Interdisciplinary Conference: (De-)constructing Central Europe: From Mitteleuropa to Visions of a Common Europe, 1918–2018
Call for papers
The humanities offer a unique reflection of Central European relations over the past 100 years. After the end of World War I and the collapse of the great empires, new nation-states became the target of border revisionism across the board. In Germany, social scientists went to the field to prove the Germanness of Polish and Czechoslovak territories. Authorities in all countries attempted to expand their territory, basing their claims on history. Divergent uses about the ideas of “federation”, and concepts such as “Deutscher Osten,” “Międzymorze,” “Čechoslovakismus,” or “Nagy-Magyarország” dominated academic discourses in the interwar period, as ethnographers and linguists set out to research the “new” peoples and states of Central Europe. Institutions like the Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem funded ideologically-driven studies to prove”scientific” conclusions about the superiority of Germans and their culture.
Scholarly attempts to legitimize political authority continued after 1945. The West Institute in Poznań was but one of many think tanks in the Soviet bloc claiming… read more