“We should welcome the context Kundera gives for the struggles between Russia and Europe, and the plight of those caught between them. His defense of small languages, small cultures, and small nations feels pressing.”—Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine “Kundera focuses on the relationship of Europe’s central ‘small nations’ like Czechoslovakia and Ukraine to Western culture and argues that their cultural identities were increasingly threatened.”—New York Book Review A short collection of brilliant early essays that offers a fascinating context for Milan Kundera’s subsequent career and holds a mirror to much recent European history. It is also remarkably prescient with regard to Russia’s current aggression in Ukraine and its threat to the rest of Europe. Milan Kundera’s early nonfiction work feels especially resonant in our own time. In these pieces, Kundera pleads the case of the “small nations” of Europe who, by culture, are Western with deep roots in Europe, despite Russia imposing its own Communist political regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Kundera warns that the real tragedy here is not Russia but Europe, whose own identity and culture are directly challenged and threatened in a way that could lead to their destruction. He is sounding the alarm, which chimes loud and clear in our own twenty-first century. The 1983 essay translated by Edmund White (“The Tragedy of Central Europe”), and the 1967 lecture delivered to the Czech Writers’ Union in the middle of the Prague Spring by the young Milan Kundera (“Literature and the Small Nations”), translated for the first time by Linda Asher, are both written in a voice that is at once personal, vehement, and anguished. Here, Kundera appears already as one of our great European writers and truly our contemporary. Each piece is prefaced by a short presentation by French historian Pierre Nora and Czech-born French political scientist Jacques Rupnik.

A host of prominent and influential thinkers such as political scientist Ivan Krastev and historians Philipp Blom and Adam Zamoyski have been invited to write essays. Their thoughts are assembled in the anthology Re: Thinking Europe.

The Grand Spas of Central Europe leads readers on an irresistible tour through the grand spa towns of Central Europe—fabled places like Baden-Baden, Bad Ems, Bad Gastein, Karlsbad, and Marienbad. Noted historian David Clay Large follows the grand spa story from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, focusing especially on the years between the French Revolution and World War II, a period in which the major Central European Kurorte (“cure-towns”) reached their peak of influence and then slipped into decline. Written with verve and affection, the book explores the grand spa towns, which in their prime were an equivalent of today’s major medical centers, rehab retreats, golf resorts, conference complexes, fashion shows, music festivals, and sexual hideaways—all rolled into one. Conventional medicine being quite primitive through most of this era, people went to the spas in hopes of curing everything from cancer to gout. But often as not “curists” also went to play, to be entertained, and to socialize. In their heyday the grand spas were hotbeds of cultural creativity, true meccas of the arts. High-level politics was another grand spa specialty, with statesmen descending on the Kurorte to negotiate treaties, craft alliances, and plan wars. This military scheming was just one aspect of a darker side to the grand spa story, one rife with nationalistic rivalries, ethnic hatred, and racial prejudice. The grand spas, it turns out, were microcosms of changing sociopolitical realities—not at all the “timeless” oases of harmony they often claimed to be. The Grand Spas of Central Europe holds up a gilt-framed but clear-eyed mirror to the ever-changing face of European society—dimples, warts, and all.

The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of a failed ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and the Holocaust.

A daring literary masterpiece and winner of the National Book Award In this magnificent work of fiction, acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye on the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century to render a mesmerizing perspective on human experience during wartime. Through interwoven narratives that paint a composite portrait of these two battling leviathans and the monstrous age they defined, Europe Central captures a chorus of voices both real and fictional— a young German who joins the SS to fight its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults upon his work and life.

A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world. When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor’s envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals—the sack of Magdeburg; the Dutch revolt; the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus; the imperial generals, opportunistic Wallenstein and pious Tilly; and crafty diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict. By war’s end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country’s greatest disaster. An understanding of the Thirty Years War is essential to comprehending modern European history. Wilson’s masterful book will stand as the definitive account of this epic conflict. For a map of Central Europe in 1618, referenced on page XVI, please visit this book’s page on the Harvard University Press website.

This collection of essays examines Yugoslavia's dissolution and the subsequent wars.