FROM STALINISM 
TO PLURALISM 
A 
Documentary History 
of 
Eastern Europe 
since 1945 
Edited by 
GALE STOKES 
New York 
Oxford 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1991
37 
The Tragedy of Central Europe 
Milan Kundera 
April 26, 1984 
In 
November 1956, the director of the Hungarian News Agency, shortly before his 
office was flattened by artillery fire, sent a telex to the entire world with a desperate 
message announcing that the Russian attack against Budapest had begun. The 
dispatch ended with these words: “We are going to die for Hungary and for 
Europe.” 
What did this sentence mean? It certainly meant that the Russian tanks were 
endangering Hungary and with it Europe itself. But in what sense was Europe in 
danger? Were the Russian tanks about to push past the Hungarian borders and into 
the West? No. The director of the Hungarian News Agency meant that the Russians, 
in 
attacking Hungary, were attacking Europe itself. He was ready to die so that 
Hungary might remain Hungary and European. 
Even if the sense of the sentence seems clear, it continues to intrigue us. 
Actually, in France, in America, one is accustomed to thinking that what was at 
stake during the invasion was neither Hungary nor Europe but a political regime. 
One would never have said that Hungary as such had been threatened; still less 
would one ever understand why a Hungarian, faced with his own death, addressed 
Europe. When Solzhenitsyn denounces communist oppression, does he invoke Eu- 
rope as a fundamental value worth dying for? 
No. 
Budapest or Warsaw. 
“To die for one’s country and for Europe” —that is a phrase that could not 
be thought in Moscow or Leningrad; it is precisely the phrase that could be thought 
in 
In 
Central Europe, the eastern border of the West, everyone has always been 
particularly sensitive to the dangers of Russian might. And it’s not just the Poles. 
Frantisek Palacky, the great historian and the figure most representative of Czech 
politics in the nineteenth century, wrote in 1848 a famous letter to the revolutionary 
parliament of Frankfurt in which he Justified the continued existence of the 
Hapsburg Empire as the only possible rampart against Russia, against “this power 
which, having already reached an enormous size today, is now augmenting its force 
beyond the reach of any Western country.” Palacky warned of Russia’s imperial 
ambitions; it aspired to become a “universal monarchy,” which means it sought 
Reprinted from Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” trans. Edmund White, 
The New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984, pp. 33-38, by permission of The New York 
Review of Books. Copyright © 1984 Nyrev, Inc. 
Wrenenn seunrertre 
217
218 
THE RETURN OF POLITICS 
world domination. “A Russian universal monarchy,” Palacky wrote, “would be an 
immense and indescribable disaster, an immeasurable and limitless disaster.” 
Central Europe, according to Palacky, ought to be a family of equal nations, 
each of which—treating the others with mutual respect and secure in the protection 
of 
a 
strong, unified state—would also cultivate its own individuality. And this 
dream, although never fully realized, would remain powerful and influential. Cen- 
tral 
a 
Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe itself in all its cultural 
variety, 
‘ 
. 
its 
smal! arch-European Europe, a reduced model of Europe made up of 
nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest 
space. How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the 
opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space? 
Indeed, nothing could be more foreign to Central Europe and its passion for 
variety than Russia: uniform, standardizing, centralizing, determined to transform 
every nation of its empire (the Ukrainians, the Belortssians, the Armenians, the 
Latvians, the Lithuanians, and others) into a single Russian people (or, as is more 
commonly expressed in this age of generalized verbal mystification, into a “single 
Soviet people”). 
And so, again: Is communism the negation of Russian history or its fulfillment? 
Certainly it is both its negation (the negation, for example, of its religiosity) and 
fulfillment (the fulfillment of its centralizing tendencies and its imperial dreams). 
‘Seen from within Russia, this first aspect—the aspect of its discontinuity—is 
the 
more striking. From the point of view of the enslaved countries, the second 
aspect—that of its continuity—is felt more powerfully. 
But am I being too absolute in contrasting Russia and Western civilization? Isn’t 
Europe, though divided into east and west, still a single entity anchored in ancient 
Greece and Judeo-Christian thought? 
Of course. Moreover, during the entire nineteenth century, Russia, attracted to 
Europe, drew closer to it. And the fascination was reciprocated. Rilke claimed that 
Russia was his spiritual homeland, and no one has escaped the impact of the great 
Russian novels, which remain an integral part of the common European cultural 
legacy. 
Yes, all this is true; the cultural betrothal between the two Europes remains a 
great and unforgettable memory. But it is no less true that Russian communism 
vigorously reawakened Russia’s old anti-Western obsessions and turned it brutally 
against Europe. 
But 
Russia isn’t my subject and I don’t want to wander into its immense 
complexities, about which I’m not especially knowledgeable. I want simply to make 
this 
is 
point once more: On the eastern border of the West—more than anywhere 
else —Russia 
seen not just as one more European power but as a singular civiliza- 
tion, an other civilization. 
