From geopolitics and regional identity to geopoetics and self­‑identification – a trajectory of conceptualization of Central Europe?

The article problematizes the discourse on Central Europe by tracing a trajectory from the twentieth-century geopolitics and region-building projects based on identity politics to the contemporary geopoetics and literary self-identifications shaped in relation to place and time. The different historical circumstances that opened and closed “the short twentieth century” produced different experiences and understandings of Central Europe. German Mitteleuropa and the renaissance of the idea of Central Europe at the end of the Cold War are the two moments in the geopolitical legacy of the concept. This paper, however, focuses on the second geopoetic, literary pole of the conceptual trajectory of the discourse on Central Europe, which is nourished by negative categories and consists of particular articulations of being a Central European in a time of historical discontinuities and crises. The paper addresses several contemporary writers’ self-identifications based on “autobiographical sites”, which provide insight into some shared articulations of certain elements of the Central European myth (problematic identity, spatial in-between-ness and sense of transience, mobility of borders, idealized Habsburg monarchy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]