On the Central Europe Debate, this article both connects and separates it from a debate among historians about Central Europe as separate cultural region, which started in the seventies.. E.g. the intellectuals were really for the re-joining of the two sides of the Iron Curtain, not an identity separate also from the West (but a purer essence of it if we look at Kundera).
Hm, maybe I should write a diary.
Or maybe you are already better-read for that :-)
At any rate, thanks for sending me on this search. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
That must have been muddled up with the German factor at least since the rise of Prussia in the Seven Years' War. If my source is right, the Central Europe idea got traction in the West in the form of the German Threat (and in Prussia/Germany Mitteleuropa became popular in the form of natural hegemonic area for regional dominance). Then again, it also claims that the East-West division idea finally supplanted the North-South idea (in which Russia was the Giant of the North) only with the Crimean War. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
