Central European Culture Research Articles

CENTRAL EUROPE: TERRITORIALITY AND SPIRITUAL IMAGES / VIDURIO EUROPA: TERITORIALUMAS IR DVASINIAI ĮVAIZDŽIAI

This article examines literary representations of Central Europe and its image in the works of Milan Kundera, Ingeborg Bachmann and others. At the same time the paper is devoted to the problems of territoriality, “feeling of border”, specificity of Central European multicultural society, and processes of culture interaction. Central Europe is the space of different and special kind of tolerance. The case of Central European tolerance is a key to understanding spiritual and artistic life in the 20th century. When we try to find more special character of Central European spiritual life and narration, the feelings of nostalgia and innumerable flashbacks in time are more typical. The author offers to look at the Central European literary nostalgia as a possibility to situate Central European culture and spirituality geographically and territorially. Santrauka Šiame straipsnyje tyrinėjamos literatūrinės Vidurio Europos ir jos įvaizdžio reprezentacijos Milano Kundera'os, Ingeborgos Bachmann ir kitų darbuose. Šis straipsnis taip pat skirtas teritorialumo, „ribos jausmo“, Vidurio Europos daugiakultūrės visuomenės specifiškumo ir kultūrinės sąveikos procesų problemoms. Vidurio Europa – tai kitoniškos ir ypatingos tolerancijos rūšies erdvė. Vidurio Europos tolerancijos atvejis yra raktas suprasti dvasinį ir meninį XX a. gyvenimą. Nors bandome rasti ypatingesnį Vidurio Europos dvasinio gyvenimo ir naracijos pobūdį, kur kas būdingesni yra nostalgijos jausmai ir nesuskaičiuojami epizodai. Siūloma pažvelgti į Vidurio Europos literatūrinę nostalgiją kaip į Vidurio Europos kultūros ir dvasingumo galimybę geografine ir teritorine prasmėmis.

Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies

Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies

Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies

Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies

A Novel Look at Moshe Idel’s East-West Problem

A Novel Look at Moshe Idel’s East-West Problem David N. Myers Moshe Idel.Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 336. For many of us in the field of Jewish studies, but not in the field of Kabbalah studies, our first encounter with Moshe Idel came in 1988 with the publication of his major work in English, Kabbalah: New Perspectives. Although he had been working in the field for more than a decade, from the time of his 1976 dissertation at the Hebrew University on Avraham Abulafia, it was Kabbalah: New Perspectives that brought Idel to wide public attention, announcing his own substantial methodological and substantive disagreements with the towering figure of modern Kabbalah studies, Gershom Scholem. Since then, Idel has gone on to attain a position of international distinction, publishing at a staggering rate in Kabbalah studies, and many fields beyond. In the process, he—like Scholem before and Wolfson and others after him—has used the study of Kabbalah as a gateway of inquiry into important methodological, theoretical, hermeneutical, philosophical, and historical questions. This leads us to the book at hand, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought, which is indeed an inquiry into important methodological, theoretical, philosophical, and historical questions. It reflects Idel’s brilliant, capacious, probing, and wildly imaginative mind, as it ranges over terrain somewhat less familiar to him and his usual readers, but of critical significance to his overarching intellectual and cultural Weltanschauung. What I propose to do in these remarks is to undertake three tasks: first, to sketch out briefly the structure of the book and point to a major argumentative strand in it; second, to identify two central motifs that surface in the book—and that make for a surprising, counterintuitive, [End Page 289] and even troubling read; and finally, to adopt a literary conceit to read the book against the analytic and stylistic grain, as a way of getting at some of the intriguing psychodynamics involved in it. I Old Worlds, New Mirrors is a collection of previously published essays on modern Jewish thought divided into four parts. The first section deals with a number of renowned Central European scholars and intellectuals who belong to what Idel calls in the introduction to the book “a new Jewish elite” (p. 6). The second section contains three of Idel’s papers on one of the chief figures of that new elite, his own long-standing master, foil, and nemesis: Gershom Scholem. The third section offers up a wideranging assembly of pieces that deal with the place that Kabbalah played in the thought of a number of other members of the new cultural elite including Kafka, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and Celan. The fourth and final section of the book deals with modern scholarly views of Hasidism, which since the late eighteenth century has been the most important site of ongoing kabbalistic activity and practice. Although disparate in focus and length, the four sections and thirteen chapters do betray a consistent theme. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to state that they present a consistent set of oppositions that add up to a theme and in fact, spell out a decided cultural stance on the author’s part. Among the recurring oppositions in the book are: i. Eastern European vs. Central European Jewish cultures ii. tradition vs. innovation iii. continuity vs. rupture iv. rootedness vs. cosmopolitanism v. homeland vs. galut (exile) vi. Jerusalem vs. Athens (or perhaps in its more modern incarnation, Hebrew vs. German) These oppositions, all of which circulate throughout the book, lend considerable weight to Idel’s critique of “the new Jewish elite”—the largely Central European Jewish intellectuals whose most famous constellation arose in Weimarera Berlin but which continued to exert itself up to the present through figures like the French literary critic Jacques Derrida and the arch cosmopolitan Jewish elitist (and diasporist, to boot) George Steiner. In casting his gaze on these figures, Idel positions himself as their cultural opposite, recalling his own origins in a small shtetl in northern [End Page 290] Romania that was “largely untouched...

