Alumni Travel Reading Lists 2020: Passage Along the Blue Danube

Winder wanders through the area that made up the former Hapsburg Empire. He describes what he sees and reflects on the historical scholarship on the period of empire. He comments on villages, towns, and cities--their present condition versus how things might have looked during the time of Hapsburg ascendency.

Surveys the first five hundred years of Eastern European history and examines the disappearance of ethnic cultures over time and how the intermixing of cultures influenced the formation of modern states.

An entertaining and informative collection of geographical, historical, political, and economic facts about the many lands along the Danube,

Ian Thomson of The Telegraph writes, "The reader bobs happily along as Thorpe moves through the Danube’s four great capitals of Belgrade, Budapest, Bratislava and Vienna."

In this volume, Fermor records his journey on foot across Europe begun in his first account, A Time of Gifts. Setting out in 1933, Fermor ends the present volume as he approaches the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans. The final volume of the three part travel saga is entitled The Broken Road (The Iron Gates to Mt. Athos).

The author recounts his present and past travels through his native Poland as well as the countries of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine.

Purchase the book here.

Find it in your local library.

Korda's eyewitness account of the uprising of Hungarian people against the Hungarian communist party and the Soviet forces in Hungary in the wake of Stalin's death.

Memoir of the noted Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.

Traces the various architectural and urban-planning strategies pursued in Bulgaria and Croatia since the mid-1950s.

Examines the design potentials of the Danube River as a civic anchor, a bioclimatic medium, and a space for collective imagination in the city of Ingolstadt, Germany.

A survey of Austria’s architects, buildings, and styles, featuring more than 2,300 images and plans, accompanied by explanatory texts.

A series of adventures about a man and his wicked dopplegänger, who breathes every forbidden idea of the man's childhood into his ear, and then reappears decades later.

This novel narraties the story of a simple, poor woman in her seventies who has endured the endless series of trials and tribulations of her life in Romania from WWI to the end of the twentieth century.

Study of contemporary art in Hungary from the period immediately following the Revolution of 1956 through 1980.

In this study of Croatia's artistic heritage, Norwich, et al., analyze the key cultural developments in the country's history.

Parvulescu examines the films produced in postwar Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland

Brings together essays that critically examine representations of post-1989 migration from the former Eastern Bloc to Western Europe.

This companion includes 25 scholarly essays that trace the history of Eastern European cinemas and offer an assessment of post-socialist film cultures.

Winning awards in France and Croatia, Hotel Tito is Bodrozic's autobiography of surviving the seige of Vukovar, a town across the Danube from Serbia, during the fall of 1991.

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."

Tale about a group of friends and lovers torn apart by the German occupation of Budapest during World War II.

Jaroslav Seifert's poetry provides refuge from world history while maintaining its sense of social consciousness.