Goodbye, Eastern Europe

> Go to Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bratislava, Wrocław, Debrecen, Timișoara, or Tallinn. Walk the streets. Visit the malls and cellphone kiosks. How would you know that you aren’t in Bremen, Charleroi, Newcastle, or Fargo?

As one who actually lived or traveled to several of those places, I'd submit that the answer is quite a few things.

There's surface level resemblance between the two lists when you're in a shopping mall or a shop heavy district. Outside of the latter, however, Western cities and countryside stand out as much wealthier in all sorts of ways. In particular less places that look like they're in shambles.

The contrast is comparable what you can encounter in the US countryside (which at times is borderline 3rd world-ish) vs e.g. major US metropoles (which compare to major Western European cities in sophistication and wealth).

Eastern European here.

Yes, the heritage of the iron curtain is slowly disappearing, but I would not say that it is happening as fast as the author thinks it is.

As an example, there is still a serious division between the "nationals" and "occupants" (Russian speaking people) in Latvia. We have different politicians, celebrations, churches, companies and neighborhoods for people speaking in either the Latvian or Russian language.

Youth still tries to get away from the country since the working conditions are not the best. I'm lucky to be working in IT, where it's much better than the for the rest of the population (developers tend to make more than our politicians), but that's due to western countries looking for cheap IT labor (cheap for them; but good money for locals).

I've lived in the US for a while now, but I'm still also Eastern European (Bulgaria) and I completely disagree that it's "disappearing".

Romania, Serbia, "Macedonia" (yes, the quotes are intentional, and yes, I know it's not cool, and yes, this is pretty typical), Bulgaria - they're all on a completely different level of human development, corruption, values, etc.

Part of the reason is 500 years of Ottoman rule, another part is the close proximity and close relations with the Russian Empire/USSR/Russia, but someone who's Czech or Hungarian or a Croat is much closer culturally with someone from Germany/Austria than someone from Bulgaria is.

Being part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and part of the Ottoman Empire completely changed how those countries developed, and the situations they're in now, even though countries are sometimes only hundreds of miles apart.

Hungary, Czechoslovakia had revolutions, in '56 in '68 respectively, to attempt to escape the iron grip of Mother Russia while a large portion of Bulgarians to this day are Russophiles and nostalgic about those days, not to mention EU- and NATO-sceptics.

Props to Western Europe for literally dragging countries like Bulgaria and Romania and Serbia away from the clutches of the Russian Bear and into Western Civilization, but I'm not convinced they'll be successful.

"Enough with the stereotypes..."

And then some more paragraphs of stereotypes.

People here are complex, just as they are everywhere. The washing-over of several different empires has added even more layers to the cultures of Eastern Europe, but to paint it as uniformly bleak is to miss the humor and wit and diversity of this place.

The trappings of modern consumer life are just a varnish on this place. Only a shallow reading would mistake them for anything else. Master a Slavic or Baltic or Turkic language and then dive down the rabbit hole. It's fun. It's weird. And it's definitely not dead.

Beware: historian R. J. Evans is known and controversial for having weird theses about Central/Eastern Europe and supporting them with misrepresentative, cherry-picked arguments.

The essay quoted in the article is a prime example:

He compares the humanisic philosophers of Austria to the natural philosophers of the West, while ignoring the significant actual scientific output of the Empire (things like Auenbrugger's invention of percussion as a diagnostic technique, Semmelweis' introduction of antiseptics, Loschmidt's groundbreaking work on ideal gases). He also deliberately mixes events from different time periods into a confused narrative: for example, Baron Chaos' Austria was the massively German-speaking southeastern part of the HRE, which does not fit the description of "too many nationalities, too many fractious nobles and rebellious provinces" more representative of the late, sprawling empire (which, by the way, also had scientific output comparable to the West).

I for one am happy that we can buy (the same) clothes, do the same things and almost live the same life in Eastern Europe as in Western Europe.

Maybe foreigners increasingly miss out on a good laugh as the horse carriages disappear from the Balkans. Maybe a westerner is disappointed that his long weekend slumming in Prague is spoiled by normalty. Maybe an intellectual's romantic dream of Eastern Europe is ruined.

But for those of us who live here, it's better this way. Maybe not for many people in the older generations, though.

It's a common mistake that everything behind the iron curtain is considered "Eastern Europe".

Say this to someone from Bratislava, Prague or anyone else of that region, and they will correct you that they live in "Central Europe".

While we (Western Europe and probably US) associate those countries with the Soviet influence, they themselves consider themselves 100% European, and didn't understand why Western Europe never came to rescue them. They want to forget the Soviet influence as fast as possible.

