Central Europe in British perception

Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe. Stanford University Press, 1994. “Introduction” pp. 1-17.

liminality

• limen = threshold

• applicable to both space and time

• liminal spaces can be specific thresholds

• more extended places can be regarded as borderlands

• Arnold van Gennep: Rites of Passage (1909)

  • initiation rituals = liminal period

  • rites of separation

  • transition rites

  • rites of incorporation

• importance of in-between periods

• human reactions to liminal situations

• personality shaped by liminality - cultural hybridity

• being stuck in liminality is dangerous beacuse there’s no chance for integration then

temporal dimensions of liminality

• signle moment for the individual: marriage, divorce

• period: critical life stage for the individual (puberty, teenagehood)

• society: revolution, war, pandemic

• constructed or simply happen

• for society: invasion, disaster

• liminality period - rules questioned, doubt and scepticism arises

spatial dimensions of liminality

• specific places, thresholds: a doorway in a house, parts/ openings of the human body - the vagina of a woman?

• areas or zones: border areas between nations, airports, stations

• “countries” or larger regions, continents: meso-potamia, medi-terrainian

social dimensions of liminality

• liminal state may be fixed - permanence

• an in-between period between two structured world-views

• in culture: positive feature (hybridity), Postcolonialism, loosening of hierarchy, fixed positions

division between East and West

• historically (cultural-political) constructed, geographically natural

• ancient division: South (civilized) vs. North (barbaric)

  • Eastern part of the Roman Empire (Constantinople) was more developed → until the Renaissance: Italy vs. North

• between Renaissance and Englightenment: financial and cultural centers of Europe shift → new perspective: West to East

liminality of Eastern Europe

• a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion to mediate between Europe and the Orient (East proper = Asia)

• demi-orientalization (image of otherness)

• intermediary (liminal) cultural space

• little knowledge in the West of the East

  • Transylvania was considered mythical for exaple (e.g.: Dracula)

• both geographical and philosophical - fact and fantasy combined → nightmarish mythology of Eastern Europe

• Otherness (not as definitive as the Orient)

• civilization vs. barbarism: Eastern Europe is ambiguous

• notions of the Enlightenment recycled during the Cold War

Mitteleuropa, Europe centrale

• early 19th c. French and German geography

• early 20th c. brought a change in what we consider Central Europe

• iron curtain, cold war - strict dichotomy

• geographically in the center of Europe, while culturally linked to the West, politically more to the East

• Transylvania: a thershold between Eastern and Western Europe

differences between Eastern and Western power structures

• Western vassalage:

  • contractual nature

  • prescence of human dignity

  • terrirorial consequence: small provinces with own customary laws → better for the development of direct legality (“ascending” principles of law)

  • “freedoms'“ - organizing principle of structure

• in the East:

  • power stuctures: concentric circles around a center of power

  • social structure similar: Church + narrow stratum of aristocrats by birth - divorced from heterogenous peasantry (including a significant number of slaves)

  • national identity is more important than elsewhere

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