The Spirit of Locarno: Europe One Hundred Years After the Peace Conference: Christine de Maizières

In memory of Seraina Plotke.

Peace dove and royal eagle

French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, together with his secretary Alexis Léger (himself a poet, also known as Saint-John Perse), delves into a discussion of diplomacy, poetry, and the utopia of peace. Briand raises the question of the compatibility of art and politics. Léger responds with a central credo: vision and action are inseparable ("la vision sans l'action est stérile").

In October 1925, one of the most consequential diplomatic conferences of the interwar period took place in the Swiss city of Locarno. Under the leadership of Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann, and Austen Chamberlain, the foreign ministers of the major European powers—France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Belgium, and the newly independent states of Poland and Czechoslovakia—negotiated a system of mutual security guarantees. The "spiritual aspect of Locarno," as literary figures dubbed it, was based on the idea that a symbolic gesture of trust could break the cycle of guilt, revenge, and national wounds that had persisted after the First World War. The goal was not to revise the Treaty of Versailles, but to transcend it morally: the voluntary recognition of borders, the mutual guarantee of peace in the West, and the promise to settle future disputes through arbitration. Locarno thus became a symbol for European understanding, paving the way to the League of Nations and later to the Nobel Peace Prize in 2026 for Briand and Stresemann, and in 2025 for Chamberlain.

But this conference was not only a political event, but also a symbolic spectacle. Locarno was teeming with journalists, poets, and diplomats alike—a place of political theatricality and media staging. Christine de Maizières explores this constellation in her novel. Locarno with astonishing precision and poetic density. Her book is not a mere historiographical retelling, but a literary experiment exploring the relationship between memory, politics, and language. Christine de Mazières, born in 1965, worked for many years in the diplomatic and cultural service before turning to literature. Her novels are characterized by a precise observation of European self-understanding, her A novel about German reunification I already discussed the 30th anniversary in 2019 in this blog. Locarno It is her most ambitious work to date: a European novel in the emphatic sense, which understands politics as a moral and aesthetic experience.

In the second half of the 1920s, in the immediate aftermath of the Locarno Conference of 1925, both Thomas Mann and Heinrich Mann expressed ideas that, in different ways, took up the catchphrase of the "spiritual aspect of Locarno"—the attempt at a moral and cultural understanding between France and Germany. The expression itself originated with Heinrich Mann, who used it in essays such as "The Spirit of Locarno" in 1927. A spiritual Locarno and Speech on the Nobel Peace Prize by Briand and Stresemann Heinrich Mann used this phrase. In it, he demanded that the political rapprochement of Locarno had to be complemented by an intellectual, humanistic one: "Politics has dared peace; the spirit must complete it." By this, he meant the obligation of intellectuals to actively promote the idea of ​​European reconciliation. For him, the "intellectual Locarno" was an alliance of reason against nationalism and militarism—a moral renewal of Europe in which art and thought should realize that unity which politics only hints at.

Thomas Mann expressed his views in lectures during the same period as From the German Republic (1922) Goethe and Democracy (1928) and Thoughts during and after the war as well as in speeches on Franco-German understanding, which he delivered in Paris and Berlin in 1926–1927. He, too, saw an intellectual mission in the political détente of the Locarno years, albeit in a different tone than his brother: He spoke of a “European humanity” that had to rise above national antagonisms and praised Briand and Stresemann for their courage in the pursuit of peace. “What saves Europe is the dialogue of minds, not of cannons,” he declared in his 1926 Paris speech. Unlike Heinrich Mann, he emphasized less activist humanism than the moral responsibility of the artist to foster intellectual understanding through measure, form, and cultural tradition—a conservative-humanist counterpart to his brother’s republican ethic.

Both authors jointly describe a cultural movement of the interwar period: the idea that the political Locarno needed a "spiritual Locarno"—an alliance of writers, thinkers, and artists for the preservation of European humanism. Heinrich Mann understood this as the ethical activism of the intellectual, Thomas Mann as the responsible humanism of culture. Both shared the conviction that Europe would be saved not by treaties, but by intellect. The "spiritual Locarno" is thus the literary continuation of the political peace project—supported also by both Mann brothers, who, in different ways, formulated the same vision: peace as a cultural achievement.

Language event Locarno

The novel begins in 2025 – exactly one century after the historic conference. An unnamed first-person narrator, apparently a descendant of the journalist Louise Lenfant, finds an old diary in a dusty chalet in Ticino: the journal of his grandmother, who in 1925 was a correspondent for the Courrier de Genève The narrative reported on the peace negotiations. The framing narrative thus establishes a typical technique of contemporary French literature: a double timeline in which the past appears not merely as an archive, but as a mirror of the present. The narrator calls that moment when the private and the historical touch "Vertige du temps aboli" ("Vertigo of suspended time"). De Mazières opens up the space between the centuries by viewing a century-long fresco through the lens of an individual memory.

The historical facts are meticulously researched: Stresemann's arrival in Minusio, Briand's walks along the lakeshore, Chamberlain's aristocratic irony, the appearance of the Czech Foreign Minister Beneš, the presence of Saint-John Perse, also known as Alexis Léger, who, as both poet and diplomat, embodies the intertwining of political rhetoric and poetic language. Marianne von Werefkin, the Russian painter who actually lived in Ascona, also appears as a character. She becomes the female, artistic counterpoint to the political events—a "Russian baroness" whose expressionist paintings reflect the inner turmoil of Europe.

The very first scene of the novel—an eagle swooping down on a flock of peace symbols as white doves are released in Locarno's Piazza Grande—unfolds a powerful allegory. The eagle's attack (explicitly referred to in the scene as a "royal eagle") on the "doves of peace" is no mere accident, but an ironic and somber premonition: war, violence, and power politics are about to shatter the idyllic peace of reconciliation. Louise, the young journalist, observes and photographs this scene, and thus the novel's emblematic image is created: the German Ernst Wibeau and the Frenchman André Meyer together hold the injured dove. "The dove of peace saved by a Frenchman and an German: what a beautiful symbol of friendship!" ("The dove of peace, rescued by a Frenchman and a German: what a beautiful symbol of friendship!") exclaims Louise, half ironically, half prophetically.

Here begins the novel's true drama: politics as image, symbol, and media event. De Maizières interweaves historical dialogues with fictional conversations, diplomatic meetings with private letters, journalistic commentary with inner monologues. The book resembles a polyphonic score in which political rhetoric, press language, and personal experience constantly intertwine. The author assembles historical documents, newspaper clippings, speeches, and imagined scenes into a multifaceted collage reminiscent of W.G. Sebald's documentary poetics, yet possessing a cinematic dynamism.

The conference itself is staged as a performance: Briand, the old fox of French politics, with his disheveled mane and ever-present cigarette butt; Stresemann, the granite block with his exorbitant blue-gray eyes; Chamberlain with his aristocratic equanimity—all appear like characters in a human comedy of peace. But lurking behind the gestures is ambivalence: Briand's humanistic rhetoric clashes with Stresemann's wounded national pride. The novel subtly explores this tension. When Luther, the German Chancellor, delivers his long lament about Germany's "innocent guilt," Briand replies dryly: "Don't continue, Monsieur le chancelier, you're all going to make us cry." ("Don't go any further, Mr. Chancellor, you'll make us all cry.") This sentence, historically documented, acts as a turning point in the novel: a moment of humor that breaks the pathos, opens the space for human conversation. Stresemann laughs – and this single "rire chaleureux" (hearty laughter) becomes a gesture of understanding.

De Maizières develops a poetics of dialogue here. The word, laughter, misunderstanding—these are not trivialities, but instruments of political understanding. The political appears not as the opposite of the personal, but as its extension. Thus, psychological dispositions are always reflected in the characters' relationships: Briand's cheerful skepticism, Stresemann's heavy sense of duty, Chamberlain's ironic detachment, Louise's wounded hope. The novel does not lead these characters toward a linear plot, but toward a polyphonic ensemble that dramatizes the act of understanding itself.

Louise's diary entries form the emotional core of the novel. They intertwine political history with a love story—or rather, with what remains of it: the memory of Jean, her child whom she left in an orphanage, and of a forbidden relationship with a German soldier during the First World War. "À l'automne 1914 à Paris, il valait mieux ne pas porter l'enfant d'un Allemand…" ("In the autumn of 1914 in Paris, it was better not to carry the child of a German…")—she writes. This intimate wound becomes the matrix of the entire novel: historical reconciliation as a sublimated form of personal guilt. Louise relives history on an inner stage; the conference she covers as a journalist is simultaneously her own reckoning with the past.

