Suivre le cours du Danube: zone frontière, non-lieu et hétérotopie. Dialogue entre "Danubio" de Claudio Magris et "Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása – lefelé a Dunán" de Péter Esterházy

The concept of “Eastern Europe” (as we currently understand it) is relatively recent, dating back to the 18th century (cf. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe). The “invention”, so to speak, of “Central Europe” is even more so, since it was created in the 1980s (by Danilo Kiš, Milan Kundera, György Konrad, etc.) in order to claim a shift of the cultural borders of Eastern Europe farther east, beyond the Iron Curtain – these “little” countries stuck between Western Europe and Eastern Europe are defined as “Central Europe”.
In this chapter, I compare two works that were written against the backdrop of these debates and that take the Danube River as the great common denominator of Central Europe: "Danubio" [Danube] (1986) by the Italian Claudio Magris, and "Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása – lefelé a Dunán" [The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn - Down the Danube] (1991) by the Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy.