Eleven

REINVENTING CENTRAL EUROPE

Krzysztof Czyżewski

1.

“Central Europe has completely fallen to pieces, as if it was the Balkan

Peninsula, but enlarged. Thus, there is no point in putting forward any plans
or projects.” Those are not the words of a contemporary analyst of our region,
but of the late Friedrich Naumann. They were published in the last issue of his
weekly Mittel-Europa. In December 1918.
What do we see when we take a closer look at Central Europe from today’s
perspective? The concepts of Frantisek Palacky, Naumann, Jozef Piłsudski,
and Tomas Masaryk—statesmen from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries—all turned out to be unreal. The most recent idea—proposed by a
dissident—attracted world-wide attention in the 1980s. Only after the publi-
cation of Milan Kundera’s essay “The West Torn or the Tragedy of Central
Europe” did the discussion start, though many had touched upon the problem
before, including Czesław Miłosz, Josef Kroutvor, and authors connected to
the periodical Cross Currents, edited by Ladislav Matejka. A lot has been
achieved since then, as Barbara Toruńczyk describes in her Zeszyty Literackie
[Literary Notebooks] of 1987:

The East European has already got his own kingdom. It is taking shape
where he lives. The kingdom is spiritual, but deeply rooted in reality. The
East European of the post-Yalta generation is now able to do without the
cult of the West and, to be honest, he rarely thinks—and remembers hard-
ly anything—about it. He is too busy living on his own—creating new
names for Europe, at his own home, at his place.

For those words to have been expressed, something must have fundamentally
changed. Something must have changed for the editors to remove the section
“Europe at its Center” from Literary Notebooks—if we are in our own home,
and are creating “new names for Europe,” surely there is no longer any need
to strive for Central Europe. But Torunczyk wrote in 1987, and only two years
later it was clear that this was not at all the case. It turned out that this being “in
one’s own home” was only a temporary situation. It was time, it seemed, to take
down the tent and to set off on a trip to a better—or at least normal—Europe.
The case of Central Europe quickly became anachronistic, relegated to
the sidelines, stuck behind the times. It returned to its preferred state of unrea-
172 Krzysztof Czyżewski

lity within a vacuum—a state of “active pessimism,” to use the term used by
the Austrian writer Robert Musil in his novel The Man Without Qualities to
describe the infamous Kingdom of Kakanien, a fictional illustration of the
dying Habsburg realm. The 1995 decision of the editors of the main Polish
daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza [The Election Gazette], to release a sup-
plement entitled The Central European Gazette recalls, somehow, the unfor-
gettable bicycle race Wyścig Pokoju [Race of Peace]. In this case, however,
Budapest replaced East Berlin, and Bratislava suddenly appeared as a sepa-
rate capital in addition to Prague. Similarly, capitals aspiring to the Central
European sphere such as Bucharest, Kiev, Vilnius, and Ljubljana, appeared
only vaguely. Unfair though I will be to the many interesting texts published
in these supplements, it seems to me the Central European Gazette shared the
inertia of so-called Visegrád Group, which consisted of the Czech Republic,
Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, all of whom entered the European Union in
2004. It is tempting to compare its activity to the famous Parallel Action from
Musil’s novel, which “temporarily for good puts off the question of authentic
action until later consideration in accordance with active pessimism.”
But the fact is that the notion of Central Europe has been rejuvenated
outside of the Visegrád Group. In Vilnius in 1998, Almis Grybauskas even-
tually found—if only for a short time—support for the idea of a periodical
called Central Europe. An issue of Ji, a cultural magazine published by young
members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, printed in capital letters a sentence
uttered by Otto von Habsburg, Austria-Hungary’s last crown prince, who re-
signed as head of the Imperial House only in 2007, during a 1997 visit to
Lviv: “Ukraine also belongs to Central Europe.” Also in Lviv, the Centre
for the Humanities at Ivan Franko University organized a conference called
“New Ukraine—New Europe,” in which Central European identity was a key
topic of discussion. In Minsk the periodical Frahmenty was released in 1995,
with the subtitle Central European Cultural Review. When I went to a semi-
nar titled “Different Europe” in Minsk in the late 1990s, I met many people
deeply impressed by Kundera’s essay, which had been recently translated into
Belorussian. For some people the essay represented a feeling of common fate
and a chance to restore a lost identity; for others—a way to run from Russia.
One participant clearly stated: “This idea can have positive results on the
condition that its initiators and implementers are aware of the fact that it is
constrained and temporary, that it is a tactic not a strategy, physics not meta-
physics.” Another participant glanced suspiciously at Poland out of fear of
new imperial ambitions emerging under the guise of a persuasive idea …
Back at home I realized that it is relatively easy to become a European: in
school one assimilates knowledge of West European history and culture, one
has access to learning English or German, there are books by Goethe or Eco
in every bookstore, one can easily find records by Bach or The Beatles, and, on
 Reinventing Central Europe 173

