What Does Europe Mean to Me?

When I was 18, I began an English degree that I thought would be the culmination of a lifetime’s love of traditional classic novels. I read a lot before I started, and have read even more since. Slowly I have eased myself into the German department and developed a true, deep love of German Romanticism and a recognition that the greatest literature is open-minded and international – and that even English literature could not exist without Europe.

I spent my childhood and teen years eating up British literature – the Brontës! Wilke Collins! Orwell, Donne, Shelley, Dodie Smith and C. S. Lewis. You could count nary a name among my young favourites that wasn’t an upper-crust Brit full to the brim with cultural capital, and I really thought that these were the best in literature. Perhaps they are – many other people count them among their favourites too, and there is so much to love in British literature that it’s easy to not look further. The British education system values Britishness above almost all else, and although I read every book I could that crossed my path it was uncommon for those books to not be British. Re-reading them again now, though, I see depth and nuance that was informed by travel, reading or news from abroad. I see a knowledge of music and history, fashion and poetry that was not constrained by borders or oceans and opened up the minds of my favourite writers and made their creations something wonderful.

Today, my favourite writers are Albanian, Hungarian, French and German. I read books by Poles and Turks. I love that Shakespeare’s plays are set all over Europe, Pushkin is ‘the Russian Byron’ and Goethe started the Romantic Movement that Britain is famous for. I don’t see British culture as dominant because I can see the influences on those British greats from not only the literature of European cultures but also the languages they learned to engage and how that changed the way they think. I know now that English literature would not exist at all if our fathers Chaucer and Defoe hadn’t travelled, spoken languages, engaged with Spanish and Florentine poetic traditions, been inspired by new and exciting things. In the age of information we can be connected to Europe more quickly than ever we have a chance to learn even more from one another.

To me, Europe means the same as it meant to my Romantic heroes: Europe is a connection of minds. It is interconnected influences, a dialectic, a cultural exchange with dynamic rhizomatic branches reaching here, there and everywhere. Travel an hour in Europe and you can be in a new country. If you can’t travel at all then there are rich traditions of film, books, visual art and handcrafts to inspire or entertain us from every nation in the Union. The legacy of Romanticism is a pan-European respect and search for knowledge that I am always excited to engage in.