„What is Central Europe? The discursive field that defines, reflects upon and depicts Central Europe, this collection of essays argues, is literature. Already in the 1980s, Milan Kundera argued that a political accident had moved countries which considered themselves the cultural center of Europe, Poland, the Czech Republic, or even Ukraine, into a political East, the Eastern bloc. The Center of Europe disappeared, and only after the fall of the Berlin Wall it started to reappear, mostly in literary and essayistic writing. The articles in this volume look closely at this writing and show how post-socialist literature moves back in time in order to revive a cultural European center. Nostalgic memories and mythic reveries evoke an image of Central Europe from a time before the world was divided into East and West."—Professor Schamma Schahadat, Institute of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Tübingen