ABSTRACT
In a subsequent lecture to a conference organized by the Social Democrats' Friedrich Ebert Foundation, he specifically disavowed the political instrumentalization of the concept, the "proclamation of Mitteleuropa as a goal." In Karl Schlogel conception, the rediscovery of Mitteleuropa would be carried forward in the realm of ideas, culture, nonpolitical exchange, and, to put it in Marxist terms, consciousness. Mitteleuropa is an acceptable term of art, or motto, for that ever closer web of common interests and mutual dependencies between the states of Eastern and Western Europe that the circle of Berlin Social Democrats set out to create more than a quarter of a century ago. The term Mitteleuropa can be found in Social Democratic (SPD) documents even in the late 1950s: and notably in the Deutschland-plan of 1959. Even more explicit, and uninhibited, is the former general secretary of the SPD, Peter Glotz, himself a Sudeten German, or as he puts it, a German "from Bohemia."
