What Made Europeans European?

My subject is European identity in historic perspective. But alas for clarity, which I prize, the word identity can mean either of two quite different things. It can signify, first, what identifies Europeans collectively, what is specifically European about them, their distinctive common traits, common institutions, or common practices such as justify a de-

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scriptive, rather than a purely geographic, use of the word European. Or alternatively that same term European identity can denote the feeling among Europeans that they are not just Spaniards or Swedes, Belgians or Bulgarians, but Europeans too, if to a lesser degree—a shared sense of kinship among them over against non-Europeans, and of concordant interests among them despite their frequent bloody conflicts, which hurt them the more for feeling like family quarrels. It is primarily this native sense among modern Europeans of their being European that I hope to trace to its historic origin, its generative source, while also showing how that generative source is still active within it. But first, observe how very peculiar a feeling it is! No other continent besides Europe can even begin to match it. The single exception proves the rule: the one-nation continent of Australia. Over the past century, some African states have taken to calling themselves African for political purposes, but Cairo and Cape Town feel no cultural or psychological kinship with each other, nor does either of them feel any with Kinshasa in between.

Why, then, should the dozens of diverse peoples scattered around just the European continent, just that one jumble of mountains and peninsulas and islands that juts out to the west of the huge Asian land mass, feel a common secondary identity such as no other continentals feel? To get to the bottom of that singular dash of likeness or even sameness felt by Europeans, fragmented though they are ethnically, linguistically, and politically, we must approach European identity as the piece of live history that it is, and approach it in both of its aspects as they intermix: both what is distinctively European when viewed from the outside, and the Europeans’ gut feeling of continental affinity over and beyond their stronger local and national ties. I hope to be able to sort out these two aspects of Europe’s identity—its perceived identity and its felt identity—and to add what needs adding to the conventional historic picture in order to explain the second and more

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elusive of the two: the feeling among Europeans deep down that they share a common inborn heritage and, as a consequence, a common fate.

Histories of the idea of Europe considered as a single entity, as a distinct existential unit, generally hark back to the Roman Empire as a sort of prototype of European oneness, as the first broad political sovereignty to have begun to approach Europe’s geographic contours as we know them today, a kernel of European oneness that moreover has left behind conspicuous monuments and mementos of itself both tangible and intangible, including most prominently a network of roads and a body of laws. In reality, however, the Roman prototype was none. It is true that in the early third century of our era all free men in the Empire were proclaimed citizens of the Empire and were thereby united under a common language and a common governance. At its core, however, the Roman Empire was Mediterranean, not European. Territorially it was no more in Europe than in Africa or Asia. Besides, the prototype of European identity, whether of perceived identity or of felt identity, can hardly have been a political construct, which the Roman Empire was. For ever since Rome declined and fell, Europe has sported a tangle of volatile political sovereignties that have resisted all efforts at subjecting them to a single higher authority.

The Frankish conqueror Charlemagne came closest to imposing such an overlordship around the year 800—ephemerally, however, and within a relatively narrow territorial compass. Though his Carolingian empire was all contained within geographic Europe, it included even less of Europe territorially than did its great Roman predecessor. He once quaintly called his realm Europe, but like the ancient Greeks, who coined the name, he meant no more by Europe than just the lands that he ruled. Moreover, his realm held together from top to bottom by personal fealty, not by any

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territorial or imperial loyalty, let alone any continental spirit. Soon after its founder’s death, his Frankish kingdom split three ways among his legitimate sons and heirs, surviving thereafter only as a stale memory in its eastern, Germanic third—which nonetheless in the tenth century claimed imperial succession from ancient Rome through Charlemagne, styling itself the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

This grand-sounding, shadowy empire vied with the Church of Rome in affirming its universal (not European) dominion. It lost all of its dubious power and dusty prestige long ages before it signed its own death certificate in 1806. At the time of its official demise, Napoleon in his turn was attempting to unite the continent by force, or at least to unite the continental mainland against England—self-defeatingly as it turned out, for the result was an upsurge of nationalisms on all sides, which proved that upstart emperor’s undoing. Hitler’s later, cruder attempt to unite Europe by force on racial principles met with swifter and even bloodier failure. Nor have dynastic marriages succeeded in consolidating much of the European family for long. When the champion dynast, the early-sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, claimed to rule Europe through its royal bedchambers within his purview, he thereby only confined the term Europe to his own limited European domains, like Charlemagne seven centuries before.