On comparative research in musicology: Peripheral vs. Central European musical culture and the musicological comparative approach in the 20th century

The paper considers some of the key issues referring to the comparative research in musicology. Contrary to the science of literature, in which comparative studies have been autonomous for a long time, such is not the case in musicology. So far, musicological comparative research has not established itself as a field with distinctly defined aims, roads and development methods, nor has it been provided with adequate terminology. It may be claimed that comparative studies have been omitted from musicological research because of an idea prevailing in the second half of the 19th century and later on, during the first half of the 20th century, based on the fact that musical art itself was specific - special in comparison with other arts and autonomous from an extra-artistic context. This is why the comparative approach in musical art may have often been understood as a comparison of exclusive - to say it in Hanslick's words - tonally moving forms (or the art of tones) which does not and should not have any other purpose except the comparison of one tonally moving form with another one. In contrast to such a conception, this paper considers the role of political-ideological incentives to the emergence and development of comparative research. It includes the reference points of a comparative musicological narrative, namely those types of musicological comparisons analyzing the works of composers belonging to differently located European musical cultures - peripheral and central ones. In view of the fact that in the 20th century such comparisons were mostly performed through a stylistic analysis (perceived as a formal analysis) of works of art, special attention has been devoted to the political-ideological instrumentalization of such analysis. The paper also puts forward the most important questions to which musicological comparative science should provide clear answers in the 21st century.

Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romania and Other Central European Cultures (review)

