Voices from Central Europe

Abstract

This article discusses the idea of Europe, its values and identity from a Central European perspective. It uses the concept of Central Europe (1945–present) as a discursive framework in which ideas of Europe are shaped. Analysing the writings of the Polish-born sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (b. 1925), the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész (b. 1929) and the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949), the paper explores what Europe means after the twentieth century placed such heavy burdens on the European idea and how the experience of living under communist rule has influenced that idea. Ultimately, the goal is to reveal how these three intellectuals attempt to restore an intellectual and cultural road towards an alternative Europe.

Notes

1. For a reflection on their role as public intellectuals see Tester and Jacobsen 57, 209; Molnár 168; Tötösy de Zepetnek 232; Wright and Wright 1–8.

2. An interesting article about these developments can be found in the summer 1994 Daedalus issue “After Communism: What?”: see Istvan Rév, “The Postmortem Victory of Communism,” Daedalus 123.3 (1994): 159–70.

3. Tester and Jacobsen write on Bauman: “Bauman's errand is to refer and discuss certain methodological reflections on the practically applied research methods based on his own personal experiences and those of other colleagues in Socialist Poland” (57). Peter Beilharz adds: “Bauman's work can be understood as a critical theory, but its east European context needs to be established alongside the west European sensibilities of the Frankfurt School” (Peter Beilharz, “Modernity and Communism: Zygmunt Bauman and the Other Totalitarianism,” Thesis Eleven 70 (Aug. 2002): 88–99 (88)). Sára Molnár says about Kertész:

• [M]y argument is that Kertész's texts are best analyzed in the specific context of Central European history and culture by attention to the region's political, social, and cultural conditions as resulting from several types of totalitarianism and the conditions of post-totalitarianism, as well as within the context of European Holocaust literature in toto. (168)

  See also Tötösy de Zepetnek 236; a special issue of Studies in East European Thought devoted to Žižek begins by explaining that it is Žižek's

• experience, as a critical Marxist, with a system that presented itself not merely as “real”, but as the incarnation of “true society”, while in fact it was neither the one nor the other, but based on systematic denial of its “lie”, that made him sensitive to the fact that all alleged social and political “reality” is in a sense “fake” [ … ] For Žižek, East European reality was a perversion not of Marxism or even Leninism, but of society, pointing to the very nature of human society as such, Western liberal-democratic and (neo-)liberal-capitalist society included. (Evert Van der Zweerde, Studies in East European Thought 56 (2004): 251–57 (252))

4. See Górny Maciej, “From the Splendid Past into the Unknown Future: Historical Studies in Poland after 1989” in Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe, eds. Sorin Antohi, Balázs Trencsényi and Péter Apor (Budapest: Central European UP, 2007) 101–72 (110). These intellectuals were part of the so-called “Warsaw School” of intellectual history, working on the border between history and philosophy. They turned away from Marxist-Leninist historicism, tried to dissociate myth and reality and separated the idea of progress from the concept of historical process. See also Z.A. Jordan, Philosophy and Ideology: The Development of Philosophy and Marxism-Leninism in Poland since the Second World War (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1963) 517.

5. See also Beilharz 2.

6. Zygmunt Bauman, “An Adventure Called Europe” in Europe: An Unfinished Adventure 1–44; Kertész, “Europe's Oppressive Legacy” vii–xii; Žižek, “The Constitution is Dead.”

7. Think, for example, of the writings of Nietzsche, Freud, Spengler, Horkheimer and Adorno in Germany. In France, the postmodernists and poststructuralists were important in trying to deconstruct the modern images of Europe and European civilisation (see John P. McCormick (ed.), Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology: Political and Social Theory from Nietzsche to Habermas (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2002). For an early critique of Bauman on rationalism and the Enlightenment I would like to refer the reader to a contribution to Telos: Zygmunt Bauman, “Dictatorship over Needs,” Telos 60 (1984): 173–78. In this article he opposes two different, what he calls, utopias: the Enlightenment and humanistic values on the one hand and Enlightenment rationalism on the other, clearly favouring the former. Kertész's critique of the dialectic of the Enlightenment can be found in his irony towards the urge to explain, understand and ultimately rule the world – a striving which was taken to the extreme and perverted by the Nazi genocide (cf. Susan Eszter, “The Narrative of Irony – Imre Kertész’ Fatelessness,” available <http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ctccs/news/conferences/eszter_susan.doc>). Yet his literature aims to find new ways on how to set forth the project of the Enlightenment after the catastrophic end of modernity (cf. Ákos Szilágyi, “Die historische Erbsünde. Auschwitz als idealer ‘Ausgangspunkt’ in den Romanen von Imre Kertész” in Der lange, dunkle Schatten. Studien zum Werk von Imre Kertész, eds. Mihály Szegedy-Maszak and Tamás Scheibner (Vienna: Passagen, 2004) 343–64 (358)). To Žižek, the Enlightenment remains a project to be finished not along the lines of “total scientific self-objectivization but – this wager has to be taken – [as] a new figure of freedom that will emerge when we follow the logic of science to the end” (Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2003) 133).

