Publications / Tr@nsit Online

A quarter of a century has passed since the collapse of European Communist dictatorships. We can now set the actual development of these countries against the predictions and prescriptions then made on their future trajectory. By now, most of those sweeping generalizations have to be qualified. Obviously, many of these past policy prescriptions had abstracted from the political, social and economic realities of these so called “transition countries”.

As of two years ago, some fifty cartons bulging with colored plastic folders placed in an old metal office cabinet at Beit Ariela, Tel Aviv’s municipal library, lay waiting for someone to notice them. This is part of the legacy of Heinrich Loewe, a pioneering German Zionist who envisaged a national Jewish library in Jerusalem already in the late nineteenth century, and who actively promoted the idea ever since the seventh Zionist Congress held in 1905.

In the murderous 20th century that experienced two world wars, the Holocaust, and the threat of atomic annihilation, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a rare moment of happiness. In hindsight, November 9, 1989 and October 3, 1990 (the day of German re-unification) merge into one and the same single event. Twenty-five years ago, things were more complicated.

Glauben Sie mir nicht. Dies ist ein sehr persönlicher und einseitiger Bericht. Über einen unblutigen Krieg, der allen eine Lehre sein kann, die sich für die Nöte einer jungen Demokratie interessieren. Und für den Spaß, den man beim Aufbau einer Demokratie haben kann.

Kharkiv-based translator Zaven Babloyan is executive director of the Oko publishing house. He was born in Moscow and spent his childhood and teenage years in Luhansk and in Shchastia, a town in the Luhansk region that has recently featured prominently in news bulletins from the war zone. He studied physics at the University of Kharkiv, but turned to the humanities while he was still a student. Babloyan has been a translator, literary editor and publisher for over twenty years.

Twenty five years ago, when I crossed the border from Austria to Czechoslovakia, I was taken off of a train there and questioned by Czechoslovak cops for an hour. My wife and children were still on the train. It was a scary experience. In March this year, I drove from Bratislava to the Vienna airport. I couldn’t easily tell where the border was or where the border guards used to be.

In 2013, the seemingly hopeless task of bringing art to the provinces finally started to bear fruit in Luhansk, eastern Ukraine. One year on, the activists, artists, journalists and writers responsible are exiles in their own country, writes Konstantin Skorkin.

Timothy Snyders international hoch gelobte Arbeit Bloodlands schraffierte den gemeinsamen räumlichen Einzugsbereich der nationalsozialistischen und der stalinistischen Massenmorde. Von einer prominenten Reihe deutscher Historikerinnen und Historiker ist sie dafür heftig kritisiert worden. Diese Kritik nahm wiederum Sebastian Huhnholz in einem jüngst unter dem Titel „Deutschsowjetische Bloodlands?“ vom Journal of Modern European History (vol. 12, nr. 4, 2014) publizierten Artikel zum Anlass, die Historikerkritik an Snyder aus einer politikwissenschaftlichen Perspektive methodologisch zu hinterfragen.

Endre Bojtár, Jahrgang 1940, wohnt seit seiner Heirat im vierten Stock eines älteren Miethauses mit den ortstypischen Pawlatschen. Der Name der Strasse hat nach 1989 gewechselt, das Quartier hinter den grossen Markthallen in der Franzenstadt ist durch die Fassadenreinigung merklich schöner geworden; das Angebot auf dem Markt ist um viele Importprodukte reicher. Kleine Kneipen, Cafés und Geschäfte geben den einstmals grauen und monotonen Strassenzügen heute ein angenehmes Cachet, ohne dass man sich bereits in der touristischen Zone befände. Wo die Altwohnungen nicht saniert werden können, werden sie niedergerissen. Gelegentlich entstehen hektargrosse Freiflächen.

What Ukraine badly needs is a compromise of strategic character around identity issues but against the background of ambivalence that has characterized the public mood since the late 1980s, Yaroslav Hrytsak wonders whether any attempts “to make things clear” would not only destabilize the Ukrainian situation even further.

Tereza Novotna contrasts the different approaches taken by the Czech Republic and Germany to commemorating the fall of communism and reflects on how these differences illustrate the experiences of those who lived through it.

One possible outcome of the economic crash of 2008 was that the majority or mainstream members of a society would direct their anger and fear against the minority or marginal members of their society. Commentators on television or the radio would claim, “it’s all the fault of the immigrants!” or “if we didn’t hand over so much of our tax dollars to the poor, the economy would not have deteriorated so much,” or “social benefits to African Americans [or German Turks] have distorted the housing market.” Citizens would come to believe these assertions, politicians would echo them – and the upshot would be not only a deteriorating national and international economy but also increased hostility and fear among racial, ethnic, or nationality groups in a country. Social solidarity would decline, perhaps irrevocably.