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Articles
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"Wait till the Scots come!"
This old Prussian proverb exhorts us to be patient and wait for the right opportunity. But what does this have to do with the far north of Great Britain? The answer leads us to Gdansk. In the early modern era, the port city attracted numerous merchant ships from the Baltic region and beyond. Some even came from as far away as Scotland to seek their fortune there.
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Abraham Hannibal
Abraham Petrovič Hannibal (circa 1696-1781) was a central figure during the early stages of the African Diaspora in Russia. He was one of the first Russian Enlightenment thinkers and the great-grandfather of the most important poet and creator of the modern Russian language, Alexander Pushkin.
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Adam Mickiewicz
Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish romantic, poet, translator and journalist, was a migrant for most of his life. He also travelled to Berlin, Rome, Constantinople and other places for pleasure, scientific purposes and on political missions. These frequent changes of location show a mobile and transnational life story.
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Capital of the Saxon Garden Baroque on the Vistula River
The cartographic drawings of Warsaw from 1730-1762, preserved in the Dresden and Warsaw collections, illustrate the architectural garden city where the artistic ideas of the Saxon Baroque were crystallized. These exceptional documents bear testimony to a golden era where the urban landscape and cultural life of the city grew and flourished, stimulated by the patronage of the Saxon royal court, the great families of the Polish nobility, and the cooperation of Polish and Saxon craftsmen and artists.
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From Brothers to Business Partners
The Train of Brotherhood and Unity was founded in 1961 as a grassroots commemorative initiative by Slovenian and Serbian journalists. Eventually, it became a manifestation of socio-political cohesion among Yugoslav nations, and a ritualized instrument for economic networking between Serbian and Slovenian municipalities.
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Góra Kalwaria or Ger
Góra Kalwaria was one of many shtetls in Poland whose Jewish life disappeared in the wake of WW II. Also goods of Jewish culture suffered immense losses. Particularly interesting is the wartime fate of library owned by tzaddik's family Alter. The history of its dispersal during WW II is exemplary for many Jewish library collections in Nazi-occupied Europe.
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Jewish Postcard Publishers and the Imagery of the Urban
In numerous cities across eastern Europe, Jewish publishers enjoyed notable success on the newly established postcard market. This article presents a socio-historical background of this topic and asks whether their social positioning influenced the depictions of the urban world they chose to feature on their postcards.
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Kharkiv–The Capital of Ukrainian Modernity
Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine from 1919 to 1934 - a place of bold architectural experiments and the center of Ukraine's cultural avant-garde. The expert on urban history Mikhail Ilchenko provides an insight into this period.
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Lembergs’s Coffeehouse Culture Before the First World War
The east Galician city of (Lemberg) Lviv had a lively coffeehouse culture during the Habsburg Empire. Poles, Jews and Ukrainians would gather over pots of coffee and tea. As the First World War approached, however, a growing sense of nationalism could also be felt in these otherwise convivial spaces.
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Malbork Castle, the Knights of the Teutonic Order and the "German East" in the 19th and 20th Centuries
How far did the “German East” extend? With recourse to Malbork Castle, which was “rediscovered” around 1800, German historical policy in the 19th and 20th centuries found very different answers to this question.
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Migration to Southeast Europe in the 18th Century
Migration stories can be success stories. Migration is often associated with people’s desire to improve their living situation. However, this wish does not always come true, and so migration stories are often marked by disappointments and failures – like that of Michael Kreutzer.
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Post-War Jewish Migration from the USSR and the refuseniki movement
The post-WW II Jewish migration from the Soviet Union (and also after its dissolution) is one of the largest in modern history. Altogether 2.75 million Soviet Jews left the USSR for Israel, the United States, Germany and elsewhere. The position of the Soviet state with respect to emigration was remarkably ambivalent: in some cases, it was allowed and even encouraged, in others, others; it was controlled and strongly limited. The Jewish emigration movement that arose in the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s-1980s became an example of resistance and activism within the authoritarian system, which increasingly alerted international attention. In one way or another, it affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and changed the appearance of many cities and towns within the Soviet Union and outside it.
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Prague Coffeehouse Culture around 1900
It would be almost impossible to imagine the rich history of European café culture without the Vienna coffeehouses or the Paris cafés. By contrast, the Czech capital, Prague, tends to be more associated with the consumption of beer. Yet, in the history of that city, the tradition of the coffeehouse played a significant role in the development of public life, not least as a meeting point for its culturally diverse population.
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Renate Marsch-Potocka on the Side of the Polish Opposition
Wolfgang Crasemann, a nephew of the famous journalist Renate Marsch-Potocka, has used interviews and personal documents - originally for his own family - to write down her life story and pay tribute to her contribution to German-Polish understanding. This previously unpublished text tells of her popularity in both countries in the years before 1989.
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Russian-German history as migration history
Russian Germans are a global minority. Their history is often characterized by migration within and outside the Russian Empire spanning several generations. In the last third of the 19th century, popular migration destinations included North and South America as well as new settlement areas in Siberia and Kazakhstan. It was here that all Russian Germans were then exiled during and after the Second World War. Since the latest period of resettlement in the 1980s and 1990s, most Russian Germans have settled in Germany.
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Ruthenia quasi est alter orbis
"Rus' is almost another world" wrote the Krakow bishop Maciej around 1150. What was the basis of this differentiation? How powerful was it and how did it play out in reality? In search of answers, this article also discusses the dimensions and ambivalences of border demarcations.
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Summer 1941: Jews from the Baltic States flee for their lives
The long shadow of the past. Only a few Jews from Lithuania and Latvia managed to escape the Holocaust in the Baltics. Here are some of their accounts and the reasons for their difficult escape.
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Synagogue, Workers’ University, Cultural Center
Once the largest Sephardic synagogue in Yugoslavia, the Il Kal Grande was built in 1930 in the center of Sarajevo. After its partial destruction by german soldiers in 1941, the building has fulfilled a number of different functions and had a varied history, that is little known to this day.
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The History of the German-speaking Volhynians as Part of a Global Migration History
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, innovations such as steam navigation and the advent of the railroad led to a sharp increase in global migration movements. The German-speaking Volhynians were part of this development, which moved between the ideal-typical poles of voluntary and forced migration and was significantly influenced by the enforcement of the ethnonational principle. This article focuses on the emigration movements of this group from the Russian governorate of Volhynia in the period between the 1860s and the First World War. The subsequent forced migrations of the German-speaking Volhynians are also briefly discussed.
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The Uprooted Ones – Lemkos in Galicia and abroad
The small, private Museum of Lemko Culture in Zyndranowa is situated on the far periphery of southeastern Poland, yet it is a destination for many travelers, mainly from western and northern Poland, but also from other parts of the country and from abroad. For many, a visit here is connected with questions of identity and with the search for traces of family history. At the open-air museum, visitors can experience, among other things, the farm of the Gocz family and learn a great deal about the life of the villagers.
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