Oh, the excitement!

tl;dr: Give me bibliographies! (or else!) (I don't suppose I could be so greedy as to request a sentence or two on some? or even precises and random thoughts and musings on things...?)

I love Central Europe. So far, I've read a little about Austria-Hungary, even a little about Austria before 1867, but my favorite time period is actually the 20s. With all those revolutionary and counterevolutionary( /conservative revolutionary...) attempts, all those lovely writers dripping with nostalgia and dreams (often of rather dubious character, if I may be pardoned for the sin of presentism), it's just so... rich. And intermingled. And crazy. The conspiracies and passions, the developments and collapses, the (attempts at often empty) grandeur and the suffering (well, this is a bad thing...)...

I have no idea what to read to go deeper here. I've not had much luck so far perusing libraries or looking around online as everything seems to descend into nationalist narratives, devoid of anything beyond "those damned (Poles, Hungarians, Serbians... etc.) were oppressing us" or "finally, we were able to oppress everyone else before our nation's station was taken!" Regional history (that is, the newish movement in opposition to national history) seems to only slowly be picking up steam here.

Minority.... successes, more than issues, really interest me, how they flowered in different ways, like Yiddish Cinema in Poland (I've never read anything about this, but knew a guy who downloaded 40gigs of 30s movies and learned Yiddish immersing himself like that...) but then also the Polanization, Romanianization etc. and how these nascent states tried to build nationalist identities. But I wonder about how contacts remained and were established, why many minorities stayed in certain regions instead of going to nation states (kind of) representing them (if lucky enough for them to have that...). And what are similar dichotomies like Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Rusin etc. where one vision of the national identity won out...

I found a book e.g. called "international communism in the time of Lenin" which however ended up being a collection of primary source essays by various figures arguing about method and conditions for revolution at the time. Does anyone know of a historical treatment or 4 of that? Besides of various volkish/protofascist (especially outside of Germany) groups etc.?

But then I'm also interested in the Baltic Germans (besides in the 20s with Freikorps etc., an Estonian guy once told me about a paper he was doing on the Swedish communities there!) and various movements in Russia and of exiles, like the Aufbau group of Russian monarchists which lost a few members in Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch (so... where they not as antislav then, did that develop later? I've also read a lot about White Russians serving in the Wehrmacht etc. as translators and so on... See: Oleg Beyda's Iron Cross of the Wrangel's Army : Russian Emigrants as Interpreters in the Wehrmacht... What was going on with the various senses of race there? Biological vs. whatever Rosenburg's Nietzschesque approach was etc... But that then gets way off topic, just the crazy groups doing crazy things.... my god.)

And what languages were common knowledge? How widespread were English and French amongst the upper echelons? When did French (and Italian...) lose their (not quite) predominant positions even in the Austrian court? How did Hungarian language policy function, especially in their attempts to Magyorize even the German speakers still during the empire! How did German's late 19th century predominance actually spread to these areas? I'm vaguely aware of the Gallacian Jews embracing it especially strongly (though how much of that's related to linguistic commonality vs. the political and social issues which interest me more...) with Polish and Russian also being strong in various areas. And in Romania, higher education seems to have been in Greek up into the mid 1800s (according to some plaques on the first Romanian language highschool in Brasov).

Then we have things like the Intermarium...

There're so many things I've read allusions to or heard about, but it's so hard to find anything treating them well (if at all) and in any detail.

(Also, Bloodlands... There's a debate about it? It's not as good as the Reconstruction of Nations?)

Books in other languages are more than welcome!

A quick run through of my impressions, please destroy them:

National identity - very fluid, many conflicting narratives which try to smash each other apart in order to win the population for themselves (different types of Croatian even starting with language, shtokavian vs. kaj- and chajkovian on the coasts, to including all southern Slavs, even Bulgarians etc. as simply Yugoslavs or Serbs... Or excluding some of those but including Poles, Czechs and Slovaks in say Austroslavism...)

I don't currently believe that it was very important in the collapse of Austria-Hungary, rather being something that happened due to the collapse, as the nationalists before the war seemed rather unsuccessful and only the Czechs fought against the crown (in large numbers as coherent entities?) and uhm... it seems like something once common but now slowly being pushed away as nationalist tellings fall from grace? I've not seen much "evidence" (not like I regularly read through primary sources...) in support of it myself, but I'm probably biased here against it as a cause.

