A History of Central Eastern Europe

Central Eastern Europe
The borderlands of the Hungarian, Slovak and Polish countries as they stand
today are of particular concern in any attempt to discover, understand and illuminate the
places and people that lived in this seemingly vast and mysterious section of the world.
But the hazy cloud that obscures the spectacular history of this area is only one of
recent invention. For the better part of the last century the Soviet control of virtually all
lands between Russia and Germany and extending to cover the Balkan peninsula have
made it difficult, if not undesirable, to uncover or rediscover these domains with their
rich history. This was not always the case – during the nineteenth century, and for
centuries before that, Europe stood as a whole entity; the artificial division into a
“Western” and “Eastern” Europe was a construct of man, a construct whose goal was to
slice the continent in two and give the appearance of an advanced culture and society
with progressive ideas in Western Europe. Societies that the United States could
befriend, defend and partner with; the “other” Europe – the backwards, illiterate, dark
one stuck in medieval ways had to be conquered, educated or otherwise dragged from
the depths of Soviet thought by those more “enlightened.” Or, at least, that was the
approach, in the proverbial nutshell that governed Western actions for the last century.
Eastern, that is to say, Soviet beliefs and acts dovetailed quite nicely with the Western
approach – the isolationist tendencies of Soviet-controlled areas were required for their
doctrines to be successful. The pre-Soviet history of the nations had to be suppressed
or rewritten, Western culture had to be portrayed as flawed and decadent while Soviet
doctrine exalted as the pinnacle of mankind’s achievements, the logical conclusion of
centuries of progress during which many different forms of government had been tried –
absolute monarchies, republics, democracies, constitutional monarchies – and
discarded for the utopian Soviet society. The disinformation coming from both sides of
the artificial divide was desired and required by both.
With the fall of Soviet power and the corrupted version of Communism that came
to predominate in the last half of the twentieth century the artificial division has also
fallen. The Berlin Wall is perhaps the greatest metaphorical symbol of this artificial
divide: constructed at the height of the Cold War in 1961, it lasted less than 30 years
before being destroyed in 1989. Future generations will be much better educated in the
history of this area as it is no longer in our government’s interest to project this area and
these people as enemies of our state or as a threat to our liberty. But those of my
generation will not benefit from the History 102 high school classes required for
graduation in 2015, or 2006 for that matter. It is our responsibility to go out and actively
seek to know, to educate ourselves, if we are to know the history of the area. Is it
important for us to know this history? The answer to that question is as individual as we
are. Its import to me is to facilitate my understanding of how it was that I came to be. My
parent’s background is quite ordinary – they grew up in the same town, they graduated
from the same high school – but that of their parent’s is anything but ordinary. How is it
that just two generations ago four individuals from such diverse backgrounds – one the
son of immigrants from the Kingdom of Naples, another a Hungarian probably of
German descent, the third being perhaps the most “American” of all with roots on this
continent going back almost four hundred years yet added to by an immigrant escaping
the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, and finally a daughter of ostensibly Slovak ancestry
whose surname has yet to be claimed by any nationality – how is it that these four
people came together at the time and place they did? Keep reading to know the answer.
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