How do post-communist museums and cinema contribute to shaping the image of a communist past in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe? This is the first systematic analysis of the use of visual techniques in grasping what the previous regime means. Museums and memorials started mushrooming all over East and Central Europe, in the former communist world, after the past was lost 1989. While reflecting on possible, actual meanings of the lost history the aim of shaping public opinion and discourse of the recent communist past also became apparent. Most of these undertakings--movies included--tried hard to make political use of recollections of the earlier world, and employed select tools from contemporary museological, memorializing and new-media practice to make their politicized intent historically credible. Thirteen essays from scholars in the region deal with the use of new media in shaping and fashioning popular perception of the previous era, and provide a fresh approach to the subject.

This text explores the memory of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, which proved crucial for communist Hungarian political culture throughout the 20th century. Apor takes an innovative approach to understudied aspects of European memory cultures, focusing particularly on how a dictatorship remembers and the concept of authenticity.

This volume offers fresh perspectives on the representation of the recent past in museums of the Second World War and of communism in post-communist Eastern Europe. It does so against the background of recent European-wide debates on history, memory and politics. The contributors from across Europe focus comparatively on a wide variety of case studies, pointing out similarities and differences, and accounting for transnational patterns of remembrance at regional and European level. Occupation and Communism in Eastern European Museums argues that museums have a huge influence on the image of the communist past in Eastern Europe. It shows how they use a vast array of media tools, visual tactics and commercial strategies in order to substantiate ideological approaches to the past and to shape the attitude of public opinion.

This is the first work that covers the post-Communist development of historical studies in six Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. It offers a uniquely critical and qualitative analysis from a comparative and critical perspective, written by scholars from the region itself. Focusing on the first post-Communist decade, 1989-1999, the book offers a longer-term perspective that includes the immediate 'prehistory' of that momentous decade as well as its 'posthistoire'. The authors capture the spirit of 1989, that heady mix of elation, surprise, determination, and hope: l'ivresse du possible. This was the paradoxical beginning of Eastern European post-Communism: ushered in by 'anti-Utopian' revolutions, and slowly finding its course towards a bureaucratic, imitative, challenging, and anachronistic restoration of a capitalism that had changed almost beyond recognition when it had mutated into the negative double of Communism. Each individual chapter has numerous and detailed notes and references.

Baron Peter Apor lamented the passing of traditional Transylvanian practices and the "Metamorphosis," written in 1783, is not a memoir in the usual sense so much a record of a vanishing way of that the life author had enjoyed in his youth, and had been told of by his elders. Apor focuses on the world he knew: upper-class society, the company of Princes and Counts. He gives detailed accounts of Transylvanian dress, feasts, rituals, ceremonials, travelling, weddings, funerals and other social functions that are unrivalled for gusto, humour and color. Here, for example, are young Lords whose horses had harnesses set with gems; Counts with forty castles; hospitality of a truly prodigious nature beginning with vermouth at breakfast drunk from silver goblets; fine banquets taken to the sound of pipes and violins, finishing with rousing dances such as the Mouse Dance.

This book--the first of a three-volume overview of comparative and transnational historiography in Europe--focuses on the complex engagement of various comparative methodological approaches with different transnational and supranational frameworks. It considers scales from universal history to meso-regional (i.e. Balkans, Central Europe, etc.) perspectives. In the form of a reader, it displays 18 historical studies written between 1900 and 1943. The collection starts with the French and German methodological discussions around the turn of the twentieth century, stemming from the effort to integrate history with other emerging social sciences on a comparative methodological basis. The volume then turns to the question of structural and institutional comparisons, revisiting various historiographical ventures that tried to sketch out a broader (regional or European-level) interpretative framework to assess the legal systems, patterns of agrarian production, and the common ethnographic and sociocultural features. In the third part, a number of texts are presented, which put forward a supra-national research framework as an antidote to national exclusivism. While in Western Europe the most obvious such framework was pan-European, in East Central Europe the agenda of comparison was linked usually to a meso-regional framework. The studies are accompanied by short contextual introductions including biographical information on the respective authors.

This collection of essays offers a captivating reading on how East-Central Europe was transformed into the 'Other' Europe. It is the first attempt to systematically explore the sovietization process in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Sovietization is generally understood in the book as a process with a dual dimension: it was in part an imperial project whereby the Soviet system was exported to the region, but it was also an attempt by the governments of the "people's democracies" to adopt a Soviet way of life (self-sovietization). Sovietization was a process dictated by ideological imperatives, but it also reflected the distinctive aspect of socialist strategies of state and nation building. Sovietization is examined in the book not only in terms of the imposition of new forms of government, but also in terms of the socialist response to modernity, as reflected in approaches to new technology and management, consumption and leisure patterns, religious and educational policy, political rituals and attitudes to the past. The essays contained in the volume explore the diversity and the tensions within the sovietization process in the countries of the region. "This collection is a bold and timely attempt at shedding light on a rather insufficiently researched topic. It offers a comprehensive view of the extent and consequences of the Sovietization process in the countries of East-Central Europe. Moreover, the diverse approaches-ranging from socio-cultural and economic history to psycho-history-offer to specialists and lay people alike a captivating reading on how East-Central Europe was transformed into the 'Other' Europe." - Dr. Dragos Petrescu, University of Bucharest. "This collection of essays remains attentive to the specificity of the ways in which Soviet socialist ideology and organizational structures, and Soviet-style practices, were embedded, naturalized, appropriated, transformed, subverted or repulsed in different national contexts in the nations of Central and Eastern Europe." - Dr. Susan E. Reid, Senior Lecturer, University of Sheffield. "After 1989, historical research on the Communist period usually remained within national borders. It is important to actively integrate the results of these endevors and pursue a European history of Communism. This volume is an important step in this direction. Its comparative, transnational perspective makes it an outstanding contribution to the field." - Prof. Dr. Christoph Klessmann, Zentrum fur Zeithistorische, Potsdam

This volume offers fresh perspectives on the representation of the recent past in museums of the Second World War and of communism in post-communist Eastern Europe. It does so against the background of recent European-wide debates on history, memory and politics. The contributors from across Europe focus comparatively on a wide variety of case studies, pointing out similarities and differences, and accounting for transnational patterns of remembrance at regional and European level. Occupation and Communism in Eastern European Museums argues that museums have a huge influence on the image of the communist past in Eastern Europe. It shows how they use a vast array of media tools, visual tactics and commercial strategies in order to substantiate ideological approaches to the past and to shape the attitude of public opinion.

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