How Martin Luther reinvented the book

Martin Luther didn't just spark the Reformation, he invented the modern book and the publishing industry. That's the intriguing story told on this, the eve of the 500th anniversary of his 95 theses, in Andrew Pettegree's new book Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe, and Started the Protestant Reformation. 

I reviewed the book for tomorrow's Washington Post. Here's a taste:

When Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door in the Saxon backwater town of Wittenberg, moveable type was something like the computer in the 1960s, a useful and expensive tool used by academics and elite institutions....Luther realized the untapped potential of print as a mass medium and used it to broadcast his message to lay readers across the German states, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers via this new social media. 

My most recent review for the Post was of Tom Gjelten's Nation of Nations in October.

Hungary's slide from democracy, Part II

For those not sure how to spend the rest of the spring solstice and Father's Day, let me suggest a review of the memoir of the former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, Eleni Kounalakis.

Kounalakis served in Budapest for the first three years of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's rule, a period in which he's turned Hungary away from liberal democracy and towards something closer to Russia, Singapore and China. Her book is surprisingly frank and paints a disturbing picture of the direction of the Hungarian state.

The review, which appears in today's Sunday Washington Post, is my second piece this week on the situation back in Hungary, where I lived for more than four years between 1989 and 1996, and where I returned recently. The previous one -- on Orban's construction of what he calls the "illiberal state" -- appeared in Politico Magazine a few days ago.

My most recent review for the Post was of former Rep. Barney Frank's memoir.

Hungary's slide from democracy, Part I

I was recently in Hungary, where I lived for some five years between 1989 and 1996, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been making good on his promise to construct an "illiberal state" inside the European Union. In Politico Magazine today you can read my dispatch on the situation there.

A teaser: most worrisome is that the only effective opposition to Orban comes from the extreme right Jobbik Party, which are on the ascent despite not long ago maintaining a jackbooted paramilitary group that marched through Roma neighborhoods wearing uniforms and symbols reminiscent of the Nazi-era Arrow Cross.

A sad state of affairs for Hungary, which when I first moved there was leading the drive for democracy and independence in the Eastern bloc.


For those with a focused interest in Orban's rhetorical argument, reading his full "illiberal democracy" speech is clarifying.

More on Hungary coming soon.... [Update, 6/21/15: That was a reference to this review of former US Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis's memoir of her term in Hungary, which ran in today's Washington Post.]

In the Czech Republic

I've spent the past few days in the Czech Republic, including Prague, which I first visited during the Velvet Revolution in 1989. It's hard for any visit to measure up to that particular one, given the emotional poignancy of those glorious days when hope and change weren't empty slogans. And, alas, the old city has continued its inevitable transformation into EuroDisney East, complete with Segways and, yes, Starbucks in the Hrad. But we all knew that would happen.

In my limited sampling, what's really impressive is how prosperous and peaceful small town Bohemia and Moravia seem, a quarter century later, and the extensive infrastructure that's been built in recent years, from highways to neighborhood revitalization to university expansion to a network of truly top-notch zoos, of all things. I haven't researched it, but I imagine there must be some European Union money behind it all, but for an American living in the Northeast, where bridges, highways, and rail systems are lucky to hold their own, it's hard not to be given pause. Did we drain all our cash into the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan? Even if we had more of it, would there not be a political fight over any effort to, say, revitalize passenger rail in the northeast or give Atlanta the public transportation system it needs and deserves?

One thing is for sure: twenty-five years ago I wouldn't have dreamed that I'd be looking at provincial Czech infrastructure and institutions and be wondering how we've managed to fall behind.

In Salzburg

I'm in the midst of a trip in Central Europe, the first in several years. I lived in this part of the world for the better part of the 1990s and it's good to be back.

A few observations after five years' absence.

1. The region has discovered "take out coffee." This is a good thing. I wonder if Starbucks, a relatively new arrival, is responsible for this long-delayed innovation.

2. The Austrians still hold the Post-Imperial Area title for motorway engineering. If we Americans spent as much as they must have to build sound barriers in even the most rural of areas, I suspect it would have paid itself back in improved property values alone. It's still jarring to go from limping across southern Moravia or south Slovakia to the meticulously engineered, tunnel-intensive autobahnen, where the original 1967 Mission Impossible television soundtrack is required driving music.

