United and Divided Europes: European Culture and Identity since Homer Volume 2 9781350058545, 9781350058538, 9781350058668

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CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 2

Mathieu Arnoux Born in Brest (France) in 1959. Professor of medieval history at the Paris Diderot University – Paris 7 and Director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), Paris. His research interests focus on the history of work and of the European economy from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. Daniel Baric Born in Paris (France) in 1972. Assistant Professor of Germanic studies at the Department of Slavic Studies at the Sorbonne University, Paris. His research interests focus on questions relating to collective memories in Central Europe and on the sociopolitical implications of multilingualism within the Habsburg Empire. Patrick Boucheron Born in Paris (France) in 1965. A specialist in the Middle Ages and a Professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the Chair of ‘the History of the Powers in Western Europe from the 13th to the 16th Centuries’. His research interests focus on European history in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, particularly in Italy. Dominique Bourel Born in Offenburg (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1952. Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (the CNRS) and former Director of the French Research Centre in Jerusalem. His research interests focus on the cultural and intellectual history of German Judaism from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Hamit Bozarslan Born in Lice (Turkey) in 1958. A historian and political analyst, he is Director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), Paris. A specialist in the Middle East, his work includes studies on violence and minority populations in Turkey. Felipe Brandi Born in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1974. Doctor of history at the Centre for Historical Research in the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), Paris and Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of São Paulo. His research focuses on the historiography and historians of France in the latter half of the twentieth century. Javier Cercas Born in Ibahernando (Spain) in 1962. Professor of literature at the University of Girona and author of several novels, including Soldiers of Salamis (2001) and The Impostor (2014). He was the recipient of the 2016 European Book Prize.

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Johann Chapoutot Born in Martigues (France) in 1978. Professor of contemporary history at the Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris 4) and an honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His research interests focus on the history of Germany and Nazism, and more broadly on contemporary European political and cultural history. Leyla Dakhli Born in Tunis (Tunisia) in 1973. Research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (the CNRS) and now based at the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin. Her research interests focus on the intellectual and social history of the contemporary Arab world. Marina Dmitrieva Born in Moscow (the Soviet Union, now Russia) in 1953. Senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig. Her research interests focus on the art and architecture of Central and Eastern Europe and the historiography of art. Alan Forrest Born in Aberdeen (the UK) in 1945. Professor Emeritus of modern history at the University of York. His research interests focus primarily on the history of the French Revolution and of the First French Empire. Étienne François Born in Rouen (France) in 1943, Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Free University of Berlin, former Director of the Centre Marc Bloch and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests focus on modern and contemporary German history and the history of European memory cultures. Willem Frijhoff Born in Zutphen (the Netherlands) in 1942. Professor Emeritus of cultural history at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests focus chiefly on the history of cultures, universities and mentalities. Javier Gómez-Montero Born in La Coruña (Spain) in 1958. Professor of Romance languages at the University of Kiel. His research interests focus on places and cultural and literary exchanges between Spain, Italy, France and Germany. Ton Hoenselaars Born in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) in 1956. Professor of literature at the University of Utrecht. A specialist in English Renaissance literature. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel Born in Montpellier (France) in 1977. Full Professor at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), Chair in Digital Humanities. She is a specialist in the social and transnational history of avant-garde art, in the globalization of images and in digital humanities. Karena Kalmbach Born in Berlin (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1982. A former Junior Professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven, she is now Head of Staff Strategy and Content at the Futurium in Berlin. Her research interests focus on the

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social and cultural history of technology and the environment with special emphasis on nuclear history and memory policy. Arne Karsten Born in Hildesheim (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1969. Professor of modern history at the University of Wuppertal. His research interests focus on the history of Italy, particularly Rome and Venice, in the Early Modern Era. Gábor Klaniczay Born in Budapest (Hungary) in 1950. Professor of medieval history at the Central European University in Budapest. His research interests focus on the religious history of Hungary and Europe in the Late Middle Ages. Cécile Kovacshazy Born in Paris (France) in 1973. Assistant Professor of comparative literature at the University of Limoges. A specialist in European literature, particularly Romani, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Gerd Krumeich Born in Düsseldorf (Germany) in 1945. Professor Emeritus of modern history at the University of Düsseldorf. His research interests focus on both the First World War and Joan of Arc. Françoise Lavocat Born in Lille (France) in 1961. Professor of general and comparative literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research interests focus on theories of fiction and narratives of catastrophe in modern literature. Jacques Le Rider Born in Athens (Greece) in 1954. Director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études (the EPHE). His research interests focus on the cultural history and literature of German-speaking countries. Ekaterina Makhotina Born in Saint Petersburg (formerly the Soviet Union, now Russia) in 1982. Research Associate in contemporary history at the University of Bonn. Her research interests focus on collective memories of the Second World War in Eastern Europe, particularly Lithuania. Pierre Monnet Born in Montreuil (France) in 1963. Director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), Paris and Director of the Franco-German Institute of Historical and Social Sciences at Frankfurt am Main. His research interests focus primarily on the history of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages. István Monok Born in Zalamerenye (Hungary) in 1956. Professor of history at the University of Szeged. A specialist in the history of European intellectual movements, particularly in the reception of ideas in Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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Jiří Pešek Born in Prague (the Czech Republic, formerly Czechoslovakia) in 1954. Professor of modern history at the University of Prague. His research interests focus on the sociocultural history of the Czech Republic and on the history of Germany and the cities of Central Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Christian Pletzing Born in Münster (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1969. Director of the Academia Baltica at Sankelmark, he is a specialist in the history of the Baltic Region. Mike Plitt Born in Bremen (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1984. Doctor of contemporary history at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). His research interests focus on the cultural history of the Weimar Triangle, and the history of European intellectuals during the Cold War. Andrii Portnov Born in Dnipropetrovsk (Ukraine, formerly the Soviet Union) in 1979. Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder). His research interests focus on the urban and intellectual history of Eastern Europe. Olaf B. Rader Born in Bad Freienwalde (Germany, formerly the GDR) in 1961. Professor of medieval history at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests focus primarily on the history of the Holy Roman Empire. Claudia Schmölders Born in Heidelberg (Germany) in 1944. She has edited books on fairy tales and teaches at the Institute of Cultural Science at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests include the culture of the book and physiognomy. Thomas Serrier Born in Le Mans (France) in 1971. Professor of German history at the University of Lille. His research interests focus on German-Polish history, the history of the Central and Eastern European border regions and collective European memories. Nenad Stefanov Born in Bad Homburg (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1970. Academic Coordinator at the Interdisciplinary Centre of border studies, ‘Border Crossings – Crossing Borders’, at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research interests focus on the social and cultural history of the Balkans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the history of intellectual exchanges between the Balkans and Western Europe. Axel Tixhon Born in Dinant (Belgium) in 1972. Professor of history at the University of Namur. His research interests focus on the history of Belgian institutions and on the oral transmission of historical knowledge.

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Richard Toye Born in Cambridge (the UK) in 1973. Professor of history at the University of Exeter. His research interests focus on the rhetorical dimensions of British politics, economics and empire. Jürgen Trabant Born in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in 1942. Professor Emeritus of philology at the Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Free University of Berlin and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests focus mainly on French and Italian linguistics and on the anthropology of language. Jakob Vogel Born in Hamburg (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1963. Professor of European history at the Centre for History, Sciences Po, Paris, and Director of the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin. His research interests focus on the role of the nation and colonial European history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Agata Zysiak Born in Łódź (Poland) in 1985. Associate Professor at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Łódź. Her studies focus primarily on the collective memory of cities and historical sociology.

Introduction Dividing lines PIERRE MONNET AND OLAF B. RADER

We begin by setting two scenes. Act One: Stockholm City Hall was built between 1911 and 1923 in the style of a Venetian Renaissance palace. It contains the famous Golden Hall, which was designed to resemble a Viking longhouse of the type that might have been used to hold the thing, the meetings of the free men of the community. Its north wall features an enormous mosaic depicting the Queen of Mälaren − as Stockholm was historically known − seated on the bank of the eponymous lake as she receives homage from East and West. Act Two: Drawing on archaeological evidence, a young British-based academic recently revealed that the Vikings did not simply pillage and depart after arriving in East Anglia in the late eighth century, a fact that runs counter to the traditional belief. Instead, they established settlements, traded and conducted explorations. Finally, like the barbarians at the limes, the frontier of the Roman Empire, they intermingled with the population of the territory that became known as the English Danelaw, or ‘land of the Danish law’, one century later. There is no better example of this process of intermixing than the monetary regime then in operation, which featured two different forms of currency simultaneously in circulation. On the one hand, there were the coins still produced by Anglo-Saxon kings, and on the other, there was the silver currency whose value depended on its ‘weight’ − ingots and foreign coins that were diced or cubed − used in the Scandinavian countries. However, this system had simply been imported from the Islamic world, where, after being struck, the dirham was subdivided into regulated weights. From the eighth to the eleventh centuries, the Vikings, embodying that symbolic fresco in Stockholm’s Golden Hall, extended as far as the boundaries of Russia before pushing further to the Black Sea and the Byzantine Empire, as well as leaving an enduring mark in England and north-western France. They colonized Ireland and Greenland, and penetrated into the Mediterranean as far as the coasts of al-Andalous in the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily. They may also have reached what was later to be known as America. But what remains of the long and complex history of their presence in our collective academic, national, popular and European memories? As yet, no truly European narrative has arisen to rectify that dark legend once and for all – a legend of brutal conquerors who plundered monasteries, of heathen pirates who shamelessly pounced on the riches of the Romanized and later Frankish

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provinces of Latin Christianity and of clans so factionalized that they would have seen exterior conquest merely as an outlet for their disunited state. In short, their world is seen as irreligious, kingless, lawless and rootless. It is the inverted version of the image that the clerics of former times and the modern historians who came after them were already elevating as the ‘true’ fountainhead of the Christian, civilized Latin West. There is no clearer proof of this deficiency than the great revival of the popularity of Nordic myths and sagas that has been taking place over the last twenty years or so. Often set against the background of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, the stories are presented in films, games and literature in a magical or fantastical context, as a means of escape or a substitute for a supposedly disenchanted, postmodern world. Finally, as we have just seen with the example of the Vikings, the untrue often casts light on the true, and the periphery often reveals the centre. This second volume is intended to reflect that accumulation of reference points and their changing images in the modern memory, that interlocking and to-ing and fro-ing involving fiction and reality, and those imaginaries, our own and others’, as they have been briefly revealed using the Nordic lands by way of illustration. This is the reason why the singular noun, ‘Europe’, has been given the plural form. The subjects presented here are examined from a long-term perspective and in all their multiple facets, confirming the aptness of this use of the plural. They include cities carrying multiple historical layers such as Byzantium/Constantinople/ Istanbul and Vilnius/Wilno/Wilna/Vilne. They also include ‘chameleon’ figures such as Napoleon in his many different versions – French, German, Polish, English and Russian – as well as the Julius Caesar of Rome and Egypt, the Alexander the Great of Greece and India and the Habsburgs as seen through Austrian, Belgian, Spanish and Amerindian eyes. Some cities stand at a crossroads, such as Venice and Saint Petersburg; together with the isthmuses of the Balkans, the Adriatic and the Baltic, they form the outlines of the European peninsula. In this way, the history of this continent is one of frontiers, both physical and phantasmal − from Berlin’s fallen Wall, a frontier in the intellectual sense, to Chernobyl, a ‘non-place’ and a frontier of catastrophe. Readers will therefore be able to gain a full picture of these subjects as they circulate among heroic and cursed figures, inhabited and imaginary landscapes, exploring blind and voracious passions, regressive or transgressive routes and archived and invented languages. Most importantly, the process of selecting the list of subjects presented here was governed by the refractive and diffractive powers attributed to them by Europeans during the course of history. The great figures chosen, for instance, are all exemplary cases associated with moments that established a European identity, for better or for worse and involving both tyranny and genius. This was a Europe at the forefront of conquest (Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte), language (William Shakespeare), science, war (Joan of Arc and Winston Churchill), and where specific intellectual approaches were used to gain greater understanding of the world (Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Gutenberg and Erasmus). Yet, each case is located at the edges between approbation at national level,

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legendary status at European level and global significance, whether acknowledged or unconscious. This multidimensional character is also evident in the perception of the ‘Europes’ whose space is outlined here. It is a cohesive interior space, with its rural areas, churches, cities and squares and its three orders of society; following centuries of sedimentation, these produce a perennial impression of familiarity all the more distinct for being viewed from the outside. It is, equally, a fragmented space with its different forms of Catholicism, the Reformation adding to the existing Schism between Latin and Greek Christianity that occurred in 1054, and its dividing line separating the Catholic lands with their vineyards from the Protestant lands with their hops. It is a space bounded by seas – the Mediterranean, of course, but also Northern seas, circulation zones that provide routes from Saint Petersburg to Amsterdam, Venice and Istanbul. It has its rivers and mountains too; sometimes these have served as walls and ramparts, and sometimes as calls to transgression and migration, the ultimate nomadic practice being that of the Wandering Jew, whose eternal return unfailingly raises the question of European identity. By now it will have become clear that the ‘Europes’ explored in this section have not been presented as an exhaustive list but through a process of categorization. This encompasses its fears (plagues, wolves and the devil); its myths, often forged through literary exchange in the form of reuse or translation (Faust, Carmen, Don Quixote, traditional tales, etc.); its emotions (involving love and death, the search for meaning and dreams) and its boundaries. Each conveys the meaning of the whole, marking a point at which the indigenous and the hybrid meet. Like a pilgrim on the road to Santiago de Compostella, every individual will trace their own route through the ‘realms of memory’ brought together here − personalities, places, collective imaginaries and shared or disputed terms. For if there can be such a thing as shared memory, it could not emerge at the behest of historians; instead, it would only arise from a sense of appropriation experienced by readers as they assimilate the fifty or so essays comprising this section of The European Way, immersing themselves, as it were, in the depths of a still-living history. The structure chosen for this second volume of the work therefore presents both all the advantages and all the shortcomings of a selection made collectively by a team of authors. Fortunately, they represent a variety of cultures and languages to be found between the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Urals. Some choices may arouse curiosity. Why Churchill but not Charlemagne? Why an emperor but no pope? Why Shakespeare but not Dante? Why Europe’s two seas but no oceans? Why Prague or Saint Petersburg but not Vienna? Other notable omissions could be added to this list of absences: great monuments, great literary works, momentous dates and so on. Yet, although additions of this encyclopaedic nature would obviously have expanded the volume, they would not have altered its line of development, its spirit or the dynamics of its reflections, which were guided by the aim of treating Europe as totality, its interior as well as its exterior. This approach enables the reader to apprehend the different layers of a threefold memory: contemporary, sedimented and considered.

CHAPTER 1

Alexander and Caesar Power through arms OLAF B. RADER

Alexander the Great of Macedonia and Julius Caesar of Rome quickly gained mythical status − one as a warrior hero and the embodiment of a conqueror, the other as the archetypal martial sovereign. They continue to shape the European memory, an impact that extends to epic ‘sword-and-sandal’ movies and comic books. In a scene in the 1963 cinema epic Cleopatra, Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) and the Queen of Egypt (Elizabeth Taylor) stand beside the alabaster sarcophagus of Alexander the Great. There, next to the general’s remains, they discuss the development of a new world order. Would the presence of his body have had a positive effect on their plans? This we do not know, yet the spectator’s attention is captured by something else; at a physical level, those two warriors would never again be in such close proximity to one another. In his Parallel Lives, Plutarch (ca. 45–ca. 125 CE) associated Alexander the Great of Macedonia (ca. 356–323 BCE) with Julius Caesar of Rome (100–44 BCE); had he guessed that over the next two millennia those two names would be used in Europe as reference points for certain ways of exercising power? One was to become the very incarnation of a conqueror, while the other was to create a regime that would bear his name. And as each embodied the archetypal charismatic warrior hero keen to enhance his power by endowing himself with a sacred aura, both were to influence a great many other domains in European history.

TWO FIGUREHEADS Much has been written about their military campaigns and their policies. Yet, as is the case with so many major figures, their histories have taken the form of a series of legends that are constantly being rewritten. Indeed, both serve as exemplary illustrations of the ways in which these processes of transformation and recreation manifest themselves. Bertolt Brecht once pointedly asked whether the two generals had accomplished their feats without comrades in arms: ‘The young Alexander conquered India. Single-handedly? Caesar crushed the Gauls. But surely he brought

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a cook, at least?’ Yet, while they were obviously not alone, their actions were those of exceptional individuals rather than implementers of a collective will. And immediately after their deaths they began to serve as frameworks of reference and forces of legitimation. Alexander’s body was the focus of an actual war between the Diadochi, his generals and companions in arms, with each seeking to appropriate the king’s remains and thereby gain legitimacy as his successor. Later, the Roman emperors, beginning with Caesar and followed by Augustus, adopted the practice of visiting the tomb of Alexander, conqueror of the East. This tradition continued until the third century CE, after which knowledge of its location was lost. From then on, following their deaths, Alexander and Caesar became more than tokens of legitimacy for their heirs – they also provided them with a genuine directive, as those in possession of the remains of a dead sovereign inherited the power that had been vested in him. In this way, the name of Caesar was given to Roman emperors as a title, before becoming an indication of sovereignty independent of the individual exercising it. It is the origin of the German word Kaiser − meaning ‘emperor’ − and of the Ostrogoth term kaisar before it. The title tsar, which emerged in the old Slavic languages to designate Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian forms of monarchy, shares the same root. The most widely read work in the Middle Ages, after the Bible, was the Roman d’Alexandre (The Romance of Alexander), for the simple reason that the text, of which there were multiple versions, provided answers to certain questions: how should a good knight and an explorer avid for new discoveries conduct himself? How should a generous and wise king act? During the Renaissance, spectacular recreations of the triumphal progress of these two warrior heroes became highly popular, as the generals of the day were keen to vanquish their foes and witness the latter’s subjugation in the same manner. One example of this is provided by the Italian painter Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506). His series entitled The Triumphs of Caesar, created for the palace of the Dukes of Gonzaga at Mantua, comprises nine large paintings depicting a military parade complete with multiple spoils of war and captives. This reference to the victorious generals no doubt allowed the Gonzaga family to believe that it too could triumph over its enemies just as Caesar had done. In the history of ideas, Alexander and Caesar have constantly served as touchstones in discourses on the highest office of the state, or as models for human action, for example in the works of William Shakespeare and George Frideric Handel. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel included Caesar among ‘these World-Historical persons, whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit’.1 For Theodor Mommsen, Caesar was above all ‘an accomplished statesman’, and Mommsen saw this as something that differentiated him from Alexander, Hannibal and Napoleon. To mark the transfer of Napoleon’s remains from Saint Helena to Paris in 1840, Victor Hugo composed a poem, ‘The Return of the Emperor’, in which he appears as the equal of the Homeric gods, Alexander and Caesar. One of the two invincible heroes who had been in such close proximity to one another at Alexandria has now met his match. The fact that a small village in Gaul

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dared to defy that military genius, Caesar − at least in the humorous comic books by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo – was certainly down to a magic potion brewed by a druid and much appreciated by Asterix and Obelix. Yet the stories are also a nod from the present day to the Roman general and the admiration he inspired.

NOTE 1. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosohie der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 46; Lectures on the Philosophy of History, translated from the third German edition by J. Sibree, MA (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861), p. 32.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Briant, Pierre, Alexandre des Lumières. Fragments d’histoire européenne, Paris, Gallimard, 2012. Goldsworthy, Adrian, Caesar: Life of a Colossus, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006. Meier, Christian, Caesar, Berlin, Severin und Siedler, 1982.

CHAPTER 2

Napoleon Dark legends, gilded legends ALAN FORREST

To some, he was a hero and a great legislator – to others, a tyrant responsible for millions of deaths. Napoleon shaped the face of Europe and made a lasting impact on collective memories. Whether they celebrate his victories or his defeats, each European country has now appropriated him in its own way. A French emperor who imposed his rule on Europe by war and was responsible for the deaths of millions of its citizens – civilians as well as soldiers – may seem an unlikely hero for the twenty-first century. Yet Napoleon’s name continues to be cited and often revered; after two centuries he remains the stuff of legends, his reputation as one of the greatest generals of all time still intact. During the recent bicentenary of the empire, Napoleon’s battles have been lovingly recreated, as re-enactors from across Europe have turned out in their thousands on fields from Marengo to Austerlitz and from Borodino to Waterloo. Military enthusiasts from countries that once battled against him now vie for the honour of serving in his imperial guard. Napoleon and his campaigns still elicit feelings of profound nostalgia.

BICENTENARY COMMEMORATION States across Europe have pumped public funding into acts of commemoration on an epic scale. Often, of course, they have been celebrating their own history as much as Napoleon’s memory. Britain – arguably the country that profited most from Napoleon’s downfall – was prominent among them, seemingly eager to revive the memory of victories won under Nelson and Wellington. Most remarkably, on the bicentenary of Trafalgar in 2005, Britain staged a huge naval review, attended by the queen and boasting the participation of thirty-six foreign navies and more than a hundred warships. The French gamely took part, even though their fleet had been destroyed at Trafalgar, sending, somewhat bizarrely, the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to join the line of ships assembled on the Solent. So in 2012, Russia celebrated the bicentenary of the Battle of Borodino – known in France as La Moskowa – with great pomp and state ceremonial. Vladimir Putin, who

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had evoked the battle as a symbol of Russian unity during his re-election campaign earlier in the year, was present on the battlefield, cheering a re-enactment by more than three thousand actors and laying a wreath in remembrance of those who fell. It was an impressive occasion which attracted huge crowds as the Smolensk Icon of the Virgin Mary returned to the battlefield for only the second time, to be blessed by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. The icon was heavy with symbolism for all those present, a link between past and present. On the eve of the battle in 1812 Russian generals and soldiers had prayed to the Virgin for strength and victory. For the centenary in 1912, when Tsar Nicholas II had led the celebrations, the icon had been solemnly paraded around the battlefield. Significantly, the bicentenary celebrations placed great emphasis on the icon and on God’s intervention to save Russia. At the close of the ceremony it was taken from the battlefield to Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral, which had been built as an act of thanksgiving for the battle, and here a prayer vigil was attended by some seventeen thousand people. The importance which Russia still attaches to Borodino is a powerful illustration of Napoleon’s impact across Europe. His memory has not been allowed to die. And if the re-enactment for the bicentenary was staged on a heroic scale, there are regular re-enactments every year, on the first Sunday of September, as a reminder of the struggle of the Russian people against an invader commanding a mass army recruited across Europe. Successive Russian regimes have gloried in that memory. The Soviet Union built a huge panorama of the battle on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow to mark the 150th anniversary in 1962 and issued a special commemorative coin twenty-five years later. And of course the battle has an honoured place in Russian literature, in Lermontov’s poem Borodino or in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Napoleon, it is clear, has left a profound mark on the collective memory of Europe, giving birth to myths and legends across the continent and beyond. In France a cult developed around him, especially after his death in 1821 and the publication two years later of Las Cases’s Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. Peasants collected the brightly coloured images (images d’Epinal) of his soldiers that were sold at local markets or listened to Béranger’s verses, urging them to keep the faith, to believe that he was not dead and that, as with Christ, there would be a Second Coming. His legend emphasized honour and glory, sacrifice and masculinity, qualities consonant with a great military hero. That is the aspect of Napoleon that lives on most strongly in popular culture: in films, on radio and television, in cartoon books and in the seemingly inexhaustible range of electronic war games which replay his battles and deconstruct his tactical genius. For the young, especially, Napoleon remains, first and foremost, a god of war.

THE LEGACY OF THE EMPIRE The Napoleonic Empire brought more than guns and bloodshed to the lands he conquered; in much of Europe it was associated with new institutions, with the end of feudalism and the introduction of modern systems of governance and justice. The Napoleon of popular legend overturned thrones and created kings almost at

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will. A stroke of his pen consigned the Holy Roman Empire, and with it a thousand years of history, to oblivion. For many he was a liberator whose name, for much of the nineteenth century, conjured up images of modernity and national pride. That memory, too, lives on. In the Museum of the Risorgimento in Milan the first three rooms are devoted to Arcola, Marengo and the French invasion of Italy. In Croatia, where Napoleon’s memory is sustained in folk art and song, a monument was erected to him in Ljubljana in 1929 at a ceremony to mark the 120th anniversary of the creation of the Illyrian provinces. In Poland, to this day, the national anthem recalls Dąbrowski’s march and sings to the glory of Napoleon’s Polish troops, fighting in the name of his Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Sweden even chose a Napoleonic marshal, Bernadotte, to rule as its new king. Everywhere, it seemed, a new world was dawning; or, as the great German historian Leopold von Ranke memorably phrased it, ‘in the beginning was Napoleon’. Not everywhere, of course, has his memory been honoured. In some European states, like Russia, Prussia and Spain, Napoleon’s foremost contribution was an inadvertent one, in that he contributed to the construction of a new national identity in opposition to his regime. For north Germans, in particular, the turning point was the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, which would often be represented – with more than a grain of imagination – as the moment when Germans had come together as a nation to expel a foreign invader from their lands. Indeed, one of the earliest organizations set up after 1815 to promote cultural nationalism among Germans, the Burschenschaft movement, wallowed tirelessly in the memory and the myth of Leipzig. Other victories against Napoleon may have entered the military and naval legends of the countries that fought in them: for the Russians Borodino, for the British Waterloo and – at sea – Trafalgar. His invasion of Spain was the catalyst for an anti-French reaction that spread to Cuba and Spanish Central America. But none was turned into a foundation myth of a nation quite like Leipzig. The battle would inspire succeeding generations of Germans and underpin the new German Reich after 1871; it would become a place of pilgrimage for Prussian generals; and it would be commemorated on its centenary in 1913 with an unashamedly militaristic memorial – the Völkerschlachtdenkmal – in the outskirts of the Saxon capital. For the cultural nationalists of nineteenth-century Germany, it was important to keep the battle’s memory alive: here, as in many other parts of Europe, Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars were indeed a lieu de mémoire. In Spain’s South American colonies Napoleon’s legacy proved equally profound, both through soldiers and political leaders like Miranda and Simon Bolivar, and through institutions like the Code. In the early nineteenth century, the Code Napoléon was introduced into Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where it is still in force. Bolivia and Chile borrowed heavily from it, and the Chilean code would be copied in turn by Ecuador and Colombia, closely followed by Uruguay and Argentina. In the United States, too, Napoleon’s influence can still be felt: towns in seven different states are called ‘Napoleon’, and two others ‘Bonaparte’. In 1815, after Waterloo, Napoleon’s first thought had been to seek refuge across the Atlantic, and many of his officers and soldiers, deprived of their livelihood in France, had sought new adventures in the Americas.

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NAPOLEON AND EUROPEAN UNITY But today, two hundred years after his defeat at Waterloo and his second abdication, how secure is Napoleon’s place in history? He may have claimed the idea of Europe as his own, aiming to unite the continent through his imperial project in a way that seemed to presage the Europe of the post-1945 world. But in the age of the European Union, that notion of unification, by conquest and imposition rather than by agreement among equals, can seem outmoded, especially in a Germany which since 1945 has been resolute in its opposition to the use of armed force in war. Besides, after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 few European leaders were prepared to listen to that narrative, and at Leipzig in 1813 ruler after ruler, persuaded that Napoleon’s star had deserted him, abandoned the empire to join a new coalition aligned against him. Most of the other heads of state were agreed that European unity could not be achieved by applying Napoleon’s military model; indeed, most came to regard him, as the British press had consistently done, as a usurper who was incapable of living at peace with his neighbours. For them no compromise was possible, and St Helena, a distant rock in the storm-battered South Atlantic, was the only conceivable destination for a man whose ambition made his continued presence in Europe a threat to public order. The caricatures that were published at the moment of his downfall, portraying him as a criminal, a devil, a miscreant to be punished or a wild beast to be caged, express more eloquently than any words the anger and relief that were felt across the continent in 1815 when Napoleon, as Britain’s prisoner on the Northumberland, sailed south from Plymouth. And the caricatures published in London, by Thomas Cruickshank, James Gillray or William Elmes, had their counterparts in most of continental Europe, in Holland, Germany, Russia and, of course, in Bourbon France itself. Napoleon did not, as his enemies hoped, disappear into oblivion on St Helena; he lived on in public memory to become one of the defining figures of the nineteenth century, worshipped by some, reviled by others. For his detractors he was a warmonger who had condemned millions of their people to death and misery – an image that was most famously captured in Francesco Goya’s heartrending drawings of The Disasters of War, a set of eighty-two pictures that chronicled the sufferings of the Spanish people and helped to forge a patriotic myth of the Spanish guerrilla fighter martyred in the nation’s cause. Napoleon was held personally to blame, for the spread of war, the invasion of their territory and the conscription of their sons for the army. He had desecrated their churches, burned their towns, raped their women and ordered the slaughter of their priests. In Spain, Portugal and some other parts of Mediterranean Europe, while a Napoleonic legend would persist, it was a dark legend, unleavened by experience of justice or good governance. So in those European cities that had suffered at his hands, like Hamburg and Leipzig, Burgos and Moscow, it would prove impossible to separate the memory of the empire from the devastation of siege and war. Here Napoleon’s memory was not that of a great lawgiver; rather, it was of a tyrant who had condemned them to plague and massacre and who had finally united their country against him. It was not far removed from the image of the ogre with which British mothers in the years after Waterloo sought to frighten their children into obedience.

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But still, Napoleon’s memory lived on. Even those writers who had feared or distrusted him could not ignore him. Walter Scott wrote a biography of him; Chateaubriand confessed a fascination for him; while romantic writers like Hugo and Stendhal, Goethe and Heine acknowledged him to be the greatest man of his age. To his supporters, Napoleon was a hero to be compared to the greatest rulers in history, an emperor – as he had portrayed himself – in the glorious traditions of Antiquity, a fitting successor to Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages. In 1840, with the Return of the Ashes and his burial in Les Invalides, his heritage was assured. Henceforth, in the words of the Minister of the Interior Charles de Rémusat, ‘France, and France alone, will possess all the remains of Napoleon. His tomb, as his fame, will belong to no-one but to the nation as a whole.’

THE NAPOLEONIC NARRATIVE TODAY While Napoleon undoubtedly remains a part of Europe’s collective memory, that memory has tended to fade with time. The centenary celebrations for the First World War – a war which killed millions of men in Europe’s armies, as Napoleon’s wars had done, but whose victims seem closer to us today – are a reminder of how deeply the shadows it cast still impact on people’s lives a hundred years later. Those alive today lost grandparents in the First World War, fathers in the Second; they were people known to them, loved by them, whose lives had been recorded in photographs or in the letters and poems they left behind, whose sacrifice was celebrated in the images of war that they saw in newsreels and on film. The survivors of the Napoleonic Wars are necessarily more shadowy figures fading in the mists of time. In the nineteenth century it was very different: in all the combatant nations men returned from the army, pensioned off or placed on half-pay, to face the rigours of civilian existence at a time of mechanization and high unemployment. Those who had survived the war often lived long lives, and many of them looked back nostalgically on their years in uniform. When Napoleon III issued the Médaille de Sainte-Hélène in 1857 to all who had served in the armies of his great-uncle, he discovered – forty-two years after Waterloo – that there were still over four hundred thousand survivors. The last of Napoleon’s French soldiers did not die until 1894, and the last known soldier of the Grande Armée – who was a Pole – only in 1901. It would be the twentieth century before all communicative memory ceased, and Napoleon’s grognards were forced to cede ground to the Tommies and poilus of the Great War, to Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the Red Army’s defence of Stalingrad. Each generation has its heroes, and each has its losses to mourn. Just as important, however, is the political climate in Europe today. As France and Germany stand side by side at the core of the new Europe, what interest have they in stirring memories of Austerlitz or Jena (a battle so conclusive that it allowed Napoleon to deprive Prussia of one-third of its territory in the peace that followed)? Why should Britain, which has been allied to France in every war since 1815, wish to celebrate France’s (as well as Napoleon’s) defeat? The restrained tones of bicentennial events in much of western Europe, the desire to commemorate rather

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than celebrate, the educational focus of so many of the historical exhibitions and, most of all, the failure of the French themselves to stage any public celebration for the greatest Napoleonic victories (Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram) suggest a reluctance to cause international embarrassment in an age when the relations between European powers are defined by cooperation and internationalism. The French government has been particularly discreet in its approach to public display, to the point where, in December 2005, at the very moment when several thousand enthusiasts celebrated the bicentenary of Austerlitz in the Czech Republic, neither the president of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, nor his prime minister chose to make an appearance. To many it seemed a humiliating gesture of political correctness, not least as the prime minister at the time, Dominique de Villepin, was himself a published author on the Napoleonic era. This prudent approach may also imply a degree of ambivalence, an uncertainty about how best to represent Napoleon at a time when it is less acceptable to public opinion to gloat over victory or to glorify war. France also, as a republic, is uncertain how enthusiastic it can be seen to be in praise of empire. In recent years this ambivalence has been made more acute by the issue of ethnic integration, since in African and Caribbean communities in France today Napoleon is remembered primarily as the man who restored slavery to the colonies and sought to re-establish the Atlantic slave trade. One of a number of anti-Napoleonic polemicists, Claude Ribbe, went further, accusing Napoleon of exterminating whole populations in the French West Indies on racial grounds. Though Ribbe may have exaggerated the degree of what he calls Napoleon’s ‘crimes’, he did raise an important question: can he be a fitting hero for the multicultural world of the twenty-first century, a world in which Toussaint Louverture and the ‘Black Jacobins’ of Haiti arguably enjoy greater popularity and esteem?

FRANCE’S DIVIDED POLITICAL CULTURE This ambivalence also reflects unresolved divisions within French political culture, where, since the early nineteenth century, the commemoration of Napoleon has been heavy with political overtones and reflective of the political regime of the day. The Restoration monarchy attempted to ban all reference to the deposed emperor, setting agents and police spies to report on those bent on idolizing his memory. In contrast, the July Monarchy sought to gain political kudos by associating itself with Napoleon’s memory, Louis-Philippe surrounding himself with four Napoleonic marshals at his coronation ceremony before inaugurating the Vendome Column in 1834 and the Arc de Triomphe in 1836. And in 1848, following another revolution in Paris, it was to the Napoleonic tradition that the French people turned when they voted for Louis-Napoleon as their president, before, in Karl Marx’s memorable phrase, history repeated itself as farce when, in 1851, the president staged a military coup and had himself crowned emperor. The Second Empire was, predictably, the high point of the cult of Napoleon, the years when it was most acceptable to boast of one’s service in Napoleon’s armies and when memoirs written by officers of the Grande Armée achieved a new vogue.

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But after 1870, with the return of the republic, France was again keen to divorce itself from the imperial legend. In the modern era, France has been firmly embedded in a republican tradition that is committed to upholding the ideals of 1789 – the tradition of 1789, of the revolution, not of the empire. For the first time since Napoleon’s death in 1821 the Napoleonic legend was divorced from party politics. One could be nostalgic without being Bonapartist: nostalgic for glory, for the army, for a world that was lost. Edouard Detaille’s paintings of the 1880s and 1890s are good examples of the spirit of the fin de siècle in France. It allowed the Napoleonic legend to be revived in the broader context of popular culture. Napoleon could now be presented as a historical figure that was above politics, a patriotic hero whom both republicans and royalists might seek to emulate – as a ruler, as a soldier and, above all, as a human being.

NAPOLEON AND THE PUBLIC In plays like Rostand’s L’Aiglon and Sardou’s Madame Sans-Gêne Napoleon is reduced to a supporting role, presenting a more intimate and less public figure, fashioned by individuals’ needs and consumed as popular entertainment. This trend was not confined to France – as witness the popular novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, where the clue that allowed Sherlock Holmes to solve a murder mystery lay in mass-produced busts of the emperor, still popular in England at the time of the novel’s publication in 1904. The Staffordshire porcelain industry had done good business out of Napoleonic memorabilia in the later nineteenth century, as did ceramic firms from Limoges to Dresden. In the twentieth century he would be an iconic figure in world cinema, with hundreds of films produced – from Russia to Hollywood, Egypt to Brazil – recounting episodes from his life or revelling in the exploits of his army. Abel Gance’s Napoléon of 1927 is probably the most famous; but there have been many since, among them several screen versions of Waterloo and of War and Peace. In Germany, the Napoleonic Wars have been presented as one of the ‘great epochs’ of modern history, and, both during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, were one of the favourite themes of German cinema, offering powerfully gendered images of resolution and masculinity. Whether he was presented as a hero or a villain, it seems that Napoleon continued to inspire cinema audiences across the globe. The world wars of the twentieth century brought Napoleon’s conquests into new focus as countries again found themselves the victims of attack and invasion. In Russia, in particular, comparisons with Hitler’s invasion were almost unavoidable, and Stalin called on his fellow citizens to resist the invasion in 1941 just as their ancestors had done in 1812. He was not alone. In Britain the government made direct comparisons between Operation Sea Lion and Napoleon’s camp at Boulogne. And even in France itself the Free French could not resist cross-referencing Hitler’s decision to invade Russia with Napoleon’s dreams of European conquest. Both, it was implied, plunged the world into war in pursuit of conquest; and both were condemned to fail. Some have, of course, gone further, suggesting, somewhat

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implausibly, that Napoleon’s expansionist ambitions directly presaged Hitler’s and that the two men shared a common purpose in launching their wars of aggrandizement. Though direct comparisons between Napoleon and Hitler are unsustainable, what is clear is that Hitler took a personal interest in the history of Napoleonic Europe and profited from his visit to Paris in 1940 to visit the emperor’s tomb. Overall, the experience of the Second World War helped revive memories of the Napoleonic Wars and did much to undermine Napoleon’s reputation in ways that have been reflected in the recent commemorations. While politicians have hesitated to give their imprimatur to the celebration of Napoleon, and the academy in France has tended to eschew political biography, Napoleon has continued to enjoy popularity with the general public. People still crowd to the Invalides to stand respectfully before Napoleon’s tomb; and of the many thousands of visitors to the Butte du Lion at Waterloo, the majority come not to see the spot where Wellington triumphed but to look out over Victor Hugo’s morne plaine, the field where Napoleon’s heroic dream was finally doomed to fail. Polls have consistently placed Napoleon among the ‘greatest Frenchmen’ in the eyes of the French people, though today he is unable to compete with the most admired figure of the twentieth century, Charles de Gaulle. And television, which tends to privilege biography and the story of ‘great men’ in its presentation of history, has shown a continuing interest in his career and, of course, in his love life, from Josephine to Maria Walewska. To commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1969 French television channels broadcast around forty-six hours of programmes over a nine-month period, and Napoleonic themes have remained popular subjects for history and literary programmes. But such programming is no longer unreservedly uncritical. In recent years there have been repeated attempts to undermine the cult of the emperor on television and to challenge his place in the pantheon of great Frenchmen, to question what Jean Tulard has called ‘the myth of the Saviour’. For the French Republic it has not always been a comfortable myth to live with.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bluche, Frédéric, Le bonapartisme: aux origines de la droite autoritaire, Paris, Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1980. Carbonnières, Philippe de, La Grande Armée de papier: caricatures napoléoniennes, Rouen, PURH, 2015. Dumont, Hervé, Napoléon: L’épopée en 1000 films. Cinéma et télévision de1897 à 2015, Lausanne, Ides et Calendes, 2015. Forrest, Alan, Napoleon: Life, Legacy and Image, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2012. Hazareesingh, Sudhir, The Legend of Napoleon, London, Tallandier, 2004. Migliorini, Luigi Mascilli, Le mythe du héros: France et Italie après la chute de Napoléon, Paris, Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2002. Pagé, Sylvain, Le mythe napoléonien, de La Cases à Victor Hugo, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2013.

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Petiteau, Natalie, Napoléon Bonaparte, la nation incarnée, Paris, Armand Colin, 2015. Robbe, Emilie and François Lagrange (Eds.), Napoléon et l’Europe: catalogue de l’exposition ‘Napoléon et l’Europe’, Musée de l’Armée, Paris, 2013, Paris, Musée de l’Armée / Somogy, 2013. Schulze, Hagen, ‘Napoléon’, in Étienne François and Hagen Schulze (Eds.), Mémoires allemandes, 197–219, Paris, Gallimard, 2007.

CHAPTER 3

The tyrant, or the perversion of power JOHANN CHAPOUTOT

The tyrant, from the Barbarians to Stalin, remains inscribed in the collective European imaginary as a figure who only emerges from the margins of civilization. If we define a tyrant (the word could simply mean ‘sovereign’ in ancient Greek) as someone who violates human or divine laws in the exercise of power, then the phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to Europe and nor did it originate here. The history of other continents abounds in despotic princes, each more cruel than the last. On the other hand, the concept is probably a European invention. This story has early origins, beginning in the year 514 BCE with the tyrannicides of ancient Athens. These refer to the actions of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who plotted to assassinate Hippias and Hipparchus, members of the Peisistratid family, achieving this aim in the case of Hipparchus. The Peisistratids had abused their power for their own profit, robbing the Athenian people of their autonomy. Democratic Athens paid due honour to the ‘slayers of tyrants’ by erecting statues to them; these adorned the city for a considerable time. The Peisistratids were subsequently condemned to a form of damnation in the collective memory based on their extraneity; owing to their tyrannical characters and actions, they were regarded for ever afterwards as alien to the city. The same was true of despotic ancient Roman principes such as Caligula and Nero, who were denounced as foreign − ‘Orientals’ in this instance − and therefore strangers to Roman tradition and culture. In the case of Caligula, who had been brought up in Egypt, this was partially accurate.

FROM THE KING OF THE PERSIANS TO THE GREAT TURK A tyrant was therefore someone who ruled over other peoples, a notion that likewise dates back to the ancient Greeks. It is enough to read Herodotus, Thucydides and the Greek tragedians to understand that the Greeks were very well able to govern themselves, while the Orientals (essentially the Persians) were incapable of doing so.

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An amorphous, indolent mass, the latter could only be brought to bestir themselves when under the merciless dominion of an evil king who was himself under the sway of his own evil passions. Freedom, like reason, was the prerogative of the Greeks. This mindset persisted throughout European history until the twentieth century. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophers engaged in political thought, the foremost among them being Montesquieu, presented the ‘tyrant’ or the ‘despot’ as an Oriental figure in the purest classical tradition. The archetypal tyrant was now the ‘Great Turk’, seen as the distant heir of the king of the Persians or as his re-embodiment. He was dreaded in the continent’s frontier territories (a dread that extended as far as Vienna!) and mocked as the ‘Grand Mamamouchi’ in Molière’s comedies. The figure of the ‘Great Turk’ proved a highly convenient means of indirectly criticizing certain abuses of power in Europe and escaping censorship. A particular focus of attack was the concept of the ‘absolute monarch’ totally unbound by law that had been developing since the sixteenth century. Countering this new notion of princehood, European aristocrats such as Bodin, Bainville and Montesquieu extolled the mythical memory of ‘Germanic’ − in other words, European − freedom as a contrast to the malevolent figure of the Oriental tyrant. From this standpoint, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes is a masterly demonstration of condemnation and irony, in which one of the subjects of the Great Turk indulges in a criticism of the power exerted by Louis XIV. Was the Sun King, therefore, a worse tyrant than the sultan? Not so, replied those who championed the system known as Absolute Monarchy − a Christian king is subject to the laws of God. Europe appeared preoccupied by two major forces of tyranny in the nineteenth century. This first of these was Napoleon, the insignificant Corsican from the minor nobility who rose to imperial dominance. Significantly, it was the ruling aristocratic powers, reacting with fear and disgust, which had him exiled to the margins of the continent. The ‘Corsican ogre’ was a wild islander, a stranger to Europe and its laws; he had wrought havoc in the cosmos, whose order had been created by an age-old power. The aptly named ‘Restoration’ brought his tyranny to an end, re-establishing the ‘Holy Alliance’, sealing the accord made in 1815 between the tsar, the king of Prussia and the emperor of Austria, and quashing the evil unleashed by a godless Revolution and the Devil from Corsica. The second force of tyranny was that of the Russian autocrats, who reigned over a nation of serfs. In this case too, the tyrant was driven to the edges of the continent, towards the remote wilderness of the steppes. It was by exploiting the most commonplace stereotypes of Russian tyranny that the most murderous dictator in history, Adolf Hitler, was able to justify his power and his actions, and this in the middle of the twentieth century. The Nazis ceaselessly condemned the ‘Asiatic’ power of the ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ led by Joseph Stalin, whom they likened to such figures as Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, also regarded as enemies of man and God in their day. The most atrocious figures of tyranny were seen as invariably emerging, at regular intervals, from the margins of Europe, where civilization ended. And in order to defend European civilization, the ‘Asiatic’ barbarian had to be defeated. After 1945, this repeated refrain used in Nazi

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propaganda resurfaced as ‘background music’ to the message delivered by the ‘free world’ to the Soviet ‘bear’. Once again, threats to liberty were external; they came from the margins, or the area that lay beyond the Iron Curtain. Europe’s representation of itself is therefore solidly anchored in the age-old belief that it is indisputably the continent of freedom − despite colonization, the Great War, fascism and Nazism. As has been the case since the ancient Greeks, tyranny remains a foreign phenomenon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Azoulay, Vincent, Les Tyrannicides d’Athènes, Paris, Le Seuil, 2014. Chapoutot, Johann, Le Nazisme et l’Antiquité, Paris, PUF, 2008. Jouanna, Arlette, Le Prince absolu. Apogée et déclin de l’imaginaire monarchique, Paris, Gallimard, 2014. Nicolet, Claude, La Fabrique d’une nation. La France entre Rome et les Germains, Paris, Perrin, 2003.

CHAPTER 4

Churchill A multifaceted figure RICHARD TOYE

Regarded today as the embodiment of courage in the face of the Nazi foe during the Second World War, Winston Churchill was not only a martial figure famous for his ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech or for his calls for a ‘United States of Europe’, but also a skilful yet contested statesman. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874–1965) began his career as a soldier, journalist and author and served in the British Parliament for over six decades. He held a wide variety of offices, including two spells as prime minister (1940–5, 1951– 5). Whereas it is in many ways natural that he should be chiefly remembered for the Second World War, the era of his greatest achievements, it is nonetheless the case that memories of him are shaped by a very specific iconography which is reinforced by a series of lieux de mémoire, which themselves are frequently shown in TV documentaries and filmed dramatizations of Churchill’s life. It must be emphasized that Churchill remains a contested figure, and even positive memories of him are not homogenous. Within mainland Europe, Churchill is often hailed, with debatable plausibility, as one of the forefathers of the EU, whereas in Britain he is most usually taken as a symbol of patriotic identity, frequently to the point of chauvinism. Churchill did a great deal to cultivate his own historical reputation, not least through the publication of his voluminous First and Second World War memoirs, which themselves also contributed to him winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. But if he could shape his reputation he could never have hoped to fully control it. Even before 1914, he was both a globally known figure and, in terms of domestic politics, a highly controversial one. Moreover, the failed Dardanelles campaign of 1915 is something that will always be associated with his name. Such episodes of poor Churchillian judgement resonate differently according to location. For example, the Bengal famine of 1943, in respect of which Churchill displayed considerable callousness and racism, is unsurprisingly much more of a sore point in India than in the UK. In the final stages of Churchill’s life, would-be custodians of his memory – ‘reputational entrepreneurs’ to use Gary Alan Fine’s terms – began the process of cementing his legacy. The first generation of these ‘entrepreneurs’ had strong

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connections to Churchill personally in some way, and genuinely wished to protect his memory against assault by detractors. For example, John Colville, Churchill’s former private secretary, poured effort into the creation of Churchill College, Cambridge, which reflected Colville’s concern both to memorialize Churchill and to promote scientific education in Britain. The college, which has a strong focus on mathematics, science and technology, received its royal charter in 1960. Colville additionally threw his energy into the creation of the Churchill Archives Centre, based at the college and opened in 1973, which preserves Churchill’s own papers and those of many of his associates. Perhaps the most recognizable piece of Churchill iconography of all is the statue in Parliament Square, by Ivor Roberts-Jones. Within Parliament itself another statue stands by the Churchill Arch that leads into the Commons chamber. Damaged by wartime bombing, the arch was rebuilt from the rubble in order to symbolize ‘the continuity of our institutions’, as The Times wrote on October 1950. There are also several other iconic sites. Chartwell, Churchill’s country home in Kent, is owned by the National Trust. Perhaps inevitably, the Churchill presented to visitors is a domesticized and depoliticized version. The military Churchill is more in evidence at the Cabinet War Rooms, the Whitehall bunker off St James’s Park, which were opened to the public in 1984. Of all the Churchill lieux de mémoire, one of the most remarkable is the US National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri, the location of the 1946 ‘iron curtain’ speech. It is housed in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury. Ruined by the London Blitz, the church was subsequently reconstructed on the campus of Westminster College. In the years since his retirement and death, many American politicians have sought to make use of his reputation for their own purposes or to cast themselves in his image. Especially noteworthy was the way in which President George W. Bush placed an Epstein bust of Churchill, loaned by the British government, prominently within the Oval Office. Churchill has been represented many times on the screen, including many fictional treatments. Arguably the greatest cinema portrayal was by Simon Ward in Young Winston (1972) and the best TV characterization was by Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm (2002). In artistic terms, these are superb, but although they do show Churchill as a complex figure, they ultimately reinforce rather than challenge his myth. On the other hand, stage plays such as Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers (1968) and Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play (1974) were deliberately iconoclastic. The contrast between screen and theatre portrayals is probably a good reflection of how Churchill stands today. He remains a saleable brand – even the most trivial historical ‘revelation’ is considered newsworthy – and also, to many, a hero. Yet, in line with his reputation during his own lifetime, he is nowhere an uncontested hero, even if the contestation remains a minority pursuit.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bédarida, François, Churchill, Paris, Fayard, 1999. Buczacki, Stefan, Churchill and Chartwell: The Untold Story of Churchill’s Houses and Gardens, London, Frances Lincoln, 2007.

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Fine, G. A., ‘Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence: Melting Supporters, Partisan Warriors, and Images of President Harding’, The American Journal of Sociology 101 (1996): 1159–93. Reynolds, D., In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, London: Allen Lane, 2004. Toye, R., ‘The Churchill Syndrome: Reputational Entrepreneurship and the Rhetoric of Foreign Policy since 1945’, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 10 (2008): 364–78.

CHAPTER 5

Joan the iconic! GERD KRUMEICH

Joan of Arc fascinated the Europeans of her time well before she became the central figure in several twentieth-century films. Both she herself and her military exploits attracted extensive commentary. Seen either as a saint or a sorceress depending on standpoints or eras, she was belatedly acknowledged by the Church and by France, which turned her into an icon. Joan of Arc was a European figure well before she became a French national heroine. This young peasant girl from Lorraine, who was probably born around 1412, was seventeen or so when she became one of the most feared and hated figures in Europe − as well as one of the most admired, venerated and loved. This was the Europe of the Holy Roman Church, or what Joan herself understood as the Ecclesia militans − the Church Militant − an active force in the world as opposed to the Ecclesia triumphans, the universal and timeless kingdom of God. And, as a Church Militant, it was the principal power in Europe, a power before which emperors, kings and princes, whatever their origins, had to bend the knee if they wanted to avoid eternal damnation. The Church had the last word on all matters concerning man’s relationship with God and also played a central role in agreements between the ruling princes of the time. One day, that seventeen-year-old girl, the uneducated daughter of a peasant family from Domrémy, came knocking at the door of secular power. This was embodied in the person of Robert de Baudricourt, captain of the garrison at Vaucouleurs, the chief town in the region. Claiming to have heard voices, she declared that God Himself had given her the mission of assisting the dauphin, Charles, France’s rightful king, to claim his throne. To this end, she sought an audience with the king so that together they could raise an army with which she would liberate the city of Orléans, besieged by the English. She also wanted to bring the king to Reims to be crowned so that decades of quarrels to determine France’s legitimate sovereign would be ended by the coronation of Charles VII.

‘SENT BY GOD’ After some equivocation, Baudricourt finally acceded to this request. The king’s situation seemed desperate, but the Lord was known to move in mysterious ways and He too was sometimes pleased to let the weaker side win in an unequal contest.

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Charles and his court doubtless shared this view. At his request, high-ranking Church dignitaries met at Poitiers to deliberate over the claims made by the Pucelle. They came to the following conclusion: The King, given his necessity and that of his kingdom, and considering the continuous prayers of his poor people to God and to all others who love peace and justice, ought not to turn away nor reject the Maid who says she is sent by God for his succor, even though her promises consist only of human works.1 The conclusions of the expert commission were transmitted in writing to the courts of Europe, as confirmed by the Chronicle written at the same time by Eberhard of Windecken, who took his quotations from the document. The phenomenon reoccurred with the famous ‘Letter to the English’ sent by Joan, then still in Poitiers, to the Duke of Bedford, who was serving as regent of France. Headed with the words Jhesus Maria, the letter contained the following statements: King of England and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself Regent of the Kingdom of France; you, William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk; John, Lord of Talbot; and you, Thomas, Lord Scales, who call yourselves Bedford’s lieutenants, do right by the King of Heaven. Hand over to the Maiden, who is sent here by God the King of Heaven, the keys to all the towns which you have taken and violated in France. She has come here in the name of God to support the Royal family. She is quite prepared to make peace, if you are willing to do right, so long as you give up France and make amends for occupying it.2

A EUROPEAN MATTER A German translation of this letter was also in circulation at the time, contributing to the process of ‘Europeanizing’ the history of the Maid of Orléans. Joan’s great exploits were definitively established as a European event shortly afterwards, when she effectively lifted the siege of Orléans with a (limited) number of noblemen faithful to the French king and their entourage. Yet she was also spurred on by the enthusiasm and active participation of the common people and the bourgeoisie. She practically drove the English troops before her on her way to Reims, urging uncooperative towns to give up their keys to her. Finally, on 18 July 1429, Joan arrived in Reims, where the king’s coronation immediately took place. She was then at the height of her success; her character and incredible feats were the focus of discussion all over Europe, gaining a mythical status. Here is an eloquent example taken from the previously mentioned contemporary chronicle written by Eberhard of Windecken: Item, when the King was crowned at Reims, there were a great many people around the city, outside among the vineyards, who ruined all the vines with their horses and by other means. And shortly after the King had left Reims and gone on his way, all the vines reappeared and began once more to flourish,

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producing more grapes than ever before so that they had to be left, even until Saint Martin’s Day.3 We form some idea of the widespread enthusiasm that the Maid inspired in other European countries through a letter sent from Reims, probably on 16 July 1429, by Jean Desch, the municipal secretary of the Free Imperial City of Metz, to an unnamed high-ranking dignitary. He gives a detailed report of the deliverance of the cities of Troyes and Châlons, and of the hopes of the people of Reims just before the arrival of Joan and the royal army. According to his fanciful account, Joan would be accompanied by thirty-three thousand mounted troops and forty thousand infantrymen. And after describing at some length the heroic deeds performed by the Maid and the irresistible fascination she exerted, Desch adds, ‘Many knights are leaving these German lands for Reims, where they want to see the Dauphin.’4 In Italy, too, these events clearly gave rise to substantial commentaries. This is particularly evident from the records kept by Antonio Morosini, a member of the Great Council of the Republic of Venice, whose Journal contains copies of numerous business letters and informative accounts sent home by Venetian merchants and aristocrats from France and elsewhere. Page after page reveals the immense fascination and admiration − but also the scepticism – aroused everywhere by Joan of Arc’s prophecies and her military feats and triumphs. We include just one example, in the form of an extract from a long letter sent from Bruges on 10 May 1429 by the nobleman Marco Giustiani to his father in Venice. He begins by recounting in detail all the talk he has heard of the liberation of Orléans by the royal troops and of a maiden, who had guarded sheep, born near the borders of Lorraine. A month and a half ago she went to the dauphin, wanting to speak with him alone, to the exclusion of anyone else; and in sum, she revealed to him that God had sent her to him, and told him that between that day and the feast of Saint John in the month of June he would certainly enter Paris [. . .] indeed, I do not know what I should believe of the things I have been told, save that God’s power is great.5

SAINT OR SORCERESS Although the deeds performed by Joan were astonishing, every Christian at the time believed them to be possible, God being the master of the world. The only problem was that the devil too had the power to lead men into temptation, inducing them to commit monstrous acts. These questions were much debated at her trial in 1431, but scholars throughout Europe were likewise striving to identify the plausible aspects, the truths and the falsehoods. The thoughts expressed by Heinrich von Gorkum, a doctor of theology at the University of Cologne, are revealing in this respect. He probably recorded them in June 1429, during the period when the Maid was achieving her military victories between Orléans and Reims. He mentions the fact that the question of whether Joan was a saint or a witch was debated ‘everywhere’. While it was said that she

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unquestionably possessed the qualities of a military leader and handled weapons with great skill, this could also be the work of the devil, which explains Gorkum’s uncertainty over the subject. He does, however, assert that God could never have ordered Joan to wear male clothing. The fall of Joan of Arc came shortly afterwards. We will set aside the question of whether this was due to treachery or hubris. She was convicted of heresy by an ecclesiastical tribunal composed exclusively of French dignitaries from the University of Paris and overseen by the ‘secular arm’ in the form of the English lords in Normandy, where she had been imprisoned. She was burnt alive on 30 May 1431. The conviction and execution of Joan of Arc also had European dimensions. On 8 June 1431, a week after the execution, the English king Henry VI (who was also king of France) sent a long letter to the representatives of ‘all the Christian nations’, in other words, the kings, princes and religious dignitaries of Europe. He asserted that in pursuing Joan of Arc and putting her to death, he had worked for the good of the whole Christian world, which was imperilled by such heresies. All who had participated in the trial would also be protected from possible attacks by Joan’s supporters, who ‘would unlawfully try, or seek to try, out of hatred, vengeance or for other reasons, to undermine the true judgements of our Holy Mother the Church’.6 It has been effectively established that these letters were sent to the Emperor Sigismund, the kings of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Navarre, Denmark, Scotland and Poland, the rulers of Milan, the doges of Venice and the city of Genoa,7 suggesting that Henry felt a strong need to justify himself.

A SHAKESPEARIAN CHARACTER A little later, however, the incredible story of Joan of Arc left the collective memory and was transformed into a vague myth discussed only in erudite circles, as a historical curiosity. Joan gradually came to be regarded as a confirmation of the French monarchy’s divine right to rule − when she was not seen as an instrument manipulated by powerful lords or as a stratagem of war as understood by Niccolò Machiavelli, the most celebrated author of the day. The memory retained in England of the deeds performed by Joan, which had been so detrimental to the country, were characterized by negation and hatred. The letter sent by Henry VI cited earlier was included in the works of sixteenth-century historians such as Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed. They were the principal sources used by William Shakespeare for his play Henry VI, in which Joan is given characteristics that played an extremely important role in the tradition associated with her. Presented there as a witch, she becomes ‘Joan Puzel’, an allusion both to her virginity (La Pucelle) and to her enigmatic, puzzling character, while her supporters are seen as allying themselves with the devil. It is not specified whether she was a shepherdess or a serving girl (with the bad company that implied), although it is true that she could have been both at once. Shakespeare is relatively untroubled by historical accuracy here; in the play, the English general Lord John Talbot,

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whom she defeated, dies before Joan, although he probably survived her by twenty years. Above all, he would have thought it important to show that she was finally abandoned by the evil spirits that had guided her − indeed, she had even discredited her voices and repudiated her misdeeds shortly before her death. This standpoint places him squarely within the traditional English narrative relating to Joan. Shakespeare finally has her dishonour herself by using a cushion to feign pregnancy in order to avoid being burnt at the stake. This act, together with the fact that the child has several possible fathers, arouses general derision among the characters in the play. According to Shakespeare, who followed English historical sources on the subject, France therefore owed its victory to a sorceress and a strumpet.

SCHILLER VERSUS VOLTAIRE This derision was echoed throughout Europe during the ‘Classical’ era. It surely found its most vivid expression in Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans. This long satirical poem, which first appeared in 1762, had already been circulating around Europe since the 1730s, when it was written, and was on everyone’s lips. Unauthorized, abridged or forged versions were published in a number of European cities as of 1755. No fewer than ten different editions had appeared before 1762 in London alone; by 1797, twenty others had emerged. Europe laughed heartily at the image of that virgin sitting astride the winged ass that carried her away to adventures in an aristocratic world rife with criminality and infamy. This was a world that had lost its bearings and where everyone was sleeping together in one way or another. The important point to remember here, however, is that Voltaire was certainly less concerned with presenting the Maid as an object of ridicule than with lampooning the institutions that had surrounded her in her lifetime. These had been just as responsible for her death as for her future rehabilitation as the servant of an ‘absolute’ monarch. Of course, although Voltaire’s Pucelle was clearly a major European cultural event, the poem was resolutely countered by a number of other works. We note just one example here: Friedrich Schiller’s The Maid of Orléans. The public reacted with intense emotion to this play, which was performed for the first time in 1801. It reflected a new spirit, based on the ‘Romantic’ treatment of the subject, where the emphasis was as much on love and humanity as on personal heroism and the spirit of self-sacrifice. Between its creation and the late 1850s there were no fewer than 252 different productions of the tragedy, many of which were presented in France and other European countries.

POLITICAL JOAN During the nineteenth century, an age of nationalism, Joan of Arc was likewise the focus of a new and unprecedented form of ‘nationalization’. Elevated by France’s Liberal and Romantic historians, she had become the embodiment of the people and was seen as initiating the process through which they obtained their freedom,

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culminating in the French Revolution. In this way, the Maid quickly became a bone of contention between the French ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. While for the Left Joan was (as she often still is) a heroine of the people, betrayed by her king and burnt alive by the Church, the Right saw her as the instrument of God, who had used this means to demonstrate that the French monarchy was truly sacred in His eyes. When the royalist star finally faded in the 1870s, the way was likewise clear for the Church to acknowledge that Joan of Arc had indeed been wrongfully convicted and executed. In 1869, the bishops of France, headed by Monseigneur Félix Dupanloup, bishop of Orléans, petitioned the Vatican to initiate the process of her beatification, as Joan of Arc had engaged in wholehearted combat for her faith and had consequently suffered the death of a true martyr. The long-drawn-out procedure was interrupted on several occasions, the last of these being the First World War, after which it was rapidly concluded. And on 16 May 1920, Joan was canonized by the Vatican. Just one week later, on 24 May, the Chamber of Deputies (known as the ‘Blue Horizon Chamber’) decided to establish a national holiday in her honour, following a proposal by Maurice Barrès. This dual operation set the seal, as it were, on a new understanding between the Catholic Church and the French Republic, which was now ready to accept Conservative Catholics as an integral part of its political landscape. Yet, through her canonization and the public holiday inaugurated for her, the Maid became both a national and a global saint, making it harder for both the Left and the extreme nationalist forces of the 1920s and 1930s to instrumentalize her. Interestingly, after the First World War, when Joan of Arc had only minor importance as a subject of political debate, she regained her status as a figure in world literature for the first time since Schiller. George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) is both empathetic and full of bitter irony. It still remains an exemplary work of poetic reflection on the power of free thinking and the annihilation of individual greatness by the bureaucratic obligation to save souls. While Joan was seen by Shaw as ‘one of the first Protestant martyrs’, her story is presented as a social parable in various adaptations by Bertolt Brecht: Saint Joan of the Stockyards, The Visions of Simone Machard and the Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, 1431. Brecht was particularly concerned with the relationship between power and faith, and between individual protest and social constraints. The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen contains a number of extracts from the records of the proceedings, attesting to the perennial influence still exerted by Joan today through the statements she made at her trial in 1431.

A MODERN HEROINE In the 1900s, Joan of Arc’s story was also adopted by that then-new medium, the cinema. Between 1898 and 1928, she was the subject of six movies. The year 1928 saw the release of the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, by the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. This portrayal of a defenceless, yet noble and fearless individual surrounded by hate-filled, implacable powers and dogmatic Church

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authorities intent on her destruction has had a lasting global impact. It has made even more of a mark than Otto Preminger’s 1957 drama Saint Joan (starring Jean Seberg) or Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc (1948), which starred Ingrid Bergman, in a performance overly inclined towards pathos, clad in cumbersome armour. Joan’s story was brought to the big screen again in the 1990s. Jacques Rivette certainly created a unique atmosphere with his Jeanne la Pucelle (Joan the Maiden, 1994), but his limited budget made it impossible for him to include the all-important action scenes; this was something that Luc Besson achieved with great success in his Jeanne d’Arc (The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, 1999), although neither movie has the makings of a classic. Besson’s film shows too little regard for historical accuracy; Joan’s conflicted conscience, for instance, is a complete fabrication, as is the portrayal of her accuser, Bishop Cauchon, as a benevolent figure with her interests very much at heart. This brief glimpse of the filmography devoted to the Maid of Orléans confirms Joan of Arc’s status as a ‘transnational’ character, something she effectively became in the twentieth century. Her reach now extends well beyond the European collective memory. As we have seen with the few examples cited here, Joan’s story has long been of interest to historians, writers and directors. That interest has spread as far as Japan. In the 1960s she was the focus of an exhibition held in Tokyo that attracted much attention; she has now become a manga and video game heroine, presented as a heroic young girl who emerges victorious from all kinds of battles with monsters and dangerous characters of every description. Joan of Arc, a major figure in European memory, is now firmly established in the cultural memory of humanity.

NOTES 1. Joan of Arc: The Early Debate, Deborah A. Fraioli (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000), p. 206. 2. Joan of Arc’s First letter to the English Commander at Orléans, 22 March 1429, Condemnation transcript, translation by Allen Williamson, archive.joan-of-arc.org, 2005. 3. Germain Lefèvre-Pontalis, Les sources allemandes de l’histoire de Jeanne d’Arc. Eberhard Windecke (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1903), p. 93 [reproduced in facsimile: Paris: Hachette/BNF, 2013 (NdT)]. 4. Jules Quicherat, Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, 5 vols (Paris: Jules Renouard et Cie, 1842-1844), quotation in vol. V, p. 355. 5. Chronique d’Antonio Morosini, edited by G. Lefèvre-Pontalis, 4 vols (Paris: Renouard, 1898), quotation in vol. III, p. 9 sq. 6. Quicherat, Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, vol. III, p. 281.

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7. Philippe Contamine, Xavier Hélary and Olivier Bouzy, Jeanne d’Arc, Histoire et dictionnaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2012), p. 285.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Boudet, Jean-Patrice and Xavier Hélary (Eds.), Jeanne d’Arc. Histoire et mythes, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014. Contamine, Philippe, Xavier Hélary and Olivier Bouzy, Jeanne d’Arc. Histoire et dictionnaire, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2012. Goy-Blanquet, Dominique, Jeanne d’Arc en garde à vue, Brussels, Le Cri, 1999. Krumeich, Gerd, Jeanne d’Arc: Die Geschichte der Jungfrau von Orleans, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2006. Maurice, Jean and Daniel Couty (Eds.), Images de Jeanne d’Arc, Paris, PUF, 2000.

CHAPTER 6

Luxemburg and Curie Intersecting destinies MIKE PLITT

Although their personalities and destinies were different, the scientist Marie Curie (1867–1934) and the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) shared certain characteristics: both were born in Poland, both were women who made history in a man’s world and, above all, both had the courage to pursue their fight to the end, at the cost of their own lives. ‘Set in Poland, that is to say, Nowhere’. With these words, Alfred Jarry introduced the first act of his play Ubu roi (1896). Its chief character, the crazed François Ubu, aspires to the throne of Poland, a land by then deprived of its statehood. Marie Curie (née Skłodowska) and Rozalia − known as ‘Rosa’ − Luxemburg left that very same ‘no-man’s land’ for the Western European cities of Paris and Berlin, where they would make a lasting impact on science, politics and the perception of women. Their personalities could not have been more different – Marie was rather timid, Rosa, larger than life. Yet this has had no bearing on their accession to the pantheon of great European figures inscribed in the collective imaginary. Both worked relentlessly to establish themselves, an imperative in that male-dominated time. The research conducted by Marie Curie − and by her husband, the physicist Pierre Curie – continued the work carried out by Henri Becquerel, who, in 1896, had demonstrated that uranium emitted radiation. Working with minute attention to detail and in extremely hazardous conditions, Marie Curie and her husband applied themselves to discovering other elements that also released radiation. The two researchers succeeded in their investigations with the aid of an electrometer developed by Pierre. They discovered polonium and radium and coined the evocative term ‘radioactivity’ to denote the emission of radiation in the form of rays or particles. Her revolutionary work on radiation earned Marie Curie the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. The first woman to become a Nobel Laureate, she shared the award with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel. In 1911, she received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The reception of her Treatise on Radioactivity (1910), a reference work on the emerging research into radiation, extended well beyond France. Despite these

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indisputable distinctions, her application to become a member of the Académie des sciences was rejected due to the gender-based prejudices of that institution. No woman was admitted into its illustrious circle until 1979, when the mathematician Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat was elected to become a full member. Yet Marie Curie attached little importance to such accolades. A born scientist, she devoted her life to discovering medical uses for radioactivity. The research institutes she founded in Paris and Warsaw have remained at the forefront of this domain. Following long years of research on radioactive substances, she died of leukaemia in 1934. One of Europe’s most prestigious fellowship programmes, intended to enhance researcher mobility, bears her name today. Rosa Luxemburg also had a remarkable destiny. Her tireless commitment to creating a better world, particularly for the international working class, coupled with her resistance to the warmongering pursued in her era, led to several years of imprisonment. This did not break her resolve. She co-founded the Communist Party of Germany (the KPD), and her convictions led her to join the anti-monarchist revolution of November 1918. This act resulted in her assassination, a few months later, by members of the Freikorps. The Nazis lost no time in dismantling Rosa Luxemburg’s political legacy, beginning with the burning of her works after they came to power in 1933. And in 1935, they destroyed the memorial to the Spartacist uprising that stood in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery and had been partly dedicated to her.

TWO CHARACTERS FOR THE BIG SCREEN The lives of these two women have great narrative potential, which has been exploited in a number of films. In Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg (1985), the actor Barbara Sukowa emphasizes Luxemburg’s feisty nature and the difficulties in her relationship with the activist Leo Jogiches. The latter, crushed by his companion’s growing fame, embarks on numerous affairs. Marie Curie’s love life likewise drew attention away from her career; after Pierre’s death she began an affair with the physicist Paul Langevin, a married man. Their relationship came to light in 1911 and the popular press pounced on the story, even going to far as to publish the couple’s correspondence. Marie was portrayed as a foreign homewrecker and her reputation remained tarnished for quite some time. Marie Curie’s rehabilitation occurred in the 1920s, thanks to the American journalist Marie Meloney. Keen to support her research, Meloney organized a fundraising operation and invited the scientist to embark on a lecture tour in the United States. She launched a vast press campaign, presenting Marie’s career as an exemplary triumph and highlighting her tireless fight against cancer. Marie Curie was also the subject of a posthumous tribute in the form of the Hollywood movie Madame Curie (1943). This makes no mention of her relationship with Langevin, concentrating instead on her love for Pierre and her passion for research. The year 1995 marked the high point in the construction of the legend, when the ashes of

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Pierre and Marie Curie were transferred to the Panthéon. François Mitterrand invited the Polish president Lech Wałęsa to Paris for the occasion. Marie had retained her concern for the Polish cause throughout her life in her adopted land; the eightyfourth element of the periodic table was given the name ‘polonium’ as a sign of her deep attachment to the country of her birth. According to the results of an opinion poll carried out in January 20031 in Europe’s six most highly populated countries (Germany, France, Poland, Spain, Italy and the UK), Marie Curie was the second most iconic figure in Europe. She placed before Charles de Gaulle and only Winston Churchill was ranked before her. It is impossible to present such a consistent and idealized memorial portrait of Rosa Luxemburg. She is virtually unknown in Poland, although anti-Communist feeling, which was particularly vehement after 1989, is not sufficient in itself to explain this. The lack of knowledge about her may equally be attributed to the fact that, unlike Marie Curie, Rosa Luxemburg argued from a postnational perspective and was not specifically committed to the cause of Polish independence. However, it is important to emphasize that she is one of the few revolutionary figures whose legacy was not only claimed by the 1968 movement but also survived the collapse of ‘Real Socialism’. Her maxim, ‘Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently’, represented a threat to the uniform thinking and repressive machinery of the Communist parties east of the Berlin Wall, distinguishing her stance from Lenin’s anti-democratic approach. And while busts and statues of Lenin were destroyed after 1989, public squares and political foundations bear her name today. One such organization is the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which has close connections with the left-wing Die Linke party. Social problems and nationalism seem likely to be ongoing issues.

NOTE 1. Opinion poll cited by Jean-Noël Jeanneney and Philippe Joutard (Eds.), Du bon usage des grands hommes en Europe (Paris: Perrin, 2003).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Badia, Gilbert, Rosa Luxemburg, Journaliste, Polémiste, Révolutionnaire, Paris, Les Éditions sociales, 1975. Curie, Ève, Madame Curie, Paris, Gallimard, 1938. Ettinger, Ełżbieta, Rosa Luxemburg: Une vie, Paris, Belfond, 1990. Goldsmith, Barbara, Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie, New York, Atlas Books, 2005. Luxemburg, Rosa, Letters from Prison, translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul, London, The Socialist Book Centre, 1946. Nettl, John Peter, Rosa Luxemburg, 2 vols, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1966.

CHAPTER 7

Leonardo The perfect genius PATRICK BOUCHERON

An exceptional painter, a multifaceted and ingenious individual who invented war machinery ahead of its time and whose creations prefigured the future − Leonardo da Vinci is the very embodiment of the Renaissance Man so admired by Europeans. With his countless talents and the aura of mystery that continues to surround him, he seems to mirror today’s creative energies, as the precursor of so many aspects of modern life. In 2003, a polling institute conducted a survey in six different countries (Germany, Spain, France, the UK, Italy and Poland) to find out which historical figure was thought to be the best embodiment of ‘European identity’. Leonardo da Vinci won by a considerable margin, ranking before Christopher Columbus and Winston Churchill. The remarkable thing about his score was that there was only a very slight connection between the nationality of those polled and the results. Although most of the Italians chose Dante Alighieri, the British, William Shakespeare, the Spanish, Miguel de Cervantes and the Germans, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, only Leonardo garnered the majority of European votes as a whole. How might we explain the tremendous fame of the individual described by Jules Michelet as ‘Faust’s Italian brother’? First, by remembering that ever since his death he has been regarded as the personification of genius and of the Renaissance, in the heroic mode as a superhuman intelligence and as a tragic figure with Promethean ambitions; both carry within them an aspiration towards universality. This encapsulates the significance of a remarkable destiny; it led to an engineer who executed commissions of every kind for princely courts becoming the incarnation of Universal Man in the era of Humanism.

INVENTING LEONARDO Historically speaking, this was Leonardo’s ingenium; he possessed the extraordinary art of being in the right place at the right time, thereby bringing about his own meteoric social ascension. Born in 1452 in Vinci, near Florence, Leonardo, the

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illegitimate son of a local Tuscan notary, died near Amboise, in the manor house at Cloux gifted to him by François I, king of France. The latter is said to have wept when told of the death of the elderly master. Today, Le Clos-Lucé is one of Europe’s principal sites of memory associated with Leonardo, together with the Leonardo da Vinci Museum, the museums of technology in Milan and Florence, and the major art museums that hold the few paintings he left, most of them unfinished. The majority may be found in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Louvre in Paris, but others are held in Milan, London, Munich, Krakow, Saint Petersburg and Washington, DC. Le Clos-Lucé contains a museum where visitors can see reconstructions of some of Leonardo’s famous ‘devices’. These include a diving suit, ball bearings, a parachute, a metal rolling mill, a canal lock and a bicycle; is there anything he didn’t invent? When speaking to the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, François I is said to have declared: ‘Leonardo da Vinci is not only an excellent painter, but a true Archimedes.’ ‘Leonardo’s inventions’ have been celebrated since the nineteenth century as advances in European technical engineering − yet who invented the figure of Leonardo himself? His successive biographers and admirers obviously did so, but Leonardo was able to ensure that his own life became a permanent spectacle of ever-developing renown. In 1467, Leonardo began an apprenticeship at Andrea del Verrocchio’s bottega in Florence. At that time, a bottega was a laboratory for technical activity as well as an artists’ workshop, and Verrocchio’s was certainly the most prestigious in Italy. There Leonardo rubbed shoulders with the future great masters of the fifteenthcentury Central Italian tradition: Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino and Sandro Botticelli. The Renaissance artist was not the solitary figure mythologized in the art histories of the Romantic age; he was the director of a workshop, surrounded by apprentices, who developed activities in several domains according to the commissions he received. Verrocchio’s position was therefore somewhat similar to Albrecht Dürer’s, and he may justifiably be compared to the latter. In addition to being an entrepreneur in the fields of painting and sculpture, Verrocchio was the custodian of all the engineering knowledge of the late Middle Ages. Goldsmithery, architecture, theatrical scenery, even alchemy – nothing was beyond the talents of the man known in Florence as ‘the new Mercury’. In this way, he was the custodian of a technical culture, a legacy forged partly through skill and partly through bookbased knowledge originating from developments in a number of cities in both Italy and Germany.

AN EXPERT IN MACHINERY So Leonardo was not only the ‘son of experience’, as he described himself – he was also an attentive reader of the engineering treatises of his day. To give just one example, the armoured vehicle that he designed, which is generally taken to be one of his war machine inventions, was actually inspired by the drawings of Guido da Vigevano and the German engineer Konrad Kyeser. Throughout his life,

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Leonardo was to remain faithful to the technical knowledge and workshop practices for which Renaissance engineers are so renowned. One of his notebooks contains the comment, ‘Remember the way we soldered the ball of Santa Maria del Fiore’, written in 1510, when he was at the peak of his fame. Leonardo da Vinci therefore inherited medieval empirical knowledge, which was still being transmitted well into the Modern Era. From Vannoccio Biringuccio’s De la Pirotechnia (1540) to Agostino Ramelli’s Le Diverse et artificiose machine (1588), books on machinery contained both descriptions of existing technical devices and designs for future constructions, and it is not always easy to distinguish between the two. His years in Florence played a decisive role in Leonardo’s technical training, but they were equally essential to the development of his fame as a painter. Out of a total of thirty-eight documented works (both preserved and lost), fourteen were painted during this period. Yet, although the Renaissance engineer was an expert on machinery, he could only fully undertake his activity as an artist within princely courts. When he left the Tuscan city for Milan in 1482, Leonardo was simply following the most notable route of cultural exchange between central and northern Italy. Being unable to retain their most famous artists, the Medicis implemented a deliberate policy of exporting talent. Their political allies, the Sforza family, who were the dukes of Milan, devoted much energy to making their court a venue not only for pioneering Florentine artists but also to recruiting a large number of engineers whose expertise assisted them in their ambitious territorial aims.

THEATRICAL MACHINERY During his Milanese period (1482–99), Leonardo’s engineering work was dominated by three major preoccupations. In this case, too, these were dictated by political requirements rather than personal choice. The first concerned a vast hydraulic system for Lombardy, for which Leonardo drew up plans, designed canal locks and perfected channelling and dredging systems to ensure that all functioned correctly. The second concerns the invention of machines for the textile and metallurgy industries; these formed part of the major drive to mechanize work operations that characterized the capital of Lombardy in the late fifteenth century. The third is associated with the lavish spectacles held at court, Leonardo being the producer of these entertainments. The princes were particularly appreciative of the special effects he created. Scenery, costumes, automated objects – when they were not weapons of war, Leonardo’s devices were likely to be pieces of theatrical machinery. This was the case, for instance, with his famous ‘automobile’; when the academic Gerolamo Calvi discovered a drawing of an automated cart in 1905 − folio 812r of the Codex Atlanticus held in Milan − he recognized it immediately as a design for a vehicle. ‘Leonardo’s Fiat’, as Calvi named it, was already famous by 1935, when the atmosphere was one of intense chauvinistic nationalism and Italian engineering technology was the object of fervent glorification. A model was conceived using the design as a basis; the recreated object was presented at the major exhibition entitled ‘Leonardo da Vinci and Italian Inventions’ held in Milan’s Palazzo dell’ Arte in 1939 and actively promoted by Mussolini. The model was destroyed a

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year later while the exhibition was being transferred back from its presentation in Tokyo. However, it served as the original for all the subsequent models exhibited in museums for a long while afterwards, notably at Le Clos-Lucé and in Vinci. So that it would be a faithful copy of Leonardo’s original design, it was not a working model and could not be used as transport, having no engine. For the majority of Leonardo’s designs include no specifications regarding scale or energy sources. It was only much later, in the twenty-first century, that this design was discovered to represent not a vehicle but a small, programmable robot powered by springs as seen in clocks and also used to animate mannequins. Yet Leonardo’s genius cannot be reduced to his talents for handiwork. In 1496 he met the renowned mathematician Luca Pacioli, whose treatise De divina proportione he illustrated. The meeting inspired Leonardo to create a cohesive body of knowledge from his accumulation of assorted empirical skills using the mathematical rules of mechanics. This is reflected in the general layout of the Codices discovered in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid in 1966. They contain what he called his ‘Machine Elements’, in the manner of Euclid, set out in a much more methodical and ordered form than his usual rough drafts. These are Leonardo’s perfected versions of a series of drawings of devices and mechanisms. All are presented in a systematic manner, from the vice to the cogwheel, and from hinged joints to chains and pulleys. He accompanied these images with precise commentaries, describing the characteristics of the mechanisms, estimating their power and calculating the force of the friction involved. Today, they are seen as the source of modern technical drawing, machine versions of the ‘flayed man’ studies likewise produced by Leonardo, who was also an anatomist.

EXPLORING THE MECHANISMS OF THE WORLD No longer content with creating machines, Leonardo’s new quest as a thinker was to investigate the great mechanism of the world. And, if not by drawing it, how else could one conceive what Daniel Arasse describes as ‘the rhythm of the world’ – in other words, the universal cadence that punctuates the movement of microcosms and macrocosms that likewise combine to form one structure? Leonardo did not draw what he saw, but what he understood of what he saw. For he regarded understanding and representing as a single, indivisible mental operation. If one’s aim is to preserve Leonardo’s image as an inventor at all costs, his pioneering work in this domain will serve the purpose; the engineer from Florence developed a comprehensive method of representing reality. ‘Thanks to my drawing’, wrote Leonardo proudly, ‘you will be familiar with every detail and every composite structure, just as if you were holding and turning the limb itself, viewing it from all sides.’ The mastery he displayed in his anatomical ‘flayed man’ drawings applies equally to his use of the sfumato technique; this produced the softly blended effect seen in the backgrounds of his paintings, from The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (1503–19) to the Mona Lisa (1504–14). ‘He practised not one profession alone, but all those where drawing was involved’; when Giorgio Vasari, who invented the discipline now known as art history, wrote this of

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Leonardo, his words were not so commonplace as they might appear. For according to the system governing Renaissance courts, the technical skills of the engineer attained the status of high culture through the art of drawing, with its aspiration to perfection. Here, then, we find the very essence of ‘Renaissance’, in its unity and universality. Today, we are better placed to understand the extent to which this is connected with developments in the figurative arts and in scientific experimentation. Through the art of drawing, Leonardo believed he could transcend the opposition between theory and practice, by conceiving a purely figurative method of experimentation. From then on, he was received into powerful circles as a ‘philosopher’; he was no longer only required to build machinery but also to understand the great natural mechanisms of the world, being engaged in investigating the analogies between their respective rhythms. Music, painting, anatomy, mathematics – all these disciplines played their parts in the activities pursued by the ‘Universal Man’, who also made his mark as a prominent figure due to his often eccentric ways. Through his air of regal detachment, which impressed so many around him, Leonardo forged a new habitus associated with the modern artist, destined for long-enduring renown in Europe. ‘He leads an unpredictable and very irregular life’, wrote a contemporary, admiringly – ‘so much so that he seems to live from day to day.’ The slowness and apparent nonchalance with which Leonardo painted seemed particularly exasperating to his patrons as they were quite simply the lordly manifestation of the fundamental freedom he enjoyed; his was the creative leisureliness of an artist no longer bound by the demands of the studio. This is how he was described by Matteo Bandello, whose uncle was the prior of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. When he was painting The Last Supper, Leonardo was cultivating his image as an inspired artist, far removed from the conventional ideal of the disciplined artisan. He might paint for two days running, ‘forgetting drink and food’, only to then abandon his work for days, remaining ‘lost in contemplation’ in front of the fresco or rushing away to work on casting his equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza.

FURIA FRANCESE The Sforza family, however, was forced to flee Milan in 1499, and Leonardo never completed his gran cavallo. Until then, his personal journey had been guided by the outcomes of the Peace of Lodi and the balance of power achieved in Italy through that treaty. Yet from then on, his life was buffeted by the forces of history, with its wars and shifting alliances. The pace quickened; Leonardo moved from city to city, from Venice to Rome, bringing with him his notebooks, paintings and crates of books, and sometimes staying no longer than a few months in one place. Subject to upheavals generated by the power of the great national monarchies, Italy was simply the laboratory of a cultural transformation that could only be accomplished on a larger scale. Leonardo da Vinci was well aware of this; having taken to the roads in view of the Furia francese – the violent acts associated with the invading

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French soldiers – he was seeking the protection of a powerful patron. Was it to be Cesare Borgia? He might have thought so for a time, as he travelled through EmiliaRomagna in 1502 on a mission for this model of a ‘new prince’, who also intrigued Niccolò Machiavelli. Seeking a power that would be extensive and enduring, Leonardo da Vinci was forced to acknowledge the evidence before him; as Borgia’s misfortune clearly indicated, his own future no longer lay in Italy. On 3 July 1503, Leonardo entrusted a Genoese merchant with a letter to Sultan Bayezid II. All that remains of this document is a Turkish translation now held in archives in Istanbul. Hearing of the sultan’s plan to build a bridge over the Bosphorus, he offered his services as an engineer, waiting in vain for an answer while he learned a little elementary Turkish and filled his notebooks with projects for the Golden Horn. As it transpired, his future lay not in the Ottoman Empire but in the kingdom of France, whose sovereign nurtured ambitions to become the Holy Roman Emperor. There is evidently nothing accidental, therefore, in Leonardo’s conversion to the service of the great French monarchy. In 1506, he was received by Charles d’Amboise in Milan, which was then governed by the French. Once more, his talent for theatrical artifices attracted the favours of powerful individuals. In 1509, he was given the task of orchestrating the triumphal celebrations for King Louis XII after his victory over the Venetians at Agnadello. He also impressed François I in Lyon in 1515 with his mechanical lion, whose stomach opened to reveal quantities of fleursde-lys. It is interesting to note that Leonardo da Vinci’s political journey, which took him from Florence to Amboise (where he died in 1519) via Milan, Venice and Rome, encompassed the full spectrum of late medieval forms of modern statehood.

CREATING CELEBRITY As an artist, Leonardo stood alone and founded no school of painting in the strict sense of the term. While his own works were not abundant, they immediately aroused the stunned admiration mirrored in Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Leonardo da Vinci (1550), and this long remained the chief source of his fame. In this way, collective memories of Leonardo were directed both towards Florence and to his legendary status. Yet it was in Milan that his small number of followers began evaluating his legacy. They included Franceso Melzi (1493–1570), who undertook to classify the six thousand or so pages left by the master. He separated these into two large sections, one containing everything connected with Leonardo’s activities as a painter, while the other, which was actually the larger, contained everything else. This was labelled ‘Nothing on painting’ and put aside. The work known as the Treatise on Painting, published in France in 1651, is no more than a largely contrived compilation, an example of those mutilations that disrupted the unity of Leonardo’s approach and had such a lasting effect until Paul Valéry endeavoured to restore it at a much later date. It was consequently in this way that the collective memory of Leonardo da Vinci first began to crystallize, and he was established as a tutelary figure of European painting in the classical tradition championed by the Academies of Art.

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The second stage in this process occurred at a later date; it originated from the activities of scholars, who had been examining his abandoned manuscripts since the late eighteenth century and found another Leonardo there. When the scientist and historian Giambattista Venturi studied the volumes that had been seized by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797, notably the famous Codex Atlanticus, he placed particular emphasis on the scientific inventions of Leonardo as a specialist in machinery. From then on, his engineering feats superseded his achievements as a painter, and he was celebrated as the prophet of industrial civilization. This shift towards science did nothing to dispel the enigmatic aura around his familiar figure − every generation came to associate him with the long beard and brimmed hat popularized by his statue in Milan’s Piazza della Scala (1872). The Leonardo legend reached a peak with the immense international success of The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (1900), a novel by the Russian writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky that was one of Sigmund Freud’s particular favourites. Some, like Pierre Duhem, credited Leonardo with a role in the scientific revolution that he had certainly not played; however, it is mainly in the somewhat simplistic form of a genius handyman that he has been presented as the precursor of every modern invention, from the car and the aeroplane in the early twentieth century to computer science and multimedia systems. In 1994, Microsoft founder Bill Gates bought the Codex Leicester for $30 million, in order to digitize it and have it exhibited throughout the world in a new city each year. This marked a turning point in the merchandising, globalization and digital dissemination of the Leonardo ‘brand’, which attained an iconic status throughout the world with the overwhelming success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). Through his ability to address all the inhabitants of the global village, combining elements of a universal culture to produce a gripping narrative, and extrapolating from known facts to devise an arcane interpretation of the world, Dan Brown has succeeded in globalizing the European realm of memory that is Leonardo da Vinci. A novel written in the first decade of the twenty-first century has therefore been able to guide visitors through the Da Vinci Tour as they navigate the sites forming part of that extensive treasure hunt, from the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris to the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where Leonardo painted The Last Supper. At the same time, it has created a second, equally lucrative market – for books deciphering The Da Vinci Code.

THE CUSTODIAN OF MYSTERIES In the 1970s, themes such as the intrigue involving the secret society known as the ‘Priory of Sion’ were still associated solely with certain extreme right-wing circles. It is for historians of esotericism and conspiracy theories to explain how they found a worldwide audience through The Da Vinci Code, establishing themselves in its readers’ consciousness with the forceful impact of evident fact. In order to achieve this, Dan Brown uses the figure of Leonardo as a key. It is true that the novel’s plot does not centre on the Renaissance artist but on the figure of Christ and the idea that the entire history of the Church is based on the shocking concealment of

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Christianity’s true story. But it is certainly Leonardo who provides the vital clue to the enigma, for by ‘deciphering’ The Last Supper, Professor Robert Langdon, the novel’s chief protagonist, discovers a momentous secret – there had been a marriage between Christ and Mary Magdalen. There was clearly nothing random in this choice. First, the Florentine engineer is renowned throughout the world and may be the only figure to embody such universally shared principles as the belief in individual genius and collective hope, scientific curiosity and the ideal of ‘absolute art’. Second, he has always left himself open to overinterpretation by occult groups; it was Joséphin Péladan, the founder of the ‘Catholic Rosicrucian’ order, who created the fundamental image of Leonardo as a ‘custodian of mysteries’ in the 1890s. Leonardo’s inclusion into the world of the occult is also due in no small part to the interest aroused by hermeticism in Renaissance courts and to the cultural climate of the Neoplatonic Florentine Academy, whose members, from Marsilio Ficino to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, explored astrology, ancient mysticism and the Jewish Kabbalah. However, the studiedly idiosyncratic ways adopted by the individual who presented himself to his contemporaries as a fascinating enigma should also be taken into account. ‘There is something supernatural about the fact that such a huge abundance of accumulated qualities should be contained within the same person’, wrote Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century. There is always an urge to associate Leonardo with mystery. Hardly a year passes without some press article breathlessly proclaiming: ‘The Mona Lisa mystery – finally revealed!’ And yet we have known since Vasari’s day that the Mona Lisa is the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, and that the only mystery surrounding it has been created by those who have made a business out of fuelling it. Does this mean that historians know all there is to know about Leonardo? Obviously not; while public curiosity remains insatiable and public demand increasingly insistent, research on Leonardo da Vinci continues, proceeding at a very gradual pace. Although there have been hardly any major discoveries over the last thirty years, certain adjustments have been made to a biography whose essential features have long been known. Historians of science have re-evaluated his contribution (generally reducing it), technical specialists have a clearer idea of his place in the ‘group portrait’ of Renaissance engineers and historians of power have further emphasized the role Leonardo played as the orchestrator of festive entertainments in princely courts. His activity as a musician has also been rediscovered, and there is now greater understanding of its links to his ambitions as a mathematician. His drawings are the focus of detailed analyses carried out by tireless art historians, but the slow, painstaking work of publishing his manuscripts is also underway. As astonishing as this may seem, it is demonstrably true that the reason why we still know relatively little about Leonardo is because there are only around ten people in the world capable of understanding − in their original form, their entirety and their full complexity − the six thousand or so pages that he bequeathed to posterity. This may explain his ability to lend himself endlessly to collective appropriation. Every era has had its own version of Leonardo; the neo-Classical age venerated him

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as the painter of the Ideal; the Romantics idolized him as the prophet of modernity, and he was celebrated in the industrial period as the engineer who had invented the automobile, the military vehicle and ball bearings. The consumer society and pop culture saw his work transformed into merchandise, created and coloured by Andy Warhol in 1963, and during the computer revolution he became an iconic figure. As an artist who aspired to universality, Leonardo seems to prefigure all the utopian idealism, innocence and youthful enthusiasm contained within multimedia culture. He is presented in turn as a feminist and a vegetarian, a proponent of alternative medicine and of behavioural theories. His association with war, his image as an irascible genius and his masterly political calculations are all being forgotten. Yet this is fundamentally of little importance. The memory of Leonardo was Italian before it became European, for in its political operations and cultural aspirations, sixteenth-century Europe was quite simply a larger version of Italy. It maintained an ideal of universality – and Europe long believed itself the sole custodian of that ideal. Hence the global fame accompanying the widespread circulation of digital versions of Leonardo’s images. Is it really surprising? If Leonardo is the history of his successive inventions, his memory is continually being invented before our eyes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arasse, Daniel, Léonard de Vinci, le rythme du monde, Paris, Hazan, 1997. Boucheron, Patrick, Léonard et Machiavel, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2008. Boucheron, Patrick and Claudio Giorgione (Eds.), Léonard de Vinci. La nature et l’invention, Paris, La Martinière/Universcience, 2012. Brioist, Pascal, Léonard de Vinci homme de guerre, Paris, Alma, 2013. Etchegoin, Marie-France and Frédéric Lenoir, Code Da Vinci: L’enquête, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2004. Migliore, Sandra, Tra Hermes e Prometeo. Il mito di Leonardo nel decadentismo europeo, Florence, Leo Olschki, 1994. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, arranged and translated by Edward MacCurdy, New York, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1938. Turner, Richard, Inventing Leonardo, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994. Vecce, Carlo, Leonardo, Rome, Salerno Editrice, 1998.

CHAPTER 8

The Vitruvian Man A metaphor for the world PATRICK BOUCHERON

This drawing by Leonardo da Vinci depicts an ideally proportioned human form and is seen as a metaphor for architecture, or even for the world itself. Its significance relates much more to philosophy than to visual art; in this way, it has become emblematic of European Humanism. The Vitruvian Man has unquestionably become a major icon of European modernity in all its various adaptations – artistic, promotional or parodic. This annotated drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, made on paper in pen and ink with wash over metal point, probably dates from the 1490s and has been held in the Accademia Gallery in Venice since 1822. It depicts an ideally proportioned human body as seen from the front; the limbs are perfectly inscribed within a circle and a square according to their respective positions. The text surrounding the image reads from right to left and displays the mirror-writing technique often used by Leonardo. It details the measurements of a perfectly proportioned human form based on the treatise De Architectura (ca. 25 BCE) by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, which includes the architect’s statement: ‘The measurements of man are distributed in this way.’ Leonardo would certainly have been familiar with Vitruvius, as his treatise had been read by the architects of his day, beginning with Leon Battista Alberti. Here he combines the two constructions: homo ad circulum and homo ad quadratum, introducing a new perspective relating to Vitruvius’s text on the analogy between human and architectural proportions. This was further explored following Claude Perrault’s translation of the work in 1673, until the idea was reinterpreted in the twentieth century by Le Corbusier with his Modulor Man. As we know, the metaphorical description of the building as both a human form and a machine is the basis of all Humanist architecture.

