Critical Social Inquiry 0239 - Coffeehouses, Catastrophe, and Culture: East Central Europe in a Century of Upheaval

In a little more than a century, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland have been transformed from provinces of multiethnic empires into a series of small successor states whose experience went from independence to Nazi occupation and communist dictatorship and back again. Today, they are members of NATO and the European Union. These three regions, with their dynamic and at times unstable population mixture of Germans, Slavs, Magyars, and Jews, embodied the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, tolerance and intolerance, the persistence of tradition and the exuberance of modernity-issues also relevant to the study of other topics in the social sciences and humanities. Our course will treat the histories of the countries and cultures and the literature, music, and art that gave voice to those tensions. In addition, we will consider the appropriation of history through memory and memorialization in the present. Key words: history, European studies, German studies, Slavic studies, Jewish studies

Time and Narrative This course is fully remote. Students are expected to spend 6-8 hours on work and preparation outside of class time.