Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight.

A quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from the vantage point of a post-Cold War, globalised, world, there is a need to address the relative neglect of postcommunism in analysis of postcolonial and neo-colonial configurations of power and influence. This book proposes new critical perspectives on several themes and concepts that have emerged within, or been propagated by, postcolonial studies. These themes include structures of exclusion/ inclusion; formations of nationalism, structures of othering, and representations of difference; forms and historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (involving issues of collective memory/amnesia and the re-writing of history); resistance as a complex of cultural practices; and concepts such as alterity, ambivalence, self-colonisation, dislocation, hegemonic discourse, minority, and subaltern cultures. Taken together, this volume suggests that some of the methodological instruments of postcolonial criticism can be fruitfully applied to the study of postcommunist cultures and, conversely, that the experience of the Soviet brand of imperialist rule in the form of communism in East-Central Europe can function as an ideological moderator in Third-World oriented, Marxist-inspired, postcolonial discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Although the 1956 Hungarian uprising failed to liberate the country from Soviet domination, it became a symbol of freedom for people throughout Eastern Europe and beyond. Labeling the events a counterrevolution, communist authorities exacted revenge in two years of terror and intimidation. Then, for the next thirty years, they pursued a policy of forced forgetting, attempting to obliterate public memory of the events. As communism unraveled in the late 1980s, the 1956 revolution was resurrected as inspiration for a new political order. In Imagining Postcommunism, Beverly James demonstrates how 1956 became a foundational myth according to which the bloody events of that fall led to the ceremonial reburial of the martyred prime minister Imre Nagy in 1989, free elections in 1990, and the withdrawal of the last Soviet soldiers on June 19, 1991. She shows how museums, monuments, and holiday rituals have aided the construction of a new Hungary through the reclamation and expression of competing memories of the critical events of 1956. Surveying the dazzling array of ceremonies, exhibitions, and memorials commemorating the revolution and its heros, James invites readers to consider the difference between the communist regime’s master narrative of 1956, with its smug, false unity, and the multiple, polemical stories woven by competing political forces in postcommunist Hungary. A thoughtful application of communication and historical theories on the uses of memory, this study offers a unique perspective on a crucial episode in the history of Eastern Europe.

The history of reform movements in postwar Eastern Europe is ultimately ironic, inasmuch as the reformers' successes and defeats alike served to discredit and demoralize the regimes they sought to redeem. The essays in this volume examine the historic and present-day role of the internal critics who, whatever their intentions, used Marxism as critique to demolish Marxism as ideocracy, but did not succeed in replacing it. Included here are essays by James P. Scanlan on the USSR, Ferenc Feher on Hungary, Leslie Holmes on the German Democratic Republic, Raymond Taras on Poland, James Satterwhite on Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Tismaneanu on Romania, Mark Baskin on Bulgaria, and Oskar Gruenwald on Yugoslavia. In concert, the contributors provide a comprehensive intellectual history and a veritable Who's Who of revisionist Marxism in Eastern Europe.

This book examines the ways in which fiction has addressed the continent since the Second World War. Drawing on novelists from Europe and elsewhere, the volume analyzes the literary response to seven dominant concerns (ideas of Europe, conflict, borders, empire, unification, migration, and marginalization), offering a ground-breaking study of how modern and contemporary writers have participated in the European debate. The sixteen essays view the chosen writers, not as representatives of national literatures, but as participants in transcontinental discussion that has occurred across borders, cultures, and languages. In doing so, the contributors raise questions about the forms of power operating across and radiating from Europe, challenging both the institutionalized divisions of the Cold War and the triumphalist narrative of continental unity currently being written in Brussels.

Shows how postwar writers in Austria and Yugoslavia re-imagined Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.

With the televised events of 1989, territories of Eastern and Central Europe that had been marked as impenetrable and inaccessible to the Western gaze exploded into visibility. As the narratives of the Cold War crumbled, new narratives emerged and new geographies were produced on and by American television. Using an understudied archive of American news broadcasts, and tracing their flashes and echoes through travel guides and narratives of return written by Eastern European-Americans, this book explores American ways of seeing and mapping communism’s disintegration and the narratives articulated around post-communist sites and subjects.

This book examines communist and post-communist literary and visual narratives, including the writings of prominent anti-communist dissidents and exiles such as Vladimir Nabokov, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, exploring important themes including how Eastern European regimes and cultures have been portrayed as totalitarian, barbarian and "Orientalist" – in contrast to the civilized "West" – disappointment in the changes brought on by post-communist transition, and nostalgia for communism.

This study reverses the question implicit in title of Christa Wolf’s now-canonical 1990 novella Was bleibt (What remains), looking instead at what was lost during the process of German reunification. It argues that, in their work during and after the Wende, most literary authors from both East and West Germany responded ambivalently to the reunification. Many felt, on the one hand, a keen sense of loss as the GDR dissolved and an expanded Federal Republic summarily absorbed former Eastern Germany. They mourned the ideals of democratic socialism, tolerance, and internationalism that the GDR had held dear, as well as the country’s rich cultural life. On the other hand, however, they recognized that the GDR was a fundamentally corrupt surveillance state whose industry weighed heavily on the environment while failing to buoy the country’s economy. By looking at works by some of the most important authors from either side of the border, this study shows that those who unequivocally embraced the reunification were clearly in the minority.

This carefully curated collection consists of 16 chapters by leading Polish and world literature scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, and, of course, Poland. An historical approach gives readers a panoramic view of Polish authors and their explicit or implicit contributions to world literature. Indeed, the volume shows how Polish authors, from Jan Kochanowski in the 16th century to the 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, have engaged with their foreign counterparts and other traditions, active participants in the global literary network and the conversations of their day. The volume features views of Polish literature and culture within theories of world literature and literary systems, with a particular attention paid to the resurgence of the idea of the physical book as a cultural artifact. This perspective is especially important since so much of today's global literary output stems from Anglophone perceptions of what constitutes literary quality and tastes. The collection also sheds light on specific issues pertaining to Poland, such as the idea of Polishness, and global phenomena, including social and economic advancement as well as ecological degradation. Some of the authors discussed, like the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz or the 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, were renowned far beyond the borders of their country, while others, like the contemporary travel writer and novelist Andrzej Stasiuk, embrace regionalism, seeing as they do in their immediate surroundings a synecdoche of the world at large. Nevertheless, the picture of Polish literature and Polish authors that emerges from these articles is that of a diverse, cosmopolitan cohort engaged in a mutually rewarding relationship with what the late French critic Pascale Casanova has called “the world republic of letters.”