This course will examine the history of 20th-century Eastern Europe, understood as the band of countries and peoples stretching from the Baltics to the Balkans. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, however, will receive special attention. Topics of study will include foundation of the national states, Eastern European fascism, Nazi occupation, contructing Stalinist socialism, the fate of reform communism, reconstitution of "civil society," and the emergence of a new Eastern Europe. Given the paucity of historical writings on the region, the course will make extensive use of cinematic and literary portrayals of Eastern Europe.

Welcome to Eastern Europe, a laboratory of the 20th Century: the place where ideas about politics have clashed with greater ferocity than anywhere else – for good and for evil. In 1914, Eastern Europe produced the spark that ignited World War I, bringing the United States into world politics and its first ever experiment in taking democracy to foreign countries ("democratization"). At the 1919 peace conference US President Wilson helped bring to life new nation states in Eastern Europe based in western ideas. The result, a little over a decade later, was differing kinds of fascism. Disputes over nationality in Eastern Europe generated a Second World War, and a new set of experiments, this time by the Nazi occupiers of Poland and the Soviet Union. The horrors were so great that a Polish Jewish lawyer invented a new word to describe them: genocide. Yet the horrors also convinced many Europeans that only a utopian society with no inequality would permit humanity to make a complete break with fascism. They called their experiment to forge new human beings socialism: we know it as Stalinism, with new industries and cities and art forms, and a leap forward in science, but also vast prison camps and neighbor spying upon neighbor. From the late 1960s a response began emerging among East Europeans to the crimes exacted by this utopia: the main slogan driving the opposition was "human rights". In 1977 Czechoslovak philosophers and academics formed a dissident movement called Charter '77 after Communist authorities arrested young rock musicians (The "Plastic People of the Universe") for no reason at all other than that they did not like their music! This and similar groups helped reveal the hollowness of the Communist edifice until it collapsed in 1989 under its own weight. As readers of our day's newspapers know, what followed was not the democratic utopia that some hoped for. Despite unprecedented prosperity, recent years have also seen continuing deep inequalities, and the return of nationalism, sometimes known as "populism," and new ideas about how to govern societies. A Hungarian politician feted at the White House calls his experiment "illiberal democracy." This class features special sources to get at this distant world and its trend-setting ideas about democratic and opposing forms of rule: we use memoirs and fiction, but also poetry and film to explain why the small countries on Europe's edge have produced so much history in one short century. Does the East European laboratory offer conclusive results for how human societies should be organized? Students will draw their own conclusions. For me, one ideal shines through the messy past: Solidarity, the word Polish activists chose for their human rights movement in 1980. In the heavy gloom of the Cold War, as militaries prepared mutual destruction, millions of Polish men and women – workers, intellectuals, farmers – began changing the world in their neighborhoods and factories in the name of an ideal, when "reasonable" people agreed change was impossible. This is one of numerous little known stories of global history that took place just beyond the old iron curtain – stories that no one should graduate from college without having heard about.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills