In the mid-1820s a certain Wallachian landlord, one of the leading figures of the local gentry, embarked on a two-year European journey that took him from Pest through Germany and Switzerland to Venice and Milan. During the trip he recorded in great detail whatever seemed relevant to him. In Vienna, for instance, charmed by the "merry and happy life of the people" and finding no reason for complaint except the dust raised by the impressive number of carriages, he made the rather odd attempt to visit an asylum. The director of that institution apologetically refused, explaining that the precarious mental condition of his patients might be worsened by the sight of the unusually dressed visitor wearing the Oriental cloak typical of his native country. Apart from its genuinely funny side, this incident is, nonetheless, symptomatic. Wrapping (I mean packing) was the first problem encountered by any East European travelling West. Before he had the chance to reveal his identity and his presumably normal behavior, he was instantly labelled an "alien," an "unidentified travelling object," and was destined, at best, to bewilder his host. In all fairness, we should point out that some progress has been achieved since. Both parties have contributed to this. Western Europe has learnt to be more tolerant of Eastern exoticism, and Eastern Europe abandoned its traditional garb and adopted the German or French fashion of the day. In 1851, another Romanian writer claimed that "trousers had a huge moral influence": while the soft folds of the Oriental cloak encouraged submissive attitudes, hypocrisy, and idleness, trousers and tailcoat compelled people to an upright position and restored proper morals.
Needless to say, such discrimination is excessive. Those landlords of old, whose unusual garb would supposedly have scared Viennese lunatics out of whatever wits they had, were eminently capable of honorable deeds. Back home, our Wallachian traveller spared no effort to achieve genuine intellectual reform: he set up schools, published periodicals and handbooks, and founded an influential "Literary Society" which, in terms of the time and place it served, was nothing short of a "center of excellence." Something was beginning to move in the right direction, something likely to narrow the gap between East and West. For quite a while, however, the wrapping problem remained unsolved. The "Iron Curtain" revived and deepened the crisis: if he managed to reach the West, the East European retained the air of an intruder, instantly recognisable by his shoes, his suit, his behavior. Little wonder that, to this very day, and much to the dismay of someone like the Prague-born author Eva Hahn, one can read in Brockhaus about the "Osteuropiden" as a distinctive race. This is proof enough that substantial help is urgently needed to mend the now chronic stagnation of East European wrapping. For wrapping is never merely packing. It reaches beyond the visible, it is no trivial ornament. One's wrapping represents the first step of communication, it is the starting point of every exchange ritual, of all dialogue. Badly packed, the most sophisticated merchandise turns into mere raw material and ends up as perishable goods. Left unattended, unprotected, unstimulated in a coherent manner, intellectual excellence soon turns into a perishable virtue. Some people might say that uninstitutionalized excellence, excellence without "centers of excellence" is preferable to a wrapped form devoid of content, to a "center of excellence" where excellence itself is lacking. Allow me to reply that we Easterners have long ceased to be charmed by clandestine excellence, stealing its way through institutions, by the charm of excellence that proliferates at random and is, paradoxically, stimulated by the very absence of means rather than by their abundance. A minimum degree of bourgeois comfort is necessary: we need normality-that is to say, we need the benefit of a decent standard of living and research or else our level of excellence will remain just another eccentric accident, a sort of barbarian creativity bearing no fruit.
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