This is why the countries in Central Europe feel that the change in their destiny 
that occurred after 1945 is not merely a political catastrophe: It is also an attack on 
their civilization. The deep meaning of their resistance is the struggle to preserve 
their identity—or, to put it another way, to preserve their Westernness. 
There are no longer any illusions about the regimes of Russia’s satellite coun- 
Central Europe 
tries. 
219 
But what we forget is their essential tragedy: These countries have vanished 
from the map of the West. 
Why has this disappearance remained invisible? We can locate the cause in 
Central Europe itself. 
The history of the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians has been 
turbulent and fragmented. Their traditions of statehood have been weaker and less 
continuous tharr those of the larger European nations. Boxed in by the Germans on 
one side and the Russians on the other, the nations of Central Europe have used up 
I 
their strength in the struggle to survive and to preserve their languages. Since they 
have never been entirely integrated into the consciousness of Europe, they have 
remained the least known and the most fragile part of the West—hidden, even 
further, by the curtain of their strange and scarcely accessible languages. 
The Austrian empire had the great opportunity of making Central Europe into a 
strong, unified state. But the Austrians, alas, were divided between an arrogant 
Pan-German nationalism and their own Central European mission. They did not 
succeed in building a federation of equal nations, and their failure has been the 
misfortune of the whole of Europe. Dissatisfied, the other nations of Central Europe 
blew apart their empire in 1918, without realizing that in spite of its inadequacies it 
was irreplaceable. After the First World War, Central Europe was therefore trans- 
formed into a region of small, weak states, whose vulnerability ensured first Hitler’s 
conquest and ultimately Stalin’s triumph. Perhaps for this reason, in the European 
memory these countries always seem to be the source of dangerous trouble. 
And, to be frank, I feel that the error made by Central Europe was owing to what 
call the “ideology of the Slavic world.” I say “ideology” advisedly, for it is only a 
piece of political mystification invented in the nineteenth century. The Czechs (in 
spite 
of 
the 
severe warnings of their most respected leaders) loved to brandish 
naively their “Slavic ideology” as a defense against German aggressiveness. The 
Russians, on the other hand, enjoyed making use of it to justify their own imperial 
ambitions. “The Russians like to label everything Russian as Slavic, so that later 
they can label everything Slavic as Russian,” the great Czech writer Karel Havlicek 
declared in 1844, trying to warn his compatriots against their silly and ignorant 
enthusiasm for Russia. It was ignorant because the Czechs, for a thousand years, 
have never had any direct contact with Russia. In spite of their linguistic kinship, the 
Czechs and the Russians have never shared a common world: neither a common 
history nor a common culture. The relationship between the Poles and the Russians, 
though, has never been anything less than a struggle of life and death. 
Joseph Conrad was always irritated by the label “Slavic soul” that people loved 
to 
he 
slap on him and his books because of his Polish origins, and, about sixty years 
ago, 
wrote that “nothing could be more alien to what is called in the literary 
world the ‘Slavic spirit’ than the Polish temperament with its chivalric devotion to 
moral constraints and its exaggerated respect for individual rights.” (How well I 
understand him! I, too, know of nothing more ridiculous than this cult of obscure 
depths, this noisy and empty sentimentality of the “Slavic soul” that is attributed to 
me from time to time!) 
Nevertheless, the idea of a Slavic world is a commonplace of world historiogra- 
220 
THE RETURN OF POLITICS 
phy. The division of Europe after 1945—-which united this supposed Slavic world 
(including the poor Hungarians and Romanians whose language is not, of course, 
Slavic—but why bother over trifles?)—has therefore seemed almost like a natural 
solution. 
So 
is 
it 
the 
disappearance? 
fault 
of 
Central Europe that the West hasn’t even noticed its 
Not entirely. At the beginning of our century, Central Europe was, despite its 
political weakness, a great cultural center, perhaps the greatest. And, admittedly, 
while the importance of Vienna, the city of Freud and Mahler, is readily acknowl- 
edged today, its importance and originality make little sense unless they are seen 
against the background of the other countries and cities that together participated in, 
and contributed creatively to, the culture of Central Europe. If the school of Schén- 
berg founded the twelve-tone system, the Hungarian Béla Barték, one of the great- 
est - 
musicians of the twentieth century, knew how to discover the last original 
possibility in music based on the tonal principle. With the work of Kafka and 
Hasek, Prague created the great counterpart in the novel to the work of the Viennese 
Musil and Broch. The cultural dynamism of the non-German-speaking countries 
was intensified even more after 1918, when Prague offered the world the innova- 
tions of structuralism and the Prague Linguistic Circle. And in Poland the great 
trinity of Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Stanislas Witkiewicz anticipated 
the European modernism of the 1950s, notably the so-called theater of the absurd. 
