From a book review on the HABSBURG list: H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (November, 2005) Steven Bela Vardy and T. Hunt Tooley, eds. _Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe_. Eastern European Monographs Series. Boulder: Columbia University Press, 2003. xiv + 861 pp. Maps, notes, tables, documents, some individual bibliographies. $68.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-8803-3995-0. Reviewed for H-German by Bruce Campbell, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (German Studies), College of William & Mary German and Hungarian Suffering after World War II, with the Ex-Yugoslavia as Background The title of _Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe_, edited by Steven Bela Vardy and T. Hunt Tooley, leads one to assume that the book attempts to describe and explain the entire phenomenon of ethnic cleansing in Europe in the twentieth century. This is not quite the case, and the focus is very clearly on the former Habsburg lands of Central Europe and the Balkans, and particularly on the persecution of ethnic German and Hungarian minorities. Other cases are included (including some chapters which include non-European events), but the focus is pronounced. -------snip-------- Finally, the most obvious focus of all is on the persecution and ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans after the Second World War. The introduction specifically states that Germans have been the greatest victims of ethnic cleansing during the twentieth century in Europe (p. 6) (with the Hungarians second). At least twenty of the contributions--nearly half--are concerned with ethnic German suffering after the Second World War. Not only is an entire subsection (Part 2) devoted to the topic, but several of the essays in other sections are as well, as is an entire section where all six essays concern ethnic Germans, four of which (Karl Hausner, Hermine Hausner, Martha Kent, and Erich A. Helfert) are personal stories of ethnic German survivors of ethnic cleansing. These are among the most poignant and heart-wrenching contributions in the entire book, but their academic or analytical value is strictly limited. The topic has been nearly taboo in historical writing since the Second World War, but has recently seen a resurgence of interest in the West and particularly in modern, post-unification Germany, as many taboos against discussing German suffering in the Second World War have begun to be challenged. The contributions on ethnic Germans are mixed in quality. On the one hand, the chapter by de Zayas makes wild accusations and excoriates the Allies and particularly Czech President Eduard Benes, while those by Scott Brunstetter, Janos Angi and Nicolae Harsanyi are superficial. On the other hand, the contribution by Christopher Kopper on the Czech case, though based largely on secondary sources, is at least balanced and shows that there was an evolution of Czech government thinking. The two chapters on Poland by Richard Blanke and Tomasz Kamusella are both very good: Blanke looks at the special case of German-speaking ethnic Poles, whereas Kamusella uses mainly Polish sources to look at Upper Silesia. Two other essays on Poland, by Elizabeth Morrow Clark and Gregor Thum, exploit the recent interest in history and memory to look at the memory of the now absent German presence in, respectively, Gdansk and Wroclaw.