Shows how postwar writers in Austria and Yugoslavia re-imagined Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.

Throughout the twentieth century in the lands of Yugoslavia, socialists embarked on multiple projects of supranational unification. Sensitive to the vulnerability of small nations in a world of great powers, they pursued political sovereignty, economic development, and cultural modernization at a scale between the national and the global – from regional strategies of Balkan federalism to continental visions of European integration to the internationalist ambitions of the Non-Aligned Movement. In Mediating Spaces James Robertson offers an intellectual history of the diverse supranational politics of Yugoslav socialism, beginning with its birth in the 1870s and concluding with its violent collapse in the 1990s. Showcasing the ways in which socialists in Southeast Europe confronted the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization, the book frames the evolution of supranational politics as a response to the shifting dynamics of global economic and geopolitical competition. Arguing that literature was a crucial vehicle for imagining new communities beyond the nation, Robertson analyzes the manuscripts, journals, and personal correspondence of the literary left to excavate the cultural geographies that animated Yugoslav socialism and its supranational horizons. The book ultimately illuminates the innovative strategies of cultural development used by socialist writers to challenge global asymmetries of power and prestige. Mediating Spaces reveals the full significance of supranationalism in the history of socialist thought, recovering a key concern for an era of renewed geopolitical contestation in Eastern Europe.

This book focuses on literary multilingualism and specifically on the challenging condition of writing in Trieste, a key European borderland located at the intersection between the Latin, Germanic and Slav civilisations. By focusing on some of the most representative modern writers operating in the area, such as Italo Svevo, Boris Pahor, Claudio Magris and James Joyce, this work offers a wide-ranging discussion of multilingual practices deriving from the different language choices made by these writers. Along with the most common manifest strategies, such as code-switching and hybridisations, Deganutti highlights how Triestine writers found innovative latent practices to engage with multilingualism, such as writing in an analogical way or exploiting internal linguistic stratifications. Moreover, she shows how they provided answers to the several linguistic, cultural and even political challenges they were subjected to, with the result of redefining linguistic boundaries that clearly separate different tongues. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers and academics interested in literary multilingualism in the fields of sociolinguistics, borderland studies and comparative literature.

Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites--multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions--that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, howev.

The revival of the region of east-central Europe known as 'Mitteleuropa' began in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. For Germany, 'Mitteleuropa' became a renewed geopolitical concept. Since 1990 Mitteleuropa has increasingly become a region of German economic engagement. However, German elites failed however to develop a coherent political approach to that region while simultaneously conducting an eclectic Mitteleuropa policy outside a broader framework of foreign policy. This book traces Germany's Mitteleuropa politics and puts them into an historical context and into a framework for future foreign policy.

Places and Forms of Encounter in Jewish Literatures. Transfer, Mediality and Situativity brings together contributions on Jewish literatures with methodologies and theories discussed in Comparative and World Literature Studies. The contributions highlight dynamic literary processes in various historical and cultural contexts.

This book discusses the influence of Friedrich Ratzel's ideas in more contemporary geopolitical analytical systems and the geodeterminism commonly attributed to him. The author thoroughly analyzes the structural components of Ratzel's thought. The research is inspired by the numerous contradictory approaches in the secondary literature, presenting Ratzel as both humanist and racist, geo-determinist and multidimensional analyst, organicist and social scientist, precursor of Geopolitics and opponent to the same idea. In this work, more particular issues are approached: the establishment of a scientific Political Geography; the methodological approach of his multidisciplinary work; the redefinition of his geopolitical period; his notion of state and the evaluation of sociological and cultural parameters as factors of state power; the biogeographical content of the notion of Lebensraum; his attitude towards the racist theories as well as towards the Darwinian theories; his overall worldview and the confrontation with cosmopolitism; his contribution to an interdisciplinary, positivist and scientific approach in analyzing social and international affairs; his thoughts on the architecture of Europe. The book will be useful for researchers and students in many scientific fields, such as International Relations, Geopolitics, Geography and History of Geography.

This innovative volume analyzes historical, strategic and domestic political influences on the character and dynamics of the European Union's eastern enlargement. Its main focus is on interactions between Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, in political-diplomatic, commercial-economic and socio-cultural fields. The book also examines the wider European and international contexts to show that as enlargement advanced, we also witnessed an increase in the potential for conflict among EU members, old and new. Steve Wood provides an eclectic and topical appraisal, which identifies the German state as the crucial actor in both the enlargement venture and parallel processes of bilateral reconciliation. The book is recommended to those with interests in contemporary Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and European integration.

"His labors were often fruitless. His own master, Wilhelm I, and the Prussian bureaucrats, diplomats, and courtiers with direct access to this first of Bismarck's Wilhelmian nemeses could be at least as obstructionist in Berlin as Franz Joseph and his minions in Vienna. In fact, all too often Bismarck's lack of control over the Prussian elites was in part responsible for the resistance of the Habsburg ruling circle.".

The twentieth century in Europe was characterized by great moments of rupture, such as two world wars, ideological conflict, and political polarization. In these processes, as well as in the historical writing that followed in its wake, the individual as an historical entity often appeared crushed. In line with contemporary theories about the precariousness of historical writing and the self, this volume seeks to understand the important developments in modern Europe from the perspective of the single, sometimes isolated, but always original viewpoint of individuals inhabiting the space at the other side of the traditional grand narratives. Including theoretical chapters as well as detailed case studies, this volume takes a biographical approach to dystopian events—the Holocaust, Fascism, Communism, and collectivization—by starting with the voices of unknown historical actors and relating their experiences to larger processes in modern European history, such as the emergence of the national, collective memory, and state formation, as well as changes in the understanding of modern identities and the (re)formulation of the self. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.