ADAM REICHARDT AND NINA PÁNIKOVÁ: We’d like to start by talking about how you came up with the thought to compose the book. What were your motivations? What drew you to the region?
JACOB MIKANOWSKI: It was a kind of voyage to compose the book. It took many years and developed beautiful slowly. Part of it is my background. I’m Polish by family. I grew up speaking Polish. My parents are immigrants from Warsaw. I grew up in a Polish-Jewish household and lived in America, but then moved back for a fewer years to live with my grandparents in Warsaw. Then I went to grad school for history. I was actually expected to survey russian history. I studied Russian in college, actually partially due to the fact that I spoke Polish, so I thought it would be easy. But I got little interested, I was always pulled back towards east Europe, the east Europe which is not a part of russian history. And I was doing that at a time erstwhile I think interest in east Europe, in America at least, was at an all-time low, before 2014 and Russia’s start of aggression against Ukraine. Then there was an absolute kind of nadir of popular and academic interest. So I was in postgraduate school and watching the ground vanishing under my feet in terms of jobs and interest. Yet, I was very passionate about this region. I thought what I was studying was incredibly interesting. And I thought what I had inherited with my family’s story, 2 planet wars, the Holocaust, spies, guns, it was incredibly interesting. And there was very small audience for it. So yet I was leaving grad school to be a journalist. As a kind of last look back at what I’d been working on, I wrote an essay in 2017 called “Goodbye, east Europe”, which was partially saying goodbye to the thought of east Europe that was in the 1980s and 90s, erstwhile there was that advanced point of western interest. I actually had problem publishing that essay, but it yet came out and had a small bit of viral success, especially in east Europe. I felt like it spoke to somebody. Then there was a slow process over 5 or six years of turning that essay into a fuller story.
Your book is called Goodbye east Europe. I was wondering how did you decide about where to draw borders in specified a region which is so vast, so different, but as you besides go through the book, you find quite a few similarities. So why east Europe? Especially despite the fact that you say at the beginning that there is no specified thing…
It’s true. It is specified an amorphous idea. I think it is hard to find people who self-identify as east European. It’s something that you get ascribed to you erstwhile you leave. For me, any of it is related to emotion. There is this baggage that comes with being east European outside the region, this cloud of stereotypes and misunderstanding that you can actually work with. That’s how I start erstwhile I am teaching students. erstwhile individual teaches about Western Europe, students already have an idea, a intellectual image of France, of Spain, of Germany… But erstwhile you’re teaching east Europe, there is this void that you’re filling. So my approach was a large shelter one. Everything between Germany and Russia, and fundamentally Finland and Albania. There is of course a hazard with this approach. We have about 20 modern day countries, more or less. But there are any advantages to this approach as well. I found incredible commonalities from Estonia down to Albania, which seem on paper to have nothing in common in terms of religion and background, or economical development. If you go from Moldova to the Czech Republic, there are actually any historical experiences or styles of experiences and parallels of social organization, parallels in history, parallels in politics. It’s not a uniform region, but it’s given its uniformity by its diversity. It is the most diverse part of Europe. And that diversity is woven very profoundly into the social fabric. We actually lost quite a few that diversity over the 20th century. I besides think its distinct from continental Russia or places in the planet that are like it, the Caucasus is kind of like it, but it’s rather unique within Europe, within European history. So it’s that full belt.
You mentioned the research, how long did it actually take you to conduct the investigation and compose the book? In many of the places that you compose about you actually visit and you take the readers there, and we feel like we are there with you erstwhile you describe the scenery, etc. So possibly you could talk a small bit about the process of the research.
It was a long process, due to the fact that it started with my essay. And only then did I start travelling. I was already beautiful acquainted with the region, especially with Central Europe. I spent years in Poland, I had done any reporting in Hungary and wrote a lot on Czech literature. So I started travelling beyond those parts. I did a couple of long trips by train and bus. usually I’d start in Poland due to the fact that I have household in Warsaw. I’d visit them and then get on trains and go to Ukraine and then down through Romania and across the Balkans, or through Budapest into Serbia and up through Bosnia. I effort to visit places, not just capital cities. In all country I effort to visit at least any place big, any place medium, any place very small, and then go to places that are resonant with the themes in the book. any of the places I found I had never heard of and discovered on site. I did a long investigation journey to Albania, which I fell in love with and found completely fascinating. I had specified a good time researching the book. Of course quite a few the investigation was in the library, quite a few it was reading novels, and then reading fiction, and then reading history, and then back and forth. But the travel was absolutely invigorating, fascinating, occasionally uncomfortable, but usually terrific.