top of it, there is no prejudice towards those claiming European identity. It is,
however, far more difficult to be a Central European in my home town of Sejny,
Poland. In Sejny, Central European identity means promoting co-existence
with our closest neighbors, such as the Lithuanians; in school one learns little
about their history, and there is almost nothing about their culture available in
Sejny for those who might take an interest. For non-Lithuanians, the language
is accessible neither at school nor in separate courses, and the bookstores car-
ry no books by famous Lithuanian writers such as Antanas Baranauskas or
Tomas Venclova, nor are there records available by Mykalojus Konstantinas
Čiurlionis. And on top of it all, there are hang-ups and prejudices. For Central
Europe to be reinvented, new ground will have to be broken. Is this realistic?
In response to my fears, an elderly man I once encountered in Graz
reminded me of a memorable quote from the infinite wisdom of Musil’s
Kingdom of Kakanien: “If there is a sense of reality, there is also a sense of
possibility.” On leaving, as if sensing that I still needed some encouragement
for my journey home, he added, “A sense of possible reality should be valued
higher than a sense of real possibility.”

2.

In the debate on Central Europe, culture combines with politics, geogra-

phy with myth, and memory with a vision of the future. But I worry about
something else: the debate seems to be estranged from the place and time of
Central Europe itself. Those involved in the debate are, primarily, those who
left Central Europe—those who emigrated or who demonstrate their interest
from far away. My reflections, however, lead me in the opposite direction,
back to the place of Central Europe itself. My goal is the restoration of what
I term “Central Europeanism” not to those far away in the diaspora, but to
those living on the borderlands of these new countries, where the wounds of
the past are still unhealed and the horizons of a new tomorrow perpetually
show their tendency to melt away.
I am interested in how to “practice” Central Europe in this post-Holo-
caust, post-totalitarian and post-modern territory. This practice concerns the
borderland ethos, which is strongly connected with the Central European tra-
dition of dialogue. I am inclined to agree with the opinion that working out
a modern form of the borderland ethos will determine the future of Central
Europe; it will define each integrative trend, including European integration.
One could risk advancing the thesis that Central Europe—as an idea, tradition,
and contemporary practice—is the road to uniting Europe for us, for Central
Europe. I am aware, of course, that we opted for a different route in 1989: each
nation state managed the transition in isolation, single-handedly, although it
did happen, as in the case of Poland and Lithuania, that a helping hand was
174 Krzysztof Czyżewski

