Shifting Borders: Konwicki, Zanussi and the Ideology of “East-Central Europe”

SPECULATIVE INTRODUCTION Once upon a time, when even war was cold, we used to speak of For a while, however, in mid-1980s, some of us began to speak of Europe. Now we speak of Europe, usually placing a hyphen between and What lies behind this shifting nomenclature? Does it show that despite legitimate postmodern-or merely commonsensical-- scepticism regarding history's fabled pursuit of an Heglian dialectic of opposites and final synthesization, some such dialectic does indeed unfold in what was once described as superstructural realm, that of terminology and ideology, with each generation self-consciously seeking to trump predecessors by ostentatiously redressing their mistakes and appropriating their achievements, adding to to yield synthetic East Central? (Meanwhile, gap or hyphen that separates and recognizes synthesis as threatened, incomplete, as two terms become potentially non-synonymous or even-as it were-opposed synonyms.) The general acceptance of term East Central, whatever else it may be, is of course posthumous triumph of historian Oskar Halecki, who first argued that comprised a Europe, which was Germanic, and a largely Slavic Europe. East may be less a synthesis than a compromise between way the West (another labile signifier) traditionally saw countries in question (those of former Warsaw Pact) as and way those countries' denizens defined themselves-at least during 1980s, period of their greatest unrest and hope for change-as Central. Their countries' forty-year sojourn within belly of Soviet whale nursed a chronic fear that Europe might indeed become Asia it was termed sardonically by Joseph Brodsky, and as it might have been described by neo-Marxists noting paradoxical persistence within Revolution's vanguard country and what Marx had defined as the Asiatic mode of production. Central Europe may have been a term steeped in utopianism (Mariola Jankun-Dopartowa, for instance, has described it as such2), a sign of wishful thinking, or a banner strategically unfurled in mid- I 980s to persuade Western politicians that realm they had consigned to a comfortable distance was nearer than they thought, and indeed central to project of constructing a European identity-by no means amenable to sweeping under red carpet in name of d&ente. The recent general adoption of East instead may in turn represent an Eastern assertion of difference from a Central Europe that translates into uncomfortably Germanic Mitteleuropa. The insistence on new term may seek magically to banish fears of economic ingestion by a Germany whose first tottering Eastward steps to absorb its own might generate unstoppable momentum towards malign old programme of Drang nach Osten, in whose throat Eastern would prefer to stick. The term is perturbingly unstable, and compromise is not-pace Fukuyama-the end of history but a moment of balance within it, perhaps precarious but hopefully long. But will East be treated as again-no real concern of ours-should a humiliated Russia seek to claw back its lost empire, in part or in full? What meanings and perhaps repressions and reservations underlie this phrase and its relation to previous names for this geo-political space? The designation appears to indicate an area that has overcome its past-in 1989, for instance-and yet somehow preserves it (the Hegelian dialectic summed up in term Aujhebung, in which what is surpassed is also stored up). It functions both as a name and a confession of failure to name, sign of a perception of area as resistant to naming, transitional, suspended, perhaps permanently indeterminate, and thus a source of difficulty-future as well as past? …

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