UvA-DARE

Émigré periodicals in Cold War Europe have long been considered isolated islands of Central and East European communities with limited relevance. In the second half of the Cold War, some of these periodicals functioned as crucial intersections of communication between dissidents, emigrants and Western European intellectuals. These periodicals were the greenhouses for the development of new definitions of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Europe at large. This article studies Cold War émigré periodicals from a spatial perspective and argues that they can be analysed as European cultural spaces. In this approach, European cultural spaces are seen as insular components of a European public sphere. The particular settings (spaces) within which the periodicals developed have contributed greatly to the ideas that they expressed. The specific limits and functions of periodicals such as Kultura or Svědectví [ Testimony ] have triggered perceptions of Central European and European solidarity. The originally Russian periodical Kontinent promoted an eventually less successful East European-Russian solidarity.


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Shortly before reform movements and impatient crowds terminated Europe's divide, the Hungarian dissident, novelist, essayist, and quintessential Central European intellectual György Konrád distinguished an 'international market of dissident ideas'.1Much more prominently than before, dissidents reached likeminded intellectuals in neighbouring countries, and particularly in the West.This growing exchange was noticed by others as well: Alain Finkielkraut observed in 1987 that 'eyes were opened' towards Central Europe.2This market of ideas between East and West communicated mainly through periodicals.Émigré periodicals from Rome, Berlin, or Paris played a decisive role in the contacts between intellectuals, and even between dissidents.Translated versions reached Western European or Northern American audiences.From the early 1980s onwards, new periodicals emerged that explained anti-communist and East European realities to a wider intellectual audience.These new stages and intellectual communities constituted new European cultural spaces in which new understandings of European solidarity were produced and promoted.
This article analyses the emergence of these new connections, loyalties and kinships from the pages of these periodicals.The debates on Central Europe and its relation to Western Europe are the best-known outcome.In this article, I argue that these periodicals were not merely the passive stages for these new ideas, but have decisively contributed to forming these ideas.From this point of departure, the émigré periodicals can be considered European cultural spaces: they implied and produced identities and visions of Europe.This article therefore opens with an attempt at aligning academic reflections on the periodical and European identities from the context of the spatial turn in the humanities.Subsequently, special attention is being paid to three pivotal émigré periodicals and their positions in the debate about Europe and Central Europe: the Polish Kultura , the Czech Svědectví [Testimony] (1956-92), and the multinational Kontinent (1974-).

Spatial Thought
In his 2003 work In Space We Read Time, Karl Schlögel declared his love for the 'spatial turn' in the historical sciences.Schlögel blames the nineteenth-century historicist obsession for 'durée, not espace' having come to dominate our perception of the past.3The spatial turn in the humanities has largely been derived from the social sciences, primarily from geography and sociology.The groundwork for the spatial turn is often thought to have been designed by Edward Soja in his Postmodern Geographies (1989).His source of inspiration was La production de l'espace (1973) by the Marxist French philosopher Henri Lefèbvre, who, albeit somewhat inaccessibly, introduced space as an analytical category.
Soja's central concept thirdspace was inspired by Lefèbvre's three types of space.Lefèbvre had defined an 'espace perçu' [perceived space], an 'espace conçu' [mental or represented space] that together constituted a third space, the 'espace vécu' [lived space].Opposite to a perceived space that refers to physical or geographical dimensions, we can distinguish a represented, mental, or social space of scientists or technocrats.The lived space or Soja's thirdspace is a more abstract notion, but can be understood as a combination of perceived space and represented space.Soja applies this spatial approach mainly to the analysis of urban environments.
In Soja's definitions, spatial thought is also heir to Bourdieu's analysis of the cultural trade.Soja proposed spatial capital as a relevant category next to Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital.4Cultural capital depends on space, and it produces spaces.Soja explicitly connects his discussion to discourses of othering.His usage of notions such as thirdspace suggests that he operates with a critical or even emancipatory strategy in his spatial approach, much like most spatial thought.5In recent years, Soja has explored this emancipatory dimension further.6His most telling case study is probably the domain of public transport in Los Angeles.He has analysed how the network of buses became the realm of workers and less educated citizens, disconnected from railway transport and particularly from environments that are intended for private cars, with the potential danger of closing down bus connections.7 Effective popular opposition prevented this, but the case study illustrates how means of transport contribute to the construction of physical and mental spaces.Destinations and fellow passengers create and determine spaces.Soja's spatial approach attempts at unravelling the norms within these spaces.
