Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina

Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Milovan Djilas, Wartime

Mark Frankland, The Patriots’ Revolution

Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, 3rd rev. ed.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the Wars

Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land

Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars

Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity, 2nd ed.

Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina (1945): Andric (1892-1975) won a Nobel Prize largely for this episodic fictional account of the history of the Bosnian town of Višegrad (where he grew up) over three and a half centuries leading up to the First World War. -- To read: Introduction, Foreword and chapters I - VIII

Ashes and Diamonds (Poland, 1958; 105 mins.): This early work by Andrzej Wajda, the best-known East European director, is widely regarded as the finest East European film of its time. Complex and ambiguous, it follows the day and night of a young partisan fighter who has undertaken to assassinate a local Communist leader as the Second World War is coming to a close. It made a star of Zbigniew Cybulski, "the Polish James Dean".

Andric, Bridge on the Drina, chs. IX - XXIV (rest of the book)

Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (1974), ch. 2

*Bruno Schulz, "August," "Visitation," and "Birds" from The Street of Crocodiles (1934), with an introduction by Jerzy Ficowski and a brief commentary by the author: A vividly idiosyncratic vision of an interwar Polish town by an isolated Jewish author (1892-1942) who is now regarded as one of the finest Polish writers of his time.

When Father Was Away on Business (Yugoslavia, 1985; 144 mins.): A funny, touching movie about a young boy buffeted by the adult sexuality and politics around him (Father is in a labor camp, not away on business). The film, by Bosnian Muslim director Emir Kusturica, is set among his people in the difficult years of 1950-52, mostly in Sarajevo. Won the Palme d'or at the Cannes film festival.

Rothschild, East Central Europe, ch. 3

*T. G. Masaryk, Masaryk on Thought and Life (1935), sections on "Politics" and "Nation": The aged President (1850-1937) muses on some of his central convictions in conversation with the great Czech liberal writer Karel Èapek.

Rothschild, East Central Europe, ch. 4

*Thomas Sakmyster, "The Admiral on Horseback: An Assessment," from his Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918-1944 (1994)

The Red and the White (Hungary, 1967; 92 mins.): Director Miklós Jancsó’s oblique, stunningly photographed commentary on civil war, specifically on the Russian Civil War of 1918-21 between the Reds (Communists) and the Whites (counter-revolutionaries). The film was made under the auspices the Hungarian and Soviet state (Communist) film industries; but the film’s take on the war is more complicated than this implies.

Rothschild, East Central Europe, ch. 5

*Rebecca West, "Croatia", from Black Lamb, Grey Falcon: The Record of a Journey through Yugoslavia in 1937 (1941): An enduring travel book from the interwar years, enlivened by the lively historical curiosity and humane sympathies of the author, a well-known novelist of the day. To read: pp. 39-55, 83-89, and 95-114

Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, Introduction and chs. 1 and 2 (on Poland and Hungary)

The Dybbuk (Poland, 1937; 123 mins.): A Yiddish-language film by Micha³ Waszyñski that vividly conveys the atmosphere of the Yiddish cultural tradition that was to be extinguished in its Polish and Lithuanian homelands a few year later. The story, from a classic Yiddish play about doomed love and exorcism by S. Ansky, starts slowly but gains strength in the second half.

Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1948): The Auschwitz experiences of a non-Jewish Pole (1922-51), turned into powerful fiction. -- To read: Introduction and the first four stories (through "Auschwitz, Our Home")

In-class film, Night and Fog (France, 1955; 31 mins.): The fundamental documentary about the Nazi death camps, made by Alain Resnais.

*Arnošt Lustig, "The Second Round," "The Old Ones and Death", and "The Last Day of the Fire," from Diamonds of the Night (1958): This Czech Jewish author (b. 1926), a survivor of Terezin (Theresienstadt), Buchenwald and Auschwitz, writes Holocaust stories in quite a different vein than Borowski’s. 

The Shop on Main Street (Czechoslovakia, 1964; 128 mins.): This funny, tragic film by Jan Kadár and Elmar Klos shows us a provincial town under the clerical-fascist puppet regime that ruled Slovakia during World War II. This is a classic story about the role of casual antisemitism and indifference in facilitating the Holocaust, with unforgettable performances by Josef Króner and Ida Kaminská. It won an Academy Award.

Milovan Djilas, Wartime (1977): More than thirty years afterwards, Djilas (1911-95) reports on the years when he was a ruthless young Communist in Tito’s inner circle, fighting the partisan war against the Germans, Italians, Chetniks, Ustashe, and others. -- To read: "The People’s Uprising" and "The Civil War within a War"

Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II (1989), ch. 2

*"Yalta", "Spheres of Influence" and "The Truman Doctrine and the Two-Camp Policy", documents from Gale Stokes (ed.), From Stalinism to Pluralism (1991)

*"Conclusion" from Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (1980)

Transport from Paradise (Czechoslovakia, 1963; 93 mins.): The "paradise" of the title is the ghetto-style camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) in northern Bohemia. The Nazis cleaned up this camp and put it on display (to the Red Cross, for instance) to prove how well they were treating the Jews -- but it also served as a transit camp to Auschwitz. Director Zbynìk Brynych brings presents a stylized telling of Arnošt Lustig’s story.

