* Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontier of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Judson’s study of nationalist activism on the so‐called ‘language frontiers’ of East Central Europe offers a challenge to traditional accounts of East Central European history as a story of escalating nationalist conflict which culminated in ethnic cleansing. This book focuses on the failures and frustrations of nationalist activists as they mobilized to make loyal nationalist activists out of local populations which were often bilingual, nationally ambivalent, or completely indifferent to nationalism.

* Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

This collection of essays situates American history in a global or transnational context. It includes both theoretical reflections on the value of transnational or global history and examples of what such a history might look like in practice.

Online Materials

1. Integrated History

http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/europe/integrated_history/contact.asp

An online archive of primary sources on the history of East‐Central Europe for educators, students, and scholars.

2. American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/absees/

Searchable bibliography of academic works published on Eastern Europe since 1990.