The spatial turn in the humanities, and particularly in the historical sciences, is both empirically and methodologically different from that of post-structuralist (Lefèbvre) and post-modern (Soja) geographers.The historical sciences have traditionally preferred a topographical or cartographical approach.Under the label of mental mapping the spatial turn has produced invaluable results with regard to the mental construction of historical and cultural regions, such as Central and Eastern Europe, or the Middle East.Its underlying assumption is that the implicit or explicit awareness of the historical (mental) reality of a region influences or even guides historical action.8In Inventing Eastern Europe (1991), Larry Wolff explored how French Enlightened philosophers drew the map of civilization simultaneously to their 'discovery' of the (European) East.9His later book Venice and the Slavs (2001) built on this and unravelled this civilizational rift between the (European) East and the West in the minds of eighteenth-century Venetians 'discovering' Dalmatia and the Croatian inland.10 The roots of this perspective are located in Central Europe and are connected to the dissident and émigré circles that are the topic of this article.From the 1960s onwards, within German academia, but also in political and intellectual circles, heated debates were held about the mental borders of Central and Eastern Europe, and more particularly about Germany's position in Europe.This political reading of geographical concepts probably also connects to older traditions of cartography and geography in Germany.11Karl Schlögel's work also has roots in these academic traditions, more particularly in the rediscovery of the concept of Central Europe in the 1980s.12Soja's postmodern spatial thought shares the emancipatory agenda with the cartographical or mental mapping spatial traditions.Revealing hidden power relations or undoing historical injustice vis-à-vis peoples, nations, or regions underlies most history writing from this particular strand of spatial thought, including Schlögel's.
However, the spatial turn can and should be approached primarily as a research innovation.Spatial thought adds a number of valuable observations to the study of periodicals and of European identity.Particularly its normative dimension -which does not necessarily imply an emancipatory dimension -generates new understandings.The periodical is not a purely physical object, but also a mental space that is marked by hierarchies and processes of inclusion and exclusion.Common and accepted theories in the study of periodicals such as the periodical as a 'circle' are closely related to a spatial reading, but differ as 'cultural capital' differs from 'spatial capital'.Much like public transport in Los Angeles creates a space that entails cultural, social, and economic inequalities, the periodical cannot be narrowed down to exclusively intellectual or socio-economic relations.The periodical is a physical and mental space that produces relations and meanings.

European Cultural Spaces
The relevance of this perspective is best demonstrated in attempts at analysing the development of ideas about Europe and European identities.The existing literature on Europe as an idea generally collects individual articulations and places them in a long discursive chronology.This often falsely suggests that these articulations all comment or build on each other.The European public sphere differs from the national public sphere in the sense that the European public sphere does not revolve around a defined political centre.Often there are contingent, incidental or geographically unrelated moments of crisis (wars, revolutions) that trigger new articulations.13From the Cold War era, the Hungarian Uprising, student protests in 1968, or the rise of Solidarność in Poland are among the prime examples: although all in a Central European Cold War context, the discourses behind these are fairly disconnected from each other.Therefore, this article uses the concept of European cultural spaces to challenge the concept of a homogenous European public sphere.
A good attempt at avoiding the concept of a homogenous public sphere was presented by Kiran Klaus Patel and Veronika Lipphardt who proposed to reconstruct not only ideas about Europe, but also the practices that produced these ideas and stages on which they were articulated.14European cultural spaces can be defined as the sum of these practices and stages.In that context, the ideas about Europe cannot be traced back to one space, but are the result of activities in 'parallel spaces', that do not automatically overlap or connect on a geographical and social level.For example, the discourse of the early European political cooperation during the late 1950s and 1960s is only limitedly connected to the idealist federalists from the Second World War, or with the radical students' movements in the 1960s, despite their explicit common European language.
