“When someone went up the Danube to Vienna, it was said that he went to Europe”, Elias Canetti (the name is derived from the Spanish city of “Canete”, from where the family seemed to have been expulsed) wrote in the first part of his autobiography “The Rescued Tongue” in 1977. Canetti was born in Rustschuk / Ruse, Bulgaria, at the Danube and his native town became the symbolic start of the journey of the later winner of the Noble prize for literature. His Jewish forefathers were expelled from Spain after the Christian Reconquista and settled in Rustschuk as merchants. This “second diaspora” made Canetti a “Sephardic Jew”, who chose German as the “mother tongue” of his literature. Canetti’s path of life was a European one and it started in Vienna after he had crossed an invisible frontier when going up the Danube. …
If there is a distinctive division, where does east and west meet? There is an ancient invisible line from Gdansk in the north to Trieste in the south that separates the two parts with remarkable continuity from the eastern border of the Carolingian Empire to the frontier between the Austrian and Hungarian part of the Habsburg Empire to the western border of “real existing socialism” after 1947. From the Dalmatian coast to Lithuania there is a line dotted with fortresses, frontier settlements, strategic towns and historic cross roads. For centuries this area has been a point of encounters of Germans and Slavs, Austrians and Turks, Catholics and orthodox Christians. But it falls across a terrain, where peoples for centuries have met, mixed and fought. Contrary to other areas in Eastern Europe, Bohemia was until 1948 a flourishing component in the Industrial Revolution, which marked the western part off from the rest of the continent more than anything else, and it was firmly settled in the western European culture.…
Map of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Archive S.Wurm
Curiously, one of the things that Europeans have long shared, that has bound them together is a sense of their divisions. The east – west distinction was remarkably well established at a very early time in history. It is sometimes supposed today that the line dividing Eastern from Western Europe was an artificial creation of the Cold War, but that is not so. The division of the continent started with the break-up of the Roman Empire into two distinct parts in the 4th century AD. The emergence of the Carolingian Monarchy reinforced the division by giving the hitherto anarchic western part distinction and enduring frontiers. Charlemagne’s 9th century empire corresponded, curiously enough, with precision the post-war “Europe of Six”; it just left out central and southern Italy and Catalonia. The eastern boundaries of the Carolingian Empire were still imprecise just as the northern borders of Byzantium, but by the 14th century the east-west distinction was well established. Although partly based on prejudices, historical documents confirmed that invisible line that separated east from west. Conradus Celtis in the 15th century recorded a sentiment that was wide-spread in Western Europe since the 10th century: Where the Roman/Carolingian, Lothringian and Hohenzollern empires ended, there ended Europe. An Englishman travelling the Habsburg lands in 1669, Edward Brown, remarked upon entering Hungary that he left his world and entered a land quite different from western countries. Long after the Habsburgs had established effective authority over territories stretching well into today’s Ukraine, Metternich spoke of “Asia beginning at the Landstrasse [a street in the eastern part of Vienna then]”. …
