Quand nous étions jeunes, nous regardions souvent au-delà des jetées en essayant de nous représenter ces pays qui nous étaient aussi inaccessibles que l'Atlantide. Nous étions exclus de force d'un monde dont nous faisions partie, dont nous avions toujours voulu faire partie.
Tomas Venclova, Un conte de trois villes
When we were young, we often gazed beyond the breakwaters and tried to imagine those lands that were as unattainable to us as Atlantis. We were involuntarily excluded from a world we were a part of, a world we always wanted to be a part of.
Lithuania was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1940, a year later by the German Nazis, and in 1944 Stalin and his regime arrived. This historical experience is reflected in the Baltic people's sense of European belonging, however separated they have remained from it. Venclova's narrative of the country's three 'capitals' (international Vilnius, the provisional capital Kaunas, and maritime Klaipėda) microcosmizes the diversity of Europe, which is further explored in literary form in the anthology edited by Olivier Guez. Le Grand Tour: autoportrait de l'Europe par ses écrivains which it has undertaken, is itself a by-product of the French Presidency of the Council in the first half of 2022 – see also President Macron's speech as a political and strategic framework. 1 Venclova considers the possibility of a free and cohesive Europe in contrast to a totalitarian-enforced unity:
Et pourtant, depuis mon enfance, comme chacun d'entre nous, je comprenais que nous n'étions pas l'Union soviétique, mais quelque chose d'autre. En réfléchissant sur l'essence de this différence, j'ai compris peu à peu qu'elle consistait en une diversité particulière qui demeure et ne cesse de renaître, quels que soient les efforts déployés par les pouvoirs transitoires pour l'effacer et l'anéantir. Ce qui fait l'unité de l'Europe, c'est qu'elle est un alliage composite de principes culturels qui ne se ressemblent pas, des principes separés existant dans des espaces différents, dans des temps différents, dans des langues différentes, mais qui ont un dénominateur commun. The world of totality is the royal kingdom of the university that dissimulates a cacophony. The countries of Europe are part of the unison mais, in the ensemble, and we are in harmony with others. The Lituanie était en quelque sorte une Europe en miniature: elle était elle-même constituée d'éléments dissemblables, mais ces éléments s'agrégeaient en formant une seule entité vivante qui, sans oublier ses contradictions, savait les aimer et même les admirer.
Tomas Venclova, Un conte de trois villes
And yet, since childhood, it was clear to me, as it was to everyone, that we were not the Soviet Union, but something else. As I reflected on the nature of this otherness, I gradually realized that it consisted of a particular diversity that endures and is constantly renewed, no matter how hard the transitional powers try to eradicate and destroy it. What constitutes the unity of Europe is that it is a composite union of cultural principles that are dissimilar—separate principles that exist in different spaces, at different times, and in different languages, but that share a common denominator. The totalitarian world is the realm of unison, behind which a cacophony is concealed. The countries of Europe are never in unison, but on the whole, they harmonize with one another. Lithuania was something like a microcosm of Europe: it itself consisted of disparate elements, but these elements coalesced into a single, vibrant unity that, without forgetting its contradictions, knew how to love and even admire them.
The journey through Europe is also, invariably, a political examination of the historical processes and experiences that shape its identity. For example, Rosella Postorinos refers to Mélancoliques Fous to the “Ventotene Manifesto”, originally “For a Free and United Europe: Draft of a Manifesto”, written in 1941 during her exile on the island by Ernesto Rossi (member of the anti-fascist exile movement founded in Paris). Justice and Freedom) and Altiero Spinelli, and published in 1944. Daniel Kehlmann chose Hohenschönhausen, an eerie place that stands as a symbol for German history; his story is about his own visit to the prison, now a memorial site.
The prison in Hohenschönhausen is not a museum in its own right - because the radioactive radiation is the result of a situation in the city of Alentour, because the citizens of the city are victims who are encore in the environment, because they are imagining themselves in the environment Nuit dans ses couloirs à l'odeur de plastic, entendant encore surgir des salles les voix posées des experts ès interrogatoires excellemment formés, ainsi que le léger ronronnement des magnétophones surveillant les agents. This dark nocturne and fantasy that the person is not entrenched is the veritable band of history.