offered. Today, however, we once again pose questions about the cohesion of
the European Union. We pose questions about the dangers of nationalism (in-
cluding a kind of European nationalism), which are still very much alive, and
also about the crisis of multicultural society: these questions return us to the
problem of the borderland ethos, which knows what transnational interest and
citizenship mean, and how difficult the art of living with the Other may be.
All I know about the borderland ethos I know as a Central European. I
have taken part in innumerable debates in which opening statements already
concluded that the formation known as Central Europe does not exist or has
never existed. This assumption is an unmistakable indication that the authors
are from “here”—from this never-clearly-defined or never-distinctly-demar-
cated European territory seeking a place for itself after 1989. Some thought
Central Europe to be just an idea, one destined to be only “temporarily useful.”
This was the case with the dissident debates of the 1980s, when the important
thing was to illustrate to those in the West (and also to ourselves) that a sepa-
rate, autonomous world situated between Russia and the West did indeed exist.
According to many, “The Autumn of Nations” (that is, the sudden collapse of
Soviet socialism in the fall of 1989 and the consequent emergence of sove-
reign and new nation states) side-tracked the debate over Central Europe and
made even the concept of Central Europe less important, if not bygone. Not
for me. Only in 1989 did Central Europeanism begin to take shape, emerg-
ing as a new, fascinating project ready for realization. I am a practitioner of
ideas. I act on the grassroots level of borderland communities themselves,
far from café or academic debates. What for academics or intellectuals is a
myth, spiced with nostalgia and a long-vanished past, is for me a reality: the
here-and-now, a new province to be developed, a future to be shaped, a memo-
ry impossible to erase or forget. I am interested not so much in an escape from
the place where I was born, but rather in the possibility of developing an an-
tidote to horror loci, the horror of place—an ailment not uncommon among
the inhabitants of Zwischen-Europa.
In post-1989 Poland, people would say: “What’s important is leav-
ing Central Europe and entering Europe.” For my Belarusian or Ukrainian
friends that would be a surprising statement: for them, Central Europe stands
for the Western option. Of course, there would also be those who would ac-
cept it with relief, proving that another untrustworthy integrative project
in this part of Europe is about to bring an uncertain future to the smaller
and the weaker. Surprise at the desire to leave Central Europe would sure-
ly also be the reaction in Hungary and some circles in the Czech Republic
and Slovakia, but for a different reason: because the Habsburg myth fares
quite well there. Harnessed as it is to the process of shaping modern identity
and Europeanism, there is no reason to renounce it now. There is a problem
with the Poles and the Lithuanians still cherishing their Jagiellonian myth
 Reinventing Central Europe 175

along with of that of Mitteleuropa—in their stubbornly extending “Vyšehrad”

Central Europe’s borders to the east, north, and south. From this point of view,
Dmytro Pavlychko, the Ukrainian ambassador to Poland in 2002, was right
in telling us again and again: “Don’t say Central and Eastern Europe, say
Central Europe. Ukraine is part of Central Europe.” For the Hungarians, who
were participating at that time in the Sejny Central European Forum, this
idea was definitely too much. For them, the inclusion of Ukraine into Central
Europe diminished the “centralness” of Central Europe and made it, quite
simply, too Eastern.
However, this rejection of Central Europe in favor of Europe would prob-
ably prove still more difficult for the Balkan states, unless “Central Europe”
were replaced with the notion of “the Balkans.” After all, I heard the fol-
lowing statement so many times in the countries of the former Yugoslavia,
Bulgaria, or Romania: we aspire to join Central Europe and to cut ourselves
off once and for good from the “Balkan pot.” In the early 1990s, I participated
in a seminar in Zagreb whose organizers wished to demonstrate one thing to
their guests from other European countries: Croatia is part of Central Europe,
not of the Balkans. A German language writer from Timisoara in today’s
Romania, now living in Berlin, often repeated during a recent conversation:
Timisoara, together with the multicultural region of Banat, is quite certainly
part of Central Europe (read: Europe) but further east (meaning Romania,
Bulgaria, Turkey … ) or south (meaning Serbia, Macedonia, Albania … )
there is nothing but Barbaria. Incidentally, this statement was an integral part
of the argument we had over the entry of Turkey into the European Union—
the way we defined Central Europe seemed to determine our pro or contra
stances towards the inclusion of Turkey into European structures.
I feel affinity with a phenomenon that I call “the Bosnia generation.”
Bosnia, in this sense, represents not only the many tragic places in the for-
mer Yugoslavia that experienced the cruelty of the civil wars, but also lack
of understanding, indifference, and most of all, a profound disillusionment
with the West. Many of the inhabitants of the former “camp of friendship”
had long cherished values they identified as part of Western civilization; the
price for supporting these values—which stood in opposition to those of the
ruling socialist regimes—was often people’s careers, or even lives. But now,
in confrontation with the realities of the late twentieth century, it turns out
that these values existed only on paper. During the drama of the breakup of
Yugoslavia, we came from all four corners of the world to debate in Sarajevo,
Belgrade, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Novy Sad, or Pristina. We then understood that
we were witnessing something much wider than just another “Balkan crisis.”
The Bosnian perspective revealed a Europe quite different to that observed
from Warsaw, Vilnius, Amsterdam, Bucharest, or Brussels. Even then, we un-
derstood that we were dealing with the crisis of multiculturalism in the world,
176 Krzysztof Czyżewski

