Episodios

  • What is Going on with Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe?

    What is Going on with Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe?
    Aug 30 2024
    After being the posterchild of democratization, today Central and Eastern Europe is often seen as the region of democratic backsliding. In this episode, Milada Vachudova and Tim Haughton talk with host Licia Cianetti about how ethno-populist and illiberal politicians have been reshaping the region’s politics, how people have gone to the streets to protest against anti-democratic and corrupt governments, and the many ways in which post-communist Europe is actually not that different from democracies in the “West”. Milada Anna Vachudova is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has recently co-edited a special section about “Civic Mobilization against Democratic Backsliding in Post-Communist Europe”. Tim Haughton is Professor of Comparative and European Politics at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Co-Director of CEDAR. In the podcast he discusses hir recent articles on elections in Slovakia and Poland, and in Slovenia. Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Co-Director of CEDAR. She has recently co-authored a chapter on Central and Eastern Europe for the Routledge Handbook of Autocratization. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    40 m
  • Adam Zamoyski, "Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess" (William Collins, 2024)

    Adam Zamoyski, "Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess" (William Collins, 2024)
    Aug 24 2024
    Princess Izabela Czartoryska was a towering figure of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European cultural and intellectual life. Married at sixteen to a distinguished older aristocrat, she amassed learning, influence, and a role in both Polish and European statecraft through encounters with figures ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Joseph II of Austria. After the liquidation of her homeland’s sovereignty with its third partition in 1795, she spent the final decades of her life pioneering and curating spaces of preservation, both of Polish nationhood and of the human experience writ large. Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess (William Collins, 2024) is her definitive biography, penned by distinguished historian Adam Zamoyski—the protagonist’s great-great-great-grandson. Trawling through a vast family archive and arcane sources in half a dozen languages, Zamoyski has told her story as one of empowerment, education, and encounter in an age of profound national and international upheaval. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 m
  • Janine P. Holc, "The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

    Janine P. Holc, "The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust" (Brandeis UP, 2023)
    Aug 4 2024
    Beginning in late 1940, over three thousand Jewish girls and young women were forced from their family homes in Sosnowiec, Poland, and its surrounding towns to worksites in Germany. Believing that they were helping their families to survive, these young people were thrust into a world where they labored at textile work for twelve hours a day, lived in barracks with little food, and received only periodic news of events back home. By late 1943, their barracks had been transformed into concentration camps, where they were held until liberation in 1945. Using a fresh approach to testimony collections, Janine P. Holc reconstructs the forced labor experiences of young Jewish females, as told by the women who survived and shared their testimony. Incorporating new source material, the book carefully constructs survivors’ stories while also taking a theoretical approach, one alert to socially constructed, intersectional systems of exploitation and harm. The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust (Brandeis UP, 2023) elucidates the limits and possibilities of social relations inside camps and the challenges of moral and emotional repair in the face of indescribable loss during the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    56 m
  • Ewa K. Bacon, "Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz" (Purdue UP, 2017)

    Ewa K. Bacon, "Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz" (Purdue UP, 2017)
    Jul 29 2024
    Today I talked to Ewa Bacon about her book Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz (Purdue UP, 2017). In a 1941 Nazi roundup of educated Poles, Stefan Budziaszek--newly graduated from medical school in Krakow--was incarcerated in the Krakow Montelupich Prison and transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in February 1942. German big businesses brutally exploited the cheap labor of prisoners in the camp, and workers were dying. In 1943, Stefan, now a functionary prisoner, was put in charge of the on-site prisoner hospital, which at the time was more like an infirmary staffed by well-connected but untrained prisoners. Stefan transformed this facility from just two barracks into a working hospital and outpatient facility that employed more than 40 prisoner doctors and served a population of 10,000 slave laborers. Stefan and his staff developed the hospital by commandeering medication, surgical equipment, and even building materials, often from the so-called Canada warehouse filled with the effects of Holocaust victims. But where does seeking the cooperation of the Nazi concentration camp staff become collusion with Nazi genocide? How did physicians deal with debilitated patients who faced "selection" for transfer to the gas chambers? Auschwitz was a cauldron of competing agendas. Unexpectedly, ideological rivalry among prisoners themselves manifested itself as well. Prominent Holocaust witnesses Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi both sought treatment at this prisoner hospital. They, other patients, and hospital staff bear witness to the agency of prisoner doctors in an environment better known for death than survival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 24 m
  • William W. Hagen, "Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

