“those features — such as coffeehouses, ample pedestrian spaces, and a humanized landscape — which George Steiner finds define Europe.”
“CB: I almost always find reading Steiner to be a very stimulating experience. Even when I disagree with him. What’s important to me as a reader is not whether he is right or wrong, but the place to which he is taking me, and the intellectual process of which he makes me part. He calls that — a touch too pompously perhaps, but not exactly wrong — an “invitation into meaning.” I, for one, feel very much at home in Steiner’s way of thinking, of addressing an issue, of framing and asking a question. Steiner is the European intellectual par excellence: polymath, polyglot, culturally self-aware, firmly rooted in a body of complex intellectual, philosophical, and literary traditions — not only shaped but perhaps even dominated by it.”
“In Errata (1997), which is a half-memoir, half-essay, he confesses: “I have scattered and, thus, wasted my strengths.” He regrets having covered too many topics in his research and writing, having reached too widely, but not deep enough, having opened up too many roads only to abandon them later. He admits, in other words, to having succumbed to the “encyclopedic temptation,” which is familiar to many European intellectuals and a very, very sweet temptation to succumb to, but which could be fatal, especially in North America. Stanley Rosen once made a quip along these lines about Leo Strauss: he said that “Strauss was an extraordinary scholar who knew so much more than his colleagues [at the University of Chicago] that they regarded him as incompetent.””
“I can say that I know a city — be it Mumbai, Istanbul, Sydney, São Paulo, or Nagoya — only insofar as I’ve walked significant parts of it. For discovering a place is a profoundly bodily experience: you have to feel it under your feet, you have to learn its smells, to listen to its sighs, whispers, and the whole music of its invisible life, you have to see it from different angles and at different times of the day. Your comprehension of that place comes to you gradually through your exhausted body, your accumulated thirst and hunger, through every inch of your tired flesh. Only then can you say that you know it. And that knowledge is as intimate as it gets.”
“RZ: Don’t get me wrong: I, too, find Steiner stimulating, especially After Babel (1975), his sustained reflection on translation. Though more indirectly than Errata, After Babel, too, is autobiographical. Equally at ease in German, French, and English, Steiner writes somewhere in the book that he must do the work — the thinking about translation — from within.”
“Steiner’s attempt to “define” Europe neatly through “five axioms” — “the coffeehouse, the landscape on a traversable […] scale, these streets and squares named after the statesmen, scientists, artists, writers of the past […], our twofold descent from Athens and Jerusalem and, lastly, that apprehension of a closing chapter, of that famous Hegelian sunset” — intellectually seductive as it may be, turns out to be a bit problematic.”
“no matter how hard we try to escape it, the obscure memory of our tribal past still keeps us captive. And all too often it shapes the way we think and act.”
“Whether we like it or not, we are embodied creatures, spiritual and material, an impossible synthesis of high and low, noble ideas and hungry flesh.”
“The ancient Greeks may have contributed something to the idea of Europe, but the modern Germans know only too well that, in order to materialize such a great idea, you need serious public funding, which you cannot have in the absence of fiscal discipline.”
“George Steiner talks beautifully of the “twofold descent of Europe from Athens and Jerusalem.” Maybe we should revise that a bit. How about: Athens and the abacus?”
“the very idea of Europe born with the Treaty of Maastricht — the one that has burdened Europeans ever since — is the work of statesmen who had little concern with either numbers or imagination: namely, François Mitterrand of France and Helmut Kohl of West Germany. Under the pressure of German unification, these leaders slapped together a monetary union that ignored the necessity of a political and fiscal union. The founding figures of a united and peaceful Europe, from Robert Schuman to Jacques Delors, were endowed with the sort of moral imagination that is now sorely lacking on both sides of the Rhine.”
“One of the great ironies, Costica, is that ancient Greece had served, since the early 19th century, as a model and inspiration for German writers, thinkers, and politicians. Think of the central role played by the ancient Greek tragedians and philosophers, historians and artists, in the writings of Goethe and Schiller, Hegel and Nietzsche, not to speak of the unspeakable Heidegger. Ancient Greek, I believe, is still part of the curriculum of the German gymnasium. And yet, at the same time — and it must be related, no? — the scorn shown by Germans toward modern Greeks is stunning.”
“At times it looks as though the countries of Europe invented the EU for no better reason than to be able to indulge in thrashing each other on a grand, European scale.”
“I am glad, Robert, that you’ve brought up the formation of the European Union and of its institutional framework. I would like to consider the topic briefly in relation to Steiner’s book. When he decides to approach the “idea of Europe,” Steiner notices, correctly, that even “the most abstract, speculative of ideas must be anchored in reality, in the substance of things.” That’s why, as we discussed earlier, he goes on to show how this idea has come to be “anchored” in a handful of concrete realities, such as the coffeehouse, the pedestrian culture, or the lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) that we come across throughout Europe. What I find symptomatic is that Steiner doesn’t look for embodiments of the “idea of Europe” in the domain of political institutions such as the European Parliament or financial mechanisms like the euro. Indeed, most of the time, he leaves the institution of the European Union alone. For him, Europe is primarily a philosophical idea, not a political project.”
“The marvelous thing about Maastricht, which is one of the greatest chapters in the history of money, is that it was the work of two men who knew squat about economic and monetary theory and were running around with their hair on fire.”
“You are right to think that it is unrealistic to hope that peoples who have spent much of their collective pasts cutting one another’s throats might live happily under the same roof. This underscores the studied ambiguity of Adenauer’s famous remark: “German problems can only be solved under a European roof.” What Adenauer’s remark leaves unsaid, of course, is that this particular roof, inspired by Berlin’s financial and monetary imperatives, remains a German roof. And should someone residing under that roof, like Greece, question the blueprint, they — not to stretch the metaphor too far — will be shown the door.”