Nicholas T. Parsons

Central Europe Again! (Or Never)

Lonnie R. Johnson: Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. Oxford University Press, 1996, 340 pp, with black and white illustrations, maps and charts.

In 1979 (so I read in my guidebook to Prague) the official organ of the Czech Communist Party, Rudé Právo, delivered itself of one of its more strikingly inelegant aphorisms, namely: "Those who lie on the rails of history must expect to have their legs chopped off". The brutality of this image, with its mixture of bullying power assertion and childish venom, can also be seen as the Communists' reductio ad absurdum and grotesque trivialization of some thing buried deep in the Central European self-perception and of the extraordinary degree of human suffering inflicted last but not least by the Communists themselves; for Central Europe as a region is characterized above all by a recurrent sense of irreparable loss, whether expressed as the collective loss of population, of territory and of statehood; or the same phenomenon in microcosm, a multitude of individual losses of property, of freedom, of life itself. The struggle to regain the past (both in a physical and a psychological sense) has inevitably led to the clash of competing claims and to the habit of legitimising present attitudes or policies with reference to the unfinished business of Central European history. Like it or not, this sense of unfinished business is one of the factors that gives the area its distinctive cultural profile; its ramifications reach deep into the psyche of Central Europeans with implications for individual and national identity, for economic and political development, as also for Central European attitudes to the rest of the world. More over, the unfinished business divides populations internally as it does states from their neighbours, often despite the best efforts of politicians and diplomats (but sometimes precisely because of their worst efforts). It lurks behind the type of double standard which Arthur Koestler applied to many Germans of the Hitler generation, for whom he coined the memorable expression "mimophant". The mimophant, says Koestler, is a phenomenon most of us have met in life: "a hybrid who combines the delicate frailness of the mimosa, crumbling at a touch when his own feelings are hurt, with the thick-skinned robustness of the elephant trampling over the feelings of others. [...] ... The majority of Germans who supported the Führer belonged to a species of mimophants. They were capable of shedding genuine tears at the death of their pet canaries; what they did at other times is perhaps better forgotten."¹

Where wars start and never seem to end...

It is hardly surprising that the descriptive metaphors for Central European historical events so often allude to violence: in the historical literature on the region, references abound to the "rape" of Poland, to the "crushing" of Hungarian freedom and now, most chillingly, to the "holocaust". Lonnie Johnson himself, in his otherwise measured and scrupulously unemotional narrative, speaks of "breaking Bohemia's back" and of the Bohemian nation being "decapitated" after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. It seems as if this is a part of the world where the slaughter and casual violence that occur in the history of any nation are never lost in the mists of time, but suppurate like an open sore, the wound of Amfortas that never heals. Kosovo is beyond the periphery of Central Europe as historians have defined it, but Kosovo's significance as the defining event in Serbian history, an ancient wrong which must sooner or later be addressed, has often been replicated in different guise amongst the nations of Central Europe. Thus, what is heroism and selfless patriotism to one nation may seem like know-nothing nationalism to its neighbour, and the self-righteous whine of a victim culture is the obverse of the same culture's aggressive tendencies. "Justice", as Norman Douglas dispiritingly observed, "is not good enough for some and too good for others."

It is one of the many strengths of Johnson's book that he strikes an ever-insightful balance between the history of the Central European psyche (collectively and individually viewed) and the geopolitical circumstances of which that psyche is an expression. We are reminded constantly not only of the reality of loss, but of how people have internalized it -- a salutary experience for readers who have grown up in a country that has not been invaded since 1066 or, in the case of the United States of America, as constituted, has never been successfully invaded at all. Compare and contrast the historical complacency of the Anglo-Saxons with the outlook of a Lithuanian, whose country in 1400 encompassed a territory that was 100,000 square miles larger than modern France. (It now occupies an area of just 25,000 square miles). As for population, the Hungarians lost 60 per cent of theirs in the Tatar invasions of 1241-2; moreover, between 1500 and 1700 (which includes the period of partition and Turkish occupation), the Hungarian population is estimated to have dropped from 4 million to 3.5 million while in Europe as a whole it increased from 80 to 130 millions.² The subsequent development whereby Magyars were to become an ethnic minority in their own historic territories was one of the determining factors of Hungarian 19th-century politics, mostly with unfortunate results.

