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"Social change -- Poland -- History -- 20th century"
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Uprooted
With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants--almost all of them ethnic Germans--were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland.Uprootedexamines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants.
In this pioneering work, Gregor Thum tells the story of how the city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society, an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building stock, and economic stagnation. This changed only after the city's authorities and a new intellectual elite provided Wroclaw with a Polish founding myth and reshaped the city's appearance to fit the postwar legend that it was an age-old Polish city. Thum also shows how the end of the Cold War and Poland's democratization triggered a public debate about Wroclaw's \"amputated memory.\" Rediscovering the German past, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their city for the second time since World War II.
Uprootedtraces the complex historical process by which Wroclaw's new inhabitants revitalized their city and made it their own.
eBook
Student politics in communist poland
Student Politics in Communist Poland tackles the topic of student political activity under a communist regime during the Cold War.It discusses both the communist student organizations as well as oppositional, independent, and apolitical student activism during the forty-five-year period of Poland's existence as a Soviet satellite state.
eBook
Thinking through Transition
Thinking through Transition is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy (as well as the older political traditions), and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.
eBook
Population Displacement in Lithuania in the Twentieth Century
Population Displacement in Lithuania in the 20th Century: Experiences, Identities and Legacies offers an account on how two world wars produced a series of population displacements in Lithuania in the course of the 20th century.
eBook
State death
If you were to examine an 1816 map of the world, you would discover that half the countries represented there no longer exist. Yet since 1945, the disappearance of individual states from the world stage has become rare. State Death is the first book to systematically examine the reasons why some states die while others survive, and the remarkable decline of state death since the end of World War II.
eBook
Marriage, Gender and Demographic Change: Managing Fertility in State-Socialist Poland
This paper explores fertility management practices in state-socialist Poland and investigates post-war demographic change through the lenses of gender and modernization. Using personal narratives from oral histories and memoirs, we examine reproductive decision-making processes from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on motivations, norms, and the means employed to achieve desired family size. Our analysis reveals the ambiguous nature of both modernization and women's emancipation in regard to reproduction. We argue that acceptance of the two-child model and the need to effectively manage fertility increased in Poland through the second half of the twentieth century, but was highly dependent on levels of spousal communication and equality. Personal narratives demonstrate how social pressure shaped women's reproductive choices, and how at times these choices were considerably limited by male violence and domination. As our analysis shows, gender relations in marriage and the modernization of fertility management in state-socialist Poland were deeply interrelated.
Journal Article
Making Scents of Transition
In this article, the growing body of literature on transition within central and eastern Europe is developed by exploring how discussing the senses may illuminate the experience of change to post-socialism for urban dwellers. After situating the study within the rich ethnographic heritage on urban transition, the key tenets of 'geographies of smell' are outlined as a means of inquiry which emphasises the lived, sensually embodied experience of transition. The empirical study is focused upon the interrogation of the meanings created by, and attached to, olfactory experience in contemporary Poland, discussing three motifs that highlight the symbolic and transformative role of smell in relation to transition. In understanding smell as playing an active role in the creation of meaning, not only are current debates surrounding geographies of smell extended, but it is argued that addressing the relatively neglected sensual dimension of the social provides an avenue into more nuanced dimensions of urban transition.
Journal Article
Memory of Political Transformation as Memory of Slow Change
This article analyzes the memory of the political transformation in Poland, not as a rapid event in 1989-1990, but as a slow, ongoing process. It identifies two contrasting memory perspectives: one viewing the transformation as a missed opportunity or an unfinished process, and the other seeing it as an open-ended task for the present and future. The article explores the challenges of remembering slow changes, including the flexibility of memory frameworks and the complex relationship between memory and the future. It argues that the 1989 breakthrough was not the \"end of history,\" but initiated a gradual change involving negotiating visions of the future and memories of the past. The article uses concepts like \"past future,\" \"cruel optimism,\" and \"happy futures\" to explain the complexities of social moods and expectations during and after the transformation. It also analyzes the conflict between Polish and Western European memory frameworks, the internal memory conflicts within Poland, and the interplay between rapid economic changes and slow progress towards a desired future. Finally, the article connects these issues to the cultural memory of the transformation and the ongoing debate about the \"Fourth Polish Republic.\"
Journal Article