I must admit I had no clue. Intrigued, I started off for a search; and so far I find there was apparently a so-called "Central Europe Debate", in which Konrád participated; kicked off by Milan Kundera's 1984 essay "The Tragedy of Central Europe", positing that in Central Europe is a part of the West kidnapped by the East, where intellectuals fight for European values against Soviet-Russian "de-Europeanisation", and that Central European intellectualism was the real center of European civilisation. That's strong tobacco indeed. Apparently, his strongest critic in the ensuing debate was emigrant Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. I am still reading.

(At any rate, while I may have absorbed Cewntral Europe myths created by the eighties dissident movement, I doubt my geography class curriculum was influenced by Konrád & co.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

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.}

Apparently, a central theme in the historians' debate on Central Europe from the seventies was the development of feudalism as something separating out such a region, in particular the second serfdom. Which brings me to thing about an earlier era. Catholics contend that what connects Europe historically above all is its common Christian past. But the spread of Christianity was just as much the spread of the then modern society model of feudalism.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}