The Meaning and Uses of Polish History by Adam BromkeReview by: Richard BlankeThe American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5 (Dec., 1988), pp. 1365-1366Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1873649 .

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Modern Europe 1365

ing information about almost any aspect of this sector. For example one can learn that the number of flour mills before World War I was around seventy-two hundred and even that the sources differ in their reporting of this number by as much as plus or minus twenty-five (p. 147). In contrast Karl M. Brousek does not come forth with any thesis on the process of Bohemian industrialization, does not set out to explore the relationship between the various components of this process, and does not begin to put it into a comparative perspective.

The author has remained isolated from Anglo- American scholarship. Of the one hundred fifty citations, only a handful are in English. This is a pity because Americans have been writing quite a lot about the Habsburg economy as well as about the process of European industrialization, and the au- thor could have profited enormously from this literature. He could have tested some of the theories that have been put forth concerning the Habsburg economy. Had he read David Good's work on mar- ket integration, to give just one example, he might have been tempted to compare the performance of Bohemian industry with that of some of the other provinces of the monarchy.

In sum this work, encyclopedic in conception, is fine as a source of data; the analysis of the data, however, is apparently left for others to do.

JOHN KOMLOS

University of Pittsbur,gh

BRIGITTE HAMANN. Bert/ia von Suttner: Emi Leben fur den Frieden. Munich: R. Piper. 1986. Pp. 551. DM 49.80.

"A life for peace," the subtitle of the latest biography of Bertha von Suttner (nee Kinsky), sums up the Austrian baroness's chief cl-aim to be remembered today. But, as the author shows, she was also active in other reform causes: women's rights as well as the struggle against anti-Semitism and for the extension of political freedom in Central Europe. The publi- cation in 1889 of her antiwar novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay down Your Arms) brought her imme- diate fame, and she succeeded in converting nmany readers to antimilitarism by her passionate protest against the horrors of war. Her reputation as a writer, however, has faded since then. Her book was essentially a Tendenzroman, a literary genre seldom in fashion in the twentieth century, while most of her other works of fiction were composed merely to keep the wolf from the door. She must now be judged, therefore, primarily as a peace activist and antiwar publicist.

An agnostic and an anticlerical, the baroness based her internationalism not on religion but on a deeply held humanist ethic, which suffused her

whole outlook on life. Unlike her disciple and friend, Alfred Hermann Fried, whose pragmatism prevailed in the German Peace Society, she ap- proached international relations from a moral standpoint. Although she did not share Tolstoy's belief in the spread of conscientious objection to military service as a panacea for war (for she thought this imposed too great a burden on the average conscript), she regarded the Russian pacifist as the prophetic voice of the peace movement. Her own remedy for militarism was comparatively mod- est: the substitution in disputes between states of a court of arbitration for the arbitrament of war.

She considered the Social Democrats, too, as allies in her crusade against militarism, yet she rejected class war. In domestic politics she was a liberal not a socialist. Under the baroness's guidance the Aus- trian Peace Society, which she had founded in 1891, sought especially the support of persons of influ- ence; this policy indeed mirrored her often ex- pressed desire to enlist leading politicians and per- sons prominent in social life for the cause of peace. She worked closely, for instance, with Tsar Nicholas II at the First Hague Peace Conference (1899) and with the Swedish dynamite manufacturer Alfred Nobel.

Von Suttner, the daughter of a field marshal and sister of three generals, began to develop an interest in peace only after she was forty. Despite a rather conventional upbringing, she had, however, en- joyed a more thorough education than most women of her social class then received. Well-read in three languages and possessing, too, some knowledge of the sciences, she combined courage in face of ridi- cule and abuse as well as considerable intellectual ability with boundless energy and enthusiasm, a talent for organization, and a striking presence. These qualities assured her a vital role in the peace movement. By awarding her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905, the prize committee confirmed this judg- ment. Her career ended with her death in June 1914 at the age of seventy-one.

Brigitte Hamann has prodluced a well-researched and not uncritical account of von Suttner's life. Not only has she used von Suttner's abundant writings but she has consulted a number of archives, of which the most significant is the collection of the baroness's letters in the library of the United Na- tions (Geneva). The book consists mainly of narra- tive; the author indulges only rarely in analysis. This is, perhaps, a shortcoming. But, on the whole, Hamann has done her job well and thereby made a valuable contribution to peace history.