3. In Budapest, the trend has continued, and it is now nearly impossible to find good Hungarian food in restaurants. The best gulyas I've had so far in the region was in Štúrovo, an ethnic Hungarian community in South Slovakia. Somebody needs to give Budapest's chefs some remedial education in the old ways.

4. If you want to see a town defy Rust Belt-ism, go to Zlin in the Czech Republic, the former Bata shoe factory town-cum-Capitalist worker's utopia. I wrote about the city five years ago in the Christian Science Monitor and the trend has only continued. The old factory complex -- largely empty last I visited -- is now a thriving neighborhood of hipster lofts, university expansion buildings, and business start-ups. And if this rural corner of the Czech Republic can build a rapidly expanding public university -- with new buildings popping up every year -- why can't Maine manage to keep the University of Southern Maine from imploding? I suspect this has to do with leadership, municipal, academic, and state.

5. Hungarian politics are as bad as they say. One could ask, "Who votes for this guy?" But I'm from Maine, so I don't need to.

Republic of Pirates, now in Hungarian

I'm especially pleased to announce the Hungarian language edition of my third book, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and The Man Who Brought Them Down, as I called Budapest home for nearly five years between 1989 and 1995.

The new edition, Kalózköztársaság, is from Könyvmolyképző Kiadó in that most paprika-worthy of cities, Szeged. At this writing it's even on sale at their website -- just HUF 2764. I gather the official release date is February 24, but it seems to be available now.

Republic of Pirates, the inspiration for the NBC drama "Crossbones", is also available in US, UK, Spanish, Portugeuse, Polish, Danish, and, shortly, Taiwan Chinese editions.

Remembering the Fall of the Wall, 25 Years Ago

I was living in Eastern Europe in 1989, and was in Berlin during the crazy week after the Berlin Wall came down, symbolically the Cold War.  Hard to believe it was 25 years ago.

Five years ago -- on the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet empire -- I wrote a series of posts here at World Wide Woodard on my experiences that breathtaking fall and early winter. Here, on the anniversary of the Wall's opening, is the piece I wrote about Berlin.

The full 1989-2009 series, for those interested, can be read here (start from the bottom and work your way to the top to read them in order.)

A quarter century later, it looks as if the Post-Cold War Era has ended, with an autocratic Russia again scratching menacingly at the eastern marches of Europe. Hopefully the world -- and the Russian people -- have the will and good sense to prevent a return to that bleak Cold War world.

Photos (c) Colin Woodard. All Rights Reserved.

Things to Watch, Hear, and Read, New Year's Editon

Welcome to 2011, and to the second anniversary of World Wide Woodard. To kick off the New Year, a few items of interest from the wider world.

Wikileaks - The Documentary: My blog got its start in Reykjavik, where Wikileaks made its first big pitch for sanctuary. I'm wondering if they'll be increasing their presence in Iceland if things get too hot and heavy in Sweden for founder Julian Assange. The most comprehensive documentary on the group's "history" -- if one can use that word for something so young -- aired on Swedish television last month. Friends and foes alike will learn something from setting aside an hour to watch. (The "Collateral Damage" helicopter tapes are still chilling.)

Ruins of Detroit: The Guardian has this arresting slide show of images from a dying American city. It provoked a lengthy capital vs labor blame game discussion when I posted it on my Facebook page. See what happens when you post it on yours. [Update, 1/5/2011: a friend-of-a-friend created this engaging video documentary, Detroit Lives, offering a second, more optimistic take on the Motor City,.]

Borders on the Brink: Speaking of Detroit, Ann Arbor-based Borders Books & Music is also in trouble. Publishers Weekly reported on Dec. 31 that the retailer has been cut off by one of the big six New York publishers after it stopped paying its bills. The Detroit News has this sobering follow-up, suggesting the firm may not survive.

Books on the Brink?: Will the Kindle and Amazon destroy the book industry or revive it? The Boston Review has an excellent and wide ranging article on the state of publishing, and what industry consolidation, big boxes, Amazon, and e-books have done to it. One of many depressing factoids: "It has become common practice for representatives of large retailers to weigh in on everything from book covers to sample chapters of manuscripts. In some cases, retailers even demand changes...Without their buy-in, the publisher is unlikely to go forward with a book." Perhaps Borders will be surrendering their seat to Amazon or Wal-Mart shortly.

