Thinking the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder & Tony Judt

Author:Timothy Snyder & Tony Judt [Snyder, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781409021520
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

7.

UNITIES AND FRAGMENTS:

EUROPEAN HISTORIAN

I LEFT OXFORD in 1987 and took up a job in New York. Within two years, I found myself caught up in the marvelous turmoil of the revolutions of 1989. I was sitting in a Viennese taxi in December of that year and had just learnt by radio of the fall of Ceauşescu in Romania, the last and most violent drama in the sequence that brought about the fall of communism in the region. What would this mean for our picture of postwar Europe, with its inbuilt assumption that the east European communist regimes were here to stay? And what, in turn, would the transformation of Europe’s eastern half entail for Western Europe and its newfound European Community?

I remember thinking quite explicitly that someone would have to write a new book about this. The old story was unraveling fast, although the shape that we would give it in the future would not emerge for some time to come. Having decided in short order that this was a book that I might like to write, I sat down and started to read for it—a process that took an unanticipated decade. But by the time the Soviet Union came to an end in December 1991, I was quite sure that my decision was the right one.

In 1992, five years after arriving at New York University, I became the chair of the History Department. In this capacity it would have been imprudent in the extreme to invite seduction by graduate students in my department, much less seduce them myself. But that, happily, is exactly what happened. In the NYU History Department in the early 1990s, I was Perhaps the only eligible male (unmarried, straight, under seventy). Jennifer Homans had been trained as a ballet dancer at New York’s School of American Ballet and had danced professionally in San Francisco and Seattle before retiring as a result of injury and perhaps diminished motivation. She had then studied French at Columbia University and gone on to win a graduate fellowship at NYU where she started work in American history.

Growing dissatisfied with this subject—increasingly reduced to hyphenated identity histories, which had replaced the no less soporific but more pedagogically serviceable micro-political monographs of an earlier generation—Jennifer met Jerrold Seigel, the prominent intellectual historian who had joined NYU from Princeton a few years earlier, and grew seriously interested in European history. Meanwhile, however, she had maintained an active engagement in the world of dance, working for the National Dance Institute founded by Jacques d’Amboise, and this interest had taken her to Prague where she interviewed dancers and became fascinated by Eastern Europe.

Inquiring of her fellow graduate students who, if anyone, taught Eastern European topics at NYU, Jenny was given my name, and came to my office to ask if I would be teaching that fall. I had no intention of doing so, and as head of department did not need to; but I decided on the spur of the moment that more than anything else I had been awaiting the opportunity to conduct an independent study on east European history.

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