Nor, finally, have the diverse European states been able to get their political act together by mutual consent: projects for a voluntary, sovereign European union keep proving visionary. Western Europe’s present common market, common parliament, and common currency have gone farther in this direction than any earlier efforts at confederation. Still they stop well short of continental inclusiveness, let alone supranational sovereignty, and they are evidently not about to move much closer to either: witness the French, then the Netherlandish, electorate’s rejection in 2005 of a proposed

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constitution for Europe that was less than comprehensive territorially and only barely integrative politically—besides having been mostly of French inspiration at that. In sum, whatever it is that makes for Europeanness, not only is it not political, but it resists being politicized.

That unpolitical family feeling among Europeans is frequently said to have built up in medieval Europe out of certain existential basics that spread far and wide within the continent and then evolved together into a unique European civilization. As this argument runs, the foundations of that distinct European civilization were, to start with, a lingua franca or common language (Latin) and Roman law. Next allegedly came Christianity, feudalism, and somewhat look-alike villages each clustered typically around a fortress, a marketplace, a church, and a burial ground. Then the twelfth and thirteenth centuries purportedly saw a whole new European order emerge on these foundations, one that featured chivalry and courtly manners among the nobility; self-governing communes; guilds, fairs, and banking; a bourgeoisie, indeed a whole status society, with family estates transmitted wherever possible from fathers to eldest sons; canon law, courts, and juries; Romanesque, then Gothic, art; universities steeped in scholastic learning; heroic poems and romances each recited and later penned in several increasingly refined European vernaculars at once. Surely the feeling of being European developed across the continent out of this vast ensemble of distinctively European facts—or did it?

One problem with the argument from alleged all-European distinctiveness is that most of such supposedly singularizing European facts were mainly, or even exclusively, west-European and did not even hold for all of Western Europe at that. But a bigger catch to the argument is logical: common institutions and usages cannot very well generate and sustain a shared consciousness unless by the same token their gradual disappearance tends to erode that shared con-

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sciousness. Take Latin as a unifying European language, or lingua franca. When Rome had ruled around the Mediterranean, the only written language in Europe outside of the Greek peninsula and islands had been Latin. Afterwards, although Latin spread in the Dark Ages as the language of the Church, it fell into disuse overall as literacy receded. Charlemagne revived it for purposes of government and scholarship, yet in high and folk culture alike it gradually yielded to local vernaculars. Had Latin underpinned European consciousness, then European consciousness would have been confined to the Latinate elites even at its height. More, it would have gone extinct by the turn of the eighteenth century, when what was left of the Latin tongue fell silent even in its last stronghold, the universities.

Or take feudalism. Not only was feudalism primarily west-European, out of sync from region to region, and even more ephemeral than Latin among the literati; still more to the point, feudal serfs could not have felt themselves to be European on the strength of their distinctive credentials as feudal serfs except by contrasting their status in feudal Europe with that of farm laborers elsewhere—a manifest absurdity, for in general all that a serf could see beyond the horizon was a universal blur. Again, if Roman law was one of the foundation stones of Europe, that foundation stone too crumbled as the remnants of Roman law in Europe came to be increasingly adulterated by local codes. And again, Gothic architecture was indeed exclusive to Europe. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it radiated gloriously within range of its native northern France even while fusing with regional styles that slowly supplanted it. But then early modern Europe disowned it as gross and ugly. Gothic cathedrals still mark some points of Europe’s urban landscape distinctively, but they hardly impress a sense of kinship from town to town where they are, let alone where they are not. As for those components of the purported medieval model of

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“European civilization” that have survived with a flourish into modern times, such as universities, banking, and the bourgeoisie, they tend to be just the ones that are least specifically European. In sum, it remains to be shown how a felt European identity can have derived from the “European civilization” of medieval vintage that historians have delineated after the fact.

Among the identifying features of medieval Europe that historians most often cite, Christianity holds pride of place with its common faith, its numerous colorful rituals, and its ubiquitous symbols beginning with the cross. Yet neither in its origin nor in its self-conception was Christianity European. It was at the start an Oriental cult that claimed universal validity and that spread from Asia to Africa before it reached Europe. When the Roman emperor Constantine converted in the early fourth century, it was in Asia (in Nicaea) that he convened a council to standardize Christian dogma. More, he moved the imperial capital to Byzantium at the tip of Asia, renamed it Constantinople, and had it rebuilt with symbolic flourish to straddle the two continents of Europe and Asia. Afterwards, however, as the empire disintegrated, Christianity did spread within Europe in particular—inside the imperial cities first, more slowly to the countryside and among the pagans come from the east, finally beyond the former Roman provinces northward and eastward into uncharted territory.