This fragmentation of the European public sphere makes the European discourse contingent, but Europeanisation can be triggered by moments of crisis.Transnational moments of change such as wars and revolutions may cause parallel spaces of European discourse to connect and merge.Hence, this Europeanisation, understood as a process of homogenisation, or less radically, as a process of increasing interconnectedness in Europe, is not solely triggered by European ideals.15Émigré and dissident periodicals are prime examples of these parallel, often marginal or isolated European spaces that became a factor of major influence after external forces triggered connections.16Towards the end of the Cold War these periodicals were both subject to processes of Europeanization and engines of the Europeanisation of Europe.

Émigré Periodicals
The migration of intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe resulted in a wide range of émigré periodicals in the West.Influential hubs of émigré culture emerged above all in Paris, London, and Munich, but also in Vienna, New York, and Toronto.17Arguably the best-known émigré periodical is the Polish Kultura (Paris).Other prime examples include the Polish Wiadomości (London), Polska w Europie (London), the Czech Svědectví (New York and later Paris), Listy (Rome), and the Hungarian Irodalmi Újság (Vienna).Most periodicals emerged in the direct aftermath of migration and kept drawing their identity from this starting point.The first migration wave followed the introduction of communism in Central and Eastern Europe (1945-49), with a second important wave in reaction to the Hungarian Uprising (1956).In this early phase of communism, many contributions to the periodicals were focused on reclaiming the intellectual and moral right to the nation and the national culture.Particularly in countries that were politically divided or housed strong popular support for the communist party (such as Czechoslovakia), this was not an easy task.Later groups, after the arrival of Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia (1968), and after the workers protests in Poland had been halted, did not have to engage in this and could concentrate on representing growing resistance at home.Kultura's first issue (1947) opened with translations from Benedetto Croce's and Paul Valéry's works ('The crisis of the mind ',1919).18 In the first postwar years, anticommunist emigrants from Eastern Europe explored the European idea.Emigrated Czechs, such as the former minister Hubert Ripka or former mayor of Prague Petr Zenkl, tried to resell the (alleged) European federalism of the pre-war Czechoslovak president.19 Others used Radio Free Europe in their battles against communism.The explicit references to Europe in the émigré discourse dropped both in frequency and in force during the 1960s and 1970s, but returned stronger than ever in the émigré periodicals in the 1980s.The rebirth of the European idea coincided with the return of Central Europe as a political and cultural concept and with the appreciation of solidarity between anti-communists in the East and West.
Émigré periodicals were not only the engine of the European idea, they also facilitated and pushed the transfer of ideas during the Cold War.Many periodicals included translated works from the West, or evergreens from their own national traditions.From the 1970s, Kultura, Svědectví, or Listy became stages and sources of knowledge for dissidents in the East.Manuscripts were smuggled across the border, printed, and in some cases these editions found their way back to the home countries.The émigré periodical was a window on the West, a source of communication with migrants, and, albeit much more limitedly, also a platform for dissidents.
The émigré periodicals have been referred to as a 'symbolic structure' or as a 'text' because of their function as crossroads.20 The European idea was a central theme in that text.The initial rift between émigré periodicals and their home front wasn't vanquished until the 1970s.This rapprochement was then accompanied by a new interest in the European idea among emigrants.21Now the attention to the European idea gave way to the revival of the concept of Central Europe.Émigré periodicals played a prominent role in this revival.

Kultura and Svědectví
The monthly periodical Kultura was supervised from the very first to its final issue by Jerzy Giedroyc (1906Giedroyc ( -2000)).Although Giedroyc was the sole editor, a circle of likeminded intellectuals formed around him, with artists of standing such as Józef Czapski, Czesław Miłosz, and Witold Gombrowicz.Estimates say that some 1,600 of the 10,000 monthly copies reached Polish soil.22 The efforts that the authorities in communist Poland went through to prevent the periodical from entering the country suggest that the periodical was a major influence on Polish dissidence.
Kultura did not have a coherent ideological programme, but the periodical operated from an explicit European agenda, with an ethnic-national bias.Particularly in the early years, Kultura was much concerned with the European idea.Its European references were attempts at attributing a deeper meaning to Polish exile.In this way, the new Polish emigrants were not simply the result of failing Polish statehood, but living proof of a deeper European, or perhaps even Western European crisis.For example, parallel to the emergence of the European Community for Coal and Steel, Kultura published a 'democratic manifesto' and even a call for a 'United States of Europe'.
