East and Central European History Writing in Exile 1939−1989 eds. by Maria Zadencka, Andrejs Plakans, and Andreas Lawaty (review)

The fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe found local historians debating the malefic nature of their totalitarian past as part of revisiting their respective national narratives. Catching up with the most advanced currents in Western scholarship, including such controversial topics as historical memory of communism and the Holocaust, the region's historians discovered the entangled nature of their past. The history of one country is related to another and thus appears transnational, with commonalities of research questions and findings requiring a new comparative methodology.¹ This has given rise to a growing body of scholarship surveying the transnationally entangled history of the region and the equally interconnected history writing in socialist countries, including everyday contacts between historians across the Iron Curtain.²

The book under review is a collection of articles written by a highly diverse group of international scholars seeking to reconstruct the invisible network of interconnections and common preoccupations that prompted the intellectual dialogue between historians who emigrated from Eastern European countries after 1939, their Western counterparts, and colleagues behind the Iron Curtain. The editors thus define the manifold purpose of the book: "(1) It expands understanding in the west of continuing revisions of the historical knowledge about eastern and east-central European countries. (2) It reshapes the historical knowledge in the former communist countries then and now. Finally, (3) it provides general explanatory models of the mechanisms that matter for intellectuals living in exile: the ways they work and operate in foreign milieus, their networking, their production of ideas and thoughts, their capacity to solving conflicts, and the ways of reestablishing contact with their home countries" (P. 1).

The project was initiated as a series of workshops and conferences bringing together historians from different countries in: Sigtuna, Sweden (2004); Rapperswil, Switzerland (2006); Lüneburg, Germany (2007); Bloomington, Indiana (2008); and most important, at the conference "East and Central European History Writing in Exile – International Dissemination of Knowledge" (Södertörn University, Sweden, 2009). It took several years to develop the papers presented at these meetings into chapters and to enrich the multifaceted discussion of the topic with case studies by scholars who joined the project at a later stage. The editors conceptualize the development of émigré historiography as "the process of "internationalization" of knowledge in response to the condition of exile (P. 2).

The book is divided into three parts. The first part, "Constituting Exile," consists of nine chapters. It describes how scholars established themselves in the community of exiled intellectuals and in Western academe, how they reestablished themselves professionally, and restored formal and informal webs of communication across borders. For example, Olavi Arens writes about Estonian historians who emigrated to Sweden and founded the Estonian Learned Society there. Unlike their colleagues who moved to New York, Estonian émigrés to Sweden succeeded in using their pre–World War II contacts to establish themselves as experts and to engage in academic debate with their Swedish and German counterparts. These contacts, particularly with German scholars – members of the Baltic Historian Commission in Göttingen (Germany) – allowed Estonian historians to play a major role in the postwar reevaluation and rehabilitation of German presence in the Baltics. Moreover, Estonian émigrés to Sweden cooperated with both German and Swedish colleagues in rewriting the transnational history of the Baltic region. The story is continued in Toivo Raun's chapter, which analyzes the development of institutional contacts between Baltic historians and the Association for Advancement of Baltic Studies in North America (established in 1968), as well as with the Baltic Historian Commission in Göttingen and with the Nordic historians. On the example of the Marburger Symposia held in 1971, 1981, and 1985, Raun shows how international meetings of historians interested in the Baltic region promoted the integration of émigré historians into Western academe.

The second section, "Transfer of Knowledge," features...