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Denis de Rougemont, Open Letter to the Europeans

Ferney-Voltaire (Ain), France, February 21 1970

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

Page 4

Margin : Nietzsche, Nationalism is Mediocrity

We "good Europeans", we too have moments when we indulge in a patriotism full of courage, a leap and a return to old loves and old narrow-mindedness - I have just given proof of this - times of national turmoil, of patriotic anguish, times when many other ancient feelings submerge us. Heavier spirits which we need longer to exorcise than what with us only occupies a few hours and passes after a few hours; some need half a year, others half a lifetime, depending on the rapidity of their faculties of assimilation and renewal. I could even imagine dull and hesitant races which, in our hasty Europe, would need half a century to overcome such excesses of atavistic patriotism and attachment to their soil to return to reason, by which I mean "good Europeanism". (…) The "good old days" are dead: they sang their last song with Mozart. What joy for us that his Rococo still has meaning for us, that his "good company", tender ardour, child-like taste for chinoiserie and ornamentation, politeness of the heart, desire for things precious, amorous, dancing, sentimental, his faith, that all this still finds in us some resonance! Alas, the time will come when all that will finish. - But do not doubt that the intelligence and taste of Beethoven will fade even more quickly, for he was but the last echo of a transformation and break with style; while Mozart was the last expression of a whole European taste that had existed for centuries, Beethoven is the interlude between an old, crumbling worn-out soul and a soul that is more than young, to come, which is springing up; over his music is spread the twilight glimmer of an eternal disappointment and of an eternal and errant hope, that same glimmer which bathed Europe when she dreamed with Rousseau, when she danced around the revolutionary tree of liberty, when finally she kneeled at the feet of Napoleon. How quickly all these sentiments pale, how difficult it already is for us to understand them, how distant and strange is the language of the Rousseaus, the Schillers, the Shelleys, the Byrons, the language which expressed this same destiny of Europe which sang in Beethoven! Then, in German music, it was the turn of Romanticism, an even shorter historical movement, more fleeting and more superficial than the great interlude, the transition from Rousseau to Napoleon and to rising democracy. (...) In music, Schumann was already a purely German fact, and was no longer what Beethoven had been or what Mozart had been to a greater degree, a European phenomenon. And with him German music ran the huge risk of ceasing to be the voice through which the soul of Europe was expressed, and of falling to the mediocre level of a purely national thing. (...)

Thanks to the unhealthy divisions which the madness of nationalities has placed and still places between the peoples of Europe, thanks to the politicians with short sight and quick hands who now rule with the help of patriotism, not suspecting how much their politics of dissension are fatally a mere interim policy, thanks to all of that and to many other things that cannot be said today, we ignore or falsely disfigure the signs, which prove in the most obvious manner that Europe wants to become one. All men of a little depth and broad in mind whom this century has seen have dedicated the secret work of their soul to this single end. They wished to pave the way for a new accord and strove to realise in themselves the European to come; if they belonged to a fatherland, then it was only ever through the superficial regions of their intelligence, or in times of weakness, or in old age: they sought rest from themselves by becoming "patriots". I am thinking of men such as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer. Let no one urge me to add the name of Richard Wagner to this list.

From Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. See also Nietzsche, The European nihilism * Morgenthau, The German Character  

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