A BOOK SUCH AS THIS, and for better or worse there are not many of them, owes a great deal to an international scholarly community—a republic of letters, if you will—and to institutions that place faith in scholars to push the boundaries of the thinkable, even if it means allowing them to bolt lemming-like into the abyss. It is not for me to judge whether my own trajectory tracks that of the lemming, but if it does, the fall has felt a great deal like flight thanks to a handful of people who have made writing it seem an especially worthwhile endeavor. I would like to acknowledge them first. Michael Gordin, Bahareh Rashidi, John Palattella, Ondřej Slačálek, Mary Gluck, Norman Naimark, Pavel Barša, and Joachim von Puttkamer all read the manuscript in its entirety (in some cases more than once) and offered their advice and encouragement. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Joachim von Puttkamer, who has offered feedback on everything from how to translate Geistesartung to the relation my analysis bears to Emmanuel Kant’s idea of “universal history.” Thanks to him and the others aforementioned, the project has steadily come into sharper focus. The work’s remaining flaws are solely my own responsibility.
I have also benefitted from the encouragement, questions, and suggestions of a number of other scholars and friends, among them Martina Baleva, Samuel Moyn, Marci Shore, Tom Meaney, James Ward, Jan-Werner Müller, Erika Kiss, Danilo Scholz, Birthe Mühlhoff, Charly Coleman, Tamara Scheer, Dessy Gavrilova, Ivan Krastev, Corey Robin, Deborah Coen, Florian Bieber, Dietmar Müller, Natasha Wheatley, Balázs Apor, Lutz Niethammer, Agnieszka Pasieka, Stefan Troebst, Robert Schneider, Evan Goldstein, Gábor Egry, Zsolt Nagy, Brett Whalen, George Giannakopoulos, Larry Wolff, Stephen Gross, Stefanos Geroulanos, Leslie Peirce, Dimiter Kenarov, Catherine Evtuhov, Vladimir Solonari, Leslie Butler, Bruce Pauley, Edin Hajdarpašić, Miloš Vojinovic, Franziska Davies, Martin Schulze Wessel, Konrad Clewing, Edvin Pezo, Ulf Brunnbauer, Sabine Rutar, Natali Stegmann, Jan Goldstein, Bilyana Kourtasheva, Georgi Gospodinov, Jessica Reinisch, Susan Pedersen, the “Wiener Kreis,” and the late and dearly missed Vangelis Kechriotis.
Most of this book was researched and written while I was teaching at Cornell, and I owe a considerable institutional and a truly outsized personal debt for those years spent among such extraordinary people. Among those who have offered substantive feedback, support, intellectual community, and/or comic relief while I worked on this project are Claudia Verhoeven, Isabel Hull, Jonathan Boyarin, Matt Evangelista, Robert Travers, Vicki Caron, Trevor Pinch, Leslie Adelson, Suman Seth, Camille Robcis, Enzo Traverso, Durba Ghosh, Duane Corpis, Oren Falk, Dominick Lacapra, Maria Cristina Garcia, Sherman Cochran, Valerie Bunce, Peter Katzenstein, J. Robert Lennon, Larry Glickman, Brian Hall, Richard Swedburg, the “Iron Circle” (most prominently Máté Rigó, Aaron Law, Chris Szabla, and Fritz Bartel), “231A-B” (Otto Godwin, Dara Canchester, and Niall Chithelen), and the people of Telluride House (to name just a few: Celina, Chinello, Albert, Stephen, Conor, Karl, Ehab, Alex, and Kevin), as well as Giorgi Tsintsadze, Sohyeon Hwang, Anton Cebalo, Alejandra Carriazo, Michael Mintz, Mwangi Thuita, the late Ann Wilde, and the many, many students over the years who have awed and inspired me with their incredible minds. To the staff of the History Department at Cornell, my friends Katie Kristof, Barb Donnell, Kay Stickane, Judy Yonkin, and Maggie Edwards, I am indebted for my (remaining) sanity.
