Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea, Luka Ivan Jukic, Hurst Publishing, £25

In 1983, the French magazine Le Débat published an essay by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera titled ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe.’ Twenty pages long, it made the relatively straightforward argument that the countries of Central Europe had always constituted ‘the eastern border of the West.’ The Soviet annexation of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in 1945, he argued, was not just a political catastrophe but an attack on their civilisation. ‘The deep meaning of their resistance is the struggle to preserve their identity—or, to put it another way, to preserve their Westernness,’ Kundera wrote.

‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ made an instant splash. ‘Central Europe is back,’ Timothy Garton Ash declared in the New York Review of Books. More than that, there was a sense that Central Europe had to be deliberately reclaimed from communist Russia. The promise of the post-Soviet world order thus lay in restoring the cultural unity of Europe, synonymous with ‘the West’.

The trouble with Kundera’s argument, as the historian and journalist Luka Ivan Jukic makes clear in Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea, is that, by 1983, whatever ‘Central Europe’ once described no longer existed. The term had fallen out of use, writes Jukic, because the place it was coined to describe ‘was so thoroughly obliterated by two world wars and as many totalitarian systems that it ceased to exist as a distinct political, cultural, or social entity’. Its rebirth in the political language of the 1989 revolutions ultimately had more to do with consolidating an idea of ‘the West’ than it did, say, with restoring Vienna as Europe’s cultural centre.

Even so, ‘the ghost of the failed Habsburg experiment continues to haunt European minds,’ as Ivan Krastev has put it. The renewed popularity of Habsburg authors like Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth and the art nouveau aesthetics of Wes Andersen’s The Grand Budapest Hotel attest to its cultural endurance. Try as we might, we can’t seem to shake our nostalgia for a world none of us has ever known. The story of a liberal, cosmopolitan society’s tragic demise is therefore also a story about us. For this reason alone, Jukic’s Central Europe might be productively read as a powerful antidote to the continent’s sense of crisis about its identity.

To begin with, there has rarely been any clear agreement on whether Central Europe exists, or, if it does, which countries it includes. Only by tracing the history of the term does Jukic arrive at something like a general definition: ‘From the late eighteenth century to the end of the First World War, Central Europe was identifiable as a constellation of linguistically and religiously diverse polities and societies that eventually developed into the great powers of the German Reich and Austria-Hungary.’

This constellation, however, was never fixed. When the term ‘Central Europe’ first came into use during the Napoleonic Wars, it did so because the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire radically altered the political and cultural geography of Europe. Between a French-ruled west and Russian-ruled east, there remained a bewildering diversity of estates, kingdoms, duchies, principalities and other sovereign territories (nearly 2,000 of them) under the hereditary rule of the Austrian Habsburgs – or, in the case of Prussia, the Hohenzollerns. Following the Congress of Vienna, many imperial polities were reduced to thirty-nine German states, as well as the Habsburg or Hohenzollern territories outside the German Confederation, thus establishing the first firm Central European boundaries.

These boundaries never stay the same for very long. ‘Like a game of musical chairs,’ Jukic writes, ‘every reorganisation reduced the number of states and consolidated the ones that remained.’ For example, the revolutionary upheaval of 1848 convinced the young Emperor Franz Joseph to declare Austria a single unit in 1851. The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 led to the dissolution of the German Confederation, while the Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867 split the Austrian Empire in two. In 1871, all of Germany’s princes were united into a single German Empire. If a live map of Central Europe accompanied this book, it would be like watching cell mutation in reverse.

Of the many ‘what-if’ moments of Central Europe, the Austro-Prussian War and the subsequent severing of ties between Austria and Germany is the one that lingers. ‘There is perhaps no conflict in European history whose significance was so inversely proportionate to its length,’ Jukic writes. Lasting less than a month, the war expelled the Habsburgs from German affairs altogether, yoking the fate of Germany to Prussia and its Junkers, whose ‘special mission’ chauvinistic historians like Gustav Droysen, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Heinrich von Sybel now championed. ‘Annus miserabilis’ is the phrase Hans Kohn, the great historian of German nationalism, rightly used to describe the year 1866.

