Customer Reviews

Central Europe: Enemies & Neighbors & Friends

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~Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, and Friends~ is an amazing background history on Central and Eastern Europe. Lonnie Johnson chronicles central European historical developments, whether cultural, political and socio-economic, after the fall of Rome and the rise of the Christian West. Central Europe ("Mitteleurope") is a vibrant region where the interplay of cultures (i.e. Slavic, Germanic, Magyar, Turkish, et al.) and faith (i.e. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Islam) interact. Johnson gives a great cursory background to the nineteenth century nationalist movements throughout Central Europe and the so called Springtime Revolutions of 1848. Moreover, his elaboration on feudal developments helps gives clarity to understanding the sometimes enigmatic region. Anyway, Johnson explains why it is integral to understand the medieval meaning of natio (nation) in order to gain proper cognizance of history. The medieval kingdoms were "relatively loose confederations ruled by kings who claimed a limited amount of jurisdiction for specific subordinate political and territorial units, each of which, in turn, was ruled by nobles who exercised a high degree of autonomy in their domains." Thus, the nobles and not the people were the constituent members of the nation. Approaching Central European history, without the clouded lens of modern democratic theory, which eschews feudalism as primitive, has clouded proper understanding of the developments so integral to Central Europe and its history. While romantic nationalism has swept Central Europe, the metamorphosis of romantic nationalism with hundreds of years of tradition, requires understanding medieval developments to frame everything in the proper perspective.

There are history lessons to be learned from this book. To me, the breakup of Austria-Hungary was an impetus for the violent ultra-nationalism, which has plagued the region in the twentieth century and those areas peripheral to central Europe like the Balkans. Austria-Hungary, a traditional monarchy, acted as a stabilizer and peacekeeper in the Balkans. Prussia's self-assertion in the 19th century, and their being the torchbearer of Pan-German nationalism, played no small part in the gradual downfall of traditional monarchies like that of the Austrian Hapsburgs though. The Great War sealed the fate of the Hapsburg Empire. This book also cast light on the Slavic and Germanic tension, which was forever part of the region. It also proves the absurdity of Nazi race theories of "racial purity," since the various peoples of Mitteleurope, the Germans in particular, are among the most mixed stocks in Europe... In the middle ages, the Teutonic Knights essentially Germanized many of the Slavs in their desire to push the creed of Western Christendom. The Teutons gave the conquered Slavs the German language and the Roman Catholic Faith. The unvanquished Slavs further to the east countered the Germanic push as well. Though, in Poland the Slavs never displaced Roman Catholicism, only the German language, though not in its entirity. Ironically, the wellspring from which Pan-Germanism and German nationalism was born was amongst amalgamated German-speaking "Germano-Slavs" in Prussia. (Granted, they were thoroughly Germanized culturally, and had no problem with future dehumanization of their Slavic neighbors to the east.) The ideology of Pan-Germanism was wrapped in a mythology about German supremacy and blood purity, which history proves to be false. Anyway, Johnson wraps up the book with a fascinating probe into 20th century history as two world wars changed the political landscape. Central European history under the Nazis and the Soviets is covered with amazing clarity. With regards to the Balkans and that multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia created after the Great War, much can be learned from this book in understanding and diagnosing the problems of Western (i.e. EU/NATO/US) foreign policy towards the Balkans.

Lonnie Johnson has assembled a fascinating window into the history and interplay of cultures over the past millenium in Central Europe. A background on medieval and modern history of the region should give the reader great deal of perspective on the European conflicts of the twentieth century.

Before coming and working in the Balkans, I taught European political-military affairs and history, and this has got to be one of the best books on the subject for an American audience. Lonnie Johnson is an American academic who has lived many years in Austria and has an Austrian wife, so his perspective is personal as well as academic. He writes in such a manner that he will be understood by the average American who hasn't done a masters in European international relations, yet goes into sufficient detail to for his book to qualify as a serious treatment of the subject. The conclusions and points that he draws apply to all of Europe, including the West. For us, to whom 1776 is a long time ago, to be able to understand why the Europeans are the way they are, this book goes a long way to explain it. We debate about whether the Confederate flag should fly over the South Carolina capital. Imagine centuries of such symbolic and real gestures that make such trivial issues matters of national importance. Centuries of antipathies and changing alliances are brought into clear perspective in this book. If you only have time to read one book on the history of Central Europe, its shifting borders and repressed emotions, make this it.