A 
question arises: Was this entire creative explosion just a coincidence of geog- 
raphy? Or was it rooted in a long tradition, a shared past? Or, to put it another way: 
Does Central Europe constitute a true cultural configuration with its own history? 
And if such a configuration exists, can it be defined geographically? What are its 
borders? 
It 
state: 
would be senseless to try to draw its borders exactly. Central Europe is not a 
It 
is 
a 
culture or a fate. Its borders are imaginary and must be drawn and 
redrawn with each new historical situation. 
. 
Central Europe therefore cannot be defined and determined by political frontiers 
(which are inauthentic, always imposed by invasions, conquests, and occupations), 
but by the great common situations that reassemble peoples, regroup them in ever 
new ways along the imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm 
inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same com- 
mon tradition. 
Sigmund Freud’s parents came from Poland, but young Sigmund spent his 
childhood in Moravia, in present-day Czechoslovakia. Edmund Husserl and Gustav 
Mahler also spent their childhoods there. The Viennese novelist Joseph Roth had his 
roots in Poland. The great Czech poet Julius Zeyer was born in Prague to a German- 
speaking family; it was his own choice to become Czech. The mother tongue of 
Hermann Kafka, on the other hand, was Czech, while his son Franz took up 
German. The key figure in the Hungarian revolt of 1956, the writer Tibor Déry, 
came from a German-Hungarian family, and my dear friend <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, the excel- 
lent novelist, is Hungario- Yugoslav. What a tangle of national destinies among even 
the 
most representative figures of each country! 
And all of the names I’ve just mentioned are those of Jews. Indeed, no other part 
Central Europe 
of 
its 
221 
of the world has been so deeply marked by the influence of Jewish genius. Aliens 
everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted above national quarrels, the Jews in the 
twentieth century were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central 
Europe. They were its intellectual cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators 
spiritual unity. That’s why I love the Jewish heritage and cling to it with as 
much passion and nostalgia as though it were my own. 
Another thing makes the Jewish people so precious to me: In their destiny the 
fate 
of 
Central Europe seems to be concentrated, reflected, and to have found its 
symbolic image. What is Central Europe? An uncertain zone of small nations 
between Russia and Germany. I underscore the words: small nation. Indeed, what 
are the Jews if not a small nation, the small nation par excellence? The only one of 
all 
the 
small nations of all time which has survived empires and the devastating 
march of History. 
But what is a small nation? I offer you my definition: The small nation is one 
whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can 
disappear and it knows it. A French, a Russian, or an English man is not used to 
asking questions about the very survival of his nation. His anthems speak only of 
grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, however, starts with the verse: “Poland 
has 
not yet perished... .” 
Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a 
vision based on a deep distrust of history. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, 
that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate—that is the history 
of 
conquerers. The people of Central Europe are not conquerers. They cannot be 
separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the 
wrong side of this history; they are its victims and outsiders. It’s this disabused view 
of history that is the source of their culture, of their wisdom, of the “nonserious 
spirit” that mocks grandeur and glory. “Never forget that only in opposing History 
as 
such can we resist the history of our own day.” I would love to engrave this 
sentence by Witold Gombrowicz above the entry gate to Central Europe. 
Thus it was in this region of small nations who have “not yet perished” that 
Europe’s vulnerability, all of Europe’s vulnerability, was more clearly visible before 
anywhere else. Actually, in our modern world where power has a tendency to 
become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few big countries, ail 
European nations run the risk of becoming small nations and of sharing their fate. In 
this sense the destiny of Central Europe anticipates the destiny of Europe in general, 
and its culture assumes an enormous relevance. 
Today, all of Central Europe has been subjugated by Russia with the exception 
of 
little Austria, which, more by chance than necessity, has retained its indepen- 
dence, but ripped out of its Central European setting, it has lost most of its indi- 
vidual character and ali of its importance. The disappearance of the cultural home of 
Central Europe was certainly one of the greatest events of the century for all of 
Western civilization. So, I repeat my question: How could it possibly have gone 
unnoticed and unnamed? 
The answer is simple: Europe hasn’t noticed the disappearance of its cultural 
home because Europe no longer perceives its unity as a cultural unity. 
In 
fact, what is European unity based on? 
222 
the 
THE RETURN OF POLITICS 
In 
the 
Middle Ages, it was based on a shared religion. In the modern era, in 
which the medieval God has been changed into a Deus absconditus [hidden God], 
religion bowed out, giving way to culture, which became the expression of the 
supreme values by which European humanity understood itself, defined itself, iden- 
tified itself as European. 
Now it seems, that another change is taking place in our century, as important as 
one fhat divided the Middle Ages from the modern era. Just as God long ago 
gave way to culture, culture in turn is giving way. 
