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The Battle for Warsaw; By Norman Davies [2003]. London: Penguin, 2006. xxix + 752 pages. Index, maps. ISBN 0-14- 303540-1. Paper. $18.00. "The strategic mistake of the Poles was to trust their British allies to support a rising that ostensibly had the full backing of Churchill and about which the British had full knowledge in all stages of planning."
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"Castorp by Paweł Huelle, Poland’s most accomplished contemporary writer (1), has frequently been interpreted as a counterpart to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. A reader of Mann’s novel may remember that before his arrival at Davos, Hans Castorp spent four terms as a student at the Danzig Polytechnic. It is around this digression that Huelle builds his plot, inserting into the biography of Mann’s protagonist an extensive Gdańsk-based episode. Both Polish and German critics have praised Huelle for his skilful exploitation of literary tradition and for revitalizing the myth of Gdańsk with its distinctive atmosphere and surroundings."
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By Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. xxi + 368 pages. ISBN 0-8214-1526-3. Cloth. $35.00. "Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, who has published articles on aspects of this historical narrative, has now written a full-scale study of the World War II generation’s exile mission and its effect on the relationship between these displaced persons seeking resettlement in postwar America and the Polish Americans already living here in long-settled communities."
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"The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, and After" By Marek Jan Chodakiewicz. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press), 2005. vii + 277 pages. ISBN 0-88033-554-8. 2 appendices, notes, bibliography. Hardcover. "The publication of Neighbors by Jan T. Gross in 2000 in Poland initiated a national debate on Christian-Jewish relations and the crime of Jedwabne. The debate became international when the book was translated into several languages. Hundreds if not thousands of books and articles discussed Gross’s work. Many of them were of polemical character. The book under review belongs to this category. Its author is a professor of history in the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC. He earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 2001 and published several books and many articles on Polish-Jewish relations and the history of twentieth century.[...]"
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"Warsaw Tales 2006 - New Europe Writers’ Ink" edited and coauthored by James G. Coon. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ksiàžkowe IBiS, 2005. 142 pages. ISBN 83-7358-031-X. Paperback. "Warsaw Tales is a collection of some sixty poems and short stories written by several dozen members of New Europe Writers’ Ink, a loose group originating in the Warsaw Writers’ Workshops of the mid-1990s and the Union of Foreign Writers in Poland.[...]"
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"Religion and the Rise of Nationalism - A Profile of an East-Central European City" by Robert E. Alvis. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press (www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu), 2005. xxvi + 227 pages. Index, bibliographies. ISBN 0-856-3081-6. Hardcover. "Over the past quarter century, there has been no lack of scholarly interest in the phenomenon of nationalism, and East-Central Europe has been widely viewed as a crucial region for understanding how nationalist programs have emerged and evolved. And yet there remain scandalously few detailed, Englishlanguage studies focusing on exactly how and why the idea of the nation mobilized specific populations and resonated in people’s daily lives. Robert Alvis’s book is a welcome contribution to overcoming this deficit.[...]"
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"Polskie wizje Europy w XIX i XX wieku" edited by Krzysztof Ruchniewicz. Texts selected by Peter Oliver Loew. Wrocław: University of Wrocław Press, 2004. Monograph Series on German and European Studies, 6. ISSN 0239-6661. 284 pages. Paper. In Polish. "The role of the land between Germany proper and the Eastern Slavs, of how the character of its people, institutions, and politics made a difference in the broader European context has been only occasionally understood by Western European rulers and political elites. It played a greater role in the imperial and geopolitical thought of Russia, while the Poles themselves have oscillated between an exaggerated sense of their importance and a deep skepticism about their European status.[...]"
