Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco

Author:Umberto Eco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Proust and the Boche

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

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.