David W. Gerlach. The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing

“In retrospect,” Tony Judt wrote in the introduction to his Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, “the years 1945–1989 . . . now come to be seen not as a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century.” It is in part thanks to Judt that “aftermath” has become a proper category of historical analysis, lending further support to the argument that wars neither begin nor end overnight. Yet his definition of it was an invitation to a polemic, not an incontrovertible statement of fact. David W Gerlach’s The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of the German-Czech Borderlands after World War II, about the economic consequences of ethnic cleansing in the Sudetenland, as former Czechoslovakia’s rim is historically known, participates in the polemic implicitly, without referencing Judt. The choice of this geographical setting is an evergreen reminder that the Sudetenland (relabeled “borderland,” or pohraničí in postwar Czechoslovakia) is not some free-floating journalistic signifier for foreign annexation or civic disloyalty, but an actual landscape.

Annexation · Argument (complex analysis) · Czech · Economic history · Ethnic Cleansing · Ethnic group · German · Political science · Politics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies