The book explores the impact of the year 1968 across a large range of countries including Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and both East and West GermanyThe volume includes an international team of contributors and pertinent introductory remarks from Irena Grudzinska GrossInterpretations of how the events of 1968 have continued to shape the modern world have been brought into focus by the fifty year anniversary

Why does 1968 matter today? The authors of this volume believe that it is a crucial point of reference for current developments, especially the 'illiberal turn' both in Europe and America. If we want to understand it, we need to look back into 1968 - the year that founded the cultural and political order of today's world. The book consists of the following four sections: '1968 and transnationality', '1968 and the transformation of meanings', 'Artistic representations of 1968', and '1968 and the European contemporaity'. This is followed by an afterword from the significant keynote speaker at the conference Unsettled 1968: Origins - Myth - Impact in June 2018 in Tubingen, Germany: Irena Grudzinska-Gross, herself a Polish '68er', reflects upon the conference and leaves remarks on her 50 years of engagement with what happened in 1968.

In 1984 Czech writer Milan Kundera published his essay 'The Tragedy of Central Europe' in The New York Review of Books, which established the framework for disputes about the space between East and West for the following 30 years. Even today, the echo of those debates is still audible in spatial narratives. Discussing the way in which literary figures are positioned within new hierarchies such as gender, class, or ethnicity, this volume shows how the space of the imagined Central Europe has been de- and reconstructed. Special attention is paid to the role of the past in shaping contemporary spatial discourse.

Dieses Buch ist die erste umfangreiche Zusammenstellung der Prosawerke von zwei Schlusselautoren der polnischen Moderne, Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878-1911) und Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969). "Konarzewskas Arbeit verdient es [...], als innovativ bezeichnet zu werden und zwar auf edelste Weise innovativ: Der Polonist fragt sich hinsichtlich der Rolle von Brzozowski und Gombrowicz fur die polnische Kultur und die zentrale Stelle des Themas 'Reife' in ihrem Schaffen: Warum bin ich bloss selbst nicht auf die Idee gekommen?" Prof. Dr. Michal Mrugalski, Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin