Memory – Recollection – Difference: Plurality and Heterogeneity as the Signature of Central Europe

Abstract

We experience so much, so fast and so consecration-free indistinctly. We are not a confi dent gender, but we feel too many things; we also talk too loud, too fast and about too much; we are not healthy enough for grace and all too poor in inner music. 3

Memory – Recollection – Difference: Plurality and Heterogeneity as the Signature of Central Europe

“…It is, as Zygmunt Bauman said, an understanding of culture as a 'spontaneous process that is free of administrative or executive centres'. 51 I therefore propose that culture be understood as an ensemble of cultural elements, signs, symbols and codes, with which individuals communicate with one another in a verbal and non-verbal context. In a fi gurative sense, culture can be understood as a communication space, as a space of 'multilayer and often contradictory social process(es), ... a dynamics of social relations', 52 wherein, through placing and rejection of elements, permanent life-worlds are constituted and at the same time balances of power are negotiated.…”

“…The main part of this idiom was the never proper and fully learned German, whose gaps were fi lled with words and phrases from a couple of other tongues spoken in Bukovina. 58 Such language interferences and interactions are thus no arbitrary inventions, but they refl ect the social and cultural reality of everyday life. They are evidence that people and groups are located at such 'internal boundaries' in multiple communication spaces, and identify themselves with those.…”