A Kidnapped West: the Tragedy of Central Europe by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

5.

There are no longer any illusions about the regimes of Russia’s satellite countries. But what we forget is their essential tragedy: these countries have vanished from the map of the West.

Why has this disappearance remained invisible? We can locate the cause in Central Europe itself.

The history of the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians has been turbulent and fragmented. Their traditions of statehood have been weaker and less continuous than those of the larger European nations. Boxed in by the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, the nations of Central Europe have used up their strength in the struggle to survive and to preserve their languages. Since they have never been entirely integrated into the consciousness of Europe, they have remained the least-known and the most fragile part of the West—hidden, even further, by the curtain of their strange and scarcely accessible languages.

The Austrian Empire had the great opportunity of making Central Europe into a strong, unified state. But the Austrians, alas, were divided between arrogant pan-German nationalism and their own Central European mission. They did not succeed in building a federation of equal nations, and their failure has been the misfortune of the whole of Europe. Dissatisfied, the other nations of Central Europe blew apart their empire of 1918, without realizing that, in spite of its inadequacies, it was irreplaceable. After the First World War, Central Europe was therefore transformed into a region of small, weak states, whose vulnerability ensured first Hitler’s conquest and ultimately Stalin’s triumph. Perhaps for this reason, in the European memory, these countries always seem to be the source of dangerous trouble.

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