Sphinx

Where is Europe? It’s perhaps not the most obvious answer, but one possibility is: sitting in the elegant Kulturzentrum PFL in Oldenburg the week before last with a mixture of academics, activists, trade unionists, students and regular citizens, listening to an elderly trio playing 1950s British trad jazz a la Chris Barber and Ken Colyer as the introduction to a podium discussion on the theme Wo ist Europa? And, yes, I should have got a photo of the band, rather than this rather off-putting one of the panel.

Such an event felt like a very European thing – like the substantial displays in almost every German bookshop I’ve visited in recent years of books on the future of Europe, the current crisis etc. – a combination of a love of serious engagement with serious issues and a continuing majority commitment to Europe as an idea/ideal. I find it quite hard to imagine such a thing in Britain, at any rate outside the really big cities – let alone that it would involve a couple of ancient historians. Of course, it may be just an Oldenburg thing, or a particular thing for the organisers – both Prof Michael Sommer from the university and Dr Nicole Deufel, head of the city museums, have worked in the UK in the past, in the latter’s case returning to Germany just last year.

Anyway, it was another good work-out for my German, offering a British perspective – not least by emphasising that it was only a small minority of Britains who opted for catastrophe last year – in discussion with Michael (developing a vision for a ‘Europe of communities’ and strong citizenship based on the model of the Greek polis), a representative of the Pulse of Europe movement, and a banker and economics lecturer. We touched on the economic consequences of Brexit, ideas of subsidiarity, the lack of democracy and transparency in the current institutions and operation of the EU, the concept of a Europe of multiple speeds (economically rational, but what does it mean for law and human rights), the Roman approach to multiple civic and cultural identities, and Europe-wide copyright law – for Michael an example of unnecessary and damaging interference in local practices, for one of the musicians a necessary and important protection for artists. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, where actually is Europe – in the heart, in the soul, in the past or the future..?

Of course what we really want in Europe is more jazz, or jazz as a model of social and political life: honouring but also reinterpreting many different traditions, bringing them into new contexts and combinations without subsuming or erasing them (okay, I’d think more in terms of Berlin group Cyminology, using Persian and Arabic scales and melodies, or contemporary Polish jazz drawing on the klezmer tradition, but an Oldenburg trio playing a version of a sixty-year-old British reception of early C20 New Orleans jazz can work as well). The constant dynamic, constructive tension between predetermined structures and free improvisation, the balance between tradition and innovation, the fact that we can have a European jazz of many different speeds (sometimes within the same number…) without any need to argue over whether or not it counts as jazz – until some idiot starts insisting on the purity of a single definition. So, UKIP and AfD and the other idiots as the moldy figs of modern Europe…