By Central Europe, we are referring to the countries and peoples west of Russia and east of the line made by the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Italy. The names and shapes of the countries in this area have changed throughout history. The most recent set of changes took place after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989. The literature of Central Europe is too vast and diverse to permit even a representative introduction in ten weeks, so in this course, we will concentrate on the Czech Republic and Hungary, countries which are dear to us, as a way of showing some aspects of the character and literary styles typical of the region.

"Czech" is a word that can refer to the Czech people or to the countries they live in. The identity of the so-called Czech Lands of Bohemia and Moravia has all too often been shaped, against the will of their people, by the ravages of war and religious conflict. The Hussite Rebellion against the Papacy preceded Martin Luther by a century. Two hundred years later the Czechs once again found themselves as the cynosure of religious struggles when the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) began and ended in Prague. With Czechs, Germans, Catholics, and Protestants competing for regional dominance, the Jewish minority, present since the tenth century, was ghettoized, literally and figuratively. Prague, the principal city in the Czech Lands, became the center for three richly diverse cultures: Czech, German, German-Jewish.

The Austrian victory in the Thirty Years War resulted in three centuries of Germanic hegemony over the Czechs, most visibly in the institutionalization of the German language. Until a cultural revival in the mid nineteenth century, written Czech was nearly extinct. The end of World War I brought independence to the Czechs in an unstable marriage to Slovakia, a similar Slavic people governed by Hungary for a millennium. Twice in the last century hostile neighbors, Nazi and Soviet, occupied the Czech Lands. These struggles shaped the Czech psyche, and likewise its literature, into one reflecting survival and endurance, but more importantly one devoid of servility.