Europe as Utopia: Causes of Its Decline

Karl Heinz Bohrer

T
he inhabitants of the european continent thought and acted
as Europeans long before they spoke of themselves as Europeans.
Talk of European unity is relatively recent in historical terms, even
though it has been practiced since the Renaissance, indeed since the
early Middle Ages. Whether we think of the communion of Christian
churches and universities, the rediscovery of Greek art and literature
in the Renaissance, or, finally, the taken-for-granted social intercourse
among the European elites, national differences only played a subordi-
nate role in this commonality. Montaignes Journals (ca. 1580), Bernard
Le Bovier de Fontenelles Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686),
Edward Gibbons The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(17761789), Herders Another Philosophy of History for the Education of
Mankind (1774), Goethes Italian Journey (178688)to mention only
these extremely diverse but highly emblematic texts documenting Eu-
ropean experienceprovide the most eloquent testimony of an early
awareness of European civilization, not to mention of a dialogue among
the leading philosophers in the eighteenth century or the grand tours
of the scions of the upper classes.
This unity in practice was, to repeat, a matter of philosophy, art, and
fashion. It was not a political unity, even though the French Revolution
and the ideas on which it was founded had momentous consequences in
all Western and Central European countries. But these same ideas also
grounded the Declaration of Independence of the American colonies of
Great Britain: a demarcation from Europe. Thus talk of the political unity
of Europetalk that never contained any concrete institutional propos-
alshad an a priori utopian orientation that required an experience of
crisis in order to come into being. Let us state this precondition at the
outset without linking it to a claim to provide a theoretical explanation
of utopias. In this case, it was the crisis of the two world wars as well
as their foreshadowing by the Franco-Prussian War of 187071. And it
was above all the Germany/France crisis that led to the development
of the Germany/France utopia. Vaguely intimated at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, this utopia was formulated from 1900 onward
and took on concrete shape in the interwar period, even as the idea

New Literary History, 2012, 43: 587605

588 new literary history

of Franco-German unity remained cultural without becoming political.

The paradoxical character of the present-day discourse on Europe is that
although it has, since 1950, actually aimed at political unity and even
attempted to realize it at the economic level, this utopia first established
itself as a cultural idea motivated by crisis, and it is now definitively on
the wane, if it hasnt already entirely disappeared.
This paradox is the subject of the following deliberations. The first part
of my argument presents the idea of European unity as a utopia, taking
as its examples representative thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. In the second part, I will elucidate its most important manifes-
tationthe emphasis on French and German culture in the reciprocal
utopian images of both nations. This emphasis is the presupposition for
the disenchantment that has now set in. The third part deals with the
disappearance of the cultural idea of unity and its transformation into
ideology, and also, importantly, with the disappearance of the mutual
German-French fascination. This leads to the question of whether, and
to what extent, European political unity can be realized if its cultural
idea, which constituted its utopian core, has disappeared.

I. The Utopia of Europe as Consciousness of Crisis

The period between the two world wars saw the appearance of works
by influential European thinkers on what was at the time still called the
spiritual situation of the age. A specific and much emphasized idea
of European intellectual and political greatness cropped up regularly
in these thematically highly diverse books: the notion of Europes un-
diminished power and its primacy in innovative, critical thinking. In
1935, the French cultural theorist Paul Hazard encapsulated this claim
in an exemplary way, and not without presumption, in his aptly entitled
book La Crise de la conscience europene 16801715 [The Crisis of European
Consciousness 16801715]: What is this Europe? A spirit that is for ever
seeking. Unsparing of herself, she is ceaselessly pursuing two goals: one
of them is Happiness; the otherand this she holds the more vital and
more dearis Truth. . . . Beyond her borders, untouched by her civi-
lizing graces, whole masses of the human race live on from day to day,
never bestirring themselves to think, satisfied simply to be.1 Hazards
description of Europes utopian character refers back to the dictum of
the French early Enlightenment thinker Fontenelle, who spoke of a
certain genius that has never yet been out of the limits of Europe.2
Hazard does not conceive of this genius in purely intellectual terms, but
identifies it with Europes resolve to subjugate other continents. Even
europe as utopia 589

though Hazard has his older French confrre speak in the spirit of an
ascending hymn, he nevertheless identifies the reference to conquest
as a metaphor for an intellectual audacity that he has in mind and with
which he concludes his analysis of the crisis of European thought be-
tween 1685 and 1715. The concept of crisis thus grounds the imaginary
utopian projection called Europe.
The category of crisis, a term that became a metaphor for European
modernity, is a consequence of the experience of the First World War,
which not only brought the centuries-long readiness for war between the
European nations to an excessively traumatic culmination, but which also
undermined their powera power that Hazard nevertheless continued
to invoke. This new crisis was thematized as early as 1920, whether in
Oswald Spenglers dramatization of the situation of Europe as the Decline
of the West (1918, rev. 1922) or in the private but incisive perception of
Paul Valry, the leading French poet of the era. In a journal article in
1919, the latter spoke of an intellectual crisis, and in a letter to Rainer
Maria Rilke on 17 December 1921 he wrote, with reference to this same
crisis, that it was a matter of a condition of the European mind after
the war, going on to say that I presume, therefore, that [a European
mind] used to existbut now we must believe that it existed and try to
resurrect it, even though it may never have existed.3 On the one hand,
Valrys always skeptical consciousness immediately called the idea of a
European mind into questionthat is, he articulated a suspicion of the
ideological nature of utopia, a suspicion to which we will return at the
end of the paper, only to then affirm this utopia all the more emphati-
cally. He did the same ten years later when he delivered his Address in
Honor of Goethe to the humanities departments of the Sorbonne. In
any event, utopian thoughtnamely, Europe as both a political and
an intellectual powerplays an important role as a regulative principle,
so to speak. At the same time, it is once again subject to skeptical doubts
concerning the extent to which Goethes European universe, the heri-
tage of the Renaissance and the still luminous eighteenth century, may
have become exhausted.
In spite of a similar uncertainty as to what the new century would
bring, Benedetto Croce and Jos Ortega y Gasset, two thinkers who left
an indelible imprint on their respective countries, made their diagnosis
contingent on the question of the European mind in the early 1930s,
even before Paul Hazard. At that time, Croce even outlined the European
utopia of 1947 when he described postwar Europe after 1918 as follows:
impoverished, troubled, mournful, all divided by customs barriers
. . . each nation busied with its own cares and with the fear of worse, and
therefore distracted from spiritual things.4 He then goes onwithout
590 new literary history