Hungary on the Brink? Hungary's government is showing its true colors, and they aren't pretty. My friend Dumneazu has a comprehensive round-up of the situation from there. Good news is, I understand support for the farther-right Jobbik party -- subject of some of my not-so- recent reporting from the region -- has been on the wane.

Who rightfully owns the plunder of war?

In recent decades, there's been an upsurge in claims for art and cultural objects seized in past conflicts or by occupying armies. Northern European museums face claims on their antiquities from governments in southern Europe or North African. Native Americans want stolen objects -- even bodies -- returned. Germany wants art taken by the Soviets during World War II and vice versa.

But returning wartime plunder to its rightful owner isn't at all straightforward, particularly for objects seized in the distant past. Who the 'rightful' owner is seems to depend largely on your point of view, and international law doesn't provide much help prior to the 20th century.

This is the subject of my cover story in the new issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, out on news stands shortly and online now.

Extreme right to enter Hungarian Parlialent

You're unlikely to know it if you rely on the website of The New York Times, but Hungary held elections yesterday, and the extreme right had a powerful showing, winning 17% of the vote.

As some of you know, I lived for several years in Hungary, and still report from the region once or twice a year. In recent years I've been following the rise of Jobbik and their uniformed paramilitary arm, the Hungarian Guard (Magyar Garda.) The latter marches around in intimidating formations in Roma neighborhoods sporting symbols favored by Hungary's fascist Arrow Cross during the Holocaust. The former won seats last year in the European Parliament, where one of their delegates arrived wearing the Magyar Garda uniform. The party advocates reopening the Trianon Treaty, which set the region's borders and created Slovakia. Roma leaders liken it to Nazism, though the party's slick, English-speaking communications staff claim they are merely patriots.

Sunday, nearly a fifth of the Hungarian electorate cast votes in support of Jobbik, which will now occupy 26 seats in the Hungarian parliament. Wednesday they're introducing the foreign press corps in Budapest to their candidates for ministers of economy, finance, and foreign economy. It remains unclear whether the party will be marginalized or coddled by the election's big victors, Viktor Orban's center-right Fidesz, which took 53% of the vote.

Watch closely to see what Mr. Orban says or does not have to say about Jobbik in the coming days and weeks.

[UPDATE, 13:11 EST: Orban just pledged to remove the "political and economic landmine" that strong support for Jobbik represents, the Associated Press reported minutes ago.]

Has European "Socialism" helped in a crisis?

The last of my stories from my recent trip to Europe just posted over at Global Post. This explores whether the European model -- a social democratic system with universal health care, a more rigid labor market, and higher taxes -- proved more resilient in coping with the shock of the Great Recession than the American "free market" alternative.

The answer, as one might expect, is nuanced. The piece, filed from Austria with input from across western Europe, can be read by subscribers to the Post's Passport service. If you don't get Passport but care about foreign news, consider trying it. Where else are you going to find a prominent Czech economist describing the situation by use of metaphors from Lord of the Rings?

Europe watches as Slovakia implements anti-Hungarian language law

Another story from my recent trip to East-Central Europe is up today over at Global Post, this one on Slovakia's draconian language law.

The country's Hungarian minority is upset because, read strictly, it criminalizes the use of any language other than Slovak in a wide range of public circumstances. The government says they're overreacting, but the government also includes a far-right party whose leader calls the country's Hungarian citizens a "cancer" which must be wiped off the national map.

Slovakia's an E.U. state, right? So what can the union do about it? As you'll read in the piece, not much. (Like most of my Global Post stories, this appears in their subscription Passport service, so you'll need to login to read it. If you care about international news, however, it's well worth the price.)

While we're in the neighborhood, Hungary's own extremist party isn't doing much to calm tensions between the two countries and is poised to enter the Parliament after April 11 elections. Jobbik, which has its own jackbooted paramilitary, has been trying to charm the foreign press corps of late, hoping to receive sympathetic coverage of their proposals to, among other things, revisit the peace settlement that ended World War I and created Slovakia. I'm on their mailing list and I listen to what they have to say: it's not charming.

Map: Hungarian minority in Slovakia (majority areas in red), Courtesy Nationalia.

Things to Watch and Read, March 22 edition

I'm still hiding out in my secret lair with a book manuscript, but a few things of interest crossed my desk over past few days.

