出版社：Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
摘要：Drawing to various degrees on Polish, Ukrainian, German, Austrian, Czech, Hungarian, Slovak, Serbian, French, British, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Finnish, Bulgarian, and American sources, Maciej Górny’s masterful study provides a critical overview of the significant contributions that intellectuals from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe made to the war effort in multiple countries during World War I.As a history of ideas, Górny’s work focuses in particular on the ‘Krieg der Geister’ – or ‘war of the spirits’ – that was waged in parallel with the military struggles on all fronts during the war.Noting that, until very recently, this war of ideas has been studied only in its Western European manifestations, Górny argues that the involvement of Eastern European intellectuals “paralleled that of their colleagues in the West,” and that these intellectuals also “matched” Western scientists “both intellectually and with regard to social standing” (p.4).Górny asserts that the similarities between the war of ideas on the Eastern and Western fronts “far outweigh the differences,” and that though the differences that existed were not insignificant, a careful comparative study of the roles that Eastern European intellectuals played is both warranted and necessary (p.4).Such a study, he contends, not only addresses a significant lacuna in the historiography of World War I, but also contributes to a growing body of scholarship that interrogates the complex history of cultural and intellectual transfer in the region in the first half of the 20th century.
