614 Slavic Review More intriguing are places where the communist regime put a unique spin on modern habits. Though the regime was suspicious of collectors, they found ways to inluence them. Philatelists, for example, were encouraged to collect stamps by topic rather than country or type to increase the educative function of their hobby. The breadth of the entries shows how the regime let no sphere of life unchanged, not even crossword puzzles or the names of popular dishes. Even better are those experiments that did not pan out. These include such anomalies as a cable radio system, a licensing system for hitchhikers, a train line run by children, a nighttime spa for workers to recover their strength, and various forms of socialist competition intended to increase supplies and quality, though inevitably in vain. Some of these were ahead of their time as in “shopping to your bag” where women let a shopping list at the grocery store in the morning and picked up their shopping ater work. Shortages of course play a key role: many children drank low-alcohol beer because of the lack of nonalcoholic alternatives, wristwatches for women were not manufactured until the 1970s, scafolding on certain buildings remained in place for years, and workplace dining oten featured only a single form of silverware (a spoon). Particular attention is paid to the regime’s attempts to rationalize eating habits: the introduction of Balkan specialties like lecsó, the battle against dumplings, and the propagation of dairy products. The sheer quantity of useful information, almost all drawn from original archival sources and footnoted, makes this an essential reference volume. Though the authors disavow any attempt to be comprehensive, they have covered considerable ground and include abstract concepts (fear of war, travel abroad, kitsch) along with the more concrete. That said, it is not a volume that many will read from cover to cover. Even long entries lack paragraph breaks, the authors can occasionally be pedantic (in describing what a museum is or how aluminum foil is used) and sometimes unforthcoming (some entries describe the institutional reaction to the phenomenon more than the thing itself—for example, tramping). The large number of conferences and congresses with copious references to leaders, participants, and speeches can be hard to digest as the authors only sometimes explain their signiicance. Similarly, some concepts are given considerably more space than they deserve—Iosif Stalin’s impact on linguistics, the Esperanto movement, and lotteries. More pleasing is the frequent use of photographs, the references to portrayals of many concepts in popular ilm, and a useful appendix with television and radio listings. The volumes are certainly worth having for both reference and browsing and should inspire students looking for new research topics. Andrew Roberts Northwestern University Literatura şi Artele în România Comunistă, 1948–1953. By Cristian Vasile. Foreword, Vladimir Tismãneanu. Istoria Contemporană. Bucharest: Humanitas and New Europe College, 2010. 335 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. RON29.00, paper. Cristian Vasile is a researcher at the Nicolae Iorga History Institute in Bucharest. He has served on the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of Romania’s Communist Dictatorship, he was a coauthor of the Commission’s 2006 Final Report, and, until recently, the Scientiic Director of IICCMER, an institute devoted to research on the crimes of communism. The book under review was published with IICCMER’s Book Reviews 615 inancial support. It appeared in the Humanitas Contemporary History series edited by Vasile and Vladimir Tismăneanu, and it is the sequel to Perfectul Acrobat: Leonte Răutu şi măştile răului (2008), a volume Vasile and Tismăneanu coauthored on “the Romanian Zhdanov.” Vasile’s study of literature, culture, education, and the arts during the Stalinist moment of Romanian communism is based on a wealth of archival records, including those of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, and those under the aegis of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (CNSAS), as well as on other sources, such as the memoirs of the participants in the cultural and artistic sphere of Romania’s Stalinist order. The volume has an impressive bibliography and excellent footnotes that make it especially useful to researchers. In my judgment, the book’s main strength is its extensive source base, much of it not seen before, while its principal weakness is that long quotations from these very sources oten remain unanalyzed. Vasile begins with a thorough critical review of the literature on Romanian culture, education, art, and letters during the early years of communism. He includes works by historians, literary and art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists writing about the role of intellectuals, culture, and memory both in Romania and elsewhere. Katherine Verdery, but also Pierre Nora, Richard Bodek, and Peter Kenez among others, serve as references in this discussion. The dilemmas that Vasile highlights for Stalinist Romania are familiar: should Romanian writers have kept silent rather than agree to publish under a regime of censorship and self-censorship? Was writing, painting, sculpting, acting, directing, teaching, and composing in the late 1940s and early 1950s akin to prostitution? Or, just the opposite, did the creative class owe it to Romanian culture and more importantly to their audiences to continue to produce something, however constrained and