To accompany a growing list of posts, I’ve now added a rough-and-ready tag Iron Curtain to the sidebar. For want of a more succinct handle, it includes posts on the region both before and since 1989.
Most of these posts suggest Chinese parallels—including various essays on the GDR (here and here, as well as a two-part biography here and here), Serbia, Bulgaria, musical cultures of east Europe, and Cheremis, Chuvash—and Tibetans. There are yet more links under the tag German too. Under the separate tag Czech are several (mercifully lighter) stories, notably from Švejk and my mentor Paul Kratochvil.
Notably I include the “bloodlands” of Timothy Snyder’s book, a vast region not easily characterized. In my post on his book, I wonder what would it take for the region to be recognized as the physical and moral graveyard of the 20th century—shifting our balance from the Western to the Eastern Front.
Setting forth from A Nazi legacy and Anne Applebaum’s Between East and West, I described the blind minstrels of Ukraine, leading to posts on the famine and the intrepid journalist Gareth Jones.
I’ve included my posts on Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, since so many people from the region ended up at such camps.
Doubtless more to follow.
Stephen Jones: a blog 