Common Historical Roots
Susan Sontag:
Welcome to this afternoon's session. Our first speaker
will be George Konrad.
George Konrad:
When speaking of Central and Eastern Europe, we
must remember that the different nations reached their transition to na–
tionhood in very different periods of their histories. There are those that
were already kingdoms in medieval times and somehow now find them–
selves thousand-year-old nations. These were the Polish, the Czech, and
the Hungarian kingdoms. Then there were other nations, some of them
latecomers. Among these are the Serbs. The Croats are a bit special be–
cause they played a very strong autonomous role in the former Austro–
Hungarian Empire. Romania came at the end of the nineteenth century,
as did Bulgaria; and there are two nations, Slovakia and Croatia, that
became independent sovereign states in a rather bad period - during the
Second World War and with the help of the Third Reich. Under what
auspices a nation was created is quite important, because when some
people perceive what the situation is now, they prefer to forget these last
forty years; beyond those years, they look back to history. With history ,
they justify and legitimate themselves; they build their traditions, their
collective mind, their common consciousness and historical past. There–
fore, historical reflections are extremely important in the construction of
the actual mentality of these nations. Of course, there are also many
historical mythologies. That is why some politicians speak in the name of
"a three-thousand-year-old history." History is always used as a political
tool to justify one national political ambition or another, some seeming
reality, some facade of reality, some ideological ambitions. Thus we have
nationally politicized historiography, as well as historicized politics.
It is quite characteristic, and even funny, that there are so many his–
tory teachers among the new politicians, deputies, and ministers. Some–
how they cannot restrain themselves from giving historical lectures to
their nations from their positions in high office. Therefore, history be–
comes one of the tools of the struggle. A kind of restoration-minded,
mythology- and symbol-searching process is taking place in the collective
minds of these countries. Some of it derives from the fact that it's hard
to find a point of departure from the years of Communism, because the
entire system, the so-call ed
allciell regil1le
as a whole, is being blamed. But
unfortunately, all these nations and people partook of that system and
somehow found their
modus vivelldi
in it, and it would be a very super–
ficial description of the situation to say that once everyone suffered and
