This article examines the lives of three politicians from Austria’s crownland of Bukovina—Aurel Onciul, Nikolai Wassilko, and Benno Straucher—who pursued distinct national ambitions and built successful political careers as advocates of democratization and nationalization under imperial rule. It aims to highlight the multiple transitions these individuals experienced, including shifts from conservative to democratic mass politics, struggles for national rights, and the passage from imperial to national orders. After 1918, Onciul became a representative of a nationality with its own nation-state, while Wassilko and Straucher became spokespersons for embattled minorities. All three struggled to adapt to the new national order, and the forces of nationalization they once championed ultimately turned against them. The article argues that the nationalist politics that had brought these politicians success under imperial rule were later criticized by their co-nationals as treasonous and opportunistic, illustrating the complex and often paradoxical outcomes of nationalization processes in Central Europe.

This article examines the early Nazi movement through the contested and violent politics of Munich’s beer halls between 1919 and 1923. It argues that these spaces were not neutral stages for political speech, but rather central arenas in which the movement defined its identity, tested its tactics, and fused party and paramilitary organization. Drawing on police reports, eyewitness accounts, and Nazi publications, the article shows how the NSDAP sought to recode beer halls into sites of antisemitic and anti-republican action, aided by the toleration and complicity of Bavarian state authorities. These spaces became laboratories for masculine bonding, crowd mobilization, and practices of exclusionary violence that made the boundaries of the Volk both visible and enforceable. By foregrounding the interplay of space, sociability, and violence, the article reframes the origins of Nazi radicalism and highlights the role of everyday venues in shaping interwar populist politics.

This article analyzes the interplay between medicine and politics in East Germany. It analyzes the meetings of the Politburo medical commissions (1958–60) to frame and define the habitus of a generation, the “Tenners” (born 1910–20), which included most of the experts in the Politburo meetings. This generation consisted of politically committed doctors who were also influential medical scholars, many with international reputations. The Politburo meetings revealed major quarrels between these experts and the Party. The communiqué (1960) issued by the Politburo showed a partial victory for the experts, because the Party acknowledged many of their claims, proving that “totalitarian” interpretations do not hold. However, this was not a victory of medicine over politics. The experts formulated their claims by combining medical and political arguments and defended the jurisdiction of their medical expertise over the Party, precisely because they believed it could more decisively contribute to achieving the goals of socialism.

This article is about the recent transformation of two powerful, paradoxical, and inseparable narratives of progress that developed in the postwar period: aesthetic autonomy and Holocaust remembrance. As far-right and illiberal parties have gained power across Europe, they adapted these foundational narratives of the liberal-democratic West to assert their own legitimacy and to reimagine the cultural inclinations of the European Union. This article examines how this process has taken place in the reception of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest (2023) and Agnieszka Holland's Green Border (2023)—both international co-productions produced during the repressive eight-year reign of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland. A close reading of these films and their reception in different contexts, exposes a world more complicated than one-dimensional dichotomies between the liberal and the illiberal. Likewise, the reception of the two films makes apparent the entanglement of the national and transnational, as well as a process of translation and mistranslation that takes place as cultural materials move across geographical and ideological boundaries. Understanding such dynamics helps us to comprehend the options for criticism available to artists working within repressive contexts.

This article examines the negotiation of ethnopolitical categories in wartime Nazi Germany by analyzing Gestapo investigations into accusations of “friendliness to Poland” against German citizens of Polish descent in the industrial Ruhr conurbation. By relying heavily on denunciations and informing, the Gestapo incentivized ordinary Germans in the Ruhr to identify perceived “dangerous outsiders” to the Volksgemeinschaft. Some therefore relied on longstanding anti-Polish tropes to frame accusations in the racial categories of the Nazi state. But while many such accusations alerted the Gestapo’s attention, they frequently masked a pursuit of personal issues and presented officers with significant investigatory difficulties. Unlike the generally brutal treatment of ethnolinguistic minorities in Nazi Germany, Gestapo officers often did not simply employ blanket repression in these cases. They frequently considered accused individuals’ socioeconomic productivity and “commitment” to Germany, characteristics that defendants stressed, thus highlighting the often contingent, unstable process of ethnic boundary formation in Nazi Germany.