Daniel Kehmann, Hohenschönhausen: the prison does not exist
Hohenschönhausen Prison is not a museum in itself – because the radioactive radiation emanating from this place wafts into the surrounding city, because executioners and victims are still nearby, because one can imagine being locked up at night in the plastic-smelling corridors and still hearing the calm voices of the highly trained interrogation experts and the faint whir of the tape recorders monitoring the officers. This nocturnal, ghostly noise, which no one else hears, is the true soundtrack of German history.
(Back-translation from French)
The titular image of the grand European Cavalier journey is transformed by the editor himself into a more future-oriented rhythm with his homage to the Kraftwerk album from the 70s: “… Rendez-vous on Champs-Élysées Leave Paris in the morning on the TEE Trans-Europe Express… In Vienna we sit in a late-night café Straight connection, TEE Trans-Europe Express… From station to station Back to Düsseldorf City…”
In the foreword, Olivier Guez, a journalist and writer now living in Rome, calls this Trans-Europe Express – which, with its first-class carriages bearing mythical names like Mercury or Bacchus, traversed Europe between the 50s and 80s – a utopian journey through the European imagination. He explains that while he wants to examine contemporary Europe, understanding the old continent also requires delving into its history. The project was originally conceived as a relatively flexible project, with one author from each of the member countries tasked with selecting a place of European significance from their own country.
I want to relate to a place that speaks to the people who pay them a lot of culture and European history. C'était leur seul cahier des charges. Pour le reste, ils étaient libres, sur le fond comme sur la forme, carte blanche.
Ils ont fait du Grand Tour A forum, a piazza of the European literature. A space of freedom and creation, a site of encounters. Dans les récits et les new inédits qui composent le recueil, les mémoires, les regards et les climates d'une Europe de chair et de sang s'entrecroisent.
Olivier Guez, preface to Grand Tour
I asked them to report on a place that would connect their country to European culture and history. That was their only requirement. Otherwise, they were free, both in terms of content and form—carte blanche.
They made the Grand Tour to a forum, a piazza of European literature. A space of freedom and creativity, a place of encounters. In the unpublished stories and short stories that comprise this collection, memories, perspectives, and the diverse climates of a Europe of flesh and blood intersect.
Here, the familiar contradiction is revealed that has accompanied the founding of the European Union from the very beginning: the pragmatic taming of national interests in the European Coal and Steel Community was in no way based on commitments to a common European history or identity, and economic or, today, military considerations cause constructions of a common European identity that go beyond something like the negative memory of "Never again war!" to fade away again and again:
In this case, there is no question in the preamble of the Constitutional Constitution, which is now written in a few years. The chefs d'État are sont chamaillés pendant des mois pour aboutir à un lâche compromises: nul heritage ne sera mentionné, comme si les Europeans venaient d'une planète inconnue. These are some of the men's sans passé, but these are also the fragments of our mosaic identity that are an offense against immigrant populations, among other civilizations and among other continents. C'est dangereux. On laisse aux droites extrêmes the loisir de cantonner notre identité depuis des décennies. C'est un terrible gâchis. The European adventure is born in a project algorithmic de proliferation piloté par une technobureaucratie contrôlée par une superstructure intergouvernementale et parlementaire.
Olivier Guez, preface to Grand Tour
None of this is mentioned in the preamble to the Constitutional Treaty, which has governed our lives for some 15 years. The heads of state squabbled for months to reach a rotten compromise: no mention is made of any heritage, as if Europeans came from an unknown planet. As if we were people without a past, as if naming the fragments of our mosaic identity would be an insult to newly arrived populations, other civilizations, and other continents. This is dangerous. It leaves it to the extreme right to pigeonhole our identity for decades. This is a terrible waste. The European adventure must not be reduced to an algorithmic proliferation project steered by a techno-bureaucracy controlled by an intergovernmental and parliamentary superstructure.