citing a reasonto develop the vision that became current after 1950:
But he who instead passes from what is external and secondary to what
is intrinsic, and seeks for the passions and acts of the European soul,
at once mentally restores the continuity and homogeneity between the
two Europes so diverse in appearance.5
In his most well-known work, The Revolt of the Masses (1930), Ortega y
Gasset subjected the category of European civilization to a much more
radical critique. Relying on Sigmund Freuds diagnosis of Mass Psychology
(1923), he develops his vehement critique of the figure of a new mass
man from the perspective of a concept of Europe as a moral idea: This
is the question: Europe has been left without a moral code. There is a
certain type of European who no longer believes in such a code. But
this is not, Ortega y Gasset stresses, a matter of a new civilisation but
of mere negation.6 The reality that has just been identifiedEuro-
pean mass manis thus canceled out in a utopian fashion. Like Croce
two years later, Ortega presents the vision of a unified Europe as an
alternative to the state of the European nations. For the Europeans, the
time is coming when Europe can convert itself into a national idea.
And it is much less utopian to believe this to-day than it was to believe
in the prophecy of a unification of France and Spain in the eleventh
century. The idea of the community of Europe is, on the one hand,
the inescapable consequence of the war and it is, moreover, a necessity
in the face of Soviet Bolshevism. The creation of a European national
State is the one enterprise that could counterbalance a victory of the
five years plan. The European, Ortega y Gasset also decreesnot
without contradicting his own basic thesisis the type of human being
that has in its history thrown all its efforts and energies in the scale of
individualism, which is why the European type is not assimilable to
Russian Communism.7
It is becoming apparent that the recurrent theme running through
the different versions of a European utopia is the notion of autonomous
individuality, the a priori of the so-called European idea. This distin-
guishing feature, which is positioned against all other cultures, has an
intellectual and a vitalistic expression. Ortegas 1932 essay, In Search
of Goethe from Within, thus recalls Valrys Goethe lecture of 1921,
not in its specific motifsthey could not be more differentbut in its
invocation of individualism. The vitalistic side is the imperial capacity
invoked by Paul Hazard, which even resembles Spenglers distinction
between European master races and Oriental peasantry. This is a per-
spective that, in the context of the perception of non-Greek antiquity
by European classical philology, archaeology, and art history, exerted
a canon-forming influence, as is especially true for Greek philology in
Germany. Bruno Snells famous work The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek
europe as utopia 591

Origins of European Thought is also an impressive document of this cur-

rent, even though it did not continue the same aggressive neohumanist
trend. First published in 1946 and reissued with sequels, it exercised
considerable influence on two postwar generations of academics. The
book promoted the idea of a future European state, an idea that struck
like a bolt of lightning chiefly in Germany or West Germany, even though
it offered not even the trace of an institutional and political argument
for such a state. The only comparable works at the academic level were
Ernst Robert Curtiuss European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages of 1948
and his Essays on European Literature of 1950. The idea of Europe in these
three books was confined to literary history, an expression of the civic
reserve of these two German scholars in the immediate aftermath of the
catastrophe and defeat of the Second World War. But notwithstanding
or even in spite ofthis past, Bruno Snells opening sentence repeats
the gesture of European superiority of Croce and Hazard: European
thinking begins with the Greeks. They have made it what it is: our only
way of thinking.8 Thinking itself is elevated to a guarantor: European
thought as guarantor of the future.
It would be hypocritical, however, to see this as a self-unmasking
hubris from the standpoint of contemporary political correctness. The
European zeitgeist thought in such terms, and it had good reasons for
doing so at the time. The problem of German classical studiescorrectly
described as the Tyranny of Greece over Germany9is another story,
and it is part of the special path pursued by German neohumanism in
the 1930s, whose heroization of Greek culture undoubtedly contained
protofascist elements. Snells discovery of Greek thought as European
has nothing to do with this trend, however, and still less did Ernst Robert
Curtiuss conception of Europe as a delightful garden in which major
writers and thinkers meet, from Virgil to Goethe, from Balzac to Miguel
de Unamuno, from Ortega y Gasset to T. S. Eliot and Jean Cocteau.
Curtiuss idea that the different national writers belonged together in
the spiritual present of European literature was utopian in the sense
that it responded to the two wars and the state of continental Europe as
a landscape in ruins. It was the anticipation of a longed-for alternative,
the illusion that ideas could literally move mountains, the mountains
in question being the borders separating countries.

