Europe in Love : Contemporary History and Fiction in the German 'European Novel'

Abstract

In German literature, a faint awareness of some continental cohesion beyond mere geographical contiguity can be traced back at least to the sixteenth century. Laux Lercher’s anti-Ottoman pamphlet News of the Large man … Christian Great India, and How He Married the Maiden Christendom Europe (1547) tells the allegorical story of the Gargantuan giant Christian, who is discovered by Portuguese sailors and whose body parts are analogous in size to the various European lands. At his request, the German emperor allows him to marry the maiden ‘Christendom Europe,’ and together they beget 30 children, representing 30 countries. United, the brothers stand strong against the Turks. Lercher’s News is perhaps the earliest literary attempt to allegorize Europe in the German vernacular, but it seems to have gone entirely unnoticed at the time and is virtually unknown today. Even though foreign political works like Juan Luis Vives’s satirical dialogue De Europae dissidiis et bello turcico (“Of the Strives of Europe and the Turkish War,” 1526; German translation 1540) or allegorical plays like Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s Europe (1643) were promptly translated into German, they did not spark a genuine tradition of literary reections on Europe.1 To be sure, scattered works like Cyriacus Lentulus’s didactic poem Europa (1650)—a versied textbook on topography-or the anonymous Scena Europaea (“The European stage,” 1629)—an array of all the princes of Europe and various personications unveiling their interests and bemoaning their fates-were published by German authors and printers during the Thirty Years’ War, but they were mostly written in neo-Latin and seem to have had only limited impact. In light of these ndings, one is tempted to adapt Peter Burke’s provocative question (Burke 1980): Did German literature on Europe exist before 1700?