Depicting European federalists in fiction: Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi in Bernhard Setzwein’s Der böhmische Samurai (2017) and Heinrich Mann in Colm Tóibín’s The Magician (2021)

Abstract

This article analyses the representation of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi in Bernhard Setzwein’s Der böhmische Samurai (2017) and Heinrich Mann in Colm Tóibín’s The Magician (2021). This discussion is situated in a number of wider contexts, including literary European Studies within German and Irish Literary Studies; existing representations of European federalists/Europeanists; the actual European thought of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Heinrich Mann; and the oeuvre of the novelists Bernhard Setzwein and Colm Tóibín. It is argued that the representation of European federalists in recent novels enables us to analyse common attitudes and understandings of Europe and Europeanness in the current environment of Euroscepticism, self-questioning, and self-doubt at the institutional as well as constituent levels. It is also argued that the European federalists Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Heinrich Mann are represented as European cosmopolitans: Both are depicted as existing within a wide variety of transnational links, as remaining deeply sceptical of nationalism, especially in its violent form, and as arguing for the extension of the space of the political, beyond the national. Their depiction is, thus, of intellectual figures who laid some of the ideational groundwork for the creation of later European institutions, undertaking this reflective task from the perspective of an idealistic, pacifist and deeply democratic cosmopolitanism.