Central Europe

Overview

Vienna, Prague and Budapest formed a single empire until 1918, and the literature that came out of it bears the trace of that disappearance: Kafka's The Trial, written in German in Prague by a Jew of Czech speech, fits into no national literature. Poland was wiped off the maps from 1795 to 1918, which made its poets political figures. After 1945 the iron curtain cut the region off from the west, and the Czechoslovak New Wave of the sixties ended with the tanks of 1968. The Czechoslovak New Wave had given some thirty films in six years.

What circulates

Authors from this region wrote a great deal from exile and published in Paris, London or Toronto, where diaspora houses printed what censorship refused at home. The return of these books after 1989 pieced together bodies of work that had existed in two halves, one published abroad, the other circulating clandestinely.

Limits of this grouping

The name itself is at stake: these countries were called Eastern Europe for forty years, and after 1989 they claimed the word central to mark that they did not belong to the Russian world. The zone leaves aside Croatia, which shared the same empire, and keeps Slovenia, which came from it too.

Works cited

• NovelThe TrialDer ProzessFranz Kafka · 1925A clerk arrested for no reason searches in vain for the court that is trying him.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryPan TadeuszPan Tadeusz, czyli ostatni zajazd na LitwieAdam Mickiewicz · 1834An epic of the life of the Lithuanian nobility on the eve of the Russian campaign, written in exile.Literature
• CinemaClosely Watched TrainsOstře sledované vlakyJiří Menzel · 1966Under the occupation, an apprentice railwayman more preoccupied with love than with resistance.Cinema