Cross Currents, Number 11

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This illustrated annual brings together essays, poetry, reportage and interviews that explore the mix and clash of cultures and nationalities in the centre of Europe. In this issue, for example, the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal gibes at Joseph Brodsky's assertion that there is a clear "border" between East and West through Central Europe, Luise von Flowtow tours the counterculture of the former East Berlin in the aftermath of reunification with the West, and Tiina Kirss reports on the cultural ferment in the Baltic republic of Estonia. The Croatian novelist Dubravka Ugresic reflects on her own and Western reactions to the destruction of her homeland in the war in Yugoslavia, Aneta Georgievska and Victor Miesel examine trends in the visual arts in Croatia and Czechoslovakia and Herbert Eagle surveys the course of East European cinema under the former communist regimes. Articles on Franz Kafka, Christa Wolf, Walter Benjamin, Frantisek Halas, Zbigniew Herbert, Jerzy Kosinski, Miklos Radnoti and Peter Esterhazy point to the deep cultural heritage of the region and struggle for identity - artistic, political, national and personal - that has occupied generations of writers and thinkers in Central Europe.