Reviewed by: Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romania and Other Central European Cultures Andrea Pető Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romania and Other Central European Cultures, by Andrei Oisteanu. Studies in Antisemitism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009. 468 pp. $60.00. Moshe Idel, the most prominent kabala scholar of our time, sets the tone of this volume, as the first sentence of his introduction labels Oisteanu as "an expert in Romanian folklore and an active Jewish intellectual in Romania." The lengthy book is a summary of "ethnic imagology" of Jews in Romania and a long overdue historical milestone in Romanian research on stereotyping. The book comes out of a very controversial national legacy. In 1940 the second largest European Jewish community, with 800,000 members, lived in Romania, labeled by Hannah Arendt as "the most anti-Semitic country." However the, "Olympics of antisemitism"—examining who is the most antisemitic of all—does not lead anywhere, as Oisteanu himself also pointed out, especially not after 1945, when the antisemitic climate reflected in the sheer denial of the existence of any other nationalities than Romanian living in Romania caused the book by Lion Feuchtwanger, The Jewess of Toledo, to be published in Romanian with a neutral title, The Spaniard Ballad. The book summarizes Oisteanu's research, executed at an often daunting level of detail, in the best tradition of Romanian intellectual life: it is rich in content and flamboyant in style and in its empirical basis. The book's divisions show the physical, occupational, moral and intellectual, mythical and magical, and religious portrait of the Jews. It resembles an encyclopedia which aims to include all possible details and information about the "image of the other," and its stringent demands on the reader's concentration makes it difficult reading. It is very useful for those who want to experience the richness of this very complex matrix of stereotyping based on all possible written sources about Romanian culture. The empirical base of the book is very wide and heterogeneous: from jokes to newspapers and literary works. The author has examined every possible corner of Romanian culture to find out what people have thought about the Jews—every corner except visual sources such as artwork and cartoons. [End Page 183] My critical comments are related to how the book handles temporality. Stereotypes are presented as timeless, and regardless of the fact that the chapters present the material more or less chronologically, the reader is left in the dark as to why certain types of stereotypes surface at a certain historical period, while others do not. This timelessness, on the other hand, has an advantage because it shows how invisible the line is between marking a group of people according to certain characteristics and denying their existence along the very same lines. In the book "Jew" stands as a "category," understood by Rogers Brubaker in disaggregated, dynamic, and relational terms (Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe [Cambridge, 1996, p. 16]). This understanding could have been more fruitfully explored in some cases, such as that of the stereotypical "Jewess." This issue is discussed in a rather old fashioned way in the section of the book on the physical appearance of the Jew, where the author describes the female Jew as beautiful, tempting but inaccessible, wearing silk and sophisticated jewelry, but does not examine how gender stereotypes are constitutive parts of constructing the image of the other and how these stereotypes change over time in different contexts. In the introduction of the book the author describes the methodology as comparative in time and in space, in cultures and in ethnicity. This is a very ambitious aim. We cannot blame the book for failing to meet this broad goal, or for the number of rich but heterogeneous details that often make the argument difficult to follow. We should rather celebrate the book as a closing cornerstone which is a historical snapshot of difficult centuries of the co-habitation of Jews and Romanians in Central Europe. Andrea Pető Central European University Budapest Copyright © 2010 Purdue University...

Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, Andrei Oisteanu (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009), xii + 468 pp., cloth $60.00

The author of this valuable addition to the series Studies in Antisemitism is a researcher at the Institute for the History of Religions in Bucharest and Associate Professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Bucharest. Although he has published extensively on Jewish themes—especially the image of the Jew in folklore—as well as on various aspects of antisemitism in his native Romania, this is among the first of his major works to appear in English (the dust-jacket note glosses over the language of publication of his previous works). Inventing the Jew consists of an introduction followed by five lengthy chapters, each devoted to a “portrait” of the Jew in Romanian culture, with extensive reference to other Central and East European cultures: the physical portrait, the occupational portrait, the moral and intellectual portrait, the mythical and magical portrait and, finally, the religious portrait. The author's approach is comparativist, running along four distinct lines: the diachronic, which investigates the evolution of clichés and motifs of legends about Jews over time; the geo-cultural, which specifically compares the imaginary (or perhaps better, “imagined”) Jew's profile in traditional Romanian culture with that found among neighboring peoples; the cultural, by which the author means the extent to which elements of “folk” antisemitism have been adopted by “intellectual” antisemitism; and finally the ethnic, which compares the image of the Jew in traditional Romanian culture with images of other “others” with whom the Romanians have come into contact over the centuries.