Although German was the dominant and, in most cases, official language spoken throughout Central Europe, the entire region was variously populated by Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Poles, Romanians, and Ukrainians. Despite fragmenting into a tapestry of nation-states in the aftermath of the First World War, ‘nationalism was never the sole driving force in Central European history,’ Jukic argues. ‘Indeed, its course from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century tended towards the inclusion of more and more people in public life rather than their exclusion.’

The most significant example of this was the inclusion of Jews, who were first granted equal rights in 1867. By 1880, they made up ten per cent of Vienna’s population and nearly twenty per cent of Budapest’s. Because they were overrepresented in the fields of finance, law, industry, journalism, and education, they became a convenient lightning rod for anti-liberal and anti-modern anxieties and prejudices. What we celebrate today as a golden age of unprecedented European-Jewish achievement in intellectual and cultural life was also one of the most virulently antisemitic periods in history – a paradoxical reality winked at in the opening scene of Karl Kraus’s satirical play Last Days of Mankind (1918). When a newsboy announces that the Austrian archduke’s assassin is a Serb, a passer-by remarks: ‘Thank God he wasn’t a Jew.’

If Jews were, in Kundera’s words, the ‘intellectual glue’ of Central Europe, it was not because of their Jewishness but because of their cosmopolitanism. The new world that emerged from the ashes in 1918, with its ethnic and racial nationalism, was the antithesis of the urban bourgeois culture in cities with large Jewish populations such as Prague, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest. ‘The building of unitary, centralised states dominated by a national majority was not based on any Central European model,’ Jukic shows. For virtually all of the successor states, the 1920s and 30s were decades of civil war, political turmoil, and rising ethnic hatred.

The scale of the immiseration and destruction visited on Central Europe between 1938 and 1945 continues to defy belief. In an arresting passage, Jukic follows the Swiss novelist Max Frisch trudging through the rubble of Frankfurt in May 1946, finding it ‘easier to imagine nature reclaiming the ruins of this old centre of Central European civilisation than […] to imagine how it could ever be again what it once was.’ Cities like Berlin, Dresden, Wrocław, and Budapest lay in ruins. ‘The Holocaust more than caused irreparable damage to the urban fabric of every single Central European city,’ Jukic notes. In Warsaw, 800,000 out of 1.2 million pre-war inhabitants lost their lives. Lviv was left with no more than ten per cent of its prewar population. The Jewish and German populations of Prague and Bratislava almost entirely disappeared.

The political order that grew out of the destruction and decimation of the Second World War was radically different from what had preceded it. Postwar Europe was transformed into a disparate collection of nationally homogenised states divided along ideological lines: Western Europe belonged to a US-led liberal and capitalist order, while Eastern Europe were ruled by the communist Soviet Union. And as Jukic observes, ‘the more time Western and Eastern Europeans spent siloed off in their own separate worlds, the more their societies diverged as they were shaped by the vastly different political circumstances prevailing in each half of the continent.’

For all these reasons, what emerged from behind the Iron Curtain in 1989 was not a suppressed cosmopolitan Central Europe, but rather ‘a series of nation-states forged in upheavals of the early twentieth-century that had destroyed that very same Central European world.’ By then, however, Central Europe had already been reborn as a powerful idea for dissident intellectuals to rally around. Jukic offers a powerful account of Milan Kundera’s intellectual journey from young communist party member to the author of ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’. There’s an almost unbearably poignant moment in the 1970s when Philip Roth, inspired by his meeting with Kundera in 1973, convinces Penguin Books to publish a series of translated works under the title ‘Writers from the Other Europe.’ When Kundera sees the editor’s note introducing ‘outstanding and influential works of fiction by Eastern European writers,’ he is so angry he doesn’t even wait for his wife to help him write a letter to Roth: ‘the regional contexte is very bad, … more over wrong, irreal’ he writes in his clumsy English.

Shortly before his death in 2023, Kundera authorised the publication in book form of his 1983 essay as A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, a decision obviously motivated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As the war continues to both unite and divide the continent today, debates about European identity and belonging grow more urgent. What is Europe, and who belongs to it? In this respect, Central Europe’s legacy continues to bedevil us. The problem it failed to solve is also ours.