Against Compensatory History

In contrast to essay writing that hovers at the boundaries between the philosophy of history and international psychoanalysis, between moral normativity and the historical macro-scale, Central European literature proves remarkably coherent; it serves current political interests to a much lesser extent and also avoids self-aggrandisement.

The existence of Central Europe, its borders, and its identity are pressing questions only for Central Europe itself. Since the eighteenth century, it has been searching for a mirror in which it might see itself and for borders that would separate it from others. Its intellectuals try to create grand explanatory structures – transnational narratives describing the spirit of history. Milan Kundera’s essay “A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe”, published in France in 1983 and still – judging also by the number of polemics it has provoked – stirring up heated emotions, has certainly lost some of its relevance, although it remains present in our culture. Kundera wrote about Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, without considering – as Przemysław Czapliński[1] rightly points out – the other countries of the former Eastern Bloc that were dependent on the USSR. The literary scholar from Poznań points out, from the perspective of the 2020s, Kundera’s omissions: his focus on the intelligentsia as the only social class; the questionable selection of only those nations that openly resisted communism; the omission of antisemitism and its role in creating bonds among the countries that participated in the Second World War; the hierarchisation of different parts of the Old Continent; and the assumption that a willingness to give one’s life for the West attests to the exceptional role of Eastern Europe.

In contrast to essay writing that hovers at the boundaries between the philosophy of history and international psychoanalysis (who is better, whose trauma pushes them to a higher position in the race of history), between moral normativity and the historical macro-scale, Central European literature proves remarkably coherent; it serves current political interests to a much lesser extent and also avoids self-aggrandisement. It bears witness to trauma; it is patriarchal and non-heteronormative, chaotic and melancholic at once, enthusiastic and score-settling, high-flown and mass-market, hyper-feminine and uber-masculine, civilian, partisan, and collaborationist.

Central European literature works against compensatory history – the term Czapliński uses in the essay cited above as he tries to show the costs of European megalomania: “The director of this spectacle is fear of the truth, and protecting a lie always requires violence – it drives the creation of laws intended to censor art and science, preventive antisemitism, the erasure of traces, and the creation of compensatory history.”

Literature from our part of the continent does not avoid violence either – but it changes its direction and dynamics and uses different tools of description. Even in Ismail Kadare’s novel “The General of the Dead Army”, written in the early 1960s and telling the story of the search for the bodies of Italian fascist soldiers in Albania, the army appears only as exhumed bones placed in specially prepared bags. There is no fighting, no conflict, while resentment and anger – Albanian and Italian – smoulder beneath the surface. Kadare lulls the reader, making them think they will be following a monotonous plot: a slow search for graves, the frustrations of the supervising general, who spent the war in Africa and now sketches battle strategies on cigarette packs. The writer from Gjirokastër introduces scenes of violence only twice, and in both cases they are striking: first, in the dream of an Italian deserter working for an Albanian farmer. Fed, hidden, and protected, he dreams of raping his host’s daughter. Upon waking, he remembers exactly how he ran up the stairs to her bedroom and what he did to her. The second time, Kadare uses the style of an official summary: Colonel Z., an Italian character and commander of a unit notorious for its cruelty, murders a partisan and then takes his fourteen-year-old daughter for the night. In the morning, straight from his tent, she jumps into a well.

Many such scenes can also be found in later literature – Sofi Oksanen, in her novel “Purge”, published in Finland in 2008 but set in Estonia, introduces a scene in which women hiding a family member, a partisan, are raped. Two adult sisters submit to this “procedure” carried out by Soviet soldiers in order to protect the husband of one of them, but also to prevent their daughter from being raped. Kateřina Tučková, in “Gerta”, devoted to the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia in May 1945, invokes rape repeatedly. The war is over, but the women marching in the procession of exiles – the new “subhumans” – are attractive, easy prey. They can be exploited at will, and their murder goes entirely unpunished. Official statistics do not even include such a category; for those who died during the German deportation, the cause of death is listed as illness or old age. None of these three authors – whose novels encompass Albania, Czechoslovakia, and Estonia and span a period of fifty years – shows us the scene of violence itself. Yet the violence is all the more stark for staying un represented; it appears first in the traces left on the body – bruises, blood, torn-out hair, broken ribs, pregnancies – and later in memories, night sweats, and nightmares. The widowed mother in Kadare’s novel begins to howl when she sees an Italian general’s uniform at a wedding in her village; Aliide Tru in Oksanen’s novel cannot stand the basement smell; Gerta in Tučková’s novel stops counting how many times she is raped – all that matters is whether she manages to protect her two-month-old daughter. Only later, when she is safe and the girl is a few years old, does the mother wake at night screaming. Violence is thus attested to by the power of trauma, as well as by suggestion, which builds a kaleidoscope of images in the readers’ minds.

Violence is directed primarily against women and children; in literary narratives it serves as a tool of discipline, and its targets are civilians, not soldiers of the enemy army. A significant shift thus takes place: even if literature contains no concrete testimonies, it gathers, as Oksanen and Tučková do, a single fate from a multitude of similar experiences. Both authors also privilege women’s voices in their other novels, making the way women are treated a litmus test for the ethics of European ideological systems. In a sense, Darko Cvijetić sets the same mechanism in motion – albeit in relation to young men – in his excellent epic poems published in Polish: “Schindlerov lift” (Schindler’s Lift) and, especially, “Što na podu spavaš” (Why Are You Sleeping on the Floor?). This Croatian-Serbian author, the younger brother of a soldier who fought in the war of the 1990s, brings to the foreground the fate of boys from a single apartment block who suddenly not only have to join the army and take up arms but also choose a side in the conflict. They do not know how to shoot; they do not know why they are supposed to do it in the first place, or what separates them from their neighbours in the massive apartment block in Prijedor. Yet from these two forms of stolen innocence emerges violence, extreme violence at that – arson, mutilation, shots fired at children. Cvijetić portrays his very young protagonists at the hour of death and describes their grieving mothers, who share traits with Kadare’s widow. He is at his most compelling, however, when he lets his characters survive and meet again as labor migrants, when suddenly these close friends, absorbed in their work, realise that during the war they served in enemy armies and fought against one another.

