Has the concept of “Central Europe” outlived its time – the idea has done its work, the idea can go? My key assumption is that such discarding of an apparently essentialist, ideologically overloaded regional approach may be premature. Rather, the paper suggests to explore options of and potential heuristic gains from a revised literary history of Central Europa by scrutinizing a “Central European text”, thus departing from an analogy to the model of the “Petersburg text”. The latter addresses a body of cultural artefacts centered around fixed semantics, a stable topic constituted by intertextuality, as well as a semiotic coherence that draws on established landmarks, or markers of a mutable, yet persistently imagined entity. Quite comparably, the Central European text synthesizes a condensed symbolic reality. And, obviously, if there is such a Central Europe of literature, a narrated reality vouched by the reality of narration, it must have a history – as a matter of fact, its essence needs to be looked for in this diachronic accumulation of experience turned into meaning. Empirically, the lecture will concentrate on the more recent history since 1990 in order to sketch a distinct Central European literature and its specific profile.

 

During this time, the region’s past, which is characterized by imperialism and to a certain extent also by colonialism, has formed the ground for the literatures of the region, the context for reflection and the source for the narrative material. For all their diversity, the key texts from around a dozen countries from the Baltic to the Balkans, written in at least twenty languages, often share a marked insistence on emancipation, aesthetic defiance and, not least, an implicit understanding of the need to speak out confidently in order to be heard amidst the more dominant narrative communities in the East and West to it. More specifically, the paper will examine these commonalities and will show and analyze ways in which recent literature from Central Europe fictionally translates the traumas of a historical region into dysfunctional family structures, fragmentary memories or self-alienated cities and landscapes – and very often into communication disorders or even symptoms of a communicative pathology.