A steady stream of creative new scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe has been arriving at the desks of reviews editors in Contemporary European History. Commissioning and editing essays on this ...scholarship has persuasively demonstrated its wider importance, not least in challenging the ambiguous and arbitrary line that continues to divide European historiography between East and West. We have therefore taken the decision to present the following five articles collectively, as a means of reflecting on and interrogating assumptions in European historiography. Why do Germany and France still dominate narratives of the Great War? Can we speak of urban continuities and similarities across the socialist and capitalist spheres? How does studying food offer new insights on the global phenomenon of socialism and socialist production?
While a central policy of the Independent State of Croatia during World War II called for the removal of "Serbs," the majority of people who identified themselves (or were identified by the regime) ...as Serbs in Sarajevo--the second largest city in the state--remained "safe." In order to understand why this was the case, Emily Greble Balić examines the interplay between local identity politics and state policies of genocide and nation-building. In so doing, she sheds light on such broad issues as the ambiguity of national identity at the local level; the limitations of traditional understandings of "resistance"; and the options open to members of the victim, or "foreign" group, as a result of the disjunction between national and local agendas.
German bombs struck Sarajevo on April 6, 1941. The bombardment continued sporadically for nine days, destroying several residential buildings, warehouses, and factories and killing ninety-three ...people.¹ During that time Sarajevo was isolated. The city’s telephone and telegraph services worked only intermittently; few newspapers arrived from outside the city. Most residents received their information from refugees and Yugoslav troops fleeing before the German army’s advance into Serbia. King Peter II issued proclamations calling on Sarajevans to stay strong and unified. But people panicked anyway. The train station was overwhelmed as Sarajevans fled the city and refugees arrived from the countryside, neither
CITY LINES Greble, Emily
Sarajevo, 1941-1945,
02/2010
Book Chapter
Since that fateful day in June 1914 when a teenage boy shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, setting off a chain of events that triggered the First World War and razed Europe’s empires, Sarajevo has stood ...for the death of the old European order. And lest the city’s importance be overshadowed by the tumultuous decades that followed, the international spotlight returned to Bosnia’s capital in the 1990s, when the siege of Sarajevo stunned the world and shattered illusions that Europe’s violent past had been laid to rest. The brutal siege, like the assassination, signaled the end of an era.
But Sarajevo has
BETWEEN IDENTITIES Greble, Emily
Sarajevo, 1941-1945,
02/2010
Book Chapter
As Pavelić’s regime sought to tighten its biologically based notions of identity and reinforce categories of “them”—non-Aryans, foreigners, and other non-Croats—Sarajevo’s leaders increasingly tried ...to modify state policies to reflect local agendas. Notions of belonging took on new meaning in the winter of 1941–42 as the armed insurgency advanced into the hills above the city, where it would remain lurking for the rest of the war. The civil conflict not only accentuated local tensions but also contributed to a growing sense among Sarajevo’s leaders that their town was not safe. A Croat army officer captured local anxieties
“Sarajevo has a soul like a village, though it is a town,” a poet named Constantine relayed to Rebecca West during her visit in 1937. He continued,
Here Slavs, and a very fine kind of Slav, endowed ...with great powers of perception and speculation, were confronted with the Turkish Empire at its most magnificent, which is to say Islam at its most magnificent, which is to say Persia at its most magnificent. Its luxury we took, its militarism and its pride, and above all its conception of love. The luxury has gone. The militarism has gone. . . . But
In the spring of 1943, members of Sarajevo’s Muslim elite reached out to Nazi Germany and—under the direct authorization of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler—created a Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS unit.¹ ...This act would cast a long shadow on the history of Bosnian Muslims, branding them as collaborators and linking their demands for political and religious autonomy to the Fascist project. With the birth of the Waffen SS Division Handžar, as it became known, Muslim leaders went from serving under the occupation to serving the occupation directly. This was by no means an easy decision. But why did