Why didn't I give it 5 stars? I like to save those for the Winston Churchills and the Vaclav Havels who not only can write well, but were an important part of the story.

This book is being used as a supplemental reading in a seminar class in Eastern Europe. Johnson, as the third generation of Slavic historians, has written an easy to read, well documented, and scholarly work. His theses are easy to comprehend, and he makes the region, politics, and ethnic struggles of the region accessible to all readers.

This is easily the best history of Central Europe available for the general reader (or the student). Johnson always keeps the big picture in mind, while moving the reader though events and people that are unfamiliar to most Americans.

Johnson has organized the material to do what you probably want it to do. Chapters on the last 150 years or so cover only a couple of decades each, while the earlier chapters cover centuries. He keeps his eyes on each of the modern countries in the region, while discussing the larger empires that have buffeted them this way and that.

While it would make a good text for an undergraduate course, I think the book's real value is for the traveler. Read the first half of the book before you go to Central Europe, and then read about more recent events while you are there. You'll gain an added appreciation for the sights and for the historical context that produced them.

This is not your easy read pseudo-historiography. This is a very well research (and notated) academic presentation of a singularly dismissed subject. (Not in the sense of being written off as more of just being ignored.) Beginning with the earliest available evidence of how different tribes moved into the area and then created kingdoms that were dedicated to a family dynasty, up to the demise of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the democracy movement, Johnson presents us with the facts and his own theories, but never mistakes one for the other.

He does an especially good job of explaining the background facts to the "nationalist" myths of many of these nations and then goes on to explain how they have been used and exploited (for good and ill).

He does a workmanlike job of taking us from the Empires of the fin de siecle (in 1899), through their demolision at the end of WWI, the disasterous interwar years of democracy fading into tyranny, WWII, the sublimation to Soviet power, and then the miraculous year of 1989 and the fall of the "Iron Curtain" (which in his opinion, just rusted away, and fell over from a stiff wind of the people's will).

A most scholarly written and presented work.