I besides wanted to add that in the book you truly chose to tell the stories of these places besides through people, many of whom were not truly well known. Sometimes it was an emperor or king, but truly you chose poets, writers or any marginal politician. I imagine that this besides took you quite a few time, to find these stories…
I effort to do a bottom-up approach alternatively of a top-down one. I think that works especially well in east Europe due to the fact that up to the 20th century, there was a long period of imperial domination of most of the region being run by 1 of 3 empires. The political past is happening in places like Vienna or St Petersburg. And I effort to find the stories that pull you a bit distant from there. east Europe itself is simply a communicative of imperial expansion, imperial retreat, with Empress Catherine or Emperor Peter you get this communicative told from the centre, from the imperial capital. To avoid that, I effort to tell it from people, including celebrated writers, but quite a few people who are completely anonymous to history. How did I find them? quite a few reading. quite a few times fiction was where I started. Reading quite a few fiction and then looking for the historical real-life versions of it. For example, there are these large books by a German author from Transylvania named Gregor von Rezzori. And you read them and he gets you into the planet of 1920s Czernowitz. And I’m like, this seems real. There’s this large football riot in the book. It seems to have a ringing of fact to it. So I get into football past in early Romania. And it’s this incredible planet of ethnically segmented rivalries. These towns in Romania would have 2 judaic teams, a Zionist and an anti-Zionist one; a Polish team; a Romanian team; a Hungarian team; and depending on where, even a Serbian team. And they would all dislike each other, but play in these tournaments in this wonderful planet of contained cultural rivalry that’s simmering but in any ways peaceful, until it isn’t. I did quite a few that. You go back and you find the real life stories out of the fiction. So it was a fun process.
In the book you besides tell the communicative through your family, which intersects with many of the interesting points in the region’s history. Can you talk a bit more about your household and how that fits in this book? Also, were there things that you discovered while you were writing this book personally about your family?
I was actually a small conflicted in how to usage my household past in the book, due to the fact that I didn’t want it to be a memoir or a household history. I wanted just a fewer moments of household past which illustrated bigger themes. I think I have a beautiful interesting household history, which in any way is typical. Lots of people across east Europe have household histories where there are divided loyalties, or they’re divided by ethnicity or religion or political orientation. My household is Polish Jewish. Both my parents are half and half. I had Polish judaic grandfathers who survived the war, 1 fighting with the Red Army in Belarus, 1 in Central Asia and then back with the Polish army attached to the Red Army. They had lost most of their relatives in the Holocaust and married Polish women, ethnically Polish, but with backgrounds from Lithuania and Hungary. I already knew a fair amount of my household history. I knew those grandparents, I grew up with them in Warsaw, and I heard the stories going back to the 1920s and earlier. But there was a lot I didn’t know. A lot which was unsaid and unspoken at home. I found a lot out by pulling my grandfather’s personnel files from the Institute of National Memory and learned from the things that he wrote about himself in 1945. There were besides Holocaust archives, especially from the Warsaw Ghetto. I had quite a few relatives who were in the Warsaw Ghetto, who mostly just disappeared. We don’t know what happened to them. But I discovered 1 aunt, Róża, who came up a fewer times in memoirs and in item in that archive. And I found the communicative of her execution. Her last moments were witnessed by individual in a prison on Gęsia Street. And that’s something that I discovered that my parents did not know, or that their parents did not know.
I wanted to ask about what conclusions you came up with following the investigation in terms of the importance of identity and language. I had marked here that in the section on nations you compose that “the age of nationalism was a golden age of forgery,” and then you go on and tell the interesting stories of how nations had to sometimes make backstories to aid specify themselves. possibly you could share a fewer thoughts and reflections on this subject and this full process of building the nation.
