Shatterzone of Empires by Omer Bartov eric d weitz

Author:Omer Bartov, eric d weitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

Twentieth Century: “The Unfamiliar Hubbub”

The eighteenth-century traveler, when he perceived, assimilated, integrated, and responded to the transitions and complications of the passage between east and west, anticipated the twentieth-century idea of Central Europe. In this sense, Central Europe may be understood as a cognitive mode of apprehension, registering the complexity of gradual transition rather than emphasizing the dichotomy of abrupt separation. Central Europe’s geographical domain was necessarily undetermined, a matter of subjective construction, but the most plausible locus for observing the variety of detail and attempting the integration of diversity was the Habsburg monarchy. This was precisely because the Habsburg monarchy had every motivation for pursuing the political integration of ethnically and linguistically diverse lands, and the details of diversity could not be denied.

In the eighteenth century Habsburg integration might take the cultural form of baroque architecture, the political form of administrative centralization, or the economic form of state cameralism, but in the nineteenth century the crystallization of the “nationalities problem”—in politics, education, language, culture, and administration—made the heterogeneity of Central Europe into the ongoing agenda of Habsburg policy. After the demise of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, the idea of Central Europe in some sense displaced the monarchy, providing a new name for the lands that were no longer politically linked. Indeed, to the extent that Central Europe might be said to possess historical reality as something more concrete than a cultural construction, it may be regarded as the legacy of the Habsburg monarchy, the intersecting factors—languages, customs, cultures—that remained after the passing of the dynasty. Paradoxically, that common legacy of the former Habsburg lands was premised on the shared experience of extreme and complex diversity.

While the idea of Mitteleuropa first emerged in relation to the Habsburg monarchy, in the later nineteenth century industrialists in Imperial Germany became very interested in the possibility of a Central European customs union, and their interest was reflected in the program of the Mitteleuropäische Wirtschaftsverein, established in 1904. Historian Fritz Fischer has shown that such economic concerns were related to German war aims at the outbreak of World War I. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg noted in September 1914: “We must create a central European economic association through joint tariff agreements. . . . This association . . . will in fact be under German leadership and must stabilize Germany’s economic domination of Mitteleuropa.” 19 Such was the German government’s interest in Central Europe at the time of the publication of Naumann’s Mitteleuropa during the war. Naumann’s vision also involved the advancement of German economic power in the region as an integrating force, and this drive toward German influence in some sense reached its evil apogee in the Nazi policy of conquest during World War II. After World War II the historian Felix Gilbert analyzed Nazi policy under the title “Mitteleuropa—The Final Stage.” 20 The Nazis were well aware of the complex diversity of Central Europe, especially what they saw as racial diversity, and they addressed it radically through policies of enslavement, deportation, and extermination.

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