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How did political power function in the communist regimes of East Central Europe after 1945? Making Sense of Dictatorship addresses this question with a particular focus on the acquiescent behavior of the majority of the population until, at the end of the 1980s, their rejection of state socialism and its authoritarian world.

The authors refer to the concept of Sinnwelt, the way in which groups and individuals made sense of the world around them. The essays focus on the dynamics of everyday life and the extent to which the relationship between citizens and the state was collaborative or antagonistic. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of life in this period, including modernization, consumption and leisure, and the everyday experiences of “ordinary people,” single mothers, or those adopting alternative lifestyles.

Empirically rich and conceptually original, the essays in this volume suggest new ways to understand how people make sense of everyday life under dictatorial regimes.

Menachem Kipnis (1878–1942) was one of the early twentieth-century’s greatest Jewish eastern European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States. Now, for the first time, Kipnis’s stories and photographs are published together in a single book.

Menachem Kipnis brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their coreligionists in the “Old Country” and eastern European urban Jews sought to distinguish themselves from their Jewish compatriots who were still living in the shtetl. Including an introductory essay, annotations, and an epilogue by Sheila E. Jelen, Menachem Kipnis suggests new ways of understanding both visual and literary depictions of eastern European Jewish culture between the two world wars.

Catherine Horel has undertaken a comparative analysis of the societal, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy as represented in twelve cities: Arad, Bratislava, Brno, Chernivtsi, Lviv, Oradea, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Subotica, Timișoara, Trieste, and Zagreb. By purposely selecting these cities, the author aims to counter the disproportionate attention that the largest cities in the empire receive.

With a focus on the aspects of everyday life faced by the city inhabitants (associations, schools, economy, and municipal politics) the book avoids any idealization of the monarchy as a paradise of peaceful multiculturalism, and also avoids exaggerating conflicts. The author claims that the world of the Habsburg cities was a dynamic space where many models coexisted and created vitality, emulation, and conflict. Modernization brought about the dissolution of old structures, but also mobility, the progress of education, the explosion of associative life, and constantly growing cultural offerings.