Youthful innocence is not a locus communis of the Central European literary tradition; I would say, rather, that it is a rare privilege. More often, things are as they are in Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel or Serhiy Zhadan’s “Arabesques”: war not only strips people of the capacity for empathy and for wonder at the world and cuts them off from the possibility of learning, but also teaches calculation, emotional coldness, and, ultimately, the adoption of the rules of a time of oppression as one’s own. There is no way out of them; concern for one’s own skin proves to be a value that cannot be unlearned, Müller seems to say. Her protagonist, Leopold Auberg, a seventeen-year-old German living in Romania (modeled on the poet Oskar Pastior), is sent to a camp just after the end of the war. The Red Army deports working-age Germans from Romania; in what is now Ukraine, they are to rebuild industrial infrastructure destroyed by the Third Reich military operations. Auberg spends five years there, doing hard physical labour, struggling with the “hunger angel”, and learning his values from it. This fascinating personification, alluding partly to Walter Benjamin and partly to the physiological hallucinations brought on by starvation, becomes the young Romanian German’s guide to the world. The “hunger angel” tells him that one movement of the shovel equals one gram of bread; it also tells him to conceal his homosexuality, punished even more harshly than in the Reich – with immediate beatings and humiliation leading to death.

There is nothing of the naive young man in Auberg; there is only the struggle for survival – and it is this that allows him to be glad he is leaving home, even though he is traveling in a cattle car. The boy fears that one of the partners from his park trysts might denounce him, so he hopes for a change of fortune in a new place. The same survival instinct resurfaces years later, after Auberg has regained his freedom, when German police arrest several gay men caught in a park. The Romanian Nobel laureate’s protagonist then leaves his wife and goes abroad – again for fear of being exposed. Yet he continues to struggle with the “hunger angel”, aware of his own immorality and reactions driven by fear.

Herta Müller published this novel, drawing not only on Pastior’s fate and stories but also on those of her own mother, in 2009. The bitterness on which “The Hunger Angel” is built can be accepted only if it is accompanied by the thought that there will be no more wars or expulsions, that young Leo’s experience and moral erosion will not be repeated in subsequent generations. Obviously, this is not true; we cannot entertain such hope, especially in 2026. A year ago, Serhiy Zhadan’s “Arabesques” was published, a book in which descriptions of the everyday wartime lives of civilians and soldiers intertwine, creating one great narrative about exhausted people subjected to constant pressure, fear, and hunger. The final story in the collection is about children who volunteers bring food to. The oldest girl, the caretaker of the entire group, keeping watch over the comings and goings in a crumbling ruin – a house that had been unfit for habitation even before the bombings – is younger than Müller’s protagonist. She looks proudly at the volunteers – all of them adult men – and Zhadan tries to interpret that gaze: how much rage it holds, how much fear, how much wounded pride, how much anxiety about the future of the children who should not be in her care in the first place?

I have juxtaposed here books by authors from Albania, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Finland, Germany and Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. This is a cursory survey, reaching across the last dozen or so years and focusing mainly on contemporary texts. It nonetheless allows us to see that literature seizes upon questions political thought is unable to answer and offers complex responses, far removed from simple judgments and hierarchies. This literature – in the hands of Cvijetić, Kadare, Müller, Oksanen, Tučková, and Zhadan – is not afraid to dig into murky and difficult terrain; at the same time, it does not turn its characters into innocent, wronged victims or allow them to become fixed in this single dimension, although that would certainly be easier. It is far from seeing Europeans from this part of the world as morally superior – as Kundera wanted to see us; it is more interested in the balance of gains and losses that life in this place and these experiences leave in people.

Even if, some time from now, it turns out that we have been living in a simulacrum of Europe and that Central Europe does not exist, its literature certainly does – coming from countries that followed different political paths after 1989, while at the same time reflecting the same experiences in similar ways. It is a literature that privileges the voices of the excluded and the weakest, prods painful and shameful places, takes little interest in the politically correct version of history, and instead goes where taboos, uncertain responsibility, blurred guilt, moral ugliness, and fear lurk.

Translated from the Polish by Tomasz Bieroń

Bibliography

Darko Cvijetić, „Czemu na podłodze śpisz”, trans. Dorota Jovanka Cirlić, Warszawa 2025.

Darko Cvijetić, „Winda Schindlera”, trans. Dorota Jovanka Cirlić, Warszawa 2024.

Ismail Kadare, “General of the Dead Army”, trans. Derek Coltman, London 2008.

Herta Müller, „The Hunger Angel“, trans. Philip Boehm, New York 2012.

Sofi Oksanen, „Purge”, trans. Lola Rogers, Winnipeg 2010.

Kateřina Tučková, „Gerta”, trans. Véronique Firkusny, New York 2021.

Serhiy Zhadan, „Arabeski”, trans. Michał Petryk, Wołowiec 2025.

Serhiy Zhadan, „Sky above Kharkiv”, trans. Reilly Costigan-Humes, Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, New Haven 2023.

[1] Przemysław Czapliński, “Literatura do oporu: Między Europą Środkową a teraźniejszością”, Czas Kultury 2023, no. 21, https://czaskultury.pl/artykul/literatura-do-oporu-miedzy-europa-srodkowa-a-terazniejszoscia/ (accessed 17 August 2026).