Listen to this engaging podcast with historian Robert Austin, the author of Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King (Central European UP, 2024). In the book, Austin explains the rise and fall of Albania's first and only monarch, King Zog!. The road to becoming Europe's youngest president in 1925 and king of Albania in 1928 was paved with feuds and assassinations. Zog retained his power until his "friend" Mussolini ousted him in 1939. He left Albania with almost no roads or trains...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 221
A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hungary and East-Central Europe. In Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist R...
Mar 03, 2025•48 min•Ep. 220
Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War discusses how anti-Jewish violence began during the revolution and civil war 1917-1920 raising questions of responsibility of civil and military authorities and the antisemitic propaganda spread by official mass media as well as deliberate exploitation of antisemitism for political purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eas...
Mar 01, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 614
The decades following World War I were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania (Stanford UP, 2025) considers the role of foreign aid in Romania between 1918 and 1940, offering a new history of the interrelation between state building and nongovernmental humanitarianism and philanthropy in the interwar period. Doina Anca Cretu argues that Romania was a laboratory for transnational intervention, a...
Feb 26, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 1546
Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (U Chicago Press, 2024) presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Christina Kiaer traces Deineka’s path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian bo...
Feb 26, 2025•1 hr 49 min•Ep. 295
The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War (Purdue UP, 2025) starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s memory and forgetting in Soviet literature and culture—in Russian as well as in Yiddish. This book challenges the prev...
Feb 22, 2025•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 610
In The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648 - 1850 (Brandeis UP, 2024), Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early modern era and on the activity of rabbis whose Jewish legal rulings determined the fate of agunot, literally "chained women," who were often considered a marginal group. Who were these men and women? How did Jewish society deal with the danger of a woman's becoming an agunah? What kind of reality was imposed on women who found themselves agunot, and what...
Feb 21, 2025•43 min•Ep. 1543
Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region tha...
Feb 19, 2025•56 min•Ep. 290
Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They are never the whole story. These old towns and their turbulent histories have been key sites in Europe’s ongoing theater of politics and war. Exploring ...
Feb 17, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 41
Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco's Spain (Cornell UP, 2024) examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two dictatorial regimes at the start of the Cold War, significant similarities existed as both states took advantage of international tourism to improve their image abroad and pursued processes of economic moder...
Feb 17, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 219
Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the first scholarly English-language study of Lithuania during World War II which utilizes previously inaccessible archives as well as academic works published in that country in the post-Soviet era. In the first chapters, the book examines the multifaceted relations of Lithuania's national communities before World War II and the international and domestic crises which led to the destruction of the Lithuanian state in 1940. The author describes in d...
Feb 14, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 608
Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, history and ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Magdalena Buchczyk delves into the history and the changing material culture in Europe through the stories of a basket, a carpet, a waistcoat, a uniform, and a dress. The focus on the objects from the collection of the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin offers an innovative and challenging way of understanding textile culture and museums. The book shows t...
Feb 10, 2025•54 min•Ep. 169
Finland, a minor player on the international arena and burdened with the tag of ‘Finlandization’ during much of the post-WWII period, has won surprisingly positive visibility and a strong nation brand in the far-off Japan in the 2000’s. How has such a transformation of a small state’s reputation been possible? In this episode, Dr. Laura Ipatti, Postdoctoral Researcher at the unit of Contemporary History, University of Turku, tackles this question by introducing the findings of her Doctoral Disse...
Feb 08, 2025•25 min•Ep. 238
On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 294
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should not have taken the world by surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, but its origins are visible as far back as the aftermath of the Cold War, when newly independent Ukraine moved to the center of tense negotiations between Russia and the West. The United States was a leading player in this drama. In fact, Jonathan Haslam argues, it was decades of US foreign policy missteps and m...
Feb 06, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 1541
We Remember Lest the World Forget: Memories of the Minsk Ghetto (JewishGen, 2018) is a collection of memories from child survivors of the Minsk Ghetto, Belarus. These are rare and moving personal testimonies, and this is a book of some significance for it opens a window on the rarely told story of the Holocaust in Belarus, in particular the Minsk Ghetto. Between 1941 and 1943 approximately 80,000 Jews lived in or pass through that place of terror; as a result of starvation and repeated brutal po...