II. The Franco-German Fascination with Utopia

The specific guise assumed by the literary idea of Europe was the
mythologizing in French and German literature of the other country.
This phenomenon had its origin in the three wars of 187071, 191418,
592 new literary history

and 194045, in which France twice suffered military defeat. Out of

this military-political disaster, ultimately experienced by both nations,
there finally arose, like a deus ex machina, the fantasy of the cultural
attractiveness of the other country. In France prior to 187071, a uto-
pian, idealizing notion of Germany as the country of poets and think-
ers had been current, inspired by Madame de Stals instantly famous
book De lAllemagne [Germany] (1810, 1813). De Stals idealization of
Germany arose in the context of the Napoleonic dictatorship, which
she understood as a cultural crisis. As such, her depiction of Germany
presented a utopian alternative, one that had already been developed as
a utopian concept around 1800 by the leading German thinkers of the
era such as Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schiller, and Hegel, and that
was intended to counteract the political powerlessness of the German
statelets. Schlegels statement that aesthetic modernity would begin in
Germany and Schiller and Hegels prophecy that the German mind
and the German language would teach the world to think were literally
utopian. From the 1830s onward, such ideas were once more bathed
in a romantic light on the French side, when Gerard de Nervals Rhine
fantasies (Loreley, Aurelia) further developed the romantic stylization of
Germany in phantasmatic formsomething which, as we will see, also
influenced early Parisian surrealism.
Heinrich Heines utopian argument in Religion and Philosophy in Ger-
many and The Romantic School should also be noted. In the latter work,
which first appeared in serial form in 1833 in the Parisian journal LEurope
littraire, the fascination with the uncanny as an innovative motif in Ger-
man Romanticism is contrasted with, as Heine emphasized, its more
innocuous conception in France. In the former text, however, which
appeared in French translation in 1835 under the title De lAllemagne,
this difference is accentuated into a difference of principle that would
soon demonize the philosophical-political image of Germany. Heine thus
warns his French readers at the end of this tract that a German revolu-
tion is imminent that would make the great French Revolution look like
a mere innocuous idyll. The point of Heines prophecy-cum-warning
is that any such German revolution would be a direct consequence of
the idealist philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. The exhortation to
take up arms against such a prospect culminates in the image of the
Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena: she always wears armor and has a
helmet on her head and a spear in her hand. Whether this metaphor
was meant as a recommendation to the French not to let their cultural
pride lead them to forget military matters, or whether the image of
the goddess of wisdom who is always armed was intended to convey a
new combination of idealist philosophy and the Prussian army, remains
europe as utopia 593

concealed behind Heines ambivalent irony. Heines prophecy is utopian

because, on the one hand, it lacks political specifics and does not say
what state formation this revolution would bring about and because, on
the other hand, it springs from a crisis of culture.
At any rate, Heines disquieting interpretation of the potential of Ger-
man philosophy demonstrated that Madame de Stals purely idealizing
depiction, which also downplayed German politics, was historically obso-
lete. In his enigmatic 1835 address, he anticipated the subsequent and
(following the Franco-Prussian war and the foundation of the German
Reich in 1871) enduring image of Germany discernible in French reac-
tions. In this context, two new moments emerge that became important
for the utopian direction within the French intelligentsia after the First
World War: on the one hand, a new form of self-criticism vis--vis the
classical rhetorical tradition as well as French morality and mentality as
displayed during the war of 187071; on the other, a new perspective
on the Prussian-German victor. That the adversary was now Prussian
Germany meant that a backward-looking literary-Romantic utopia had
been replaced by a militarist-scientific, and hence forward-looking and
threatening, utopia. In 1870, as evidenced in the popular Parisian daily
press (Le petit journal), political caricatures (Le Charivari), and the essays
and books of important authors such as Victor Hugo (Rentre Paris
[Back in Paris]) and Thodore de Banville (Idylles prussiennes [Prussian
Idylls]), utopia as the evocation of an eternally spiritual France is directed
against the fact of a new, barbaric Prussian Germany.10
However, a handful of opposing critical voices announced a different
utopian perspective. The Journal of the Goncourt brothers on the war
year 187071 contains reflections and reminiscences of conversations
among leading Parisian men of letters regarding the future superiority
of the Germans in science, technology, and even intellectual discourse
generally. Cited at length was Ernest Renan, the influential philosopher
of religion, who interpreted the military victory of Prussian Germany as
the result of a far greater potential superiority, as augured by Heines
prophecy. Hippolyte Taine, the other influential historian of the early
Third Republic, made a similar distinction. He argued that the social
and political system invented by Napoleon was ancient and heathen
compared to the Germanic Christian system, which Taine described as
modern (The Origins of Contemporary France, 187594). Taine criticized
the French school system and mode of instruction as mechanical and
soulless as opposed to the cultivation of the individual. Renan empha-
sized the presence of two Germanys (La France et lAllemagne [France and
Germany]) and developed the idea of a common European civilization
founded on an alliance between France, Germany, and England on
594 new literary history

which, he claimed, the intellectual and moral greatness of Europe

rested.11 That is the same idea that Hazard, Croce, and Ortega y Gasset
would formulate in utopian terms.
Renan and Taines valuations are instructive as signs of a new cultural-
critical impulse vis--vis the French tradition. From what has been said,
one could conclude that the French experience of the first war between
Germany and France initially destroyed the Romantic perception of
Germany, only to replace it with a fundamentalist-existentialist tendency
that was structured in utopian terms. This change had already occurred
before the outbreak of the First World War. A phantasm arose that would
become authoritative for some leading French intellectuals after the
war and that created the idea of the two sides of a shared culture. The
writer who invented this utopia was Romain Rolland. His multivolume
novel Jean Christophe, which appeared between 1904 and 1912 and was
an instant European success, tells the story of a German-French friend-
ship that is developed as a cultural utopia. The hero of the novel, Jean
Christophe, is a young German composer from the Rhineland who,
after a murderous brawl with German soldiers in a tavern, flees to Paris
where he meets his lifelong friend, a sensitive littrateur. An archetypal
affinity and distance develops between the young, vital German musi-
cian and the young, delicate French author, through which Romain
Rolland develops his idea of a future German-French union. This also
involves a ruthless depiction of the shallow, conventional, and rhetorical
features of French civilization and an uncompromising depiction of the
provinciality of German music as an enterprise that has degenerated into
bourgeois conformism, with the pompous reception of Richard Wagner
and Beethoven suffocating all artistic refinement. Here Rolland clearly
draws on the image of a primitive German musical culture, especially
the Richard Wagner cult, which, according to French accounts, was
widespread in Germany in 1870 and which stood in opposition to what
Charles Baudelaire had recently written in his famous essay on Wagners
aesthetics. The key point, however, is the evocation of a German hero in
whom the old Romantic dynamic was resurrected as the spiritual event of
a new art, thereby positing a different ideal for a nationalist era shortly
before the outbreak of the world war. The presupposition of Rollands
utopian fantasy is, in turn, a prewar situation caught between decadence
and vitalistic rhetoric that was experienced as a crisis.
If the polarization of modern realism and old-fashioned rhetoric is
identified as a criterion of Romain Rollands workan alternative that
Anatole France also presented around the same time in his prose works
(LHistoire contemporaine [Contemporary History], The Gods Are Athirst)
then we have an explanation for the imaginative-utopian character of
europe as utopia 595

