A History of Middle Europe [antikvár]

Foreword History can be written in many ways, and each region of the world offers the historian its own set of choices and challenges. Since the time of the barbarian invasions the eastern marchlands of Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Black, Aegean, and Adriatic seas, have been a battleground of nations and empires, their peoples buffeted by powerful forces beyond their control and set against each other by the ambitions of their leaders and the mutual antagonisms of different ethnic groups and social classes. In this age of nationalism each national state or ethnic group has developed a history of its own to fortify its existence, back its claims to territory, or assert its right to a place in the sun. The most talented historians of Eastern, Central, or Middle Europe rarely moved beyond this perspective; indeed, the imperatives of twentieth-century nationalism tend to be read backward into the past. The Marxist interpretations which the political fate of the region has made mandatory in the years since World War II, although now themselves attenuated by nationalism, liave merely compounded the confusion, adding more distortion than clarification. This is not to imply that national aspirations, ethnic conflict, and class struggle are not the stuff and substance of Middle European history. They are. The question is whether, in searching for broad political and social forces which give form to what otherwise appears as a chaotic series of events, one appioaches the task with predetermined values and conclusions. No historian, of course, can be wholly free of* the predilections of his time and of his personal philosophy and thus write only pure history "as it really was." The very choice of what events to include and how to relate them one to another, especially in a narrative covering a thousand years or more, presupposes a value system. But one of those values can be a conscious striving for a bias-free vision. Leslie Tihany's great merit, in guiding his readers through the changing fortunes of dynasties and nations, is that he has no cause to plead, no preconceived theory to justify, no nation to exalt above its neighbors. His concern is to tell a human story, that of all the people, the silent peasants as well as the princes and the warriors. If there is