The Nord Express Special Train: Between Peace and War (1884-1914)

The article was submitted on 25.01.2015.Железная дорога в XIX в. - символ идеи технического прогресса par excellence, двигатель индустриализации в России с 1870-х гг. Благодаря железной дороге Петербург превратился на рубеже XIX и XX вв. в крупнейший индустриальный центр страны. «Северный экспресс», соединив Петербург скоростной линией с Варшавой, Берлином, Кельном, Парижем, значительно ускорил и облегчил трансфер идей между Западной и Центральной Европой и Россией. Пример Ж. Нагельмакерса и А. фон Вендриха показывает всю противоречивость развития железных дорог, с одной стороны, как «посла мира», с другой - как «мотора войны». В научный оборот впервые вводятся архивные материалы, не использованные ранее.In the 19th century, the railway was a symbol of progress par excellence and, as of the 1870s, it served as the driving force of industrialization in Russia. At the turn of the 20th century, Saint Petersburg developed into the country’s largest industrial centre thanks to the railway system. The Nord Express connected the city with Warsaw, Berlin, Cologne and Paris, it facilitated and intensified the transfer of ideas between Western and Central Europe and Russia. The experience of G. Nagelmackers and A. von Vendrich shows the inconsistency in the development of railways as they were both a messenger of peace and an engine of war. The article introduces a number of previously unstudied archival materials.Статья подготовлена в рамках реализации гранта Правительства РФ по привлечению ведущих ученых в российские образовательные учреждения высшего профессионального образования и научные учреждения государственных академий наук и государственные научные центры Российской Федерации (Лаборатория эдиционной археографии, Уральский федеральный университет). Договор № 14.А12.31.0004 от 26.06.2013 г

Il posto dei migranti

Profughi e migranti in Europa. Loro accoglienza e collocazion

Binding the nation, bounding the state: Germany and its borders

The borders of Germany and of Europe have come under increased academic scrutiny over the last few years as questions of mobility and migration have surged to the forefront of public interest. Most such studies remain embedded in regional historiographies, although they are increasingly informed by interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical developments. Historians of the nineteeth- and twentieth-century French-German border emphasize transnational overlaps that arguably prefigured European cooperation, whereas studies of the Polish-German border stress the indifference and resentment generated by nationalism well into the twentieth century. Histories of divided Germany during the Cold War have transnationalized interpretations of everyday life in the GDR and the FRG, while studies of Europe since 1990 have probed the meanings and anxieties connected with Schengen. Taken together, these works show how interconnected discourses of ‘Europe’ have come together from experiences with borders that have varied greatly across time and space

Europäische Stadt

Unterschiedliche Kulturen, Religionen, Herrschaftssysteme, Ethnien, Ökonomien, Planungen und Projekte haben die Herausbildung von unterschiedlichen Stadtpersönlichkeiten in Europa begünstigt. Gesellschaftlicher Wandel hat die Städte fortwährend verändert und Spuren, Verwerfungen sowie Überlagerungen befördert, die heute europäische Städte kennzeichnen. Städte bilden damit ein Spiegelbild der jeweiligen politischen, rechtlichen und administrativen Gegebenheiten sowie historischer Prozesse von langer Dauer. Mit Eindeutigkeit ist die europäische Stadt an sich nicht zu erfassen

失われたのは誰にとってか？

失われた20年と日本研究のこれから（京都 : 2015年6月30日-7月2日）・失われた20年と日本社会の変容（ハーバード : 2015年11月13日

European Commemoration: Locating World War I

Commemoration depends on current views of the past. The conference "Europäische Erinnerungskulturen - European Commemoration 2014" gave an overview of the initiatives, narratives and commemorations taking place across Europe. This expert conference provided an opportunity to analyse common perceptions and to discuss different opinions about what the First World War still stood for a hundred years later. What are the correlations between national, transnational and European perspectives? Is there a difference between a European perspective and multiperspectivity? What can and what should be the goal of historical education concerning the First World War

Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics – “Mitteleuropa” as a Transnational Memory Discourse in Austrian and Yugoslav Postwar Literature

My dissertation Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics – “Mitteleuropa” as a Transnational Memory Discourse in Austrian and Yugoslav Postwar Literature examines how the German idea of Central Europe inspired a new poetics of memory in Austrian and South Slavic literary texts during the Cold War period (1945 – 1989). As early as the 19th century, German and Austrian political thinkers (Fürst von Metternich, Friedrich Liszt, Friedrich Naumann) have framed ideas of Germanic cultural and economic eastward expansion under the term Mitteleuropa. This was countered by a wave of post-imperial Austrian literature after 1918 that nostalgically evoked what had once been the largest multiethnic and multilingual political entity on the continent as Mitteleuropa. Even though these writings offered far from a unifying vision of old Austria, literary scholarship in the 1960s interpreted them as creating a retrospective utopia or “Habsburg myth.” Decades later, a group of Eastern European dissidents resuscitated that same literary idea to attack the Cold War division of Europe. The dialectics inherent in the Mitteleuropa debate from the beginning (east versus west, Germans versus Slavs, center versus periphery) have continued to shape postwar public discourses on memory, loss and justice. Challenging both expansionist and nostalgic visions of a larger Europe, my dissertation argues that with the radical geo-political shifts after World War II, an alternate memory discourse of Mitteleuropa emerged in the work of writers who questioned previous notions of geographic identity and national allegiance. By looking at the way that iconic writers like Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić utilize the legacy of Habsburg nostalgia in the postwar period to develop their own poetics of memory, I show how they establish a new form of engaged writing, which transgresses the ideological divide that has defined the continent. I reveal deep ties between the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and the second Austrian Republic of 1955, dating back to a common imperial past, the persistent ideal of a multiethnic community and an uneasy relationship to dogmatic political ideologies. Both the second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia found themselves in what seemed to be a historical vacuum after the end of the Second World War: Though under completely different political premises, both countries elided uncomfortable aspects of their recent pasts and replaced them with a highly edited version of historical ‘truth.’ In Austria, this meant a self-fashioning as the first victim of Nazi-Germany, and a denial of widespread collaboration in Holocaust atrocities. In the newly founded federative republic of Yugoslavia, Socialist ideology promoted the image of the partisan hero, but kept silent about crimes committed by the ‘liberators’ themselves. While Austria sought to distance itself from postwar Germany through a nostalgic reference to the Habsburg Empire, the Yugoslav Socialists’ official rhetoric of progress, plurality and unity left no room for inconvenient truths that might ignite conflicts between its numerous ethnicities. For lack of a public debate, the role of critical memory in both countries was consequently taken over by postwar authors and artists offering a different ‘engaged’ literature without succumbing to the pitfalls of ideology. Unlike previous interpretations, which focus on the historical ruptures created by Nazi Fascism and the Iron Curtain, my dissertation shows that Central Europe persists both as a literary network and a cultural community (Kulturgemeinschaft) defined by political debate and civic engagement