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August 17, 1962: Peter Fechter killed by GDR border troops By Patrick van Schie Peter Fechter bleeds to death on the wrong side of the Wall The young East Berlin construction worker Peter Fechter became world famous because of his flight to freedom. More than a year after the construction of border barriers […]
Publications
Description of Nausicaa Marbe, Waiting for the West (Amsterdam, 2022) ISBN 9789044647280 Patrick van Schie The Iron Curtain fell away more than thirty years ago. What happened behind that Curtain is history for most Western Europeans. It is different for those people in or from Eastern Europe who are old enough to have […]
By Roger MOORHOUSE September 1 is the conventional start date for the European war. But little in life is set in stone. Of course, a pedant might want to point out that the British and French only declared war on Germany on September 3, so that date marks the expansion of a German-Polish war […]
By Patrick van Schie 65 years ago, an uprising against communist rule took place in Hungary. It was not the first uprising behind the Iron Curtain (in June 1953 an uprising took place in the GDR, in June 1956 in the Polish city of Poznan) but it was the largest. The Hungarian uprising was […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska When you are in the capital city of Poland Warsaw you definitely cannot miss Marszałkowska Residential District (MDM) and the Constitution Square, which will bring you back in the communist times. When the construction of the Warsaw W-Z route was successfully completed in 1949, the communist authorities intended to create a flagship […]
Interview by Beata Bruggeman-Sękowska with David Hill and Ilona Karwinska, directors of ‘Neon Muzeum’ in Warsaw, first and only museum of its kind in Europe about neon signs in Poland and Hungary in communist times. David Hill and Ilona Karwinska @Neon Muzeum Beata Bruggeman-Sękowska: You are Poland’s unofficial ambassadors of neon signs. […]
Mr Jacek Jaśkowiak, mayor of Poznań prepared an exclusive statement for EIOCO on the 65th anniversary of Poznań uprising. By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska Statement of the Mayor of Poznań Mr Jacek Jaśkowiak On June 28, 1956, the road to freedom began in Poznań. Workers from Poznań factories took to the streets […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska 65 years ago on the 28 June of 1956, at 6 a.m. Poznań ( city in the western part of Poland) riots started at the multifactory complex of Joseph’s Stalin’s (or ‘Cegielski’s) Metal Industries. Approximately 100,000 people gathered in the city centre near the local Ministry of Public Security building demanding better […]
By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska Milada Horáková was a lawyer, politician who was convicted on fabricated charges of conspiracy and treason and murdered by communists in the communist Czechoslovakia on June 27 1950 by hanging at the age of 48. She died after being strangled for more than 13 minutes. Her remains were never found. Many […]
Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska During the parliamentary elections on the 4th of June 1989 Polish people voted on the Citizens’Committee, an opposition group around Lech Wałęsa, which led to the end of communism in Poland. This in turn led to the wave of changes across Central and Eastern Europe. These were the first elections in Poland […]
In 1891, Eugen Richter predicted what the GDR would look like more than half a century later Patrick van Schie Karl Marx and his followers dissected “capitalist” society (in their own way) and predicted the revolution, but Marx and his followers remained vague about what post-revolution “socialist” society would look like. One of […]
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