and, indeed, a deep crisis of European culture. And we understood that it

was just a matter of time before new cultural tensions emerged and escalated
in Madrid, Marseille, Paris, Rotterdam, or London. We shared a common
conviction about the advent of a swelling dark wave which is bringing back
to Europe both violent intolerance and the need to oppose it, and which de-
mands a new responsibility on our own part— something much more difficult
to handle than debating within an international forum. This sense of respon-
sibility is exactly what brought us back to Central Europe and its borderland
ethos—as something that matters today and offers a direction for the future.

3.

Central Europe, as a philosophy and practice, suggests ethics more than poli-
tics. Central Europe is an attitude—an ethos—that juxtaposes rootlessness
with belonging, ideological mystification with a bold reference to reality, pro-
vincialism with the power of the province, and distinctly demarcated borders
with a space of transition and co-existence.
The Polish intellectual tradition refers to the space of the Central European
cultural mosaic as the “borderland.” Our choice to follow in this tradition car-
ries important semantic connotations. The term “borderland” intentionally re-
places the term Kresy [ends, bounds] popularly used by the Poles to refer to the
eastern peripheries of the former Commonwealth, now located in the modern
states of Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine. This term is very emotional-
ly charged due to its connection with the glory of the multicultural Jagiellonian
realm—the romantic myth, traumatic war memories, and sentiment for the
cultural motherland. For our eastern neighbours, however, the connotation is
quite different: to them Kresy stands for Polish imperial domination, the as-
similation of local elites into the Polish language and culture, a paternalistic
multiculturalism imposed by force, and the thwarting of the emancipation and
independence movements of the so-called ethnic minorities.
Notwithstanding the strength of the Kresy myth (past or present), it seems
to have been successfully counterbalanced by the line of thought and action
forged by the milieu of the Paris- based Kultura magazine and its editor, Jerzy
Giedrojć. Soon after the war ended, the readers, editors, and writers associa-
ted with Kultura began to wage war against Polish nationalism, historical
resentment, and irrational national myths such as that of a “Poland from sea
to sea.” It is particularly striking that these ideas originated among émigrés.
For many other Central European nations, the diaspora has remained a bas-
tion of conservative and nationalistic attitudes which preserved the poisons of
various nationalistic-messianic phantasms, and, what’s worse, transplanted
them back to the soil of the native land. A circle similar to Kultura was estab-
lished by Lithuanian émigrés connected to Akiračiai magazine in the United
 Reinventing Central Europe 177

States; among its collaborators could be found such names as the poet Tomas
Venclova, and Valdas Adamkus, who later served two terms as President of
Lithuania. The crucible of Kultura gathered together excellent writers and in-
tellectuals, including Czesław Miłosz, Witold Gombrowicz, Tomas Venclova,
Bohdan Osadczuk, and Juliusz Mieroszewski. The latter, a political essayist
unfortunately not well known outside Poland, is considered the author of the
concept “ULB”—Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus.
This concept implied that Poles thinking long-term about their sovereign-
ty, while fighting against communism and the Soviet empire, should renounce
the idea of Kresy in favour of the future independence of their neighboring
states. It meant not only reconciliation with the “loss” of cities that had sym-
bolic meaning for the Polish spirit, such as Lithuanian Vilnius (that is, Polish
Wilno) or Ukrainian Lviv (that is, Polish Lwów), but also an active commit-
ment to aid and cooperate with the Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians
struggling for self-determination. After 1989, the idea of ULB gathered new
momentum, and the term pogranicze [borderland] (as opposed to Kresy) is an
extension of that tradition.

