Kontinentalisierung. Das Europa der Schrifststeller (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kontinentalisierung. Das Europa der Schrifststeller Azade Seyhan (bio) Kontinentalisierung. Das Europa der Schrifststeller [Continentalization. The Europe of Writers]. By Paul Michael Lützeler. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2007. 293 pp. $24.80. Paul Michael Lützeler’s Kontinentalisierung. Das Europa der Schrifststeller looks at the idea(l) and reality of a unified European continent through the lens of continental (predominantly German-speaking) writers of modernity. Leading the procession of scribes, famous and familiar as well as obscure and forgotten, is the poet of freedom, Friedrich Schiller, whose dramatic work and historical writings analyze with profound insight the political clashes that tore European lands and cultures apart for centuries. In the writings of visionary German and French thinkers, the hope for peaceful coexistence in a Europe riven with conflict lay in the possibility of a shared culture that could forge a strong European identity. In late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who were weary and mistrustful of the pronounced nationalist tenor in German life and politics, defined themselves not as German but as European writers. From the work of Europe’s many cosmopolitan writers, Lützeler abstracts an Europadiskurs [discourse of Europe] that emerges as the literary archetype of the idea of Kontinentalisierung. In Lützeler’s treatment of continentalization, the concept presents itself as a transnational union of nations on a continental scale that not only evades the economic and cultural downside of globalization but also resists the provincialism of regional revivals that attempt to halt the tide of globalization. In the preface, “Kontinentalisierung und Globalisierung” [continentalization and globalization], Lützeler offers both a rationale for the viability of continental unions and a detailed history of the formation of the [End Page 552] European Union. Citing such organizations as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the African Union, and the Organization of American States as the prototypes of continental unions, Lützeler narrates the history of the EU from its beginnings in the European Coal and Steel Community, formed in 1951, through its expansion by the two treaties signed in 1957—the European Economic Community that established a customs union and the European Atomic Energy Community for developing nuclear energy—its consolidation in 1967 by the Merger Treaty that joined these three communities to form the so-called European Community, and the 1993 Maastricht Treaty that constitutes the present structure of the organization. The idea of (European) continentalization for purposes of a lasting peace had been the focus of numerous European writers and intellectuals who believed that in Europe there was “eine ontologische Tiefenstruktur, ein kulturelles Sediment, eine Traditionsbasis” [an ontological deep structure, a cultural sediment, a foundational tradition] (16) that could be remembered in times of crisis. However, the European Union did not correspond to the “utopian” peace project of the writers who had been championing peace and unity on the Continent for centuries. In the first chapter, Lützeler reviews the criticism directed at the cultural and moral shortcomings of the European Union by three contemporary authors, Reinhold Schneider, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Adolf Muschg. While supporting the idea of a transnational European cooperation, these writers reject the solely economic interest of the European Union. Muschg, who has always been a champion of “der kulturellen Anerkennung des Anderen” [the cultural acknowledgement of the Other] (45), goes even further to assert that without opening its doors to Turkey, the European Union cannot hope to achieve the status of a global player. This chapter offers arguably the most thought-provoking and original insights of the book into the problematic question of universalizing discourses and the misguided ambition of a European universalism. It is impossible to give a full account of Lützeler’s long journey with its numerous and prolonged stops through European literary history. The space of this review can only accommodate a brief docent’s tour. Beginning with the second chapter on Schiller, Kontinentalisierung takes a historical detour through a mini encyclopedia of European authors who have variously contributed to the Europadiskurs. With the exception of the preface and the afterword, the book is about the “Europe of Writers,” as its subtitle suggests. Thus, it does not...