Jacob Mikanowski

It isn’t easy to write about ‘Eastern Europe’. Many countries described as such now prefer the more civilised designation ‘Central European’. Others can more accurately be described as Balkan or Baltic. Some, such as Czechia and Slovakia, share common history and similar languages. Others, like Ukraine and Russia, or Serbia and Croatia share the same but want nothing to do with each other. Estonia and Macedonia, or Belarus and Hungary have as much in common with each other as they do with Belgium.

What exactly is Eastern Europe, then? The historian Larry Wolff argued in Inventing Eastern Europe that the concept emerged during the Enlightenment to give ‘the West’ its semi-barbaric eastern foil. It reached its apotheosis in Europe’s Cold War division, but since that division is long gone many now think Eastern Europe has outlived its purpose. Jacob Mikanowski’s Goodbye Eastern Europe is intended as its obituary. A light, panoramic portrait of a region that has left a lasting mark on the literary and cultural history of Europe, his book may well be the most readable overview of Eastern European history yet written, suffering as it does under the contradictions inherent to the idea itself.

Scholars of the region are unlikely to glean much new information from it beyond some amusing anecdotes, but this is not a book for scholars. It is a book aimed squarely at the average westerner who would find it hard to disagree with Neville Chamberlain’s assertion that Nazi Germany’s predatory behaviour towards Czechoslovakia was nothing but a ‘quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’. Mikanowski covers everything from Eastern Europe’s Muslim communities to its golden age of alchemy; the experience of Stalinism and late-socialism to early 20th-century imperial collapse and late 20th-century utopian collapse. Borders, peoples and identities are, and always have been, perplexingly fluid in Eastern Europe.

Read the rest at HistoryToday.com

Luka Ivan Jukic writes on Central Europe.… (altro)