Volume 33, Number 15 · October 9, 1986
Does Central Europe Exist?
By Timothy Garton Ash
The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe
by Václav Havel et al., introduction by Steven Lukes, edited by John Keane
Hutchinson (London), 228 pp., £16.95
The Anatomy of a Reticence
by Václav Havel
Charta 77 Foundation, Voices from Czechoslovakia, No. 1, (Stockholm)., 34 pp., $3.00 (paper)
Antipolitics: An Essay
by George Konrád, Translated from the Hungarian by Richard E. Allen
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 243 pp., $12.95
Letters from Prison and Other Essays
by Adam Michnik, translated by Maya Latynski, foreword by Czeslaw Milosz, introduction by Jonathan Schell
University of California Press, 345 pp., $25.00
Takie czasy…Rzecz o kompromisie
by Adam Michnik
Aneks (London), 140 pp., $7.50 (paper)
KOR: A History of the Workers' Defense Committee in Poland, 1976–1981
by Jan Józef Lipski, translated by Olga Amsterdamska, by Gene M. Moore
University of California Press, 561 pp., $39.95
Central Europe is back. For three decades after 1945 nobody spoke of Central Europe in the present tense: the thing was one with Nineveh and Tyre. In German-speaking lands, the very word 'Mitteleuropa' seemed to have died with Adolf Hitler, surviving only as a ghostly 'Mitropa' on the dining cars of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Even in Austria, as ex-Chancellor Fred Sinowatz has remarked, 'until ten years ago one was not permitted so much as to mention the word 'Mitteleuropa.'' In Prague and Budapest the idea of Central Europe continued to be cherished between consenting adults in private, but from the public sphere it vanished as completely as it had in 'the West.' The post-Yalta order dictated a strict and single dichotomy. Western Europe implicitly accepted this dichotomy by subsuming under the label 'Eastern Europe' all those parts of historic Central, East Central, and Southeastern Europe which after 1945 came under Soviet domination. The EEC completed the semantic trick by arrogating to itself the unqualified title, 'Europe.'
Review, 11521 words
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