This chapter answers the question ’does central Europe exist?’ by first drawing a literary-historical line between Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, focusing particularly on the critical tensions in Kundera’s construction of a vanished culture and on the West’s mythologizing of central Europe. It then turns to two Prague-set novels, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, which explores the condition of stubborn aesthetic individualism under communism, and Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, set in the months following the splitting-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Beyond the Czech lands, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, a significant work of avant-garde feminism, offers a doomed fantasy of post-war Austro-Hungarian relationships. Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, set in the Polish–Silesian borderlands, is a revenge thriller whose narrator is inspired by the radicalism of William Blake. These case studies signal the ways central Europe has been confabulated by British writers; they also show how an evolving canon of fiction-in-translation is appropriately pluralizing and updating the West’s idea of the ‘middle’.

Nationalist ideas on the economy went global in the late nineteenth century, affecting policy in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ireland, India, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Japan. In general, policy makers considered closing the gap with Great Britain to be of paramount importance. This aided the spread of Listian ideas. However, these ideas were transformed by local conditions in the countries they impacted. Developmental approaches worked better if they could be tethered to indigenous ideas, as was the case in Japan. In Germany, Listian was transformed into an aggressive ideology of territorial expansion and national struggle. In colonial India and Ireland, opposition to British rule and the necessity of public mobilisation meant that industrialist ideas were supplemented with agrarian interests. In multi-ethnic locations, such as the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, isolationist approaches came to the fore as nationalists looked to build ethnically homogenous economies separate from those of other nationalities.

The chapter explores what type of sources can help us understand multilingualism in the past. Since direct observation and elicitation techniques are not available, tackling the “poor data problem” is one of the key issues in the study of historic multilingualism. The chapter focuses on the late Habsburg Monarchy and its linguistically exceptionally diverse populations. Scholars frequently draw on the ethnographic maps, demographic data, and language laws that have come down to us from historic times to make sense of this diversity. Important as these sources are, they only offer a bird’s eye view of the realm’s multilingualism. Other sources are needed to explore its functioning in day-to-day life in particular communities. The chapter argues that memoirs, late-Habsburg satirical magazines, and criminal court records can all serve this purpose. They afford unique glimpses into everyday life in the past and allow us to reconstruct the workings of historical multilingualism in terms of its social underpinnings and linguistic outcomes.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.

A comparison of Vienna and Berlin, the two most significant centres of German-speaking decadence, provides insight into the relationship of social class and aesthetic experience in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1897–1914) prior to World War I and during the tumultuous period of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). The cultural and urban development of both cities, in their shared departure from nineteenth-century certainties, qualifies them for comparison in the context of decadence: Vienna’s imperial decline clashed with a radical re-thinking of tradition in art, and Berlin’s expressionistic distortions brought forth a brutal modernity that conservative thinkers considered to be the expression of racial degeneracy. To show how social history shaped the aesthetics of decadence at the time, the chapter focuses on the decadent art and writing of Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Schnitzler in Vienna, followed by Otto Dix, Alfred Döblin, and Christopher Isherwood in Berlin.