Issue Theme: Liberation, Revolution, Transformation. Central Europe and the year 1945
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2016
Contact: stred@mua.cas.cz
Publication languages: Czech, English, German
Journal Website: http://www.mua.cas.cz/index.php/en/journals/centre
Full text of the journal: www.ceeol.com
Abstracts: http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl
Indexing: ERIH+, SCOPUS, CEEEOL, CEJSH
The goal of the issue is to bring together the often separated debates about interwar, wartime and postwar Europe, as well as to consider the year 1945 a key moment of historic change, on which the nationalist revolutions after the Second World War were based. The events of 1945 ushered in many significant changes in Europe. The National Socialist regime collapsed; postwar economic, social and bureaucratic systems were formed. In the words of Ian Kershaw, the year 1945 is the intersection of the history of destruction, which culminated in the interwar European crisis and the Second World War, and the history of a new beginning, the rise of leftist socialism and the political constellation of the Cold War.
Nationalism and the national question were the central problems not only in Germany, but also, in different forms, in other Central European regions. Current historiography charts the creation of national, ethnically homogeneous societies most often using the example of the displacement of the German population, but rarely goes beyond the horizon of explicit national conflict. The issue’s central perspective should encourage crossing over individual national narratives by comparing or examining the transnational phenomena that are common to the individual nations. The revolutionary fervor of 1945 can serve as a tool to investigate the continuity and discontinuity in the societies that were going through complex political and economic changes. Significant connections can be found, for example, in the legacy of Nazi social policy in the newly established national systems of social provisions or in the organization of the state and society, where the role of the state or the significance of technocractic elites increased in comparison to the interwar period in East and West alike.
Contributions can elaborate on one particular case, but comparisons as well as transnational analyse are particularly welcome.
Possible topics might include:
- the construction of a nation and patriotism in political thought
- the collaboration of national elites
- the working class and the project of the welfare state
- population politics
- national socialism, leftist socialism, capitalism and labor (the science of labor and social practice)
- property relocations: from aryanization to nationalization
- relationship with the “enemy” – national identity and economic interests
- the question of guilt and retribution, “settling of accounts”
- the principle of collective guilt in enforcing political and economic interests
- the influence of the war and Nazi and Fascist ideologies on the transformation of the collective mentality – the transformation of the concept of violence and its usage in establishing a new order