Reinventing Central Europe

Summary

“Central Europe has completely fallen to pieces, as if it were the Balkan Peninsula, but enlarged. Thus, there is no point in putting forward any plans or projects.” You are wrong, those are not the words of an analyst about our region's current situation. Those are the words of the late Friedrich Naumann, published in the last issue of his weekly Mittel-Europa. It was in 1918, in December. However …

Let's take a closer look at Central Europe from today's perspective. What do we have here? We have several concepts, of Naumann, Frantisek Palacký, Józef Piłsudski, and Tomas Masaryk, for example, but all of them turned out to be unrealistic. The most recent concept—that of dissident —garnered quite a reputation worldwide in the 1980s. Only after Milan Kundera's essay “The West Torn or the Tragedy of Central Europe” was published did the discussion start, although many had touched upon the problem before: Czesław Miłosz, Josef Kroutvor and authors gathered around the periodical Cross Currents, edited by Ladislav Matejka. It seems as though quite a lot has been achieved since that time.

“The East European has already got his own kingdom. It is taking shape where he lives. The kingdom is spiritual, but deeply rooted in reality. The East European of the post-Yalta generation is now able to do without the cult of the West and, to be honest, he rarely thinks—and remembers hardly anything—about it. He is too busy living on his own—forming new names of Europe, in his own home, at his own place.”

Those are the touching words by Barbara Toruńczyk from Zeszyty Literackie [Literary Notebooks] of 1987. For Toruńczyk to have written those words, something must have been changed. That was also the time when they removed the section “Europe at its Center” from Literary Notebooks —since we are in our own home, and we form “new names of Europe,” there is no point in striving for Central Europe. But only two years later it was clear that it was not like that in the least. It turned out that this “at our own home” was only a temporary residence, and it was necessary to take down the tent and set off on a trip to a better—a normal, at last!—Europe.