‘PAINTING WAS HIS PHILOSOPHY’ This drawing by Leonardo is certainly emblematic of Humanism − but yet again, this is Humanism as filtered through memory. For in academic culture it is often

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associated with the maxim presented as the encapsulation of Humanism: ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ However, this is a truncated quotation taken from a sentence attributed by Sextus Empiricus to the Sophist philosopher Protagoras, traditionally associated with Plato’s eponymous dialogue. Consequently, it is incomplete; the sentence as a whole actually relates to a technical philosophical problem concerning ontology: ‘Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of things that are not, that they are not.’ The Neoplatonist Renaissance was hardly likely to recognize that thought, originating from a Sophist, let alone lay claim to it by quoting it – the only exceptions being Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas of Cusa. Therefore, due to a recent reinterpretation absorbed by a collective memory, this drawing by Leonardo came to be seen as the illustration of a maxim thought to encapsulate Renaissance Humanism. The collective memory in question is that of Europe from the sixteenth century onwards, in which the dignity of humankind became the focus of all philosophy. In this sense, the work certainly represents that moment in the European memory when Leonardo’s activity as a painter was regarded in the light of philosophy. This is described by Paul Valéry in his essay ‘Leonardo and the Philosophers’ (1929), in which he revisited a work he had written during his youth: Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895): Leonardo was a painter; I mean that painting was his philosophy . . . Indeed, he himself says this, and he speaks of painting in the way one speaks of philosophy; that is, he relates all things to it. He formed an extravagant idea regarding this art (which appears so specific in comparison with thought and so far from being able to satisfy the intellect in its entirety); he sees it as an ultimate aim for the strivings of a universal mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Golsenne, Thomas, ‘“L’homme est la mesure de toutes choses” (ou comment l’humanisme de la Renaissance est fondé sur deux malentendus)’, in Gil Bartholeyns, Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, Thomas Golsenne, Misgav Har-Peled and Vincent Jolivet, Adam et l’astragale. Essais d’anthropologie et d’histoire sur les limites de l’humain, Paris, Éditions de la MSH, 2009, pp. 223–61. Pico Della Mirandola, Giovanni, Oration on the Dignity of Man, translated from the Italian by A. Robert Caponigri, Chicago, Henry Regnery Company, 1956. Zölner, Frank, ‘L’uomo vitruviano di Leonardo da Vinci, Rodolf Wittkower e l’Angelus novus di Walter Benjamin’, Raccolta vinciana 26 (1995): 329–58.

CHAPTER 9

How Shakespeare created European man TON HOENSELAARS

Idolized in England since the seventeenth century, Shakespeare has become a canonical author throughout Europe. He drew on the Graeco-Roman heritage; the references in his works span the continent from Italy to Denmark and include Russia. The author of Hamlet placed Europe at the heart of his geographical identity. During the past four hundred years, and chiefly since the beginning of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, most if not all the countries of Europe have, in their attempt to fashion distinct cultural, ethnic and linguistic self-identities, focused on native writers to represent the nation. Through a self-perpetuating process of celebration and commemoration, these writers have risen to pre-eminence as major representatives of their nation both by birth and by their perceived cultural and linguistic achievement. Thus, in the course of the centuries, England has come to embrace Shakespeare as its national poet, Portugal Camões, Spain Cervantes, Italy Dante, Germany both Goethe and Schiller. France, particularly during the politically turbulent nineteenth century, pondered the merits of Corneille, Racine as well as Molière. This handful of more or less canonical authors only represents the tip of the iceberg. The fame of these few – which may even be said to extend across the globe – tends to eclipse that of countless other poets in Europe whose names may well sound unfamiliar to non-natives to their particular region: Alberto Salvadó (Andorra), Hristo Botev and Ivan Vazov (Bulgaria), William Heinesen (Faroe Islands), George Métivier (Guernsey) and so on. The cultural history of Europe may record that all of its member states have a tradition of celebrating and commemorating their literary hero figures, but among these figures Shakespeare holds pride of place. The cult around him in England dates from the early seventeenth century. This early tradition explains how the ‘foreign’ playwright and poet has also been considered a prototype for other nations. As Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney argue, the cultures of commemoration around other writers across Europe really began with and fanned out from Shakespeare. It further explains why Friedrich von Schiller has been dubbed ‘the Germanlanguage Shakespeare’, and why Theodore Rodenburgh was known as ‘the Dutch

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Shakespeare’. Shakespeare came to manifest himself as ‘a benchmark for canonicity itself ’, the standard by which later writers have been measured. This model function explains why many nations have also uniquely come to honour Shakespeare alongside that of their own countries’ literary hero figures. The reputations of Cervantes and Shakespeare have long been closely connected. But Shakespeare has also been commemorated as the third German classic after Goethe and Schiller. And most countries of Europe also have their own institutions to honour and study Shakespeare. Across Europe, references to Shakespeare’s work keep alive and circulate the memory of the ‘original’ plays and poems. Shakespeare has changed the face of Europe. Thanks to Shakespeare, Verona remembers Romeo and Juliet, as well as their tragedy, which really took place in southern Italy. The Casa Giulietta has its charm, despite the un-Shakespearean balcony installed during the first half of the twentieth century to boost the tourist industry. At Helsingør the aficionado may pay his respects at Hamlet’s grave, but he may also visit the park that prides itself on the pool where Ophelia was drowned, and relax with a bowl of Ophelia fish soup for lunch. In many countries, Shakespeare has perhaps not become an integral part of the popular tourist industry, but statues, busts, plaques, images, street names and gardens may be found across the European continent. He graces the façade of the Semperoper in Dresden, and overlooks the entrance to the walk of fame at the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. Shakespeare’s plays are performed more frequently in Europe than those of any native playwright. Across the continent, replicas of Shakespearean theatres have been constructed to recreate the original experience even more accurately. The idea of a replica of the Globe on London’s south bank may lie well within the reach of anyone’s imagination, but something more collective seems to be at stake when we find copies of this theatre at Neuss am Rhein, in the ‘England’ section of Europa-Park at Rust in Baden, in the park of Villa Borghese in Rome and in the Dutch town of Diever, where the local amateurs have been performing Shakespeare annually since 1946.

EUROPEAN SHAKESPEARE The work of Shakespeare largely absorbs, reflects and engages with the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, including the perception of Europe itself, while further engaging chiefly with British and continental European history and literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It may briefly allude to China (Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor), Asia Minor (Henry V), India (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Africa (Antony and Cleopatra, Othello) and the New World (The Tempest), but Europe is always the centre of a geographical world stretching from the Bay of Lisbon (As You Like It) and Muscovia (Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Winter’s Tale) to Iceland’s pedigree dogs (Henry V) and Ovid’s Castalian spring (Venus and Adonis). Shakespeare’s geographical identity is that of the ‘European’ Renaissance, part of a renewed preoccupation with its Greek and Roman heritage, following the conquest

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of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 and a unique movement of the Oriental peoples, their cultures and their cultural artefacts westwards. Shakespeare’s work also partakes of the passionate early modern charting of the ‘new’ world. It further testifies to a contemporary preoccupation with nations, their history and their national character with an intensity that was at the time accelerated not only by newly developing trade relations but also by the complex religious divisions of the Reformation that marked the continent from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards. Of course, the brand of national self-awareness that speaks from the work of Shakespeare should be recognized as a form of patriotism, distinct from the cultural nationalism that begins to spread across Europe from the eighteenth century onwards. Yet, a degree of continuity did exist between these two perceptions of nationhood, and, as also Leerssen and Rigney argue, the work of Shakespeare is likely to have played a significant role in establishing this. With special reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V – and the king’s address before the battle of Agincourt, telling his men to imagine future ages in which they will be commemorated annually, like the patron saints of the Medieval church calendar – they reason that this ‘self-reflexive historicism’ which is at the core of Shakespeare’s plays was conducive also to the memory cult of those plays and their writer. Curiously, the commemorative dynamic of the histories that fuelled the British cult did not prevent them from becoming a collective frame of reference also beyond the shores of Britain. Richard and Cosima Wagner had strong views about the play, and when, on 8 August 1870, Friedrich Nietzsche told them that he had resolved to join the Prussian army in the war against France, Cosima recorded in her diary that to cope with the situation she and her husband read Shakespeare: ‘Our one consolation [. . .] we found in scenes from Henry V’ (I, 254). During the First World War the rector of the University of Nancy cited from Henry the Fifth’s preAgincourt speech to support the Anglo-French alliance against Germany, whereas on the occasion of the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916, British troops stationed in Calais performed Henry V with the part of the French queen actually played by an actress from the French town.

SHAKESPEARE: ‘EUROPEAN’ SITE OF MEMORY If English Shakespeare enjoys a reputation of long-standing, not just in Britain but also alongside the native hero writers in so many European countries, on which grounds may we call him a ‘European’ site of memory? ‘Shakespeare’ is best brought into focus as a ‘European’ site of memory by considering the multiple geographical perspectives that admirers bring to the Bard and his work. We should approach him as an English or a British author with a canonical position and a commemorative tradition within the culture of his native island environment. But we should also recognize him as a bilateral or multilateral author emphatically between the nations of Europe, whether it concerns relations between Britain and individual member states of Europe, or more complex forms of international exchange. At the same time, Shakespeare should be recognized as a writer providing a transnational frame

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of culture and a set of values within such a European context. And finally, we cannot ignore the phenomenon of our iconic author perceived as ‘European’ for his merits and demerits by non-European outsiders. These four distinct ways of meaning by ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Europe’ together bring into focus the unique phenomenon in the field of literature and culture at large that we safely term ‘Shakespeare as a European site of memory’.

UNILATERAL SHAKESPEARE The story of Shakespeare’s ‘promotion from the status of archaic, rustic playwright to that of England’s timeless Bard’ has been told many times, perhaps never more convincingly than by Michael Dobson in The Making of the National Poet (1992). The account of Shakespeare’s rise to fame and his canonization around the middle of the eighteenth century is a rich tale of commemoration not simply by means of statues, monuments and other effigies. Editions of the plays conveniently standardize the text, and adaptations and rewritings appear in ever more rapid succession. Performances of the plays, commemorative by their very nature, prepare the way for the practice – turned into a benchmark custom by David Garrick in 1679 – of celebrating the author in festival form, with the dates of the events corresponding to the author’s biography, and increasingly also in terms of time and place interwoven in the history of the nation, its rulers and its patron saint. At the same time the Shakespearean corpus was ‘nationalized’ during the middle of the eighteenth century, the Romantic notion emerged of Shakespeare as the Bard, as the poet ‘directly inspired by Nature to voice the universal truths of humanity’ (Dobson). The perceived ‘universal’ relevance of Shakespeare granted his work and vision the centrifugal force that helps to explain the subsequent spread of Shakespeare across the continent of Europe. In the 1840s, Thomas Carlyle did not overstate the case when he noted that ‘perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgment not of this country [= Britain] only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakespeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature’ (‘Hero as Poet’). Shakespeare’s afterlife, as imagined and celebrated in Britain, was a multilayered affair from the beginning, a combination of national self-identity and pride blended with intimations of the native son’s European fame. Predictably, perhaps, this dual perception was repeatedly to give rise to fights for ownership. This commemorative schizophrenia is foreshadowed in Charles Kelsall’s First Sitting of the Committee on the Proposed Monument to Shakespeare (1823). In this dialogue, Kelsall presents a vast number of international authors (Aristotle, Longinus, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plautus and Terence, Lope de Vega, Molière, Voltaire, Diderot and D’Alembert, Vittorio Alfieri) as well as representatives of multiple social groups from Britain and the rest of the world. They must decide on a way to honour the memory of Shakespeare (statue, monument, birthplace, museum, etc.), and where

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this should be done (London, Stratford, Scotland, Greece or anywhere else). Despite a long discussion, the members fail to reach a consensus. Individual or national interests continue to override a shared sense of how to commemorate the Bard. The meeting is, therefore, suspended indefinitely.

BILATERAL AND MULTILATERAL SHAKESPEARE Charles Kelsall’s First Sitting nicely foreshadows the bilateral and multilateral relations that involved the British writer and the rest of Europe. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, for example, Germany developed a complex nationalist cult around the man from Stratford leading eventually to the conviction that Shakespeare ought to be recognized as a German author, ‘unser Shakespeare’.1 This tradition included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s commemorative essay, ‘Zum Schäkespears Tag’ (1771), as well as his plan with Friedrich Schiller to embrace the histories as a model to write the German nation. This explains why during the foundational meeting in 1864 (the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth) the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft considered that taking the histories under its special protection ought to be its most important mission. Even Adolf Hitler discussed Shakespeare and the genre of the German history play from this perspective in his table talk. Nineteenth-century nationalism also developed a German practice of national identification around the character of Hamlet, when, in 1844, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath alleged that a politically impotent Germany bore a strong resemblance to the doubting Danish prince. There is a straight line from his observation to the strategy of Emperor Wilhelm II, who, on his entry into the Great War, had his propaganda machine issue postcards carrying the motto: ‘Um sein oder nicht sein handelt es sich’ – ‘To be or not to be, that’s what it’s all about2’. Intriguingly, at this point, France, too, began to cite Shakespeare’s Hamlet by way of a self-defence, thus turning a bilateral phenomenon between England and Germany into multilateral one. As early as 11 August 1914 – barely over a week into the war – the rightwing newspaper La Croix devoted a short article to the German appropriation of ‘Être ou ne pas être’: apparently the German emperor, ‘taking up arms against a world of enemies’, had found it necessary to quote from Hamlet. But should he not, instead, have quoted something like: ‘There’s something rotten in Germany; it is the German himself who has committed horror and barbarism’? This French response was not the last. When the German army suffered any significant losses, the French media made the emperor eat even his Shakespearean words. Now, Wilhelm II was depicted as Hamlet, addressing a skull in a typical Prussian spike helmet, with the words: ‘Être ou ne plus être . . .’ (‘To be or no longer to be?’). The illustration originally appeared on the front page of the Echo de Paris on 20 August 1915, and it was soon given wider and more lasting circulation by the popular reader’s digest journal, Messidor. The war between France and Germany also directly affected the collective remembrance of Shakespeare at the tercentenary of his death in 1916. On 30 April 1916,

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Paris commemorated it with a ceremony in front of the poet’s statue at 134 boulevard Haussmann. Here, the president of the Société du Souvenir littéraire, Camille Le Senne, recognized Shakespeare as a trait d’union between England and France: ‘Civilisation, when threatened by barbarians, can never have too many energetic models.’ Since it was wartime, however, not everything proved predictable, and towards the end of the ceremony, an unplanned event occurred: ‘At that moment a number of Russian, Italian and Serb soldiers came walking down the boulevard Haussmann. They joined the crowd of admirers of the great poet.’ The press interpreted this collective gesture symbolically to represent an alliance between all civilized peoples hoping for the triumph of civilization against barbarism. The commemoration elsewhere in Europe that year was less antagonistic. German prisoners of war interned on the Isle of Man performed Shakespeare for their English guards, whereas the British civilian internees at Ruhleben Camp (Berlin) were granted permission to mount a festival of no less than a week to commemorate the Bard. In both cases, propaganda interests, though, seem to have affected the reports on which we must base ourselves.

TRANSNATIONAL SHAKESPEARE The wars that mark the landscape of European history since the early modern period yield striking Shakespearean instances of collective, cross-border, bilateral and multilateral memory, often surprisingly connecting both friend and foe. But it is the post-war reflection on the past atrocities and the challenges that armed conflicts pose to the prevailing ideals of civilization which – particularly since the beginning of the twentieth century – has tended to produce an image of Shakespeare in transnational and explicitly European terms. The international career of Shakespeare, then, reveals a tendency to look beyond narrow rivalries and to consider the fate of the entire region. Shakespeare’s role in the European experience of remembrance and mourning appears to have started with Paul Valéry’s essay on ‘The Crisis of the European Mind’ (1919) where Valéry introduces ‘the Hamlet of Europe’: From an immense terrace of Elsinore which extends from Basle to Cologne, and touches the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the chalk of Champagne, and the granite of Alsace, the Hamlet of Europe now looks upon millions of ghosts. But he is an intellectual Hamlet. He meditates upon the life and death of truths. [. . .] If he picks up a skull, it is a famous skull. [. . .] Hamlet hardly knows what to do with all these skulls. Valéry’s image of Hamlet begins a series of reflections on Europe, the bankruptcy of European philosophy, and the decline of European culture after the Great War. Notable admirers have been T. S. Eliot, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Jacques Derrida. However, the image that Valéry introduced has also been deconstructed by Heiner Müller, who adopted and adapted it during the Cold War. His Hamletmaschine (1977)

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began with the words: ‘I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me.’ The echo here is not perfect. Where Paul Valéry described the ruins of ‘Europe’ stretching out to the sea ahead of him, the German playwright’s Hamlet faces the open the sea, and all of ‘Europe’ now lies in ruins behind him. Dare one read a direct or indirect comment in Müller on the earlier vision of Europe formulated by Paul Valéry? In any case, Müller’s alternative phrasing puts the reader in mind of the fact that Valéry may not really have been speaking of ‘Europe’. The ‘Europe’ that he saw and described was only the territory located to the west of the Basle-Cologne line. It left out (Weimar) Germany, with the exception of the Rhineland (occupied by Allies and Associated Powers), and marginalized Central and Eastern Europe. Valéry’s ‘Europe’ was a construction. His focus was on France. With hindsight it is ominous to realize that Valéry’s Hamletian speaker, for all his pacifist intentions, blocked from view the very nations that were to determine most forcibly the political scene until nearly the end of the twentieth century, the nations on whose behalf Heiner Müller speaks. But Valéry also inspired Jacques Derrida’s influential Spectres of Marx, which wove the ‘ghost’ of Shakespeare’s Hamlet back into a new image of Europe. It was following the demise of Müller’s reviled Communism in 1989, that Derrida reflected on ‘old Europe,’ and took up the notion of the ‘ghost’ or ‘spectre’ of which Marx and Engels had spoken at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto (‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus’). With the knowledge that Marx was a great Shakespearean, Derrida toyed with the idea of continuity between Shakespeare, Marx, Valéry and the ‘new Europe’ after 1989. Valéry’s is only one manifestation of Shakespeare transformed into a collective frame of reference for a continent in crisis. It is rarely noted that in his Second World War novella Le Silence de la Mer, Vercors also drew precisely on Shakespeare to depict the fate that threatened to destroy European culture at the time. In the novella, the German officer Werner von Ebrennac is billeted with an elderly intellectual and his niece in the French countryside. Each night he compulsively shares with them his views of culture. Initially, he manifests himself as a cosmopolitan admirer of literature and music, for whom the national origin of the works he reads or plays is secondary. Gradually, however, and particularly after his meeting with German friends in Paris, he changes into a militant defender of exclusively German values. Significantly, this process is conveyed by his use of quotations from Shakespeare, particularly in the second chapter of the novella which begins with the famous quotation from Othello about the irreversibility of murder and destruction: ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light.’ In the chapter that follows, we encounter Ebbrenac on his return from Paris. He too is convinced now that the literary culture of France, which he had always admired, has no place within the new political climate. The Germans, he tells his hosts, ‘are flattering your writers, but at the same time in Belgium, in Holland, in all the countries occupied by our troops, they already put the bars up. No French book can go through anymore . . . Not only your Péguy, your Proust, your Bergson . . . But all the others.’ Adapting the quotation from Shakespeare’s Othello at the beginning of the second chapter, Ebrennac declares: ‘They will put the light out altogether. [. . .] Never again will Europe be made bright by that glow.’3 As in this

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French novella about the Second World War, the dialogue between a German officer and a French intellectual about the future of European culture is articulated in the translated words of an author from a third nation, Britain, Shakespeare is granted prophetic transnational and specifically European reference and resonance. Since the Second World War the role of Shakespeare in the transnational European imaginary has not changed. In 2016, the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death also witnessed the referendum about Britain’s membership of the European Union. As Shakespeare’s death was being commemorated, the writer was also much alive on the transnational European stage, certainly once Donald Tusk, in a letter that marked the official beginning of the referendum, announced: ‘I deeply believe that our community of interests is much stronger than what divides us. To be, or not to be together, that is the question which must be answered not only by the British people in a referendum, but also by the other 27 members of the EU.’ Before the referendum that challenged the notion of European unity, the question was, ‘What would the Bard do?’ (The Australian). Wasn’t King John a Brexit play (The Guardian, 20 June 2016)? Or was it Henry V (The Guardian, 3 July 2016)? Apparently, it was a perfect coincidence that the Shakespeare-Theater Neuss had scheduled a production of All’s Well That Ends Well on polling day (RP Online, 24 June 2016). The outcome of ‘Brexit or Not Brexit’ (Le Figaro, 29 June 2016) was defined by some as ‘a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions’ (www​ .nickhunn​.com, 28 June 2016). The power struggle that immediately followed among the Conservatives – with Michael Gove stage-managing the political exit of Boris Johnson – was interpreted in Germany as a scene from Julius Caesar (‘Ein Brutus steht vor Downing Street’, Der Tagesspiegel, 2 July 2016), and by the London Evening Standard as a scene from Othello (‘Like Iago, he brought down the natural leader while also destroying himself ’, 8 July 2016). The nefarious role of Gove’s wife in the ‘Shakespeare-Tragödie nach Brexit’ led The Economist actually to rewrite an entire scene from Macbeth as The Tragedy of Michael and Sarah MacGove (1 July 2016). And the front page of the French Libération (1 July 2016) had a photograph of Johnson with the unambiguous headline: ‘Shakespeare en pire’ (‘Worse than Shakespeare’). But it was Shakespeare nevertheless as multiple nations sought to counter a serious challenge to the prevailing conception of a united Europe.

BOOMERANG SHAKESPEARE Traces of Shakespeare, his work and the multiple cults of commemoration, can also be found beyond Europe, in areas that were once its colonies. Both in the heyday of colonialism and during the postcolonial era the empire has written back, and its rewriting of European classics, like Shakespeare, was a successful method, in British colonies, of course, but also elsewhere, in Latin America, Canada and other French colonies. A case in point is Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, who critically rewrote Shakespeare’s The Tempest as Une tempête, having the characters speak of Prospero’s island not in relation to England, Italy or France, but explicitly to

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Europe, in a way that Shakespeare avoids. As he arrives on the island, Gonzalo notes: ‘On a bien raison de dire que ce sont des pays merveilleux. Rien de commun avec nos pays d’Europe’. The island’s original inhabitant, Caliban, is equally explicit in his rejection of Prospero: ‘Tu peux foutre le camp. Tu peux rentrer en Europe. Mais je t’en fous!’ Not all extra-Europeans contribute to Shakespeare as a European site of memory in an equally divisive and dismissive manner. A video documentary produced by The Guardian (10 September 2015) records the march of a Syrian family to ‘to the heart of Europe’. At one stage, a male refugee is interviewed wearing small white sandals. Asked why he should be shod and walking in women’s shoes, the refugee answers cheerfully: ‘I have given my slippers to my wife ’cause her feet are bleeding. My feet are bigger than the shoes: what shall I do? To be, or not to be, that is the question. We will be.’ From the way in which the educated Syrian refugee responds to the reporter – Hamlet’s perennial question coupled with an affirmative answer – we catch an outside-in glimpse of Europe where Shakespeare is a frame of reference. In this instance, the self-identification of the speaker with a Shakespearean character, and in English, is considered the most effective visiting card to Europe. Clearly, our image of Shakespeare as a European site of memory is determined by Europe and Europeans, but also by non-European countries and their citizens. Failure to recognize this would be an act of Eurocentrism. This has also been a major article of faith for the European Shakespeare Research Society (ESRA). This international academic network, officially founded in 2007, began at a time when momentous events challenged traditional perceptions of national culture – the demise of Communism and the birth of the New Europe, the foundation of the European Union, the Third Balkan War and the Iraq War. The scholars who founded ESRA investigate the reception of Shakespeare in a federal Europe, and reflect on its sense of pan-European identity, past and present, around the memory of ‘Shakespeare’. ESRA scholars who investigate the role of Shakespeare in forging a sense of European self-identity object to fostering a spirit of self-complacent Eurocentrism or Europhilia. They argue that if Eurocentrism and Europhilia play a role in their research, it is as objects of study in their own right. The geographical and cultural focus of ESRA is on ‘Europe’ as much as it is on Shakespeare, but research into European Shakespeare is a worldwide affair. After almost twenty-five years of research into Shakespeare as a European site of memory, ESRA itself has become part of that same phenomenon.

NOTES 1. Günther, Frank, Unser Shakespeare: Einblicke in Shakespeares Fremd-verwandte Zeiten (München: DTV, 2014). 2. Andreas Höfele has recently argued (2016) that this particular ghost of Hamlet was laid to rest in 1989. 3. Put out the Light became the title of Cyril Connolly’s English translation of the French novella that appeared in 1944.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Boston, The Athenaeum Press, 1901. Césaire, Aimé, Une tempête. D’après ‘La Tempête’ de Shakespeare. Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1969. Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated from the French by Peggy Kamuf, London and New York, Routledge, 1993. Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994. Domokos, John (dir.), ‘We Walk Together: A Syrian Family’s Journey to the Heart of Europe’, The Guardian online, 3 November 2016. Günther, Frank, Unser Shakespeare: Einblicke in Shakespeares Fremd-verwandte Zeiten, München, DTV, 2014. Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘British Civilian Internees Commemorate Shakespeare in Ruhleben, Germany (1914–1918)’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 151 (2015): 51–67. Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Great War Shakespeare: Somewhere in France, 1914–1919’, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 33 (2015). http://shakespeare​.revues​.org​ /2960 Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘The Pierre Fournier Shakespeare Statue in the City of Paris, 1888– 1941. Reflections on Commemoration, Cosmopolitanism, and Urban Development during the Third Republic’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 147 (2011): 105–23. Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Sculpted Shakespeare’, in Coppélia Kahn and Clara Calvo (Eds.), Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 279–300. Hoenselaars, Ton (Ed.), Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Leerssen, Joep and Ann Rigney (Eds.), Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Müller, Heiner, ‘Hamletmachine’, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Eds.), Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, London and New York, Routledge, 2000.

CHAPTER 10

The countrysides MATHIEU ARNOUX

The image of ‘the countryside’ as a place of peace whose landscape and inhabitants never change still persists in the memories of those who do not live there. However, rural areas are actually characterized by innovation, brought about through wars, crises, rebellions, industrialization and, most recently, globalization. The plural form is required in this case. In referring to the countryside in the singular, we are implying that only one exists – real or imaginary – from which memory can be created. The assumption that one sole memory is involved here leads in turn to the conclusion that this can be shared, and, specifically, that it is common to all, country and city dwellers alike. This would put us on the wrong track; ‘the countryside’ is neither a place nor an object. It is a notion that makes sense to those who have not made it the setting for their existence. As such, it only constitutes a memory for those who have left it to become urbanites, and who return to it with the certainty that they will be leaving it once more. In order to know what the ‘countrysides’ are in terms of sites of memory, it is therefore necessary not to confuse the different spheres of representation and remembrance that constitute each of the countries and regions of Europe; this is because, for their rural and urban inhabitants alike, they are lived and conceived spaces, as well as being that other territory that is both implicit and explicit in the memory of Europeans: the countryside. It is an allusive landscape, not local but general, different from most representations of the city and its territory. The following pages are not intended to provide an analysis of the experience of consciousness and the power of the collective memory, specifically historical, associated with every ‘little homeland’; a discussion based on generalities would be disrespectful, extraneous to the subject and would serve no purpose. We will, however, be trying to understand how the space that extends beyond city walls could have formed the basis and the focus of a shared memory.

THE ORDO LABORATORUM ‘Certain wild animals, male and female, are scattered over the country, dark, livid and quite tanned by the sun, who are chained, as it were, to the land they are always digging and turning up and down with an unwearied stubbornness.’1

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These words, included in Jean de La Bruyère’s Les Caractères (1688), reflect both the conscience of a humanitarian shocked by the spectacle of poverty and incomprehension of the rationale behind social inequality. He concludes by stating: ‘They spare other men the trouble of sowing, tilling the ground, and reaping for their sustenance, and, therefore, deserve not to be in want of that bread they sow themselves.’ Curiously, this statement has been considered bold and novel, although it refers to one of the most stereotypical clichés associated with the European peasantry, which is linked to the definition of the ordo laboratorum − the third estate, comprising the labouring class. The presentation of rural inhabitants as wild, inarticulate creatures likewise relates to a timeless, practically unalterable image that excluded them from any conscious participation in historical events due to their animalistic nature. La Bruyère’s words were simply intended as a provocation for his Parisian readers, both aristocratic and bourgeois; they were all perfectly well aware, as was the author, of their proximity to that rural world, which lay just outside the suburbs. What we retain of this stereotype, widespread throughout European literature, is the confirmation that city and country dwellers’ perception of each other is essentially characterized by alterity. The nature of that alterity and the effects it has produced on the collective memory are worth investigating at this point. The peasantry’s unfitness for civilized life is one of the hidden issues underlying the history of the French Revolution. This was seen in strictly urban terms until the publication of Georges Lefebvre’s The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, a major piece of work on memory and emotion first published in 1929. The author pointed to the rural uprisings of the summer of 1789 as marking the birth of the peasantry as a political force, a process heralded by a period of fear and anti-feudal riots. His work includes quantities of comments quoted from local original sources, conveying both the authorities’ lack of comprehension and the peasants’ infinitely diverse languages of revolt and threat. In this way, he demonstrates how the ‘Great Fear’ enabled the peasantry to progress from a mood of unease – which, although general, was invariably experienced from the narrow perspective of a rural locality – to the incontrovertible awareness of its own political weight. And all this occurred within the space of one summer, during one period of food shortage. Still notable for the distinctive regional or local character displayed by the languages of protest, this movement remained unperceived until the middle of the following century.

MARX’S ANALYSIS: A CLASS WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS In 1852, reflecting on the massive support Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte received from the French peasantry during the elections of December 1848, Karl Marx put his own perspective on that sense of otherness which had led the oppressed rural population to rise against both the oppressed and the progressive urban populations. As he saw it, the situation characterizing ‘the most numerous class of French society

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. . ., the small-holding peasants’ was the cause of that unexpected occurrence. His analysis is worth quoting: The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse [. . .] A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class.2 As the text progresses, Marx introduces nuances into his analyses. However, he continues to maintain his fundamental assertion that the peasants’ condition itself impeded both their understanding of their situation in its historical context and the construction of a strategy for the class struggle. His conclusion was categorical; as oppressed by the system based on bourgeois capital as they had been by feudal obligation, the peasants ‘cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’. Therefore, unlike the urban proletariat and the bourgeoisie, they could neither acquire insight into their own history nor equip themselves with a collective memory of their own. In this way, Marx was establishing himself within an age-old conceptual framework, in which cities and their inhabitants are presented as the true driving forces of history. Consequently, rural inhabitants are seen either as latecomers to civilization or as an oppressed group only able to access that civilization via the actions of dominant forces. In either case, they are regarded as beings from the past. In assuming that the peasantry could not possibly have a conception of its own class identity, Marx was implicitly drawing attention to an important fact; the relationship that rural inhabitants have with historical consciousness, which forms the basis of class identity, is not the same as that of city dwellers. However, he saw this fact purely in terms of negation or lack.

PÉGUY’S PERSPECTIVE: A CLASS WITH NO IMPRINT Half a century later, another socialist thinker, Charles Péguy, gave his own interpretation of this difference, using an anthropological perspective in his imagined dialogue between a Catholic from a rural background (himself) and a Jewish city dweller (the philosopher Julien Benda): If you prefer, the Jew has been literate since the beginning, the Protestant since Calvin, the Catholic since Ferry.

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Or if you prefer, the Jew has been lettered since the beginning, the Protestant since Calvin, the Catholic since Ferry. Seeing all this, the Catholic turns back in search of his own past. Whichever path he takes, he is unlettered by the second generation. Neither his ancestors of the Bourbonnais, nor those perhaps of the Marche, nor those of the Loire Valley and the first hillsides of the Orléans forest, neither of his grandfathers, neither of his grandmothers could read or write. [. . .], and whichever path he takes he collides, right after his father, right after his mother, with this four-wide front of illiteracy [. . .] He would be hard pressed to go much further back. Being poor and French, Catholic and peasant, he has no family papers. His family papers are the local parish registers. No single family stands out in this countless ancestry [. . .] Nothing that could be traced within the papers of notaries. They never possessed a thing. Poor and of the people, they left to Jews, Protestants, and bourgeois Catholics, the right to a documented genealogy.3 What Péguy identifies in a contrast based neither on religion nor on ethnicity is a different relationship to historicity and time. Countering Marx’s analysis, he recognizes in the anonymity, obscurity and silence into which the peasants’ past has sunk the actual basis of a collective consciousness: ‘He is the same man to have never been clothed but in a common fabric, to have never written but on a common paper, to have never sat down but at a common table.’ The self-confessed heir to a peasant culture, Péguy bases the shared identity of country people on a lack of concern over origins and a lack of desire for anchorage. There is no longterm memory and no claim involved, but a tacit bond founded on gestures and practices. There is no long-term consciousness, but the immediate awareness of the past, both endured and reactive. Recent research on the role of language and memory in rural communities confirms that they do not serve as a vehicle for historical and political representation, but as a ceaselessly reactivated instrument for the negotiation and defence of group rights. Furthermore, Péguy indirectly casts light on a fact that is often concealed or simply not known; even though the discourse of city dwellers presents rural inhabitants as a conservative or reactionary mass hostile to all change, the permanence and continuity of ancient structures and the desire to perpetuate established situations are not characteristic of the countryside, but of cities. And the countryside is the place where innovation has its most immediate and violent forms.

THE CITY VERSUS THE COUNTRYSIDE: THE REJECTION OF CHANGE According to this paradox, the countryside is both the custodian of age-old cultural forms and an environment buffeted by the radical changes brought about through globalization. This dichotomy is explored in Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi’s account of rural life in the province of Lucania under the fascist regime. The author,

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a doctor and a painter from Piedmont banished to southern Italy for his opposition to fascism, represents an urban civilization rooted in historical consciousness. He pinpoints the ‘archaic’ elements, in other words, those unbound by a specific historical association, that characterize the culture of his rural hosts: There is nothing strange in the fact that there were dragons in these parts during the Middle Ages. (The peasants and Giulia used to say: ‘A long time ago, more than a hundred years, long before the brigands . . .’) Nor would it be so strange if dragons were to appear again today before the startled eyes of the country people. Anything is possible, where the ancient deities of the shepherds, the ram and the lamb, run every day over the familiar paths, and there is no definite boundary line between the world of human beings and that of animals or even monsters.4 Yet in his narrative, which reflects a resistance to any notion of intemporality, he links that mythology to the social traumas produced by the disruptive effects of modern life, particularly the contact established between an agrarian, feudal society and the cities of the New World: All that people say about the people of the South, things I once believed myself: the savage rigidity of their morals, their Oriental jealousy, the fierce sense of honor leading to crimes of passion and revenge, all these are but myths. Perhaps they existed a long time ago and something of them is left in the way of a stiff conventionality. But emigration has changed the picture. The men have gone and the women have taken over. Many a woman’s husband is in America. [. . .] Gagliano has twelve hundred inhabitants, and there are two thousand men from Gagliano in America.5 When a contrast is made between the city and the countryside, there is all too often a confusion between pace and temporality. In cities, time is experienced in an accelerated form, and we associate this with an attraction to novelty, whereas the measured, cyclical form of time experienced in rural spaces is associated with the fear of the new. However, the extraordinary stability that characterizes European urban networks and the ability of urban oligarchs to perpetuate their dominance while maintaining the appearance of change would suggest the exact opposite. The disciplines of archaeology and palaeoenvironmental science have brought their own contributions to the discussion, revealing on the one hand the proto-historical or high medieval roots of most European cities, and on the other, the extent of the ruptures that have left their mark on rural spaces and whose origins have been forgotten. We therefore now know that there were no continuities between the villae of the Roman period and the estates of the High Middle Ages, that the medieval era witnessed a considerable proliferation of scattered settlements and that villages were not established as a form of community common to most of Europe until the period of development that occurred from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. We also know that the long period of wars and crises that left their mark on Europe’s

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landscapes between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries resulted in the total transformation of a large number of regions. The very contrast, seemingly so long entrenched, between a densely urbanized, politically fragmented, economically dynamic and dominant Western Europe and a Central and Eastern Europe unified by the three characteristics of dependence on agriculture, large seigniorial estates and cereal monoculture masks a succession of economic and social innovations. These are inextricably linked to the construction of economies with global reach, first the Dutch and then the English. The very phrase ‘the return to serfdom’, which political thinkers, and later historians, have taken to using when defining the various types of domination exerted over these countries, obviously refers to the archaic, or rather, timeless figure of the serf, not to the successive regimes, both imposed and unstable, originating from a history constantly evolving at a European level.

A COUNTRYSIDE WITHOUT ITS PEASANTRY: THE ENCLOSURES At the other end of the continent, the kingdom of England was the scene of a development just as radical in its consequences. Known as enclosure, this process involved the aristocracy’s appropriation of common land and took place from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It resulted in a rural space devoid of communities, peasants and crops, the land being used solely as grazing pasture for livestock or for the entertainment of the nobility. Little would remain in the collective memory of the peasant farmers expelled in this way, and they moved to cities, swelling England’s urban population. Included among the very few examples of that remembrance is a tragic passage in Utopia by Thomas More, a prescient witness of the initial stages of this process: One way or another, these wretched people – men, women, husbands, wives, orphans, widows, parents with little children and entire families (poor but numerous, since farming requires many hands) – are forced to move out. They leave the only homes familiar to them, and can find no place to go. Since they must leave at once without waiting for a proper buyer, they sell for a pittance all their household goods, which would not bring much in any case. When that little money is gone (and it’s soon spent in wandering from place to place), what finally remains for them but to steal, and so be hanged – justly, no doubt – or to wander and beg? And yet if they go tramping, they are jailed as idle vagrants. They would be glad to work, but they can find no one who will hire them. There is no need for farm labour, in which they have been trained, when there is no land left to be planted.6 Nature itself, seen as primordial and indifferent to human time perception, did not remain static, whether in the context of landform patterns or ecosystem longevity. Written sources and palaeoenvironmental studies alike confirm the occurrence of successive waves of development spanning over a thousand years. These saw the introduction of new plant species into the crop rotation, including cereals such as

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rye, buckwheat and maize; livestock fodder such as clover, sainfoin and lucerne; and plants used for textiles and dyes such as hemp, flax, Isatis tinctoria (woad) and madder. Such developments prove that subsistence agriculture provides space for innovation, even in periods of scarcity such as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While herbariums and agronomic treatises reflect the interest aroused by the new species, the memory of these major changes has not been preserved in collective representations of the rural world. Yet the research conducted by the Italian historian Mauro Ambrosoli confirms the magnitude of those developments, whether reflected in the introduction of fodder crops throughout Europe during the Renaissance or in the trees lining public roads planted by local administrators during the short-lived Napoleonic Empire.

APPROPRIATED MEMORY Indeed, from the works of the Dutch masters to those of contemporary artists, the countryside is portrayed as a timeless catalogue of symbols, forms and colours, often devoid of all human presence and with nothing to indicate progression besides the changing seasons. From the Le Nain brothers’ paintings of peasants at table – possibly representations of the pilgrims’ supper with Christ at Emmaus – to The Angelus by Jean-François Millet, Vincent Van Gogh’s numerous images of seed sowers, and even the ploughs painted by Georges Braque, it is not difficult to find examples of the enduring character of an iconography rooted in Christianity and its celebration of the liturgical and natural cycles, where technological developments play no part. This static vision, in which the countryside and its inhabitants appear as the custodians of unchanging values and gestures, obviously affected collective representations, particularly in the domain of historiography. The rural history of most European countries comprises two aspects: local and agrarian. One is intended to highlight everything of note connected with the past of a particular locality, conceived as the focus of a collective memory, while the other, constructed from an analytical, often interdisciplinary perspective, is intended to identify general developments. Local history, the preserve of landowners and prominent figures throughout the nineteenth century, played a key role everywhere in Europe in the construction of a local memory shared by urban and rural inhabitants. In the case of France, this accumulated historical knowledge was put to use during the process of codifying the usages locaux, a considerable task. Systematically compiled, these local customs and rules of practice were recognized by post-Revolutionary jurists as valuable sources of law. It therefore comes as no surprise to see that in most cases, this localist historiography established itself within a conservative vision of society, based on the permanence of territorial divisions, social customs, agrarian practices and regulations governing ownership; these were regarded as bulwarks against the upheavals imposed by industrialization. Rural history, which originates from academic research rather than from the sociability of local communities, is so similar to agricultural geography that the two frequently seem to merge. It began to take form in the late nineteenth century, a procedure that often constituted a critical reaction to regionalist discourse. The

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latter emphasizes the notion of deeply rooted memory; rural history counters this with its focus on the discontinuities created by processes of economic, technological, agronomical and social innovation. In France, the British Isles and in Italy, agricultural history constituted a sphere of debate for the social sciences rather than a space where shared memory could be celebrated. A reflection on the peasantry undertaken in the Russian Empire during the mid-nineteenth century encompassed the European experience as a whole, thereby leading to the creation of a social science devoted to rural matters, combining agronomy, economics, sociology and political science. The most comprehensive text resulting from this development was Alexander Chayanov’s The Theory of Peasant Economy (1923); this key work brought about the death of its author due to its implicit criticism of the Soviet regime’s industrial and urban model. Research in Western Europe was conducted within a national framework, as was the case with Marc Bloch’s famous work, Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931), and was accompanied by an extensive discussion of the relevance of this context to the study of evolutionary dynamics. Conversely, Germany’s rich tradition of agricultural history (admittedly steeped in Romantic and nationalistic nineteenth-century ideology) was deliberately used by the National Socialist regime as an instrument to legitimize its racist ideology, based on the celebration of Blut und Boden – blood and soil. The writings of Günther Franz – an agrarian historian who achieved the rank of SS Hauptsturmführer – on the German peasantry are particularly significant in this respect. In the long term, the result was catastrophic for this domain of research, which was discredited by the use of historiographical notions and concepts for the promotion of an ideologically constructed and distorted memory.

THE MEMORY OF PARADISE Whereas history is an essential dimension of memory in the case of cities, it only provides rural areas with direct access to memory through recollections of domination. This is particularly clear in the case of Italy, where the words contado (the countryside) and contadini (the peasants) are directly related to the word conte (a Count), and therefore to the sovereign power that the governors of the cities exerted over the surrounding lands. This collective representation dictated by dominant forces is countered by a very different shared distinction; based on morals rather than economics or politics, it is both timeless and without specific context. Memory, which holds a key place in this construction, is not connected to the chronological concept of history in this instance, but to a sacred history of sin and salvation. The innumerable accounts of the morally superior nature of rural labour and life – as opposed to the corruption intrinsic to urban society – form a continuous series, from Hesiod to Leo Tolstoy, and include the works of Jean de La Fontaine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yet it is far from being the case that a literary cliché, however widespread, has the capacity to reflect the more complex reality of an element of shared memory. Towards the year 1000, that cliché underwent a change in signification; in ancient times, it was associated with a criticism of the vanity of

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individual existence; this meaning has now faded. The stereotype formed part of a genuine social model within the new framework provided by the system of the three orders of society. While the first two orders, the clergy and the nobility, conveyed the power and values of the city, the recognition of the peasantry’s moral quality was accompanied by the affirmation that country dwellers possessed a particular dignity. The ancient identification of the peasant – paganus – with the pagan was put aside. This is indicated by the parallel drawn between the first man, Adam, who took care of the Garden of Eden, and peasant labourers, which was derived from Saint Augustine’s commentary on the account of the creation in the book of Genesis and was no doubt used for sermons addressed to rural inhabitants. Traces of this concept may be found in iconographic form, with Adam usually depicted as a ploughman or a gardener. It appears in that hymn to creation, the stained glass in the windows of Chartres Cathedral; the farm labourers of the neighbouring village of Nogent obtained the right to have a ploughman and his plough portrayed, in glory, in one of the panels of the large windows in the nave. Another characteristic of this model was the image promoted by the Peace and Truce of God movement during the same period. From the eleventh century, the peasant was presented as a peace-loving character, unarmed and absorbed in his task of serving nature for the benefit of all the social orders. That idealized figure of a righteous man, the embodiment of a Christian order of things, appears in countless verse narratives written in vernacular languages accessible to peasants. One of the oldest of these is Meier Helmbrecht, a novel in verse written in Middle High German, probably in the latter half of the thirteenth century. In the lines that follow, a peasant is attempting to dissuade his son from leaving the countryside for the city and the court, where his salvation would be put in jeopardy: Meanwhile I beg, belovèd lad, Give up the trip you plan to Court! The courtier’s life is of a sort Too hard for those, and not well fit, Who have not always followed it. Dear son, you drive the steer for me, Or take the plow while I drive. We Shall thus get all our acres plowed. And you will near your grave and shroud With fullest honor, as I do (I flatter me that this is true), For I’ve been upright, faithful, just, And never have betrayed a trust; What’s more, I pay in full each year My proper tenth without arrear. And thus far I have lived my life Free from envy, free from strife.7 A century later, an English narrative poem that exists in three versions and enjoyed national success introduced another rural labourer, Piers Plowman, engaged on a

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mission to save a society undermined by corruption and despair. His task takes both a physical and a spiritual form. In one of the speeches he addresses to English society, the structure of the three estates is given a new, revitalized form, reconfigured around the image of the man with the plough; in this way, the life of the farm labourer is presented as a pilgrimage towards divine truth: ‘And I shall apparel me’, quoth Perkyn, ‘in pilgrim’s wise, And wend with you I will till we find Truth; Put on me my clothes patched-up and ragged, My leggings and mittens ’gainst cold of my nails, Hang my seed basket at my neck instead of a scrip, And a bushel of breadcorn bring me therein; For I will sow it myself and then will I wend To pilgrimage as palmers [pilgrims] do, pardon for to have. Who will help me to plow or to sow ere I wend Shall have leave, by our Lord! to glean here in harvest And with it make himself merry spite of who may begrudge it. And all kinds of craftsmen who will honestly live, I shall find them food that faithfully work.’8 We should not be deceived by the seemingly naïve moralism in these texts. They amount to more than a simple repetition of exhortations against violence as set out in the Scriptures and the liturgy, or to a discourse in praise of social conformity. The concept of the three orders of society (oratores – those who pray, bellatores – those who fight and laboratores – those who work) proved a successful model; this led to the development of an image of the peasant class that was simultaneously moral, anthropological and political in character, a process that took place between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. This was period of agricultural growth unparalleled in European history, which explains the construction of an ideology presenting the peasants’ labour as freely offered, rather than forced or extorted. As such, it seemed to counterbalance the bellicose activity of the knights, disciplined and therefore useful on account of its protective function, and the prayers and sacraments of the clergy. However, this type of pact was not without its quid pro quo; any lack of respect for the peasants’ commitment shown by the other two orders, or simply by the urban population, would result in rebellion.

A HISTORY OF UPRISINGS Whether viewed from the standpoint of urban inhabitants and dominant forces, or from that of country dwellers, the history of Europe’s rural spaces is characterized by agrarian rebellions. To greater extent than literature – a mirror held up to city folk, who wanted a submissive, peaceable rural population – iconographic works portrayed the peasants as they really were: strange, comical, unsettling, even rebellious. These images were made accessible to all through the engraving and printmaking processes. Albrecht Dürer made an extraordinarily ambiguous sketch, which he included in a treatise on architecture that he published after the

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German Peasants’ War of 1525. The drawing, a design for an unbuilt monument commemorating a fallen peasant, exalts both the massacre, whose outcome favoured his aristocratic and urban readership, and the productive activity of the victim, without whom no life could be sustained. During the years that spanned the French revolts – from the Jacquerie uprising of 1358 to the Great Fear of 1789 and the Vendée and Chouans uprisings of the 1790s, and including the Croquants’ revolt of 1636 − England experienced the great revolt of 1381; Catalonia, the War of the Remences in the 1460s; Italy, the ‘Fat Thursday’ revolt of the Friulian peasants in 1511; the Holy Roman Empire, the Bundschuch revolts of the latter half of the fifteenth century, followed by the German Peasants’ War of 1525, to name but a few. While demonstrating the extremely diverse nature of their respective causes and developments, Hugues Neveux emphasizes their shared origins: the demand for ‘justice’, a value essential to peasant identity, or the wish to put an end to a situation of ‘injustice’ connected with the dominance of territorial rulers, sovereigns, lords or urban inhabitants. Ultimately, as a focus of collective memory, the countryside was constructed around this dual theme of justice and rebellion. From the perspective of the dominant forces, or rather the city, it was an indecipherable space, whose inhabitants’ dogged conservatism might suddenly give way to devastating insurrections; these had to be quelled by every means possible. From the peasants’ perspective, when the certainty that they represented a form of moral excellence was replaced by the awareness that they were enduring subjugation, contrary to agreed social pacts, the only response was to take up arms; and farm implements such as scythes, flails and hoes were also counted as weapons. The countryside has been collectively forged as a realm of memory in the tension between these two extreme representations of the space that lies beyond the city walls. Seen as a place of abundance where we can still glimpse the remains of an earthly paradise characterized by both toil and tranquillity, it is also regarded as a dominated territory, whose insurrections were justified by the brutal nature of the conditions its inhabitants endured.

NOTES 1. Jean de La Bruyère, The ‘Characters’ of Jean de La Bruyère (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885). [‘Of Mankind’, p. 318.] 2. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, online version: Marx/Engels Internet Archive 1995, 1999; chapter 7, translated by Saul K. Padover from the German edition of 1869. 3. Charles Péguy, ‘Towards a Republican Ethics of Fraternité: Charles Péguy’s Mystical Refashioning of Civic Virtue’, UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018, pp. 226–7. [Copyright © by Matthew Gervase, 2018.] 4. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947 [1945]), p. 112. 5. Ibid., p. 102. 6. Thomas More, Utopia, edited by George M. Logan, translated from the Latin by Robert M. Adams, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (third edition) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 19–20.

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7. Wernher der Gartenaere, Meier Helmbrecht, translated from the Middle High German of the thirteenth century by Clair Hayden Bell, Peasant Life in Old German Epics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), v. 242–58. 8. William Langland, The Book Concerning Piers the Plowman, translated by Donald and Rachel Attwater (New York: Dutton, 1957) [Passus VI, p. 52].

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ambrosoli, Mauro, The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1350–1850, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Arnoux, Mathieu, Le Temps des laboureurs. Travail, ordre social et croissance en Europe (XIe −XIVe siècle), Paris, Albin Michel, 2012. Demade, Julien, ‘The Medieval Countryside in German-Language Historiography since the 1930s’, in Isabel Alfonso (Ed.), The Rural History of Medieval European Societies: Trends and Perspectives, Turnhout, Brepols Publishers, 2007, pp. 173–252. Freedman, Paul, Images of the Medieval Peasant, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999. Hilton, Rodney, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973. Kula, Witold, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model of the Polish Economy 1500–1800, translated from the Polish by Lawrence Garner, London and Atlantic Highlands, NLB and Humanities Press, 1976 [1962]. Lefebvre, Georges, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, translated from the French by Joan White, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973 [1932]. Neveux, Hugues, Les Révoltes paysannes en Europe (XIVe–XVIIe siècle), Paris, Albin Michel, 1997. Pianzola, Maurice, Peintres et vilains. Les artistes de la Renaissance et la grande guerre des paysans de 1525, Paris, L’Insomniaque, 2015. Rösener, Werner, Peasants in the Middle Ages, translated from the German by Alexander Stutzer, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996 [1985]. Thorner, Daniel, Basile Kerblay and R. E. F. Smith (Eds.), A. V. Chayanov on the Theory of Peasant Economy, edited by Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerblay and R. E. F. Smith, Homewood, The American Economic Association, 1966.

CHAPTER 11

The plague and the wolf GÁBOR KLANICZAY

Perceived as the manifestation of divine wrath, the Black Death epidemic, which spread from Asia to North Africa, first struck Europe in 1348 and swept over the continent, killing almost half of its population. The wolf, that other embodiment of the destructive power of nature, likewise aroused panic – yet it offered humankind the opportunity to retaliate. Memento mori – is there a stronger command for remembrance in history? And is there a larger collective experience of mass mortality – save the two world wars in the twentieth century and perhaps the impact of smallpox and measles on indigenous peoples in early modern America – than the Black Death of 1348–53, which must have cost the lives of an estimated 30–60 per cent of the population of medieval Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean? Matteo Villani compares it to the Flood; this is the most general contemporary view on the underlying cause of the catastrophe: a divine retribution for sin. The threats of the Old Testament prophets framed their views on the Great Plague, which, on the other hand, was also seen as a turning point in history. Villani writes: ‘I have set my mind to start with the multiple and disastrous events of ours at this time, as a renewal of time and of the world, annually including the new events that appear worthy of recording.’1 The plague is therefore presented as a ‘realm of memory’, a key to understanding the history of humankind. This memory is also perpetuated in the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, which provides a vivid eye-witness account on how ‘the noble city of Florence, which for its great beauty excels all others in Italy, was visited by the deadly pestilence’. He describes how the disease spread through the city ‘with the speed of fire’, from house to house; how it destroyed families: ‘Brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children as though they did not belong to them.’ Those who did not run away engaged in extremes of conduct, some others enclosed themselves in isolation and only very few assisted the sick and showed real compassion. The plague, set in such a prominent position, is not merely the background of the Decameron but rather the triggering event for the ten days of storytelling, a ‘key to meaning’.

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Boccaccio’s testimony is based on what he saw with his own eyes, but as philological research demonstrated, historical readings must have also influenced him. His immediate model seems to be the description by Paul the Deacon of the Justinianic plague in the sixth and seventh centuries: ‘Sons fled, leaving the corpses of their parents unburied; parents forgetful of their duty abandoned their children in raging fever.’ Beyond the interesting philological correspondence, we should underline another aspect: Historical memory is built into an experience-based account, as a kind of hidden framework. The plague, coming via Kaffa, Constantinople, Cairo and Messina in 1347, struck the ports and the hinterland in Italy in early 1348, quickly spreading to France, Spain, England and Germany, and then, passing through the Baltic to Scandinavia, it reached Novgorod and Moscow in 1352. Its memory was also perpetuated by the fact that it continued to return, with unpredictable intensity and regularity for almost four hundred years, till the 1730s. In France, Jean-Noël Biraben identified sixteen larger and eight secondary waves of the plague in 189 years, so it struck about every eighth year. A second round, between 1536 and 1670, comprised nine larger and three secondary waves, in other words, a frequency of about every eleventh year. The memory of recurrent plague epidemics was further eternalized by prominent intellectuals, such as Petrarch, Ficino, Machiavelli, Luther and Defoe. But none of the successive waves reached the intensity of the Black Death, which therefore became a threatening realm of memory. Besides its catastrophic effect, the Great Plague also became noteworthy for its psychological and religious aftermath. In the face of such a peril, panic-ridden collective actions were taken. Since one of the most frequently supposed reasons was divine wrath, a penitent movement started to spread in these territories: the Flagellants, who practised self-flagellation as they walked in procession. This collective frenzy also quickly merged into an attempt to punish the ‘culprits’ who brought the poisonous infection, and the Jewish communities became the scapegoats of this religiously inspired violence. The years following the Black Death witnessed the deadliest series of pogroms in medieval Catalonia, France and above all in Germany; according to the accusations the plague was spread by the poisoning of the wells – a Jewish conspiracy to exterminate Christians. Another, less harmful religious reaction was the emergence of the cult of ‘plague saints’, St Sebastian and later St Roche, as well as the rise of the cult of the Virgin, whose mantle protected Christians from the plague. A further religious explanation for the plague was eschatological in character; Pestilence was, after all, one of the ‘four horsemen’ of the Apocalypse. Besides these social, psychological and religious reactions to the plague, its causes and remedies were researched by doctors and intellectuals of the age. Forty-nine masters of the Paris University held a consilium in 1348, in which they examined the presumed celestial and terrestrial causes of the plague: astrological conjunctions and miasma – poisoned air. This first, most popular explanation was followed by a large number of plague tracts, which also presented the plague as a realm of memory: references to local memories outweigh the generic explanations by experts. The memory of past plagues was perpetuated by testaments and pious bequests. The growing efficiency of administrative means of self-protection, police measures, the

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public health initiatives, the implementation of quarantine (a mechanism of power noted by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish) – all the accumulated knowledge of the handling of such problems – likewise preserve this memory. It was not until the recurrence of the plague in Marseille in 1720, a dramatic episode which marked the last appearance of this re-emerging threat, that the plague became a ‘realm of memory’ in the true sense. The outbreaks of cholera, a deadly new pandemic disease, in the 1830s, revived the Black Death in the collective memory. The German historian of medicine Justin Hecker published his book Der schwarze Tod in 1832, which became the foundation stone of the new science of epidemiology. Hecker saw the history of epidemics as a hitherto unnoticed force for historical change and progress, with a greater influence on the course of world history than wars or politics. Another innovation by Hecker was to assess the social impact of the Black Death, the ‘unbridled demoniacal passions,’ the processions of the Flagellants and the hideous pogroms against the Jewish communities. Hecker’s vision, founded on the combination of scientific inquiry into natural events and a document-based exploration of social and psychological effects, came to dominate historical research on plagues until our time. Nineteenth-century scholarship made important progress regarding the plague. The question of which of the two supposed causes of the plague, miasma (corrupt air), or contagion, was responsible for spreading the disease, was long debated. When a new wave of the disease appeared in the east, in Hong Kong, the Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin identified the bacterium responsible for the bubonic plague (later named Yersinia pestis in his honour). A French microbiologist, P.-L. Simond, then verified that the principal carriers of the bacteria were rats, and the fleas were the agents, which transmitted them to humans. The ensuing debates over microbiology have persisted to this day. Was the most deadly and contagious Black Death indeed caused by Yersonia pestis? What of the possibility of other epidemics, such as anthrax or Ebola? Or a combination of bubonic, pneumonic plague and typhus, smallpox and respiratory infections? Through the systematic comparison of the different pandemic diseases in human history, this enduring twentieth-century debate has contributed significantly to turning the Black Death into a universal realm of memory. In the twentieth century, Hecker’s heritage also continued on another plane: the interpretation of the Black Death as a symptom of a late medieval societal and cultural crisis, which could lead, after horrible destruction, to a spectacular renewal. Friedell’s Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit provided a vivid panorama of the plague catastrophe as a prelude to the ‘dawn of the world’: the Renaissance. A similar vision inspired the famous monograph by Millard Meiss in 1951: Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death; it was probably also stimulated by the renewed experience of a mighty cataclysm, the Second World War, and the ensuing reconstruction. According to that author, the crisis caused by the plague and the macabre visions of the Triumph of Death contributed to the creation of a new form and new artistic content after Giotto. The novel La Peste by Camus (1947) and the dramatic panorama in the film The Seventh Seal by Bergman (1957) also drew on the plague memory. Finally, the vogue for plague scholarship, which emerged in

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the 1960s, continues to maintain its status as a collective memory, which has been given a new intensity by the genre of microhistory. How does all this relate to the figure of the wolf as juxtaposed to the plague in the title of this essay? They are generally connected by the fact that they both triggered the intense panic aroused by the destructive forces of nature. Wolves also represented a mortal danger in medieval and modern Europe; they had to be combatted for centuries. There also happens to be a slender historical link between the two; according to some popular beliefs, the wolf was the personification of the demon that caused the plague. Yet wolves were rarely claimed to be the real carriers of the disease; instead, domestic dogs and cats were suspected of this, and they were sometimes killed as a preventive measure. Following discoveries in modern microbiology, rats have definitively taken the place of dogs and cats as agents of plague transmission. Yet there are many crucial differences between the plague and the wolf. First, the attitude shown by humans towards this prominent predator, a powerful symbol of the wilderness, was far from being purely negative. The founding myth of Rome is that of the twin brothers Romulus and Remus fed by a she-wolf – the festival of Lupercalia perpetuated this memory throughout Antiquity. Wolves were raised in early medieval Nordic societies; Odin himself was a type of wolf god. For the Vikings and for the Gauls, wolves symbolized martial identity; this is what explains their lasting use in name-giving and heraldry. In Charlemagne’s capitulary of 813, it was stipulated that each county was to have 2 luparii, who were to send the emperor the pelts of killed wolves every year, for which they would be remunerated. Medieval chronicles mention awe-inspiring wolves who killed several dozens of humans. At the same time, legends of hermits and saints abound with stories in which this wild enemy is tamed; the most famous of these is the story of Saint Francis of Assisi taming the wolf of Gubbio. The ambivalence towards wolves gradually turned into extreme hostility: at the end of the Middle Ages the wolf became the principal enemy in the wilderness. In 1395, Charles IV authorized French people ‘of any estate to kill and chase all wolves and she-wolves’. In 1583, Henry III obliged every household in each parish to send out a man three times a year to kill wolves. The systematic annihilation of wolves was initiated in Early Modern Europe. The dreadful werewolf, a being who periodically transforms into a savage wolf and attacks humans, emerges in this context of the ‘war on wolves’. During the period of large-scale Early Modern witchcraft prosecutions, the image of this shapeshifting creature absorbed all the negative anthropomorphic characteristics of this animal, and in the inquisitorial reports of certain spectacular trials in France and Germany the figure becomes a bloodthirsty monster. The extermination of wolves continued. Panic over murderous wolves, such as the fear aroused in 1764 by the ‘Beast of Gévaudan’ (a village in central France), an extraordinarily aggressive animal whose main victims were children, triggered intensive action. The real change in this field was brought by the revolution, which armed the peasants, gave them hunting rights and offered payment for each killed

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wolf – throughout the nineteenth century wolves were killed in France by the tens of thousands and came close to extinction. At the same time, the fear of wolves was eternalized by folktales, popularized in the fables of La Fontaine and later by the Brothers Grimm. Every child in modern Europe is familiar with the frightening wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. The story of Mowgli in Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894) only partially counterbalances this fearsome memory. To conclude, let us turn back to the comparison between these two realms of memory. Wolves, who have claimed the lives of a few tens of thousands of human beings throughout European history, seem perhaps more alive in human memory than the terrible plagues that reduced the population within and beyond Europe by the hundreds of millions. A possible reason for this could be that the confrontation with these prime predators and the ultimate victory over them is a meaningful epic with a happy conclusion. The wolves invested with anthropomorphic qualities seem to be all too human (‘Homo homini lupus est – Man is wolf to man’ as Thomas Hobbes put it, drawing on the ancient proverb). The lasting antagonism between man and wolf embodies the opposition between nature and culture, wilderness and civilization. The memory of this long fight is that of a victory of humanity over brutish animal impulses, a struggle that has a psychological significance and traumatic memories for humans, also reflected in the beliefs associated with werewolves – as Sigmund Freud and Robert Eisler recognized. Compared with these meaningful memories, the shock generated by the Black Death and histories of the plague in general offer less material to enable us to come to terms with this danger – the stories can only speak of unavoidable loss or fortunate survival. Human efforts to understand the causes and find remedies met with failure for a considerable time. When modern discoveries emerged and the plague (more or less) vanished, there was a greater urge to forget than to remember. However, the plague is still an active realm of memory; the fear of experiencing different forms of plague remains alive.

NOTE 1. Timothy Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Press, 2006), pp. 54–63.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Biraben, Jean-Noël, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, Paris, La Haye, 1975. Getz, Faye Marie Getz, ‘Black Death and the Silver Lining’, Journal of the History of Biology 24, no. 2 (1991): 265–89. Pluskowski, Aleksander, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2006.

CHAPTER 12

Church towers and belfries ‘Works and Days’ ÉTIENNE FRANÇOIS

Church bells have punctuated the days of Europe’s inhabitants for centuries. Located at the heart of the village or the city, church towers and belfries have embodied European religious and community identities. Elements of architectural heritage, they are now no more than a realm of memory associated with a Christianity whose influence is declining. No one has described the significance that a church tower could have for the majority of Europeans in the late nineteenth century with greater clarity than Marcel Proust. The narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu recalls the sight of Combray’s church steeple, seen from the train in which he would travel there from Paris with his parents as a child in the week before Easter: ‘The steeple of Saint-Hilaire could be distinguished from a long way off, inscribing its unforgettable form upon a horizon against which Combray had not yet appeared.’1 At first, therefore, only the steeple can be seen – a distant, solitary landmark and a distinctive signal. As the train approaches, notes the narrator, the view begins to grow clearer: Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it from the railway [. . .], was no more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherdess gathers her sheep, the woolly grey backs of its huddled houses, which the remains of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting.2 The steeple is now no longer alone; it becomes one with the church, which, in its turn, gathers the town around it, giving it meaning, shape and shelter, like an image of the Virgin Mary with her cloak spread wide.

‘THE FINGER OF GOD’ Combray’s church steeple is living stone, a symbol of transcendence and eternity. It charms and captivates that major figure in the narrator’s life, his grandmother:

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Often in the Square, as we came home, my grandmother would make me stop to look up at it. [. . .] I think, too, that in a confused way [she] found in the steeple of Combray what she prized above anything else in the world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinction. Ignorant of architecture, she would say: ‘My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face that pleases me. If it could play the piano, I’m sure it wouldn’t sound tinny’. And when she gazed up at it, when her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent inclination of its stony slopes which drew together as they rose, like hands joined in prayer, she would absorb herself so utterly in the effusion of the spire that her gaze seemed to leap upwards with it.3 And wherever one might go, continues the narrator, at one with his grandmother in her contemplations and sensibility: It was always to the steeple that one must return, always the steeple that dominated everything else, summoning the houses from an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the finger of God, whose body might have been concealed below among the crowd of humans without fear of my confusing it with them.4 As he had previously stated: ‘It was the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that shaped and crowned and consecrated every occupation, every hour of the day, every view in the town.’5 Far from being limited to Combray, those marvellous descriptions can be applied to the whole of Europe. As any tourist will have observed, from Ireland to Russia and from Norway to Sicily, every European village has a church in its centre, with a tower overlooking it and signalling its presence on the horizon. In the words of a Belgian proverb: ‘The bell tower must be in the middle of the village.’ This ubiquitous presence of church towers is the legacy of a history that dates back over a thousand years. It is reflected in historical maps, where until the eighteenth century, villages and market towns were represented by stylized images of bell towers in different sizes. These were later used by surveyors in the triangulation processes from which modern maps originated.

OMNIPRESENCE AND DIVERSITY In the same way, from the Late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, the church tower was an obligatory element in paintings depicting landscapes and scenes of rural life. Examples include those shown in the fourteenth-century fresco series entitled The Allegory of Good and Bad Government painted in Siena by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the four bell towers dotted about the countryside featured in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Hunters in the Snow (1565), the church tower in El Greco’s View of Toledo (ca. 1599), the Gothic spires that emerge from the mist in Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape (1811), the cathedral spire in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, painted by John Constable in 1831, and the wooden Orthodox Church in the centre of the painting Above the Eternal Peace by Isaac Levitan (1893). Old engravings, paintings and early photographs attest to the whole multitude of towers, each outdoing the last, to be found in cities. In Autumn Leaves (1831),

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Victor Hugo describes Rouen as ‘the city of ancient streets / Of ancient towers, the remains of bygone peoples, / The city of a hundred church towers, bells pealing through the air’. And if one believes the claim made by Napoleon in a letter sent to the Empress Marie-Louise just after his triumphant entry into Moscow in September 1812, the Russian city boasted sixteen hundred! Yet the omnipresence of church towers is no indication of uniformity. In addition to the Gothic or neo-Gothic towers crowned with a steeple or a spire, we should not forget the very large number of Romanesque bell towers incorporated into the western façades of churches or surmounting the inter-transept. They are geometric in form, their levels composed of semicircular bays and are topped by squat roofs. In many cases, they date back to the very origins of this architectural form, as church towers were not a widespread feature before the eleventh century; this was a time when, in the words of the chronicler Raoul Glaber, ‘Christianity clothed itself in a white mantle of churches’. There are also the bell-tower porches, in the form of a square tower featuring plain, flat roofing (as seen e.g. in English villages), the campanile erected beside Italian churches (in Venice, Pisa and Florence, for instance) and the Baroque bell towers of southern Germany, Austria and Central Europe, each crowned with a bulbous dome. Then there are the high bell towers that soar skywards from Orthodox churches and cathedrals, and those other towers, topped with gilded onion domes, that echo the central dome of those very same churches. There are the churches with just one bell tower, those with two-tower façades (as in Normandy) and even churches boasting several, such as the cathedrals of Bamberg and Naumburg, each of which has four – two on the façade and another two on either side of the apse. All told, these towers take infinitely varied forms; more than any other structure, they express the creativity and inventiveness of European religious architecture.

‘CHURCH TIME’ Wherever it may be located and whatever form it takes, the bell tower is inseparable from the church into which it is incorporated and which it completes. In the case of Combray, to quote Proust one more: ‘It was in its steeple that [the church] seemed most truly to find itself, to affirm its individual and responsible existence. It was the steeple that spoke for the church.’6 Indeed, the church tower’s primary function is religious in nature. In cities and rural areas alike, the church tower houses the bells, whose main purpose is to summon the faithful to celebrate Mass and to pray the Divine Office. There are etymological indications that these bronze bells may have been introduced throughout Europe in the seventh century by Irish missionary monks, as the Irish Gaelic for bell – clog – finds its echo in Germanic languages (Glocke in German, klok in Dutch and klocka in Swedish), and even in the Russian kolokol. Only the Mediterranean countries retained the Latin word campana. In 817, the Council of Aachen decreed that all parishes belonging to the Latin Church should have two bells; the reason why the towers were always

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higher than the churches was in order to ensure that the sound of the bells would carry as far as possible. They needed to be heard by the entire parish, as they also served to invite the faithful to pray the Angelus three times daily – morning, noon and evening – as seen in the famous painting by Jean-François Millet (1859). Alongside these regular, recurrent practices, the bells also signal the great religious feast days of the Liturgical year, characterized by the use of different rhythms and tones, with a hiatus from Holy Thursday to the Easter Vigil. But they likewise mark the major stages in the lives of every parishioner, from baptism to marriage to the funeral toll. From this perspective, the bell tower was the perfect agent, spreading and imposing on the whole of Christendom what Jacques Le Goff, in a milestone article, termed ‘Church Time’. Until the late eighteenth century, the sound of the bells – which, in contrast to present times, had no competition – coupled with the massive, central presence of the churches and the height of their towers, exceeding that of all other houses, clearly expressed the power of the Church as an institution and its unchallenged domination. This power was exerted over daily life, society and beliefs for over a thousand years. In fact, it was the church, both as an institution and a building, which founded parishes and gave them form; still today, the German word Gemeinde is used to denote both a community and a parish, as was the case with the French word paroisse until the Revolution. As a building, the church lay at the heart of a parish, particularly in rural areas, serving as the quintessential link between our world and the hereafter, and between the living and the dead, the latter being buried either inside the church itself or in its adjoining cemetery. For centuries, however, these buildings remained the property of the Church as an institution. They were owned by the Church alone (which is still the case in Germany, Italy and Spain), and the Church alone built and maintained them. This was achieved, among other means, through the tithes collected from the inhabitants of the parish. The Church also appointed the parish priests and, with the assistance of temporal powers, saw to it that the commands it issued to the faithful were obeyed by one and all.

THE SECULAR HOURS Although they were the property of the Church as an institution, manifestations of its power and dominance, the church buildings and their bell towers were nevertheless integral to the communities in which they were located. As a building, the church is the quintessential site of memory for a parish community; it is in the church that the community gathers every Sunday or on the great liturgical feast days, in the church, too, that each of its members is baptized and married, and where funerals are held for the deceased before they are buried, either inside the building itself or in the adjoining graveyard. Moreover, the pews bear the names of the various local families, and it is the priest who has charge of the parish registers, with their official written records of all the events in the history of parish life. In all, the church is

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a building whose architecture and interior decoration preserve the memories of centuries past so that it becomes, to quote Proust once more, an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space – the name of the fourth being Time – extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant.7 The church tower is also the quintessential witness to community life as a place of exchange and encounter – as with the lists of grievances known as the Cahiers de Doléances drawn up of the eve of the French Revolution – and consequently includes a social and political dimension. In addition, the bells it contains are used to mark the ‘secular’ hours of the day, and were also thought to keep hail and thunderstorms at bay, while tocsins were sounded to warn of dangers threatening the community, such as fires or, worse still, war. In 1914, church bells rang more or less all over Europe to announce mobilization for war. In situations of conflict, churches and their bell towers – which also served as lookout posts affording a good view of approaching enemies – were transformed into places of refuge. This was the case, for instance, with the inhabitants of the village of Poinson-lès-Fayl, in Burgundy, who in 1636 were obliged to take refuge in the village church, which was the only place they had that remained intact, and . . . in the said church, they, their wives and children slept, together with the small number of livestock they had left. From the bell tower of which place they defended themselves on several occasions against the enemies who presented themselves there in order to exert force on them.8 A large number of fortified churches were built in France during the Middle Ages, in the south, the Thiérache region and Lorraine. Their reinforced belfries, constructed in the form of watchtowers and in some cases even topped with crenellations, still bear witness to this usage today, as do the hundreds of fortified churches constructed in Transylvania during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Intended as a protection against the Turkish Menace, the most imposing of these – beginning with the example of the church at Biertan, with its three defensive walls – are included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites.

SPIRES: THE QUEST FOR HEIGHT In marked contrast to rural areas, which generally feature just one bell tower per parish, the towns and cities of modern and medieval Europe are characterized by the large number of bell towers and churches to be found there, even if this is only due to the fact that they encompass not one but several parishes. Many also contain a cathedral, as well as abbatial, collegiate or conventual churches, hence the frequently recurring topos of ‘the city of a hundred bell towers’ to be found in descriptions of the time. The height of these multitudes of city bell towers is equally significant. Symbols of a municipal ambition in which the praise of God is indissociable from a markedly secular quest for power and grandeur, they impose their presence through

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their size and loftiness. This is particularly true in the case of cathedrals. The Romanesque south tower of Chartres Cathedral is over one hundred metres high and made a deep impression on Charles Péguy during his pilgrimage from Paris. He sang its praises in his poem ‘Présentation de la Beauce à Notre-Dame de Chartres,’ hailing it as ‘the firmest ear of wheat that ever arose / Towards a sky of clemency and serenity’, and as an ‘irreproachable, infallible spire’. The quest for height reached its zenith during the Gothic period, when the principle of verticality was taken to extremes, in sharp contrast to the preference for horizontality displayed in Classical architecture. This triggered a competitive impulse, and the chief cities and architects of Western Christendom vied with each other in their attempts to create the highest spire. Those of the cathedrals of Strasbourg (1439) and Saint-Étienne de Vienne (1433) were the highest to be built in France during this period, measuring 142 and 137 metres, respectively. But Europe as a whole, from Salisbury to Riga, from Antwerp to Florence and from Gdańsk to Burgos, certainly contains a hundred or so Gothic cathedrals or churches whose bell towers are nearly – or over – one hundred metres high. These gravity-defying, soaring forms are richly decorated. Featuring filigree stonework and often topped with a small pinnacle, they tower over the cities that they symbolize. Yet they cannot efface the memory of those other spires, which failed to meet the mark, either because they were left unfinished, as with the south tower of Cologne Cathedral, whose construction remained in its initial stages from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, or because they collapsed, the most famous case being the 150-metre-high spire of Beauvais Cathedral. Built to surmount the inter-transept in 1569, it was the highest of its kind in Christendom after its completion, yet it collapsed in 1573.

THE BELFRY: A TEMPORAL TOWER The second difference between the city and rural localities is that urban communities, which enjoyed autonomy and wealth and were keen to assert their power, began to acquire their own bell towers in the twelfth century, in the form of belfries. Symbols of municipal liberty, they also housed the charters detailing a city’s exemptions and freedoms. They contained the bells that summoned the inhabitants to municipal debates, indicated the time through clock mechanisms that were often highly sophisticated and also signalled all the major events of city life, making them urban realms of memory. Some of these belfries were incorporated into a cathedral, as is the case with Metz and its Mutte Tower, which takes its name from the eight-tonne bell it houses; this was used to alert (ameuter in French) the urban population to fires and enemy attacks, as well to signal major celebrations. In the majority of cases, however, the belfries stand alone, independent and majestic; in some cities, they even tower over the churches and cathedral. In this way, they expressed the autonomy of temporal power and its distinction from that of the Church, thereby confirming that the urban space is indeed ‘the City of God and the City of men’ (Dominique Iogna-Prat). In most instances, these belfries are connected with, or even integrated into other elements of municipal architecture, such as covered markets and city halls. In the case of prosperous urban spaces, such as port and commercial cities,

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and even more so in that of urban republics, which extended their own authority over the lands around them, these belfries were a conspicuous sight. They stood out not only on account of their size but also because of their decoration, which magnified their urban identity, and their clocks, which punctuated the day according to the secular conception, thereby manifesting the autonomy of ‘merchant time’ in relation to ‘ Church time’. The belfries of northern France and Belgium included in UNESCO’s World Heritage List (among them those of Abbeville, Bruges, Cambrai, Dunkerque, Ghent, Tournai and Ypres) still bear witness to this, along with several other examples. They include the belfry in Rouen with its astronomical clock known as the Gros-Horloge, the observation tower that rises above the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and the 102-metre-high Torre del Mangia, which stands beside the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena; it dominates the large semicircular area, scene of the annual Palio horse races. In Poland, Krakow’s City Hall boasts a seventy-metre-high, late-thirteenth-century tower, while the monumental, flamboyant City Hall and its sixteenth-century tower dominate the market place in Wrocław (formerly known as Breslau). This list, which could easily be extended, includes Prague’s majestic Old Town Hall tower; also seventy metres high, it is incorporated into a collection of Gothic and Renaissance buildings and features an impressive early fifteenth-century astronomical clock.

THE ARCHITECTURAL COUNTEROFFENSIVE The pre-eminence of church towers remained unchallenged for centuries, their sole rivals being the city belfries. However, their supremacy gradually diminished with the advent of the Renaissance. The new churches built during this period, whose architecture and façades were inspired by the Classical rules of harmony, reflected the preference for domes; if they still included bell towers, these were no longer as high. This change in perception became more marked in the late eighteenth century. In Revolutionary France, bell towers risked destruction as symbols of fanaticism and superstition; their bells were often taken away to be melted down and made into cannon, both during the revolution itself and during the empire. Although this episode was brief and localized, it nevertheless reveals a more profound transformation. The questioning of the Church’s legal status, the gradual recognition of freedom of conscience, the acceptance of religious pluralism and the secularization process then beginning to emerge all affected the religious, cultural and social foundations on which the pre-eminence of the bell tower and the church had been based, at both a sacred and community level. Faced with this danger, the initial reaction of the clergy and the political powers that supported them was to conduct a form of architectural and spiritual counteroffensive. This reached its peak towards the mid-nineteenth century and continued into the early twentieth. In rural areas, more or less all of which were then reaching their maximum population levels, existing churches were either enlarged or replaced with bigger edifices. Towns, which continued to experience increasingly rapid population growth, were also provided with new churches to meet this challenge. In this way, around forty Protestant churches were built in Berlin at the initiative of the Empress AugustaVictoria between 1884 and 1908.

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More churches were probably built in Europe during this period than at any other time. Whatever the dominant faith, the majority of these, together with their accompanying bell towers, were built in a neo-Gothic style; more so than any other, this expressed the ambition to restore an idealized form of Christianity. Local initiatives, backed by municipal powers and national heritage preservation institutions, were launched in the major cities. These were intended to restore damaged spires and even, in some cases, to complete abandoned construction work. The most spectacular example of these restorations was that of the 151-metre-high cast iron spire of Rouen Cathedral, built between 1825 and 1876. Work on constructing Cologne Cathedral, which had remained unfinished since 1530, was resumed in 1842 at the initiative of a local committee backed by the Prussian monarchy. The operation was completed in 1880, with the extension of the nave and the construction of a two-tower façade. The tallest building in the world in its day, it survived the bombings and destructions of the Second World War without undergoing significant damage. A similar case in point is that of Saint Vitus Cathedral in Prague, which had likewise remained unfinished since the Late Middle Ages. It was completed in 1929, eleven years after Czechoslovakia became independent. However, although these operations completed the plans that had been made in medieval times, the motivations involved were different, insofar as patrimonial and political considerations far outweighed religious ones. The cathedral’s primary purpose during these processes was to be a site of memory for the nation and its culture.

‘THE DEAR FACE OF MY PAST’ Quite rapidly, however, with the beginnings of the industrialization process and the rural exodus, followed by the decline in religious practices, these new churches and their bell towers lost the significance they had had in days gone by. In the words of the historian Philippe Boutry, the bell tower was formerly ‘the quintessential architectural sign of the memory of a thousand years of Christian life rooted in a region, in the feeling of belonging to a community and to a Church, and in a daily connection with the sacred’. However, as he rightly noted, this all gave way to ‘the fragmented history of beliefs and practices, of fidelities, of detachments and desertions – to a modernity of morally autonomous behaviour and individualised spiritual orientations’. City churches now only bring together a section of the population, often minority communities. They are only sites of memory for those who frequent them and identify with them. There is a growing divergence between those who continue to regard them as sacred places, and the increasingly large number of people who see them purely in terms of heritage, culture and identity. In country areas, depopulated by the rural exodus and even more affected by the decline in religious practices, the desacralization and loss of significance of bell towers and churches are still more dramatic in their consequences. A full church is the exception, rather than the rule, and they usually stand empty. In the early twentieth century, Maurice Barrès lamented the ‘Great Pity of the churches of France’. Rather than using arguments of a religious and community-orientated nature as the basis of his appeal, he emphasized the ‘national treasure’ represented by the ‘beautiful chain of French

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art’. His successful campaign contributed to the legislation for the protection of historic monuments passed in 1913. Yet it also clearly shows the depth of the change that had occurred in the meantime. Sites of memory associated with a bygone rural past, the church and its bell tower are now simply sites of nostalgia, as expressed by Charles Trenet in the song Que reste-t-il de nos amours? (What Remains of Our Love?) recorded in 1942: A small village, an old church tower / A landscape so well hidden / And, seen in a cloud, the dear face / Of my past.

NOTES 1. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. I, Swann’s Way, translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library Edition, published by Random House, Inc., 1992 [1913]), p. 85. 2. Ibid., p. 65. 3. Ibid., pp. 86–7. 4. Ibid., pp. 90–1. 5. Ibid., p. 88. 6. Ibid., p. 87. 7. Ibid., p. 83. 8. Quoted by Philippe Boutry, ‘Le clocher’, in Les Lieux de mémoire, t. III: Les France, vol. 2: Traditions, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 76.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bindig, Günter, Was ist Gotik? Eine Analyse der gotischen Kirchen in Frankreich, England und Deutschland, 1140–1350, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000. Boutry, Philippe, ‘Le clocher’, in Pierre Nora (Ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, t.III: Les France, vol. 2: Traditions, Paris, Gallimard, 1992, pp. 56–89. Corbin, Alain, Les Cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes du XIXe siècle, Paris, Albin Michel, 1994. Dohrn-Van Rossum, Gerhard, Die Geschichte der Stunde. Uhren und moderne Zeitordnungen, Cologne, Anaconda, 2007. François, Étienne, ‘Die Kirchen’, in Christoph Markschies and Hubert Wolf (Eds.), Erinnerungsorte den Christentums, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2010, pp. 707–24. Iogna-Prat, Dominique, Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes. L’Église et l’architecture de la société, 1200–1500, Paris, PUF, 2016. Kieckhefer, Richard, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. Le Goff, Jacques, ‘Au Moyen Âge: temps de l’Église et temps des marchands’, Annales ESC (1960): 417–33.

CHAPTER 13

The public square A beating heart ÉTIENNE FRANÇOIS

The Place de la Bastille in Paris, Trafalgar Square in London, Krasnaya Ploshchad’ in Moscow, Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kiev, the Piazza San Pietro in Rome; there is no city in Europe whose history is not associated with a square in the collective memory. The fact that the European public square is a realm of memory is apparent from the outset, through its etymology. Its Classical origins are reflected in the Latin languages (piazza in Italian, plaza in Spanish), as well as in a number of Germanic tongues (Platz in German, plads in Danish). They are also to be to found in Slavonic languages (ploshchad’ in Russian and płac in Polish). Its name is connected with both ancient Greek – plateia, meaning a broad way or a street, and Latin – platea, a public square. Descending from the Greek agora and the Roman forum, which remain its primary references to this day, the European public square is, in the words of the Swiss geographer Bertrand Lévy, the place where the urbs and the civitas coincide. The civitas is the city associated with the human community that peoples the public space, like the Roman forum, which did indeed serve multiple purposes (political, civic, religious, commercial and so on). But it is also an obvious manifestation of the urbs, that is, the physical city, and, as such, it structures the urban layout.1 It is also a realm of memory in that it reflects all the processes involving the reassignment of monuments that a city or a state has conducted there over the centuries – this is the case with all the squares that ‘make’ a capital city, in Paris as in Prague. It is primarily the place where the streets and roadways leading to it all converge, the place where the inhabitants of the city itself, as well as all the visitors it attracts, meet and gather. It is also the place where the objects produced, imported and exported by the city are exchanged and sold. In this way, every European town has its marketplace; the more extensive its influence, the more splendid the square. This was the case, for instance, with towns and cities that held fairs; these formed a network that structured the whole of Europe in the Middle Ages. One of the

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finest cases in point is the main market place in Krakow, which dates back to the thirteenth century. Its dimensions are impressive (each of its sides measures two hundred metres), it is surrounded by arcades and noblemen’s residences and boasts a majestic, enlarged textile trading hall – the Cloth Hall – which was decorated by Italian architects during the Renaissance.

A THEATRE FOR THE CITY In every case, likewise, public squares are places where the city puts itself on display, expressing its civic pride and affirming its desire for autonomy, modelled on the example of ancient Rome. Prime examples are the Piazza del Campo in Siena and the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, whose layout is emulated throughout Europe. At the height of its glory in the late sixteenth century, the Free Imperial City of Augsburg completely redesigned its City Hall Square, drawing on its ancient heritage, its wealth, its internationally renowned commerce, the huge success of its textile industry and its splendid tradition of arts and crafts. The square was enlarged, and a magnificent Renaissance-style city hall was built next to the municipal belfry. This replaced the former city hall, which had been built in the Gothic style. In addition, a fountain was erected in the centre; this was surmounted by the statue of the city’s founder, whose name it still bears – the Emperor Augustus. The public square very quickly became the location where the powers that dominated a city and sought to assert their authority over it emphasized their presence. That authority might be the Church, especially in cases where the city in question was the seat of a bishopric, the prime example being Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. It might be a princely or a central power, the latter case being increasingly widespread from the late Middle Ages onwards. This explains the large number of geometrically formed public squares created in the hearts of capital cities. They were inspired by the royal squares in Paris and, like the harmonious Place Stanislas in Nancy (originally the Place Louis-XV), served to display a statue of the sovereign in his majesty. In the Place Stanislas, for example, this stands in a central position, the square surrounded by buildings reflecting the royal power. As it carries so much significance, the public square is the quintessential centre of rivalry involving appropriation and power struggles, revolutions and repressions. This is reflected in the frequent changes of name and the architectural, monumental and symbolic restructurings that continue to affect the majority to this day. The Old Town Square in Prague was a seat of municipal power and became a major centre of Hussitism in the fifteenth century, after the execution of the Czech theologian Jan Hus, convicted of heresy at the Council of Constance and burnt alive in 1415. After the Battle of White Mountain (1620), it became emblematic of the reappropriation of Bohemia by the Catholic Church and the Habsburgs. In the early twentieth century, it became central to Czech identity and independence regained, the memorial to Jan Hus erected in the middle of the square replacing the column featuring the statue of the Madonna put up in the early seventeenth century. The same is true of the Parisian squares, which were places expressive of harmony or sites of execution, as seen with regime after regime, each of which made effective

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use of symbolism; this strategy was deployed once more, to powerful effect, during the French Revolution of 1789. The city square is to be found all over the world and has now become a global site of memory. Beijing’s Tiananmen Square is still associated with the 1989 prodemocracy demonstrations – and with their violent repression. In 2013, Istanbul’s Taksim Square became a centre of protest against the authoritarianism of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However, European public squares, in comparison with others throughout the world, are distinguished as much by the degree of artistic and architectural achievement they display as by the interlocking layers of history and memory they reflect. And, just as they are sites of complex memory, they are also sites of freedom.

NOTE 1. Bertrand Lévy, ‘La place urbaine en Europe comme lieu idéal’, in Lieux d’Europe, ed. Stella Ghervas, François Rosset (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2008).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coubier, Heinz, Europäische Stadt-Plätze: Genius und Geschichte, Cologne, DuMont, 1985. Topalov, Christian, Laurent Coudroy de Lille, Jean-Charles Depaule and Brigitte Marin (Eds.), L’Aventure des mots de la ville à travers le temps, les langues, les sociétés, Paris, Robert Laffont, coll. ‘Bouquins’, 2010. Zucker, Paul, Town and Square: From the Agora to the Village Green, New York, Columbia University Press, 1959.

CHAPTER 14

The city A space of freedom PIERRE MONNET

The European city is more than just a place; it is also a discourse, a form, an idea. Embodying both individual freedom and a certain middle-class type of order, it has given us the public library, the café and the museum, while the term ‘urbanity’ perfectly encapsulates the essence it conveys. Yet, although the vast majority of Europeans now live their lives there, the city is in danger of becoming the theatre and vehicle of the upheavals of the day, after having served throughout history as a refuge in times of trouble. How should we characterize the city and its inhabitants today? The level of simplicity contained within this question is matched only by the level of difficulty experienced in finding a reply. Demographically, culturally, socially and politically, the city occupies a significant place in everyday life, both in spatial terms and in relation to the government of contemporary societies. So much so, in fact, that the phenomenon saturates our experiences, our collective representations, our memories and the discourse of the social sciences tasked with documenting it. Whereas in 1950 just 30 per cent of the global population lived in functional urban units – in other words, non-agricultural centres containing over two thousand inhabitants − that proportion rose to 54 per cent in 2015. In this way, the population explosion that occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century also took the form of a global urban explosion affecting all parts of the world, which now contains 23 urban areas with over 10 million residents, and 850 containing between 500,000 and 10 million inhabitants. Historically, Europe was a cradle of urbanism and urbanity – although certainly not the only one, or the most ancient – and it forms part of this general shift. Today, 73 per cent of its inhabitants live in cities, the proportion rising to 80 per cent in northern countries (Germany, France and Britain). Urban dominance is less pronounced in the case of Central European and Mediterranean regions (65 per cent) and the Balkans (55 per cent). Despite the familiarity of our cities’ architecture and culture (all the result of the major medieval urbanization programme), evident from Barcelona, Paris and London to Budapest, Krakow and Riga, and even more

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apparent when contrasted with New York, Mumbai, Mombasa, Cairo, Rio or Beijing, several different versions of urban Europe continue to exist, as is manifested in their demographic make-up, morphology and development. The new cities of post-1945 Western Europe and those of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Eastern Bloc provide ample evidence of this. Nevertheless, here as elsewhere, the city has become home to the overwhelming majority of the population, representing its hopes and expectations. It the chief focus of government development policies, while most of the problems relating to housing, violence, pollution, segregation and displacement characteristic of postmodern societies are concentrated within the urban area. What with ‘rurbanization’ and reruralization, vanishing boundary lines, the practice of remote working, permanent communication and the blurring and globalization of landmarks and histories, the city seems to have invaded the entirety of the political, cultural, ecological and social space to such an extent that a number of experts are even beginning to cast doubt on its independent existence. Or at least, they doubt its definition and its status as a specific entity, at a time when the city perceived in terms of a way of life is absorbing and encompassing the concept of the city as a living space, particularly as we embark on the third millennium.

THE CITY AS A LABORATORY This has not always been the case. For almost two thousand years, the contemporaries of Emperor Augustus, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor Charles V, Peter the Great and even Queen Victoria, all had the tangible experience of the city as a distinct and homogenous unit, legally defined and spatially demarcated. It has often been conceived, through the imaginary associated with it, as being ‘counter to’ the country estate, the village, the forest, the castle and the monastery – that is, to the isolated, the dangerous, the unknown, the solitary and the ephemeral. In short, it has been viewed in terms of culture as opposed to nature, according to the Western conception of this dichotomy. That distinctive historical character was reinforced by urban layout. All over Europe, cities began to develop concentrically around a nucleus, forming a contrast to the square contour characterizing the late medieval era (as with the bastides of south-west France and the eastern European cities colonized by the Germanic peoples) and to the star-shaped fortified city of the Modern Period. This resulted in a distinguishing pre-eminence; from the very outset, the city served as both a laboratory and a model, a situation common to the whole of Europe. As Leonardo Benevolo aptly remarked, ‘The cities of Europe were born with Europe and, in a sense, they gave birth to it.’1 A comment of this type conveys a number of meanings. From a historical viewpoint, for instance, it suggests that the European city – perhaps more than any other – retains an accumulation of architectural, spatial and archaeological layers, together with layers of memory. These are the enduring imprints of the acts carried out by the various administrations responsible for creating and managing the city, and at the same time, they enable us to retrace the different ways in which the

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citizens used the urban area, in the spatial, social and ideological sense. In other words: ‘A city’s materiality is marked by the continuous action of time and almost all of the urban inventory is part of history.’2 But the perception of a city formed of historical imprints conceived as a series of contrasts between different rates of development – or rather, the conception of a society as having the same type of relationship with its space as it does with its past – is a recent one. We may be sure that it is closely connected to the scientific approach to history established in the 1800s; in this way, the modern conception of a city is imbued with an ideologically constructed view of the past; the social significations it ascribes to urban spaces do not reflect the reality of ancient, medieval or pre-modern cities. One example may serve to confirm this. From the Age of Antiquity more or less until the conflicts of the nineteenth century, an attacker would usually besiege, then conquer a city; the destruction of Carthage became symbolic for its exceptional character, both as a warning and a source of outrage. By contrast, as we know, the wars of the twentieth century were so ideological and all-encompassing in nature that the aim was to annihilate cities, in some cases down to the last stone. This was not only intended to weaken economic activity, strike at the population and disrupt the business of the state but equally to destroy the capital that represented the ideology, civilization and memory of an entire country. The Germany of 1945 bears witness to this in the most striking and sinister fashion, not to speak of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the other side of the world. In the same perspective, the rearrangements that have taken place in the last two or three decades in both East and West European city centres, with a focus on heritage and pedestrian areas, clearly reflect the cultural and social demand for a return to the flamboyant origins of these cities’ histories, setting aside the risk of museification involved. These initiatives have endowed the (long) medieval era with reparative and restorative attributes and play no small part in the inscription of such ‘rediscovered’ cities on UNESCO’s World Heritage List; examples include Carcassonne, Kiev and, indeed, Istanbul. Yet at the same time, they have triggered lively debates on policies and urban planning.

THE CITY AS A WITNESS It is no coincidence that the observation previously quoted came from the pen of an Italian historian (who was also an architect and urban designer), since Italy has been upheld for centuries as the the birthplace of the European city. The second meaning attached to his comment relates to the European tradition of casting cities in the role of a driving and pioneering force, generating grand narratives on processes of civilization, socialization, modernization and rationalization. These were shared both by historians of the urban condition, from Jakob Burckhardt to Jacques Le Goff, including Henri Pirenne and, in his way, Fernand Braudel, and by sociologists and philosophers: Max Weber, Norbert Elias and, to some extent, Jürgen Habermas, not forgetting Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The university, that daughter of the city, has conducted continuous reflections on the urban phenomenon, which has therefore been integrated into the major interpretations of European

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history and culture. As the conveyor of values ceaselessly undergoing renewal, the middle-class city dweller has therefore come to be regarded as the first historical agent of transformation to act on the societies of Europe’s past. The third consequence of a history of Europe written from the perspective of its cities is that the definition and conception of the city itself will eventually be affected. Now as, in previous eras, the city is still envisaged and experienced as a complex and comprehensive ensemble, as a system, space and ‘place’, as a meaning-form that joins together the concepts of the bourgeois and the citizen, of urban government, of the city as a network of imprints and experiences and as an imaginary and ideological configuration slowly consolidating over time. These processes are ultimately based on the shared foundation of the Aristotelian definition, whereby Athens is the centre of democracy and power. From this perspective, the city (which translates as polis in Greek, denoting both the urban space and the social body inhabiting it) enables humankind to live a better life and transforms man into a political animal: ‘The community which is the highest of all, and which encompasses all the rest, aims highest, that is, at the good with the most authority. That is what is known as the city-state, or political community’ (Aristotle, Politics, I, 1252). This triple dimension – historical, relating to the collective memory, and conceptual – noted by Leonardo Benevolo accounts for the fact that European writings on urban history closely follow the detours and turnarounds of European historiography itself. They alternate between histories of the state and the nation, supposedly conveyed by nineteenth-century cities and their middle-class inhabitants, economic and social histories of the twentieth century’s major political and technological advances, which occurred in an essentially urban context, and cultural and spatial histories of globalization and transfer also involving the cities of the twenty-first century.