distorted, at whatever cost? Vasile has no ready answers to these diicult questions, nor should he. But he condemns Romania’s early communist leaders, while casting the authors, teachers, cinematographers, musicians, and artists as innocent victims. This overly stark picture lacks nuance and thus relinquishes some historical credibility. The irst chapter examines the transition from Romania’s broad postwar coalition to complete communist control through a series of Gleichschaltung–style measures in the ield of cultural production. The Propaganda and Agitation Department (or Section) of the Central Committee made sure that the Romanian Academy, the press, the radio, cinema, theaters, and writers’ and artists’ organizations executed party directives. Eventually communists took the Ministries of Arts and Education from their erstwhile social democratic allies, controlling the government’s cultural bureaucracy as well. Professional associations of writers, ine artists, musicians, and actors were transformed into “creative unions” on the Soviet model and became forces of peremptory ideological “guidance” to producers of culture. But Vasile is careful to point out that this process took time and the communists acted “prudently” in order not to alienate the cultural elite. The regime and the artists needed each other. New cultural institutions protected the material interests and working conditions of the creators and preserved their elevated social status. With carrot and stick, the regime—which gradually permitted only the oicial style of socialist realism—managed to attract many of this elite to its side, particularly in the midst of postwar misery, though discipline and arrest were also used. The chapters on literature, theater, ine art, music, cinema, and education tell this story of control, accommodation, and repression in speciic detail. Vasile is at his best when surprising the subtle ironies of this traumatic and transformative period. The prewar Society of Romanian Writers was irst renamed 616 Slavic Review the Society of Writers in Romania to integrate previously excluded minority writers— these were inclined to like communism ater years of right-wing xenophobia—before becoming the Writers’ Union. Communist authorities recognized that many of the cultural elite had been fascist, antisemitic, and anti-Soviet. Yet they tried to bring them around. Traditionalists with no previous letist sympathies were even favored over avant-gardists who had embraced Marxism independently long before the war. The regime might have considered the latter precious allies in a country where communism had few genuine followers; not so according to Stalinist logic. Irina Livezeanu University of Pittsburgh The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970. By Andrew Demshuk. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xxii, 302 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $90.00, hard bound. About 12 million ethnic Germans led or were expelled from east central Europe ater 1945. How did some of them deal with the loss of their homelands? Andrew Demshuk ofers novel answers to this question based on a wide variety of sources. Moving in snapshot-like fashion from 1945 to 1970, he builds a kind of collage of memories to create a new image of how West German expellees dealt with and remembered the territories ceded to postwar Poland. The composite image he constructs contradicts the singular portrait of expellees as revanchists who failed to mourn their loss and wanted nothing less than to return to their former homes. Although West German expellee spokespeople and leaders demanded the establishment of a united Germany within its 1937 borders, their desires for territorial revision hardly relected, Demshuk argues, the “genuine wishes” (64) of the vast majority of West German expellees. Rather, most expellees worked through their loss and realized over time that they could not return to what was now Poland. Demshuk constructs this argument by turning to underutilized fragments from the past produced by ordinary people—picture books, chronicles, newspaper clippings, drawings, photographs, travelogues, sermons—that he assumes to be untainted by what he calls the “oicial narrative” (28, 64, 92, 261) propagated by expellee leaders. The existence of such a narrative, as well as Demshuk’s methodological separation of individual memories from it, underpins his book’s analytical intervention. Demshuk builds this argument from a speciic archive of mentalities, emotions, and memories: he explores the longings of expellees from Silesia, a region that incited strong revanchist desires from expellee leaders and intense engagements from ordinary expellees. About 3 million German expellees came from Silesia, and of them about 2 million settled in West Germany, while another 1 million lived in East Germany, although they are not examined in this book. Ater providing a brief overview of Silesian history and discussing the political-ideological rhetoric of expellee leaders, Demshuk turns to constructing his counternarrative through three thematic chapters on private memories, expellee gatherings, and tourism. In each of these diferent modes of encountering Silesia, he inds expellees mourning what they have lost and moving ever further away from the language, ideas, and motifs of their spokespeople. Demshuk develops this argument most thoroughly in his chapter on tourism. Expellees who traveled to Poland encountered a landscape that had altered tremendously. If they had any lingering desires to return, they now lost them amid the foreign