El TLS me descubre un ensayo que intenta explorar las relaciones entre mitos, lenguajes y conciencia nacional, añadiendo: “De cómo las baladas crearon Finlandia, como la ópera hizo Bélgica y como los cuentos de hadas unificaron Alemania”.

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Temas recurrentes en mi De la inexistencia de España.

Times Literay Supplement, 26 septiembre 2007.

Myths, languages and national consciousness

How ballads created Finland, opera made Belgium, and fairy stories unified Germany

Tom Shippey

NATIONAL THOUGHT IN EUROPE
A cultural history

Joep Leerssen
312pp. Amsterdam University Press; distributed by University of Chicago Press.

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In 1848, the year of revolutions, a “National Assembly” was convened at Frankfurt, to discuss unification of the German lands, civil rights and a constitution for a future Reich. The strangest thing about the assembly was its seating plan. Delegates were placed in a semi-circle facing the Speaker, but there was one seat in the centre of the semi-circle, directly opposite the Speaker, set apart from all the others. It was reserved for Jacob Grimm. Can one imagine a British durbar to decide the future of the Empire, deliberately and symbolically centred on a professor of linguistics, also known as a collector of fairy tales? But Grimm was not a mere linguist, he was a Philolog, and by 1848, as Joep Leerssen points out in his exceptionally wide-ranging study, philology was a combination of linguistics, literary history and cultural anthropology with the prestige of a hard science and the popular appeal of The Lord of the Rings. Grimm was there to speak, not for the nation, for there was no German nation, but for an imaginary Deutschland which he had very largely created in an unmatched though repeatedly imitated feat of “cultural consciousness-raising”.

Leerssen traces this Europe-wide process from its beginnings to the present day, showing how European politics changed from the medieval and early modern game of dynastic monopoly to the present era of nation states and EU liberal democracies – with its shadow-side of identity politics, disputed linguistic boundaries, ethnic cleansing, whipped-up national hatreds and total war. In some ways, his work corroborates well-known books like Eric Hobsbawm’s collection The Invention of Tradition (1983) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991). But unlike the former, he sees the process in a European perspective, not piecemeal, and unlike the latter, he is alive to the impact of the professors, the librarians and folk-tale collectors and littérateurs. The “folk” often did not know they were a folk till they were told so. National feeling, which we have been taught to regard as a fact of life, was the result of a “non-stop multi-media cult” promoted by a network of scholars.

In keeping with this assertion of the vitality of academic discussion, Leerssen locates one major stimulus for “national thought” in the discovery, in Rome in 1455, of the sole surviving manuscript of Tacitus’s Germania. This proved to be “the single most influential piece of Latin literature in post-medieval Europe”. It generated a cult of rustic simplicity as opposed to aristocratic decadence; it provided a powerful image for republicans as against monarchists; it bolstered, or perhaps created, the belief that Northern Europeans are more trustworthy than the “Club Med”; and in Germany it was responsible for the cult of Arminius (or “Hermann” as he was soon renamed), the guarantor of German liberty by his destruction of the legions of Varus at Kalkriese in Lower Saxony in ad 9. Some of the dafter philologists identified him with Siegfried, and Varus with the great dragon Fafnir, for, as Leerssen points out in copious detail, when national feeling began to spread, one vital sign of it was felt to be the possession of an ancient epic which testified to the immemorial existence of the nation: for Germany, the Nibelungenlied (republished 1807), for France, the Chanson de Roland (1836), for the Netherlands, the Reinaert beast epic (also 1836).

If no epic was available, collections of ancient ballads would do, or philologists could simply forge epics to suit. The most successful creation of them all was certainly Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1835), an epic put together from oral ballads, its publication date still a national holiday in Finland. Finland would probably never have developed a national identity and would not now exist without that book and the new prestige it gave to what had been a backwoods dialect without written form, in a territory ruled by Swedes and Russians. Historical novels sometimes had the same effect. Flanders celebrates its national day on the anniversary of a battle of 1302, but the battle would have been forgotten without Hendrik Conscience’s novel, De Leeuw van Vlaenderen (The Lion of Flanders, 1838). Conscience was imitating Scott, whose novels of national unification such as Ivanhoe (1819) continue to underpin the tottery mythical foundations of the British state. Opera also played its part, most notoriously in the creation of Belgium following the anti-Dutch riots that broke out in 1830 when D.-F.-E. Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici reached the aria “Amour sacré de la patrie”, and the audience got carried away. The opera remains a potential flashpoint in Flanders, as five minutes’ internet research will show.