The communicative of nationalism is very crucial in east Europe, and very connecting. There’s a shared kind of nationalism across east Europe. It’s rather distinct from Western European nationalism. It started as a cultural movement which turned into a political movement. And that pattern is almost everywhere in the region and goes back to the imperial history, circa 1800. Almost all square kilometre of east Europe was ruled by an empire, Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman or Prussian. And across the 19th century, any of that starts disintegrating, first in the Balkans. But you have a planet of peoples inside empires. The way the nationalist movement develops, in the Czech case for example, is paradigmatic. It begins as a movement of reclaiming culture in a very language-specific way, with building up the vocabulary. Even though anyone who wanted to learn about discipline doctrine would read it in German or they’d read it in French or Latin, depending on where you were. Despite this, you gotta first strengthen the language, grow the language and then you grow the culture, grow the music. erstwhile you do that, you start stretching into the economy, creating Czech beer or Czech institutions to rival the German ones. In the Bohemian lands a Czech-German rivalry emerged. The Czechs actually forged a full kind of medieval epic history. In the Baltics they created them out of cloth or from bricolage or the revival, it’s a different process of uncovering narrative, uncovering language. And then after one, 2 or 3 generations, it turns into a political movement.
You mentioned all this beautiful diversity that you have seen in the region, especially at the end of the 19th century which finished with the 2 planet wars. So I just would like to decision us a small bit to the war that we are unfortunately experiencing in Europe right now. We are curious to hear from you and your take on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You mention it a bit in the epilogue of the book, but do you see it as a continuation of the communicative that you’ve been writing?
I was in the last phases of the last revisions erstwhile the invasion started. And so I faced a real dilemma due to the fact that the war had started, in any ways it started in 2014, but this fresh war started. I had to think, how does this fit into my story? I besides didn’t know where it was going. We remember those first weeks in February, the predictions were Ukraine will collapse, within weeks. And I was writing virtually as it was happening, trying to find how to balance the long view of a 1000 years or a 100 years versus the short word of writing into an unknown future? I do think it’s a continuation in any ways, especially due to the fact that Russia sees it as a continuation. It’s amazing to me how backwards looking Vladimir Putin’s conception and justification is. It is so purely imperial; not Soviet, but a return to Catherine and to Peter and to the thought of specifically Russian empire building, of the brotherhood of the Russian people. These are ideas that were promulgated to explain Russian linguistic national hegemony in Ukraine. I think Putin very much looks at himself in the lineage of Russian empire making, that he’s in the lineage specifically of Peter and Catherine, and that this is simply a way of reasserting their legacy and furnishing his own as a successor to that imperial lineage. But there’s been 200 years of past since then, a full planet of national sovereignty and nation states and national cultures and independency and the breakup of the russian Union, and to just blow past that and imagine that you can return to the days of Potemkin and Catherine in Crimea is extraordinary. To see that historical conception, I think, is so false. Is it part of an east European doom and gloom story? I hope not. But I worry that in any ways what I’m talking about in Goodbye east Europe is that this concept of east Europe is disintegrating. erstwhile I was writing it, especially in 2011 or 2014, prosperity was the thing. There was the enlargement of the European Union and the broader integration with Western Europe which has erased quite a few the diversity from erstwhile centuries. But I think you have another east Europe that is now under this shadow of frozen or active conflict. That is the east Europe of the Bosnian conflict; or the frozen conflict of Transnistria and Moldova; and then you have Ukraine, a very active conflict. erstwhile I was in Republika Srpska, in the area close Croatia where there was dense fighting in 1993, I travelled through burnt-out villages where trees are increasing inside houses and everything is for sale. It is simply a conflict that happened 30 years ago, and has not yet healed. With Ukraine we have quite a few optimism, quite a few admiration for the strength shown in the conflict. But there is simply quite a few worry about erstwhile the rebuilding is going to happen. Will it happen? The shadow of a conflict can last generations, definitely decades. And we can see a divided between 2 kinds of east Europe emerging. 1 very western focused, and 1 that wants to be western focused but fundamentally has a ball and chain around its ankle. I hope that’s not true, but that’s my worry.
This interview is besides available as a podcast episode for Talk east Europe – visit www.talkeasterneurope.eu.
Jacob Mikanowski is simply a freelance writer and writer. He is the author of the book Goodbye, east Europe: An Intimate past of a Divided Land.
Adam Reichardt is the editor in chief of New east Europe and co-host of the Talk east Europe podcast.
Nina Pániková is simply a is a elder capacity building officer at with the Human Rights home Foundation and co-host of the Talk east Europe podcast.
