The Substrate of Culture: Central Europe as Intellectual Space
Rezumat
Abstract: There have been numerous definitions of Central Europe, from Friedrich Naumann who defined Mitteleuropa as the widest extent of “German” holdings to Milan Kundera who argued that Central Europe contained all the countries “boxed in by the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other.” Others have argued that there is no such thing as Central Europe other than the remnant left when Europe is divided into East and West, a useful shorthand for a region with no real coherence. This article takes a new approach and defines Central Europe as the area grounded in Germanophone philosophy. I use Germanophone here because it was not just “Germans” who used the language for philosophy, and I am using scare quotes around the term German, since there have been many, differing definitions of that nationality as well. Germanophone philosophy created an intellectual arena different than that of English, French, or Russian in Central Europe from Christian Wolff through the Second World War. This philosophical grounding created what I call a substrate of soil, a layer upon which artists, thinkers, and writers grew in a myriad of different ways, while still having a rich connection to the Germanophone tradition.
Keywords: Mitteleuropa, Central Europe, Milan Kundera, Germanophone, Philosophy, Franz Kafka
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