“Central-Eastern Europeans, in all their freedom, have slowly but surely lost their identity. The memory of it sometimes emerges from the deep down in our guts, but we have to block it, or act as if it were an ordinary tourist attraction. The gentry of New York, Landon, Berlin and Paris are sometimes fond of our Balkan exoticism. They would gladly hear a song or see a Kusturica movie. The Parisian ladies would scream silently, oh, what an exotic world! In order to please them, we put our Balkan mask on our faces, war-paint copies of our true selves, and stage a Balkan historical play for them. All this, however, is only a flirt, pure fun, dose of folklore nostalgia for the lounge globalists. To accommodate their requests, we sometimes serve them with a slice of it. It is better they applaud to these, than poke their noses into the reality. It didn’t take long for the true faces of the Western Europe and Balkans to appear, the faces we had so eagerly concealed. The faces which scream of countries and nations suspiciously eyeing each other and bursting with nationalism and populism. This region has turned to the right so violently that its back started to ache. It wanted to be more extreme right than the West.
the freedom, down with the equality! Down with the equality, down with the brotherhood! We gasp under the weight of our freedom. We suffer under our freedom. We cry, yet serve an espresso with careful ballet steps at a big Central-Eastern European café, just like my fellow countryman does at Caffe San Marco in Trieste. The Central Europe and the Balkans had gotten rid of their shackles, and, with them, of their identities.” László Végel
The freedom has exposed us. Stripped us naked. That other face, hidden behind the adjusted masks – the face that Communism and its dictatorship had forced to hide – our illusions and ideals put a make up of an imaginary Central Europe all over it. The dream of Central Europe, dreamed by Kundera, Conrad and Magris, has shattered. The illusions have, too. It turned out we falsified our own biographies, while the rest has remained the same. Fathers have given up on their past, their sons have given up on them. We’re now marking time with our own illusions long lost. Neither Socialism, dying in pains, nor the Soviet Empire, that had allegedly invaded the Central Europe, is to blame. We are free – we admit that with a certain Central-Eastern European irony, for we know our freedom is but a mask. Long live the freedom, which is worth nothing! Long live A WAR RITUAL
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