Short answers, pulled from the story.
Central Europe commonly includes Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland, though definitions vary. The World Factbook lists nine countries, while Encyclopaedia Britannica includes up to twelve in various articles.
After World War II, much of Central Europe was absorbed into the Soviet Eastern Bloc, with Austria, Switzerland and Yugoslavia declaring neutrality. Most Central European states became Soviet satellites and were unable to preserve political independence, according to Karl A. Sinnhuber. Research on Central Europe was suppressed in Eastern Bloc countries because its findings conflicted with Stalinist doctrine.
The Pan-European Picnic on the 19th of August 1989 opened the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary. The event was based on an idea by Otto von Habsburg to test Mikhail Gorbachev's response to a border opening, and it triggered the largest escape movement from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.
Mitteleuropa was a German concept of Central European political and economic integration, with Germany and the Habsburg monarchy at its centre. Friedrich Naumann's 1915 book Mitteleuropa was its defining text, calling for an economic federation to be established after World War I. The concept collapsed after Germany's defeat in World War I.
Before the Holocaust of 1941-45, approximately 16.7 million Ashkenazi Jews lived in Central Europe. In 1933, Jews constituted 9.5% of the Polish population and 7.6% of the Lithuanian population, making Poland and Lithuania home to the largest Jewish populations in Europe as a percentage of total population.
Charles University in Prague, founded in 1348 by Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, was the first university established east of France and north of the Alps. It was modelled on the University of Paris and initially included faculties of law, medicine, philosophy and theology.