Polish Encounters, Russian Identity by David L. Ransel , Bozena Shallcross (review)

16o SEER, 86, I, 2008 the often virulent theological divergences, rose above controversies by refusing to take sides, thus preserving their friendshipwith both conflicting parties. The last paper, twelve, by Christopher Giros, 'Pr?sence athonite ? Thessalonique, XIIIe-XVe si?cles' (pp. 255-78) deals with the property and administration of dependencies owned by differentmonastic foundations, known as metochia,used for the lodging of themonks who visited Thessalonike for the affairs of themonastery. The metochiausually comprised a church, lodgings for themonks, other annexes and a well, all these in an enclosed courtyard. The management of this property was in the hands of monks, though, when necessary, assisted by lay administrators. In the course of time these properties increased through donations, exchange, purchase, or con fiscation for non-repayment of loan. This expansion of monastic property, dating from the middle of the thirteenth centuiy onwards, and ranging from houses and shops, to vineyards, orchards and wine presses, encountered complications often leading to litigation. At other times the upkeep of immovable property proved too expensive, forcing themonastery to transfer these metochiato individuals for a specific time on condition that repairs were undertaken and completed before they were restored to the monastery. Giros's paper provides a wealth of detail that casts light not only on the actual management and holdings of the Athonite monasteries, but also on the topography of the city, the shape of itshouses, shops, open spaces and the occupation of its inhabitants, who ranged from doctors and lawyers, to master builders, masons, painters and saddlers. No less valuable is the information on cost of labour and materials. The volume ends with twoArchaeological Reports, 'The Amorium Project: Research and Excavation in 2000', by C. S. Lightfoot, Y. Mergen, B. Y. Olcay, and J. Witte-Orr, (pp. 279-97 w^m illustrations), and 'Excavations and Survey at Androna, Syria: The Oxford Team 2000', byMarlia Mundell Mango (pp. 293-97 with illustrations), followed by a brief report on the themes and conclusions of the Dumbarton Oaks Symposium held in 2002, entitled 'Realities in the Arts of theMedieval Mediterranean, 800-1500 (PP- 299-301). This volume on Late Byzantine Thessalonike, important and often thought provoking, is a most welcome contribution to scholarship. The Hellenic Institute J. Chrysostomides Royal Holloway, Universityof London Ransel, David L. and Shallcross, Bozena (eds). Polish Encounters, Russian Identity.Indiana-Michigan Series inRussian and East European Studies. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2005. vii + 218 pp. Maps. Notes. Index. $22.95 (paperback). The book under review is a collection of diverse essays set in different time periods and differentfields but nevertheless well connected through theirfocus on one important topic: the role of Poland and Poles in the development of Russian (as well as Soviet) identity. Poland and Russia are important as 'significantothers' which played key roles in their respective histories. Even if REVIEWS l6l one could argue thatRussia was more important forPoland than Poland for Russia, at least during the last two centuries, there seems to be a dispropor tionately stronger interest in the role of Russia in the construction of Polish identity than in the functionswhich Poland had for the development ofmodern Russian identity.Thus the book can be viewed as an important step in balancing an inequality in the study ofmutual perceptions of nations in Central and Eastern European culture. As all the essays in the volume demonstrate, for centuries, up until the time of the late Soviet Union, in cultural termsPoland was Russia's closest signifi cant European neighbour as well as a key intermediary in its relations with West European culture. Like Western Europe, Poland isperceived inRussia in a very ambivalent way, both as arrogant, haughty and often domineering but also as fascinating and culturally attractive. This collection of studieswell illustrates how, on the one hand, Poland was an important face of theWest toRussia, but on the other hand, as a Slavic country which had profound cultural and historical tieswith Russia, itwas not perceived as truly Western and alien. Paradoxically, Poland was, at least since the late eighteenth cen tury, not only a nation dominated by Russia, seen as a minor, often ignored actor, but also perceived at the same time as a dangerous, covert enemy...