The novel's form is doubly dialogic: On the one hand, political discourse is conducted in long, suspensefully staged conversation scenes between the delegates; on the other hand, aesthetic and existential dimensions unfold in Louise's inner monologues and encounters with the painter Marianne von Werefkin or with Ernst Wibeau. This creates a delicate network of parallels: While Briand and Stresemann struggle for words, Louise and Marianne search for images, for colors, for forms that can capture the pain of the century. Art stands in contrast to diplomacy—not as an escape, but as a complement. Werefkin says to Louise: “One day, we see the world with other eyes, seeing eyes. This happens when we no longer think of the name of the world, but dust among dust.” ("One day you see the world with different eyes, seeing eyes. This happens when you no longer consider yourself the center of the world, but dust among dust.") – This poetic humility forms the ethical core of the novel.

The animal metaphors are also consistently and meticulously composed. The eagle, the dove, the dog gazing at the human—all these animals function as mirrors of human nature. The eagle represents power, the masculine impulse toward domination and killing; the dove the fragile utopia of peace; the dog, who ("flairant l'oiseau") hesitates, suppressing violence. The animal looks at the human: "Que peut bien penser d'eux ce chien?" ("What might this dog think of them?")—a variation on Montaigne's famous question, which reappears here in narrative form. De Maizières uses these animal perspectives to reveal the moral instability of human beings: they are simultaneously civilized negotiators and instinct-driven creatures.

At its core, however, lies the contrast between language and silence. The Locarno Conference is a monumental linguistic event, but it takes place in a space of the unspeakable. The characters speak to banish the silence—the silence about guilt, about death, about personal loss. Louise says: “La haine, je la connais, elle m'a chassée de chez moi.” (“I know hatred, it drove me from my home.”) The sentence could just as easily have come from Stresemann, speaking on behalf of a humiliated people. For de Maizières, language becomes the medium of healing—not because it offers solutions, but because it makes trauma articulable.

And what is peace?

The novel's intertextual dimension is wide-ranging. Even the motto from Paul Valéry's Crisis of the mind (1919) poses the central question: “Et qu'est-ce que la paix?” (“And what is peace?”) – The aftershocks of the First World War appear as a spiritual crisis of Europe. Equally significant is the quotation from Hermann Hesse Demian“For a century, Europe has known exactly how many grams of gunpowder are needed to kill a person, but it no longer knows how to pray.” These quotations frame the novel within a European canon of skepticism toward peace, stretching from the 1910s to the present day. The author also introduces Saint-John Perse, in his dual role as a poet (under a pseudonym) and as the diplomat Alexis Léger. His poem “Amitié du Prince” is quoted as a literary echo of the political friendship between Briand and Stresemann. With this, de Maizières lays a self-reflexive trail: the poet as a witness to history.

Valéry had already written an essay in 1897. The German Conquest (The German Conquest) on German expansion, which was republished in 1915. Valéry remarked in 1941 that at the time it was “a certain boldness—and today a certain merit” to bring together the names of Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1895. His critical analysis of German dynamics was thus well-known. Valéry was elected to the Académie française in 1925. He was heavily involved in the Committee for Intellectual Cooperation (Comité de Coopération Intellectuelle) in Geneva. In July 1926, immediately after the ratification of the Locarno Pact, Valéry attended a meeting of this committee in Geneva, which the Germans also joined. He described his impression of this "séance d'entrée des Allemands" (meeting of the Germans' entry) as ambivalent: "Impression nulle ou énorme, suivant que je me consulte" (Impression zero or enormous, depending on how I consult myself).

The text Crisis of the mindValéry's essay, written in the spring of 1919, a few months after the armistice, is among the most poignant self-diagnoses of 20th-century Europe. It describes not the physical, but the spiritual exhaustion of the continent: Europe as a cultural space that had cast doubt on its own foundations—reason, moderation, education, and intellect—through the war itself. "Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles," reads the famous opening sentence. ("We civilizations now know that we are mortal.") For Valéry, the First World War destroyed Europe's metaphysical security: the belief in progress, in rationality, in a future guaranteed by science and humanism. The essay is a meditation on the limits of the Enlightenment, written at the moment of its collapse.

