Hamlet als Denkfigur in nationalen and regionalem Diskursen: Central Eastern Europe

Partly due to their different proportions of English, German and French cultural influences and partly to other local factors,« as Petér Dávidházi maintains (1998, 186), Central and East European countries — Poland, Czech Republic (in 1918–89 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — differ significantly in their attitudes to Shakespeare, and by extension to Hamlet. Yet, even in these diversified cultural contexts, certain similarities can be identified: for example, in each of these countries the play has achieved the status of a national classic, helping the local cultures not only to catch up with the Western European standards, while preserving their own unique identity, but also respond to and deal with their complex political and social predicaments. One of the corresponding cultural dimensions of these countries is their history, reflecting a constant fight for liberation from various foreign invasions and devastations. Here, Poland is the most vivid example, since it lost its independence for 123 years in three consecutive partitions carried out by the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and Habsburg Austria (1772, 1793 and 1795).