Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in Post-imperial Europe

After the First World War, East Central Europe underwent an extensive geopolitical reconfiguration, resulting in highly turbulent environments in which political sacrificial narratives found a breeding ground. They engaged various groups’ experiences of dispossession, energizing them for the wars against their ‘perpetrators’. By knitting together their frustrations and thus creating new foundational myths, these narratives introduced new imagined communities. Their mutual competition established a typically post-imperial traumatic constellation that generated discontent, frustrations and anxieties. Within the various constituencies that structured it through their interaction, this book focuses on literary narratives of dispossession, which, placed at its nodes, develop much subtler technologies than their political counterparts. They are interpreted as individual and clandestine oppositions to the homogenizing pattern of public narratives.