After 1945, German Breslau was transformed into Ur-Polish Wroclaw at Stalin's behest. Most of the remaining prewar population was expelled, and a stable population of a few hundred with German ethnic background is estimated to have lived in the city since then. This paper is based on qualitative analysis of 30 oral history interviews from among the self-defined German minority. It pays close attention to historical context, urban milieu, and salient narratives of identity as shaping forces, which include the suppression of German culture under Communism, prevalent intermarriage between Germans and Poles, and the city's qualified reinvention as “multicultural” after Polish independence in 1989. Together with the group's relatively small numbers, these narratives play out in their hybrid approach to ethnicity, often invoking blended cultural practices or the ambiguous geographical status of the Silesian region, to avoid choosing between “national” antipodes of “German” and “Polish.” The results follow Rogers Brubaker's insight into ethnicity as an essentializing category used to construct groups where individual self-perception may differ; and the concept of “national indifference,” previously applied to rural populations. It also suggests we might better approach circumscribed “minority” identities such as these, by seeing them as a form of “sub-culture.”

Imagine all history written as if all people, even women, mattered. Until a couple of decades ago, that was at most an aspiration for those of us working on East European history. Since then, however, and especially with the fall of Communism, feminist scholars have made significant inroads toward achieving this goal. This review essay reflects on the contributions made by five such studies that focus on different aspects of women's lives under state socialism in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland, and Romania. In one way or another, each author asks similar questions about the relationship between the Communist ideological emphasis on gender equality as a core moral value, on the one hand, and the policies and actions of these regimes with regard to women, on the other hand. Moreover, all studies focus on how women themselves participated in articulating, reacting to, and in some cases successfully challenging these policies. In short, they present us with excellent examples of how pertinent gender analysis is for understanding the most essential aspects of the history of Communism in Eastern Europe: how this authoritarian regime transformed individual identity and social relations.

The heart and soul of a society is often much more fully revealed in its imaginative literature than in such self-conscious statements as political manifestos or constitutions. It is this soul-baring quality of imaginative literature which explains, even if it does not justify, the primacy in Soviet literary criticism of political and ideological concerns over such factors as psychological honesty and aesthetic efficacy. The neglect of the transpolitical, transideological subtleties of literary art makes Soviet literary criticism seem very mechanical and heavy-handed to most non-Marxists. Of course this kind of critical analysis is not inappropriate to some of the hack work generated under the rubric of “socialist realism.” However, Western critics are often equally ideological in their own way, even towards Soviet literature of intrinsic artistic merit. Indeed, this essay itself runs the risk of abusing art by subjecting a charming little Soviet story, “Instructress Asta,” to political analysis.

The social status of ethnic minorities residing in a state is one indicator of the level of democracy in each newly formed or restored democratic society.

As is generally known, the contemporary demographic situation in Estonia is fundamentally different from that of the prewar period. The autochthonous minorities who lived in the prewar Estonian Republic—Germans, Jews, Swedes, Finns, but also native Russians (living in the northern and southern areas of the Peipsi lake)—were lost after World War II together with a change of Estonia's eastern border by Soviet authorities in 1945. This left Estonia a very homogeneous country where Estonians formed some 97% of the population and where the entire population was made up of Estonian-speakers.