ANCIENT SOURCES If the city can blend into European history, its patchwork of different temporalities constantly reactivated through our daily processes as urban beings, it can therefore shed light on the memory of that history in its own original ways. One of these – by no means the least important – involves combining several traditions and imaginaries. Indeed, to emphasize the point, a long-term history of European urban life must take into account perennial and sometimes weighty references, drawn from two sources. The first of these is the Age of Antiquity. Athens and later Rome both defined themselves as urban civilizations, with all things, in some fashion, beginning and ending through the city. Indeed, the city of Rome came to designate the empire as a whole, pars pro toto. In this way, the Sack of Rome in 410 CE continues to be seen as the traditional dividing line between the ancient and the medieval worlds, while the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople/Byzantium in 1453 might be regarded as the true end of the long history of Romanity in Europe. The second reference, which is both material and idealistic in nature, is based on Jerusalem. The quintessential Holy City, it is nonetheless ‘extra-Occidental’

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and ‘extra-European’, so from this standpoint, it has a dreamlike, inaccessible quality. Western medieval Latin and Christian civilization therefore perceived its principal, original centre and the focus of its eschatological speculations as being located on its periphery rather than at its heart; this has had a bearing on both the creations and the representations of urban life. If we also include Alexandria and Babylon among these references, those great cities that were ‘historically’ recognized and constantly recalled during the long medieval millennium, we see that, mutatis mutandis, the Western city long remained an Eastern import. This is likewise fundamentally true of Christianity itself and of the writings so closely connected with it. This assertion also contains a second paradox. During the period between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, Europe experienced a widespread urbanization movement, involving the planning and building of large numbers of cities – and we still retain the network established at that time. They constantly remind us of these ancient origins, sometimes through historiographical accounts, with those urban, and later princely and royal chronicles that endowed them with a mythical status; according to legend, for instance, Paris was founded by the Prince of Troy. And yet it must be said that the educated members of the ancient world, who were so immersed in urban life, produced no specific discourse or ideological literature devoted to the city. While they can certainly be credited with all the related land surveying, planning and architecture, they developed nothing resembling an urban theory or a reflection on the city’s dominance over every nonurban area. Nevertheless, European cities dating from that period of Antiquity still bear its traces – they include Nîmes, Segovia, Trier, Milan, York and Split, as well as Rome and Athens. Although not all those traces are architectural in form, they are, at least, toponymic and relate to the collective memory. Moreover, they have generated a number of legacies and constants that still form part of our current collective urban imaginary: the importance accorded to aesthetic appeal; the concentration of monumental buildings marrying ornamentation with utility and distributed according to road layout; the notion that being associated with the city constitutes a distinctive and meliorative cultural and social criterion; the idea of the city as a centre of administration, justice, trade, documentation and finance; the inextricable link forged between production and consumption; the formation of the urban networks characteristic of a city (as with the succession of Greek and Roman colonies along the Mediterranean coastline) or of a central power, urban archipelagos being structured and therefore ranked according to their proximity to the centre; the gradual yet decisive distinction made between private, public and sacred space, and the emergence within the population of a hierarchy and a socio-topography that established distinctions between the ‘low’, the ‘middle’ and the ‘high’ ranking. A good many of these characteristic criteria would clearly fit into a present-day definition of the contemporary city. Until the nineteenth century, indeed, the possession of ancient monuments was essential to the dignity of a city, endowing it with a measure of superiority. Ultimately, this demonstrates the extent to which urban Europe remained influenced over the centuries by the demarcation system of the ancient Roman limes.

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THE MEDIEVAL SOURCE However, the city presented to visitors and European residents alike is no longer that of the ancient world, despite recent virtual reconstructions facilitated by digital images and plans, and despite the vestiges unearthed by practitioners of preventive archaeology, a domain currently experiencing a major renewal. Rome itself is a perfect illustration of this. Although it could have displayed an enormous number of ancient imprints, the forum was torn apart by pickaxe-wielding fascists in the 1930s. They were led by Benito Mussolini, who described his ‘restoration’ work as ‘the war we prefer’ during the inauguration of the recreated Ara Pacis on 23 September 1938. Nowadays, tour guides direct the gaze of historically minded visitors towards the vestiges of the medieval city − and also, incidentally, to the modern Rome. In a sense, the powerful and still ongoing association between the Middle Ages and the collective memory of the European city might even be seen as the result of a twofold triumph. As well as the very real victory of the medieval city’s performance as it turned towards its future, it triumphantly captured the imagination with the aid of chronicles, images and travel narratives, creating an enduring memory and a past for itself at that point in time. ‘Performance’ and ‘paradigmatic reversal’ are apt terms to use in relation to the impact of the destruction and de-structuration brought about by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, by the major displacements of the least Romanized and least urbanized populations and by the territorial recomposition – formerly described as ‘barbarian invasions’ – that all took place between the third and fifth centuries. That long period, which extended to the twelfth century in some cases, witnessed the survival, inexpert maintenance, contraction and reuse of the urban space. And one of the noteworthy achievements of these cities is the fact that written accounts of their history actually present that era as a time of construction and continuity. Yet the true story was very different, which largely explains the architectural and architectonic temporal (con)fusion evident in the monuments that survived that period. In simple terms, it is generally agreed that the crisis undergone by the ancient urban system lasted more or less until the year 1000. The situation was saved, in a sense, by the spread of Christianity, which introduced a new configuration through the spacialization of the sacred. This resulted in networks of parishes, sanctuaries, dioceses and their cities, and in the building of churches and their cemeteries, laid out in a grid pattern. The process also involved the creation of a network of castles, palaces, monasteries and large estates established under the feudal system, notably in the Carolingian Empire. These formed a type of scaffolding for an urban façade still in its tentative stages. Yet, this fledgling urbanization process, which spanned half a millennium between the years 500 and 1000 CE, has left hardly any traces. It certainly produced nothing to rival the powerful impact that the monastery of Saint Gall and the Palace of Aachen have had on the collective memory. Moreover, despite the presence of the pope, it might be said that ‘Rome [was] no longer in Rome’. Its population fell from over a million inhabitants during the empire to fewer than thirty thousand in the eighth century, and even beyond. The city sought refuge elsewhere; this was provided by Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire, on the one hand, and by

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Toledo, Córdoba and Seville in Muslim Spain, on the other. Naturally, we should not overstate the case here. There are still impressive remains dating from this period to be found in Milan and Ravenna, and the sacred Christian city of the Early Middle Ages bears imprints that have long endured, in both a symbolic and a functional sense. These include the presence of a sometimes sizeable body of clergy, established on a long-term basis until the secularization processes of the nineteenth century, and the concentration of convents and churches that turn any urban space into a ‘city of a hundred bell-towers’.

A NEW IDEA OF THE CITY Nevertheless, the age-old collective memory of European cities remains attached to those that were rebuilt and enlarged during the period between 1100 and 1200. This second phase of urban activity that took place in the long Middle Ages – a period that extends in principle right up to the eighteenth century – has provided us with a legacy of essential aspects and appearances of major significance that have formed our current vision of the pre-modern city. These include a visual revolution that established the city as a genuine political and ceremonial space from 1350 onwards, the most striking illustration of this being the famous frescoes (1338–9) in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, and a body of theoretical literature that set out a systematized approach to urban construction. The most notable example of this is Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Art of Building. This work, which the author began in 1449 and which was published in 1485, is one of the symbols of the Renaissance. This period also witnessed the creation of the capitals that expressed the very essence of the historical encounter between the court and the city, the mutual and coordinated management of urban functions undertaken by the municipal authority and the Church and the establishment of a network of universities. Around sixty of these were founded between 1200 and 1500. In some cases this involved the complete reconfiguration of the urban fabric, as with Oxford and its thirty-eight colleges, Paris’s Left Bank, Salamanca and Bologna. In this way, the city became a centre of knowledge as well as a space of power and of trade. It also became a place of permanent immigration, intended to compensate for the structural deficit in the urban population brought about through rebellions, wars, plague epidemics and narrower kinship circles. Further aspects associated with the urban space include the definition of the ‘bourgeois’, who was conceived in legal, as well as cultural, honourable and social terms, with circumstances still prevailing over status; the polymorphic composition of elite groups; the existence of many and varied nerve centres, such as churches, council chambers, castles, public squares and markets; the diversity of services reflecting a city that consumes more than it produces; the deepening of divisions – although created chiefly through money, these were likewise brought about by improvements in circumstances and also separated marginalized groups from the rest of society; civic pride expressed through vertical constructions, in contrast to the cities of the ancient world, whose eminence was displayed through horizontality; the erection of a defensive framework; the promotion of

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the public good and of public spaces; the creation of federated cities through urban leagues; the diversification and fiscalization of labour and production; a growing influence over rural areas; the systematic production and conservation of practical documentary texts, as exemplified by the three hundred-volume Florentine catasto (1427–30), a compilation of fiscal, anthroponymical, family and domestic data relating to no fewer than 260,000 individuals; and finally, government autonomy achieved through elections, representation and discussion. In short, these are the characteristics that we now tend to associate with all things urban and which first began to form a discourse, a structure and an idea of the city in the period between 1400 and 1500. And it was that very ‘idea’ of the city that proceeded to spread beyond the ancient hearts of Western Europe’s urban spaces. It was first exported to other areas of the continent, brought eastwards by the German settlers who were to establish a large number of cities on the borders of Poland, the Baltic lands, Hungary, the Ukraine and Russia. The long-term result was the creation of multi-ethnic, multicultural cities that became home to large Jewish communities whose history only ended with the Second World War. Yet the concept also travelled further afield, extending beyond Europe through the colonial conquests that took place from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This is reflected in the Spanish and English colonial cities established, respectively, in South America and on the west coast of the United States, and in the French, English and Dutch colonial cities of Africa, India, Indonesia and Asia. One might even claim find the essence of the European city of bygone days in Washington DC, Boston, Santiago, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Havana, Delhi, Macao and Jakarta, albeit somewhat reduced to its core substance as the years accumulate and the built environment grows denser. And the concept subsequently lived on – after all, Sydney, Shanghai, Bombay/Mumbai and Saigon all present planned and accomplished reproductions of the nineteenth-century European administrative and industrial city. At all events, that belated medieval urban revolution, both material and conceptual in character, certainly forms the principal layer of the collective memory of both the European and the non-European city between 1500 and 1900. Moreover, it is largely thanks to their historic medieval centres that a number of European cities have made their way onto UNESCO’s World Heritage List – Bruges and Brussels, Bremen, Lübeck and Bamberg, Bern, Visby, Provins, Carcassonne, Avignon, Albi and Strasbourg, Krakow and Toruń, Prague, Porto, Luxembourg City, Ferrara, Mantua, Genoa, Urbino, Siena, Naples, Palermo, Pienza, Florence, Verona and Venice. Many of these, partly for similar reasons, were chosen by the European Union to be European capitals of culture after 1985.

‘CITY AIR MAKES ONE FREE’ The title of this chapter – ‘The City: A Space of Freedom’ – is intended to echo that original medieval adage, Stadtluft macht frei (‘City air makes one free’), which was widespread throughout the Germanic countries and originated in the fourteenth

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century. The saying has a poetic aspect, and its otherworldly character also expresses the importance accorded by medieval society to the ethereal conception of circulating fluids, both spiritual (as with the Holy Spirit) and corporal (as with illness). Yet it also underlines an important fact; the legal status of the city transforms and transcends individual status, thereby theoretically granting personal freedom. It would be no exaggeration to maintain that the Early Modern Period, which lasted from 1500 to 1800, did not witness any profound changes to the essence that characterized those long Middle Ages. And we might even venture to present the hypothesis whereby this relative continuity was able to prevail because modern Europe was not the Europe of cities, but of princes. Indeed, both the modern city and the state continue to draw on this ‘laboratory’ for future nations constructed between 1200 and 1500. Since then, rather than changing its form or built structure, it is more often the case that the European city has become revitalized through a concurrence of other factors. These include recomposition, occurring in conjunction with the reduction in urban freedoms and with the supervision of municipal authorities, local powers being increasingly absorbed by princely and royal ones; increased monitoring of urban inhabitants in lower social categories and marginalized groups; and demographic growth that saw the population spilling beyond the city walls and the structuring, predatory effect that the major state capitals (Paris, London and Madrid) had on the regional urban fabric – this also prompted the creation of prestigious urban spaces (Mannheim, Saint Petersburg and Versailles). Finally, a shift occurred in the economic epicentres. In general terms, this involved a move to the north from the south, bringing about the rise of English, Hanseatic and Dutch cities to the detriment of the old Mediterranean trading metropolises. The idea that the cities of the Ancien Régime produced nothing new would therefore be an affront to the historicity of such powerful movements as the first wave of industrialization, pre-capitalism, Europe’s global occupation and the founding of sovereign empires and states. This is immediately apparent to anyone who travels successively to Nancy, Antwerp, Edinburgh, Caserta, Krakow, Heidelberg, Budapest and Copenhagen. It is true that the city of the Early Modern Era did not experience the demographic transformation that was to affect those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries − from 1500 to 1800, Europe’s urban population rose from 15 to 25 per cent of the total number of its inhabitants. Nevertheless, it dismantled its walls, it modified its decision-making processes and its management of the urban space and it built new blocks laid out on a grid plan and broadened interurban networks. In addition, chiefly through improvements to methods of transport, it developed its economic and productive functions. These had been strongly concentrated in cities since 1300 and revolved around markets, fairs and large numbers of artisan communities grouped into trade associations endowed with privileges. They contributed to the city’s dominance over rural areas, particularly through the commissioning system and the expansion of both the salaried workforce and the practice of subcontraction. These were established, with good reason, as powerful aspects of the proto-industrialization phase, both in relation to textile work and to the extraction and transformation of metals.

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THE EMERGENCE OF THE BOURGEOIS Above all, the city’s chief innovation was its invention and consolidation of a cultural life. It achieved this by establishing institutions and completely novel venues that created a new urban fabric and still form the basis of a real intellectual asset to city life. They include the public library, the café, the salon, the theatre, the museum and the concert hall, all of which sprang up in European cities – even of the more modest variety – in a process that lasted until the eighteenth century. This effectively put the finishing touches to a succinct definition of the concept of the bourgeoisie. Categorized in legal, social, economic and cultural terms, this group was born through a combination of dominance, expertise, reputation and conviction; apart from a few rare exceptions, its existence was reinforced by an art and a literature that expressed their faith in the modern city. Indeed, we should perhaps turn to literature for a clear picture of the truly astounding transformation to which the urban fabric was subjected from 1800 onwards. This brought about profound changes to the connections forged over the centuries between society and topography, despite the efforts to re-establish these links made by the German Bauhaus School in Weimar during the 1920s and by Le Corbusier in France during the 1930s. Their creations, in both cases, were inscribed in UNESCO’s World Heritage List. In his Tableaux Parisiens (1857–61) Charles Baudelaire writes of his wanderings through the old streets of Paris, torn open to make way for the new city designed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann: ‘The old Paris is no more (the shape of a city / Changes faster, alas! than the human heart).’ These verses are included in a poem entitled ‘Le Cygne’ (The Swan). Baudelaire dedicated this work to Victor Hugo, whose novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) had made its own declaration of love to a thousand-year-old city that was gradually being erased. And, just as urban spaces are repurposed, Baudelaire’s verses themselves were reused on two occasions. The first writer to do so was Walter Benjamin; the author of Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, he also translated Tableaux Parisiens into German. The first notes for Paris date back to the period between 1927 and 1929, during Benjamin’s stay in the city he was to revisit in 1933 – this time, however, as an exile fleeing Nazi Germany. Initially conceived as a dialectical, surrealistic phantasmagoria presented by the writer as he meanders through a city that envelops him like a formless dream, the essay rapidly develops into a reflection on the changes wrought in the city by the nineteenth-century capitalist economy. The work appears as an interpretation of a city in crisis – an open book in the open air – made up of traces and fragments of space and thought. It comprises six chapters in all: the arcades, dioramas, the World Exhibitions, interiors, streets and barricades. Some fifty years after Benjamin, the writer and geographer Julien Gracq portrayed the streets of Nantes, which had been bombed then reconstructed after the war, in his book La Forme d’une ville (1985). This title was clearly no arbitrary choice, as Gracq reprised Baudelaire’s lines: ‘The shape of a city changes faster, as we know, than the human heart.’ The years 1861, 1935 and 1985 therefore mark three moments in literature that saw the city of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – torn through, tortured, destroyed and rebuilt – captured

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in three different manners: visually (Baudelaire), photographically (Benjamin) and cartographically (Gracq). Yet these also form three images of fracture to which we can certainly add the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Robert Musil’s Vienna and Franz Kafka’s Prague.

THE BREAK PRODUCED BY INDUSTRIALIZATION We are the living heirs of two breaks in the course of events that occurred between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the present time, roughly speaking before and after 1945. In the post-1800 European city of the age of industrialization, the agenda was dominated by the guiding principles of finding locations for factory sites, of extending access routes following the mass influx of migrants from rural areas and of transporting goods and people (first by train and later by road). This resulted in at least three phenomena, which extended beyond the break marked by 1945: the rise of an anti-urban discourse, which still persists in our contemporary political culture on the one hand and the establishment of urban sciences (beginning with the birth of sociology at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) on the other. These were coupled with the rise of urban development projects and of the professionalization of urban management, and the emergence of the ‘social question’. The latter was chiefly directed by the acknowledgement of the vulnerability of newly urbanized populations. The figures involved give some indications of these transformations; between 1800 and 1945, the proportion of Europe’s urban population rose from 25 to 60 per cent of the total number of its inhabitants. The speed at which this process occurred reached a peak in the years between 1920 and 1950, which saw the percentage of city dwellers almost double. This explains why the Second World War, which affected so many of Europe’s cities, did more damage to the urban fabric in a few years than the ten previous centuries, although they themselves had been beset by conflict. We are probably better placed today to perceive the extent to which most of the post-1945 urban reconstruction projects failed to readdress the fundamental question of what the European city actually was; the result was a series of juxtaposed, contradictory responses. These include restoration to the original state, as with Warsaw; a marriage of old and new; the eradication of the past (i.e. of the German city) in the case of Königsberg, which became Kaliningrad; the superimposition of different models and the creation of a new urban space out of nothing. If this discussion never took place, it may be because new processes involving the dilution of a specific character associated with the European city were already in operation.

A POINT OF CONVERGENCE In effect, until 1950 or thereabouts, the maintenance and creation of the built environment associated with the new economic and migratory flows generated by industrialization and capitalism had followed relatively well-established directions and sequences. These had involved routes, supply chains, the rural exodus and the

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buffer zones represented by the faubourgs and the suburbs, following processes already in evidence during the preceding centuries. However, the rupture with the past seemed considerably more obvious after 1950, with the emergence of certain dominant trends: urban spatial discontinuity, ‘rurbanity’ – the blending of city and countryside – the development of de-localized employment and of teleworking, the expansion of the multi-occupancy sector, the housing crisis and the removal of factories and production sites to locations outside the city. The urban space was thenceforth experienced as the point at which inflowing elements and services converged. The city that presents itself to us today is therefore the product of a highly contradictory process. This makes it all the more challenging to assimilate and comprehend, as the old European urban fabric is still in evidence on the maps. For on the one hand, that process was characterized by the recognition of a historic nucleus serving as a reminder that the city had indeed been a place of organization, of innovation and of refuge − in short, of freedom and experience − right up to the mid-twentieth century. Yet on the other hand, it was shaped by the awareness that urban time had accelerated and spatial practices in the city had developed since the 1950s. This essentially involved a diffusion of technological inventions in both the social and physical space that was not determined by geography; a dispersed urban space, the city having lost its frontiers and spread its territory to outlying areas; a separation of economic, demographic and urban growth, and a dissociation between the material and the political city − that is, the severing of the connection between the organization of society and the structuring of the urban space. This reflection, which has reached its completion, relates more to the future of the city than to its memory. Indeed, the main question to ask is whether the reservoir of history and memories established through the long process of forming Europe’s urban spaces can be of use in meeting the challenges faced both by European cities and by their counterparts in other regions of the world. These involve reconciling urban growth with environmental issues, conveying civic and democratic values to the city, regulating competition between cities themselves, managing transportation, sharing and restoring common heritage, safeguarding spatial and social diversity, devising new forms of urban governmentality, managing the general ageing of urban populations and their increasing isolation and countering the rise of separatism − in short, preserving the historically organized character of European cities faced with the chaotic megalopolises of Asia, Africa and America. Having long served as barriers and refuges against troubled times, cities are now becoming not only the theatres but also the powerful vehicles of such turbulence. Engaged in this struggle, which concerns its very future, the city nevertheless possesses two distinctive essential features. First, it is a force of resistance, transcending all ruptures. Abandoned over the millennia by agriculture, then by the artisanal professions and finally by industry, it stood firm. Second, it is the very place, in both the historical and the present context, where the crises produced by the city itself are perceived and resolved, through accumulated, layered temporalities, through the filter of a mosaic reflecting noncontemporary contemporaneities – in other words, that disconcerting assemblage

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of forms that have survived their function. In this way, the city has formed a reactivated, ongoing memory − the expression of an urban territory of bygone days based on its practices in the present time.

NOTES 1. Leonardo Benevolo, La Ville dans l’histoire européenne (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993), p. 9. 2. Bernard Lepetit, ‘Le Présent de l’histoire,’ in Les Formes de l’expérience, ed. Bernard Lepetit (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), p. 291.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bairoch, Paul, De Jéricho à Mexico: villes et économie dans l’histoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1985. Benevolo, Leonardo, La Ville dans l’histoire européenne, Paris, Le Seuil, 1993. Hassenpflug, Dieter (Ed.), Die europäische Stadt. Mythos und Wirklichkeit, Münster, LIT, 2002. Hohenberg, Paul and Lynn Hollen Lees, La Formation de l’Europe urbaine, 1000–1950, Paris, PUF, 1992. Le Goff, Jacques, Pour l’amour des villes, Paris, Textuel, 1997. Pinol, Jean-Luc (Ed.), Histoire de l’Europe urbaine, Paris, Le Seuil, 2003.

CHAPTER 15

Manchester and Łódź ‘Hell upon Earth’ AGATA ZYSIAK

Manchester in England and Łódź in Poland have each served to illustrate the rise and subsequent decline of European industry, together with the emergence and ensuing marginalization of the working class as a social actor. Now, in the twenty-first century, it is the disused and redeveloped factory, rather than the worker, that lies at the heart of the social imaginary. According to contemporary accounts, newcomers to the city were greeted with the sight of a mysterious and ‘dirty fog on the horizon, which perpetually hangs over this capital of chimneys’. From that ‘gigantic cloud of smoke’ there emerged ‘a forest of brick chimneys that rose upwards, hurling smoke, fire and ashes into the sky with proud hatred’; these created the impression that ‘a legion of blazing volcanoes was encircling the proletarian city’. These descriptions of the industrial city from the late nineteenth century were not descriptions of Manchester but of Łódź – a little-known Polish locality, almost impossible to pronounce and rejected by its own country. While Manchester became a symbol of a new modern era, Łódź (known as ‘the Polish Manchester’) epitomized the experience of industrialization in Eastern Europe – imitated but distorted, dreamed of and feared. Both Manchester and Łódź struggled with the changes that came with modernity, even as they served as junctions for the transnational networks and foreign markets that emerged in the multinational empires they were part of. They were widely seen as ‘shock cities’ (Briggs), frightening contemporaries both with their achievements and the dark horrors that came with modernity and capitalism. In a way, both cities became symbols of industrialization and later of post-industrial decline. While Manchester is seen as the very first industrial city, a reference point which provided a model for the rise and fall of industrial development, Łódź can be seen as a paradigmatic example of how troublesome modernization was for the periphery states and, in general, for many states around the globe. The aggressive and uncontrolled capitalism that shaped both Manchester and Łódź had its own local variations, but in both cases it resulted in enormous incomes and abysmal poverty, speculation and social struggles and a clash between popular and high culture. From the late 1820s in

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Manchester and thirty to forty years later in Łódź, it became evident that artisans were being proletarianized and that capital was concentrated in some of the largest companies. Moreover, in Łódź, class differences were strengthened by ethnic and religious divisions. The class conflict came to a head in what has come to be known as the Peterloo Massacre, and in the Łódź insurrection of 1905. A short prosperous period ended with these events, and both cities had to face the challenges of economic marginalization and industrial decline. Public discourses and social memory were changing rapidly but within already established settings, thus remaking, repeating and reframing them. In their works on Manchester, Alan Kidd and Peter Hall might argue that the city cannot solely be seen in terms of the industrial revolution, but on a discursive level and in social memory, both Manchester and Łódź are inextricably associated with it. What impressed contemporaries were the factories, the pace and scale of changes, and the signs of a new economic order, which were everywhere to be seen. Under the effects of capitalism, urbanization and industrialization, ‘all that was solid melted into the air’ as Karl Marx put it. This phenomenon was evident everywhere, but there are few places where it captured as much attention as in those two cities of chimneys, smoke and dirt, with their rushing crowds of unfamiliar characters, the noises from their factories and their gloomy, dreary slums. These were the details that preoccupied writers and journalists, and connected the histories of the two cities.

THE SCALE OF THE SHOCK Industrial cities began to be presented in a specific manner, laying the foundations for countless depictions of these places as alien and savage, the very epitome of the new era. Manchester drew the attention of many from the very beginning of its modern development. Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of what is probably the most famous description of Manchester, emphasized the interwoven nature of the contrasts between civilization and barbarism to be found there. During his travels in 1835, he noted: ‘Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.’ In 1844, Friedrich Engels called it ‘Hell upon Earth’. Victorian society was as fascinated by the horrors of the urban slum and living conditions as by moral aberrations. Writers and journalists explored industrial cities on guided tours that were a form of urban safari. A separate type of travel writing emerged with regard to industrial cities, often applying a type of ‘colonial’ gaze or using the notion of the barbarian to portray the poor. Writings on Manchester focused on presenting the naked face of capitalism, albeit usually perceived as only a temporary, ameliorable aberration. This ugly face was so alien, amoral and wild that ‘civilized’ nineteenthcentury society needed to distance itself from the uncomfortable truth, through discourse. And it was precisely those elements connected with industry, capitalism and modernization that were presented as ‘foreign’ and therefore not part of the broader civic community. Łódź was no exception. Modern changes forced its champions and victims alike to confront the awkward, disjointed, rapid and ruthless character of these developments, while at the same time offering Łódź the paradoxical promise of surpassing itself, leading to its reputation as ‘a caricature of proper city development’.

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An important feature of the depictions of industrial cities was the growing fear of the poor ‘terrorizing respectable people’, which was also caused by direct contact with them and by the rise of the ‘hooligan panic’ that emerged in the 1880s. That was a time when the working masses were approaching the strongholds of civilization, claiming a new visibility and questioning well-established order. The development of the social hygiene movement, the germ theory of disease, and eugenics in the late nineteenth century caused a shift from moral to social environmentalism and helped to establish the notion that the centres of industrial cities should be avoided. Manchester achieved a higher degree of suburbanization than London and became an exemplary model for the rest of the world. This spatial separation only served to reflect a deep social division underlined by many contemporary intellectuals, from Friedrich Engels’s ‘culture of poverty’ to Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘two nations’ and including a large number of novels by Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. These all provided a foundation for concepts in more recent urban studies, such as the duopolis. Manchester was a place where ‘the rich lose sight of the poor’ (William Cooke Taylor). It became paradigmatic not only in public discourses but also in social theory. Journalists in Łódź were likewise unable to understand how the rich remained in a city centre. The plots of novels from these times became part of subsequent discourses, social memory and amnesia. For example, fear of the urban poor became an enduring tendency and generated a stereotype regularly used to portray contemporary urban dwellers. According to the stereotype, the so-called ‘Manc’ is involved in petty crime, is silly rather than dangerous, and is depicted in various jokes as stealing, overusing stimulants, having too many children and living on welfare benefits. Similarly, Łódź is said to be a city rife with illnesses, crime and alcohol problems – the nickname ‘the evil city’, coined in 1907, seems to have anticipated future descriptions, one of the most recent being ‘the city of drunkards’. These depictions of both cities presented in national cultures endure even to this day. Deindustrialization processes have only served to reinforce the notion that both cities are non-places – this has resulted in a discrepancy between symbolic representation and actual status. Local public debates, articles and TV shows repeatedly feature complaints about Łódź’s negative public image (which is likewise confirmed by sociological research). The resurgence of this image of Łódź can be traced back to the movie Absolute Beginner (2007). This was the first film about the city after Andrzej Wajda’s The Promised Land (1974), in which Poland is likened to ‘a giant arse’ with Łódź in the middle of it.

THE MODERN WAY OF LIVING The elites in Manchester and Łódź, unlike those of other historical urban centres, were perceived as ‘people without history’, and their ‘origin myth’ had to be established. What was striking about industrial cities was not only smoke, noise and poor infrastructure, but also proletarian customs, popular culture and cosmopolitanism. Two elements shaping memory practices are intertwined here: the notion of a city without its history and culture, together with the emergence of a construct of the modern man – the very opposite of the traditional gentleman.

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The myth of a young city with no traditions was especially unfair in the case of Manchester (all in all one of the oldest cities in the UK), which spared no efforts to prove how unfounded it was. Still, it is striking how often it was called a ‘city without a past’ and criticized for a ‘lack of taste’. Local elites in Manchester struggled for recognition by referring to Renaissance Florence or ancient mercantile and manufacturing wealth and its role in supporting the arts, to prove their connections with industrial entrepreneurs like the Medici and the Strozzi. In addition, an apparent rivalry between the middle-class entrepreneurs and the aristocracy was discursively framed as a conflict between progress and regression, peace and violence – the industrialization achieved by Mancunians would benefit humankind and free trade would help to maintain a fairer world order. In Łódź, where the new upper class comprised just a small group of mostly foreign factory owners and an almost nonexistent intelligentsia, any claims to medieval origins were much weaker. Yet the contrasting strategy of underlining the city’s readiness to adapt to modern changes was rarely used. Consequently, the notion that it lacked a heritage and legacies resulted in an assumption that Łódź was generally lacking in culture, good manners and aesthetic taste. Industrial cities became epicentres of early mass culture, such as mass entertainment attractions and the cinema. Such popular attractions were viewed as regressive and as signalling the collapse of traditional values, notions that became enduring constructs. In Manchester one ‘hears more music in the everlasting motion of the loom than he would in the songs of the lark or the nightingale’1 and it was no better in Poland: ‘What kind of music can we hear in Łódź? The crack of steam engines, the bang of hammers’.2 This was the Manchester represented as Coketown in Dickens’s Hard Times, and the Łódź of Władysław Reymont’s The Promised Land. The latter title was sarcastic: Promises of prosperity tempted many, but Nobel Laureate Reymont saw this as a mirage that brought moral degradation. Specific terms describing the new way of life were coined and imprinted themselves into the social memory: the Manchestertum (‘Manchesterism’) and the Lodzermensch (‘man of Łódź’). This discursive construct was not entirely built on an ethnic or national element but on the mentality and morality of this new group. A few decades earlier, the stereotype had already been established; Manchester men were said to be ‘hard-headed businessmen, an offspring of humble origins, a parvenu of undoubted talent, but obsessed with material gain to the exclusion of human compassion or aesthetic appreciation’.3 This figure represented the new social and economic order, new in traditional England and new fifty years later in the still ‘feudal’ regime of Congress Poland. In this way, a strong fear that the new capitalist order would change people's mindsets and reinforce their animal instincts became widespread. In addition, a construct based on nationality and ethnicity was enforced in Poland. While it can be argued that prejudice towards the German industrialists was present to some extent in Manchester as well, it occurred on a much greater scale in Łódź. A positive literary figure was offered as a contrast to these negative images: the noble industrialist, a preserver of traditional moral values. The Polish nobleman character features in the very few novels set in Łódź, and plays a crucial role, protecting the virtues of the ‘good old days’. There is also a wanderer who helps

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an impoverished noble family regain its honour, and a well-educated doctor who fights for justice for workers. Those figures were noble, yet in a modern manner – they were neither eighteenth-century property owners nor members of the ‘alien’ bourgeois but were the urban nobility, modelled on the British gentleman. The aim was to provide a noble version of capitalism.

THE AGE OF THE WORKING CLASSES AND SOCIAL AMNESIA The charms and risks associated with the ‘shock cities’ in the nineteenth century did not last very long. In the 1870s, Manchester lost its leading position in the British Empire; the impact of both wars and the Great Depression further aggravated the decline of the textile centres of Europe. In the post-war era both the cities found themselves on opposing political sides. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of state planning, industrialization and welfare policies both in Western and Eastern Europe; this also resulted in the development of labour studies and in the popularization of working-class history. The People’s Republic of Poland put the worker at the centre of the social imaginary. Dozens of documentary movies, academic research and press articles depicted the working class and the factories. The history of the Łódź insurrection of 1905 and the legend of the ‘Red city’ became the country’s proud heritage and a crucial aspect of national identity. At the same time, the bourgeois element of history was not only marginalized, but criticized. Furthermore, the reconstructed history of Łódź left little place for a multicultural legacy. Both its Jewish and German histories were dominated by a nation-centric narrative, especially from the 1960s onwards. In England, which experienced an erosion of post-war prosperity and the rise of neoliberal politics from the 1970s onwards, Manchester became the focus of worldwide attention and a symbol of industrial decline. The working class as a social agent became marginalized. Rust and ruins dominated the depiction of Manchester and soon the concept of so-called ‘ruin porn’, as well as working-class nostalgia, dominated the social memory. Surprisingly, the industrial landscape and abandoned mills kept their charms for the alternative scene on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. The harsh image of a declining city was romanticized by many; both Manchester and Łódź were established as centres of alternative culture with their underground music scene (the Smiths, Joy Division and the famous techno event, the Freedom Parade), as well as their burgeoning artistic scene, including the Polish Film School and street art. Strong football cultures also emerged and become an important source of local pride and patriotism in all its forms – such as bitter rivalry between clubs or hate speech. Streets and walls reflect the continuous symbolic conflict between mutually antagonistic sports clubs – two in each city! The past few decades have seen a constant struggle to revive radical history in both cities. Once again, the ‘Polish Manchester’ seems to echo many features of its more famous model after a few years’ delay. Using this time lag, both cities tried to establish their stories within the enterprise culture. The paradox of post-industrial revival is that it often marginalizes working-class heritage in favour of innovative

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entrepreneurs and technological development, also leaving behind, in turn, those who had already been left behind by industrial decline, creating discourses rather than jobs. The figures of Manchester men and Lodzermenschen seemed to be designed for a vision of economic growth and individual effort – yet it was the ‘homo sovieticus’ or the aforementioned ‘Manc’ that dominated the development of social memory. In Poland, that memory was influenced by a resurgence of the totalitarian paradigm in the social sciences after 1989 – what had been established at the centre of social memory through postwar efforts was discredited as another propaganda lie. The working class no longer constituted a topic. The process of social amnesia was reinforced by class amnesia. This was especially harmful for social memory on account of the structural conditioning underpinning its development and overrepresentation of upper-class narratives of the past.

MEGAPROJECTS AND MICROHISTORIES Only recently, the status of post-industrial architecture shifted from its ‘brownfield’ association to become a historical legacy. Despite the massive destruction of most of the factories during both cities’ industrial decline, today their most famous and vibrant sites are located in former industrial areas. These include the middle-class Manufaktura shopping centre in Łódź, and hipster meccas like Off Piotrkowska or Castlefield. Local authorities have made efforts to use the golden age of industry in order to create tourist attractions. Recent redevelopment processes focus on the entertainment and leisure industries aiming to attract visitors and students. In recent years both cities were enthused by Richard Florida’s creative industry theories, and by megaprojects intended to restore prosperity and rectify the negative perception of cities in industrial decline. David Lynch’s Inland Empire was shot in Łódź, and even radical chapters of these cities’ histories are slowly finding their way into official celebrations, guidebooks and artistic initiatives. These developments might be the consequence of a belated popular reception of the ‘memory turn’, microhistory and subaltern studies, in addition to the development of history 2.0 initiatives. In recent years, local enthusiasts have successfully dedicated their time to accumulating oral histories, archival photos and histories of everyday life, for the purpose of commemorating strikes etc., forgotten customs and even the popular culture of industrial cities, in contrast to the ‘drums and trumpets’ side of history. It is worth mentioning that the commemoration gap concerning textile centres like Manchester and Łódź was also caused by the intersection of gender and class. In Poland, especially, heavy industries traditionally associated with men, such as mining and shipbuilding, found their places in the social memory and in developing discourses much sooner and on a much more extensive scale than those associated with women. This class/gender intersection can be illustrated by a symbolic presence in street names; while throughout modern history, in most cases, women made up the majority of the workforce (and population) in Łódź, only 3 per cent of streets are named after women! This development of microhistories was followed by the partial institutionalization of social memory. The People's History Museum and the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester offer modern exhibitions, introducing a wide audience to workers’ struggles, while in Łódź the anniversary of the insurrection in 1905 gained

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the official support of the City Council in 2014. The second example of heritage to be re-established on an institutional level was cosmopolitan identity. This multicultural heritage is celebrated in literature, anniversaries and festivals such as the Four Cultures Festival held in Łódź. It also chimes perfectly with the modern narrative of multicultural Europe, which has provided financial support for many commemorative initiatives for several years, and with the latest focus on transnationality in history. The next step to be taken by both cities with regard to social memory may be to reframe local examples in terms of their international connections. Manchester and Łódź, cities on the edge of tomorrow, vanguards of progress – but threatened with returns to barbarism – became a battlefield for both egalitarian and elitist narratives of the past and for nation-centric and multicultural interpretations of their history. Early accounts of these ‘shock cities’ determined social memory practices for decades and laid out an agenda for future discourses and practices. At the same time, there is nothing in the nineteenth-century industrial city, as described by Dickens or Reymont, that would not give us cause for concern in relation to the developing city of today.

NOTES 1. J. S. Gregson, Gimcrackiana; Or, Fugitive Pieces on Manchester Men and Manners Ten Years Ago (Manchester: W.H. Jones, 1833). 2. A. Gliszczyński and A. Mieszkowski, Łódź - Miasto I Ludzie (Łódź: Naklad B. Londynskiego, 1894). 3. A. Kidd, National Image and Self Image; Manchester since the Industrial Revolution, (Manchester: Portico Library Monograph 9, 1996).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Chu, Winson, ‘The “Lodzermensch”: From Cultural Contamination to Marketable Multiculturalism’, in K. Kopp and J. Nizynska (Eds.), Germany, Poland and Postmemorial Relations in Search of a Livable Past, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Gliszczyński, Artur and Antoni Mieszkowski, Łódź - Miasto I Ludzie, Łódź, Nakład B. Londyńskiego, 1894. Gorski, Stefan, Łódź Spółczesna: Obrazki I Szkice Publicystyczne, Łódź, Rychlinski i Wagner, 1904. Gregson, John Stanley, Gimcrackiana; Or, Fugitive Pieces on Manchester Men and Manners Ten Years Ago, Manchester, W.H. Jones, 1833. Kidd, Alan, National Image and Self Image; Manchester Since the Industrial Revolution, Manchester, Portico Library Monograph 9, 1996. Kossert, Andreas, ‘“Promised Land”? Urban Myth and the Shaping of Modernity in Industrial Cities: Manchester and Lodz’, in Christian Emden, Catherine Keen and David Robin Midgley (Eds.), Imagining the City, vol. 2, The Politics of Urban Space, Oxford and Bern, Peter Lang, 2006. Liszewski, S. and C. Young, A Comparative Study of Łódź and Manchester: Geographies of European Cities in Transition, Łódź, University of Łódź, 1997.

CHAPTER 16

The three orders The spectre of inequality FELIPE BRANDI

For centuries, the three social orders − those who pray, those who fight and those who work − were seen as the ideal social framework, until their supremacy was challenged by the French Revolution in 1789. Nowadays they are negative realms of memory, embodying the model of an inegalitarian society that shaped the history of Europe for a thousand years. The French National Assembly (comprising representatives of the clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate) met in Versailles on the night of 4 August 1789 to pass a decree for the total abolition of the remaining aspects of the feudal regime and the privileges connected with it. One of the first images brought to mind in relation to the three orders of society is the occasion that sealed the fate of this assembly. Due to its radical character, the session quickly found its way into the social imaginary, endowed with the iconic power of a foundational moment. Meanwhile, the very concept of the three orders and its associations, with the biased institutions of a deposed regime, was cast out to take its place among other hated memories. The image of the tripartite society continues to inhabit our collective imagination in Europe today, having left its mark in the form of a prolonged history full of vicissitudes that transcended national boundaries and fashioned a lasting political imaginary. The structure of the three orders reflects a religious, reactionary view of society based on the principle of reciprocal services exchanged between three hierarchical social categories: those who pray, those who fight and those who work. The distinction between oratores, bellatores and laboratores was formulated in England in the tenth century by Aelfric, the abbot of Eynsham Abbey, and subsequently became an established system. This tripartite division constituted an image of social harmony based on the dual premise that inequality between the social orders was necessary and desired by God, and that social stability would only be achieved through their mutual aid. As a theory, it primarily involved a stratification of society regarded as ideal and manipulated on all sides by rival elites determined to defend their pre-eminence by legitimizing the subjugation of the masses. The message

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imparted through the image of the three orders was that each group should devote itself to the work required by its rank; the effect of this system on society was more divisive than cohesive. Segregative in character, it glorified the concept of major social divisions and shattered any notions of social mobility. It produced a simplistic, distorted image of society, obscuring nuances and complexities. And, although it was a vision that falsified actuality, it eventually became a creator of reality in its own right.

ENDURING EFFECTS From the great religious monuments to the major centres of commerce and power, from seats of government to civic buildings and farms, Europe’s urban and rural landscapes are full of the material and symbolic imprints left by the clergy, the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry. Yet the system of the three social orders is based less on the three categories involved than on the divisions and contrasts between them. And its imprint on the present time would have to be sought among the only surviving vestiges of a desire to subject society to the hierarchical structure of a functional framework. We then discover that this system is now an exclusively negative realm of memory; banished from civic imagery, it functions chiefly as a deterrent. In terms of a history of connections with the past, this bygone structure is no longer the focus of conflicting memories, of a clash between the notions of a gilded and a dark legend − nor can it be categorized as a treasured cultural legacy. Indeed, it plays no part in commemorations, is a stumbling block to self-glorification and does not even offer us the antiquated beauty of ruins. Our contemporary societies have taken care to base their identity on the defeat of that obsolete tripartite division of society. It is the gesture that abolished it that constitutes a true realm of memory for us, remaining in our recollections as a means of guarding against its resurgence. The memory of the three orders of society has been integrated into our collective representations of the past, but it survives as an object of rejection that we can continue to use when reflecting on our identity. It reminds us that the achievement of equal rights was a conquest, and that the recognition of the value of work was the fruit of an age-old struggle. In this way, it has been introduced into the vast domain of realms of memory, finding its place amid the institutions, precepts and symbols that regulate what we remember and what we forget, helping us in the choices we make with regard to our past.

LAYERS OF MEMORIES The theory of the three orders of society may have originated from the hierarchical system comprising the three functions − sovereignty, military force and productivity − which Georges Dumézil saw as the framework of the Indo-European conception of the world. That theory formed a nomadic, resistant and flexible image, endowed with a prodigious capacity for reinvention. Its appearance in Christian Europe dates back to the ninth century, when Alfred the Great, king of England, added a

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commentary to his translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. In it, he asserted a king’s need for men who prayed, men who fought and men who worked. During this same period, the image of the three orders emerged in continental Europe, in the Abbey of Saint-Germain d’Auxerre. It was later appropriated by the Peace of God movement and by the bishops Gérard de Cambrai and Adalbéron de Laon around the year 1000. The theme flourished from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, thanks to its ability to operate in tandem with other notions. These included the representation of society as a human body. The theory here was that although all the parts of the anatomy were needed, they were hierarchically distributed; the upper limbs were seen as having a more noble character than the lower, while the feet were placed in direct contact with the ground, supporting the entire body. Prevailing over the various other systems in competition with it, the idea of the three orders was enhanced by analogies with the Holy Trinity and by the notion of three as a mystic number, and its field of application was consequently extended. In this way, it generated a wide range of representations and symbolic motifs, such as the animal fable created by Eadmer of Canterbury, in which the orantes were presented as sheep, the defensores as dogs and the agricultores as oxen. Writing in the twelfth century, Honorius Augustodunensis used the theme of Noah’s three sons as a means of demonstrating that men were divided into three categories; the descendants of Shem were free men, those of Japheth were noblemen and those of Ham, serfs. That biblical endorsement imbued the concept with Christianized overtones, and the submission of the third order to the other two ranked above it appeared to have its basis in the Scriptures. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the concept of the three orders was snatched from the clergy, desacralized and reappropriated by the temporal powers, after which it became established as an institution. Newly fledged political assemblies in every corner of Europe adopted the model, adjusting it in countless ways. This was the case, from the late thirteenth century, with the Corts of Catalonia and their division into tres braços: the eclesiàstic, the militar and the braç reial (the city representatives). Other examples include the states-general in France, convoked by Philip the Fair, and the English Parliament. And although it apparently failed to make its way into Italy, as demonstrated by the historian Ottavia Niccoli, the principle of the three orders succeeded in penetrating institutions, literature and political thought in Spain, Prussia, Scotland, the Netherlands and elsewhere. In this way, it offered one of the most expressive images of the conformist society that prevailed in modern Europe − a labyrinthine arrangement of legal, moral and economic hierarchies, where individuals were defined by their affiliation to a community, an order or a corporation. The system of the three orders of society was naturally called into question on numerous occasions and gave rise to endless counter-models. The English theologian John Wycliffe, a dogged opponent of ecclesiastical privilege, accepted the concept of a tripartite division purged of its inegalitarian doctrine. In Bohemia in 1425, the reformer Petr Chelčický wrote a virulent treatise entitled About the Three Estates, in which he portrayed the division as the very source of abuse and oppression. The seismic tremors of the Reformation had already become apparent, causing the

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structure to shift. It was appropriated by Martin Luther himself, and divided into ecclesiastical, political and domestic orders. The image of the tripartite society was closely linked to the vicissitudes of European powers, providing us with a common thread that serves as an excellent guide through European history. The Revolution saw it transformed into an instrument of propaganda; caricatures such as that of a peasant carrying a priest and a nobleman on his back exposed the grotesque nature of the exploitation of the people, while others, such as the image of a peasant astride a nobleman and a cleric, celebrated the triumphant overthrow of the old order. It was time for the awakening of the Third Estate.

REMAINING TRACES In 1978, Georges Duby took up the theme of the three orders; he explored the medieval origins of this model of an inegalitarian society based on the principle of ensuring that the people remained in a submissive role, and on the division between those who command and those who obey − the officers and the troops. The Revolution did not bring about the definitive demise of this vision of society, which was rekindled over the centuries. Nineteenth-century Europe was to be haunted by a nagging doubt over the genuine collapse of the inegalitarian principle on which the Ancien Régime was founded. Inequalities still persisted, and other divisions revealed the heterogeneous character of society. Far from disappearing, the problem of social distinctions was all the more brutally exacerbated as it unfolded against a background of belief in a homogenous society where each individual was to find their own position. The functional framework of the three orders was now out of place. Strongly associated with monarchism and the clergy, it was directly countered by the rise of anti-clerical, anti-royalist ideologies and was regarded as archaic. Yet did the collapse of the tripartite structure mean that its solid core had dissolved? After all, its inegalitarian basis must have ensured that it would remain implicitly and triumphantly present so that it was all the easier for it to discard its obsolete carcass. It very quickly became apparent in the nineteenth century that the differences that continued to divide humankind had not genuinely been abolished, that some still enjoyed the right to command, while others were constrained to obey them dutifully, and that the loudly vaunted outward appearance of equality was, in fact, relative and tentative − many would say, a sham. New projects intended to organize society in an optimal manner continued to flourish, but they operated in the wake of the former opponents of this tripartite division; this time the opposition between capital and labour was denounced and the premise that society is inevitably and necessarily destined to be rife with injustice was rejected. Has the image of the three orders now been wiped off the map? During the twentieth century, its memory was preserved as a subject for academic studies; these included a more general history of the system, actively participating in its literary progress. In England, the division of society into the three estates of the realm, which constituted the origins of its Parliament, gave rise to controversy, as did their effects on the theory of the ‘mixed monarchy’ of the eighteenth century. Elsewhere, the question of whether the society of the Ancien Régime should be described in

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terms of orders or of classes was long debated. Quarrels broke out over the validity of the criticisms used to describe and explain social structures different from our own, in a collective effort to detach the analysis of the three social orders from the discourse it conducted on itself. Yet the memory of the three orders cannot be reduced to a topic for scholarly debate. The ideology on which it is based, which incorporates that outdated vision of a hierarchy as necessary and providential, and the decree that all individuals must conform to the position assigned to them in order to maintain an unbroken chain of command, always finds fertile ground for its resurgence in entrenched spaces. During the interwar period, when totalitarianism was casting its shadow over the map of Europe, a number of dictatorial regimes were to align themselves with the corporatist doctrine refined within the Catholic Church. The corporative system presented itself as a solution to class divides, countering the dual threat of liberal democracy and Marxist Socialism. It advocated conciliation by the adoption of a model of political organization subject to the control of a strong state that was built around it. This was a new ideal of social harmony following on from the tradition of the medieval guilds; it framed working relationships, thereby connecting society to the state in a hierarchical and disciplined manner. Embraced by fascist Italy, an adapted version of the corporatist model was also applied to the Constitution of António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo in 1933, and was subsequently adopted by the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. This state corporatism likewise reached the Spain of Francisco Franco and, beyond the Catholic world, the Latvia of Kārlis Ulmanis and the Estonia of Konstantin Päts. The extreme right wing never tired of outdated inegalitarian ideologies. While Benito Mussolini extolled the disuguaglianza irrimediabile e feconda e benefica deglie uomini, Oswald Mosley reprised the image of the nation structured in the manner of the human anatomy, as promoted by John de Salisbury eight centuries before him. In 1949, Georges Dumézil detected a deliberate bid to reactivate the three social functions in the form of the Partei, the Wehrmacht and the Arbeitsfront of the Third Reich. And in his research on the imaginary of feudalism, Georges Duby commented ironically on the praise of the virtues of the priest, the soldier and the peasant to be found in a text entitled Notre beau métier de soldat, suivi d’un Essai de portrait moral du chef, written by Colonel de Torquat in 1951. Periodically roused from their slumber, this tripartite image of society and its inegalitarian ideal serve the justifications of a regenerated society − and their powers of persuasion may not have been expended. Inculcating the virtues of obedience and obsequious reverence to superiors in the name of discipline, they take root in the resentment felt towards the agents of social change and towards the driving force of the young, seen as pushing society to its rapid demise. There may still be recesses where that antiquated vision of society manages to find refuge, crouching behind hate-filled discourse and endless grumblings over the dangers threatening social order, fearful of showing its true face when it emerges from the lairs to which it has withdrawn.

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1989 After 1989, Europe rejected the image of the three orders as the epitome of counterutopias. If it is now seen as a problematic realm of memory, this must surely be because it embodies the spectre of social inequality, of elite privilege and of the hardship faced by the masses. And it is also because that image serves as the symbolic arena in which the endless battles for prestige, power and material assets are played out − an arena that is perpetually occupied. If that tripartite division of society continues to engage the attention of our contemporaries, this may be because it has left today’s Europe with the legacy of an unyielding gap between rich and poor, and with the awareness of the fragility of civil rights and of its own ideal of democratic citizenship. The fact remains that Europe must still take the spectre of this model of society into account if it is to meet its current challenges and to consolidate the set of values on which it hopes to base its project. Caught between past and present, the concept of the three orders highlights the value of reflecting on negative realms of memory viewed as deterrents; these do not help us to define what we are or where we have come from, but to explore the question of what we would like to become.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Constable, Giles, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Duby, Georges, Les Trois Ordres ou l’Imaginaire du féodalisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1978. Le Goff, Jacques, ‘Note sur la société tripartie, idéologie monarchique et renouveau économique dans la chrétienté du IXe au XIIe siècle’, in Pour un autre Moyen Âge, Paris, Gallimard, 1977, pp. 80–90. Niccoli, Ottavia, I sacerdoti, I guerrieri, I contadini. Storia di un’immagine della società, Turin, Einaudi, 1979. Oexle, Otto Gerhard, ‘Die funktionale Dreiteilung als Deutungsschema der sozialen Wirklichkeit in der ständischen Gesellschaft des Mittelalters’, in Winfried Schulze and Helmut Gabel (Eds.), Ständische Gesellschaft und soziale Mobilität, Berlin, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 1988, 19–51. Powell, Timothy E., ‘The “Three Orders” of Society in Anglo-Saxon England’, AngloSaxon England XIII (1994): 103–32.

CHAPTER 17

Empire and nation An unresolved debate JAKOB VOGEL

The Roman Empire long served as the framework of reference for reflections on political identity in Europe. During the nineteenth century, ancient Rome gradually yielded its exalted status to the concept of nationhood, based on the glorification of a people and their history. The development of ‘national stories’ responded to the rise of a quasi-ethnic ideology that spread throughout Europe, leading the twentieth century into global conflict. While Europe seeks a future for itself at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the debate between nation and empire continues. Empire and nation occupy such a central position in the pantheon of European collective memories that it would be impossible to remove them. For centuries, they formed an almost indispensable narrative framework so that it seemed as if our shared past could only be recounted in those terms. These two historical perspectives have often been regarded as antithetical, and this is still the case, for example, in accounts of the emergence of the ‘national movements’ within the major empires of the nineteenth century. Nations were then generally associated with the individual worlds of collective memories shared by each of Europe’s ethnic communities; these were seen as being strongly imbued with a sense of European-ness that was supposed to have lasted to this day – until the emergence of ‘the Europe of nationstates’. For their part, the empires appeared to be closely connected to the vanished world of the Ancien Régime, or else with the European colonial empires that have now likewise been dismantled.

BRITAIN’S JOURNEY The recent debates triggered by ‘Brexit’, however, have shown how closely ‘nation’ and ‘empire’ can be linked, as they have been in the past, forming a chain of memories still active today. For in fuelling the hope that their country could reconnect with its imperial history, those opposed to Britain remaining in the European Union were applying the concept of English exceptionalism. In this context, a group known as the ‘Historians for Britain’ has emphasized the exceptional nature of Britain’s

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journey within Europe – a vision of the past that is far from achieving a full consensus. This has been proved by the referendum result, as well as the long and vigorously debated question of whether Scotland could constitute a specific, or even an independent nation within the British Isles. British political discourse features clashing, highly diverse conceptions of the term ‘nation’, and of its relationship with the ‘empire’ and how it is remembered. In relation to society, for instance, the former prime minister David Cameron championed the ‘one nation policy’1 developed by the Conservative statesman Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881); yet he regularly invoked the concept of the ‘four nations of Great Britain’2 when it came to the issue of Scottish independence. From this perspective, the word ‘nation’ refers both to the ‘United Kingdom’ as a whole, with its own history and to its individual, constituent historical territories: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Similar questions arise concerning the Commonwealth; is Britain’s history that of a ‘nation’ or an ‘empire’, and what role is played by the monarchy? Despite this lack of conceptual clarity, the use of both notions in political discourse is certainly no indication of neutrality, insofar as the historical references emphasized by the ‘nation’ as a realm of memory are different from those highlighted by the idea of ‘empire’. The central place now occupied by these categories in our European cultures of remembrance dates back to the nineteenth century. This is not to say that they played no role in the cultural and political space prior to that time. But it was not until the nineteenth century that they acquired the particular characteristics that have continued to stimulate discussions in Europe, despite different processes of development and specific national features. They have been constructed in an antinomical fashion in a large number of countries, as politicians, historians and essayists have shown a tendency to present the ‘ethnic’ nation, with its own memories, myths and historical narratives, as running counter to the empire and its global memory. However, although that construction was founded on opposition, it also included converging features. These narratives of memory therefore exhibit multiple facets, enabling them to adapt to developments in the political and social context.

THE IMPERIUM ROMANUM The Imperium has been embedded in the history of the European collective memory for a considerably longer period than the concept of the nation. Indeed, the idea of ‘empire’ remained linked to the shared recollection of the Roman Empire and the Age of Antiquity for several centuries. It is certainly true that the historical chain connecting the Imperium Romanum to the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ had been broken by the great invasions. However, the ‘renewal’ of the Empire in the West through Charlemagne, coupled with the mythical status subsequently accorded to Rome in the Middle Ages, acted as a welcome symbolic bridge enabling the fiction of the uninterrupted transmission of Roman dominance to be maintained. Furthermore, the Middle Ages had witnessed the forging of a close link between the imperial Roman tradition and the papacy, based in Rome, giving additional

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legitimacy to imperial assertions. By having his coronation in the year 800 held in Rome, Charlemagne had already established the alliance between secular power and the Church, which embedded the notion of empire into a doctrine of salvation. This link was visually manifested by the introduction of the monarch’s anointment with holy oil into the coronation ritual, and it left its mark on the subsequent history of the empire for centuries. The practice had never formed part of the coronation ceremonies of the Eastern Roman Empire during this period, and it aroused the mockery of the Byzantine historiographer Theophanes. Yet it proved to be a particularly important innovation in the long term, as it enhanced the emperors’ status in comparison with that of other European dynasties. The Hohenstaufen family claimed hierarchical primacy over the kings of France, for instance, basing this assertion on the universal character of the power conferred by the imperium sacrum. However, it was no easy matter to have such claims accepted, given the power structure in Europe, where royal and imperial titles were generally regarded as being on an equal footing. Furthermore, it was not in the interests of the pope to damage his relationships with the monarchs by placing limitations on their sovereignty within their mutual associations. As the French jurist Jean de Blanot wrote: ‘The King of France is Emperor in his own kingdom.’ From the late eleventh century, imperial powers and their legitimation found significant support in Roman law. Introduced by jurists into European legal systems, it played a vital role in the formulation and exercise of the law on the continent. In this way, the collective historical memory of the Roman Empire pervaded legal and political practices in an even more direct fashion. At the same time, the emperors of the Late Middle Ages and the Modern Era took care to connect their domination over Italy with the Roman Empire’s principal realms of memory in markedly concrete terms. In doing so, they came into conflict with those Renaissance politicians and writers who preferred to associate the myth of Rome with the Italian city states and their elites, rejecting the imperial tradition of Antiquity. Despite these disagreements, which chiefly involved different interpretations of the memory of Rome, the concept of empire benefitted from the enduring myth of Rome as the ‘eternal city’, the caput mundi (capital of the world) and the orbis domina (mistress of the earth) disseminated by the great texts of Classical Antiquity, which were ceaselessly reread.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE In the Modern Era, under the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, dominated by the Habsburgs, the emphasis on the imperial Roman tradition was slightly reduced in favour of ‘Germanic’ characteristics. Yet, keen to legitimize imperial power, jurists and chroniclers continued to work on the long history of a conception of empire. For them, all began with Julius Caesar’s appropriation of the title of Imperator, and with the development of the imperial cult under Augustus. The Leipzig-based bookseller and publisher Johann Heinrich Zedler espoused this version in his Universal Dictionary (1737), placing it under the entry: ‘Kayser or Käyser, Kaiser’.3

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The Habsburg’s imperial title, and consequently their imperium, remained just as subject to challenge in the European states of the Modern Era as they had been during the preceding centuries. Other monarchs also claimed symbolic equality according to the protocol governing relations between the states and their representatives. In this way, Ivan III (who reigned from 1462 to 1505) added the word ‘Tsar’ to his title ‘Grand Prince of Moscow and Grand Prince of all Rus’’, thereby associating himself with the tradition of the Eastern Roman Empire and placing himself on an equal footing with the Holy Roman Emperor. In the seventeenth century, however, the protocol governing relations between the tsar and the emperor remained a thorny diplomatic issue for the royal courts of Europe. Russia, at least, had a residual, rhetorical connection with the Roman Empire and its history. Yet the claims made by the envoys of the king of France, for example, who wanted to be accorded the same status as the emperors at the Ottoman court, were based on the politics of precedence maintained by European dynasties, with issues relating to rank being the focus of constant negotiation. It was not until the early eighteenth century that an equal relationship was achieved with the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, an important actor on the European diplomatic stage, who had been calling for equal status with the German emperors since the sixteenth century. But issues like these that remained subject to controversy in the protocol governing relations between states were decidedly easier to resolve at the discursive level. In this way, it became the normal practice to apply the title of ‘Emperor’ liberally during exchanges and contacts with non-European powers, regardless of their lack of direct links with the history of the Roman Empire. This custom highlighted the cultural hierarchy of peoples and civilizations established by Europeans, for only some non-European sovereigns were endowed with this honorary title. The ‘emperors’ of China and Japan owed their standard designation in European languages to the favourable reception of their respective cultures in Europe. The only African princes who enjoyed imperial status were the ‘Emperor of Abyssinia’ and the ‘Neguse Negest’ of Ethiopia. Yet this did not prevent the word ‘empire’ from being regularly applied to the great civilizations of Africa and precolonial America.

THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE The reference to the Imperium Romanum also contributed to the dignity of France’s new empire, established by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early nineteenth century. He applied two methods of reconnecting with the past − on the one hand, through various symbolic references to Ancient Rome, which had influenced debates on both public law and the image of the French state at least since the Directoire period, and on the other, through deliberate references to the traditional ceremonial rites of the Holy Roman Empire during his coronation at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in 1804. The evocation of a Roman past was manifested in the golden laurel crown, a symbol of ancient imperial dignity, and in the presence of the pope, who was responsible for conferring the traditional legitimacy of the Church of Rome on the new emperor.

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The vital role played by the ancient past in Napoleon’s imperial cult is evident in the magnificent paintings by his official court artist Jacques-Louis David (1748– 1825); ever since the fall of the Ancien Régime, David had used Classical Rome to symbolize the French political scene of the day. The neoclassical style, which David masterfully adapted to political developments, immediately set its seal on the image that the new imperial power intended to convey. It connected that power to the late Enlightenment ideal, this being a European culture rooted in Antiquity. Napoleon sought to place himself at the head of that culture – for although he styled himself as ‘the Emperor of the French’, the imperial character of his monarchy and its trappings emphasized his ambition to reign over a larger, European Empire rather than contenting himself with ruling France. It was this mindset that gave rise to the ‘Musée Napoléon’, a major museum project involving a collection of artistic treasures from Europe that formed the foundation of the art collection in the Louvre. While Napoleon was relying on perpetuating the conception of imperial Rome to further his political ambitions, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, a Habsburg, was turning his back on the ancient Roman origins of his imperial title and embracing the world of Europe. In 1806, he renounced the traditional title attached to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, styling himself as ‘Francis I, Emperor of Austria’ – a title he had first adopted in 1804. This did not imply that he no longer sought to exercise his power over the Italian, Hungarian and Czech territories in his empire, but that in view of the collapse of the traditional imperial ideal and of the doctrine of salvation it inspired, the reference to the monarchy’s Roman past seemed obsolete. The erosion of the notion of empire based on the Imperium Romanum continued over the course of the century, as seen with the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871. While the new German emperor Wilhelm I, his chancellor Otto von Bismarck and supporters of the ‘Second Reich’ certainly reconnected with the medieval conception of empire – for instance, the historic imperial crown was included in its coat of arms − they largely avoided its ancient association with Rome. Classical Antiquity played only a minor role in the history paintings of the Hohenzollern Empire, in contrast to the importance given to medieval elements such as the legend of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. For their part, left-leaning German liberals tended to use the Roman reference when criticizing their rulers. For example, Ludwig Quidde (1858–1941) denounced the ‘Caesarean madness’ of Wilhelm II and his penchant for ‘Byzantinism’.

THE GLOBAL EMPIRE The proliferation of imperial titles in Europe and the subsequent decline of ancient Rome’s importance as a reference point opened up new horizons in the latter half of the nineteenth century, introducing the concept of a more far-reaching empire. With the rise of European colonialism, efforts were made to promote the idea of a global empire, although there had been little evidence of this notion at the beginning of the century. The creation of the title ‘Empress of India’, adopted by Queen Victoria

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in 1876, serves as a political manifestation of that development. The British crown was therefore deliberately turning away from the standard terminology used by European dynasties in order to support its claim to world dominance. This positive interpretation of the idea of a global empire was challenged by the Liberals, who opposed the extension of Britain’s overseas empire. Fiercely contesting the policies pursued by the prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, in relation to India, they accused him of exhibiting dangerous ‘imperialism’. In this way, they were equating their own government’s policy with the expansionism of France’s former emperor, also denouncing its ‘Bonapartism’ in connection with domestic policy. The military might in the colonies, they declared, was imperilling the constitutional order and placing too much power in the hands of the army – an argument that the prime minister’s supporters instantly countered with references to ‘true imperialism’, presented in a positive light. The ‘Imperial Crown of India’, created for King George V in 1911, was a highly visible manifestation of this paradigm shift involving the British monarchy − a shift that was still being legitimized by Queen Victoria’s advisors in the mid-nineteenth century chiefly through references to the rank of the ‘Mughal Emperor’. The Roman imperial tradition was therefore permanently relegated to a less prominent role in the culture governing Europe’s collective memory. This was also illustrated, in the case of France, by the pursuit of colonial ambitions and the expansion of the ‘French colonial empire’ after 1878, during the Third Republic. For, in the eyes of French republicans, the ‘empire’ should not be founded on the monarchy and its embodiment in the person of the emperor, but on the global character of the domination for which they were competing with other European colonial powers. In this sense, the ‘imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century led to a significant turning point in the history of Europe’s collective memory, as it distanced the concept of empire from the historical reference to Rome, concentrating instead on the much broader notion of global empire. Although the idea of the Imperium Romanum as the ‘capital of the world’ still remained an implicit focal point, it no longer symbolized the perpetuation of the imperial dignity of Caesar and Augustus as emphatically as it had in former times. Moreover, in the context of late-nineteenth-century European colonial dominance, the emphasis was on promoting other aspects of shared memory. The important narrative now centred on the European powers’ expansion in the Modern Era, which was occupying an increasingly prominent position among the complex interlacing chains of European memory.

THE NATION: THE ‘PEOPLE’ AS THE FOCUS While in the nineteenth century narratives of memory were gradually detaching themselves from the traditional concept of empire and its focus on sovereigns, a new framework for the collective memory was developing through the concept of the ‘nation’. This disrupted European ‘mytho-motricity’ (Jan Assmann), which had remained subject to an essentially monarchical influence for centuries. The idea of the ‘nation’, a construct for the collective memory strongly determined by an

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‘ethno-cultural’ dimension, involved a vision of the past that centred on the ‘people’ and their history. That being said, the ‘nation’ was far from being a nineteenth-century invention. The concept of the nationes was already in evidence in the Late Middle Ages; vague in character, it was used to denote, for instance, the shared geographical and linguistic origins of student groups in European universities. The latter used the notion in highly varied ways; the University of Bologna recognized seventeen nationes in its student body (three Italian and fourteen ‘Nordic’ groups), while four different student groups were distinguished in Paris: the nationes gallicorum, normannorum, picardorum and anglicorum. The groupings may appear strange to us nowadays, for the ‘Gallic’ nations identified in Paris encompassed all the students from the Mediterranean regions (including Greece, Spain and Italy), while the ‘English’ nations also included students from Germanic countries and Northern Europe. The nationes made their appearance on the political scene at the Council of Constance (1414–18), convoked by the Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg and the Antipope John XXIII for the purpose of ending the Western Schism. In order to break the supremacy of the Italian bishops, the council altered the voting system, inaugurating a rule of one vote per nation, rather than per individual. The number of nations involved was established as five. The church representatives were accordingly divided into groups: Italica, Gallica, Germanica, Anglica and Hispanica. Germanica also contained Scandinavian, Polish, Lithuanian, Croat, Hungarian and Czech representatives. These initially very vague characterizations gradually gave rise to a more or less clearly defined set of diverse ‘national cultures’ through the writings of Modern Era authors. Partly drawing on the texts of the Ancient World, these were intended to encapsulate the features supposedly characterizing the different European populations. Tacitus’s Germania, for example, was regarded as a highly valuable reference work, endowing definitions of the essential qualities of the ‘Germans’ with the authority of the Roman author. Descriptions of the European nations − ‘Spanish, ‘French’, ‘Hungarian’ and ‘Turkish’ – as they appeared, for example, in the Völkertafeln, the tables of nationalities produced in Austria and Southern Germany in the early eighteenth century − included numerous examples of prejudice. These tended to differ considerably depending on the viewpoint represented. The authors obeyed no clearly defined rules in their categorizations of the various peoples, and that psychological portrait, created before the term was coined, remained confined to the nebulous realm of stereotypes.

SEARCHING FOR ROOTS The peasant populations were readily used to exemplify the various nations in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as it was thought that they retained the characteristics typical of those populations. In terms of music, this was manifested in the folk dances, such as the allemande, which were so much admired in the Baroque period. This fashion was echoed in the set of works entitled Les Nations by François Couperin (1668–1733), composer at the court of Versailles, with its four sonatas:

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‘La françoise’, ‘La piémontaise’, ‘L’espagnole’ and ‘L’impériale’. The idealization of a national peasant culture did not remain confined to courtly entertainments – it also left its mark on the ethnographical portraits outlined in the eighteenth century. For instance, the German writer Michael Lebrecht (1757–1807), who was born in Hermannstadt (now Sibiu, in Romania), made the following observation in his work On the National Character of the Nations of Siebenbürgen4 published in Vienna in 1792: It is not on the sofas, at the gaming-tables or in the cafés that one should seek the spirit of the nation, any more than one should look for it in effeminate, bland and insipid creatures; they are devoid of character and are only nominally part of the nation. [. . .] The heroic character of the people is to be found in the countryside and in the villages − it is there that we wish to seek it and it is there that we shall find it, whether it be good or bad. It is there that we wish to find the Hungarian and the Siculian, the Saxon and the Valachian in their respective environments.5 These völkisch6 portrayals of characteristics and cultures as being chiefly embodied by peasant communities are also to be found in the writings of Enlightenment thinkers such as Justus Möser (1720–1794) and Johann G. Herder (1744–1803). In the eighteenth century, they were still associated with the image, circulated chiefly through official propaganda, of a ‘homeland’ that should be defended against its enemies. The Seven Years’ War, which was already taking the form of a ‘world war’ with its multiple settings, caused this attachment to the nation and its past to acquire a more emphatic and exclusive significance. This was partly linked to fantasies of the ‘total destruction’ of the foe. It was but a short step from that point to the idea of a long-standing historical rivalry between two nations, as set out by French and English authors, for example, with regard to the memory of the Hundred Years’ War. In the context of the Napoleonic Wars, and even more so in that of the FrancoPrussian War (1870–1), it was now the German nationalists who presented the past as an endless conflict between two hereditary enemies, France and Germany.

THE INVENTION OF NATIONAL HISTORY At the dawn of the nineteenth century the representation of the nation expanded to include that of popular sovereignty, as previously manifested in the American and French Revolutions. In terms of collective and historical memory, this resulted in ‘the people’ becoming increasingly thematized as a political force on an equal footing with sovereigns and prominent statesmen. Other elements of the national past besides the history of the Revolution came to express the characteristics of each national community. In this way, for example, the nineteenth-century German jurists of the ‘German School of Law’ sought to conceal the persistent influence of Napoleonic (and therefore Roman) law on the German states by referring to ‘German’ legal traditions allegedly already present in the Middle Ages, or even included within a traditional Germanic culture. As historians in the tradition of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have shown in the last thirty years, the development of nationalist ideology in Europe during the nineteenth century prompted a trend

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that consisted of ‘inventing’ national traditions. In practice, the protagonists often borrowed images and concepts from each other. Over the last decades, the interlinked trajectories followed by these pasts, conceived in exclusively national terms, have been reconstructed by historians in different countries. They range from the ‘Gaelic revival’ of a purportedly ‘Celtic’ Irish nationalism that drew inspiration from both England and Scotland as well as Brittany, and from the Viking myths of Norway, to the Czech traditions of the Sokol Movement, which were strongly influenced by the German Gymnastics Movement. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, many of these national histories lacked a clearly defined reach. For instance, the states that had succeeded the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation cultivated the competing ideas of a ‘Prussian’, ‘Bavarian’ and ‘Saxon’ nation, together with a ‘German’ national consciousness. The same indeterminate situation reigned elsewhere in Europe, and it took time for a clearer image of a nation’s identity and autonomy to be formed. This process had still not been completed in the twentieth century, as seen in the examples of Ireland, Finland and Norway, which became nation states only after the turn of the century. Yet those very same nineteenth-century historians, whose occupation was becoming professionalized, played a key role in circulating the various historical narratives of a national past. Although they strongly debated the role of the monarchy in national histories, for example, they very quickly agreed that the history of Europe should be seen in terms of the histories of the various nations. It was in this context that The History of England, written by the English historian and politician Thomas Macaulay and published in the 1840s, aroused admiration and enthusiasm throughout Europe and was rapidly translated into several languages. Macaulay emphasized the liberal character of England’s national history, dominated by a relatively weak monarchy and a strong Parliament. Later coined as ‘the Whig interpretation of history’, it inspired several foreign authors engaged in developing their own national histories. These historical narratives were popularized through school textbooks, paintings and designs for historical monuments; over the decades, national memories and their heroes therefore became embedded into people’s everyday lives. Today they still form the bedrock of those representations of the past, often taken as read, which were regarded as a shared historical legacy and the foundation of the ‘national story’. Examples include Joan of Arc in France, the Battle of Grunwald in Poland and the Serbian legend of the ‘Field of Blackbirds’.

THE NATION TAKES ARMS Not surprisingly, in view of the increasingly widespread idea of a continuous rivalry between nations, national historical narratives drew inspiration largely from past military glories, heroes (almost exclusively male) and victorious battles. All over Europe, painters of historical and battle scenes appropriated these subjects, drawing on the relatively limited repertoire of forms offered by European art in order to glorify the military pasts of the ‘nations in arms’. In this context, for instance, Franz Roubaud (1856–1928), an artist of French parentage who was born in Odessa and

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trained in Munich, became the Russian Empire’s leading painter of battle scenes. This example clearly illustrates the close links forged in the domain of nationalist art and culture in nineteenth-century Europe. The concept of the nation progressed over the course of the century, stimulating the various national movements and, at a political level, leading to a series of emblematic creations of nation states. Nevertheless, the outlines of these national histories remained blurred. Definitions and boundaries of the nation were debated at various levels, for instance at a ‘Pan-Slav Congress’ in Prague held at the same time as a German National Assembly that took place in Saint Paul’s Church, Frankfurt, during the ‘People’s Spring’ of 1848. Delegates attending the Congress, presided over by the Czech historian František Palacký, proclaimed the unity of the Slav peoples, although there were no direct calls for political unity. The demand for solidarity addressed to the Slavs played a particularly important role in the Balkans Crises of the 1870s, insofar as Pan-Slavism had become one of the cornerstones of Russian foreign policy. Nevertheless, even in the cases of the newly formed nation states of Germany and Italy, the demarcation lines around the ‘nation’ and its history were still disputed. This was evident with the persistence of a völkisch German nationalism extending far beyond the frontiers of the Reich, and with Italian Irredentism in the Adriatic regions. Similar claims were made by Greek and Hungarian politicians; arguing that their national history extended well beyond the confines of the state, they called for their frontiers to be altered − or, at the very least, for the recognition of those ‘national minorities’ who resided abroad. Conversely, the question of the role in the collective memory that national narratives should ascribe to religious minorities triggered violent debates. Against a background of widespread anti-Semitism, Jews were often excluded from the national community as ‘foreign’ elements, just as Muslims were the target of attacks and exclusion in a number of Balkan states. Following German unification, even avowed Catholics and social democrats were liable to suffer the wrath of state propaganda; condemned for not confining their historical and political loyalties to the national community, they were regarded as ‘stateless individuals’.

TOWARDS A POSTNATIONAL EUROPE? These disputes formed the background to the two world wars of the twentieth century and fuelled numerous regional conflicts in Europe up to the Balkans War in the 1990s – yet the national paradigm continued to pursue its victorious course, even in the ‘age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm). It achieved this by easily adapting to the new configurations of the modern world. After the First World War, the League of Nations still confined the concept of nationhood to those that were ‘civilized’; this notably excluded peoples under the domination of European imperial powers in a ‘global society’ composed solely of nations and their histories. After 1945, however, it was upheld as a general principle of international political relations within the framework of the United Nations. In this sense, even in the decolonized world of the late twentieth century, the national paradigm has remained an essential aspect of the legacy of the global political dominance exerted by Europe at least since the early

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nineteenth century; this was clearly shown by the Anglo-Irish historian Benedict Anderson. Identified as ‘national liberation’, the fight against the old imperial order always involved a curious alliance of liberal, nationalist and communist ideologies. The underlying persistence of imperial characteristics was repressed or concealed by the rhetoric of ‘realpolitik’ during the Cold War. The subsequent belief, shared by certain European intellectuals, that the reunification of Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century would usher in a ‘postnational’ era characterized by supranational politics and partnerships was plainly illusory. As they saw it, empires and nations would become mere distant echoes of Europe’s past. The expression of nationalist sentiment would be confined to stadiums and sports competitions. Examples countering this theory include the conflicts between Belgium’s Flemish and Walloon inhabitants and the arguments over the place of the Basques and Catalans within the Spanish state, which reintroduced the question of identity and national past into the political scene. Yet it does not end there. For the resurgence of a certain ‘Anglo imperialism’ in the context of Brexit discussions and of Donald Trump’s electoral win in the United States, together with the rehabilitation of Russia’s imperial past through Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, all demonstrate the persistence of both the nation and the Imperium as a framework for European historical memory. Today’s historian now has the difficult yet fascinating task of apprehending all the different strands of Europe’s complex history of collective memories, which continues to develop before our very eyes.

NOTES 1. See e.g. the Queen’s Speech of May 2015: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/po​​litic​​s​/201​​ 5​/may​​/27​/q​​ueens​​-spee​​ch​-eu​​-refe​​rendu​​m​-bil​​l​-hum​​an​-ri​​​ghts-​​act​-d​​avid-​​camer​​on. 2. See Cameron’s speech after the Scottish referendum, quoted in: http:​/​/www​​.tele​​graph​​ .co​.u​​k​/new​​s​/ukn​​ews​/s​​cotti​​sh​-in​​depen​​dence​​/1110​​8256/​​Scott​​ish​-i​​ndepe​​ndenc​​e​-Dav​​id​ -Ca​​mer​on​​s​-spe​​ech​-i​​n​-ful​​l​.htm​​l. 3. Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon aller Wissenshaften und Künste (Leipzig, 1737), vol. XV, p. 258 sq. 4. Transylvania. 5. Michael Lebrecht, Über den National-Charakter der in Siebenbürgen befindlichen Nationen (Vienna, 1792), p. 12 sq. 6. Völkisch is normally translated as ‘national’, yet the root of the word is Volk (‘people’). For this reason, we have decided to retain the German term.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York, Verso, 1983. Brunner, Otto, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. III, academic publication, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 2004, pp. 175–221 (art. ‘Impérialisme’).

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Hroch, Miroslav, Das Europa der Nationen. Die moderne Nationsbildung im europäischen Vergleich, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. Stein-Hölkeskamp, Elke and Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp (Eds.), Erinnerungsorte der Antike, vol. II, Die römische Welt, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2006. Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches, 2nd edn, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2013. Thiesse, Anne-Marie, La Création des identités nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle, Paris, Le Seuil, 1999. Wendehorst, Stephan (Ed.), Die Anatomie frühneuzeitlicher Imperien. Herrschaftsmanagement jenseits von Staat und Nation, Berlin, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015.

CHAPTER 18

The Habsburgs A state of mind THOMAS SERRIER

From Charles V to Emperor Franz Joseph, the Habsburgs were the most powerful of Europe’s sovereign dynasties. After its collapse in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire became a source of fascination for writers, who drew on this bygone world that also inspired sentimental films set against a background of Strauss waltzes, fuelling a nostalgia based on a picture-postcard vision of the past. Until Brexit took effect, the European Union included seven constitutional monarchies. The days of the Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns seem distant memories, as do those of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty, whose name is now synonymous in French with an exclusive elite, and whose members simultaneously occupied the thrones of Britain, Belgium and Bulgaria prior to 1914. Nevertheless, royal weddings in Monaco and Britain still attract much media attention. The death, in 1989, of Zita of Bourbon-Parma, the last empress of Austria (1916–18), together with that of her heir, Otto von Habsburg, in 2011, likewise caught the public imagination. Are these the dying embers of a centuries-old history? Of all the dynasties that have reigned over Europe, none has had such a profound effect on the structure of European time and space, none has provided so many kingdoms with so many sovereigns for such an extensive period, and none, above all, has attained such a degree of power as the Habsburgs in their time. This is a long way from the tiny fiefdom in the Swiss canton of Aargau where it all began; the letters A.E.I.O.U., the grandiose signature adopted by Frederick III (1452–1493), remain intriguing to this day.

‘THE WORLD’S LAST NATION’ Austria erit in orbe ultima and Austriae est imperare orbi universo – these esoteric interpretations of that acronym reflect the House of Habsburg’s identification with empire and its far-reaching ambitions. And indeed, the Habsburg dynasty provided the Holy Roman Empire with no fewer than twenty-one emperors, from Rudolf I in 1273 to Francis II, until its dissolution in 1806. By then, Francis II had already

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proclaimed himself Francis I, the Austrian Empire’s first hereditary ruler. The aura around the Habsburgs survived beyond 1918 and the effective dismantling of the empire, and beyond 1945 and the radical denunciation of the imperialism of the ancient world. Today, countless periodicals, documentaries and history textbooks relate the story of how and why ‘the sun never set’ on the empire of Charles V, five hundred years ago. A polyglot and a traveller, this sovereign was the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Spain during the ‘Age of Discovery’, the King of both Naples and Sicily, and the Duke of Burgundy, which still encompassed the Netherlands at that time. Meanwhile, his brother, Ferdinand I, Archduke of Austria, became Apostolic King of Hungary and King of Bohemia in 1526. At the same time, threatening forces were beginning to proliferate, in the form of the Ottomans, the Hungarians, the Burgundians, the Hussites and the cantons of the Swiss Confederation. The year 1555, however, witnessed the very rare event of an abdication, when that same Charles V stepped down in favour of his brother Ferdinand and his own son, Philip II. This made it impossible to unify the empire, thenceforth split into two sections comprising Austria, Bohemia and Hungary on the one hand, and Spain, together with its colonies and the Netherlands, on the other. The memory of that thwarted dream of unity leads us directly to the assassination of 28 June 1914 − from Charles V, powerless to contain the spread of the Reformation, to the notion of the ‘prison of the peoples’, an omnipresent stereotype in the Europe of nation states, from the Italian Risorgimento of 1848 to the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Together with his wife, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was shot in Sarajevo by a Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip; in retrospect, this assassination sounded the death knell for an era, signalling the start of the ‘short twentieth century’, that ‘age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm). Was the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved in 1918 for failing to resolve the conflicts between the nations that had comprised the empire before 1914? This theory was debated throughout the twentieth century. The judgements passed on the AustroHungarian Compromise of 1867 − an inadequate model or a laboratory of the future − played a key role here, as did the fate reserved for the Habsburg Empire at the hands of the victors of the First World War. While he lamented the ‘misery of the small states of Eastern Europe’ (the title of his work published in 1946), the Hungarian political scientist István Bibó gave no quarter to the empire. However, in his Requiem pour un empire défunt, first published in 1988, sixty-eight years after the Treaty of Trianon, his compatriot Ferenc Fejtő argued that the destruction of the dual monarchy paved the way for the absorption of Central Europe, first by the Third Reich and subsequently by the USSR; ‘Austria-Hungary did not collapse, it was made to collapse.’1

THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY Following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in the upheavals of a revolutionary Europe, nostalgia for a federative Christian Reich was first rekindled

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after 1800, its mystique reflected in the works of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. However, the demise of the ‘k.k. monarchy’ (the abbreviation for kaiserlich and königlich − imperial and royal), gave rise to a full-blown ‘Habsburg myth’ in the interwar period. Austria-Hungary appears as ‘Kakania’ in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930); the monarchy’s former states, meanwhile, were confronted with grave political and social crises. Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Ödön von Horváth all retrospectively transformed the Belle Époque into a golden age. As Joseph Roth, the author who epitomized this myth, wrote in Die Kapuzinergruft (1938): So far as Austria-Hungary is concerned, the ostensibly peculiar is perfectly natural. [. . .] Of course it’s the Slovenes and Poles and the Ruthenian Galicians, and the kaftan Jews from Boryslaw, the horse-dealers from Bačka, the Moslems from Sarajevo and the chestnut roasters from Mostar who sing the Gott erhalte. [A reference to the practice of celebrating Franz Joseph’s birthday on 18 August].2 Roth’s masterpiece, The Radetzky March (1932), describes the decline of the Trotta family – clearly a metaphor for the inevitable demise of a bygone world, which was revisited one last time by Stefan Zweig in his work The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European. Shortly afterwards, in 1942, he took his own life while in exile in Brazil. This idyllic picture, recreated after the events in question, is characterized by ‘hinternational’ ecumenism, a quip coined by Prague-born writer and historian Johannes Urzidil that combines the idea of ‘international’ with what lies behind (hinter) the various nations. Its guardian spirit was Emperor Franz Joseph (1848– 1916), despite his well-known hostility towards liberal ideas and contempt for the Modernist scribblers of the Vienna Secession. The two other figures central to Habsburg mythology are Archduke Rudolf, who held liberal views, suffered from depression and committed suicide at Mayerling in 1889, and Empress Elisabeth, a type of Princess Diana of her day, who has become known as ‘Sissi’. Her life, characterized by endless ordeals and singularities, ended at the hands of the anarchist Luigi Luccheni, who assassinated her on the banks of Lake Geneva in 1898. As royalty in crisis, they were cinegenic subjects – the triology Sissi, starring Romy Schneider, was a European success – embodying what Hermann Broch called the ‘joyful apocalypse’, reflected by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Sigmund Freud. The reason why fin-de-siècle Vienna continues to hold so much fascination for us lies in the ambivalent aspects of its modernity, which would be inconceivable without the accompanying identity crises that sometimes appear so similar to those of our own time.

PIECES OF A PUZZLE Austria, forgetting the fact that Adolf Hitler had spent some of his formative years in Vienna, certainly used and abused a series of convenient contrasts after 1945.

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These included The Blue Danube as opposed to The Rhinegold; the multicultural belt running through Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest as opposed to the source of all ‘German-ness’; the genius of Mozart and the soft lightness of operettas, later contrasted with Wagnerian bombast, and the enlightened attitudes of Maria Theresa and the debonair Franz Joseph as opposed to the bellicose Hohenzollern dynasty. A number of intellectuals from countries in the post-Habsburg cultural zone were not taken in, however; amid the revival of Mitteleuropa, both during the 1980s and after 1989, they continued to view themselves, knowingly and intentionally, in terms of this determinative past. This is illustrated by Gregor von Rezzori’s portrayal of a fragmented self in his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1979). Of Italian descent, Rezzori was born in Bukovina in 1914 and was therefore a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; he became a Soviet citizen in 1945 and was subsequently stateless for a long period, before adopting Austrian nationality in his later years. Further examples include the works of Trieste-born writer Claudio Magris; Celestial Harmonies (2000), a saga by the Hungarian author Péter Esterházy centring on his ancestors, who were prominent members of the Empire’s aristocracy; the inebriated wanderings of the Polish Galician writer Andrzej Stasiuk described in My Europe (2000); and the ‘disorientation’ experienced by the Ukrainian writer Yurii Andrukhovych faced with the ‘post-multiculturality’ of his world, both narrow and infinite, on the margins of Europe. The international success achieved by these authors clearly shows that what is being played out in these cultural reappropriations − from Trieste to Lviv (Lemberg) and from Budapest to Chernivtsi (Czernowitz) – extends far beyond the confines of the post-Habsburg space. The collective memory of the Habsburgs is a piece of the whole puzzle that is now in the process of reconfiguration.

NOTES 1. Ferenc Fejtő, Requiem pour un empire défunt (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1988), new edition published by Le Seuil, coll. ‘Points Histoire’, 1993. 2. Published in English as The Emperor’s Tomb; translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Publications, 2013 [1938])

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cole, Laurence, ‘Der Habsburger-Mythos’, in Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller and Hannes Stekl (Eds.), Memoria Austriae, I: Menschen, Mythen, Zeiten, Vienna, Verlag für Geschichte und Politik/Oldenbourg, 2004, 473–504. Horel, Catherine, Cette Europe qu’on dit centrale. Des Habsbourg à l’intégration européenne, 1815–2004, Paris, Beauchesne, 2009. Judson, Pieter M., The Habsburg Empire: A New History, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2016. Kaszyński, Stefan H. and Sławomir Piontek (Eds.), Die habsburgischen Landschaften in der österreichischen Literatur, Poznań, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 1995. Le Rider, Jacques, Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité, Paris, PUF, 1990.

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Magris, Claudio, Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna, Turin, Einaudi, 1963. Menasse, Robert, Das Land ohne Eigenschaften. Essay zur österreichischen Identität, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1995. Schorske, Carl, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York, Random House, 1979.

CHAPTER 19

Tragic love OLAF B. RADER

The theme of love and its vicissitudes has played a central role in the arts ever since Ovid wrote his Art of Love. It has inspired troubadours’ songs, dramas and literary works, producing multiple representations that have permeated our collective imaginary. The heroes of the European love story are often tragic figures: Héloïse and Abélard, Romeo and Juliet, Madame Bovary, the young Werther and Anna Karenina. Omnia vincit amor (‘love conquers all’) declared Virgil in his Eclogues. But is that really the case? Perhaps so – yet surely it is equally true that the victims of those arrows so accurately fired by the Archer of Love are plunged into a nightmare. His targets find themselves just as close to their own death as they are to pleasure. For the history of love has shown us that life’s most perilous moment could well be that encounter with the Goddess of Love and her little accomplice. Known in Greek and Roman mythology as Eros, Love or Cupid, he assists her in her task and has therefore become a central figure in the European collective memory. After all, love may be the most stimulating, inspiring and enduring aspect of human existence, having driven mankind to compose, write and paint, as well as to wage war − sometimes in its name, as illustrated by Homer’s account of the Trojan War. Libraries and art galleries are full of works that focus solely on these questions: What is love and what does it mean for us?

OVID: SENSUAL LOVE The major literary classic devoted to this theme is unquestionably Ovid’s The Art of Love. There, and in his other writings, he offers readers a type of manual guaranteeing success in love – or else deliverance from it. Taking inspiration from older erotic works, the author introduced the figure of a praeceptor amoris, a teacher who dispenses the most graphic advice, sometimes including practical tips, all set out in verse form. He instructs men on the art of seducing women, and shows women how to enhance their beauty. Although the work met with some success, it displeased Emperor Augustus, as it also presented a detailed and highly unfavourable picture of Roman customs. Ovid paid the price for this, being exiled to a location by the Black Sea.

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Interest in Ovid revived a few centuries later, in the High Middle Ages, when chivalric culture was developing in Europe. The troubadour tradition emerged in France during this period, and its popularity soon spread to Italy and Germany. Ovid’s works were reread and reinterpreted to such an extent that he eventually came to be seen as the ideal model in the domain of love poetry, then enjoying huge popularity. One might almost describe this phenomenon, which took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as Ovid’s renaissance, manifested in a number of works devoted to courtly love. One example of these is the treatise written in the late twelfth century by the cleric André le Chapelain – or Andreas Capellanus, as he was called at the court of the French king Philippe Auguste. Entitled De amore libri tres, this work drew inspiration from The Art of Love. It taught readers not only how to inspire lasting love but also how to remedy the condition, and spoke of both sexuality and the relations between the sexes. It was widely circulated and, a century later, had been translated into French, Italian, German and English. While the troubadours and minstrels were periodically reprising the Ovidian approach in their exaltation of a generally sensual form of love, a different, unprecedented aspect of this emotion was emerging in the context of Augustinian thought. This was the Christian concept of caritas, whose triumphant power formed a total contrast to the culpable desires of the flesh (cupiditas). Moreover, the notion of love was increasingly enhanced by elements from the New Testament essentially referring to God. Indeed, the love of God is most clearly manifested in the creation and the work of salvation, and its multiple theological interpretations preoccupied almost all renowned scholastic philosophers up to the Late Middle Ages. In this way, the complex analyses of love presented by troubadours and theologians also constituted a discourse on society and a mechanism for maintaining social discipline.

CHRISTIANITY’S IDEALIZATION OF THE COUPLE Pierre Abélard, a medieval French philosopher, experienced the joys, torments and dangers of sensual love both in thought and in deed, also exploring the most extreme of theological subtleties. The story of his love for the beautiful Héloïse features all the elements that arouse emotion in sentimental hearts, but it also serves as a prime example of the disastrous consequences resulting from the social constraints of the time. It likewise raises the crucial question of whether that form of love was favourable to the emancipation of women in the Western Christian world during the Middle Ages and the Modern Era. Furthermore, by emphasizing monogamy and the sacrament of marriage, Christianity reinforced the idealization of the couple, although this did not prevent the publication of lively, erotic tales that depicted quite different types of love. These include Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, the Ragionamenti by Pietro Aretino, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and, much later, Honoré de Balzac’s Contes drolatiques. Yet the idea of love was constantly linked to that of marriage, an association that gave rise to the great nineteenth-century novels of adultery, such as Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest. The act of adultery, as described by

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Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy and Theodor Fontane, signalled a love that rejected social constraints and was accordingly brutally excluded from society. Another specifically European feature was the tendency in the nineteenth century to treat sexual knowledge as belonging to the scientific domain; this, in turn, inevitably influenced the ways in which love was portrayed. The social environment seemed at odds with human nature, or, at least, with the nature of ‘genuine’ love. Conflict with families and social circles, with social hierarchies in the broad sense and with the mindset prevailing in the church and in political life all appeared to prevent individuals from being able to make independent decisions and from experiencing love in the fullest sense − except in a few rare cases. Broken hearts expired, and spurned lovers chose suicide. The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a roman à clef dating from the Sturm und Drang1 period, rapidly became a best-selling work of German literature, causing its author to be taxed with inciting the emotionally unstable young to react to disappointment in love by killing themselves. And indeed, the death rate of such lovers rose considerably in the Modern Era. Literature’s most famous couple, Romeo and Juliet, had already exemplified the love that unhesitatingly chooses death, their fate marking its apogee. Shakespeare’s text was not the only work to perpetuate the subject; its popularity has been maintained to this day through numerous musical and literary adaptations, films and theatrical productions. The plays of Pierre de Marivaux (which gave rise to the term marivaudage − mannered dialogue) present a contrasting picture of the behaviour of different social classes. This extends to the domain of romance; while his aristocratic characters express their sentiments through subtleties, their servants exhibit much greater freedom. In this way, he turned the ars amandi into a refined rhetorical art. Ovid had already presented a description of enduring happiness in love in his Metamorphoses. In return for having shown hospitality towards Hermes and Zeus, the devoted elderly couple Philemon and Baucis were united for eternity. After their deaths, which occurred at the same moment, they were metamorphosed into trees; their branches intermingled, ensuring that their bond outlasted their human existence. But is their story an exception; is failure the rule, as the literary works of history would have us believe? Whatever the case may be, cultural models will continue to operate, just as love will continue to motivate humankind. From casual dating and the open, uncommitted relationships extolled by the ‘’68 generation’ to forced marriages and honour killings − whatever the cultural background involved – love continues to encompass a vast range of experiences, in both art and life, in our time. The demographic changes and altered mindsets brought about by the arrival of immigrants whose culture, in some cases, differs considerably from our own will inevitably have an effect on love. Yet if Europe were to authorize polygamy and provide it with a legal basis, it would lose an important aspect of its identity. Does love really conquer all? This question remains open, but Virgil’s observation ends with words that underline a profoundly human vulnerability: et nos cedamus amori – ‘so we too shall yield to love’!

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NOTE 1. ‘Storm and compulsion’; this was a movement in literature − as well as in politics − created in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Holzberg, Niklas, Ovid. Dichter und Werk, Munich, C.H. Beck, 1998. Ovid, The Art of Love, translated from the Latin by James Michie, New York, Modern Library, 2002. Passerini, Luisa, Europe in Love, Love in Europe, London, I.B. Tauris, 1999. Rougemont, Denis de, L’Amour et l’Occident, Paris, 10/18, 2001 [1939]. Virgil, The Eclogues of Virgil, translated from the Latin by David Ferry, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

CHAPTER 20

Free-spirited love Carmen CÉCILE KOVACSHAZY

Prosper Mérimée’s literary creation has become a major figure in European culture. Both free and dangerous, Carmen embodies the modern woman with all her ambivalence – a characteristic that was seen as typically Bohemian. First published in 1845, Carmen is a novella by the French author Prosper Mérimée, who was fascinated by the Romani people. The work comprises four chapters in all, yet it is the third that captures the reader’s imagination. This describes the misfortunes of Don José, a sergeant from the Basque Country who, having fallen madly in love with the beautiful Carmen from Andalusia, succeeds in becoming her lover. Although she later declares him to be her rom, or husband, he blames her for his downfall; stripped of his rank, he becomes a brigand, a smuggler and, finally, a murderer. The narrative theme pursued by Mérimée was to enjoy massive popularity in the late nineteenth century. It involves a female character who combines the essence of amorous passion (eros) with the force of destruction (thanatos), thereby bringing about the death of any man who falls victim to her fatal feminine attractions. Carmen is therefore the prototypical femme fatale − the prevailing topos of the time. Yet her success lies in the fact that a number of archetypal models are combined within her. She is the embodiment of the ambivalent female − a passionate, magnetic and shamelessly calculating character − and of the quintessential chauvinistic fantasy of possessing and dominating a woman. She is also a true ‘servant of Satan’ in the Romantic sense, in that she pursues a diabolical path outside established norms. Yet at the same time she is an iconic figure, an emancipated woman who earns her own living and enjoys an intensely sensual life with no need of a husband. She is a nomad who goes wherever she chooses – an itinerant lifestyle seen as characteristic of the Romani people; ‘I won’t be plagued and above all I won’t be dominated. I just want to be free and to do as I please.’ Carmen is a profoundly corporeal female European realm of memory, with a desirable body essentially defined by its liberty. Her success is partly due to the many and varied forms that have been used to tell her story.

