• Humanitarian mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe
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Humanitarian mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe

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This volume examines humanitarianism in Central and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. It challenges the often Western-focused history of humanitarianism by bringing together local, “priv...
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  • 18 November 2025
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By focusing on aid in Central and Eastern Europe, this volume adds to the existent scholarly explorations of modern humanitarianism, its actors and practices. In the twentieth century, aid workers assisted victims of war and earthquakes, delivered food, supported health care, provided childcare, or sheltered refugees. The contributors not only reconstruct these diverse histories and their protagonists, but also bring international, national, and local actors together: from grassroots activists to private associations to state-driven “socialist humanitarians” to large Western aid organizations. In doing so, they challenge the often unidirectional, from West-to-East, and asymmetrical perspective on donor-recipient relationships in humanitarian processes.
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Price: £90.00
Pages: 280
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Humanitarianism: Key Debates and New Approaches
Publication Date: 18 November 2025
ISBN: 9781526189936
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Disasters & Disaster Relief, Aid and relief programmes, HISTORY / Europe / Eastern, POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General, Social impact of disasters / accidents (natural or man-made), Economic and financial crises and disasters
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Doina Anca Cretu is Assistant Professor in Modern European History at University of Warwick

Michal Frankl was Senior Researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project “Unlikely Refuge?”. Currently, he is the head of the Prague Department “Knowledge and Participation” of the Leibniz-Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe.

Introduction: humanitarian mobilization in Central
and Eastern Europe
Doina Anca Cretu and Michal Frankl
Part I Local humanitarianism
1 Save the (workers’) children: humanitarian kindergartens in
Budapest’s slums after the First World War
Friederike Kind-Kovács
2 Ethnicizing aid: Jews and Christians inside and outside the
social care system in interwar Lubartów
Franciszek Zakrzewski
3 When the ‘socialist good life’ met its match: austerity and
humanitarian crisis in 1980s Romania
Cristian Capotescu
4 Self-organized care for older people in East Germany: local
humanitarianism and post-1989 transformations
Maren Hachmeister
Part II National humanitarianism
5 The Czechoslovak Red Cross and refugee children from Greece
and North Korea
Nikola Tohma
6 Refugees in the ‘better Germany’: humanitarian aid to Greek
refugee children in the early German Democratic Republic
Julia Reinke
Part III Transnational humanitarianism
7 How to leave Central Europe? Transnational, humanitarian
state building and the post-Habsburg transition
Gábor Egry
8 Western perceptions of Czechoslovak humanitarian interactions
under Nazi occupation, 1938–1939
Laura Brade
9 ‘The same spirit that led me into war’: Italian and transnational
humanitarian actors and post-revolutionary Russia
Ruth Nattermann
10 Religious humanitarianism: the World Council of Churches
for refugees in Austria in 1956 and 1968
Sarah Knoll
Index