4.

The difficulties I have encountered trying to convey the meanings and asso-
ciations of certain words—new entries in my Central European lexicon, as it
were—is a separate story. Many times I have been forced to correct erroneous
readings of the word pogranicze and to explain that the term should be under-
stood and translated into English not as “borderline” but as “borderland.” As
a result of these lexical difficulties, I try nowadays not to translate the term at
all, realizing that appropriate equivalents in different languages will not ren-
der it correctly. Instead, I give the word in its original form and explain briefly
that I mean here a Commonwealth territory whose borders run internally
while its outer boundaries, as Nicholas of Cusa put it, lie “nowhere.” I hope
this helps people to better comprehend the ethos to which I refer: it is an at-
titude that values good neighborly relations over manifestations of a separate
identity, because only a positive attitude towards the Other, our neighbor, and
not a confrontational type of patriotism based on enmity towards strangers
can establish an authentic community. In Polish this idea is expressed by the
term obcowanie, or “communing,” and is related to the word obcy, or “other,”
which is as problematic to render and translate as pogranicze. The term ob-
cowanie implies that a particular community’s strength lies in the Other’s
belonging as much as it is undermined by the Other’s exclusion.
Unlike popular notions ascribing to Central Europe the character of an
almost Arcadian myth—especially regarding the wealth of its multicultural
heritage and assumed history of tolerance—my own Central European myth,
178 Krzysztof Czyżewski

transformed into the borderland ethos, eschews such idealization and denial of
the darker side of reality. This is not because I wish to go from one extreme to
the other and to advocate another popular fallacy claiming that the history of
this part of the world is nothing but a constant chain of cataclysms and tribal
warfare. My point is that the values I associate with the ethos of Central Europe
could not have been born in the reality of an Arcadia, but only in the clash of
dramatic events, contradictions, and impossibilities. By themselves, they may
bring chaos and destruction, but when transcended (not with exclusion or isola-
tion, but with an embrace), they turn into beauty and wisdom: the Old Bridge
in Mostar, or the Holy Trinity Chapel in Lublin, or the philosophy of dialogue.
I think here of Martin Buber, born in Lemberg–Lwów–Lviv, or Emanuel
Lévinas, from Kovno–Kaunas, or the masters of the meeting with the Other,
Stanisław Vicenz and Józef Tischner, from the Carpathian mountains. I think
of the dialogic poetry of Paul Celan, from Bukovina, or the writings containing
the best antidote to provincial nationalism—the works of Czesław Miłosz or
Danilo Kiš. The brilliance of these thinkers lies precisely in their embrace of
the impossible collision of difference in which they found themselves.
Memory retrieval, and the search for and translation of words, are essen-
tial aspects of the process of becoming Central European. We have lost the
language to express our co-existence and our ability to transcend ourselves (a
philosopher of dialogue would say “our leaning out towards the Other”). We
have been dominated by the language of confrontation and self-defense—by
separate national mythologies that isolate, wound, exclude, and lock us in the
sense of our own belonging. These myths render us helpless and incapable
of describing an encounter, of understanding the reality of intertwining, of
expressing a need for dialogue. They render us helpless because they deprive
us of words—of language long forgotten, devalued, denied, compromised, or
classified as taboo. We must recover and revive the lexicon that could once
again make the Central European ethos communicable. It would contain en-
tries like those mentioned earlier, such as pogranicze and obcowanie, but
also others: agora, neimar (bridge-builder in the Balkans), critical patriotism,
“connective tissue” (Miłosz), and “inheritor of the whole” (a term used by
Józef Mackiewicz, a Polish writer from Vilnius, in connection with people
who struggled in newly established national states to maintain the multicul-
tural Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s tradition of citizenship). If it is to become
real, “Central Europeanism” needs a new language—a new, alive, and fu-
ture-oriented lexicon able to counterbalance the national myths that have so
strongly determined our reality for the last two hundred years.
 Reinventing Central Europe 179

5.

