The Idea of Europe by George Steiner

Author:George Steiner [STEINER, GEORGE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO010000; LCO008000; POL032000
ISBN: 9781468311808
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2015-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. My wife and I had the great privilege of being invited to dinner by Nadine Gordimer in her beautiful home in Capetown during the bad moments, the pre-liberation moments. She invited the leaders of the ANC, the National Resistance Movement, including the military leaders, for dinner. The police cars were parked outside and wrote down all the guests, but they did not touch Nadine. One was completely safe. They simply wrote down who was coming for dinner. In my whole life my main gift has been a cosmic tactlessness—I plead guilty. So I finally asked these three great leaders: ‘Look, occupation by the Waffen SS was very bad, they were very good in occupying. But from time to time one killed one of the bastards. You have not touched a white man. Not one. In Johannesburg the figures are 13 to 1. On the street all you have to do is close your arms and you suffocate the white person. You don’t even need weapons. 13 to 1. What the hell goes on?’ One of the leaders of the ANC said, ‘I can answer. The Christians have the gospels, you Jews have the Talmud, the Old Testament, the Mishna, my communist comrades at this table have Das Kapital. We blacks have no book.’

It was an enormous moment for me. The heritage of Athens to Jerusalem, which is that we have a book, we have several books. This was an overpoweringly sad and persuasive answer: ‘We have no book.’

2. German has a word we cannot translate, as so often: Geschichtsmüde—tired of history. It is a very odd and haunting word.

3. You have to remember there is so much to remember. Herodotus asked the following question: ‘Every year we send our ships at the risk of life and very expensively to Africa to ask: “Who are you? What are your laws? What is your language? They never sent one ship to ask us.”’ No amount of political correctness of fashionable liberalism can destroy that question.

4. This week the figures came out. Between 75 and 80 percent of all Europeans who take PhD’s in America do not return. We have nothing to offer them, of course they don’t return. We could pay them decently for one: in that sense I am a real materialist!

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