culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES
OF THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD:
A CRITICAL APPROACH
DOINIŢA MILEA
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
There are two ‘anchor points’ to Central Europe: the political and cultural world
of the state, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with Vienna as its “center”, and a
space generated by the horizon of the German culture, in which Jewishness
evolves. The concept develops between the fall of the German world and its
withdrawal from the political stage after World War II, in much the same way as
Austria did after World War I. In his essay called Mitteleuropa, Jacques Le
Rider portrays a “space with a variable geometry, keeping its vague contours by
means of its very nature” (1997: 21) for which the defining term is “Middle
Europe”. MittelEuropa “enters the German vocabulary towards 1914, marked by
the pan-German ideology which, in 1938, would lead to the Anschluss, the
annexation of Austria, inspiring the famous theory of the German vital space and
its natural expansion towards the East”. Thus, the approach to Central Europe
implies a discussion on the European situation, on the contours of the borders
and on its center, the representation of a territory, of a middle ground between
the Western model and its oriental counterpart, in much the same way as “Hans
Castrop, the hero from the Enchanted Mountain by Thomas Mann is in between
the liberal Italian Settembrini and Naphta, the Ostjude, the Eastern Jew”, which
reminds at the same time of a “utopian potential of multiculturalism and
multilinguism”. As a project of utopian restoration of “harmonious regression”,
MittelEuropa can put itself outside the German or Austrian rhetoric of a “center”
and can define the “religious and cultural frontier between the Greek orthodox
(Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Serbs, Macedonians,
Bulgarians, Greeks) the catholic and protestant nations” (Krzysztof–Pomian,
1991: 38). Another point of view, expressed by Michel Foucher, is that there is a
“polycentrism” and also a “variable geography” as landmarks of a map of
Central Europe: either the 1930 representation of the geographer Emmanuel de
Martonne, an expert who placed Germany, Switzerland, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary and Romania in Central Europe, or Jacques
Ancel’s map, who names Habsburgia the resulting geo-political block
corresponding to Danubian Europe. Michel Foucher selected, as a reaction to the
Pan-Germanism of the first definition, a new Central Europe, “made up of states
formed between 1919 and 1920, and being previously fully or partially part of
the old Austro-Hungarian empire: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania
and Yugoslavia”. (1991: 43)
The idea of a Central Europe, reborn in the eighth decade of the 20 th
century in countries such as the former Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary,
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