the emotionally charged relationship between France and Germany

between the world wars. Two relations are especially emblematic: in the
1920s, the rediscovery of the fantastical in German Romanticism by the
surrealists as a program for cultural revolution and, in the 1930s, the
influence of Martin Heideggers Being and Time on the young Jean-Paul
Sartrein other words, the invention of existentialism out of the spirit
of German phenomenology. If one adds Alexandre Kojves famous
lectures on Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, then there are evident reasons
for the thesis that the first two wars gave rise to an innovation in French
self-perception that was informed by German literature and philosophy.
Immediately prior to the First World War, Apollinaire, the inventor of
early surrealism, adorned his avant-gardistic poetics with motifs derived
from the Loreley myth, which is cited in his first major poetical work
Alcools as a free adaptation of Clemens Brentanos poem Zu Bacharach
am Rheine [To Bacharach on the Rhine]. A whole group of poems in
this work refers to the Rhine theme: Rhenish Night, Bells, Autumn
Rhnane, and finally The Women. The early surrealist complex of
Rhine themes inspired by Brentano is influenced by metaphors from the
symbolist tradition and the style of Verlaine and Rimbaud. Brentanos
Rhine motifs are transformed into elementary particles of the early sur-
realist imaginationthat is, the French language is not reromanticized
but Romantic elements contribute to the sought-for modern mood.
In this case, however, the German motif merely functions as an exotic
elementary particle.
More relevant for the utopian aspect is the reference to German
themes in the case of early texts by Andr Breton and Louis Aragon,
the true founders of surrealist theory. Novalis, the central figure of early
German Romanticism, is cited in the first Surrealist Manifesto as a kind
of spiritual forebear because he called into question the conventional
concept of reality. Breton refers likewise to Grard de Nerval, who, as
we know, was not only the first to discover Rhine Romanticism, but who,
as Breton states, anticipated the term surrealism with the concept of
supernatural reverie, which he attributed expressly to the Germans.
Almost more informative about the presence of a German theme within
surrealism is Bretons commentary on Achim von Arnims fantastical
tales, whose 1858 translation by Thophile Gautier as Contes bizarres was
reedited by Breton in 1933 with an extended introduction. Without
going into Bretons extremely complicated and conceptually challeng-
ing notion of the fantastical, which he interprets not as an affective
but as a reflexive understanding of the dualism of reality, we should
note one thing above all: Bretons intellectualization of the uncanny
figures in Achim von Arnims tales is at the same time a discussion of
596 new literary history

the German idealism that subsequently plays a key role in modern,

early twentieth-century French thought, chiefly through the reception
of Hegel. The decisive point is that insofar as Arnim is identified as the
inspiration and guarantor of the surrealist cultural revolutionhence
not, for example, as the mouthpiece of a new Romanticismthe theme
of Germany acquires the contemporary relevance of the modern mode
of thought par excellenceone that breaks definitively with the old
Rhine motifs of Romain Rolland. In Louis Aragons novel, Nightwalker
(1924), the idea of a mythologie moderne, which wants to be nothing other
than a modern utopia, is furnished with eschatological motifs drawn
from Novalis. Here we are dealing with something that goes beyond
the previously mentioned intertextual references and that, to put it in
psychological terms, gives rise to historical reference persons. This is
even more evident in the case of my second example.
The other German reference person, Martin Heideggeras has been
recounted again and againentered French consciousness fifteen to
twenty years later thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre, but in a more enduring
fashion. Sartre confessed in his diary of 1940 that the war and Hei-
degger had put [him] on the right path, that is, had taught him to
place a new emphasis on existence. Heidegger showed him that there
was nothing beyond the project whereby human reality realized itself.12
Here utopia is inherent in Being itself, where it awaits discovery. Over
and above such motifs, however, both German classical literature and
recent German-Prussian history had acquired existential significance for
Sartre. The political authors of the Action franaise and the contemporary
French fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Lucien
Rebatet, and Robert Brasillach, by contrast, never appealed to German
models in their literary texts. This utopia inherent in Being must be
distinguished from the fascist idea of a united Europe, which was devel-
oped chiefly by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, the prophet of futuristic lan,
even before his radicalization and which he never abandoned (Le jeune
europen [The Young European], 1927; LEurope contre les patries [Europe
against the Homelands], 1931). Whereas Drieu La Rochelle rejected
the nationalism of the Action franaise and Vichy as being reactionary,
he tried to justify the German occupation as a new phase of a future
unified Europe. In other words, here the fascist utopia and the ideal of
a unity of Europe melded into one and the same project.13
On the German side, by contrast, a quasimetaphysics of the idea of
Europe was already apparent from the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, its main semantic expression being the replacement of the word
Europe by the word Occident or the West (Abendland). This motif
was already expressed in the title of Oswald Spenglers famous treatise,
europe as utopia 597