8. In “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality” Timothy Snyder criticises the use of Auschwitz as a metaphor for the Holocaust. He argues that Auschwitz as a symbol of the Holocaust excludes the largest group of its victims and that to give an adequate account of the Holocaust every historian should also reflect on the actual scope of German mass killing policies in Europe. “Auschwitz is only an introduction to the Holocaust, the Holocaust only a suggestion of Hitler's final aims” (Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” The New York Review of Books 56.12 (16 July 2009), available <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875>. I do not wish to discuss his point further, yet one remark has to be made. In my current paper I use the notion of Auschwitz in the same way as it is used in the writings of both Bauman and Kertész: as a metaphor for the Holocaust and its most visible memorial symbol.

9. My translation. Hungarian original:

• Az életképes társadalomnak ébren kell tartania és állandóan meg kell újítania az önmagáról, a saját feltételeiről való tudását, tudatát. S ha döntése úgy szól, hogy a Holocaust súlyos, fekete gyászünnepe elmaradhatatlan része e tudatnak, akkor ez a döntés nem holmi részvéten vagy megbánáson, hanem eleven értékítéleten alapul. Érték a Holocaust, mert felmérhetetlen szenvedések révén felmérhetetlen tudáshoz vezetett; és ezáltal felmérhetetlen erkölcsi tartalék rejlik benne. (Kertész, “A Holocaust mint kultúra” 84)

10. For an extensive description of these developments see Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History [1998] (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). His chapter “A New Society: From Humanism to the Enlightenment” is particularly illustrative.

11. “The concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality” (from Gályanapló [Galley Boat-Log] qtd in Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” 268). In another essay published in A száműzött nyelv [The Exiled Language], Kertész places himself in a literary tradition that includes Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Améry, Primo Lévi, and Albert Camus. Nonetheless, Kertész claims that, unlike those intellectuals, philosophers and thinkers living in free countries, he was able to survive in the aftermath of Auschwitz. He writes that communist society saved him from the disappointments of living in a democratic society where intellectuals who survived Auschwitz and believed in freedom, liberation and the big catharsis were soon to find out that they were mistaken. The big catharsis was never completed and many survivors of Auschwitz still committed suicide because of it (Kertész, “A Holocaust mint kultúra” 79). The imprisoned life in a totalitarian society, in communist Hungary, saved Kertész from this disillusionment, as it was impossible to have any mistaken impressions. He could not hold any illusions about society after Auschwitz, about his identity. In a sense, he did not have one. The only identity he was able to create was through literature. This is another reason why literature is so important to Kertész.

12. As early as 1973, Bauman talks about humanity as a project that is more than its mere existence. He transcends “the realm of determinism, subordinating the is to the ought.” Man is a creative being. See Zygmunt Bauman, Culture as Praxis (London and Boston: Routledge, 1973) 172.

13. Poul Poder even describes him as “a sociologist of freedom,” pointing out Bauman's unusually big engagement with the conditions of and threats to freedom. See Poul Poder, “Bauman on Freedom – Consumer Freedom as the Integration Mechanism of Liquid Society” in The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman: Challenges and Critique, eds. Michael Hviid Jocobsen and Poul Poder (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008) 97–114.

14. See Bauman and Tester 129–58, and Tsvetan Todorov, De Onvoltooide Tuin. Het humanistische denken in Frankrijk [Le Jardin imparfait. La Pensée humaniste en France], trans. Frans de Haan (Amsterdam and Antwerp: Uitgeverij Atlas, 2001) 50–51. Todorov writes that humanists stress the importance of values, society and responsibility of the individual. The individual, in principle, is free to cultivate or develop him/herself autonomously and decide his fate. He is the one who acts, but in his actions he is also responsible for the well-being of the other. Todorov summarises the three essential humanist values as follows: (1) the autonomy of the “I,” (2) the finality of the “you,” and (3) the universality of the “they.”

15. In his book Žižek argues that the liberalist tolerance truly is anti-tolerance. Everything is good as long as it fits the model shaped by liberals and capitalism. The moment one tries to leaves this framework, or refuses to become part of it, the reaction is anything but tolerant (Žižek, Pleidooi voor intolerantie 29–34).