Stefan Zweig's ‘ The World of Yesterday : Memoirs of a European ’ is a text that should be read or reread by every culture enthusiast. Written in 1941 on the eve of his suicide, it seems so contemporary, evoking the transition from a world that seemed to be one of eternal peace and guaranteed security to a world of violence and savagery. This visionary text should sound the alarm and shake us out of our apathy in the face of the savage world that threatens Europe.
These are hard times for European societies, and therefore also for culture. The general demand for savings is undoubtedly justified, and the world of culture must contribute to the general scheme of things. But the fragility of the cultural ecosystem means that cuts (slightly in proportion to overall needs) are provoking disasters and drastic rethinkings here and there, much more than elsewhere.
It is true that among the current disasters and those that are feared or predicted, the cultural issue seems secondary to some… Moreover, the political world as a whole – and the speeches that surround it prove it every day – hasn't even been talking about it for a long time. Have we heard a single one of our hierarchs address the issue or have a vision on the subject ? A strategy ?
In a Europe that is supposed to be European, and not an aggregate of nations that believe they have divergent interests, or that lay claim to nationalisms that taste rancid, that smell of the past (a savage past that has already failed, leaving millions of dead in its wake) as if it were a refuge, as if the anxieties of the future had only one solution, the return to the fold, which is the best way to fall prey to the ogres, China, Russia or the United States.
No single European country is a happy island.
But the continent of Europe, regardless of supranational political structures or geopolitical vicissitudes, has something in common in its history, and that is its cultural roots. Shakespeare, like Walter Scott or James Joyce and so many others, enlightened the whole of Europe, just as Handel, who came from Saxony, enlightened London : cultural flows have never ceased to flow between all countries, without borders, be they political or natural.
Stefan Zweig reminds us that in Imperial Vienna before the First World War, artists were a common good, actors and singers, whether or not you went to the theatre or the opera, were shared monuments, a common heritage that made up culture, and this Vienna fascinated all Europeans for everything it produced until the arrival of the Nazi barbarians, structurally thieving and destructive, structurally mafia-like like all fascisms, past and present.
The barbarism that threatens us is the law of the strongest, a deleterious deviation from liberalism, a furrow dug by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (with a passage through Silvio Berlusconi a tragicomic character halfway between William Shakespeare and Federico Fellini) that today leads to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, a path that, moreover, has always challenged (see, for example, the deleterious role of Thatcher within the EU itself) a Europe that was seeking to unite . .. There must be a reason…
Against this law, a sign of the approaching ‘savage state’, the whole philosophy of a tolerant, open, available and democratic Europe has risen up. To run towards Trump or Musk is to accept the ‘savage state’ of the world.
And defending a European approach to culture is one of the bulwarks. Brahms, Verdi, Hugo, Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Keats, Poe, Joyce, Dante, but also Pablo Picasso, Federico Fellini, Peter Brook and so many others are not ‘national assets’, any more than Homer or Virgil. They are part of the world heritage, but first and foremost a common European heritage with which we have to live, in a Europe where ideas have been circulating at incredible speed since the Middle Ages.
Who, if not the blind and narrow-minded, would have us believe that just because we are British, French, Italian or German, we can get by on our own ? François Mitterrand said : ‘Nationalism is war’, and nationalism is unfortunately also stupidity. It is because we are Europeans, that is to say British, Italian, French, German and…and… that we have built our culture, which is the fruit of history despite the wars and massacres that have also torn us apart, and not a gift from heaven. There is no such thing as a ‘national’ genius, only the one we build together on the only homeland that counts, the Earth.