Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T03:20:57.029Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Local Experiences and the Second World War: New Perspectives on Mass Violence in Mid-Twentieth Century Europe

Review products

AmarTarik Cyril, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City Between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 356 pp, $35.00, ISBN: 978-0-8014-5391-5.
BergholzMax, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 441 pp, $35, ISBN: 978-1-5017-0492-5.
BrochLudivine, Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 280 pp, £64.99, ISBN: 978-1-10703-956-8.

Show more reviewed productsShow more reviewed products

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2019

Filip Erdeljac
Filip Erdeljac*
Affiliation:
Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, 53 Washington Square South, 3rd Floor, New York University, New York, NY, USA
*
*[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The extensive attention that Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin has attracted since its publication in 2010 has raised our overall awareness of the structural might that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany displayed as they reshaped the territories that had separated the two states during the interwar period. In addition to earning widespread acclaim, the volume has been widely criticised by scholars who have exposed the extent to which non-German populations in Eastern Europe participated in the violent persecution of unwanted minority communities during the Second World War. Jan Gross, whose Neighbors unearthed that the Poles of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbours without significant prompting from the German occupiers, has argued that Snyder deprives the inhabitants of his ‘bloodlands’ of agency by blaming wartime violence in the region almost exclusively on Hitler, Stalin and their overlapping policies of state destruction. The evident tensions between micro-historical approaches that stress the importance of local agency and macro-level analyses of larger geographical spaces have obscured how profoundly the interplay of broader structural factors and local variables shaped the course of the Second World War in different locations. Four recent micro-historical works help to partially reconcile the two seemingly oppositional approaches by providing new frameworks for thinking about the complex interactions that occurred between smaller groups of people and the broader forces that shaped their lives during the 1930s and 1940s. The four volumes show that global, national, regional and local agendas overlapped to make ordinary people reconfigure how they saw themselves and how they interpreted the world around them. The identities and perceptions that emerged from these interactions enhance our understanding of the multiple factors that determined people’s actions during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 422 - 433
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010)Google Scholar.

2 Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (New York: Penguin Books, 2002)Google Scholar.

3 Gross, Jan T., ‘A Colonial History of the Bloodlands’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 15, 2 (Summer 2014), 593, 695CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 595.

4 Kotsonis, Yanni, ‘Ordinary People in Russian and Soviet History’, Kritika, 12, 3 (Summer 2011), 3, 739–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Segal, Raz, Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence, 1941–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 10Google Scholar.

6 Segal, 26.

7 Gross, Neighbors, 110.

8 Brubaker, ‘Rethinking Nationhood: Nationhood as an Institutionalized Form, Practical Category, Contingent Event in Brubaker’, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Questions in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18–22.

9 Bartov, Omer, ‘Review: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder’, Slavic Review, 70, 2 (Summer 2011), 424–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Snyder, Bloodlands, 397–8.

11 Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

12 Snyder, Bloodlands, 155.

13 Nielsen, Christian, Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Alexander’s Yugoslavia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 For national indifference in Eastern and Central Europe, see Judson, Pieter M., Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; King, Jeremy, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zahra, Tara, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Karakasidou, Anastasia, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yosmaoglu, Ipek, Blood Ties: The Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2014)Google Scholar; Dragostinova, Theodora, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949 (Ithaca, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Case, Holly, In Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. For some works that consider implications of the literature on national indifference and uneven nationalisation in Southeastern Europe, see: Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste and Venice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Fine, John V.A., When Ethnicity Did Not Matter in the Balkans: A Study of Identity in Pre-Nationalist Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Hajdarpašić, Edin, Whose Bosnia: Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 For more on Snyder’s approach to statelessness, see Snyder, Timothy, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Duggan Books, 2015)Google Scholar.

16 Bergholz, Max, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 95Google Scholar.

17 See Ivo Goldstein, ‘The Independent State of Croatia in 1941: On the Road to Catastrophe’, and Payne, Stanley, ‘The NDH State in Comparative Perspective’, in Sabrina Ramet, ed., The Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945 (London: Routledge, 2015)Google Scholar.

18 Korb, Alexander, Im Schatten des Weltkriegs: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945 (Hamburg, 2003)Google Scholar.

19 Hayden, Robert M., ‘Review: Violence as a Generative Force by Max Bergholz’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 19, 4 (Fall 2017), 251–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order (Toronto: Norton, 1975).

21 Cyril Amar, Tarik, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City Between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Amar, 319.

23 Snyder, Timothy, ‘Collaboration in the Bloodlands’, Journal of Genocide Research, 13, 3 (2011), 347–51Google Scholar.