RIP Mitteleuropa — the tragedy of a lost civilisation

Times

21 hours ago

For more than a week in autumn 1790 the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt was the scene of one of the oldest and most extravagant political rituals on the European continent: kings, queens, princes, ambassadors and assorted aristocrats gathered for a series of events culminating in the coronation of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, as Holy Roman Emperor.
Goethe, a native of the city, claimed that anyone watching could not fail to consider the celebration as the 'crowning glory of his whole life'. The future statesman Klemens von Metternich called it 'one of the most sublime and simultaneously magnificent spectacles that the world has ever seen'. A concert given by Mozart, who had travelled from Vienna in an attempt to revive his flagging career, proved a sideshow.
Leopold, who, like many of his predecessors, was a member of the House of Habsburg, died of pneumonia just 18 months later before having had the chance to implement many of his planned liberalising reforms. Francis II, his more conservative son, managed 14 years, but in 1806, after military defeats by Napoleon, was obliged to abolish the title and continued to rule as mere Emperor of Austria.
The coronation of the new head of a curious entity that Voltaire famously quipped was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire is an appropriate starting point for this detailed study of the part of the continent where the Germanic, Slavic and Romance worlds meet.
The term Central Europe, or rather Mitteleuropa in German, was coined — appropriately enough also in 1806 — by Georg Hassel, a German geographer who defined it as the space between Russian-dominated northern and eastern Europe and the British Isles and France to the west.
There is no shortage of histories of the various peoples of the region, nor of the Habsburgs, who ruled much of the area for more than 600 years. Luka Ivan Jukic, a London-based author and journalist, aims instead 'to disentangle the history of Central Europe from the histories of the many nations that have emerged from it and to show that Central European history is much more than the sum of its parts'.
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Foremost among these parts were the German-speakers, long the dominant political, economic and cultural force — something they came to consider proof of their innate superiority, with disastrous consequences under Hitler. They shared the space with Hungarians, various types of Slavs — from the Poles in the north to the Croats in the south — as well as northern Italians, Lithuanians and Jews.
Jukic writes fluently and peppers his book with colourful anecdotes. His decision to weave the different peoples' respective stories into a single chronological narrative makes sense, especially for times such as 1848, when a wave of revolutions promised to transform Central Europe (as would happen in 1989). The same is true of phenomena such as industrialisation and the construction of the railways. Often, though, the sheer number of separate narratives and the need to switch back and forth between places can be overwhelming.
The book is subtitled The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea. Central Europe, he contends, was killed as a distinct civilisation by the Nazis as they marched eastwards. Nor did Allied victory in 1945 herald its return: the continent's rigid division into capitalist west and communist east left no space for anything in between.
The idea endured, however, in the minds of cultured Czechs, Poles and Hungarians resentful of having been forcibly separated from the European mainstream after centuries and trapped on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain — as evinced by the Czech writer Milan Kundera in his 1983 essay The Tragedy of Central Europe.
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The collapse of communism at the end of that decade brought another change of direction: admission to Nato and then to the EU from the late 1990s required the adoption of what Jukic calls the 'prescriptive bundle of policies that accompanied becoming a 'normal' western country' — from the rule of law to an economic system based on the primacy of free markets.
The first generation of post-communist leaders such as Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa were happy to oblige. Their citizens' reward for enduring an initial few painful years of 'shock therapy' were soaring living standards and the satisfaction of escaping a Russian-dominated world in which their neighbours to the east remained mired.
But what of Central Europe today? The emergence of the so-called Visegrád Group of Poland, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak republics in the 1990s pointed to a sense of shared regional destiny. The illiberal approach of Hungary's Viktor Orban and Poland under its former Law and Justice Party government to touchstone issues such as gay rights and immigration could be taken as reflecting more conservative attitudes in the middle of the continent than in Europe's liberal west.
Jukic nevertheless believes the differences between the countries of Central Europe outweigh their similarities — all the more so if Germany is considered one of their number. If anything unites them it is the legacy of their years of communism rather than the centuries spent under Habsburg rule.
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'What emerged from the ruins of communist eastern Europe was not a suppressed cosmopolitan Central Europe but a series of nation-states forged in the upheavals of the early 20th century that had destroyed that very same Central European world,' he concludes.
'It is only natural that since 1989 each of these nation-states has interpreted that legacy in their own way, trying to come to terms with their own histories and places in a new world not as Central Europeans but as Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats.'Peter Conradi is author of Who Lost Russia? From the Collapse of the USSR to Putin's War on Ukraine (Oneworld £10.99)
Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea by Luka Ivan Jukic (Hurst £25 pp344). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members