“A Dark, Impenetrable Wall of Complete Incomprehension”: The Impossibility of Heterosexual Love in Imperial Germany

In the years around the turn of the twentieth century, the “war between the sexes” was a major topic of public discussion and concern in Germany—in the daily press, in academic sexology journals and organizations, among medical and psychiatric professionals, in the women's movements, among conservative Christians, in art and music. Jacques Le Rider has even referred to the “obsessive leitmotif of male-female confrontation” in central European culture in this period. Much of what has been written about this topic in recent years posits a crisis of gender relations produced by the growth of the women's movement, and by the backlash against it. The idea that the feminist challenge generated hostility between men and women in this period was one that was also common at the time, particularly among anti-feminists. As Hedwig Dohm put it in 1913, “In all anti-feminist speeches and writings, the hostility between men and women is tirelessly denounced as a characteristic of the times, and a product of the women's movement.”

In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity by David A. Norris (review)

574 SEER, 85, 3, JULY 2OO7 theApollonian (i.e., rationality being the only road to happiness). Involved in founding a new culture, he is, like Peter theGreat inPeterburg, willing to sacrifice himself and others for the future good. In Zamiatin's dystopian novel My, legality functions in a similar way, but here it is satirically exaggerated and fundamentally negative. The under ground is both political and psychological because the revolutionaries want to restore emotion and the imagination (the Dionysian) which have been abolished by a state founded entirely on rationality (theApollonian). Gerigk concludes that Sologub and Zamiatin represent a pessimistic model inwhich negatively perceived legality oppresses the individual and cannot be overthrown, whereas Gor'kii and Gladkov represent an optimistic view, in which present or future legality is identifiedwith 'just cause'. Gerigk sees Belyi as a tragic model, because the balance between underground and legality can be maintained only for a short time before a cultural cycle comes to an inevitable end. Gerigk's study is compiled from lectures to students of Russian and comparative literature.This results in an eloquent stylewhich makes reading a true pleasure, but the volume's sparse bibliography and lack of consider ation of critical literature is surprising in a publication of this significance. Still, thebook will be of great interestnot only to students but to the academic community at large. Department ofSlavonic Studies U. Lange Universityof Mainz Norris, David A. In the Wake ofthe BalkanMyth: QuestionsofIdentity and Modernity. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York, 1999. xiv + 192 pp. Notes. Maps. Plates. Bibliography. Index. ?58.00. The late nineteenth-century Serbian writer Laza Kostic once tried to explain the relationship between the culture of Serbia and those ofmajor Western European cultures using the scenario of a phone conversation, in which the speaker in Belgrade keeps repeating: 'Can you hear us? We do hear you, can you hear us?', with the other end of the line remaining silent. If you were to substitute 'Serbian' with 'Bulgarian' or 'Slovak', or any other Central or South East European culture, the image would still retain its value and accu rately express the frustrations of smaller European cultures at not being heard, or not being understood. David Norris begins In the Wake of the BalkanMyth: Questions ofIdentityandModernity by reminding his reader of Bakhtin's idea, expressed in hisNovy mir interview, of a dialogue between cultures, inwhich they open up to each other. By contrast, those small nations that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe had to struggle from their early days with an imbalance in the dialogue through which cultures come into being. The Balkan's entry into this symbolic dialogue has been hindered by what Norris calls the 'Balkan myth': the cluster of representations of the Balkans as a seat of primitivism,which isalternately looked upon positively ('noble savage') and negatively ('threatening barbarian'). Norris maintains that the source of the REVIEWS 575 Balkan myth lies in theWest, and its fears of a cultural Other. It reduces a culturally varied territory into a threatening unity which both justifies the colonialist ventures of theGreat Powers, and relieves them of responsibility for the origins of the FirstWorld War. Western images were established on an identity of the Balkan as Other and alien to themodern world. The West offered cultural recognition to that exotic world on the borders of theOrient, within the European family of cultures, but kept itas a separate space which was not and would never be fully integrated. The production of Balkan semantics isbased on a narrow range of persis tent images, reinvented as appropriate in each historical moment, and derived fromRomanticist aesthetics which privileged the national authenticity disco vered in folk epics. Norris shows how the Balkan myth resurfaces in critical periods in its Janus-like form ? either noble savage or primitive barbarian ? from thewritings of journalists such as Harry De Windt orJohn Reed at the beginning of the twentieth century, to those of Ian Traynor, the current Balkan correspondent of The Guardian. However, while other small and more colonized societies in a classical sense established a culture of resistance to the foreign voice, in Serbian culture the dominant motifs of the noble savage and primitive barbarian eventually came to dominate...

