Kontinentalisierung. Das Europa der Schriftsteller (review)

The “idea of Europe,” coupled with the problem of a specific European political and cultural identity, has emerged as a central theme of intellectual debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, recent developments that are suggestive of an increasing distance between the U.S. and the European Union in a number of social and political areas—from neo-liberal models of globalization and climate change to the interpretation of human rights and the future of the welfare state—even seem to have accelerated an idea of Europe as a concrete alternative to the Machtpolitik of the traditional nation state. Although rooted in a particular form of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, this image of Europe is, to put it mildly, not entirely unproblematic; the emergence of a truly European public sphere, or rather, a set of European publics, is itself a contested issue. For obvious reasons, the intellectual debate about the possibility of a European public sphere takes place mainly in the context of constitutional and political thought and all too often seems to become lost in the administrative intricacies of social and economic policy. A specifically European cultural identity is, against this background, either taken for granted or ignored—given the fact that “cultural identity” is itself a notoriously vague concept, this should perhaps not be particularly surprising.

In contrast, Paul Michael Lützeler’s most recent book, Kontinentalisierung. Das Europa der Schriftsteller, which in many ways continues some of his earlier work, such as the magnificent Die Schriftsteller und Europa von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart (1992) and the collection Hoffnung Europa (1994), argues that the political identity of Europe cannot be discussed without taking into account its changing nature as point of reference for the production of culture. In eleven essays he investigates the way in which German literary writers and public intellectuals—from Goethe, Schiller, and Ernst Moritz Arndt to Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Peter Sloterdijk—have reflected on the idea of a transnational European culture. In a far-reaching argument that leads from the literary response to the hegemonic claims of Napoleon to the contemporary Austrian discussion of a possible Mitteleuropa and includes essays on Heinrich von Kleist, Ernst Jünger, and European pacifism, Lützeler traces a shift from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to a multicultural Europe. Following Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, and Ulrich Beck, he presents his readers with a cosmopolitan vision that replaces passive tolerance of the “other” with an active acceptance and acknowledgement of cultural pluralism (9). Within this context—Lützeler explains—literary writing, and the literary representation of the idea of Europe, performs an inherently political function. The latter consists in counterbalancing the culturally homogenizing effects of economic globalization with an emphasis on the particular, on local specificities and difference. Irony and poetic ambivalence, as they come to the fore in drama and the novel, but especially in the essay, provide literary writing with a special quality that separates the literary form from other media (14–15). Thus, while public policy and political thought operate with universalisms, literary writing is able to render obvious the syncretic and porous identity of the European “continent.”

It is impossible here to do justice to the wealth of material Lützeler’s book discusses, but the first three chapters on the response of literary authors to the economic and political unification of Europe after 1945 and on Schiller’s and Goethe’s European vision are particularly noteworthy. It is here that we see literary history being practiced at its best, relating contemporary issues to their historical development since 1800. Discussing a series of essays by Reinhold Schneider, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Adolf Muschg, Lützeler, for instance, shows how the unification of Europe as a primarily economic project was viewed with much skepticism since it suggested a translatio imperii from Rome to the various incarnations of the European Union. In terms of a balance between Macht and Geist (33), the idea of Europe only becomes feasible if economic success is coupled with the acceptance of cultural diversity...