Yet if the Hungarian experience looks grim, Johnson's figures for Bohemia are a powerful reminder of the shared fate of Central Europeans: between the Battle of the White Mountain (he writes) and the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, emigration and population decline in the Czech lands amounted to 70 per cent of the former Czech nation (p. 95). It is no wonder that Czech historians called this period of Bohemia's history the doba temna, or "time of darkness", even if the flowering Baroque culture that changed the face of Prague thereafter has given us a different perspective on it. Leaving aside all questions of justice and injustice in the past, the sheer magnitude of the changes inflicted on individuals, sometimes with brutal rapidity, has deeply marked the peoples of this region, although it has also taught them vital survival skills. Moreover the rationalizing tendency of our own age to justify social and economic upheaval (even certain aspects of Nazism and Stalinism) in the name of "progress" (= modernization) loses its appeal in the face of developments that turned the clock back ("second serfdom") or removed a country from the map (the partition of Poland). Generation after generation has had to accommodate such unwelcome new realities: in Elias Canetti's second volume of autobiography there is a poignant evocation of the sheer bewilderment and disorientation (but also a dogged determination to survive) that the ordinary person might feel when faced with historical earthquakes that dismantle entire socio-economic systems; Canetti's cleaning lady in the Vienna of the 1920's had a vivid memory of her youth, when she once served a welcoming drink to the Russian Czar, the German Emperor and Franz Joseph on their arrival at the Lainzer Park; but now she inhabited a world utterly changed, though mentally she had never really left the world it replaced: "She could see all three of them, as though they were still standing there; she described their panaches, their uniforms, their faces; she still knew what types of horses they had been riding and what words they had used when thanking her for the beverage. She didn't sound servile, more as if everything was still present; and while her arms reached up to show me how she had offered the welcoming beverage to each of the emperors, she appeared a bit surprised that no one was taking the cup from her hands. Everything was gone. Where were the emperors? How was it possible nothing was left? And while she never put these thoughts into words and never betrayed any regret, I sensed that it was no less enigmatic for her than for me, and that it was because of this enigma that she told me about the past so powerfully and graphically."³

The ball and chain of the past

Raimund Löw, the highly professional foreign correspondent of the ORF, recently summed up his impressions for viewers at the end of a five-year stint covering the United States for Austrian television and radio. "America", he said, "is a land that concerns itself not at all with the past and not too much with the present, but very actively with the future. That is what gives this country such an extraordinary dynamic power". Leaving aside whether this quasi-aphorism is actually true, what is significant is that Central European intellectuals like Löw are inclined to view America in this light. The unspoken comparison is with their own countries that lack the American dynamism because they are immured in their past, nursing ancient grievances, learning little, remembering everything. Johnson himself (a married-in Central European) has written a book entitled Vienna: The Past in the Present, but to his credit, his depiction of Central Europe's claimed backwardness in relation to the west is by no means so one-dimensional as the view I have caricatured above. With commendable lucidity he beats the boundaries of traditional debate about the failure of Central Europe to match both the speed and the quality of economic, social and political development in the western half of Europe. Failure, (which is always relative failure) in each of these fields may be explained in historical or geopolitical terms, although scholars naturally disagree on the degree of emphasis to be placed on individual factors. Johnson is scrupulous in reporting alternative views with notable lack of bias and qualifies the generalizations he does offer, without ever losing sight of structural continuities. Was the late survival of feudalism (in some cases the introduction of a second feudalism) a main cause of sluggish economic performance? Does the lagging development of an autonomous middle class satisfactorily account for delayed modernization and the slow achievement of a civil society? To what extent have purely geographical factors (the insecurity of plain dwellers, the controlling influence of rivers, the mountain barriers) determined the course of history in the area? Each of these questions raises supplementary ones, but simply posing such questions helps us to think about a complicated history in a productive way.

