2024
Nicole Eaton
German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad
The Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history in the previous calendar year.
Winner: Nicole Eaton, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad (Cornell University Press, 2023)
Nicole Eaton’s innovative German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad narrates the entangled histories of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that ruled and fought over this unique borderland. It boldly challenges chronological boundaries by charting the Nazi revolution in Königsberg, the city’s mobilization as a fortress city during the Second World War, and the murder of Jews as the Red Army closed in, through the Red Army conquest, Soviet occupation, and transformation of Königsberg into a Soviet outpost. Eaton masterfully brings together the histories of the Nazi and Soviet regimes by showing that their leaders were in constant dialogue in their construction of their political dreams in Königsberg/Kaliningrad. At the same time, Eaton vividly portrays the lived experiences of everyday people who suffered, participated, resisted, and helped to shape their city’s history. Based on deep archival research in five countries, German Blood, Slavic Soil is a gripping account of a single space that tells a larger story of how the clash of ideologies in the 20th century continues to shape Central and Eastern Europe.
Honorable Mentions: Serhiy Bilenky and Oksana Sarkisova & Olga Shevchenko
Prize Committee: Aaron Retish (chair), Małgorzata Fidelis, and Stephen Norris