Friederike Kind-Kovács and Valeska Bopp-Filimonov: Debating East Central Europe Again? German Academia and the Dilemma of Spatial Categories (original) (raw)
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The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700
Covering territory from Russia in the east to Germany and Austria in the west, The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700 explores the origins and evolution of modernity in this turbulent region. This book applies fresh critical approaches to major historical controversies and debates, expanding the study of a region that has experienced persistent and profound change and yet has long been dominated by narrowly nationalist interpretations. Written by an international team of contributors that reflects the increasing globalization and pluralism of East Central European studies, chapters discuss key themes such as economic development, the relationship between religion and ethnicity, the intersection between culture and imperial, national, wartime, and revolutionary political agendas, migration, women’s and gender history, ideologies and political movements, the legacy of communism, and the ways in which various states in East Central Europe deployed and were formed by the politics of memory and commemoration. This book uses new methodologies in order to fundamentally reshape perspectives on the development of East Central Europe over the past three centuries. Transnational and comparative in approach, this volume presents the latest research on the social, cultural, political and economic history of modern East Central Europe, providing an analytical and comprehensive overview for all students of this region.
OUR EUROPE: THREE POST-COMMUNIST WRITERS ON CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE DENIAL OF HISTORY
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The paper focuses on Central Europe’s problematic philosophical relationship with history by bringing together three different post-communist viewpoints on Central Europeanism which seem to spotlight a certain distrust in history as a key element in any relevant understanding of its cultural specificity. The primary sources proposed for analysis consist of three authoritative Central European writers’ essayistic approaches to the said relationship – namely, Andrzej Stasiuk, Mircea Nedelciu and Gheorghe Crăciun’s – as each of them provides a different paradigmatic standpoint on Central Europe’s “historic pudency” and this attitude’s role in re-defining Europeanism in the zone. The investigation’s main purpose is to determine the way in which these discourses articulate around a distinct conceptual apparatus and build emblematic contemporary perspectives, adding up to pre-communist and late, 1980s (anti-)communist philosophical debates concerning Central European identity.
2020
The study of East-Central Europe has long been weakened by a failure to contextualize the region alongside a full range of relevant comparisons. The underdevelopment and authoritarianism of the region is emphasized when set next to northwestern Europe, which is appropriate insofar as local intellectuals tend to focus on this perspective. Nonetheless, we misunderstanding the broader position of the lands between the Baltic and the Balkans if we only take a regional approach. Globalizing the study of these territories gives us a radically different perspective on the central processes and developments that have created the East-Central European countries we know today.
Central Europe is as much invented as the continent of Europe, and as any human concept for that matter. But when people subscribe to and act in accordance with a concept of this kind, it becomes reality, that is, part of social reality. This essay, in an interdisciplinary manner, traces the origins and the functioning of Central Europe as a concept through the lens of cartography, history and culture. From the vantage of intellectual and political discourse, the usually nebulous idea of Central Europe was a reply to the disappearance of empires in this region after 1918, and to the rise of totalitarianism in 1938-48. After the period of “occlusion” during the communist years (when the concept was preserved among Central European e;migre; scholars in the West as “East Central Europe”), it resurfaced in the 1980s as a cultural-cum-political banner, under which refusniks and dissident intellectuals proclaimed their protest, seeing the Soviet bloc countries as different from the Soviet Union, then identified with Eastern Europe. In the postcommunist 1990s Central Europe flourished as a cultural and political concept, but following the 2004-07 eastward enlargement of the European Union, its significance was reduced to culture only. Time will show whether any need for Europa Centralis may still remain.