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"Polish Encounters, Russian Identity" edited by David L. Ransel and Božena Shallcross. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005. 218 pages. ISBN 0253217717. "This collection of essays is based on a series of papers originally presented at the conference “Polonophilia and Polonophobia of the Russians,” held on the campus of Indiana University in September 2000. The essays discuss the creation and development of Russian national identity in light of the influences of their Polish neighbor. Poland has always presented a strong cultural and political problem for the Russians. While the other boundaries touching upon Russia are distinctly non-Russian in their culture (Finnic peoples to the north; Turkic peoples to the south; and Asiatic peoples to the east), Poland, as a fellow Slavic nation, shares a number of cultural traits, among them linguistic, with Russia. In this way, Poland has been more accessible and, as some Russians have argued and continue to argue, therefore presents more of a threat to Russia, both politically and culturally. Thus Russia has often felt the need to define itself as distinctly non-Polish.[...]"
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Louis E. Van Norman, Poland: The Knight Among Nations. Introduction by Helena Modjeska. New York-Chicago-Toronto-Edinburgh: Fleming H. Revell Company (New York: 158 Fifth Avenue, Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue, Toronto: 25 Richmond St W., London: 21 Paternoster Square, Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street), 1907. 2d edition. 359 pages, index. Hardcover. "In the following pages no attempt is made to write a history of Poland, or to present a comprehensive study of the Polish national psychology. To sound the depth of racial character would require many years of actual life near the heart of the people, and elaborate historical research. Nor has the writer ventured to prophesy the political future of the Poles. Nor, finally, has he attempted to describe the condition of Russian Polish cities during the reign of terror of the past two years. The following chapters, many of which have already appeared as magazine articles in this country and in England, are no more than the first-hand impressions of an American journalist who has been permitted to spend a year in the former Polish Commonwealth, visiting almost all the important historical points.[...]"
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The Hungarian Spring Festival of 1991 invaded Santa Barbara with a burst of cultural energy: our local Symphony conducted by the illustrious Yehudi Menuhin played Kodály’s Háry János Suite; the Art Museum displayed major works by a large number of early 20th century Hungarian artists; a scholarly conference was held, arousing, as was to be expected, strong feelings among academics; a poetry reading by the late, great, and widely lamented actress Éva Szörényi was held in an estate in Hope Ranch; and in a small gallery, now a realtor’s office, perhaps the most unexpected examples were to be seen: a good selection of the two- and three-dimensional works of Peter Meller. Professor Meller was known only as a highly regarded Art Historian at the University of California in Santa Barbara, but this show gave glimpses of his almost secret life as an artist in his own right.
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We are in the midst of a revolution in sexual and romantic tastes unlike any other in history, a social experiment being performed on children and teenagers, captured in a powerful, poignant scene in the recent British documentary InRealLife, about the effects of the internet on teenagers, directed by Baroness Beeban Kidron. In the film, a 15-year-old boy of impressive frankness articulates a process that is going on in the lives of millions of teen boys, whose sexual tastes are being shaped in large part by their 24/7 access to internet porn. He describes how porn images have moulded his “real life” sexual activity: “You’d try out a girl and get a perfect image of what you’ve watched on the internet … you’d want her to be exactly like the one you saw on the internet … I’m highly thankful to whoever made these websites, and that they’re free, but in other senses it’s ruined the whole sense of love. It hurts me because I find now it’s so hard for me to actually find a connection to a girl.”
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My connection with Czernowitz runs deep. I can even gauge it by eye: approximately two metres. The cemeteries of this city host the remains of my aunts, my grandmother, my father and my elder brother. Even today my bride, now my widow, alas, and my cousin still live there. I left the city in 1970, when I finished university. One of the reasons was simple: after graduating in English from the Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology I was unable to find work locally. Czernowitz, like the rest of the Empire at that time, was draped with an iron curtain. There was, it is true, a camp site frequented by foreign tourists, but I never managed to get along with the KGB, even in my youth, so I wasn’t allowed anywhere near it. There was another reason though. I was a young man with big ambitions, I looked the future boldly in the eye and felt an overwhelming passion for poetry. And I believed my love would be reciprocated. I felt I was the equal of any capital city and would be met with applause wherever I went. I was wrong. But I left town and haven’t been back for nigh on 35 years now. I simply can’t get down there, even when I travel to Kiev. I know you should do the things you’re frightened to, go to places you’re scared of, overcome fear and so on. But maybe it’s not fear I feel, but embarrassment. It’s like meeting a girl you once loved forty years on. You say stupid things – “Hi there!”, “How’s life?” So, I say to the city “How’s life?” It looks at me sceptically, then says: “How’s life? Well, we managed to get by without you somehow.” It’s true, there’s no way I could come out with what that old provincial, Plutarch, used to say: “I live in a little town, and as long as it doesn’t get any smaller, I’m happy to stay there.” Czernowitz stayed little for me, like a fly in amber, stilled in the memory, frozen in history. Or like my favourite dungaree shorts with button-down braces.
