The essays in this volume present a nuanced analysis of the development of scientific fields and institutions in Eastern Europe during the "long 19th century" (1789-1914).In 19th century Western Europe science often developed in the context of emerging national states. In Eastern and East-Central Europe, however, until World War I science operated in the imperial framework of the Habsburg and Tsarist Empires. The imperial characteristics of these states (such as multinationality, linguistic diversity, and a pronounced polarity between centers and peripheries) created specific conditions for the sciences. Taking this observation as a starting point, this volume addresses the interplay of science and empire in Imperial Russia and the Habsburg Monarchy in a comparative framework.

Retrospectively, the Prague Spring appears to have been a coherent but unsuccessful experiment in finding a synthesis of Western democracy and socialism. However, this perspective ignores that different groups and individuals participated in these developments and shaped the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia with their completely varying professional, generational, national, and gender-specific experiences. What appears retrospectively as a goal-oriented reform movement or as an 'interrupted revolution' looked in the eyes of the protagonists rather like the situation in a laboratory, where they worked on new syntheses with uncertain results. The volume focuses on the protagonists' ideas of politics, society, and their reform plans. Of particular interest is the question which new thoughts about the interrelation of politics, science, economics, and arts were developed in Czechoslovakia.

In the autumn of 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered the evacuation of the German population from east-central and south-east Europe. The reason was the advance of the Soviet troops to the west. Can this evacuation, as happened mainly in German memory after 1945, be simply understood as a humanitarian measure in the interest of the civilian population threatened by war? Or weren't the objectives of the National Socialist war policy behind it? This book presents the results of a German-Slovak research project. Using the example of the Germans in Slovakia, backgrounds, processes and relationships of the evacuation in the years 1944-1945 are examined, which until now have mostly only been assigned to the complex of flight and displacement. A special focus is on the general development in the region, where, as a result of hostilities, the Slovak civilians fled in parallel. One of the central results of the present study is that National Socialist politics also had a significant influence on what was happening. The evacuation policy of the German Wehrmacht and persecution measures against Jews, Roma and political opponents are also taken into account. At the end of the volume there is an outlook on the consequences for those affected and the historical-political classification of the evacuation in the Federal Republic of Germany.