Inventing Eastern Europe

Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment by Larry Wolff, 374 pages

In this survey of 18th century travel literature, Larry Wolff explores how Enlightenment authors charted the domains of civilization and barbarism, making Western Europe the focus of the former and Eastern Europe - or, more evocatively, the European Orient - as the frontier.  For the progressive writers of the eighteenth century, the eastern nations were clearly behind the West on the univocal path of human development, and eastern backwardness served the Western intellectual elite not only as reassurance of their own status but as an inspiration to great "civilizing" projects, to be undertaken with or without the agreement of the peoples concerned.  This division of the continent, Wolff contended in 1994, underlay but was not effaced by the later Cold War division, and with the Cold War now over, the older division would resurface.  

Inventing Eastern Europe is a triumph of postmodern scholarship - obvious and tendentious.  With considerable skill and intelligence Wolff conquers the eighteenth century writers who conquered the East, taming them to his narrative.  Wolff's case is strengthened by his prescience, as today's enlightened Western elites regard Eastern populists with the same familiar smug revulsion.  It also serves as a model for understanding those journalists who have, especially since 2016, embarked upon adventures in Middle America in search of confirmation of their own biases.

Realm of St Stephen

The Realm of St Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary 895-1526 by Pal Engel, translated by Tamas Palosfalvi, 371 pages

As the ninth century neared its end, a new wave of nomadic horsemen from the Eurasian steppes invaded and settled the Carpathian plain.  They called themselves the Magyars, and were of Finno-Ugraic stock, but their neighbors called them by the names of their Turkic predecessors, the Onogurs and the Huns.  Unlike those earlier arrivals, however, the Magyars managed to establish a stable state and, not unrelatedly, converted to Christianity.  The kingdom of Hungary survived for centuries until buried under the last and greatest Turkish power in the form of the Ottomans.  What remnants survived were absorbed by the Austrian Habsburgs, but the memory endured until the reestablishment of the kingdom in the nineteenth century.

There are a paucity of sources for early medieval Hungary, and what sources exist require careful sifting.  Engel carefully employs archaeological and linguistic evidence to give as accurate a picture as possible, and if this is sometimes not as full a picture as might be wished, the author deserves credit for recognizing the limitations of current knowledge.  The result is a landmark work that not only expands the readers knowledge of Hungarian history, but also provides for illuminating comparisons with analogous developments in other parts of medieval Latin Europe.

Mucha

Alphonse Mucha 1860-1939: The Artist as Visionary by Sato Tomoko, 91 pages

Tomoko's brief survey of the life and work of Alphonse Mucha, concentrating on his signature illustrations featuring those much-imitated Art Nouveau nymphs as well as his less famous grand multi-work masterpiece The Slav Epic, sheds little light on the life of its subject, but supplies the framework for plentiful stunning reproductions of his work.

The Vanquished

The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End by Robert Gerwath, 267 pages

After the guns fell silent across the western front on the 11th of November, 1918, the Western Allies entered a peaceful reverie that lasted, with brief disturbances, until September of 1939.  The result is a clear division between the world wars.  But, as Robert Gerwath relates in The Vanquished, the experience of those decades was very different for those in the empires - German, Austrian, Russian, Ottoman - whose defeat in the War resulted in their dissolution.  In the East, the War continued for years after peace was formally declared, as the lines drawn on a map at Versailles were rewritten in blood across the landscape, and the conventional rationales of the First World War were gradually replaced by a new, genocidal logic.

Gerwath briskly and readably relates the bloody chaos and anarchy, and even bloodier order, that attended the revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars and territorial wars, of the early twenties,  The remainder of the inter-war period is only briefly summarized.  There are some oddities of organization - the rise of Mussolini is described several chapters before the saga of D'Annunzio's seizure of Fiume, for example - but these do not prevent The Vanquished from being a compelling and informative account of a much-neglected but vitally important chapter in the history of the twentieth century.

Living in Truth

Living in Truth by Vaclav Havel, edited by Jan Vladislav, 294 pages

This collection of essays was published in 1986, on the occasion of the author receiving the Erasmus Prize for his "opinion that every human being must personally bear his or her responsibility" and his opposition to "all threats to a humane culture".  In the included writings, Havel defies a "revolutionary ideology in which the ideal of man's total liberation has a central place" but whose anthropology imagines man as a "creature whose only aim is self-preservation", and therefore brings about "the gradual erosion of all moral standards, the breakdown of all criteria of decency and the widespread destruction of confidence in the meaning of values such as truth, adherence to principles, sincerity, altruism, dignity, and honour."  He advocates instead a society of voluntary associations which respects the private sphere of individual conscience.