Family satisfaction in the intensive care unit: cross-cultural adaptation of a questionnaire

Purpose Family needs and expectations are often unmet in the intensive care unit (ICU), leading to dissatisfaction. This study assesses cross-cultural adaptability of an instrument evaluating family satisfaction in the ICU. Materials and Methods A Canadian instrument on family satisfaction was adapted for German language and central European culture and then validated for feasibility, validity, internal consistency, reliability, and sensitivity. Results Content validity of a preliminary translated version was assessed by staff, patients, and next of kin. After adaptation, content and comprehensibility were considered good. The adapted translation was then distributed to 160 family members. The return rate was 71.8%, and 94.4% of questions in returned forms were clearly answered. In comparison with a Visual Analogue Scale, construct validity was good for overall satisfaction with care (Spearman ρ = 0.60) and overall satisfaction with decision making ( ρ = 0.65). Cronbach α was .95 for satisfaction with care and .87 for decision-making. Only minor differences on repeated measurements were found for interrater and intrarater reliability. There was no floor or ceiling effect. Conclusions A cross-cultural adaptation of a questionnaire on family satisfaction in the ICU can be feasible, valid, internally consistent, reliable, and sensitive.

German-language Culture and the Slav Stranger Within

The aim of this article is to delineate the symbolic position of the Slavonic, and in particular the Czech, in German-language Austrian culture of the period 1890–1940. My approach will be informed by psychoanalysis. A subsidiary aim is to try to demonstrate uses of psychoanalysis in the study of central European culture. What is at issue here is an historical set of social power relations that find their expression in culture, that is to say, in art and literature, and that can be interpreted by psychoanalysis. All too often psychoanalysis avoids the social and the political outside the framework of the individual and her or his predictable traumas emanating from domestic life.1 This article, however, constitutes an exercise in inter- and intra-cultural psychoanalysis: intra-cultural as an investigation of psychoanalytic dynamics within German-language culture; inter-cultural as an examination of the relationship between German-language and Slav cultures in psychoanalytic terms.

Mitteleuropa: politische Konzepte - sportliche Praxis

When Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary le galized professional football in the mid-1920s, they formed the central European triangle of ?Danubian Football. The most popular event in this context was the Mitropa Cup which was established in 1927. This tournament for the best teams involved clubs from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hun gary, Yugoslavia as well as, two years later, Italy. It became very popular, even in countries not involved in the games. From the very beginning the main goal of the Mitropa Cup was to strengthen the economic basis of the clubs, particu larly as in 1925 football was regarded as an economic fac tor. Even the term ?Mitropa shows the primarily economic impact, as this tournament seems to have been the first visi ble sponsoring activity in European Football: teams and fans travelled exclusively by ?Mitropa sleeping-cars to the away games. And the media became an undeniable part of football culture for the first time. National Socialism stopped the further development of this Central European sports culture; and attempts at re establishing it after 1945 were initiated rather half-heartedly due to the political changes in Eastern Europe. Finally, a new pattern of organising European club football, with France as the new centre, took shape in 1955. Nevertheless the glory of the Mitropa Cup remained vivid and caused several attempts at reviving the tournament up until the late 1990s. Address all communications to: Matthias Marschik, Mallygasse 6, A-1210 Wien; e-mail: matthias.marschik@univie.ac.at.

