What counts in the contemporary world, as in the past, is not the numeric superiority of a people, nor the tally of its war dead, nor the vastness of its destroyed areas, but that each people profits from universal history, by the value it contributes in terms of artistic sculpturing to the poetic arsenal of humanity. It is not warring peoples who decide, but the poetic peoples, and what is decisive in this sense is not the importance of the mass of humanity, but humanity in terms of its creative claim.
I shall take the example of the Scandinavian countries, whose destiny, over centuries, since Charles XII, ceased to have any bearing on the warmongering, imperialist shaping of Europe. Yet with what sculptural force, with what powerful reality are they ever present! As we know their history, their cultural developments, so we sense their presence, through the knowledge that Scandinavian literature conquered Europe at the close of the nineteenth century, that Sweden and Norway possessed for a time an uncontested supremacy in the art of the essay and that their men of letters exercised a primary influence in all Europe. Thanks to Strindberg, to Selma Lagerlöf, to Verner von Heidenstam and a number of others, we have been informed of the historical, sociological and ethnic problems of Sweden as if we were living them ourselves, because poets have spoken of them, because the history and culture of this country have been articulated to us not in a dry and flat academic manner, but in poetic form. Even those countries numerically inferior, poorer or more insignificant in a political, economic or military sense, can make their presence equally felt in world history; and we Austrians feel with the same pride that it is not necessary to be politically challenging or especially rich and powerful economically in order to make our mark on the world with our own cultural life. It is enough that via music the breath of a whole people can be animated, that its being can be opened up to the world, because music harbours this mysterious poetic accent which has the power to render everything that exists with greater substance and reality. I say again that history only lives where it achieves a certain poetic grandeur, which is why the highest accomplishment of a people is to transform as much as possible of its national history into world history, its private people’s myth into a world myth. What ultimately counts are the spiritual values a single nation can offer humanity as a whole. My hope is that the hour is not far off when the nations will only compete in the sense of giving something back to each other, when one can convince the other of its raison d’être not through military might but through artistic talent, and history will no longer be recounted via the immortal war ballad but will raise all to a common height with a heroic hymnal poem to unity.
I have sought to present history as “the workshop of God”, as an art studio without rival, an archive of the most uplifting and stimulating documents. But what we might say in favour of the past must not make us blind as regards the present. Admittedly, the present is not so easy to warm to: rarely has it been the fate of a generation to live in such a tense and overheated atmosphere as ours, and we all experience a craving to rest a while from the constant overabundance of events which our epoch produces, to take a breath amidst the unremitting political assault to which we are subjected. But precisely if we know world history, if we grow to love it, we can take courage from the present in remembering that in the long run nothing that happens is entirely senseless, that all which in past epochs seemed to be useless and senseless to the contemporary mind was later seen from a higher perspective as revealing a creative idea or extolling some metaphysical sense. This is why all the confusion and distress we experience today are but waves bearing us to something new, to the future—nothing is in vain. Each moment that we live, as soon as we give word to it, becomes past. There is no present that does not immediately become history, and thus we are all, as actors and fellow players, endlessly blended into a great drama which is in a perpetual state of becoming; let us then in suspense and awe await its solution. Whoever loves history as a poetic work brimming with soul must equally consider the present and his own existence as also possessing a profound sense and believe, despite current evidence to the contrary, that in the conscious act of creating, acting, writing, we fulfil the real life goal, each of us someone else but all of us the same, that supreme objective, the great triumph over time for which Goethe provides such an admirable formula: “It is to make us eternal that we are here.”
HISTORY, this seemingly tideless ocean of events, in fact obeys an unswerving rhythmic law, an internal swell which divides the epochs through ebb and flow, in forward and backward currents—and how could it be otherwise, given that it is created by man and his psychic laws only reflect those of the individual? In each of us this duality exists; the process we call life is in the end only a state of tension between opposing poles. Fortunately we are able to name these opposing forces as the centrifugal and the centripetal, or, in the language of the new psychology, the introvert and the extrovert, or, in that of morals, the egoistic and the altruistic—and it is always through this formula that we express the shifting tendency which is in each of us, on the one hand with the “I” isolated from the world and on the other the “I” bound to the world. We want to retain our “I”, the unique personality, who we are, to make this personality still more personal. But simultaneously this personality, this substance which binds us to the world, our individuality, is drawn inexorably into the community. What then is a people other than a collective of individuals? So, underlying all nations is this double tendency: on the one hand their individuality, their spirit and cultural personality, coloured by nationalism, and on the other the supranational search for a higher community which will enrich them but which will demand in return a measure of their wealth and personality. Across all history, these two tendencies of attraction and repulsion, peace and war, the concentric and the expansive, proceed in eternal opposition. As soon as the great structures of state and religion are built they dissolve; over decades and centuries periods of hostility are succeeded by those of reconciliation and friendship; but essentially humanity, with its ever-expanding vision, has always striven towards unions which are more elevated and illuminative. Both of these tendencies, the national and the supranational, already have, since they exist, their cultural and corporeal sense; one is not possible without the other in the intellectual organism of beings that we call states or nations. This opposition is necessary in order to maintain a creative tension at the heart of humanity. But I shall take only one as the object for my study here, in an epoch of nationalist disunity. I wish to underline the contrasting element of unity, that mysterious Eros which has always drawn humanity over differences in language, culture and ideas towards a superior union. I wish to attempt, by casting a glance at the intellectual development of Europe, to furnish a brief history of this perennial yearning for unity, in feelings, wills, thoughts and lives, which across two millennia has created the magnificent common edifice which we can proudly name European culture.
I say “across two millennia”. But in truth this basic instinct for an eventual creative community reaches well beyond the history we know, to the primitive times of myths. Already in the most ancient book of the world, at the beginning of the Bible, when it speaks of the first men, we find through a magnificent symbol the first signs of this desire for the creative union of humanity. It is of course the profound legend of the Tower of Babel, and it is this myth that I wish to recall here and explain a little.
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