Are you talkin' to me?

SECONDO ME GLI anglosassoni hanno un problema con l’idea di Europa. Forse perché avevano un impero, una volta, e adesso non si adattano all’idea di vivere in un condominio: vorrebbero una villa come quella di Downton Abbey (ovviamente, abitando al piano nobile). Peccato.

Money quote: “The idea of a coherent European culture is actually quite new. Scattered uses of the phrase appeared in the 19th century, but it was only in the 1920s and ’30s that the idea came of age. Those decades saw an unprecedented burst of attention for the idea of Europe, in which the age’s leading liberal intellectuals developed a compelling vision of the continent’s purportedly shared cultural identity. Influentially, Valéry cast Europe as a shared, intangible inheritance, rooted in ‘a desire for understanding and exchange’ among its nations. He thought this shared desire had produced a ‘European spirit’. For the Austrian playwright and librettist Stefan Zweig, non-material values defined Europe. Zweig thought Europe expressed its defining quality through cultural exchanges in the ‘supranational realm of humanism’. In 1932, bourgeois intellectuals across Western Europe celebrated the centenary of the death of the great German poet and polymath Goethe by casting him as the very model of European culture. Goethe was the embodiment of their ideal of Europe: cosmopolitan and sophisticated, curious and creative, committed to the highest humane, Christian and Enlightenment values.”

ps: l’autore del pezzo vive a Uppsala ma è americano