Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe

by Benjamin Lieberman

Book Overview

In the modern Greek city of Thessaloniki, the ruins of a vast Jewish cemetery lie buried under the city's university. Nearby is the site of the childhood home of one of the founders of the modern... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566636469
• ISBN13: 9781566636469
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.4" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Equally interesting and disturbing

This book chronicles the development of ethnic cleansing in Europe during the late 19th century and well into the 20th century. Even before the Treaty of Lausanne, which formally established ethnic cleansing as a national policy (as well as a foreign policy), numerous European nations were practicing it. One thing that is particularly bizarre is that many of the victims of ethnic cleansing were very loosely categorized as being members of a certain "foreign" ethnic group, even if they didn't particularly see themselves as such (i.e., the Pontic Greeks). Perhaps Professor Lieberman should have chronicled how these groups fared upon being "returned" to their "national homeland" (which many of them had never previously seen, let alone considered moving to). The book is well-written and balanced. Professor Lieberman includes horrifying eyewitness testimony of ethnic cleansing, making the book more persuasive. I would have liked Professor Lieberman to have also included the Indian partition and the expulsion of Jews from much of the Middle East during the 1940s and after (this is just a personal preference, and in no way takes away from this book).

Fascinating History Everyone Should Know

This book provides an excellent history of ethnic conflict in modern Europe in a very readable, compelling form. It presents esential material for anyone wanting to gain an understanding of how Europe came to be the way it is today, and provides a context for ongoing ethnic conflicts from Cyprus to the Balkans to Chechnya. The writing is superb and Dr. Lieberman weaves a fascinating narrative. I read it while on vacation and at the end of each chapter found myself eager to move on the next. I recommend it highly.

Gripping, Revelatory Account on European Ethnic Cleansing

Historian Benjamin Lieberman's "Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe", is the first, exhaustive account I have read on this hitherto relatively unknown aspect of modern European history; one which has regrettably played such a prominent role in reshaping the map of modern Europe. Lieberman demonstrates convincingly that both the Ottoman Turkish Armenian genocide of World War I and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews in World War II can be seen as the most horrific manifestations of a long-term history of ethnic cleansing in Europe which started nearly 200 years ago and has continued to the present. Lieberman's riveting account begins with the Greek War of Independence (1821 - 1830), in which he notes - much to my own amazement - that there were substantial Turkish populations residing in Morea - better known both historically and today as the Peloponessus (Regrettably this is misspelled in Lieberman's book.) - who were driven out via massacres and the burning and looting of Morean towns and villages and were forced to flee to the Anatolian portion of the Turkish empire. Then he describes the bloody history of the Balkans in the latter half of the 19th Century and the first two decades of the 20th Century; the relatively recent ethnic cleansing in the Balkans since the early 1990s may be best understood by examining anew the Balkans' first wave of ethnic cleansing. Lieberman reminds us that substantial episodes of ethnic cleansing accompanied the rapid decline and fall of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and especially, Ottoman Turkish empires immediately after World War I. Probably the best known example is the mass expulsion of Anatolian Greeks - which I might add is vividly recounted in an early chapter of fellow Brunonian Jeffrey Eugenides' bestselling novel "Middlesex" - by Turkish nationalist armies commanded by Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, but there were other, almost equally dramatic, episodes between the two world wars which involved mass deportations of German- and Polish-speaking peoples among others. The Holocaust is covered succinctly in the chapter entitled "There Was No One Left for Me", in which Lieberman reminds us of substantial support for the Nazi genocide against the Jews by Poles, Ukranians and others living in Nazi German-occupied terrorities. World War II's end was marked by yet another series of ethnic cleansings, which would remove finally Poland's resident German population, virtually all of the Soviet Union's German population, and the Ukraine's Polish population. He also treats the mass exodus of Arabs and Jews in the Middle East marking the birth of the nation state of Israel as yet another Ottoman legacy of ethnic cleansing, along with ethnic strife between Cypriot Greeks and Turks, before turning his attention once more to the Balkans in the 1990s. Without question, Lieberman's book is an important - indeed definitive - look at ethnic cleansing in shaping modern European

Gripping True History

The gripping history of Central and Eastern Europe and how the plunder, massacres, and killings change its history. Genocide is never pretty

A 'must' for any who would understand modern Europe

It's surprising to note this is the first comprehensive history of ethnic cleansing in Europe to appear in print: surprising because you'd think by now there'd have been many works on the topic, since over the last two centuries ethnic cleansing has virtually changed empires and united or divided nations throughout the region. TERRIBLE FATE: ETHNIC CLEANSING IN THE MAKING OF MODERN EUROPE surveys the history and social impact of these events that murdered millions and forced migrations of survivors. From ancient to modern times, TERRIBLE FATE describes violent transformations which have impact and meaning into modern times. A 'must' for any who would understand both the face and the underlying tensions of modern Europe.