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Until the end of the Cold War it was largely taken for granted that an effective foreign policy depended crucially on the possession of military power. While diplomacy and other forms of what has become known as “soft power” had a role, it was generally assumed that in the absence of robust defences and military alliances that were kept in good repair vital national interests could not be safeguarded. This assumption went hand in hand with another assumption, namely that while peaceful means to limit the possibility of conflict should be pursued war should be regarded as a permanent feature of the human condition.
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In the latest in Hungarian Review’s series evoking the tragic events of March 1944– April 1945 in Hungary, I have selected testimonies that focus on what happened in June– July 1944. While Regent Horthy did not resign, for the reasons discussed in our May issue, following the 19 March occupation by Germany, he was under virtual house arrest in the Royal Palace, and had few means to influence the pro-German puppet government of Döme Sztójay. However, Horthy began to gather force in June, after the Allied landing in France, the receipt of a copy of the Auschwitz Testimonies written by two escaped Slovakian Jews, and translated by the office of Géza Soos, who secretly distributed them to Jewish authorities and foreign diplomats. By then the majority of the Jewry of the countryside was rounded up and deported to Auschwitz in a sudden campaign organised by Eichmann and his men, under pretext of war service. Despite coming under serious threats, as witnessed by the attempt on the life of his closest confidant István Bárczy, the Permanent Under Secretary of the Cabinet, Horthy ordered the halting of the deportations on 24 June. This order was made effective by his surprise moves in the early hours of 5 June, and the loyal First Armoured Division which took all strategic positions in Budapest the following night under command of General Staff Lientenant Colonel Ferenc Koszorús (see Letter in the May 2012 issue of Hungarian Review). These actions saved the life of the 250,000 strong Jewry of Budapest, many of whom had found shelter from abroad and from the countryside. At least 60 per cent of them were to survive the War in the city, despite ghettoisation and the carnage that the Nazi Arrow Cross gangs would wage against them after the outright Nazi coup on 16 October, when Horthy and his family were arrested and deported to Germany, and countless Hungarian anti-Nazis were also deported, imprisoned and murdered.
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A spectre is haunting the universal map of humanity: the spectre of minorities. The map is overwhelmingly complex and these travellers are small and vulnerable. A distant viewer would not even discover this chaotic and anarchic stream of people aimlessly yet stout-heartedly drifting on pathless ways, far away from the main roads. Here everything is uncertain. Viewed from above it might appear as a stream, but a closer look reveals the fragmented world of isolated groups and lonesome travellers.
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This essay discusses the middle class in Hungary, not from a sociologist’s angle, but its present situation and social weight. The title invokes a particular social construct, one that played a key role in the concept as well as in the successful practice of Germany’s Sozialmarktwirtschaft back in the 1950s.? Social market economy differs from other versions of market based socioeconomic system in many aspects; a healthy and socially active propertied middle class equipped with entrepreneurial skills and civic values is one of the features that distinguishes it from several other varieties of successful market economy (“capitalism”). Yes, it is important to underscore, given the widespread misunderstanding about it, that the social market economy was not only a German-accented variety of capitalism (cf. Walter Röpke, Walter Eucken, Konrad Adenauer) but also one that proved to be a very successful version. The adjective “social” does not imply less competition or restrained performance in the original model, quite the contrary: the Ordoliberal school that provided the theoretical underpinning for what became known as the German economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s called for more competition and in particular more competitors, that is, for a large number of economically active agents. This version of market order is thus called social because it aims at the widest possible inclusion of members of society into economic value generation.
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