Nota bene, Europa

The Befreiungshalle in Kelheim is a national monument, and yet it does not stand for nationalism. The idea expressed in it is not reactionary-nationalist, quite the opposite. This monument contains a commitment to federalism in Germany, which, unlike the establishment of an all-German nation-state demanded by the bourgeois side, envisaged a considerable autonomy of the individual German states. The monument springs from the recognition that only by concentrating forces can a possible threat from abroad be opposed. A higher level had to be reached, a common goal focused, in order to escape the barbarity of the Napoleonic invasion, whose actual purpose was the conveying of the ideals of the French Revolution. Europe today finds itself in a comparable situation. On a higher level the unification of the 18 German peoples stands symbolically for the harmony and solidarity of the European member states. They too can meet the threat from within and from without only by overcoming their national egoisms—without, however, losing their identity. Therefore Europe looks with a magnifying glass at the burning Befreiungshalle, which is in the process of transforming itself and of becoming from a national symbol into a lesson for a united Europe. The current crisis that Europe must face today is only one of the great threats; another, less visible, is the creeping loss of the ideals of the French Revolution, which, in the billowing garb of a misunderstood bureaucratism, threaten to sink like small boats.