Antemurale christianitatis

Self-sacrifice and the "desire for recognition"

The often paradoxical leitmotifs of Central European self-perception would be the central feature of a cultural history of the whole region, were one to be written.⁴ Johnson highlights the notion, common to Hungarians and Poles in particular, that their historical role was to be the "bulwarks of Christianity" (although the interpretation of what this meant naturally varied according to the enemy being confronted). The failure of the West adequately to appreciate the degree of self-sacrifice that these and other nations endured for the Christian world, or even the sense that they had often been betrayed by the rest of Chistendom, led to a remarkable local identification with the sacrifice of Christ himself. One could add to Johnson's historical analysis some cultural examples that supply a further perspective on this enduring theme: Mickiewicz's poem Dziady (Forefathers' Eve -1832) compared Poland to Christ suffering for the other nations; in Petõfi's "Sors, nyiss nekem tért..." ("Fate, Give Me Space...") the poet himself, filled with a sense of his patriotic duty, aspires to a Christ-like role that will win him a "new cross and crown of thorns" when he dies "for all men's good": ⁵

Tell me, tell me, fate, such holy death
awaits me ... and I'll make
with my own hands the cross on which I'm laid
crucified to break.

Remarkably enough, even Germans could see Poland in a quasi-mystical light, as suffering in their rebellions for the oppressed everywhere. This attitude could find romantic expression, for instance in Harro Harring's Der Freiheit Heiland (Free dom's Salvation), where Poland assumes the role of John the Baptist preparing the nation for its sacrificial role.⁶ In painting, historical figures abound which iconographically recall the pietà, the locus classicus being supplied by Bertalan Székely's treatment of The Finding of Louis II after Mohács. An heraldic example given by Johnson is the Polish eagle mounted on a black cross that became current after the 1863 uprising in the Russian-controlled part of Poland. In the Czech context, Masaryk and others have made play with the more general notion of the "Czech martyr complex", based on the idea that the most glorious period of Czech history had begun and ended with martyrdom (that of St Wenceslas and of John Hus). The Jesuits were cunning enough to tap into this vein of Czech feeling with a counter-martyr in the shape of St John Nepomuk, whose martyrology directed attention away from "national" preoccupations and back towards the politically safer notion of sacrifice for the faith.⁷

Of course the Romantic and Historicist examples cited above post-date the national revivals that were to be transmuted into political nationalism. One of the notable strengths of the book under review is its demonstration of the manner in which the past of Central European nations was reinvented to suit a nationalist perspective. The medieval "natio", where "the nation" was defined by the nobility and its interests (the nobility itself often being of diverse ethnic origin) gave way to a racially determined perception of the heroic "one nation", which was then projected onto the past. Religion gets drawn into this process, the Hussites being seen by some as proto-nationalists, as they were proto-Socialists for the purposes of Communist propaganda. In Hungary, the Calvinists are strongly (but not exclusively) associated with the national cause as freedom fighters in Transylvania, the latter region being the repository of authentic Ungartum during the period of partition by the Turks and Habsburgs; subsequently they were a source of manpower for the kuruc armies. Calvinism being a creed that in principle subjected the state to the church, there was no inherent contradiction between Calvinist piety and secular Magyar rebelliousness. By contrast with this picture of Protestantism as the underdog, fighting against the central power for national and religious autonomy, Johnson offers an especially iluminating discussion on the role of Lutheranism in German nationalism (sometimes crudely described as the "Luther to Hitler theory"). The Lutheran insistence on the personal nature of religious experience, its "inwardness", was the obverse of an outward subservience to the state, whose potential consequences we all know.

Herder and progress--Forward to the past

The ghost of Herder (or at least his notion of the Volksgeist) flits through these pages like an ambivalently programmed harbinger of liberation. The enthusiasm with which his ideas were embraced (not to say misinterpreted and misused) is an indication of the shallow roots struck by the Enlightenment in Central Europe (one remembers Joseph II withdrawing virtually all his measures on his deathbed). Johnson aptly quotes Sir Isaiah Berlin: "All regionalists, all defenders of the local against the universal, all champions of deeply rooted forms of life, both reactionary and progressive, both genuine humanists and obscurantist opponents of scientific progress, owe something, whether they know it or not, to the doctrines which Herder introduced into European thought"⁸.