The Havel revealed in these essays is not a political figure, if "political" refers to a programmatic approach to concrete issues and specific problems.  He is, rather, a cultural, social, and ultimately moral critic.  This is consistent with his characterization of the "dissident" as simply an individual who affirms that certain values are worth suffering and, potentially, dying for.  His dissent is therefore not limited to the peculiarities of communist Czechoslovakia, but extends to the West and the twenty-first century as well, for he rejects both the faceless power of impersonal technocracy and the cynicism that is the natural result of the wreck of utopianism.

Living in Truth also includes tributes to Havel from literary figures including Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard.

Havel

Havel: A Life by Michael Zantovsky, 517 pages

Vaclav Havel was born into a wealthy, culturally active Czech family in 1936.  After the Second World War, his family background resulted in him being actively discriminated against by the Communist government installed by the victorious Soviets, and the marginalized young man naturally gravitated to the bohemian scene in Bohemia.  A successful career as a playwright developed in tandem with a role as one of the most visible and eloquent dissidents in the Warsaw Pact, a role which repeatedly landed him in prison, but ultimately helped produce the Velvet Revolution by which the Czechoslovakian Communist regime was overthrown.  Reinventing himself as a politician as much out of necessity as choice, Havel became President of the newly free Czechoslovakia, only to have the country split into Czech and Slovak halves beneath him.

Biographer Zantovsky was Havel's friend and sometime spokesman, and his intimate knowledge of his subject is an important asset in dealing with such a complex, and sometimes contradictory, figure.  He does not conceal, although he does try to explain, his friend's shortcomings as a statesman and as a man.  Zantovsky's greatest revelation is the extent to which Havel's philosophy of "living in truth" was the result of his experience as a dissident, rather than the cause, as was his non-dogmatic experiential approach to that truth.  Indeed, in Zantovsky's telling, much of Havel's approach to politics was shaped, not so much by the hubris of the Communist regime, but by his own experiences of humiliation at the hands of that regime, both large and small.  Nothing shines through as clearly as Havel's humility - his awareness, based partially on bitter experience but also on a playwright's instincts, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished alone.

Mad Catastrophe

A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire by Geoffrey Wawro, 385 pages

In 1847, the Austrian Empire stood as the foundation of the European order and the arbiter of European destiny.  In 1848 that order was shaken, in 1866 Austria was humiliated in the Austro-Prussian War and excluded from wider German affairs, and a year later power within the Habsburg realms was divided between the German Austrians and the Hungarian Magyars.  By the second decade of the twentieth century Austria-Hungary was a dysfunctional state, a patchwork of rival linguistic and ethnic groups theoretically united by their shared allegiance to the Habsburg dynasty and its octogenarian patriarch, Emperor Franz Joseph.  It was this sick man of Europe that would stumble into beginning the First World War. 

Wawro's unrelenting cynicism occasionally becomes tiring - although there is certainly enough here to warrant cynicism - and at times petty, as when he sneers at Archduke Franz Ferdinand's insistence on visiting a man who had been wounded by an attack aimed at the Archduke, a decision that led him directly into the hands of his assassin.  Unfortunately, his constant denigration of his subjects on all sides of the war creates suspicion about the value of his judgement generally, which is a shame, since his Strangelovian tale of the follies of generals on the Eastern Front is otherwise a compelling examination of a largely forgotten part of World War I.

The Far Reaches

The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe by Michael Gubser, 229 pages

If phenomenology is little known and little respected outside academic philosophical circles, much of its obscurity is no doubt due to its epistemological preoccupations, which are hardly applicable to everyday life.  Yet, as Michael Gubser chronicles in The Far Reaches, phenomenology always included ethical and social elements, planted by early figures such as Husserl and Scheler and bearing fruit most spectacularly in Central Europe in the late twentieth century, in thinkers including Vaclav Havel and St John Paul II.  In the process, Gubser also calls into question claims that the revolutions of 1989 had little intellectual originality.  The dissidents may have had an apolitical shyness born of a long experience of totalitarian rule, but their writings describe a global crisis of values that afflicted the materialist, individualist West just as deeply as the materialist, collectivist East.

In places, The Far Reaches makes for rather difficult reading - a contributing factor in the obscurity of phenomenology is its specialized vocabulary, and while Gubser does his best to ameliorate this difficulty, the reader is still left with pages of abstract language.  The rewards, both philosophical and historical, are well worth the struggle.