A Reading Room
Literature in East Central Europe since 1989
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Eduard Goldstücker’s prediction that the historically significant novel of the present would come from East Central Europe was promptly fulfilled in Péter Nádas’s A Book of Memories. The works of Aleksandar Tišma and Imre Kertész left their readers shaken. Their literature proved itself to be mature enough to recount the break with civilisation that was Auschwitz and the horror of war, about the contamination of every square meter of Central European soil with guilt and crime. Younger authors are making accessible historical metropolises, landscapes, and expanses that had lain in the shadow of the Iron Curtain and over which the fog of forgetting had settled. And as already was once seen on the ruins of the Habsburg Empire: The melancholy and grotesque permeate the great Central European literature.
(Osteuropa 2-3/2009, pp. 205–228)
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As the fog lifted
Když se zvedla mlha