This monograph is based on a broad range of primary and secondary sources and explores the development of the political, legal, economic, social, cultural, and military ‘communities of conflict’ within Austria-Hungary (especially in the Bohemian and south Slav lands); the convulsions of the
First World War and the Czech, Slovak, and south Slav break with the Habsburg Monarchy; the difficult formation of successor-states; the domestic and foreign policies of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; Hitler’s destruction of the order created by the Treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain, and Trianon; the Nazi policies of conquest and occupation in Bohemia, Moravia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia; the genocide committed against the Jews in the Protectorate, Slovakia, the Ustaša-state, and Serbia; the retaliation against and expulsion of the Sudeten and Carpathian Germans as well as the Germans in Slovenia, Croatia, and the Vojvodina; and finally the issue of history and memory east and west of the Iron Curtain as well as in the post-communist national states at the end of the twentieth century in eastern and southeastern Europe. The focus is, on the one hand, on the ethnic-national contention between Germans and Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as well as between Magyars and Slovaks, Serbs, and Croats; and, on the other hand, on the conflicts at the level of the state of the German Empire and Austria with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
Although many emperors, kings, presidents, chancellors, minister-presidents, ministers, business tycoons, general directors, ambassadors, generals, Gauleiter, and high SS and police functionaries appear as historical actors in the 150 years of east-central and southeast European history since 1848, three of them remain especially present in historical memory at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the German “Führer” and Chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister and President Edvard Beneš (1884–1948), and the Yugoslav partisan-leader and President Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980).
Arnold Suppan
ist Professor emeritus am Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte der Universität Wien und ehemaliger Vizepräsident der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Benes Hitler Tito Internationale Geschichte Konflikt Krieg Völkermord Ostmitteleuropa Südosteuropa Zeitgeschichte Arnold Suppan