Crisis without Catharsis? Crisis Discourses and the Problem of Political Modernity in Interwar East Central Europe

East Central European authors focusing on crisis in the interwar years were eminently part of a pan-European discussion, being avid readers of Paul Valéry, Oswald Spengler, José Ortega y Gasset, or Johan Huizinga, and closely following the French, German, Spanish, and other intellectual debates.¹ Given this entanglement, overviews of the East Central European “crisis literature” are often framed as Rezeptionsgeschichten, focusing mainly on the translations and readings of key Western authors.² This perspective, especially under the aegis of the more recent paradigm of “history of transfers,” does not preclude an interest in local creativity, as translation and reception are by default manifestations of intellectual negotiation. Still, there are not many regionally framed transnational analyses of the explicit or implicit dialogues between East Central and Western European authors about crisis. In the following, I seek to identify a number of cases where East Central European authors did not just pick up on certain Western works, but actually tried to engage with the very phenomenon of European crisis literature, develop their own interpretative position, and take an active part in the transnational conversation.