As Valéry La Crise de l'esprit When Valéry published his work, the Paris Peace Conference was within reach. The Treaty of Versailles was still being negotiated, but the "moral" catastrophe had long since become apparent. Valéry saw the political reorganization of Europe not as a restoration of reason, but as a continuation of destruction by other means. The war, he wrote, had "exhausted the spiritual forces" ("épuisé les forces spirituelles"). It was as if the intellect itself had waged war against itself.

What interests Valéry is not the victory or defeat of individual nations, but the loss of a shared European consciousness. Europe, he writes, is less a geographical space than a "petit cap du continent asiatique" ("small promontory of the Asian continent"), whose significance arises solely from its intellectual energy: from the capacity to think for itself. If this energy dries up, the West is in danger of dying not through external conquest, but through internal exhaustion.

This line of thinking forms the philosophical foundation for what the politicians of Locarno attempted to achieve practically ten years later: a revival of European self-awareness beyond the logic of victory and retribution. Locarno is, on another level, the political response to the intellectual crisis that Valéry had analyzed.

Between Valéry's essay (1919) and the Locarno Conference (1925) lies a symbolic transition: from horror to hope, from diagnosis to healing. But the connection is deeper than mere chronology. Briand and Stresemann, the main protagonists of Locarno, explicitly understood peace as a "moral rebirth." Their friendship and mutual respect were intended to establish a new political culture, which Valéry would likely have described as an attempt at the "reconstruction of the European spirit."

French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand was not an intellectual in the strict sense, but he shared Valéry's view that Europe should be founded not on violence, but on "esprit," on spirit. In his speech before the League of Nations (1929), Briand spoke of a "fédération européenne de l'esprit"—a European federation of spirit—thus explicitly echoing Valéry's discourse. Saint-John Perse, also known as Alexis Léger, Briand's chief of staff and a poet, was also intimately familiar with Valéry's writings; he was a student of Gide and a confidant of the NRFIn his poem Anabasis (1924), which de Maizières also quotes (“So sweet in the heart of man, can he fail to find his measure?”), echoes the same question about the immoderation of humankind that Valéry had formulated. Thus, one could say: The spirit of Locarno is the political translation of Valéry's spirit. What Valéry describes as an intellectual task—the restoration of a European self-awareness based on measure, reason, and language—Briand, Stresemann, and Chamberlain attempt to implement in diplomatic form.

The Mann brothers and Paul Valéry were not alone in this diagnosis. In the years after 1918, a whole series of essays, manifestos, and correspondences emerged, all similarly revolving around a spiritual reconstruction of Europe.

Romain Rolland had already in 1914 in Above the fight (“Above the Tumult”) wrote against the nationalist frenzy and invoked the “esprit européen” as a moral authority that stands above nations. “L’Europe sera le juge suprême de l’Europe” (“Europe will be the supreme judge of Europe”) – this sentence from Rolland’s essay sounds like a moral precursor to Valéry’s warning.

Stefan Zweig published in 1932 The spiritual unity of Europe, in which he invokes the cultural interconnectedness of the continent as a counter-image to the political borders: "Across all borders, Europe remains a spiritual homeland." Here, too, the central motif of esprit européen as a force for understanding, an idea that first took on political form in Locarno.

Julien Benda formulated this in 1927 in The Betrayal of the Clerics (“The Betrayal of the Intellectuals”) is a radical indictment of the intellectuals of his time, who had turned away from universal principles and surrendered to the politics of passions. Benda demands that the intellectual must transcend “political passions”—a demand that directly connects to Valéry’s ideal of intellectual self-control.

Hermann Hesse, whose Demian (1919) de Maizières, also quoted in the epigraph, spoke of the inner brutalization of Europe, which “knows exactly how many grams of powder are needed to kill a person, but no longer knows how to pray.” Hesse, too, describes the crisis of the spirit as a loss of inner life, as an alienation from humanity through technologization and nationalism.

Bertrand Russell published in 1916 Principles of Social Reconstruction, in which he argues that civilization can only survive if reason is stronger than the lust for power. And Albert Einstein, in his correspondence with Sigmund Freud on the question "Why War?" (1932), names precisely what connects Valéry and Locarno: the necessity of a supranational order based on moral consciousness.

