Based on his book Blood-Dimmed Tide: Central Europe's Long Great War, 1905-1921 (under contract with Harvard University Press), this talk will first outline the idea of the First World War's "central European theater" as an alternative to the vague  "eastern front." It will then show how the war interacted with pre-existing political and social forces in the region to produce a system of sovereign national-states out of the political wreckage of the theater. While the new states of post World War One central Europe are still, to this day, dismissed in surveys and monographs as 'fragile,' or 'backward,' or inherently prone to despotism and failure, locating their origins firmly within the war calls attention to the degree to which these states were not only post-imperial, but post-war states, who sought to deal with the catastrophic aftermath of war at the same time they were building new political institutions. Finally, the talk will show how tensions raised during the war were exacerbated and institutionalized in the postwar world, and continue to destabilize the region today, calling into question the notion of a "short" twentieth century. 

Jesse Kauffman earned his BA from UCLA and his PhD from Stanford. His first book, Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War One was published in 2015 by Harvard University Press. He is currently Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University.

RSVP here