Minorities, Nation-States, Fascism: Central Europe, from the late 19th century to 1949 - HIS00182M

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Module summary

Facing major challenges from the growing influence of nationalism among their largest ethnic minorities in the second half of the 19th century, the empires in control of East Central Europe - Russia, Germany and Austro-Hungary - were brought down by the First World War. Emerging from the wreckage of these empires, the fledgling nation-states of interwar East-Central Europe faced huge challenges bringing stability to their politics, economies, societies and international relations. Some of the most serious difficulties seemed to stem from their ethnic diversity - the fact that nations did not map neatly onto states, so that each state contained numerous large minorities. This module will probe into this matter, studying how ethnic minorities were treated in different East-Central European states, why this happened, how this changed over time, and how the minorities responded to their situation. We will think through key concepts such as nation, state, ethnicity and citizenship. We will study how the rise of Nazi Germany impacted on East-Central Europe and on its minorities, nationalists and fascists. We will examine the ethnic violence and ethnic cleansing which peaked during and after the Second World War.

We will start with seminars addressing the situation of minorities in the pre-WWI empires and how their position transformed at the end of that war. We will then study inter-ethnic relations and minority treatment between the wars in five East-Central European states, before turning to Germany itself, where Hitler’s regime seized power in 1933. The final session will examine the wave of ethnic cleansing carried out during and immediately after the Second World War. We will explore these topics through a variety of perspectives - drawing on primary sources such as official documents, speeches, testimony, diaries, newspapers and photographs.

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 2 2025-26

Module aims

The aims of this module are to:

• Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
• Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
• Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will:

• Demonstrate a knowledge of a specialist historiographical literature;
• Present findings in an analytical framework derived from a specialist field;
• Solve a well-defined historiographical problem using insights drawn from secondary and, where appropriate, primary sources.
• Set out written findings using a professional scholarly apparatus.

Module content

Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:

1. Empires and Minorities before 1914
2. The Minorities ‘Problem’ at the end of the First World War
3. Poland
4. Czechoslovakia
5. Hungary and Romania
6. Yugoslavia
7. Germany
8. ‘Solving’ the Minorities ‘Problem’, 1939-49

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

Students submit a 2,000-word formative essay in week 9.
A 4,000-word summative essay will be due in the assessment period.

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Module feedback

Students will typically receive written feedback on their formative essay within 10 working days of submission.

Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative essay during their tutor’s student hours—especially during week 11, before, that is, they finalise their plans for the Summative Essay.

For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.

For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.

Indicative reading

For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

• Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century. London: Penguin, 1998.
• Prusin, Alexander, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870-1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010..
• Zahra, Tara, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.