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More than twenty years have passed since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic country that did not establish nation-states like most of Europe but opted for a confederation. In the 1990s, when the European Union was consolidating and expanding, Yugoslavia was fast dissolving. Scholarship treating the disintegration of Yugoslavia has overlooked the cultural dimension of its collapse. This volume fills that gap by bringing together leading writers and scholars to focus specifically on the dynamics of post-Yugoslav cultural transition. The authors touch upon the topic of dissolution of the common state but move beyond it to consider consequences and repercussions in various cultural fields. Together, the contributions show that while the country has ceased to exist as a political project, it lives on in the individual and collective memory, in a variety of cultural practices, and as a potent legacy.

This book tells the story of eight men and women with deep roots in provincial Hungary. "Hungary" before the First World War meant the eastern half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the second largest state in Europe after Russia. Hungary then was as large as Italy and more populous than Spain. Another Hungary lingers in prewar Hungary's small towns and studies their inhabitants, asking how they earned a living, what they thought about politics, and how they got along with their neighbors, including those who might speak a different language or practice a religion different from their own. This book argues that the history of small towns in Eastern Europe matters. They were not just a dull reflection of the capital city or of western Europe, but interesting and important in their own right. They mattered economically, they mattered culturally, and they mattered politically; their history deserves our attention. Each of the book's eight chapters examines someone born in a small town but eager to act upon a wider stage. They include a garrulous aristocrat, a misunderstood merchant, a tobacco enthusiast, and other figures from the nineteenth-century provinces. One of the central premises of this book is that surprising, interesting, and valuable ideas can sometimes emerge from the most unlikely of places.

This book focuses on the first fifty years of the Ligue des droits de l'homme—the League of the Rights of Man—informed by the recently available archives of the organization. Founded during the Dreyfus affair, the Ligue took as its mandate the defense of human rights in all their forms. The central argument of this book—and the point on which it differs from all other writings on the subject—is that the Ligue often failed to live up to its mandate because of its simultaneous commitment to left-wing politics. By the late 1930s the Ligue was in disarray, and by the 1940s a number of its members opted to defend the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain.

The Transylvanian Question—the struggle between Hungary and Romania for control of Transylvania—seems at first sight a side-show in the story of the Nazi New Order and the Second World War. These two allies of the Third Reich spent much of the war arguing bitterly among themselves over Transylvania's future; Europe's leaders, Germany and Italy, were drawn into their dispute to prevent it from spiraling into a regional war. But precisely as a result of this interaction, the story of the Transylvanian Question offers a new way into the history of the European idea—how state leaders and national elites have interpreted what “Europe” means and what it does. For tucked into the folds of the Transylvanian Question's bizarre genealogy is a secret that no one ever tried to keep, but that has remained a secret nonetheless: small states matter. The perspective of small states puts the struggle for mastery among its Great Powers into a new and perhaps chastening perspective. In short, when we look closely at what people in small states think and how they behave, the history of twentieth-century Europe looks suddenly very different.

This book tells the story of French statues and monuments that were melted down and shipped to Nazi munitions factories during the Second World War. Beginning with the economic context that led to the destruction of public art, the book goes on to detail the process by which monuments were removed and destroyed and the metal sent to Germany for Hitler's war machine. The most remarkable part of the story is the reaction of the French public to the loss of its artwork. People protested all over France, and many communities took extraordinary measures to save their statues. This protest, and the way the collaborationist Vichy government handled it, sheds light on the complexities of life in wartime France.

This book explores the fate of art and cultural heritage during the Nazi occupation of France. The French cultural patrimony was a crucial locus of power struggles between German and French leaders and among influential figures in each country. The book examines the preservation policy that the Vichy regime enacted in an assertion of sovereignty over French art museums, historic monuments, and archeological sites. The limits to this sovereignty are apparent from German appropriations of public statues, Jewish-owned art collections, and key “Germanic” works of art from French museums. A final chapter traces the lasting impact of the French wartime reforms on preservation policy. The book introduces the concept of patrimania to reveal examples of opportunism in art preservation. During the war, French officials sought to acquire coveted artwork from Jewish collections for the Louvre and other museums; in the early postwar years, they established a complicated guardianship over unclaimed art recovered from Germany. A cautionary tale for our own times, this book examines the ethical dimensions of museum acquisitions in the ongoing noble quest to preserve great works of art.

This book follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. The book asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. It challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East–West relations. Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. The book draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.

This book tells the story of the origins and shared history of representative and democratic institutions in central Europe—a history that has been largely erased by the nation-state-centered histories which have dominated European historiography after 1918. This is a political history of constitution making and state building in one of the most complex polities that modern European history has known, the Habsburg monarchy. The book specifically aims at looking at how the Habsburg state was built, how its political institutions developed, and how the imperial bureaucracy—normally regarded as an absolutist organization—participated and even led this process. The imperial administration fostered and developed first representative institutions and then democratic ones over the course of the nineteenth century. By engaging in state building through the channeling of public participation in governance, the Habsburg state administration not only built the foundations of democratic practice and liberal citizenship in much of central Europe, but it—in the process—attempted to retool itself to accommodate popular participation in policy making. The book is clearly a revisionist work. It argues for seeing the ways in which the Habsburg state actively developed a vibrant political culture through political practice and representative institutions.

Eugénie Luce was a French schoolteacher who fled her husband and abandoned her family, migrating to Algeria in the early 1830s. By the mid-1840s she had become a major figure in debates around educational policies, insisting that women were a critical dimension of the French effort to effect a fusion of the races. To aid this fusion, she founded the first French school for Muslim girls in Algiers in 1845, which thrived until authorities cut off her funding in 1861. At this point, she switched from teaching spelling, grammar, and sewing, to embroidery—an endeavor that attracted the attention of prominent British feminists and gave her school a celebrated reputation for generations. The portrait of this remarkable woman reveals the role of women and girls in the imperial projects of the time and sheds light on why they have disappeared from the historical record since then.

Genocide in the Carpathians presents the history of Subcarpathian Rus', a multiethnic and multireligious borderland in the heart of Europe. This society of Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, Magyars, and Roma disintegrated under pressure of state building in interwar Czechoslovakia and, during World War II, from the onslaught of the Hungarian occupation. Charges of “foreignness” and disloyalty to the Hungarian state linked antisemitism to xenophobia and national security anxieties. Genocide unfolded as a Hungarian policy, and Hungarian authorities committed mass robbery, deportations, and killings against all non-Magyar groups in their efforts to recast the region as part of an ethnonational “Greater Hungary.”