A decisive event not only for Polish and Lithuanian history, but also for the history of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe was the Union of Kreva in 1385. This not only decided upon the marriage of the Grand Duke Jogaila to Queen Hedwig of Anjou in Poland. Furthermore, the Union of Kreva – in addition to the establishment of a new dynasty, that of the Jagiellons – also formed the cornerstone for the increasingly interwoven history of Poland and Lithuania until the end of the eighteenth century, since it heralded an era of successive Polish-Lithuanian personal unions which favoured the political, economic, and also cultural entwinement of both countries. This chapter is devoted to the geographic horizon of knowledge in general, and travel reports in particular, in these two countries, which were so politically and culturally intertwined from the fourteenth century onwards. Discussing the earliest beginnings of chorographic writing from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance humanist period, I would like to end this overview with the aforementioned, caesura-like Union of Lublin, providing only a brief glimpse of subsequent pre-modern era Polish-Lithuanian travel accounts.

The nineteenth-century Russian poet Fedor Tiutchev rightly marvelled at his motherland’s remarkable growth: ‘Moscow, and Peter’s town, and Constantine’s city, these are the Russian realm’s cherished capitals … But where is its limit? Where are its borders? The fates will reveal them in times to come …’ Over the past 400 years an obscure principality deep in the forests on Europe’s eastern edge had expanded to become the largest continental empire on Earth – a domain whose immense territory stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, covering one-sixth of the planet’s dry surface. Although somewhat diminished in size after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians today still nickname their country ‘the seventh continent’.

This chapter focuses on the reception of Sean O’Casey’s drama in central Europe, defined for the purpose as consisting of Czechoslovakia (and its successor states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Poland, Hungary, and Austria. We see how, in this geographical area, productions and publications of the playwright’s work did not really take off until the 1950s. But this chapter shows that, from the mid-twentieth century, successful productions included Jan Werich and Jiří Krejčík’s filmed adaptations of O’Casey’s one-act plays in Czechoslovakia, and Zygmunt Hübner and Bronisław Pawlik’s Polish translation of The Shadow of a Gunman.

Jews trying to survive in Poland, on the “Aryan” side, were exposed to permanent risk of detection not so much by the Germans, but by their Polish neighbors, passers-by, officers of the “Blue” police and the ever-present szmalcovnicy (blackmailers). The behavior, cultural and religious codes, speech, aand stereotyped physical characteristics of Jews conspired to make Jewish survival so very unlikely.

This chapter discusses the emergence of networks of help and rescue for and by Polish Jews during the Holocaust. It focuses on the activities of individual non-Jews who risked not only harsh measures imposed by the Germans but also social ostracism. The chapter stresses the centrality of Jews’ participation in the rescue initiatives, in particular the role of the Council to Aid Jews “Żegota.”

This chapter offers a global and pan-European account of Holocaust trials, which stretch from occupied Germany immediately after the war to Australia in the 1980s, and much in between. It shows that initially crimes against Jews were not in the primary prosecutorial focus of the thousands of trials dealing with Nazi crimes across Europe, but that over the decades Holocaust-related crimes moved to the center of Nazi war crimes and criminal trials related to the Second World War. The chapter trances the evolution of Nazi trials, from an initial period of intensive prosecution in the immediate aftermath of the war, to a period of relative quiet in the 1950s, to a renewed wave of prosecutions beginning in the 1960s.

This chapter treats the daily life experiences of Jews who survived the Second World War in the interior regions of the Soviet Union. Included among this group were Soviet citizens who evacuated eastward ahead of invading German armies as well as refugees from Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.

Focusing particularly on Poland and Ukraine, with less detailed considerations of other parts of eastern Europe, this chapter examines the politicization of Holocaust memory in the post-Cold War period. An attempt to forge a new, postcommunist identity in eastern Europe also entailed an evasion of wartime reality. The all too real suffering of Poles or Ukrainians during the Second World War was conflated with, or even substituted for, the extermination of east European Jews. The tragic reality that collaboration was commonplace among non-Jewish Poles or Ukrainians was denied. Even more strikingly, Poland and Ukraine tried to use the power of the state to craft a new, revisionist mythology about the past in which Poles and Ukrainians were rescuers, Jews were largely absent (or even blamed for their own murder), and only Germans did anything bad. This revisionism was part of a revived nationalism that sought to ground new, postcommunist, often authoritarian regimes in a comforting mythic history.

During the 1920s Jewish organizations in the USA developed a strategy for guarding the global security of Jews. The strategy was based on economic assistance, international diplomatic pressure, and emigration. The Nazi accession to power fundamentally upset that strategy.

This chapter discusses the stances of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Churches towards the increasing persecution of Jews and other targeted groups (such as disabled people or Roma), the splits within some of these hierarchies and between hierarchies (including the Vatican), and grassroots reactions.

This chapter describes the “choiceless choices” of the leaders as circumstances changed over time and as a result of Nazi strategies of annihilation. Similarly, the chapter addresses the motivations and strategies of the Jewish police and its role at different stages of the “Final Solution” and how these decisions affected Jews according to gender, age, country of origin, and class.

The introduction highlights the enduring impact of the Holocaust, the global reach of its legacy, and the ways it has shaped all domains of social and cultural life. Briefly tracing the changing shape of Holocaust memory and post-Holocaust politics, it is argued that the Holocaust has become a global touchstone for thinking about mass atrocity. The Holocaust has become a master metaphor for evil, which has led to it being appropriated and misappropriated for diverse contemporary political uses in ways that are often detached from the historical event itself. The introduction suggests that the various chapters in the volume trace these developments across a range of geographical spaces and cultural practices.

After Kristallnacht, the Nazis introduced forced labor for German Jews. Later, over a million Jewish men and women toiled for private and public enterprises in Europe and North Africa. Changing economic needs and persecution goals during the war determined timing, purpose, inhumane labor conditions, and chances of survival in each territory.

The durability of democracy among modern political systems is based on its ability to provide for its own self-enforcement without recourse to outside compulsion (North, Summerhill, and Weingast 2000; Przeworski 1991). Recourse to outside enforcement is always dangerous because loss of self-restraint by that authority raises the dilemma of “who guards the guardians” (Hurwicz 2008), and holds out the possibility of dictatorship.

This chapter examines the relationship between a politicized public sector and democratic backsliding. It is argued that politicization of public employment is an important, if understudied, component of the institutional landscape that makes democracy vulnerable. Bureaucratic politicization increases the likelihood that backsliding becomes endogenous by generating electoral advantages for incumbents and by raising the stakes of control over government. Politicization of the state administration allows incumbents to dole out patronage jobs; introduce political loyalty tests as a precondition for accessing basic government services; press public employees into campaign-related work; and utilize state funds for political purposes. Building on this volume’s aim of untangling the relationship between institutional subversion and backsliding, particular attention is given to the timing and sequencing of these processes. Evidence from Eastern Europe and a global sample shed light on how governments in countries that once seemed to be the front-runners of democratization concentrated political power by extending the economic reach of the state and subverting public sector independence. This study contributes to research on the illiberal political economy that supports backsliding regimes and their capture of key levers of political power.