After the War at Half Past Five: Central Europe, Its Literatures, and Us

Book project: After the War at Half Past Five: Central Europe, Its Literatures, and Us

“After the war at half past five!” Josef ?vejk shouts to his friends before being deployed to the front. Their appointed meeting place: a pub in Prague called At the Chalice. Since 1920, when Jaroslav Ha?ek put this surreal farewell in the mouth of his “Good Soldier ?vejk,” it has become a modern classic quote. The First World War, in which ?vejk soon fights, inaugurated central Europe’s “short twentieth century,” an era of fresh starts and abrupt endings, extreme violence, replays of oppression and liberation. Since 1990, this history, imbued with imperialism and in some respects colonialism, has functioned as the historical ground beneath the region’s literatures, as a context of reflection and a source of material. For all their variety, key texts from around a dozen countries stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans, written in at least twenty languages, often have in common a distinct insistence on emancipation, shows of aesthetic defiance, and, last but not least, an implicit understanding of the need to assertively speak up to be heard amidst the more dominant narrative communities to the east and west. The book will investigate these kinds of commonalities, revealing and analyzing ways in which more recent literature from (eastern) central Europe fictionally translates a historical region’s traumas into dysfunctional family structures, fragmentary memories, or self-alienated cities and landscapes—and very often into breakdowns of communication, or indeed symptoms of a communicative pathology. This syndrome—an injury inflicted by insult—is particularly evident in certain neural clusters such as city versus country, center versus periphery, and West versus East, but especially in the overlapping, often reciprocal colonial experiences of polyethnic transitional spaces. At the same time, the texts portray an accelerating present with new fears, new insults—and, most of all, new hopes. If only for the worst to be past. For it to be “after the war”: time to reunite and catch up on what has happened. Especially with the—overtly addressed—Europe that lies beyond the supposed semiperiphery, which is in fact the continent’s true center.