The more Christianity prospered in Europe and retreated outside Europe, moreover, the more Europe ignored the Christian emperors in Constantinople, especially after the Moslems started conquering the older Christian areas of Asia and Africa. The Pope, or Bishop of Rome, crowned Charlemagne emperor of a Christian Europe in opposition to the professedly universal Christian emperors in Constantinople. But then Charlemagne’s proud empire split up after his death and decentralized into feudalism, its remnants ravaged by

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pagan marauders until the fiercest of these, the Northmen and the Huns, eventually settled down and converted. In 1095, European Christianity, newly emboldened, embarked on a series of military expeditions, or crusades, to deliver the Holy Land from the Moslems and, in the process, to subdue the Eastern Empire. The venture failed—but inside Europe meanwhile Christianity did gain ever more ground by the sword as the Moslems in Spain were pushed southward under the sign of the cross and the Baltic pagans were conquered and forcibly converted (in the Baltic area only Lithuania, the largest state in Europe, converted freely). With Christianity thus triumphant in Europe, the Eastern Empire embattled, and the few, scattered Christian enclaves elsewhere in tatters, churchmen and cartographers alike took to equating Christianity with Europe as then delineated. The European way of life was no issue here, for this new equation of Christianity with Europe still held even after the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and subdued south-central Europe, absorbing the Christians there culturally. Indeed, after this conquest Christian and European were illogically more synonymous than ever: it was in the 1460s that Pope Pius II popularized the adjective European as a variant of Christian.¹ Thanks to the continuing Turkish peril, the notion of a common European Christianity even survived the early-sixteenth-century Reformation, which split the cult into multitudinous sects. Indeed, the terms Christian and European continued to be used interchangeably now and again until the cosmopolitan, secular Enlightenment of the eighteenth century set the two asunder once and for all.

Christianity taught spiritual oneness among believers, who were said thus to constitute an “invisible church.” That Christianity actually realized such spiritual oneness in Europe was, however, a later, Romantic myth about the Europe that the French Revolution destroyed. As a rule, Christianity was in fact imposed by authority throughout

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Europe, so that it penetrated the hearts of initially reluctant converts only slowly and imperfectly. By the late Middle Ages, much of nominally Christian Europe was still only poorly Christianized at best. The common Christian creed in Europe comprised at most an all-knowing, all-powerful God, an omnipresent, nasty devil, a fearful Last Judgment, and God’s all-loving son, Jesus Christ, by an infinitely compassionate human mother. On the other hand, the Christian saints, processions, masses, festivals, and icons in western Europe contrasted sharply with their relatively stiff and stylized eastern, Byzantine counterparts. On neither side of that east/west divide, moreover, was a common felt Christendom, or community of the faithful, ever much more than an elitist preachment. The battle cry of the defense of Christendom or of Europe might rally western knights in armor against a common heathen threat from Muslims, Saracens, Mongols, Seljuks, or Ottomans, but the image of Christian Europe as a besieged continental bastion of the true faith did not thereby imprint itself on the souls of commoners anywhere. And even among clerics or knights-at-arms, the view of Christendom fending off the infidel could hardly acquire stable continental contours so long as the Popes in Rome urged the capture of Jerusalem or the liberation of Christians in Turkey and points east, not to mention the Popes’ standing claim to spiritual dominion over the world as a whole, urbis et orbis. For all that—even forgetting the Christians outside Europe and the non-Christians inside, forgetting Christianity’s oriental origins and universal pretensions, and forgetting the often radical differences in beliefs and practices from one Christian to another inside Europe, especially from west to east—a Christendom loosely congruent with geographic Europe did constitute a rudimentary collective unit by the twelfth or thirteenth century. At the same time, the bottom line of that rudimentary collective unit needs to be underscored: Christendom, like Europe, was then at most a term of outer identification and not of inner bonding—about like Occidental as dis-

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tinguished from Oriental, a conceptual couple likewise in common use by the twelfth or thirteenth century, and one that worked at cross purposes with the notion of a unitary Christian Europe in that the so-called Orient included south-central Europe even before the Turkish conquest Orientalized that whole area as never before.