PETER BROCK

University of Toronto

ADAM BROMKE. The Meaninig arnd Uses of Polish History. (East European Monographs, number 212.) Boul-

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1366 Reviews of Books

der, Colo.: East European Monographs; distributed by Columbia University Press, New York. 1987. Pp. viii, 244. $20.00.

Despite its title, this is not really a work of historical scholarship, nor does it have much to say about Polish history as such. Adam Bromke is a political scientist whose latest book continues his side of a somewhat dated debate (but one that has tradition- ally held great interest for Poles) concerning the lessons that history holds for those trying to find their way politically in today's Poland. Fhe first half of this short book consists of a series of essays by the author; much of their contents are replies to critics of his twenty-year-old book, Poland's Politics: Idealism VS. Realism, and have mostly been stated previously. References to Polish history are exclusively from the presentist perspective of its "meaning," that is, how it should be read by today's armchair political strat- egists. As the author concedes, his essays are per- sonal and contentious; they are also subjective, rep- etitious and self-indulgent, and they could have been summarized effectively in a single, cogent article. The second half of the book consists of Bromke's translations of various Polish political thinkers, ranging from Roman Dmnowski to Pope

john Paul II, whose thoughts are considered helpful to Bromke's position. These selections are made available in English for the first time, and even those who do not share Bromke's views will find them useful.

Bromke is a veteran of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and has been personally and professionally involved in Polish political questions ever since. He has read widely and knows "everyone," and his opinions will deserve a hearing from those inter- ested in his issues. But these issues will not be of primary importance to historians, who are more likely to be put off by his repeated dismissals of scholarly history (except as it serves as a guide to current politics) as a matter of overspecialization, narrow monographs, and whatever Bromke under- stands as "historicism in the Von Ranke tradition." Bromke's own quaint positivism seems dated even by social science standards, for example, his search for "the model" of Polish history, his conviction that it contains a "uniform pattern," and his determina- tion to force historical forces and events into an analytical structure defined by simplistic (if not false) dichotomies (for example, realism vs. idealism), which, where not altogether sterile, merely point to some of their less interesting aspects. Most contro- versial to me is Bromke's continued fascination with Dmowski, who he believes still has much of value to teach today's Poles. But most scholars who have studied the historical consequences of Dmowski's philosophy, an amalgam of Social Darwinism, anti- Semitism, clericalism, and chauvinism that repre-

sents much that is least attractive in Polish national- ism, place him among the most baneful of Polish political thinkers. One might as well recommend Heinrich von Treitschke as a guide for today's Germans. Overall, while this book may find a recep- tive audience among political theorists or students of current affairs in Poland, its value to historians of that country will be quite limited.

RICHARD BLANKE

University of Maine

R. J. CRAMPTON. A Short History of Modern Bulgaria. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pp. xiii, 221. Cloth $34.50, paper $12.95.

To write an intelligible history of Bulgaria since that country's recovery of independent statehood in 1878 and to compress this history into 209 pages of narrative text while holding political, socioeco- nomic, and cultural aspects in judicious balance is quite a challenge. R. J. Crampton meets that chal- lenge handsomely. Beginning with a short, twenty- page introductory chapter on premodern Bulgaria from the founding of the first empire in 681 through the country's extraction from Ottoman rule in 1878, the book proceeds through three longer chapters to relate Bulgaria's history from 1878 through the end of World War I, during the interwar decades and World War II, and under Communist rule to the present time.

Fhe history of modern Bulgaria tends to punc- ture a conventional contemporary academic myth that claims that political violence is a function and consequence of deep inequality between socioeco- nomic classes or of polarizing hostility between eth- nic groups. Neither of these two allegedly causal conditions pertained in this country. Bulgarian so- ciety was the most egalitarian in Eastern Europe in terms of both property distribution and status flex- ibility. There was no aristocracy, nobility, or oligar- chy after 1878; literacy was more extensive and the population was ethnically more homogeneous than in any other state in the region. Yet Bulgarian politics were particularly violent and savage, consis- tently marked by multiple assassinations, coups d'etat, revolts, torture, and repression, long before the Communist seizure of power at the close of World War II. And the manner in which the Com- munists consolidated their power in the era of mature Stalinism extended and deepened but scarcely initiated this mystifying tradition of gratu- itous political violence. In as concise a book as this, it is enough that Crampton relates this story without accounting for it. Perhaps it cannot be "explained" in conventional social science terms.

Particularly helpful to the reader interested in current history is the book's account of the Commu-

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