Introduction

Abstract

‘Central Europe’ is a vague concept. With the exception of German-languagewriters, until recently, the region was as alien or exotic to the Western European and Northern American public as the Balkans still are. Prior to World War I, the concept of Central Europe was practically unknown in the West unless one associated the region with Austria-Hungary and the German Empire. German-language authors and politicians from both polities reinforced this association during the Great War, when some proposed creating a Germanic Mitteleuropa (‘Central Europe’ in German) consisting of the Dual Monarchy and the German Empire alongside the eastern territories seized from the Russian Empire. In the period between the two World Wars, the concept of Central Europe was largely ‘de-Germanized’ and its extent limited to the new nation-states between Germany and the Soviet Union, with the Baltic as the region’s limit in the north. The southern reaches of Central Europe, clearly delimited before 1914 as coterminous with Austria-Hungary’s southern border, became fuzzier in the wake of the 1918 territorial changes, when the prewar frontier disappeared within the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) and considerably enlarged Romania.

Language has always been a companion of the empire.²

Gramática de la lengua catellana (Grammar of the Castilian[Spanish] Language, 1492, Madrid) (Dedication)Antonio de Nebrija (1441–1522)³

[I]t hath ever beene the use of the Conquerour, to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all meanes to learne his (1596).

(In Crowley 2005a: 27) Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)

It is language, which constitutes the correct border of the nation (1813).⁴

(In Leuschner 2004: 389) Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860)

Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.

Considerations on Representative Government (1861, Chapter 16)

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

Each healthy nation endowed with its own state, and each healthy nation-state must wish that its national language is also the state language, and its state language the national language.⁵

(Trampe 1908: 268)

A language is a dialect with an army and navy.⁶

(In Weinreich 1945: 13)