though Georg Trakl, the most important poet writing in the German
language before and during the First World War, also gave one of his
greatest poems the title Occidental Song. Without being able to go
into the historical origins and historical-philosophical etymology of this
concept, which does not feature prominently in the relevant German
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century treatises on world history and for
which there is no precise equivalent in other European languages, we
should simply note that Heidegger, in his 194243 wartime lectures on
Hlderlins hymn The Ister, with which Sartre was not acquainted,
appealed to the category of the Western and Western humankind
as a difference from America relevant to the philosophy of history.14 In
his work Parmenides, Heidegger speaks of the essential history of the
Occident.15 Heideggers terminology of essence with regard to Europe
had analogies in the idioms of conservatives and prefascist authors: in
Rudolf Borchardt, for example, the succinct titles of his historical es-
says, such as Europa, Dorer, Pisa, and Villa, indicate that here
an ideal, as he puts it elsewhere, is supposed to be conceptualized in
stylistic and metaphysical terms.16 This is also true of Gottfried Benn,
who, in an unambiguously prefascist perspective, posits the formula for
the history of Europenamely, the designation of peoples devoted to
an innovative style and an extension of nature.17 The reference of both
authors to the Dorians is a final, racial phase in the German obsession
with Greece as a European paradigm. Borchardt, the most interesting
conservative cultural critic of the Wilhelminian era, encapsulated Eu-
rope in an ahistorical notion of form inspired by art nouveau. Benn,
alongside Bertolt Brecht, the most modern German poet of his era,
fetishized this idea of form, which can also be described as a transition
from utopia to ideology. However, none of these texts played a role in
French perceptions of Germany after the First World War.

III. The Cause of Decline

The political fathers of the idea of a united Europeinitially Charles

de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide De Gasperi, three decades later
Helmut Kohl and Franois Mitterrandhad no notion, or at best a ves-
tigial grasp, of the thinkers and commentators discussed above and the
books and essays I have mentioned. Nevertheless, they were also familiar
with the central motif of the utopian view of Europenamely, the two
world wars that resulted in the special importance attached to the relation
between Germany and France, including their ideas of each other. Here
an ideological inversion is also evident. On the one hand, there is the
598 new literary history

pragmatic justification that European wars must be put to end forever,

but, on the other hand, there is a Carolingian conception of this politi-
cal motif that was not yet articulated in the idea of Europe of the 1930s
and earlier. It was Carolingian in the sense that the German-French
reconciliation to which de Gaulle and Adenauer aspired was invested with
an exaggerated historical symbolism by referencing the shared origins
of France and Germany in the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne. The
borders of West Germany in the 1950s were more or less identical with
the eastern frontier of the old Frankish kingdom, whose eastern part
kept the name regnum francorum in early medieval sources after its divi-
sion via the Oath of Strasbourg in 842, before acquiring the afterwards
familiar name of Holy Roman Empire plus the later addition of the
German Nation. The transfer of the political decision-making center
from Berlin to the Rhineland in 1949 contributed to this Carolingian
conception of the state, which was also expressed in rituals such as the
annual award of the Charlemagne Prize in Aachen to a European politi-
cian who has rendered outstanding services to European unification. A
consciousness of shared Christianity, especially of Catholic Christianity,
as celebrated in Reims in 1962, was also important in this regard. Thus
in educated circles, a work that had played no role in the cultural idea
of Europe of the 1930snamely, Novaliss 1799 essay Christianity or
Europewas read once again after the war. Henceforth, political utopia
took on a historical-retrospective and fundamentalist guise.
It is no accident that until now we have only mentioned continental
European writers. No English or British author developed an idea of
Europe similar to the ones presented above. However, there is one
characteristic exceptionthe two Anglo-American poets Ezra Pound
and T. S. Eliot, inventors of literary modernity, on the one hand, and
sympathetic to ultraconservative and fascist ideas, on the other. These two
poets, however, were not scions of the English milieu they admired. In
particular, there was no literary or philosophical affinity between British
and German writers that could have led to something like a European
category. Even the interest of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and
Christopher Isherwood in the Germany of the 1930s and later remained
a private matter that did not give rise to any speculative historical sub-
ject matter. This distance toward European themes also holds true for
nineteenth-century Germanophile English authors like Thomas Carlyle
and George Eliot. Characteristic of English reserve toward the idea of
Europe is the fact that the English philosopher Arnold J. Toynbee, an
influential spokesman of his era, analyzes the dramatic history of Europe
as a whole in his diagnosis of the European postwar situation, War and
Civilization, published in 1950, but in doing so he does not employ the
europe as utopia 599