Nationally, the periodical built on the remnants of the old Jagiellonian tradition that promoted the idea of a multinational, eastward-looking Poland.23 Although the periodical opened its pages to European and Central European unity and integration, its central line of argumentation shifted subtly from the 1970s onwards to reconciliation and rapprochement between the East and the West.A good example was that Kultura no longer revisited the Polish expansion, or sense of responsibility, towards the East, but now supported much more open attitudes towards Germany.Paradigmatic 'reconciling' articles that were published included Jan Józef Lipski's 'Two Fatherlands, Two Patriotisms'.24 Despite these developments, in the 1980s Giedroyc revisited Kultura's mission 'to stress the role and meaning of Poland in the East'.To be sure, he added that this was not to be mistaken for expansion, but seen as an attempt at resolving old conflicts about the Polish-Lithuanian Vilnius (Wilno) and the Polish-Ukrainian L'viv (Lwów).25Both cities played a central role in Polish history, but had ended up outside Polish borders after World War Two.Publicist Juliusz Mieroszewski (1906-76) was, together with Giedroyc, the most important initiator of these new connections with Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.26 The current Polish preoccupation with Ukraine and Belarus is often traced back to its revival on the pages of Kultura.27 Although Kultura was strongly anti-communist, it remained marginally positive about Russia and the Russian culture.Giedroyc supported Russian emigrants and even compiled three Russian issues over the years (1960, 1971, and 1981).Nevertheless, its connections with neighbouring countries were indisputably stronger.A Czech issue appeared in 1969 and a German one in 1984.28As a concept, Central Europe never really found its way to Kultura, unlike its Czech or Hungarian counterparts, but the periodical was very explicit in its demarcation of Central European solidarity.
Central Europe was prominently visible in Svědectví.Svědectví had its first editions in New York, but relocated to Paris, which remained its headquarters until 1989.Pavel Tigrid (1917Tigrid ( -2003) ) was to Svědectví what Giedroyc was to Kultura.Tigrid was a young catholic periodicalist who had escaped Czechoslovakia shortly after the communist party took over.At the end of his life, he was one of the anchoring points of the Czech national conscience during the post-communist transition.For a short while he even served as a Minister of Culture  and advisor to President Havel.His moral capital was rooted mainly in his role in Svědectví.Immediately after his emigration he was active in the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe and, from the United States, he wrote for Voice of America.Svědectví saw the light of day in 1956, the year of the Hungarian Uprising.The suggested solidarity now seems self-evident, but stood against a background of long historical animosity between Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks at the time.
Svědectví's first edition opened with a 'salute to Poland and Hungary', and with an affirmation that the Hungarian Uprising was not directed 'against socialism, but against the country that had betrayed socialism'.29This position and tone was representative for Tigrid.Also in 1980-81, his main advice to his Polish friends was that they needed a strong communist party to guide the revolt against the regime to a desirable outcome.30This was most likely a result of the fear of escalation that dominated the region and the West.The Central European discourse that eventually emerged in the periodical was far from self-evident in the 1950s.
Kultura and Svědectví can be read as attempts at defining the canon of Polish and Czech tradition, culture, and loyalties.They were an answer both to the need for a common identity among emigrants in the West, and to communist parties in the East appropriating Polish and Czech history.Svědectví printed articles from and about the pre-war president Masaryk and likeminded politicians and intellectuals, and offered space to legendary and controversial (to communists) writers and artists such as René Wellek (1903-95) or Karel Teige (1900-51).Teige's case was telling.He was a designer and theoretician of art with explicit left-wing and communist convictions who could easily have been discarded from the Czech national pantheon.Conversely, he turned out to be the ideal case for Svědectví to separate the good socialists from the bad, 'non-Czech' socialists.Before the war, Teige had opted for the internationalist, avant-garde wing of Czech communism of which the dominant strands were rapidly moving towards Stalinism.His manifesto Surrealism Against the Current (1938) was seminal in that decision.Sections from this manifesto were reprinted in Svědectví.31Even the cover design carried the same message: Ladislav Sutnar, a famous Czech typographer and designer with similar ideological inclinations created it.In this way, banned Czechs were embraced, and a national canon was defined based on both conservative and progressive ideas.This was Tigrid's reconciling world view in action and it can also be understood as a side product of the small and isolated cultural spaces of the émigré community: they needed all the help they could get.