Thomas Mann's aforementioned Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918) are closely related to Valéry: they defend the idea of ​​"culture" against "civilization," that is, the inward against the merely mechanical. But Mann's later transformation—into the Radio addresses to the Germans (1940s) or in Doctor Faustus – leads to an attitude similar to Valéry's: a skeptical but morally committed humanity.

In his speech “A Spiritual Locarno,” delivered in Berlin in October, and in his lecture “An Intellectual Locarno,” presented in French in Paris in December of the same year, Heinrich Mann was convinced of the active, preparatory role of the intellectual in international diplomacy. While acknowledging the conciliatory peace policies of Ministers Stresemann and Briand, he confidently added that these policies could only have succeeded “because we writers had done the groundwork and created a more palatable atmosphere.” Heinrich Mann considered himself an “avant-diplomate”—a term that succinctly expresses his self-conception as an intellectual mediator between nations and to which he repeatedly referred. His “intellectual Locarno” was thus an appeal to writers and thinkers to actively put their moral and political commitment to peace and democracy into practice.

In his speech “A Spiritual Locarno,” Heinrich Mann emphasized the central mediating role of German intellectuals between European nations, both in the West and the East. For Mann, the peaceful coexistence of Germany and France was the “most important foundation” for European unification. This idea culminated in the notion that the initiative of European intellectuals would ultimately determine the mentality of all Europeans. Mann believed that the “rest of the continent” would follow the lead of Germany and France “even against its will.” This ideal was a continuation of Mann’s political and ethical stance, which he had espoused since his essay “Spirit and Action” (1911). In this earlier work, he attacked intellectuals who “cultivate contempt for democracy and genteel political abstinence.” He stressed that the mind is “nothing that preserves”; it “decays” and is “leveling” and must penetrate “over the ruins of a hundred fortresses.” The “intellectual Locarno” thus called upon writers to transform their “definition of the world” into a concrete intervention in the political sphere, which Mann termed “action.” Until the end of the Weimar Republic, Heinrich Mann championed this Franco-German understanding and the overcoming of nationalism in favor of a political unification of Europe.

What Valéry describes in his essay as a figure of reflection—the recovery of European thought about itself—becomes a historical temptation in Locarno. Briand's gesture of the outstretched hand is the embodiment of an idea born in literature: Europe as a moral community of the spirit. But Valéry would likely have also seen the limits of this interpretation. Views of today's world In 1931, he expressed skepticism regarding the political instrumentalization of the "esprit" (spirit). The spirit, he argued, could not be institutionally imposed but had to draw its sustenance from individual insight. "L'esprit ne se fédère pas," he wrote, in essence – the spirit cannot be federated. This contains a subtle critique of Briand's later project of a "European Union." Nevertheless, Valéry remains the undisputed thinker of the moral Locarno. His 1919 diagnosis – the necessity of a spiritual renewal – was the prerequisite for making a political experiment like Locarno conceivable at all ten years later.

After 1945, Valéry's Crisis of the mind Valéry's work has once again become a central text of European post-war reflection. During the founding of the European Community, it was quoted by Jean Monnet, Raymond Aron, and Hannah Arendt alike. Arendt spoke of the "loss of the world," meaning the same thing as Valéry: the collapse of a shared horizon of meaning.

In the cultural memory of Europe, it is marked La Crise de l'esprit the transition from aesthetics to ethics, from art to responsibility. De Maizières understood this intuitively: Her novel Locarno This is the narrative continuation of this essay. It allows Valéry's question "Et qu'est-ce que la paix?" to echo throughout the entire book – as a question that neither the diplomats nor the writers can definitively answer.

In this respect, Locarno Less a historical reconstruction than a dialogue between literature and history, between intellect and politics. Valéry's essay provides the undertone, the moral echo. When Briand says on the shores of Lake Maggiore: "Between France and Germany, there is no other alternative: friendship or war," he is responding—perhaps unconsciously—to Valéry's statement: "This transition from war to peace is darker, more dangerous than the transition from peace to war." That is the real point of reference. La Crise de l'esprit names the paradox of peace that Locarno is trying to solve – peace as a spiritual risk, as working on one's own excess.

