Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the
nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in
the German tradition, exhorted them to be "good Europeans", avatars
of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-century. Yet as
RG Collingwood observed in his last great inquiry into the nature
of civilisation, a book written to the glory of Hobbes at the
height of the London blitz, Nietzsche was himself a victim of the
disease he diagnosed. In "The Good European" Iain Bamforth reports
on fifteen years of "experimental living" during which his
attachment to the old continent brought him from Berlin, in the
week in which he saw the fall of the Wall in 1989, to Strasburg,
heart of aboriginal Europe and the city of noses in "Tristram
Shandy". Thrown into a deep identity crisis by Bismarck's victories
against the French in 1870, pilot region for some of the modern
state's most radical policies (health insurance, public relations),
Alsace's divided loyalties have affected the nature of Europe
itself. With his ear attuned to the complexities of culture and
politics, Bamforth attempts to discover Europe through
extra-diplomatic channels: he offers essays on writers and thinkers
who have done much to define the small archipelago on the edge of
Asia, including classics such as Kleist, Kafka, Roth and Benjamin,
WG Sebald and Mavis Gallant. He provides a portrait of the Nazi
jurist Carl Schmitt, a send-off for Bernard Pivot's classic
literary chat-show "Bouillon de Culture", a scrutiny of
philosophising media pundit Peter Sloterdijk, landscapes from
Provence and Bavaria, reports from Prague and Geneva, Franco-German
shibboleths, a sarcastic letter from 'Kakania', and an anatomy of
the Alsatian humorist Tomi Ungerer. Europe often reeks of the
terminally nostalgic and the curatorial: here a sceptical Scots
intelligence reaches out to Musil, Heine, Gogol, Sterne, Montaigne,
Rabelais and beyond the 'standard average European' to the gallant,
helpless, hero-smitten Don, in the hope that they can help him find
the way towards a more generous Europe.
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