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Book Reviews
of nation-building before the age of modern nationalism. There are
not many comparable works on eastern central Europe, a region that
is highly attractive to comparative historians who are interested in
cultural transfer. It is an area in which linguistic-ethnic, legal, and
cultural mixtures are as characteristic as the problems of national
identity-creation, which are fraught with conflict. Karin �riedrich’s
stimulating book makes two things clear: it underlines the necessity
of continuing to subject to critical scrutiny older images of history
and lines of tradition, in particular, in the regions central to German-
Polish relations, and it demonstrates in an exemplary way the profit
to be gained by posing old questions afresh and discussing them
within a methodologically ambitious framework.
JOACHIM BAHLCKE is Professor of Eastern Central European
History at the University of Erfurt. His publications include Ungarischer
Episkopat und Österreichische Monarchie: Von einer Partnerschaft
zur Konfrontation (1686–1790) (2002), and, as co-editor, Konfessionalisierung
in Ostmitteleuropa: Wirkungen des religiösen Wandels im 16.
und 17. Jahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur (1999). He is currently
working on a history of Eastern Central Europe from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth century.
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