This volume brings together a diverse group of scholars from North America and Europe to explore the history and memory of Germany’s fateful push for power in the Balkans during the era of the two world wars and the long postwar period. Each chapter focuses on one or more of four interrelated themes: war, empire, (forced) migration, and memory. The first section, “War and Empire in the Balkans,” explores Germany’s quest for empire in Southeast Europe during the first half of the century, a goal that was pursued by economic and military means. The book’s second section, “Aftershocks and Memories of War,” focuses on entangled German-Balkan histories that were shaped by, or a direct legacy of, Germany’s exceptionally destructive push for power in Southeast Europe during World War II. German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century expands and enriches the neglected topic of Germany’s continued entanglements with the Balkans in the era of the world wars, the Cold War, and today.

This work looks at the complicated relationship between Germany and the European East during the short twentieth century. It looks at the social, cultural and political contexts during the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. Please note that images or diagrams have been excluded from this text due to copyright restrictions.

The essays in this volume address theoretical and methodological issues of Balkan or Southeast European regional studies—questions of scholarly concepts, definitions, and approaches but also the extra-scholarly, ideological, political, and geopolitical motivations that underpin them.

Age of Entanglement explores patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. Kris Manjapra traces the intersecting ideas and careers of a diverse collection of individuals from South Asia and Central Europe who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. Moving beyond well-rehearsed critiques of colonialism towards a new critical approach, this study recasts modern intellectual history in terms of the knotted intellectual itineraries of seeming strangers. Collaborations in the sciences, arts, and humanities produced extraordinary meetings of German and Indian minds. Meghnad Saha met Albert Einstein, Stella Kramrisch brought the Bauhaus to Calcutta, and Girindrasekhar Bose began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Rabindranath Tagore traveled to Germany to recruit scholars for a new Indian university, and the actor Himanshu Rai hired director Franz Osten to help establish movie studios in Bombay. These interactions, Manjapra argues, evinced shared responses to the cultural and political hegemony of the British empire. Germans and Indians hoped to find in one another the tools needed to disrupt an Anglocentric world order. As Manjapra demonstrates, transnational intellectual encounters are not inherently progressive. From Orientalism and Aryanism to socialism and scientism, German–Indian entanglements were neither necessarily liberal nor conventionally cosmopolitan, often characterized as much by manipulation as by cooperation. Age of Entanglement underscores the connections between German and Indian intellectual history, revealing the characteristics of a global age when the distance separating Europe and Asia seemed, temporarily, to disappear.

This book examines Nazi Germany's expansion, population management and establishment of a racially stratified society within the Reichsgaue (Reich Districts) of Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia in annexed Poland (1939-1945) through a colonial lens. The topic of the Holocaust has thus far dominated the scholarly debate on the relevance of colonialism for our understanding of the Nazi regime. However, as opposed to solely concentrating on violence to investigate whether the Holocaust can be located within wider colonial frameworks, Rachel O'Sullivan utilizes a broader approach by investigating other aspects, such as discourses and fantasies related to expansion, settlement, 'civilising missions' and Germanisation, which were also intrinsic to Nazi Germany's rule in Poland. The resettlement of the ethnic Germans-individuals of German descent who lived in Eastern Europe until the outbreak of the Second World War-forms a main focal point for this study's analysis and investigation of colonial comparisons. The ethnic German resettlement in the Reichsgaue laid the foundations for the establishment and enforcement of German society and culture, while simultaneously intensifying the efforts to control Poles and remove Jews. Through this case study, O'Sullivan explores Nazi Germany's dual usage of inclusionary policies, which attempted to culturally and linguistically integrate ethnic Germans and certain Poles into German society, and the contrasting exclusionary policies, which sought to rid annexed Poland of 'undesirable' population groups through segregation, deportation and murder. The book compares these policies - and the tactics used to implement them - to colonial and settler colonial methods of assimilation, subjugation and violence.

Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume take a different approach. They view the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled histories. This regards the treatment of shared historical legacies by rival national historiographies. The volume deals with historiograpical disputes that arose in the process of “nationalizing” the past. Contributors include: Diana Mishkova, Alexander Vezenkov, Roumen Daskalov, Tchavdar Marinov and Bernard Lory.