For a while, the entry ticket to these transnational European spaces of emigrants, dissidents, and Western European intellectuals was taking a stand in the debate about Central Europe.Milan Kundera's 'Tragedy of Central Europe', that was first published in France under the title 'Un occident kidnappé' and later reprinted in the New York Review of Books, was not only the beginning of this debate, but also remained its centre until well into the 1990s.32In this polemic sermon, written primarily for a Western audience, he framed the countries that were controlled by Soviet dominance as a kidnapped 29 Svědectví, no. 1 (1956).Prior to the protests in Hungary there had also been tensions in Poland.30 Pavel Tigrid, 'Dělnictvo ve východní Evropě' ['Workers in Eastern Europe'], Svědectví, no. 14 (1981) The importance of this debate about Central Europe stretches far beyond the somewhat provincial discussion about Russia's position.In a similar vein, the question if Central Europe should be considered a coherent historical culture in itself also attracted attention.Josef Kroutvor supported Kundera wholeheartedly, although he pointed out the hidden 'sadness' in Kundera's article (next to its 'truth' and 'knowledge').35Milan Hauner commented on Kundera's dramatic suggestion that in Central Europe people were still prepared to die for Europe: Hauner reminded of German Nazis during the Second World War who also perished with Europe on their minds.36Obviously, the debate was not limited to Svědectví.Many of the articles were reprinted elsewhere, often in multiple languages, provoking reactions from intellectuals from other countries as well.Among the most famous were Czesław Miłosz, György Konrád,Danilo Kiš,and Peter Bender.37The renaissance of European themes and rhetoric in the periodicals had two important driving forces.Firstly, dissident life in the East did not really emerge until the 1970s.In most cases, these dissidents had similar backgrounds as later generations of emigrants.For instance, in Czechoslovakia both dissidents and the vast group of emigrants had roots in the Prague Spring (1968), so they connected very well across Europe.Secondly, in Western Europe in the 1980s the European idea awoke from deep hibernation in the 1960s and early 1970s, in an attempt at finding a way out of the Cold War deadlock.For the United States and the Soviet Union, the Helsinki Accords (1975) were decisive.The power play between the two driving forces over recognition, security, and trade that initiated the negotiations in Helsinki offered some space for Europe to frame its own position, which mainly resulted in an additional human rights agenda.This turned out to be the starting point for a new European self-awareness and a point of reference for dissidents.38After the accords, American nuclear presence in Europe was criticised and intellectuals started opting for a 'third way' in the Cold War.39 The debate about Central Europe had a strong ritual function.Writing about Central Europe implied testifying to European culture.Despite conflicting positions, contributions served to a certain extent as a rite of passage for the community of European intellectuals.The periodicals and debates built biographies and careers.Jiří Pelikán, the front man of Svědectví's Italian variant Listy serves as a good example.40Listy was a product of the Prague Spring.Pelikán's life and career underpin the hypothesis that émigré circles and their periodicals developed into European cultural spaces that, in the 1980s, emerged from anonymity through transnational engagement with the Central European and European idea.Pelikán had a history in the Czech communist party and, as a director of Czech Television, played a crucial role during the Prague Spring.During his exile in Rome, he started Listy, a periodical central to the international émigré community.Via these circles, Pelikán entered the Italian socialist party, for which he served in European Parliament for two terms.The émigré networks brought him to the forefront of the European idea.

The European Market: Kontinent
Emigrants were decisive links between dissidents at home and likeminded people in East and West.Their periodicals were important bridges between eras and regions, though their audiences were largely determined by the languages that were used.A fair number of periodicals attempted at reaching wider audiences.From the second half of the 1970s, an intellectual market for East-West exchange developed in Western Europe and the United States.41In France Les Cahiers de l' Est (1975-79), L'autre Europe (1984), La nouvelle alternative , and particularly Lettre internationale (1984-93) started appearing.The latter periodical was established by the Czech émigré writer Antonín J. Liehm, who had been one of the intellectual engines in the Czechoslovak Prague Spring movement in the 1960s.Lettre internationale was a truly transnational stage because it also appeared in German, Italian, Spanish, and later also in Hungarian and Romanian editions.Particularly since these periodicals did not exclusively deal with Central and Eastern Europe, they implicitly revealed which discourses were interconnected.In Germany, Kursbuch (1965Kursbuch ( -2008)), which dealt with East European affairs extensively, was an example of a periodical that was able to connect discourses.Kursbuch was initiated by two paradigmatic intellectuals from the '68 generation, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Karl Markus Michel.With that connection, the East-West theme and the East European dissidents were directly connected to the future of socialism in the West.
