“... we... huddle here on the western margin of the Soviet empire and on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, with a cautious strategy of limited self-preservation and a troubled mind, because we don't want to identify with the East and we can't identify with the West.” György Konrád, Antipolitics “With no precise borders with no Center or rather with several centers, `Central Europe' looks today more and more like the dragon of Alca in the second book of Anatole France's Penguin Island to which the Symbolist movement was compared: nobody who claimed to have seen it could say what it looked like.” Danilo Kiš, “Variations on the Theme of Central Europe”
Melvin Croan (1989) studied this question.