This volume, titled in English, Magazines as Nodal Points for the Modern/Moderns, originated in a 2017 conference held in Regensburg, Germany, with the sponsorship of two research groups: “Prag als Knotenpunkt europäischer Modernen”(Prague as Intersection of European Moderns) and “Grenze/n in nationalen und transnationalen Erinnerungskulturen” (Border[s] in National and Transnational Memory Cultures). These “moderns” are referenced herein in full recognition that the term is used differently in various disciplines, but here they are used more specifically to refer to the collectives that formed around the magazines that became the characteristic medium for central Europe's modern thinkers. Who evolved their own avant gardes in the urban centers they inhabited: Prague, Brno, and Vienna?
The various essays included here (a selection from the conference) are well chosen to map a transnational and consciously multilingual network of artists, authors, translators, and editors who created a third space (9) with international reach and impact. All the texts cite copiously from original sources (and translate the quotations from Czech into German or English, depending on each essay's language). Together, they offer an extraordinary introduction of the problematics involved in reconstructing the cultural spaces in central Europe as a fundamental contact zone that can challenge our inherited notions of the modern/modernism as seen from France and the UK. Most importantly, the essays offer a view of modernism as an encompassing phenomenon.
Marek Nekula introduces the volume with a brief overview of how the terms “the modern” and “modernisms” have been used to encompass interdisciplinary artistic endeavors, and how the authors in the present collection approach their topics.
The first section, “The Modern and the Antimodern,” has three contributions by Dalibor Tureček, Daniel Vojtěch, and Steffen Höhne, respectively, on how Czech magazines staged aesthetic arguments about “the modern” around 1900, how those magazines changed their approaches after 1900 under the influence of psychological anthropology (focusing on Sigmund Freud and Otto Weininger), and the juxtaposition of Czech aesthetics to the German in a prominent German-language journal in Prague.
The second section, “Linguistic and Literary Polyphony,” is of particular interest in presenting six articles, each detailing how multiple languages and cultures met in central Europe and created an original response to modern(ist) trends. Moritz Csáky begins by defining central Europe as a space of communication that created a common culture out of confrontations among languages and language cultures. Lucie Merhautová discusses how modernist magazines in Prague responded to and confronted Viennese modernisms, especially in the form of “literary letters” published in dual language publications. Following Merhautová, Kurt Ifkovits implicates writers like Hermann Bahr in how modern Czech literary cultures were created in two important Prague weekly magazines, Die Zeit and Der Friede. Nekula returns with a discussion of the Moderní revue as a compendium of important authors influential to Czech modernism, taking the journal as a different staging of a network of authors for a multilingual public. Jindřich Toman concentrates on what he calls the “Linguistic and Visual Internationalism in Czech Avant-garde Magazines” (145), concentrating on the graphic design of the magazines as a branding move in international contexts. Finally, Irina Wutsdorff discusses the magazine ReD as a particular avant garde voice that also references the Soviet Union, not only the west.
The volume's third section addresses “Jewish Moderns/Modernism” (Jüdische Moderne/n) as represented in the context of Brno rather than Prague, offering two different discussions of the magazine Die Wahrheit (the second most important German-language magazine, after the Prager Presse). Štěpán Zbytovský addresses the era's arguments about Jewishness and Europeanness, and Jan Budňák speaks of the journal's appeal to cosmopolitanism as a critique of nationalism.
Every essay is well-conceived theoretically and well-written (whether in German or English) and gauged to map out its terrain very carefully for its readership, with thumbnail biographies and copious secondary literary references in footnotes. Each also presents translations of Czech materials into German or English, helping readers from European studies to appreciate this particular terrain that needs to be factored into discussions of Europe's modernism.
An index would have facilitated cross-referencing between articles for novice readers. Nonetheless, this collection is exemplary: scholars in central European and modernist studies will avoid it only at their peril, because it teaches much about the dynamics of cultural multilingualism and the periodical press in forming literary tastes and audiences. A must-read.
