Paul Gradvohl is a Junior Professor at the University of Lorraine in Nancy, part of the CERCLE (Centre de recherches sur les cultures et littérature européennes, France, Europe centrale, Europe orientale) and has headed the Center for French Civilization and Francophone Studies (OKFiSF) at Warsaw University (UW) 2012-2016. He researches Central European History in the 20th century, inquiring security issues as well as cultural ones, including politics, memory and historiography.
He edited the volume L’Europe médiane au XXe siècle : fractures, décompositions – recompositions – surcompositions (Prague, CEFRES, 2011). The focusses on the specifics of the state/security relationship in more recent articles (‘L’ire et la frayeur en Europe centrale’, p. 74-83, Esprit Nr. 423, 2016 ; ‘Orban et le souverainisme obsidional’, p. 35-45, Politique étrangère (IFRI), 1/2017. Besides his standard activities he authored with Violaine Gelly a biography (Charlotte Delbo, Fayard 2013, and pocketbook 2017).
Clear ideological differences between East and West may be long gone. But recently solidarity itself seems to have become a thing of the past too. Public debate in Europe is now riven by a new volatile set of polemics about the European Union, the memory of the Holocaust and of communist crimes, nationalism and multiculturalism.