Herder's writings, therefore, supply ammunition for both nationalists and liberal internationalists. His insistence that nations learned from each other in fruitful intercourse could underpin the recurrent and idealistic project of a Danubian Con federation that Kossuth and others have envisaged. Unfortunately, for this to be credible as a project, its proponents really needed to assume a "Central European identity". One assumes that such an identity would look partly like that of an American, and partly like that of an EU citizen, where a sense of common European heritage is combined with a (qualified?) allegiance to the individual nation state. In an interesting article on Central European writers, Csaba G. Kiss cites the case of Stanislaw Vincenz (1888-1971), whom he describes as a "son of the Carpathians" and who might be one of those rare people with such an identity, "knowing at first hand the coexistence of peoples and nationalities in Eastern Galicia ... a complex conglomerate of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews and Rumanians". In 1942 Vincenz lamented the missed opportunities for making common cause among Central Europeans in words that could appear appropriately in any requiem for the area: "If the Central European region does not unite its forces into some kind of intellectual and cultural alliance, each one of its parts will, of necessity, become the dependency of a great er unit."⁹ More recently, Milan Kundera, in a seminal essay, has stressed the shared cultural values and common cultural identity of the region.¹⁰ Centuries of divide and rule by outside powers have failed to extinguish the idealistic hopes of co-operation entirely; on the other hand, we most of us share some complicity in our fate. As with the original founding of the European Union (or "Common Market" as it then was), the impulse to turn away from past aggression and address the prospect of a common future must reflect a deep commitment of the nations concerned, if it is to have any hope of success.

In contrast to the potentially benign influence of Herder, as suggested above, the philosopher's identification of Volk with Kultur proved a handy foundation for racist theories, while his qualitative attribution of ethnic characteristics (e.g. that the Slavs were "charitable, loyal, law-abiding" etc. ) could ultimately be twisted to make arbitrary distinctions between Herren volk and Sklavenvolk. As Johnson remarks with the agreeable asperity that often characterises his book: "No one was interested [in] having a national past that did not surpass others in greatness."

The implications of Herder's ideas for the concept of progress are also marked by ambiguity. Nations could be torn between the realisation that they were slipping behind the West in all sorts of ways -- economic, social and political--and a reluctance or inability to reform or replace ossified social structures. Yet capitalism, which is by definition dynamic, was likely to destroy (or at least diminish) those sacredly authentic and essentially static attributes of Herderian "national" (ethnic) identity, just as globalization today threatens to destroy the power of governments to control the most important areas of national policy. A 19th-century paradigm of the clash between modernisation and romanticized (but also self-interested) tradition is to be found in the story of Széchenyi and the toll that was to be levied for the projected Chain Bridge. The struggle to get the nobility (traditionally exempt from tax) to pay the toll like everybody else was part of the struggle to substitute for the privileges of the Hun garian nation the more equitable spread of obligations and rights that civil society requires. The bridge was also a symbol of the transition from tradition to modernization in that it was initiated by a reform-minded Hungarian nobleman, but the finance was raised from the ethnically non-correct Greek and Jewish bankers of Vienna. In modern societies (theoretically at least), what you can do becomes more important than who you are, and this (again in theory) should apply as much in the realm of race as in the realm of class. (The intelligent racist's way round this is summed up in the famous remark by the Christian Social Viennese mayor at the turn of the century: "Wer ein Jud ist, bestimm ich"). Old habits die hard, however, and in Central Europe it is doubtful if they die at all. Only recently, the inimitable Vladimir Meciar, Slovakia's nationalist premier, was quoted as rubbishing the tiresome do-gooding of George Soros, the millionaire philanthropist who has made such a signal contribution to helping Central Europe equip itself for the future: "Not only is he a Jew," complained Meciar indignantly, "but a Hungarian as well, and that's just too much!" ¹¹