I would also like to thank my new colleagues and friends at Brown University for thinking enough of the project to hire me, especially Omer Bartov, Ethan Pollock, Amy Remensnyder, Cynthia Brokaw, Mary Gluck, and Kevin McLaughlin.
As I was researching and writing the book, I benefitted greatly from a number of grants and visiting fellowships, including at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM-Institut für Wissenschaften vom Menschen) in Vienna, and Birkbeck College in London. A Mellon New Directions Fellowship was the greatest honor and most inspiring series of opportunities one could wish for.
Some of my earlier thoughts on the “age of questions” have been published in Modern Intellectual History and the Chronicle Review, and I have given invited lectures on the project and received valuable feedback at several universities and institutions in the United States and abroad, among them the GWZO-Ringvorlesung at the University of Leipzig; the Modern Europe Colloquium at Yale; the Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte “New approaches to Polish and East European History” series at the University of Vienna; the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; two classes at Charles University in Prague; the Oberseminar zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte at the LMU in Munich; the conference “The Allure of Totalitarianism: The Roots, Meanings, and Political Cycles of a Concept in Central and Eastern Europe” at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena; the lecture series of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna; the opening of the the Centre for the Study of Internationalism at Birkbeck College in London; the Pauley Annual Lecture at the University of Central Florida in Orlando; the NYC History of Science Group; the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies; the annual European Studies student conference at the College of William & Mary; the Cornell Jewish Studies Program Event Series; the Cornell Comparative History Colloquium; the Department of Science and Technology Studies colloquium series at Cornell; Cornell Adult University; the Chicago Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe Workshop at the University of Chicago; the “Visions of European Unity Across the Twentieth Century” conference at NYU’s Remarque Institute; the Eastern Europe Workshop and European History Workshop at NYU; the Ottoman Studies Lecture Series at NYU; the New York Area Seminar in Intellectual and Cultural History; the European History Workshop at Columbia University; the interdisciplinary “Nineteenth-Century Group” at Dartmouth; the lecture series “Eastern Europe in the World” at the University of Pittsburgh; the WWI Symposium at the University of Wisconsin in Madison; the International History Seminar at Georgetown University; the conference on borderlands research sponsored by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in Vilnius; the Zentrum für Südosteuropastudien at the University of Graz; the Centre for South-East European Studies at Queen’s College in Belfast; Trinity College in Dublin; the Imre Kertész Kolleg colloquium in Jena; the research colloquium “New Perspectives in Southeastern and Eastern European History” at the Südost-Institut in Regensburg; and a graduate course on nationalism in the Balkans at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.
A number of staff and friends in various countries and institutions have shown me great kindness, support, and forebearance, without which this project would have been a great deal more difficult and less thrilling, among them Szilveszter Dékány, Diana Joseph, Daniela Gruber, Raphael Utz, Stavroula Papagianni, Anastasia Bolovinou, Róbert Pölcz, Ágnes Matuska, Kerim Erdogan (no relation), Müge Sökmen, Scott Sherman, Musa Günes, Ana Mohoric, Mary Kemle-Gussnig, Florian Rainer, and Maxence.
I am especially grateful to my various editors at Princeton University Press for their good nature and patience, and for letting me keep the subtitle. Sincerest thanks to Brigitta van Rheinberg, Amanda Peery, Kathleen Cioffi, the wonderful Plaegian (Play) Alexander, and that god among indexers, Steven Moore. The feedback of the two anonymous readers was invaluable, and especially that of Michael Gordin—no longer anonymous—who entered into the soul of the project and saw an ingenious way to make it better.
For asking the Ur-question about questions, I thank Paul Hanebrink. And for everything else, my family—Linda, Tom (Sr.), and Tom (Jr.) Case, Christianne Hess, and Fergus Ryan—and Canim.