The Afterlives of Europe Nevermore

One hundred years ago, much of the discourse on the crisis of Europe during the 1920s and 1930s attested to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War. In these reflections, my aim is to recast the narrative of European crisis from this epicenter of disappearance and, in its wake, delineate an alternative Europe as a possibility lost to the twentieth century, neither "the West" nor "the East," but "Central Europe"—a center that does not exist and may have never existed. Prompted by Milan Kundera’s contention that the tragedy of Central Europe encapsulates the "tragedy of Europe," I examine in this chapter the diverse ways in which Central Europe, as centered on the Habsburg Empire, was imagined by a host of interwar writers and philosophers (Husserl, Masaryk, Naumann, and others) with a focus on Joseph Roth. Through the multifaceted lens of Roth’s novels and short stories, the aim of this chapter is both to situate the crisis discourse of Europe within the cultural context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and assess the ways in which different "afterlives" of Europe—ghosts, specters, and spirits—inhabited the interwar literary imaginary of Central Europe, its loss and haunting.