These are harsh times for anyone who believes in the European Union: with Cameron, who is asking his compatriots to decide whether they still want it, or ever wanted it; with Berlusconi, who one day declares himself pro-European but the next day, when he’s not making some visceral appeal to the old Fascists, appeals to those who think it better to return to the lira; to the Northern League and its hypo-European provincialism. In short, the bones of the founding fathers of Europe must be rattling in their graves.
And yet we should all remember that forty-one million Europeans died massacring each other during World War II (and that’s just Europeans, not including Americans and Asians). Since then, apart from the tragic episode in the Balkans, Europe has witnessed sixty-eight—yes, sixty-eight—years of peace. And if we tell young people that the French today might dig trenches along the Maginot Line to hold back the Germans, that the Italians might want to smash Greece, that Belgium might be invaded, or that the British might bomb Milan, these young people (who are perhaps going off to spend a year in some other European country on a university scholarship, and perhaps at the end of this experience will meet a kindred spirit who speaks a language other than their own and their children will grow up bilingual) would think we’re inventing a science-fiction story. Nor do adults realize that the borders they now cross without a passport had been crossed by their fathers and grandfathers carrying guns.
But is it true that Europeans have failed to be seduced by the idea of Europe? Bernard-Henri Lévy recently launched a passionate manifesto for the rediscovery of a European identity, Europe ou chaos?, which starts off with a disturbing warning: “Europe is not in crisis, it is dying. Not Europe as a territory, of course, but Europe as an Idea. Europe as a dream and as a plan.” The manifesto was signed by António Lobo Antunes, Vassilis Alexakis, Juan Luis Cebrián, Fernando Savater, Peter Schneider, Hans Christoph Buch, Julia Kristeva, Claudio Magris, Gÿorgy Konrád, and Salman Rushdie, who isn’t European but found his first place of refuge in Europe at the beginning of his persecution. Since I too have signed, I found myself with some of my co-signatories at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris for a debate on these questions. A theme that immediately emerged, and with which I broadly agree, is that there is an awareness of European identity, and I happened to quote several passages from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. It is World War I, we are in Paris, the city fears night attacks from German zeppelins, and public opinion accuses the hated Boche of every kind of cruelty. And yet, in the pages of Proust one breathes a Germanophile air, which emerges in the conversations of his characters. Charlus is a Germanophile, though his admiration for the Germans seems to depend not so much on cultural identity as on his sexual preferences: “‘Our admiration for the French must not allow us to underestimate our enemies, that diminishes ourselves. And you don’t know what a German soldier is, you’ve never seen them as I have, on parade doing the goose-step in Unter den Linden.’ In returning to the ideal of virility he had touched on at Balbec . . . ‘You see,’ he said, ‘that superb fellow, the German soldier, is a strong, healthy being, who only thinks of the greatness of his country, “Deutschland über Alles.”’”
Let’s move on from Charlus, even if his philo-Teutonic discourses stir literary reminiscences, and talk instead about Robert de Saint-Loup, a brave soldier who would die in battle. “To make me grasp contrasts of shade and light which had been ‘the enchantment of the morning,’ [Saint-Loup] alluded to a page of Romain Rolland or of Nietzsche with the independence of those at the front who unlike those at the rear, were not afraid to utter a German name . . . Saint-Loup, when he spoke to me of a melody of Schumann gave it its German title and made no circumlocution to tell me, when he had heard the first warble at the edge of a forest, that he had been intoxicated as though the bird of that ‘sublime Siegfried’ which he hoped to hear again after the war, had sung to him.”
Or further on: “I had learnt, in fact, of the death of Robert Saint-Loup, killed, protecting the retreat of his men, on the day following his return to the front. No man less than he, felt hatred towards a people . . . The last words I heard him utter six days before, were those at the beginning of a Schumann song which he hummed to me in German on my staircase; indeed on account of neighbors I had to ask him to keep quiet.”
And Proust hastened to add that French culture made no prohibition on studying German culture, even in those days, though with some precaution: “A professor wrote a remarkable book on Schiller of which the papers took notice. But before mentioning the author, the publishers inscribed the volume with a statement like a printing license, to the effect that he had been at the Marne and at Verdun, that he had had five mentions, and two sons killed. Upon that, there was loud praise of the lucidity and depth of the author’s work upon Schiller, who could be qualified as great as long as he was alluded to as a great Boche and not as a great German.”
What lies at the base of the European cultural identity is a long dialogue among literatures, philosophies, and musical and theatrical works. Nothing that can be canceled out in spite of war, and this is the core identity of a community that holds out against the greatest of barriers, that of language.
Although this sense of European identity is strong among intellectual elites, is it the same with everyone else? I found myself thinking that, even today, every European country, in schools and in public commemorations, celebrates its own heroes, all people who have valiantly slaughtered other Europeans, beginning with Arminius, who exterminated the Roman legions of Publius Quinctilius Varus in AD 9, then Joan of Arc, El Cid (the Muslims against whom he fought had been Europeans for centuries), and the Italian and Hungarian heroes of the nineteenth century, including those Italian soldiers who fell to the Austrian enemy. Has anyone talked about a European hero? Have there never been any? And who were the Byrons or Santorre Santarosas who fought for Greek independence, or the many Schindlers who saved the lives of thousands of Jews regardless of what nation they belonged to, or the heroes who were not warriors, such as Alcide De Gasperi, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Altiero Spinelli? And by searching in the recesses of history we could find others to tell our children about.
2013