Goodbye, Eastern Europe Quotes

“Motion is the enduring principle of Eastern Europe. Motion of people, motion of faiths, motion of ideas. This is the reason why population maps of Eastern Europe, especially old ones, look so disorderly, like slabs of marbled beef or a cup of coffee before the cream has settled. The migrations leading to the creation of Western European nations happened in the very distant past. In Eastern Europe, they never stopped. Long after the Visigoths and Franks, Saxons and Jutes of the West were a distant memory, nomadic Cumans and Pechenegs were still arriving from the steppes. Tatars were still conducting great slave raids in the territory around Lviv in Mozart's day, and only ceased when Catherine the Great finally put a stop to them.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“One reason the city has so many fine art nouveau and Secession-era buildings is that Czech and German developers tried to outdo one another in the wealth of ornament and ingenuity of decoration incorporated into their properties.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“Eastern Europe is one of the world's great homelands of forgetting.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“The postwar settlement left other scars as well. In a single swoop, the ancient empires of the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Romanovs vanished from the face of Europe.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“Eastern Europe is a land of small countries, wedged between great powers. . . It is a place that has long been dominated by empires. but it has not, for the most part, inherited an imperial frame of mind. Since the close of the nineteenth century, its politics have been dominated by nationalism of various stripes. Its history, by contrast, has been shaped most by the clash of feuding ideologies. But that is only the story of the past hundred years or so. Eastern Europe has a longer history and older traditions to draw on in formulating its future. Largely neglected by historians, there was an Eastern Europe that existed alongside the structures imposed by empire and independent of the hopes fostered by nationalism.

This was a world of multiple faiths and languages, in which many parallel truths lived beside on another. It was a place of shared saints and intersecting stories, where folk cures and prophecies passed among neighbors, and sacred heroes donned one another's clothes. It coalesced gradually in the centuries following the introduction of monotheism -- the three great religions of the Book -- and the decline of paganism, which itself never disappeared completely but simply refashioned itself as the background of all later folk belief.

This Eastern Europe was not a conscious creation, but the product of open spaces and centuries of benign neglect. This was not a place where different people deliberately chose to live side by side, but where they did so out of long and practiced habit, enshrined more by custom than by law. Inequality -- especially of class -- was part of the bedrock below its foundation. But despite its not being built around principles of universal rights, this order did have its own considerable advantages. Chief among them were plurality and multiplicity -- truly impressive virtues, especially if one knows what followed in their wake.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“The conventional image of the Holocaust is inextricably bound with the concentration camps, about all Auschwitz. This can have the effect of making the murder of Europe's Jews seem like a rather impersonal, mechanized process. In some histories, it almost becomes a question of logistics, in which German ingenuity -- with a little help from local atavism -- triumphs over problems of men and matériel. But in most of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust was an intimate slaughter. It was conducted up close, often face-to-face, in the presence of scores of witnesses and neighbors.

The Holocaust should therefore be thought of as a question not of populations but of individuals. No one lived the whole experience of a nation or a tribe. Instead, they experienced the catastrophe on their own terms, as the death of a pet or a family member, or the disappearance of a community. Schulz's death, and the massacre of the Jews of Drohobycz, stands as a synecdoche of the catastrophe as whole, just as any other act of violence could. And every Jewish family in Eastern Europe, including mine, had a Drohobycz of their own.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“[Hitler] thought he had discovered the key to a great mystery -- the secret of propaganda. He liked to rant about its power. 'Propaganda, good propaganda, turns doubters into believers,' he told his friend, continuing, 'Propaganda! We only need propaganda. Of stupid people there are always enough.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“A new spirit had taken hold of Eastern Europe by 1900. It might be most easily characterized as a violent disjuncture between the heart and the head. Materially, things had never been better. Europe was nearing the end of almost a half-century of (barely) interrupted peace. Most adults had never heard a shot fired in anger. That same half-century witnessed an unprecedented burst of economic growth and technical innovation. When steamships were dropping passengers off at Dereszewicze, citizens of Budapest were already riding the city's first underground metro line, which had opened in 1896. Cities, for the first time, were illuminated at night, something Eastern Europe took an unexpected lead in: Lviv was the first city to use modern kerosene lamps, and Timişoara, in present-day Romania, was the first city in Europe to be lilt by electricity.

Railways now crisscrossed the continent, reaching even Janina's home in the forgotten Lithuanian hamlet of Bieniakonie. Grain from Ukraine flooded the American market, while wood from the remotest forests of Lithuania could be shipped all the way to Liverpool and beyond. Buoyed by these new connections, landowners grew suddenly and unexpectedly rich. . . .

But however prosperous things might have seemed, spiritually there was a feeling of mounting crisis. Everywhere people put their trust in progress and scientific discovery, to the detriment of older faiths. In politics, nationalism still held sway -- indeed its influence had never been greater -- but in the arts, its primacy had begun to wane. The great national bards were still being celebrated, ut more as icons of struggle than as writers to be read. Young people especially craved something new.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“All these conflicts were driven by variations on a single notion: that peoples should rule themselves. But what was a people? The answer, most commonly, was language. Those who spoke a given language were those who belonged to a given nation. This equation of language and nation was a rather peculiar idea and a very Eastern European one. Its earliest proponents were priests and polyglot intellectuals. Its legislators were poets. Out of their dusty journals and sweaty verses came the birth of states and the ruin of empires.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“This relatively hands-off style of rule practiced by the Eastern European empires was born of pragmatism. Social divisions were not a flaw to be overcome, but a tool to be used. In these realms, universal citizenship did not exist. People lived not as individuals but as parts of wider social estates, each of which came with its own set of privileges and prohibitions. Everyone was discriminated against to some extent, except for the sultan or czar. Everyone also had a function. To most people, before the arrival of modernity, the idea of equality before the law was unthinkable. What mattered most in life was to be allowed to fulfill their role undisturbed. Meanwhile, what mattered most to rulers was that the sum total of these various roles added up to them staying in power. For this, outsiders could be just as useful as locals and often showed themselves to be more dependable.