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FROM BIZET TO THE PRESENT DAY Carmen achieved worldwide renown thanks to the opera composed by Georges Bizet, with a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. First performed in 1875, it led to a great many translations of Mérimée’s novella and has been repeatedly staged and readapted throughout the world ever since. Its musical qualities have greatly contributed to its current status as the world’s most frequently performed operatic work, its popular melodies rivalling those of the Italian opera. Bizet added a docile fiancée, Micaëla, to Mérimée’s tale. Rather than being the sum of all national variations on the theme, the legend of Carmen involves an archetype that has become mythical. The fact that this varies very little from country to country attests to the supranational dimension of this character, originally conceived in France. There have been so many adaptations of her story that it would be impossible to mention them all here. They include the film versions of the opera by the German-born American director Ernst Lubitsch (1918), Spain’s Carlos Saura (1983) and South Africa’s Mark Dornford-May (2005); the ballets choreographed by France’s Roland Petit (1949), South Africa’s Dada Masilo (2014) and Cuba’s Carlos Acosta (2015); the play by British director Peter Brook (1981) and the musical adaptation by the Belgian musician Stromae (2015).

THE BOHEMIAN WOMAN The Romantic vogue for Spanish Orientalism and Bohemianism is not sufficient in itself to explain the fact that Carmen’s story has been circulating continuously throughout Europe, and indeed the world, from 1845 to the present day, portrayed in every art form. For, in cultural terms, Mérimée’s Carmen did not emerge from nothing – quite the reverse. She is the direct continuation of a deeply embedded, age-old figure that had formed part of the European artistic imaginary since the days of the Ancien Régime – that of the Egyptian woman, who developed into the Bohemian character of the neoclassical age. There are records of the presence of Romani communities in Western Europe from the early fifteenth century onwards, and they appear to have been well received by society as a whole. However, this situation changed during the seventeenth century, with the emergence of nation states and the repression exerted by the Church, which condemned the practice of palm-reading. Yet while itinerant groups were subject to increasingly severe suppression, ‘Egyptian’ men – and more often women – and their beautiful adornments were frequently depicted in the arts, in the manner of communicating vessels. Examples include paintings (by Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour), the commedia dell’arte and the ballet. La Gitanilla (1613), a novella by Miguel de Cervantes, and La Zingara (1753), an intermezzo by Rinaldo di Capua (reworked by Charles Simon Favart), constitute two major sources, anchoring the character within a solid, meliorative artistic tradition. The idea of Carmen and the figure of the Gypsy girl as the embodiment of a foil or of a cultural (or ontological) Otherness is therefore a misinterpretation. In fact, the opposite is true, for until recently, the Gypsies’ situation in society as a whole was characterized by a positive

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‘culture of contact’ (to use Henriette Asséo’s expression), which was consequently reflected in the arts, particularly in the West. Carmen continues to embody these different myths today. She remains a (fictional) muse, a catalyst for prompting both chauvinistic and feminist thinking, a fascinating and sometimes off-putting figure and the prototype of the Latina caliente associated with an Orientalised Spain, in Edward Said’s sense of the term. In almost all the films made by French director Tony Gatlif, for instance, she appears as the archetypal emancipated woman; this is particularly true of Transylvania. We cannot fail to notice the glaring paradox here; on the one hand, we have the isolated, fascinating figure of the Gypsy woman as she has always been portrayed in the arts, while on the other, we have the omnipresent fantasm of the Roma people, always conceived in the plural and presented in extremely negative terms in political and social discourse.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Asséo, Henriette, ‘Figures bohémiennes et fiction, l’âge des possibles. 1770–1920’, Le Temps des médias, no. 14 (2010/1): 12–27. Bohèmes. De Léonard de Vinci à Picasso, exhibition catalogue, RMN/Grand Palais, 2012 (in particular the text by Adeline Collange-Perugi). Mérimée, Prosper, ‘Carmen’, Revue des deux mondes, 1 October 1845; Carmen, Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1847.

CHAPTER 21

The art of dying OLAF B. RADER

The hereafter long remained a source of fear for the people of Christian Europe. Our secularized societies seem to have relegated death to the personal domain. Yet for centuries human beings sought to regulate it collectively through ritual, in order to transform that fear-inducing, inevitable end into a moment of redemption. Mors certa, hora incerta: ‘Death is certain, its time is uncertain.’ This unarguable statement, whose origins remain vague, could be expanded to include an additional message; if death is certain, it is equally certain that the ideas and representations associated with it have evolved and will continue to do so. Death remains inevitable, of course, but we no longer think and act in the same way when attempting to fight the fear that it arouses in us – always assuming that it does frighten us. In L’Homme devant la mort, published in 1977, Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) showed that the conception of death and the sentiments it inspires in us have changed, confirming their historical character. Although, biologically speaking, death might appear to be a uniform process, ways of dying and funeral rites, images of death and representations of the hereafter, mourning ceremonies and burial practices differ vastly from culture to culture. What remains a constant, however, is the fact that in several pre-modern societies death was associated with highly varied circumstances – this remains the case today.

RITES OF PASSAGE First, death is universally seen as the termination of earthly life. And because it has always been regarded as a fearsome threat or a longed-for release – as the outcome of old age or illness, of violence or suicide – it has required rituals to regulate the emotions it arouses. Consequently, these practices should be seen as rites of passage whose chief purpose is to banish and neutralize the threat it represents. At the same time, death can appear to act as a cultural marker; for in order to be able to develop an ancestor cult associated with the rituals governing death and burial, one must first acquire a sense of self. If one is not able to distinguish one’s own identity from that of another, the fate of dead bodies will be of little interest. Or, to view the matter from the opposite perspective, burial practices, funeral rites and reflections on death are closely linked to the emergence of the human dimension.

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Social groups are just as destabilized by death as individuals, and have just as much need to find points of reference. In this context, remembrance ceremonies and mourning rituals, which may be perceived as standardized manifestations of emotion instituted by groups, become important mechanisms of social regulation. In the context of ancient Egypt, a civilization positively steeped in thoughts of death and the desire for immortality, the Egyptologist and cultural studies specialist Jan Assmann observed that death, and consequently awareness of mortality, constituted ‘a major generator of cultural identity.’1

A ‘BAD’ DEATH Following the end of the Age of Antiquity, Christian Europe developed coping strategies in dealing with dying and death which were particularly characteristic during the Middle Ages. One of the most striking of these was the notion of a community comprising the living and the dead. This conception of ‘the presence of the dead’, which was evident throughout the pre-modern era and naturally influenced the degree of proximity that the living maintained with the dead, only began to decline in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. Until that time, it was believed that the dead, present among the living, supported earthly life. One could therefore take refreshments or feast in the company of the deceased at funerary meals, which bore no resemblance to the offerings of meat and wine customarily laid on altars in former times. In some situations, the dead even retained a legal status and could become an anchor point for the creation of a collective memory. Consequently, they kept their belongings or acquired new ones. Kings were not exempt from this rule; the royal crown of Bohemia, for instance, was regarded as the legal property of Saint Wenceslas and was deposited on the reliquary containing his skull, which is kept in Saint Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague. If a king of Bohemia wanted to use it for his coronation, he had to ‘borrow’ it from the saint, effectively entering into a type of rental agreement. In fact, the scenario featuring a saint who had ownership of a crown had become increasingly common in Europe. And it was in the cult of saints that the understanding between the living and the dead found its most forceful expression. If one succeeded in guaranteeing the intercession of one of the saints by venerating their mortal remains – such as their bones, even though these might have been reduced to fragments – one could be sure of securing celestial aid in dealing with the problems of everyday life. Although nowadays our fear tends to be linked to the actuality of death itself rather than to what becomes of us afterwards, the opposite was true in the premodern era. It was the thought of the hereafter that aroused either dread or longing for deliverance, and there was no prospect more terrible than that of a sudden death occurring when one was in a state of sin. The notion of mors peccatorum pessima referred to the inescapable fate of eternal damnation and the fires of hell. And as the Christian Church had been continually devising new methods of conferring graces on believers since the twelfth century, there were growing numbers of remedies available for assuaging fears of a ‘bad death’ and leaving this life for the next. These

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included Eucharistic adoration, devotion to the Virgin Mary in all its forms and the contemplation of Saint Christopher, all seen as particularly effective ways of preparing oneself for death during the High and Late Middle Ages. The devastation wrought by the plague epidemics that broke out in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century was totally unprecedented. Some regions experienced the sudden deaths of half of their populations. The effects in social terms were incalculable, as reported by certain contemporary witnesses such as Giovanni Boccaccio. From then on, the representation of death was accorded an increasingly significant place in the development of a conception of the world. It was even incorporated into the arts, finding expression in multiple literary and artistic works. The fifteenth century saw the emergence of little ‘manuals’ introducing readers to the art of dying; entitled ars moriendi, they were based on the idea that one could learn how to die in keeping with divine precepts, thereby ensuring the salvation of one’s soul. For those unable to read – in other words, the vast majority of the population – these opuscules were illustrated with prints depicting dying individuals surrounded by angels and saints, and also, of course, by the devil and his acolytes. This was a time of crucial importance, as the hour of death foretold the fate of the soul; would it ascend into heaven or be cast into hell? Needless to say, the devil, intent on acquiring souls, had powerful instruments such as doubt and pride at his disposal. Fortunately, the lures put out by the Evil One were counterbalanced by the exhortations of the angels, who would urge a dying individual to remain steadfast in their faith, trust and hope and, most importantly of all, to make a General Confession. By closely following the developments in the scenes portrayed, the reader learns that the devil finally concedes defeat and the angels carry the soul to heaven. And indeed, when it came to images of death, Europe was gripped by an iconographic obsession in the Late Middle Ages. The danses macabres provided artists with a forceful means of demonstrating that all human beings were equal in death, regardless of their social standing in this world. Popes and emperors, kings and princes, cardinals and bishops, knights, members of the bourgeoisie and peasants – all danced with the Grim Reaper, submitting to their inevitable fate.

LEARNING TO DIE The ars moriendi was not the only literary genre to reflect on the dangers accompanying death and the fleeting nature of earthly life. There were also the Sterbebücher, works that offered apprenticeships in dying. The most outstanding example of these is undoubtedly The Ploughman of Bohemia by Johannes von Tepl (ca. 1350–1415), which may be considered one of most important literary works of the Late Middle Ages. This text, which appeared in 1400 or shortly afterwards, features a poignant dialogue between a grieving ploughman whose wife has just died and Death, whom he denounces: ‘O Death, insatiable destroyer of humankind, abominable despiser of the world, dreadful murderer, I curse you!’2 However, Death provides him with convincing and, above all, logical answers, and the exchange

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continues. God eventually intervenes, not only reminding the ploughman of his mortality but also enjoining Death not to forget that its power comes from Him, and from Him alone. The Christian religion had also introduced a radical change with regard to burial practices. Pre-Christian peoples buried their dead extra muros, that is, outside the localities where they had lived. Moreover, ancient burial law dictated that no tomb of any description was allowed within the walls surrounding a temple. This rule was rejected in the third century, however, and the dead were henceforth buried in the cemeteries created around churches, which now received the mortal remains of saints, sovereigns and benefactors within their walls. Donations and funerary monuments, some of which were extremely large, were intended to guarantee that the deceased would continue to be remembered in prayers. The mausoleums, vaults and monuments built for the dead, housing their bones or marking their burial place, were in fact primarily for the use of the living, who needed both a material manifestation of their memories and a means of indicating the social position (whether actual or desired) of their departed relatives. And as tombs then served as an anchor point for memories, to a much greater degree than they do nowadays, they made a notable contribution to the creation of a collective or familial identity; presented in a particular manner, they could even be used to legitimize power. Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome contains spectacular funerary monuments built for the popes of the Early Modern Era, indicating the extent of their families’ investment in the perpetuation of their memory. For some social groups, such as the aristocratic dynasties of the pre-modern period, family tombs played an exceptionally important role in terms of remembrance, consolidating the identity of the family in question both within and outside its immediate circle; indeed, without that consolidation, the nobility itself would have become inconceivable as a social category. Power relies on remembrance, but the memorial culture that it establishes also serves its future ambitions. It is through those alternating functions − commemorating the deceased, inspiring prayers of remembrance and legitimizing power − that the tombs and burial places of royal figures, both major and minor, have acquired their full significance.

THE REPRESSION OF DEATH In the period that followed the Age of Enlightenment the attitude towards death underwent a further radical change. This originated on the one hand from a process of secularization, which led to a rejection of the notion of an afterlife, and on the other hand, from a lessening (real or partly imagined) of the threats to human existence. The risk of early death is far from being as prevalent in the collective consciousness today as it was a century ago – and victims of the Great Plague could be dead within just a few days, or even a few hours, of experiencing the initial symptoms. Nowadays, medical treatments offer hopes of recovery and lives have been lengthened, in some cases by several years. After death, the body becomes no more than a material support, to be dispatched with all possible speed.

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In the context of representing the soul’s immortality and the rewards or punishments awaiting us in the next life, our modern culture appears to have distanced itself from others that preceded it. This is also true of the cult of the dead, now seemingly all but obsolete, and the corresponding treatment of their mortal remains. Yet in every culture until the Age of Enlightenment, the cult of the dead served as one of the structuring elements of a society; in this respect, religious practices clearly revealed the mechanisms that created a social group. This may appear strange to us today. What with the considerable lengthening of lifespans and the advances made in modern medicine, death seems to have been repressed. Nevertheless, the Ebola virus, the Coronavirus and even hospital-acquired infections serve as warnings against excessive optimism. After all, the devil has numerous means at his disposal when plotting the unexpected deaths from which our predecessors sought protection in the form of the ars moriendi. And although this has now been forgotten, traces of it still remain in the tattoos sported by rockers and Goths.

NOTES 1. Jan Assmann, Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie. Todesbilder und Totenriten im Alten Ägypten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 14. 2. Johannes de Tepla, Civis Zacensis, Epistola cum Libello Ackerman und Das Büchlein Ackerman, based on the Freiburg manuscript, 163, and the Stuttgart manuscript, HB X 23, edited and translated by K. Bertau (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), vol. 1, text and translation, chap. 1: ‘Grimmiger tilger aller leute, schedlicher echter aller werlte, freissamer morder aller menschen, ir Tot, euch sei verfluchet!’

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ariès, Philippe, L’Homme devant la mort, Paris, Le Seuil, 1977. Assmann, Jan, Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie. Todesbilder und Totenriten im Alten Ägypten, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Barloewen, Constantin von (Ed.), Der Tod in den Weltkulturen und Weltreligionen, Munich, Diederichs, 1996. Binski, Paul, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, London, British Museum Press, 1996. Imhof, Arthur E., Ars moriendi. Die Kunst des Sterbens einst und heute, Vienna and Cologne, Böhlau, 1991. Rader, Olaf B., Grab und Herrschaft. Politischer Totenkult von Alexander dem Grossen bis Lenin, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2003. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Les Revenants. Les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale, Paris, Gallimard, 1994. Vovelle, Michel, La Mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours, Paris, Gallimard, 1983.

CHAPTER 22

Saint James The meaning of the way JAVIER GÓMEZ-MONTERO

Santiago de Compostela, a city in the autonomous community of Galicia in northwestern Spain, has been attracting pilgrims from all over Europe since the year 820. Today, despite the secularization of our society, Europeans still walk the Pilgrim Way in search of meaning. The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela was established during the High Middle Ages, following the discovery of Saint James’s tomb there in about 820 CE. Conceived as an act of penitence and gratitude, it attained its apogee between the fourteenth century and the Lutheran Reformation (ca. 1520). As it became a holy route, ecclesiastical and secular authorities throughout Europe established its rituals, spreading pious traditions and heroic legends reinforced by texts and images, accounts of miracles and splendid motifs. A specific iconography devoted to Saint James was established in the parishes placed under his patronage and in the churches associated with the pilgrimage, such as the cathedrals of Toulouse and León and the abbey church of Sainte-Foy de Conques; these images are scattered throughout the cities and market towns along the pilgrimage route. In this way, through his miracles and iconography, James became the most popular saint in medieval Western Europe, whether depicted as an apostle, a pilgrim, a Matamoros (‘slayer of Moors’) or − from the fifteenth century onwards − a child in pilgrim’s clothing. During this formative phase, a marked interconnection between the sacred and the secular was already becoming evident; this has always characterized the social tradition of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, as noted in accounts given by pilgrims and travellers. Although the pilgrimage provided much material for medieval literature, it was redefined in the Renaissance, when it became open to other interests – commercial, diplomatic and professional – as reflected in travellers’ reports. From then on, the pilgrims’ descriptions placed greater emphasis on cultural aspects, on customs and landscapes, some of them exotic, and were presented from a more personal perspective. The journey to Santiago de Compostela remains holy for Catholics today, but it has also become a space of secular spirituality, of individual freedom and

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personal growth, of self-esteem and significance. Nowadays, it primarily embodies an existential experience.

A SACRED AND SECULAR SPACE The Pilgrim’s Guide, entitled the Liber Sancti Jacobi, was completed in about 1145. It defined the four original routes to Santiago de Compostela, establishing the journey made by each pilgrim from his or her doorstep to the tomb of Saint James. The Via Turonensis starts, symbolically, from the Saint-Jacques Tower in Paris, continuing through Tours and Bordeaux; the Via Lemovicensis starts from Limoges, the Via Podiensis from Puy-en-Velay and the Via Tolosana from Toulouse. These routes, together with those extending from northern and eastern Europe, form the graphical equivalent of the continent’s nervous system, a network whose branches stretch to the boundaries of Muslim and Orthodox Christian Europe. The most unique aspect of this pilgrimage may be the fact that it is not a point of remembrance or a memorial but is characterized by practices. The route to Santiago de Compostela is a living, complex European realm of memory, sustained both by its religious framework and its Christian basis, and by the secular practices of a contemporary society governed by the mass media. The collective memory of Santiago de Compostela is based on a space characterized by its bivalent nature, having been pervaded by both the sacred and the profane. Both a mental and a symbolic space, it is appropriated by each and everyone, for ‘Compostela’ can be experienced subjectively, nourished by personal cultural and existential experiences. The pilgrims’ route has therefore come to epitomize Europe, as a type of subconscious underlying its territories, where the shared foundation of its nations, with their various languages, traditions and values, is formed and where European memory and identity is forged. The Way of Saint James is the material realization of Charlemagne’s dream of a Christian route leading from the Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea to the former Roman province of Hispania Gallaecia, and is exceptionally complex from an anthropological perspective. It has been developing its own language of spirituality from the ninth century to the present day, as its pilgrims conduct dialogues both with each other and with their predecessors, gradually forging a language of solitude inspired and stimulated by their journey through natural and sublime countryside. It has also witnessed the limitations of the human body, its most fundamental needs and the human experiences of emptiness and fulfilment. It is at this point that the road to Santiago de Compostela is transformed from an espace autre − a ‘space otherwise’ − into a temps autre − a ‘time otherwise’.1 The slow pace at which the pilgrims proceed facilitates their encounter with their own memory, with local memory and, consequently, with the collective memory of Europe. The pilgrims’ journey also leads to a meeting with Europe itself, a process that stimulates the emergence of its collective memory, at the same time raising their awareness of ‘European-ness’. At least, this is what is suggested in witness accounts; these may be written (as journals, narrative descriptions and guide books) or visual (in the form of photos,

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videos or illustrations). They may also be posted on the internet and on social media sites, which have witnessed the development of a genuine community relating back to the hypothetical community of pilgrims that existed in days gone by. This has been experienced by people from every walk of life, of all ages and in all conditions, with different educational backgrounds, nationalities and religions. Today, as both a physical and symbolic territory, the road to Santiago de Compostela offers us a mirror image of Europe.

NOTE 1. Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics, Robert Harvey (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 103.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Gómez-Montero, Javier (Ed.), Topografías culturales del Camino de Santiago – Kulturelle Topographien des Jakobsweges, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2016. Herbers, Klaus, Der Jakobsweg, Munich, DTV, 2007. Rucquoi, Adeline, Mille fois à Compostelle, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2014. Vielliard, Jeanne, Le Guide du pèlerin de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle, Mâcon, Protat frères, 1969.

CHAPTER 23

Luther, Ignatius and Calvin The longing for salvation ÉTIENNE FRANÇOIS

These three reformers disrupted the uniform religious landscape of their day, overturning the status quo. This led to a century of conflicts that lasted until the French Revolution, when tolerance and, later, religious freedom were established on the principle that nobody should be ‘disturbed for his opinions, even in matters of religion’. This fragmentation gave rise to distinct artistic traditions − exemplified by Bach in Germany and the religious paintings of the Spanish Golden Age. These had a lasting effect on the development of sensibilities, landscapes and mentalities. Why take three figures who all feature prominently in Europe’s collective memories and place them side by side, in the same context and on the same terms, when everything about them – including their personalities and legacies – seems to emphasize their dissimilarity? Martin Luther (1483–1546) initiated the Protestant Reformation and spent practically his whole life in Saxony; Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Jesuit order, was born in the Basque Country and lived mainly in Spain, France and Italy; John Calvin (1509–1564), who spent most of his life outside France, in Strasbourg and Geneva, instigated a new phase in the Protestant Reformation. What could they possibly have in common?

REFORMATION AND REFORMS First, in addition to their contemporaneity, all three embody the same desire to carry out a comprehensive reform of the medieval Christianity and the Latin Church that had shaped their religious education. Luther was condemned by Rome almost immediately after denouncing the system of indulgences and its abuses in his ‘ninety-five articles’ of 1517. His drive to introduce reform consequently involved a break with the papacy and a commitment to return to the early form of Christianity, based on the primacy of faith and the Scriptures, and on the universal priesthood of all baptized believers. Calvin subsequently introduced new organizational structures, also inspired by the early church, into the new churches. This enabled them to act in accordance with the ‘Institutes of the Christian Religion’ − to quote the title of his book, published in Latin

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in 1536. And in the case of Ignatius of Loyola, that same reforming zeal was expressed through the new type of religious order that he founded in 1534. Likewise based on a return to the Scriptures, this was to play a major role in the reforms of the Catholic Church; their programme was set out by the Council of Trent, convoked between 1545 and 1563 for the purpose of countering the Protestant threat. Each of these three individuals, who were motivated by the same desire but expressed it in different, even opposing, ways, also wrote seminal works in both Latin and vernacular languages. These were addressed to a large number of readers and invited them to make a free and personal choice. Thanks to the printing process, these texts circulated throughout Europe and established themselves as important works of reference. Luthers’s On the Freedom of a Christian, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Papacy and Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church were published in the 1520s and constituted a true ‘Copernican Revolution’ (Thomas Kaufmann). Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion was first published in Latin in 1536; a French translation appeared in 1541, and a more developed version in 1559. This extended the rupture initiated by Luther and accentuated its radical character. Ignatius of Loyola’s Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (1539), and above all his Spiritual Exercises (1548), likewise emphasized the central role of the Scriptures and the need for personal conversion, while remaining in keeping with Catholic Church doctrine. Finally, all three attracted large numbers of adherents throughout Latin Christendom. As a lecturer at the University of Wittenberg from 1512 until his death in 1546, Luther trained several thousand students of theology with the assistance of his favourite pupil, Philipp Melanchthon. The principal conveyers of Lutheran reform in the Holy Roman Empire and Scandinavia, they became authorities in the Reformed Church, spreading his interpretation of Christianity and founding the dynasties of pastors that imparted his message to future generations. The same is true of Calvin, after he settled permanently in Geneva in 1541. The city state, which had become the centre of Calvinist reform, likewise welcomed several thousand supporters of the Reformation. Many of these had been persecuted in their own countries and, once their education had been completed, they returned to Switzerland, Germany, the United Provinces, France and Britain to establish new churches there. Ignatius of Loyola, who was elected general of the Society of Jesus in 1541, trained the first generation of Jesuits, whom he then dispatched throughout Europe as missionaries tasked with founding seminaries and colleges. When he died in 1556, ten years after Luther and eight years before Calvin, the Society already counted over a thousand members and had established seventy-nine houses and colleges, chiefly located in Portugal, Spain, Italy and France. This was undoubtedly a Europe of diffusion, mobility and communication networks.

‘IN-DEPTH CHRISTIANIZATION’ As this brief outline clearly shows, these three major figures of early-sixteenthcentury Western Christendom cannot be viewed in isolation. They are linked through their contemporaneity and reputations, particularly since each defines the

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other, through their choices, their pathways and their influence. Without Luther, there would have been no Protestant Reformation; and it was precisely because he found the reforms initiated by Luther insufficient that Calvin presented a more radical interpretation of Christianity and new methods of organizing the churches. Without the threat posed by the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent would not have been convoked. Yet, conversely, a number of reforming initiatives carried out within the Catholic Church were implemented independently of the Protestant reforms – starting with Ignatius of Loyola’s spiritual conversion, which dates from 1522. And without the refusal of a number of believers and sovereigns to rally behind the Protestant cause, it is highly likely that the Calvinist radicalization of the Reformation would never have taken place. The fact that these figures define one another likewise explains the resemblances between the procedures adopted by the three major reform movements. In retrospect, these similarities can be interpreted as three different forms of expressing one desire: to bring about a process of ‘in-depth Christianisation’ (Jean Delumeau). Each of these methods presented itself as the agent and expression of a truth emanating directly from God and based on the Scriptures, with all the intransigence that this entailed, since that truth was conceived as absolute, transcendent and essential to salvation. In each case, prime importance was given to the formulation of a body of doctrine presented in written form (a confession of faith) and the establishment of institutions tasked with spreading the ‘true doctrine’. This was achieved not only through preaching and teaching (the catechism was introduced during this period) but also through books, reading and song. In each case, likewise, the clergy, supported by secular authorities, ensured that members of their flock regularly practised their religion, adhered to the doctrine that they had been taught and behaved according to its commandments. And finally, each of these reforming movements was dedicated to challenging, as radically as possible, the dangers that threatened it; these included superstitions and heterodox beliefs, as well as the source of them all – namely, the devil.

DIVISIONS AND RUPTURES However emblematic they may be, these three different, and indeed, mutually antagonistic applications of reform were far from unique. Besides the radical reforms advocated, for example, by the Anabaptist and Mennonite movements, which were likewise attacked by the dominant Churches and political powers of the day, other types emerged. In the case of England, the break with Rome brought about by Henry VIII through the Act of Supremacy passed in 1534 was motivated chiefly by political, rather than doctrinal considerations. It was not until the Second Act of Supremacy, passed in 1559 in the reign of Elizabeth I, and the Thirty Nine Articles, drawn up in 1563, that Anglicanism really began to take form, positioned midway between the legacies of Catholicism and Lutheran and Calvinist influences. Indeed, the overlap between religion and politics was a decisive factor in the future development of these reforms. In the case of several European countries, the control exerted by the existing powers was so strong, and the alliance between

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religion and politics so solid, that the shift to Lutheranism, Calvinism or Tridentine Catholicism was carried out rapidly and maintained on a permanent basis. This was true of Italy, where the ideas promoted by the Reformation certainly found an echo − in Venice or in the Duchy of Ferrara for instance – but, with the exception of the Waldensian Valleys in the Alps, they failed to take root. This was due to the choices made by the ruling powers of the time, and to the counteroffensive conducted by a revitalized Catholicism supported by the Jesuits and other religious orders. It was even more true of the Iberian peninsula, where the Catholic Church, assisted by the monarchy and the Inquisition, easily prevailed over northern European influences, demonstrating its determination through the anti-Lutheran autos-da-fé held in Seville and Valladolid between 1559 and 1562. Reinforced by internal reforms dating back to the late fifteenth century, by the celebrated memory of the Reconquista and the conversions of the Jews, the Catholic Church asserted its religious, cultural and artistic dominance over Spain, Portugal and their overseas colonies. This was also the case with the kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark, whose authority extended to the whole of Scandinavia, and where Lutheran churches subject to royal jurisdiction were established. These were administered by an episcopal authority that had retained its Catholic appearances while adopting Luther’s catechism; religious orders were suppressed and their assets were secularized, vernacular worship was introduced and pastors were authorized to marry. It was the case, too, with the canton of Geneva and the kingdom of Scotland, both of which adopted Calvinism as their state religion, imposing its confession of faith on the entire population and establishing strong, independent, ecclesiastical structures. And finally, it was also the case with the Holy Roman Empire. The settlement signed at Augsburg in 1555 by the emperor, who was the defender of the Roman Catholic faith, and the princes and cities that had adopted Lutheranism, established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (‘whose realm, his religion’). In this way, the princes of states within the empire and the authorities governing its free cities were given the right to impose the religion of their choice on their subjects. Countries whose religious affiliation was firmly fixed in the sixteenth century accounted for a good half of the territories of Europe. The specific cultures that flourished in these lands generated collective memories in their turn, each set being emphatically distinct from the others. In the case of Lutheranism, that memory was based on the reformer’s major foundational texts, on his translation of the Bible into German – a translation that contributed to the emergence of German as a literary language – on new liturgical practices centred on preaching, music and choral singing (starting with the choral works composed by Luther himself) and on ecclesiastical structures placed under the authority of the political powers. The first contributors to that collective Lutheran memory were the pastors and their families, who very quickly established dynasties through the practice of endogamy. This new type of university-trained clergy took Luther as its role model, as a theologian and preacher, husband, father and musician. It also celebrated the reformer’s life in this way, developing the legendary aspects of his story, enriched by such acts as nailing his ninety-five ‘Theses’ to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg in 1517, and hurling an inkstand at the devil during his combat with the latter in Wartburg in

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1521. Wittenberg and Saxony lie at the centre of the mental map associated with Lutheranism, primarily conceived as a German, northern phenomenon. As was the case with Lutheranism, the first contributors to the collective memory of Calvinists and reformers were the pastors and their families, together with all those given responsibilities within the new ecclesiastical structures, such as deacons and church elders. The writings of Calvin himself form the central reference point of Calvinist memory, but it was also influenced by theologians such as Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, Théodore de Bèze and John Knox, who helped to formulate the Calvinist interpretation of Christianity. Based on an even more radical opposition to Catholicism and its established legacies than Lutheranism, this interpretation emphasizes the all-powerful nature of God and His grace, and the universal obligation to act morally in both public and private life. Keen to underline the concept of divine transcendence and the primacy of the Scriptures, the Calvinist Church instituted liturgical practices centred on the spoken word and the singing of psalms, rejecting any act even remotely resembling the worship of images, seen as idolatrous. Highlighting the pre-eminence of the conscience, Calvinists regarded the Reformed community as the new chosen people, a view that led to the development of a militant and aristocratic conception of Christianity. Geneva was the centre of Calvinist activity, but as it established itself in countries where different languages were spoken, its influence became more international in character. The principal aspect of the collective memory of Catholicism, renewed and reformed by the Council of Trent, is its sacrality. It is rooted in a tradition that dates directly back to the origins of Christianity and places great emphasis on the multiple opportunities for salvation offered by the Seven Sacraments, the sanctity of the church and, at a more general level, the intercessions of the Virgin Mary and innumerable saints. Particular importance is accorded to the saints of the Catholic Reformation, such as Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, Francis Xavier and Philip Neri, who were canonized in 1622. The emphasis on pious practices plays a major role in this collective memory, as do the graces obtained through pilgrimages and the forms of sanctification represented by entry into the clergy or into the male and female religious orders. Centring on Rome, with Latin accorded greater importance than vernacular languages, Catholic collective memory was reinforced by the fact that the influence of Catholicism, while strong in southern regions, also extended across the continent. The conviction that the Catholic Church alone could offer salvation was a driving force, hence the rejection of Lutheranism, Calvinism and all forms of Protestantism, regarded as dangerous heresies to be relentlessly fought and refuted.

RELIGIOUS TERRITORIALIZATION However, only some of the countries in Europe were characterized by the adoption of one sole religion during the ‘Age of Reform’ (Pierre Chaunu). As religious pluralism was then regarded as incompatible with affiliation to one political entity, the presence of competing faiths led to conflicts in the majority of cases. These were particularly violent as each camp was convinced that its adversary was associated

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with diabolical forces, or even with the Antichrist himself, and was therefore a threat to be vanquished and eliminated. This was the situation that prevailed in sixteenth-century France, where militant Calvinism encountered an ever-increasing number of followers, particularly among the nobility. Meanwhile, the royal family, together with the majority of the population, retained their Catholic faith. In a context characterized by the frailty of the monarchy, with the death of Henri II in 1559 and the regency of Catherine de Medici, the kingdom of France found itself beset by exceptionally savage wars of religion. These continued from 1562 until 1598, when Henri IV established peace between the warring parties by signing the Edict of Nantes. A similar situation occurred in the northern regions of the Spanish Netherlands (later to become the United Provinces), where the majority of the population had become Calvinists and rebelled against Spanish rule. The revolt of the Gueux, or ‘beggars’, which took place in 1566, led to the ‘Eighty Years’ War’ (1568–1648) and the struggle to achieve full recognition of Dutch independence. These politico-religious conflicts finally culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, which broke out in 1618 when the Protestants in Bohemia rebelled against the Catholic Habsburg monarchy. The hostilities gradually engulfed almost all of Europe, as Spain, Denmark, the United Provinces, Sweden and France entered the conflict, which ravaged and depopulated most of the Holy Roman Empire. It ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which established a new system of political order in Europe and instituted new forms of religious and political coexistence. These recurring conflicts affected the whole of Europe, either directly or indirectly, and their impact on collective memories cannot be overestimated. They undoubtedly resulted in the long-term stabilization of religious affiliations in the various countries of Europe. On the one hand, there were those that retained or restored the Catholic faith. These included Portugal and Spain, Italy, France, the Habsburg states, Poland and the south-western territories of the Holy Roman Empire, such as the Electorate of Bavaria and the ecclesiastical Electorates of Trier, Cologne and Mainz. On the other hand, there were the Protestant countries, or those under Protestant control, with all the various denominations of that faith. These included Lutheranism, adopted in the Scandinavian countries and the northeastern territories of the Holy Roman Empire such as the Electorates of Saxony, Brandenburg and Hanover; Anglicanism established in England and Ireland (at least in theory); and Calvinism, adopted in the United Provinces, parts of Switzerland and Scotland. The stabilization of the religious frontiers dividing Europe and the territorialization of religious identities are enduring phenomena that continue to have a cultural impact on the European space to this day. The fragmentation of religious belief and the conflicts it entailed have certainly enriched the collective memories of both Catholics and Protestants with a multitude of recollections and emotionally charged images. These reinforce their shared identity, as well as their hostility towards opposing faiths and their adherents. This process of enrichment clearly occurs through the commemoration of victories over hostile forces. Examples include England’s celebrations of its maritime victory over Spain’s ‘invincible’ Armada in 1588 and the shrines dedicated to Our Lady of Loreto built in the Catholic countries of Europe following the triumph over the Bohemian

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rebels at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. It is evident in the countless prints and reproductions depicting King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden arriving in Germany in 1631 in order to save the cause of Lutheranism, whose very survival was in jeopardy, and in the columns erected in honour of the Virgin to commemorate the victory of the imperial troops over the Swedes; one such Marian column is located in Munich. A further example is provided by the ‘festivals of peace’ instituted in several southern German towns in 1648. These were intended to maintain the memories of the guarantees given to Protestants through the Peace of Westphalia, although the battles had wrought appalling devastation. At the same time, collective memories were also enriched by the celebration of victims of persecution forced into exile. These include the Calvinists from the Spanish Netherlands who emigrated to the United Provinces in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the English religious dissidents who sought refuge in overseas colonies in the early seventeenth century and the French Huguenots who left the kingdom of France following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, taking refuge in Switzerland, the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, the United Provinces and England. That same collective memory also finds expression in the glorification of martyrs who died for their loyalty to the true faith. These include the Calvinists massacred in France, at Wassy in 1562 and again on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, the Lutheran inhabitants of Magdeburg who were killed during the city’s capture by the Count of Tilly’s troops in 1631 and the Irish ‘Papists’ slaughtered in 1649 by Cromwell’s soldiers, who had arrived in Ireland to re-establish English sovereignty there.

FROM TOLERANCE TO RELIGIOUS FREEDOM Despite these multiple conflicts, the Europe that emerged from the Age of Reform witnessed various examples of different faiths coexisting peacefully from the sixteenth century onwards. Besides countries with a dominant religion (i.e. those whose frontiers were consequently overdetermined by religious belief), there were those where religions with opposing doctrines coexisted in a variety of situations, and whose adherents therefore found themselves rubbing shoulders with one another on a daily basis. This was the case, for instance, with the Rzeczpospolita, in other words, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where the Warsaw Confederation Act of 1573 guaranteed religious tolerance. In its early days, at least, it distinguished itself from all other European states by extending that tolerance not only to the major faiths but also to persecuted religious minorities and Jews. It was also the case with the United Provinces, which, although theoretically affiliated to Reformed religion, nevertheless recognized the right to freedom of conscience and included a significant Catholic minority, as well as Lutheran and Jewish minorities among its population. Other examples include Ireland, whose majority Catholic population was subject to English authority, France, whose Protestant minority was officially tolerated from 1598 to 1685, and Bohemia, where Catholicism was re-established after the Catholic victory at the Battle of White Mountain and whose population included Protestant and Jewish minorities. In addition to these examples, there

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were frequent cases of religious cohabitation in the Holy Roman Empire and in Switzerland, a situation that arose on account of their fragmented territories. Elsewhere, various forms of religious cohabitation involving the acknowledgement of minority rights were established in the latter half of the seventeenth century. This first concerned Protestant countries with populations that included Protestant minorities who had set themselves apart from the official faith. A case in point was England, whose ‘dissident’, radical Protestants were critical of the Anglican Church for not distancing itself sufficiently from Roman Catholicism, and had therefore aroused its hostility. Yet they achieved quasi-equal rights through the Toleration Act of 1689, which acknowledged their right to freedom of worship. This was likewise the case with a number of trading ports and cities that maintained religious tolerance − de facto and later de jure − an approach that facilitated their economic activities.

ARTICLE 10 Religious tolerance was one of the major objectives of the Age of Enlightenment, and its cause was upheld all over Europe from the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth. The concept had first been championed by the philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a Sephardic Jew who lived in Amsterdam, and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a French Protestant who had sought refuge in Rotterdam. It subsequently gained favour through John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration. First published in 1689, one year after the Glorious Revolution, this work proceeds from the principle that one should not continue to fight what cannot be changed. Locke emphasizes the individual’s right to freedom of conscience in determining what they believe to be true, arguing for an end to the civil discrimination of all Protestants and of most Catholics, with a few exceptions; only atheists were excluded. His views were echoed, two generations later, by Voltaire, with his Traité sur la tolérance (1763) and his campaigns in support of the victims of the fanaticism exhibited by the Catholic Church, such as Jean Calas, Pierre-Paul Sirven and the Chevalier de la Barre. Two notable figures in German-speaking countries who championed a religious tolerance extending to Jews as well as to Christians were the writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) and his friend, the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). Lessing’s opinions were most emphatically expressed in his play Nathan the Wise (1779), a true parable illustrating the superiority of honesty and of its autonomous character in relation to religious conviction, while in Mendelssohn’s view, religious tolerance should know no bounds. An increasing number of countries and constitutions responded to these calls for tolerance, chiefly for pragmatic reasons. These included the kingdom of Prussia in the reign of Frederick the Great (1740–1786), the Habsburg states, with the Edict of Toleration promulgated by Joseph II in 1781, and finally the kingdom of France, whose Edict of Toleration was issued in 1787. This groundswell culminated in Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen issued on 26 August 1789, according to which ‘no one may be disturbed for his opinions,

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even in matters of religion, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law’. A true qualitative leap, this article expresses the transition from tolerance to religious freedom, which Goethe, in a famous maxim, translated as follows: ‘Tolerance should really only be a passing attitude; it should lead to appreciation. To tolerate is to offend.’

INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES These more settled forms of religious coexistence, which extended to encompass the majority of European countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were eventually accompanied by the recognition of equal religious rights. This did not mean, however, that the divisions between the faiths and the cultures they generated were to disappear. The differences between the various branches of Protestantism certainly diminished, giving way, through the influence of tolerance and the Enlightenment, to a sense of affiliation to one community. Yet, just as Protestant identity is inseparable from the rejection of Catholicism, seen as archaic and associated with superstition and fanaticism (and very frequently with the Jesuits in Catholic countries), Catholic identity, for its part, is inseparable from a rejection of Protestantism, associated with heresy and even lack of belief. These enduring forms of rejection consequently created an ‘invisible boundary’ between Catholics and Protestants, which was rooted in the cultures of remembrance previously mentioned. That boundary – a multiplicity of boundaries, in the case of the highly fragmented Holy Roman Empire – marked a dividing line between two different relationships to time, as Protestant countries did not accept the Gregorian calendar, adopted in Catholic Europe in 1582, until 1700. The same was true of the relationship to space, with each side having different points of reference. It is certainly true that those of different faiths enjoyed more peaceful relations on a day-to-day basis; this was manifested through various forms of communal activity – professional or economic, for instance. However, the boundary became evident once more in matters of education, with each religion favouring the institutions conforming to its specific identity. It was even more pronounced in the case of rites of passage, such as baptism, with Catholics and Protestants choosing godfathers and godmothers of their own religion and giving their children first names reflecting their cultural environment. These practices differentiated them from one another and made them ‘prisoners’ of their baptism (Arthur Rimbaud). Mixed marriages were extremely rare until the late nineteenth century, as religious affiliation was overdetermined by deeprooted family tradition and loyalty to one’s ancestors. The desire to marry someone of a different religious persuasion and who, moreover, refused to convert, was to betray one’s kith and kin. And in the case of funerals, there were differences in the locations, as well as the rites involved, with each religion having its own cemeteries. There were also multiple symbolic signs denoting dissimilarity, such as the decoration of interiors, female clothing, leisure activities and festive practices. While these did not pose a challenge to relations and exchanges between those of different faiths, they nevertheless acted as reminders of insurmountable division and conveyed the fact that the majority of Europeans had internalized their religious affiliations.

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While these forms of differentiation have not entirely disappeared from the Europe of today, they have lost the determining dimension that they might have had until the mid-twentieth century, especially in countries and regions identified with Catholicism. The almost universal separation of church and state, the markedly secularized character of several Western nations, the decline in the influence of the churches and the fact that differences within the same religious faith are often more pronounced than those between the faiths themselves have all led to the ‘invisible boundary’ that separated Catholics and Protestants for centuries becoming increasingly inconspicuous. Nevertheless, despite the fact that its importance in religious and ontological terms has diminished, the boundary continues to exist in an indirect, cultural and patrimonial form. This is illustrated by a comparison between two practically contemporaneous Golden Ages in European art – Spain’s Siglo de Oro (which occurred from the late sixteenth century to the latter half of the seventeenth) and the Golden Age of Dutch painting (which extended roughly from 1620 to 1670). During this period, the majority of Spanish painters, including El Greco (1541–1614), José de Ribera (1591–1652), Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664) and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682), placed their art at the service of the church and of Tridentine Catholicism. Executing commissions from religious orders, monasteries, colleges, brotherhoods and private patrons, they produced a large number of paintings with a mystical dimension. An extreme case in point was Zurbarán, who was strongly influenced by Teresa of Ávila. Although they painted scenes from the life of Christ, with prominence given to the Passion and Crucifixion, their preferred subjects were the Virgin Mary (The Virgin of the Rosary, The Immaculate Conception, The Coronation of the Virgin, etc.), the apostles, the Church Fathers (painted as though they were prelates of their own era), the saints who founded the religious orders that commissioned their work and martyrs. As the court painter, Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) was the only artist among them who painted more secular scenes than religious ones, most of the latter being portraits of clerics rather than images of devotion. The situation was reversed in the case of the subject matter treated by Dutch artists. This was true of Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), Frans Hals (ca. 1582– 1666), Pieter De Hooch (1629–1684) and Salomon Van Ruysdael (ca. 1600– 1670), to name only the most renowned. Working within the Realist tradition they had inherited from the sixteenth century, they favoured portraiture (the most highly regarded genre), history painting, still lifes, genre painting, landscapes and seascapes – in other words, secular subjects, while images with a religious theme remained in the minority. Since Calvinism, the dominant religion, forbade religious paintings in churches, the only commissions of this type came from private patrons, who were relatively few in number. The only exception was Rembrandt (1606–1669); his first work depicted the stoning of Saint Stephen (1625), he painted numerous scenes from the Old and New Testaments and, notably, produced a large number of prints and etchings inspired by religion, primarily focusing on the life of Christ.

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CATHOLIC ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE The contrast between the cultural and patrimonial legacies left by Catholicism and Protestantism becomes even more marked when one compares two modes of expression: Baroque religious architecture, on the one hand, and religious music, also Baroque, on the other. In both cases, the creative powers of the two religions were at their most fertile in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, one of the most enduring assertions of Rome’s primacy was expressed through the decision made by Pope Julius II in 1506 to build a new church there. This was to be erected in the place of the basilica built in the fourth century on the very spot where the apostle Saint Peter had been martyred; likewise dedicated to the memory of the first Pontiff, this was a much larger construction. It was initially built from plans drawn up by Donato Bramante and was subsequently modified by Michelangelo, who was appointed as its architect in 1546. Completed in 1626, the new basilica distinguished itself through its dimensions − it remained the largest religious edifice in Christian Western Europe for several centuries − as well as its richly decorated interior and the majestic, elliptical piazza extending before it. The square was designed in the seventeenth century by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (who was also responsible for the gilded canopy set above the high altar in the basilica) and is surrounded by a colonnade crowned with statues; in its centre stands the obelisk that had been raised in Caligula’s circus, later to be named after Nero. It serves as the assembly point for the crowds of pilgrims who come to Rome from every corner of the Christian world, before they make their way to Saint Peter’s tomb and the basilica built for his successors. With the mother church of the Jesuit order, known as Il Gesù (1568–84), Rome created the prototype for the Baroque church. This is characterized by the central position of the altar, by a ceiling featuring a dome and vaults decorated with trompe l’œil frescoes depicting celestial visions, by a flowing interior layout and lavish decorative detail. Theatres of divine glory, such interiors offered an early glimpse of paradise. This model was adopted throughout Catholic Europe and also spread to its colonies. It was primarily used for the construction of countless pilgrimage, convent and abbatial churches. These attracted the faithful, highlighted the specific character of Catholic piety, celebrated the Church as an instrument of salvation and contributed to the sacralization of the landscape.

THE PROTESTANT MUSICAL LEGACY In the Protestant faith, the central role of the Bible in its vernacular translations, together with the importance accorded to the spoken word and to song, resulted in the creation of religious music that amplified the influence of the Scriptures and enhanced worship. In this way, its followers effectively became a community of praise. Initiated by Luther himself, this musical tradition was first expressed by the extraordinary inventiveness shown in the composition of new hymns. These were learnt by heart and compiled in hymnals whose symbolic importance was equal to that of the Bibles; in many cases, like the latter, they preserved the memory

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of the families who owned them. They subsequently developed into cantatas, oratorios or passions, where choral singing was combined with organ and orchestral accompaniment. This musical legacy comprises the works of Samuel Scheidt and Michael Praetorius, Heinrich Schütz and Dietrich Buxtehude, and is based on Luther’s German translation of the Bible and the religious poetry that extended this work. It reached its apogee in the creations of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), whose whole life, like that of the reformer, was spent in Saxony and Thuringia. He was also the exact contemporary of Balthasar Neumann (1687–1753), the foremost Baroque artist of southern Germany. Although this heritage has now become global and autonomous, the memory of the Lutheranism that generated it is kept alive through its texts and references. This becomes clear when attending a performance of one of Bach’s passions in Saint Thomas Church in Leipzig, which features a stained glass window in which Bach is shown alongside Luther. There, the congregation evidently knows the recitatives and arias by heart and joins in the choral sections that punctuate the piece. In a secularized (in some cases, even post-Christian) environment, faith-based prejudice has declined and the major Christian Churches have drawn closer to one other over a fifty-year period characterized by increasing ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. These factors have created a situation which has little in common with the circumstances that prevailed for three or four hundred years. Yet the indirect influence exerted on sensibilities, landscapes and mentalities by the legacy of memories originating from the ‘age of Reforms’ is no less perceptible. Formerly an expression of division and exclusion, it is now much more indicative of a Europe on the path to a shared future built on diversity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, Matthieu, Martin Luther, Paris, Fayard, 2017. Benedict, Philip, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002. Chaunu, Pierre, Le Temps des réformes. La crise de la chrétienté, l’éclatement 1250–1550, Paris, Fayard, 1975. Delumeau, Jean and Monique Cottret, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire, Paris, PUF, coll. ‘Nouvelle Clio’, 2010. Delumeau, Jean, Thierry Wanegfellen and Bernard Cottret, Naissance et affirmation de la Réforme, Paris, PUF, coll. ‘Nouvelle Clio’, 2012. Duhamelle, Christophe, La Frontière au village. Une identité catholique allemande au temps des Lumières, Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 2010. El Kenz, David and Claire Gantet, Guerres et paix de religion en Europe, XVIe–XVIIe siècles, Paris, Armand Colin, 2008. François, Étienne, Protestants et catholiques en Allemagne. Identité et pluralisme, Augsbourg 1648-1806, Paris, Albin Michel, 1993. García Hernán, Enrique, Ignacio de Loyola, Madrid, Taurus, 2013. Kaufmann, Thomas, Erlöste und Verdammte. Eine Geschichte der Reformation, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2016.

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Lauster, Jörg, Die Verzauberung der Welt. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Christentums, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2016. Leclerc, Joseph, Histoire de la tolérance au siècle de la Réforme, 2 vols, Paris, Aubier, 1955. Roper, Lyndal, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, London, The Bodley Head, 2016. Schilling, Heinz, Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval, translated from the German by Rona Johnston Gordon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017 [2014].

CHAPTER 21

The art of dying OLAF B. RADER

The hereafter long remained a source of fear for the people of Christian Europe. Our secularized societies seem to have relegated death to the personal domain. Yet for centuries human beings sought to regulate it collectively through ritual, in order to transform that fear-inducing, inevitable end into a moment of redemption. Mors certa, hora incerta: ‘Death is certain, its time is uncertain.’ This unarguable statement, whose origins remain vague, could be expanded to include an additional message; if death is certain, it is equally certain that the ideas and representations associated with it have evolved and will continue to do so. Death remains inevitable, of course, but we no longer think and act in the same way when attempting to fight the fear that it arouses in us – always assuming that it does frighten us. In L’Homme devant la mort, published in 1977, Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) showed that the conception of death and the sentiments it inspires in us have changed, confirming their historical character. Although, biologically speaking, death might appear to be a uniform process, ways of dying and funeral rites, images of death and representations of the hereafter, mourning ceremonies and burial practices differ vastly from culture to culture. What remains a constant, however, is the fact that in several pre-modern societies death was associated with highly varied circumstances – this remains the case today.

RITES OF PASSAGE First, death is universally seen as the termination of earthly life. And because it has always been regarded as a fearsome threat or a longed-for release – as the outcome of old age or illness, of violence or suicide – it has required rituals to regulate the emotions it arouses. Consequently, these practices should be seen as rites of passage whose chief purpose is to banish and neutralize the threat it represents. At the same time, death can appear to act as a cultural marker; for in order to be able to develop an ancestor cult associated with the rituals governing death and burial, one must first acquire a sense of self. If one is not able to distinguish one’s own identity from that of another, the fate of dead bodies will be of little interest. Or, to view the matter from the opposite perspective, burial practices, funeral rites and reflections on death are closely linked to the emergence of the human dimension.

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Social groups are just as destabilized by death as individuals, and have just as much need to find points of reference. In this context, remembrance ceremonies and mourning rituals, which may be perceived as standardized manifestations of emotion instituted by groups, become important mechanisms of social regulation. In the context of ancient Egypt, a civilization positively steeped in thoughts of death and the desire for immortality, the Egyptologist and cultural studies specialist Jan Assmann observed that death, and consequently awareness of mortality, constituted ‘a major generator of cultural identity.’1

A ‘BAD’ DEATH Following the end of the Age of Antiquity, Christian Europe developed coping strategies in dealing with dying and death which were particularly characteristic during the Middle Ages. One of the most striking of these was the notion of a community comprising the living and the dead. This conception of ‘the presence of the dead’, which was evident throughout the pre-modern era and naturally influenced the degree of proximity that the living maintained with the dead, only began to decline in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. Until that time, it was believed that the dead, present among the living, supported earthly life. One could therefore take refreshments or feast in the company of the deceased at funerary meals, which bore no resemblance to the offerings of meat and wine customarily laid on altars in former times. In some situations, the dead even retained a legal status and could become an anchor point for the creation of a collective memory. Consequently, they kept their belongings or acquired new ones. Kings were not exempt from this rule; the royal crown of Bohemia, for instance, was regarded as the legal property of Saint Wenceslas and was deposited on the reliquary containing his skull, which is kept in Saint Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague. If a king of Bohemia wanted to use it for his coronation, he had to ‘borrow’ it from the saint, effectively entering into a type of rental agreement. In fact, the scenario featuring a saint who had ownership of a crown had become increasingly common in Europe. And it was in the cult of saints that the understanding between the living and the dead found its most forceful expression. If one succeeded in guaranteeing the intercession of one of the saints by venerating their mortal remains – such as their bones, even though these might have been reduced to fragments – one could be sure of securing celestial aid in dealing with the problems of everyday life. Although nowadays our fear tends to be linked to the actuality of death itself rather than to what becomes of us afterwards, the opposite was true in the premodern era. It was the thought of the hereafter that aroused either dread or longing for deliverance, and there was no prospect more terrible than that of a sudden death occurring when one was in a state of sin. The notion of mors peccatorum pessima referred to the inescapable fate of eternal damnation and the fires of hell. And as the Christian Church had been continually devising new methods of conferring graces on believers since the twelfth century, there were growing numbers of remedies available for assuaging fears of a ‘bad death’ and leaving this life for the next. These

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included Eucharistic adoration, devotion to the Virgin Mary in all its forms and the contemplation of Saint Christopher, all seen as particularly effective ways of preparing oneself for death during the High and Late Middle Ages. The devastation wrought by the plague epidemics that broke out in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century was totally unprecedented. Some regions experienced the sudden deaths of half of their populations. The effects in social terms were incalculable, as reported by certain contemporary witnesses such as Giovanni Boccaccio. From then on, the representation of death was accorded an increasingly significant place in the development of a conception of the world. It was even incorporated into the arts, finding expression in multiple literary and artistic works. The fifteenth century saw the emergence of little ‘manuals’ introducing readers to the art of dying; entitled ars moriendi, they were based on the idea that one could learn how to die in keeping with divine precepts, thereby ensuring the salvation of one’s soul. For those unable to read – in other words, the vast majority of the population – these opuscules were illustrated with prints depicting dying individuals surrounded by angels and saints, and also, of course, by the devil and his acolytes. This was a time of crucial importance, as the hour of death foretold the fate of the soul; would it ascend into heaven or be cast into hell? Needless to say, the devil, intent on acquiring souls, had powerful instruments such as doubt and pride at his disposal. Fortunately, the lures put out by the Evil One were counterbalanced by the exhortations of the angels, who would urge a dying individual to remain steadfast in their faith, trust and hope and, most importantly of all, to make a General Confession. By closely following the developments in the scenes portrayed, the reader learns that the devil finally concedes defeat and the angels carry the soul to heaven. And indeed, when it came to images of death, Europe was gripped by an iconographic obsession in the Late Middle Ages. The danses macabres provided artists with a forceful means of demonstrating that all human beings were equal in death, regardless of their social standing in this world. Popes and emperors, kings and princes, cardinals and bishops, knights, members of the bourgeoisie and peasants – all danced with the Grim Reaper, submitting to their inevitable fate.

LEARNING TO DIE The ars moriendi was not the only literary genre to reflect on the dangers accompanying death and the fleeting nature of earthly life. There were also the Sterbebücher, works that offered apprenticeships in dying. The most outstanding example of these is undoubtedly The Ploughman of Bohemia by Johannes von Tepl (ca. 1350–1415), which may be considered one of most important literary works of the Late Middle Ages. This text, which appeared in 1400 or shortly afterwards, features a poignant dialogue between a grieving ploughman whose wife has just died and Death, whom he denounces: ‘O Death, insatiable destroyer of humankind, abominable despiser of the world, dreadful murderer, I curse you!’2 However, Death provides him with convincing and, above all, logical answers, and the exchange

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continues. God eventually intervenes, not only reminding the ploughman of his mortality but also enjoining Death not to forget that its power comes from Him, and from Him alone. The Christian religion had also introduced a radical change with regard to burial practices. Pre-Christian peoples buried their dead extra muros, that is, outside the localities where they had lived. Moreover, ancient burial law dictated that no tomb of any description was allowed within the walls surrounding a temple. This rule was rejected in the third century, however, and the dead were henceforth buried in the cemeteries created around churches, which now received the mortal remains of saints, sovereigns and benefactors within their walls. Donations and funerary monuments, some of which were extremely large, were intended to guarantee that the deceased would continue to be remembered in prayers. The mausoleums, vaults and monuments built for the dead, housing their bones or marking their burial place, were in fact primarily for the use of the living, who needed both a material manifestation of their memories and a means of indicating the social position (whether actual or desired) of their departed relatives. And as tombs then served as an anchor point for memories, to a much greater degree than they do nowadays, they made a notable contribution to the creation of a collective or familial identity; presented in a particular manner, they could even be used to legitimize power. Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome contains spectacular funerary monuments built for the popes of the Early Modern Era, indicating the extent of their families’ investment in the perpetuation of their memory. For some social groups, such as the aristocratic dynasties of the pre-modern period, family tombs played an exceptionally important role in terms of remembrance, consolidating the identity of the family in question both within and outside its immediate circle; indeed, without that consolidation, the nobility itself would have become inconceivable as a social category. Power relies on remembrance, but the memorial culture that it establishes also serves its future ambitions. It is through those alternating functions − commemorating the deceased, inspiring prayers of remembrance and legitimizing power − that the tombs and burial places of royal figures, both major and minor, have acquired their full significance.

THE REPRESSION OF DEATH In the period that followed the Age of Enlightenment the attitude towards death underwent a further radical change. This originated on the one hand from a process of secularization, which led to a rejection of the notion of an afterlife, and on the other hand, from a lessening (real or partly imagined) of the threats to human existence. The risk of early death is far from being as prevalent in the collective consciousness today as it was a century ago – and victims of the Great Plague could be dead within just a few days, or even a few hours, of experiencing the initial symptoms. Nowadays, medical treatments offer hopes of recovery and lives have been lengthened, in some cases by several years. After death, the body becomes no more than a material support, to be dispatched with all possible speed.

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In the context of representing the soul’s immortality and the rewards or punishments awaiting us in the next life, our modern culture appears to have distanced itself from others that preceded it. This is also true of the cult of the dead, now seemingly all but obsolete, and the corresponding treatment of their mortal remains. Yet in every culture until the Age of Enlightenment, the cult of the dead served as one of the structuring elements of a society; in this respect, religious practices clearly revealed the mechanisms that created a social group. This may appear strange to us today. What with the considerable lengthening of lifespans and the advances made in modern medicine, death seems to have been repressed. Nevertheless, the Ebola virus, the Coronavirus and even hospital-acquired infections serve as warnings against excessive optimism. After all, the devil has numerous means at his disposal when plotting the unexpected deaths from which our predecessors sought protection in the form of the ars moriendi. And although this has now been forgotten, traces of it still remain in the tattoos sported by rockers and Goths.

NOTES 1. Jan Assmann, Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie. Todesbilder und Totenriten im Alten Ägypten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 14. 2. Johannes de Tepla, Civis Zacensis, Epistola cum Libello Ackerman und Das Büchlein Ackerman, based on the Freiburg manuscript, 163, and the Stuttgart manuscript, HB X 23, edited and translated by K. Bertau (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), vol. 1, text and translation, chap. 1: ‘Grimmiger tilger aller leute, schedlicher echter aller werlte, freissamer morder aller menschen, ir Tot, euch sei verfluchet!’

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ariès, Philippe, L’Homme devant la mort, Paris, Le Seuil, 1977. Assmann, Jan, Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie. Todesbilder und Totenriten im Alten Ägypten, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Barloewen, Constantin von (Ed.), Der Tod in den Weltkulturen und Weltreligionen, Munich, Diederichs, 1996. Binski, Paul, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, London, British Museum Press, 1996. Imhof, Arthur E., Ars moriendi. Die Kunst des Sterbens einst und heute, Vienna and Cologne, Böhlau, 1991. Rader, Olaf B., Grab und Herrschaft. Politischer Totenkult von Alexander dem Grossen bis Lenin, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2003. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Les Revenants. Les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale, Paris, Gallimard, 1994. Vovelle, Michel, La Mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours, Paris, Gallimard, 1983.

CHAPTER 25

Faust Selling one’s soul JACQUES LE RIDER

Few legends have provided such inspiration for works representing both high and popular culture. Ever since it became widely known through Goethe’s play Faust, the German tale of the scholar who made a deal with the devil has featured prominently in the European collective imaginary. Set to music by Wagner and Gounod, the subject of novels by Thomas Mann and Mikhail Bulgakov and of film adaptations, it also serves as a metaphor for modernity. The legend of Faust is rooted in Europe, a characteristic it shares with that of Don Juan and Romeo and Juliet. First published in Frankfurt in 1587, the tale of Doctor Johannes Faustus centres on a magician and necromancer who, tired of devoting his whole life to a fruitless search for the secret of all knowledge, seals a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles. According to this agreement, he will receive forbidden knowledge and enjoy every worldly pleasure in return for giving up his eternal soul. Almost as soon as it had been published in German, the legend was translated into English, French, Dutch and Czech. In England, notably, it inspired Christopher Marlowe to write his Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. Staged for the first time in 1594, this play was subsequently performed throughout Europe, sometimes in puppet theatres. It gave the German Faust the dimension of a universal myth, featuring a new Prometheus in the person of a central character with boundless ambition who challenges the divine order simply in order to satisfy his desire for power and knowledge. In this way, Faust becomes both the prototype of the intellectual freethinker and scholar who risks everything to eliminate the boundaries of human knowledge, and the embodiment of the ‘man of power’, in the tradition of the major empire builders.

THE GERMAN FAUST In Goethe’s version, through which the tale acquired its literary and philosophical credentials, the modern myth of Faust takes on a new dimension. Here, his resemblance to Don Juan is purely superficial. For although his pact with Mephistopheles enables

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Goethe’s Faust to win the love of the young, innocent and pious Gretchen, he is not a libertine who has previously seduced mille e tre women in Spain, an assertion made by Don Giovanni’s valet, Leporello, in relation to his master. This is what gives depth to the Faust legend as transformed by Goethe. He shows the ambivalent character of the masculine eros, and, through Gretchen’s tragic end (she is sentenced to death for having killed, in her desperation, the child she had with Faust), he emphasizes the difficult nature of the union between man and woman. Whereas the sixteenth-century legend related the story of a German Faust, a scholar, a risktaker and a contemporary of Luther, the modern myth of Faust, created through Marlowe’s work and developed through Goethe’s, encompasses all European cultures, adapting itself to them while retaining its original German identity. In Don Juan und Faust, a tragedy by Christian Dietrich Grabbe first performed in Detmold in March 1829, Faust declares to the Spanish seducer: ‘I would not be Faust if I were not German!’ (Act I, sc. II). The nineteenth century witnessed Faust’s transformation into an identificatory figure and a national symbol of the German people. Faust: A German Myth, by the journalist Ewald Ludwig Engelhardt, was published in 1916, when nationalist hysteria was at its peak. In his Decline of the West, published two years later, the conservative philosopher Oswald Spengler described the spirit of the modern West as ‘Faustian’. And in 1933, on cue, Faust im Braunhemd (Faust in a Brown Shirt) made its appearance. This work, by the Nazi publicist Kurt Engelbrecht, was the first of a long series portraying Faust as the precursor of Nazi heroes. Today, Faust is still regarded as the most significant German literary work and also remains the most cited.

FAUST: PART TWO During the wars of liberation waged by Prussia and her allies against Napoleon Faust was frequently repurposed to suit a nationalist agenda. The results horrified Goethe. He preferred Rembrandt’s print The Alchemist (ca. 1652), a reproduction of which he had chosen for the frontispiece of the very first print edition of the work, Faust, A Fragment (1790). This image represents a universal character rather than the stereotype of the ‘Faustian’ German thinker. Goethe turned his back on the popular altdeutsch (old German) style with Faust: Part Two, on which he worked for the rest of his life and which was published posthumously, in 1832. He had accomplished his ideal, having created an example of Weltliteratur, a universal literary work that transcends national themes and styles. This five-act play is considerably more complex and has a much broader scope than the first Faust, which was published in 1806 and centres almost exclusively on Faust, Mephistopheles and Gretchen. References to German art at the time of Albrecht Dürer and Emperor Maximilian are certainly included in the later play. However, they are combined with descriptions of ancient Greek sculptures and the art of other lands: Italy (the frescoes in Pisa’s Campo Santo, the works of Andrea Mantegna and Antonio da Correggio), France (the paintings of Charles Le Brun) and the East (the iconography of the Thousand and One Nights).

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In addition to these multiple pictorial references, Faust: Part Two is characterized by a profusion of intertextual connections; its subtext abounds with allusions to Shakespeare, Dante, Petrarch, Byron and several other major figures, both ancient and modern. After Faust has captivated The Iliad’s Helen of Troy by addressing her in German verses modelled on the sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare, he finds himself back in the Holy Roman Empire, once more subject to the machinations of Mephistopheles. Devoured by the desire to perform a mighty feat, which is quite simply a lust for power, he exclaims in Act IV: ‘Power is what I seek to win, and property! / The deed is all, the glory, nothing.’ A negative demiurge figure and ‘land developer’, he has Mephistopheles destroy the little paradise that is home to Philemon and Baucis, the elderly, inseparable couple from Greek mythology. He also wreaks havoc in a landscape as idyllic as a painting by Claude Lorrain, in order to construct gigantic dykes, canals and warehouses, and also plans an enormous city for working people, justifying his criminal acts by presenting himself as a benefactor. In the second part of the tragedy, Goethe transforms the Faust legend into a myth of the ‘Iron Age’ of the Modern Era; the period ushered in by the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and rapid scientific and technical developments is portrayed in Faust: Part Two as a time of modernization that had a destructive effect on the world and on social relations, when the powers of Mephistopheles, who became a political leviathan, were given free rein. The first Faust, with the tragic tale of Gretchen, remained much more popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than the second, which presents greater challenges. Nevertheless, the combined legends recreated by Goethe have inspired major literary works. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, written from 1929 and 1940 and published in 1966, features a Mephistophelean figure named Woland (a variant of the devil’s name in Goethe’s first Faust), who creates havoc in Stalinist Moscow and the USSR. In Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947), the new Faust, Adrian Leverkühn, is an avant-garde composer who owes his brilliant, demonic inspiration to his pact with the devil, effectively made when he contracted the syphilis that is destroying him. Leverkühn’s baneful fate occurs in conjunction with that of Germany, which has sold its soul to the devil, in the form of Hitler. Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto (1936) likewise draws a parallel between a major contemporary crisis, in this case that of the Weimar Republic, and the Faustian deal with the devil.

FAUST IN HIGH AND POPULAR CULTURE Over the last two centuries, the Faust legend has been the subject of countless pictorial representations, musical and film adaptations and philosophical interpretations, while continuing to flourish in popular culture. As the history of music dazzlingly demonstrates, the Faustian theme as a realm of memory is far from being a museum piece, having retained all its compelling power. Goethe himself would have liked Mozart to create a musical adaptation of his Faust, just as he had with Don Giovanni. And indeed, few modern myths have inspired so many

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musical compositions within the European tradition, such as Ludwig Spohr’s opera Faust (1813), Franz Schubert’s lied, Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel (1814) and The First Walpurgis Night, set to music by Felix Mendelssohn (1831–2). Other examples include La Damnation de Faust by Hector Berlioz (1846); Charles Gounod’s Faust (1859), one of the most famous operas of its time; the Overture (1844) and Seven Compositions on Goethe’s Faust (1831) by Richard Wagner; Robert Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844–53); the Faust Symphony by Franz Liszt (1854– 7); and the second movement of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (1906). With works such as Faust (2003–4), a two-act opera by Philippe Fénelon after Nikolaus Lenau’s poem of the same name; Doctor Atomic (2005) by John Adams and Pascal Dusapin’s Faustus, the Last Night (2006), contemporary composers continue to demonstrate their original and innovative approaches to this theme. Turning to the cinema, Faust was the inspiration for four silent movies directed by Georges Méliès: Le Cabinet de Méphistophélès (1897), Faust et Marguerite (1897), La Damnation de Faust (1898) and Faust aux Enfers (1903). The legend was subsequently the focus of much more sophisticated and ambitious adaptations. These include Don Juan et Faust by Marcel L’Herbier (1922), in which fantastical elements are combined with an exploration of form; Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Faust (1926); René Clair’s La Beauté du diable (1950), starring Michel Simon and Gérard Philipe and Faust, directed by Alexander Sokurov (2011). As with the Faustian novels of the twentieth century, from Bulgakov to Mann, none of these films, from the most commercial to the most sophisticated, require what is known as the exposition in the domain of French Classical tragedy, the plot and its episodes being familiar to all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dabezies, André, Des rêves au réel, cinq siècles de Faust: littérature, idéologie et mythe, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2015. Dabezies, André, Le Mythe de Faust, Paris, Armand Colin, 1973. Franceschini, Paul-Jean and Jacques Le Rider, Faust, le vertige de la science, Paris, Larousse, coll. ‘Dieux, mythes, héros’, 2010. Le Rider, Jacques and Bernard Pouderon, Faust, homme Renaissance, Paris, Beauchesne, coll. ‘Christophe Plantin’, vol. I, 2010. Reibel, Emmanuel, Faust. La musique au défi du mythe, Paris, Fayard, 2008.

CHAPTER 26

Emotion and the stadium MIKE PLITT

Originating from the English upper classes, football conquered the world in a few decades. It provides a setting in which powers confront one another and local and national passions are expressed, and is also a reflection of European social history. ‘Football’s coming home’; the chorus of the anthem adopted by the English team when England hosted Euro 96 left no doubt as to the game’s origins. A proud reminder that modern football was an English invention, it also, ironically, drew attention to their teams’ defeats. Yet its story certainly began in England, more specifically in her prestigious universities; the ‘Cambridge Rules’, a uniform set of regulations drawn up in 1846, were implemented by the Football Association in 1863. Originally the preserve of the upper classes (a ‘gentleman’s game’), football became a mass sport through the gradual emancipation of the working classes. The reduction in factory workers’ hours left them free to organize their newly acquired Saturday leisure time, and football became the most popular working-class pastime. From then on, a symbiotic relationship developed between the sport and the working classes in industrial cities such as Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. A number of clubs were founded in areas dominated by factory chimneys and blast furnaces. They include Arsenal (once named Royal Arsenal and founded as an armament workers’ team); AS Saint-Étienne and FC Sochaux-Montbéliard (both located in the vicinity of Peugeot plants); Juventus (Turin); KS Hutnik Nowa Huta, founded in the new city built near the steelworks to the east of Krakow; Schalka 04, established in Gelsenkirchen, a city in the Ruhr mining basin; and PSV Eindhoven, associated with the Philips factories.

NOSTALGIC MEMORIES Football always begins on the streets. The first dribbling skills practised on vaguely marked-out or fenced-off terrain form the basis of urban footballing memories that fuel childhood, family and neighbourhood recollections, as echoed by English writer Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch. Every gilded legend built around the heroes of Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Chelsea begins with an account of their debuts on the rough pitches of their childhood clubs. Working-class environments form the ‘first circle’

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of collective memories of football; depending on the situation in each locality, these have either endured or eroded away with the disappearance of a certain form of working-class world in the last third of the twentieth century. At the same time, with football becoming increasingly commercialized, the fans’ boisterous celebrations are giving way to the more orderly behaviour of ‘clients’. These intermingled forms of nostalgia pervade Ken Loach’s film Looking for Eric (2009), a heart-warming story in which Eric Cantona appears as a fantasy figure, both the saviour of Manchester United and of working-class pride. Like the factory, the church also played a role in the development of football, giving rise to a collective memory of the sport following the same model, but in this case linked to parish sponsorship. Borussia Dortmund came into being in this way, in 1909, as a club created for Polish and Catholic immigrants who had come to work in the Ruhr region. Reminders of those early days resurfaced in popular culture. The first Don Camillo film (1952) features an epic football match between the parishioners of the village priest, played by Fernandel, and the ‘red’ team put forward by the Communist mayor, Peppone. If this were a contest between church and trade union-sponsored clubs, parallels between football and religious worship are already well established, with references to ‘hallowed turf ’ and ‘miracles’. Like religion, the cult of football is founded on an ‘imaginary community’ (Benedict Anderson), characterized by shared representations and rituals: ‘The players’ celebratory entrance, the anthems, the fans’ symbolic apparel – with the scarves replacing the pallium, the caps and hats replacing the mitre and the flag replacing the crucifix – all this has a liturgical air.’1 This liturgical character is obvious in a local context – through the stars of the major teams in the Champions’ League, for instance – yet it takes on an entirely different dimension at national level. More than any other sport, football breaks down social barriers and provides the fragmented nation with its schedule of High Masses and the promise of Holy Communion. A number of players have been worshipped like gods by Europe’s various nations. As is often the case in other domains, European polytheism also prevails here, with each country idolizing its own. Alfredo di Stéfano, Ferenc Puskás, Raymond Kopa, Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, Franz Beckenbauer, George Best, Johan Cruyff and Hristo Stoichkov form a prestigious circle that expands with each generation, from Zinedine Zidane to Cristiano Ronaldo. This is not an exclusively European phenomenon. Even the ‘hand of God’ came to the assistance of Diego Maradona in his goal against England; the Argentinian player with the exceptional dribbling skills is revered to an almost unimaginable degree in his native land.

MATCHES FOR THE HISTORY BOOKS The results achieved by certain countries over the last century have established them as great European footballing nations. This is particularly true of Italy and Germany, who have each won the World Cup four times. Every country certainly owes its glory as much to its adrenaline-fuelled victories over its European rivals

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as to its especially prestigious wins over the great South American teams, the gold standard in this domain. Jules Rimet launched the World Cup in 1930; the first champions were the home team, Uruguay, who gained a memorable victory over Argentina and subsequently achieved what was probably an even more noteworthy win in the 1950 final against Brazil. To this day, the heroes of the tournament can be sure of instant and lasting glory, acquired through their remarkable scores (as with Germany’s incredible semi-final victory in 2014 – 7-1!) or high-stakes matches (as with France’s triumph in the 1998 final). This is manifested in news headlines, football shirt sales and clips featuring the ‘best dribblers’ and the ‘best goals’ repeatedly shown on television and social media networks. These great feats, so different and yet structurally so similar in every case, form the collective memories of the footballing fraternity of Europe’s nation states. And is it really true, as stated by English player Gary Lineker, that the same team invariably prevails? ‘Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.’ Spain’s dominance in the mid-2000s certainly proves that each nation can have its golden age and that the memory triggered by the list of winners is by no means impartial. As Lineker’s comment clearly shows, this is not a simple matter of figures and statistics – emotions are involved here too. In some cases, these are concealed in the form of national resentment; in others, they are openly expressed through invective and renewed confrontation. The memories brought into play through European football are too numerous to mention here, but this ‘long shadow of the past’ (Aleida Assmann) is always sure to imbue any match between long-standing foes with powerful symbolic importance. Good examples of this are Poland–Russia games, and most closely contested matches pitting Germany against the Netherlands, Poland or England are weighted with extra significance, the tabloid press urging players to ‘bomb the Krauts to bits’. By indulging in these immoderate, targeted attacks, the media ensure that old hostilities never really subside.

REPLAYING THE PAST In this way, when France and Germany found themselves playing each other in the Euro 2016 semi-final, the talk was not all of strategy, selection and stakes. Memories of the World Cup semi-final of 1982 also resurfaced, when the two teams had met in a game that has gone down in the tournament’s history as the ‘Night in Seville’. The match, won by Germany on penalties, was the scene of a controversial incident between the German goalkeeper, Toni Schumacher, and the French defender Patrick Battison. As the latter took the shot into the penalty area in the fifty-seventh minute, Schumacher leapt aggressively into the Frenchman, who suffered damaged vertebrae and went into a coma. This violent foul (which went unpunished) and the images of Battison being carried off the pitch on a stretcher imprinted themselves deeply into the collective memory of the French fans, as did the relatively indifferent attitude shown by Schumacher in subsequent interviews. The clichéd image of the boche, dating from the First World War, resurfaced in the French press. Schumacher was called a Nazi and received death threats. One might have thought that the laborious

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efforts expended since the end of the Second World War in order to bring about a Franco-German reconciliation had all been in vain, as the hereditary antagonism thought to be a thing of the past suddenly appeared to have been reactivated in a modern context. Helmut Schmidt, the German chancellor at that time, was even compelled to defuse this explosive situation by issuing a communiqué. The Germany–Poland match that took place during Euro 2008 was also seen in terms of a contentious history. Before the game, the Polish tabloid Fakt (which is actually owned by the German group Axel Springer) published a cartoon featuring the German team captain Michael Ballack wearing a spiked helmet and dressed as a Teutonic warrior. The cases of Miroslav Klose, Lukas Podolski and Piotr Trochowski have also attracted much media attention. When Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, its team included several players of Polish origin, a phenomenon that had already occurred in the 1930s, when Ernst Kuzorra and Fritz Szepan, Polish players from the Ruhr region, were German football stars. During the Euro 2008 tournament, Podolski demonstrated his strong attachment to his native land with his very muted celebrations of the two goals he scored against Poland, a gesture that earned him the respect of the Poles. Here, as with many other cases linked to migration within or outside Europe, football provides a scenario for demonstrating chosen affiliations.

RITUALIZING CONFRONTATION Far from being a channelling force, football catalyses the violence of the international confrontations that it ritualizes and displays. In December 1945, following the match between Dynamo Moscow and Arsenal, George Orwell wrote: I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations [. . .] If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles . . .2 Football can cause passions to inflame at any moment. The atmosphere in the stadium is primarily generated on the terraces, where hardcore fans stand together, creating a trance-like ambience with their banners and football chants sung in unison. The match played between the two teams tends to be no more than a pretext for that other match taking place in the stands, involving ‘firms’ of ‘ultras’ ready for a headon fight. Originally a British phenomenon, soccer hooliganism led to tragedy during the Euro 85 tournament at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, ruining the anticipated ‘dream final’ between Juventus and Liverpool. The story is told in Dans la foule, a novel by Laurent Mauvignier. The hooligan element among Liverpool supporters triggered general panic on the part of the Italian fans, resulting in thirty-nine deaths, the victims being trampled or crushed. Following the drama, English clubs were banned from European competition for five years. Although hooliganism was long regarded as ‘the English disease’, it is actually a Europe-wide pandemic, as shown by the assault carried out on French gendarme Daniel Nivel, critically injured by German hooligans during the 1998 World Cup, or the clashes between Russian and

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English hooligans in Marseille in 2016. Heysel, a symbol of football’s dark side, was closely followed by the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 and its memory has now been suppressed. The name ‘Heysel’ does not appear on the site where the tragedy took place in 1985; following major restructuration work, the ground reopened in 1995 under its new name, the King Baudouin Stadium. The case of Yugoslavia likewise inevitably springs to mind in any discussion of football’s potential for unleashing violence. After the death of Josep Tito, several matches resulted in physical confrontations between communities. The clashes between supporters of Dinamo Zagreb and Red Star Belgrade in May 1990 left dozens of people injured. In retrospect, as the first catalyst of ethnic tensions and nationalist hopes, football appears to have heralded the war that led to the dismantling of the federal state.

FOSTERING COHESION In contrast to these dramatic examples, football can also act as a powerful agent of European integration. If one had to choose a single example, it would surely have to be the case of Germany at the World Cup in Bern in 1954, less than ten years after the end of the Second World War. In view of the monstrous crimes committed by the Germans, the country’s return to the European family fold did not take place under the best auspices. However, the Allies had no wish to repeat the errors of the Treaty of Versailles. This time, (West) Germany was swiftly reintegrated into the Western European family, thanks to financial aid from the United States and to the newly developing cooperation between (Western) European nations. The FRG’s ‘long road West’ (H. A. Winkler) reached its symbolic apogee through football. The German team’s victory over the firm favourites, Hungary, in Bern’s Wankdorf Stadium was seen as the end of the period of ostracism that had weighed heavily on the German nation. This liberating ‘miracle at Bern’ was instantly incorporated into the collective memory, completing a triad of other miraculous cases forming part of the social imaginary: Konrad Adenauer, the ‘miraculous’ elderly gentleman (Sebastian Haffner) and the ‘German economic miracle’. As with all legends, the slightest details associated with this triumph are indelibly imprinted on German memories. They include the highly excitable commentary provided by the sportscaster Herbert Zimmerman, as well as his miraculous ‘coaching tip’; his recommendation ‘Rahn should shoot from deep!’ had an instant result and his cries of ‘Goal! Goal! Goal!’ are rebroadcast via loudspeakers in German stadiums to this day, a nostalgic gesture that revives those recollections.

REMEMBERING BYGONE WORLDS The end of the bipolar world in 1989 did not only signal the dawn of a new political era, it likewise did away with the world of experiences lived under Communist regimes, some nations being incorporated back into Europe, while others broke up. With the disappearance of the ‘Eastern bloc’ countries, the significance of the cups, medals and trophies they had won between 1945 and 1989 also faded.

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The encounter between the FRG and the GDR in the group stage of the 1974 World Cup provides a revealing example. Although the match was not especially important in terms of the competition, both teams having already qualified, Germany’s division into two different political systems inevitably gave it a symbolic resonance. The game was relatively quiet, and it was only at the end of the seventy-eighth minute that the GDR, who were the outsiders, achieved a narrow victory thanks to Jürgen Sparwasser. This was a unique match, pitting the Eastern and Western halves of a divided Germany against one another − and yet what remains of it today in the annals of West Germany’s glorious footballing history, where the only memory that lives on is the ‘miracle at Bern’? The limited attention accorded to the GDR’s ‘minor’ win became evident in the early 1990s, with the initial refusal on the part of the German Football Federation to include East Germany’s matches in a history of German football. The former East German player Hans-Jürgen Kreische reacted by stating: ‘Those sods don’t want to acknowledge our international matches. They can cancel out forty-nine of them, that’s fine by me. But there’s one I do care about. Or maybe they played and lost against themselves in 1974?’3 The historian Christoph Dieckmann noted a certain ambivalence with regard to the GDR’s victory in 1974, both as a marginalized institutional memory (Sparwasser’s jersey is nevertheless on show at Bonn’s ‘House of History’) and as an example of a counter-recollection. In the case of Ukraine, the collapse of the Soviet Union likewise represented a rupture in both political and footballing terms. The legendary trainer Valeriy Lobanovskyi, a key figure in Ukrainian football, managed Dinamo Kiev from 1974 to 1990 and also selected the players for the USSR national team. Thanks to his modern approach to the game, the USSR won the bronze medal at the 1976 Olympics and were the runners-up in the 1988 Euros. The team he chose for the latter was almost exclusively composed of Dinamo Kiev players, which clearly demonstrates the extent to which Moscow relied on Kiev in this domain. Dinamo Kiev was among the top-flight teams in the Soviet First League, its thirteen championship victories placing it far ahead of PFC CSKA Moscow, FC Ararat Yerevan and Žalgiris Vilnius. The new Ukrainian League created in 1990 did not manage to arouse the same emotions. Lobanovskyi, for instance, ‘could not conceal his scorn for the Ukrainian championships, nor did he wish to. Perhaps everything that was best and most vigorous about him had remained attached to the Soviet past, so rich in intrigues, challenges and tensions?’4

GULLIT, ZIDANE AND BOATENG: MEMORIES OF THE MELTING POT Conversely, as well as conveying memories of these vanished worlds, football provides a framework for narratives of worlds in the making, born of the movements and migrations that take place beyond Europe’s borders. Football has become a significant social melting pot in most of the countries with large immigrant populations, a phenomenon that has developed within different time frames. This

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has given rise to innumerable stories woven into one grand narrative that triggers conflicting opinions. These different views may seem irreconcilable. The most emblematic example must surely be the multi-ethnic Tricolore team of 1998, chiefly comprising players from former French colonies. It included such football virtuosos as Christian Karembeu, Thierry Henry and, most notably, Zinedine ‘Zizou’ Zidane. Following the victory of the ‘Black-Blanc-Beur’ team over Brazil in the final there were cries of ‘Zizou for President!’ and the portraits of the players were projected onto the Arc de Triomphe. This achievement, closely followed by the French victory at Euro 2000, was seen as a success for France’s multicultural society − until the first cracks began to appear. These emerged during the friendly match between the French and Algerian teams at the Stade de France in 2001. The encounter brought back memories of the Algerian War of Independence and its scenes of violence. During that period, the fight for independence was manifested through the medium of football; Algerian stars such as Rachid Mekhloufi and Mustapha Zitouni, premier league players who had been named to the French squad, left France to join the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) team and embarked on a world tour to promote recognition for a future Algerian state. Once independence had been achieved, Mekhloufi rejoined Saint-Étienne and made significant contributions to France’s victories in 1964, 1967 and 1968. Curiously, his supporters did not bear a grudge against him for his commitment to the FNL; all that counted for them was his talent as a player. At this point, however, we leave the moving story of Mekhloufi in order to return to the ‘colonial fracture’ within French society, as it is potentially symptomatic of more widespread friction occurring at European level. The France–Algeria match had been intended to achieve reconciliation between French and Algerian citizens − by birth or by nationality, according to Marie-George Buffet, the sports minister at the time. However, the Marseillaise was relentlessly booed by young fans of Algerian origin, mostly second- or third-generation French citizens, who then proceeded to invade the pitch. Politicians rapidly turned the conversation to the discontent of the ‘inner city generation’,5 while the polemicist Alain Finkielkraut subsequently described the national team as ‘black-black-black’.6 Such attitudes may be found elsewhere. Prior to the 2016 European Championship, Alexander Gauland, vice chairman of the xenophobic Alternative for Germany party, stated that the German people ‘wouldn’t want to have a [Jérôme] Boateng for a neighbour’. These inflammatory acts did not go unanswered, however. The theatre play Peng! Peng! Boateng!, staged in Berlin in 2016, charted the interconnected pathways of the two Boateng half-brothers, Jérôme and Kevin-Prince, starting with their GermanGhanaian childhood in the working-class district of Berlin-Wedding, ‘where you either become a gangster, a drug dealer or a footballer’ (K.-P. Boateng). Jérôme, a World Champion in 2014, plays for Die Mannschaft − the German national team − while Kevin-Prince has chosen to play his international matches for Ghana. So on the one hand, the champion who wins victories for your country inspires fascination, while on the other, the colour of his skin is always liable to trigger racist jeers and insults inherited directly from the collective imaginaries of colonial times. Caught between the mindsets of the past and the issues of the future,

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between traditional representations of the nation and the challenges of globalized competitions, football lays bare the contradictions within our societies. The same principles are applied to immigrant players, be they English, Portuguese, Belgian, Austrian and so on. Their life stories are overdetermined by their origins, their performances assessed in the light of their representative status, in both the sporting and the civic sense. Pioneers always have a symbolic value in their countries. This was the case with Raymond Kopa (né Kopaszewski), and later with the Michel Platini, Jean Tigana and Marius Trésor generation of the 1980s, together with Ruud Gullit, who played for the Netherlands during the same period, and Mesut Özil, who more recently played for Germany. Together, these individual stories indicate the emergence of a marked tendency to form new European narratives that are no longer limited to a handful of nations. For it has been some time since this phenomenon was the sole the preserve of the traditional countries of immigration, as demonstrated by the career of Swedish player Zlatan Ibrahimović.

THE EUROPE OF THE STADIUM European Football and Collective Memory, edited by Nils Havemann and Wolfram Pyta, was published in 2015. The book, which originated from an international research project financed by the European Union (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe – FREE), came to a disappointing conclusion; despite the uniform character of the rules of the game and its institutions, despite the huge numbers of matches played and the existence of footballing icons, we cannot really speak of football realms of memory in a European context. In the authors’ view, this is chiefly due to the lack of a genuinely European public sphere. And yet football can certainly be defined as a European realm of memory, continually creating shared spaces and thereby working towards the establishment of essential processes of unification. By offering European societies a form of ‘ersatz war’ (Paul Auster), football, which both preserves and transforms contentious recollections, has made a significant contribution to maintaining peace in the continent. From this viewpoint, the stadium is the ultimate forum, the setting of the momentous match played for the Europeanization of Europe; this is not an encounter involving two teams with eleven players apiece, but two sets of memories: the frenzied and the calmed. The UEFA European Championship, for instance, is the scene of endless examples of European nationalism, and also witnesses the workings of collective memories. Conceived in 1927 and launched in 1960 as the European Nations’ Cup, the tournament reflects developments and acts as a ‘Europeanizing’ machine, insofar as it brings together states whose political affiliation or cultural connection to Europe are the focus of renewed debates – Ukraine in the former case, Russia and Turkey in the latter. Despite the fact that Ukraine is highly unlikely to join the European Union in the near future, given the current political situation, she is included in the family of member states through her participation in the competition. This was demonstrated in 2012, when the European championship was co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland. We might say that football has made a conscious decision to free itself

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of historical determinism, thereby displaying a generosity in its very conception of Europe that is rarely encountered nowadays.

NOTES 1. Andreas Merkt, ‘Die Arena. Warum Fussball eigentlich ein recht zivilisiertes Spiel ist’, in Fussballgott. Elf Einwürfe, ed. Andreas Merkt (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006), pp. 17–50 (here p. 35). 2. George Orwell, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, first published in Tribune, London, 14 December 1945. 3. Quoted in Christoph Dieckmann, ‘Sparwassers Tor’, in Erinnerungsorte der DDR, ed. Martin Sabrow (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009), p. 359. 4. Yuri Andrukhovych, ‘Kiev’, in Totalniy Futbol, ed. Serhiy Zhadan (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), p. 165. 5. Éric Taïeb, ‘France-Algérie de football: Évitons les conclusions trop rapides’, VilleÉcole-Intégration Enjeux, 135 (2003): 226. 6. ‘What Sort of Frenchmen Are They?’ Haaretz, 17 November 2005.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dietschy, Paul, Histoire du football, Paris, Perrin, 2010. Galeano, Eduardo, El fútbol a sol y sombra, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1995. Goldblatt, David, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, New York, Riverhead Books, 2006. Guilianotti, Richard, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999. Havemann, Nils and Wolfram Pyta (Eds.), European Football and Collective Memory, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hornby, Nick, Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life, London, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1992. Mauvignier, Laurent, Dans la foule, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2006. Zeyringer, Klaus, Fussball. Eine Kulturgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 2014. Zhadan, Serhiy (Ed.), Totalniy Futbol, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2012.

FILMOGRAPHY The Last Yugoslavian Football Team (Vuk Janic, 2000, the Netherlands). Les Rebelles du foot (Gilles Perez and Gilles Rof, 2012, France). Looking for Eric (Ken Loach, 2009, United Kingdom). The Miracle of Bern (Sönke Wortmann, 2003, Germany).

CHAPTER 27

The timeless fairy tale CLAUDIA SCHMÖLDERS

For centuries, fairy tales have been reminding us of the powerful magic forces that come to the aid of individuals in distress. Archetypal oral narratives with universal scope, they were first collected and transcribed in Europe. The timeless stories of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella have been adapted to every medium and the characters have become constituent elements of European social imaginaries. Who created Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella? Nobody really knows. Yet, like so many other fairy-tale characters, they have long played a key role in Western consumer and culture industries. These two figures, both of whom embody themes originating from ancient Greek and Germanic mythology, were first discovered by European readers in the sixteenth century. In Piacevoli notti (1550–3), Gianfrancesco Straparola provides a framework in the form of a gathering whose participants spend several nights telling each other stories; the work includes the first printed versions of those two tales. Both characters also appear in Giambattista Basile’s The Pentamerone (ca. 1635), which was subsequently transformed into court literature by Parisian writer Charles Perrault (1628–1703). His eight Tales of Mother Goose (Contes de ma mère l’Oye, 1697) were regarded as the Bible of popular fairytale collections and attracted the interest of the Brothers Grimm, as reflected in the collection of stories they published in the early 1800s.

UNIVERSAL THEMES Fairy tales belong to a large family of epic stories forming part of the legacy of universal narrative themes originally classified by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne in 1910. As realms of memory, they serve psychosocial (or even bio-psychical) theories. The ‘happy ending’ is not solely a shamanistic invention, however. Published in 1928, Morphology of the Folktale was an innovative study by Russian scholar Vladimir Propp, who identified a nucleus of narrative structures that form the basis of all such stories and are adapted in various ways. Any new elements are introduced through these structures, for in most cases there is nothing innovative about the protagonists, the majority of whom are given an impersonal label rather than a name. The fairy, the witch, the ogre, the king and the hunter are familiar stock characters, but they can all experience new adventures, some being deliberate satires. This is

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the case with Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, in which he mocks the ladies of the court through the vanity displayed by one of the fairies. And with the extraordinary tale of the unknown, sleeping young girl, who actually bears the prince two children, he lampoons unfaithful husbands. Born into a middle-class, progressive family, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm naturally shunned this audacious picture of court life, although the tale, like many others, had been passed onto them by a peasant woman from Hesse whose Protestant ancestors had left France to settle there after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Their Children’s and Household Tales (1812) emphasized the satirical image of a sleeping court. As the repository of a national oral culture that had been rescued from oblivion, this work became the emblem of the Romantic awakening and was enthusiastically imitated by admiring writers from the fledgling European nations established during the nineteenth century. In the case of Cinderella, the awakening occurred in a very different manner. Although her dying mother certainly promises to watch over her, she is then humiliated by her cruel stepmother, who ensures that her own daughters are decked out in finery. The happy ending here is well known. But the story has a variant, the Peau de l’Âne (also known as Donkey-Skin), which is almost exclusively to be found in the European family of fairy tales. A widowed king wishes to marry his own daughter, whose fairy godmother helps her to escape, disguised in a donkey skin; finally, having captivated a prince, she is transformed into a beautiful bride-to-be. Children throughout Europe and Russia, particularly those undergoing traumatic experiences, found consolation in tales of this type. In psychoanalytical studies, especially the book by Bruno Bettelheim (1976), ‘fairy tales’ are even seen as having a lasting impact on the memories of adult women. In Europe, these tales were quickly and unambiguously incorporated into the domain of ‘high culture’. The first examples of this appropriation occurred in the eighteenth century, with the influence of the Middle Eastern tales in the Arabian Nights naturally playing a part. Cinderella has existed as an opera since 1759, while Sleeping Beauty inspired Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet and is the subject of admirable paintings and illustrations. A large number of theatre plays and new versions of the story have subsequently appeared, some having great literary merit.

GRAND NARRATIVES AND HAPPY ENDINGS The advent of the cinema provided limitless opportunities for retelling fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty made its first appearance on the silver screen in 1908, as a silent film. Cinderella followed suit in 1950, in the form of a Disney film, paving the way for others. The movie was the perfect illustration of the American dream; an existence that had begun in the most disadvantaged circumstances was followed by a rise to dizzying social heights, with everything ending in blissful happiness. The Czech film Three Wishes for Cinderella (1973) even became the most popular fairytale movie in the GDR. The Socialist and American dreams resembled one another so closely as to be virtually indistinguishable – the only difference being that in the context of the Eastern bloc, the meaning of the story is conveyed through the proletariat, who naturally prevail in the end.

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It was the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, however, who provided the fairy tale with its very latest role, by introducing it into the domain of cultural memory. In 1979, inspired by the Brothers Grimm and Vladimir Propp, he created the concept of ‘grand narratives’, in other words, narratives of universal historical meaning; examples include the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the hopes placed by Voltaire, Diderot, Lessing and Kant in progress, reason and world peace. Lyotard saw these ‘grand narratives’ as being connected to one another in the oral tradition, all being based on the expectation of a happy ending. In his view, they were already in jeopardy in the early 1800s, just as the great era of ‘fairy tales’ was dawning. However, the written tales struck such a chord that they imprinted themselves on memories and collected their own following. Yet despite their success, we should not forget their humble beginnings, originating as they do from the magical world of storytellers – most of them women.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Defrance, Anne and Jean-François Perrin (Eds.), Le Conte en ses paroles: La figuration de l’oralité dans le conte merveilleux du Classicisme aux Lumières, Paris, Desjonquères, 2007. Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale, translated from the Russian by Laurence Scott, Bloomington: Research Center, Indiana University, 1958 [1928]. Schmölders, Claudia (Ed.), Die wilde Frau. Mythische Geschichten zum Staunen, Fürchten und Begehren, Cologne, Diederichs Verlag, 1984. Uther, Hans-Jörg, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004. Zipes, Jack, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, New York, Routledge, 2006.

