Abstract This article is about the recent transformation of two powerful, paradoxical, and inseparable narratives of progress that developed in the postwar period: aesthetic autonomy and Holocaust remembrance. As far-right and illiberal parties have gained power across Europe, they adapted these foundational narratives of the liberal-democratic West to assert their own legitimacy and to reimagine the cultural inclinations of the European Union. This article examines how this process has taken place in the reception of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest (2023) and Agnieszka Holland's Green Border (2023)—both international co-productions produced during the repressive eight-year reign of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland. A close reading of these films and their reception in different contexts, exposes a world more complicated than one-dimensional dichotomies between the liberal and the illiberal. Likewise, the reception of the two films makes apparent the entanglement of the national and transnational, as well as a process of translation and mistranslation that takes place as cultural materials move across geographical and ideological boundaries. Understanding such dynamics helps us to comprehend the options for criticism available to artists working within repressive contexts.

Abstract This article analyzes the interplay between medicine and politics in East Germany. It analyzes the meetings of the Politburo medical commissions (1958–60) to frame and define the habitus of a generation, the “Tenners” (born 1910–20), which included most of the experts in the Politburo meetings. This generation consisted of politically committed doctors who were also influential medical scholars, many with international reputations. The Politburo meetings revealed major quarrels between these experts and the Party. The communiqué (1960) issued by the Politburo showed a partial victory for the experts, because the Party acknowledged many of their claims, proving that “totalitarian” interpretations do not hold. However, this was not a victory of medicine over politics. The experts formulated their claims by combining medical and political arguments and defended the jurisdiction of their medical expertise over the Party, precisely because they believed it could more decisively contribute to achieving the goals of socialism.

Nadège Ragaru, Bulgaria, the Jews, and the Holocaust: On the Origins of a Heroic Narrative Translated by Victoria Baena and David A. Rich. Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe. University of Rochester Press, 2023.

Ottomans in Eighteenth-Century Prussia: Delegates to Diplomats By Irena Fliter. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023. Pp. xiv + 245. Paperback £65.00. ISBN 978-1802078671.

Multicultural Cities of the Habsburg Empire 1880-1914: Imagined Communities and Conflictual Encounters By Catherine Horel. Budapest and Vienna: Central European University Press, 2023. Pp. xviii + 556. Cloth $121.00. ISBN: 978-963-386-289-6.