Mitteleuropa

it may refer to different things for different people. Its meaning changes in different national and historical contexts, or as Jacques Rupnik ... observed: "Tell me where Central Europe is, and I can tell who you are." For example, when Germans start talking about Central Europe, Mitteleuropa, or their historical relations with "the East," everyone starts getting nervous because this inevitably conjures up negative historical associations starting with the conquests of the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages and ending with German imperialism in the nineteenth century, World War I, the Third Reich, Nazi imperialism, World War II, and the Holocaust.

I have identified at least seven different "definitions" of "Central Europe": Mitteleuropa (in the German imperial sense); German-Jewish Central Europe; the Central Europe of small (non-Germanic) nations (the Palacky-Masaryk tradition); the nostalgic, k.u.k. or Austro-Hungarian version of Mitteleuropa (without imperial Germans) which is related to the Austro-Hungarian version of Mitteleuropa in the 1970s and 1980s (Kreisky-Kadar-Busek); the Mitteleuropa of the West German left and peace movement in the 1980s; the "Central Europe" of Eastern European dissidents and intellectuals (for example, Milosz, Kundera, Konrad); and finally the "Central and Eastern Europe" of the European Union.

The notion of Mitteleuropa carries diverse connotations, many far from positive. ... the Mitteleuropa fondly recalled by Habsburg-era nostalgics stands in clear oppositions to the Prussian understanding of Mitteleuropa. The Habsburg multi-national vision is a negation of the Prussian state-centric ideal first promoted by Friedrich Naumann and others, and later adopted by Nazi geopoliticians.

Not only has Central Europe been recovered from oblivion, but also the memory of past links, affinities and cultural commonalities between Italy and other Mitteleuropean countries — namely, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia — seems to have come to the forefront again. ... one should mention the role and the weight of Mitteleuropean literature in Italy. This genre has acquired considerable prominence among Italian readers and in cultural debates since the early 1960s, thanks to literary festivals such as Mittelfest and to the support of important publishing houses such as Adelphi. Authors such as ... are all read and known to Italians not only as Italian, Austria, Czech, Hungarian, etc, but also as Mitteleuropean. The well-known writer Claudio Magris contributed more than anybody else to the 1960s revival of Mitteleuropean culture and to the awareness of the existence of a common cultural koiné among those territories that were once part of the Habsburg Empire. ... The notion of Mitteleuropa, as authors such as Magris conceive it, has nothing to do with the notorious pan-Germanist interpretation of it that goes back to Frederich Naumann's Mitteleuropa (Le Rider 1995:97–106). The point of reference is, instead, the super-national, cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian Empire and its specific 'cultural and spiritual koiné'. ... there is no embarrassment surrounding the use of this term in Italy as is the case with Germany and Austria.

the German-speaking world was the filter through which western European ideas were transmitted to central Europe; ... The frontier of this Mitteleuropa may correspond to the more benign Habsburg or, after 1867, the Austro-Hungarian version of Mitteleuropa as well as the more aggressive imperial German versions of Naumann's German "economic space" or Hitler's Lebensraum.