Historical Reflections on Central Europe by Stanislav J. KirschbaumReview by: Martyn RadyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 556-557Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212929 .

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556 SEER, 77, 3, I999

Kirschbaum, Stanislav J. (ed.). Historical Reflections on Central Europe. Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, I995. Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, I999. xiii + 245 pp. Notes. Index. f45.00?

MULTI-AUTHORED volumes, particularly those arising out of conferences, tend to have a predictable feel about them. The contributors' essays are largely unrelated to one another and are variable in quality. They are preceded by an introduction in which the editor of the volume unconvincingly attempts to impose an intellectual rationale upon the collection. There is frequently no index. The present work is one of eight volumes in which are published a selection of papers given at the Warsaw Congress of Central and East European Studies in I995. At first sight, it would seem to fit the pattern for volumes of this type. Individual essays range from the Middle Ages to the I 990S. They are prefaced with an introduction which disingenuously explains how each contribution variously adds to our understanding of the new region called Central Europe which has emerged from the end of the Cold War. There are the usual genuflections in the direction of Larry Wolff. Beyond this, however, points of comparison become harder to establish. First, there is an index. Secondly, most of the contributions are of a high standard and certainly more than conference musings. Thirdly, and most importantly, the volume has been imaginatively put together. Although diverse, most of the essays are arranged in groups around common themes. Although unstated in the volume, these themes may be considered to include: communities of memory in the Middle Ages; relations between the state and Polish e'migre groups in the Communist period; Vaclav Havel and the changes in Czechoslovakia in 1989; and the trade unions and tripartism in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the I990s. The editor's own introduction is itself supported by a related essay by Philip Longworth on myth-making and legitimacy in Central and Eastern Europe.

One criticism applies to a number of the essays here. Although the editor makes reference in his introduction to the common features of the region and to its close association with the rest of Europe, most of the contributors focus almost exclusively on their own narrow areas of interest and eschew any comparative observations. Grzegorz Mysliwski's account of the rituals attending boundary delimitation in medieval Poland attempts therefore to establish their origin without any reference to practices elsewhere in the region, and without any obvious appreciation of the influence of canonical procedures. Brian Porter's account of the failure of nineteenth-century liberalism in Poland discusses neither the simultaneous decay of liberalism in the western part of the Habsburg Monarchy nor its 'strange death' only several decades later in the land of its birth. For their part, the essays on tripartism make no reference either to corporate traditions inherited from the nineteenth century or to the post-war Austrian experience. A valuable opportunity to establish some of the distinguishing characteristics of Central Europe and to test them against West European norms is not therefore pursued. There are, however, several exceptions to this criticism. Robin Alison Remington explores the disintegration of Yugoslavia by reference to

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REVIEWS 557

models of federalism taken from the social sciences. Building on the comparative research undertaken by in particular Susan Reynolds and Wendy Davies, Piotr Gorecki likewise confirms the role of the neighbourhood as a repository of collective memory in thirteenth-century medieval Poland. Philip Longworth's account of the role of myth and legitimacy in Central and Eastern Europe is characteristically wide-ranging. Longworth fails, however, to distinguish myth from legend. The point about myths is surely not that they are 'plausible untruths' (p. 7) but that they perform an explanatory function. Whether true or untrue, they provide a means of interpreting phenomena and of either legitimating or delegitimating a social, political or national order.

Altogether, this is an excellent collection of essays which restores the present reviewer's faith both in the multi-authored volume and in the publication of conference proceedings.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies MARTYN RADY University of London

Donnert, Erich. Katharina II. die Grosse (I729-I 796) Kaisernn des Russischen Reiches. Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg, I998. 367 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. DM 58.oo.

EVEN though he spent most of his career in the German Democratic Republic where the dominant scholarly paradigm implausibly placed Catherine the Great in opposition to the humanitarian struggle of a small but courageous band of radical 'enlighteners' Erich Donnert has always been prepared to acknowledge that the Empress had a more positive personal part to play. It is fitting, therefore, that in the year in which he celebrated his seventieth birthday he should finally have placed her centre-stage. Among his new book's most obvious virtues is the clarity of its organization. Within a broadly chronological series of seventeen chapters, short and clearly identified sub-sections offer a clever mixture of biography and analysis of Catherine's own time in the context of the wider background of eighteenth-century Russian history. No topic of significance seems to have been ignored. Yet although the cocktail has been conscientiously shaken, it still tastes rather bland. In part, that is because most of the ingredients are familiar. Having evidently completed his work before the publication of new material such as V. S. Lopatin's ground-breaking edition of the correspondence between Catherine and Potemkin, Donnert relies instead on such well-worn evidence as the Grimm correspondence and other treasures from the multi-volume Sbornik of the Imperial Russian Historical Society. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that since those sources have by no means yet been squeezed dry, and the German reader will doubtless learn much from the extensive quotations given here. The real disappointment of this book instead lies in its reluctance to engage in debate. In view of the author's particular expertise in the German dimension recently reconstructed in unprecedented detail by his doctoral pupil, Claus Scharf, and emphasized here as significant one might have expected him to discuss in some detail, say, the extent to which Catherine's views on religion (and especially her hostility to monasticism)

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