Journal of Modern European History 9 (2011), 3

The contributions explore the experiences of urban devastation in the wake of the Second World War, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe, where destruction was most profound. They ask for the connections between urbicide and genocide, the wars of extinction of cities and peoples and what this meant for re-establishing urban communities, in particular during and after Soviet-style state socialism. While the German and Allied bombing campaigns in the West have received much attention in recent years, this issue shifts the research agenda to cities that were directly effected by the fierce life-or-death struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This includes not only bombing, but planned devastation (as in the case of Warsaw), the transformation of cities into battlefields (Berlin), starvation (Leningrad) as well as genocide and forced exchange of populations (Lviv).

Forum

Manfred Hildermeier: “Well said is half a lie”. Observations on Jörg Baberowski’s “Criticism as crisis, or why the Soviet Union still collapsed”

Aleksei Filitov: The End of the Cold War and the Dissolution of the USSR

Post-Catastrophic Cities

Edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Martin Kohlrausch and Manfred Hildermeier

Lisa Kirschenbaum: Remembering and Rebuilding: Leningrad after the Siege from a Comparative Perspective

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann: Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience

David Crowley: Memory in Pieces: The Symbolism of the Ruin in Warsaw after 1944

Tarik Cyril Amar: Different but the Same or the Same but Different? The Re-Making of Public Memory of the Second World War in Post-Soviet Lviv

Article

Massimo Baioni: Anniversaries and the Public Uses of the Risorgimento in Twentieth-century Italy