A slightly different category was formed by the periodicals that were entirely dedicated to publishing translated East European sources.Although they did not fit as well into this analysis of transnational cultural spaces, they did function as breeding grounds for the authors who published in the émigré periodicals.In some cases, articles were direct copies, such as from Index on Censorship (1972), a periodical that was started by two dissidents in London, but widened its initial East European scope to dictatorships across the globe.On a smaller scale and even more politicised, a vast number of periodicals or leaflets about East European affairs appeared throughout the West, such as the socialist Osteuropa-info in Germany or Gegenstimmen in Austria.42In the United States, Cross Currents offered a broad range of essays and literary texts, larded with academic work from academics from Central and East European descent.Although these publications were aiming at a Western audience, they sometimes also reached Central Europeans, because French, German, or English were increasingly used as pivot languages between dissidents and emigrants.
Kontinent is a periodical that combined many of the above characteristics.It was both a classic émigré forum and a direct bridge to Western European and Northern American audiences.It was launched in 1974 by the Russian writer Wladimir Maximow, who had moved to Paris that year.In Germany, Kontinent was eagerly accepted by Ullstein Verlag, part of the Axel Springer group, resulting in a very successful start with 30,000 copies of its first German issue and with Springer being personally involved.This intellectual and financial background was crucial for its success and its contents.Springer was a conservative force in the German media landscape and had clashed with left-wing intellectuals from the '68 generation.This framed Kontinent as an ideologically driven, anti-communist periodical, and a personal revenge of Springer against leftwing groups in Germany that had repeatedly flirted with the communist East.43Günter Grass published a letter in Die Zeit to Solzhenitsyn and Sinjavski, pointing at Springer's personal war history and questioning if it would be wise to scare away the 'kommunistischen Teufel ' ['communist devil'] with an 'antifaschistischen Beelzebub '.44Even with this context, Kontinent was not solely a German-Russian experiment.Eventually it was published in ten different language editions: parallel to the dominant German, French, and English editions, there were also short-lived Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Dutch editions.The editorial boards fragmented, causing not all editions to be equal.Maximow even expressed his concern over the German edition, and Le Figaro published a plea to end the German edition.
Up until his emigration to Paris in 1974, Maximow himself had been rather exclusively oriented towards Russian literature, and had played a role in the Union of Soviet Writers.After his excommunication from the party, he had allegedly been forced to spend time in a psychiatric hospital.His publishing activities were then limited to Western Europe and soon Maximow decided to leave the Soviet Union.
Maximow's initial ideas about Kontinent favoured a periodical built around Russian prose and poetry.As an exiled intellectual however, he depended on the resources and knowledge of others.In Germany, Springer contributed and in Paris he developed good relations with Giedroyc from Kultura.Kulturrevolution, 1967-1977[The Red Decade: Our Small German Cultural Revolution, 1967-1977 The underlying tensions between Russia and Eastern Europe were still tangible in the first edition.After opening statements by Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, followed a letter to the board from the French-Rumanian Eugène Ionesco, who pointed to the French self-deception with regard to socialism.46The Central and Eastern Europeans were included further on in the volume.After short articles by Luděk Pachman and Ota Filip about the Prague Spring, a section by the Hungarian cardinal Mindszenty was included.A central document in the volume was the letter to the editor of the board about Solzhenitsyn's famous 'Letter to Soviet Leaders'.47It was Solzhenitsyn's patriotism that caused concern in Eastern Europe.Despite this slow start, the Russian-Eastern European alliance was embraced more and more, and even special editions were launched, such as a volume about Prague.48In 1979, the German subtitle was changed into Forum für Ost-West Fragen, indicating that the initial goal of providing space for authors who were censored, gradually shifted towards a more political agenda.
