Rethinking Central Europe: The Symbolic Geography of the Avant-Garde

Central European Avant-Gardes. Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930. Timothy O. Benson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. 448. $59.95 (cloth).

Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central European Avant Gardes, 1910-1930. Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. 736. $45.00 (cloth).

A voice out of the European "wasteland" of times past: "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch" (I'm not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, a true German). In this unattributed assertion, stitched into the opening section of T. S. Eliot's famous verbal collage of the early 1920s, the poet encapsulates the problem of speaking about "Central Europe." The dynamics of migration and expatriation, the overlaps of geography and language and national identity, have made of it a bewildering territory that does not neatly correspond to any of the maps at our disposal: historical, geographical, regional, national, cultural, linguistic, or artistic. Moreover, to the present-day observer, who perceives Eliot's speaker as a historically bounded voice, still innocent of both Hitler's and Stalin's spasmodic attempts to resolve the status of this territory once and for all, "Central Europe" represents a complex fusion of interpretative horizons, of past and present elements. One horizon looms out of the first three decades of the twentieth century, that key moment in which Central Europe took on one form of temporary unity in dispersion; a second emerges at century's end in a newly possible, but still unrealized Central Europe swept up in the vast experiment of postmodernism, postcommunism, the expansion of European unity, and globalization.

Familiar theoretical problems concerning the retroactive and retrojective effects of historical writing on the appearance of the past surface in the starkest practical relief in relation to Central Europe. ¹ Similarly, the difficulty of establishing a reliable interpretative "context" when that context is itself indefinitely "iterable"—a problem that Jacques Derrida has foregrounded in a general philosophical way—takes on dense empirical concreteness when one starts to ask how the "Central Europe" of contemporary politics, historical writing, and cultural studies re-cites and reactivates Central European contexts of a receding historical past. ² These contexts include the nomadic movements of late-antique and medieval Europe; the shifting borders between "Western" Christianity and "Eastern" Ottoman incursions into Europe; the absolutist empires of baroque and post-baroque modernity; the nationalist upsurges of the 19th century, the post-World War I creation of new Central European nations; the external and internal articulations of the so-called "East Bloc" countries; and the diversified shapes of collapse and reform of once-Communist societies.

Central Europe, finally, is by no means a mute object of study, lying still and quiet for the West to dissect and catalogue. On the contrary: Central Europe is a notion that is hotly debated and noisily contested within "Central Europe." "Central Europeans" are at times keen to address "the West," sometimes to summon us forcefully into a dialogue in which they are eager to participate more fully, at other times to make this desired and despised Big Other hear a single, crucial message: Hey man! We're not talking to you! This ambivalent complex of desire for recognition, identification with an idealized yet envied and resented other, and the fervent assertions of equal right to be at the table of the banquet and yet, should one so choose, at a different, smaller, more intimate and exclusive event altogether are familiar dynamics of identity constitution in what, for Western scholars, are classic "post-colonial" societies. They are not, however, typically perceived as characteristic of "Europeans" and European societies. Nevertheless, many of the cultural problems and theoretical frameworks foregrounded by British and American postcolonial criticism—initially developed to confront issues of Western multiculturalism and Western-driven globalization—have close relevance and corollaries in post-imperial and post-communist...