In Europe

The Germans explained their dearth of morale during the Nazi era – the Nazis were always ‘the other people’ – with the legend of Hitler as ‘the evil demon’.
    All these mollifying, explanatory, comforting myths cannot exist without a national context. People need stories in order to grasp the inexplicable, to cope with their fate. The individual nation, with its common language and shared imagery, can always forge those personal experiences into one, great, cohesive history. But Europe cannot do that. Unlike the United States, it still has no common story.
    The Amsterdam sociologist Abram de Swaan speaks in this regard of Europe's ‘pedagogical deficit’: the lack of political fire at the European level, of that spirit so indispensable to a vital democracy. The absence of a common European language almost certainly has something to do with that, although it is estimated that eighty per cent of the conversations held within the EU bureaucracy are now in English. Much more serious, however, is the total lack of so much as a forum for mutual discussion: there is still no European coffee house, no place where Europeans can together mould their opinions, where ideas can be born, viewpoints examined. Without such an agora all further political processes remain hanging in thin air, without such a permanent debate Europe remains a cascade of phrases, a democracy for the sake of appearances, and nothing more.
    The British chronicler of Europe Timothy Garton Ash speaks in this regard of the
grand ennui
, the risk that the entire European project will collapse under its own inertia. ‘If I wish to reach the broadest intellectual European audience,’ he writes, ‘then I can best write an essay for the
New York Review of Books
, or a shorter editorial in the
International Herald Tribune
or the
Financial Times
.’ That is funny and absurd, but it illustrates above all how deep the problem lies: what seems to be missing here is a common attitude to life, an attitude like the one that existed, for example, within the chaotic Danube monarchy. The coffee houses of Vienna, the barracks,the theatres and clubs in all those far-flung provinces, that entire monarchy on the Danube was dominated by a carefully cultivated mixture of lightness and great earnest, a musical German full of Italian drama and Slavic melancholy, a common culture that, more than all the rest, bound together the national elites. For years, it was this culture which propped up that strange, dégagé empire.
    Have you ever heard Europeans shouting ‘We the People’? Yes, perhaps at the mass demonstrations against the American intervention in Iraq, in spring 2003. And certainly one year later, during the mass demonstrations in almost every capital on the continent against the bombings in Madrid. But those were the very first times.
    In 1924, Joseph Roth's
Hotel Savoy
was published, a novel about a hotel full of disenfranchised guests stranded on the edge of Europe. Hotel Savoy was crawling with the victims of war, refugee families, whores, speculators, lottery-ticket touts and the unforgettable Croatian veteran Zwonimir Pansin. Zwonimir is always dreaming of a better world, and he loves America so much that he underscores all things commendable with the cry:‘America!’.‘If the food in the mess hall was good, he said: “America!” If a scaffolding was built well, he said: “America!” Concerning an “outstanding” first lieutenant he said: “America”. And because I was a good shot, he called my bullseyes: “America.”’
    The main character in
Hotel Savoy
is a black hole, an eternally missing person, someone for whom everyone else waits and waits. His name is Bloomfield, a Pole who has garnered a massive fortune in America and is now coming back to visit his father's grave. Everyone in the hotel has put their hopes in Bloomfield. ‘All over town, people were waiting for Bloomfield. In the Jewish quarter, people were waiting for him, everyone was holding onto their money, trade was slow … At the soup kitchen, everyone was talking about Bloomfield as well. Whenever he showed up, he met their every wish and the earth took on a new appearance.’ The people go down to the railway station every day to wait for Bloomfield, until one day he actually shows up, fleeting and ephemeral as always.
    Bloomfield has passed through Europe twice: in 1917, and again in 1941 (not counting the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift and the American