Writing history in twentieth-century Eastern Europe

Here, the concrete institutional settings and broader contexts of historical research and reflection in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe are reconstructed, with special attention paid to key schools and individuals and their most important works. Based on the perception that historical arguments have often played crucial roles in the political contests and cultural debates of the region, the chapter also focuses on key disagreements and on what their primary causes can tell us about the transformation of historical cultures. It does so in order to argue that the ‘vertical’ integration of historians into pan-European scholarly paradigms and discussions has often preceded the ‘horizontal’ integration of Central and Eastern European historiographies.