ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I turn to Milan Kundera and Gu¨nter Grass in order to explore
how their promotion of the myth of civilized, democratic, and enlightened
European traditions allows them to critique Eastern European communist
regimes as distortions and deviations from those traditions. While an Orien-
talist articulation of Eastern Europe in Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz
surfaces through seemingly naturalized geographic discourses that delineate
civilizational hierarchies between Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, Kun-
dera and Grass employ historicist narratives of Europe’s progress toward an enlightened modernity and resulting fulfillment of liberal-democratic ideals,
which allows them to Orientalize communism as a non-European aberration
and a non-modern obstacle to the linear trajectory of European development.
This gesture, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have argued, in fact characterizes
Eurocentric discourses, which ‘‘project a linear historical trajectory leading
from classical Greece to imperial Rome and then to the metropolitan capi-
tals of Europe and the US . . . attribut[ing] to the West an inherent progress’’ from which Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin are mere ‘‘aberrations’’ (1994: 2). Kundera and Grass criticize Western European democracies for betraying
the ideals of the Enlightenment as well: Kundera is offended by ‘‘vulgar’’
consumerism and abdication to mass media and entertainment, and Grass
denounces the Nazi past, bureaucratization, capitalist inequalities. Never-
theless, the enlightened ideals themselves bear a definite Western European
stamp, becoming master-signifiers in comparison to which any political
alternative is inevitably inferior, or even not properly historical. What is
especially interesting is how in their texts written after 1989 the very myth of a European civilization and its unified historical development is brought
into a crisis through a portrayal of Western Europe’s less than noble com-
portment in the proclaimed rescuing of Eastern Europeans: the emphasis
shifts to renewed colonization, capitalist exploitation, and patronizing,
racist attitudes towards Eastern Europeans. For this purpose, then, I intend
to analyze Kundera’s brief novels Slowness (1996) and Ignorance (2002) and
Grass’s The Call of the Toad (1992), written after the fall of communist
regimes in Eastern Europe, in constellation with their earlier writings on communism and formulations of a European ideal.
