A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This “territorial revisionism” came to include all manner of political and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the war itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period and East European national histories.

How did the Second World War come about? Nazi Foreign Policy, 1933-1941 provides lucid answers to this complex question. Focusing on the different regions of Nazi policy such as Italy, France and Britain, Christian Leitz explores the diplomatic and political developments that led to the outbreak of war in 1939 and its transformation into a global conflict in 1941. Nazi Foreign Policy, 1933-1941 details the history of Nazi Germany's foreign policy from Hitler's inauguration as Reich Chancellor to the declaration of war by America in 1941. Christian Leitz gives equal weight to the attitude and actions of the Nazi regime and the perspectives and reactions of the world both before and during the war.

Tangible Belonging presents a compelling historical and ethnographic study of the German speakers in Hungary, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Through this tumultuous period in European history, the Hungarian-German leadership tried to organize German-speaking villagers, Hungary tried to integrate (and later expel) them, and Germany courted them. The German speakers themselves, however, kept negotiating and renegotiating their own idiosyncratic sense of what it meant to be German. John C. Swanson's work looks deeply into the enduring sense of tangible belonging that characterized Germanness from the perspective of rural dwellers, as well as the broader phenomenon of "minority making" in twentieth-century Europe. The chapters reveal the experiences of Hungarian Germans through the First World War and the subsequent dissolution of Austria-Hungary; the treatment of the German minority in the newly independent Hungarian Kingdom; the rise of the racial Volksdeutsche movement and Nazi influence before and during the Second World War; the immediate aftermath of the war and the expulsions; the suppression of German identity in Hungary during the Cold War; and the fall of Communism and reinstatement of minority rights in 1993. Throughout, Swanson offers colorful oral histories from residents of the rural Swabian villages to supplement his extensive archival research. As he shows, the definition of being a German in Hungary varies over time and according to individual interpretation, and does not delineate a single national identity. What it meant to be German was continually in flux. In Swanson's broader perspective, defining German identity is ultimately a complex act of cognition reinforced by the tangible environment of objects, activities, and beings. As such, it endures in individual and collective mentalities despite the vicissitudes of time, history, language, and politics.

Between 1929 and 1942, Hungary's motion picture industry experienced meteoric growth. It leapt into Europe's top echelon, trailing only Nazi Germany and Italy in feature output. Yet by 1944, Hungary's cinema was in shambles, internal and external forces having destroyed its unification experiments and productive capacity. This original cultural and political history examines the birth, unexpected ascendance, and wartime collapse of Hungary's early sound cinema by placing it within a complex international nexus. Detailing the interplay of Hungarian cultural and political elites, Jewish film professionals and financiers, Nazi officials, and global film moguls, David Frey demonstrates how the transnational process of forging an industry designed to define a national culture proved particularly contentious and surprisingly contradictory in the heyday of racial nationalism and antisemitism.