My Eastern Europe
An Attempt to Summarise
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The historian Karl Schlögel looks back on a lifelong preoccupation with Eastern Europe. His interest in what lay outside of West German reality, which was awakened in his early childhood, continued during his student years in the discovery of Russian literature, the Soviet avantgarde, heretical communism, and the Polish labour movement. Travelling was a decisive means of gaining knowledge – the first trips took place as early as the mid-1960s, and countless more followed after communism’s fall. Encounters with the real expanse of the “third Europe” – which had largely disappeared from Western consciousness but had been merely concealed by the continent’s division – opened up new historical perspectives. However, the work on an undivided history that began back then now seems to have reached a new epochal threshold.
(Osteuropa 1-3/2025, pp. 167–174)