The main drive of nineteenth-century public ceremonial, Leerssen insists, was also about connecting with the recently discovered past. It can be seen in political architecture, and it can be seen in national anthems, of which the most dangerous was of course “Deutschland über alles”. People often point out that this means “Germany above all” not “Germany over all others”, but as composed by Hoffmann von Fallersleben it was quite sufficiently aggressive. In 1796, Goethe had asked, ironically, “Deutschland, where is it though?”, and Hoffmann told him. It ran (first stanza) from Maas to Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt. Even in Hoffmann’s time only the Memel – now the River Neman, on the borders of Lithuania and Kaliningrad – was within a German state, in East Prussia. The Etsch, or Adige, is still in Italy. The Maas, or Meuse, is in Holland/Belgium, and the Belt is the lille bælt, well inside Denmark by almost anyone’s calculation. Underlying the anthem was Grimm’s philological assertion that a Volk meant people who spoke the same language, so that the territory of Deutschland was wherever Deutsch was spoken: which would take in Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein, Austria, the Czech Sudetenland, and even Switzerland, all except the last to become sites of Anschluss or of shooting wars.

Just as potentially dangerous was Grimm’s strong tendency to define Deutsch as convenient. Sometimes he meant just “German”, that is, High German, but sometimes he meant “Germanic”, and when he meant that he sometimes included all branches of that language family, including Scandinavians, while he often included Low German, namely, Dutch, Flemish and North German Plattdeutsch. These would mostly have to be re-absorbed, politically and linguistically. Some of Grimm’s linguistic arguments were quite as silly as seeing the dragon Fafnir as Varus in disguise, such as his claim that Jutland was really German, not Danish, because (some) Jutish dialects prefix the definite article like German der Mann, instead of suffixing it like Danish manden.

Underlying such philological fantasies, however, were deadly serious theses which are still current. Irredentism: what had once been “national” territory always remained so, and must be taken back, if necessary by “ethnic cleansing”. Language/nation identity: if people speak your language in another country, that proves it’s yours. Language denial: if convenient, you can relabel what its speakers think is a language as a mere “dialect”, thus denying national identity. The underlying problem, as Leerssen points out, is that states have very clear boundaries, drawn on the map and marked by customs posts if nothing else. Languages, however, do not. In many parts of Europe they shade into each other, or overlap: Catalan/Castilian, Plattdeutsch/Dutch, Serb/Croat, Czech/Slovak, etc. Wherever a boundary is drawn, someone will always be anomalous. In long-established states the matter has been largely cleared up by the deliberate elimination of dialects, backed by national dictionaries and state media. In 1794, it was reckoned that only one French person in nine spoke standard French, and the National Assembly received a report on the need to “destroy the dialects”, anéantir les patois. In Italy, almost a century later the proportion of standard Italian speakers was more like one in forty.

Leerssen’s major achievement in National Thought in Europe is to provide a schema for considering this far-reaching and still relevant paradigm shift in self-definition, from the Enlightenment onwards. Two questions, however, stand out for contemporary English-speakers. Where does the UK fit in all this? And what is to be done now?

The answer to the first question is, it often doesn’t. What Gordon Brown means by “Britishness” remains obscure; while the theory that the people equals the language has never worked for England, since even in the Middle Ages it was obvious, because of Scotland, that the English language and the English state were not coterminous. When it comes to national epics, Beowulf (published in Copenhagen in 1815 as a poema Danicum) was a disaster all the way, since although it was written in Old English it never once mentions England. Several favoured European strategies simply do not work on the British archipelago. As for what is to be done, Leerssen’s solution lies in what he calls “heteronomy”, the opposite of autonomy, or (though he does not say this) of devolution. It means living together instead of separating out. If you placate a Catalan minority within Spain, you create a Castilian minority within Catalonia. This can go on down the scale to the village neighbour level, and both the Yugoslav and the Northern Ireland experiences should have reminded us that “intensity of conflict does not diminish at the smaller scale”. Yet in some places contending groups have learned to live together instead of backing away. As a Limburger, Leerssen is very aware of micro-tensions within Outre-Meuse, the Dutch–French–German triangle between Maastricht, Liège and Aachen. Here, the language boundaries have remained stable for centuries, but, even in the Middle Ages, village courts were resisting rationalization and, in very modern style, refusing to reply to any communications not drafted in their own language. Nevertheless there was and is no urge towards autonomy: the villagers just wanted, as we all do, recognition of their customary rights, and protection against arbitrary government from remote centres.

This, perhaps, is a model of a kind. But the real problem remains the success of the national “consciousness-raisers” of the past two centuries, and the lack of any competing European brand images now. It was the Prussian Chief of Staff Gneisenau, not an evident sentimentalist, who said “The security of the throne is founded on poetry”, while it was Ernest Renan who argued that national identity depends on a plébiscite de tous les jours. But the bureaucracies of Brussels and Westminster have little time for poetry, or history, or seeming irrelevancies like Jacob Grimm, and as for a “daily referendum” . . . don’t even think about it.

● Tom Shippey holds the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University. His most recent publications include The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm’s mythology of the monstrous, 2005, and Roots and Branches: Selected papers on Tolkien, which was published earlier this year.