Martin Kohlrausch: Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910-1950 (2019)

“The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of modernist architects. Brokers of Modernity reveals how East Central Europe turned into one of the pre-eminent testing grounds of the new belief system of modernism. By combining the internationalism of the CIAM organization and the modernising aspirations of the new states built after 1918, the reach of modernist architects extended far beyond their established fields. Yet, these architects paid a price when Europe’s age of extremes intensified.

Mainly drawing on Polish, but also wider Central and Eastern European cases, this book delivers a pioneering study of the dynamics of modernist architects as a group, including how they became qualified, how they organized, communicated and attempted to live the modernist lifestyle themselves. In doing so, Brokers of Modernity raises questions concerning collective work in general and also invites us to examine the social role of architects today.”

Publisher Leuven University Press, 2019
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License
ISBN 9462701725, 9789462701724
400 pages

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

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Cultural Anthropology: Lessons for Liberalism from the “Illiberal East” (2018)

“The cumulative effects of Brexit, the resurgence of populist politics in Europe, and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States have given rise to the perception that Western liberal democracies are undergoing profound change, if not a bona fide crisis. Moreover, there is a sense that it is the political liberalism of the post–Cold War period—rather than its far less popular companion ideology of neoliberalism—that finds itself in disarray. As scholars and commentators rummage through their intellectual toolboxes for explanatory frameworks, many are turning to (post)socialist histories and experiences as heuristic devices for making sense of the upheavals in Western politics. In this Hot Spots series, we suggest that the postsocialist transition, as both discursive space and set of practices that attempted to make capitalists out of socialists and liberals out of totalitarians, renders the former socialist world a rich site for understanding the current shifts in the Western political landscape. We aim to make sense of this landscape in a way that is attuned to both long-term processes and to the state of emergency reinforced with each new wave of current events. Even though the ground appears to be constantly shifting beneath our feet, these essays insist that detailed, historically and geopolitically sensitive analysis of actually existing post–Cold War liberalisms is one key approach for making sense of the present.”

Edited by Dace Dzenovska and Larisa Kurtović
Publisher Society for Cultural Anthropology, Apr 2018
Hot Spots series
ISSN 1548-1360

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Local Contexts / International Networks: Avant-Garde Journals in East-Central Europe (2018)

“This volume presents papers based on the presentations held at the conference Local Contexts / International Networks – Avant-Garde Magazines in Central-Europe (1910-1935) held at the Kassák Museum in September 2015. The Museum is the only Hungarian museum devoted entirely to the avant-garde and its documents. It launched a programme centred around the presentation of archives and private collections, contemporary reflections on the avant-garde, and a reconsideration of Kassák’s oeuvre.

The avant-garde journal was arguably the most important medium of communication for progressive literature and visual arts in the region during World War I and the interwar period. The conference brought together researchers of different disciplines and approaches to analyse the multifaceted nature of the avant-garde journal. It aimed to draw attention to the tensions between national/local and international/cosmopolitan and offer possible answers to the question: how did the different cultural and historical characteristics affect the local avant-gardes of Central Europe?” (from Introduction)

With texts by Gábor Dobó and Merse Pál Szeredi, Eszter Balázs, Jindřich Toman, Gábor Dobó, Piotr Rypson, Michalina Kmiecik, Przemysław Strożek, Klára Prešnajderová, Sonia de Puineuf, Michał Wenderski, Dušan Barok, György C. Kálmán and András Kappanyos, and Irina Denischenko.

Edited by Gábor Dobó and Merse Pál Szeredi
Publisher Petőfi Literary Museum & Kassák Museum, Kassák Foundation, Budapest, 2018
The Avant-Garde and Its Journals series, 2
Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic License
ISBN 9789631259728
192 pages

Conference
Publisher

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