But what is a small nation? I offer you my definition: the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it.

A Frenchman, a Russian, or an Englishman is not used to asking questions about the very survival of his nation. His anthems speak only of grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, however, starts with the verse: “Poland has not yet perished . . .”

Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a vision based on a deep distrust of History. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate—that is the history of conquerors. The people of Central Europe are not conquerors. They cannot be separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the wrong side of this history; they are its victims and outsiders. It’s this disabused view of history that is the source of their culture, of their wisdom, of the “nonserious spirit” that mocks grandeur and glory. “Never forget that only in opposing History as such can we resist the history of our own day.” I would love to engrave this sentence by Witold Gombrowicz above the entry gate to Central Europe.

Thus it was in this region of small nations that have “not yet perished” that Europe’s vulnerability was clearly visible before anywhere else. Actually, in our modern world where power has a tendency to become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few big countries, all European nations run the risk of becoming small nations and of sharing their fate. In this sense, the destiny of Central Europe anticipates the destiny of Europe in general, and its culture assumes an enormous relevance. ¹

It’s enough to read the greatest Central European novels: in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, History appears as a process of the gradual degradation of values; Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities paints a euphoric society that doesn’t realize that tomorrow it will disappear; in Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, pretending to be an idiot becomes the last possible method for preserving one’s freedom; the novelistic visions of Kafka speak to us of a world without memory, of a world that comes from historic time. ² All of this century’s great Central European works of art, even up to our own day, can be understood as long meditations on the possible end of European humanity.