CHAPTER 28

Don Quixote Tilting at dreams JAVIER GÓMEZ-MONTERO

Emerging from the mists of the Middle Ages and its chivalric novels while also heralding the Romantic movement, the character created by Cervantes has established himself as a gentle yet combative anti-hero. He invents a more beautiful version of life for himself, although he risks losing sight of reality in the process. ‘The ingenious hidalgo, don Quixote de la Mancha’ is a solitary, impoverished hero who spends his nights reading chivalric romances, causing him to lose his grip on reality. Accompanied by his loyal ‘sidekick’, Sancho Panza, he devotes his days to endless confrontations in defence of widows and orphans, even creating imaginary enemies in the process. This naïve and touching figure has become one of the most famous fictional characters in the world. Written by Miguel de Cervantes, the story was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, and is said to be the most translated Western literary work, after the Bible. The figure of Don Quixote has a unique status as a powerful point of reference in terms of the condition of Homo Europaeus. This is not only justifiable on account of the multiple translations made of the book (mostly into European languages) or the fact that artists and intellectuals throughout and beyond Europe have chosen him as a source of inspiration. It is above all due to the diverse and profoundly meaningful images generated by that figure, and to its presence in the European social imaginary. Don Quixote has found a place among the various possibilities of self-identification open to European man and woman, and within the frameworks of their reflections on themselves. Moreover, his powers as a source of identification have effectively been reinforced by the fact that the work has remained a source of entertainment from the seventeenth century to the present. This is reflected not only in its translated versions but also in musical compositions by Henry Purcell, Georg Telemann and Jules Massenet.

TILTING AT WINDMILLS The text has inspired a profusion of images ever since its publication, from the first description of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at the beginning of the novel to its most

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famous episodes – such as the ‘tilting at windmills’ scene featuring the knight and his companion mounted respectively on a horse and a donkey. This is especially true of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the publication of both luxurious and popular illustrated versions of the book reached a peak. Editions were produced throughout Europe, with illustrations by John Vanderbank in England, CharlesAntoine Coypel in France and José del Castillo in Spain. Versions of Don Quixote intended for an adolescent readership were first published in the late nineteenth century, notably as English and German translations, with adaptations for children appearing in the twentieth century. Gustave Doré’s remarkable images encapsulate this artistic effervescence. His illustrations for a French edition of the novel in 1863 are full of dramatic emphasis; his highly expressive scenes have imprinted the character, in all his folly, nobility and humanity, into the social imaginary. Honoré Daumier, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí continued this tradition with contemporary images through which Don Quixote became a symbol of madness and human folly, of melancholy and desire, of solitude and uncertainty. The origin of this appropriation lies in the Romantic movement; this also generated the first modern visions of Europe (as in the works of Novalis and François-René de Chateaubriand), while the continent’s relationship with itself, both critical and sensitive, is likewise the product of Romanticism. The Romantic movement – and with it, Europe – identified with Don Quixote, admired him and recognized him as the embodiment of its own values, dreams and failures. Don Quixote has established itself in European history and minds; the social values and ethical principles represented by the characters, perceived by Europeans as being their own, have imprinted themselves both in the collective imaginary and in the individual subconscious. Ever since Friedrich von Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck and Lord Byron brought to light the character’s individualism and modern sensibility, a number of modern writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Thomas Mann and Jorge Luis Borges have developed that interpretation, seeing Don Quixote as a figure in whom reason and vitality, empathy and self-criticism, community spirit and individuality all are combined. European identification with Don Quixote centres on the character as the embodiment of the hero with a broken soul; he sees reality for what it is, yet he has the desire and creative energy that define the Homo Europaeus, described by Paul Valéry as ‘perpetually anxious and searching’. Don Quixote is a hero of the word, engaged in constant dialogue with Sancho Panza, each of them maintaining opposite views. The theories of the absorption of the other (Paul Valéry) and the appropriation of the outsider (Rémi Brague) are metaphorized in these continuous reflections, as are the dialogic ‘whirlwinds’ presented by the sociologist Edgar Morin as specific to European culture. The principles of contradiction and self-criticism that are an inherent part of the hero’s trajectory and are expressed in his deeds, discourse and conversation may be added to this list. The sacrificial dimension of Don Quixote heralds Europe’s experience of agony as described by the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano and the Czech thinker Jan Patočka, in the light of the self-destructive potential presented by totalitarianism throughout the twentieth century.

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As a hero with a broken soul, Don Quixote embodies the ambivalences of European individualism, conceived within the framework of a subjectivity that gives him autonomy but abandons him to chance events. With its ability to recreate itself time and time again, Don Quixote is an exceptional reference point for Europeans in terms of intangible cultural heritage. They will easily recognize the symbolic reflections of their own personality and existence in the figure of the Knight of La Mancha.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brague, Rémi, Europe, la voie romaine, Paris, Gallimard, 2009. Close, Anthony, The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978. Imágenes del Quijote. Modelos de representación en las ediciones de los siglos XVII a XIX, edited by Patrick Lenaghan, Madrid: The Hispanic Society of America, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2003. Morin, Edgar, Penser l’Europe, Paris, Gallimard, 1987. Semprún, Jorge, Pensar en Europa, Barcelona, Tusquets, 2006. Valéry, Paul, ‘La crise de l’esprit’, ‘Note (ou l’Européen)’, in Œuvres I, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1957, pp. 988–1014.

CHAPTER 29

‘The history of Europe is the history of its borders’ THOMAS SERRIER

The European Union has fourteen thousand kilometres of borders; the continent, from the Atlantic to the Ural River, has around ninety interstate borders whose total length exceeds thirty-seven thousand kilometres. Europe has always been characterized by its multitude of frontiers, which echo the continent’s numerous languages. Dismantled in some localities only to spring up in others, the frontier always re-emerges, shattering the European illusion of a world without borders. Was it a totem pole? That may have been the impression given by the imposing, enigmatic and somewhat unsettling sculpted column that greeted visitors to Frontières, an exhibition held at the Musée de l’Histoire de l’immigration in Paris in late 2015. The Borne-frontière (Boundary Marker) was carved in 1945 by the sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi, one of the most significant names in contemporary art. What prompted the curators’ decision to place it at the entrance to this exhibition, which opened shortly after the record influx of refugees in the summer of 2015? What meaning did it hold for them? Despite, or perhaps because of its timeless appearance, the sculpture certainly served as a link between those two eras, seventy years apart, when borders were a burning issue. Here, a simple boundary marker, that traditional, material manifestation of a border, is set within the immaculate whiteness of a sculpture; the very concept of the frontier appears to have been petrified in its three blocks of limestone, superimposed to form a column. But Brâncuşi’s Borne-frontière also expresses the fundamental ambivalence of the border, omnipresent in the reality and social imaginaries of Europe. The four surfaces of each block feature pairs of human profiles chiselled into the limestone, eye to eye as they exchange a solemn kiss − are these stylized images of love or of direct confrontation? In other words, does this present the frontier as a front line or a meeting place, as a barrier or a pathway, as a coupure or couture, to borrow the evocative leitmotif used by Lucien Febvre in his work Le Rhin (1931)?

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A MULTITUDE OF BORDERS There was a period when European borders were regarded as fixed or frozen − it seems so long ago! With the end of the Cold War, their future once again became an open book. The collapse of the status quo that had prevailed during the Eastern bloc era suddenly cleared the way for a whole range of possibilities. However, just when the demise of the Soviet bloc was enabling dreams of free movement to become a reality, the spectre of old conflicts based on territorial division was reawakened by the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. Although external borders are the central issue today, long-term memories of internal borders have likewise been brought back to boiling point as a result of the current situation, the functions of both being closely linked. The discipline of border studies, which has been developing rapidly over the last twenty years, has produced considerably more complex analyses of the types and functions of borders, which are themselves undergoing significant changes at the present time. Yet that fundamental ambivalence between the notions of openness and closure is still structuring memories and polarizing opinions − to an unprecedented degree. Europe’s multitude of frontiers is an unvarying feature of its history. While the European Union has around fourteen thousand kilometres of external borders, according to the parameters applied (whether its Eurasian peripheries are included) the continent itself now has around ninety interstate borders whose total length exceeds thirty-seven thousand kilometres. Some are among the oldest in the world (Spain-Portugal, Spain-France, Andorra, Switzerland and Norway-Sweden), but half of them are of very recent date, having been established after 1989. Around a quarter of the world’s borders are in Europe, and a quarter of the states recognized by the UN are European. Therefore, although its share of the global population amounts to just 8 per cent, and its land mass is only 3.3 per cent of the global total, Europe occupies a unique position within the international system. ‘The European area’, observes the geographer Michel Foucher, ‘is composed of reduced units that have been fragmented, altered by history and by aspirations to sovereignty, which remain enthusiastic even in cases where viability is in doubt’.1 This structuring process of fragmentation certainly appears to be ongoing − as an issue at stake in the Ukraine conflict, for instance, or in the form of Scotland’s possible post-Brexit secession from the UK, or in the separation of other regions both outside and within the European Union itself, as in the cases of Spain or Belgium. Even before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the violent break-up of the Yugoslav Federation or Czechoslovakia’s ‘Velvet Divorce’, this awareness of the imminent ‘birth’ of new territorial boundaries due to the collapse of the Iron Curtain led the historian Krzysztof Pomian to declare in 1990: ‘The history of Europe is the history of its borders.’2 Could this incisive pronouncement also be applied to memories? To quote Febvre once more: ‘It is neither police nor customs officials who ensure that [a frontier] is powerfully “rooted” into the earth − nor is it a cannon behind ramparts. It is emotion: fervent passions and hatreds.’3 ‘Memories’ should certainly be added to this remark. There are living memories, closely linked to personal experiences, and

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institutional memories, which preserve rights of ownership over a given territory; nor should we forget those memories developed by national education systems − how many generations of schoolchildren have had their attention directed towards the ‘blue line of the Vosges’ or the blood-red contours of a battle-scarred frontier? Then there are the cultural memories, through which our individual and shared feelings towards borders are transformed into enduring collective representations.

THE BOUNDARY AS A CONNECTING FORCE The task of evaluating the significance of the border in European memories remains a challenging one, however. It is complicated, from the very outset, by the highly varied terms used to denote it. From the word ‘frontier’ (in some contexts a ‘false friend’) to ‘border’, confine, kraina and so on, these ‘nomadic concepts’ (Olivier Christin) have circulated among the different languages for centuries, reflecting infinitely varied representations of the demarcation line. While the English word ‘boundary’ suggests a ‘connection’, frontière and frontera are closer to the term ‘front’, and the German and Slavic words Grenze and granica are based on the notion of the ‘edge’ or ‘end’ of something. Some words have had a lasting effect on geographical space as names of places or regions, such as Ukraine, which literally means ‘border country’. Others have been revived as a result of circumstances, such as the Carolingian term ‘marches’; this re-emerged through the partition of Poland, with references to ‘Germany’s eastern marches’, and in the expression ‘eastern marches’ as applied to France, which had lost Alsace in 1871. Yet what elements of this historical glossary are capable of encompassing all the geopolitical issues at stake today? In addition to lexical matters, the task is complicated by a number of paradoxes. First, might we not describe the boundary itself as a ‘paradox in space’, to quote Daniel Nordman?4 And why indeed, given the immense range of demarcation lines in existence, does one border consolidate its presence more emphatically than another? This must surely be the result of a cumulative process – in other words, a process of recollection – that has caused the attention of the princes and societies involved to converge, over time, on one boundary line and one alone, endowing it with the greatest political significance. Second, we have the paradox whereby the demarcation line is the very element that connects us. It is certainly true that the constant reappearance − indeed, the omnipresence − of the frontier is an experience common to all Europeans. Yet, as the third paradox, that proliferation of borders has generated, and continues to generate, totally opposing views. These range from a very earnest anti-border stance to no less earnest eulogies in their defence. These conflicting arguments all manage to take root in the deep, fertile ground of memories. Everyone in Europe has developed through multiple confrontations with the frontier. They separate us physically; they distinguish us politically, socially and culturally; in a psychological sense, too, they continue to pervade and divide us. Yet they also offer us protection, real or desired and long regarded as sacred. European states and nations have called on this and may continue to do so when establishing their political systems; but

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equally, it has been used in a historical context as a form of defence – primarily against one’s European neighbours!

THE BORDER AS A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE Europeans know − both individually and collectively − the price to pay for crossing, circumventing or knocking down borders. They are equally aware of the cost of the new allegiances and painful adaptations involved in every change of territory, when traditional, sometimes centuries-old affiliations are overturned, or conversely when they oscillate between one sovereign power and another, from era to era. Whether the process is smooth, abusive or intrusive, whether it involves routine detail − passports and customs control − or drama, conflict or violence − clandestine journeys or even invasions − the act of crossing a frontier is therefore a memorable part of so many life stories, from the most anonymous to the most iconic. Madame de Staël, banished from France by Napoleon Bonaparte, expressed a feeling experienced by countless others when crossing a border: The frontier of the Rhine has something solemn in it. One fears, in crossing it, to hear this terrible sentence, − You are out of France. − It is in vain that the understanding would pass an impartial judgement on the land that has given us birth; our affections never detach themselves from it; and, when we are forced to quit it, existence seems to be torn up by the roots, and we become strangers to ourselves.5 This is why so many places, such as Trieste, Strasbourg and Lviv / Lwów / Lemberg, to name but a few, are haunted by recollections of shifting borders, while their uprooted populations have established multiple specific sites of memory. The Danzig of Günter Grass, transfigured in The Tin Drum (1959), provides one example: ‘First came the Rugians, then the Goths and the Gepids, and later the Kashubians, from whom Oskar is directly descended. [. . .] Curiously, this time it wasn’t the Prussians, the Swedes, the Saxons or the French who arrived after the Russians; it was the Poles.’ The dramatization of affiliations intensified in Europe with the advent of the linear border. As seen with the example of Madame de Staël, it imprinted itself deeply into social representations and is equally likely to produce the type of elation displayed by Alexander Pushkin: ‘Arpachai! Our border! [. . .] I galloped toward the river with an indescribable feeling [. . .] There was something mysterious about the border for me.’6 As historians have repeatedly shown, until the Treaties of Westphalia were signed in 1648 this idea was slow to emerge and did not begin to permeate social imaginaries until the early nineteenth century. Successive shifts have been noted, from ‘feudal boundaries to political borders’ (Bernard Guenée) and from ‘the boundaries of the State to national borders’ (Daniel Nordman). The practice of a territory adopting a specific faith according to the principle cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion) instituted at Augsburg in the sixteenth

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century and the notion of languages and nationalities as criteria were likewise slow to implant themselves. An idea that perverted the principle of self-determination soon insidiously emerged. Not confined to the strategies of totalitarian regimes, it was defined in 1940 by Nikolaos Politis, who wrote: ‘It is in the interests of order and peace that political borders should correspond to ethnic ones.’ A Greek jurist and statesman, Politis was profoundly cosmopolitan and an influential member of the League of Nations.7 The post-1945 peacemaking process has not effaced these historical scars, which remain, as it were, embedded in collective memories.

THE EUROPE OF BOUNDARY LINES Borders are therefore the focus of faint hopes and fears; these are as profoundly interlinked as the potential fault lines are infinite. While there may be countless geographical borders, even more are contained within collective memories, which preserve the vestiges of now-obsolete boundaries. As demonstrated by Michel Foucher in Fragments d’Europe (1995), if one presents only those European state boundaries that now exist or have existed since the eighteenth century alongside one another, the result is a spectacularly close-knit and entangled network. Some enclaves have survived the centuries, such as the Belgian territories of Baarle in the Netherlands, established in 1579! Battlefields, networks of fortifications such as those built by Vauban along the borders of France, lines of bunkers and medieval forts survey each other from hilltops or embankments, like the fortresses of Narva and Ivangorod on the border between Estonia and Russia. Some frontiers were the scenes of royal meetings; Henry II of England and Philippe Auguste, for example, met at the river Epte, which lay between French and Norman Vexin, while the Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed on Pheasant Island (also known as Conference Island) on the Bidassoa river. A large number of borders and former marches still retain their historical character as ‘disputed territories’ (Georges Duby8). Archive documents and local knowledge should be added to material traces, as inhabitants were accustomed to ‘juggling’ their various affiliations to their village, parish, fiefdom or kingdom. Affiliations, even those no longer in force, are interiorized in memories; ‘invisible frontiers’ (Étienne François) endure in this way, through distinct practices or sensitivities. There have been many references, for instance, to the ‘mental barriers’ that affected both East and West Germans immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet a vast landscape of ‘phantom borders’ (Béatrice von Hirschhausen) is apparent throughout Europe, manifested in distinct legacies, different social practices and multiple reappropriations of the past, displayed on either side of vanished boundaries. Europe’s division into different territories has given rise to dark memories – the hell or the nightmare of the impassable frontier − as well as to gilded legends – the joy of unfettered freedom to travel. More theoretical discussions have developed midway between those two extremes, based on the notion of ‘diversity in unity’.

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The first aspect to note is that network of borders covering Europe’s surface both contains and generates considerable internal diversity. The theme of varietas as the very essence of Europe unquestionably forms a realm of memory in itself. The slogan ‘unity in diversity’ is rooted in ancient, fertile ground. During the Age of Enlightenment, a whole philosophy of diversity was developed by Gibbon, Montesquieu and Voltaire, as well as Schiller, in his famous inaugural lecture on universal history (1789). In an essay on the pluralist character of Europe as contrasted with the vastness of China (1758) David Hume spoke of the continent as the most fragmented region on earth. He shared Montesquieu’s opinion that Europe’s subdivided state, comparable to that of the ancient Greek world, was far from calamitous − quite the contrary, indeed, as it had the great virtue of promoting innovation, trade, democracy and tolerance. From this perspective, the advances in the arts and sciences characteristic of Europe originated from the natural process of emulating one’s neighbour prompted by the restricted size of the territories and the omnipresent notion of Otherness.

‘THE FIRST FORM OF SERVITUDE’ The second aspect is even more directly linked to the experience of the border; this is the memory of cosmopolitanism, which boasts a long history in Europe. In a somewhat contradictory fashion, the social imaginary associated with openness draws on the European experience of confinement. Abolished, obsolete or miraculously ineffective, the border lies at the heart of these happy, playful and ever militant representations. Their history can be retraced from the ‘No Border’ stance of the transnational networks opposed to ‘Fortress Europe’ to Erasmus, whose Complaint of Peace (1516) included the assertion that space separated bodies, but not minds. Each generation has its own key moment, as seen in the images of the opening of the Wall in 1989, which still generate euphoria, or in the Berliners singing the folk song Die Gedanken sind frei (Thoughts are Free) during the Berlin blockade of 1948. These occasions have become part of a long history. The anti-border activists of the 2000s adopted the May ’68 slogan ‘Les frontières, on se’en fout!’ (We don’t give a damn about frontiers!), while the challenge to patriotism became embodied in the form of the stateless Daniel Cohn-Bendit, expelled from French soil. Although he did not attain this degree of concision, the Austrian politician Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was already arguing for the abolition of frontiers in the interwar years. In his PanEuropa (1923), he maintained that lasting peace could only be guaranteed by the dismantling of borders from the Atlantic to Russia and the Black Sea, which would also be a necessary condition for the emergence of a ‘United States of Europe’ – a term that unfailingly brings Victor Hugo to mind. Exiled to Jersey, the author inveighed bitterly against borders in his famous ‘Letter to my fellow-citizens of the United States of Europe’ (1869): ‘Man’s first need, his first right, his first duty, is freedom. [. . .] The first form of servitude is the frontier. Who says frontier, says ligature. Cut the ligature, obliterate the frontier, do away with the customs officer and the soldier, in other words, be free; peace will follow.’

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He goes on to write: Who has an interest in frontiers? Kings. Divide and rule. A frontier suggests a sentry-box, a sentry-box suggests a soldier. ‘No one shall pass’, is the declaration of all privilege, of all prohibition, of all censorship, of all tyranny. From that frontier, that sentry-box, that soldier, the whole human catastrophe emerges9. Pre-1914 internationalists expressed similar views. Today, the European Union readily chooses its iconic figures among cosmopolitan guiding lights such as the pedagogue John Comenius, who endured countless exiles and outlined a philosophy of tolerance in his work The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (1621).

CORRECTING HISTORY The peacemaking and unification initiatives carried out in the continent after the two world wars were naturally inspired by these humanist and pacifist traditions. Robert Schuman certainly made concessions in his plea Pour l’Europe: This is not a question of obliterating ethnic and political borders. They are a historical fact, and we do not presume to correct history, or to invent a rationalised, managed form of geography. [. . .] What we want is to remove the rigidity from borders, what I would call their intransigent hostility.10 The story of an existential, uncompromising revolt against the arbitrary and ‘intransigent hostility’ of the border had been developed by Heinrich von Kleist in his novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810), which heralded the Kafkaesque world of the absurd. The tale of this humble horse dealer, whose whole life becomes blighted by an unjustly extracted toll charge, causing him to turn to violence, was brought to the big screen by French director Arnaud des Pallières in 2013. Conversely, since the construction of Europe, a process that emerged from the middle ground between utopianism and realism, scores of images representing fraternization have been created at border points. A fifty-seven-metre-high sculpture of a handshake was installed at the former Franco-Belgian motorway customs post at Hensies in 1972. Bridges such as those connecting Strasbourg to Kehl and Frankfurt an der Oder to Słubice are naturally known as ‘Europe Bridge’, and the reconstruction of the famous Mostar Bridge was co-financed by the European Union. Following the end of the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the collapse of Yugoslavia, this now marks the border between Bosnia’s Muslim population and its Catholic Croats. The admittance of new EU member states in 2004 and the enlargement of the Schengen area in 2007 were celebrated by firework displays held near border posts. Yet the Community – in other words, a body specific to Western Europe that expanded after 1989 – did not have the monopoly on this type of spectacle. In the Warsaw pact countries too, the inviolable character of the new frontiers imposed by Stalin was emphasized in a similarly stereotypical manner. The signing of the Treaty of Görlitz (1950), whereby the GDR formally recognized the Oder-Neisse Line as its eastern frontier with Poland, generated

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a plethora of images expressing jubilation and hope, all executed in the purest Socialist Realist style. And yet the friendship between the (East) German and Polish people, five years after 1945, was an obligatory one, dictated by the Soviet Union – hence the characteristically European challenge, after 1989, of renewing a dialogue between contentious memories in multicultural frontier zones. In the same spirit as Anti-Komplex – the Czech association working with the formerly expelled Sudeten Germans – a number of local initiatives are promoting a policy of ‘open regionalism’ (Robert Traba), particularly with regard to the pasts and legacies of their neighbours across the border. This therapeutic approach, whereby the frontier becomes a symbol of healed wounds, has been applied at the cultural centre run by the Fundacja Pogranicze (the Borderland Foundation), at the crossroads between Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. A similar objective lies at the heart of the Bridges Project, which includes plans to establish a heritage centre for the communities of Islam Grčki and its immediate neighbour, Islam Latinski. These two Croatian villages both bear the mark of a historical frontier; this is reflected in their very names, Islam recalling the Ottoman Empire, Grčki, the Orthodox Greek religious practices of the Serb population, and Latinski, the Latin Catholicism observed by the Croats. They also bear the still-open wounds of the period between 1991 and 1995, with their legacy of ruins and minefields. This project may one day come to full fruition. We end this section by looking at the border’s symbolic associations with life and death, returning to the context in which Brâncuşi sculpted his Bornefrontière. The year 1945 is naturally steeped in significance, being the pivotal point of connection between the World Wars and the Cold War. The sacralization of the border seems to have reached a tragic form of acme in the mid-twentieth century, with each generation playing its part in terms of suffering and bloodshed. ‘Frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations’,11 stated Lord Curzon in 1907. The viceroy of India, he was also an assiduous creator of international boundary lines, from the partition of Bengal to the Polish-Soviet frontier. The notions of defending and dying for one’s country were taken to extremes in the trench warfare of the First World War and the resulting mass slaughter. The multiple territorial disputes subsequently generated by the peace treaties of Versailles, Trianon and Sèvres were crucially significant, as they made it impossible to establish peace in the continent. The League of Nations was ultimately unable to calm irredentist passions and desires for revenge, or to reduce the lure of extremism. In German ultranationalist parlance, the 1918 boundary line established with Poland was a ‘blood-soaked frontier’, to be redrawn at all costs. All these truly European experiences − the trench warfare of 1914–18, the endemic irredentism of post-Versailles Europe, the violence unleashed during the Second World War and the major restructuring processes that took place after 1945 − seem to be represented in the sculptor’s highly symbolic work, created at the end of the war. At that time Brâncuşi, a Romanian immigrant who had settled in Paris in 1904, may already have had a presentiment that the two halves of the continent were about to be divided by what Churchill would later term the ‘Iron Curtain’.

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FROM COUPURE TO COUTURE In this way, the concept of coupure − the border that cuts, that divides – has been evoked in multiple images. Everyone could easily add their own personal versions. They lurk in the recesses of collective, family or individual memories, from Christa Wolf ’s They Divided the Sky (1963), an emblematic novel about the Berlin Wall, to The Tunnel (2001), Roland Suso Richter’s film on the same theme, and from the fascination inspired by Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski’s recently rediscovered journey from Warsaw to London via Spain through occupied Europe to family pilgrimages that retrace the clandestine passage of a Jewish or resistance fighter grandfather who crossed the Pyrenees, crowned by a visit to the moving memorial Passages at Port-Bou. Inaugurated in 1994, this work by the Israeli architect Dani Karavan is a homage to Walter Benjamin. Having fled Nazi Germany, the German Jewish philosopher, who risked being handed over to the Vichy police by Francoist customs officials, committed suicide in this Spanish border town in 1940. The grip of fear is the common denominator in all these memories. The Berlin Wall, a symbol not only of division but also of inhumanity, remains a dark emblem deeply rooted in the European psyche despite the passing of time, as it generates multiple echoes. Conversely, its undreamt-of fall amid scenes of jubilation continues to serve as the iconic image of the ‘passage’. Memories of the border, like those of the Wall, are often fragile, traumatic and anguished, permeated with the individual’s powerless desire to rebel. At first sight, the new era that emerged precisely after the collapse of the Wall appears spectacular in comparison with this dramatic past. The contemporary Polish artist Zbigniew Libera, a professional provocateur, drew attention to this sudden sea change in 2002 with his photograph of racing cyclists (Kolarze) calmly removing the border post. He had them positioned to mirror the gesture made by the Wehrmacht soldiers in the famous image of 1 September 1939, during Germany’s invasion of Poland – two eras and two radically different border crossings, involving the same frontier. What with the collapse of the Wall, the enlargement of the EU in 2004, the expansion of the Schengen area and the generations accustomed to Interrail passes and low-cost travel, crossing a frontier has become quite routine to Europeans. ‘Where do all the borders go?’ This was the question written in monumental letters on an installation created by the artists Iris Andraschek and Hubert Lobnig. It was set up in 2009 in a village on the Austro-Czech border with the symbolic name of Fratres.

CLOSURES The question asked by Andraschek and Lobnig implicitly suggests that when borders are dismantled in one location they spring up elsewhere, and are equally inflexible. In view of current migration flows, this can no longer be in doubt. Three interconnected issues – the European political crisis, the question of the external border and the management of internal borders – were suddenly brought to light in the summer of 2015, forcing Europeans to confront an existential dilemma. Indeed,

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as we have seen, the sense of European identity has developed despite, or even expressly in order to counter the division created by customs posts and national, political borders. To return to Pomian’s observation, if ‘the history of Europe is the history of its borders’, it is at least equally true to say that it has also been the history of tireless efforts to overcome them. These were punctuated by the ‘People’s Springs’ that occurred from 1848 to 1989 and are reconfirmed with each new phase of European ‘construction’. Europe, the continent of borders, has given rise to a shared identity characterized by a fundamentally ‘anti-border’ stance resistant to any notion of permanent territorialization and hermetic closure. Yet this ideology, which has never achieved full consensus, is currently under fire. A fragmented continent, Europe has also been scarred by the recurring wars that may arise from antagonism between nations and territorial disputes. Of all the regions in the world, it has done the most in terms of reducing or even abolishing its internal borders, first through the European Community and later through the European Union. With the wave of EU enlargements that took place in 2004, 2007 and 2013, and the admittance of new Central European member states, the question of boundaries remained temporarily unanswered. However, it then reemerged with even greater intensity amid a resurgence of international tensions. Europeans have noted that urgent global migration and/or geopolitical issues are having dramatic repercussions on their internal borders, from Lesbos to Calais and from Donbass to Crimea. The reunification of the continent does not appear to have signalled the ‘end of history’ – neither, seemingly, has it signalled the end of frontiers. The current question regarding external borders, therefore, clashes with the open form of territoriality advocated by Europeans. Moreover, it has proved impossible to reach a consensus regarding the definition of those borders. This is an old story. Europe is well known for being defined in relation to configurations that alter in accordance with vested interests. The issue was not confined to the South and East as it is today, as reflected in the starting point chosen by Frederick Jackson Turner in his influential study on the frontier as the source of American identity: ‘At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense.’12 But what is the current situation confronting a Europe that extends to the ‘Ural border’ (the arbitrary boundary proposed in 1730 by the Swedish geographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg) in the light of Vladimir Putin’s Russia? What is to be done with discourses on Turkey’s affiliation to Europe in view of the ‘democratorship’ established by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was declared by Newsweek to be ‘the European of the Year’ as recently as 2004? The assertion that borders are indispensable is accepted by some in the name of pragmatism, and rejected by others. It comes up against a further problem in the form of an inability to envision anything other than an impenetrable frontier, incompatible with the fluid systems in operation over the last few decades. And indeed, to quote Lucien Febvre one last time as we reach our conclusion, who would welcome ‘a real border, linear and intimidating − one of those exposed nerves that is a source of throbbing pain in the side of our old Europe’?13

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NEW ODYSSEYS Today’s refugee camps, walls and dramas echo those of previous eras and therefore inevitably reawaken memories. These include the retirada (retreat) of the Spanish Republicans in 1939, the maelstrom of displaced peoples in Central Europe after 1945 and the populations fleeing Kosovo in 1999. References to those killed behind the Iron Curtain sometimes present an unconsciously yet revealingly distorted picture, overlooking the fact that far greater numbers of migrants now die every year in the Mediterranean. This suddenly brings to mind the fact that that the mountain path skirting Ventimiglia has always been known as ‘the Death Pass’, while the remote Roya Valley, which affords the only crossing points between Italy and France in this alpine region, is remembered for the crowds of asylum seekers stranded there and the reactions of local inhabitants and authorities. As in the past, there is a poignant narrative thread associated with the crossing of Europe’s internal borders. Today these narratives centre on non-Europeans, protagonists despite themselves, who carry the memory of their odysseys in their scanty baggage. These odysseys are made all the more interminable by the administrative barriers to be surmounted once the physical crossing has been made. Indications of a tentative, limited form of openness to these foreign destinies are evident in the continental cinema and theatre, where they now feature as today’s new heroes. Examples include Le Dernier Caravansérail, created by the Théâtre du Soleil in 2003 and dedicated to the countless refugees who have journeyed from Afghanistan to Sangatte, Eden Is West by Costa-Gavras (2009), Philippe Lioret’s Welcome (2009) and Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope (2011 and 2017) by Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki. As Europeans know, the prevalence of surveillance equipment, monitoring and patrolling has reached an unprecedented level. The return of border controls is also affecting, or will affect, their dream of free movement and openness to the world, a fact that they can no longer push to the back of their minds. This issue reaches into the very depths of the cultural substratum; there is a reason why The Odyssey is one of Europe’s founding myths. Ulysses ‘roamed for years / seeing many cities, discovering many customs’ (Homer), before returning ‘full of space and time’ (Osip Mandelstam). If ‘the language of Europe is translation’ (Umberto Eco), will it also be said that the border of Europe is free movement?

NOTES 1. Michel Foucher, L’Obsession des frontières (Paris: Perrin, 2007), p. 131. 2. Krzysztof Pomian, L’Europe et ses nations (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 7. 3. Lucien Febvre, Le Rhin. Histoire, mythes et réalités (Paris: Perrin, 1997 [1931]). 4. Daniel Nordman, Frontières de France. De l’espace au territoire, XVIe -XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 511. 5. Germaine de Staël, Germany, translated from the French (London: John Murray, 1813), vol. I, pp. 130–1.

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6. Alexander Pushkin, A Journey to Arzrum, quoted in Prisoner of Russia: Alexander Pushkin and the Political Uses of Nationalism, Yuri Druzhnikov, translated by Thomas Moore and Ilya Druzhnikov (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999), Chapter 32, ‘Caucasus: Crossing the Border’. 7. In L’Esprit international, 54, April 1940, quoted by Catherine Gousseff in Échanger les peuples. Le déplacement des minorités aux confins polono-soviétiques (19441947) (Paris: Fayard, 2015), p. 11. 8. Georges Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal ou le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris: Fayard, 1984), p. 112. 9. Victor Hugo, Actes et Paroles II (Pendant l’exil, 1852-1870) (Paris: Robert Laffont, coll. ‘Bouquins’, 1985). 10. Robert Schuman, Pour l’Europe (Geneva: Éditions Nagel, 1963). 11. Quoted by Bruno Tertrais, Delphine Papin in L’Atlas des frontières. Murs, conflits, migrations (Paris: Les Arènes, 2016), p. 6. 12. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover Publications, 2010 [1920]), p. 4. 13. Lucien Febvre, Le Rhin. Histoire, mythes et réalités, p. 213.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Amilhat Szary, Anne-Laure, Qu’est-ce qu’une frontière aujourd’hui? Paris, PUF, 2015. Balibar, Étienne, Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple, Paris, La Découverte, 2001. Deger, Petra, ‘Grenzen’, in Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Eds.), Europäische Erinnerungsorte, vol. I, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2012, pp. 247–55. Foucher, Michel, Le Retour des frontières, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2016. François, Étienne, Die unsichtbare Grenze. Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg, 1648–1806, Sigmaringen, Thorbecke, 1991. Gasimov, Zaur, ‘Grenze Ural’, in Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Eds.), Europäische Erinnerungsorte, vol. II, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2012, pp. 593–600. Guenée, Bernard, ‘Des limites féodales aux frontières politiques’, in Pierre Nora (Ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, t. II: La Nation, vol. 2: Le territoire, l’État, le patrimoine, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, pp. 11–33. Hirschhausen, Béatrice von, Hannes Grandits, Claudia Kraft, Dietmar Müller and Thomas Serrier, Phantomgrenzen. Räume und Akteure in der Zeit neu denken, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2015. Jeanpierre, Laurent, ‘Frontière’, in Olivier Christin (Ed.), Dictionnaire des concepts nomades en sciences humaines, Paris, Métailié, 2010, pp. 157–71. Maier, Charles S., ‘Transformations of Territoriality 1600-2000’, in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Oliver Janz (Eds.), Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010, pp. 32–55.

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Nordman, Daniel, ‘Des limites d’État aux frontières nationales’, in Pierre Nora (Ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, t. II: La Nation, vol. 2: Le territoire, l’État, le patrimoine, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, pp. 35–61. Popescu, Gabriel, Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-First Century: Understanding Borders, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. Rey, Violette and Thérèse Saint-Julien (Eds.), Territoires d’Europe. La différence en partage, Lyon, ENS Éditions, 2005. Schlögel, Karl, Grenzland Europa. Unterwegs auf einem neuen Kontinent, Munich, Hanser, 2013. Scott, James W., EU Enlargement, Region Building and Shifting Borders of Inclusion and Exclusion, Farnham, Ashgate, 2006. Traba, Robert, Kraina tysiąca granic, Olsztyn, Borussia, 2003.

CHAPTER 30

Hadrian’s Wall THOMAS SERRIER

A frontier line demarcating the provinces of the Roman Empire, the limes extended over five thousand kilometres at the height of Rome’s power in the second century CE. It stretched from the north of England – the section built in the reign of Emperor Hadrian – to the Red Sea. As the boundary between the empire and the Barbarians, in our modern social imaginary it has become a line of defence against perceived threats to Europe. In Germany, Emperor Hadrian was detained by ‘renovations or new constructions of camps, fortifications, and roads’ − in ‘the Isle of Britain’, by ‘the erection of a wall cutting the island in two in its narrowest part’. This was a response to the fate of ‘the unhappy Ninth Legion, cut to pieces by the Caledonians during the uprisings which made the grim aftermath, in Britain, of our Parthian expedition’. Meanwhile, ‘the revolt in Mauritania was flaming still’ and ‘grave incidents were occurring on the Euphrates.’1 The Hadrian envisaged by Marguerite Yourcenar in her famous Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951) has dedicated himself, body and soul, to promoting the grandeur of the Roman civilization and to his personal quest for beauty and inner harmony, despite being ceaselessly active. As a defence against the Caledonian Picts, ‘for many of these mountain-dwellers, so newly subdued’, this wall would constitute ‘the first irrefutable proof of the protective power of Rome’, and would also be ‘the emblem of [his] renunciation of the policy of conquest’. Its sole function would be ‘to protect the fertile, guarded areas of the south from the attacks of northern tribes’. At the time of Hadrian, then, the threat came from the barbaric North; during the Cold War era, it was represented by the Communist East (where, conversely, the West was seen as ‘fascist’). And today, having traded its expansionist past for a simple defence of its ‘civilization’ (together with its standard of living), it might appear as if Europe is guarding itself from the South. The return of the borders in the post-1989 period resurrected the memory of the Roman limes. This is reflected, inter alia, in the eponymously named Italian geopolitical journal founded in 1993. Hardly a day goes by now without a political commentator drawing a parallel between the limes of ancient times and the scores of reinforced barriers erected in EU territories – yesterday in Ceuta and Melilla, today across roads in the Balkans. A familiar echo may even be found in the

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description of an emperor rushing from one emergency to another in an effort to seal the borders on the peripheries of his empire, then, after each insurrection, reestablishing trade relations between Rome and the Barbaricum – the world that lay beyond civilization. The most recent manifestation of this situation occurred with the EU Referendum held in the UK in June 2016 – could this lead to Scotland’s becoming independent? The possibility has prompted comparisons with the past and pointed remarks regarding ‘a modern day version of Hadrian’s Wall’ between the two countries, an allusion to its proximity with the border between present day Scotland and England. The current European and global obsession with enclosures is not unrelated to this archetypal status ascribed to the Roman example. Rather than invading, commanding and governing foreign peoples, fear and containment are now the order of the day. For the last twenty years, the ‘Fortress Europe’ metaphor has been used in conjunction with the ‘migratory pressures’ originating first from the east and later from the south. The fact that this expression was used in the propagandist material of the dying Third Reich is something we prefer to forget. Setting aside all the differences in style with Yourcenar’s evocation, surely there are echoes of Hadrian’s Wall and the very concept of the limes in fantasy series such as Game of Thrones, with its impenetrable wall of ice? In short, the limes is now almost exclusively seen as a vast defensive structure, a protective envelope that attained a maximum length of over five thousand kilometres and was erected as a bulwark against threats from the external forces surrounding the Empire. Constructed successively by Augustus, Vespasian, Hadrian, Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, at the height of Rome’s power in the second century CE, the limes extended from the north of what is now Great Britain, followed the course of the Rhine and the Danube to the Black Sea, extended to the Red Sea, then stretched across the whole of North Africa back to the Atlantic coast. With its small stone forts, its watch towers and its rectilinear course across the border regions, Hadrian’s Wall is the most emblematic example of the defensive function of the limes – a mini Great Wall of China in northern England. However, a meticulous analysis of documents reveals that the definition of the word limes as a defensive wall is of very recent date, emerging in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that the Latin meaning was very different. Above all, it referred to the main communication routes linking Rome to the Barbaricum, and to the administrative districts comprising the frontier territories. According to the historian Benjamin Isaac, Hadrian’s Wall was never defined as a limes. The limes is therefore essentially a conceptual entity, yet it has also left multiple physical traces of its presence. These are now recognized and cared for as sites of interest. Hadrian’s Wall was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1987, to be followed in 2005 by the German sections of the limes along the Rhine and the Danube. Over time, neighbouring yet distinct areas developed within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Traces of their former attachment to the Empire are still to be found in the toponyms of the Romanized areas lying south of that line; Cologne derives its name from colonia, Augsburg from Augusta Vindelicum and so on.

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The connection is also reflected in urban landscapes, in the Latin character of the Romanian language, and in the faith-based divisions established in Germany, with Catholicism remaining more prevalent in Bavaria and the Rhineland than in northern and eastern parts of the country. As with all ruins, the limes invites meditations on long-lost grandeur. In his book Danube (1986), for example, Claudio Magris observes: ‘For the late medieval peasant, who could see no further than the field he was ploughing, the very idea of the Limes, the rampart intended to mark the frontiers of the Roman Empire all the way to the Black Sea, was unthinkable and superhuman.’2 This familiar theme had already been treated by Sir Walter Scott, whose novel Guy Mannering (1815) begins with a character’s arrival in Scotland: ‘What a people! whose labours, even at this extremity of their empire, comprehended such space, and were executed upon a scale of such grandeur!’3 We might certainly share Magris’s perspective: ‘Our history, our culture, our Europe, are the daughters of that Limes. Those stones tell of the urge to frontiers, of the need and ability to give oneself limits and form.’ Yet conversely, is it not the case that Europe originated from the resorption of the Limes in the Middle Ages? Maybe the popular tradition associated with it has been all but forgotten? In 1731, Johann A. Döderlein, a local scholar from Weissenburg on the Danube, produced an opuscule with the splendidly Baroque title Roman Antiquities in Nordgau, or an Accurate Presentation of the Ancient Roman Rampart, Defences, Piles and Rows of Stones, Likewise Known as the Devil’s Wall, which in their Time the Glorious Roman Emperors Hadrian and Probus had Built and Fortified against the Attacks of the Teutons in the Lands Conquered on this Side of the Danube and the Rhine in Nordgau and Swabia. Thus, it was noted that the construction of this long stone boundary line, so much of which has disappeared, was seen as the work of the devil.

NOTES 1. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955 [1951]), pp. 143–7. 2. Claudio Magris, Danube, translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh (London: Collins Harvill, 1989 [1986]) (quotations taken from paperback edition, The Harvill Press, pp. 97–8). 3. Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverly, vol. 111. Guy Mannering (Edinburgh and London: Constable & Co. and Hurst Robinson & Co., 1822), p. 6.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Isaac, Benjamin, ‘The Meaning of the Terms Limes and Limitanes’, Journal of Roman Studies 78 (1988): 125–47. Quétel, Claude, Murs. Une autre histoire des hommes, Paris: Perrin, 2012. Reddé, Michel, Les Frontières de l’Empire romain (Ier siècle av. J.-C.-Ve siècle ap. J.-C.), Lacapelle-Marival: Archéolgie Nouvelle, 2014.

CHAPTER 31

1054, or the two Romes ÉTIENNE FRANÇOIS

The split that occurred between the Western and Eastern Churches, which had been united during the Roman Empire, created a major frontier at the heart of Europe. This was the tragedy of a Christianity incapable of maintaining its original unity. The schism has gradually come to be seen chiefly in terms of identity, with mutual misunderstandings accumulating over the centuries. The fact that the excommunications carried out in 1054 were not cancelled until 1965 serves as a reminder that this wound remains raw. In 1054, reciprocal excommunications were carried out by Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople, and Rome’s papal legate, Humbert de Moyenmoutier. These remain embedded in all the collective memories of the long history of relations between Latin and Greek Christianity – a rare instance of unanimity. That year, indeed, Pope Leo IX (1049–54) had sent a legation to Constantinople tasked with settling a number of disputes that were hampering good relations between East and West. The legation was headed by a Benedictine monk who had been brought to Rome to act as one of his closest advisors. He had been elevated to the rank of cardinal in recognition of these services. Favourably received by the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX, who was personally committed to the alliance with Rome, Humbert de Moyenmoutier therefore began to negotiate with the patriarch. His mission was to bring about the reopening of Constantinople’s Latin churches, which had been closed following their clergy’s refusal to return to the Greek rites, and to obtain the agreement that the Byzantine governor of southern Italy would recognize the Latin rites in exchange for the aid promised to him by the pope. A renowned theologian and a firm believer in Rome’s jurisdictional superiority in religious matters, Humbert de Moyenmoutier hardened his initial stance rather than seeking a compromise, allowing the patriarch no other choice than to accept every aspect of Rome’s position. Noting that the talks had failed, he decided to return to Rome. Before doing so, he went to Saint Sophia’s Cathedral and solemnly placed a papal bull on the altar, thereby excommunicating the patriarch of Constantinople and his collaborators. Describing the Eastern Church as ‘the source of all heresy’, he demanded that the emperor and the Greek clergy eliminate these errors immediately. Michael I Cerularius responded in kind a few months later, excommunicating the papal legate and his assistants with the agreement of the other Eastern patriarchs.

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THE ORIGINS OF A SCHISM This, then, was a dramatic episode, and as such it has imprinted itself on historical memories. It was not without consequences, as from then on there was no mention of the pope in Byzantine rites. But on closer analysis it soon becomes clear that its impact should be put into perspective. Indeed, it only affected those involved in the negotiations and only represents one phase at most in the long list of disputes that lasted from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries. Rather than presenting a cumbersome list, we will limit ourselves to a study of three stages in these growing disagreements. The first originated from an initiative on the part of the Western Church and concerns the nature of the three persons in the Trinity. In the early fourth century Arius, a theologian from Alexandria, had questioned the divine nature of Christ. In order to counter such heresy, the Council convened at Nicaea in 325 by Emperor Constantine had affirmed in its profession of faith (the Credo) that the Son and the Father were of the same nature. This affirmation was confirmed at the Council of Constantinople summoned by Emperor Theodosius and declared ‘orthodox’ – in other words, it expressed the ‘true doctrine’ of the universal Church. Arianism had not disappeared, however. Following the transfer of the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople and the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it had been adopted by many of the Germanic peoples who had come to settle in the western regions of Europe. These included the Visigoths in Spain and the Lombards in Italy, the only notable exception being the Francs, whose king, Clovis, had been baptized in the faith defined by the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople. Faced with this new threat, the Western Church had independently taken the decision to use the Credo as a way of further emphasizing Christ’s divinity, by adding the statement that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son. This is the famous Filioque clause, first affirmed in Spain in the fifth and sixth centuries and later reaffirmed with greater authority at the Synod of Aachen convened in 809 by the new emperor of the West, Charlemagne. The row over images that took place from 726 to 843 constitutes the second stage in these disputes; this time, the friction arose in the East. Some, like the Emperors Leo III and Constantine V, denounced the cult of images as a heresy that contributed to the attacks on the Empire carried out by the Bulgarians and the Arabs; others, such as monks, the ordinary citizens of Constantinople and certain members of the imperial family, considered the cult of icons to be an essential element of true faith. This quarrel gave rise to periods of condemnation (accompanied by the destruction of frescoes and mosaics; in other words, iconoclasm), which alternated with periods when images were rehabilitated or even venerated (iconodulism). Regarded as the last great heresy within the Eastern Christian Church, the quarrel was brought to an end in 843 following a synod that reiterated and confirmed the conclusions reached at the Second Council of Nicaea (787). This was no minor episode, the eventual outcome being that Rome was ejected from the Greek East and Byzantium from the Latin West (Georg Ostrogorsky). The Western Church was not directly involved in the quarrel and chose to take a neutral stance at the synod convened in Frankfurt by

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Charlemagne in 794. The decision gave rise to the reign of the imago in the western regions of Europe, and with it the relative freedom exercised in the use of the image. The conflicts that pitted the Eastern Church against the Latin Church in the latter half of the ninth century mark the third phase in these disagreements. Photios I, the patriarch of Constantinople (who is venerated as a saint by the Orthodox Churches) played a central role in these disputes. As with the preceding cases, they arose from diverging views over doctrinal matters (with the re-emergence of the Filioque question), over missionizing initiatives (the beginning of the Slavic people’s conversion to Christianity by Saints Cyril and Methodius and friction between Greek and Latin missionaries), over political issues (whether an alliance should be forged between the Western and Eastern Empires to retake Sicily and southern Italy from the Arabs) and over jurisdictional matters (whether the authority hitherto exercised by the patriarchate of Constantinople over a section of Italy should be transferred to the papacy). Despite the reconciliation that had occurred between Rome and Constantinople at the Council held in the latter city from 879 to 880, the most enduring legacy was that of the conflicts that had preceded it. These subsequently resurfaced, with the same accumulated disagreements, ineffective compromises and instances of overlap between religion and politics. At the same time, differences between Eastern and Western ways of expressing relations between religion and society, between the clerical and the lay worlds and between the Church and imperial power also continued to grow and accumulate.

CONSTANTINOPLE 1204 These stages are therefore part of a long history characterized by alternating periods of rapprochement and separation. In the interests of providing a specific date, we should look beyond the episode of 1054 to the consequences of the sack of Constantinople by the crusaders a century and a half later, in 1204. In 1096, during the First Crusade, the crusaders had been greeted like brothers by the emperor, Alexius Comnenus. This was not the case a century later. Launched from Venice, and largely financed by the city, the Fourth Crusade was diverted from its initial objective of winning back the holy city of Jerusalem. As a means of recovering their loans, and on the pretext that Latin Christians had been massacred by Greek Christians in 1182, the crusaders chose to lay siege to Constantinople, capturing the city in April 1204. The fall of the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which many now associate with the great painting by Eugène Delacroix, was indeed a dramatic, traumatizing event, with its large-scale massacres, pillaging, profanation and destruction. It is certainly true that the Venetians profited from this act, in terms of debt repayment, the acquisition of the copper horses that had decorated Constantine’s hippodrome (which were transferred to Saint Mark’s Square) and the seizure of numerous manuscripts that had some influence on thirteenth-century intellectual life in the West. However, the event immediately imprinted itself on memories, becoming a festering wound. There is no better proof of this than contemporary accounts such as The Alexiad, a prose poem by Anna Comnena (1083–1148), daughter of the Emperor

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Alexius I, and the History by Nicetas Choniates (1155–1217), a high-ranking Byzantine dignitary forced to flee Constantinople in 1204. For them, as for many memorialists who succeeded them, the Western crusaders were no more than barbarians and heretics, arrogant traitors and predators whose sole aim was to destroy the Eastern Roman Empire. Mirroring this response in a type of inverted symmetry, Western clerics set about reactivating the old suspicion of the Greeks, holding them entirely responsible for a separation now defined as a schism and presenting the Latin Church, headed by the papacy, as the only legitimate heir to the early Church.

THE GREEK EAST, THE LATIN WEST A number of factors, most of them interconnected, serve to explain the differences that were constantly arising between the Greek East and the Latin West. The first are linguistic in nature. Following the transfer of the imperial seat from Rome to Constantinople and the latter’s division into two halves, knowledge of Greek, which had hitherto been the lingua franca of the Roman Empire and was regarded as more refined than Latin, began to decline inexorably in the West. At the same time, there was less trading between the different Christian communities. This decline in the use of Greek is particularly noticeable in the case of the Fathers of the Western Church. Born in what is now Trier in around 340, Ambrose, who was elected Bishop of Milan in 374 and died in 397, was almost as proficient in Greek as he was in Latin. The same is true of Jerome (347–420), who provided the Western Church with the ‘Vulgate’, his Latin translation of the Bible. With the next generation, however, it became evident that Latin was beginning to prevail over Greek. Despite having been converted to Christianity by Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) achieved no great proficiency in Greek; the same was true of the fourth Father of the Western Church, Pope Gregory the Great (540–604), despite the six years he spent in Constantinople as a papal legate. But while Latin was rapidly establishing its dominance in the Western half of the empire – it was the language used to celebrate Mass from 380 onwards – it was declining in the Eastern half, particularly as many there considered it to be a barbaric tongue. Unsurprisingly, therefore, communication between the East and the West evidently became increasingly difficult. A single example, taken from the quarrel over images, serves to illustrate this. In Greek, the term proskynesis is used to express the veneration of icons; in Latin, however, it is translated as adoratio. In addition to these initial difficulties, further differences were established in connection with the Christianization of the Slavic peoples by Saints Cyril and Methodius. This led to the introduction of a non-Latin alphabet across large swathes of Eastern Europe, which is itself linked, to this very day, to a different understanding of Christianity. The Western section of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia, is chiefly inhabited by Bosnians (Muslims) and Croats (Catholics), who use the Latin alphabet. However, the inhabitants of the Eastern section, known as the ‘Serb Republic’, use the Cyrillic alphabet, as do those of Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

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These linguistic differences go hand in hand with cultural ones. Heirs to the legal tradition of the Roman Empire, the Western theologians preferred to focus on the juridical and organizational aspects of Christianity, namely the theology of salvation and the structures of the Church. From the late fifth century onwards, the clerics in the West had the monopoly on written culture. In the East, conversely, the laity also concerned itself with theology, which was far from being the exclusive prerogative of clerics. Indeed, Eastern emperors were often considerably more erudite than Western kings, or even emperors, at least until the twelfth century. Moreover, as in ancient Greece, philosophy played a dominant role, explaining the importance given to debates of a speculative character, such as discussions based on the nature of the three persons in the Trinity.

TRANSFER OF POWER Another difference arose in the form of the distance that was gradually established between Eastern and Western conceptions of the jurisdictional structures of the church. Until the fifth century, it was headed by five patriarchs of equal rank, whose seats were in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Jerusalem. Ever since its creation, the patriarchate of Rome had been accorded supreme status, but its authority remained limited to the bishoprics within its jurisdiction. Only those decisions made by the five patriarchs extended to the church in its entirety, and only ecumenical councils attended by bishops from all five patriarchates had the power to make decisions of a dogmatic nature applicable to all. This original rule was gradually called into question in the East on account of the transfer of the imperial seat from Rome to Constantinople, but also as a result of the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in the seventh century, followed by that of Antioch and Alexandria. This led to a reinforcement of the authority of the patriarchate in Constantinople, and of the power of an emperor seen as God’s viceroy on earth. Conversely, on the Western side, following the fall of the Roman Empire and in a context characterized by the centuries-long absence of a supreme political authority, the dominance of the pope as a guarantor of stability and continuity grew ever stronger. The anointing of the Frankish king Pepin the Short by the pope in 751, then a second time in 754, marked a significant stage in this process. For Pepin reciprocated by delivering to the papacy the northern Italian territories that fell within the jurisdiction of the Exarchate of Ravenna, which had previously been conquered by the Lombards; from then on, the popes enjoyed both spiritual and temporal power. Charlemagne’s imperial coronation in 800 took place in Rome, on the strength of the alleged ‘Donation of Constantine’, which had supposedly instigated the translatio imperii (transfer of power) from the East to the West, carried out on the basis of an alliance between the papacy and the emperor. In Constantinople, this was perceived as a betrayal of both a spiritual and a temporal nature. The situation was exacerbated in the late eleventh century, when the crusaders established two Latin patriarchates in Jerusalem and Antioch, and was further inflamed by the Gregorian Reform, initiated to consolidate the autonomy and supremacy of papal and clerical power in relation to imperial, temporal authority.

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Indeed, from then on, the political and jurisdictional issues involved in East–West relations were far more prominent than those of a doctrinal, liturgical nature, particularly in the light of the situation facing the East. Already deprived of its territories in Sicily and Italy, repeatedly riven by internal conflicts and reduced to its European possessions alone in the early fourteenth century, the Eastern Empire found itself confronting a number of external threats. The most formidable of these came from the Bulgarians and the Turks. Naturally, contact between East and West did not cease altogether. Following an initial attempt at reconciliation during the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, a final attempt was made at the Council of Florence (1439–42). Faced with an increasingly urgent situation due to the Ottoman threat (the Turks had captured Thessalonica in 1430), the Eastern Church, led by the Emperor John VIII Palaiologos, sought the help and support of the papacy and the Western powers. After lengthy discussions, which this time addressed fundamental questions, the two parties reached an agreement in 1439, as manifested in the Papal Bull Laetentur Coeli (Let the Heavens Rejoice). However, such was the hostility felt towards Rome and the West by the remaining Eastern Empire that the agreement came to nothing. In a sense, the saying ‘Better the Turkish Turban in the midst of Constantinople than the Papal Tiara’, which was reiterated during this period, anticipated the city’s capture by the Ottomans in 1453. It implied that the Eastern Christians would have a greater possibility of remaining faithful to the ‘true doctrine’ and of preserving their Graeco-Byzantine identity by becoming an Islamic territory, rather than submitting to the pope.

MOSCOW: THE THIRD ROME Once the rupture had taken place, the attitude towards the Orthodox world developed by Latin Christianity, and later by Western Europe, was characterized by condescension and lack of understanding. The detachment was first expressed through Western historiography’s new approach to the Eastern Roman Empire. This followed the example of the German Protestant historian Hieronymus Wolf, who defined it by a new term, ‘the Byzantine Empire’, and whose Corpus Byzantinae Historiae was published in 1557. Concealing its Roman dimension and its links with Antiquity, this new terminology generated a widespread image of an intolerant and corrupt empire, frozen in its dogmatism, and attributed its scientific, philosophical and literary legacy to the Arabs. ‘After the sixth century, the history of the Greek Empire was no more than a web of rebellions, plots and betrayals’, declared Montesquieu in his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734). He went so far as to state that a ‘universal bigotry dampened people’s courage, causing the entire Empire to become sluggish’. This combination of disdain and incomprehension may still be found today, reflected in the vocabulary of the major Western languages. The expression ‘Byzantine quarrels’ is an implicit reference to the interminable theological discussions, conducted with passion but devoid of any practical purpose, that were said to have taken place in Constantinople. For its part, the adjective ‘Byzantine’ has

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equally negative connotations, being associated with extreme formality, excessive complexity, potential betrayal and tendential immorality. The perception of Orthodoxy as an archaic form of religiosity remains widespread in Western regions of Europe. Its chief deficiency is its failure to take account of the change brought about by Russian Orthodoxy after the fall of Constantinople and the extension of Ottoman domination. After 1453, Moscow was identified as the ‘Third Rome’, as Russia had then become the only independent Orthodox state. The origins of the country’s conversion to Christianity date back to the baptism of Prince Vladimir I of Kiev in 988 and the creation, three years later, of its first metropolitan seat. Initially placed under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, it gradually detached itself from the city, was transferred to Moscow in 1328 and transformed into an autocephalous patriarchate by Boris Godunov in 1589. Supported by the rise of monasticism and the reinforcement of Russian political power, which had been boosted by the reference to the ‘Third Rome’, Orthodoxy established itself in Russia as an identificatory, unifying element free of political contingencies and frontiers. Yet insofar as that affirmation was made in the context of a threefold opposition to the Mongols and Tatars, the Ottoman Empire and the Latin West, the replacement of Constantinople by Moscow resulted in a deepening of the gulf separating Latin and Orthodox Europe. When defining themselves, the Orthodox Churches draw particular attention to their fidelity to doctrine. Contrasting themselves to other Churches, which they regard as deviant, they emphasize their status as the quintessential custodians of religious truth and tradition. ‘We are your past’, they seem to say to the Western Churches, as manifestations of the prestige accorded to all that is ancient and original. Yet this identity-affirming assertion with its doctrinal, theological basis has had less impact than all the experiences, practices, traditions, customs, ways of life and attitudes that developed once the schism between East and West had been established. Consequently, the real differences are principally to be found in mentalities and cultures; there, elements relating to remembrance play a vital role, with ‘faithful memory’ reinforcing fidelity to doctrine (Antoine Arjakovsky).

THE ROLE OF MYSTERY The representation of the cross provides us with our first example of this. Unlike the Western Churches, which favour a four-pointed cross, the Orthodox Churches have adopted a cross with eight points. The small upper crossbar bears the inscription ordered by Pontius Pilate, while the lower bar, which serves as a support for the feet of the crucified Christ, is often placed slantwise. The side inclining upwards towards the penitent thief indicates that he has earned salvation, while the side slanting downwards towards the impenitent thief indicates his consignment to Hades. This difference goes hand in hand with another dissimilarity between practices, namely the manner of making the sign of the cross. Whereas in Western Churches, this gesture is customarily made from left to right, in the Orthodox Churches, it is made from right to left, using three fingers to symbolize the Trinity, and is in most cases accompanied by several bowing movements.

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There are also differences in liturgical practices. For although Catholic and Orthodox believers share the same sacramental theology, many more dissimilarities are apparent in their liturgical rites. According to Maximus the Confessor, a seventh-century Byzantine theologian recognized as a saint by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, ‘the liturgy is the ultimate goal, in view of which God created the world’. For this reason, the Orthodox liturgy is characterized by its stately, sumptuous quality. Mystery plays a large part in the proceedings so that worshippers feel as if they are sharing Christ’s life, while the Mass makes a vital contribution to the church as a whole in its quest to achieve union with God. Normally at least two hours long, on major feast days it can last up to four or five hours. The altar itself is hidden from the sight of the congregation by a partition covered with icons, which are arranged in tiers following a specific system. Known as the iconostasis, this represents a gateway to the divine world. The iconostases, which became widespread from the fourteenth century onwards, separate the holy space, reserved for the clergy, from the area allocated to the lay faithful. The icons were inspired by imperial art, transformed into hieratic images representing divine omnipotence and the glory of the saints, and are as characteristic of Orthodox churches as their ‘onion-’ shaped domes and their layout in the form of a Greek cross. The icon is a central aspect of Orthodox identity. Rather than being an objet d’art treating a religious subject, it is an object of veneration whose sacred character stems from what is considered to be a divine presence within the image itself. As icons are the embodiment of the invisible, there are strict rules governing their execution. Obligatory features include a gilded background, a two-dimensional form, the absence of conventional perspective and a stylized appearance. Icons were widespread in the West during the first millennium – as is evident in the mosaics at Ravenna – but they disappeared in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, being gradually replaced by the ‘religious painting’. These images were intended to resemble reality, hence the invention of linear perspective, followed by the introduction of the portrait and the new importance accorded to volume. The Orthodox East also differs from the West in the absence of scenes exalting the sufferings of Jesus. Instead, the Passion is envisaged as a miraculous conclusion presented in the form of the Resurrection, which explains the magnitude of the liturgical celebrations and symbols characterizing the Orthodox Easter, with its all-pervading atmosphere of transfiguring joy. For Orthodox believers, the cross is not seen principally as the symbol of sacrifice and death endured for the redemption of the sinful human race, but as the expression of pain overcome and the emblem of He who triumphed over the world and over evil, destroying death through death. (Andrei Pleşu) Orthodox faith is affirmed through its saints, that is, through the intermediary of a religious memory that evolved independently of the Western half of Europe. In the case of Russian Orthodoxy, there are three categories of saints that inspire particular veneration. The first is that of the ‘New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia’, a group which includes those thousands of believers who fell victim to the anti-religious policies of the Communist state. Then there are the ‘Holy Fools’ and ascetics who

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renounced the world and despised earthly pleasures, an example being Sergei Radonezhsky (ca. 1313–92), the first great Russian mystic and a monastic reformer. The third principal group is that of the Elders (startsy) such as Saint Seraphim of Sarov (1759–1833), who provided monasteries with spiritual guidance and lived as anchorites. The saint who best expresses the links between Orthodox religion and Russia is Alexander Nevsky (ca. 1220–63), Grand Duke of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Vladimir, who defeated the Swedes at the Battle of the Neva and the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Lake Peipus before becoming a monk. Officially canonized in 1547, he is both a national hero − he was the subject of an epic film directed by Sergei Eisenstein with music by Sergei Prokofiev (1938) − and a saint. This explains why Peter the Great had his relics transferred to Saint Petersburg, where they were placed in a monastery especially built in his honour. He was subsequently chosen as the patron of several churches and cathedrals, for instance in Sofia, Tallinn and most recently in Paris, whose Alexander Nevsky Cathedral was inaugurated in October 2016.

THE RENAISSANCE OF THE ORTHODOX FAITH IN THE EAST A development linked to the collapse of communism and the demise of the USSR, the Orthodox Church continues to display impressive vitality in Europe today. Not only does this form a contrast with the advanced state of secularization evident in a number of Western European countries, but it is also remarkable in view of its history, characterized by centuries of oppression and often of persecution. The longest period of suppression concerns Greece, the Balkans and the countries of Eastern and Central Europe that gradually came under Ottoman rule between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. While it is certainly true that the Ottoman Empire allowed Orthodox churches to exercise real independence in the territories it had conquered, they were obliged to acknowledge the sovereign power of the Sublime Porte. Moreover, a whole series of measures contributed to the weakening of Orthodoxy, starting with the recruitment of Christian children, who were effectively reduced to slavery and raised to become soldiers, or janissaries. In Tsarist Russia, the Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged position until the October Revolution; yet as the tsars consolidated their power, the control they exerted eventually led to Peter the Great’s suppression of the Moscow patriarchate in 1721. Orthodoxy experienced a short-lived renaissance at the beginning of the revolution, and another following the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the USSR in 1941, when it was seen as boosting the defences of the ‘motherland’. But seventy years of communist rule saw it subjected to a policy of persecution and eradication conducted in the name of state atheism. This was expressed through acts of destruction and confiscation, trials, deportations and death sentences, resulting in its gradual suppression; there were 55,000 Russian Orthodox churches in the country in 1914, as opposed to just 6,800 in the 1970s. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, Orthodoxy has been enjoying a spectacular revival both in Russia and in Europe’s other Eastern Orthodox countries. The percentage of people identifying as members of the Orthodox Church ranges

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from sixty in Belarus to ninety-seven in Romania. Russia itself is home to around one hundred million Orthodox believers – in other words, half of Europe’s Orthodox Christians. There are several indicators confirming this resurgence, such as the very large number of adults who have returned to the faith and been baptized, the rise in the number of baptisms and the increase in the number of dioceses. The patriarchate of Moscow and All Russia counted 92 bishoprics in 1993, the number rising to 286 in 2015, with around 40,000 clerics and 35,000 parishes. Churches are also being reconstructed, notably the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, destroyed on Stalin’s orders in 1931 and rebuilt identically in 2000, while over six thousand religious sites were returned to the Orthodox Church in 2010. Moscow has become the ‘city of four hundred bell towers’ once more, and the close alliance between the central political power and the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church is based on a shared desire to work for the renewal of Russian society by giving it a religious foundation. For several centuries now, the Orthodox religion and the nation have been regarded as consubstantial, a factor that has played a significant role in this renaissance. Each Orthodox country has its own ‘autocephalous’ church, which acknowledges its affiliation to the Orthodox community but makes its own administrative decisions and is not subject to external jurisdiction. After protecting both Greek and Orthodox identity from the mid-fifteenth century to the restoration of independence in 1821, the Greek Orthodox Church immediately declared its independence from the patriarchate of Constantinople. To this very day, the Constitution of Greece, proclaimed in the name of the Trinity, does not recognize the concept of separation between church and state. It is likewise the case with Serbia, where the Orthodox Church considers itself the protector of Serbian identity, the defender of Serbia’s territory and the guarantor of its future. This has given rise to a confusion between national and political identity, fuelled by collective memories of the Ottoman occupation, of persecution and of the forced conversions inflicted on Serbs by the Croatian Ustasha during the Second World War, as well as painful memories of the civil war resulting from the break-up of Yugoslavia. The memory of occupations and persecutions correlates not only with a feeling of pride in having resisted oppression but also with an attitude of mistrust towards the West. This suspicion has been exacerbated by a number of factors, among them the attempts at reconquest undertaken by the Catholics. The most painful episode for Orthodox believers was the Union of Brest-Litovsk (1596); this gave rise to the foundation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church following the rupture between the bishops in the Eastern section of the ‘Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’ (Rzeczpospolita) and the patriarchate of Constantinople. Although the ‘Uniates’ (the name given to Catholics who observed Greek rites) retained their own ritual practices and the traditions they had inherited from the East, such as that of a married priesthood, they fully recognized the authority of Rome. Consequently, from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, a turbulent history developed in connection with the different political affiliations of that religious minority, which is now located in the Western section of Ukraine and is particularly hostile to the Orthodox religion associated with Moscow.

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The mistrust towards the West is also linked to the criticism it has attracted for failing to remember everything it owes to Orthodoxy. For instance, the Orthodox Churches are proud of having brought monasticism to the West, thereby making a vital contribution to its spiritual life. It likewise stems from the insufficient recognition accorded to the East for its artistic contributions. These include the marvellous examples of Byzantine art to be found in Ravenna, the technique of dome building, transmitted via churches in southern Italy and Périgueux Cathedral, and the great Romanesque cathedrals of Sicily featuring mosaics created by Byzantine artists. One such example is Cefalù Cathedral, which is decorated with mosaics representing Christ Pantocrator (Christ in Glory) and the Virgin Mary, the latter depicted with raised hands and flanked by four archangels. There are also artists such as Duccio di Buoninsegna (ca. 1255–1319), the greatest painter in Siena in his day, whose works reflect the strong influence of icon painting, and Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco, who was born in Crete in 1541 and died in Toledo in 1614, and whose artistic style might be described as a combination of Italian mannerism and Byzantine hieratism. This pride, coupled with mistrust, has also been exacerbated by the fact that the West has neglected or simply marginalized the contribution made by the great Russian Orthodox philosophers and theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They facilitated the West’s rediscovery of the texts written by the Eastern Fathers, as well as those of the Slavophile authors, with their unparalleled ability to convey the specific characteristics of Orthodox piety and culture. These writers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Berdyaev and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, denounced the amorality, rationalism and materialism of a ‘heartless West’, a total contrast to an East characterized by intensity, sensitivity and humanness.

OVERCOMING A LEGACY Deeply rooted in collective memories, the separation between East and West was the result of a long process whose multiple repercussions remain ever present. Perceived as the tragedy of a Christianity incapable of preserving its original unity, over the centuries it has been reduced to a fundamental question of identity. This has produced an accumulation of mutual misunderstandings, suspicions and prejudices. Will the spectacular revival of Orthodoxy, both in Russia and in several other former Soviet bloc countries, facilitate the construction of a different future? Nothing is less certain. Indeed, as a phenomenon, this renaissance is much more redolent of an identification with nation and culture than a new-found religious vitality. Moreover, the internal divisions fragmenting the Orthodox Churches present an obstacle to internal reunification. They were the reason for the scaled-down version of the PanOrthodox Council held in Crete in 2016. Initially, all the autocephalous churches had called for the Council to take place, and preparations had begun in the 1960s with a whole series of preliminary meetings. In the end, however, no delegations from the churches of Russia, Antioch, Bulgaria or Georgia attended the proceedings. This was nonetheless a historic event, being the first of its kind to take place since the East-West Schism. As such, it has generated a movement interpreted by foreign

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observers as a further step towards a rapprochement between the various Orthodox Churches and their acceptance of modernity. It also forms part of the progression marked by such events as the meeting between Pope Paul VI and the Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople in Jerusalem in 1964, the reciprocal cancellation of the 1054 excommunications, implemented by mutual agreement in December 1965, and the meeting between Pope Francis and the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow that took place in Havana on 12 February 2016, likewise the first of its kind. Such symbolic gestures may play a part in calming collective memories, this being the only way to overcome the ever-present legacy of the schism between Greek and Latin Christianity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arjakovsky, Antoine, Qu’est-ce que l’orthodoxie?, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘Folio essais’, 2013. Clément, Olivier, Rome, autrement: Une réflexion orthodoxe sur la papauté, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1995. Elm, Susanna, Éric Rebillard and Antonella Romano (Eds.), Orthodoxie, christianisme, histoire, Rome, École de Rome, 2000. Evdokimov, Paul, L’Art de l’icône, théologie de la beauté, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1970. Kaplan, Michel, Byzance, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2007. McGuckin, John (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, New York, Wiley/Blackwell, 2011. Meyendorff, John, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church AD 450–680, New York, Crestwood, 1989. Meyendorff, John, The Orthodox Church: Its Past and Its Role in the World Today, New York, Crestwood, 1996. Ostrogorsky, Georg, Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates, Munich, C.H. Beck, 1963. Pelikan, Jaroslav, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974. Pleşu, Andrei, On Angels: Exposition for a Post-Modern World, translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth, Berlin, Berlin University Press, Cross Meridian 2012 [2003]. Ware, Kallistos, The Orthodox Church, London, Penguin, 2012.

CHAPTER 32

The bulwarks of Christianity THOMAS SERRIER

In 1519, Hungary, Poland and Croatia blocked the advance of the invading Ottoman forces, thereby claiming the role of bastions of civilization. Created in order to delineate a space and identify an enemy, in reality the concept of the bulwark conceals Europe’s heterogeneous character, and the fractures that lie between the heart of the continent and its periphery. In 1994 − while the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia were raging − Pope JohnPaul II made a visit to the newly independent country of Croatia and was met in Zagreb by its president, Franjo Tudjman. In his speech of welcome, Tudjman emphasized the ‘existential struggle’ of his most Catholic nation, situated on the frontier between different civilizations, and recalled the continuous support it had given the Holy See from the days of Kings Tomislav and Zvonimir, who died in 928 and 1089, respectively. Nor did he omit to mention the remark made by Pope Leo X, who, when faced with the Ottoman advance in 1519, had described Croatia as the antemurale Christianitatis: ‘the bulwark of Christianity’. This concept, born of another age, must have seemed strange to late-twentieth-century Westerners. However, following the attacks in Nice on 14 July 2016, the French newspaper Libération published an article by the francophone Moroccan-Dutch intellectual Fouad Laroui, in which he wondered whether the practice of simply citing Isis as responsible rather than examining contributory internal factors was intended to mobilize European opinion against an external enemy. Such a force would be easier to identify and could certainly be defeated ‘as we previously defeated the Nazi foe or the Ottoman hordes before the walls of Vienna.’1 This was a clear reference to the two sieges of 1529 and 1683, emblematic examples of the Christian defence against the Ottomans. The legend of the ‘bulwark of Christianity’ has evidently not yet been rendered obsolete. Yet there was nothing new in Tudjman’s discourse. Five years earlier, in 1989, Slobodan Miloşević had given a portentous speech in Kosovo Polje, in which he had already stirred the embers of the past in an enfeebled Yugoslavia by recalling Serbia’s defeat at the hands of the Ottomans, led by Murad I. This had occurred at the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds in 1389, a catastrophic event symbolized by the death of Serbia’s Prince Lazar during the fighting. However, Lazar,

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an iconic figure in the Serb mythology of sacrifice, has a Croatian counterpart in the person of Nikola Šubić Zrinski. The latter was slain at Sziget (Szigetvár) in 1566, during the same siege that witnessed the death of Suleiman the Magnificent.

A LEGEND OF DEFENCE As was the case following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, it is not uncommon for two opposing camps to define themselves as the sole defenders of civilization. In its original Christian version, the expression exacerbated relations between religious or national communities, by establishing a frontier in both the territorial and rhetorical sense. It was conceived in order to function at a ‘macro’ level (Christianity against its foes) but can also be applied at a ‘micro’ level for the purpose of underlining regional, local and ethnic differences. The varied terms within this lexical field were widely used during the Middle Ages. In a letter to the Emperor Frederick III, Pope Paul II used the concept of the shield (scutum Christianitatis); Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, likewise described Hungary as a shield (clipeus), as well as a wall (murus), during his famous appeal at the Diet of Frankfurt in 1454. On this occasion he also referred to ‘Europe’ − the first time the term had been used since the Carolingian era. In short, the legend of the bulwark, or bastion (propugnaculum) of Christianity, which emphasized defence, replaced that of the Crusades, where the focus was on attack. Europe had become attuned to this idea during the thirteenth century through the territory-building policies of the Teutonic Order, which also cast itself in the role of a defender − a Germanic bastion of Christianity in a Slavic, pagan land. Although the conversion of the Baltic peoples by the Teutonic Order and the Reconquista conducted in the Iberian peninsula were both seen in terms of this legend, it was particularly prominent after the fall of Constantinople and during the Ottoman expansion into Europe. When bestowed on an actual or expected ally in the face of an external threat, these titles conferred additional prestige. In claiming one for itself, a country was effectively crowning itself with the halo of true faith, heroism and sacrifice. Venice, Croatia and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) were ‘bulwarks’; Transylvania, whose fortified churches were ready to withstand the Turkish incursions, was a ‘bastion’, while Moldavia − where scenes of the siege of Constantinople are depicted in the striking frescoes adorning the sixteenth-century monasteries of Humor and Moldoviţa − was a ‘defensive wall’. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Poland, Hungary and Austria were established as regional powers thanks to their status as antemurali. The Siege of Vienna, which took place in 1683, saw the Grand Vizir Kara Mustafa Pasha pitted against the troops of Emperor Leopold, Poland’s king, John Sobieski, the prince-electors of Bavaria and Brandenburg, the margrave of Baden, the duke of Lorraine and many others. An emblematic victory for the allies, it was immediately commemorated by an anniversarium decided by Pope Innocent XI. The astronomer Johannes Hevelius of Danzig named a constellation Scutum Sobiescianum in honour of Sobieski, who remains very popular in Poland today. Although he was barely twenty years old at the time, Eugene of Savoy acquitted himself gloriously at Vienna and soon rose to the rank of field marshal in

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the Austrian army. He is portrayed as an idealized military commander in Balthasar Permoser’s Baroque sculpture The Apotheosis of Prince Eugene (ca. 1720), which is held in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. During times of national resurgence, and when appeals are being made to show solidarity with oppressed peoples fighting ‘Oriental despotism’ (as with the Greeks facing the Ottomans in 1821 and the Poles confronting the tsar in 1831), scenes showing the sieges of Belgrade or Szigetvár are popular subjects for patriotic paintings in Hungary, Croatia, Serbia and so on. The heroes of yesteryear serve as the reference points of a nation’s identity. This is the case with the defensor Christianitatis and king of Hungary Matthias Corvinus (1440–1490) and the Albanian hero Gjergj Kastrioti, known as Skanderbeg (ca. 1403–1468); the latter was given the title of fidei defensor and athleta Christi by Pope Callixtus III, although he had once been in the service of Murad II. Further examples include the voivodes of Moldavia, Stephen the Great (1433–1504), and of Wallachia, Vlad Drăculea (1431–1476, known as ‘the Impaler’ and the inspiration for the character of Dracula), the aforementioned Sobieski, to whom Jan Matejko devoted a monumental fresco in 1883, during Poland’s period of partition, and Eugene of Savoy, whose statue naturally stands in Vienna’s Heroes’ Square, where it was inaugurated in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the notions of defending Christianity, Europe and the West all reinforced one another. Three years after the Russian Revolution, Poland’s victory over the Red Army, which had advanced to the gates of Warsaw, was seen as genuinely miraculous − ‘ the Miracle of the Vistula’ − and Józef Piłsudski was hailed as the saviour of Europe in the face of the Bolshevik peril. In order to mobilize the allies of the Third Reich, the Nazis likewise used the threat of ‘Asiatic Bolshevism’ in their propaganda material, constructing the Ostwall on the Reich’s eastern borders to defend European civilization. Hungary, led by Admiral Miklós Horthy, Slovakia, by Mgr Jozef Tiso and Croatia, by Ante Pavelić, all sealed the alliance between fascism and clericalism, drawing inspiration from their historical repertories to evoke memories of their ‘vocation’ as the ‘shields of Christendom’.

RESENTMENTS ON THE PERIPHERY Such images all share a common feature, namely a propensity to generate, over time, messianic beliefs, megalomania and xenophobia. These are indissociable from an inferiority complex directly linked to these territories’ peripheral location, the reality of which forms a total contrast to the leading role they claim for themselves. For although a defensive wall helps to define the space it encircles, its function is limited to that of protection. It remains on the borders, its situation characterized by its quasi-exteriority in relation to the space it is shielding. Moreover, the theme of the antemurale, which is chiefly evident in the central and south-eastern parts of the continent despite its claim to Europe-wide relevance, actually heightens tensions between the centre and the periphery. The former was reinforced by the establishment of specific administrative regions such as the military border (kraina), as was the case with Rome and the Habsburg Empire. The latter, conversely,

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experienced repeated frustrations following requests for solidarity that were rarely fulfilled. Examples range from the sixteenth-century querela Hungariae to the newly established Croatia, beset by the conflicts of the early 1990s, and include that of nineteenth-century Poland, where, after the all too brief Napoleonic period, the expression ‘wait for the French’ became a common saying. The partitioned country was idealized by Adam Mickiewicz as the ‘Christ of the Nations’. This latent resentment is about to resurface today in connection with the management of illegal immigration via the Balkans. It emerges in the complaint made by Slovenian political activist Rastko Moćnik: ‘Nobody seems to care about our having become the antemurale Christianitatis again, the dumping-ditch under the walls of civilization.’2 Therefore, despite the idea that the image of the ‘bulwark’ maintains a mutually agreed distinction between the Same and the Other, these reproaches regularly levelled at the centre by the periphery indicate that it has the potential for creating profound divisions over what defines Europe, rather than serving as a repository for shared memories. The territory to be defended is supposedly a unified mass (Christendom, Europe or the West, depending on the context). Ultimately, however, it reveals its heterogeneous character. No doubt there is nothing new under the (European) sun. After all, François I of France had a readymade ally in Suleiman the Magnificent in his bid to launch a surprise attack on his rival, Charles V. And Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) certainly brings to mind the ceremonious salamalecs reserved for the ‘Grand Mamamouchi’ at the court of the Sun King during the wars between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires.

NOTES 1. Fouad Laroui, ‘Arrêtons de crier au calife comme on crie au loup’, Libération, 17 July 2016. 2. Quoted from Anne Cornelia Kenneweg, ‘Antemurale Christianitatis’, in Europäische Erinnerungsorte, ed. Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale, vol. II (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012), p. 80.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakic-Hayden, Milica, ‘“Nesting Orientalisms”: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, no. 54 (1995): 917–33. Csernus, Sandor, ‘La Hongrie rempart de la chrétienté’, in Chantal Delsol, Michel Maslowski and Joanna Nowicki (Eds.), Mythes et symboles politiques en Europe centrale, Paris: PUF, 2002, pp. 107–24. Hein-Kirchner, Heidi, ‘Antemurale Christianitatis. Grenzsituation als Selbstverständnis’, in Hans Hecker (Ed.), Grenzen. Gesellschaftliche Konstitutionen und Transfigurationen, Essen: Klartext, 2006, pp. 129–47. Kenneweg, Anne Cornelia, ‘Antemurale Christianitatis’, in Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Eds.), Europäische Erinnerungsorte, vol. II, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2012, pp. 73–83.

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Lepetit, Mathieu, ‘Die Türken vor Wien’, in Étienne François and Hagen Schulze (Eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. I, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2001, pp. 391–407. Tazbir, Janusz, Polska predmurzem Europy, Warsaw, Twoj Styl, 2004. Thomsen, Martina, ‘Prinz Eugen und Jan III Sobieski’, in Hans Henning Hahn and Robert Traba (Eds.), Deutsche-Polnische Erinnerungsorte, vol. III, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012, pp. 182–202.

CHAPTER 33

The Wandering Jew DOMINIQUE BOUREL

The legend of the Wandering Jew, condemned to perpetual roaming for his refusal to help Christ on the way to Calvary, is a constituent element of European culture. He appears in paintings by Courbet and Chagall, and in the works of Dumas and Shelley, and embodies both the enemy and the notion of transgression. The scene takes place when Jesus is on his way to Calvary. Exhausted, he asks if he might rest in a doorway. He addresses the man who has refused his request with the following words: ‘I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day.’ In another version, as the Jews were dragging Jesus out of the hall of judgement to be crucified, Cartaphilus, a porter in the service of Pontius Pilate, pushed him with his fist, saying contemptuously: ‘Go on quicker, Jesus, go quicker! Why dost thou loiter?’ And Jesus, looking on him with a sad, stern countenance, replied: ‘I am going, and thou shalt wait till I return.’ This Christian legend, known as that of ‘The Wandering Jew’ (Le Juif errant or wandernder Jude), was adapted and transformed in many lands over the centuries, and also includes the notion of the ‘Eternal Jew’ (Le Juif éternel or Der ewige Jude). In terms of the history of fears in the West, it serves as an excellent barometer. It emerged in the Middle Ages, when judeophobia found an initial outlet in the crusades, and became established in the thirteenth century or thereabouts. In 1223, pilgrims from a monastery in Ferrara related that while they were in the Holy Land they had seen a Jewish man who had witnessed the death of Christ, whom he had refused to help. Christ had then said to him: ‘Go, and await me until I come again.’ According to the story, the man had then been baptized and lived the life of an ascetic forever afterwards, as an eternal punishment. Similar narratives appeared elsewhere − in England, for example, with the account by Matthew Paris. This appeared in 1228, when Jewish messianism was reaching a peak with the imminent approach of the Jewish year 5000 (1240 in the Christian calendar). According to an analogous legend, the discovery of a holy nail from the True Cross was to put an end to the roamings of vagabonds and other ‘Bohemians’.

REFLECTIONS OF FEARS The legend of the Wandering Jew flourished in Europe with the introduction of printing and chapbooks. A pamphlet entitled Kurze Beschreibung und Erzählung von

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einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus (A Brief Description and Narration Regarding a Jew Named Ahasuerus) was published in 1602. The text was soon translated into other languages. In this version, the character had been noticed by a bishop of Schleswig, Paul von Eitzen, in a church in Hamburg in 1542. He was barefoot, had long hair and raised his head when the name of Jesus was uttered, sticking out his chest. The individual said to have been Pontius Pilate’s porter was given a variety of curious names. These include Cartaphilus, Juan Espera en Dios and, in France a few centuries later, Isaac Laquedem and Isaac l’Ancien, while Alexandre Dumas also referred to him as Isaac l’Oriental. He was likewise given a new career, being described as a shoemaker from Jerusalem. Rumours of his presence, meanwhile, spread to Lübeck in 1603, to Paris in 1604 and thence to Nuremberg, Hamburg and Leipzig. It was predicted that he would be arriving in Brussels on 22 April 1744 at six o’clock! In 1783, the German poet and composer Christian Friedrich Schubart described him as hurling skulls from the top of Mount Carmel. In 1810, the local Préfet dreaded his arrival in Épinal, and his presence was ‘confirmed’ in London in 1818. Mark Twain heard the story from his guide on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem in 1867. Eugène Sue’s Le Juif errant, one of the most popular serialized novels of the nineteenth century, was published in Le Constitutionnel, causing subscriptions to the newspaper to increase sixfold between 1844 and 1845. The Romantics transformed the character into their hero. He was immortalized by Gustave Doré, who portrayed him with the mark of Cain on his forehead, in the form of a cross. Ahasuerus suddenly began to serve a different purpose; he was now a heroic figure who pitted himself against fate, a rebel born of the masses awaiting social redemption, the embodiment of all forms of vulnerability. In La Rencontre (1854), Gustave Courbet presents him as the quintessential impoverished artist. Thousands of images circulated in every land, reflecting the surprise he caused and the terror he inspired − the sound of a raging storm, for instance, was the Wandering Jew passing by. A student of the austere Professor Jean-Martin Charcot even wrote an essay in which he stated that a Jewish predisposition to ‘nervous illness’ was linked to an ‘irresistible need to travel’.1 When under hypnosis, somnambulists walk.

EXCLUDED, THEN CHOSEN As the Jews became emancipated, the presence of Ahasuerus grew in proportion to Jewish visibility. He has served as a highly effective symbol for millenarians, as he will cease to roam the world on Christ’s Second Coming, heralding ‘the time of the end’. The legend likewise states that each time he reaches his hundredth year, he returns to the age of thirty-three − that of Christ at the time of his crucifixion. He is also depicted fleeing Jerusalem following the city’s destruction by Titus. The myth was used in anti-Semitic France at the dawn of the twentieth century, the collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout subsequently condemning the itinerant life led by Léon Blum. It also lent itself to the idea of a Jewish force on its way to world domination; that unsettling omnipresence and ceaseless roaming were also

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confirmations of omniscience. The Wandering Jew knows every language; as an invulnerable figure his presence is proof of divine greatness, while at the same time he is ready to oblige one and all in order to expiate his sins. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wondered if his punishment were not unduly harsh, thereby transforming Ahasuerus into a victim. In 1902, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote of an encounter between an individual whom he named Le passant de Prague (The Prague Passer-By) and a visitor to the city. The former is heard referring to ‘the ironic certainty of survival’, adding: ‘Yet mine is no Way of the Cross, my paths are joyful.’ The conclusion is astonishing: ‘Christ − I taunted him! He made me superhuman. Farewell!’2 A number of Jewish artists appropriated the character in the early twentieth century. In one of his otherworldly images, Marc Chagall depicts him floating over Vitebsk. The Wandering Jew was nationalized − ‘Zionized’ − with Palestine indicating the end of his roamings. Invitations to Zionist congresses presented him as advancing towards Redemption; he is portrayed in certain images as a stately figure holding a Torah scroll against his heart. 1929 saw the publication of Albert Londres’s study of European Judaism and Zionism in his time, his conclusion being expressed in its title, The Wandering Jew Has Arrived. After the war, Ahasver (1981) by Stefan Heym (Helmut Flieg) was banned in the GDR. This comes as no surprise, given that his Wandering Jew became the prototype of the intellectual critic and utopian thinker. Forever vigilant, forever in transit, the Wandering Jew follows in the footsteps of the great migrants, Abraham, Moses, Enoch, Elijah, Noah and Ulysses, demonstrating that the creation of identity involves both a journey and an uprootal. His subliminal message − ‘the Stranger is among us’ − suggests dangers of every type. Closely linked to the remembrance of the Passion, that foundational event, the legend of the Wandering Jew is a constituent element of European culture. Today, however, fear has given way to a fascination with the ideas of movement, transgression and the eradication of boundaries embodied in this figure. Is he an eternal sinner or the hero of humankind in its future form? The Wandering Jew has come to symbolize hopes of redemption and expectations of a better world. In this way, the character hitherto excluded from society gradually became the Chosen One.

NOTES 1. Henry Meige, Le Juif-errant à la Salpêtrière. Étude sur certains névropathes voyageurs (Paris: L. Battaille et C ie, 1893). 2. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Le Passant de Prague’, in L’Hérésiarque et Cie (Paris: Stock, 1910).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, George K., The Legend of the Wandering Jew, Providence, Brown University Press, 1965.

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Hasan-Rokem, Galit and Alan Dundes, The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986. Knecht, Edgar, Le Mythe du Juif errant. Essai de mythologie littéraire et de sociologie religieuse, Grenoble, Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1977. Le Juif errant. Un témoin du temps. Catalogue of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris, Adam Biro, 2001. Milin, Gaël, Le Cordonnier de Jérusalem. La véritable histoire du Juif errant, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1997. Rouart, Marie-France, Le Mythe du Juif errant dans l’Europe du XIXe siècle, Paris, José Corti, 1988.

CHAPTER 34

The Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder and the Ural The fluvial network THOMAS SERRIER

The Rhine has served as a major route through Europe since the Age of Antiquity, facilitating the movement of people and goods and the circulation of ideas. The source of legends, it has also embodied the quintessential ‘natural frontier’, forming a dramatic barrier between peoples. As with other rivers, it has also been regarded as a dividing line between East and West. As we have been accustomed to peace since 1945, the concept of couture associated with the Rhine – ‘fastening’ together newly reconciled European nations – now seems trite. And yet it was surely the vision of an irreparable cut − a coupure − between mutually hostile countries that prompted Lucien Febvre to write Le Rhin (1931), the model for recent histories of the Danube, the Elbe and the Oder. His avowed aim was to deconstruct false certainties, to reveal national myths, and to show ‘how a border is made and dismantled’ as a result of human action; this is far removed from the notion of the ‘natural’ border that has existed since time immemorial. The Rhine has served as a frontier − for instance between Gaul and Germanica, Burgundy and the Helvetic Confederation, the Netherlands and Belgium and France and Germany. Conversely, it has also acted as a link. ‘Space separates our bodies, but not our minds’, wrote Erasmus in The Complaint of Peace (1516); ‘there was a time when the Rhine separated the French from the Germans, but it does not separate Christians from Christians’. The Rhenus Pater − an allegory already present in the works of the Roman poet Martial – has certainly functioned as a major route since ancient times, enabling humans, merchandise and ideas to circulate between Italy, Northern Europe and faraway England. The cities of the Rhine − ‘Roman, Germanic and Christian all at once’ (Lucien Febvre) − are the cradle of a material civilization and a genuinely transnational culture. The Rhine appears in innumerable scenes of commercial activity and in countless allegorical portrayals in medieval paintings, Renaissance engravings and Baroque sculptures.

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During the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers journeyed up and down the Rhine Valley, which was known as the ‘Priests’ Alley’, or Pfaffengasse. ‘From Konstanz to Leiden, ideas circulated at the speed of a hurricane.’1 The Frankfurt International Book Fair reflects the prominent role played by the Rhine, which had grown in importance with the appearance of the first printed book in Mainz. Two antithetical movements arose following the events of 1789. In total contrast to the idyllic riverside scenes depicted in Dutch paintings, the Rhine became politicized. Cultural barriers initially seemed surmountable in the rush of democratic enthusiasm. In 1793, the National Convention in Mainz, which supported the Jacobins, offered its assistance to the French Republic in its war with the Prussians and Austrians, who had formed a coalition against Revolutionary France. But Napoleon’s control of the Rhineland led to antagonism between the two nations, more so than the expansionism previously pursued by Louis XIV. The belligerentlooking Germania at Watch on the Rhine was painted by Lorenz Clasen in 1860, while Napoleon III’s Second Empire was reviving memories of the First. It was inspired by Max Schneckenburger’s poem ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, and by the ‘duel’ between the two poets, Nikolaus Becker and Alfred de Musset, which took place in 1840. Becker’s declaration, ‘They shall not have it, / The free, German Rhine’, was scathingly countered by de Musset, who stated: ‘We have possessed it, your German Rhine; / We’ve had in our glass.’ The bombastic Niederwald monument near Rüdesheim (1883), which glorifies the annexation of AlsaceLorraine, was likewise countered by the monumental example of marquetry work by Lorraine-born Émile Gallé exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1889. It shows Father Rhine shielding a young woman (representing the lost provinces) from barbaric attacks. Richard Wagner’s tetralogy reinterprets the Nibelungen legend and presents the Rhine as the source of Germany’s regeneration. Established in 1813, this repertoire was brought into play during the occupation of the Rhineland in 1923, and was used with increased intensity during the Second World War. However, it lost its relevance when the Rhine and its cities were celebrated for their central role in the construction of Europe. Although national stereotypes inspired the acerbic drawings of Alsace-born Tomi Ungerer, a dialogue between memories gradually established itself. This was the case with August von Kageneck and Hélie de Saint Marc; the former had served in the German occupying army, while the latter had fought in the French resistance. The passages written by Julius Caesar concerning the Rhine had been given a nationalistic slant in the nineteenth century, this emphasis being yet more pronounced in the case of Tacitus and his Germania. But this was also an age with a predilection for lyricism, when the Rhine was extolled by Friedrich Hölderlin as a ‘free-born’ river. Madame de Staël, Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine, Lord Byron, Nikolai Kostomarov and Guillaume Apollinaire were all enraptured by its ‘ruined castles standing on the edge of precipices’, as described by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1817). The Lorelei, the subject of a lyric poem by Heinrich Heine, attracted some of Europe’s first tourists and acquired worldwide fame. The legend lives on in our era, through a song by London Irish band The Pogues, and the femme fatale Lorelei Lee played by Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

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VERTICAL DIVIDING LINES Of course, the Rhine is not the only river to be associated with mythology and cosmology – it follows in the tradition of the Styx, the Nile and the Euphrates. The Danube (referred to as the Ister by Herodotus and Claudius Ptolemy) is shown as a major artery in the allegorical map Europa Regina included in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmography (1544). Together with the Ganges, the Nile and the Río de La Plata, it appears as one of the four new rivers of paradise on the fountain sculpted by Gian Lorenzo Bernini that stands in Rome’s Piazza Navona. It is seen as a bridge between East and West, a theme adopted everywhere, and exhibits that dual character described by Claudio Magris in Danube; after splitting and spreading out, ‘the river comes together again into one powerful stream’.2 This is a general form of duality, resulting from the impression produced by the ‘mental maps’ suggested by rivers. At this point, we might well recall the theory of the two Germanys previously formulated by Max Weber − a modern country in the West, a traditional one East of the Elbe. Networks of vertical lines, from the Rhine to the Ural River, have therefore acted as markers of the East-West divide in various ways according to the different circumstances involved. The Oder has performed that role, sometimes adapted to a local context. Together with the Elbe, it was already serving as a reference point for the German eastward expansion occurring in waves since the thirteenth century, although it was only established as an international border in 1945. In previous times, Poland’s river Brynica and Ukraine’s river Zbruch formed frontiers between the German and Habsburg Empires, on the one hand, and the Habsburg and Russian Empires, on the other. Today, the collective representations and voting behaviour of the populations on one side of these rivers differ markedly from those on the other − yet a child could easily leap over them in a single bound.

NOTES 1. This quotation by Lucien Febvre, together with all the others that appear in this article, have been taken from Nicolas Beaupré’s Le Rhin. Une géohistoire (Paris: La Documentation photographique 8044, 2005). 2. Claudio Magris, Danube, translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh (London: Collins Harvill, 1989 [1986]) (quotation taken from paperback edition, The Harvill Press, pp. 386–7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aldenhoff-Hübinger, Rita, Catherine Gousseff and Thomas Serrier (Eds.), Europa vertikal. Zur Ost-West-Gliederung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2016. Febvre, Lucien, Le Rhin. Histoire, mythes et réalités, Paris, Perrin, 1997 [1931]. Gazimov, Zaur, ‘Grenze Ural’, in Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Eds.), Europäische Erinnerungsorte, vol. II, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2012, pp. 593–601.