utopian terminology used by Ortega y Gasset, Croce, Hazard, Heidegger,

and Curtius, even though he always speaks of Europe as a cultural unity.
And if Winston Churchill rhetorically invoked the utopia of a united
Europe in 1946, it was also simultaneously understood that England,
if faced with the choice, would always pick the open sea. This dif-
ference, romanticized at the time, between Great Britain, on the one
hand, and the continental European nations, on the otherone which
still resonates with a majority of the British, or at any rate the English,
populationis not only due to a tradition of splendid isolation or its
empire, but also, in equal measure, to the English distrust of ideas,
not to mention of concepts dressed up in ideological and utopian terms
that do not promise any strictly political currency.
A variant of this English suspicion of the European utopia that has
been current since the 1990s discovers elements of the Europe ideology
of National Socialism in such a utopia and continues to discuss them
today, in much the same way as such elements were established in the
case of French fascism. It is true that the Nazis presented their war
against the Soviet Union, especially at the end, in propagandistic terms
as a European campaign against the Asian barbarians. This conception
of Russia was undoubtedly still a factor in Adenauers decision in favor
of a strict orientation of West Germany to the West, which also reflected
the explicit wishes of large portions of the West German population. The
name of the French SS division Charlemagne confirmed the National
Socialist appropriation of Europe against the Soviet Union. The original
German aims of the First World War also included economic and ter-
ritorial gains that could be subsumed under the ominous term Middle
Europe. The latter concept was coined in 1915 by Friedrich Naumann,
a populist Protestant pastor and an extremely effective propagandist of a
European economic community under German leadership. Addressing
this tendency, Jean-Paul Sartre made the general observation in his 1940
diary that the idea of community appears as the specific possibility
of the German nation. It involves a striving for unity that always goes
beyond the simple unification of the Germanies. It aims at a unifying
unification of Europe.18
Even though National Socialist or socialist-vlkisch motifs were not
openly appealed to after the Second World War, they certainly con-
tinued to influence the immediate postwar German sympathy for a
united Europewithout being identified as such. More effective was
the image of de Gaulle and Adenauer side by side in the Cathedral of
Reims, the coronation site of the Frankish kings, an image repeated
thirty years later by Mitterrand and Kohl standing hand in hand before
the graves of Verdun. It is well known that the common denominator
600 new literary history

of these ambivalent symbolic historical motifs, on the German side, was

the search for a new identity after the apparent ruin of old National
Socialist tradition. And the previously discussed literature on the idea of
Europe, specifically with regard to the historical necessity of a German-
French symbiosis, could only confirm such desires. Here, however, a
rupture occurred that amounts to a paradigm shift and that gave rise
to the paradox already alluded to at the beginning: on the one hand,
the continuation of the profound influence of German philosophers on
French thought that announced itself from the 1930s but, on the other,
the now complete lack of any specific affinities between the German
and the French intelligentsiarather, indifference and even antipathy.
The memory of the German occupation of France between 1940 and
1944 does not suffice to explain this phenomenon, even though it cer-
tainly had a longstanding effect on French intellectuals, not to mention
the conservative bourgeoisie. The Paris city council, after all, gave the
name Stalingrad to a subway station located close to the working-class
neighborhood Belleville. The left-wing intelligentsia sympathized with
the existence of the German Democratic Republic for more than three
decades and preferred the Communist state to the Federal Republic,
all of which was reflected in the French school and university curricula
and in the selection of books in German bookstores in Paris. Crucial for
a declining mutual interest, however, was above all the disappearance
of the threat of war. This is the elementary difference between before
1944 and after 1944: the slow disappearance of the motif of crisis from
the consciousness of the two nations, and hence the disappearance of a
key cause of political utopia. Once war had definitively and conclusively
ceased to be a possible form of relationship between France and Ger-
many, the emphatic expression of a possible symbiosis lost its material
support. This point was established by Peter Sloterdijk in 2008.19
But there is a more complicated reason for the decline, for the implo-
sion of the utopian: the French obsession with the German philosophical
heritage, in which the formal cause of utopia, that is to say, crisis, had
materialized, took a decisive turn. It was not only the writings of Hegel,
Marx, and Freud that took root in French thought. It was increasingly
the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and some authors of German
Romanticism that suddenly received an exciting new interpretation in
the readings of Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze, readings that were dia-
metrically opposed to the German postwar reception of these writings.
It was not only that the German humanities had subjected the poets
and thinkers embraced by the French to radical suspicion as ideologi-
cal figures and described them as in part prefascist, at best irrational,
thinkers whose impulses were incompatible with the rational ethos of
europe as utopia 601

the postwar West German university. The issue is more complicated.

After all, the point of the French readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Schlegel, Novalis, and Hlderlin had nothing to do with references to
irrational ideologies, but precisely with their modernity. This was not
understood east of the Rhine. For the modernity that transpired from
lucid French interpretations contradicted a German way of reading
texts that was still rooted in the idealist tradition of the history of ideas
and that the new German Enlightenment had done nothing to change.
On the contrary, whether it was Derridas commendation of Nietzsches
style or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes and Jean-Luc Nancys discovery of
the literary absolute in the literature of German Romanticism,20 these
ambitious, innovative theories fell flat before German university chairs,
if they were even noticed before the 1980s. The reason was not just
one of different hermeneutic approaches. It resided in a quintessential
differencea renewed aesthetics versus a renewed philosophy of his-
torythat did not allow for a reciprocal conversation. This difference can
be formulated more precisely in terms of the criterion of utopia: French
deconstruction, though formally antiutopian, in fact gave rise to a new
reading of the world that can be described as utopian. German distance
from this reading, based on a regeneration of utopian Enlightenment
ideas, remained de facto faithful to tradition, that is, in this case to the
history of ideas. On the one side, a genuine leap out of history, on
the other, the immanence of historical continuity.
This difference reveals a psychological and cultural diversity that goes
beyond scholarly differences, a radically distinct mental chemistry that
continues to stand in the way of direct conversation about such ques-
tions and that has condemned the indirect attempt to bridge these
differences to failure. The irony of this story lies in the fact that subtle
French readings of famous German texts discovered a subversive qual-
ity in these texts that contradicted the never-abandoned German crite-
rion of the idea. Without discussing the influence of Paul de Man, a
Belgian-American theorist who, as is well known, profoundly influenced
the French option, we need only note what is evident in the French-
German dispute: De Manian or Derridean deconstruction discovered
stylistic-semantic features of literary texts that escaped summation in
terms of their content or reduction to an idea. This dealt a severe blow
to the still-dominant influence of German idealismthe philosophy of
identityand to the most recent idea of the later Frankfurt School, the
theory of communication. The French thinkers had, as it were, turned
the German Romantic heritage against the new German Enlightenment.
And, even further, they had discovered something in this heritage that
the German humanities, because of self-imposed political controls, would
never have struck upon themselves, with a few exceptions.
602 new literary history

