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Abstract
This chapter discusses a multilingual community of writers and intellectuals who gathered around the idea of a Central European culture in the 1980s, during the last decade of the Cold War. Czeslaw Milosz, Danilo Kis, Milan Kundera, György Konrád and others advocated the idea of a Central European culture. Their own work and their biographies, immersed in and marked by a triple historical trauma of Nazism, communism and endemic nationalism, were, as they claimed, both evidence of and a consequence of a specific Central European, historical imagination, marked by a 'specific tone and sensibility' (Milosz). They convened on a number of occasions, commented on each others' work and referred to each other, but they had no common language. This is all the more poignant as they did claim to be heirs of the actual cosmopolitan culture of pre-WWII Central Europe, which had German (and to some extend Yiddish) as a lingua franca. This chapter first explores how the self-proclaimed Central Europeans of the 1980s constructed their sense of community on an idea of multilingualism without having an actual lingua franca. This is followed by an analysis of how their invocation of a pre-WWII cosmopolitan culture of multilingualism relates to the actual linguistic situation a major multilingual writers, Franz Kafka.
Longing for a lost multilingualism
The Czech writer Milan Kundera (Brno, 1929), in exile since the 1968 Prague Spring, launched a debate in Central Europe when he published The Tragedy of Central Europe' in the New York Review of Books on 26 April 1 984. Although it was not the first time the region was mentioned as a separate cultural and historical entity between East and West, Kundera's essay synthesized the ideas and sentiments that emerged both in the countries under Soviet rule and among Central-European exiles in the West. Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), exiled since the early 1950s and Nobel laureate in 1980 had already identified his 'corner of Europe' in his 1983 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University.
Kundera and Milosz became the pillars of a community of writers and poets who mosdy lived in exile during the second half of the 1980s. They discussed the cultural and literary consequences of their common past and shared literary traditions. They attempted to distinguish...