Far more of a piece than Christianity, and more inclusively and exclusively European, were Europe’s great cultural movements from the Renaissance on, principally Classicism, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. Though they too flourished mainly among west-European elites, they did nonetheless engulf the whole continent, penetrate the folksy countryside, and seep down recognizably to the lowliest cultural levels. Rural folk culture on its side also tended to cross all national borders within Europe, and within Europe alone. A most impressive token, or even symbol, of this trans-European cultural harmony was a new European lingua franca of sorts that emerged at the tail end of the Renaissance: the major and minor tonal structure of European music—that is, of music throughout Europe and nowhere outside Europe except as a European export.² These facts and artifacts of an all-European culture from the Renaissance on were unmistakable signs that a European unity of spirit had set in by then. But just as unmistakably those signs of a European unity of spirit were not its cause. For never in its history did Europe attain anything like the cultural, not to mention religious and political, commonality of, say, modern South America, which is much more of a solid geographical block besides, yet South Americans have no inkling of a continental identity. Obviously, then, something more than what has already been mentioned was needed in Europe to account for the deep-lying sense of continental identity that coexists among Europeans with intense countervailing nationalisms on all sides.

What was that something more?

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That something more, I submit, was a European trauma, a mass trauma of epic proportions, one unexampled in its magnitude and severity since the ice age: the Black Death.³ This ghastly, pitiless pandemic came from Asia Minor to Sicily at the end of 1347 and thence spread to the continent proper, where it promptly advanced in all directions. Strictly speaking, it was not exactly a European trauma when it first struck Europe, given the lack of a full-fledged European consciousness at the time of its fearful initial impact: even the most widespread or typical reactions to its approach tended to vary regionally. But it pulled Europeans together psychologically as it fanned out among them, and this already several centuries before their resultant sense of being European reached full consciousness. That resultant sense of being European was, then, originally a sense of having been targeted together to deadly effect; indeed, it remains at bottom a sense of being targeted together to deadly effect, for such traumatic moments stay present-tensed where historic memory runs deepest. But the term Europe was not inherent in the grim experience itself. A geographers’ term above all, it was used less frequently than its companion term Christendom by the time the Black Death struck and may even have fallen into relative disuse by then.⁴ The vague contours of the continent that it evoked varied from map to map, never reaching very far north or east. Yet in identifying themselves in common as Christian victims, the plague-stricken picked up on that rudimentary European identity that had been invoked together with Christendom in the face of earlier alien threats from the outside. Christendom, I repeat, denoted the body of the Christian faithful the world over; it nonetheless carried European territorial connotations in practice, though it was never systematically restricted to just Europe or extended to all of Europe. I am laboring these points somewhat redundantly in order to drive home the traumatic essentials, which were these: In 1347-1352 a continent open-ended to the north and east that was the territorial stronghold of Chris-

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tianity, and that was threatened by the Oriental infidel on its south-central edges, was stricken with a deadly pestilence out of the Orient that hit suddenly, unexpectedly, swiftly, and indiscriminately in all walks of life, and that did to death horrifically about one inhabitant out of two in its first, gigantic onslaught,⁵ only to recur regionally again and again thereafter. It spread across Europe straight off even farther than Europe was then seen by any cartographers to extend, ending up in Russia long before other Europeans agreed that the Russians were Europeans too. By the time it recessed in 1352, it had precisely traced the entire present-day map of Europe, Iceland alone excepted.

I have said that the traumatic impact of the Black Death pulled Europe together psychologically, even if not at once under the name of Europe. My designation of the Black Death as Europe’s formative trauma involves two concepts that have emerged over the years from the study of history in its psychological dimension—from psychohistory—and that may need defining for present purposes. One is that of psychological coherence within a group such that its members can act or react together without realizing it, as a rule when their core concerns as a group are on the line. Psychohistorians call this phenomenon group process. It has been closely observed by naturalists since antiquity in animal societies as they adjust collectively to changing conditions of life. At the same time it has been largely ignored in human affairs because of the long-standing human conceit that, unlike other animals, humans behave as individuals only, and only for conscious personal purposes at that. However, psychoanalysis has shown that, even in acting for conscious purposes, individuals may be pursuing other ends than they know—unconscious ends. Similarly, the historic record shows that, even in acting for their own purposes, individuals may be pursuing the unsuspected agenda of a group to which they may not even know they belong. If this sounds mysterious,

