Borderland and Battleground: A journey Through Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe

Explores through history, film, fiction, and memoirs the 'extreme' political experience, hybrid ethnic identities, and stunning art and testimony of twentieth-century Central and Eastern European cultures, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Traces the emergence of new nation states in the region at the end of World War I, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, the devastating experience of World War II, and the absurdist mix of politics and daily life in Eastern Europe from 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall.