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Essays | Spring 1990
The Quest For Central Europe

nce upon a time there
was a region of Europe
united not so much by
language or even history
but by something more

elusive-by hard-to-de-fine common sensibilities and affinities. What is referred to ever more longingly to- day as Central Europe has in reality always been a crazy quilt of nationalities inhabiting countries wedged between the vastness of Mother Russia and the paternal rigor of Germany. Yet, because many of these countries were for centuries under Aus- trian tutelage, their pe...

Essays | Spring 1990
Budapest 1945: The Year Zero

In my stepfather's cellar I was waiting for the Russians. I was 20 years old, a deserter, with false military identity papers; if I were to befound out by the National Socialists or by the field gendarmerie, I could be shot or hanged on the spot. I had left my unit, an anti-aircraft battery in the Hungarian army, in November of 1944.

Essays | Spring 1990
AFTER THE BLOC PARTY

It is easy to wax euphoric over the events that swept Eastern Europe

in 1989. The images-flashed
across television screens or played
upon the pages of newspapers and

magazines-still remain fresh in memory: In Hungary, the funeral and re- burial of Imre Nagy, leader of the 1956 Revolution; in East Germany, the joyous flood of people streaming through the Ber- lin Wall, that symbol of division and Cold War; in Poland, the beaming face of Lech Walesa, his Solidarity trade union relegalized; in...

Essays | Spring 1990
Goodbye, Samizdat

id-December 1989, poetry buffs
in Poland received a Christmas
present they had long been waiting
for: the first "official" (that is, nei-
ther underground nor emigre)
publication in Polish of the se- lected poems of Russian-American Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. The fact that the book was just a reprint of an earlier emigre edition could not detract from the readers' satisfaction: Another taboo had been bro- ken, another long-vilified author had made his way into aboveground circulation....

Essays | Spring 1990
The Birthplace of Psychoanalysis

t is not by chance that psychoanaly-
sis was born in Vienna and came of
age there. In Sigmund Freud's
time-that is, in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries-the cultural

atmosphere in Vienna encouraged a fascination with both mental illness and -sexual problems which was unique in the Western world-a fascination that ex-tended throughout society, even into the imperial court which dominated Viennese social life. The origins of this preoccupation can be traced to the history of the city it...

Essays | Spring 1990
Fighting Poverty the Old-Fashioned Way

t is difficult to exaggerate the dread
and sense of crisis that the urban
poor inspired in most citizens of
the United States a century ago.
The phenomenally rapid industri-

alization that had been underway since the Civil War was attracting millions of eastern and southern Europeans to America's sweatshops, steel mills, and railyards. The influx of these "more foreign foreigners," more alien in language, cus- toms, and religion than the Irish and Ger- man immigrants who preceded th...

Essays | Spring 1990
A President for Certain Seasons

Americans remember the those who recall the 1950s as a time of so- 1950s for many things, but cial stagnation, Cold War belligerence, high among them is the im- and hidden turbulence, Eisenhower has age of Dwight D. Eisen- seemed (like the decade itself) bland, inef- hower, the genial, smiling fectual, mediocre-a man, Arthur Schle- national hero whose reas- singer has written, "who did not always suring presence seemed to symbolize the understand and control what was going halcyon days of...

Essays | Spring 1990
To Form a More Perfect Human

is name was Orson Squire
Fowler. In his day, it was a
name to be reckoned
with, a name that gar-
nered notice-and in

some cases tributes-from many of his triple-monikered con- temporaries: Julia Ward Howe, Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, to name a few.
He is largely forgotten now. He was buried just over a century ago in an un- marked grave in the Bronx, and there is no monument to his memory or his varied achievements. But there are ma...

Essays | Spring 1990
RESEARCH REPORTS

Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions
"American Indians: The First of This Land."
Russell Sage Foundation, 112 E. 64th St., New York, N.Y. 10021. 408 pp. $49.95.
Author: C. Matthew Snipp
The 1980 census revealed two landmarks in the history of the North American Indians. For the first time in over two cen- turies, their population ex-ceeded one million. It also re- vealed that American Indians, who just a decade earlier were the poorest group in the...

In Essence | Spring 1990
War of the Underdogs

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and "Race-Neutral Programs and the Democratic Coalition" Wil- liam Julius Wilson, in The American Prospect (Spring 1990),
P.O. Box 7645, Princeton, N.J. 08543-7645, and "The Life of the Party" by Rep. Newt Gingrich, in Policy Review (Winter 1990), 214 Mass. Ave. N.E. Washington, D.C. 20002.

Has. the United States become a one-party state? Judging by these essays, written by leading lights on opposites sides of the U.S. political spectrum, you might t...

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