I had expected a good and objective review of the history of central Europe. Unfortunately the book doesn't provide it. Although the author claims to be unbiased, His emphasis on the benefits of the German culture brought by Germans to central Europe during the middle ages is totally off the mark. He spends too much time explaining to his audience that as an American who has no association with Central Europe, that his work is an objective summary of the history of this region, but the German bias that he obviously has acquired in Vienna shows through very clearly. One of the important elements that he obviously has missed in his learning and research is that until Bismark united the various principalities, there was no single German culture or even a common German language. Each of the principalities had their own culture and language. I can attest to this from personal experience during my life in Germany from late 1945 to 1951 when my family moved to Germany to escape the Russians and avoid the Gulag and again during a three year assignment in 1989 -1992.
In October of 1944 my family moved to Breslau (today called Wroclaw). The German's there, that I met, were what would be called today typical Germans and spoke the common language of today's Germans. However if you studied the history of this region as well as that of the people west of this area to the river of Elbe, you would find out that most of these were Slavic people who had been Germanized by the conquests of the Saxons. starting at about year 1000AD. The Saxons at the time lived on the west bank of Elbe. Due to the advancing Russian army, in early 1945, our family moved west and ended up in a small village in the state of Thuringia. What amazed me was that the natives there spoke a different dialect, dressed differently, their diet was different (including snails and large sour potato dumplings) and had a totally different outlook on life. For example none of the houses were heated and during the coldest nights in the winter you were expected to sleep with windows open (you kept warm with a big thick feather filled blanket). Each house did have a small kitchen with a wood burning stove, but for bigger baking each family in the village used the common outdoor village oven which was operational all the time and was used primarily for baking bread (each family had a scheduled time when they had access to it). During the summer of 1945 we moved to Wurzburg and letter that year to a village near Hanover. Wurzburg, of course is part of Bavaria, but back then the population of Wurzburg was starving, while we were being taken care of by UNRA. Hence I didn't have much contact there with the natives. However, on our next stop, in the village not far from the city of Hanover, we spend 3 years and I got to know the natives quite well. Again it was very surprising at the difference between these natives and those of the others that I had met. These people can best described as the Amish and Mennonite people here in US. They did speak the classic German, but women wore black dresses and their heads were covered by a black shawl or a white cap. Their diet again was different. Perhaps the most striking difference though was their work ethic and self reliance. The one family house, that we lived in, was surrounded by a field where the family grew wheat and an orchard with apple, plum, and cherry trees. There was a garden plot to plant vegetables, and adjoining the house was building that housed a washroom including a hand pump, an area for animals (a stall for a cow, another for a pig, and an area for chickens, ducks, and geese), it also had an indoor outhouse. They also had a system for collecting rainwater from the roof. The well water was hard on the skin and hair. This was a typical house in the area and the families there were obviously very self sufficient. But the most shocking difference I found among the various regions in Germany was when we moved to the village of Sengwarden, just 10km north of the city of Wilhelmshaven and 1 km from the North Sea. Upon my first visit to the village, hearing the people talk, I thought that this was an English outpost. I couldn't understand a word, but it sounded similar to what the English soldiers spoke (at the time I did not understand the English language). Turns out that I was hearing the Frisian language which is close to neighboring Dutch. It turned out that most of the people in the state of Freesia were bilingual. They spoke mostly in their native Frisian and the official German when needed. From 1989 to 1992 I lived again in Germany on the outskirts of Munich. While there I met several native Bavarians who again spoke a very different language from that of the classic German. Not many of the people that I met in Munich speak or understand the Bavarian language and when asked, said that they did not want to be identified as Bavarian natives, because Bavarians were lazy and just wanted to party. I also spend some time in Stuttgart which is in the state of Swabia. These people often had qualms of being identified as Germans, because they felt that their mentality is different from the rest of the Germans and were more trade and business oriented.
The point of all this is that until the 1800's when the Bismark through guile and force brought together the various principalities, the only two things in common among these people were that they spoke a Germanic language as do the English, Dutch, and the Scandinavians and they politically were part of the Holly Roman Empire which included parts of Italy. Thus to speak about a common German culture, before it developed (after the Bismarck era), is very misleading. By the way, until the mid 1800's French was the language in use in all German universities). The drive of the various Germanic speaking principalities and kingdoms (including the Danes and Swedes) to the east was the selfish quest for land and serfs for the growing number of the sons of the rulers (the eldest inherited all of the fathers and the rest were left dry) and quest by the traders of cities for monopoly of trade routes with east (Islamic middle east and the silk route with China). The need for these more cumbersome trade routes was caused by Venice which controlled all European trade in eastern Mediterranean and the exorbitant tariffs they charged. To legitimize the conquests in the east, the aggressors promised to convert the natives to Christianity and thus received the blessing of the church to pursue their ventures. Not all of the missionaries to central Europe were German speaking (Latin was the official language of the church at the time). The best that can be said is that Germanic speaking aggressors, invited immigrants, or self seekers (pioneers) for open land, brought into underpopulated central Europe the then prevailing Latin high culture (common language for interstate communications, common written form, laws, religion, and church supported autocracy) which then prevailed in most of western Europe. Western Europeans considered France and Italy to be the centers that developed and cultivated this culture.

This is one of the best, perhaps the best, survey or overview history of a region that I have read. (Central Europe -- at least as Lonnie Johnson defines and writes about it -- comprehends Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and, further to the east or south, the Baltic states and portions of Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.)

1600 years of history of a dozen or so "peoples" (whose territories are by no means congruent with the states of the region) are intelligently presented in 308 pages. Each of the twelve chapters is written in a stand-alone fashion, with useful sub-chapters, so one should be able to use the book as a reference and find readily enough discrete periods, countries, episodes, or events. Yet it also is sufficiently well-written that I could read it from front-to-back without ever bogging down. That is not to suggest that it is a quick or easy read. In fact, it took me about three weeks, reading perhaps 20 pages at a sitting. But for historical surveys of its kind, it is eminently well-written and readable.

Especially engaging were the later chapters, dealing with the Cold war and its end and the dissolution of the Iron Curtain and the Eastern Bloc. Then I learned more from the five or six pages on the disintegration of Yugoslavia than I had from an entire book devoted to the Balkans but not nearly as well-written, organized, or presented.

I read the book primarily as historical background for reading fiction from Central Europe, but no matter what one's interest in the region (including travel), I doubt seriously that there is, or soon will be, any comparable much less superior history.

