A Conversation with Rene Wellek [Volume: 9(1990), pp. 135-145]

Cross Currents 9 (1990)
A Yearbook of Central European Culture
A CONVERSATION WITH RENE WELLEK
Peter Demetz
Yale University
DEMETZ: In many countries and cities of Europe, intellectuals and writers these days are very much interested again in what
they call Mitteleuropa. Often these writers live in, or come from, regions that once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Intellectuals in Budapest, Vienna, and Trieste. and among Czech
writers Milan Kundera in Paris, ask questions about Middle Europe
and rediscover its history. It is not quite clear yet whether they are
thinking of a new kind of utopia, a convenient dream, or of their
nostalgia for time past. What would you say?
WELLEK: I think the term itself is somewhat suspicious. It
was invented by Friedrich Naumann during the war in 1915. It
was obviously a part of the German war propaganda, and aimed at
establishing a central European monarchy which would be wider
than Prussia. The concept itself, I think, is pretty vague, for it is
not clear what its boundaries are. I would say that it expresses a
mood of nostalgia.
DEMETZ: You probably have many memories of your childhood and early youth in Vienna in which so many mitteleuropaisch
cultures came together. Did people talk about Mitteleuropa at that
time, or did they rather see themselves as belonging to one or the
other nation that made up the Austro-Hungarian monarchy?
WELLEK: My father was an Austrian official who worked in
Vienna but was born in Prague, and he had very strong Czech national feelings. We were totally opposed to the Austrian monarchy
and felt our opposition very strongly, simply by being outsiders in
Vienna. I remember that neighbours called us b6hmische Schweine.
We were members of the Protestant church, actually the Lutheran
church, and in old Austria we had to choose between Lutherans and
Calvinists; no other possibility existed. We were compelled to go
downtown to the Dorotheengasse for religious instruction, and we
got a heavy dose of the Lutheran history of the Reformation. When
the Monarchy fell apart I was 15 years old. I think I was not very
conscious of the terrible destruction of the war, and my father looked
forward to the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic; in the first
days in October, 1918, he immediately left for Prague, convinced
there would be a Czechoslovak Republic. I myself and my brother
were being prepared for the move. My father engaged a Protestant
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