The past is always in the present. Aether and the returns of history and Europe's new post-1989 peripheries. The cases of Mihail Sebastian's diary and Emir SuljagiA‡'s Srebrenica memoir

In this article I have used the notion of 'the aether'aEuro"radio space-in two non-fiction texts, to analyse how both older and more recent trauma reconfigured post-1989 European literary geography into a new constellation of a centre and peripheries. I describe how Mihail Sebastian's Diary, written between 1935 and 1944, but not published until 1996, reflects the idea of a European Hochkultur that could be maintained by listening to classical music on the radio, while anti-Semitism and ethnic persecution denied the author his cosmopolitan Romanian-Jewish identity. The author's 'identity confusion' was transposed in the 1990s, when his diary's first publication in the midst of 'Romania's cultural wars' (Livezeanu) led to heated debates about the holocaust in Romania as a moral touchstone for its ways into Europe. The case of Sebastian is discussed alongside Emir SuljagiA double dagger's literary Srebrenica memoir, in which comparison with the holocaust deeply influences both the protagonist's interpretation of his own experience of ethnic persecution, and the European world's failure to identify with his position. The two cases shed light on how an imaginary European centre emerged in Eastern-Europe and the Balkans from the perspective of two peripheries, one old, one new.