Even the choice of location becomes relative in the contributions, for example when Fernando Aramburu in Le Pain de l'Europe The five cities of Lisbon, Segovia, Paris, Hanover and Klagenfurt are combined in an autobiographical journey to vividly illustrate our lives across borders: Europe is our home.
Fifteen years ago, Thomas Macho lamented how unsatisfactory our answers to the cultural studies search for a European identity must remain; it remains a circular undertaking that actually presupposes what it seeks to build: “Travel, learning, remembering—these are the cultural strategies associated with these answers; ethnology, pedagogy, and history function as academic reference disciplines. But how is the future of Europe to be addressed with these strategies and disciplines? An answer to the question of European identity is already presupposed as soon as decisions are made about belonging or shared chronologies; and the appeal to sites of memory, monuments, or cultural capitals feeds precisely on that intellectual history of Europe which these institutions and initiatives are meant to awaken. Europe—that is the answer that tends to precede every question about it.” 2 And so Guez's anthology is perhaps more convincing narratively than conceptually and theoretically. At the moment, it appears that this project exists only in French translation; that a purely Francophone European anthology is a contradiction in terms is obvious, but it also says something about the French understanding of culture.
Guez refers to classics such as Stefan Zweig's European essays, which he wrote between the First and Second World Wars, among others. The Tower of Babel (1916) The moral detoxification of Europe (1932) The European idea in its historical development (1932) The history writing of tomorrow and History as a poet (both 1939). Let us not forget that Zweig's farewell letter in South American exile in 1942 referred to the destruction of his spiritual homeland, Europe (similarly to Paul Celan in Norman Manea's Romanian history); the Habsburg multi-ethnic state before the First World War corresponds in many ways to today's multifaceted realities more than a Prussian will to order. In the article by Eva Menasse Interdiction aux drones de survoler (“No-fly zone for drones”) will reappear to the Jewish Stefan Samuel Zweig when she considers the role of Eastern European Jews and their secularized role in Central Europe:
Pour les Juifs, l'Autriche-Hongrie, this monarchie démesurée, était une patrie quasi parfaite. It also has multilingual languages, it is devious, and maîtriser cinq ou sept langues n'était pas rare pour des Juifs cultivés. S'ils voulaient live selon la tradition et la religion, ils restaient in les shtetls de l'est, lorsqu'ils se sécularisaient et devenaient libéraux, ils s'installaient in les grandes villes, Prague, Budapest et Vienne. A source that is available to the public – among doctors, lawyers and journalists, writers, actors, composites and artists in the scene – can also be found in the Salzkammergut. On les y trouvait tous, les representatives de la bonne société juive, Theodor Herzl and Sigmund Freud, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jakob Wassermann, Karl Kraus and Stefan Zweig, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg and Max Reinhardt, Leo Perutz, Franz Werfel, Arthur Schnitzler. In 1938, we commença la chasse sans merci, de nombreuses villes d'eaux leur interdirent, alors qu'ils y étaient peu de temps auparavant des hôtes courtisés, de porter le costume traditionnel, la culotte de cuir or le dirndl. Maize cela, c'était plus tard.
Eva Menasse, Interdiction aux drones de survoler
For the Jews, Austria-Hungary, this excessive monarchy, was a nearly perfect homeland. They, too, were multilingual; they had to be, and mastering five or seven languages was not unusual for educated Jews. If they wished to live according to tradition and religion, they remained in the eastern shtetls; if they secularized and became liberal, they settled in the major cities of Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. As soon as they achieved success there—as doctors, lawyers, journalists, writers, actors, composers, and directors—they came to the Salzkammergut region to spend the summer. They were all there, the representatives of respectable Jewish society: Theodor Herzl and Sigmund Freud, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jakob Wassermann, Karl Kraus and Stefan Zweig, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Max Reinhardt, Leo Perutz, Franz Werfel, and Arthur Schnitzler. When the merciless persecution began in 1938, many spa towns, even though they had been sought-after guests there just a short time before, forbade them from wearing traditional clothing, such as lederhosen or dirndls. But that came later.