Consideration of racial prejudice brings us naturally to the role of the Germans in Central Europe: Herrenvolk or barbarians? Imperialists or diligent and pious settlers? Kulturbringer and transferors of tech-
no logy or überhebliche carpet-baggers? Although Johnson's treatment of the psycho-history of the Germans (more especially the Prussians) seems a shade too glib (e.g."... the psychopathology of groups is a controversial way of looking at history, (but) the relationship between subser vience and aggression can be used to illustrate the dynamics of Germany's development"--p. 113), he is uniformly stimulating on the role of the Germans as settlers in the region. Virtually all were invited in--by medieval kings, who needed German expertise in mining, brewing and agriculture, or by the Habsburgs to settle the lands devastated and depopulated by Turkish wars. Herder's claim that the Germans had contributed "more than all others to the weal and woe of this continent" is no more than a statement of fact (what Central European could dissent from it?); in their adopted lands they contributed, at least until the Nazis arrived on the scene, far more of weal than of woe. It is true that in the rural areas they did not assimilate (this was often true of other ethnic groups with their own villages); in Pest-Buda however, Ger mans became completely Hungarianiz ed by the second half of the 19th century (like Liszt or Lech ner). In Poland and elsewhere there was a long tradition of cities like Cracow where a powerful German merchant community enjoyed legal autonomy under the Magde burg Law, and indeed the city was substantially Germanized in terms of language and culture. In Prague there were historically parallel German and Czech cultures with some overlap and friction, finally clashing irrevocablyin the 1880's. The 19th-century citizen of Prague could see himself as a citizen of German Prague, of Czech Prague, or perhaps of Jewish Prague; alternatively (with varying degrees of emphasis), he might com bine one of these identities with another, or even all three together. How, for example, is one to categorize Franz Kafka? As a Ger man, a Czech or a Jewish writer? Or is he quintessentially a Central European writer?

From the time of the Enlightenment onwards, Central European Jews assimilated to German language and culture, and in 19th-century Hungary, they assimilated further to Hungarian culture, in which they became major creative forces. By throwing in their lot with the dominant political forces in the Dual Monarchy (Franz Joseph considered them the most loyal of his subjects and in recognition of this protected and supported them) Jews became equally successful in the free professions in Vienna and Budapest. For the Jewish communities in large swathes of Central Europe, the last and uniquely savage chapter of their history appeared to have been written by the Nazis'. Only in Hungary, where some 100,000 Jews survived out of a pre-war total of 787,000 have they continued with their traditionally catalytic cultural role. The loss of the Jewish cultural contribution in much of Central Europe through the Nazis' extermination programme is virtually incalculable. While Western academe has benefited from Central European Jewish refugees throughout the century, the region itself has suffered a cumulative, finally a cataclysmic, loss. Individual or national complicity in that loss makes it even harder for it to be integrated into the national consciousness; another ghost of the past has been created to haunt the future.

As for its German inhabitants, Central Europe has lost them almost as completely as it has lost its Jewish leavening: between 1945 and 1950 eleven million were expelled from areas that their forefathers had lived in for centuries, thousands perishing in the process; many more have drifted away in the interim, among them the Saxons of Transylvania who were sold to the West German government for some 12,000 Marks a head by Ceausescu. How ever, the loss of the Germans as citizens has been offset by the arrival of German capital, first under late Com munism, then in a great flood after 1989. Colonization gives way to economic imperialism, the politically acceptable twentieth-century sub stitute for colonies and sweated la bour. Hungary having lost both world wars and both the peaces, is now the beneficiary of the highest level of German (partly Austrian) investment in the former East Bloc and the Czech Republic is similarly favoured. Perhaps if Germany turned most of the Central European states into new Federal States on the model of the former DDR, the dream of entering the European Union could be realized by the back door. Meanwhile the memory of expulsions is an embarrassment. President Havel's apology in the name of the nation was not too popular with the Czechs and nobody else has thought it wise to pursue such a risky strat egy. Once again an ambivalent attitude to a past full of complicities, large and small, makes a minefield of the present:

in tyranny's domain
you are the link in the chain,
you stink of him through and through,
the tyranny is you;¹²

Where is Central Europe?

