Rethinking Literary History -- Comparatively
HISTORY of the LITERARY CULTURES IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE: AN INTRODUCTION
I. Defining the Region
Mitteleuropa represents a German perspective on both the eastern part of Europe and Germany itself. Whenever Germans conceived of themselves as Mitteleuropäer, they took a middle ground between East and West and defined their identity as much by relations to the former as to the latter. The term moved into the center of discussion during world War I, when, in view of military alliance between the Reich and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Friedrich Naumann (1860-1919) envisioned a post-war Mitteleuropa uniting Germany, the Monarchy, and in a broader sense all the nations "that belong neither to the Anglo-French western alliance nor to the Russian Empire" (Central Europe 9). Naumann's idea could not muster much support in Austria, but some Austrians contemplated different Mitteleuropas. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, for instance, spoke of an Austrian-centered spiritual Mitteleuropa well before the publication of Naumann's book, and he continued his attempts to define a new cultural identity for Austria and the surrounding areas with the founding of the Salzburg Festival and a steady stream of speeches and essays throughout the 1920s. Hitler's Anschluß and the neutralization of Austria in 1955 silenced such speculations and dreams for a while, but Mitteleuropa stayed alive among exiled East-European writers, became a hot topic during the glasnost in the eighties, and generated a wave of nostalgia about Vienna, Austria, and the Monarchy after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Germany's center of gravity shifted to the East through the reunification, but this has revived and intensified Polish and Czech preoccupations with German hegemony. And the well-intended but highly questionable German role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia has fed similar fears in the Balkans.
Mitteleuropa (and to a lesser degree Zentraleuropa and Central Europe) is a historically loaded term that focalizes the eastern part of Europe from a predominantly German perspective, with explicit or implicit hegemonic intentions. When Naumann wrote his book, a certain transnational middle-European culture was still alive in the rich German and Yiddish cultures stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Danube delta, with centers in Prague, Budapest, Lemberg, Czernowitz and elsewhere. That culture, epitomized for us by the names of Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel, Paul Celan and Rosa Ausländer, Elias Canetti, Joseph Roth and Karl Franzos, Sholem Aleichem, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Musil, also included hundreds of newspapers, journals, theaters, and cultural societies. German, and especially German-Jewish culture acted as a glue, an integrating force, among the various ethnic groups.
These seeds of a German yet genuinely transnational East European culture were burned in Auschwitz, uprooted when the Germans were ethnically cleansed after the war in Eastern Europe, and further decimated during the Jewish exodus of the last decades. A German-oriented Mitteleuropa concept is applicable in historical studies that stress the German and Yiddish cultures of the region, but the disappearance of these cultures makes a present- or future-oriented use of the term either vacuous or a euphemism for a new German imperialism. A German-oriented concept of Mitteleuropa is not the appropriate means to achieve the reconciliation that the nations and ethnic groups of Eastern Europe genuinely need. Ultimately, reconciliation must come through a revision of the self-image that these various cultures have constructed of themselves in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
If Mitteleuropa is both linguistically and ideologically oriented towards the German cultures, Eastern Europe gives undue emphasis to Russian hegemonic policies. Eastern Europe, defined during the Enlightenment, acquired new meanings during the Cold War (1945-1989), when the region became associated with the Iron Curtain and the "Soviet bloc," including the GDR. While the Iron Curtain is now lifted, Eastern Europe remains a highly problematic designation, first, because historical usage has associated it with the hegemonic sphere of Russia and the Soviet Union, second, because it has no clear Eastern borders, save the purely geographical divide of the Ural Mountains. East-Central Europe, a relatively recent, and geographically somewhat vague term, was probably introduced to avoid the undesirable historical connotations of the alternatives. For our purposes the unifying feature of East-Central Europe is the struggle of its peoples against the German and Russian hegemonic threats. In this sense, the region is a liminal and transitional space between the powers in the west and the east, a long but relatively narrow strip stretching from the Baltic countries in the north to Macedonia in the south. In the west it is clearly bounded by the hegemonic German cultures of Germany and Austria; its eastern boundaries are less distinct, for the populations of the Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldavia were both part of Russia's hegemonic power and suppressed by it. Two additional factors contributed to the present composition of the region. The first is the impact of the Turks, who occupied its southern part for centuries and decisively contributed to the shaping of the Balkans. They left behind a twofold legacy that still plays a crucial role in the region: a large Muslim population, and a wealth of national myths, legends, and literary creations about fighting the Turkish invaders, which continues to shape the region's notions of ethnicity and nation. Witness the function of the Kosovo myths in recent conflicts. Second, East-Central Europe has also been shaped by internecine conflicts and wars. The regions remarkable ethnic, linguistic, and religious variety led to emancipatory struggles that were as often directed against powers within as against the external hegemonic powers. The process of identity forming may have created a variety of conflicts among the ethnic groups, but the very process of national awakening was fairly uniform throughout the region and it paradoxically also interrelated these cultures. The national accounts of the region's history have systematically ignored or suppressed the intra-regional connections and exchanges.
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Text - Copyright © 1996 Mario J. Valdés and Linda Hutcheon.