The author touches on something I've often thought about - the crazy ethnolinguistic diversity within the Austro-Hungarian empire and the fringes of the Russian one.

Consider Lviv - Polish, Austrian, and Ukranian; Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish. Or, Bratislava: 40% German, 40% Hungarian, and 15% Slovak. The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof wrote of the conditions in Bialystok which inspired him:

    The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Białystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies.

In the aftermath of WWII, the populations within the former Austrian empire became extremely stratified, with the notable exception of Yugoslavia, which retained it's multi-ethnic character.

Now that we have an open Europe, the once-strict are starting to become less meaningful again. I wonder to what extent the populations of Europe will again intermix. Sadly, seeing the Balkans subdivide in to smaller and smaller states does not give one hope.

I'm only half Polish, but I live in Poland and I drive a miniature Fiat.

So don't worry. Everything is still fine.

Curiously few mentions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia in the first half. You'd think they've produced enough literature to be mentioned, but no.

Then this gem:

> A haphazard construction, held together by little more than dynastic loyalty and a touch of baroque magic, the realm of the Habsburgs had an essentially comic nature. Its chief sins lay less in violence than in needless complication, an endless and pointless elaboration of court ritual and bureaucratic protocol.

Not sure where this essay is headed; it starts off by noting the increased cosmopolitanization of contemporary Eastern Europe as affected by peacetime capitalism, while pointing that the psychological stereotypes live on in fewer and fewer places that are more rural and further from the malls and thoroughfares of second-tier cities. But then it winds through a retrospective of many decades of literature defined by different circumstances of the time: a multi-ethnic hodgepodge of people living in alternating periods of peacetime and war who often dipped down to dry humour to maintain some semblance of normalcy and sanity in spite of the political, military, and economic conflicts hanging over their lives.

Perhaps more so than in any other part of the world, Eastern Europe's people have been more acutely defined by economic inequality than anywhere else: whether from the Empire days when one's ethnicity was secondary to one's status as a serf or civis or nobility until it came time to kill each other in someone else's war, or from the Eastern Bloc times when socialist governments handed down a bureaucratic and unremarkable forced egalitarianism that applied only to the masses but not the ruling class, even if it gave them affordable housing and education and healthcare and womens' and workers' rights, or today when middle-class people in Timișoara and Debrecen can buy world-class consumer goods but good jobs are few and far between, and lucrative opportunities lie in few fields, or on the other side of the continent, or in remittances.

Yes, perhaps the stereotype of Eastern Europe is dead, and its cities are more lively to the untrained eye. But plenty of problems still exist; they're just hidden beneath a veneer of disposable spending of South Korean goods to absorb people's momentary desires while being unable to cultivate lasting wealth. It's still a deeply troubled place, albeit in ways that the banlieues of France, the run-down districts of Brussels, the declining Midlands, the small towns of America can relate.

Well, the same can be said about Western Europe. When did you last see a person in a national costume in Austria?

Good that my country (Russia) stays the same and we keep our own culture and everything.

Looking at a physical map of Europe is an interesting way to visualise how arbitrary the split into Western and Eastern Europe used to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe#/media/File:Europe_topo...

When I grew up in Western Germany, the world seemed to end at the Iron Curtain. Would be great if this is indeed changing now.

I once referred to Czech Republic as part of Eastern Europe to a Czech and was swiftly corrected. He felt it was Central Europe. I was grouping it as 'formerly Communist', but I'm sure Kafka would find more in common with Germany than Serbia. These definitions shed little light. Reading Hasek, even concepts like Austria-Hungary are nearly useless beyond knowing where the taxes go.

What a poorly timed article...with Russian aggression given implicit license by Trump's election and the rising tide of far right nationalism in Western Europe, the author just might get their (very bizarre and offensive imo) wish of a return to "a shared experience of occupation and exclusion, the permanent-seeming weight of economic backwardness, treasured memories of defeat".

I don't know about our neighbors but us Slovenes consider ourselves as Central European. Even Wikipedia says so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe

Go to rural areas of Ukraine and Belarus. Eastern Europe is still kicking there hard.

An amazing fetishization of the "psychogeography" of what is colloquially called Eastern Europe. Borders which represent a bastardization of cultures and partitions for empires long past.

It starts off by playing on stereotypes of dirtyness, grit, and sanctuaries of sexual promiscuity whose location changes by which first world country you ask. Before diving into existential questions and nuances of a variety of cultures in the former second world. A term whose meaning is largely erased from the collective conscious and lost for a colliqualism of first and third world ambiguity.