“Europeans without Euros”: Alternative Narratives of Europe’s ‘New Happiness’

Abstract

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, belles paroles such as ‘Europe without borders’ and ‘the family of European nations’ announced in discourse - if not in reality – the ‘reunification of Europe.’ However, as the years of perpetual transition wore on, many Eastern European writers and intellectuals began to suggest Anschluss as a more appropriate description of East-West rapprochement. In fiction and in feuilletons, these writers and intellectuals pointed to the fact that while communism may have become water over the dam, generations of Eastern Europeans, unable to find their feet in the new circumstances, were drowning in the flood of Europe’s ‘new happiness.’ This paper considers Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of Pain, 2004) and Milan Kundera’s L’ignorance (Ignorance, 2000) as alternative narratives of the post-Wende years; attempts to articulate the experiences of those whom Svetlana Boym would call “Europeans without euros.”