This gulf became public, in a manner of speaking, when a number

of French and German philosophers met in Paris in the mid-1980s for
a conversation entitled Rationalit et subjectivitthough, as it turned
out, no conversation took place, even though the chief representatives
of their difference, Derrida and Jrgen Habermas, were present. Ac-
cording to the report of eye witnesses, it was a downright scandalous
event that culminated in a scene in which a French secretary, on hearing
the diction of a renowned German epistemologist who had especially
influenced Habermass concept, broke down in tears and confessed,
after being prompted, that the harsh German of the philosophy profes-
sor had reminded her of the intonation of German officers. Instead of
dialogue, there was embarrassment. The German philosophical ace, who
was well-known for this sort of thing, is said to have played the role of
advocate of rationality like a ranting missionary. It was more embarrassing
when, some years later, young German philosophers dragged the matre
of contemporary French philosophy before the court of their criteria
of rationality during his one-off visit to the capital city of the Frankfurt
School. The reports of French participants gave the impression that
they believed these politically correct Fridolinsan ironic term for
German navetywere trying to show the frivolous French the error of
their ways. This vacuum or abyss in relations remained hidden, thanks
to the impact of French cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and popular
forms of cultural tourism.
There is no sign of this situation changing. On the contrary, the
upsurge in antipathy has in the meantime given way to banal tedium.
The consciousness of cultural and intellectual difference as a mutually
cultivated indifference has become even more pronounced. The French
historian, Pierre Nora, editor of the important Parisian journal Le Dbat,
recently described this situation in an interview with the Frankfurter Allge-
meine Zeitung as a fait accompli: literally a condition of speechlessness that
is becoming increasingly unavoidable because hardly anyone in France
understands German any longer and, conversely, nobody in Germany
understands French.21 However, this observation should be relativized
and dedramatized: it is not only now that a relationship no longer exists.
Beyond the symbolic politics discussed above that took place between
1953 and 1998, there was never even a trace of psychological and intel-
lectual proximity. After the Second World War, Parisian intellectuals
showed greater interest in and sympathy for Arab and South American
cultures than for what was happening in Germany. Conversely, the style
of French thinking and French discussions remained anathema to lead-
ing German academics and other figures. Revealingly, the only occasion
on which Paris responded to Berlin or Frankfurt was that of the Baader-
europe as utopia 603

Meinhof complex: an aging Jean-Paul Sartres romanticization of West

German left-wing anarchists-turned-criminals of the 1970s. Alternatively,
French interest in Germany awakened only when something romantic
and erratic was anticipated. This hoary assumption could only and can
only be disappointed by West German normality.
What this means is that the utopian claim to a future European intel-
lectual commonality, not to speak of a German-French intellectual rap-
prochement, is definitively obsolete as a historical phenomenon. This
fact receives additional confirmation from a change in the erstwhile
intellectual canon. A new generation of pupils and students throughout
Europe no longer takes its orientation from those intellectual standards
and conceptslet us call them intellectual symbolsthat still enjoyed
currency into the 1970s and 1980s. The same holds true for the intellec-
tual public. This is shown in an exemplary way by the demythologizing of
the French Revolution, as became all too apparent on its two-hundredth
anniversary in 1989. These changes are called a posthistorical mental-
ity. Sartre defined history in 1940 as an assumption of the past, to be
distinguished from a pure causal action of the latter.22 The European
idea, in this sense, whether the intellectual one of the 1930s or the
Carolingian one of the 1950s, no longer has the chance to function
in a utopian way. The past is in fact no longer taken over and hy-
postatized as the future.
The European utopia presented in this essay remains rooted in the
language of an ideal-typical speculative and historical mode of thought
to which, characteristically, the most modern mind among the German
intelligentsia after 1900, Max Weber, no longer adheredeven though
his themes would have made the term Europe possible. For him, such
a language would have lacked analytical distinction, as it does to this
day. Nevertheless, this utopian fantasy, as we have seen, continued to
exert concrete political effects after the Second World War, even if
notwithstanding Brusselsit did not give rise to any change in national
notions of sovereignty. Given that a political core failed to develop out
of the cultural core of the idea of Europe and that, as I have shown,
this cultural phantasm has lost its effectiveness, how can political ambi-
tion function without it, especially now that the criterion of war is no
longer in effect? Has a too-long-cherished illusion undergone a salutary
awakening? Alternativelyif it was not, after all, an illusiondid a
utopian impulse, as a precondition for a political goal, have too brief a
chance? For either utopian discourse was merely a distraction from the
political-institutional unreality of a united Europe, or a utopian phase
is still necessary in order to achieve the reality of a political union that
only seems to be unreal. For without a utopian driving force, it is obvi-
ous that practical political innovations remain at a standstill.
604 new literary history

At present, we are dealing with a situation that has lost its voice: a
matter of purely economic coexistence and antagonismas long as
things go well. Since intellectual communication between France and
Germany in a utopian sense has ceased, thought-free practice will col-
lapse as soon as the money runs out. This is not the finding presented
by Peter Sloterdijk that I alluded to.23 To be sure, Sloterdijk makes it
clear that the relationship between Germany and France is at best one
of benevolent mutual disregard or benign estrangement.24 He sees an
advantage in this development, however, as it would also betoken the
end of the tragic epic between Germany and France. That is undoubt-
edly true. Nevertheless, the vacuum that is beginning to replace the
spiritual flow of energy between the two countries is not a precondition
for European developmentespecially as the French reception of Ger-
man thought did not cease but, as we have seen, had a negative effect
on the mutual relationship. The question posed by Arnold J. Toynbee
in 1950whether we might not pay a terrible price for bringing Eu-
ropean confusion to an end in a pacified universal state, hence in
a definitive utopian modelhas acquired a new topicality in the light
of our discussion. We do not know what price he meant or what that
price could be today. Toynbees question, however, was formulated in a
language that lies beyond the banality of German-French relations. But
can Europeans get by without a utopian imagination if they really want
to bring about political unity? They would have to invent, in any event,
a different, a new utopian language. But this possibility is at odds with
the waning of a speculative philosophy of history that I have described.