Sonderweg etc. - A good (half?) of everyone seemed to be rabidly racist, with many Naziesque groups popping up, so I don't see Germany as having been unique there, Bohemia was certainly more developed than say Bavaria at the time, but wasn't any better (is it presentist to... judge them for... everything.) And since the clean Wehrmacht theory as well as defenses like "Well, you know what would've happened to them if they didn't..." have been resoundly rendered invalid, I guess that... damns pretty much (a lot... half? well.. a good amount of people are generally passive and don't care, say half of the "motivated"/politically active?) population of these areas at the time, as collaboration also seems to have been huge (much larger than most histories dare to touch? So much seems to have been whitewashed). (There was of course a lot of resistance, though often from groups largely in support of Nazi policies...)

Hitler and the Nazis then weren't special in Germany either, with all those other groups active at the time, that they were lucky/able to politick themselves into prominence ahead of other similar groups seems more an accident of history than anything else, I'm unsure if I then think the Holocaust etc. would have still been likely to occur if say (how do I even choose one.... the Alldeutscher Verbund) managed to take power? ...what led to the Nazis doing it? I'm unsure if some similar group would have ended up there or if the left (or even seemingly non-existent center) could have rather come to the forefront. Hmmms. Or is this actually the thesis, that this was all bound to happen... Well, it's not like the Croatians or Romanians or or or acted much differently.

A lot more people seemed to like ww1 than our literary histories say, at least I keep reading allusions to other writers like Jünger who romanticized and enjoyed it. A lot of the workers would have already come from factory lives etc. and were completely used to the regimentedness and inhumanness etc. Philipp Blomm mentions in his introduction that in (other book by him, can't recall the name) he covers the break into modernism already happening in the early 1900s, before the war. He even brings some quotes to that effect out. So the war doesn't seem like the end all change and newer stuff seems to be working towards that end. Conflict also certainly didn't just end in 1918.

What's opinion on calling it the 2nd 30 year's war like? I've only really heard the thesis explicated by Nazis (of say the metapedia type...) and... besides not liking their approach of "everyone was persecuting us but we tried to fight the Jews except we... didn't kill them!!!" and their general un...trustworthiness, it does seem to be a good concept as a whole, along the lines of the longue durée or such, since so much was (seemingly?) caused by the first, which resolved in the 2nd etc. Can that be rehabilitated in a more general sense without seeming like a nazi? I've read a few historians speaking in such a direction, but they seem to stop short of actually saying it.

WW1 wasn't very incompetently carried, other sectors were more mobile, but due to a lack of transport and communications technology, it was hard to push offensives after getting through a few lines of trenches, as the men would be out of artillery support's range etc. Methods kept improving etc. Military history itself doesn't really interest me though. I recall reading some German general: "We couldn't handle a 2nd Somme"

Stalin's great purges (the prewar stuff) seem to have been under 1 million and "mostly" confined to party members etc. This seems iffy though, most things either say oh... "it was valid!" or "TWENTY MILLION DEAD RIGHT THERE! HE WAS WORSE THAN HITLER!" During the war, including forced deportations etc. it goes up though... But those are different events.

The Golodomir also seems too politically... difficult to get a clear image of. But considering the character of Ukrainianization, differing frameworks (thinking less of nationalities than classes...) and the famines of the same nature occurring in other parts of the USSR in ethnically Russian areas (and in Central Asia?) it seems to be more so an issue of... incompetence in distributing resources - or was that intentionalish, they were selling it for machinery etc. but still not in a genocidal framework as there was no intent(?) to erase the culture(s) (well... there was Russianization trying to reverse the Ukranianization they'd implemented before Stalin but these seem like unrelated processes to me?), combined with bad harvests, an unwillingness to realize that yields could be lower and the grain maybe didn't exist, combined with desperation and spite of oppressed peoples (the burning of grain and working less...)

But collectivization by itself doesn't make much sense to me as a scape goat, since they were traditionally collectivized under the mir/osobschinas etc. although those were of course of a different nature and the Russian empire'd just spent a lot of energy trying to stamp them out... But collectivization (in the form of factory farms) in the US and elsewhere was successful at the same time...

Versailles' actual terms seem rather inconsequential as compared to in 1871 and noting that they kept their industrial base, with the overreaction being an example of the big lie, much like the stab in the back etc. The government (out of spite?) crashed the economy on purpose to pay the loans in that manner!

It's all so endless and shaded in meanings of possible interpretation. Thankfully Gödel's second law at least allows us to render some things invalid, so even if we can't prove any models, we can at least have some covalid arguments to make clouds of possibility. ...the Landscape of History's the only actually historiographical work I've read i.e. treating historiography itself, otherwise just through osmosis and the occasional thread here. Do you guys have suggestions on this?

/u/Kugelfang52 /u/commiespaceinvader /u/AshkenazeeYankee /u/G0dwinsLawyer

edit: hey... it even somewhat touches the week's topic!