Rothschild, Return to Diversity, chs. 3 - 4

*"The Case for Stalinism", "The Expulsion of Yugoslavia" and "The Purge Trials", documents from Stokes, From Stalinism to Pluralism

*"The ‘People’s Democracies’", document from Lyman H. Legters (ed.), Eastern Europe: Transformation and Revolution, 1945-1991 (1991)

*Arthur Koestler, untitled chapter of The God That Failed, ed. by Richard Crossman (1949): The Hungarian-born Koestler (1905-83) became a Communist in 1931 but turned away from the party at the time of the great Purge Trials in the Soviet Union (1936-38). Here he records his experiences as a party member.

*Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (1953): Milosz (b. 1911), then a recent émigré, wrote to elucidate the mystery of how so many of his fellow Polish intellectuals could come to pay allegiance to their country's new Stalinist regime. -- To read: preface and chs. I and III

*Milovan Djilas, "The Character of the Revolution" and "The New Class", from The New Class (1957): Totally out of favor by this time, Djilas wrote to achieve self-understanding of what he found false about the Yugoslav Communist regime he helped to establish. The book, published only abroad, brought him a prison sentence in Yugoslavia. 

Rothschild, Return to Diversity, pp. 147-60

*Charles Gati, "From Liberation to Revolution, 1945-1956", from Peter F. Sugar et al. (eds.), A History of Hungary (1990)

*"The Hungarian Revolution", documents from Stokes, From Stalinism to Pluralism

Interrogation (Poland, 1982; 118 mins.): A lacerating story from the early 1950s of what could happen to a young woman taken in by the secret police because of a casual association. Ryszard Bugajski made the film during the artistic freedom of the first Solidarity, but it was not released until the Communist regime fell. Brilliant portrayal of the central figure by actress Krystyna Janda.

Rothschild, Return to Diversity, pp. 160-90

*William V. Wallace, chapters from Czechoslovakia (1976)

*The Party’s "Action Program", the "2000 Words", and other documents, from Andrew Oxley et al. (eds.), Czechoslovakia: The Party and the People (1973)

Mark Frankland, The Patriots’ Revolution (1992), ch. 3

*Václav Havel, "Letter to Dr. Gustav Husák" (1975), from his Living in Truth, with an introduction by Jan Vladislav: Havel (b. 1936), a playwright and intellectual, presents a strategy for opposition that was adopted not long afterwards by the dissident group Charter 77.

*Havel, "Protest," a play (1978): Here Havel uses dramatic form to comment sardonically on the position of a "dissident".

*Adam Michnik, two essays from his Letters from Prison and Other Essays (1976 and 1979), with a foreword by Czeslaw Milosz: Michnik (b. 1946), whose style is marked by his past as a Communist intellectual, argues differently from Havel; but how different is his approach to dissident agitation?

A Report on the Party and the Guests (Czechoslovakia, 1966; 74 mins.): An allegory or parable, quite unlike any of our other films. Director Jan Nìmec deals directly if mysteriously with the responses of solid Czech citizens to the demands of a clever and confident authority. It took a sustained campaign to get the film released for viewing in 1968, and it was among four films banned "forever" by the Czech authorities in 1973.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979): The best-known Czech novelist of our time (b. 1929) wrote this work in emigration as a playful but cutting reflection on what history was doing to his countrymen. -- To read: parts One - Four

Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, parts Five - Seven and the xeroxed "Afterword"

The Witness (Hungary, 1969; 116 mins.): Farcical East European satires about Stalinism are rare. In this one, directed by Péter Bacsó, a seemingly clueless workingman creates havoc high in the Communist administration when people try to use him for their own sinister purposes. Made in 1969 when a relatively permissive period was ending in Hungary (as elsewhere in Eastern Europe), the film was released only nine years later.

*Lawrence Weschler, The Passion of Poland (1984): The story of the Solidarity trade union's challenge to the Polish state in 1980 and 1981, told as the experiences and reflections of an American journalist who was able to interview nearly every leading actor in the story. -- To read: all of it

Frankland, chs. 4-6

Blind Chance (Poland, 1981; 112 mins.): This film examines three kinds of life open to young Poles of the period just before Solidarity by attributing each of them to the same young man, depending how his chase after a departing train comes out. Starting and restarting three times at the same moment, Krzysztof Kieœlowski’s impressive film shows his protagonist becoming an apparatchik of the regime, a dissident, and an unpolitical professional man.

Frankland, chs. 7, 8 and 10

Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, 3rd rev. ed. (1996), chs. 5 and 6 and Epilogue 1996: "Return to Purgatory"

Man of Marble (Poland, 1977; 160 mins.): Andrzej Wajda tells two interconnected stories from different periods of Communist Poland: a naive young bricklayer is selected by the regime as a representative workingman in the Stalinist early 1950s; and a young film-maker of the 1970s (Krystyna Janda again) tries to recover his story a quarter-century later. The release of this political movie about a younger generation trying to understand an older one was a major cultural event in the last years of the decaying Gierek regime, just before Solidarity.