Orel Beilinson

Over the past two centuries, Eastern Europe has undergone significant changes. This is not only a story of collapsing empires and radical experiments in communist utopia, but also of the loss of traditional sources of livelihood, the restratification of society, and the spread of new ideas—ideas that some claim created an entirely new kind of person. This course offers precisely such a history of Eastern Europe since roughly 1800. Rather than focusing solely on shifting borders, government agencies, and high politics, we will seek to understand how the upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shaped everyday life among serfs and factory workers, shopkeepers and nomads, doctors and schoolteachers, nobles and princesses. How did the growing power of the state, the expanding aspirations of the middle class, the opening of politics to the masses, the concentration of capital, rapid industrialization, total wars, and sweeping ideologies transform social structures? How malleable are seemingly natural structures, such as the family? To what extent do economic and social conditions shape collective identities, and to what extent can collective identities reshape economies in turn? Through themes such as family life, education, labor, and gender, the course will trace the major currents of Eastern European history.

The course readings (all available in translation; original-language versions are available to interested students) will also center the voices of the period’s contemporaries. We will read autobiographies, diaries, and even literary works. Alongside efforts to understand historical actors on their own terms, the course will also aim to situate Eastern Europe in its global context. How different was the Russian Empire from other contemporary empires? How does Eastern Europe’s belated industrialization compare to experiences elsewhere in the world? To what extent did these experiences—and the ideologies that emerged from Eastern Europe—create a shared language among workers and peasants across the Second and Third Worlds? Might it be that Eastern Europe’s path to modernity is closer to that of most of the world than to that of England and France? In this way, the course will provide students with foundational knowledge and methodological tools that are equally relevant to those specializing in other parts of the globe.

The twentieth century established the presence of youth in politics as self-evident. The Hitler Youth and the “Swing Youth” have become inseparable parts of Holocaust education and its memory. Youth has become almost banal: squares, streets, and neighborhoods in many European cities are dedicated to youth. Youth movements such as the Scouts are still around, but joining them is no longer accompanied by the idealistic vision of masculine-imperial renewal that drove membership up a hundred years ago. Although many political parties still have youth wings, it is hard to imagine them as a revolutionary force. This stands in contrast to the late nineteenth century, when impassioned young people aroused deep anxiety—some even warned of the collapse of the social order into a “paedocracy”: rule by children.

This seminar asks how “youth” became an interest group and a political force in the nineteenth century. Although the story is usually said to begin in Germany in 1813, we will go further back and look for the connection between youth and authority in rural inns, artisan workshops, and universities. We will examine what drove young people to participate in moments of upheaval, and why they emerged as a group separate from adults. Once we identify the beginnings of the label “youth,” we will explore how certain young people (for example, students) tried to persuade others to adopt this identity. Throughout the seminar, we will read texts that praise young people’s unique capacity to repair a broken world, uplift the rest of the people, and even create a new world. Yet we will also read texts that express anxiety about youth and concern that modernity is producing immoral, degenerate, and dangerous young people. These two tendencies will lead to adult attempts to control youth, organize them, and subject them to the interests of emerging mass politics. Thus, we will face their disappointment. Instead of idealistic fervor, they were tamed into bureaucratic, standardized, institutionalized, adult-led organizations such as the Hitler Youth and the Scouts.