I have left till last the problem that Johnson necessarily tackles at the beginning of his essay. So much ink has been spilt on this topic,¹³ some of it in order to prove that there is no such thing as Central Europe, that Johnson is to be congratulated on producing something much better than "aufgewarmtes Kraut" in his treatment of it. The seminal study that has coloured almost all subsequent attempts at normative definition since it was first published in 1983, is Jenõ Szûcs's The Three Historical Regions of Europe. This in turn supplanted Oscar Halecki's earlier four-regional division of the continent. Largely for political reasons, Szûcs's work was adapted and developed in the last phase of Communism: the all-embracing term "Central Europe" was now insisted on, precisely to indicate that the region is not now, as it never has been, the peripheral part of an eastern empire (meaning Russia).

Underlying what sometimes seems to an outsider to be a somewhat theological debate about nomenclature is the crucial idea that those nations rightfully claiming to be Central European belong to the western tradition in terms of their cultural and (with some reservations) their political identity. Thus the dividing line is drawn between Orthodoxy (where the state has nationalized the church) and Rome (later including Protestantism), where the state and the church co-existed in creative tension, allowing the ur-shoots of civil society to thrust up in the space between the two. The broad difference between "East" and "West", on this analysis, is between a society shaped by the state (the eastern model) and a state shaped by society (the western model). It was Szûcs's achievement to show how Central European nations with a traditionally (or potentially) western model of development oscillated between the two types of culture, striving towards the western model, but knocked back towards the East by historical setbacks such as the Turkish wars, dynastic struggles and economic factors; (an example of the latter was the impossibility of overseas co lonial expansion that helped to externalize problematic factors for Britain and the Netherlands). Endre Ady's metaphor for Hungary as a victim of this oscillation syndrome likens the country to "a river ferry, continually travelling between East and West, with always the sensation of not going anywhere but of being on the way back from the other bank."

As far as economic factors are concerned, some Hungarian historians have built on Szûcs' description of Central Europe as an area showing weak development of cities (which become centres of entrepreneurship and self-government) to formulate a paradigm of economic regions defined as center, semi-periphery and periphery. These rather schematic formulations do nevertheless supply some of the answers to the many puzzling questions of Central Europe, most notably the "backwardness" with which local intellectuals have traditionally been obsessed; also the constant frustration of attempts to mould the area into some sort of functioning unit, the least unsuccessful of which was that undertaken by the Habsburgs over 400 years.

Lonnie Johnson's thought-provoking and invariably judicious analysis of these matters should become required reading for students, as well as for veterans, of the Central European scene. The book takes the form of a themed chronological essay beginning with the Romans and ending with some remarks about the problems of transition in the area since 1989. As one would expect from the Oxford University Press, it comes with a full scholarly apparatus and index, but its clarity and admirable grasp of the broad sweep of historical narrative make it as suitable for the general reader as for specialists. It is particularly valuable for the way it allows the human element to emerge from the rubble of warfare, the clash of faiths, the aridity of legal and constitutional dispute. Thus we can see that the sense of loss, to which I have repeatedly referred, is a Central European's birthright and even a vital component of his identity. How, for instance, can anyone who has not lived in the region hope to mediate between the competing claims of an Hungarian patriot who remembers "Upper Hungary" as an integral part of historic Hungary for 1,000 years, and a Slovak patriot who sees it as a place where Hun garians spent 1,000 years repressing a Slovak nation? (For that matter, how can anyone who does live in the region hope to mediate in such a case?) Mutual loss is supposed to unite people in common mourning, but how does one cope with a mutual loss that divides them? One way that has been adopted by intellectuals is to invent, or re-invent the past; to picture the Polish Commonwealth as a "golden age" of British-style constitutionalism, for instance, or 17th-century Tran sylvania as a Schla raffenland of ethnic and religious harmony, where Unitarians, Ana baptists and Ortho dox, Catholics and Pro testants, Hungarians, Jews, Germans and Rumanians all rubbed along together delightfully as in Jókai's "Golden Trasylvania". Real loss is partly assuaged by its transformation into loss that is largely imaginary insofar as it posits a state of affairs invented only in retrospect. The Vien nese version of this process has been sketched in terms of the symbolism of the Ringstrasse: "...the Athenian parliament and Gothic city hall on the Ring still record the aspirations of nineteenth-century Liberals to build civic institutions which their imperial city never possessed and to connect these with a history that Vienna had never experienced."¹⁴ The almost affectionate irony of these observations suits the Viennese milieu very well; but one Central European at least was more interested in building a bridge to the future than connecting with a fictitious past. His name was Count István Széchenyi and his cri de coeur sums up the frustration of the modernizer and the longings of a patriot: "Sokan gondolják: Magyarország volt; én azt szeretem hinni: lesz!" (Many think that Hungary once was: I want to believe "she will be!"). Perhaps we should hope the same for a "Confederation of Central Europe".