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Halicka, Beata and Karl Schlögel (Eds.), Oder-Odra. Blicke auf einen europäischen Strom, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2007. Magris, Claudio, Danube, translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh, London, Collins Harvill, 1989 [1986]. Plessen, Marie-Louise von, Der Rhein. Eine europäische Flussbiographie, Munich, Prestel, 2016. Rada, Uwe, Die Elbe. Europas Geschichte im Fluss, Munich, Siedler, 2013.

CHAPTER 35

Wines and beers The drinks menu AXEL TIXHON

Wine and hop growing have coexisted in Europe since the Middle Ages; a division gradually established itself between the South and its vineyards and the North and its breweries, each having its own terroir and sensibilities. While Catholic Europe favoured wine, Protestant Europe preferred beer. Two different ways of life therefore developed at the point where nature, culture and geopolitics meet. The consumption of beer and wine in Europe was necessitated by the development of the city, as it originated from the dangers of drinking unclean water and therefore evolved with growing levels of urbanization. The production of these two beverages demands considerable technical expertise, the elite Christian groups of late Roman Antiquity playing an important role in this process. Following the collapse of Roman dominance in the fifth century CE, the monasteries strove to maintain the practice of cultivating grape vines. Windmills and breweries, located alongside one another, were stocked with grains in order to feed members of religious institutions. In rural areas, they gradually came under the control of the feudal lords, providing them with substantial revenues through the system of banalités, which included the peasants’ obligation to use the lord’s mill in return for payment. The practices of wine growing and beer making coexisted in the Middle Ages. The barrel, which was developed by the Gauls, was used for the storage and transportation of the two beverages, while the amphora fell into disuse. However, it was difficult for grapevines to survive in the regions to the north of the Rhine and the Moselle. In Christian Europe, a hierarchy was established between wine, sanctified through its association with the blood of Christ, and beer, regarded as the drink of the poorer classes. White wines, known as clairets, were ranked the highest; in France, those of the Beaune region enjoyed superior status. They were exported to northern Europe via maritime trade routes, while the export of beer, helped by the introduction of hops into the brewing process, was only just beginning. The breweries of Hamburg and Bremen were innovators in this respect, and benefitted from Hanseatic trade, although their products were banned in England, which was protecting its traditional ale.

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In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation created a divide between the beer-brewing North and the wine-making South. The divine nature of wine was called into question, with reformers condemning the intoxicated state reached more quickly by drinking wine than beer. The latter has a lower alcohol content, and its quality improved when a more professional approach was applied to its production.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BOTTLE In Britain, the upper classes gradually became enamoured with red wine from the Bordeaux region, which they imported in casks and then bottled. The names of the owners of the wine estates, the vineyards and the vintages all became important factors. In the kingdom of France, the invention of the bottle was put to good use, as a container for the juice of the grapes from the Champagne region. This made it possible to produce an effervescent wine that delighted the country’s aristocracy and went on to enchant the courtly circles of other lands. In the early nineteenth century, France was the largest wine producer in the world. Most of the wine made in the country was consumed there, only a fraction being exported, chiefly to an aristocratic clientele. Other leading producers and consumers of wine were Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and the Austrian Empire. Britain continued to prefer its ales, which retained the characteristics of the old cervoise, or barley beer, as opposed to beer made with hops. These ales were dark, flat and fairly mild. German beers dominated in continental Europe. Bavaria, in particular, enjoyed a hallowed status as the quintessential beer-producing region. In the Netherlands, which became unified in 1815, the tax imposed on beer was one of the factors that led the inhabitants of the kingdom’s southern provinces to rebel against Dutch rule. This agitation, together with other grievances, resulted in Belgium’s independence, established in 1830. In 1842, brewers in Bohemia created an entirely new beer, using the fermentation technique applied in Lower Bavaria and the city of Pilsen’s excellent spring water. The resulting creation, Pilsner lager, made its appearance just as Czech national sentiment was flourishing in the 1840s. During the following two centuries, the practice of consuming beer or wine constituted a cultural marker identifying a way of life, or even a particular origin. Beer-drinking and wine-drinking Europe appeared to be in direct confrontation. This division manifested itself in the context of the German Empire’s industrial and nationalist expansion in the late nineteenth century. It was reinforced during the First World War, when the propaganda material circulated by the Allied forces included the image of a Germanic kultur that involved a partiality for beer-based drinking sprees. The refined nature of Latin civilization, conversely, was presented as the result of the moderate, genteel consumption of the Bordeaux grands crus, which were appreciated on both sides of the Channel. At the same time, the eating and drinking practices of the major powers were spreading all over the world through the process of colonization. Initially introduced in order to satisfy the needs of the European settlers, beer was subsequently made in Asia, Africa and South America, where it conquered new markets. The response was

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favourable, as reflected in the popularity of ‘Tsingtao’ beer, created by the Germans when they controlled the Chinese city of Qingdao in the early twentieth century. In the same context, wine production benefitted from these new terroirs. Indeed, French wine was saved from the phylloxera blight as a result of this process of globalization, when French vines were grafted onto Californian rootstocks, thereby enabling them to resist the onslaught of these dangerous aphids.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Garrier, Gilbert, Histoire sociale et culturelle du vin, Paris, Bordas, 1995. Glover, Brian, Le grand livre de la bière, Paris, Éditions Manise, 2001. Pitte, Jean-Robert, Le désir du vin à la conquête du monde, Paris, Fayard, 2009.

CHAPTER 36

Crossing the Alps THOMAS SERRIER

The Brenner Pass is a point of contact between Northern and Southern Europe, a corridor through the Alps forming a border between Italy and Austria. Now a commercial route, it is generally open to traffic − yet it is also a migration thoroughfare, used in former times by Mozart, Goethe and Hans Andersen. In the Chalcolithic Age − long, long before the concept of Europe emerged − a man armed with a copper axe, a knife with a stone blade and a quiver, his body covered with tattoos, collapsed due to a fatal wound on his left side. He had lived sometime between 3350 and 3100 BCE, and his body lay, perfectly preserved in ice, at an altitude of 3,200 metres above sea level for five thousand years. It was found near a glacier on the Italian slopes of the Ötztal (the Austrian Tyrol), by German hikers on 19 September 1991. The discovery of the ‘Ice-Man’, who was subsequently named Ötzi, is a genuine historic milestone. Exactly twenty-five years later, on 19 September 2016, a distinguished group of experts met at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, a city in the Alto-Adige region, in the hope that this hibernatus would reveal his final secrets. Meanwhile, for the last twenty-five years, Ötzi has been presented as age-old proof that ‘natural’ frontiers have never truly existed; even the high barrier formed by the Alps has never hindered that free movement of people now central to European identity. Borders − a ‘social fact’ according to the German sociologist Georg Simmel – are chosen and created by man. This was the case, for instance, in 2016, with Austria’s reintroduction of border controls on the Brenner Pass, not far from the Ötztal; troops would be called in ‘if need be’, stated the Defence Minister Hans Peter Doskozil. The move reawakened vague feelings of uneasiness.

THE NORTH-SOUTH CONNECTION Twenty-seven thousand refugees and migrants crossed the border from Italy to Austria via the Brenner Pass in 2014, and over fifty thousand in 2015. It has been the most frequently used of all the Alpine passes since Roman times and has the lowest altitude. It is part of that network of routes, vestiges of which have been unearthed by archaeologists, that afforded a passage through the Alps, thereby linking northern Europe to the Mediterranean and forming what Fernand Braudel eloquently calls

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the ‘German isthmus’ between the North Sea and the Baltic, the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Adriatic. The Graubünden, Splügen, Julier and Septimer Passes, all in contention as possible routes depending on the circumstances, were nevertheless eclipsed by the Brenner, which established itself as the quintessential link between North and South. Eventually, the flourishing commerce in the marketplaces of London and Amsterdam led to the prominence of another legendary route, located at an altitude of over 2,100 metres and opened to traffic by Milanese merchants – the Saint Gotthard Pass. This continuous flow of traffic is a world away from the portrayal of Napoleon Bonaparte on the Great Saint Bernard Pass, his apotheosis immortalized by JacquesLouis David, and from the remarkable image of Hannibal and his elephants walking through the snows of what was probably the Col de la Traversette. How many tourists from northern Europe travel through the Brenner Pass every summer without giving a thought to the illustrious figures who have gone before them? These include the Fugger family and Albrecht Dürer, on their way to Venice, Michel de Montaigne on his Grand Tour of 1580, Mozart, en route from Salzburg to Verona, and Hans Andersen, who crossed the Pass between 1834 and 1872 on each of his journeys to Italy and the east. Of course, it also provided escapes routes, known as ‘ratlines’, for Nazis on the run in 1945. Yet many will have felt, like Goethe on rushing into the land of ‘blooming lemon trees’ and ‘golden oranges’, that after they have crossed the divide, ‘the sun shines with warmth, and there is once more belief in a Deity’.1 In medieval times, the kings of the Romans who came to Rome to be crowned emperor by the pope would likewise have retained that truly ‘dazzling’ memory, as would the pilgrims and crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. In 2016, thirty-five thousand vehicles travelled over the autostrada del Brennero every day. Forty-one thousand tonnes of merchandise are transported over the Pass every year. This movement of goods and people, as vast in scale as it is commonplace, embodies the success of a union forged between European nations. Conversely, its closure would put the Brenner in the same category as Ceuta, Lampedusa, Calais and Idomeni – symbols of failure – especially since painful memories are quick to resurface. The nearby battlefields of Caporetto and Isonzo were scenes of fierce fighting in the First World War. The state boundary line on the Brenner Pass was established as recently as 1919, when, despite its largely German-speaking population, the South Tyrol was made part of Italy and given the name of TrentinoAlto Adige. Decades of tension followed. While Italian fascists and supporters of Tyrolean independence were fighting each other in the valley, the summit was sacralized by the addition, in 1933, of a military cemetery and a Roman-style column built on the orders of Mussolini, despite the fact that no soldier had fallen there. Hitler and Il Duce met at the Brenner Pass on three occasions between 1940 and 1941, events that marked the cooperation between the Axis Powers while also highlighting Germano-Latin mutual aversion. The South Tyrolean independence movement weakened after 1945, despite the ‘Night of Fire’ that took place in 1961. In this way, the Brenner, like the other frontier mountain passes, symbolizes the

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resounding success of the European method of peacemaking; first, ensure that the intangible character of borders is unequivocally acknowledged − then increase their flexibility. The conception of the Alps as a purely physical obstacle, rather than a dividing line between distinct identities, provides a sharing formula for memories. On the one hand, there are the picture-postcard images – the rugged mountains with their legendary peaks and the iconic stories of the first ascents, starting with the climbing of Mont Blanc in 1786. On the other hand, the Alps are also a circulation space like any other; despite the harsh climate and precipitous terrain they play their part, like any other region, in forming the fabric of European commerce, in all its aspects. From this perspective, although it may seem paradoxical, the mountains have the same characteristics as the great rivers of Europe; they are thoroughfares and points of intersection. The first Gotthard Tunnel was the longest in the world when it was inaugurated in 1882; the 57 -kilometre St Gotthard Base Tunnel, which opened in 2016, is likewise the world’s longest. Running between Zurich and Milan, it is a type of counterpart to the Channel Tunnel. This is Europe as a constructor, creating major routes through seas, rivers and mountains.

NOTE 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Switzerland and Travels in Italy, translated from the German by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A., originally published as part of The Auto-Biography of Goethe. Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life (London: George Bell & Sons, Vol. II, 1881 [1816-1829]). See the entry for 11 September 1786.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Kreis, Georg, ‘Die Alpen – ein europäischer Erinnerungsort?’ in Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Eds.), Europäische Erinnerungsorte, vol. II, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2012, pp. 383–93.

CHAPTER 37

Central Europe(s) Heart and margins ANDRII PORTNOV

A fluid, shifting concept, ‘Central Europe’ is difficult to define in purely geographical terms. The enduring myth of ‘Mitteleuropa’, on the other hand, synonymous with cosmopolitanism and tolerance, involves the notion of an outlying Eastern territory with a less developed idea of democracy and culture. The central position (‘the golden mean’, ‘the happy medium’) plays a privileged role in the European cultural tradition. The ancient Greeks believed that the ‘navel of the world’ (ὀμφαλός) lies at Delphi. Modern geographers, historians and politicians disputed the location of the ‘centre of Europe’. Clearly, such a location would inevitably depend on the very definition of Europe and its borders. At present, monuments designating the centre of the continent can be found near the Lithuanian village of Purnuškės, north of the capital city of Vilnius; in the town of Suchowola, north of Białystok, in north-east Poland; in the village of Kremnické Bane in central Slovakia; near the town of Tállya in north-eastern Hungary, as well as in several places in Belarus. In 1887 the Habsburg monarchy declared the Carpathian town of Rachiv (Rachau in German, Rahó in Hungarian) a ‘centre of Europe’. After the Second World War, when Rachiv became part of Soviet Ukraine, the Soviet geographers reconfirmed this conclusion. Does ‘Central Europe’ exist on the mental maps of western Europeans and nonEuropeans? Where are its borders and how they are defined? Does it resemble the images of Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel and include fluid ethnicities, abandoned cemeteries, attractive vampires and numerous (non)existing borders? The notion of ‘Central Europe’ was (and still is) frequently used in intellectual debates in various European countries. The issues are particularly thorny in the history of the German notion of Mitteleuropa, in the debates over ‘Central Europe’ during the Cold War era and with the Othering of Russia. Polish and Ukrainian mythologies of ‘Central Europe’ and their political implications are also very deeply embedded within today’s debates.

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THE GERMAN MITTELEUROPA The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German nationalistic political philosophers developed a utopian view of the German military and economic hegemony in Mitteleuropa (the title of the influential book by German politician Friedrich Naumann published in 1915) – the area extending from Copenhagen to Trieste and from Basel to Warsaw of which Germany was supposed to be the heart and where the German language was to play the role of lingua franca. The ideas of Drang nach Osten (‘drive toward the East’), Ostkolonisation (‘eastern colonization’) and Lebensraum (‘living space’, a term first proposed in 1898 by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel) inspired the Nazi dreams of a self-sufficient German empire with a key role for the German peasant as the Kulturträger and heroic tamer of ‘vast open lands’ inhabited by ‘amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization’. Hitler believed that ‘the only possibility (for Germany) of a sound agrarian polity was the acquisition of land within Europe itself ’. To make German colonization possible, Hitler developed a hunger plan to eliminate tens of millions of Untermenschen (‘subhumans’). And the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ involved the Shoah and the genocide against the Jews of Europe that cost millions of lives.

POST-YALTA EUROPE At the end of the Second World War, in February 1945, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British prime minister Winston Churchill met at the Yalta conference to define the spheres of influence in Europe. Pro-Soviet regimes were installed in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland and Romania. Germany was divided into its Western and Eastern parts, and the Berlin Wall, built in the summer of 1961, became the main symbol of the division of the entire continent. The post-Yalta order dictated a clear ‘east-west’ dichotomy, and the countries under Soviet domination were now generally designated in the West as ‘Eastern Europe’. Since 1945, as British historian Tony Judt put it, ‘‘‘Central Europe” became invisible to the West, and its disappearance from the consciousness of Western intelligentsia represents an astonishing act of collective cultural amnesia.’ No less important was the fact that, after the Nazi genocide against the European Jews, the post-war expulsion of the Germans from ‘Eastern Europe’ and the ‘population exchanges’ between the countries, the region lost a significant part of its cultural diversity. As the philosopher of Czech origin Ernest Gellner observed, ‘Central Europe before the Second World War resembled a painting by Kokoschka made of subtle touches of different shades; after the war it was turned into a painting by Modigliani, made of solid single-color patches.’

KUNDERA’S ‘CENTRAL EUROPE’ AS THE ‘MOST FRAGILE PART OF THE WEST’ ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ (1984), an essay by Czech émigré writer Milan Kundera, is considered to be the most influential manifestation of ‘Europeanness’ as

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the ‘essence of identity’ for Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the most disputable reminder of the ‘Yalta betrayal’ and ‘a kidnapped West’ (one of his metaphorical definitions of Central Europe). Kundera addressed his appeal to the West and recalled that the people of Central Europe (‘the uncertain zone of small nations between Russia and Germany’) belong to Western culture, ‘are not conquerors’, but do have a clear awareness that ‘a small nation can disappear’. The pessimistic tone of Kundera’s writing was markedly emphatic. His ‘Central Europe’ desperately looked for the confirmation of its European identity from the West and, at the same time, concluded that ‘in Europe itself Europe was no longer experienced as a value’. Kundera was neither the first nor the only intellectual from the region who asserted the importance of the ‘most fragile part of the West’. In 1944 (that is, before the Yalta conference!) Polish émigré historian Oscar Halecki defined ‘historical CentralEastern Europe’ by its ‘unlimited devotion to the ideal of freedom and independence in democratic states of their own’ and ‘inseparable connection with western Europe’. Hungarian émigré writer György Konrád spoke of the ‘historical misfortune’ of Central Europe for being unable to become independent ‘after the collapse of Eastern Tatar-Turkish hegemony and later the German-Austrian hegemony of the West, followed by Soviet hegemony’. Those hegemonies, according to Konrad, prevented ‘our area from exercising the Western option taken out a thousand years ago, even though that represents our profoundest historical inclination’. As Italian intellectual Claudio Magris observed, ‘Central Europe’ became a metaphor for the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. For Kundera, as well as for the other intellectuals from Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia, insecure and endangered ‘Central Europe’ was a synonym for Western Europe, temporarily captured by the ‘East’. In this case ‘East’ meant Russia.

RUSSIA AS THE DEFINING OTHER According to Kundera, Central Europe was kidnapped by the Soviet Union and betrayed by the West. Was Central Europe, then, simply everything East European that is not Russian? Or was Central Europe no more than an anti-Soviet concept provoked by Soviet dominance over the Warsaw Pact countries? For Kundera it was clear that ‘totalitarian Russian civilization is the radical negation of the modern West’. He interpreted communism as a ‘fulfillment of Russian history’ with its centralizing tendencies and imperial dreams. As a historical entity (or even in its essence), Russia appears as ‘Central Europe’s’ Defining Other. As there was no tradition of the division of power or of independent cities in Russia, it seemed logical that it should be the main alternative to (and enemy of) the European political order. Polish historian Oscar Halecki, for instance, claimed that the Polish–Russian border also marked the boundary-line of constitutional government and Western culture. In his view, in Poland ‘the whole way of life was inspired, through all ages, by the idea of individual liberty’ whereas in Russia it was inspired by ‘the almost unlimited power of an autocratic ruler’. Individualism as well as political liberties were usually mentioned as the main historical features of Russia’s difference from the West. The same claim was often made by Russian writers and philosophers themselves.

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Still, the anti-Russian sentiment of Kundera’s text provoked a number of responses. The shrewdest of these was written by Joseph Brodsky, a Russian writer who was forced to leave the USSR. Brodsky insisted that Bolshevism was very much a product of Western culture, and the ghost of communism – after wandering through Europe – faced the strongest resistance in Russia itself (it is telling, though, that in this claim, as well as in his other writings, Brodsky did not see the historical viewpoints of Ukraine or Belarus). The Russian poet pointed out the limits of normative ‘eastwest’ oppositions and noted, sarcastically, that ‘the cultural superiority of the Eastern victim over its Western betrayer does not prevent the first from admiring the system created by the second’. Brodsky rejected the very notion of ‘Central Europe’ and taxed Kundera with showing a lack of feeling regarding the unpredictability of the history of his nation. He wrote this in 1985. Less than five years later, the situation in Central Europe had undergone a profound change.

AFTER 1989: THE ‘NEW’ ‘EASTERN’ AND ‘CENTRAL’ EUROPES Discussions over ‘Central Europe’ in the late Cold War era mostly involved the past, but were clearly orientated towards the future. The positive myth according to which Central Europe was historically Western, humanistic, democratic and tolerant was supposed to influence Western European and US attitudes to the region under Soviet control. The unexpected dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the series of revolutions (from the ‘velvet’ one in Czechoslovakia to the violent one in Romania), the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union created a totally new geopolitical situation. It is telling that a ‘return to Europe’ in the intellectual debates and selfrepresentations of the post-Communist countries was influenced by the reinvention of their lost multiculturality. The Lithuanian émigré writer Tomas Venclova presented Vilnius’s history and culture as a result of the coexistence and creative interaction of different ethnicities and confessions. The same is true of autobiographical works such as Native Europe by Czesław Miłosz and My Europe by Andrzej Stasiuk and Yuri Andrukhovych. The numerous publications on the ‘Parises’, ‘Venices’ and ‘Jerusalems’ of the East (concepts applied to Krakow, Lviv, Chernivtsi and other cities) asserted their ‘Europeanness’ in terms of tolerance, the creative coexistence of cultures and respect for the Other. The Lithuanian historian Eduardas Gudavičius was not the only such figure in the region who depicted his country’s history as a constant, thousand-year-long effort to adapt to Western Europe. The fulfilment of this ‘adaption’ was usually seen in the integration into the European Union. In 1999 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO. On 1 May 2004 all three countries, together with Slovakia, Slovenia and the Baltic states – former Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) – joined the European Union. The notion of the ‘re-unification of Europe’ became popular, and one might expect that the concept of ‘Central Europe’ would gradually lose its political relevance. But what of Ukraine, Belarus or Moldova? As American historian Timothy Snyder observed, ‘Not a single square centimeter of European territory that belonged to the

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prewar Soviet Union now lies within the European Union.’ He continued: ‘The gray zone of nation-states of 1918 became, almost exactly, the western extension of the Soviet empire in 1945, and then became, almost exactly, the zone of enlargement of the European Union in the first years of the twenty-first century.’ In other words, the EU can be seen as overcoming the dividing line of 1945, and the dividing line of 1918, but not the dividing line of 1917 (at least, not yet). Post-Soviet Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, located between the enlarged EU and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, are sometimes described as the ‘New Eastern Europe’. For instance, Ukranian historian Serhii Plokhy proposed thinking of the NEE (‘geopolitical no-man’s land’) as a meeting place of various states, cultures and nationalities. It is revealing that Ukraine (the second-largest country in Europe after Russia) is usually absent in the Czech, Hungarian and Romanian ‘Central Europe’, but it plays an essential role in that of Poland.

POLISH ‘CENTRAL EUROPE’ AND UKRAINE The modern Ukrainian nation project struggled to define itself against two neighbours: Russia and Poland. In Ukrainian Romantic literature and historiography, the Polish kingdom appeared as an oppressor and Cossack uprisings against it were described as ‘liberation movements’. And in the Polish tradition the Kresy (eastern borderlands) were widely seen as a centre of Polish culture and spirit. It was only in the post-war years that certain émigré Polish intellectuals who wrote for Kultura, a journal edited in Paris by Jerzy Giedroyc, initiated the process of profoundly rethinking the Polish attitude towards Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, calling for the full recognition of their cultural and political agency. As a continuation of this approach, certain Polish historians (Andrzej Sulima Kamiński, Jerzy Kłoczowski and Janusz Tazbir) proposed reconceptualizing the entire history of the Rzecz Pospolita (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which existed from 1569 until the end of the eighteenth century) as a unique experience of civil society (limited, of course, to the aristocratic class), with an elected king, a parliament, self-government and religious diversity. No less important, the new vision of the Rzecz Pospolita treated it not as ‘a Polish state’ but as a common product and the common heritage of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. Such an approach offers Ukraine a choice of historical tradition and a place within ‘Central Europe’. But it requires the re-examination of the entire Ukrainian cultural canon. The positive (or even idealized) image of the Rzecz Pospolita and its multinational, multireligious and multicultural noble (szlachta) nation also poses a serious challenge to the traditional Polish Kresy mythology. French historian Daniel Beauvois stressed its colonial connotation. Polish literary scholar Bogusław Bakuła supported this view in his analysis of post-1989 Polish publications devoted to the Kresy. According to him, these works are characterized by the idealization of multiculturalism with Poland as the centre; by the rejection of any language other than Polish in the region; the treatment of the phenomenon of ‘Borderlands-ness’ as a component of the Polish historical and civilizational mission and the imposing on Others of Poland’s own perspective, terminology and ‘Borderlands’ culture.

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‘CENTRAL EUROPE’ WITHIN UKRAINE Post-Soviet Ukraine is often stereotypically seen as a ‘divided country’. Its western parts (the most important region here is Eastern Galicia) belonged to Poland for centuries and, after its partitions in the late eighteenth century, to the Austrian Empire. They did not become part of Soviet Ukraine until 1939. A number of renowned writers come from Eastern Galicia. The most famous of them, Yuri Andrukhovych, has focused intensely on the concept of ‘Central Europe’. For Andruchovych, Ukraine’s fragile ‘Europeanness’ is connected with 114 years of the Austrian past of East Galicia (part of Ukraine he calls ‘our last territory’). In one of his essays Andrukhovych explains why Ukrainians should be grateful to ‘grandma Austria’ (chiefly because its tolerance and diversity helped to preserve Ukrainian culture and endowed the cities of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk with beautiful architecture), adding how hard is it ‘to believe that my city once belonged to the same political entity as Venice and Vienna, and not Tambov and Tashkent’. Here again lost ‘Central Europe’ is associated with political pluralism and freedom, and is presented in sharp contrast to the corrupted realities of post-Soviet politics. In Andrukhovych’s writings, which are very similar to Kundera’s, ‘Central Europe’ serves as a metaphoric tool to criticize post-Soviet reality and to appeal to Europe and its ‘values’ for more understanding and support of Ukraine’s transformation. Ukrainian intellectuals, describing themselves as ‘pro-European’ and ‘liberal’, have played a significant role in the formulation of the concept of ‘two Ukraines’: ‘western’ and ‘eastern’. This reductionist concept envisioned a country divided by language (Russian versus Ukrainian) and history (European i.e. Polish-Austrian versus Russo-Soviet). One of the Ukraines (‘eastern’) was described not just as different, but worse. It was actually designed to play the role of the Defining Other characterized by ‘hopeless Sovietization’. Stereotypical images of a ‘divided country’, further reinforced by American political scientist Samuel Huntington’s fantasies of a ‘clash of civilizations’, quickly spread in the international media, becoming the easiest (and usually misleading) way to explain all the developments in post-Soviet Ukraine. The Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Maidan movement (2013–14) followed by the Russian annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in the border region of Donbass, among others, revealed the dynamic nature of the concepts of ‘West Ukraine’ (belonging to Central Europe) and ‘East Ukraine’. After the Orange Revolution, Andrukhovych recognized that he had been wrong when he previously claimed that the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, was part of a ‘psychologically and mentally non-Ukrainian area’. Later on, in his book published in 2012, he apologized for the discriminative comments he had made earlier regarding Dnipropetrovsk – a large industrial centre in south-eastern Ukraine. After the outbreak of war in Donbass, Andrukhovych spoke of a ‘new division in Ukraine’, this time claiming that the eastern borders of the Dnipropetrovsk region would soon become a border ‘between Ukraine and non-Ukraine’. The shrinking of ‘East Ukraine’ in this type of interpretation would probably involve the enlargement of ‘Central Europe’. The Ukrainian intellectual debates in the context of war showed that many essayists’ engagement in the nostalgic idealization of lost Austrian multiculturalism

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has done nothing to stop them rejecting the heterogeneity of present-day Ukraine. They see this not as longed-for diversity but as a weakness and a barrier to a successful national project. In other words, it is much easier to idealize the multiculturalism of the past that to accept existing variety and tensions. And in this case Ukraine seems to be no exception.

A GOOD/BAD MYTH? In 1944 Oscar Halecki wrote: ‘Unfortunately neither the historians nor the geographers have yet arrived at any argument as to the precise meaning of such purely relative terms as central Europe, eastern Europe, or the even more controversial concept of central-eastern Europe.’ In 1917, certain German geographers were already speaking of the ‘non-existence’ of ‘such a natural or cultural reality as Central Europe’. In 1986 British historian Timothy Garton Ash pointed out that ‘Central Europe is not a region whose boundaries you can trace on the map . . . It is a kingdom of the spirit.’ And Czech philosopher Karel Kosik offered one of the best definitions: Central Europe is a place where people discuss what it means to be European. ‘Central Europe’ is not a neutral term. It implies certain (geo)political ambitions and promotes a certain type of historical narrative where cosmopolitan tolerance is more characteristic than nationalism and racism. The historiographical relevance of such a narrative could (and should) be disputed. But its cultural function is also important. The concept of ‘Central Europe’ has played an important role in the re-establishment of the historical subjectivity of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in late-Cold-War-era international discourse, and later it helped all those countries to enter the EU. At the same time, the notion of ‘Central Europe’ could be used discriminatively. A centre needs peripheries, and ‘Central Europe’ needs an ‘Eastern’ one to be perceived as less developed, less pluralistic, less European. Such strategies of Othering were used towards Russia, or, in the case of post-Soviet Ukraine, towards the eastern part of the same country. It is possible to be well aware of the discriminative potential of ‘Central Europe’ without rejecting the usefulness of this concept, if it helps to bring more attention to the countries and cultures east of Germany and Austria as part of the common European heritage in all its complexity and ambiguity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Garton Ash, Timothy, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe, London, Random House, 1989. Hnatiuk, Ola, Pożegnanie z Imperium. Ukraińskie dyskusje o tożsamości, Lublin, Wydawn, Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2005. Judt, Tony, ‘The Rediscovery of Central Europe’, Daedalus 119, no. 1. Eastern Europe … Central Europe … Europe (Winter 1990): 23–54. Koenen, Gerd, Der Russland-Komplex. Die Deutschen und der Osten, Munich, C.H.Beck, 2005.

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Kundera, Milan, ‘The Tragedy of Eastern Europe’, New York Review of Books, 31, no. 7 (26 April 1984). Miller, Alexei, ‘Tema Tsentralnoj Evropy: istoriia, sovremennye diskursy i mesto v nikh Rossii’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 52 (2001): 75–96. Snyder, Timothy, The Reconstruction of the Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 38

The Berlin Wall Phantoms of division THOMAS SERRIER

During the night of 12–13 August 1961, the German Democratic Republic closed the Iron Curtain by erecting a barbed-wire fence and a wall in the heart of Berlin, in order to halt the haemorrhage of East German citizens to the West. Long after the collapse of this border, Europe is still haunted by the phantoms of division. On 9 November 1990, exactly one year to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a monument entitled Breakthrough, created by Edwina Sandys, was inaugurated in Fulton, Missouri, in the presence of former president Ronald Reagan. This sculpture, symbolizing the restoration of freedom and the end of the division that had split the world, was the first memorial outside Germany to use the Wall’s famous prefabricated panels. From Australia to South Africa and including the Baltic States, this example was subsequently imitated hundreds of times – even in Russia, albeit in the purely private context of the Memorial Society. The monument features openings in the shape of human figures, allowing daylight − and the gaze − to pass through the wall. As the granddaughter of Winston Churchill, Sandys was therefore honouring her grandfather in the very place where he had delivered his speech on 5 March 1946. Made shortly before the address in which he called for a ‘United States of Europe’, it is regarded as a defining moment in the Cold War: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.’ Today, the reference to Churchill as the creator of that metaphor may be found in every textbook relating to the ‘Cold War’, even though the ubiquitous expression has become somewhat distanced from its inventor. From 1961 to 1989, the East-West border was symbolized by the Berlin Wall, with its explosive mines and its watchtowers. The erection of the ‘Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart’ was officially commemorated in the GDR every 13 August. However, it is the thousands of powerless gestures of rebellion, attempted escapes, dramas and

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nerve-racking border crossings made at monitored transit points that make up the fabric of memories circulated all over the world. They include the classic story of the East German Checkpoint Charlie border guard, who leapt over the barbed wire ‘towards freedom’, represented by West Berlin. Berlin’s predominance in this regard can be problematic. The importance of remembering the roles played by Solidarność and the Velvet Revolution is keenly felt in Poland and the Czech Republic, as was evident in the debates during the twentieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries of the fall of the Wall in November 2009 and 2014. When former ‘Eastern bloc’ countries joined the European Union on 1 May 2004, the occasion was marked by firework displays all along the former border. From 1945 onwards, the theme was embraced by the worlds of film, photography and rock music. It forms the backdrop to novels such as Christa Wolf ’s They Divided the Sky (GDR, 1963) and movies such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966), the James Bond film Octopussy (1983) and Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015). At the same time, a whole community of artists, from Keith Haring to Thierry Noir, came to paint on the Wall before it fell in 1989. David Bowie’s song Heroes (1977) includes the lines: ‘I, I can remember / Standing by the wall / And the guns shot above our heads’. Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire was released ten years later. Its original German title, Der Himmel über Berlin, translates literally as ‘the sky above Berlin’. It was likewise in 1987 that President Ronald Reagan stood at that same historic site in Berlin and addressed the words: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall’, directly to the Soviet leader. Two years later, Pink Floyd held their concert The Wall – Live in Berlin in the same area, near the Brandenburg Gate. Some were momentous occasions, others less so; some were aesthetic in character – all were political. Duly recorded for posterity, these events and powerful images now form a widely shared collection of memories. The division that split Europe has given way to phantoms. Has the Iron Curtain simply shifted further eastwards with the expansion of the Schengen Agreement, as stated by critics of an inward-looking Europe? Do the historical East-West differences resurface with every new crisis – Iraq in 2003, the refugees in 2015? At all events, there is a great temptation to put forward simple causalities drawn from collective memories, as if ‘Eastern Europe’ still constituted an indistinct space after twenty-five years. Paradoxically, although it is included in all these debates, the old East-West border has vanished from its former locations. In turn, that physical disappearance has been countered – often just in time – by initiatives to preserve its last vestiges. These include a local museum inaugurated at the border between Austria and Hungary, a green belt marked out with sculptures that runs the length of the former frontier between the two Germanys, a series of paving stones laid out in Berlin and audiovisual reportage. In the words of the Atelier Limo documentary filmmakers who produced La Frontière intérieure (The Barriers Within, 2009): ‘[Our parents] were the Wall generation, but we are the generation of the void that it left behind, of those highly symbolic ruins that still continue to exercise our minds.’1 The happy

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memory of 9 November may have been effaced by the sombre one of 11 September, with 11 / 9 giving way to 9 / 11. Nevertheless, the surprisingly rapid collapse of the Iron Curtain, conveying both tragic recollections and their transcendence, was enough to take one’s breath away. Fragments of the Wall are still sold as modern relics to tourists throughout the world; but do those curious visitors seeking out its remaining traces ever think of looking under their feet? For there it lies – a broken, crushed Bastille, a track running through the tarmac, a buried, ever-present phantom, trampled into the very foundations of the city.

NOTE 1. http:​/​/dat​​abase​​.atel​​ier​-l​​imo​.e​​u​/pre​​senta​​tionp​​​ostes​​.php.​

BIBLIOGRAPHY Applebaum, Anne, Rideau de fer. L’Europe de l’Est écrasée, 1944–1956, Paris, Gallimard, 2014. Henke, Klaus-Dietmar (Ed.), Die Mauer: Errichtung, Überwindung, Erinnerung, Munich, DTV, 2011. Kaminsky, Anna and Ronny Heidenreich (Eds.), The Berlin Wall in the World, Berlin, Berlin Story, 2014. Serrier, Thomas, ‘Au-delà de la Chute. Le mur de Berlin cassé et concassé’, in Emmanuel Fureix (Ed.), Iconoclasme et révolutions de 1789 à nos jours, Paris, Champ Vallon, 2014, pp. 253–65. Ullrich, Karen, Geteile Ansichten. Erinnerungslandschaft deutsch-deutsche Grenze, Berlin, Aufbau, 2006.

CHAPTER 39

Chernobyl A blind spot KARENA KALMBACH

On 26 April 1986, a nuclear accident occurred at Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine. Its repercussions have been felt throughout Europe, in terms of both radioactive fallout and the ensuing debates over the future of nuclear energy. For most of us, the memory of this accident is primarily personal in nature. It is rooted in our own experiences and memories, beginning with the recollection of how we first learned of the event, what we experienced and felt during the days that followed, what we thought of it and how it was spoken of. Those who had young children at the time still recall today the dread they experienced regarding the impact on their health. Naturally, that memory and the weight of its significance depend on one’s whereabouts at the time. In Ukraine itself, Chernobyl represented a profound break in the lives of the women and men who worked at the power plant, the firefighters, their families and the thousands of people evacuated from the area. It was the same case, shortly afterwards, for the hundreds and thousands of individuals living in territories strongly affected by the nuclear fallout – Belarus, Ukraine and Russia – who had to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Over six hundred thousand people were brought from all over the Soviet Union to seal and decontaminate the site; for them, too, there was a time ‘before’ and ‘after’ Chernobyl. It is impossible to arrive at an exact figure in relation to the past and future victims of Chernobyl. This is not only due to uncertain scientific information regarding local radiation levels and the effects of low-level radiation but also due to the fact that these numbers have been highly politicized. As a result, any quantitative indication regarding Chernobyl is now perceived in terms of a pro- or anti-nuclear stance. Yet it is no less true that uncertainty as to the exact dose and impact of the radiation absorbed by each individual and their family since 1986 has become a constant in the daily lives of the populations affected. Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, raised a literary monument to these people and their suffering with her novel Voices from Chernobyl.

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The disaster also represented a caesura in countries outside the former Soviet Union. In Western Europe, opponents of nuclear power saw their worst fears confirmed, while reindeer breeders in Scandinavia and sheep farmers in Britain − mainly in the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and Snowdonia − were brought to the brink of ruin as a result of contaminated pasture land. Chernobyl is clearly not a single historical event, experienced in a uniform manner throughout Europe, but rather a myriad of different events − local, regional and national. This multitude of histories has likewise generated different memories, which have been politicized according to their context. In Belarus, where the information policies pursued by the Soviet Union were the focus of vigorous criticism in the late 1980s, the accident became central to the Belarusian independence movement. After 1996, Alexander Lukashenko’s government did everything it could to appropriate the symbolic power attached to Chernobyl. That being said, every anniversary of the event sees the head of state and the opposition at odds over how this national site of memory should be interpreted. The central question is whether Chernobyl should be presented as a story of heroism, highlighting the way in which the catastrophe was contained, or whether, conversely, the emphasis should be on the long-term effects of contamination, thereby giving the priority to the victims rather than the heroes. In France, too, Chernobyl became a site of political confrontation; from May 1986 onwards, arguments began to erupt over whether the authorities had done enough to warn the public about radioactive fallout in the country. That issue, the affaire Tchernobyl, was framed as a political scandal and has been resurfacing regularly in public debates – particularly when there is talk of building additional nuclear power stations. As a French site of memory, Chernobyl therefore embodies a sceptical attitude towards the credibility of official statements on technology-related health risks and government expertise, and an undisguised criticism of the elites who manage the national nuclear programme. Chernobyl has also become a central element of national memories in a number of other European countries. Since the 1990s, however, an increasing number of actors have focused their memory work on the European dimension of the accident. This transnational endeavour is based on identifying its long-term effects on people and the environment, and on the need to develop joint responses. In this way, the numerous humanitarian associations providing support for children in Eastern European regions severely affected by the disaster emphasize the social and environmental responsibility shared equally by East and West. And the protests and vigils organized by anti-nuclear campaigners throughout Europe every 26 April on the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster underline the fact that the effects of Chernobyl − in terms of both politics and contamination – were not curbed by the presence of the Iron Curtain and that nuclear risks need to be governed beyond the national level. After the nuclear accident at Fukushima in March 2011, this memory work acquired a new intensity and a more global perspective. Will the memory work produce long-term results? Will it mean that Chernobyl becomes a European site of memory, that it becomes more than the sum of its parts as

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local, regional and national sites of memory? One thing, at least, is certain; as long as there is no European consensus on the uses of nuclear energy, it will remain a contested, divided and conflictual memory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arndt, Melanie (Ed.), Politik und Gesellschaft nach Tschernobyl. (Ost-) Europäische Perspektiven, Berlin, Ch. Links, 2016. Kalmbach, Karena, The Meanings of a Disaster: Chernobyl and Its Afterlives in Britain and France, New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2021. Kalmbach, Karena, ‘Radiation and Borders: Chernobyl as a National and Transnational Site of Memory’, Global Environment, November 2013. Available online at: http:​//​ www​​.whp-​​journ​​als​.c​​o​.uk/​​GE​/Ar​​ticle​​s​/Ka​l​​mbach​​.pdf.​

CHAPTER 40

The Mediterranean The centre of gravity LEYLA DAKHLI

Located at the junction between North and South, between Christianity and Islam, the Mediterranean is a battleground for competing powers, a point of contact, the focus of dreams and utopian desires. It has also become a cemetery for the migrants who attempt to cross it today. Yet it remains the beating heart of Europe, which has always regarded the Mediterranean as its geographical and symbolic anchor point. Europe is shaped by seas and oceans − the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean – all of which define its contours and shorelines. Yet it is the Mediterranean, more than any other, which appears to constitute the basis of what we term ‘Europe’; ancient images portray the continent as a nymph reclining on the sea. This dangerous, chaotic little lake, a central point between land masses, is claimed by Europe as an extension of its territory – more significantly still, it is the setting in which European pre-eminence is displayed. ‘Mediterranean’, like Mitteleuropa, is one of those geographical names that instantly evoke particular images; as Europe’s maritime hub, it lies at the very heart of a certain idea one might have of the continent. An unruly periphery, it forms the dangerous boundary of a part of the world all too often perceived as a besieged fortress. It has the distinctive status of frontier zones, of borderlands named and defined through demarcation lines originating from opposing shores, transformed through conquests and advances. The Mediterranean, in the strictly European sense, forms part of the territories of Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and Greece, not forgetting Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, each of which has limited access to it via a port. It completely encircles Malta and Cyprus. It has its own name in multiple languages; it includes numerous smaller seas, penetrates land to form gulfs and receives rivers. Shared characteristics and legacies (particularly those originating from the Roman Empire) mingle with one another in each of these bordering territories. They coexist alongside the dissimilarities that developed over the centuries, differentiating Roman Catholic from Eastern Orthodox Europeans, those who dwelt within the confines of the Muslim Caliphate’s furthest boundaries

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from those who lived outside them, and the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire from those of its Western rivals. Consequently, Europe seems to be perpetually confronted with something other than itself. This seems to be the space where North and South, East and West are defined. It is no commonplace frontier, however, for that sea is regarded as ‘ours’, even when it is kept under surveillance and militarized. The Roman expression mare nostrum, adopted by a military and humanitarian operation to rescue migrants crossing the sea, indicates both familiarity − the Mediterranean Sea viewed as a ‘cradle’ − and the desire to control. It can be compared to the control that an authoritarian father seeks to exert over a somewhat wayward child; it may even be seen as the face of conquest in its most arrogant form, still deemed legitimate and justified, from the Crusades to colonialism. Understanding in what way the Mediterranean is ours is certainly one means of exploring an ambivalent European memory.

NAMING THE SEA AND TRACING ITS OUTLINES In the preface to the first edition of his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Fernand Braudel writes: Woe betide the historian who thinks that this preliminary interrogation [how to define the historians’ Mediterranean] is unnecessary, that the Mediterranean as an entity needs no definition, because it has long been clearly defined, is instantly recognizable and can be described by dividing general history along the lines of its geographical contours.1 This is especially true given that the noun la Méditerranée, spelt with a capital ‘M’ and used to denote a specific space, did not become established in the French language until the nineteenth century; prior to that, the adjective méditerrané2 was used as a way of characterizing a particular area. In French, as with numerous other languages, the name Méditerranée hardly offers an adequate means of encompassing the entirety of this space, for it is divided into micro-seas, ever smaller sub-areas that each have their own name: the Adriatic, the Aegean, the Sea of Marmara, the Libyan Sea and so on. These reflect both the struggles that took place in order to appropriate the space and the infinite precision that can be applied to the geography of a sea, noting the area that surrounds it, what it demarcates, what it crosses and what it submerges. Understood as a totality comprising micro-areas and microenvironments, it is also a ‘corrupting sea’ − the title chosen by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell for their book, published in 2000.3 This echoes the engraving included in the work, an ‘inverted anthropomorphic map’ made by a troubled Italian priest, Opicinus de Canistris (1296–ca. 1350), representing a male Europe (Adam) lying on a female Africa (Eve). The theatre of their union appears to be the Strait of Gibraltar, which features a devil’s head at its easternmost extremity and is given the name causa peccati: ‘the cause of the sin’. This sets the tone. The task undertaken by the two authors involved presenting the exceptionally fragmented nature of the ‘terrestrial’ Mediterranean (if we might use that expression), its diverse landscapes,

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seen as micro-regions, their enduring interdependence and intercommunication and the ever-threatening instability and unpredictability of the climate, as the principal, unvarying characteristics of this point of interconnection. This is the most recent large-scale, post-Braudelian historical study of the Mediterranean, and it is intended to capture a type of pre-Braudelian state prevailing in the medieval era. The authors use the environment as a basis (albeit not a uniform one) on which to build a study that brings the real-life region closer to the apocalyptic medieval visions associated with it. The ‘sea between the lands’ corrupts through its uncertain nature that very aspect which ensures that anyone crossing it practically never finds themselves ‘out on the open sea’. It is known as the White Sea by the Turks (Akdeniz) and the Arabs (al-bahr al-abyad), the Great Sea (Yam Gadol) by the Jews and the Middle Sea (Mittelmeer) by the Germans. Other, more local names reflect struggles and the last vestiges of former conquests. A case in point is Gibraltar; created from the Arabic Jabal al-Tāriq (‘the mountain of Tāriq ibn Ziyād’), it was named after the general who conquered the Strait in the eighth century. It is possibly the most potently symbolic example of all, given the huge numbers of people obliged to cross that perilous threshold today, risking their lives in their bid to ‘enter Europe’. Northern shore / Southern shore; Maghreb / Mashriq; Catholic / Orthodox; Asian Turkey / European Turkey; the Eastern Roman Empire / the Western Roman Empire . . . there are an abundance of terms indicative of division that can be used to describe the various areas within the Mediterranean, and they are not easy to bypass . . . In order to relegate those dividing lines to the background, one needs to have an elevated view. An initial examination of the Earth’s Northern hemisphere, a few degrees to the West of Greenwich, reveals a North-South line marking a change of environment. That line separates the Atlantic Ocean, which extends into the Polar Regions, from a vast land mass. It is broken, more or less at its centre, by a vast expanse of water located towards the East. This separates Europe from Africa, and is wide enough to connect with the continent of Asia. That expanse is truly a sea between lands – the Mediterranean.4 The geohistorical description given here by Jean-Luc Arnaud requires an understanding of the circulation system and movement of the waters, currents and winds; it also emphasizes the Mediterranean’s connections with other areas. The currents carry cold water from the West to the East via the South, and from the East to the West via the North; the sea is fed by additional water from the rivers of Russia, and from others that enter it from the Atlantic via the ‘Pillars of Hercules’. Since the opening of the Suez Canal, it has also been visited by hitherto unfamiliar species of fish.5 The Mediterranean Sea is an ecological observation zone, since that science remains, as always, one of connection and interdependence. Differences in water and salinity levels between the Black and the White Seas (to use the local terminology) explain the turbulent nature of their intercommunication. It is this approach that led David Abulafia to put forward an entire timeline based on the ‘natural’ events that punctuate his history of the sea: the plague and the opening of the Suez Canal. He defines ‘his Mediterranean’ from the outset as

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‘resolutely the surface of the sea itself, its shores and its islands, particularly the port cities that provided the main departure and arrival points for those crossing it.’ However, his study remains focused on the people who cross it and navigate it, rather than those who form its hinterland. In this way, Abulafia’s Mediterranean is a very British one; its ports of call are Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus. For Europe’s memory of the Mediterranean is not homogenous. It follows the contours linked to the history of each nation’s association with the Mediterranean world. It varies according to the colonial enterprises involved, and the influences and trading posts that were established. The reason why France exerts a particular influence is due both to its former colonial empire and capitulation treaties and their consequences, which remain evident to this day. Britain’s presence is manifested in a strategic, central route through the Mediterranean – but the sea has also been Russian, Turkish, Venetian and so on. On terra firma, if we might be permitted to bring the sea to dry land, the Mediterranean region is a place of crossing points that have all established themselves in historical memory. These may be associated with myths, like the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ that stand at its edges, or with wars, such as those of the Dardanelles (which pitted the Ottomans against the Russians), the Gallipoli Peninsula or Gibraltar; whatever the case, the Mediterranean remains, as ever, a series of seas from which ‘another side’ is always visible, approachable and may be reached with varying degrees of ease. This is still evident today, when small vessels laden with migrants attempt to make the crossing from the coast of Libya, from Tangiers or Izmir. The narrow straits at the edges of the sea are associated with divinities, with epic tales of the heroes who crossed them or remained there forever, with conquests and invasions. According to one version of the myth of Hercules, the hero smashed through two mountains, inadvertently causing the Mediterranean to flow through them: The coast of Mauritania extends . . . from a promontory that contains a hideout dedicated to Hercules . . . Further on stands a very high mountain, situated directly opposite another mountain that rises from the coast facing Hispania. The first is known as Mount Abyla, the second, Mount Calpe, and together they form the Pillars of Hercules. According to the fable, that same Hercules once separated these two mountains, which had been joined to one another, and in this way, the Ocean, which had previously been halted by this barrier, spread out over the vast lands that it now covers with its waters.6 The Bosphorus, located on the opposite shore, is associated with the memory of Jason and the Argonauts. The Hellespoint, which was crossed by the Persians in the Age of Antiquity, has been established as the symbolic site of the confrontation between the world of the ancient Greeks and the Barbarians. Contemporary Russian ambitions in the Black Sea serve as a reminder that endeavours to gain control of passages through to the Mediterranean are not confined to ancient times. In this way, when we observe and attempt to describe the sea itself, its waters and its regions, we are compelled from the outset to try and understand its complexity and its position as the connecting point between different worlds, to use the

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concept developed by Robert Ilbert.7 It is a battleground for competing powers, the focus of dreams and utopian desires. A site characterized by intermixing and syncretism, the Mediterranean is a point of contact, of crossings associated with both war and love.

A SPACE OF RUPTURE At this point, we should re-emphasize what Braudel’s Méditerranée owes to the circumstances in which it was written. This will allow us to understand how the work undertaken by the historian, who was discovering the sea’s southern, colonial shore, finally enabled him to perceive the Mediterranean world that he was describing in terms of the rupture that he noted, or thought that he noted, rather than unity. Having settled in French Algeria, where he was working as a teacher, and with little knowledge of Maghreb and Arab culture, Fernand Braudel discovered the Mediterranean and interpreted it through his own heritage, namely so-called ‘classical’, Latin culture. That heritage is present in the observations of the colonial scholars and Orientalists who describe indigenous cultures and dig through the soil seeking out vestiges of Roman influence, traces of an ‘us’ in those everrebellious lands. The narrative he inherited, as did so many of his contemporaries, presented the Mediterranean as a shared world infiltrated by the Muslim conquest. It had already been described in Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937), a work by Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, in which he declared his admiration for his conception of ‘Romanity’. Associating Rome with its barbarian limes in one bold gesture, he writes: ‘Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals and Burgondes governed in the Roman style. . . . Everything that lives and functions is Roman.’ As he saw it, Islam alone was responsible for upsetting Europe’s Roman balance. The idea whereby the Muslim conquest put an end to a Mediterranean koine associated with a Christian Europe that was a shared, civilized space is one of those popular beliefs that still forms part of our legacy, whether we like it or not, and Braudel never really questions its legitimacy. The Mediterranean is perceived on the basis of its fragmentation, of its being split between Islam and Christianity. ‘Our sea’ interests us because it has disappeared, because it is something to be reconquered. In this sense, it is still viewed in terms of nostalgia. This provides us with the basis for a discussion centring on the Mediterranean as a divided space. The sea is regarded as being shared; it separates two worlds. If Braudel had set out to capture the period of unity by recording the time before the Battle of Lepanto, it is because he believed that it had split the sea in two. Yet he notes, in defence of his long-term perspective, that if one’s focus is not confined to events alone − ‘that glittering layer on the surface of history’ − countless new realities emerge, unobtrusively, without fanfare, continuing beyond the Battle of Lepanto; the spell of Turkish power was broken, a dynamic Christian pathway reappeared and the enormous Turkish Armada disintegrated.8 Should we, then, regard Lepanto itself as Europe’s foundational legend? In a sense, Europe was given form once the issue of the Mediterranean was cast aside, as stated in 1972 by Andrew Hess, whose account begins ‘after the battle of Lepanto’.9 A new

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European and world order was constructed in the aftermath of the confrontation. There are several different ways of interpreting the events of 7 October 1571. What remains certain, however, is its position as an anchor point for conflictual memories, as is the case with other historical episodes. It was celebrated from the very outset as a victory against those maritime rivals, the Muslim Turks; the Ottomans were driven back to the borders of Asia and the Mediterranean frontier was safe for Christians. Yet Lepanto does not seem to have constituted this type of rupture, either in terms of trade relations or even of conquests, since the capture of the port of Tunis, La Goulette, by the Ottomans took place a few years later, in 1574. The battle was seen as a dividing line, however − possibly one that marked out zones of influence in a form of zero-sum game, at least at the edge of the north-western section. Cyprus had been taken by the Ottomans; from an African and Asian perspective, Europe was the embodiment of the Other. Subsequent histories of the medieval and modern Mediterranean always featured the figure of the ‘Muslim pirate’. The victory was attributed to the praying of the rosary by Catholics, as confirmed by a vision of the Virgin of the Rosary that had appeared to Pope Pius V. According to certain interpretations, the European flag, with its twelve stars on a blue background, is associated with Marian iconography and Mary’s crown of twelve stars, as described in the Book of Revelation.10 Although this interpretation is not included in official discussions involving the flag, it was mentioned by its creator, the painter Arsène Heitz, and is very visibly displayed on specialized European sites by upholders of ‘Europe’s Christian roots’. This all-pervading, emblematic memory continued to guide Modern-Age conquerors. When Napoleon Bonaparte led his expedition to Egypt, the land he was seeking to capture was not as incognita as that of ‘continental’ Africa. This campaign turned out to be a significant moment in Europe’s story, as it played a part in integrating the past of the Pharaohs into ‘our history’. To this day, European museums still reflect our attachment to Egyptian objects, whose ‘non-European’ character is never questioned. While Napoleon’s Arabian dream constituted an attempt to pose as someone else, to present himself as a new prophet, the discourse governing his discovery of ancient remains emphasized the shared aspects of the two civilizations. An heir to that colonial vision and to that perception of the Mediterranean, Benito Mussolini conquered neighbouring lands overseas − the terre d’ oltremare – and cultivated the image of a leader who recovered territories captured long ago by others, inevitably barbarians. Every such act was reinterpreted from the perspective of a legitimate return to the Roman ‘fold’, to Christian roots and to empire. The politics of expansion conducted on the other side of the sea led him to strengthen his links with Italian émigré communities in Tunis, Alexandria, Malta and Tripoli, likewise inspiring him to reinstate a neoclassical aesthetic. This is evident, for instance, throughout the EUR, a district in Rome whose full name is Esposizione Universale Roma. The new Caesar therefore regarded his colonizing activities in the Mediterranean as a form of recuperating ‘the things that were his’. The Mediterranean ambitions harboured by both Napoleon and Mussolini reinterpreted the divisions created between ‘natural’ links with its shores. From

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this perspective, the Mediterranean is seen as a nerve centre, a symbolic locality where various powers asserted themselves. In order to write a history of the Sea from that standpoint, one would have to focus first on Rome before moving on to Constantinople and then, perhaps, to Venice, producing a narrative featuring a series of maritime empires that formed the basis of polycentric, cosmopolitan communities.

A SHARED SEA The sea is also a site of division and rupture insofar as it is shared between the three monotheistic religions. Equally, however, the richest examples of intermixing and syncretism that define a Mediterranean quality may well arise from its position as a point of intersection. These conceptions have become somewhat more diverse and interconnected through the work of scholars who have been able to establish links between the two shores. One should, of course, include Adolf Schaube’s books on the Roman Empire; written in the early twentieth century, they offer a different approach to the ties between Antiquity, Christianity and Islam. Thanks primarily to archaeological studies, historians of the Early Middle Ages have been able to trace the outlines of a history more closely connected to the Mediterranean area. At this point one should likewise mention the groundbreaking work carried out by Peter Brown and the more recent overview produced by Chris Wickham. One of the architects of that integrated historiographic approach is Shlomo Dov Goitein; through his account of the Jewish presence in the Mediterranean he charts an alternative history of the region, centring on passing participants, intermediaries and connections. Another distinctive feature of this monumental work is the fact that it is based on an approach which could be defined as micro-historical, focusing entirely on one source whose multiple facets are patiently explored by the historian. This historiographic basis has allowed the Mediterranean the time to develop into another space onto which memories are projected. Within that space lie smaller areas – we might call them ‘little Mediterraneans’ − where unions are forged, crossings are made and micro-civilizations evolve. This site has been the focus of complex historical developments and constructions centred around particular periods and areas. There have been events that wrought division and disruption, such as the Battles of Lepanto and the Dardanelles – yet equally, there are stories of reconciliation and syncretism. These include Andalusia, where three monotheistic religions coexisted in harmony; Sicily and the multilingual, mobile populations of its minor islands; the lingua franca spoken in all the ports around the Mediterranean; and the holy hermit who dwelt in a cave on Lampedusa, greeting shipwrecked Muslim and Christian visitors with food appropriate to their religious practices and their own places of worship – a chapel with an altar dedicated to the Virgin and a mosque containing the relics of a Muslim saint. There were also numerous holy places in Jerusalem and Palestine shared by the three monotheistic religions. These are no modern inventions devised in order to counteract conflicts; they were shared, sacred spaces before the emergence of ‘a

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strong tendency toward polarisation, then partition’11 that began to develop in the nineteenth century. Further examples include the Krak des Chevaliers, a crusaders’ fortress that passed through the hands of all the conquerors of the westernmost region of Syria, and Beaufort Castle, which was taken by the crusaders in 1139 and subsequently captured and recaptured by numerous powers and seigneurs before becoming the symbol of the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon after 1982. On close examination, these divisions, which have now been transformed into frontiers, always involve some form of syncretism, of interconnection. Moreover, the proximity of the Mediterranean meant that it could be reappropriated and assimilated by Europeans as something both familiar and exotic, a combination probably best reflected in the vogue for Orientalism. In Mathias Énard’s novel Compass, for example, a Viennese specialist in Middle Eastern music recalls his own, meandering journey, based on a construction created by both East and West. That reciprocal fascination/deformation inspired the creation of objects that found their places in the interiors of Europe and the cities of the Ottoman Empire. The Mediterranean Sea was central to Orientalism, yet in most cases it was avoided in pursuit of an authenticity that was required to be European and was therefore sought beyond its shores. The worlds of Islam, the Orients of Delacroix, Ingres, Goethe and Mozart were enclosed within tastefully wallpapered salons draped in velvet. The Sea itself was given its own aesthetic treatment, as with the seascapes and ports painted by Le Lorrain and Vernet; it was also central to the art of landscape gardening, which enthusiasts learnt in the Mediterranean regions of Europe, particularly Rome.

AN ANCIENT CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION The worlds of the Mediterranean harbours serve as links; they do not become Oriental, they are already so by nature. As Gérard de Nerval wrote in Voyage en Orient, it is the ports of the Orient that bring to mind the scenes painted by Vernet, not vice versa. It is the characters depicted in his harbours who are Oriental: We are surprised to rub shoulders with that colourful crowd, which seems to belong to another era, two centuries ago, as if the mind were travelling back through the ages. . . . Am I truly the son of a solemn land, of a century clad in black clothing that seems to be in mourning for those who lived before it? Here am I, myself transformed, both observing and posing, a figure from a seascape by Joseph Vernet.12 For what really is Oriental, far removed from the world of landscapes and alignments of stones, is the multiplicity of human beings, the ‘disorder, profusion, strangeness, the bad taste’ described by Victor Hugo in his collection of poems, Les Orientales; ‘There, [in the Orient] all is indeed vast, rich, fecund, as with the Middle Ages, that other sea of poetry.’ The discovery of the Orient, as we see once again, goes hand in hand with that of dim and distant eras, revealing, in the present, a constructed ‘European past’. Yet this construction was ceaselessly reappropriated and re-elaborated by the peoples of the East themselves, through an interplay of domination and reciprocal translations and interpretations. In this way, operas with

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an Oriental theme were composed in eighteenth-century Europe, and ‘Western’ music was incorporated into the Oriental canon in the nineteenth century; Mozart and Verdi composed works based on their conceptions of the East; the paintings of Delacroix and Ingres heralded pictorial modernism with their Oriental subject matter, and the stringed instrument known as the kamanjā that originated in the Middle East returned there in its European form − the violin − to accompany the songs of Umm Kulthum. Far from being characterized by an attitude of detachment, the Orientalist tendency manifested itself in a markedly concrete fashion through interior décor and the vogue for all things Egyptian, also known as ‘Egyptomania’. It followed one of the most significant episodes in the relations between Europe and the Mediterranean world – Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign and the ‘discovery’ of the Pharaonic civilization, its art, its sciences and its monumental creations. In turn, Egypt subsequently became the ‘cradle of our civilisation’. That very term ‘cradle’, which governed the foundation of the great European museums of cultural heritage, reflects a connection with collective memories of the Mediterranean. And although this may be rooted in the monotheistic religions and in a Christianity defined in relation to a Muslim world – the important thing here is to preserve the irreducible individual elements – it would be more natural to find its source in a close link with an Antiquity revisited as ‘primary’. Although historians of the Medieval, Modern and Contemporary eras are at odds with one another over the perception of ‘their’ Mediterranean, depending on their own particular standpoints, scholars of Classical Antiquity have long remained detached from such confrontations. In the narrative relating to its connections with Europe, their Mediterranean East was always perceived as familiar, as ‘ours’, from the birth of democracy in Athens to the Tables of the Law and the earliest tablets to be inscribed with cuneiform writing. It is this idea of an eternal Europe that is represented in Orientalist paintings of ruins. Whether they stand in Rome, Athens, Alexandria or Cyrenaica, ruins are fragments of civilization lost in an ocean of barbarity. They are frequently depicted with ‘locals’ at their feet – indifferent and unaware, these indigenous communities incongruously occupy areas that still bear the traces of bygone riches and refinements. This portrayal of local inhabitants who have no knowledge of their illustrious past extends to the whole of Mediterranean Europe. In this way, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings of scenes in Greece and Italy often include indigenous characters similar to those found on the other side of the sea. We might well associate contemporary debates over museography and the place that should be accorded to non-European art in particular museums in Europe’s capitals with current uncertainties over European borders. The bust of Queen Nefertiti is kept on Berlin’s Museum Island, a complex of national heritage museums, while a specific space was built to house ‘genuinely’ non-European objects. In many cases, these originate from less familiar areas that lie beyond the Mediterranean. In the case of Paris, the arts of Islam are held in the Louvre, while the artefacts we no longer describe as ‘primitive’ have their own separate home in the Musée du quai Branly. The Mediterranean, meanwhile, has found its own space at the Mucem in Marseille, where its dialogue with Europe is continually being

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explored through the museum’s exhibitions and collections, which are regularly recomposed. These choices are also the result of relationships based on domination and perpetuated, for instance, in the presence of archaeological sites and excavations in the Ottoman, Persian and European colonial empires. Ruins have therefore become an important element of Orientalism and affiliation; this is also reflected in the writings of Albert Camus, as he describes how the ruins of Tipasa became part of the original, natural world: ‘In this marriage of ruins and of springtime, the ruins have become stones once more, and, losing the polish imposed on them by man, they have returned to nature.’13 Recent debates over the ‘fall of Palmyra’ are symptomatic of the patrimonial connection that unites Europeans with the ancient Mediterranean past. When Islamic State militants seized possession of the archaeological site at Palmyra, the legitimate indignation of the Europeans was primarily directed at the affront to ‘our’ civilization. Few questions were asked regarding the radical, instant obliteration of the vestiges of a much more recent past: the infamous prison of the Ba’athist regime, located in the city of Palmyra.

AT THE JUNCTION OF DIFFERENT WORLDS Today, the Mediterranean still seems to be the focus of questions regarding affiliation. Is Europe Mediterranean? The area offers us holiday resorts, the promise of relaxation and an art de vivre whose popularity has spread throughout the continent. Markets everywhere in Europe, from the South to the Baltic, display the olive oil and ewes’ milk cheeses typical of the Mediterranean diet. However, this enthusiasm remains detached, associated with the idea that the dolce vita is all very well for a holiday situation but may not be best suited to the realities of a productive working life. For instance, a somewhat contemptuous attitude became evident with regard to the economic crisis suffered by the countries of southern Europe, deemed incapable of regulating their own affairs and of combatting corruption. Typical examples of paradoxical labelling, the words ‘Mafia’, ‘siesta’, ‘beach’ and ‘sunshine’ have a distancing effect. This might also explain why transient, ever-changing utopian dreams are projected onto the Mediterranean. The opening of the Suez Canal − the enactment of a Saint-Simonian utopia based on reconnecting continents in a modern context − was succeeded by other idealistic projects involving bridges and tunnels. The Spanish government set up a design project in the 1920s, commissioning engineers to look at three potential ways of building a tunnel at a depth of four hundred metres under the Strait of Gibraltar. One engineer produced plans for an undersea tunnel formed of an enormous tube attached to the bottom of the Strait by an anchoring device. The possibility of constructing a floating bridge connecting Tarifa to an urban development zone to the east of Tangiers was mooted in 1984. The early twenty-first century saw the re-emergence of the tunnel project, and the kings of Spain and Morocco signed a whole series of official agreements with a view to

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launching new preparatory studies. Sadly, as we now know, the building of tunnels does not preclude the erection of walls. It may be interesting to reflect on that distancing effect now that the Mediterranean has established itself as Europe’s fortified frontier, with thousands of people drowning in its waters every year. Attempts have been made since the 1990s to integrate the Mediterranean into the European Union, giving rise to the expression ‘Euro-Mediterranean’. In the light of the European Union’s current crisis and the tensions that have beset it, the perception of the Mediterranean has very quickly changed, giving way to an instinctive reaction characterized by withdrawal and isolation. Euro-Mediterranean summit meetings now focus chiefly on collaborative measures aimed at curbing immigration and controlling a border that increasingly resembles a fortress. The small island of Lampedusa, where prisoners were once exchanged and a hermit welcomed shipwrecked travellers to his cave, was the birthplace of many Italian Tunisians so poor that they had come to fish and then to settle in Africa, a practice that continued until the early twentieth century. Today it is associated with doleful memories shared by Europe and the world, where dreams of solidarity and mutual aid dissolved in the waters. The sea around Lampedusa has now become the scene of humanitarian operations; the rescue ship Aquarius, which is chartered by the aid group SOS Méditerranée, is sent to the outer limit of Libyan territorial waters to assist migrants bound for Europe in sinking vessels out on the open sea – ‘our sea’.14 There, with the help of thousands of European citizens, rescue workers devote all their energies to saving the lives of the women, men and children who have entrusted their futures to those inhospitable waves and ferocious currents.

NOTES 1. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. I, translated from the French by Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972–3 [1949]). [English translation copyright ©1972 by Wm. Collins Sons Ltd. and‑ Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc]. 2. Anne Ruel, ‘L’Invention de la Méditerranée’, Vingtième Siècle, 32 (1991): 7–14. 3. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (London: Blackwell, 2000). The illustration described above is accompanied by a quote from Strabo referring to the sea as a “teacher of vice” (ponerodidaskalos). 4. Jean-Luc Arnaud, ‘Instabilité structurelle en Méditerranée; entre contournements et raccourcis’, in Étudier en liberté les mondes méditerranéens. Mélanges offerts à Robert Ilbert, ed. Leyla Dakhli and Vincent Lemire (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016), pp. 113–23. 5. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Penguin Books, 2012), Introduction. 6. Pomponius Mela, Description de la Terre, I, 5, translated into French by M. Nisard (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1863), pp. 605–6. Quoted in Laurent Escande, ‘Entre terres et mers: Gibraltar et Bosphore’, in Étudier en liberté les mondes méditerranéens.

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Mélanges offerts à Robert Ilbert, ed. Leyla Dakhli and Vincent Lemire (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016), pp. 519–29. 7. Robert Ilbert, De Suez à Panama. L’articulation des mondes (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010). 8. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. III, Events, Politics and People, translated from the French by Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper Row, 1972–1973 [1949]). 9. Andrew C. Hess, ‘The Battle of Lepanto and Its Place in Mediterranean History’, Past and Present, no. 57 (November 1972): 53–73. 10. ‘And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars’ (Book of Revelations 12:1). 11. Vincent Lemire, ‘Le Manteau rapiécé des prophètes. Lieux saints d’Israël-Palestine entre partage et partition’, in Lieux saints partagés (Mucem: Actes Sud, April 2015). 12. Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient (Paris: Gallimard, 1984 [1851]), p. 404. 13. Albert Camus, ‘Noces à Tipasa’ [1939], in Essais (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1965), p. 56. 14.

http://www​.sosmediterranee​.fr.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abulafia, David, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, London, Penguin Books, 2012. Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, translated from the French by Siân Reynolds, New York, Harper Row, 1972–1973 [1949]. Dakhli, Leyla and Vincent Lemire (Eds.), Étudier en liberté les mondes méditerranéens. Mélanges offerts à Robert Ilbert, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016. Dakhlia, Jocelyne, Lingua Franca. Histoire d’une langue en Méditerranée, Arles, Actes Sud, 2008. Goitein, Shlomo Dov, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967. Horden, Peregrine and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, London, Blackwell, 2000. Ilbert, Robert, De Suez à Panama. L’articulation des mondes, Arles, Actes Sud, 2010. Julien, Charles-André, Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord. Tunisie – Algérie – Maroc, Paris, Payot, 1931. Miller, Peter N. (Ed.), The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2013. Picard, Christophe, La Mer des califes, Paris, Le Seuil, 2015. Pirenne, Henri, Mahomet et Charlemagne, Paris, Alcan and Brussels, Nouvelle Société d’éditions, 1937.

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Raphael, Lutz, ‘Fernand Braudel. 1902–1985’, in Lutz Raphael (Ed.), Klassiker der Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. II: Von Marc Bloch bis Natalie Z. Davis, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2006, pp. 45–62. Schaube, Adolf, Handelsgeschichte der Romanischen Völker des Mittelmeergebiets bis zum Ende der Kreuzzüge, Berlin and Munich, Oldenbourg, 1906.

CHAPTER 41

Venice against the tide ARNE KARSTEN

Once an independent republic, Venice was known for her splendour, her merchants and artists. She then became a city for lovers and a powerful magnet for tourists from all over the world. Enclosed within her lagoon, she is now threatened by rising sea levels. One of the singular features of the European city is its ability to display a style and an aura that far transcend the material, functional role assigned to a dense, structured area of habitation. None embodies this originality better than Venice, that amphibious, fantastical creature immersed in her lagoon. In Watermark, the brilliant essay he dedicated to the city, the Nobel Literature Laureate Joseph Brodsky somewhat ironically observes: ‘I should say that, good though this place is for honeymoons, I’ve often thought it should be tried for divorces also.’ In this way, he was highlighting its dual nature as a location where both joyful, hopeful dreams and those that end in failure are able to crystallize.

‘LA SERENISSIMA’ The unique influence exerted by this city, which stands at the northern edge of the Adriatic Sea, is of long duration. An urban area was first established in the middle of the Realtine Islands during the ninth and tenth centuries, as a result of the amalgamation of several older districts that had hitherto been separate. Subsequently, Venice quickly evolved as a city with a dual face. One of Europe’s principal Mediterranean ports (even becoming the capital of the ‘world-economy’ in the sixteenth century, as described by Fernand Braudel), she was also the focal point for the veneration of Saint Mark the Evangelist. According to the legend, Venetian merchants had managed to take the saint’s remains from the Saracens in Alexandria in about 830 CE. And indeed, they found a fittingly sumptuous place of rest in the Basilica placed under his patronage and dedicated to his memory. Moreover, as time went on, Venice and her patron saint became synonymous with one another. Her treaties were signed in the name of Saint Mark, and it was to him that the cities and states conquered by Venice submitted. The motif of the winged lion holding an open book bearing the inscription Pax tibi Marce, evangelista meus (‘Peace be with you, Mark, my Evangelist’) featured on Venetian coins and was disseminated throughout

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the Mediterranean region. To this day, the omnipresent sculptures of the lions of Saint Mark may still be seen in territories formerly possessed by La Serenissima, the title quickly acquired by the Republic of Venice and used both in the lands of northern Italy and on the shores of the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean. Those in the service of the Republic of Venice were likewise serving Saint Mark and, therefore, God. The association between the city and its patron saint was so strong that it became customary throughout Europe to refer to it simply as ‘San Marco’. The cult of patron saints played an important role in the cultural memory of all European urban societies; in Venice, however, that cult of remembrance took on a particular intensity and exerted exceptional influence.

THE DREAMLIKE SETTING OF A BYGONE WORLD This picture changed completely with the demise of the Republic of Venice following the invasion of the French Revolutionary armies in 1797, a collapse that put an end to over a thousand years of independence, power and magnificence. For the next two centuries, Venice was a meeting place for the artists and writers, bohemian figures and members of the Decadent movement who converged on the city from every corner of Europe. They took the area demarcated by the Rialto and Saint Mark’s Square, turning it into a vast theatre set in which to present the city’s glorious European past in a melancholy, rhapsodic and constantly changing form. That past was now reflected only in the visible radiance of forms from which life had long since fled, like the reflections of the monumental façades of the palazzi in the cloudy waters of the Grand Canal. In addition to the demise of its political independence, the city subsequently experienced economic decay during the Napoleonic era, the rapid decline of its formerly proud working class and the concomitant deterioration of its architectural structures. All these examples of decline undergone by a Republic that had once been so proud of its identity and had reigned as a great European power for centuries have left a particularly striking impression as features belonging to the past have been more fully preserved here than anywhere else. Nowadays Venice is a unique site of memory, insofar as its location in the middle of a lagoon has allowed it to shun modernization. Anyone seeking to transform Venice into a contemporary city would be obliged to destroy it, applying a much more radical approach than with any other city in old Europe, as they would have to do away with its vital substance − its water. Thanks to the omnipresence of that liquid element, an environment foreign to a being as terrestrial as man, Venice − and Venice alone – enables us to share the same experiences as our ancestors in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era. The first of these human experiences involves moving at a slow pace in the absence of any technical means of locomotion. We discover that public space is a precious thing in limited supply when created through the laborious operation of controlling water. Venice takes us on a journey through the past, through a compact, inextricable and haphazard medley of buildings representing highly diverse historical periods, all of which coexist in an indissoluble union. It also shows us that, however hard we strive to achieve security,

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we can only plan and control our lives to a very limited extent. The Venetians have expended huge efforts on applying laws and common sense in their bid to create an urban structure based on respect for the principle of the common good; however, all their striving has come up against the impossibility of mastering that invincible power represented by water and the sea. This is experienced by all visitors to Venice when they find themselves hopelessly lost in her maze of narrow, winding alleys just a few minutes after leaving the tourist offices. Venice is an irrational city − and it may be that very aspect of Venetian reality that we now experience with the greatest intensity; while it can produce a sense of calm, it is equally capable of generating irritation.

THE CITY OF DREAMS AND DEATH Venice − the city that defies all rationality? It would be very interesting to know how the Venetians of former times would have reacted to that judgement passed on their city. For while she appears today as a unique reflection of the Pre-Modern Era, as a protest, formed of stone and water, against fantasies involving absolute faith in progress and technology, in her golden age Venice was seen as a centre where human intelligence and rational creativity flourished. It was to commerce that Venice owed her wealth and influence. Venetian merchants were regarded as the embodiment of the cool-headed trader, guided less by religious conviction and a certain notion of honour than by prosaic calculations and an instinct for making a profit. That human reason, with its capacity for plan making, likewise seems to have formed the basis of the political constitution of the independent Republic of Venice, whose long existence extended from the Early Middle Ages to 1797. In this way, the Venetians were able to endow their city with institutions that brought remarkable stability to Venice and her territorial possessions and aroused the admiration of the entire world. The Venetians were therefore all the more convinced that they could celebrate that constitution, together with the subtle balance of powers that characterized it, as the most perfect example of a prosperous and happy coexistence to be born of human reason. Venice was one of the most cosmopolitan and tolerant European cities of her time. However, she was also responsible for inventing the ghetto, as a decision was made in 1516 to segregate the Jewish population in a site occupied by a former foundry, known in the Venetian language as a geto or gheto. The paintings of the city made by Tintoretto, Titian and Canaletto also reflect those notions of ‘irrationality’ and ‘dreamlikeness’ – yet it would probably never have occurred to an Early Modern Era European to associate such words with Venice. Nevertheless, we now see them as perfectly appropriate ways of describing the city in the lagoon. Five hundred years ago, Venice, the city of dreams and death, was no less famous than she is today, but for very different reasons. At that time, the dreams she inspired were those of wealth and power, and the aspirants in question were those cool-headed traders and bankers. They felt no scruple in having the crusaders pillage Constantinople in 1204 as a way of recovering their debts, and also had four copper horses removed from its hippodrome and brought to Venice; there, they

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were placed on the front façade of Saint Mark’s Basilica, forming a quadriga. Later, those wealthy individuals financed the painters, writers and musicians – from Titian to Tiepolo and from Monteverdi to Goldoni – whose works remain as testaments to the splendours of the city. This was also a time when the words ‘death in Venice’ had nothing to do with Thomas Mann’s novel of 1912 and its tragic hero Gustav von Aschenbach − a writer intoxicated with beauty who falls heavily under La Serenissima’s sensual spell on the beaches of the Lido island. Instead, they referred to the punishment meted out to criminal conspirators against the Venetian state, who were drowned in the lagoon in the dead of night, by order of the authorities. These times are now long past. All that remains is a realm of memory whose uniqueness stems from the intense effect it produces on posterity’s collective imagination − but also from the powerful threat that the modern world poses to its survival. This is partly due to the ever-increasing influx of tourists who come to Venice for events such as the Carnival and the Bienniale, and who are gradually chasing the Venetians out of their own city – its post-war population stood at 180,000, whereas it now has fewer than 60,000 inhabitants. Yet it is also due to the fact that the physical survival of this highly sensitive urban biotope is likewise at risk; it is threatened by rising sea levels, the wakes of speeding motorboats that undermine the foundations of its buildings and the ever-increasing number of giant cruise ships that dock there. Experts today have even come to believe that it is only a matter of time before Venice, that realm of memory overflowing with riches, is no more. Are we drawing nearer to a future when it will only live on through our memories?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Collaborative Work, Storia di Venezia, 12 vols, Rome, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1992–2007. Karsten, Arne, Geschichte Venedigs, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2012. Lane, Frederic C., Venice: A Maritime Republic, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

CHAPTER 42

The Adriatic A crossroads DANIEL BARIC

The Adriatic has enjoyed popularity as a summer retreat since ancient times, yet it is also a conflictual space. As a fault line marking the split between East and West, it holds varied, fragmented and even mutually antagonistic national memories. A semi-enclosed sea, the Adriatic extends over some eight hundred kilometres between the Italian and Balkan peninsulas. According to modern geographers, it is delimited by the seventy-two-kilometre-long Otranto Channel, which separates it from the Ionian Sea. Although it is a modestly sized maritime space, its low average depth and the short distance between its opposite coastlines have facilitated its standing as a crossroads of civilizations, given its geographical location between Greece and Italy. Its thousands of kilometres of coastline extend along markedly contrasting landforms. Its western shore, which has no natural obstacles, stands opposite a deeply indented coastline dominated by the Dinaric Alps and edged with countless islands. These geographical features explain the diverse character of the region’s peoples, so long affected by the difficulties involved in establishing a landbased means communication along the eastern coasts. Consequently, the sea was the favoured way of maintaining contact between these neighbours, and, of course, between the inhabitants of the east and west coasts. Yet this has not prevented each of these linguistic and national communities from preserving their own specific memories connected with the Adriatic.

BOUNDARY LINES AND CIRCULATING BELIEFS The worlds of Italy, the Balkans and Central Europe all converge within the Adriatic space, which is characterized by fracture and contains multiple, shifting political borders. In the past, these marked the division between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires; today, they lie between the European Union and candidate countries for EU membership. This interstitial space was once set between the worlds of Rome, Illyria and Greece, then between those of the medieval and modern imperial powers − the Venetians, the Byzantines and the Arabs − and later between

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the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. It was the focus of a centuries-old fight to gain unfettered access to the Mediterranean, if possible, in the form of a monopoly. After the Second World War, the two coastlines were once more divided as the Iron Curtain descended from the Baltic to the Adriatic. At Trieste, as Paul Morand observes: ‘The Italian-Yugoslav border divides two worlds; facing one is Asia, and those state-controlled lands that swallow up individuality as the plain imbibes the sand’.1 This description may seem uncompromising, yet it is an apt one, for the issue of Europe’s borders is constantly resurfacing at the edges of the Adriatic. While the shoreline played the role of an internal channel of communication between peoples separated by mountain ranges, the few coastal plains situated on the western side of the Balkans were used by conquering forces as entry and departure points. The Via Egnatia started at the Balkan port of Dyrrachion (Durrës) and was used as a point of entry for those arriving from the West, serving this purpose from the Age of Antiquity up to the arrival of Italian troops in 1939. Conversely, the transmission of topographical knowledge also served the ambitions of those preparing to seize possession of the opposite coastline, as a prelude to a confrontation with the West. These include Pyrrhus of Epirus during his conflict with Rome in the third century BCE; the Byzantine Empire, which had established bridgeheads in southern Italy; and the Ottomans, who arrived on the Adriatic by way of the Via Egnatia in 1385 and launched a flotilla with the aim of conquering Italy a century later. Located at the centre of an East-West divide within a continent, the Adriatic was favoured as a transport route conveying not only goods and people but also beliefs, thereby connecting the North to the South. From the sixth century BCE, the Greeks peopled its expanse with their gods and heroes. Continuing northwards on their explorations, they crossed the Otranto Channel and ventured onto the islands. The memory of Ulysses’s unfortunate companion Diomedes, said to have disappeared on an island in the Adriatic, in an area then still unfamiliar to the Greeks, was venerated on the island of Palagruža/Pelagosa, in the central Adriatic Basin, as confirmed by recent archaeological excavations. According to a long-held tradition, the Tremiti Islands − also known as the Diomedean Islands − off the mountainous Gargano coast had the honour of receiving this demigod. In fact, the Adriatic’s ancient toponymy, being rooted in Homeric Greek culture, served as a cultural portolan enabling Greek navigators to find their bearings in that sea, perceived as hostile. The tragic history of Diomedes was a myth based on welcoming lands that accompanied the Greeks on their progress northwards. From then on, beliefs circulated within and beyond the Adriatic, forming the basis of a shared memory transcending linguistic differences. This manifested itself as an imperial cult established throughout the Adriatic, which was gradually incorporated into the Roman Empire. The Christian faith spread simultaneously from Rome and Constantinople. The Exarchate of Ravenna, an administrative centre of Byzantine government, disseminated examples of Byzantine religious architecture long after direct links to the capital of the Eastern Empire had become weaker, as is borne out by the mosaics in Istra (Poreč/Parenzo). The relics of Saint Nicholas, held in Bari, are venerated

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by pilgrims faithful to Rome and Eastern Orthodox believers alike; the Cathedral receives worshippers from both faiths, as does the Church of Saint Luke in Kotor/ Cattaro, with its two altars. Saint Mark, sent by Saint Peter to convert the peoples inhabiting the Adriatic coasts, came to Aquileia and ran aground on his way back to Rome, near the lagoon that was to become the location of the city of Venice. According to legend, he was visited by an angel, who informed him that this would be his final resting place. The angel’s greeting Pax tibi Marce, evangelista meus (‘Peace be with you, Mark, my Evangelist’) appears in countless forms, on stone, on painters’ canvases − wherever the lion representing Saint Mark, the embodiment of La Serenissima, has placed his paw. In 1848, the emblem was adopted as a logo by the Trieste-based Generali insurance company, thereby ensuring that the winged lion had a worldwide presence. Meanwhile, the short-lived Republic of San Marco, which was established during the People’s Spring and whose tricolour flag bore the lion emblem, ceased to exist, just as the thousand-year-old maritime Republic had vanished half a century earlier. This same process of dissemination was at work in the case of the cult of the Santa Casa of Loreto. According to legend, the Virgin Mary’s former home in Nazareth was initially transported by angels to a hill at Trsat, at the gateway to the city of Rijeka/Fiume. Later, in 1294, the house was enshrined in the Basilica at Loreto in Italy’s Marche region, a territory that remained under the jurisdiction of the Holy See for several centuries. The church built at the first site, situated on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, continued to attract large numbers of believers; these were no longer permitted to go on pilgrimages to foreign lands following a decision made by the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa. Having spread across both sides of the Adriatic, these cults and symbols became European; they were then disseminated throughout the world.

FRAGMENTED MEMORIES Seemingly impenetrable memories were formed on either side of the linguistic divide − heroic myths that were reinterpreted when the Modern Era, which had been dominated by empires, gave way to that of nation states. The metaphorical marriage between the Venetian Republic and the sea took place a few years before the year 1000. The union was symbolically sealed when the doge of Venice, Pietro Orseolo II, cast a consecrated ring into the waters. This act became the justification for Venetian, and subsequently Italian imperialism: ‘We wed thee, Sea, as a sign of true and perpetual domination’ (Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii). In the nineteenth century, the Venetian politics of the Stato da mar were incorporated into the irredentist claims made by Italian patriots on either side of the sea. The presence of the Lion of Saint Mark was presented as sufficient proof that the Adriatic belonged to the Italian state, despite the fact that native Italian speakers were in the minority on the sea’s eastern shores. This triggered a war of memories between Italians and Southern Slavs, centring on the figure of the lion. It did not break out when the Venetian Republic fell in 1797, but during the interwar period, when it became a highly charged political issue as new borders were being drawn over the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian

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Empire. Certain sculptures were taken by Italian troops at the end of the First World War and put on display at the Museum in Zadar/Zara, which had become an Italian enclave in Dalmatia. In 1928, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s rhetoric on the Italian character of the lion met with a riposte in the form of a poem by Croatian writer Rikard Katalinić Jeretov: ‘Down With the Lion!’ (Skidajte lava!). One could measure tensions between Italy and Yugoslavia through the acts of mutilation that were carried out on the Venetian emblem, effectively serving as a seismograph. In 1932, some particularly fine examples of sculpted lions were damaged at Trogir. Although this act was immediately condemned by the historian and curator Ljubo Karaman, his reaction included a reference to the treatment of Slav tombstones at Istria, which had likewise been vandalized. When Berlin fell in April 1945, and when Yugoslav troops left Trieste in October 1954, the Venetian lions attracted opprobrium through their association with memories of fascist Italy. The end of the Second World War, which saw Trieste occupied by Josip Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans, was marked by assassinations and the mass emigration of the Italian-speaking population from Istria and Dalmatia. These events lie at the heart of the traumatic collective memory of exiled Italians, especially in Trieste, Rome, and in the Marche region. New museums were created in those localities, together with associations of a political character such as the Libero Comune di Zara in Esilio, founded in Ancona in 1963, all of which were intended to perpetuate the memory of an Italian presence on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. That memory was initially confined to the family circles involved, insofar as the Italian state sought to cooperate with Tito’s Yugoslavia, a chink in the armour of the Communist bloc during the Cold War era, and, in the case of Trieste alone, it had a certain political resonance. The National Memorial Day, or Giorno del Ricordo, was not officially established in Italy until after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the end of the wars of independence. Observed for the first time in 2004, it commemorates the victims of the Foibe Massacres, who were thrown into limestone pits used as mass graves, and of the period of exile from 1943 to 1955. These phases of confrontation are consistent with a more ancient antagonism between Italians and Yugoslavs, as exemplified by the Uskoks, Croatian pirates who travelled in light vessels, preying upon the ships that circulated in the northern Adriatic. Their strongholds, which were destroyed in 1617, were located between Senj and Rijeka, an intolerable presence for the Venetians and an undefendable one for the Austrians. The annihilation of the pirates generated an abundance of narratives, both oral and written. In this way, Venice became the focus of an anti-myth, a dark legend involving La Dominante’s exploitation of the Croats and her monopolization of the riches to be found in the coastal areas. An updated version of the Uskoks’ story was published in Switzerland in 1941. It was written by German author Kurt Held, who created the fictitious literary character Red Zora (Die Rote Zora). This tale of a rebellion against an established power, regenerated through its heroic female figure – an adolescent girl − became one of the best-loved children’s books in the post-war German-speaking world. A television adaptation of her story was made in 1979, followed by a big screen version in 2008, extending her popularity beyond the German-speaking nations. The book was translated into Serbian in 1952, and

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included the subtitle ‘a novel of the Adriatic coast’ (roman sa obale Jadrana). There was no Croatian translation, however – the more distanced one is from the Adriatic, the greater the power exerted by the collective imaginary associated with it. Ideological fault lines cut across each of the societies within the Adriatic space, generating official realms of memory that are soon replaced by others. The Memorial at Redipuglia, created in the vicinity of Trieste after the First World War, was effaced from national Italian memory following the rejection of fascism, while monuments to Yugoslav Partisans often gave way to those commemorating victims of the wars of independence in the early 1990s.

BEYOND NATIONS – MEMORIES OF EMPIRE As demonstrated by Zora’s success, the Adriatic has regularly offered Central Europe a promising setting in which to pursue its Mediterranean dream. The Habsburg Empire secured the loyalty of its cities in the fourteenth century, beginning with that of Trieste. It was tireless in pursuit of its maritime vocation, which developed over successive centuries and was reinforced by the addition of the kingdom of Hungary, which had itself been united with that of Croatia since the twelfth century. Trieste and Rijeka were accorded the status of Free Port Cities in 1719 and 1723, respectively, accelerating a process that saw Austria’s Habsburg sovereigns, the emperors of the former Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, inheriting the spoils of Venice and her Dalmatian dominions in 1815. From then on, the imperial eagle maintained its position in relation to the lion. After the turbulent Napoleonic period, which brought down the Republics of Venice and Ragusa, a local collective memory manifested itself. Common to both the populace and erudite circles, it was more favourable towards the reforms undertaken in the Illyrian provinces attached to the French Empire. The development of this positive recollection countered an Austrian government that appeared set in its ways. The Austrian navy’s victory over Italy near the island of Vis/Lissa in 1866 confirmed the enduring, powerful attraction felt towards the Adriatic, which was accompanied from then on by a more proactive policy of highlighting its potential. A rostral column was inaugurated in Vienna’s Praterstern in honour of the victorious admiral, Wilhelm von Tegetthoff. The Austrian authorities encouraged archaeological research. In 1914, the Archaeological Museum in Split, which had been founded in the 1820s like that of Athens, was installed in a vast edifice built to resemble an imposing Roman villa, as with the Museum at Carnuntum on the Danube near Vienna. The monumental amphitheatre at Pula was restored while the Austro-Hungarian navy was using the city’s harbour as a base. A new Central European imperial power was built on the foundations of a shared Roman past – that prestigious empire, which had encompassed many faiths, had also been tolerant and homogeneous. A large exhibition devoted to Austria’s maritime exploits was inaugurated in Vienna in 1913. Nor had Budapest lagged behind. In 1846, Lajos Kossuth, a major figure in Hungary’s political life, urged the Hungarian people to take control of their destiny and rise to the challenge presented by the Adriatic, issuing the inspiring rallying cry, Tengerhez magyar! (‘To the sea, Hungarians!’).

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The Adriatic also held dreams of Ottoman conquest. For several centuries, faced with the sultans’ advances over land and sea, Venice was unable to maintain control over more than a very narrow area along the coast, which threatened to fall with each new war. Those resistance efforts are reflected in the presence of fortresses all along the eastern shore. From 1535 to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the period when the Ottoman Empire had reached the fullest extent of its expansion there, the Adriatic could be viewed as an Ottoman sea. Following the withdrawal of the Ottomans, there was a long period of uncertainty over what should be done with a series of buildings. The caravanserai at Lake Vrana in Dalmatia was built at the westernmost point of the Ottomans’ dominions in Europe by Jusuf Mašković, a local figure who had become a high dignitary and had converted to Islam. After several centuries of relative neglect, it was refurbished with backing from the European Union and is now a new tourist attraction. It remains to be seen whether the architectural object will find its place as a realm of memory pertaining to the third imperial presence, together with that of Venice and the Habsburgs, that occupied this site with its triple, shifting frontier; the subject of regular renegotiations in the Modern Era, it was known as the triplex confinium. The political borders established through treaties also became cultural demarcation lines. Different memories formed within the nation states that now extend along the shores of the Adriatic. The urban communities on which Venice or Austria left more of a mark developed a particular relationship with the former imperial metropolis. The seaside resort of Opatija/Abbazia has recently renamed its coastal promenade after Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, who made frequent visits to the Austrian Riviera. The heraldic and architectural symbols of Venice remain as visible traces of that centuries-old presence, which has become primarily patrimonial in character now that border issues between the former imperial powers are a thing of the past.

THE HOMO ADRIATICUS The set of features characterizing the languages and cultures that developed and intermixed in the Adriatic region seems to have generated distinctive traits that transcend religious, imperial and national affiliations. Consequently, the multitude of memories that coexist within this space contain certain unvarying elements. It has no shortage of key figures, beginning with that of the translator. Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, is traditionally said to have been born in Dalmatia. There, as is the case elsewhere in Europe, the link established with the world of ancient Greece forms part of the intellectual universe. The Renaissance was particularly rich in personalities responsible for the emergence of a body of literary works, written in various languages both ancient and modern, which drew on these rediscovered cultural strata. During the unsettled times of the Ottoman incursions, the Humanist poet Petar Hektorović (1487–1572) built a home on the island of Hvar, former site of the colony of Pharos. Intended as a refuge and fortified against attack, its walls bear ancient inscriptions in Latin, Italian and Croatian. Of course, references to Antiquity made in Humanist circles, and later by the writers forming

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part of different national canons, did not fulfil the same function. Beliefs that had continued in the tradition of their Illyrian ancestors disappeared from Southern Slav society during the nineteenth century. Yet the events of the ancient past, like that of the Illyrian resistance to Rome, were the subject of constant retellings; Dimitrija Demeter’s play Teuta (1844) was a Croatian classic. This type of representation of Adriatic history may be found in Albania, where the memory of the fight against the Romans led by Teuta, the widow of the Illyrian king Agron, from 229 to 219 BCE, is regularly related in updated versions. Present-day Albania was once part of the much larger Illyrian territories. In 2002, while highlighting the specific identity of this area, the official Albanian historiography developed by the Academy of Sciences emphasized the benefits of ‘integration into the progressivist civilisation of the Mediterranean’. Even the politically motivated demolition of a monument does not necessarily mean that a shared heritage of recollection has been rejected by the population as a whole. The monumental fountain at Split, inaugurated in 1880, was destroyed in 1947 as the fasces lictoriae that adorned it were mistakenly interpreted as a fascist symbol. In fact, it had been funded through contributions made by the city’s numerous inhabitants, Italian and Croatian native speakers alike. Afterwards, fragments of the fountain were carefully hidden away in family homes, only resurfacing at the end of the last century. The fountain at Split is a realm of memory that has now vanished from the public space and is unknown to tourists, yet it is increasingly present in the social imaginary of the city’s inhabitants. As reflected in the traditions fostered through the vocal ensemble Dialogos, whose repertoire includes both written and orally transmitted chants from either side of the sea, one might agree with Fernand Braudel’s suggestion that the Adriatic ‘may be the most coherent of all the maritime regions’ in the Mediterranean. This is because ‘everything contributes to the construction of a homogenous Adriatic world’. Individuals living on its shores, whatever their social or national origins, have been developing a more integrative relationship with the past over the centuries.

FROM DEATH IN VENICE TO THE DEATH OF VENICE – A COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF FRAGILITY Stories of the profusion of riches accumulated in Venice were transmitted all over Europe in the medieval era by the merchants and travellers who stayed in the city, grouped into linguistic communities. The various branches of collective European memory have developed from lived experience. In this sense, there is an obvious continuity, what with the irresistible attraction of sea bathing and of contemplating a bygone past that has remained a cultural model throughout Europe. Gustav von Aschenbach’s fatal stay on the Lido Island in Thomas Mann’s novel Death in Venice is the culmination of a longing for the Adriatic that had begun in Munich. In Venice, Aschenbach meets other tourists on holiday, from England and Central Europe. Trains had been running from Vienna to the city since the mid-nineteenth

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century, and the Gulf of Venice in the northern Adriatic was developed to meet the needs of a clientele accustomed to the comforts of luxury hotels. The promotion of local cultural heritage accompanied early initiatives to establish the Brijuni Islands, Opatija, Venice and Ravenna as tourist destinations. The efforts expended by local communities in maintaining and preserving their cultural legacies were recognized when these were inscribed on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites. In the tradition of preserving a past that is far from being exclusively national, they include the Stari Grad Plain on the island of Hvar, the Palace of Diocletian, the Basilica at Ravenna and the Episcopal Complex of the Euphrasian Basilica at Poreč, Saint Mark’s Square and the Riva degli Schiavoni and the old cities of Dubrovnik and Kotor. The success of this approach has created a tension, with the influx of tourists threatening vulnerable monuments. Just how many decibels and visitors can a Roman edifice withstand? The obsession with the death of Venice has been exercising the European conscience from the writings of John Ruskin and Maurice Barrès to the present day. Collective memories are now converging on the Adriatic space, its fragile nature presenting a new sphere of action.