Like words, places are also essential—the recovery of space must accompany
the recovery of language. The necessity of belonging to Central Europe is just
such an attempt at recovery. Apart from the ethos of borderland itself, it ex-
presses a feeling of belonging to place, which is akin to the magical power of the
telescope: through the lens we can zoom in on Central Europe, the microcosm
of the small homeland with its palimpsest of cultures and its inhabitants’ close
encounters with otherness. We could also direct the lens in the opposite direc-
tion, to reveal the macrocosmic perspective, which would reach beyond the na-
tion state (without negating it), allowing us to identify with a certain collective
historical experience. In the latter perspective, Central Europe, while remaining
a different Europe, is not separated from European identity. Although Central
Europe is connected with Europe’s integrative processes, it supports cultural
integration only in choosing the more difficult road of facing, in all honesty, its
own heritage and building more authentic bonds in the borderland space.
Practicing the borderland ethos, then, involves approaching the Place—
the word Czesław Miłosz wrote, following William Blake, with a capital letter.
Paradoxically, by approaching the borderland Place, we reach the centre, like
the wanderer disinherited by History, the wanderer who tries to recover the
mystery of which he was deprived, by making use of the heritage of past gen-
erations, embracing rootedness, school education, or ritual initiation. The only
path to the very core of the Place is the meridian—Paul Celan’s “meridian of
soul,” which is a designation for spiritual coordinate points connecting people.
“I find,” Celan said on the occasion of receiving the 1960 Buchner Prize, “the
connective which, like a poem, leads to encounters. I find something as imma-
terial as language, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of the circle … a merid-
ian.” Empathy will help us find the path. This attitude shares much in common
with ecology—our taking care of the Place we wish to understand and love
must be holistic and include caring for even the smallest particle, including the
things we fear or that previously seemed strange or inimical. Accompanying
this attitude is the awareness that separation or poisoning (oblivion or exclu-
sion) of any of its parts will threaten the entire ecosystem, thus degrading the
Place. I do not mean that we must cease hatred, overcome prejudice, or rid
ourselves of fear. These are easy to write or talk about, but hatred, prejudice,
and fear persist in people, and those who have experienced tragedies among
their neighbors feel them all the more. Even if humankind manages to over-
come them, the victory will never be final. In a similar way, one cannot build
a bridge once for all; a bridge is constantly being built. However, one who is
familiar with hate, prejudice, and fear can begin to care for the Place, can learn
to love it, and herein lies the great opportunity for beginning to think ecologi-
cally and to long for a citizenship of the centre.
180 Krzysztof Czyżewski

6.

