Abstract

Émigré periodicals in Cold War Europe have long been considered isolated islands of Central and East European communities with limited relevance. In the second half of the Cold War, some of these periodicals functioned as crucial intersections of communication between dissidents, emigrants and Western European intellectuals. These periodicals were the greenhouses for the development of new definitions of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Europe at large. This article studies Cold War émigré periodicals from a spatial perspective and argues that they can be analysed as European cultural spaces. In this approach, European cultural spaces are seen as insular components of a European public sphere. The particular settings (spaces) within which the periodicals developed have contributed greatly to the ideas that they expressed. The specific limits and functions of periodicals such as Kultura or Svědectví [Testimony] have triggered perceptions of Central European and European solidarity. The originally Russian periodical Kontinent promoted an eventually less successful East European-Russian solidarity.  

Highlights

  • Before reform movements and impatient crowds terminated Europe’s divide, the Hungarian dissident, novelist, essayist, and quintessential Central European intellectual György Konrád distinguished an ‘international market of dissident ideas’.1 Much more prominently than before, dissidents reached likeminded intellectuals in neighbouring countries, and in the West

  • In the second half of the Cold War, some of these periodicals functioned as crucial intersections of communication between dissidents, emigrants and Western European intellectuals

  • These periodicals were the greenhouses for the development of new definitions of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Europe at large

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Summary

13 Europäische Öffentlichkeit

The rebirth of the European idea coincided with the return of Central Europe as a political and cultural concept and with the appreciation of solidarity between anti-communists in the East and West. He added that this was not to be mistaken for expansion, but seen as an attempt at resolving old conflicts about the Polish-Lithuanian Vilnius (Wilno) and the Polish-Ukrainian L’viv (Lwów).25 Both cities played a central role in Polish history, but had ended up outside Polish borders after World War Two. Publicist Juliusz Mieroszewski (1906–76) was, together with Giedroyc, the most important initiator of these new connections with Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.. A Czech issue appeared in 1969 and a German one in 1984.28 As a concept, Central Europe never really found its way to Kultura, unlike its Czech or Hungarian counterparts, but the periodical was very explicit in its demarcation of Central European solidarity. 24 Jan Józef Lipski, ‘Dwie ojczyzny — Dwa patriotyzmy: Uwagi o megalomanii narodowej i ksenofobii Polaków’ [‘Two Motherlands — Two Patriotisms: Remarks on the National Megalomania and Xenophobia of Polish People’], Kultura, no. 10 (1981), 3–29

25 In a conversation with an employee
46 Quoted from the Dutch edition
48 Kontinent
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