Castorp by Pawel Huelle, Poland's most accomplished contemporary writer [Halikowska-Smith, 2003] has frequently been interpreted as a counterpart to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. A reader of Mann's novel may remember that before his arrival at Davos, Hans Castorp spent four terms as a student at the Danzig Polytechnic. It is around this digression that Huelle builds his plot, inserting into the biography of Mann's protagonist an extensive Gdansk-based episode.
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| Central Europe as a Problem |
| Towards the end of the nineteenth century there appeared in Germany the idea of Mitteleuropa, a concept related in discursive terms to colonial expansionism, infamous in its intentions. It is worth recalling, however, that the word "colony" (and its derivatives) comes from the Latin colonia, where it meant: a peasant enclosure, a settlement, in order to enter later - via the French colon (one who tills the soil, a settler) - eighteenth-century European dictionaries in its current, rather pejorative, and in any case widely disputed meaning. In the discourse of colonial expansionism, however, it retained a certain heroic aura, since it preferred settlers to nomads, those who cultivated anything at all to ignoramuses. The Latin colonia coincides here with the closely related term "culture" (from the Latin cultus, meaning cultivation, husbandry, breeding) in its original, agricultural association with that which is stable, |
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