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Looking for a word for ‘European cultural identity’.

By UMBERTO ECO [L’Espresso via PressEurop] — “I learned that Robert de Saint-Loup was killed two days after his return to the front, covering the retreat of his men. Never had any man fed less on hatred of a whole people than he […]. The last words I had heard from his mouth, six days earlier, were those that began a song by Schumann, which he hummed to me on my stairs, in German; but because of the neighbours, I had to shut him up.”

And Proust hastens to add [in Time Regained] that even then, nothing in French culture proscribed the study of German culture, which could be undertaken albeit with a few precautions: ”A professor wrote a remarkable book about Schiller, and it was reported in the newspapers. But before talking about the author of the book, he wrote, as if it were a licence to publish it, that he had been to the Marne, at Verdun, and that he had five citations, and two of his sons had been killed. After that he praised the clarity and depth of his book on Schiller, who could be described as “great” only as long as you said, instead of ‘this great German’, ‘this great Boche’.”

This is what constitutes the basis of the European cultural identity: an enduring dialogue between the literatures, philosophies, musical and theatrical works. Nothing that a war can wipe away. And it is this identity that is the foundation of a community that resists the biggest barriers, that of language.

Continued at L’Espresso | English translation PressEurop | More Chronicle & Notices.

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