Mesolithic-Neolithic contacts as reflected in ritual finds

The beginnings of settled life in Central Europe were marked by a series of interactions between local foragers and immigrants of southern origin. The Carpathian Basin is the last region to have had direct contact with Balkan peoples in the early Neolithic. In the course of the interaction, not only did two groups of different origin and manners meet and merge: two ways of symbolic thinking, two kinds of cult life, two perceptions of space and time must have come face to face. We know much more about south-east European Neolithic cults and ritual life, as reconstructed from enormously rich finds of material consisting of figurines, house models, anthropomorphic vessels etc. In the western part of the Carpathian Basin there are local imitations of these finds, thanks to contact. However, the figural representations almost entirely disappear by the developed phase of the Linear Pottery culture in Central Europe. Thus, we may find some hints about the other, local way of thinking. The possible causes of this change and also different perspectives in the symbolic meaning of this process are discussed in this short paper.

Resenlund og Brøndumgård bronzedepoter – Kult og samfund i yngre bronzealder

Resenlund og Brøndumgård bronzedepoter – Kult og samfund i yngre bronzealder

Moscow and Petersburg: The City in Russian Culture by Ian K. Lilly (review)

896 Reviews The afterword, 'Inscribing Otherness: Polish-American Writers after the Great Divide', is ambitious in its scope but rather superficial in its conceptualization of the emigre discourse. Gasyna's mechanical transfer of Edward Said's thoughts on Orientalism to the Polish-American scene is not convincing since from 1956 Poles (unlike Oriental intellectuals) spoke for themselves and their own culture through limited publications in English (the most prominent authors being Kridl, Milosz, Krzyzanowski, and Zamoyski). However, the richness of this afterword lies in the information it provides regarding emigre presses, publishers, on-line resources, pub? lications, and academic centres documenting Polish emigre culture and founded on the American continent. Overall, the volume presents a valuable source for students, scholars, and readers interested in (intellectual) emigration. It is a highly recommended addition to the reading lists for courses on Central and Eastern European culture. University of Glasgow Elwira M. Grossman Moscow and Petersburg: The City in Russian Culture. Ed. by Ian K. Lilly. Notting? ham: Astra Press. 2002. x+120 pp. ?16. ISBN 0-946134-67-7. The six essays ofthis volume explore the existing myths and representations ofthe two rival Russian capitals, Moscow and Petersburg. The firsttwo focus on Moscow and the Moscow text. In her essay 'Representing Moscow in 1812: Sentimentalist Echoes in Accounts of the Napoleonic Occupation', Sara Dickinson reconfirms the myth of Moscow as the centre of 'sincere, intimate and familial, patriarchal, comfortable' Russia in the light of Napoleon's attack on Moscow in 1812, drawing on a great variety of letters, poems, and prose of the period. Continuing the theme of Moscow as a warm and convivial place in his 'Female Sexuality in the Pre-Revolutionary "Moscow Text" of Russian Literature', Ian K. Lilly examines Moscow's 'femini? nity' in various literary sources. The metaphors of the fertile 'Mother Moscow' and 'the stay-at-home matron' are extended by the analysis of female characters, ranging from the bereaved bride to the femmefatale. Moscow's femininity comes out in contrast to the cult of the transvestite Ksenia Petrova in the Petersburg text, which is explored by George E. Munro in 'The Petersburg of Catherine II: Official Enlightenment versus Popular Cults'. The myth of the 'enlightened' capital is challenged by the fact that the city also became home to the self-castrators, skoptsy. In 'The Poetics of the Street in Blok and Guro' Milica Banjanin parallels the re? presentation of St Petersburg in Blok's poetry and Guro's poetic prose, observing a movement from the 'hazy symbolist vision of the street to the seemingly disjointed, fragmented world of the 20th century' (p. 66). In the following essay, ' "Looking Back in Extreme Anguish": St Petersburg in the Autobiographic and Collective Memory of the 1920s', Ekaterina Yudina investigates the portrayal of a 'death' of Petersburg in the refusal to admit to the changing reality in the 1920s. This anguished depiction of Petersburg is challenged by Emily Johnson's reading of Nikolay Antsiferov's in? terpretation of Petersburg as a symbol of 'eternal beauty' in the final contribution to the volume, 'Transcendence and the City: Nikolai Antsiferov's Dusha Peterburga as an Aesthetic Utopia'. University of Surrey Natalia Rulyova ...

