Central Europe

• 1. Introduction

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  Central Europe sits at the crossroads of the continent, a region pressed between Eastern, Southern, Western and Northern Europe, where empires have risen, collapsed, and risen again across more than a thousand years. At one moment it was the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, anchored by the coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III at the turn of the 9th century. At another, it lay divided by an Iron Curtain, with Austria, Switzerland and Yugoslavia declaring neutrality while their neighbours were absorbed into the Soviet Eastern Bloc.

  The region lacks a fixed definition. Geographers, historians, and encyclopedia editors have never fully agreed on which countries belong here. The World Factbook lists nine countries; the Encyclopaedia Britannica includes twelve in various articles; and the German Standing Committee on Geographical Names offers two different sets of boundaries depending on whether you count by borders or by cultural criteria. That slipperiness is not a weakness. It is the subject itself.

  What the region does share is a layered past: the spread of Magdeburg rights through its towns from the mid-13th century onward, centuries of Habsburg rule, the annihilation of a Jewish community that had numbered around 16.7 million before the Holocaust, and a Cold War partition that lasted until the opening of the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary on the 19th of August 1989. Each of those ruptures left traces in the region's politics, languages, architecture, and cuisine. Understanding Central Europe means following those traces across time.

• 2. Empires and Boundaries

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  Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, founded at the turn of the 9th century, established the first durable political framework across much of the region. At its inception it incorporated present-day Germany and nearby regions, including parts of what is now Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Switzerland. Three decades after its founding, Great Moravia, centred on present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia, became one of the first West Slavic states established in Central Europe.

  From the late 6th century to the early 9th century, the area roughly corresponding to the Carpathian Basin was part of the Avar Khaganate. Then, in the late 9th century, Hungarian tribes originating from the Eurasian Steppe settled in that basin and established the Principality of Hungary. The territory of Lithuania was home to Baltic tribes, among them the Samogitians, Lithuanians and Curonians.

  Following the East-West Schism in 1054, the religious frontier between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy became one of the defining lines of Central European identity. The historian Jenő Szűcs argued that between the 11th and 15th centuries, Christianization shaped the cultures of Central Europe along Western lines. The spread of Magdeburg rights from the mid-13th century brought self-government to towns and counties across the region.

  In 1335, the Kings of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary and Croatia met at the castle of Visegrád to agree on close cooperation in politics and commerce. That meeting would later inspire the post-Cold War Visegrád Group. In 1386, Jogaila, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, converted to Catholicism and became King of Poland through marriage to Queen Jadwiga of Poland. This Union of Krewo established a personal union between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland and laid the groundwork for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, formally established in 1569.

  The Ottoman Empire and the Habsburgs shaped the region's later centuries just as decisively. The Ottomans came to occupy most of present-day Croatia and Hungary, and southern parts of present-day Slovakia. The Kingdom of Croatia, then in personal union with the Kingdom of Hungary, served between the 15th and early 16th centuries as a significant maritime gateway for trade routes between Central Europe and the Mediterranean. The Republic of Ragusa emerged as a prominent hub for cultural exchange during that same period.

• 3. The Idea of Mitteleuropa

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  Friedrich List and Karl Ludwig Bruck were among the first thinkers to articulate a concept of Mitteleuropa in the mid-19th century, and their concerns were primarily economic. With the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire around 1800, power had consolidated around the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns, two states that had much in common but competed as often as they cooperated.

  At the Frankfurt Parliament, convened in the wake of the March Revolution of 1848, competing visions of German unification clashed openly. Austria pushed the mitteleuropäische Lösung, or Central European Solution, which sought to merge smaller German-speaking states with the multi-ethnic Habsburg monarchy. Prussia and others opposed it. When the German Empire was established in 1871 and began intensive economic growth, an imperialistic version of the Mitteleuropa idea gained traction.

  The railways gave the concept a concrete administrative expression. When the Union of German Railway Administrations established the Mitteleuropäische Eisenbahn-Zeit, or Central European Railway Time, the time zone was applied by the railways from the 1st of June 1891, and was later widely adopted in civilian life. That name has since been shortened to Central European Time.

  On the 21st of January 1904, the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftsverein, or Central European Economic Association, was established in Berlin. Its main aim was economic integration of Germany and Austria, with eventual extension to Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands. Friedrich Naumann's 1915 book Mitteleuropa became the defining text of this vision, calling for an economic federation with Germany and the Habsburg monarchy at its centre. The concept collapsed with Germany's defeat in World War I, though it was later revived during the Hitler era.

  Professor Fritz Epstein argued that the threat of a Slavic expansion westward had been a major factor in the emergence of the Mitteleuropa ideology even before the German Reich of 1871 came into being. According to the historian Fritz Fischer, the Mitteleuropa scheme during the era of the Reich of 1871-1918 was a plan by old imperial elites to build German economic, military and political domination from the northern seas to the Near East.

• 4. World Wars and Partition

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  During World War II, Central Europe was largely occupied by Nazi Germany. Many areas became battle zones and were devastated. The mass murder of the Jews depopulated centuries-old settlement areas and erased entire communities. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin both opposed the centuries-old Habsburg principle of "live and let live" with regard to ethnic groups, minorities, religions, cultures and languages.

  Winston Churchill preferred a Central European Danube Confederation to counter those countries against Germany and Russia. Plans were also discussed to add Bavaria and Württemberg to an enlarged Austria. The Austrian priest Heinrich Maier led a group that supported the Allies by forwarding production sites and plans for V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks and aircraft to the United States. Otto von Habsburg worked to relieve Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and northern Yugoslavia, particularly the territories of present-day Croatia and Slovenia, from German and Soviet control. Churchill's proposal to reach the area around Vienna before the Russians via an Adriatic operation was not approved by the Western Allied chiefs of staff. As a result, Stalin's plans prevailed and much of Central Europe came under Soviet control.

