CENTRAL EUROPEAN WRITERS
AS A SOCIAL FORCE
651
Provinciality is the key concept here. Central Europe is keenly aware
of its marginality, of living on the periphery. Of course, we Americans
are even more on the periphery, though for most of this century we
haven't felt it and for its second, post-war half, at least, we have even
managed to convince Europe that we are not. Now that Europe is
making a comeback, we are on the point of being shunted back into
marginality, but more about that later.
For now, let us go back to the beginning of the century and place
our relations with Central Europe in the framework of recent history.
To a great extent World War One made us an integral part of Europe
for the first time since our Revolution, and we made the most of the
situation at Versailles, when Wi lson played a major role in carving the
Habsburg Empire into a number of successor states. We did not, how–
ever, follow through. We made no protest twenty years later, in 1938,
when Sir Neville Chamberlain, fully aware of Hitler's intent to invade
Czechoslovakia, referred in a radio broadcast to the British Empire to "a
quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know noth–
ing." (Another Englishman had betrayed an infinitely more benign igno–
rance of or indifference to the area three centuries earlier when he set
scenes of his play
The Winter's Tale
on "the seacoast of Bohemia.")
If Munich and 1938 led inexorably to the outbreak of the war, Yalta
and 1945 brought on its long, cold aftermath . Here is how George
Kennan described the situation at the time in a letter to Charles Bohlen,
Roosevelt's right-hand man at Yalta: "I recognize that Russia's war ef–
fort has been masterful and effective and must, to a certain extent, find its
reward at the expense of other peoples in Eastern and Central Europe."
Kennan's plan, eventually adopted, was to contain Stalin by partitioning
Europe, to "divide Europe frankly into spheres of influence, keep our–
selves out of the Russian sphere and keep the Russians out of ours." In
other words, as he puts it even more bluntly elsewhere in the letter, "the
United States should write off Eastern and Southeastern Europe."
Hence the Cold War (before the hot one was over); hence the Iron
Curtain ("From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," said
Churchill in the speech - to a small Missouri college - that gave a name
to the concept, "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent");
hence the Soviet bloc. The idea of the Soviet bloc banished whatever
might have remained of the idea of Central Europe. Admittedly, when
an uprising or a springtime or a paroxysm of martial legality occurred,
we took separate notice of the country in question, especially if an inva–
sion followed and flooded our country with freedom-fighter emigres.
But we saw them less as fleeing their country than their bloc, a bloc as
uniform and gray as the blocks of flats lining their cities' streets.