When Central Europe Wanders: Austrians Abroad

Alison Frank Johnson’s remarks will argue that Central Europe only coheres as an idea and a term of reference is we are willing to define it in different ways at difference times (writ small, the truth that is encapsulated in the old joke about an old woman who never left her village but lived in five different countries in one lifetime). The "transnational" has always been what “Central European” and “Eastern European” historian undertook to illuminate. As the case of the old woman again shows, border crossing was not only the privilege of certain kinds of elites or professions but the everyday experience of all. Adding to the conceptual richness—and flexibility—required of any effort to locate “Central Europe” is the problem of taking into account changing ideas of race and fluctuating lines of ethnicity in these multi-dimensional spaces.