Eastern Europe before the horrors of the 20th century was “a world of multiple faiths and languages in which many parallel truths lived beside one another.” It was “a kind of ramshackle utopia” with “many peoples and faiths and languages arranging themselves in a loose symbiosis” that had lasted centuries, according to the journalist and author Jacob Mikanowski in “Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.”
Mr. Mikanowski’s book arrives as a new war rages in Ukraine, evoking memories of the region’s darkest days, when the area now known as Eastern Europe was dominated first by Hitler’s Germany then by Soviet Communism. After 1989 and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the newly independent states began writing new national narratives combining truth and folklore, Mr. Mikanowski said.
In this episode of History As It Happens, the author explains why this forgotten past is worth recovering.
“We have clear ideas of what German history is like, or French history or Italy. But when you go east, it becomes a lot vaguer. There are more countries and we have less of a sense of them. We also have a generalized sense that Eastern Europe is doom and gloom. It’s war. It’s Communism,” said Mr. Mikanowski, who argues that perspectives on the region’s richly diverse past have been obscured by the cataclysms of two world wars, the Holocaust and then decades of Soviet domination.
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
