![]() ![]() Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. ![]() ![]() These rhetorical dockings on the banks of the Danube, located at the intersection of fiction and essayism, reflect upon the legacy of Mitteleuropa and attempt to chart a possible postnational future for Europe. The narrator of Magris’s extended travelogue takes the reader on a textual journey through local narratives and literatures along the Danube, where a palimpsest of discarded and overwritten histories reveals neglected and almost forgotten paradigms. This reading, however, suggests that in the context of the Cold War, Magris’s emphasis on the non-national legacy of Mitteleuropa, conceived as a strategy of resistance against the totalitarian reaches of authoritarian regimes, resists the allure of a straightforward and easy nostalgia. Claudio Magris’s revisitation of the idea of Mitteleuropa in the essay-novel Danubio is often read as a contribution to the imperial nostalgia inherent in the Habsburg myth, the process of transfiguration of Austrian history that Magris himself observed and theorized. ![]()
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