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Gott ist Russe
Der Russe blickte dem Teufel ins Auge, er legte Gott auf die Couch des Psychoanalytikers und begriff, dass seine Nation die Welt erlösen kann. Ein gequälter Gott erzählte dem Russen eine Geschichte vom Scheitern. Am Anfang war das Wort, Reinheit und Vollkommenheit, und das Wort war Gott. Doch dann beging Gott eine Jugendsünde.
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Hungary’s Real Indians
Native Americans have long been beloved in Hungary, where ‘Indians’ stand for what is real, endangered and exceptional. Viktor Orbán has used the trope to channel demographic anxiety and bolster his anti-migrant rhetoric, but it could also spell trouble for his politics of fear.
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Can It Happen Here? Our Central European Future
Austria may come to play an ominous role in the deepening conflict between East and West, writes Carl Henrik Fredriksson. The future of the EU will be decided in Central Europe.
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Suspekte Solidarität. Gesellschaftlicher Protest in Polen nach 1989
Solidarität als Prinzip und Bewegung gehört zum Gründungsmythos des postkommunistischen Polen. Dass Vertreter unterschiedlichster Gruppen der Gesellschaft zusammenarbeiteten und gemeinsam Widerstand leisteten, wird oft als Hauptmerkmal des polnischen Wegs aus dem Kommunismus betrachtet. Angesichts dieses Erbes ist es umso merkwürdiger, dass sich in den polnischen öffentlichen Debatten der 1990er Jahre ein Stereotyp herausbildete, demzufolge die Mehrzahl der sozialen Proteste in Polen von gesellschaftlich, politisch oder ökonomisch Ausgeschlossenen ausgeht.
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Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt. 1989 revisited – Ergänzende Beiträge zu Heft 50
Die 50. Ausgabe der Zeitschrift Transit - Europäische Revue zieht unter dem Titel "Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt. 1989 revisited" 27 Jahre nach dem Erscheinen des ersten Hefts Bilanz.
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How Eurovision Became the Kremlin’s Mousetrap
The Kremlin presented Ukraine with two options, both of which were mousetraps. Were Ukraine to allow Samoylova to enter the country, it would violate its own law and tacitly recognize the “Russian status” of Crimea. Were Ukraine to stick to the rule of law and ban her – and this is what happened – it would indirectly tarnish its image as a country that adheres to European values.
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Robert Silvers: Just an Editor?
There are dozens of stories and myths surrounding Bob Silvers: how he worked around the clock, with several shifts of young assistants struggling to keep up; or his Christmas morning or past-midnight phone calls to discuss ‘a dangling modifier’ or a semicolon that he felt should be changed to a full stop. However, the most apt characterization of him is that of the author who doesn’t write. Asked if he wrote at all, his answer was quick and emphatic: ‘No, I just edit."
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Dilemmas eines Herausgebers
Wie kaum ein anderer Zeitschriftenmacher verstand es Robert Silvers, der legendäre Mitgründer des New York Review of Books, Autoren zum Schreiben zu bringen. Er selbst aber schrieb nie. Mit einer Ausnahme: 2009 erschien in Transit sein Essay „Dilemmas eines Herausgebers“. Wir drucken es hier anlässlich seines Todes am 20. März 2017 wieder ab.
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Crimea as a Glimpse into a Post-American World
Fareed Zakaria’s “post-American world” may not be as benign as the author envisaged back in 2008. Other centers of power may follow Russia’s lead and start exploiting the cracks in the international order rather than engage in helping to patch them up.
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The Trap of Being New Europe
In the face of the migration crisis and populist shift within the EU, the outmoded and stale division between New and Old Europe is coming back into favor in European public debate. The concept of ‘New Europe’ can easily serve to explain and at the same time to normalize, in a politically correct way, a qualitative difference between Western Europe and its Eastern neighbors. From a Central and Eastern European perspective, however, the term ‘New Europe’ seems essentially contradictory, since being a part of Europe in its cultural and political dimensions always was and still is an undebatable assumption.
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The Never-Ending Lukács Debate
Relatively little is known in the West about the “White Guard” type of anticommunism, which was prevalent on the European continent in the interwar period, and which is now triumphantly reborn in contemporary Eastern and Central Europe, including Hungary. The latter has tended to see socialism and communism as the uprising of the Untermensch, the biologically and spiritually inferior members of society. For these anticommunists, communism does not mean too little, but too much freedom, and the idea of equality is a sin against nature. And however one feels about putting up graven images of controversial thinkers for the pigeons in the park, one must understand: it is these anticommunists who will destroy Lukács’s statue.
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Fifty Years After Naxalbari, Popular Movements Still Have Lessons to Learn
In 1967, an armed rebellion by peasants in Naxalbari, a hitherto unknown village in northern Bengal, broke out that was to leave its imprint not just on the politics of the time but on the course of radical movements all the way down to the present.
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The Reichstag Warning
The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime. There is nothing new, to be sure, in the politics of exception. The American Founding Fathers knew that the democracy they were creating was vulnerable to an aspiring tyrant who might seize upon some dramatic event as grounds for the suspension of our rights. As James Madison nicely put it, tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency.” What changed with the Reichstag fire was the use of terrorism as a catalyst for regime change. To this day, we do not know who set the Reichstag fire: the lone anarchist executed by the Nazis or, as new scholarship by Benjamin Hett suggests, the Nazis themselves. What we do know is that it created the occasion for a leader to eliminate all opposition.
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Countering Fake News… with Fake Expertise?
The Czech state has set out to fight for the truth and against disinformation using untrustworthy representatives, inspired by a controversial think tank that employs problematic methods. To oppose a disinformation campaign by Russia based on spreading fake news, we have the fake expertise of a think tank that exerts influence on the state administration. Under such circumstances it is not surprising that a center that was meant to confront Russian propaganda has thus far managed only to defend its own existence.
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Shedding Light on Corruption: A Small Romanian Victory
“We see you”. This short message, projected on a building near the Romanian government's headquarters, was the main message from hundreds of thousands of people to their politicians. At 9 PM local time, on Sunday, 5 February 2017, some 250,000 people turned on their mobile phones' flashlights, in a symbolic gesture of “shedding light on corruption”. A total of 600,000 people gathered in Romania that night, making it the largest protest movement in the country since 1989.
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From Theresienstadt to Santa Teresa: The Inexpressible in the Last Novels of W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño
Consciously or not, nearing the end of their lives both authors felt that they should go straight to the "heart of darkness" in their next work. In the middle of the 1990s, when each of the two had already achieved considerable literary recognition and as the end of 20th century drew near, they took up subjects with a link to mass violence and death and created works of dark gravity which obsessively circle around a kind of black hole that gradually sucks in the characters and the readers.
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Washington Has Sealed Aleppo’s Fate
In recent months, the diplomatic posturing in Washington about a cease-fire in Aleppo barely obscured its acquiescence in Bashar al-Assad’s winning the war before the end of the Obama administration. The fall of Aleppo makes us examine who we are. Despite generally honest media coverage, an international mobilization for the besieged city never materialized.
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What Lessons Can European Leaders Learn from Trump’s Victory?
As the news about the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections have shocked many in Europe, it is high time for European leaders to learn lessons from the outcome of these elections and – to quote Winston Churchill – not let a good crisis go to waste.
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20 Lessons from the 20th Century
Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.
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Donald Trump and the Bieber Doctrine
Following the initial shock of Donald J. Trump’s victory, both friends and foes will downgrade the significance of what has transpired. The same people who portrayed a Trump victory as apocalyptic will come to see it as business as usual. The risk is that, this time, we’re not returning to business as usual.
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Trump, Contemporary Fascisms and the Acquiescence of the Left
To whatever extent we may be tempted to call the current threat fascism, it must be acknowledged that we no longer live in the world of 1930s Europe. This, instead, would be a fascism born of a bourgeois fantasy of enduring domination, given shape, for example, as the American dream - white, Christian, heteronormative, masculine.
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Autocracy: Rules for Survival
Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.
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Der Eurozentrismus und seine Widersacher: Kritische Bemerkungen zu einer unfruchtbaren Kontroverse
Die dezentrierte und offene Einstellung gegenüber anderen Kulturen ist keine Errungenschaft der Moderne: Sie geht auf vormoderne europäische Wurzeln zurück.
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Aleppo as a Path to Invincibility
As soon as the U.S.-Russia-brokered cease-fire agreement collapsed about two weeks ago, Assad’s army, supported by the Russian air force, intensified its bombing campaign and artillery shelling of the besieged areas. The Syrian government prevents humanitarian aid from getting to Aleppo, saying that this is how the rebels get arms and ammunition. The result is a bloody stalemate in which neither side is prepared to compromise and no force on the ground is overwhelming enough to claim victory and thus end the carnage. Eastern Aleppo is facing defeat by slow attrition if no political agreement is reached.
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