Book description
Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the
nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the
German tradition, exhorted them to be 'good Europeans', avatars of the
enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-century. Yet as RG
Collingwood observed in his last great inquiry into the nature of
civilisation, a book written to the glory of Hobbes at the height of
the London blitz, Nietzsche was himself a victim of the disease he
diagnosed. In The Good European Iain Bamforth's reports on fifteen
years of 'experimental living' during which his attachment to the old
continent brought him from Berlin, in the week in which he saw the
fall of the Wall in 1989, to Strasburg, heart of aboriginal Europe and
the city of noses in Tristram Shandy. Thrown into a deep identity
crisis by Bismarck's victories against the French in 1870, pilot
region for some of the modern state's most radical policies (health
insurance, public relations), Alsace's divided loyalties have affected
the nature of Europe itself. With his ear attuned to the complexities
of culture and politics, Bamforth attempts to discover Europe through
extra-diplomatic channels: he offers essays on writers and thinkers
who have done much to define the small archipelago on the edge of
Asia, including classics such as Kleist, Kafka, Roth and Benjamin, WG
Sebald and Mavis Gallant. He provides a portrait of the Nazi jurist
Carl Schmitt, a send-off for Bernard Pivot's classic literary
chat-show Bouillon de Culture, a scrutiny of philosophising media
pundit Peter Sloterdijk, landscapes from Provence and Bavaria, reports
from Prague and Geneva, Franco-German shibboleths, a sarcastic letter
from 'Kakania', and an anatomy of the Alsatian humorist Tomi Ungerer.
Europe often reeks of the terminally nostalgic and the curatorial:
here a sceptical Scots intelligence reaches out to Musil, Heine,
Gogol, Sterne, Montaigne, Rabelais and beyond the 'standard average
European' to the gallant, helpless, hero-smitten Don, in the hope that
they can help him find the way towards a more generous Europe.