Tea Party Bigots at the Capitol: The freedom-loving "Tea Party" folks who showed up at the U.S. Capitol to protest the health care bill reportedly shouted the "n" word at black civil rights hero John Lewis (D-Ga.), spit on Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), and screamed "faggot" at Barney Frank (D-Mass.)

"I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus," James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told the Huffington Post. Later that day, someone threw a brick through the window of Rep. Louise Slaughter's district office in Pine View, New York.

What's next: tarring, feathering, and burning down houses? That'll keep health care affordable.


The Hungarian "race": The Hungarian-American lobby sent out a press release with instructions for their constituency on how to declare themselves racially Hungarian on the U.S. 2010 Census, apparently believing the write-in campaign will increase leverage on lawmakers.

I'm not sure that Hungarian-Americans share a common policy position on events in their ancestral home: someone whose family fled the Nazi takeover may have different feelings about, say, the rise of a far-right party with its own jackbooted militia, than someone who fled the Soviet invasion in '56. But what if ancestral memory really does trump independent thought? To hedge my bets, maybe I'll declare my race to be "Anglo-Franco-Irish-Dane-Scot" and give the politicians something to puzzle over in the next redistricting effort.


Timbuktu Claims the Blues: My Monitor colleague, Scott Baldauf, has an interesting piece on how Timbuktu, Mali, the famous terminal of trans-Sahara caravan trade, asserts itself as the birthplace of the blues, preempting the American South.


Editor who Needs An Editor: For those in Maine wondering what's wrong with the former newspaper of record, the Portland Press Herald, here's another clue. Owner/editor Richard Connor -- whose possessions also include the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal -- appears to have no idea how to research and write something as simple as a personal opinion piece.

His contribution on health care in yesterday's Morning Sentinel is a case in point: a rambling and unfocused piece that features an uninterrupted 500-word block of quotes from a Gorham innkeeper to make the rather obvious point that insurance premiums vary by state. The innkeeper has some theories as to how to improve the situation, but rather than examine their merits, Connor veers off into some fuzzy ruminations about his companies' health care costs (replete with undigested statistics) before arriving at a perfect non-argument: what's done is done, so "it’s time for all of us to get on with our lives."

This is why directors shouldn't act in their own movies: there's nobody around who can tell them when when they're making an ass of themselves.

Czech Republic: How Zlin kept its groove

During my recent trip to Central Europe, I was able to revisit Zlin, the "model city" created in the early 20th century by the self-made Czechoslovak shoe tycoon, Tomas Bata. The provincial town in Czech Moravia is something of a pilgrimage site for enthusiasts of prewar industrial design, as Bata built nearly the entire place from scratch via a central, standardized plan. Along the way he created the world's largest shoe company, and exported the model just about everywhere else.

As you can read in my story now up over at The Christian Science Monitor, his legacy lived on in the Zlin region even during the Communist Era and many credit his (self-aggrandizing) social engineering with the city's relative prosperity and entrepreneurial spirit. (New to me was the tale of a Bata-inspired collective farm that managed to conduct a surprisingly capitalistic operation in the midst of the dour Brezhnev-era Warsaw Pact.) And his brother's famous office-in-an-elevator is still there, restored along with the Bata skyscraper to its 1930s glory.

Photo (c) 2010 Colin Woodard. All rights reserved.

Austria's banking worries

I was in Austria recently in connection with a series of stories on how the Great Recession is playing out in East-Central Europe. There many countries had only just emerged from their post-Communist recession when they got whacked hard by an uber-Capitalist one.

One of the casualties has been Austria, whose banks loaned heavily to the region during the go-go years, so much in fact that many experts say the country is vulnerable to a Greek-style meltdown. Read my piece on this topic in the Christian Science Monitor to find out more.

One thing to be aware of: reporters generally don't write the headlines and subheads that go with their story, and the ones the Monitor wrote for this piece don't accurately reflect the article. A better headline would have been "Austria fears wave of bad banks loans tied to Eastern Europe" and the subhead should have focused on the Hypo bank failure (in December) rather than the Austrian state's massive bank rescue (more than a year ago.)

Memo to journalists: always ask to see headlines and captions beforehand.

Has Eastern Europe's crisis peaked?

My old stomping ground in (what we children of the Cold War called) Eastern Europe has been hard hit by the Great Recession. So has the region's crisis peaked? That's the topic of my first piece from my recent trip to the region, which posted at Global Post today.

