is a professor of East European history at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and one of the directors of the Imre Kertész Kolleg. His research interests include the history of state-building and nationalism, political violence during socialist rule and museums and exhibitions in Central and Eastern Europe. More recent publications include Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (München: Oldenbourg, 2010), Catastrophe and Utopia. Jewish Intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, eds. Ferenc Laczó and Joachim von Puttkamer (München: de Gruyter/Oldenbourg, 2017), and From Revolution to Uncertainty. The Year 1990 in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Wlodzimierz Borodziej, Stanislav Holubec and Joachim von Puttkamer (London: Routledge, forthcoming in 2019).
The erstwhile students of 1989 have recently returned to the streets of Bucharest, Warsaw, Bratislava and Budapest to defend what they achieved three decades ago. But could the tragedy of Central Europe that Milan Kundera wrote about so compellingly in 1983 be repeating itself?