The process of inviting helpful strangers into Eastern Europe began very early. Eastern European monarchs began looking abroad for talent in the Middle Ages Compared to Western Europe, the East was under-populated, lacking sities and the specialized craftsmen and traders who inhabited them. Eastern rulers also sat uneasily on the intersection of multiple frontiers: between pagan and Christian, Christian and Muslim, and Catholic and Orthodox. Because of this, they needed all the help they could get cultivating, defending, and administering their realms. In the eleventh century, A Hungarian king lectured his son about the usefulness of immigrants:

'As guests come from various areas and lands, so they bring with them various languages and customs, various examples and forms of armaments, which adorn and glorify the royal court. . . . For a kingdom of one language and one custom is weak and fragile. Therefore, my son, I order that you should feed them with goodwill and honor them so that they will prefer to live with you rather than inhabit any other place.'

The young prince took his father's advice to heart. By the thirteenth century, the kingdom of Hungary harbored, within its ragile borders, groups of Jews, Muslims, Armenians, Slavs, Italians, Franks, Spaniards, and Germans”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“How to account for [Eastern Europe's] wondrous and mystifying melange [of peoples]? Stempowski's answer had to do with nations and states. In the West, he wrote, the equation between ethnic and linguistic belonging and political allegiance began very early. Beginning in the Middle Ages, priests and prelates imposed their particular strands of Christianity on the populations, executing heretics and unbelievers. Meanwhile kings expelled their Jews and confiscated their property. If a realm contained Muslims, they were likewise forced to convert or were banished. By the nineteenth century, national belonging replaced religion as the dominant template to be imposed on society. Little armies of bureaucrats and educators fanned out into the countryside, making sure that all the people there spoke the same language. Across the territory conquered by the French kings, peasants were *made* into French people, and if the Scots didn't concurrently become English, they certainly adopted the English language. Virtually everywhere, the machinery of the state worked like a giant steamroller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found.

In all these regards, Eastern Europe was different. There, empires tended to accentuate difference rather than suppress it. In the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire offered many Christians and Jews a wide measure of autonomy, allowing them to manage their own affairs. The Russian Empire, Stempowki's birthplace, afforded religious minorities an even greater degree of freedom. The Habsburg empire did its best to impose Catholicism on its various peoples, especially the rebellious Czechs, but even so, it remained home to numerous Orthodox Christians and Jews. More importantly, the Habsburgs made hardly any effort to turn their various constituent peoples (around 1900 the empire was home to eleven official nationalities) into Germans. These empires took a laissez-faire approach to governing, They taxed and counted their subjects, but they did not intervene too deeply in the inner structure of their communities”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“Fortunately, the Ottomans were unrivaled masters of supply-chain logistics. No other state in Europe devoted as much energy or care to the repair of its roads. From very early on, the Ottomans became justly famous as builders of beautiful stone bridges, whose delicate arches appeared to be as delicate as eggshells but proved as durable as iron. Supplies of food, cloth, gunpowder, and steel flowed continuously over this system of roadways. Camels, able to carry twice as much as any European beast of burden, made their transport easier. Every year, thirty thousand of these essential animals arrived from the Maghreb and Syria, in time for the campaigning season. But the real heart of the Ottoman procurement system was its bakeries. In Istanbul alone, 105 gigantic ovens worked around the clock, baking hardtack for the army and navy stores. Many more operated across the provinces.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“The Monastery of Saint Naum is an ancient foundation, begun in 905 by the saint himself on the shores of Lake Ohrid. Naum chose an enchanting place for his monastery. Lake Ohrid, a pane of still turquoise water shimmering in the mountain air, looks like a droplet of the Aegean plopper in the middle of the Jablanica Mountains. The monastery stands at a point on the shore -- now the boundary between North Macedonia and Albania -- where a series of springs emerge from the base of Mount Galičica. They are ice cold and immensely clear. The point where they emerge from the ground is surrounded by a grove of tall, ivy-covered oaks, in the midst of which stands a single spreading fig tree.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“In order for Christianity to be lasting, it first had to become local. The easiest way to make this come about was to find some homegrown saints and build a cult around them. It was good if these saints left behind some relics that could pass into royal hands, and even better if they were royal family members themselves. This had the double advantage of conferring legitimacy on the dynasty internally, while making ia good show of faith to the wider Christian world.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

“Eastern European paganism was a local religion, intimately tied to place. Its laws stretched only as far as the course of a single stream or the shade of a certain tree. Christianity, by contrast, was a missionary faith. It tried to remake the whole world in its image. It attacked in waves. First the missionaries cut down the holy groves. Then came the Crusaders to break the power of the ancient chiefs and massacre their followers. When their work of slaughter was done, Christian landowners arrived to reduce the baptized survivors to the status of serfs.”
― Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land