Kontinent's intellectual contribution was its attempt at introducing a 'continental' definition of European culture, with a much more explicit rapprochement between Eastern Europe and Russia than in other émigré periodicals.This definition emerged from the notion of cultural kinship between East (including Russia) and West.Kontinent offered the possibility of joining all anti-communists and tried to challenge the mental East-West divide.The daily reality of the periodical, including its financial situation, the potential audience, the dependence on the Russian editors and the geographical archipelago of editions resulted in the Russian project reinventing itself by invoking cultural connections rooted in a continental definition of Europe.Kontinent, like other émigré periodicals operated according to the cultural space in which it found itself, and contributed to the redefinition of the borders of that space.

The Periodical as Crime Scene of the European Ideal
In the first issue of Kontinent, Maximow referred to the 'book' as the 'corpus delicti, evidence of guilt, crime, and justification for punishment' of critical intellectuals.49If Maximow was right, the periodical -and the cultural space it represents -can be seen as the crime scene of the European ideal.The ambitious and new continental definition of Europe that arose from both Maximow's Kontinent and Gorbachev's notion of the 'European house', proved an unachievable ideal.The artificial character of these temporary intellectual coalitions of dissidents in Kontinent was revealed when the periodical returned to Moscow in 1990 and rediscovered its exclusively Russian roots.
attitude was an intellectual challenge, but primarily a practical necessity.The Central European idea became a dominant topic when communication between East and West and among dissidents increased through émigré periodicals.These European ideas should therefore not be understood as the product of individual seclusion of determined intellectuals, but as the result of the physical and intellectual spaces of émigré circles, in particular periodicals.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, these relatively marginal European cultural spaces became dominant environments for a short while.Intellectuals who had explored the European and Central European idea for one or two decades in an attempt to survive intellectually or even physically, became the specialists on questions that were asked throughout Europe.Laureates of important European literary and peace prizes such as György Konrád and Václav Havel became oracles of European integration.The Central European theme faded away rather rapidly, but the appreciation of Europe as a cultural and historical unity that has political implications lasted longer, well into the 2000s.It belongs to the paradoxes of European integration that the European idea thrives on the inability to express those ideas.Marginal European cultural spaces harvest most of these ideas.
Carlos Reijnen is Associate Professor of East European Studies and Director of the Graduate School of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam.His teaching and research focuses on East-West relations in Europe and the EU, with a special focus on the public sphere and competing memories of conflict.
of the West.He seemed to suggest that, as a result, these countries appreciated or cherished the European values more than Western Europe itself.The image of 'kidnapping' implied that Kundera did not consider Russia to be part of the West or Europe, despite having sympathies for parts of Russian literature.Although Svědectví had printed sections of Solzhenitsyn's or Pasternak's works, the question of Russia's relation to Europe and the extent to which communism could be seen as a continuation of Russian traditions became prominent in Svědectví as well.Many rejected Kundera's position by pointing to the fact that communism was mainly an export product of the West (Milan Šimečka).33Afinal answer to this question was never reached, despite the fact that Svědectví had made its own position clear by printing the work of Brodsky's, who had explicitly distanced himself from Kundera's misleading oppositions between 'East and West' and 'emotion and rationality'.34 32 Milan Kundera, 'Un occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l'Europe centrale' ['The Kidnapped West; or, The Tragedy of Central Europe'], Le Débat, no.27 (1983), 1-22; Milan Kundera, 'The Tragedy of Central Europe', New York Review of Books, no. 31 (1984), 33-38.See also Carlos Reijnen, Op de drempel van Europa: De Tsjechen en Europa in de twintigste eeuw [On the Threshold of Europe: The Czechs and Europe in the Twentieth Century] (Kampen: Klement, 2005), pp.295-306.section Opening up towards Central and EasternEuropean seemed like an obvious move.Much like in Kultura, Svědectví, and Listy, the Russian-Eastern European connection did not have strong traditions but emerged Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche quickly, largely due to strategic considerations.In 1974, Solzhenitsyn expressed his appreciation in Kontinent for the new Eastern European alliance that had been impossible for decades.45 ] (Köln:Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001).44 'Wer relativiert hier wen?Die Zeitschrift Kontinent als Springers Waffe gegen Böll und Grass'['WhoRelativizes Whom?The Periodical Kontinent as Springer's Weapon against Böll and Grass'], DieZeit,  no.50 (1974).See also Kind-Kovács, p. 274.rather