NOTE 1. Paul Morand, Venices, translated from the French by Euan Cameron, London, The Pushkin Press, 2002 (1971).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ballinger, Pamela, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003. Baric, Daniel, Jacques Le Rider and Drago Roksandić (Eds.), Mémoire et histoire en Europe centrale et orientale, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010. Bosetti, Gilbert, De Trieste à Dubrovnik: une ligne de fracture de l’Europe, Grenoble, Éditions littéraires et linguistiques de l’université de Grenoble, 2006. Cabanes, Pierre (Ed.), Histoire de l’Adriatique, Paris, Le Seuil, 2001. Falaschini, Nadia, Sante Graciotti and Sergio Sconocchia (Eds.), Homo adriaticus. Identità culturale e autocoscienza attraverso i secoli, Parma, Diabasis, 1998. Ivetic, Egidio, Un confine nel Mediterraneo. L’Adriatico orientale tra Italia e Slavia (1300–1900), Rome, Viella, 2014. Livljanić, Katarina (Ed.), Terra Adriatica, CD, Dialogos, 1998. Morand, Paul, Venises, Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘L’Imaginaire’, 1983 [1971]. Rada, Uwe, Die Adria. Die Wiederentdeckung eines Sehnsuchtsortes, Munich, Pantheon, 2014. Roksandić, Drago, Triplex Confinium, Zagreb, Barbat, 2003. Turri, Eugenio (Ed.), Adriatico mare d’Europa, 3 vols, Bologna, Rolo Banca, 1999–2001.

CHAPTER 43

Constantinople, Byzantium, Istanbul The metamorphoses of a gateway city HAMIT BOZARSLAN

A bridge between two continents separated by the Bosphorus, Constantinople was also known as Byzantium before it became Istanbul. It was shaped first by its Roman origins and subsequently by the various peoples and communities who successively inhabited it. As a city that has ceaselessly reinvented itself in turbulent circumstances, it is a space where European memories converge. A two thousand-year-old city, Istanbul was founded in 330 CE by the Emperor Constantine, thereby providing the Roman Empire with an Eastern capital. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, the city became the capital of a new entity, the Byzantine Empire, whose name seems to have originated from that of Byzas, the son of Poseidon and Keroessa, and grandson of Zeus. The capital, which was regarded as the ‘Second Rome’, acquired a wealth of impressive monuments over the centuries. These include the Hagia Sophia, the Hippodrome and the Basilica Cistern. The heart of the Orthodox world, it was nevertheless pillaged in 1204 by the crusaders, who were more interested in its riches than in landlocked Jerusalem, and later ravaged by the Black Death (1345–55). The final blow was dealt on 29 May 1453; then, abandoned by the Latin Christian world, fragmented and estranged from that of Orthodox Christianity, the city succumbed to the attack launched by the young Mehmet II, known as the Conqueror.

THE FALL OF BYZANTIUM The Ottoman victory, which put an end to the ‘Eastern Roman Empire’, marked a historical break − it was also a violent one. Constantine XI and his five thousand ill-equipped troops refused to capitulate, thereby justifying, in the eyes of the city’s new master, the ensuing pillaging and massacres. Some four thousand inhabitants, including a number of dignitaries, were killed in the space of three days, while others were taken prisoner. The Orthodox Church, which had lost its leader, was

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put into the hands of Gennadius II Scholarios, a dissident who had previously fallen into disgrace for having opposed the union between the Eastern and Western Churches and for having developed a sympathetic stance towards the Ottomans. The Constantinopolitan Greeks known as the Polites, only a handful of whom remained in the city, acquired the status of a confessional community under the ‘Millet System’; although subject to Ottoman supremacy, they were allowed to regulate their own affairs. This was likewise the case for the Armenians, whom the new sultan had installed in his capital in order to counter the lack of a qualified workforce. Occurring four decades after a period of Fetret (interregnum and discord) that almost led to the demise of the Osman dynasty, the conquest of Constantinople effectively marked the birth the Ottoman Empire. The largest Muslim victory over the Christian world, it fulfilled a prophecy made by Mohammed, yet it also marked a radical break with Islam. Mehmet II, who assumed the title kayzer-i Iklim-i Rum (the ‘Caesar’ of the Roman Lands), did indeed regard his own empire as the Third Rome and the heir to Byzantium, rather than the ‘anti-Rome’. This title was surely not challenged by certain Greek dignitaries who enjoyed a position of considerable superiority over other inhabitants in the capital, particularly Turks and Armenians, due to their long-established presence there: ‘Let no one doubt that you are the Emperor of Rome, for he who has de facto possession of the heart of the Empire is the Emperor, and Constantinople is the heart of the Roman Empire.’ A medal bearing his effigy, struck after his death, presented Mehmet II as Bizantii Imperatoris et Ottomanum Turcarum Imperator (Byzantine Emperor and Emperor of the Ottoman Turks). These titles were also adopted by his successors Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent.

OTTOMAN ISTANBUL During the centuries that followed, the urban space was ‘Ottomanized’ by hundreds of new buildings; these included the Blue Mosque, a rival for Hagia Sophia, which had itself been converted into a mosque, and Topkapi Palace. Order reigned in the capital of the ‘Great Turk’, which was shared by the three religions and their authorities, brotherhoods and guilds. Istanbul was open to the European traders and diplomats who admired it, but the city also experienced a few mass movements, one such example being the ‘fever of fanaticism’ displayed by followers of the preacher Kadizade Mehmed Efendi (1582–1635), who organized anti-Jewish campaigns in the reign of Murat IV (1623–40). Above all, however, it was teeming with palace intrigues, resulting in the murders of the sultans’ brothers (and sometimes their own sons) or in the executions of Grand Vizirs and Vizirs ‘for reasons of state’. Although these acts, which almost became commonplace, took place behind thick palace walls and remained unseen, the same could not be said of the insurrections carried out by the Janissaries. These soldiers, who belonged to elite Ottoman infantry units, periodically expressed their discontent by killing their leaders and erecting a Vakvak, a reference to a mythological tree whose leaves were said to be formed of human skulls.

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The early nineteenth century witnessed the collapse of the mysterious, arcane world of the former Ottoman Empire, which fascinated the travellers of the time and continues to enthral present-day fans of TV period dramas set in the former Ottoman territories. The year 1808 saw a new insurrection carried out by the Janissaries and a dual regicide, that of Selim III, known as the Reformer, who was accused of disrespecting Sharia Law, and his highly conservative successor, Mustafa IV. These military units were abolished in 1826, an act accompanied by many executions. Between those two dates, the capital abandoned the claim that it embodied the nizam-i alem (universal order), replacing it with the more modest one of representing a new order − nizam-i cedid. The ambitions of the Ottoman rulers became clearer with the adoption of the reforms known as Tanzimat (‘re-organizations’, carried out between 1839 and 1876). Threatened on several occasions by the Russian armies, Istanbul became modernized; new palaces were built for its all-powerful bureaucrats and later for its ‘Red Sultan’, Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909). At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was an ‘international city’, where readers, defying censorship, sought out copies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus in the bookshops of the Pera district. Alexander Pushkin saw this ‘Europeanization’ as a sign heralding a fatal fall: Istanbul is now praised by the giaurs [infidels] But tomorrow they will crush it, Like a sleeping snake, with their iron heel And they will depart, leaving it thus. Istanbul fell asleep before the catastrophe. Istanbul has rejected the Prophet; The truth of the Old East, The treachery of the West has covered it with its shadow. Istanbul has betrayed prayer and the sabre For the delights of vice Istanbul no longer acknowledges the sweat of combatants And drinks wine at the hour of prayer. Several decades later, the Turkish poet Tevfik Fikret (1867–1915) delivered his own stern verdict on the Ottoman capital: [Istanbul]! You, O virgin widow of one thousand husbands How many unsullied brows will be able to show themselves Among the millions of corpses that you hold? O splendours, great pomp, glories and ceremonies Murderous towers, palaces with fortress-gaols O, the national effort that you abuse and humiliate O, your political prisoners; the sword and the pen. The apocalyptic event predicted by Pushkin did indeed occur, but it struck the empire more than its capital. In 1908, yielding to the ultimatum issued by insurgent officers, Abdul Hamid II reinstated the Ottoman Constitution, which had been suspended

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a few months after its adoption in 1876. Dubbed the ‘French Revolution in the East’ by French observers, including Jean Jaurès, this ‘Proclamation of Freedom’ nevertheless served as a prelude to very dark days. In 1909, a counter-insurrection organized by some sections of the army ended in numerous public executions. The First Balkan War of 1912 dramatically reduced the Ottoman presence in the Balkans; it was followed, in 1913, by the coup d’état launched by members of the Committee of Union and Progress, which inaugurated the first single-party state in history after the assassination of the Prime Minister Mahmud Shevket Pasha and the elimination of liberal politicians. The infamous ‘Istanbul conference’, which led to the Armenian genocide, was held in the city in the spring of 1915, shortly after the empire and its allies entered the First World War and suffered its first defeats. Occupied by British and French forces in 1919, the capital became a place of refuge for members of various ‘losing sides’. These included representatives of the liberal Turkish opposition, surviving Armenians and White Russians. A decade later, Leon Trotsky was also to experience a period of exile in Istanbul, just as his former foes had done before him. In the autumn of 1922 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s troops liberated the city, only to remove its status as capital in favour of Ankara, then hardly more than a small town. After a few years of worsening health, the ‘Eternal Chief ’ died in one of his palaces on 10 November 1938.

A MULTILAYERED SOCIETY The demographics of Asia Minor changed dramatically between 1915, when the Armenian genocide took place, and 1923, the date of a compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The number of Armenians and Greeks living within the borders of present-day Turkey dropped from over three million in the last days of the empire to 176,116 in 1927. Nevertheless, Istanbul remained a multi-ethnic, multireligious ‘imperial’ city until the anti-Greek pogroms of 6 and 7 September 1955. In response to a rumour that the house in Thessaloniki where Atatürk was born had been bombed – a complete fabrication on the part of the Turkish secret service – a crowd of one hundred thousand people, including men wearing ties and women in Western clothing, went on the rampage. They destroyed not only Greek but also Armenian and Jewish homes, places of worship and schools. A large proportion of the city’s Greek population left to settle in Athens, Thessaloniki and elsewhere in Europe, carrying with them the memory of those doleful places and times. Other Greeks, who did not have Turkish nationality, were expelled from the city in 1964. Fifteen years later, in the wake of the turbulent episodes of 1968, a year that had a seismic effect on Europe and the world, Istanbul became the ‘capital’ of Turkey’s left-wing movement. A number of leading figures of the radical left lost their lives under the military regimes of 1971–3 and 1980–3. On 16 February 1969, a day now known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, an anti-American demonstration on Taksim Square was attacked by religious militants and those of the radical right. The largest mass protest ever seen in the country took place on 15 and 16 June 1970, when hundreds

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and thousands of workers occupied the city. In 1977, when Turkey was virtually in a state of civil war, the May Day celebrations on Taksim Square ended in tragedy; a shooting carried out by ‘unidentified’ perpetrators resulted in thirty-four deaths. In 1995, the target was a café in the Gazi district, a neighbourhood with a substantial Alevi community, whose faith is inspired by Shiism; around forty people died in the ensuing violence. A year earlier, the young Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had won a victory in the municipal elections. Since then, Islamist conservativism has remained entrenched in Istanbul. However, in the summer of 2013 the city was the scene of a new surge involving a broad range of left-wing activists, from proEuropean militants to supporters of an armed Socialist revolution. The event that took place that summer encapsulated all the complexity of the city’s multiple layers of memory. Erdoğan, who had become prime minister, announced that he would be demolishing Gezi Park (‘The Promenade Park’), which had been created on the site of an old Armenian cemetery. His intention was to rebuild the Ottoman artillery barracks that had formerly stood there – and whose architect had also been Armenian! Campaigners defending their green space occupied the park for several weeks; the subsequent repression of the protest resulted in eight deaths and thousands of injuries. Istanbul had a population of around one million at the dawn of the twentieth century, a figure that had risen to two million by 1970; it is now a sprawling city with fifteen million inhabitants. It is vulnerable to seismic events (the earthquake of 1999 resulted in seventeen thousand deaths) and ecological disasters (a large number of vessels laden with hazardous products pass through the Strait of Istanbul on a daily basis). The Ottoman heart of the city − Topkapi Place, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and dozens of other historic buildings − has been preserved. Moreover, visitors strolling through the streets of the Pera district can still see evidence of the Westernization of its elites that took place during the nineteenth century. This is not the case, however, with the rest of Istanbul, whose blocks of flats extend as far as the district of Tekirdağ to the north, near the Bulgarian border, and to the edge of the province of Kocaeli to the south. The name ‘Constantinople’, which clearly connects it to Christian history, was still widely used in the early twentieth century but was subsequently banned in Turkey. Yet ‘Istanbul’, supposedly more Turkish and therefore Muslim in character, actually derives from the expression eis tên polin, which means ‘toward the city’ in Greek. Istanbul is also a place of migration, both permanent and temporary. The districts that previously housed religious ‘minorities’ are now inhabited by Kurds and by African, Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian migrants. The former group, expelled from their villages in Kurdistan, share similar memories to those of the Armenian, Greek, Jewish and Roma communities who disappeared or were marginalized. The latter groups are making a temporary stopover in the city – a stay that might last several years – before entering Europe via the land route or the Aegean Sea. Only the most fortunate among them succeed in carrying memories of Istanbul’s narrow streets to pastures new.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Déroche, Vincent and Nicolas Vatin, Constantinople 1453: Des Byzantins aux Ottomans, Toulouse, Anacharsis, 2016. Georgeon, François, ‘Istanbul’, in François Georgeon, Nicolas Vatin and Gilles Veinstein (Eds.), Dictionnaire de l’Empire ottoman, Paris, Fayard, 2015, pp. 610–26. Mantran, Robert, La vie quotidienne à Istanbul au siècle de Soliman le Magnifique, Paris, Hachette, 1990. Vatin, Nicolas and Gilles Veinstein, Le Sérail ébranlé. Essai sur les morts, dépositions et avènements des sultans ottomans, XIV e-XIX e siècle, Paris, Fayard, 2003. Yérasimos, Stéphane, La Fondation de Constantinople et de Sainte-Sophie dans les traditions turques: légendes d’Empire, Paris, IFEA / Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1990.

CHAPTER 44

The Balkans confined NENAD STEFANOV

References to the Balkans, formerly known as the ‘Turkey of Europe’, bring to mind stereotypical ideas of atavistic violence, astonishing vitality and frenetic music. This powerful folkloric image was relayed by the burlesque, tragic films of Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica and contested by Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, who saw the fragmented character of the Balkans as the result of fractures between social classes rather than ethnicities. A whole host of clichés spring to mind in association with the Balkans – from the ‘noble savages’ of Karl May’s novel Through the Gorges of the Balkans (1908) to the explicitly negative image of the ‘Balkan powder keg’ presented in the newspapers of Western European cities at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and including the exotic imaginary country of ‘Syldavia’ created by Hergé. That exoticism is generally tinged with Orientalism, as demonstrated by Maria Todorova in her major work, Imagining the Balkans. However, all these representations of the Balkans originating from bygone times may also be losing their relevance. Certain connotations have sunk into oblivion, giving way to new definitions. Proof of this is provided by the Yugoslavian restaurants that sprang up everywhere in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, almost all of which, from Frankfurt to Berlin, were called Balkan-Grill or advertised their particular speciality with the words: ‘the cuisine of the Balkans’. These even resurface as recollections in contemporary German novels such as Sven Regener’s Neue Vahr Süd (2004). These, then, are mobile stereotypes − one only has to examine how the toponyms in use in that region of Southern Europe evolved in Western Europe.

EUROPEAN TURKEY If we study the history of the term ‘Balkans’, as used to designate the region we now know by that name, and, more specifically, the eponymous mountain range in present-day Bulgaria, we learn that the principal name used in ancient times was ‘Hemus’ (Hæmus). That term was retained in Western Europe until the Early Modern Era. The word ‘Rumelia’ was introduced when the Ottomans established their dominance in that part of Europe. The terms Rum or rumeli elayet derived

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from a Byzantine context, as its governing elites regarded themselves as Romaion or Romans. In this way, Rum-Ili was literally ‘the land of the Romans’. Besides ‘Rumelia’, which essentially referred to the southern section of the Balkan peninsula, the term generally used in the nineteenth century was ‘European Turkey’. The Ottomans used the word ‘Balkans’ to describe the central part of the peninsula, particularly the mountains it contained. In the Turkish language, ‘Balkans’ signifies, among other things, ‘stony terrain’. The idea that a different geographical term, besides existing historical designations such as ‘Rumelia’ and ‘European Turkey’, might be used as a clearer way of defining the region’s specific features gradually developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The German geographer August Zeune extended the term ‘Balkan’ (mountain) to encompass the whole of the peninsula – the Balkan peninsula. He shared the widespread conviction that the Balkans began at Istria – at the extremity of the Alps – and crossed the entire peninsula, as with the Apennine Range in Italy. This error was corrected by the geologist Ami Boué in the mid-nineteenth century. It did not mean, however, that the name ‘Balkans’ established itself in the minds of Europe’s scholars and ruling elites from then on. Furthermore, Ami Boué’s major work was entitled La Turquie d’Europe (1840).

FROM THE BALKANS TO ‘BALKANIZATION’ A gradual change took shape following the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the creation of new nation states to the detriment of the Ottoman Empire. It was precisely during this time of armed confrontations between the new nation states established on the basis of ethnicity, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, on the one hand, and the Ottoman Empire, on the other, that the use of the term ‘Balkans’ began to spread across the western regions of Europe. The negative connotations it conveyed at that time were primarily linked to the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. That being said, it was not the dream of ethnonational homogeneity or its violent implementation in societies hitherto characterized by great cultural and religious diversity that troubled Western Europe’s ruling elites. What unsettled them was the fact that ‘little’ states that ‘lacked history’ were appropriating their governmental practices and their use of force in order to impose the model of a modern nation state on a territory of smaller dimensions. It was not the use of force that attracted condemnation, nor the desire to create ethnonational entities, but the fragmentation of power within numerous small states – a process that has been dubbed ‘Balkanization’. But in this case too, these connotations were not universally shared. Towards the end of the First World War, the Serb geographer Jovan Cvijić paved the way for ‘anthropogeography’ with his lectures at the Sorbonne. His book La Péninsule balkanique: Géographie humaine, published in Paris in 1918, acquired a certain level of fame in academic circles. The multidimensional character attached to the term ‘Balkans’ endured over the following decades. The name itself was somewhat sidelined during the Cold War, being supplanted by the expression ‘Eastern Bloc’ − at least, in the case of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, although Bulgaria was actually ‘associated’ with the ‘Socialist camp’ under Soviet domination. In these societies, the

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name ‘Balkans’ never had the explicitly negative connotations that emerged during the Yugoslavian crisis in the late 1980s. Nobody there spoke of ‘Balkanization’ as a way of illustrating the risk of disintegration faced by Yugoslavia. Instead, the press spoke of a possible ‘Lebanonization’ – a reference to the fragmentation of the Lebanon, split into different ethno-religious communities in the 1970s. However, the term ‘Balkans’ re-emerged in Western Europe as a result of escalating violence in Yugoslavia, and it was soon used as an explanation for these tragic events. To use the ‘refrigerator’ theory then in vogue in relation to the demise of ‘real Socialism’ and the ensuing upheavals in Eastern Europe, traditional conflicts that had been contained by authoritarian governments were reactivated in the subsequent ‘thawing’ process. These dated from the interwar period or from more distant eras. In this way, there appears to be a continuing connection between the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the 1990s. Fractures and ruptures had not given great cause for concern during the Communist period. The Balkans became a new realm of memory in Western Europe as a result of the wars in Yugoslavia. Fifty years after the end of the Second World War, Western TV viewers were once more confronted with images of cruelty in the very heart of Europe. And two films have made a decisive contribution to the way in which the Balkans are visualized in the Western European public space: Underground, by the director Emir Kusturica, and Ulysses’ Gaze by Theo Angelopoulos.

UNDERGROUND: THE BALKANS ENSNARED BY THEIR OWN VIOLENCE Both were released in 1995, the last year of the war in Bosnia, and appeared at the same edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Kusturica won the Palme d’Or, Angelopoulos, the Grand Jury Prize. It would be impossible to convey the visual complexity of the two films in a just few lines. We will focus instead on examining how, over the last two decades and in different ways, they have enabled us to approach the Balkans as aspects of European collective memory. Of the two, Underground is more connected with the ‘refrigerator’ theory mentioned earlier. It tells the story of a group of resistance fighters in Belgrade during the Second World War. Hidden in a cellar, they manufacture weapons that Marko, a go-between, delivers to the partisans fighting the German occupying forces. Marko, who is raking in a handsome profit, leads his companions to believe that the war is still continuing, although peace has been declared. The group members therefore continue to manufacture the arms, which soon find takers in the new Socialist regime. One day, however, they emerge from the cellar, straight onto the set of a film being made about the partisans. The leader of the small clandestine group, believing the war to be ongoing, kills an actor wearing a German uniform. Although the novel that inspired the film stops at that point, in the 1960s, Kusturica extends the plot into the 1990s. The inhabitants of the cellar are therefore immediately confronted with the Yugoslav wars − there is no transition period. That being said, the conflict had been continuing in a latent form since the Second World War, as suggested by the images. Yet it was the film’s

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presentation, rather than its narrative, that regenerated the image of the Balkans as a place of memory. In this way, it made its mark on Western European popular culture, from advertising to the music industry. The soundtrack features Romani music, whose popularity has since become well established, with its characteristic brass fanfare and asymmetrical Balkan rhythms. Set against that breathtaking soundtrack, the visual sequences showing the characters abandoning themselves fully to life, drink and pleasure succeed one another at a frenetic pace. Violence, intoxication, vitality − all is carried to excess, while war is seen as a plague, a force of nature that has no beginning, no identifiable cause and, consequently, no instigator to be held to account. Kusturica conveys all these associations through his evocative images. On its release, the film was criticized for justifying the wars in Yugoslavia and conforming to the Serbian nationalist vision; yet, setting aside that specific context, in more general terms Kusturica created the Balkans as a visual realm of memory.

ULYSSES’ GAZE: BECOMING PART OF EUROPEAN HISTORY With its focus on the past, its enduring presence in contemporary Balkan societies and, above all, its visualization, Ulysses’ Gaze offers an entirely different image of the Balkans. The quest to find the first film images of the Balkans clearly lies at the heart of Angelopoulos’s film. In this case, too, temporal strata seem to merge through flashbacks – yet successive forms of government and the social conditions in which individual actions take place become evident and, therefore, discernible. The film’s chief protagonist, A., has embarked on a quest to find undeveloped film reels shot by the Manaki brothers. The latter had been photographers and filmmakers in the city of Monastir – then under Ottoman rule, it is now in Macedonia and is known as Bitola. The Manakis had shot the first documentary film showing scenes of daily life in the Balkans, Weavers at Work (1905). A.’s quest leads him to Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia and, finally, Sarajevo in Bosnia. The story of his search is combined with flashbacks showing the lives of the Manaki brothers, scenes from A.’s childhood, the experience of war in the Balkans, the enforced establishment of ‘real Socialism’, the dissolution of various forms of government, the threats represented by new mass movements and the war in Bosnia. Rivers and border crossing points play a major part in the narrative, which forms a chain of visual associations. Yet they are always understood as personal recollections of a brutal exercise of power. The work undertaken by the individual to assimilate the perpetually repeated experience of social fracturing, presented here as the distinctive feature of the Balkans, lies at the heart of the film. In this way, Angelopoulos incorporates the history of the region into that of Europe. But this gaze on the supposed specificity of the Balkans, on what is particular to the area and believed to be shown in the old film reels, turns into a quest, an odyssey. At the same time, one becomes aware of the effort, the work – the memory work, in a sense – that is needed in order to track down visual recollections of the Balkans

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not seen in images associated with governing powers and wars. The conception of the Balkans as a place of memory is characterized by that self-reflexivity. It does not offer an exoticism that would set disturbing events at a reassuring distance. Instead, it gives the spectator who sees the film in a Western European cinema the opportunity to identify with individual memory work in the Balkans. In terms of commercial success, Ulysses’ Gaze was emphatically eclipsed by Underground. The impact of the latter extends far beyond the world of the cinema, whether in Serbia, for instance, or in Western Europe. In both cases, it is linked to the film’s social function. The images it presented enabled European observers of the Yugoslavian tragedy to establish the fact, regretfully yet unequivocally, that this war was the result of mindsets and traditions completely unfamiliar to them − intoxication, virile vitality, a fragile boundary line between bacchanalian abandon and sudden cruelty and, above all, the constant presence of war, so deeply rooted in the Balkans as to be an almost ontological feature of the region. Its timeless character would exonerate the West of all responsibility. That war had seemingly nothing to do with the governmental crises and modern social conflicts that could be dealt with at a political level; it was linked to an archaic culture whose myths shattered any notions of temporality or historicity. It would be too reductive to speak of Orientalism when referring to this type of relationship with the events in Yugoslavia. For the images in Underground offered even Serbian spectators the opportunity to escape the question of responsibility for the country’s descent into war. The conflict appeared to be the result of a destiny that individuals could never escape, of something that had already left its mark on the lives of their parents and forebears. In a situation such as this, characterized by ‘extra-temporality’, there were no precise causes to seek, nor was there any individual responsibility; indeed, this interpretation allowed the question of individual responsibility to be eliminated. Underground presented the myths of ethnonationalism in Serbia in the form of images. Far from being specific to Serbia, these myths manifested themselves in various ways in all Balkan societies at the time. This memory has therefore fulfilled a social function in recent crises and conflicts, a role that has endowed it with crucial importance. Consequently, there is nothing obsolete about Ulysses’ Gaze – quite the reverse.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Mazower, Mark, The Balkans: A Short History, New York: Modern Library, 2000. Sundhaussen, Holm, ‘Europa balcanica. Der Balkan als historischer Raum Europas’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 25 (1999/4): 626–53. Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997.

CHAPTER 45

Prague of a thousand lives JIŘÍ PEŠEK

A state capital for the last one thousand years, the city of Charles IV and Jan Hus, of Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, Prague has simultaneously been Bohemian, Jewish, German and Czech. According to the circumstances involved, it has both motivated and endured Europe’s major episodes, from the Reformation to the Cold War. Its urban landscape bears the traces of that tumultuous history. In the early twentieth century, Guillaume Apollinaire, then aged twenty-two, made a sightseeing trip to Prague. There he wrote a poem whose verses reveal what interested him, how he felt and the effect produced on him by that city, its historic and artistic monuments. They also tell us that in Prague he discovered new things about himself. These fundamental forces at work in the city may explain why it attracts so many enthusiastic visitors, why Europeans (in particular) are drawn to it and why it is regarded as an embodiment – a somewhat mythified one – of European values. You are in the garden at an inn outside of Prague You are completely happy a rose is on the table And instead of getting on with your short-story You watch the rosebug sleeping in the rose’s heart Appalled you see yourself reproduced in the agates of Saint Vitus You were sad near to death to see yourself there You looked as bewildered as Lazarus In the Jewish ghetto the clock runs backwards And you go backwards also through a slow life Climbing the Hradchen listening at nightfall To Bohemian songs in the singing taverns1 In 1537, a map of Europe personified as a woman was published in Paris. It had been drawn by Johannes Putsch (or Bucius), a young humanist and typographer who worked in the service of the Habsburgs as a cartographer. The woman in question was a queen. Her head represented Spain; in her right hand she held Sicily, shown as the orb, while her left hand represented Jutland. Over her heart, Europa Regina wore necklace with a reliquary representing Bohemia, a land surrounded by mountains and forests. Certain successors to Putsch reprised this image, which appeared in

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cosmographical publications and loose sheets throughout the Early Modern Era; works by these successors in particular show just one precious gem set into the reliquary – Prague! That gilded metropolis standing on the banks of the Vltava is the spellbinding city that Europe wears on its heart.

CREATING A NATIONAL IDENTITY Prague had already been presented as the foundational realm of memory forming the basis of Czech identity in the mythical traditions of the Middle Ages. This is illustrated, for instance, by the reference to the city made in the legends of the Přemyslid dynasty, transmitted from the twelfth century in the Chronicle of the Bohemians by Cosmas Pragensis. It is traditionally said that Libuše, a princess and a seer who later married Přemysl, the mythical founder of the dynasty and, thus, became the ancestress of all Czechs, prophesied that Prague would become the city ‘whose glory [would] touch the stars’. Later, nineteenth-century Czech followers of the Romantic movement would adopt those words as their motto. The role played by Prague in creating an identity for the Bohemian crown and the inhabitants of that region was clearly reinforced when the kings of Bohemia became major political figures within the empire and Europe, notably during the era of the Luxembourg dynasty in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Long before it was established as a formal city in the thirteenth century, Prague, situated under the castle complex with Saint Vitus Cathedral and the Romanesque monastery of Saint George, a cradle of Czech literary culture, was the Czech, German, Welche (Latin, as opposed to Germanic) and Jewish centre of the Bohemian state and at the same time a strategically important power centre of the Holy Roman Empire, in many respects. The King of Bohemia and later Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, then attempted to turn Prague into a second Rome, or rather the secular centre of Europe in the fourteenth century, by founding the first university north of the Alps and launching a vast artistic and architectural programme. The decades of his reign number among the greatest chapters in Czech and German history. However, the ‘European’ dimension was often omitted, especially in the context of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury accounts of national history. For the last thousand years, and without interruption, Prague has maintained its status as a metropolis and an intellectual, religious, ideological and political centre, while it continues to embody both the country and the ‘Bohemian’ nation − an almost unique phenomenon in European history. The foundation of the University of Prague by Charles IV in 1348 placed the city at the heart of European intellectual life, in which ecclesiastical politics then played a major role. During the 1380s, the University of Prague was briefly one of the largest and most important in Europe. This was one of the factors driving Bohemia’s Reform movement, which chose Jan Hus, a professor at the university, who would later be burned alive for heresy at the Council of Constance in 1415, as its emblematic, revered figurehead. He is still commemorated today; an imposing monument, the Jan Hus Memorial, stands on Old Town Square in the centre of

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Prague. In 1419, the Bohemian Reformation gained visibility in Europe thanks to the Hussite movement. Even the crusades launched against Prague did not succeed in eradicating this heresy. The city’s university took on the role of the Protestant religion’s supreme administrative centre. Since the Hussite period, the country’s inhabitants had regarded Prague as the mater urbium and caput regni Bohemiae. This perception stemmed from the remarkable political and juridical role played by the Old City of Prague in the kingdom of Bohemia and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown as a whole, together with the part it played in the fight for the Protestant religion. The complex nature of its development in the Middle Ages is reflected in the city’s architecture. The monumental Saint Vitus Cathedral, which stands near Prague Castle, continues to embody the city’s Catholic tradition. Its first architect, Matthias of Arras, was summoned from the Papal Court of Avignon to construct a ‘modern’, light-filled cathedral in Prague. After his death, Peter Parler of Gmünd, one of the greatest artistic figures of Central Europe in the Middle Ages, took over its construction. The monumental cathedral now forms an integral part of the coded image of the Bohemian metropolis. The large church at Týn, on the other hand, situated in the Old City and boasting an enormous golden chalice in its gable, became the ‘cathedral’ for the Utraquists (moderate Hussites who received ‘Communion under both kinds’) and, subsequently, another famous landmark of the city. Certain vedute of the city dating from the Early Modern Era show two churches, sometimes drawn out of proportion, symbolizing the ‘double religion’ in force in Prague and Bohemia. In 1357, Peter Parler also embarked on the construction of a new bridge over the Vltava River− this was a bold project, the structure being 516 metres long. The right bank of the Vltava affords a view of the bridge and the district of the Lesser Town, overlooked by the castle and cathedral; this is the classic, ‘picture-postcard’ or ‘heraldic’ view of Prague. From the publication of the Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493 to the present day, that view has been reproduced by dozens of painters, graphic artists and photographers, and has become an internationally recognized symbol of the city that has also appeared on banknotes and stamps and in countless publicity images.

THE JEWISH TRADITION An additional element making Prague an important lieu de mémoire for Europe as a whole is its Jewish history; although very vibrant, this is often suppressed in historical accounts of the city. The Jewish element was no marginal phenomenon in Prague’s history. The city had its own Jewish town, which was established in an area north of the Old Town following the construction of the latter and the dissolution of the old Jewish quarters. The oldest and largest synagogue in Prague, known as the ‘Old-New’ (Altenei) Synagogue, was built in the centre of the Jewish town in about 1230 by stonemasons who had worked for the Dominican Order in the city. According to legend, the stones used were to be returned to Jerusalem after the arrival of the Messiah for the construction of a temple there. To this day, in the eyes

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of many Jewish visitors to the city, it continues to represent the heart of Prague’s Jewish tradition. The exceptional character of the Jewish district does not stem solely from its size and the wealth of monuments preserved there. Between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries, most of the Jewish communities in Central Europe were brutally annihilated. However, this was not the case in Prague, whose Jewish population, conversely, survived and prospered until the nineteenth century despite these torments, embodying the whole Central European Jewish tradition to this day. Prague’s Jewish town was one of East Central Europe’s largest Jewish teaching centres and, in both the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, it also boasted one of Europe’s most productive Hebrew printing industries. Its prosperity reached a peak in about 1600, a period when the Emperor Rudolf II had turned Prague, his city of residence, into a splendid European centre for the arts and sciences. At that time, the wise Rabbi and scholar Judah ben Bezalel, also known as ‘Rabbi Löw’, was teaching in Prague and writing his philosophical and mystical works. According to legends that remain famous today, and that have been adapted to the cinema, the scholarly Rabbi was responsible for creating a giant monster made of clay named Golem, which he brought to life and trained to obey him. Rabbi Löw’s tomb, which is situated in the old Jewish cemetery a short distance from the Old-New Synagogue, is a tourist attraction visited by pilgrims − not only Jewish − from all over the world. They come to seek help and advice from a Rabbi who died four hundred years ago, and leave a small stone by his grave. The ‘second life’ experienced by the Jewish town dating from the Renaissance began at the dawn of the twentieth century, in the Jewish-Czech-German milieu peopled by such iconic writers and artists as Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Gustav Meyrink and Rainer Maria Rilke. It is to these young, fun-loving men, who, in times of growing Czech and German nationalism as well as anti-Semitism, held their gatherings in the fashionable Arco café and dubbed themselves the ‘Arconauts’, that we owe the portrayal of the sombre, sinister Prague of bygone times; their texts forged the image of a city whose narrow alleyways recall the days of Golem. Those works were all but cast into oblivion; it is only since the 1960s that Prague has experienced renewed interest in its writers, its Jewish tradition and its myth in general. Franz Kafka is now seen throughout the world as the embodiment of Jewish, German and Czech Prague.

AN OPEN-AIR MUSEUM In the mid-twentieth century, the Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval described Prague as ‘the old city of portals, Baroque statues and banking establishments’. Unlike the Czech banks, the numerous beautiful statues – mainly Baroque – that adorn Charles Bridge and several other architectural monuments in the historic districts of the city are of a high standard and have brought it Europe-wide renown. These historic statues enliven the city, and for centuries they have contributed to its unique atmosphere. Yet this is no museum. All these ‘exhibition pieces’ may be touched; furthermore,

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they are characters in their own right who form part of today’s Prague. It is easy to hold a dialogue with them, if one takes the time to ask the right questions. One of the capitals of the European Baroque, Prague’s version of that style is perhaps a little less ‘imperial’ than that of Vienna, but it is sometimes more playful. This is illustrated by the statue of Saint John of Nepomuk on Charles Bridge and by the Bambino di Praga (the Infant Jesus of Prague) in the Church of Our Lady Victorious in the Lesser Town district. The largest group of preserved Baroque works in the city is to be found in the area at the foot of Prague Castle; Wallenstein Palace, with its vast garden and Riding School, was built between 1623 and 1630 by Giovanni Battista Pieroni at the request of Albrecht von Wallenstein; the supreme commander of the imperial army, he was assassinated for high treason with the emperor’s approval in 1634. The splendours of this residence cast Prague Castle, which the Habsburgs had just vacated, into the shade and reflected the ambitions of this military leader, who had had the ceiling of the main hall decorated with a painting of himself portrayed as Mars, the god of War. However, the glory enjoyed by this architectural ensemble was short-lived. In 1648, Swedish soldiers plundered all its treasures, including the magnificent Mannerist statues and fountains sculpted for the garden by Adriaen de Vries, and took them to Drottingholm as spoils of war. Prague’s culture was not exclusively material in character. It was and remains a musical city. The first operas were performed there in the 1630s, but its most important period in terms of Europe’s musical history came later, towards the end of the eighteenth century; on 14 October 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conducted his Don Giovanni in the new Estates Theatre, which had been modelled on La Scala. The Prague public received his opera, as well as the symphonies and dances he composed in the city, with immeasurably greater warmth than was shown in the imperial capital, Vienna. Ludwig van Beethoven, who visited the city on several occasions between 1786 and 1812, was likewise acclaimed there. A century later, two large opera houses vied with one another in the capital. One was the Czech National Theatre, where several operas by Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák were performed for the first time; the other was the New German Theatre, where Gustav Mahler, who had been obliged to leave Vienna, was appointed principal conductor in 1908. Musical as well as artistic and intellectual modernism flourished in Prague during the early 1900s, resulting in a specific synthesis of Czech Art Nouveau. The Municipal House, which was built between 1905 and 1912, may be regarded as a total work of art. A dozen or so famous Czech artists were involved in its creation, including the painter and graphic artist Alfons Mucha, who had settled in Paris and was one of the European precursors of the Art Nouveau movement. This building could be described as the ‘temple’ of this liberating approach to art, which was also new in the philosophical sense.

THE EPICENTRE OF EUROPEAN CONFLICTS Yet Prague was not only a meeting place for painters, patrons and aristocrats with a strong desire for representation. It was also − and all too often − a city in

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which Europe’s major catastrophes both began and ended. This was the case, for example, in May 1618, when young, radical noblemen entered the royal Council Room at Prague Castle (Hradčany) and threw two governors of Bohemia, Count Vilém Slavata and the nobleman Jaroslav of Martinice, representatives of the king and the emperor, out of the window. The Bohemian Revolt marked the start of the Thirty Years’ War, which wrought devastation throughout Europe. A book by Jerome K. Jerome, the renowned English author of humorous novels, illustrates the impact of the 1618 defenestrations as a European lieu de mémoire. In Three Men on the Bummel2 (1900), he ironically suggests that the Czechs always hold important political meetings in cellars so as to avoid any risk of defenestration. In 1848, as in 1648, marking the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Prague students and journeymen, Czechs and Germans, set up a barricade below the tower on Charles Bridge in the Old Town. During this ‘June Revolution’ they tried – in vain – to hold out against General Windischgrätz’s troops and guns. This was just one small episode among all the revolutions that broke out in Europe during that particular year. Yet both student barricades in Prague, that of 1848 as well as the much older one of 1648, remained a vivid presence in the collective memory until at least the mid-twentieth century, being immortalized in literature, paintings, monuments and, later, in films. It was only after the brutal Nazi repression of a protest by Czech students on 17 November 1939 that the resulting shockwaves caused the memory of 1648 and 1848 to give way to that of 1939, when nine of the students were killed, 1,200 were deported to concentration camps and all Czech universities were closed. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 revived these memories, the anti-communist protest organized by the students having been launched in Prague on 17 November, in a direct reference to the events of 1939: ‘The students have a duty to protest against the totalitarian regime in the name of the nation, as they did in 1939!’ This time, however, there were no barricades. The protest relied – successfully – on mass contestation, manifested in a peaceful form against a well-armed regime. It brought together more than half a million of Prague’s citizens. After 1989, the role played by students in the Velvet Revolution acquired an almost mythical aspect, which was both national and international in scope. The students were certainly one of the most active elements within the revolt conducted by Czech society. But the real key to the success of this revolution was the participation of hundreds of thousands of ‘ordinary citizens’, who immediately rallied to the cause. Another determining factor of equal importance was the ability of the opposition, headed by the charismatic Václav Havel, to bring together all these diverse forces for a few months in the political movement known as the Civic Forum. This alliance, comprising the whole of society, driven by the students and Havel, may well be the revolution’s most precious symbolic legacy. Today, when the Czech president Miloš Zeman shows authoritarian tendencies – in the form of a pro-Russian or pro-Chinese stance – it is the living memory of 17 November 1989 that resurfaces as a major point of friction between him or his allies and student or middle-class circles.

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The revolutionaries of 1989 and the democratic forces still refer to the example and legend of democratic Czechoslovakia, the time when the ‘philosopher on the throne’, the renowned philosopher, political analyst and expert in East European culture Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, was president of the Republic. Prague, where the three historical constituent elements – Czech, Jewish and German – were enriched by important cultural contributions from Russian and Ukrainian émigrés after 1918, and from refugees who fled the German Reich after 1933, rapidly developed into a vibrant centre of young European, particularly left-wing, avant-garde culture, a meeting place for artists, architects, playwrights and musicians. Democracy, freedom and stability reigned there – especially by comparison with other European states at that time. The many universities, colleges and art schools in Prague – Czech, German, even Russian – not only produced many artistic personalities from the younger generation but also an enthusiastic audience for everything that was organized in the city. Taking these circumstances into account, the ‘Good Soldier Švejk’, a character created by the writer Jaroslav Hašek during this period and who was enthusiastically received by readers, should not be regarded merely as a mischievous, simple-minded person, but rather as surreal and radically pacifist one. This cultural paradise on the banks of the Vltava, which lasted no more than twenty years, doubtless also experienced its darker moments. However, during and after the chaos of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the general devastation wrought in the continent, the period when Prague’s star shone brightly in Europe (seen retrospectively at least as one of happiness) took on a mythical dimension: Prague in Gold, as Peter Demetz called it.

FROM MUNICH TO THE RED ARMY The events of the Second World War are another example of Europe’s major catastrophes beginning and culminating in Prague. Czechoslovakia’s tragedy effectively began in 1938, when, as part of the Munich Agreement, the democratic republic was delivered to Adolf Hitler by the great powers as a token of peace. Divided, deprived of border regions that extended to the heart of the state, Czechoslovakia was no longer viable. All guarantees turned out to be just scraps of paper when, on 15 March 1939, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded ‘the rump of Czechoslovakia’. As soon as the swastika flag was raised on Prague Castle and Hitler declared the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia to be a protectorate of his Reich, it became clear – to the British and French governments, at least – that war would be inevitable. Six months later, this proved to be true. During the spring of 1945, when the war that had decimated Europe was drawing to a close, there was just one major city and capital yet to be liberated: Prague. The Western Allied generals deliberately left that final act to the Russians, in return for compensations in northern Germany – but without informing the Czech resistance of these terms. Therefore, on 5 May, when the Prague uprising against the German occupying forces broke out in a spontaneous and somewhat disorganized fashion, the American troops remained stationed at a location eighty kilometres to the west

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of Prague. Czech Air Force units in exile were even forbidden to come to the aid of the bombarded capital, whose citizens were confronting not only the Wehrmacht but also SS units from behind 1,600 barricades, and were sending out desperate appeals for help via the radio. Later, the Red Army did indeed liberate Prague – one day after Germany’s surrender. After the war had ended, the bitter experiences undergone by the people of Prague and their memory of fearing that the city would suffer the same fate as Warsaw, which had been completely destroyed, were used and exploited by the Communist Party in its propaganda campaigns against the West. The memory of the liberation of Prague and of Czechoslovakia was manipulated on a massive scale. It served for years as the one of the most valid arguments in favour of the subordination of the new Czechoslovakia under the Soviet protectorate, this being presented as the only means of guaranteeing the country’s security. A Russian tank remained in the centre of the capital, by way of a monument, until the events of the autumn of 1989. A symbol of the liberation of Prague by the Red Army, it also served as a reminder that the tanks could re-enter the city at any time. In the summer of 1968, when the Soviet Union violently put an end to Czechoslovakia’s experiment with Socialism with a human face, the whole world saw just how serious that warning was.

DRAMATIC EVENTS: 1948, 1968, 1989 Three dates, all connected with Prague, define or symbolize the Cold War in Europe: 1948, 1968 and 1989. On 25 February, the Communists, who were already in government and had control of the police and the army, definitively seized power by staging a coup d’état. From then on, until 1989, images of armed militia striding through Prague became part of the standard iconography of communist propaganda. Meanwhile, the events in the capital showed the world that Churchill had been correct when he had stated, in his speech at Fulton, that an ‘Iron Curtain’ would separate the Eastern half of Europe, incorporated into the Soviet Empire, from the West. When, in 1968, the younger, educated generation of Communist Party members attempted to take power, with a view to modernizing a rigid Soviet model and making it more bearable for the citizens, the reforming enterprise aroused interest throughout Europe. The world turned sympathetic eyes to Prague; at the same time, audiences enthused over Czech ‘New Wave’ cinema, whose key figure, Miloš Forman, emigrated to the United States, and works by Czech writers likewise enjoyed popularity. And then, on 21 August 1968, the arrival of Russian tanks put paid to that optimism, that atmosphere of rebirth. Photos of the powerful forces of Russian occupation in the streets of Prague circulated throughout the world and the fate of a small Central European country led a large number of Communist Party members – mainly French but also, notably, Polish – to cancel their membership. The Soviet Army’s invasion of Prague robbed Europe’s young, left-wing generation of the illusion that Socialism could be associated with humanism. The dramatic death, in January 1969, of Jan Palach, a student at the University of Prague who

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burnt himself alive, was an appeal to the whole of Czech society − and perhaps not only Czech − not to yield in the face of political terror. When the rusty Communist regimes of Central Europe began to fall in 1989, Czechoslovakia seemed to remain detached from these movements, until the November of that year. The whole world had been seeing images of thousands of citizens from the GDR who, ever since the summer, had been climbing over the fence into the gardens of the West German embassy in Prague, under the impassive gaze of the Czechoslovakian police. On 30 September, following the speech given by Foreign Secretary Hans-Dietrich Genscher on the embassy balcony, the first groups of refugees from the GDR entered the Federal Republic of Germany. This was clear proof that the regimes were crumbling, both in the GDR and in Czechoslovakia. The Czechs observed these events and assisted the refugees but made no decisive move until mid-November. One week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a student demonstration took place in order to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody events of 17 November 1939. This was brutally suppressed by the police. The revolutionary dynamics triggered by that event brought citizens out into the streets, protesting peacefully. The scale of the protest took everyone by surprise. What had taken weeks or even months in other countries happened in Prague in a matter of hours. Just six weeks after the launch of the revolution, the playwright Václav Havel, the key figure in Czech underground culture and opposition politics, was elected president of the country. He occupied the position until 2003 and was one of the moral consciences of Czech politics, which he sometimes presented in his plays. He was especially determined to restore Prague’s reputation as a lively and diverse European meeting place. The memory of all these major chapters, key moments and European legends associated with this city was to play a role in the intellectual revival and reEuropeanization of a Czech society oppressed by decades of communism, and in a ‘vibrant Europe’s’ subsequent ‘return’ to the capital.

PRAGUE TODAY What does Prague symbolize today, as seen through European eyes? For certain visitors, the city is one of the major arenas of European history. The destinies of Prague, set in the heart of Europe and a permanent focal point in the history of this continent, are not limited to an exclusively local or regional context. Each stage in its history forms part of a wider European story. These stages are reflected in the city space, in its buildings and works of art and in the preserved alleyways of the Lesser Town and the Old Town. Prague may have been a capital city for a thousand years, but it is by no means static. On the contrary, it is a multiple realm of memory; everyone sees their own conceptions reflected there, or projects them onto its space. The city of the imagination varies according to its visitors’ origins, cultural and religious horizons and interests, or any films they have seen that were made in Prague. Since these perspectives of visitors to the city often differ, not least depending on their religious

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or cultural background and the tourist routes they choose, it is quite possible that they would not meet in Prague. But even this parallelism between different urban environments is an independent quality that has always made Prague a city of legends and nightmares – especially in literature.

NOTES 1. Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools, translated from the French by Donald Revell (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1995 [1913]). 2. Three Men on the Bummel, by Jerome K. Jerome (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1900).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Fucikova, Eliska (Ed.), Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City, London and New York, Thames and Hudson, 1997. Iggers, Wilma A., Women of Prague: Ethnic Diversity and Social Change from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Providence, Berghahn Books, 1995. Ledvinka, Václav and Jiří Pešek, Prag, Prague, Lidové noviny, 2001. Michel, Bernard, Prague Belle Époque, Paris, Aubier, 2008. Sayer, Derek, Prague: Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2013. Spector, Scott, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Kafka’s Fin de Siècle, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000. Theinhardt, Marketa et al., Prague, Paris, Citadelles & Mazenod, 2005. Wittlich, Petr, Prague. Fin de Siècle, Cologne, Taschen, 1999.

CHAPTER 46

A Northern venture: The Hanseatic League and the Baltic CHRISTIAN PLETZING

An alliance of trading cities on the Baltic and North Seas active from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, the Hanseatic League, whose capital was Lübeck, played an influential role both commercially and politically. Long perceived as an instrument of German domination, it is also regarded today as an early version of a European Union. In the speech she made at the inauguration of the European Hansemusem in Lübeck in 2015, the Chancellor Angela Merkel described the Hanseatic League’s considerable achievements as an inspiration for the European Union. Now, in the twenty-first century, the name ‘Hansa’ has retained its distinction as a European label, yet it is difficult to understand its full significance. It symbolizes reliability, solidity, the spirit of enterprise, justifiable confidence, sobriety and an openness to the world. This prestigious label is used as a selling point for items as diverse as ‘Hansa Pils’ beer and ‘Hansaplast’ pharmaceutical products. It is included in the names of the ‘HanseMerkur’ insurance company, the ‘Hansa Rostock’ football club and the ‘Lufthansa’ airline company. The range of businesses operating under the Hansa label extends from funeral directors to leisure parks, and includes taxi companies. There are ships bearing the name ‘Hansa’ or ‘Hanseatic’; there are ‘Hansa Streets’ and ‘Hansa Squares’. It is not only used as a trademark in Germany but throughout the Baltic region. ‘Hansapank’ operated in Estonia, while the ‘Trygg-Hansa’ insurance company operates in Sweden, as do the ‘Hansa Rail’ and ‘Hansavägen’ companies. In the Latvian capital, Riga, one can stay in the ‘Hanza’ Hotel and buy one’s bread at the Hansa bakery − ‘Hanzas Maiznīca’. Turku in Finland boasts a vast shopping centre named ‘Hansakortteli’ (the Hansa district); a skyscraper named ‘Hansa Tower’ was built at Szczecin in Poland, while Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg, has a ‘Hansa’ cultural and commercial centre. The emotionally charged character of the word ‘Hansa’ is no recent phenomenon. In 1926, Thomas Mann, who was born in Lübeck, was already making a connection

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between the Hansa and the patrician urban spirit, likening the concept of ‘Hanseatic’ with ‘the taste for spiritual and intellectual adventure’.1

GERMAN ORIGINS Originating from a German-speaking community of maritime traders, records of whose existence date from 1161, the Hansa developed into an informal union during the thirteenth century. At its apogee, it comprised up to 180 cities (including territorial principalities) situated to the north and east of the Baltic. The foundation of the Hanseatic League resulted in a dense network of trading relationships, with land- and sea-based traffic that moved back and forth from the Atlantic coast of France via England, the northern regions of the empire and the Scandinavian countries to the shores of Poland, the Baltic regions and Russia. The organization shared trading (involving cloth, salt, wine, grain, furs and metals) and a currency, had its own legal system and a fluid federative structure. It was based, among other things, on concessions and shared trading stations (in London, Bergen, Bruges and Novgorod) and the use of efficient ships such as cogs and caravels; the Hanseatic fleet comprised close to a thousand ships in the fifteenth century. It also had a common language, Low German, which was used for both written and oral communication, in recognition of the leading role played by the city of Lübeck in both a practical and a symbolic sense. After the Hanseatic League had held its last assembly in 1669, a period that saw the emergence of absolutist territorial states, that association of cities sank rapidly into oblivion. In 1802, it was still perceived as ‘a half-forgotten antiquity’.2 The Hanseatic League acquired a new importance as a realm of memory through efforts made to create a German fleet during the revolution of 1848–9. Liberal, middle-class historians regarded it as a union whose aim was to establish Germany’s maritime interests. The year 1870 witnessed the foundation of the Hanseatic Historical Association, which quickly became the epicentre of all the research dedicated to the subject. Germany’s liberal nationalist movement was able to appropriate the idea of the Hanseatic League; the perfect example of citizen selfgovernance and freedom, it was established as a counter-model to an aristocratic society. At the same time, from the latter half of the nineteenth century the Hansa was seen as a centre of German power in northern Europe; as such, it represented a bright spot in the Late Middle Ages, a period presented by nationalists in sombre colours. Die deutsche Hanse (‘The German Hansa’), a book by Bremen-born historian Dietrich Schäfer published in 1903 and subsequently republished several times, had a considerable influence on the image of the Hanseatic League in the early twentieth century. In Schäfer’s view, the Hansa embodied Germany’s interest in the sea. For its part, the Wilhelmine Empire (1871–1918) saw the league as the incarnation of medieval German colonial power in the Baltic area − later, during the First World War, it was perceived as having countered British political expansion. Together with the Teutonic Order, it was presented as a vehicle for the nations’ cultural mission to expand eastwards; after 1933, it prepared the way for National Socialist conceptions serving the aim of creating ‘living space in the East’.

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After 1945, that nationalistic image of the Hanseatic League gave way to a more sober vision. In the GDR, it was seen primarily as an alliance of cities. East German historians were less interested in the history of actors in the world of international trade and in the patrician class than in the lives of working people. The coexistence of different social classes in Hanseatic cities and the contrasts between them were presented as part of the ‘pre-bourgeois revolution’ – an idea that was developed in the early 1970s, this time not by the Hanseatic Historical Association but by the ‘Hanseatic Working Group’, formed of GDR historians. However, the study of Hanseatic history did facilitate exchanges between East and West German historians, in the form of regularly held congresses. In post-1945 West Germany, the Hanseatic League was seen as a Western bulwark against the East. From this standpoint, in the eyes of the historians of the 1950s and 1960s, the Baltic region formed part of the West through its membership of that community, which had been united by economic interests and shared values. It was then but a short step to the Europeanization of the Hanseatic League − which had become a realm of memory − in the 1970s. The new, supranational vision of that alliance established itself gradually, first with the Hansa in Europe exhibition held in Cologne in 1973, subsequent exhibitions being held in in Hamburg and Rostock (1989–90) and finally in Magdeburg and Braunschweig (1996.) An alliance of cities known as ‘The New Hansa’ was created in Zwolle, in the Netherlands, in 1980. Now counting 185 members, it set itself the task of ‘keeping alive the spirit of the League as a social and cultural alliance’.3 Tourism plays a major role here, as illustrated, for example, by the ‘Hanseatic days of modern times’, organized every year. In today’s Germany, however, the league manifests itself in its most visible form as a realm of memory in people’s wallets and in the streets. Lübeck’s Holsten Gate, one of the symbols of Hanseatic identity, featured on the reverse side of fifty Deutsche Mark banknotes produced from 1960 to 1991. Since 2006, it has also appeared on German two-euro coins. The letters seen on vehicle licence plates likewise show that the Hansa is still part of the local identity of northern German coastal cities; HH denotes Hamburg, HL, Lübeck and HRO, Rostock. The Europeanization of the Hanseatic League as a realm of memory formed the basis of the ‘New Hansa’, a concept officially presented in 1988 by the ministerpresident of the Region of Schleswig-Holstein, Björn Engholm, who perceived it as the source of a transnational, economic and political partnership in the Baltic Sea Region. Despite being contested − chiefly for historical reasons linked to fears of a possible resurgence of German dominance in the area − the idea of a new form of supranational cooperation was successful, although all reference to the Hanseatic League was erased.

THE ‘EUROPEAN UNION OF THE MIDDLE AGES’ Outside Germany, the Hanseatic League was the focus of controversy for decades. Scandinavian historians regarded it as a disputed realm of memory up to the 1960s. In the case of countries with shorelines along the Baltic, the national interpretations projected onto the league continued to reflect their societies’ perception of this

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historical phenomenon until the late 1980s. In this way, Sweden greeted Engholm’s initiative to create a ‘New Hansa’ in a somewhat reserved manner, as the Hanseatic League had been seen as that country’s principal rival in the Middle Ages. It had therefore been necessary for Hanseatic dominance to be vanquished before Sweden could begin to prosper – at least, this was the traditional national viewpoint, which also prevailed in Finland. Right up to the 1960s, it was said that the Hansa had been an impediment to Sweden’s economic and social development, until its inhabitants had succeeded in throwing off this ‘yoke’. The same reserve was displayed by Norway and Denmark. In their view, the Hansa had protected German interests, and it was Germany’s economic supremacy that had ultimately caused the decline of Norway and its integration into the kingdom of Denmark in 1536. The latter, which had been the Hanseatic cities’ chief rival in the Middle Ages, saw the Hansa as playing a part in cutting off its contacts with Europe. During the interwar period, national historiographers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania distanced themselves from any sign of German influence. Conversely, as a reaction to their incorporation into the Soviet Union, these countries subsequently perceived the Hanseatic League as part of their regional identity and as a symbol of their affiliation with the West. The most visible manifestation of this re-evaluation occurred in Riga in the 1990s, with the reconstruction of the building known as the ‘House of the Black Heads’, so named because in the fifteenth century it had been adorned with an emblem in the form of a head representing Saint Maurice, who originated from Nubia and was the patron of the guild based there. While in the interwar period the house had been regarded as a symbol of Germanity, it later served to indicate Latvia’s membership of the Hanseatic League, and therefore her affiliation with the West. In Poland, conversely, the Hanseatic League was simply seen as part of a German legacy laden with negative connotations. Notably, it was denied any form of cultural manifestation. This perception on the part of the Poles essentially reflected the image that Germany had created for itself under the National Socialists; that of a German system of colonial exploitation extending eastwards. However, a more neutral attitude towards the Hansa began to develop in Poland in the 1960s, leading to a more positive appropriation of its legacy in 1989. Today, even the Polish city of Słubice, an eastern suburb of Frankfurt (Oder) prior to 1945, presents itself to visitors as a ‘Hanseatic City’. ‘It was with the Hanseatic League, the EEC of the Middle Ages, that Sweden forged its first link with a European community’, stated the Dagens Nyheter in 1990. In this way, the Swedish daily newspaper provided the framework within which the Hansa has evolved ever since. All around the Baltic region, it is regarded as a European institution ahead of its time, the ‘European Union of the Middle Ages’ (Der Spiegel, 2002) or ‘the first European Union’ (National Geographic Polska, 2004). The Hanseatic League has even established itself as an international realm of memory in the virtual world. In the video game Patrician, the first version of which appeared in 1992, the player takes the role of a Hanseatic trader whose goal is ‘to rise to the most successful and influential member of the Hanse, ultimately being elected Elderman, leader of the trading league’. Demonstrating the Hanseatic

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League’s immense capacity for transformation as a realm of memory, that very realm, detached from its own history, has now become a genuinely European label.

NOTES 1. Thomas Mann, ‘Lübeck als geistige Lebensform’, in Thomas Mann, Reden und Aufsätze, vol. III, (Gesammelte Werke, 13 vols) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), pp. 376–98, quotations p. 378 and pp. 393–4. 2. Georg Sartorius, Geschichte des Hanseatischen Bundes, vol. I (Göttingen: Heinrich Dieterich, 1802), quoted from Rainer Postel, ‘Hanseatische Treuhänder und Erben: Das Nachleben der Hanse’, in Die Hanse. Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos, ed. Jörgen Bracker (Hamburg: Katalog der Ausstellung des Museums für Hamburgische Geschichte, 1989), pp. 667–79, quotation on p. 674. 3. http://www​.hanse​.org​/de/ (26 April 2016).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brand, Hanno (Ed.), The German Hanse in Past and Present Europe: A Medieval League as a Model for Modern Interregional Cooperation? Groningen, Hanse Passage/Castel International Publishers, 2007. Dollinger, Philippe, La Hanse (XIIe-XVIIe siècle), Paris, Aubier, 1964. Escach, Nicolas, Une ‘Nouvelle Hanse’ en Europe? Brême − Gdańsk – Riga (Hochschulschriften, vol. 32), Berlin, Trafo, 2010. Hackmann, Jörg, ‘Hanse. Mittelalterliche Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft’, in Hans Henning Hahn and Robert Traba (Eds.), Deutsch-Polnische Erinnerungsorte, vol. I, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015, pp. 83–95. Hackmann, Jörg, ‘Not only “Hansa”. Images of History in the Baltic Sea Region’, in Mare Balticum ’96, Lübeck and Travemünde, Ostsee-Akademie, 1996, pp. 23–35. Hammel-Kiesow, Rolf and Rudolf Holbach (Eds.), Geschichtsbewusstsein in der Gesellschaft. Konstrukte der Hanse in den Medien und in der Öffentlichkeit (Hansische Studien, vol. XIX), Trier, Porta Alba, 2010. Postel, Rainer, ‘Hanseatische Treuhänder und Erben: Das Nachleben der Hanse’, in Jörgen Bracker (Ed.), Die Hanse. Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos, Hamburg, Katalog der Ausstellung des Museums für Hamburgische Geschichte, 1989, pp. 667–79.

CHAPTER 47

Saint Petersburg The window on the West MARINA DMITRIEVA

Founded by Peter the Great in 1703 and capital of the Russian Empire, Saint Petersburg was later to become known as Petrograd, then Leningrad. These name changes reflect the course of Russian history; yet, in the eyes of its inhabitants and visitors alike, the city embodies the European character of Russia. In early June 2016, residents of Saint Petersburg took to the streets in protest against the official decision to name a bridge after the first president of the Republic of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov (1951–2004). They expressed their disapproval of political leaders’ interference in the life of their city, claiming their right to determine their own memorial narrative. A few years earlier there had been similar protests against plans for the construction of a skyscraper as part of the futuristic GazpromCity project planned for the right bank of the River Neva, which would have altered the physiognomy of Saint Petersburg. These examples are a perfect illustration of the close link that the inhabitants maintain with their city, the emotional relationship between its history and their individual destinies and the crucial place occupied by tradition, which characterizes their urban identity.

A EUROPEAN CITY Founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, the city began life as a small fortress, becoming the capital of the Russian Empire within just ten years; it represents the embodiment of European-ness in the collective Russian cultural memory. Saint Petersburg, or ‘Pieter’, as it is familiarly known, was subsequently renamed Petrograd and later Leningrad, before becoming Saint Petersburg once more in 1991. The city has acquired multiple significations that have accumulated over the course of its relatively brief history and crystallized in these different names. At the same time, they also relate to a conflict of interpretation, as yet unresolved, between various cultures of

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memory whose common denominator is the city’s relationship to Europe. It might be seen, for instance, as a young, ambitious rival to older European metropolises, as a symbol of radical modernization in contrast to Moscow − a traditional and ‘Asiatic’ capital − or as the emblem of a collective heroism that enabled its inhabitants to resist the assault launched on it by German forces during a three-year siege. Its construction on the marshlands of the Neva Delta was a challenge in itself. Francesco Algarotti (1712–1764), author of the famous description of Saint Petersburg as ‘a great window recently opened in the north through which Russia looks on Europe’1 marvelled at the visual contrasts he perceived between nature and civilization. Having arrived by boat from Cronstadt in 1739, he was travelling along the deserted riverbanks covered with small bushes, when suddenly, ‘as in an opera’, there appeared before him an ‘imperial city’: Majestic buildings arose from either side of the river, towers gleamed, topped by golden pinnacles, ships displayed flags that floated in the wind. This was the fantastical spectacle that greeted us! Here, we were told, was the Admiralty, there, the Admiralty Arsenal; there, we would find a fortress, further on, an academy; in front of us, we perceived the Tsarina’s Winter Palace.2 The city at the water’s edge planned by Peter the Great – ‘the new Amsterdam’ or ‘the new Venice’ – was seen from the outset as an ideal, the tsar’s ‘paradise’. Its main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospect, linked the Admiralty, headquarters of Russia’s military and trade fleet, with the Saint Alexander Nevsky Monastery, a holy building. The monastery was erected on the site where it is presumed that the canonized Russian prince had defeated the Swedes in 1240. The city’s foundation was therefore associated with the history of Old Russia. The large number of European architects commissioned to work on the plans for Saint Petersburg contributed to fashioning its physiognomy, initially markedly heterogeneous in character. The use of serfs and Swedish prisoners of war in the construction process, in addition to the forced transfer of elite groups to the city, turned this paradise into a hell. Throughout its history, Saint Petersburg retained its reputation, which is echoed in literary works, as a ‘cursed city’, built ‘on bones’. Due to its layout, together with the participation of a great many ‘foreign’ architects and artisans in the planning process, it became embedded in Russian collective consciousness as an ‘artificial’, ‘abstract’ and ‘foreign’ city. In addition to its status as a commercial metropolis, the city was known as the ‘Palmyra of the North’ on account of its sumptuous façades, created by prestigious architects from both Europe and Russia in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The Saint Petersburg of the first half of the nineteenth century was characterized by homogeneous architectural ensembles that endowed it with a European imperial lustre. In 1990, it was inscribed on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites as an exceptional urban landscape, set on the banks of the Neva. The aesthetic principles governing its creation were the imitation of illustrious models (imitatio) and the desire to rival them (aemulatio). The European architectural norms applied in the city must have been instantly recognizable to its visitors and still today make a considerable contribution to its inhabitants’ collective identity.

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THE PETERSBURG TEXT AND THE DUAL MYTH OF SAINT PETERSBURG The sites and monuments in Saint Petersburg are associated with multiple layers of symbolic meaning. This link, revealed by Pierre Nora, is established between the materiality of actual objects and the conceptual points of reference that crystallize the cultural memory of a society or a group.3 The subtle mechanism at work in the shift a realibus ad realiora was analysed in the 1970s and 1980s by the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, using the example of the ‘Petersburg Text’. This is a coherent body of literary works written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which Saint Petersburg features as the central element of the story and, at the same time, fulfils a literary function. For Vladimir Toporov, who created the concept, the Petersburg Text was not only a reflection of the city but also a literary device that helped to bring about ‘the transformation of material realities into spiritual values, clearly retaining the traces of its extratextual substrata’.4 In Alexander Pushkin’s poem, ‘The Bronze Horseman’, the equestrian statue of Peter the Great by French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet is presented as the symbol of a victory over nature and over Russia itself. The opposition between nature and civilization, mystique and rationality and the ‘man in the street’ and the prevailing powers lies at the heart of these literary texts. For Nikolai Gogol, Nevsky Prospect is both the most beautiful avenue in the world and a phantom: ‘All is illusion, all is a dream, nothing is what it seems!’ Death and resurrection, themes with a strongly Christian connotation, figure prominently in this body of texts. In this way, the concept of the ‘Petersburg novel’, directed against the official politics of memory imposed by the Soviet regime, offered a very powerful tool enabling Saint Petersburg to be understood as a ‘text’ and became a realm of memory itself. At the same time, it reinforced the myth of the ‘old Saint Petersburg’ − the static image of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city – in the collective consciousness. Its morbid beauty was evoked as the symbol of a vanished world in works by the artists of the World of Art movement, founded in Saint Petersburg in 1897. Nikolai Antsiferov sought to capture the genius loci of Saint Petersburg during the civil war of 1917–22; in his eyes, this was the city of ‘tragic imperialism’, where all was ‘condemned to perish’.5

A CITY OF REVOLUTIONS Saint Petersburg has also witnessed the radical renewal of the established order. In 1825, Senate Square was the scene of the ‘Decembrist’ uprisings given prominence in the Soviet era. The 1905 revolution tragically came to a head in the centre of the city, with the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of 9 January. The Field of Mars, which was used as a military parade ground and later for funfairs, became a hallowed site when an honorary communal burial ground for victims of the revolution of February 1917 was created there. The Winter Palace and the cruiser Aurora form part of the official realms of memory associated with the October Revolution. Nevertheless, it is astonishing to see how speedily the city has evacuated and suppressed its memory

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of revolution. Peter the Great’s city did not become that of the leader of the world’s proletariat. In the wake of the patriotic policies of Russification initiated at the start of the First World War, Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd. Later, following the death of Lenin in 1924, it was renamed once more, becoming Leningrad. Before that, in March 1918, the Bolshevik government had relocated the national capital to Moscow. Petrograd lost its imperial lustre and became a regional capital. Although its original name was restored in August 1991, it remained the principal city of the ‘Leningrad Region’. In the mid-1980s, the writer Joseph Brodsky described the magical power of names and the mechanism of resistance: Leningrad . . . – But I prefer to say ‘Pieter’, for I remember that city in the days when it did not yet resemble ‘Leningrad’ – just after the war. It had an almost gaunt appearance, giving it more pronounced, and, if you will, more noble features. A survivor cannot take its name from that of Lenin.6 The German historian Karl Schlögel has described it as ‘the laboratory of modernity’. That being said, the rapid development of capitalism and the debates over modernization that took place before the outbreak of the First World War do not seem to have had a marked effect on the cultural memory of the Russian people. The most significant memories of the Soviet era are not linked to sites associated with revolutions, but with Stalinist terror. These include the ‘Big House’ on Liteyny Prospect, the headquarters of the NKVD and Kresty prison. The newspapers Zvezda and Leningrad, targeted by the government for having published works by Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, are also realms of memory associated with the totalitarian regime.

FROM LENINGRAD TO SAINT PETERSBURG – AND BACK The siege of Leningrad by the Wehrmacht, which took place from September 1941 to January 1944 and left around seven hundred thousand dead, was a truly defining event for the city’s identity. The memory that developed around the siege also included other discourses on the victims, such as Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, which was played in the besieged city and which commemorates the victims of Hitler as well as those of the Stalinist terror. Among the carefully preserved reminders of those days are walls riddled with bullets and the mass graves in Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery; yet they also include the ‘route of life’ across Ladoga Lake, the liberation of the city in the winter of 1944 and the poems of Olga Bergholtz, which were broadcast on the radio during the blockade. It was those memories that prevented the city from regaining its original name for a while. Today in Russia there is a ska-rock band called Leningrad that greets its millions of YouTube fans from ‘The sunny city of Saint Petersburg’ − a place usually described as ‘misty’. ‘Piter – that comes from the verb “to drink” (pit’)7!’, bellows the larger-

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than-life lead singer, Sergey Shnurov. This is his fight against the ossification and museification of the city. Although it is the birthplace of the country’s current ruling elite, they have chosen instead to reside in Moscow. The ‘Petersburg Text’ has ensured that Saint Petersburg is associated with beauty and culture in Russian cultural memory. The missing pages are those of revolution, modernization and change. Nevertheless, its decline, demise, rebirth and salvation continue to be the dominant themes of the discourse of collective memory pertaining to the city. This explains why the face of the sphinx sculpture created by Mikhail Shemyakin in tribute to the victims of the Stalinist regime is split in two. One side, turned towards the Kresty prison on the opposite bank of the Neva, is a death’s head; the other, turned towards passers-by, displays the timeless beauty of Antiquity.

NOTES 1. Francesco Algarotti, Lettere sulla Russia a Mylord Harvey, quoted from Opere Scelte di Francesco Algarotti (Milan: Dalla societa tipografica de classici italiani, 1823 [1736]), vol. 3, p. 41. This description was quoted by Alexander Pushkin in his poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’, written in 1833. 2. Ibid., p. 41. 3. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: les lieux de mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. 4. Vladimir N. Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury; Izbrannye trudy (Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2003), p. 7. 5. Nikolai Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga (Petrograd: Brockhaus-Efron, 1922). 6. Joseph Brodsky, Erinnerungen an Leningrad (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987), p. 8. 7. From the song ‘V Pitere − pit’.’

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bérard, Ewa, Pétersbourg impérial: Nicolas II, la ville, les arts, Paris, Belin, 2012. Berelowitch, Wladimir and Olga Medvedkova, Histoire de Saint Pétersbourg, Paris, Fayard, 1996. Clark, Katerina, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1995. Lotman, Jurij M., ‘Simvolika Peterburga i problemy semiotiki goroda’, Trudy po znakovym sistemam, Tartu, 18 (1984): 32–44. Reid, Anna, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941–1944, London, Oxford and New York, Bloomsbury, 2011. Schlögel, Karl, Petersburg: Das Laboratorium der Moderne 1909–1921, Berlin, Siedler, 1988.

CHAPTER 48

Babel or paradise The languages of Europe JÜRGEN TRABANT

The works that collectively constitute the basis of European culture were all translated from Greek, Hebrew and Arabic into Latin. Those of Cicero and Virgil, as well as Roman legal texts, were subsequently translated from Latin into national languages. As Umberto Eco observed, ‘The language of Europe is translation.’ Despite the current trend towards standardization, the continent’s multiplicity of languages, regarded as a rich heritage, is one of modern Europe’s great acquisitions. One of the characteristics of European culture is the continent’s multiplicity of languages. The European Union acknowledges this through its policy of multilingualism, which honours that diversity as a rich heritage to be preserved and promoted. Yet the recognition that these multiple languages are a precious asset is one of the great discoveries of Early Modern Europe. The continent’s foundational texts tended to present this plurality in terms of punishment (recalling the fate of the Tower of Babel) or as a negligible quantity (as in ancient Greece). Monolingualism (that theologico-philosophical European dream) was a quasi-reality for the erudite members of society in the Latin Middle Ages. During the Renaissance, however, the languages spoken by the peoples of Europe (vulgaria) gained prestige within their nations, becoming symbols of identity. Today, as the constraints of globalization have given rise to the ever-increasing dominance of a single language, the various European tongues are losing their prestige and, consequently, their status as languages of culture. This process, strongly favoured by elites, is being promoted by the peoples of Europe, particularly the younger generations. These languages are therefore in danger of becoming vernacular tongues once more, as they were in the Middle Ages. Will these key European realms of memory survive the economic, political and cultural tensions of a globalized world?

IS TRANSLATION THE LANGUAGE OF EUROPE? ‘The language of Europe is translation.’ That fine statement, attributed to Umberto Eco, is profoundly true – yet, as is often the case with fine statements in general, it

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does not encompass the whole truth. It is true in relation to the historical basis of our culture; all cultural texts (in Greek, Hebrew and Arabic) were translated into Latin. And following the decline of Latin as the language of a shared culture, the nations of Europe translated their continent’s foundational texts into their own languages. These texts include the Bible, Greek philosophical works, Roman legal writings, Virgil, Ovid and Cicero. Later examples include the works of the great writers of various European nations: Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante, Corneille, Racine and various French novelists, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and so on. As proof that translation really is the language of Europe, one need only consider the EU’s language services, whose hundreds of translators and interpreters, based in Brussels and Luxembourg, are striving to ensure that Europe can understand itself. However, two further elements would need to be added in order to complete the statement. First, the language of Europe is also multilingualism. Europe is a multilingual space where several languages coexist side by side in the same locality. The challenge posed by this horizontal coexistence is that of inter-comprehension, which requires a specific solution if people are to live with others, rather than in isolation. One answer to this problem, therefore − apart from that of translation − is to speak several languages. Europeans have always been multilingual by necessity, armed with linguistic skills in order to communicate with their past (Latin and Greek), or because they were obliged to speak their neighbours’ language (in order to sell something, marry an attractive neighbour, read an untranslated poem, and so on). However, as it would be practically impossible to speak every language – learning just one foreign tongue is difficult enough in itself – translators and intermediaries are needed. The second element (which would solve the problem of multiple languages and mutual incomprehension) is the eradication of these tongues and the establishment of one language for all. This is set out as the ideal solution in the Bible, which presents the multitude of different tongues as a punishment, fuelling nostalgia for a return to the single language used in the Garden of Eden. This dream of linguistic uniformity is deeply embedded in Europe – and not only in the Bible. The ancient Greeks, likewise, did not look favourably on the existence of multiple languages, feeling that their own should suffice; ‘to speak Greek’ simply meant ‘to speak’. In its way, the expansion of the Roman Empire fulfilled this dream of linguistic unity. The peoples of the West learned Latin, which was the sole language of the elite groups of medieval Christendom. The policies of linguistic unification pursued, at a much later date, by the French Republic, and its desire to eliminate languages presenting an obstacle to that unity should be viewed in terms of this tradition – one language alone for the res publica! This monolingual model, adopted by the majority of European states, haunts the multilingual world of Europe like a spectre. From the vantage point of its Latin monolingualism, the ‘Catholic’ (in other words, ‘universal’) Church, heir to the Roman Empire, had nonetheless understood that it would have to learn the tongues of others and translate them in order to succeed in spreading its message. While pursuing the unifying policies of the empire

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whose political structures it had inherited, the Church simultaneously applied the message of the Day of Pentecost − speak all the tongues of the peoples of Jerusalem, be multilingual and translate. During the Early Modern Era, from the Renaissance onwards, Europe’s linguistic history followed this path of linguistic diversification. Countering the imperial character of the single language (Latin), the European peoples developed and celebrated their multiple languages, not forgetting, however, to learn and translate those of others. In Europe, therefore, two contrasting linguistic policies coexist as ways of managing language multiplicity: the imposition of uniformity (the Garden of Eden) and a policy of translation and multilingualism (the Day of Pentecost). This tension characterizes Europe’s situation as a continent of many languages. In fact, this ambiguity chimes with the thoughts of Europeans concerning their current linguistic situation. In 2012, the European Commission published the results of a survey on ‘Europeans and their Languages’ (Special Eurobarometer 386). This report notes that, on the one hand, Europeans regard all languages as equal, and consequently see their maternal languages as valuable and important (81 per cent), and that learning languages, in other words, plurilingualism, was the best response to the coexistence of multiple languages (88 per cent). A very substantial majority (72 per cent) therefore support the official policy of the European Union, according to which all Europeans should speak two foreign languages in addition to their mother tongue. They likewise recognize the important role played by translation. Yet there are almost as many supporters of the ‘Garden of Eden’ option, with 69 per cent believing that there should be one sole language to be used by all. Half of the Europeans polled would even be in favour of monolingualism in Brussels, with European Union institutions using one single language to communicate with citizens (they are currently obliged to translate into all the official languages). There is indeed a specific European language common to all: English. This scenario involves no translation, no multilingualism; the language of Europe is (or will be) widespread bilingualism, a new diglossia, with English in a superior position and other languages below it – thereby reserving monolingualism for native English speakers.

THE MAJOR LINGUISTIC AREAS It is extremely difficult to produce a satisfactory overview of the languages of Europe, for two reasons. First, because it is difficult to pinpoint the boundary lines of a language, and second, because it is just as hard to define Europe, these two difficulties being linked. Starting with the second difficulty, where does Europe begin and end? Its western boundary seems easy to pinpoint, as the Atlantic Ocean offers a natural frontier. The question is, are the British Isles and Iceland – situated right out in the Atlantic – part of Europe or not? For the British themselves, ‘Europe’ means continental Europe, not their home. Yet it would be difficult to categorize English or Icelandic as extra-European languages. It is generally said that the Urals mark the easternmost frontier of Europe. But in this case, likewise, the great land of Russia clearly has no

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desire for political affiliation with Europe, despite that geographical demarcation line. Could Russian be described as a non-European language? Moreover, Western Europeans might hesitate to classify Bashkir and Tatar (Turkic languages spoken in Russia to the west of the Urals) or Turkish and the Caucasian languages, as European. There is a certain lack of clarity, therefore, over the ‘European-ness’ of languages. Furthermore, the demarcation lines between languages are inevitably somewhat blurred, German being a good example. Although it might not be comprehensible to a speaker of standard German, why should we not regard Swiss German (or indeed all the Swiss dialects) as an actual language? After all, Luxembourgish, another variant of German, has attained the status of Luxembourg’s official language. Nobody doubts that Dutch, linguistically speaking a Low German dialect, is a ‘language’ in its own right. All these tongues are variants within the vast linguistic zone covered by German. To the east, this is clearly demarcated by the Slavic languages and Hungarian; to the south and west, by the Romance languages, and to the north − fairly distinctly − by the Germanic languages. The boundary lines within Theutonia (a beautiful, outdated French term used to denote the German linguistic zone) are therefore vague. This is because local variants form a dialect continuum showing fluid linguistic transitions rather than marked differences. Now, how might we define a ‘language’ in view of these continuities and transitions that have no clear boundaries? An American linguist has described a language as ‘a dialect with an army and navy’. Not only is this remark witty, it goes straight to the political heart of the question. When a dialect is used by a state as an administrative, military, cultural and educational tool, it becomes a ‘language’ – in other words, a means of communication used to regulate the social existence of this political entity. However, the definition of a dialect as a language is not dependent on a purely political criterion. In order to be endowed with the status of a ‘language’, the dialect in question needs to have a written form, even this serves exclusively cultural, literary or religious purposes. In this way, German, a written form of expression transcending specific dialectal characteristics and distinctive political identities, was a ‘language’ well before the existence of a German state, army or fleet. The most meaningful criterion for elevation to the status of a ‘language’ is that a given linguistic variant should be ‘common’ to a diverse linguistic zone. This is a clear allusion to the ancient Greek concept of koine. The Greek linguistic zone was highly diverse. ‘Greek’ was actually a group of dialects, but for transdialectal and written communication, the Greeks developed a common language, known as koine. The notion of ‘community’ is one of the criteria for determining whether a linguistic system is seen as a ‘language’. While remaining aware of grey areas regarding both geography and linguistic boundaries, we will now identify, in an approximate fashion, the main European languages and linguistic zones, starting with the south west. Most European languages belong to the Indo-European family. This includes Romance languages (Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, French, Italian, Sardinian and Romanian), the Germanic language family (German, Dutch, English, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Swedish), Celtic languages (Breton, Scottish and Irish

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Gaelic and Welsh), the Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Slovak, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian), in addition to the Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian), Greek and Albanian. Romani also belongs to the IndoEuropean family; Romani speakers are dispersed more or less throughout Europe. Finno-Ugric is another major European linguistic family; languages within this group include Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish. Basque is an ‘isolated’ language, belonging to no linguistic group. Europe’s only Semitic language (a family of languages spoken across North Africa and the Middle East) is Maltese, which is strongly influenced by Italian. The Caucasian and Turkic languages are spoken on the margins of Europe. We can therefore locate Europe’s linguistic zones on a map of the continent, always bearing in mind the reservations previously expressed. However, this is an extremely unbalanced list, as it makes no mention of ‘minority languages’ (Rhaeto-Romanic, Sorbian, Occitan, etc.), dialects (or geographical variants) of the ‘major’ languages or those spoken by immigrants. A list based on the last category would include almost every language on earth, as Europe has immigrants from all over the globe. The members of the largest immigrant communities are Arabic and Turkish speakers. Finally, European sign languages must certainly be added to our list. In short, what with the difficulties involved in producing a definition of a European language, it is hard to determine exactly how many languages Europe has. Those who have ventured to do so have produced answers ranging from 64 to 234!

THE GENEALOGY OF LANGUAGES The term ‘language family’ used earlier denotes a connection based on genealogy and leads us from the spatial to the temporal distribution of languages. Those in the Indo-European family have a common origin; this explains the structural and lexical similarities between them, which is also the case with the other language families. The geographical distribution of languages across the map of Europe is the result of several waves of migration and conquests; the major movements alone will be briefly outlined here. The Indo-European languages originate from a geographical zone north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The peoples of that zone began to migrate westwards, towards Europe, and eastwards, towards India (hence the term ‘IndoEuropean’) from the second millennium BCE. The Greeks occupied the Balkans, the Italic peoples inhabited the Apennine peninsula, the Celts migrated towards Central Europe, Gaul, the Iberian peninsula, and advanced as far as the British Isles. Little is known of the pre-Indo-European peoples of Europe. The only language to have survived following the Indo-European migrations is Basque. After their ‘arrival’ in Europe, the Indo-European peoples continued their migrations and conquests over the next few centuries. The Greeks founded colonies along the Mediterranean coast, from Asia Minor to Spain. The Romans (an Italic people) conquered Italy and the whole Mediterranean Basin. As a result of the expansion of the Roman Empire, Latin spread to the Western section of Europe. The Celtic languages all but disappeared under its dominance. Meanwhile, in the Eastern section of the empire, the cultural prestige enjoyed by Greek enabled it to maintain its position almost up

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to the period of the Arab and Turkish conquests. Even the masters of the world – namely, the Romans – respected Greek as superior to their own language (hence the Greek-Latin bilingualism of the empire’s elites). A new wave of migrations, this time involving Germanic peoples, then occurred, destroying the Roman Empire. These Germanic tribes shattered the political and cultural structures of the Western Roman Empire. However, as they regarded Latin culture as superior, they often integrated themselves into Roman society by adopting the Latin language or its spoken form, known as Vulgar Latin. They only retained their own languages in the northern regions of the empire (Germania and the British Isles), and in areas that lay outside it. The Slavs and Hungarian peoples, the last to arrive in their present-day territories, established themselves further to the east and south. The Germanic peoples then advanced eastwards. This expansion into Slav territory, which occurred during the Middle Ages and modern times, was nullified after the Second World War. Today, the migration of millions of European and non-European language speakers – much larger in scale than those of the past – is profoundly altering the linguistic map of Europe. This brief outline cannot provide a comprehensive picture of language migrations in their entirety and full complexity. However, it gives a general idea of the migratory movements leading to the existence of today’s major European linguistic areas (Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Hungarian). One would have to give the history of each of these languages to explain why French is spoken in France, how the Germans created their shared language, how the francophone Normans’ invasion of England contributed to the development of English, that partly Latin-based, partly Germanic language, why there are three major Romance languages in the Iberian peninsula, how Danish and Norwegian split into two distinct languages (a situation somewhat similar to that of Serbian and Croatian today) and why the Italians have a shared language. To obtain this information, the reader will refer to the histories of each of these languages, but we will mention two points of convergence in their shared European history. The first concerns their linguistic form; the second, their cultural and political destiny. In-depth comparative research carried out on the languages of Europe has highlighted the profound impact produced by the long-standing coexistence of languages within a shared cultural zone. The languages of Europe have acquired common structural features aside from their genealogical relationships. In this way, the Germanic, Romance, Slavic and Hungarian languages have a set of shared grammatical characteristics that enable them to be grouped together under the heading ‘Standard Average European’.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL LANGUAGES The second point concerns the sociolinguistic position of these languages (which has certainly favoured grammatical convergence). Above all, it concerns the Latin world and, therefore, the Western languages, but it introduced concurrent dynamics. In the medieval Christian world, Latin was used for ‘higher’ purposes (religion, politics,

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scholarly texts and law). The prevailing powers, the university and the church used and above all wrote in the language of the bygone empire. Latin was the language of spatial and social distance. In everyday life, the populace (vulgus) spoke various vernacular languages (vulgaria). The Renaissance and the complete rebirth of European culture saw sovereigns, clerics and scholars beginning to speak and write in the vernacular languages, which gradually moved into the spheres of discourse previously reserved for Latin. This process was furthered by different factors within each linguistic community, but the result was the same. Little by little, the languages used by the people gained in status and began to replace Latin. In France, the vernacular was mainly promoted by the ruling powers (starting with the example of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts signed into law by François I in 1539.) In Germany, religion was the driving force of the movement, with the translation of the Bible carried out by Martin Luther between 1522 and 1534. In Italy, it was achieved through literature. By the end of this process, scientific and philosophical texts were being written in the vernacular. Symbolic dates in this transition include the shift made by Galileo Galilei from Latin to the vernacular when he published Il Saggiatore in 1623 and the Dialogo in 1632, and that of Descartes, with his Discours de la méthode in 1637. The diglossia of the Middle Ages − Latin superior, the vernacular inferior − gradually became obsolete, at varying speeds depending on the countries. The process was furthered by the development of printing and the Enlightenment. From then on, and up to the 1950s, the dominant language regime in Europe was characterized by the use of the ‘vulgar’ languages in almost every conceivable domain, from the humblest to the most elevated; this has been the case in France since 1700, and in Germany since 1800. The accession of these vernacular tongues to the higher spheres of discourse had two important consequences. It enriched the languages enormously and increased their prestige. People became aware of the fact that their own native languages were just as worthy and estimable as Latin, which had long been seen as the sole possessor of these qualities. The status of language was elevated during the French Revolution; it became a symbol of the nation and of the unity of the Republic, establishing a political linguistic model that remains valid today. Commercial, diplomatic and scientific exchanges certainly required the use of an additional language; a nineteenth-century German trader had to have a knowledge of French in order to conduct his international business dealings, while French was the language of diplomacy from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. And until the First World War, even a British chemist had to have some knowledge of German. Nevertheless, the ‘national languages’ gradually came to cover every linguistic need within the nation states. Even in those countries where a language belatedly came to be a national language (as with the Baltic countries), it was quickly assigned to various ‘superior’ domains such as education, law and politics. In this way, Maltese is becoming a sophisticated and prestigious language, having been recognized as an official language of the European Union. The linguistic situation in Europe today is characterized by highly developed languages serving as a symbol of the nations that speak and write them − that

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is, languages with the status of a national language of culture. There is no single superior language in Europe today, as Latin was in the Middle Ages. All languages have the same dignity as Latin; all are equal.

LANGUAGE AS A WORLD VISION A philosophical aspect should be added to that sociolinguistic situation characterizing the languages of Europe. The elevation of the vernacular languages to the heights previously occupied by Latin gave rise to new knowledge and linguistic profundity. Up to the Renaissance, it was generally thought, in accordance with the views of Aristotle, that languages express one identical, universal thought through their different sounds. From this perspective, all human beings produce the same ideas – without the aid of language – and words are merely material, phonic signs used for the communication of those ideas. Yet, after abandoning Latin and using different languages for their scientific and philosophical works, European thinkers understood that the various languages did not express identical thoughts and that each, in its own way, contributed to the formation of ideas. Contact with other peoples of the world following the European conquests – especially in America – and encounters with languages that differed profoundly from those of Europe in both the grammatical and the lexical domain further enriched this new conception of language. In this way, the Europeans discovered that it was extremely difficult to express the Christian faith in unfamiliar languages, such as Nahuatl, Quechua and Otomí, and that they would have to ‘convey’ it using totally different semantic systems, which effectively meant giving it new forms. This led to the realization that languages were not only sound systems − they were also different semantic universes corresponding to different ‘world visions’, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Languages become all the more valuable through the awareness of this semantic profundity; they are not only the voices of linguistic communities, but, in a certain sense, they also correspond to those communities’ thoughts. When Leibniz saw the German language as ‘our way of living, speaking, writing, even thinking’ (unsere Art zu leben, zu reden, zu schreiben, ja sogar zu denken1), he was already expressing, in 1682, this new European conception of languages. Mindful of that precious, symbolic value of languages, the European Union respects those of its members. Twenty-four languages are regarded as official: Bulgarian, Croat, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. It [the European Union] shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced. (Treaty of Lisbon, Article 2 (3)) This respect entails the need for a language service which – in principle – translates from and into every language. As all these languages are endowed with the same dignity, it would be impossible for the European Union to adopt a policy of standardization.

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LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY AND ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE Nevertheless, despite its official policy of preserving the richness of cultural diversity, the European Union is engaged in a process of standardization, although it has no political mandate to do so. The language mainly used by its representatives when speaking to the world’s press is, of course, English; the dominant language used for internal administrative communication in Brussels is English; most EU texts and decrees are in English, and English is the dominant ‘source language’. All European Union member states pursue language education policies that promote the learning of English. Already, practically the entire populations of the Nordic countries – Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland – and that of the Netherlands are bilingual. Germany is well on the way to catching them up. The younger generations in the other European countries are losing no time in learning English. In a few decades from now, the entire population of Europe will be equipped with good English language skills. Viewed from this perspective, Europe is not the land of translation, but the land of a shared language − namely, English. The learning of a single language by a multilingual continent in this way inevitably has its consequences, which are evident in all Europe’s languages. In reference to European language knowledge statistics, it is routinely deplored that ‘only’ 50 per cent of the continent’s population speak English. There are differences to take into consideration here; for instance, 90 per cent of the Dutch population are English speakers, as against 15 per cent in the case of Bulgaria. In reality, the fact that 50 per cent of Europeans speak English is an unprecedented achievement in itself, and the result of a revolutionary process. The development of a bilingual population is a victory certainly due to the language teaching efforts expended from the 1950s onwards. It is expected that within a few decades the whole of the continent, not just Northern Europe, will be bilingual, with English as the common language. The transformation of a continent of 500 million inhabitants into a bilingual area (with the exception of Britain, whose monolingualism will naturally become more pronounced) is a totally unique event in the history of human languages – it took just a century to accomplish. The intrusion of English words is not something to be feared. Languages, especially those of Europe, have always borrowed words and structures from other languages, without losing their individuality. Languages are not ‘pure’ − they are subject to all kinds of influences in the course of their history. In this way, French is no more than Latin spoken by ‘foreigners’, Celts and Germanic peoples, who played a major part in forging its sonorous character – that sound that we Germans find so appealing. They also contributed to its lexicon, as did the Italians, the Germans and the English at a later date; the Greeks and the Latin-speaking peoples, those eternal sources, had done so before them. Instead, the process to be feared is the relegation of vernacular languages, as this would nullify the great triumph of European culture − the elevation of European languages to advanced levels of culture and power. For English is not only used as the language of international communication; it is, increasingly, replacing national

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languages even in the national context. Certain discourses are now conducted exclusively in English. The language, both spoken and written, of science, performance, technology, economics and finance is now English, and English alone. And if the language of erudition and power is different from that spoken by the rest of the population, that language becomes ‘superior’. The languages used by the people are once more consigned to lower levels; their status downgraded, they become discredited, and are used solely in a local or domestic context. The existence of multiple languages is perceived as an obstacle to communication; all examples of linguistic standardization are seen in terms of progress. However, that perception, much in evidence in the domains of sociology and the social sciences, fails to take into account a fact brought to light by the elevation of European languages to the status of Latin; languages are not only tools of communication − above all, they are forms of thought enabling human beings to appropriate the world in the intellectual sense. In this way, one must learn a language in order to discover how one thinks in that language, in order to encounter Otherness and to form a ‘bond of friendship’ with one’s European neighbour. If Europe is to remain herself, she must experience and endure this fundamental tension between linguistic diversity and uniformity.

NOTE 1. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Unvorgreifliche Gedanken, betreffend die Ausübung und Verbesserung der deutschen Sprache. Zwei Aufsätze, edited by Uwe Pörksen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983 [1697]), p. 64.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cavalli, Alessandro and Alberto Martinelli, La società europea, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2015. Cerquiglini, Bernard (Ed.), Les Langues de France, Paris, PUF, 2003. Gerhards, Jürgen, Mehrsprachigkeit im vereinten Europa. Transnationales sprachliches Kapital als Ressource einer globalisierten Welt, Wiesbaden, VS Verlag, 2010. Glück, Helmut (Ed.), Metzler Lexikon Sprache, Stuttgart and Weimar, Metzler, 2005. Grévin, Benoit, Le Parchemin des cieux. Essai sur le Moyen Âge du langage, Paris, Le Seuil, 2012. Haspelmath, Martin, ‘The European Linguistic Area: Standard Average European’, in Martin Haspelmath (Ed.), Language Typology and Language Universals, vol. I, 1492–1510, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2001. Heine, Bernd and Tani Kuteva, The Changing Languages of Europe, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. Hinrichs, Uwe (Ed.), Handbuch der Eurolinguistik, Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 2010. Kortmann, Bernd and Johan Van Der Auwera (Eds.), The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2011. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Unvorgreifliche Gedanken, betreffend die Ausübung und Verbesserung der deutschen Sprache. Zwei Aufsätze, edited by Uwe Pörksen, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1983 [1697].

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Martinet, André (Ed.), Le Langage, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1968. Meier-Brügger, Michael, Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2010. Siguan, Miquel, Die Sprachen im vereinten Europa, Tübingen, Stauffenburg, 2001. Trabant, Jürgen, Europäisches Sprachdenken. Von Platon bis Wittgenstein, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2006. Trabant, Jürgen, Globalesisch oder was? Ein Plädoyer für Europas Sprachen, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2014.

CHAPTER 49

The sanctuary of thought ISTVÁN MONOK

A site of knowledge and a seat of power – in that it perpetuates memories of a king or a state − the library was also conceived as a space for sharing culture. In this way, it constitutes ‘a material history of European thought’. The Europeans developed two establishments for the preservation and management of written heritage: libraries and archives. These house the entirety of our written legacy. The origins of writing are closely linked to the need to perpetuate memory (that of prevailing powers and governments). Writing added a new, unprecedented possibility to the oral and pictorial tradition: reading. Promoted by Greek and Roman cultures, and also by (Western) Christian communities, this new means of transmission eclipsed the culture of images during certain periods in history. As had already been the case with the renowned library of Nineveh in the seventh century BCE, the documents representing written heritage were mainly connected with practices (economic, legal and administrative). For the primary purpose of libraries is to collect, systematize and present written heritage.

