For German-speaking readers, the title Historical Atlas of Central Europe might at first seem confusing compared to the content. The prevalent geographical boundary of Mitteleuropa usually includes the Westmitteleuropa countries Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, on the one hand, and the Ostmitteleuropa countries Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, on the other (Brockhaus Enzyklopädie [Mannheim, 1998]). This remnant of the Cold War, with its division of East and West, seems itself contrary to the original concept of Mitteleuropa in the German geographical and historical sciences, dating back to the nineteenth century, usually implying Austria-Hungary and Germany in their borders before 1914. The most prominent script, Friedrich Naumann's work defining the German aims of World War I, was also named Mitteleuropa (Berlin 1915). In this vision, Mitteleuropa would include all countries outside the Triple Entente and would be under German cultural and economic hegemony.
Paul Robert Magocsi's Central Europe seems geographically quite different from Mitteleuropa. He defines his area of investigation as “the land between the linguistic frontier of the German- and Italian-speaking people on the west and the political boundaries of the former Soviet Union on the east” (xi). The author's Central Europe is therefore located much more to the east, moving the German-speaking countries to the western fringe. He expands this region even to the south to include the entire Balkan Peninsula. In historical terms, he discusses those parts of Europe that had been under Ottoman, Habsburg, Prussian, and early modern Polish-Lithuanian rule.
Magocsi is a professor of history and political science and is chairman of Ukrainian studies at the University of Toronto. His studies broadly focus on Ruthenian (Rusyn) and Ukrainian history from the early Middle Ages up to the postcommunist era, including American immigrants originating from Carpathian Rus’.
The atlas was first published in 1993 as part of the multivolume History of East Central Europe under the title Historical Atlas of East Central Europe—which seems more congruent with current Mitteleuropa definitions. The title changed in the second edition in 2001 when the author no longer saw a need to differentiate between east and west. This third edition was released in 2017 to update the current border changes in the former Yugoslavia.
The atlas gives an overview of the history of Central Europe from 400 AD up to recent times—comprising sixty-one chapters altogether. Ancient history is not covered at all, despite that some regions of the area of investigation—especially the Balkan Peninsula—have a much longer written history dating back to classical Greek and Roman times. The thousand years up until the fifteenth century is covered in only nine chapters, in which the author gives an overview of the Migration Period, the settlement of the Slavic tribes, the early medieval kingdoms, and the Hungarian invasion. In these chapters, Magocsi tries to show the first traces of later historical processes. For example, he describes the incorporation of the Meissen mark and Lusatia to the Holy Roman Empire under the primacy of a cultural conflict between Germanic and Slavic tribes, insinuating a “first stage in the Germanic drive to the East (Drang nach Osten)” (13). In recent medieval studies, including those of Walter Schlesinger (Sigmaringen, 1975), Klaus Zernack (Berlin, 1991), and Robert Bartlett (Munich, 1998), this concept of “Deutsche Ostsiedlung,” which dates back to the nationalistic nineteenth century, is much less focused on ethnic aspects than on economic, social, and political processes. Furthermore, Magocsi uses modern concepts for nations for medieval feudal territories, as illustrated in his summary of the principalities owned by the House of Luxemburg in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a (more or less fictive) country named Bohemia-Moravia (22).
The modern period is well covered, showing in addition to political maps, thematic maps on the economy, development of cities, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, as well as on the Reformation and Counter Reformation. In general, all these maps show the same geographical extent, leaving blank other parts of Europe and the world to achieve the desired focus on Central Europe. This might seem problematic for superregional topics, such as the Reformation or the development of the Ottoman Empire, which, due to the cropping of the map, is reduced to the Balkan Peninsula. Similarly, the Napoleonic Wars and World War I are cartographically reduced to their eastern theaters.
For the twentieth century, Magocsi includes individual maps of all Central European countries, describing their territorial development after the world wars and giving detailed statistical tables on their ethnolinguistic-national compositions. The maps of industrial development, the enormous population transfer after World War II, the distribution of Jews in Central Europe, and ethnolinguistic distribution and population give the reader a wealth of information on the turbulent transitions in this century.
The last map shows postcommunist Central Europe, giving just a short overview of the period after 1991. Recent developments, such as the European Union's Eastern Enlargements in 2004 and 2007 (and the European Union in general) and the NATO enlargement between 1999 and 2017, are not regarded, nor are there maps showing either the Russian influence in Central Europe or the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Somehow it seems the “End of History” proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama (New York, 1992) is still present in Magocsi's work.
The Historical Atlas of Central Europe is nonetheless a mammoth project, focusing on the history of a region underrepresented by Western historians for too long, while addressing a large public with excellent maps and coherent accompanying texts.
