Marina Cattaruzza Book order

Focusing on border issues, this scholarly work explores their significant influence on the history of nations in 19th and 20th century Europe. It reexamines Italian history over the past 150 years, emphasizing how events at Italy's eastern periphery shaped the nation’s core. By analyzing the interplay between borders and national identity, the book offers a fresh perspective on historical narratives and the complexities of state formation in modern Europe.

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.