Nations and nationalisms used to be the heroes and villains of Central and Eastern European historiography. The protagonists of recent literature in the field are networks, flows, and cosmopolitan intellectuals. This volume is emblematic of this development. It contributes to a growing body of literature that reenvisions the region from global and transnational perspectives. The authors deliberately part with nationally bound narratives, arguing that every important development in Central Europe (including the rise of nationalism) was shaped by transnational and transcultural exchanges and transfers. The volume aims to document the variety of transnational connections that shaped Central European life over the course of one century through topics ranging from music to media studies to literature to “kitchen studies.” The book consists of two parts, each one focusing on a moment of transcultural and transethnic exchange. The first part explores cultural connections established in Central Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part shifts to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, exploring how these older patterns of exchange were reconstructed after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Two essays in this collection stand out. In a chapter on music's role in the “social construction of space” in the Habsburg territories, Gregor Kokorz argues that “the national and international, while represented by strikingly different patterns, expressed not an insuperable conflict but rather a necessary complementarity” (57). He claims that Franz Liszt became a “national icon” in Hungary because—not in spite of the fact that—his repertoire consisted mostly of non-Hungarian music. The chapter's other contribution is to draw attention to a time and space in which national identities in Central Europe did not revolve primarily around language. Liszt, who thought of himself as Hungarian, was in fact of German ethnicity and spoke neither Hungarian nor German but French as his first language. In “Spaces of Unhomeliness,” Irene Sywenky explores memory as a form of transnational connection across Central Europe. The essay looks at how several literary figures associated with the city of Lwów, both Polish and Ukrainian, including Adam Zagajewski and Zbigniew Herbert, Jozef Witlin, Stanislaw Lem, and Yurii Andrukhovych, made Lwów the center of a rich narrative memory. Sywenky argues that Lwów has loomed so large in the imagination of so many writers because of its “heterotypic” quality. The city was simultaneously anchored in the past and in the present, belonging to everyone and no one in particular.

The authors spend a good deal of time justifying their theoretical choices—reflecting on the applicability to Central Europe of concepts such as “geomodernism” or “networks.” At the same time, they tend to gloss over many of the big questions the volume implicitly raises. One of these has to do with Central Europe's definition—a matter the authors declare to be beyond the book's scope. Instead, they are content to define the region rather vaguely as a “geopolitically ambivalent space,” a multipolar realm that gravitated toward different cultural centers and a backdrop for narrative palimpsests. Yet the same could be said of almost any other borderland in the world. One cannot help but wonder what—if anything—was unique to Central Europe and how this would shape our understanding of the region's position in Europe. The concept of Central Europe gained currency in the 1980s, when intellectuals like the Czech writer Milan Kundera and Hungarian writer George Konrad rejected the notion that their countries belonged to “Eastern Europe” on the grounds that, from a cultural point of view, they shared more with German-speaking Europe than the Slavic East. At the time, this was a powerful argument against Soviet imperialism. It is not, however, one that should be taken for granted today. Yet the volume seems to do just that by focusing exclusively on cultural matters and generally leaving out the political and economic factors that structured these cultural exchanges.

Another one of the volume's goals is to trace—as the subtitle suggests—“continuities and transformations” in Central Europe over the course of one century. The authors show that the networks and connections established in the late nineteenth century continued to resonate with Central Europeans even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. One cannot help but wonder why memories of older cultural connections across the region were so enduring. Here the authors miss an opportunity to expand their reflections into a potentially fascinating argument about the cultural legacies of Austrian rule and the ineffectiveness of the Soviet cultural project in the region.

The authors foreground “culture” as a powerful instrument for shaping space. By “culture” they do not mean high culture exclusively but also popular cultural forms (see the essays on the pop band Laibach in former Yugoslavia or the chapter on “Kitchen Stories”). Yet even these “lower” cultural forms are relatively high. These are all essays about modernist journals, avant-garde or classical music performances, and literature written by cosmopolitan writers and intellectuals. The transnational universe they sketch belongs firmly to the educated middle and upper classes. This leaves us with a rather narrow definition of culture, for it remains unclear how relevant cultural exchanges and connections between highly educated individuals were to the societies in which they were embedded. Was transnationalism in Central Europe limited to a stratum of cosmopolitan intellectuals? Or were other forms of transcultural exchange perhaps more significant? The volume does not delve into these questions.

Nevertheless, the book is a welcome contribution to Habsburg and Austrian studies because it puts forward a nuanced, vivid, and dynamic image of the Habsburg and post-Habsburg space by shifting focus away from the large urban centers (Vienna and Budapest), toward the neglected margins. From this perspective, the authors show that none of the Central European “crossings” they explore were unidirectional. Ideas and cultural practices flowed not only from the large urban centers to the periphery but also within regional and local networks that have yet to be fully understood.