This was a fun read about how large kingdoms in the past are little countries today. Here are some excerpts to give you an idea of style and content:
P.24 "The differences between Poles and Russians or Poles and Ukrainians reinforce the idea that the southern and eastern borders of Central Europe can be drawn using alphabets and religions. Different alphabets and different conceptions of the same religion are useful instruments for drawing cultural borders with Europe, but they do not necessarily promote mutual understanding among the peoples who have them. Each nation in the region came to regard itself as a "chosen people" with Christian and national missions: defending the True Faith against other Christian heretics and shielding the Christian West against infidels. In the 19th century, nationalism drew heavily on the sense of exceptionalism rooted in the Christian and European missions that individual peoples in the region saw themselves as having fulfilled in their histories."

P.25 "One of the peculiarities of Central Europe is that some people from the region consider the Middle Ages to be the high point in their national historical traditions. Therefore, we should examine the period before 1500 because the process of empire building in Central Europe, which gradually led to the demise of the kingdoms of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland, began shortly thereafter. By the end of the 18th century most of Central Europe had been divided among three dynastic powers: Habsburg Austria, Romanov Russia, and Hohenzollern Prussia.

"All four of Central Europe's political nations also were multiethnic. The "national interest" consisted of the interest of the nobles."

The union of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania lasted 186 years and ruled from Russia to Hungary. And they functioned as feudal states ruled by nobles. The details are quite a story. And so is how things worked out between the Russian and Orthodox churches and the spread of Islam. Here you will find out how scattered groups became allies sometimes and enemies at other times.

"When the borders of Central Europe were redrawn after WWI, many looked at the dismemberment of the Austrian and Russian empires as an opportunity to reestablish their "historical borders" ...Croatian and Serbian nationalists provide the best contemporary examples."

The chaotic agitation of all these old tribes and their religions is what triggered WWI and WWII and the collapse of communism. Revolts are still going on. So the story is not finished. But you will never know or understand the story without a book like this. And there's a lot more story than just battles.

For those who have an interest in the WWII eastern front, your going to go away with a different understanding of what was happening.

What do the historical details have to do with the news headlines recently? There are 3 battling groups in Iraq, several in Libya, several in Lebanon, several in Turkey, many in Russia and China. Are we going to see these places become a re-run of Central Europe?

Lonnie Johnson has written an excellent history of a complex region that is, to many Americans, a relatively unknown part of the world (or a part of the world known as Eastern Europe, the satellite nations of the USSR).

The region is extraordinarily complex: about 1500 years of history, with many different peoples moving around, political units coming into and out of existence, and forms of political order (e.g., states, empires) changing and morphing. Just trying to make sense of the Hapsburg line is a difficult task. But Johnson finds common themes (or contrasts) in each time period he chooses to structure his chapters, and so transforms the multidimensional area into a readable text.

Different readers will come away with different senses of what is important. But for me, knowledgeable in western European history and politics, Johnson gave me a sense of the greatness and the ironies of these countries (at least as seen by themselves). Most of them have one point in their past when they ruled vast territories, most have had a significant history of being ruled, including oppressive domination, by outsiders, most see themselves as having protected the west from the dangers of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the Ottomans, the Bolsheviks, and other assorted 'barbarians'. Equally, most, having been ravaged by the Nazis and the Stalinists in the 20th century, are also responsible for large-scale forced emigrations (after World War II), flirted or succumbed to tyranny in the inter-war (1919-39) years, and are now facing or accepting exclusionary nationalism now. And also the long sweep of history allows one to see many aspects now forgotten: the value, and the ultimate failure, of the Austro-Hungary Empire; the past centuries where different ethnic groups lived together in relative peace and stable, usually limited, inequalities; and the exceptionalism of the 20th century, with its exclusionary nationalism, destruction of the Jews, creation of a unified Germany, and destruction of the vast empires around Austria, Hungary, or both.

All in all, a very readable, expert, thoughtful book.

(I read the 1996 paperback. The pagination of the 2010 paperback is identical except that the last chapter, on post-1989, has grown from about 23 pages to about 33 pages.)

For me, the book is dense with facts and slow reading but full of critical pieces of history that I would bet to say you did not receive in your European History College Course. The information provides background to a lot of relevant American history which many of us may not have considered. If you are headed to Central Europe for travel or relatives are from this area I would encourage you to read this.