I remember Kundera making a big deal about "kitsch" in one of his novels (I won't bother looking up which one). Anyway, he returns to it in Curtain: The word "kitsch" was born in Munich in the mid-nineteenth century; it describes the syrupy leftover of the great Romantic period. But Hermann Broch, who saw the connection between Romanticism and kitsch as one of inverse proportions, may have come closer to the truth: according to him, kitsch was the dominant style of the nineteenth century (in Germany and in Central Europe), with a few great Romantic works separating out from it as phenomena of exception. *** Which led me to think: And what's the difference between "kitsch" and "poshlust"? Kundera likes to talk about kitsch, Nabokov attacked poshlust. Certainly there's some semantic overlap. A quick google came up with: [From http://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/16116/ ]
