Informace o kurzu

This course traces the history of Central Europe from the Second World War to 1989 through successive attempts to remake Europe. It explores how multinational European states experienced and responded to the major transformations of the twentieth century, and how different political regimes imagined and sought to create a “new Europe.” Using Czechoslovakia as an entry point into the broader history of Central and Eastern Europe, the course begins shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War and follows the making and transformation of postwar Europe. It focuses on four major turning points — 1938–45, 1948, 1968, and 1989 — while also examining the continuities that connected them. Topics include interwar democracy and the nationalities question, Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, liberation and postwar retribution, the Communist takeover and Stalinism, the 1968 Prague Spring, everyday life under state socialism, and the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Combining classroom discussion of primary and secondary sources with site visits in Prague, including the Jewish Quarter/Lidice and the Museum of Communism, the course asks how the Czechoslovak and Central European experience reflected — and sometimes challenged — broader European developments in dictatorship, war, genocide, socialism, and democratization.