The intellectual horizon of Locarno is inconceivable without Valéry. La Crise de l'esprit This is the prefigured theory of what became political practice in Locarno: the realization that peace requires not only treaties, but also a way of thinking. Valéry, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Rolland, Hesse, Benda, Zweig, and Saint-John Perse together form the intellectual constellation of this "second humanism" that emerged after 1918: a humanism of skepticism, moderation, and language. They are all united by the attempt to forge a new idea of ​​Europe from the ruins of the First World War—not as a power structure, but as a "federation of the mind."

From this perspective, Locarno Not just a conference of politicians, but a late scene from Valéry's essay – a dramatic answer to the question posed in 1919, which is relevant again in 2025, the year Christine de Maizières's novel is published: "Et qu'est-ce que la paix ?" – What is peace, and how long can the mind sustain it?

Political stage and narrative form

Formally, the novel employs a multifaceted structure: alternating between journal entries, letters, interior monologues, and dramatic dialogues, interspersed with essayistic interludes reminiscent of reportage. This juxtaposition creates an almost cinematic dynamism. The scenes are composed of short, rhythmically precise sentences, and the atmospheric density arises from the repeated description of the light on Lake Maggiore—"le lac, brillant comme une émeraude" ("the lake, shining like an emerald")—which runs like a refrain throughout the book. Light and water are the true metaphors for peace: fluid, transparent, but also fleeting.

The constellation of characters is functional: Briand and Stresemann represent two forms of political humanity—the French, rhetorically sophisticated, and the German, morally and rationally reasoned. Between them stands Chamberlain as an ironic mediator, the "peaceful father" of Anglo-Saxon diplomacy. Louise and Wibeau, on the other hand, form the counterpart on the private level: a Franco-German couple who fail when peace is near. Their encounter remains fleeting, but it carries the utopian element of the novel. Marianne von Werefkin, in turn, functions as an allegory of art—her paintings, the "montagnes géantes incendiées de rouge" ("giant mountains ignited by red"), translate the emotional turmoil of Europe into color.

In de Maizières's work, the tension between the private and the political is resolved not morally, but structurally. The grand speeches of politicians are reflected in the small sentences of the diary. When Briand says, "Entre la France et l'Allemagne, il n'est pas d'autre alternative : l'amitié ou la guerre." ("Between France and Germany, there is no alternative: friendship or war"), Louise responds from afar with her own attempt to transform personal trauma into language. The individual and the collective become two versions of the same longing.

The novel's narrative economy is permeated by reflections. The text constantly opens itself up: the grandmother's journal is read in the grandson's novel; the reader reads the novel, which in turn contains the journal—a palimpsest of memory. Historical discourse (newspaper articles, political speeches) is absorbed by fiction, and fiction, in turn, by memory. This creates a kind of hermeneutic loop, demonstrating that history is always mediated through narrative.

The language is remarkably nuanced: at once journalistically concise and poetically charged. De Mazières masters the art of the "style mixte"—a language that oscillates between documentary precision and lyrical suggestion. Particularly in the descriptions of nature—the mountains, the light, the animals—the text achieves a metaphysical density reminiscent of Saint-John Perse.

The novel's ending—which deserves detailed interpretation here—brings together the different time periods. The grandson, who has read the diary, realizes that the peace of Locarno was only an illusion: as early as 1936, Hitler marched into the demilitarized Rhineland, and the "spiritual spirit of Locarno" shattered. But something remains in the personal realm: Louise's voice, her faith in the Word, in the possibility of understanding. The novel concludes with a view of the sky, where an eagle circles once more—this time not as a threat, but as a symbol of remembrance. "Peut-être, se dit-il, que même les aigles apprennent un jour à voler sans tuer." ("Perhaps, he thinks, even eagles will one day learn to fly without killing.")

The conclusion is ambivalent, but not pessimistic. De Maizières does not let the story end with the catastrophe of 1939, but with the awareness that peace is not an era, but an attitude – a daily practice of attentiveness, of listening, of tolerating difference.

A hundred years later, Locarno is strikingly relevant. At a time when the idea of ​​peace in Europe is once again under pressure, de Mazières reminds us that understanding begins not with treaties, but with language – with the courage to listen to the other without losing oneself. Her novel is a monument to the power of words, a literary Locarno in the truest sense: a place of difference, of encounter, of trust in dialogue. For, as Briand says in the novel – and as is true again today:

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.