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1 The Traveler’s View of Central Europe GR ADUAL TR ANSITIONS AND DEGREES OF DIFFERENCE IN EUROPEAN BORDERLANDS Larry Wolff Introduction: “Traveling in the Central of Europe to Get Educated” In 1925 the American writer Anita Loos published a celebrated comic novel under a title that was to become one of the most famous mottoes of American popular culture: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The novel followed the fictional European travels of the irresistibly preferable blonde heroine, Lorelei Lee, a spectacularly uneducated and uncultivated young American woman from Arkansas. Lorelei Lee appeared as the comic caricature of the American golddigger as she sought to exercise her blonde American charms upon men with money in the great metropolises of Europe. She dismissed England with the chapter title “London is Really Nothing,” and celebrated France illiterately with the title “Paris is Devine,” but when she turned eastward toward Germany, the native land of the mythological Lorelei, the American heroine summed up her experiences under the chapter title, “The Central of Europe.” With this goofy malapropism, Anita Loos seemed to suggest that her heroine was quite unable to understand the meaning of “Central Europe,” an epithet that was already broadly current in the 1920s. The German politician Friedrich Naumann had published his landmark book Mitteleuropa in Berlin in 1915, and it was translated into English as Central Europe and published in London in 1916 and New York in 1917. The idea of Central Europe was pervasive in the 1920s and 1930s, as prominent as it would ever be until, perhaps, its rediscovery in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, then as now, “Central Europe” could be a frustratingly vague and elusive notion, and this was perhaps part of 24 Larry Wolff what Loos meant to suggest when she permitted her completely unintellectual heroine to become cheerfully confused about its meaning. Indeed there was room, then as now, for legitimate uncertainty about whether Central Europe represented a concretely specifiable geographical region, or whether it was actually more of a slippery cultural concept. Accordingly, Lorelei Lee, traveling around Europe, jumped to the preposterous conclusion that Central Europe was some sort of telephone exchange, or perhaps a train station, the Grand Central of Europe. While Anita Loos was certainly ridiculing her heroine, the author was perhaps also satirizing the puzzlingly problematic concept of Central Europe. “So now we have a telegram,” remarks Lorelei Lee, “and Mr. Eisman says in the telegram for Dorothy and I to take an oriental express because we really ought to see the central of Europe because we American girls have quite a lot to learn in the central of Europe.” Central Europe, after all, must be “central,” poised between east and west, and so the traveler can only arrive in Central Europe by following either an easterly or westerly vector, like an “oriental express,” that is, the Orient Express. What could American girls “learn” in the Central of Europe, especially American girls who had already mastered the universally valid lessons of sex and money? And I really think it is quite unusual for two American girls like I and Dorothy to take an oriental express all alone, because it seems that in the Central of Europe they talk some other kinds of landguages [sic] which we do not understand besides French. But I always think that there is nearly always some gentleman who will protect two American girls like I and Dorothy who are all alone and who are traveling in the Central of Europe to get educated.1 In her ungrammatical and illiterate musings Lorelei Lee unerringly identified a characteristic experience of the western traveler making an oriental voyage into Central Europe: hearing “some other kinds of landguages which we do not understand besides French.” Linguistic commingling and complication has always been fundamental to the traveler’s experience of Central Europe. Lorelei Lee surely had no intention of actually learning any of the languages of Central Europe, or even French, but the discovery of the diversity and heterogeneity of languages was in itself an educational experience. If it provoked any anxiety, or even foreboding of danger, the certainty of finding some gentleman to provide protection, or perhaps translation, was sufficient reassurance. The experience of travel may permit the observation of difference among the regions of Europe, but at the same time, more subtly, the traveler may actually produce that difference as a consequence of subjective impressions on the road or in the train. In the eighteenth century, the subjective experience of travelers...

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