J.C.: But still nationalism, even together with communism that you pay much attention to, didn't fill the whole picture of modern ideologies in EE. There were also huge agrarian (in Polish context: PSL) and socialist movements (in Polish context: PPS) present, clearly different from nationalists or communists and very influential. Yet they haven't been included in your book. Were you afraid of giving too many details for an American reader?
J.M.: That's a good question. There was a strong agrarian and socialist movement in a lot of EE. There was something like that in America too - working men's parties, an agrarian movement in general. They were indeed influential, but rarely decisive in the course of events.
J.C.: Well, speaking of the Polish context, PSL (Polish People’s Party) was ruling the country in the interwar period together with the nationalists, and then Piłsudski took over the power and he was one of the previous leaders of the PPS (Polish Socialist Party). In post-war Poland, but also in Hungary, it was the agrarian movement that was one of the major opposition forces - weren’t they to some extent decisive, even if power was in the hands of communists?
J.M.: They were an important part of the political framework, but they didn't set the agenda. They were important in Bulgaria, they were significant in Czechoslovakia, but the pattern of the book is to pull out the most diagnostic movements and experiences. Within that pattern, agrarianism, although important, doesn’t stand out as hugely politically determinative and also not as distinctive. The PSL has its deep history in 19th century Galicia, they were important, but on a canvas of 20 countries they don't really make the cut. Even in Bulgaria, which is probably the country with the strongest agrarian movement of the interwar years, it is only a part of the bigger story of the violent conflict between a monarchy and insurgent communist movement, in which they get caught in the middle. This is a book that does privilege the extremes over that middle.
J.C.: Understood. You also decided not to include Eastern Germany, which didn’t need to be only Eastern Germany from the Soviet period - it might have been West or East Prussia in the earlier centuries. What made you exclude it from the EE definition?
J.M.: It’s another good question. East Germany often is present in survey histories of EE. It is because of the way EE is defined there, which is to start in the late 20th century and look backwards. It is depicted on the basis of the post 1945 world and shared history of state socialism that East Germany does belong to. But I tried to define the region on a thousand year basis and within that Eastern Germany doesn't really fit. Neither does Prussia. The German lands or the different German principalities didn't have that element of …
J.C.: Being under empire?
J.M.: Of being under empire, of smallness, of domination, of threat. East Germany post 1945 in a sense did, but didn’t have that kind of fractal diversity and that level of population concentration.
J.C.: Let's move to another characteristic of your book which is its personal character. As you write: ,,This book is not a family history, but my family's history forms a braid running throughout it. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote that 'awareness of one's origins is like an anchor line plunged into deep' without which 'a historical intuition is virtually impossible'. And so it is for me; my ancestors are the root of everything I wrote. Is Czesław Miłosz still recognizable at the University of California where you have graduated from history and he was once a professor?
J.M.: My dissertation was focused on him. I knew many people who knew him, I had dinner at the house where he used to live. I lived a few blocks away from the house where he recorded Mój wiek by Aleksander Wat. His translator, Robert Hass, is still there. He is very much a living part of the bay area and indeed he wrote wonderful poems about the San Francisco Bay, where he intertwined those two worlds: pre-war Vilnius and Berkeley. He was better known for much of his life in the United States as a writer of prose, not poetry, and as writer of prose he explained EE to the West. First in the Zniewolony umysł [The Captive Mind] communicating the experience of the imposition of totalitarianism, then in Rodzinna Europa [Native realm] or Dolina Issy [The Issa Valley], where he swung the other way. The Captive mind was so popular and people associated him with this position so much, that he went the other direction and tried to write about the EE of his childhood, of Lithuania and the Russian Empire before WWI and about the old order of EE before WWII, before Stalinism. I think he's one of the great explainers and communicators of the region, for me more so than Kundera. They didn't exactly debate, but I am much closer to the Native realm by Miłosz than to the Kidnapped West or The Tragedy of Central Europe by Kundera, even though I see value in both.