Mitteleuropa oltre il mito. Rinuncia, nostalgia, il caso Moor

Abstract

The paper focuses on the co-existence of national identities, the concepts of Central Europe as a geographic space, and Mitteleuropa as a cultural space. In particular, it examines the development of a cultural unity need after the fall of the Austrian Empire, namely from the time of independent small states after the WWI, to the time of the iron curtain that reshaped the continent into two halves, West and East, thus delating the spirit of Mitteleuropa. As Milan Kundera wrote in 1983, at end of WWII the civil frame of Central Europe disappeared, and only the idea of a cultural community survived for a long time. On the one hand, the "nostalgia" of Mitteleuropa, and the new policy after the fall of the Berlin’s wall, permitted to discover the driving role of Czech musicians from Poland to Italy, in particular from Austria to Southern-Slavic regions. On the other hand, this trend helped to clarify their engagement in promoting a kind of Pan-Slavism, and the spread of a German-Slavic mixture of musical culture, in and out Austrian borderlines.