(Back-translation from French)
This passage may make it clear why the Jewish-Austrian writer from Vienna, who lives in Berlin, describes even the kitsch-prone concept of homeland not as a real place, but as a "utopia of the positive"; for her, even diaspora is conceivable as belonging beyond the religious sphere. 3 In the fictional Austrian town Darkflower In her 2021 novel of the same name, Menasse depicts a massacre of 180 Jewish forced laborers in 1945 (modeled on the events in Rechnitz, Burgenland). The text also stands in the tradition of the Austrian anti-Heimat novel, reflecting the fact that after 1989, what had been repressed could no longer be kept hidden. The Salzkammergut region, which Eva Menasse chose for Guez's anthology, is the place where Emperor Franz Joseph triggered the First World War and where Asian tourists travel to a sentimentalized past.
Nous sommes incapables de décrire correctement l'époque à laquelle nous vivons, c'était déjà le cas de nos ancestors. Les évocations romanesques les plus réussies de this obscurité qui a peu à peu rongé de l'intérieur la monarchie Austro-Hongroise, avant même que François-Joseph ne signe à Bad Ischl ce document fatal, ne furent écrites que des années plus tard, par Joseph Roth et Heimito von Doderer. Nous qui plongeons nos pieds dans le fleuve de notre temps, nous sommes au mieux capable d'observer des anachronismes, des recouvrements atmospheres, des interferences étincelantes avec ce temps d'alors, tentatives qui à défaut de la distance nécessaire à l'auteur tendent souvent verse une légère satire.
Eva Menasse, Interdiction aux drones de survoler
We are incapable of accurately describing the era in which we live; this was true even for our ancestors. The most successful novelistic evocations of this darkness, which gradually eroded the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy from within, even before Franz Joseph signed the fateful document in Bad Ischl, were written only years later by Joseph Roth and Heimito von Doderer. We, who dip our toes into the current of our time, are at best able to observe anachronisms, atmospheric overlaps, and sparkling interferences with that era—attempts that, lacking the necessary distance for the author, often tend toward mild satire.
In an interview about the book project, the editor also linked the undertaking to a war and sees a turning point in what Europe now means. From the margins, the Ukrainian population is creating a Europe into which it now wants to be integrated, like Georgia and Moldova. The external threat would, of course, be a different justification than the attempt to invoke cultural traditions, historical experiences, or other identity-based connections.
The Grand Tour Paraît alors que l'Ukraine vient d'être envahie par la Russie. Is this even a supplementary port with this autoportrait littéraire of Europe?
OG Quelque chose de fondamental est en train de se produire: les Europeans ont, je crois, pour la première fois la sensation de former une communauté de destin. Nous prenons conscience qu'un model politique, économiquel et culturel est menacé, et qu'il va falloir le défendre très sérieusement. Ce sont les Ukraines qui permetettent ce réveil de la conscience européenne.
Olivier Guez in an interview with Youness Bousenna 4
The Grand Tour It appears at a time when Ukraine has just been invaded by Russia. Does this event lend this literary self-portrait of Europe additional significance?
OG Something fundamental is happening right now: I believe that for the first time, Europeans feel they are part of a community of shared destiny. We are becoming aware that a political, economic, and cultural model is under threat and that we must defend it very seriously. It is the Ukrainians who are making this awakening of European consciousness possible.