The story is for the Post's Passport section, which means they'd like you to subscribe, but it's well worth the bother. Remember all those newspapers that cut their foreign bureaus? A lot of their veteran writers file copy for Global Post these days.

More from Europe coming up....

In Austria

I'm currently in Austria, where the banking sector has been under stress from having lent perhaps too heavily to the former Warsaw Pact countries during the recent financial and real estate bubble. It being western Europe, there are few signs of stress on the streets. Homeless people are extremely rare, crime is extremely low, and fur coats remain as popular as ever for the older generations. The trains, of course, run on time. I think I once had to wait a full three minutes for a subway train in Vienna; generally its been about 5 to 15 seconds.

In Prague

I'm currently on assignment in the Czech Republic (and, soon, neighboring countries), where they're still recovering from a weekend of blizzards.

As a Mainer, it's a little difficult to see what the fuss is all about: they received about a foot of fresh snow on top of what looks to have been a base of less than an inch. But two days after the snow stopped, trains are running late, stores are closed, and streets remain slick and uncleared. (Are winters usually very mild in Bohemia and Moravia? I thought they played hockey here.) It is quite beautiful, and I've enjoyed the atmosphere immensely, even if its hard to get around.

1989-2009: Romania's Revolution lifts off (as do I)

Twenty years ago this morning, I was being interrogated by Vienna airport security, along with just about everyone else intending to fly to New York with TWA.

I was grilled by a hawk eyed Austrian agent with a cold demeanor and a Mitteleuropean's clipboard. My answers seemed to annoy him. Where are you traveling from? (Hungary.) How long were you there? (Four months.) Where else did you go? (the Romanian Socialist Republic, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, twice to the Polish People's Republic, Yugoslavia three times.) What were you doing there? (Exchange student, Karl Marx University of Economics.) You entered Austria yesterday, where did you spend the night? (Sleeping on an airport ticket counter.) Why? (I can't afford your hotels.) Are you carrying any weapons? (No.) Are you sure? (Yes.) And so on. Vienna had been the site of a horrific terrorist attack four years earlier engineered by Abu Nidal, that decade's stand in for Osmama bin Laden. They weren't taking any chances.

While riding out to my aircraft in one of those giant people movers, I saw my first glimpses of the Romanian Revolution on a wall-mounted television. There was footage of protesters seizing control of Timisoara and talk of security forces mowing down thousands in mass graves. It had apparently been going on for two days, but I'd again been traveling on long-distance trains and this was the first I'd heard of it. I was shocked. I'd been in Ceausescu's Romania two months earlier and had come away with the sense that there was no chance of a popular uprising: the people were terrified, cold, and hungry, the security forces aggressive, heavily armed, and omnipresent. I'd expected Romania to hold out, North Korea-style, until their mad dictator succumbed to age or disease.

At home in Maine, I watched the revolution unfold on television. The events raised some provocative questions, particularly after a group of once-powerful Ceausescu regime apparatchiks seized control of the government. I would return to Romania that summer in search of answers, stumbling into a journalism career along the way. As in a bad mystery novel (or an X-Files episode), I only turned up more questions (along with a close call with a pack of government-guided miners brought into Bucharest to put down a new wave of protesters.)

Twenty years later, scholars remain divided on whether we yet know all the answers about what happened in Romania in December 1989, the subject of my feature that posted this morning over at Global Post.


For more on the 1989-2009 series -- including the opening of the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, and visits to Ceausescu's Romania, late Communist Poland and inflation-plagued Yugoslavia -- click here.

1989-2009: A Czech town survives two utopias

The Czech city of Zlin has had a strange century.

One hundred years ago it was a village of less than 4000, seventeen years later, a centrally-planned industrial utopia of 45,000, the brain child of a local cobbler who would build the world's largest footwear company. Ten years, a world war, and a Soviet "liberation" later, it found itself part of another centrally-planned vision, this time guided by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin rather than a self-made industrial tycoon. In 1989 that second utopia collapsed, of course, and by the beginning of the 21st century the shoe industry that had built the city was gone too.

So how has Zlin weathered it all? Very nicely, thank you, not least because its peculiar past. Passport members can read all about it in my feature now posted at Global Post.

Scholars of the industrialist Tomas Bata will be interested to know that elements of his vision for a centrally-planned garden city were co-opted by the Communist regime, which also pressed Bata Company technocrats into service, creating the concrete panel buildings that ring many Czech and Slovak cities today.