Between Nazism and Communism

This course will examine the history of Eastern Europe, focusing on the experience of several groups in the region, including Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, to understand the lasting legacies of Nazi and Communist rule in the modern period. These populations were part of a historically rich multicultural, multifaith, and multilinguistic region that was homogenized in the 20th century due to war, genocide, political nationalism, and population transfers. Although our course will not focus on the contemporary crisis in Ukraine, our exploration of the complexity of Nazi and Soviet control over Polish territory in the 20th century, and the experiences of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians – including their sense of belonging, their reactions to dislocations, and the memory of their and the memory of their physical extermination and national-ethnic subjugation – will deepen your understanding of our current moment.
 
The region of Eastern Europe is vast. Our course will introduce students to its history by studying the history of Poland, beginning in its “Golden Age,” which saw the expansion of Jewish settlement throughout the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – which included Ukrainian lands – and continuing to the effects of the partitions in the late eighteenth century, in which Poland and its peoples became subjects of the Russian, Habsburg, and Austrian Empires. In the “long” nineteenth century, the “national” principle prevailed in Eastern Europe, affecting Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish national aspirations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course will investigate the dislocations caused by World War I, the exhilaration of the reestablishment of Polish statehood in its aftermath, and then focus on the catastrophic invasion and occupation of western Poland by the Nazi Third Reich in 1939 and of eastern Poland by the Soviets. We will then turn to 1941 when the Germans invaded Soviet lands and study the unfolding of the so-called “Final Solution” against the Jews of Eastern Europe. The course will then examine the radical shifting of populations after the war, the effect of Soviet domination in the region after 1946, and the complex ways in which Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews remembered Nazism and Communism.
 
To explore this history, we will examine primary historical documents, secondary scholarship, memoir literature, poetry, a graphic novel, and film.