The collection The Grand Tour By its publication in March 2022, the book itself had already become historic, given a turning point in European history that surprised many, much like the 90s when Robert Picht reconsidered European thought patterns under the conditions of a new German identity after reunification: “‘Europe’ – this gave Western integration a historical consecration far beyond the restorative dreams of a Christian West. Europe promised liberalism, civic democracy, and cosmopolitanism. To be European, many Germans dreamed of a new identity beyond the threatening narrowness of nationalism. Europe liberated them from the trauma of German history.” 5
Does Europe currently need a new debate about a shared identity, given the fear of war between NATO countries and Putin's Russia? For Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, the European Union may remain unattainable for the time being, just as it was for Lithuania in the opening quote. The seven chapter headings for Guez's thematic compilation of contributions from European authors are rich in associations: scars, wanderings, ghosts, flesh, vacation, injuries, and longing evoke narratives of European identity(ies) that resist right-wing instrumentalization. A few years ago, Felix Heidenreich argued that the identitarian discourse in France is conceived from a place of deficiency and thus serves as a pretext for national discourses of decadence: “How grotesque this notion is can be clearly seen in the identitarian discourse in France. Authors like Alain Finkielkraut consistently attribute France’s crisis to a lack of identity. The diagnosis of the crisis goes something like this: If we had more clarity about what constitutes the essence of France, then we would know what to do! The unhappy identity (identité malheureuse) is supposedly responsible for the lack of economic growth, the failed integration, the crisis in education, and the decline of culture.” 6
The Normandy-born author Maylis de Kerangal thus faced a particular challenge: to tell a story about European identity from a French perspective. She chooses a beach, but not as in her book. À ce stade de la nuit about the refugee crisis on the Italian island of Lampedusa, and incidentally, to illustrate Europe, she chooses the situation of Russian soldiers who are involuntarily sent to war in Europe; read her book on this. Tangente vers l'estIt is, rather, the coast of the English Channel, where on June 6, 1944, American troops landed in Normandy to liberate the Nazi-occupied parts of Europe. A powerful text, personal, historically significant, with keen observations of nature from the dawn of humankind to climate change; the writer walks on a necropolis of human bodies, the beach blending sand and human ashes into a very particular color, just as she began her text. With this, Kerangal concludes her personal self-portrait of Europe:
Le jour tombe, la mer est violette à this heure, presque black, elle se rapproche, j'entends les vagues qui clapotent à quelques mètres. Devant moi, la courbe du littoral inscrit sa ligne claire dans l'obscurité, l'air se charge d'embruns, et soudain j'ai le sentiment de me trouver sur la margin d'un territoire, en lisière de continent, très exactement sur l'une de ses extrémités et comme au bord du monde – ce sentiment geographical. The paysage changes little by little, the tremble, it is brouille and it is reconfigured, and there is no s'agit plus ici de la plage de l'enfance, ni meme d'une plage normande, et encore moins d'une plage française, the s'agit d'un rivage européen, c'est là que je suis.
Maylis de Kerangal, An hourglass
It's slowly getting dark, the sea is violet, almost black at this time of day, it's drawing closer, I can hear the waves lapping just a few meters away. Ahead of me, the coastline inscribes its clear line into the darkness, the air is thick with spray, and suddenly I have the feeling of being on the edge of a territory, on the edge of a continent, precisely at one of its ends, and like at the edge of the world – this geographical feeling. The landscape gradually changes its scale, it trembles, blurs, and reconfigures itself, and soon this is no longer the beach of my childhood, not even a Norman beach, and certainly not a French beach; this is a European shore, this is where I am.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- Discussions of the President of the Republic at the Conference of the Press on December 9, 2021 at the French President of the European Union Council, https://presidence-francaise.consilium.europa.eu/fr/actualites/discours-du-president-de-la-republique-a-la-conference-de-presse-du-9-decembre-2021/ – German version: https://presidence-francaise.consilium.europa.eu/de/aktuelles/rede-von-prasident-emmanuel-macron-zur-franzosischen-eu-ratsprasidentschaft/.>>>
- Thomas Macho, “Europe’s Future: Remembering an Eccentric Identity”, Merkur 701 (October 2007): 948–55.>>>
- Eugen El, “Eva Menasse in conversation”, Jewish General, 11. March 2021.>>>
- Youness Bousenna, “L'Europe vue par les écrivains: Les gens ont oublié à quel point ce continent est un espace de liberté,” Télérama, 2. March 2022.>>>
- Robert Picht, “Europe – but what does that mean? A call to re-examine our thought patterns”, Merkur 546/547 (September 1994): 850–66.>>>
- Felix Heidenreich, “The EU doesn’t need an identity”, Merkur 820 (September 2017): 80–84.>>>