Translated by Ciaran Cronin

NOTES

1 Quest-ce que lEurope? Une pense qui ne se contente jamais. Sans piti pour elle-
mme, elle ne cesse jamais de poursuivre deux qutes: lune vers le bonheur; lautre, qui
lui est plus indispensable encore, et plus chre, vers la vrit. Hors delle, non touches
par la civilisation, des masses dhumanit vivent sans penser, satisfaites de vivre. Paul
Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years 16801715, trans. J. Lewis May (New York:
Fordham Univ. Press, 1990), 44041.
2 Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686), trans.
William Gardiner (London: A Bettesworth, 1715), 191 (trans. amended).
3 Valry to Rilke, Paris, December 17, 1921.
4 Benedetto Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Henry Furst (1932;
New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), 351.
5 Croce, History of Europe, 351 (trans. amended).
6 Jos Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. anonymous (New York: Norton,
1957), 187, 190.
7 Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 179, 186, 184.
europe as utopia 605

8 Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. T. G.
Rosenmeyer (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1982), v (originally published as The Discovery of the
MindThe Greek Origins of European Thought, trans T. G. Rosemeyer [Oxford: Blackwell,
1953]).
9 E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by
Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth
Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935).
10 Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und
Selbstverstndnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 17921918 [The Fatherland and the En-
emy: Studies on National Enmity and Self-Concept in Germany and France 17921918]
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), 20734. Also Claude Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pense
franaise, 18701914 [The German Crisis of French Thought, 18701914] (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1959).
11 See Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde, 237.
12 Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, November 1939March 1940,
trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1984), 324.
13 See Hlne Baty-Delalande, Drieu La Rochelle, LEurope se damner, in Les criv-
ains et loccupation: Le Magazin Littraire [Drieu La Rochelle: Europe to Die, in Writers
and the Occupation: The Literary Magazine], No. 516 (February 2012): 6465.
14 Martin Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymn The Ister, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996), 43.
15 Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andr Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington:
Indiana Univ. Press, 1992), 76.
16 Rudolf Borchardt, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbnden [Collected Works in Individual
Volumes], ed. Marie Luise Borchardt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996), Europa, 4:740, Dover,
4:4155, Pisa, 3:3870, 3:11516, Villa 3:381 (Frankfurt am Main, 2008).
17 Gottfried Benn, Dorische Welt: Eine Untersuchung ber die Beziehung von Kunst und Macht,
Gesammelte Werke in vier Bnden [Doric World: A Study of the Relationship Between Art
and Power, Collected Works in Four Volumes], ed. Dieter Wellershoff, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 1965), 1:263.
18 Sartre, War Diaries, 328.
19 Peter Sloterdijk, Theory of the Post-War Periods: Observations on Franco-German Relations
since 1945, trans Robert Payne (Vienna: Springer, 2009).
20 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsches Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1978); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute:
The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1988)
21 Pierre Nora, Ein Gesprch ber das deutsch-Franzsische Verhlthis, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, February 17, 2012, 31.
22 Sartre, War Diaries, 301.
23 Sloterdijk, Theory of the Post-War Periods.
24 Sloterdijk, Theory of the Post-War Periods, 9.
 CONTRIBUTORS

Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of

Munich, British Journal of Sociology Visiting Centennial Professor at the Lon-
don School of Economics and Political Science, and Professor at the Fondation
Maison des Sciences de lHomme, Paris. His publications include Cosmopolitan
Europe (2007, with Edgar Grande), World at Risk (2009), A God of Ones Own
(2010), Twenty Observations on a World in Turmoil (2012), Distant Love (2013, with
Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim), and German Europe (2013).

Karl Heinz Bohrer is professor emeritus for Modern German Literary History at
the University of Bielefeld and currently Visiting Professor at Stanford University.
He is the author of numerous books including Die gefhrdete Phantasie (1970),
Die sthetik des Schreckens (1978), Das absolute Prsens: die Semantik sthetischer Zeit
(1994), Pltzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des sthetischen Scheins (1981; translated as
Suddenness:On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance [1994]), Die Kritik der Romantik:
Der Verdacht der Philosophie gegen die literarische Moderne (1989), Der Abschied - Theorie
der Trauer (1996), and Das Tragische: Erscheinung, Pathos, Klage (2009).

Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture

of the University of Amsterdam and from 2006 to 2012 was Visiting Professor
at Yale University. Among his most recent books are Terror und Trauma (2007),
Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (2010, with Malte Hagener), and
The Persistence of Hollywood (2012).

Nilfer Gle is Professor of Sociology at the cole des hautes tudes en sciences
sociales, Paris. She is the author of The Forbidden Modern, The Forbidden Modern:
Civilization and Veiling (1996) and Islam in Europe: The Lure of Fundamentalism and
the Allure of Cosmopolitanism (2010). Currently, she is conducting a European-scale
research project, Islam in the Making of a European Public Sphere, funded by
European Research Council.

Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Centre

for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in London. She
is the coauthor with Ernesto Laclau of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards
a Radical Democratic Politics (1985) and the author of The Return of the Political
(1993), The Democratic Paradox (2000), and On the Political (2005).

New Literary History, 2012, 43: 751752

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