    William W. Hagen, "Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
    Jun 19 2024
    Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish-Soviet War. In Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2018), William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study shows that anti-Jewish violence by perpetrators among civilians and soldiers expressed magic-infused anxieties and longings for redemption from present threats and suffering ('folk anti-Semitism'). Illustrated with contemporary photographs and constructed from extensive, newly discovered archival sources from three continents, this is an innovative work in east European history. Using extensive first-person testimonies, it reveals gaps - but also correspondences - between popular attitudes and those of the political elite. The pogroms raged against the conscious will of new Poland's governors whilst Christians high and low sometimes sought, even successfully, to block them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 35 m
  • Glenn Dynner, "The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Glenn Dynner, "The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Jun 5 2024
    In The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024), Glenn Dynner tells the story of an unexpected Hasidic revival in Poland between the two World Wars. In the aftermath of World War I, the Jewish mystical movement appeared to be in shambles. Hasidic leaders had dispersed, Hasidic courts lay in ruins, and the youth seemed swept up in secularist trends as a result of mandatory public schooling and new Jewish movements like Zionism and Socialism. Dynner shows that in response to this, Hasidic leaders reinvented themselves as educators devoted to rescuing the youth by means of thriving networks of heders (primary schools), Bais Yaakov schools for girls and women, and world-renowned yeshivas. During the ensuing pedagogical revolution, Hasidic yeshivas soon overshadowed courts, and Hasidic leaders became known more for scholarship than miracle-working. By mobilizing Torah study, Hasidic leaders were able to subvert the "civilizing" projects of the Polish state, successfully rival Zionists and Socialists, and create clandestine yeshiva bunkers in ghettos during the Holocaust. Torah study was thus not only a spiritual-intellectual endeavor but a political practice that fueled a formidable culture of resistance. The Light of Learning belies notions of late Hasidic decadence and decline and transforms our understanding of Polish Jewry during its final hour. Glenn Dynner is the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Professor of Judaic Studies at Fairfield University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 14 m
  • Judy Batalion, "The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos" (William Morrow, 2021)

    Judy Batalion, "The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos" (William Morrow, 2021)
    May 27 2024
    Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town's water supply. They also nursed the sick, taught children, and hid families. Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown. As propulsive and thrilling as Hidden Figures, In the Garden of Beasts, and Band of Brothers, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos (William Morrow, 2021) at last tells the true story of these incredible women whose courageous yet little-known feats have been eclipsed by time. Judy Batalion--the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors--takes us back to 1939 and introduces us to Renia Kukielka, a weapons smuggler and messenger who risked death traveling across occupied Poland on foot and by train. Joining Renia are other women who served as couriers, armed fighters, intelligence agents, and saboteurs, all who put their lives in mortal danger to carry out their missions. Batalion follows these women through the savage destruction of the ghettos, arrest and internment in Gestapo prisons and concentration camps, and for a lucky few--like Renia, who orchestrated her own audacious escape from a brutal Nazi jail--into the late 20th century and beyond. Powerful and inspiring, featuring twenty black-and-white photographs, The Light of Days is an unforgettable true tale of war, the fight for freedom, exceptional bravery, female friendship, and survival in the face of staggering odds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    44 m
  • Jan Grabowski, "On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust" (Yad Vashem, 2024)

    Jan Grabowski, "On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust" (Yad Vashem, 2024)
    May 27 2024
    "The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews." -Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943. Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this police force was responsible for enforcing many anti-Jewish regulations issued by the Nazis. Who were these policemen, and how did they transform from ordinary policemen to murderous executioners? And what was the role of the Germans in this horrifying picture? In On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust (Yad Vashem, 2024) addresses these questions and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 6 m