Feb 02, 2025•2 hr 4 min•Ep. 604
Antisemitic caricatures had existed in Polish society since at least the mid-nineteenth century. But never had the devastating impacts of this imagery been fully realized or so blatantly apparent than on the eve of the Second World War. In Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland (U Press of Mississippi, 2024), scholar Ewa Stańczyk explores how illustrators conceived of Jewish people in satirical drawing and reflected on the burning political questions of the day. Incorporat...
Feb 01, 2025•59 min•Ep. 603
As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe and the United States's westward expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny. The peoples of Eastern Europe were, he said, his "redskins," and for his colonial fantasy of a "German East" he claimed a historical precedent in the United States's displacement and killing of the native population. Edward B. Westermann...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 1537
Dr. Yanni Kotsonis, Professor of History and Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University, is the author of The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 2025). This deeply researched and beautifully written history traces how something brand new – a Greek nation-state – emerged out of an Ottoman Balkan mosaic of languages, religions, and cultures. The book argues that the Greek Revolution was an event of global historical significance, ushering in...
Jan 29, 2025•58 min•Ep. 218
Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. And yet, to Ukrainians, this attack was painfully familiar, the latest episode in a centuries-long Russian campaign to divide and oppress Ukraine. In Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024), political scientist Eugene Finkel uncovers these deep roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukraine is a key borderland between Russia and the West, and, following the rise of Russian nation...
Jan 29, 2025•37 min•Ep. 39
Year 2008 marked the introduction of a new economic governance regime in the European Union (EU) in response to the global financial crisis. Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency (Cambridge UP, 2024), authored by leading scholars in the field and also available open access, uses a approach to capture the EU formulation of prescriptions and their uneven deployment across member states (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romani...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 41
Radical right parties are no longer political challengers on the fringes of party systems; they have become part of the political mainstream across the Western world. How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA (Oxford UP, 2024) shows how they have used their political power to reform economic and social policies in Continental Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and the USA. In doing so, it argues that the radical right's core ideology of nativism and aut...
Jan 28, 2025•57 min•Ep. 508
Viktoriya Fedorchak's The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power (Routledge, 2024) provides a systematic analysis of the Russian-Ukraine war, using the concept of resilient fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides during the first year of the full-scale invasion. The Russian war in Ukraine began in 2014 and continued for eight years, before the full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022. It is not a new war, but the intensity of the warfighting revived many d...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 256
The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942-1943 (Routledge, 2021) narrates the last days of the once prominent Jewish community of Thessaloniki, the overwhelming majority of which was transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1943. Focusing on the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki, this book maps the reactions of the authorities, the Church and the civil society as events unfolded. In so doing, it seeks to answer the questions, did the Christian so...
Jan 26, 2025•56 min•Ep. 600
With From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2024), Susan Grunewald significantly enhances understandings of the fate of Germans captured by the Soviet Union during World War II. Her archival research demonstrates that the Soviets saw the German prisoners of war as a source of labor at a time when the Soviet Union urgently needed to rebuild and lacked manpower after its enormous war losses. Numerous Soviet enterprises, operating under dozens o...
Jan 26, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 291
Today I talked to Anthony McElligott about The Last Transport: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean (Bloomsbury, 2024). The deportation of 1,755 Jews from the islands of Rhodes and Cos in July 1944, shortly after the last deportation from Hungary, was the last transport to leave Greece for Auschwitz and brought to a close the last significant phase of the genocide of Europe's Jews (notwithstanding the death marches). Within six weeks of their deportation, the Germans were retreating from Greece a...
Jan 21, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 218
"Herta Müller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Müller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Müller's work, though an undesired and dreaded one: most of her writings are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceaușescu's Romania and her own traumatic experiences ...
Jan 17, 2025•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 217
Forty years ago, Schengen - a wine-making village at the tripoint border of Luxembourg, France, and Germany - made European history when diplomats from these countries, Belgium, and the Netherlands struck a deal to scale back their mutual border checks. "The event at Schengen went unnoticed by much of the European press," writes Isaac Stanley-Becker in Europe Without Borders: A History (Princeton University Press, 2025). Yet, as one of its signatories said much later, the Schengen agreement "cha...
Jan 14, 2025•45 min•Ep. 39
Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents: Hungary’s Democratic Opposition and its Western Friends, 1973-1998 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024) demons...
Jan 10, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 216
In our conversation about Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), Dr. Jacob Flaws expands the spatial realities of the Treblinka death camp and what it means to be a witness of the Holocaust. Spaces of Treblinka utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Trebl...
Jan 09, 2025•57 min•Ep. 46
