In the German media Merkel was much praised for the courage and wisdom of this response.

13. Tiredness

13

Tiredness

As so often, the Germans have a word for it: Geschichtsmüde, meaning ‘weary of history’. It is something that modern Europeans can feel at almost any time. Some may feel it continuously, whereas others get it in waves, often at surprising moments. On a recent flight to Budapest I got hit by a sudden wave of it after turning on the in-flight navigation map on the screen in front of me. We were flying over Germany and the moving map placed us over the centre of a triangle of cities: Nuremberg; Regensburg; Bayreuth.

On that occasion it was easy to identify the layers: Nuremberg obviously for the post-war trials but also the Meistersinger; Regensburg most recently for that careful and fateful address by Pope Benedict; Bayreuth for the culture’s heights and depths. But the surge of layered thoughts brought on two things more than anything else: the reminder of how old our continent is and how many layers of history there are. Then close behind, the thing that causes the tiredness: the fear that none of this can ever be escaped and that these histories are always there, capable of not only breaking out but of dragging us under. You don’t have to be German to experience this, though it helps.

It isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. For centuries Europe has had terms, including pseudo-medical ones, to describe personal listlessness and fatigue, including varieties of nervous exhaustion. In the nineteenth century there was a vogue for diagnosing ‘neurasthenia’. But even nineteenth-century exhaustion was not only about frayed nerves, but also existential tiredness. It was a subject in German thought and literature long before the catastrophes of the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke all wrote about it. At that time a consensus emerged that the speed and variety of the pressures involved meant among other things that there was a draining of the spirit which was particular to modern life. Those who addressed this problem or suffered from it looked for cures as well as diagnoses and found them in a whole range of physical lifestyle changes, encompassing everything from physical exercise to the growth of the culture of the sanatorium, alterations in diet and an evangelism for the eating of muesli. Others looked abroad for a solution, identifying their listlessness as originating in a particular ‘Europe-fatigue’. Some of these people looked to the Orient for the answers to their problems. There, tired Europeans could bathe their nervous souls away from the crushing weight of their own past and present.