Central Europe today can be “practiced” as a culture of coexistence, in a

longue durée process of opening up the perspective. Any attempt to narrow
this perspective, to limit it to short-term expectations and effects, can prove
destructive. An imagination born of dialogue creates before our eyes a vi-
sion of the era we are entering. The challenge we must face in this era is the
encounter with the Other. Philosophers of dialogue claim that we are passing
into an age that will complete the threefold cycle of the spiritual development
of humanity. The new paradigm of this age will be in the second person—
“you.” It follows the two previous ages: the Ancient, based on the third-
person paradigm of “it,” championed by Aristotle and valuing objectivity;
and the Modern, based on the first-person paradigm of “I,” associated with
Descartes, subjectivity, and human will. Of course, these two philosophies
are not yet exhausted—they are permanently wrought in human conscious-
ness. The upcoming age of the second-person paradigm, however, stands a
chance of completing subjectivity, objectivity, truth, and freedom with a cul-
ture of coexistence, empathy, and responsibility.
One way or another, by naming the upcoming age we acquire an under-
standing that our future will be largely decided by the problem of our encoun-
ter with the Other—an encounter that unsettles us because of its potential for
failure and endless cultural conflicts. Such a failure would bring about defeat
of our ability to integrate with each other, and prevent us from forming au-
thentic communities in a postmodern reality. That is why we need to create a
culture of coexistence, to form an ethos for those involved in its creation, and
a way to express it in practice in our everyday relations. If this is to be pos-
sible, we need new cultural practices and new tools for constructing bridges
of understanding.
The encounter with the Other is an act of construction. It is not given to us,
and does not happen on its own. Such an encounter is a craft. Those who prac-
ticed this craft throughout the ages were frequently compared to the builders of
bridges. In the Balkans these people were called neimar and accorded with the
respect usually given to architects, as people who know the secrets of nature
and can impose order upon chaos. With time, this name was forgotten, and
along with it the secrets of the neimar’s craft. Constructing a bridge became
merely a technological issue. Old tools were misplaced, and the new tools re-
placing them could not fulfill all the functions the neimar could once utilize.
For too long we have lived in communities lacking the neimar’s craft,
where no schools of the philosophy of dialogue exist, where the art of con-
structing bridges is absent. This is not the time to consider what might have
been if such schools had existed in any significant number in the past, when
we were trained, using increasingly more advanced tools, in the ways of de-
 Reinventing Central Europe 181

stroying bridges. The very existence of Martin Buber’s workshop for dialogue
in Nazi Germany might seem absurd. Brought up in Lemberg (then Lwów,
now Lviv), Buber knew all too well the alternative to living together in a mul-
ticultural city—there was no option of living separately, so the only alterna-
tive was conflict with the Other. His seemingly impractical philosophy might
have appeared jarringly out of place in that time. Armies of journeymen al-
ready filled the ideological workshops, which craved murder of the Other in
order to entrench an identity in its position as the binding element of a com-
munity. And although the number of deaths among people branded as class or
racial enemies proved to be the highest in history, even more important was
the number of guilty witnesses—the participants of the binding rituals, who
formed lasting covenants. Such covenants, created in the murderous twenti-
eth century, have proven to be so enduring that we still feel them beneath the
surface of our lives, though we are usually unconscious of how easily they
may re-emerge.
And yet, despite the resilience of the forms cast in the workshops of
twentieth-century totalitarianisms, it is these workshops themselves that now
lie broken, compromised by their inhumanity and transient usefulness. That
which seemed pragmatic and consistent with the spirit of the times was un-
masked as nothing but a foible, and one which might even prove grotesquely
amusing, if not for the extent of suffering and destruction it caused. On the
other hand, the workshop of dialogue, established by such people as Martin
Buber, and which always bore the odium of utopian idealism, now provides us
with an example of amazing vitality and wisdom.
For the connection established by the neimar’s bridge to truly realize the
possibility of coexistence, there also needs to exist a real chance for breaking
that connection. Separation and differentiation create a need for communica-
tion and the effort to establish connections. In the case of a bridge there is
always the possibility of destroying it; we are aware of its vulnerability, and
of own our helplessness in the face of the destructive powers that nature and
man can use against it. This may not be apparent in the physical image of a
bridge. Georg Simmel wrote that “a bridge in a landscape is usually perceived
as a scenic element.” This is why he ascribed to the bridge only the meaning
of unification. Simmel built on this symbol with the image of a door, which
“demonstrates that separation and unification are but two aspects of the same
act… . Doors can be opened, and because of this, when they are closed, they
embody the sense of separation from whatever is behind them much more
strongly than a wall.”
A bridge erected in accordance with the neimar’s craft includes within it
Simmel’s door. We must remember, however, that the bridge might cease to
exist at any given moment. That it exists at all is only thanks to the work of the
neimar, and the work of the living material used to hold it together: its human
182 Krzysztof Czyżewski

caretaker. It is that caretaker who opens and closes the bridge, which on its
own offers only the possibility of a connection.
We need Central Europe just as we need the neimar today—people who
can practice the ethos of borderland, who can invent a language of dialogue
and a space of coexistence. This caretaker and warden once again stands at
the border in the history of Central Europe. And once again, so much depends
on him.