Kertész among the Germans

Imre Kertész's current role in the German debate about the Holocaust is contrasted to the reception of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the influence of György Lukács, and the prominence of Martin Walser. Kertész's popularity in Germany dovetailed with that of Goldhagen, but whereas the latter's impact was fleeting, Kertész has become a guardian of Holocaust memory in Germany. While Goldhagen repudiated past German culture, Kertész is both a survivor of the Holocaust and champion of a lost Central European Jewish-German culture, in the tradition of Wagner, Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann. In this capacity he serves as an anti-Lukács, reviving or rather honoring a lost cosmopolitan tradition. Both Kertész and Walser capture the adolescent confusion, but the message and cosequences of Kertész's camp experiences of 1944 and 1945 and Martin Walser's autobiographical account of the same years in the Hitler Jugend are starkly different. In the present German dialogue on the Holocaust, Kertész's language of homelessness acts as an antedote to Walser's cult of the Heimat.

Worlds Apart: Western and Central European Judicial Culture at the Onset of the European Enlargement

In this article, I would like to explore the legal culture and judicial methodology prevailing in post-Communist Europe. The first part deals with the transformation during the last century of continental law and its legal reasoning and judicial methodology. In contrast, the second part shows a very different development in nations of really existing socialism,as they were often called, with the emphasis on the post-Stalinist decades. The decline of law and the judiciary in communist societies also caused a degeneration of their judicial methodology. The key third part of the article describes and analyzes the present situation in post-communist nations, including doctrinal developments and case law. My argument is that a steady process of fundamental legal change in the judicial ideology of decision-making is taking place in the countries of Central Europe. However,

Historical picture of development of early iron age in the Serbian Danube basin

The paper offers a historical survey of the development of Early Iron Age cultures in Danubian Serbia, its characteristics, relations with contemporary cultures of the Pannonian Plain, the Balkans, Carpathian Romania (Transylvania) and the Romanian Banat. It describes the genesis of individual cultures, their styles, typological features and interrelationships. Danubian Serbia is seen as a contact zone reflecting influences of the Central European Urnenfelder culture on the one hand, and those of the Gornea-Kalakaca and the Bosut-Basarabi complex on the other. The latter?s penetration into the central Balkans south of the Sava and Danube rivers has been registered in the Morava valley, eastern Serbia north-western Bulgaria and as far south as northern Macedonia. The terminal Early Iron Age is marked by the occurrence of Scythian finds in the southern Banat, Backa or around the confluence of the Sava and the Danube (e.g. Ritopek), and by representative finds of the Srem group in Srem and around the confluence of the Tisa and Danube rivers. The powerful penetration of Celtic tribes from Central Europe into the southern Pannonian Plain marked the end of the Early Iron Age.

‘Confessionalisation’ —a useful theoretical concept for the study of religion, politics, and society in early modern East‐Central Europe?1

The confessionalisation paradigm, introduced by two German historians in the early 1980s, initiated a fundamental change of perspective in the scholarship of early modern Germany. Taking into account long‐term developments and directing attention to the relatively neglected period between the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, the concept paved the way for historical writing that considers ‘religion’ and ‘church’ as an integral part of societal history (Gesellschaftsgeschichte). This essay discusses the background of the confessionalisation model in German historiography as well as its essential features. Second it offers an overview of the critique and recommendations towards a refinement of the confessionalisation thesis. What follows is a presentation of several ongoing case studies of scholars affiliated with the Humanities Center for the Study of East Central European History and Culture in Leipzig, Germany (Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas or ‘GWZO’). The relevance of the concept of confessionalisation for these research projects will be explored here, focusing on the Crown Lands of Bohemia, as well as, Poland and Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.