Bücher der Reihe New Studies in European History

When East Germany collapsed in 1989-1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domestic and transnational engagement with nature and pollution. The communist dictatorship limited opportunities for protest, so officials and activists looked abroad to countries such as Poland and West Germany for inspiration and support. Julia Ault outlines the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and shows how East Germans responded to local degradation as well as to an international moment of environmental reckoning in the 1970s and 1980s. The example of East Germany thus challenges and broadens our understanding of the 'greening' of post-war Europe, and illuminates a larger, central European understanding of connection across the Iron Curtain.

Migrating Memories charts the transnational story of German speakers from Romania during a turbulent century in modern European history. From uneasy supporters of their home country, to enthusiastic Nazis, tepid Communists, and conciliatory Europeans, Romanian Germans have been at the centre of major European events since 1918.

This comparative and transnational study of three student revolts in France, Italy and West Germany in the 1960s examines the origins, course and dissolution of these protests, arguing that the student protests of 1968 should be understood as a conflict between different forms of democratisation.

This first full history of jazz over the lifespan of East Germany, from 1945 to 1990, draws on previously unexamined sources and vivid eyewitness accounts to reveal the experiences of jazz musicians and fans, and the surprising ways state policies sought to manage and control jazz during the cultural Cold War.

This history of the struggles to regenerate France's colonial empire in the eighteenth century reveals how political economists, colonial administrators and planters shaped the recalibration of empire in the Americas and Africa, unearthing connections between Ancien Regime colonial innovation and the French Revolution's republican imperial agenda.

This innovative pan-European history of post-war socialism shows the Cold War categories of 'East' and 'West' cannot be projected back onto post-war Europe. By comparing the socialist and social democratic parties in Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, and Poland, it highlights the many similarities across and divergences within the two putative blocs.

In the late Holy Roman Empire, no group better embodied the traditional noble ideal than the Protestant and Catholic knights in Electoral Mainz. This book traces the transnational 'cultural' landscape in which these knights moved and its transformation by social, political and national revolution in Germany and the Habsburg Empire.

The first comprehensive and accessible study of the critical constitutional debates in the Estates General and National Assembly of 1789 through which the National Assembly became a sovereign body. Robert H. Blackman uses diverse primary sources to create a compelling, narrative-driven account of events leading up to the French Revolution.

Focusing on the local wine industry, Mack Holt examines the relationship between the ruling and popular classes and demonstrates how ordinary Burgundians were crucial in turning back the tide of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, until the absolutist policies of Louis XIII curtailed their influence on local politics.

Examines the development of memory laws in Europe, Ukraine, and Russia and the contrasting purposes they serve in the identity politics of the East and West. This is a major contribution to the history of memory and ongoing conflicts over the legacy of the Second World War, Nazism, and communism.

Karen Offen offers a magisterial reconstruction and analysis of the heated debates around relations between women and men, how they are constructed, and how they should be organized or reorganized, that raged in France and its French-speaking neighbors during the French Third Republic.

The first exploration of how Mussolini's Italy employed population settlement inside the nation and across the empire to consolidate its rule. Roberta Pergher shows how ordinary citizens became uncertain agents of Italianization as the regime responded to new interwar norms of sovereignty and national self-determination.

A major new interpretation of Nazi influence in southeastern Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. This book explores the emergence of German soft power and informal economic empire, and their role in enabling the militarisation of the German economy and the Third Reich's territorial conquests after 1939.

Evaluating the period between the revolutions of 1917 to 1920 and the beginning of Europe's postwar integration in 1957, this book explores European civilisation as a concept of twentieth-century European political practice and as a specific project of a transnational network of European elites. This title is available as Open Access.

Was the Soviet Union a superpower? In examining the constraints and opportunities afforded the Soviets in their engagement of the capitalist world, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony offers a significant rereading of the Cold War as an economic struggle shaped by the global economy.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, millions of Germans were uprooted from their homes in Poland's newly created Western territories and sent back to Germany as these areas were repopulated by Poles. This book charts the processes of postwar displacement and nation-building, revealing the stark regional disparities in experiences.

A magisterial account of the day-to-day practice of Russian criminal justice in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nancy Kollmann contrasts written law with its pragmatic application by local judges and sets Russian developments in the broader context of early modern European state-building strategies of governance and legal practice.

Robert Hornsby examines the nature of political protest in the USSR following Stalin's death. He explores the emergence of underground groups, mass riots and public attacks on authority as well as the ways in which the Soviet regime under Khrushchev viewed and responded to these challenges.

Few regions in European history have experienced such a complete religious transformation as Bohemia. This wide-ranging examination of its history and culture, ranging from art, architecture and literature to music, philosophy and hagiography, sheds light on the Counter-Reformation and the nature of early modern Catholicism.

This transnational history of Paris in 1919 explores the global implications of the revolutionary crisis of French society at the end of World War I, using the events of 1919 to illustrate broader tensions in working class, race and gender politics in Parisian, French and ultimately global society.

This richly illustrated book explains the origins of our modern fascination with heritage. Drawing on archival sources from Germany, France and Britain, it uncovers for the first time the fascinating story of international competition, rivalry and collaboration which lay behind the rise of preservation in Europe and the world.

Examining how West German 1968 arose out of transnational connections, from the presence of Third World student radicals, to exchanges with European avant-garde movements and the appropriation of Anglo-American cultural forms like rock and roll, this study explores the interplay of radical politics and popular culture in the explosion of '1968'.

An innovative history of the formation of the Soviet intelligentsia which focusses on universities as key institutions in Soviet society. It reveals the changing place of universities and intellectuals from their strategic importance during the early Cold War to their role as incubators of political opposition under the thaw.

This illuminating guide to the night opens up an entirely new vista on early modern Europe. Using diaries, letters, legal records and representations of the night in early modern religion, literature and art, Craig Koslofsky explores the myriad ways in which early modern people understood, experienced and transformed the night.

German society and the dynamics of German nationalism were profoundly changed prior to 1914 by the exchange of goods and capital, imperial expansion, the circulation of people and ideas and the integration of labour markets. This is the first account to set German nationalism within the process of globalisation.

This book shows how 'national' identity was invented in the German Democratic Republic and how citizens engaged with it, exposing the reasons why individuals found it hard to identify with the GDR and explaining how an apparently stable society fell apart with such ease when the revolution came.

Honor in nineteenth-century Germany is usually thought of as an anachronistic aristocratic tradition confined to the duelling elites. This book shows instead how it pervaded all aspects of German life and how, during rapid modernization, it was adapted and incorporated into the modern state, industrial capitalism, and mass politics.

This fascinating study examines how ordinary German subjects incorporated the material culture of monarchy into their daily lives, through the consumption of relics and royal memorabilia. Providing an insight into attitudes to sovereign power, Giloi examines how people used these objects to articulate, validate or reject the state's political myths.

An innovative study of the politicisation of 'ordinary people' in western Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century. With chapters devoted to reading, singing, public space, carnival, violence and religion, James Brophy argues that popular culture played a critical role in linking ordinary Rhinelanders to the public sphere.

This is a regional study of psychology during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before the emergence of professional psychiatry. It explores the treatment of mental illness in society and the use of spiritual remedies to deal with physical and mental ailments from melancholy to demonic possession.