1st Edition
A New Europe, 1918-1923 Instability, Innovation, Recovery
This set of essays introduces readers to new historical research on the creation of the new order in East-Central Europe in the period immediately following 1918.
The book offers insights into the political, diplomatic, military, economic and cultural conditions out of which the New Europe was born. Experts from various countries take into account three perspectives. They give equal attention to both the Western and Eastern fronts; they recognise that on 11 November 1918, the War ended only on the Western front and violence continued in multiple forms over the next five years; and they show how state-building after 1918 in Central and Eastern Europe was marked by a mixture of innovation and instability. Thus, the volume focuses on three kinds of narratives: those related to conflicts and violence, those related to the recasting of civil life in new structures and institutions, and those related to remembrance and representations of these years in the public sphere.
Taking a step towards writing a fully European history of the Great War and its aftermath, the volume offers an original approach to this decisive period in 20th-century European history.
Introduction
Part 1: Patterns of Violence
1. Imperial Collapse, State-Building and Attempts at Stabilisation: East Central Europe after the Great War
Jörn Leonhard
2. An Age of Revolutions: East Central Europe at the End of the First World War
Robert Gerwarth
3. Violence and the New Europe: The War that Didn’t End
Jay Winter
4. After the Peace Settlement: Frustrations and Possibilities
Andrzej Chwalba
5. The Collapse of the Versailles System during the Interwar Period
Jan Rydel
Part 2: Recasting Public Life: Ideas and institutions
6. Economic Revival in East Central Europe after the Great War
Bogdan Murgescu
7. Boundaries of Imagination. Geographers and Territories in East Central Europe
Maciej Górny
8. To ‘acquire the right place among the nations’. Cultural Diplomacy and the New Order in East Central Europe
Bartosz Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk
9. Minorities at the Death of the Continental European Empires, 1918-1923
Panikos Panayi
10. New Cities in New States
Helmut Konrad
11. Doctors and Diplomats: Health Services in the New Europe, 1918-1923
Sara Silverstein
12. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Reconstruction of New Europe, 1918-1923
Kimberly Lowe
Part 3: The New Europe in Memory and History
13. Political and Cultural Aspects of the Aftermath of the Great War in East Central Europe
Attila Pók
14. Wars Over War Memory: East Central Europe, 1918-1989
Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny
15. The Modernist Turn: The New Europe and the Arts, 1918-1923
Andrzej Szczerski
16. The Future of the Past in the New Europe
Bartosz Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk and Jay Winter
Biography
Bartosz Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk is Deputy Head of the Academic Department at the Institute of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity and Researcher at the History Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. His fields of research include Polish-German relations, Polish foreign politics of memory and cultural diplomacy. He is currently writing a book on history as a tool of Polish diplomacy towards Germany, 1918‒1939.
Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. His fields of research include the First World War in history and memory, and the Armenian Genocide of 1915. He is currently writing a history of the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 and a book on the cultural history of modern war.