LIBRARIES OF POWER At Nineveh, King Ashurbanipal (668–631/629 BCE) created a library for political elites and custodians of religion. Although we know little about how it functioned, the great libraries of Alexandria (the Mouseion and the Serapeum), on the other hand, hold no secrets for us. These two collections, founded in the third century BCE, comprised Egyptian, Greek and Middle Eastern works that had been brought together for the reigning Ptolemaic dynasty. Libraries fulfilled several functions; they were studios where manuscripts were copied, schools and research centres. Educated individuals, well versed in philology, translated works in different languages into Greek – the lingua franca of the time. It is to them that we owe the Septuaginta – the Septuagint − the Greek translation of the Old Testament. The Mouseion caught fire on a number of occasions (48–47 BCE, and then again in 262, 272 and 296–7); the Serapeum, however, was destroyed in the anti-pagan campaigns pursued by the Christian community in Alexandria. Indeed, each era adopted a new stance with regard to the heritage of its predecessor. In this way, the Roman Empire, characterized by Horace’s famous comment Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (‘once conquered, Greece has conquered her conqueror’) incorporated the Greek

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heritage into its libraries, thereby reinventing it, while at the same time giving ample space to the applied sciences. Huge private collections were created, the sign of a boundless curiosity described in unfavourable terms by the Stoic philosopher Seneca in his treatise Of the Tranquility of the Mind and in his Moral Letters to Lucilius: ‘[...] this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of masterthinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere.1 Introduced by the Christian Church at the Council of Nicaea, the practice of canonizing texts led to the classification and hierarchization of works according to theological criteria (theology, law and medicine). These were preserved and transmitted by the religious orders and the secular clergy. Unlike the nightmarish library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), monastic libraries were never reserved exclusively for monks, although access to them was limited. In the fifteenth century, erudite humanists established libraries for shared usage that were open to their friends and the middle-class inhabitants of their cities. This shared practice of reading − combined with the growth of vernacular literature and boosted by the dissemination of printed material – played a major role in the development of the Reformation. The aim was to make Christianity’s foundational texts and the humanist heritage accessible to all.

NATIONAL LIBRARIES The idea of preserving all written material dates back to the sixteenth century. A series of ordinances established the legal deposit obligation and motivated the practice of collecting and systematically classifying all the works published in a kingdom. The decrees issued by François I date from 1539 and were connected with the establishment of northern French, used at court, as the language of administration. This gave rise to the birth of ‘national’ libraries, fostering emulation among sovereigns, learned societies and high-ranking prelates; the Church also participated in this movement, as was the case in Central Europe. With the collapse of the Ancien Régime and the political ascension of the Third Estate, the public library established its presence everywhere. Although this was a Europe-wide phenomenon, regional distinctions prevailed, with access by catalogue, as in Prussia, or a system of open access as in English libraries. In theory, the internet is the most open library of all, but this will not genuinely be the case until Europe’s cultural heritage is accessible there in its entirety − this involves making complex political choices and determining a financial model. Libraries are democratic institutions and are therefore connected with fundamental European values. Since the nineteenth century, however, they have also been engaged in a national conservation mission encompassing the entire cultural heritage of a given linguistic community. In this way, it is not uncommon to see conflicts between communities leading to the destruction or deliberate appropriation of libraries, the hearts of collective identities and memories. There is nothing new in the idea of

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destroying or burning books with the aim of annihilating the cultural memories of one’s foes. This is illustrated by the example of the Serapeum Library in Alexandria, destroyed by the Christian community in order to prevent the dissemination of non-Christian writings. A similar example, at least according to certain hypotheses, is that of the Mouseion Library, said to have suffered a comparable fate during the Muslim conquests (640–2 CE). Instances of wilful destruction are legion, from the Nazi book burnings and the ‘cleansing’ of libraries by the communist governments of Eastern Europe to the systematic acts that have been described as ‘memoricide’ carried out during the wars in Yugoslavia; these led to the deliberate decimation of the National Library of Bosnia by the Serb army and the destruction of the Bosnian archives by Serb and Croat forces. There are many cases of entire libraries being seized by foreign hands, as with the Soviet and American armies during the Second World War, for example. During the Partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century, the book collections amassed by Polish aristocrats were transported to Saint Petersburg. Under the Ceauşescu regime, Transylvania’s collections of Hungarian and Saxon literature were transported to Bucharest in order to ‘Westernize’ the image of the Romanian capital. On each occasion, the underlying presupposition is that a given national community should be the sole legitimate owner of a given cultural archive collection – a highly problematic simplification. For instance, the traces of written material originating from the Carpathian Basin, which unquestionably constitute the shared heritage of the various peoples who live there, also carry the signs of a German and Italian presence. As for the history of book printing and its connection with Alsace − Johannes Gutenberg spent some years in Strasbourg − the French are certainly not the only nation to be able to lay claim to this legacy. The history of libraries is a ‘material history of European thought’ (Frédéric Barbier). Changes affecting the linguistic or thematic compositions of their collections faithfully reflect the intellectual orientations of the cultural community in question. In accordance with the developments that characterize European cultural history, German and Italian works dominated library collections from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, with French and English books emerging in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, respectively. As depositories of intellectual products given a material form, libraries are the custodians of European collective memory. Their foundation, their development, their distribution, their role in representing political and urban life and their regularly readapted presence in the most diverse everyday and cultural representations (including the speculations on the infinite developed in The Library of Babel and The Book of Sand, by Jorge Luis Borges) form a major chapter in European history. The attempts at destruction to which they have often been subjected only serve to prove that the accessible treasures they hold make a substantial contribution to European values.

NOTE 1. Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, translated by Richard Mott Gunmere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vol. I, 1917; vol. 2, 1920).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Baratin, Marc and Christian Jacob (Eds.), Le Pouvoir des bibliothèques. La mémoire des livres dans la culture occidentale, Paris, Albin Michel, 1996. Barbier, Frédéric, Histoire des bibliothèques, d’Alexandrie aux bibliothèques virtuelles, Paris, Armand Colin, 2013. Barbier, Frédéric and István Monok (Eds.), Les Bibliothèques centrales et la construction des identités collectives, Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005. Jacob, Christian (Ed.), Lieux de savoir, 2 vols, Paris: Albin Michel, 2007 and 2011.

CHAPTER 50

Gutenberg and Erasmus From the letter to the spirit ISTVÁN MONOK

Today, their names are associated with ambitious intellectual and scientific programmes. Johannes Gutenberg and Desiderius Erasmus embody the historical values of humanism and universal learning that Europe seeks to reflect. Johannes Gutenberg (before 1400–68) and Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (ca. 1469–1536) are each, in their own way, iconic figures in European history. The former owes his fame to his ‘invention’ (still disputed in academic circles) of printing with movable type. One of its advantages was that it enabled the written heritage to be reproduced and circulated at a lower cost. The latter is renowned for his intellectual treatises, disseminated thanks to the introduction of those very same printing techniques, just as the European discovery of the New World and the division in the Christian Church was broadening and transforming traditional horizons. While Gutenberg was declared ‘Man of the Millennium’ by American newspapers in 1998, his name is now associated with a vast programme involving the digitization of copyright-free literary works (the Gutenberg Project). And Erasmus gave his name to the best-known European university exchange scheme, the renowned Erasmus Programme, created in 1987. These exchanges provide experiences and promote intercultural mobility, as well as creating personal memories, as seen in Cédric Klapisch’s Franco-Spanish comedy Pot Luck (L’Auberge espagnole, 2002). How have Gutenberg and Erasmus been able to imprint themselves so deeply into the collective European memory, where they remain the objects of more or less consistent and unvarying admiration? This is also true of its ideological variations, such as classical Marxism, which sees them as paving the way for the fight against feudalism.

GUTENBERG: THE POWER OF THE BOOK The first answer lies in their relationship with tradition. At a time when the fabric of Christianity was being torn apart (in Gutenberg’s era, the fifteenth century, various councils sought to resolve the Papal Schism of 1378, while that of Erasmus was

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beset by the conflict between different branches of Christianity triggered by the Reformation in the sixteenth century), the rise in the practice of private reading, the promotion of vernacular literature and the growing importance of personal piety gave rise to the devotio moderna characteristic of erudite humanism. Gutenberg, from a middle-class family and apparently extremely devout, was able to capitalize on this moment. He had attended a school attached to a religious brotherhood, the Sankt Viktor Bruderschaft, near Mainz. His invention, a movable-type printing system, was developed thanks to his knowledge of goldsmithing, financial assistance from a printer friend, Johann Fust, and the collaboration of the theologian Peter Schöffer. It was rapidly (but not exclusively) used for the purpose of critiquing the institutional Church and for fostering a personal piety based on private reading. In this way, the ‘Gutenberg Bible’, as it is called, combines the aims of Apologetics with the dissemination of knowledge and speculation; this was also the case, in a broader sense, with the ‘book’ − the new product described by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in L’Apparition du livre (1958) as a ‘Commodity’ and a ‘Force for Change’. Although historians are aware of the financial difficulties that Gutenberg was originally obliged to battle, only the ‘Gutenberg revolution’ brought about through his invention has gone down in history, having led to a change of era. Initially honoured at the local, and later the social level (by middle-class city dwellers), he was recognized as a figure of national importance when the city of his birth, Mainz, erected a statue in his honour in 1837. Frankfurt, Hamburg and Vienna followed suit. His renown subsequently spread throughout Europe and later the world, during a period that also witnessed Stuttgart honouring Schiller, Frankfurt commemorating Goethe and Nuremberg venerating Dürer. If, as one often reads, Europe is the civilization of the book, then Gutenberg is its ultimate iconic figure. His legacy, which has long reigned supreme, is now being revisited in the context of issues relating to the computer and digital revolution.

ERASMUS: THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS The homage paid to Erasmus in Rotterdam dates back still further; there is mention of a wooden statue of him in the city when it was visited by the future King Philip II in 1549. This was later replaced by a stone version and then, in 1620, by one of bronze, which was hidden when the Nazis occupied the city. Erasmus, who is portrayed in famous paintings by Hans Holbein, Albrecht Dürer and Quentin Metsys as the ideal image of a cleric and a scholar, likewise attended a school run by a religious brotherhood (the Canonici Regulares Sancti Augustini Fratrum a Vita Communi at Deventer). He was not only an ordained priest but also a trained theologian. His numerous travels (in the Netherlands, France, England, Italy and Switzerland) and his encounters with diverse groups of people − clerics, prelates, members of the middle class, scholars and aristocrats – motivated him to draw inspiration from the experiences of others and from history. Furthermore, he was convinced that it was impossible for a single individual to produce a perfect book. One of the earliest examples of efficient networking was the publication of a critical

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work on the principal Fathers of the Church; this was the result of a collaboration between Erasmus and Johannes Frobenius, who produced the book at his printing office in Basel. A prolific letter writer with a verbose style, Erasmus conducted written exchanges with over six hundred correspondents throughout Europe. Although he was undeniably a Christian philosopher, the dogmatic thinking that characterized the representatives of a distorted tradition and the arrogance of power were regular targets of his mordant irony. This was the case, for instance, with Antibarbari (which he composed before 1500) and In Praise of Folly (1511). Norbert Elias drew extensively on Erasmus’s work On Civility in Children (1530) when writing The Civilizing Process (1939). The fact that Erasmus had such a broad network of acquaintances − transcending political, linguistic and religious boundaries − indicates an open-mindedness on his part that commands respect. It has endowed him with the aura of ‘European-ness’ that he possesses today, as the quintessential embodiment of the humanist movement and of the ideal represented by the ‘Republic of Letters’. One of the most vibrant tributes paid to that emancipatory, utopian ideal was offered by Stefan Zweig in his Erasmus, Grandeur and Decadence of an Idea (1935). Gutenberg and Erasmus are therefore not only men of modernity but, above all, men in modernity. One introduced printing with movable type, the other demonstrated and shared the intellectual’s potential for self-reflexivity. These legacies represent knowledge in circulation; being open in character, it is always unsettled, and always unsettling.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, translated from the French by David Gerard, London, Foundations of History Library, 1976 [1958]. Füssel, Stephan, Johannes Gutenberg, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 2003. Huizinga, Johan, Erasmus, translated from the Dutch by Frederik Jan Hopman, New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1924. Monnet, Pierre and Dominique Borne, ‘Érasme’, in Les Arpenteurs de l’Europe (collective work), Arles, Actes Sud/CulturesFrance, 2008, p. 70.

CHAPTER 51

The globish of the Middle Ages JÜRGEN TRABANT

The lingua franca, a mixture of Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Greek and Turkish, was used from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century by the sailors in the Mediterranean ports as a rudimentary means of communication. For this reason, it is sometimes compared to English, now spoken by all and sundry. We read more or less everywhere that English is, or should be, the lingua franca of Europe. On that subject, for instance, the Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs stated: ‘We need a lingua franca, and only one.’1 By this he means that English should become Europe’s transnational medium of communication. But does he also mean that we need a highly simplified language reduced to serving elementary, limited communicative functions? Because this was the actual purpose of a lingua franca; a verbal means of communication, it had to be easy to assimilate (it was ‘picked up’ rather than learned) and it met the everyday needs of maritime and commercial life. The essential functions of the system of communication denoted by the term lingua franca are transnationality and rapid communication within a limited domain, such as trade and the relaying of practical information. Yet this original usage corresponds neither to the forms nor the functions of the international version of English known as ‘globish’, a contraction of global English.

AN ‘EMERGENCY LANGUAGE’ The expression lingua franca traditionally denotes a pidgin language – a ‘secondary’, auxiliary language rather than a mother tongue – that was spoken in the Mediterranean ports until the nineteenth century. It served as a rudimentary means of communication and was used on an everyday basis by speakers of different languages. The adjective franca refers to the Franks of the medieval Mediterranean world, in other words, the Western Christians, who spoke a Romance language. It is therefore completely unrelated to the adjective franc − ‘free’ or ‘open’ − as in the German expression frank und frei. It must surely be that idea of freedom and openness – ‘free language’, ‘open language’ − that makes the expression lingua

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franca sound so appealing when used today. As for the franca (the Roman, Christian) aspect of the language, its vocabulary was based on Italian and Spanish, together with elements of other languages spoken on the Mediterranean coasts: Arabic, Greek and Turkish. As a language used exclusively for spoken communication, artificially created for the sole purpose of exchanging basic information, it had an extremely rudimentary grammatical system. It originated, therefore, from the contacts established between people who spoke different languages and never came to learn those of their neighbours. ‘These languages were created through necessity, and we might also describe them as emergency languages; the functions they have to fulfill are important, but they vary little; above all, they are the languages of commerce.’2 The description ‘emergency language’ (Notsprache) reflects the profound difference between the lingua franca and globish. Those who learn English really learn it. This is not a question of ‘picking up’ a ‘light’ form of the language with a simplified grammatical system, to which they tack on elements of other languages. English is the maternal language of a vast, natural linguistic community. It is a ‘full’ language, in other words, a complex linguistic diasystem, with a fully developed linguistic architecture and diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic variations (relating to dialects, sociolects and registers). A language with a long history (Indo-European, West Germanic, French and Graeco-Latin), it has also produced one of the greatest literatures in the world. In this way, studying English enables learners to access both a major language and a major culture. The lingua franca provides access to nothing at all; it has no internal architecture and no history in the true sense of the word, as it is not, strictly speaking, a language. It is simply a register, a way of speaking linked to a basic situation – an orphan register, moreover, with no family or home of its own. Describing it as a lingua franca is a highly rhetorical way of minimizing the advance of that powerful linguistic force, English, and of presenting it as harmless; or, conversely, it is an insult to that great language. Granted, it is sometimes used as a rudimentary communication tool − ‘One package of Marlboro, please’ – ‘airport English’ that calls to mind the language spoken in the Mediterranean ports. Yet, even when used in such a basic manner, that register belongs to English, which is certainly no emergency language. Only recently, Latin has started to be described as the lingua franca of Europe in the Middle Ages; this definition is even less true of Latin than it is of English. In Old Europe, Latin was respected as a sophisticated language that fulfilled a wide variety of functions and was endowed with the highest status. Primarily a written language and the expression of a prestigious culture, Latin enjoyed superiority. Its only point in common with the lingua franca of the Middle Ages was that, from the sixth century or thereabouts, Latin ceased to be a maternal language, becoming instead a ‘second’, learned language. And what a learning process! It was acquired over long years of formal education, not rapidly picked up here and there through a few passing linguistic encounters in taverns, markets and brothels.

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NOTES 1. Philippe Van Parijs, Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 209. 2. Hugo Schuchardt, ‘Die Lingua franca’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 33 (1909): 442.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dakhlia, Jocelyne, Lingua Franca. Histoire d’une langue en Méditerranée, Arles, Actes Sud, 2008. Parijs, Philippe Van, Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011. Schuchardt, Hugo, ‘Die Lingua franca’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 33 (1909): 441–61.

CHAPTER 52

The many lives of Amsterdam WILLEM FRIJHOFF

Its extensive collection of Rembrandt paintings and its relaxed attitude to soft drugs have contributed to Amsterdam’s status as a tourist capital of Europe. The city has made tolerance its trademark; previously applied in a religious context, it is now associated with illicit pleasures. In his stimulating essay on Amsterdam and its history, the American journalist Russell Shorto described it as ‘the world’s most liberal city’, perfectly encapsulating what it represents in collective European memories. The appeal it exerts over the entire world clearly proves this. Although the city has only eight hundred thousand inhabitants, it received twenty million visitors in 2016. There are myriad signs of the past; this is omnipresent in the physical sense, in sights and in sounds, while multiple memories have also left their imprints on the city, metamorphosing it into a realm of living memory. In the late sixteenth century, the Northern Netherlands broke away from Spanish rule and Amsterdam rose rapidly, becoming the new Republic’s leading city as a trading and financial hub, as well a centre for communication and a printing capital. It has attracted hyperbolic commentary ever since. In their Délices des Pais-Bas (1697) the two Flemish brothers François and Pierre Foppens stated their views in no uncertain terms: Amsterdam is, indisputably, the most important mercantile city on earth. One might call it the world’s general store; the centre of opulence, it brings together all the riches and delights the nations have to offer. Newcomers are surprised at the sight it presents, charmed by its beauty and spellbound by its magnificence. The countless visitors who arrive in the Netherlands invariably find themselves in Amsterdam and are captivated. In former times, they marvelled at the economic dynamism and commercial influence of a city that had become the capital of the ‘world economy’ in the seventeenth century (Braudel); now, they are enthralled by the exotic character of the full ‘Amsterdam experience’. Visitors to the city experience a sensation of physical and intellectual freedom through their immersion in a centuries-old world steeped in powerful recollections, from the lost exoticism of the East Indies to rekindled memories of the Holocaust. Amsterdam only reveals

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itself through the lived experience of the city, through the layout of its streets and canals, the façades of its houses, its gliding boats and the sonorous peals of its bells.

UNFETTERED FREEDOM Amsterdam holds a particular attraction for younger generations; there, they discover possibilities of freedom and an almost unlimited openness to the world. These longstanding characteristics are symbolized both by the ubiquitous presence of the bikes to be found here, there and everywhere in the city, and by its atmosphere of eroticism. It is obviously not Europe’s only youth capital. Yet, more than any other, it embodies dreams that are seemingly engraved on its heritage and memory. These are the dreams of freedom that inspire backpackers and those younger generations seeking forbidden gratification, tourists who come to admire masterpieces by Rembrandt and Van Gogh or others who are simply seeking a change of scene and a longed-for escape to a metropolis famed for its easy-going attitude. Having established itself as a city of unfettered freedom regarding social commerce, the presence and the culture of the body, prostitution and drugs, it is continually rewriting its history, emphasizing this as an enduring characteristic. Over half a century, Amsterdam became redefined in the collective memory as an epicentre of liberty, a reputation based on leading artistic and intellectual figures such as Descartes, Spinoza and Rembrandt, and also came to be seen as a place of intellectual, religious and cultural tolerance. In more recent times, that image has been reinforced by the memory of Anne Frank, who is celebrated as an iconic figure embodying freedom of spirit in the face of extreme adversity. The idea of Amsterdam as a European place of memory unfailingly brings to mind the beautiful song by Jacques Brel (1964): Dans le port d’Amsterdam Y a des marins qui chantent Les rêves qui les hantent Au large d’Amsterdam [In the port of Amsterdam There are sailors who sing Of the dreams that haunt them, By Amsterdam’s shore] Its dreamlike quality remains one of the charms that Amsterdam offers its visitors, although the port gradually disappeared from the city centre after the 1960s. It still has its fine, exotically named warehouses, street names that evoke its colonial past and replicas of ships from the Golden Age – the few remaining vestiges of the forest of masts that captivated visitors in previous times. Spectacles are presented on the IJ and the Amstel, and the city is also a maritime tourist destination. In the nineteenth century, international commercial enterprises gradually relocated to Rotterdam, leaving Amsterdam with its financial activities, its beautiful urban décor and its memories as an international port. Today, the sailors’ district, together with its taverns, has disappeared – or rather, its character and visitors

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have changed. Thousands of tourists stroll down the Zeedijk and the Wallen, red light districts with a regulated sex industry. The Sex Museum on the Damrak attracts half a million visitors a year. The Warmoesstraat, the city’s main shopping street in the seventeenth century, is now strongly associated with drug tourism. Intense experiences are on offer at the Torture Museum on the Singel and at the Amsterdam Dungeon on the Rokin, an attraction combining a museum of horrors with interactive shows. Ironically, the latter is situated on the very site formerly occupied by a large medieval pilgrimage chapel, the Heilige Stede (‘the Holy Place’, 1345) built to commemorate a Eucharistic miracle. It fell into Protestant hands when the city officially adopted that religion in 1578. It was demolished in 1908, despite protests by Catholics, who had discreetly maintained their worship in the form of a silent nocturnal procession, a tradition still upheld each year on 15 March, the anniversary of the miracle. The rise in secular experiences of this type seems characteristic of our time. However, the phenomenon is imprinted on the city’s long European collective memory. As confirmed by the English travellers William Brereton (1634) and John Evelyn (1641), the cabarets and inns, with their entertainments and artificial fountains, attracted foreigners, merchants and sailors from the 1620s onwards. These served as a source of business for brothels. Outlawed in the formal sense, the latter were nevertheless tolerated as serving the public interest and were sometimes even taxed by the authorities. A booklet entitled Le Putansime d’Amsterdam, published in 1681, provided information about brothels intended for visitors to the city. In The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch citizen who had emigrated to England, applauded the policies of the Dutch regenten (the city’s administrators), who authorized prostitution in the case of sailors; tolerance of these private vices effectively protected the female citizens in the public space. Its permissive social climate lies at the heart of the civic culture on which Amsterdam’s fame is based. While its specific features have changed over the years, its essence has remained the same. It continues to affect every sphere of collective life, from prostitution, drug use or squatting to intellectual dissidence, social critiques and religious life.

RELATIVE RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE In this case, too, an overview of the past provides clarification. Although officially Protestant, the city’s attitude towards non-Reformed religions was one of relative and selective tolerance, and daily relations between citizens of all persuasions were markedly ecumenical in character. Calvinism was unquestionably dominant, although not triumphant. The Reformed Consistory there was constantly at odds with the more liberal regenten. The latter ultimately imposed their own decisions and ideas, which ran counter to those of the ecclesiastics and of the ‘High and Powerful’ members of the States General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, based at The Hague. Aside from commercial and political motives, such as fear of civil war or of violent conflicts over the interpretation of the Bible, the moderate

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policies pursued by magistrates were dictated by the principle of defending freedom of conscience, as set out in the Union of Utrecht (1579), the treaty that served as the foundation charter of the Republic. Lutheranism was tolerated from 1633, while in 1675 the Jews, who were given a specific status, were able to build their two large synagogues, one each for the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities, originating from Germany and Portugal, respectively. The large Catholic and Mennonite (Anabaptist) populations, however, had to wait until the eighteenth century, all the while practising their faiths privately in their homes. Later, they were able to worship in actual churches concealed behind a neutral exterior. Examples of these semi-clandestine churches can still be seen today, in the Béguinage and the Museum of Our Lord in the Attic (1661), which now celebrate the tolerance traditionally associated with Amsterdam. Foreign religious communities (such as John Amos Comenius’s Moravian Brethren), practitioners of esoteric doctrines (such as Hermetists), spiritualists and other religious dissidents were often treated in a more positive manner, particularly when they had sympathizers among the magistrates. But although radical dissidents liked to call Amsterdam Eleutheropolis − the ‘city of freedom’ – that liberty still had its limits. Fervent, radical religious figures, such as the seventeenth-century preacher Jean de Labadie, who sought to purify the church or to build a new Jerusalem, were not welcome. Adriaen Koerbagh, a friend of Spinoza who preached atheism, was condemned to hard labour for blasphemy and died in prison in 1669. His writings were destroyed by the authorities, but in secret, for fear of the public’s reaction. During the Old Regime, therefore, Amsterdam’s famous tolerance primarily amounted to a form of governance resulting from judicious permissiveness. Nevertheless, it forms an essential part of the city’s memory and is an enduring aspect of its European image.

THE LEFT-LIBERTARIAN HERITAGE That tolerance was reinvented in the 1960s. During this period, Amsterdam’s presence on the international scene was characterized by its ‘happenings’ − collective, performative public events. The Provo movement met by a small statue on Spui Square, which became a meeting place for anti-establishment youth in 1965. Together with the anarchist Happenings organized by Robert Jasper Grootveld and Roel van Duijn, it unleashed left-wing libertarian dynamics that soon transcended these activities, as broader pathways beckoned. Amsterdam was the first city to internationalize youth tourism. It had hippies, hashish, coffee shops and smartshops, as well as Damslapers (young people sleeping on the steps of the national monument inaugurated on Dam Square in 1956) and squatters occupying the Paradiso and Melkweg, now concert venues. Its young visitors saw it as the magical centre of the world and immersed themselves in the odours emanating from soft drugs that floated in the air. Later came the ‘white bike’ cycle sharing plan, the craze for organic food and an organic lifestyle counterbalancing the fast food omnipresent in the city, whose culinary history is characterized by ‘quick bites’ such as raw herrings, chips

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and various snacks and a whole alternative culture that can be traced back to the left-wing libertarian memory of historic Amsterdam. Although it is not associated with the city’s history, the gay movement likewise forms part of this left-libertarian heritage. It first took off in Amsterdam in 1946 with the opening of the gay cultural centre, COC, before gaining momentum worldwide. Since then it has extended to the lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities, interspersing its public activities with major gestures; Pink Saturday was organized in 1978; the Homomonument in front of the Westerkerk was inaugurated in 1987; the Gay Games were introduced in 1998, followed by the annual Pride event and the Canal Parade. And finally, the world’s first same-sex marriage took place here in 2001.

THE MEMORY OF THE GOLDEN AGE A reappraisal of the city’s history in the late twentieth century revealed the aspects that made it unique in the seventeenth century and restored its position within the framework of a history of memory. That memory fundamentally rests on the exemplary urban layout created in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. The process involved two phases, one starting in 1613 and the other after 1663. It resulted in a ring of four canals encircling the old city, with its nine thousand or so pre-1800 buildings and its eighty bridges, which was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2010. This canal belt and the city’s mercantile past explain why traditional Amsterdam is regularly described as ‘the Venice of the North’. With its alluring combination of water and buildings, the city displays a remarkable interplay of perspectives and vistas, making canal boat tours a lucrative enterprise. In this landscape, the buildings characteristic of the centuries-long Dutch Ancien Régime alternate with the homes of rich merchants, the grand middle-class residences and the functional edifices constructed over the last four centuries. Although many of these exhibit styles from later periods that have little to do with the tastes that prevailed in the Golden Age, they are inevitably associated with that era through the power of evocation and the harmonious effect produced by the whole architectural ensemble. And it is the memory of the Golden Age, more than the urban landscape itself, which guides perceptions of the old city. The same is true of the City Hall, which was built in the mid-seventeenth century by the regenten, conscious of their importance as the aristocracy of the city and keen to consolidate their power through allegorical references to the grandeurs of Antiquity. In the nineteenth century, it was transformed into a royal palace by Louis Bonaparte − appointed King of Holland by the grace of Napoleon, his brother − and ever since then it has also been used as such by the sovereigns of the House of Orange. However, a stubbornly middle-class air has continued to emanate from the building, proclaiming commercial expansion, free enterprise and citizen autonomy. The term ‘Golden Age’ itself, with its connotations of exceptionality, was not established until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the ‘iron centuries’, mired in mediocrity and characterised by a lack of dynamism, began to give way to

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what was soon described as a ‘Second Golden Age’. This second period of prosperity saw Amsterdam flourish as a European port, a centre of industry and international banking and a focal point for literary and artistic activity. The ‘Second Golden Age’ gave rise to a new phase in urban design whose inspiration stemmed from highly diverse sources and which has made its mark on the city. The Central Station and the Rijksmuseum were built in the neo-Gothic style, while the former Central Post Office, the Concertgebouw, the Stadsschouwburg and the De Bijenkorf department store display the characteristics of Historicism. The new Stock Exchange, created by Hendrik Petrus Berlage and inaugurated in 1903, likewise references the Renaissance, but was primarily inspired by new trends in modern architecture. This is even more pronounced in the case of the imposing conversion carried out on the former De Bazel bank, which now houses the municipal archives, while the American Hotel and the Tuschinski Theatre were built in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. From the 1910s to the 1930s, the School of Amsterdam made its mark on entire districts and built its masterpiece, the Scheepvaarthuis (now the Amrâth Hotel) in the very heart of the city. Today, a third Golden Age with its own iconic creations seems to be developing. Examples include the NEMO Science Museum − built in the form of a boat, it incorporates memories of the past into present-day Amsterdam − the ARCAM Centre for Architecture, the new public library (OBA) and the concert hall, which is called Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ. Countless Atlases and Histories of Amsterdam of every size have been published, written either by inhabitants of the city or by foreigners. All engage in hyperbolic praise of the Golden Age and its great painters, and include the new enthusiasm for bourgeois art, multiple discourses of tolerance and memories of the active presence of the Black, Asian, Turkish and Muslim communities in the city during the Golden Age. They present a discourse of memory, recalling Amsterdam at the height of its renown, when it appeared to the whole of Europe as the perfect example of a successful union between money, culture and liberty. This was admirably summarized by the philosopher Caspar Barlaeus in the title of the speech he delivered at the inauguration of the ‘Illustrious Athenaeum’ (which preceded the University of Amsterdam) in 1632: Mercator sapiens, sive Oratio de conjugendis Mercaturæ & Philosophiæ studiis − ‘The Wise Merchant, or an Oration on the Bringing Together of the Study of Commerce, the Arts and Philosophy’. At the same time, the poet Joost van den Vondel, whose parents were also Flemish refugees, was writing these triumphant verses on his city: Aan d’Amstel en aan’t IJ, daar doet zich heerlijk open Zij die, als Keizerin, de kroon draagt van Europe. She spreads out in majesty on the Amstel and the IJ, Wearing the crown of Europe, as an empress. The memory of the dynamic freedom characteristic of Amsterdam remains alive today and is maintained by the city’s forty or so museums, half of which are devoted to the cult of Rembrandt and to his contemporaries and their patrons. Few other national museums are as effusive in their celebration of Amsterdam in the Golden

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Age as the Rijksmuseum, which is continually recreating that memory for its visitors from all over the world. They become immersed in the somewhat Manichean vision of a Golden Century, opulent in every respect and constructed entirely by a flourishing middle class and the regenten who governed Amsterdam, intent on upholding freedom and autonomy. This triumphant manner of perceiving and presenting the Dutch Golden Age draws a veil over the fact that it was followed by centuries of stagnation, even regression, during which knowledge that had been acquired was consolidated and the current physiognomy of the city was established. In the same way, it overlooks the destitution endured by most of the inhabitants of Amsterdam in that century. Half of the city’s population were immigrants with no resources; Protestants and dissidents, Catholics and Jews, they came from all the northern and eastern countries of Europe, and even, in some cases, from further away, seeking refuge, work and their fortunes. Many met an untimely end on battleships, in the merchant navy and the colonies, leaving no trace of themselves in the archives, often not even their names. The districts where these destitute groups found lodgings – the Jordaan in the case of artisans, the areas behind the main canals in the case of the immigrants fleeing persecutions and the small islands near the main synagogues in the case of the Jewish community – have now been renovated. Today, these neat, well set out spaces have regained their place among the dominant elements of historical memory, as reflections of the most clearly visible middle-class values of the Dutch Golden Age. Indeed, Amsterdam imprinted itself on the collective memory as a city with a dual face and was seen as such from the outset. In 1647, the French visitor Jean Le Laboureur described the city as ‘a veritable Babylon, with its beauty, its riches, the pride of its inhabitants and its motley mix of different nations, languages and religions’. He celebrated it as ‘the world’s market, and a shop of curiosities for all of humankind’. Jewish refugees acclaimed Amsterdam as the ‘gateway to heaven’ and named it Mokum, a Yiddish word meaning a safe haven and now in general use in the Dutch language. Yet there are other images countering these perceptions that have been gradually sublimated into a romantic, middle-class vision of urban freedom. In En Hollande: Lettres à un ami by Maxime Du Camp (1859), the ‘clean, neat, polished city, which looks at if it has been bathed every morning’, is contrasted with the Jewish district: A type of muddy, flea-ridden, leprous ghetto, a Babylon of squalor, a Nineveh full of rubbish and residue. It is . . . inhabited by teeming masses clad in rags full of holes, worn-down old shoes and battered hats; it was there, in the midseventeenth century, that the Wandering Jew was last seen.

ANNE FRANK’S CHESTNUT TREE It was not until after the extermination of three-quarters of the city’s eighty thousand Jewish inhabitants that Amsterdam finally appropriated the Jewish presence and incorporated this into its collective memory. On 25 and 26 February 1941, a general strike was held in protest against the Nazi raid on the Jewish quarter, and was

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violently suppressed. It was the only large-scale demonstration held in Europe as an act of resistance to the persecution of the Jews. The Hollandsche Schouwburg, the location where Jewish inhabitants were rounded up before being deported, is now their official site of memory. The true European realm of memory, however, is no. 263 Prinsengracht, the house where the Frank family hid until their arrest on 4 August 1944, and where Anne wrote her famous Diary. It attracts an everincreasing number of visitors each year − about one million three hundred thousand in 2019, for example. Now a realm of memory in itself, the Diary was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2009. The chestnut tree in the yard, described when in full bloom by Anne on 13 May 1944, perpetuated her memory until it was toppled in a storm in 2010. But the remains of the tree and the offshoots from its branches were distributed throughout the world; they were the first of the emblematic items whose significance for so many has consolidated the memory of Anne Frank, an iconic European figure, establishing it more firmly within the Jewish memory of Amsterdam.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Deben, León, Willem Salet and Marie-Thérèse van Thoor (Eds.), Cultural Heritage and the Future of the Historic Inner City of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Aksant, 2004. Feddes, Fred, A Millennium of Amsterdam: Spatial History of a Marvellous City, Bussum, Thoth, 2012. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara and Jeffrey Shandler (Eds.), Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2012. Mak, Geert, Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City, London, Harvill Press, 2001. Phillips, Derek, Well-Being in Amsterdam’s Golden Age, Amsterdam, Pallas, 2008. Shorto, Russell, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, New York, Doubleday, 2013.

CHAPTER 53

Montmartre and Montparnasse United by myth BÉATRICE JOYEUX-PRUNEL

From the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, the districts of Montparnasse and Montmartre were considered the legendary embodiments of Paris, the city of the arts. Now tourist attractions, they symbolize the past of a capital open to the modern world and to painters and writers from all over the globe. They have been immobilized within a folklore that has eradicated all references to political and religious conflict. From the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, the districts of Montmartre and Montparnasse were thought to embody the essence of Paris − the international capital of culture, open and welcoming to innovative creators from all over the world. They were also the focal points of the collective memory of a world map of cultural developments that would have centred on Paris prior to 1945, losing its force after that date. Created during the 1900s, that memory was subsequently consolidated by successive generations of artists and writers whose impact was lessening in the 1950s and 1960s. It has since proved fruitful for cultural entrepreneurs and tourist promoters, supported by the work of museums and historians. It has become increasingly idealized over time, focusing on Montmartre and Montparnasse as legendary centres of internationalism and modernism, and excluding less libertarian and more controversial elements, chief among these being the memory of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the political and religious scars associated with it.

CENTRES OF ARTISTIC INFLUENCE As new artistic styles emerged in modern Europe, Montmartre and Montparnasse each became a centre of influence in turn − Montmartre in the late nineteenth century and Montparnasse during the interwar years. At the dawn of the twentieth century the French capital was already promoting its image abroad as the centre of modernity, while other European cities were

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struggling to catch up. Since the 1880s, Paris had been a regular port of call for groups from Berlin, Vienna, Barcelona, Prague and Christiania who were calling for cultural modernization; they subsequently reinterpreted the city’s artistic vocabulary, especially that of Montmartre. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters for the Chat Noir reappeared in the Berlin Kabarett, Alfons Mucha’s artwork in Prague, and even in the paintings in the Quatre Gats café in Barcelona. And it was also in Montmartre, in the large, ramshackle wooden studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, that Pablo Picasso and his friend Georges Braque pioneered Cubism. This movement gathered momentum, developing in Montparnasse after 1910; by 1913, it had conquered the cultural capitals of Europe. Today, tourists gravitate from Montmartre to Montparnasse, exploring the sites associated with European modernity, now canonized by art historians and museums. Each nationality discovers traces of the pioneering artists who established their own national Modernist tradition. The Dutch seek out Vincent Van Gogh at the Moulin de la Galette and Piet Mondrian at the rue du Départ, the Poles look for Moïse Kisling at La Coupole, the Italians, Amedeo Modigliani and Ricciotto Canudo on the boulevard Raspail; the Germans hunt for traces of that leading light of Surrealism, Max Ernst, while the Catalans seek out his colleagues Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. The Americans commemorate the heroes of their own Modernist literature, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, the Japanese remember Tsuguharu Foujita and the Brazilians, their first ‘avant-garde Anthropophagist’. Montmartre and Montparnasse seem to have been consensual districts, whether the artists had come there because they took Paris as the main reference point for modernity or whether they had taken the very best from all other cultures and brought it to the capital. Publications devoted to these localities and the artists who passed through them regularly include the phrase ‘from Montmartre to Montparnasse’; the emphasis here is on mobility and the positive transgression of political, aesthetic, cultural and sexual boundaries.

A DE-POLITICIZED TOURIST PROGRAMME Yet the practices and visual translations generated by that memory are different in each of the two districts. Montmartre appears to be ensconced in the world of a nineteenth-century popular novel. Charcoal and red chalk drawings of the place du Tertre portray a neighbourhood where everyone cuts a handsome figure despite their poverty. Inexpensive chromolithograph prints show a Parisian village that has remained unsullied by modern architecture. Montparnasse, in contrast, is no picture-postcard district. In the 1970s, it was restructured around the station, the Tower, its mall and its cinemas, and exudes the air of a civilization based on a fastpaced lifestyle and shopping. The usual hallmarks of tourism, from the souvenir shop to the model Eiffel Tower sellers, are missing here. Although the restaurants on the boulevard Raspail are full, the Musée de Montparnasse, which opened its doors in the rue du Maine in 1998, closed in 2013 for lack of visitors. Conversely, as well as the Moulin Rouge, the place du Tertre, the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur and

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Clos Montmartre, the Butte Montmartre has its own museum, with a regularly updated website. Ever since its inauguration in 1960, it has been providing its visitors with information about the 1789 and 1871 Paris Communes, their ideal of autonomy and revolutionary artistic movements. The only memories of the two districts that chime with one another at international level are those relating to art. Like the Montparnasse Tower, the SacréCœur forms part of the Parisian skyline featuring in tour operators’ programmes. However, its controversial, quintessentially French memory of spilled blood − that of the Communards and of the Catholic victims of the Commune of 1871 − is not deemed important. Yet a large number of French Catholics still associate Montmartre with its Basilica, while the latter remains a jarring sight for secularists. Although they intermingle within the Sacré-Cœur itself, memories vary in scale from one to another. Rather than keeping the traumatic 1871 massacres in their prayers, the Benedictine nuns in the choir are now more likely to be praying for the world. Throughout the day and night, worshippers take turns to engage in silent adoration beside them before going about their business. Meanwhile, the air is filled with an incessant rustling noise from morning to evening, as visitors from all four corners of the earth wander through the Basilica before moving on to other leisure activities.

MEMORIES OF COSMOPOLITANISM IN A NATIONALISTIC ERA Accounts of these two districts from the 1850s onwards and of the artistic, literary and musical activities that developed there indicate that memories of their artistic associations − for which they are best known − were constructed jointly in the early 1900s. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Montmartre’s bohemian reputation was already being disseminated through printed images, literary works and narrative accounts. Toulouse-Lautrec’s distinctive style was introduced to the United States by the Goupil Gallery. His images − from the French Cancan to the divan in the brothel − were copied more or less everywhere. But it was principally after 1905 that Montmartre established itself as a mythical locality in a large number of novels, paintings and recollections, as well as in vaudeville performances and musical comedies. At that time, modernity was experiencing a crisis at international level; this was more specifically due to the system, centred on Paris, that led to modern art becoming increasingly exclusive. Montmartre was able to serve as a reminder of the libertarian and popular foundations of internationalized modern art. During this period, Montparnasse’s image was starting to develop in conjunction with that of Montmartre. In 1901, the former was still a poverty-stricken neighbourhood. Bubu de Montparnasse, Charles-Louis Philippe’s story of a pimp and the prostitute he controls, portrays a run-down area where all hopes are wrecked by alcohol and venereal diseases. Towards 1910, however, Montparnasse began to be seen as an up-and-coming art district, appearing in paintings in Budapest, London,

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Berlin and Stockholm. Its cafés were meeting places for groups belonging to a new bohemian community from Eastern Europe, Russia and the United States. These pioneering creators depicted their own living environments – or, at least, their leisure environments – at the same time as they were painting Montmartre. Dance scenes, such as those by Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, were given a new, contemporary treatment, from the Bal Tabarin by the Italian Futurist artist Gino Severini to the Bal Bullier by the Russian-born artist Sonia Delaunay. Meanwhile, the newspaper cuttings, glasses of wine and pedestal tables that regularly featured in paintings by Braque and Picasso after 1912 came to be associated with the two neighbourhoods – and, through metonymic usage, with the avant-garde, a shared artistic cause that transcended national boundaries. The Swiss Expressionist painter Paul Klee, who travelled to Paris in 1912, found it had the same cosmopolitan atmosphere as the Munich district of Schwabing, where he lived. Preserving the positive cosmopolitanism associated with avant-garde environments became a necessity for those who rejected the chauvinism of an increasingly nationalistic era. The art war raged in the period prior to 1914, amplified by aesthetic and commercial rivalries that extended from Moscow to Paris, Berlin, Munich and Prague and involved Futurists, Cubists, Expressionists, Cubo-Futurists and so on. In this way, through a process of aestheticization and de-politicization, the collective memory of Modernism has eradicated the negative elements that existed in Montparnasse in the 1910s. It is not widely known that the leading figures of the Parisian avant-garde movement failed to defend their foreign colleagues in the face of the xenophobic criticism levelled at them in 1912. This attitude was hardly less commendable than that of the German artists (also Modernists), who took the xenophobic line of decrying the ‘invasion’ of Germany by Parisian art. Internationalism had its detractors everywhere, and these included avant-garde artists themselves, from London and Amsterdam to Berlin and Barcelona.

PARIS IS A PARTY An idealistic perspective was therefore adopted. This was first applied to avantgarde circles; moves to the Beaux-Arts and the Académie française that followed trajectories between Montmartre and Montparnasse were swept aside in the collective memory, along with instances of ‘selling out’ to commerce and publicity. Emphasis was then placed on the cosmopolitan, humanist side of the movement, and finally on the disinterested nature of the artists, literary figures, critics and art dealers engaged in cultural innovation. That process of idealization intensified after 1920. Exuberant stories of the soubrettes of Montmartre were updated in operettas, novels and poems, from Germany to the United States. At the same time, poets – led by Ernest Hemingway – forged connections between Montparnasse and their poetry, and vice versa. Young writers who had returned to their native lands published their reminiscences of the ‘cradles of modern painting’ and of their ‘renowned artists and writers’ – among whom they were naturally included.

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This phenomenon formed part of a period of nostalgic modernity at a time when the growth of the art market was threatening avant-garde purity. Competition was also emerging, from new, more politically engaged and self-assured avantgarde movements, particularly Constructivism, which was inspired by the Russian Revolution, to political demands more radical in character than bohemian anarchism. Montmartre and Montparnasse played their part in defending the purity of the Parisian avant-garde. In the 1920s, the image of Montmartre as a timeless Parisian village was exported through the commercial success of ‘naïve’ painters such as Maurice Utrillo, while the colourists of Montparnasse grew rich by selling their restaurant scenes to foreign buyers. Through the pens and paint brushes of the writers and artists involved in this evolution, Montparnasse developed into a contradictory space in terms of success stories − a district full of new ‘saints’ such as Amedeo Modigliani, who, after dying in poverty in 1920, suddenly became rich in posthumous admirers. In the 1950s, certain figures who had been active on that artistic scene were continuing to produce vivid recollections of their participation in the Modernist movement of the 1910s–1940s, through novels, reminiscences, prefaces, illustrations, music and poems or translations; these appeared in Italy, Germany, England, Sweden and the United States. Hemingway’s Memoir, A Moveable Feast (translated into French as Paris est une fête − Paris Is a Party), stands out among the symbolic literary constructions of Montmartre and Montparnasse. Posthumously published in both English and French in 1964, it celebrates a liberated, cosmopolitan generation and the districts they inhabited, islands of democracy in a Europe that was abandoning itself to totalitarianism. It may have been necessary for that generation to distance itself from fascist regimes as being culturally conservative, and to do its best to demonstrate the openness of Modernist culture. It was also a case of one generation feeling the need to reaffirm its dominance just as it was losing its symbolic power, with new generations of iconoclastic rebels emerging from the late 1950s onwards.

COMMEMORATING AND REVIVING And everything did indeed change with the 1960s. The mythical periods and places associated with the whole avant-garde carnival held little meaning for the new generation. Paris did not serve as a reference point in the cases of OuLiPo, the Situationists, the Beat Generation, the New Realists, Zero, Nul or the American and Japanese neo-Dadaists − the Pop artists of the 1960s − while conceptual art was purported to be ‘polycentric’. The two districts subsequently became the focus of commemoration − this effectively involved entombing them and immobilizing them in folklore. Since then, quantities of biographies of the emblematic figures associated with them have appeared on the scene, and many historians and journalists continue to claim that they have genuinely brought the two districts ‘back to life’ through their books, documentary films or travelling exhibitions. Idealization suits history, to the benefit of the present. As with the case of the ageing artists who had lost their lustre when the spotlight shifted to New York, it

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very soon became a necessary policy for the Parisian authorities to pursue; Paris’s standing in the world had to be defended. The creation of the Musée de Montmartre, together with the exhibitions held in the two districts in the late 1970s, were part of a programme designed to rehabilitate a capital perceived as outmoded. With the inauguration of the Pompidou Centre in 1977, and its first exhibitions, Paris-New York, Paris-Moscou and Paris-Berlin, the two districts re-emerged into the light. The legend of Montmartre and Montparnasse also took on a European dimension in the numerous exhibitions devoted to them that circulated from Italy and Germany to Switzerland. This may be interpreted as the effect of post-traumatic stress, with pre-1945 European Modernism consigned to the past, and Europe marginalized through a global geopolitical perspective on culture symbolically dominated by New York. The Parisian tourism business has benefitted from this approach since the 1980s, as confirmed by the publication of multitudes of guidebooks, all of them promoting the same itineraries. At the same time, the two districts have been the subject of more detailed research, although the aim in these cases is to focus on specific sections of the population, such as the Jewish community, American writers, women and iconic personalities (Chaïm Soutine, the muse and model Kiki, Man Ray and Foujita). The cosmopolitan spaces that are seen in a positive light (Le Chat Noir, Le Dôme, La Coupole, the Flore and the art academies) are ‘brought back to life’ here; sites deemed problematic, however, such as Montparnasse Tower and the Sacré-Cœur, do not feature in this particular bibliography. There is nothing on prostitution, the police or commerce, no mention of deliberate display or inauthenticity – history makes its own contribution to the clichés associated with the two districts. The notion of the ideal has its political function too. Since the 1990s, when nations were deconstructed by historians, Montmartre and Montparnasse have become the ideal embodiments of European friendship forged through culture. Nationalism and xenophobia have been erased from the picture, as have disputes over art and cases of sexual exploitation and commercial speculation. Today, people from all over the world, be they German, Japanese, Canadian, American, Korean or Norwegian, have likewise developed an image of the two districts as ‘living history’ representing a bygone Old Europe − whether they see it in their imaginations or in reality. The legend of emancipated creativity fostered by remarkable international encounters, by free love and the absence of norms, is maintained through that collective memory and romanticized in films. Perhaps it is all the more important as the economic and cultural globalization resulting in its dissemination appears to generate poverty, cultural uniformity and discord.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Gautherie-Kampka, Annette, Les Allemands du Dôme. La colonie allemande de Montparnasse dans les années 1903-1914, Berlin, Peter Lang, coll. ‘Contacts’, series II, Gallo-germanica, 14, 1995.

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Gee, Malcolm, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930, New York, Garland, 1981. Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice, Les Avant-gardes artistiques 1848–1918. Une histoire transnationale, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘Folio histoire’, 2016. Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice, Les Avant-gardes artistiques 1918–1945. Une histoire transnationale, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘Folio histoire’, 2017. Lambert, Jacques, De Montmartre à Montparnasse, la vraie vie de bohème (1900–1939): avec Picasso, Juan Gris, Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrillo, Modigliani, Kisling, Vlaminck, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Marie Laurencin, Soutine, Foujita, Francis Carco, Pierre Mac Orlan, Paris, Les Éditions de Paris, 2014. Silver, Kenneth E. (Ed.), Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945 (contributions by Romy Golan, Arthur A. Cohen, Billy Klüver and Julie Martin), New York, Universe Books, 1985 [1981].

CHAPTER 54

Vilnius, Wilno, Wilna, Vilne EKATERINA MAKHOTINA

Vilnius has been Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Soviet by turns. Steeped in Jewish culture and once occupied by the Germans, Romain Gary’s birthplace has experienced its full share of the suffering endured throughout Europe’s history. This has made its mark on the city’s toponymy and its cemeteries. In order to discover the truly European face of Vilnius, it may be necessary to view it from a distance and with a touch of melancholy nostalgia. The Lithuanian poet and author Tomas Venclova did just that; after emigrating to America, he portrayed the city as an inextricable fusion of European histories and as standing for the ‘success and failure of the “European dream”’. The capital of Soviet Lithuania also represented a ‘European island’ for his friend Joseph Brodsky, who went there seeking freedom for literary creation – and he certainly found it, as confirmed by his poem cycle Lithuanian Divertissement (1971–2). Although Brodsky, like so many Soviet dissidents, went to Vilnius in quest of Europe, many other writers and artists who are now the focus of veneration in Europe see the city primarily as a homeland or view it with nostalgia. These include Polish author and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, French writer-diplomat Romain Gary, the artists Chaïm Soutine, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Jascha Heifetz and the poets Abba Kovner and Oskar Miłosz; all associated Vilnius with uprootal and homesickness, with detachment and nostalgia. Each of them had left their own personal homeland there – this might have been Polish (romantic), Hasidic (traditional), Bundist, Zionist or Lithuanian, and peopled with dreams.

THE EUROPEAN ISLAND Does Vilnius have a European or a national identity? Is it marginal or central? This is a question of perspective. The city, whose every stone bears witness to history, according to Czesław Miłosz, may be interpreted in different ways depending on the characteristics with which it is endowed, so the question remains: to whom do Vilnius and its history belong?

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In the Middle Ages, Slavs, Jews and Tatars lived in the large territory of RutheniaLithuania. Following its union with Poland in 1569, Vilnius became overshadowed by Warsaw; after the partition of Poland, it was frequently seen in the Tsarist Empire as a ‘pleasant corner of Russia’ (Leo Tolstoy). After the First World War, the young nation states of Poland and Lithuania entered into armed conflict over Vilnius. The Poles were victorious and Lithuania consequently lost its capital. During the Second World War, the German occupiers eliminated Vilnius’s Jewish population and, with it, the Jewish Millenarian culture of the ‘Jerusalem of the North’ and the concept of the litvak. The Soviet powers then re-established Vilnius as part of Lithuania and fulfilled the dreams of the country’s inhabitants as the Polish population were compelled to leave the city. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the question of how to present the history of the city and its multiple layers emerged once more – and remains unresolved to this day.

A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME ALONG GEDIMINAS AVENUE If one wanted to examine Vilnius from a national perspective, one would have to travel the length of the city’s main avenue, from east to west. This is named after the Grand Duke Gediminas (ca. 1275–1341), the legendary ‘father’ of the city of Vilnius. Cathedral Square, at the easternmost end of the avenue, contains new points of reference relating to the country’s history. In addition to the reconstructed Palace of the Grand Dukes and the monuments evoking the golden age of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Gediminas’s legendary castle is also located there. This has constantly served as an emblem for those who rally to the national cause, as proof that Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, will always rise again. When Józef Piłsudski conquered Vilnius for Poland after the First World War, the iconic castle served as a focal point in the attack. In the Soviet era it was regularly chosen as the setting for public celebrations and song festivals. Further to the west, off Gediminas Avenue, lies Kudirka Square. This contains a monument that was erected in the 2000s in honour of Vincas Kurdika, who composed the Lithuanian national anthem. If this is less imposing than Cathedral Square, which is thoroughly steeped in the national spirit, it may well be because the conflicting memories of the city’s past resurface there. For some inhabitants of Vilnius, the square remains associated with Ivan Chernyakhovsky; the monument commemorating the Soviet general who liberated Vilnius from Nazi occupation in the summer of 1944 was erected there in 1949, remaining in place until 1990. During the period of Perestroika and Glasnost Lithuania’s relations with the Soviet Union were renegotiated, and the former’s independence was symbolically sealed by the dismantling of Soviet monuments, which were removed to a park well away from the city. The next stage in our journey, Lukishkiu Square, likewise bears witness to the ambivalent nature of the city and to the conflicts that have beset it. Its solid granite pillars draw the gaze towards its central point, emphasizing the void left by the

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statue of Lenin, regrettably broken during its removal in 1991. The empty square also reflects the difficulties involved in establishing what the principal monument to an independent Lithuania should be. For the time being, an image of national identity characterized by sacrifice dominates Lukishkiu Square. The symbolic tomb of an unknown anti-Soviet Partisan fighter and a museum dedicated to victims of genocide, the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fighters, serve as reminders of the persecution carried out by the Soviet Secret Service, and, in a more general context, of the suffering endured by the Lithuanian people from 1940 to 1991: persecution by the KGB, the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, the Partisans’ war, deportations, the Gulag and the Soviet dictatorship. Independence Square and the Seimas (the Lithuanian Parliament) are situated at the westernmost end of Gediminas Avenue. This locality may be seen as the image of the triumphant nation state. The concrete blocks there – the remaining vestiges of the barricades erected in the struggle for independence in 1991 – introduce an indispensable note of drama into the national story. This vantage point affords a view of the opposite bank of the River Neris, where the city’s diverse character is revealed once more, in the Russian Orthodox Znamenskaya Church and the kenesa (synagogue) of the Karaite Jewish community. These traces of a shared RussoLithuanian and Tataro-Lithuanian past cast doubts on the mono-national version of history reflected in Gediminas Avenue. Macha Rolnikaite, a young writer from the Vilnius ghetto and one of the few Jewish inhabitants of Vilnius to have survived the Holocaust, wrote that she no longer recognized the city on her return there. Many of the other Litvaks who returned to Vilnius experienced the same feeling of being strangers in their own city. This was highlighted in the 1990s, when descendants of the survivors came from all over the world in search of their roots, to see the places where their relatives had suffered or been murdered. They found no trace of Jewish life or history in the city; the Germans had set fire to the whole ghetto, while the Soviets had relocated or demolished Jewish cemeteries. Much reduced in size, ‘Yiddish Street’ (Jiddish gas, or Žydu gt.) now symbolizes the lack of a Jewish presence in Vilnius, with the exception of the few historical landmarks remaining in the old city; other projects involving the reconstruction of Jewish buildings have been put on hold. Jewish Vilnius no longer exists today, apart from a few signs and plaques commemorating famous names or places associated with violence or death.

THE POLYPHONIC NATURE OF CEMETERIES The numerous cemeteries on the outskirts of the city restore its diverse character and reflect the breaks that have occurred in Europe’s past, perpetuating a memory which runs counter to that of the nation’s history writers. The tombs there attest to the violent combats that decided who would possess Vilnius. But they also contain the graves of soldiers whose death has never been claimed to be of national significance. These include the two thousand grognards (‘grumblers’) from the Grande Armée who died on their way back from the Russian campaign of 1812 and have now

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been reburied at Antakalnis Cemetery, making it perhaps one the largest Napoleonic war memorial sites in Europe. At that time, the inhabitants of the city had greeted Napoleon with cries of Vive l’Empereur! in the hope that he would bring foreign dominance to an end. This process was repeated in the twentieth century, when the Lithuanians once more applauded foreign armies (including the Wehrmacht), who had come to liberate them from ‘Russian domination’. While the tombs of the French soldiers are maintained as a legacy of (West) European history, the monument to Soviet soldiers at Antakalnis remains a realm of memory for foreigners − not to say a ‘foreign’ realm of memory. The memorial, in the form of a group of highly expressive sculptures, is transformed into a RussoSoviet enclave every year on 9 May. On that day, all those whose memories of the war and the Soviet era do not chime with the official view of history gather there for remembrance. Polish national memory is expressed at the Rasos cemetery. It was here that Józef Piłsudski had his heart buried, joining a list of illustrious Polish politicians and writers and marking Wilno’s historical affiliation to Poland. The section of the cemetery containing the graves of Armia Krajowa soldiers (Poland’s Home Army) remains a popular place of pilgrimage for the city’s Polish visitors, who also come to Wilno on the trail of Poland’s national poet, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), author of the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. In the nineteenth century, Mickiewicz had extolled the Polish-Lithuanian union, describing it as ‘two souls in one body’; he could surely never have imagined that relations between the two states in the twentieth century would be marked by such enmity, mutual violence and senseless bloodshed. Its admirers see Vilnius as a miniature version of Europe. The city carries within it layers of Lithuanian, Polish, Jewish, Russian, Karaite, German and Belarusian history, as well as a panoramic swathe of most of the conflicting collective memories of Central and Eastern Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Briedis, Laimonas, Vilnius: City of Strangers, Vilnius, Baltos Lankos leidykla, 2009. Miłosz, Czesław, Die Strassen von Wilna, translated from Polish into German by R. Matwin-Buschmann, Munich, Carl Hanser, 1997. Rolnikaite, Macha, Le Journal de Macha. De Vilnius à Stutthof (1941-1945), translated from the German by N. Casanova, Paris, Liana Levi, 2003. Schulze Wessel, Martin, Irene Götz and Ekaterina Makhotina, Vilnius. Geschichte und Gedächtnis einer Stadt zwischen den Kulturen, Frankfurt am Main and New York, Campus, 2010. Venclova, Tomas, Vilnius. Eine Stadt in Europa, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2004.

Overview Europe and the novel JAVIER CERCAS

First, I would like to thank the jury from the bottom of my heart for awarding me this prize. Second, I would like to say that it is particularly important to me as it has been awarded by the European Parliament. For centuries, many Spaniards saw Europe as the great dream. The best of my ancestors were aware that they were living in a country that had been increasingly isolated since the early seventeenth century, descending ever deeper into poverty and increasingly characterized by a lack of culture and of freedom, by obscurantism and the imperial myth; from the mid-eighteenth century onwards they saw Europe as offering a realistic promise of modernity, prosperity and freedom. The vast majority of us still feel this way today, which is why Spain has never ceased to be one of the most pro-European members of the European Union. I fear that we are lacking in reasons to feel proud of being Spanish at this precise moment, but that is one. I have already written that the idea of a united Europe is the only reasonable Utopia that the Europeans have ever forged − and we have forged plenty of dreadful Utopias, theoretical paradises that have been transformed into very real hells − but, to my knowledge, only one of them has been reasonable, and it is this one. As Michel Serres has just reminded us, thanks to this Utopia, from the end of the Second World War to this day, Europeans have been able to enjoy ‘the longest period of peace and prosperity since the Trojan War’. That said, I will add that the modern novel is not only one of the finest fruits of this Utopia, but it is also the one that most resembles it; the proof is that its two most remarkable characteristics are also those that characterize a united Europe: its hybrid, heterogeneous quality and its anti-dogmatic nature. The modern novel is the truly brilliant creation of a Spaniard, Miguel de Cervantes; however, it was certain English, rather than Spanish writers – Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding – who were the first to absorb Cervantes’s teachings in the fullest sense and to ensure their continuity. Moreover, it was neither a Spanish nor an English author, but a Frenchman, Gustave Flaubert, who took on the immense task of elevating something hitherto almost universally regarded as mere entertainment to the status of a noble art. And it is a fact that no one assimilated Flaubert better than either James Joyce, an Irishman who wrote in English and spent almost all his adult life on the continent, or a Czech author called Franz Kafka who wrote in German. In the same way, it is a fact that few writers today have been as faithful to the legacy of Kafka and Joyce as Milan Kundera, a Czech author who began

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writing in Czech and later switched to French. The modern novel is a mixed genre, not only because it was created in this way by Cervantes – a genre containing and drawing inspiration from all others − but also because its history is characterized by a profound intermixing of languages and cultures. However, the modern novel is also an anti-dogmatic genre. This is because its truths are neither clear, nor unequivocal, nor distinct, but on the contrary, ambiguous, equivocal and essentially ironic. Don Quixote is unquestionably stark, raving mad – yet at the same time, he is the most lucid, reasonable man in the world; Don Quixote is unquestionably a laughable, comical, ludicrous character − yet at the same time, he is noble and heroic: ‘King of the hidalgos, lord of the sad’, in the words of a great Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío. Those are the novel’s truths – contradictory truths, multiple, many-sided, paradoxical and essentially ironic. And in creating a genre that enjoyed resounding success based on these sorts of truth, Cervantes created a genuine weapon of mass destruction against the dogmatic, monist, closed and totalitarian vision of reality. It was to counteract this vision that modern Europe was born − the Europe of reason, of freedom, of well-being and of progress. And it was to counteract this vision, and the totalitarian and nationalist regimes whose hard-line stance and opposition to intermixing plunged the twentieth century into a bloodbath, that a united Europe was born. We should not delude ourselves – that vision is now threatening to return, or indeed, it has already done so. It is almost as if we are aiming to confirm the truth of George Bernard Shaw’s statement: ‘We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.’ For, contrary to what we are accustomed to believing, history always repeats itself, albeit in such different forms that it is sometimes difficult to recognize. Today, it is not even difficult to do so. Today, now that the British have committed the folly of isolating themselves from Europe, for all the world as if they were seventeenth-century Spaniards, and now that the Americans have put power into the hands of a sinister demagogue, comparisons between our era and the 1930s have almost become clichés. We have actually reached the point where certain historians have felt compelled to remind us of the differences between the two eras. I find that all well and good. But I find it less good – in fact, I find it reckless – that we should forget the similarities between that terrible era and our own: a grave economic crisis; a profound distrust of elites and of democratic institutions; widespread anti-establishmentism; the return of nationalism and totalitarianism in the more or less regulated form of right- and leftwing populism; the replacement of rational, pragmatic politics by a politics based on grand national narratives and sentiment, and the perpetration of falsehoods on an epic scale used as a political expediency. We could go even further. In fact, we could ask ourselves whether, after sixty years of peace and prosperity, the West – and not only Europe – might be harbouring a form of grand ennui similar to the type noted by George Steiner, which was incubating after the century of relative peace and prosperity that succeeded the Napoleonic Wars. This state of mind had given rise to a longing for an intense collective experience and a secret desire for destruction and death that was clearly manifested in the art of that period − ‘Better barbarism than boredom!’, declared

OVERVIEW

351

Théophile Gautier. It was this combination that produced the perfect storm, in the form of two world wars that destroyed Europe just when so many were convinced that there could never be another conflict on European soil. However, I may be going too far and allowing myself to be carried away by pessimism. After all, we may still have time to disprove Shaw’s comment and take note of Cervantes, who wrote that history should be ‘an example and a lesson to the present, and a warning to the future’. In any event, I am sure of one thing; in these sombre times, not only does the European Union remain the most ambitious political project of the twenty-first century and our only reasonable Utopia, but it is also, quite simply, the great hope for global democracy. Admittedly, in its current mode of functioning, the European Union gives no one cause for satisfaction; it has enormous shortcomings and deficiencies and faces colossal problems − but that simply means that there is much work left to do. As Europe’s novelists, we must do ours, which means following the example set by Cervantes; but you, as Europe’s political community, must also do yours. All things considered, your task is more or less the same as ours. It involves building a more Cervantine Europe, more anti-dogmatic and heterogeneous − in other words, freer, more prosperous, stronger and more united. In the interests of us all, I wish you good luck. Thank you very much. [This is a translation of the speech delivered by Javier Cercas, recipient of the 2016 European Book Prize, at the award ceremony, © Javier Cercas, 2016].

INDEX

Above the Eternal Peace (Levitan)  77 Absolute Beginner (movie)  103 Acosta, Carlos  138 Adams, John  169 Adriatic  243, 252, 265, 268–75 boundary lines and circulating beliefs 268–70 collective memory of fragility  274–5 death in and of Venice  274–5 fragmented memories  270–2 homo adriaticus 273–4 memories of empire  272–3 agreement  13, 25, 166, 204, 209 Alberti, Leon Battista  94 The Alchemist (Rembrandt)  167 Alexander the Great  2, 7–9 Alexandria  8, 92, 205, 208, 256, 259, 264, 320, 322 Alexievich, Svetlana  246 Algarotti, Francesco  303 The Allegory of Good and Bad Government (Lorenzetti)  77 Alps, crossing  232–4 North-South connection  232–4 ambivalent European memory  252 Amsterdam  3, 155, 330–7, 341 Anne Frank’s chestnut tree  336–7 left-libertarian heritage  333–4 lives of  330–7 memory of golden age  334–6 relative religious tolerance  332–3 unfettered freedom  331–2 Ancien Régime 118 Annales movement  164 Antibarbari (Erasmus)  326 Apollinaire, Guillaume  223, 226, 287 Ariès, Philippe  140 Armenians  277, 279, 280 art of dying  140–4

‘bad’ death  141–2 learning to die  142–3 repression of death  143–4 rites of passage  140–1 sacred and secular space  146–7 The Art of Love (Ovid)  133, 134 assassination  34, 127, 271, 279 Athens  91, 92, 259, 272, 279 Atlantic 251 Austerlitz  10, 14, 15 Austria  20, 118, 126–8, 217, 232, 241, 244, 270, 273 Austria-Hungary  127, 128 Autumn Leaves (Hugo)  77 Babel or paradise  309–18 English, global language  317–18 genealogy of languages  313–14 language as world vision  316 language of Europe is translation 309–11 linguistic diversity  317–18 major linguistic areas  311–13 national languages development  314– 16 Bach, Johann Sebastian  148, 159 Balkanization  283, 284 Balkan peninsulas  268, 282 Balkans  2, 88, 212, 219, 269, 279, 282–6 Balkans confined  282–6 Balkanization and  283–4 European Turkey  282–3 Ulysses’ Gaze 285–6 Underground 284–5 Baltic  2, 72, 233, 243, 251, 260, 269, 297–301 battlefields  11, 107, 191, 233 Battle of White Mountain  86

354

Baudelaire, Charles  97 Bayle, Pierre  155 beers 229–31 geography of bottle  230–1 Belarus  194, 207, 213, 235, 238, 239, 246, 247 belfries 76–84 architectural counteroffensive  82–3 temporal tower  81–2 bell towers  77–84 Benjamin, Walter  97, 98 Bergman 73 Berlin wall  35, 191, 195, 236, 238, 243–5, 295 Bettelheim, Bruno  180 Bible  8, 151, 158, 159, 179, 182, 207, 273, 310, 315, 332 bicentenary  10, 11, 15 Biraben, Jean-Noël 72 Biringuccio, Vannoccio  38 Black Death  71–3, 75, 276 Black Sea  1, 251 Bloch, Marc  66 Boateng, K.-P.  175–7 Boccaccio, Giovanni  71, 72 Bohemia  86, 127, 141, 142, 153, 154, 287–9, 292, 293 borders  175, 187–97, 200, 201, 232, 235, 269 Borodino  10, 11 Bosnia  284, 285, 322 Boué, Ami  283 Boutry, Philippe  83 Bowie, David  244 Braudel, Fernand  90, 232, 252, 255, 264, 274 Breakthrough (monument)  243 Brecht, Bertolt  7 Brel, Jacques  331 Brenner Pass  232, 233 Brereton, William  332 Bridge of Spies (Spielberg)  244 Britain  10, 14, 16, 22, 23, 49, 50, 54, 114, 126, 230, 247, 254 Brodsky, Joseph  238, 264, 345 Brook, Peter  138 Brown, Dan  42 Bruegel, Pieter  77 Bruyère, Jean de La  60

INDEX

burial places  143 Byzantine Empire  1 Byzantinism 118 Byzantium  205, 276–80 fall of  276–7 multilayered society  279–80 Caesar, Julius  2, 7–9, 54, 119, 226, 277 Calvin, John  61, 62, 148–59 Article 10  155–6 Catholic architectural heritage  158 divisions and ruptures  150–2 ‘in-depth Christianization’  149–50 invisible boundaries  156–7 Protestant musical legacy  158–9 reformation and reforms  148–9 religious territorialization  152–4 tolerance and religious freedom  154– 5 Calvinists  150, 152–4 Cameron, David  115 Camp, Maxime Du  336 Camus, Albert  73, 260 Canistris, Opicinus de  252 capital  101, 102, 205, 206, 276–9, 291, 293–5, 302, 338, 346 capitalism  98, 101, 102, 105, 305 Capua, Rinaldo di  138 Carmen  3, 137–9 Catholic Church  30, 86, 112, 149–52, 155 Catholic Europe  156, 158, 229 Catholicism  3, 150, 152, 154, 156–8, 202 Catholics  61, 62, 152, 153, 155, 156, 207, 211, 213, 253, 256, 332, 336 Celestial Harmonies (Magris)  129 cemeteries, polyphonic nature  347–8 Central Europe(s)  235–41, 268, 272, 274, 289, 290, 295 German Mitteleuropa 236 good/bad myth  241 Kundera`s 236–7 new Eastern and Central Europe after 1989 238–9 Polish ‘Central Europe’ and Ukraine 239 post-Yalta Europe  236

INDEX

Russia and  237–8 within Ukraine  240–1 ceremony  11, 12, 52 Cerularius, Michael  204 Cervantes, Miguel de  36, 48, 138, 182, 310, 349–51 Charcot, Jean-Martin  222 Charles IV  74 Charles V  126, 127 Chayanov, Alexander  66 Chernobyl, blind spot  246–8 Children’s and Household Tales (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm)  180 Christ  11, 42, 43, 157, 205, 213, 214, 221–3, 229 Christianity  76, 78, 92, 93, 148–50, 152, 206–8, 216, 217, 324, 325 Christianity, bulwarks  216–19 legend of defence  217–18 resentments, periphery  218–19 Christ Stopped at Eboli (Levi)  62 Churchill, Winston Leonard Spencer  3, 22, 23, 194, 236, 243, 294 ‘Iron Curtain’  194 ‘iron curtain’ speech  23 multifaceted figure  22–3 Nobel Prize for Literature  22 Church Militant  25 church towers  76–84 ‘the dear face of my past’  83–4 ‘the finger of god’  76–7 omnipresence and diversity  77–8 secular hours  79–80 spires, quest for height  80–1 ‘the time of the church’  78–9 Cinderella  179, 180 city 88–100 ancient sources  91–2 bourgeois, emergence of  97–8 ‘city air makes one free’  95–6 of dreams  266 dwellers  59, 61, 62, 98 industrialization and  98 as laboratory  89–90 medieval source  93–4 new idea of  94–5 point of convergence  98–100 as witness  90–1 Civic Forum  292

355

The Civilizing Process (Elias)  326 civilization  19, 20, 52, 61, 90, 102, 103, 200, 201, 216, 217, 258–60, 303 civitas 85 Clair, René 169 clairets 229 classes  34, 60, 61, 101, 105, 106, 112, 170, 229, 265 Cleopatra 7 collective European memories  274, 324, 330 collective historical memory  116 collective memories  41, 46, 59, 60, 93, 119, 146, 152–4, 172, 177, 191, 336, 341 Combray 76–8 Comenius, John  193 communication  207, 268, 269, 312, 316, 318, 327, 330 Communist Party  34, 294 Complaint of Peace (Erasmus)  192, 225 Compostela 145–7 Confessions (Rousseau)  278 conflictual memories  248, 256 Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Montesquieu)  209 consilium 72 Constable, John  77 Constantinople  204–10, 213, 215, 217, 276–80 Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (Ignatius of Loyola)  149 contamination 247 Corvinus, Matthias  218 Costa-Gavras 197 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard  192 Council of Constance  86, 120, 288 Council of Florence  209 countrysides 59–70 appropriated memory  65–6 city versus 62–4 class with no imprint  61–2 class without consciousness  60–1 Marx’s analysis  60–1 memory of paradise  66–8 ordo laboratorum 59–60 Péguy’s perspective  61–2 rejection of change  62–4

356

uprisings, history of  68–9 without peasantry, enclosures  64–5 Couperin, François 120 Courbet, Gustave  222 Crespet, Pierre  162 ‘The Crisis of the European Mind’ (Valéry) 52 Croatia  12, 216–18, 251, 272 cultural heritage  259, 316, 321 cultural memory  31, 181, 189, 265, 302, 304–6, 322 Curie, Marie  33–5 characters for big screen  34–5 Curie, Pierre  33–5 Czechoslovakia  83, 188, 236–8, 293–5 Dalmatia  271, 273 Danube  201, 202, 225, 227, 272 Danube (Magris)  202 d’Aubignac, Abbé 163 David, Jacques-Louis  118, 233 The Da Vinci Code (Brown)  42 De Architectura (Pollio)  45 death  8, 10, 11, 28, 29, 49, 54, 135, 140–3, 194, 211, 266, 280, 347 Death in Venice (Mann)  274 Death Pass  197 defence  62, 182, 189, 190, 200, 202, 212, 217, 255 De Hooch, Pieter  157 De la Lycanthropie, transformation et extase des sorciers (Nynauld)  163 De la Pirotechnia (Vannoccio Biringuccio) 38 Délices des Pais-Bas (François and Pierre Foppens) 330 Demeter, Dimitrija  274 Der schwarze Tod (Hecker)  73 devil and witch  161–5 demonology, treatises  162 disbelief, advances  163 Harry Potter and return of the wizard 164–5 taming 163–4 The Devils of Loudun (Huxley)  164 dialects  312, 313, 328 Dieckmann, Christoph  175 Die Kapuzinergruft (Roth)  128 disputes  123, 204–6, 343

INDEX

Disraeli, Benjamin  115 Dobson, Michael  50 Doctor Atomic (Adams)  169 Doctor Faustus (Mann)  168 Don Camillo (film)  171 Don Juan  166, 167, 169 Don Juan et Faust (L’Herbier)  169 Don Quixote  3, 182–4, 350 tilting at windmills  182–4 Dornford-May, Mark  138 Drăculea, Vlad  218 dreams  182, 183, 188, 251, 255, 261, 264, 266, 273, 310, 331, 345, 346 Dreyer, Carl Theodor  30 drinks menu  229–31 Duby, Georges  111 Dusapin, Pascal  169 Early Modern Europe  74, 309 Eastern Europe  53, 64, 101, 105, 236, 237, 241, 243, 244, 341, 348 Eco, Umberto  197, 309, 321 Eden Is West (Costa-Gavras)  195 Efendi, Kadizade Mehmed  277 Eighth Symphony (Mahler)  169 ‘Eighty Years’ War’  153 Eisenstein, Sergei  212 Eisler, Robert  75 Elbe 225–7 Elias, Norbert  90, 326 emergency language  327, 328 emotion and the stadium  170–8 bygone worlds, remembering  174–5 cohesion, fostering  174 confrontation, ritualizing  173–4 Europe of the stadium  177–8 matches, history books  171–2 memories of melting pot  175–7 nostalgic memories  170–1 replaying past  172–3 empire and nation battle scenes  122 Britain’s journey  114–15 global empire  118–19 Holy Roman Empire  116–17 Imperium Romanum 115–16 military glories  122 Napoleonic empire  117–18 national history invention  121–2

INDEX

nations in arms  122–3 ‘people’ as focus  119–20 postnational Europe  123–4 searching for roots  120–1 En Hollande: Lettres à un ami (Camp) 336 Erasmus, Grandeur and Decadence of an Idea (Zweig)  326 Erasmus Roterodamus, Desiderius  2, 192, 225, 324–6 republic of letters  325–6 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip  87, 196 Europe borders, history  187–98 of boundary lines  191–2 closures 195–6 connecting force, boundary  189–90 correcting history  193–4 coupure to couture 195 democratorship’ 196 ‘the first form of servitude’  192–3 history of  187–98 multitude of borders  188–9 new Odysseys  197 personal experience, border  190–1 totem pole  187 European cities  88–90, 93–9, 264, 266 European civilization  20, 218 European collective memory  31, 114, 115, 133, 284, 322 European culture  52–4, 118, 137, 167, 221, 223, 309, 315, 317 European history  68, 75, 90–1, 285, 288, 295, 322, 324, 345, 348 European identity  2, 3, 36, 196, 232, 237 European Island  345–6 Europeanization  278, 299 European languages  117, 182, 311–13, 317, 318 European memories  1, 7, 31, 46, 59, 119, 146, 189, 276 European powers  15, 111, 119 European public squares  85, 87 Europeans  50, 52, 183, 184, 189, 190, 195–7, 258, 310, 311, 316, 317, 349 European site of memory  55, 247, 331 European Turkey  253, 282–3

357

Europhilia 55 Evelyn, John  332 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (Mandeville)  332 fairy tale  179–81 grand narratives and happy endings 180–1 universal themes  179–80 Faust German 166–7 in high and popular culture  168–9 selling one’s soul  166–9 Faust (Murnau)  169 Faust aux Enfers (Méliès) 169 Faust et Marguerite (Méliès) 169 Faust legend  166–8 Faust Symphony (Liszt)  169 Faustus, the Last Night (Dusapin)  169 Febvre, Lucien  187, 225 Fever Pitch (Hornby)  170 Fielding, Henry  349 figureheads 7–9 Fikret, Tevfik  278 Finney, Albert  23 First Sitting of the Committee on the Proposed Monument to Shakespeare (Kelsall)  50, 51 First World War  14, 30, 49, 123, 127, 172, 194, 230, 233, 271 Fleming, Victor  31 fluvial network  225–7 Foucher, Michel  188, 191 Fragments d’Europe (Foucher)  191 France  14–16, 25, 26, 29, 41, 53, 72, 116, 117, 119, 148, 149, 153, 154, 161, 190, 230, 315 Franco-Prussian War  121 Frankenstein (Shelley)  226 Franz Joseph (Emperor)  128, 129, 273 Frederick III  126, 217 Frederick the Great  155 free-spirited love  137–9 Bizet to present day  138 Bohemian woman  138–9 frescoes 94 Freud, Sigmund  42, 75 Friedrich, Caspar David  77 frontiers  1, 2, 123, 187–96, 202, 216

358

Garton Ash, Timothy  241 The Gathering Storm (Finney)  23 Gautier, Théophile 351 Gediminas, Grand Duke  346 Gediminas avenue  346–7 German Faust  166, 167 Germany  13, 14, 34–7, 51, 72, 172–4, 236, 299, 300, 315 Gibraltar  252–4, 261 global empire  118, 119 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  14, 36, 47, 48, 51, 135, 156, 163, 166–9, 232, 233, 258, 310, 325 Goscinny, René 9 Gracq, Julien  97 The Great Fear: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (Lefebvre) 60 Greeks  19, 20, 91, 92, 207, 269, 279, 280, 309, 310, 312, 313, 316, 317, 320 Gros, Frédéric 164 Gullit, Ruud  175–7 Gutenberg, Johannes  2, 324–6 power of the book  324–5 Guy Mannering (Scott)  202 Habsburgs  2, 86, 116, 273, 287, 291 pieces of puzzle  128–9 state of mind  126–9 the world of yesterday  127–8 ‘the world’s last nation’  126–7 Hadrian’s wall  200–2 Halecki, Oscar  241 Hals, Frans  157 Hamid, Abdul II  278 Hamlet  47, 51–3 Hamletmaschine (Heiner Müller) 52 Handel, George Frideric  8 Hanseatic League  297–301 European Union of Middle Ages 299–301 German origins  298–9 Havel, Václav  292, 295 Hecker, Justin  73 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  8, 90 Heine, Heinrich  226 Hektorović, Petar  273 heresy  28, 86, 156, 205, 288, 289 Heroes (Bowie)  244

INDEX

Hipparchus 19 historical memory  72, 121, 205, 254, 336 historical narratives  115, 122 historicity  62, 96, 286 History of the Column of Infamy (Manzoni) 163 Hitler, Adolf  16, 17, 20, 51, 128, 168, 233, 236, 293, 305 Hobbes, Thomas  75 Höfele, Andreas  55 n.2 Holy Roman Empire  12, 14, 115–18, 122, 126, 127, 151, 153–5 Hornby, Nick  170 Hugo, Victor  8, 17, 78, 97, 192, 226 Hume, David  192 Hunters in the Snow (Pieter Bruegel)  77 Huxley, Aldous  164 Hymne des Démons (Ronsard)  162 Ignatius of Loyola  148–59 Article 10  155–6 Catholic architectural heritage  158 divisions and ruptures  150–2 ‘in-depth Christianization’  149–50 invisible boundaries  156–7 Protestant musical legacy  158–9 reformation and reforms  148–9 religious territorialization  152–4 tolerance and religious freedom  154– 5 Il Gesù 158 Indo-European family  312, 313 industrial cities  95, 101–4, 106, 107, 170 In Praise of Folly (Erasmus)  326 internal borders  188, 195–7 Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (Valéry) 46 Istanbul  2, 3, 41, 90, 276–80 multilayered society  279–80 Ottoman Istanbul  277–9 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław 164 James, Saint  145–7 Jarry, Alfred  33 Jerome, Jerome K.  292 Joan of Arc  25–31 European matter  26–7

INDEX

modern heroine  30–1 political Joan  29–30 saint or sorceress  27–8 Schiller versus Voltaire  29 ‘sent by god’  25–6 Shakespearian character  28–9 Joan of Arc (Fleming)  31 Joyce, James  349 Jungle Book (Kipling)  75 Kadyrov, Akhmad  302 Kafka, Franz  98, 287, 290, 349 Kaurismäki, Aki  197 Kelsall, Charles  50, 51 Kleist, Heinrich von  193 Kosik, Karel  241 Kundera, Milan  236, 287, 349–50 La Beauté du diable (Clair)  169 The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (Comenius) 193 La Damnation de Faust (Méliès) 169 La Forme d’une ville (Julien Gracq)  97 La Gitanilla (Cervantes)  138 Lancre, Pierre de  162 languages  2, 60, 146, 273, 309–18, 328 La Peste (Camus)  73 L’Apparition du livre (Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin)  325 La Rencontre (Courbet)  222 Latin  149, 152, 207, 273, 274, 309–11, 313–18, 328 La Turquie d’Europe (Boué) 283 La Zingara (Capua)  138 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Molière) 219 Lebrecht, Michael  121 Le Cabinet de Méphistophélès (Méliès) 169 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Hegel) 8 Le Diverse et artificiose machine (Agostino Ramelli) 38 Lefebvre, Georges  60 Le Goff, Jacques  79 Le Havre (Kaurismäki) 197 ‘Leonardo and the Philosophers’ (Valéry) 46

359

Leonardo da Vinci  36–44 celebrity, creating  41–2 custodian of mysteries  42–4 expert in machinery  37–8 exploring mechanisms  39–40 Furia francese 40–1 inventing 36–7 painting, philosophy  45–6 theatrical machinery  38–9 Lepanto  255–7, 273 Le Rhin (Febvre)  187, 225 Les Caractères (Bruyère) 60 Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (Bloch)  66 Les Nations (Couperin)  120 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  155 Leverkühn, Adrian  168 Levi, Carlo  62–3 Levitan, Isaac  77 L’Herbier, Marcel  169 L’Homme devant la mort (Ariès) 140 Life of Leonardo da Vinci (Vasari)  41 lingua franca  207, 236, 257, 320, 327–8 Lioret, Philippe  197 Liszt, Franz  169 Lithuanian Divertissement (Brodsky) 345 Loach, Ken  171 Łódź, Poland  101–7 age of working classes  105–6 megaprojects and microhistories 106–7 modern way of living  103–5 scales of shock  102–3 social amnesia  105–6 Looking for Eric (Loach)  171 love  3, 29, 34, 84, 97, 133–5, 137, 167, 187 Loyer, Pierre de  162, 163 Lubitsch, Ernst  138 Lupercalia 74 Luther, Martin  148–59 Article 10  155–6 Catholic architectural heritage  158 divisions and ruptures  150–2 ‘in-depth Christianization’  149–50 invisible boundaries  156–7 Protestant musical legacy  158–9 reformation and reforms  148–9

360

religious territorialization  152–4 tolerance and religious freedom  154– 5 Lutheran Reformation  145 Luxemburg, Rosa  33–5 characters for big screen  34–5 Madame Curie (movie)  34 Magris, Claudio  129, 202, 227, 237 Mahler, Gustav  169 Mahomet et Charlemagne 255 The Making of the National Poet (Dobson) 50 Manchester, England  101–7, 170 age of working classes  105–6 megaprojects and microhistories 106–7 modern way of living  103–5 scales of shock  102–3 social amnesia  105–6 Mandeville, Bernard  332 Mann, Klaus  168 Mann, Thomas  168, 274, 297 Mantegna, Andrea  8 The Man without Qualities (Musil)  128 Manzoni, Alessandro  163 Marivaux, Pierre de  135 Marx, Karl  15, 60–1, 90 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue  293 Masilo, Dada  138 May, Karl  282 Mediterranean  1, 3, 251–62, 274 ancient cradle of civilization  258–60 junction of different worlds  260–1 naming and tracing sea  252–5 shared sea  257–8 space of rupture  255–7 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Braudel) 252 Méliès, Georges  169 Melzi, Franceso  41 Mémoires d’Hadrien (Yourcenar)  200 Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (Rezzori)  129 memory  12, 49, 55, 59, 66, 72, 75, 83, 109, 115, 175, 247, 299, 304, 305, 331, 334, 335, 337, 340 Mendelssohn, Moses  155 Mephisto (Klaus Mann)  168

INDEX

Mephistopheles 166–8 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry  42 Merkel, Angela  297 metamorphoses, gateway city  276–80 Michael Kohlhaas (Kleist)  193 Michelet, Jules  36, 164 Mickiewicz, Adam  348 microhistories  74, 106 Middle Ages, globish of  327–9 emergency language  327–8 Millet, Jean-François 79 Miłosz, Czesław 345 Mitteleuropa  129, 235, 236, 251 Mommsen, Theodor  8 The Mona Lisa (Leonardo)  39 Montesquieu  20, 192, 209 Montmartre 338–43 centres of artistic influence  338–9 commemorating and reviving  342–3 cosmopolitanism memories, nationalistic era  340–1 de-politicized tourist programme 339–40 Montparnasse 338–43 centres of artistic influence  338–9 commemorating and reviving  342–3 cosmopolitanism memories, nationalistic era  340–1 de-politicized tourist programme 339–40 Morand, Paul  269 The Morphology of the Folktale (Propp) 179 Mother Joan of the Angels (Huxley)  164 Müller, Heiner  52, 53 multiple languages  251, 309–11, 318 Murat IV  277 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban  157 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm  169 Museum of Our Lord in the Attic  333 Musil, Robert  98, 128 My Europe (Stasiuk)  129 mystery  36, 43, 210, 211 The Name of the Rose (Eco)  321 Napoleon  2, 8, 10–17, 20, 118 bicentenary commemoration  10–11 and European unity  13–14 France, divided political culture  15–16

INDEX

legacy of empire  11–12 narrative today  14–15 and public  16–17 Nathan the Wise (Lessing)  155 national histories  121–3, 288 national languages  309, 314–16 national memories  122, 247, 268, 348 Neoplatonist Renaissance  46 Nerval, Gérard de  226, 258 Neumann, Balthasar  159 new churches  82, 83, 148, 149, 158 Niederwald monument  226 Nordic myths  2 North Sea  251 Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo)  97, 163–4 Nynauld, Jean de  163 Oder 225–7 On Civility in Children (Erasmus)  326 On the Art of Building (Alberti)  94 Orthodox Churches  206, 210–15, 276 The Other Side of Hope (Kaurismäki) 197 Ottoman Istanbul  277–9 Overture (Wagner)  169 Ovid  48, 133–4 Palazzo Pubblico, Siena  94 Pan-Europa (Coudenhove-Kalergi)  192 Parallel Lives (Plutarch)  7 Paris 341–2 Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Benjamin) 97 parishes  74, 79, 80, 93, 145, 191, 213 The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)  30 Péguy, Charles  61–2, 81 Peisistratids 19 Penderecki, Krzysztof  164 Perrault, Charles  179 persecution  154, 212, 213, 337, 347 Petit, Roland  138 Piacevoli notti (Straparola)  179 Piazza della Scala (Milan)  42 pilgrimage  12, 68, 81, 145, 146, 152, 158, 270, 348 Pirenne, Henri  90, 255 place of memory  71, 73 plague  3, 13, 71–5, 253, 285

361

Poland  33, 35, 36, 101, 103, 104, 172, 194, 217, 237, 239, 240, 300, 346, 348 political borders  190, 191, 193, 196, 268, 273 Pollio, Marcus Vitruvius  45 Pope Leo IX  204 Possédées (Gros)  164 power, perversion of  19–21 Prague  83, 85, 86, 287–96, 339, 341 dramatic events  294–5 European conflicts, epicentre  291–3 Jewish tradition  289–90 Munich to Red army  293–4 national identity, creating  288–9 open-air museum  290–1 symbolize today  295–6 of thousand lives  287–96 Prokofiev, Sergei  212 Promised Land (Wajda)  103 Protestant Reformation  3, 148, 150, 230 Protestants  61, 62, 150, 153–7, 332, 336 public square  85–7 theatre for city  86–7 public squares  35, 85–7, 94 Pushkin, Alexander  190, 278, 304 Quidde, Ludwig  118 The Radetzky March (Roth)  128 realms of memory  3 ‘Red Sultan’  278 Reformation 3 religion  147, 148, 150–4, 156–8, 206, 314, 315 religious orders  149, 151, 157, 321 Rembrandt  157, 167, 330, 331, 336 Renan, Ernest  278 Rezzori, Gregor von  129 Rhine 225–7 Richter, Roland Suso  195 The Ring of the Nibelung (Wagner) 2 The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (Merezhkovsky) 42 Roman Empire  114–17, 200–2, 204, 205, 207, 208, 276, 277, 310, 313

362

Rome  7, 40, 41, 48, 85, 91, 93, 115, 116, 158, 204, 208, 209, 257, 269 Ronsard, Pierre de  162 Roosevelt, Franklin D.  236 Rosa Luxemburg (Trotta)  34 Roth, Joseph  128 Roubaud, Franz  122 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  66, 278 Russell, Ken  164 Russian Orthodox Church  11, 212, 213 Saint Joan (Shaw)  30 Saint Petersburg  2, 3, 212, 302–6, 322 city of revolutions  304–5 dual myth of  304 European city  302–3 siege of Leningrad  305–6 Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (Constable) 77 sanctuary of thought  320–2 libraries of power  320–1 national libraries  321–2 Sandys, Edwina  243 Santiago  3, 95, 145–7 Saura, Carlos  138 Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (Schumann) 169 Schumann, Robert  169 Scot, Reginald  163 Scott, Sir Walter  202 Second Rome  276 Second World War  17, 22, 53, 54, 73, 173, 174, 194, 213, 236, 349 sensual love  133–4 Serres, Michel  349 Seven Compositions on Goethe’s Faust (Wagner) 169 The Seventh Seal (Bergman)  73 Shakespeare, William  8, 29, 47–55, 168 bilateral and multilateral  51–2 boomerang 54–5 European 48–9 European man  47–55 ‘European’ site of memory  49–50 transnational 52–4 unilateral 50–1 shared language  314, 317 Shaw, George Bernard  30, 350 Shelley, Mary  226

INDEX

Shorto, Russell  330 Simond, P.-L.  73 single language  309–11, 317 social memory  102–4, 106, 107 Sokurov, Alexander  169 Spielberg, Steven  244 Spinoza, Baruch  155, 331, 333 Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola) 149 Stalin, Joseph  16, 19, 20, 193, 213, 236 Stasiuk, Andrzej  129 Steiner, George  350 Stephen, Saint  157 Stephen the Great  218 Sterne, Laurence  349 Straparola, Gianfrancesco  179 Strasbourg 81 Stromae 138 Tableaux Parisiens (Baudelaire)  97 Tales of Mother Goose (Perrault)  179 Teuta (Demeter)  274 The Theory of Peasant Economy (Chayanov) 66 They Divided the Sky (Wolf)  195 Three Men on the Bummel (Jerome)  292 three orders 1989 113 enduring effects  109 memories, layers of  109–11 oratores, bellatores and laboratores 108 realm of memory  113 remaining traces  111–12 spectre of inequality  108–13 Three Wishes for Cinderella (film)  180 Through the Gorges of the Balkans (May) 282 timeless fairy tale  179–81 grand narratives and happy endings 180–1 universal themes  179–80 The Tin Drum 190 towers  77–9, 81, 292, 303, 309, 339 ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ (Kundera) 236 tragic love  133–6 Christianity’s idealization  134–5 Ovid, sensual love  133–4

INDEX

Traité sur la tolérance (Voltaire)  155 Treatise on Radioactivity (Curie, Marie) 33 Treaty of Görlitz 193 Trenet, Charles  84 The Triumphs of Caesar (Mantegna)  8 Trotta, Margarethe von  34 The Tunnel (Richter)  195 two Romes, 1054  204–15 Constantinople 1204  206–7 Greek East and Latin West  207–8 legacy, overcoming  214–15 Moscow, third Rome  209–10 mystery, role of  210–12 orthodox faith renaissance, East  212– 14 schism, origins of  205–6 transfer of power  208–9 tyrant 19–21 king of Persians and Great Turk  19–21 Ubu roi (Jarry)  33 Uderzo, Albert  9 Ukraine  95, 175, 177, 189, 207, 213, 238–41, 246 Ukrainians  239–41, 313 Union of Brest-Litovsk  213 Union of Utrecht  333 United Provinces  149, 153, 154, 332 Universal Dictionary 116 Ural 225–7 urban spaces  81, 90, 91, 93–7, 99, 277 Valéry, Paul  41, 46, 52–3, 183 Van Parijs, Philippe  327 Van Ruysdael, Salomon  157 Vasari, Giorgio  39, 41, 43 Velázquez, Diego  157 Venetian Renaissance palace  1 Venice  27, 28, 40, 41, 264–7, 270–5 city of dreams and death  266–7 dreamlike setting, bygone world 265–6 ‘la serenissima’  264–5 Vermeer, Johannes  157 vernacular languages  67, 149, 152, 315–17 Verri, Pietro  163 vertical dividing lines  227

363

Vie de Jésus (Renan)  278 Vienne, Saint-Étienne de  81 View of Toledo (El Greco)  77 Vikings  1, 2, 74 Vilne 345–8 Vilnius  235, 238, 345–8 The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Leonardo) 39 Vitruvian Man 45–6 Voices from Chernobyl (Alexievich) 246 Voyage en Orient (Nerval)  258 Wagner, Cosima  49 Wagner, Richard  2, 49, 169, 226 Wajda, A.  103 Wandering Jew  3, 221–3, 336 excluded and chosen  222–3 reflections of fears  221–2 Ward, Simon  23 Watermark (Brodsky)  264 Weavers at Work (film)  285 Welcome (Lioret)  197 Western Churches  205, 207, 210, 277 Western Europe  14, 66, 138, 141, 161, 237, 238, 247, 282, 284, 286 Weyer, Johann  162, 163 Wilhelmine Empire  298 Wilna 345–8 Wilno 345–8 wines 229–31 geography of bottle  230–1 Winter Landscape (Friedrich)  77 witchcraft 161–4 witches  28, 161–5, 179 Wolf, Christa  195, 244 wolves  3, 71, 74–5 The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European (Zweig)  128 Young Winston (Ward)  23 Yourcenar, Marguerite  200, 201 Zedler, Johann Heinrich  116 Zeman, Miloš 292 Zidane, Zinedine ‘Zizou’  171, 175–7 Zita of Bourbon-Parma  126 ‘Zum Schäkespears Tag’ (Goethe)  51 Zweig, Stefan  128, 326