In the modern Greek city of Thessaloniki, the ruins of a vast Jewish
cemetery lie buried under the city’s university. Nearby is the site
of the childhood home of one of the founders of the modern Turkish
state. These are tantalizing reminders of what was once the bustling
cosmopolitan city of Salonica, home not just to Greeks but to
thousands of Sephardic Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, and Armenians living
and working peacefully alongside one another. Thessaloniki is just one
example among many of what used to be. Over the past two centuries,
ethnic cleansing has remade the map of Central and Eastern Europe and
the Middle East, transforming vast empires that embraced many ethnic
groups into nearly homogenous nations. Towns and cities from Germany
to Turkey still show traces of the vanished and nearly forgotten
ethnic and religious communities that once called these places home.
In Terrible Fate, Benjamin Lieberman describes the violent
transformations that occurred in Salonica and hundreds of other towns
and cities as the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German
empires collapsed, to be reborn as the modern nation-states we know
today. His book is the first comprehensive history of this process
that has involved the murder and forced migration of tens of millions
of people. Drawing upon eyewitness accounts, contemporary journalism,
and diplomatic records, Lieberman’s story sweeps across the
continent, taking the reader from ethnic cleansing’s earliest
beginnings in Bulgaria, Greece, and Russia in the nineteenth century,
through the rise of nationalism, both world wars, the Armenian
genocide, the Holocaust, and the rise and fall of the Soviet empire,
up to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Along the way he
examines the decisive roles of political leaders—not only monarchs
and dictators but also those who were democratically elected—as well
as ordinary people who often required very little encouragement to rob
and brutalize their neighbors, or who were simply caught up in the
tide of history.
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Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781442230385
Publisert
2015
Utgiver
Vendor
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter