ABSTRACT
History writing has always been influenced by the biases historians apply automatically – necessarily taking the perspective of their own time and place. Scholars have usually treated East Central Europe, if at all, as somewhere between three regions (the West, Byzantium, and Russia/the Central Asian steppes), a dead end, a road or, at best, a region of passage. In the second half of the twentieth century, not the least due to the influence of the Cold War, the medieval East and West were judged to be completely separate from each other. What can historically be defined as Central Europe – the regions between the Rhine (with its German urban culture) in the West and the rim of the expansion of Latin Christianity on the east – was torn apart politically and its role in historical processes was not considered. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, shortly before the regime changes in East Central Europe and the fall of the Iron Curtain around 1990, both historians and the general public inside and outside the region began to devote increasing attention to East Central Europe, that is, east of the cultural region of Central Europe.
