Notes on the Post-War Development of Slavic and Eastern European Studies in the Netherlands

Abstract

Amsterdam. The Slavic Department at the University of Leiden was headed by Professor Nikolaas van Wijk, and from 1930 Bruno Becker held a special professorship in eastern European cultural history at the University of Amsterdam. Both courses were primarily intended for philologists and historians. At that time, socio-political developments in contemporary eastern Europe were not as yet the subject of scientific research. Only in the Russian Department of the International Institute of Social History, which had been founded in 1935 in Amsterdam, were materials pertaining to current developments in the Soviet Union collected and analyzed, at least insofar as they were connected with the history of the international labour movement. Postwar developments have been characterized, on the one hand, by an increasing differentiation and specialization in the field, the main product of which was the coming into existence of eastern European area studies as a separate branch of social science, and, on the other hand, by the rapid proliferation of Slavic studies to other centres besides the above-mentioned universities. The results of this