  Following the war, research on Central Europe was blocked in Eastern Bloc countries because its findings proved the region's distinctiveness, which conflicted with Stalinist doctrine. Karl A. Sinnhuber noted that most Central European states were unable to preserve their political independence and became Soviet satellites. Austria, Switzerland and Yugoslavia declared neutrality.

  The opening of the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary at the Pan-European Picnic on the 19th of August 1989 set off a peaceful chain reaction. The picnic was based on an idea by Otto von Habsburg to test the reaction of the USSR and Mikhail Gorbachev to a border opening. The leadership of East Germany did not dare to completely block its own borders, and the USSR did not respond. It was the largest escape movement from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Tens of thousands of East Germans set off for Hungary after media reports spread word of the opening.

• 5. Jewish Life and Its Erasure

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  Between the early 18th and the early 20th centuries, Central Europe had a substantial Jewish population. By the time of the Holocaust, the Ashkenazi Jewish community in the region numbered approximately 16.7 million people. Poland and Lithuania held the largest Jewish populations in Europe as a percentage of their total populations: Jews constituted 9.5% of the Polish population and 7.6% of the Lithuanian population in 1933.

  Most Central European Jews had embraced the enlightened German humanistic culture of the 19th century. Jews at the turn of the 20th century became representatives of what many consider to be Central European culture at its finest. The Nazi conceptualisation of Mitteleuropa sought to destroy that culture, and the Holocaust of 1941-45 largely succeeded in wiping out the communities that had sustained it for centuries.

  Communities of Tatar Muslims also settled in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 15th and 16th centuries, and Tatar Muslim minorities remain in Poland and Lithuania today. Islam in Hungary dates back to the foundation of the state, with a significant Muslim community persisting for several centuries before being revived under Ottoman rule. The region's religious diversity has always been one of its defining characteristics, and one that has been repeatedly subjected to violent pressure from outside powers.

  In the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War following the Bohemian Revolt, the number of inhabitants in the Kingdom of Bohemia decreased from three million to only 800,000, the result of battles including the Battle of White Mountain and the Battle of Prague in 1648, as well as execution and forced emigration. Many Czechs were killed, executed, forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism, or fled to Scandinavia and the Low Countries. In recent years, most Czechs report as overwhelmingly non-religious, with only about 10.3% describing themselves as Catholic.

• 6. Infrastructure and Economy

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  Central Europe contains the continent's earliest railway systems, with the greatest expansion recorded in Austrian, Czech, German, Hungarian and Swiss territories between the 1860s and 1870s. By the mid-19th century, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich, Pest and Prague were focal points for network lines connecting industrial areas of Saxony, Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia and Lower Austria with the Baltic and Adriatic. By 1913, the combined length of railway tracks in Austria and Hungary reached 43,280 kilometres.

  Rail infrastructure in Central Europe remains the densest in the world. As of 2022, Switzerland leads with 129.2 kilometres of lines per 1,000 square kilometres of territory, followed by the Czech Republic at 120.7 and Germany at 108.8. By 1936-70% of the Swiss Federal Railway network had already undergone electrification.

  Before railways arrived in the 1840s, river transport was the main means of communication and trade. The Bega Canal, built in 1710, connected Timisoara to Novi Sad and Belgrade via the Danube. The Plauen Canal and the Finow Canal were among the earliest such projects. The most significant achievement of this era was making the Danube navigable from the Black Sea to Ulm in the 19th century.

  Industrialisation reached Central Europe relatively early, beginning with Germany and the Czech lands near the end of the 18th century. In agriculture, the region holds notable global positions: Germany is the world's largest hops producer with a 34.27% share in 2010, Slovenia is one of the world's leading producers of honey, and Serbia is the world's second largest producer of both plums and raspberries. The first university established east of France and north of the Alps was founded in Prague in 1348 by Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, modelled on the University of Paris with initial faculties of law, medicine, philosophy and theology.

• 7. Culture and Identity

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  The avant-garde movements of Central Europe reached their peak across the continent during the 1920s. The Sourcebook of Central European Avantgardes, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, contains primary documents from Austria, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia between 1910 and 1930.

  The Angelus Central European Literature Award carries a prize of 150,000 PLN, approximately $50,000 or £30,000, for writers originating from the region. Research centres dedicated to Central European literature operate at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Purdue University, and the Central European Studies Programme at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. The Vilenica International Literary Prize is awarded to a Central European author for outstanding achievements in literature and essay writing.

  The Central European University was proposed by Ernest Gellner in 1991 for Prague. The philanthropist George Soros provided an endowment of US$880 million to support the project, making the university one of the wealthiest in Europe. As of 2019, 1,217 students were enrolled, of whom 962 were international students, giving it the fourth most international student body in the world. In 2021, the admission rate into its programmes was 13%.

  The Czech Republic has the highest beer consumption per capita globally, followed by Austria, with Germany coming fourth. Cheesemaking in the region has an archaeological record dating back to 5,500 BCE in the Kuyavia region of Poland. Wes Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which won the Oscar and depicts a fictional hotel somewhere in Central Europe, was actually modelled on the Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. The city of Trieste expressly sees itself as a città mitteleuropea, sitting at the interface between Latin, Slavic, Germanic, Greek and Jewish culture, and between the geographical areas of the Mediterranean and the Alps.