Germany, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1949-1991 by Rajendra K. JainReview by: Patrick SalmonThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 773-774Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211418 .

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REVIEWS 773

I 945 the military commander of the territories of Czechoslovakia liberated by the Red Army, together with the Czechoslovak army, commanded by General Ludvik Svoboda.

The twenty-three short articles (or chapters) of this book give a very adequate account of the Czechoslovak military effort. Particularly notable are the two articles on the parachutist groups CARBON (Frantisek Bogataj, pp. I6I-74) and WOLFRAM (Robert Matula, pp. 175-92), and the two articles on the siege of Dunkirk by Bohuslav Sulc (pp. I93-2I6). Even more interesting are the last four articles dealing with the Svoboda army (Miroslav Kerner, pp. 23I-44, Jaroslav Nemec pp. 245-54, Frank Vohryzek-Vernon, pp. 255-64 and Lewis White, pp. 265-80). To a greater or lesser extent they are all critical of General Svoboda, an officer of little ability, whose military and political career was based on abject subservience to the Soviets and the Czechoslovak Communists. Unfortunately, Svoboda was typical of many Czechs in the period at the end of the war. On the other hand, he did have the courage to organize the first Czechoslovak army units in Poland in 1939 and to remain with them when eastern Poland was overrun by Soviet troops. This is in sharp contrast to General Prchala, appointed commander-in-chief of Czechoslovak forces in Poland, whose only role seems to have been to address the troops and then vanish (Miroslav Kaspar pp. 9-22). Prchala also distin- guished himself by refusing to admit Jews and Communists into army ranks. Indeed, a Czechoslovak army could hardly exist without these two groups. The subject ofJewish participation is hardly mentioned. The article on 'The Crisis of the Czechoslovak Army in England in the second half of I940', by Jaroslav Nemec (pp. 83-94) mentions the accusation made by Czech Commu- nists that the officers of the army were anti-Semitic. This is only one of the two references tojews in the book. Yet, in I 94 I Benes told Sidney Silverman that of the 9,ooo Czechoslovaks in England, only 1,500 were either Czechs or Slovaks: the others, that is the majority, werejews or Germans. It is, of course, true that the officer corps had fewerJews and the government apparatus even fewer, but Jews did much of of the fighting, just as their co-religionists at home were the main victims of German persecution.

The authors must certainly know the work of Erich Kulka, who has written extensively on Jews in Svoboda's army (Jews in Svoboda's Army in the Soviet Union, New York, I987). It is surprising therefore that neither Kerner nor Nemec, writing about the judicial murder of Lieutenant Holzer instigated by Svoboda, do not mention that he was aJew (pp. 240-4I, 248-50).

School of Slavonic and East European Studies HARRY HANAK University ofLondon

Jain, Rajendra K. Germany, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 194-i1991. Sangam Books, London, I993. xv + 386 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?29.95.

HAVING written extensively on international relations in East and South Asia, Rajendra Jain turns his attention in this book to relations between West Germany and Eastern Europe since 1949. Using published documents and

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774 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

German- and English-language secondary sources, and with the recent unification of Germany very much in mind (his book was completed in June 1992), Professor Jain provides a clear and well structured account of the Ostpolitik of successive West German governments from Adenauer to Kohl. He portrays West German Ostpolitik as a success story. Abandoning the immobi- lism of the Adenauer era, German governments after I966, and especially under Willy Brandt between I969 and I974, adopted a flexible approach which enabled them to normalize their relations with Eastern Europe while remaining in close step with their Western allies. In this way the Federal Republic enhanced its freedom of manoeuvre, opened up the possibility of greater contact between the populations of East and West Germany, and kept open the options for unification. The tone of the book is relatively uncritical (it is one of those books in which the notes frequently read more interestingly than the text to which they refer). Little consideration is given, for example, to the possibility that the normalization of relations with the East may have helped to harden the division between the two Germanies; nor is there much mention of the ideological clamp-down in the German Democratic Republic which accompanied the increased opportunities for contact between its citizens and the West. Parts of the book, notably the section on economic relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, read as if they were completed before reunification and subsequently revised only to a limited extent. Jain writes interestingly, however, on recent events. He provides useful detail on the process by which unification occurred in i989-90, and concludes with reflec- tions on the future place of Germany in Europe and in the world at large. While discounting fears of a militarized 'Fourth Reich', Jain points out that Germany 'has in the past used economic means and influence to achieve political objectives' (p. 284). Germany's economic strength will clearly make its role in both Western and Eastern Europe even more central than it has been in the past but, Jain believes, its influence will be asserted in ways that will not conflict with the interests of other European countries. Department of History PATRICK SALMON University ofNewcastle upon Tyne

Spence, Richard B. and Nelson, Linda L. (eds). Scholar, Patriot, Mentor: Historical Essays in Honour of Dimitrzje Djordjevic. East European Mono- graphs, Boulder, Colorado. Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, I992. xvi + 422 pp. Notes. Index. $51.00.

IT apparently took time for the University of California Santa Barbara campus to realize that the erudite 'old-fashioned European' scholar who had arrived from Yugoslavia in the late I96os to teach Balkan history had, in younger days, been an inmate of both Nazi and Communist gaols. His beginnings had been hampered by the fact that he had been in the resistance with General Mihailovic. It was only in I958 that the Belgrade Academy found Dimitrije Djordjevic a niche that launched him on a distinguished career during which he evolved from a student of Serbia's foreign policy in the decade before the First World War into that rare species - the complete Balkan historian, whose comparative studies of the development of modern society in the

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