---

1 Arthur Koestler: "The Lion and the Ostrich," introductory essay to Suicide of a Nation. Ed. Arthur Koestler, London, 1963, Repr. 1994.

2 According to contemporary Austrian monks "no country had suffered such a tragedy and misery since the birth of Christ". The demographic loss in mountains and forests was 23.5 per cent, but on the plains up to 80 per cent of settlements were destroyed. See A History of Hungary. Ed. Peter Sugar et al. Indiana 1990. p.27.

3 Elias Canetti: The Torch in My Ear, London 1990, pp. 234-5.

4 William M. Johnston's The Austrian Mind, Berkeley, 1972, is the best-known attempt at such a cultural history, but is marred by a tendency to generalize from the particular or over-emphasize colourful, but not necessarily controlling factors (e.g. the "délibáb mentality" in Hungary or "therapeutic nihilism" in Vienna).

5 Translated by Edwin Morgan, The New Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. 143, No. 48, p. 74, Winter 1972.

6 Quoted in Harold James: A German Identity, 1770-1990. Revised edition: London, 1990, p. 29, from which the Mickiewicz example is also taken.

7 See Robert B. Pynsent: Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality, Budapest, London, New York, 1994, Ch. 4 for a discussion (albeit a controversial one) of Czech self-identification through martyrdom. An interesting modern example of using the martyr image to shame those who purport to share its cultural associations is the famous Black Christ picture painted by Ronald Harrison during the apartheid era in South Africa and a powerful weapon in the armoury of anti-apartheid campaigners. The picture is of a crucified Chief Albert Luthuli with John Vorster and Hendrik Verwoerd shown as Roman soldiers standing by. Luthuli was former head of the ANC and a Nobel Prize-winner.

8 Sir Isaiah Berlin: Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, N.Y. 1976, p. 176.

9 See Csaba G. Kiss: Central European Writers on Central Europe, in George Schöpflin & Nancy Wood Eds., In Search of Central Europe, Oxford 1989, p. 129-130.

10 Milan Kundera: "The Tragedy of Central Europe", in New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984.

11 Quoted in an article on George Soros
by Peter Martin, in Die Presse, 2nd August 1997, p. 3.

12 From "A Sentence About Tyranny", by Gyula Illyés, written in 1950, which first appeared during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Translated by George Szirtes, The Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 139, Autumn 1995, pp. 15-20.

13 See for example: George Schöpflin & Nancy Wood, Eds.: In Search of Central Europe (Oxford, 1989); Jacques Rupnik: The Other Europe (London 1988); Piotr S. Wandycz: The Price of Freedom (London and N.Y. 1992); Philip Longworth: The Making of Eastern Europe (Basingstoke, 2nd Ed 1997). Many of the studies concerned with economic and political developments in the former East Bloc countries de facto recognize a Central European entity with common traditions and characteristics.

14 Anthony Grafton: The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1997. Vol XLIV, Number 13.
p. 50, in an article on the social history of Berlin entitled "Hullo to Berlin" (an ironic reference to the title of Christopher Isherwood's famous Berlin stories, Goodbye to Berlin).

---

Nicholas T. Parsons

is the author of The Xenophobe's Guide to the Austrians (Ravette Books, 1994) and The Blue Guide to Vienna (1996).