But to what and to whom? What realm of supreme values will be capable of 
uniting Europe? Technical feats? The marketplace? The mass media? (Will the great 
poet be replaced by the great journalist?) Or by politics? But by which politics? The 
right 
or 
the 
left? 
Is 
there 
a 
discernible shared ideal that still exists above this 
Manichaeanism of the left and the right that is as stupid as it is insurmountable? Will 
it 
be the principle of tolerance, respect for the beliefs and ideas of other people? But 
won't this tolerance become empty and useless if it no longer protects a rich 
creativity or a strong set of ideas? Or should we understand the abdication of culture 
as 
the 
a 
sort of deliverance, to which we should ecstatically abandon ourselves? Or will 
Deus absconditus return to fill the empty space and reveal himself? I don’t 
know, 1 know nothing about it. I think I know only that culture has bowed out. 
The last direct personal experience of the West that Central European countries 
remember is the period from 1918 to 1938. Their picture of the West, then, is of the 
West in the past, of a West in which culture had not yet entirely bowed out. 
With this in mind, I want to stress a significant circumstance: The Central 
European revolts were not nourished by the newspapers, radio, or television—that 
is, 
by the “media.” They were prepared, shaped, realized by novels, poetry, theater, 
cinema, historiography, literary reviews, popular comedy and cabaret, philosoph- 
ical discussions—that is, by culture. The mass media—which, for the French and 
Americans, are indistinguishable from whatever the West today is meant to be — 
played no part in these revolts (since the press and television were completely under 
state 
control). 
That’s why, when the Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, they did everything 
possible to destroy Czech culture. This destruction had three meanings: First, it 
destroyed the center of the opposition; second, it undermined the identity of the 
nation, enabling it to be more easily swallowed up by Russian civilization; third, it 
put a violent end to the modern era, the era in which culture still represented the 
realization of supreme values. 
This third consequence seems to me the most important. In effect, totalitarian 
Russian civilization is the radical negation of the modern West, the West created 
four centuries ago at the dawn of the modern era: the era founded on the authority of 
the 
thinking, doubting individual, and on an artistic creation that expressed his 
uniqueness. The Russian invasion has thrown Czechoslovakia into a “postcultural” 
era and left it defenseless and naked before the Russian army and the omnipresent 
state television. 
While still shaken by this triply tragic event which the invasion of Prague 
represented, I arrived in France and tried to explain to French friends the massacre 
of culture that had taken place after the invasion: “Try to imagine! All of the literary 
Central Europe 
and 
223 
cultural reviews were liquidated! Every one, without exception! That never 
happened before in Czech history, not even under the Nazi occupation during the 
war.” 
Then my friends would look at me indulgently with an embarrassment that I 
understood only later. When all the reviews in Czechoslovakia were liquidated, the 
entire nation knew it, and was in a state of anguish because of the immense impact 
of 
the 
event. 
If 
ail 
the 
reviews in France or England disappeared, no one would 
notice it, not even their editors. In Paris, even in a completely cultivated milieu, 
during dinner parties people discuss television programs, not reviews. For culture 
has 
already bowed out. Its disappearance, which we experienced in Prague as a 
catastrophe, a shock, a tragedy, is perceived in Paris as something banal and insig- 
nificant, scarcely visible, a nonevent. 
After the destruction of the Austrian empire, Central Europe lost its ramparts. 
Didn’t it lose its soul after Auschwitz, which swept the Jewish nation off its map? 
And after having been torn away from Europe in 1945, does Central Europe still 
_ 
exist? 
Yes, its creativity and its revolts suggest that it has “not yet perished.” But if to 
live means to exist in the eyes of those we love, then Central Europe no longer 
exists. More precisely: in the eyes of its beloved Europe, Central Europe is just a 
part of the Soviet empire and nothing more, nothing more. 
And why should this surprise us? By virtue of its political system, Central 
Europe is the East; by virtue of its cultural history, it is the West. But since Europe 
itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central 
Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe 
only Eastern Europe. 
Central Europe, therefore, should fight not only against its big oppressive neigh- 
bor but also against the subtle, relentless pressure of time, which is leaving the era 
culture in its wake. That’s why in Central European revolts there is something 
of 
conservative, nearly anachronistic: They are desperately trying to restore the past, 
the past of culture, the past of the modern era. It is only in that period, only in a 
world that maintains a cultural dimension, that Central Europe can still defend its 
identity, still be seen for what it is. 
The real tragedy for Central Europe, then, is not Russia but Europe: this Europe 
that represented a value so great that the director of the Hungarian News Agency 
was ready to die for it, and for which he did indeed die. Behind the Iron Curtain, he 
understood. 
did not suspect that the times had changed and that in Europe itself Europe was no 
longer experienced as a value. He did not suspect that the sentence he was sending 
by telex beyond the borders of his flat country would seem outmoded and would not 
be 
‘ 

Summarize the above text.