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well, it still is quite mysterious in all of its fundamentals. I, who have written a whole book on group process in human history,⁶ do not even know how, in physical terms, autonomous human groups cohere and remember, or even how they form except that, at the one extreme, some, such as nations, form out in the open, self-aware, while some at the other extreme hardly even suspect their own existence. Among these latter, largely un-self-aware, groups are those born of a trauma suffered in common, the way Europe was born in the mid-fourteenth century. In such cases, those persons traumatized together internalize an outer identity, however feeble, around that integrative trauma and somehow pass that internalized common identity down to their descendants. Initially, the outer identity seized upon by the plague-stricken of Europe in 1347-1352 was more Christian than European, for they saw the pestilence in its first flush as the Christian God’s punishment for their iniquity—unless alternatively (and equally Christianly) they blamed it on the Jews. But the group’s felt identity went from Christian to European as the pestilence spread throughout the continent among Christians, Jews, and pagans alike and, within the Christian community, among saints and sinners indifferently, with some of each kind surviving, so that manifestly it was neither God’s righteous doing nor the Jews’ dirty work, but a deadly secular fate that had befallen them all together from the outside.

The other tricky concept on which I have drawn in tracing Europe’s felt identity back to the traumatic Black Death is that of trauma itself over and beyond its narrow received meaning. The word trauma (from the Greek) originally denoted a purely physical wound, then by extension also a crippling mental blow. Psychiatry has lately tended to confine this second sense to experiences of violence or abuse perceived as life-threatening and anxiously recalled night and day or else, alternatively, pushed out of conscious memory with pathological consequences. Psychohistory has mean-

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while brought to light other, more insidious effects of trauma, such as its victims’ tendency to construe it initially as a punishment due, the way Europeans first construed the Black Death. But far and away the most momentous aftereffect of a trauma in the psychohistorical repertoire is for the traumatized individual or group to relive it unawares—often in superficial disguise, and in a wholly different walk of life—driving it anew to its disastrous outcome, which may even be magnified in the process for good, or bad, measure. Such so-called traumatic reliving, though far more the exception than the rule, has been the driving force behind much of history, and particularly of its most demonic episodes.

The Black Death was relived undisguised in the first instance in that it recurred locally across Europe over the centuries with much the same symptoms, albeit with generally declining death tolls and diminishing frequency. As a rule, its recurrence has been seen as the work of a nasty pathogen striking again and again, whereas the disease was perforce the interaction of a pathogen with a host now more, now less receptive or vulnerable. That pathogen has been wrongly identified more than once; it remains elusive to this day.⁷ What is known about it for sure is that initially it played no favorites among its victims: wherever the pestilence first struck, everyone urban or rural, rich or poor, young or old, fat or thin, was equally vulnerable. About half the exposed population survived the first strike of the pestilence, including an estimated one-third of those infected. Hence about half of those left alive after the first strike had escaped infection through natural immunity, while the other half had contracted the disease and pulled through, acquiring nonheritable immunity in the process. Had those natural and acquired immunities both still held when the pestilence first recurred in this or that locale some ten years after the traumatic pandemic, the only new victims would all have been under ten years of age–and, with heritable immunity now

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running at one-half of that junior gene pool, the overall death toll of the second strike would at most have come to one-half of the local population aged under ten. In fact the new overall death tolls ran ever so much higher than that, however markedly down they were from the first strike, whereas the age distribution of the new victims was only somewhat skewed toward childhood.⁸ Chroniclers’ comparable accounts of successive regional waves of the pestilence argue fairly conclusively against any radically new strain of the pathogen from one episode to the next. The indication is, then, that Europeans of over some ten years of age were losing, or suppressing, immunity between episodes even if data on survivorship do not suffice to enable even tentative inferences as to which kind of immunity (natural or acquired) was being lost or suppressed. In sum, the traumatic Black Death was not simply recurring independently of all human agency; rather, Europeans were recycling it.

In their new-found collective identity, Europeans could henceforth act in concert without even realizing it, let alone exchanging signals to cue each other in. Such “synchronicity,” as it has been called,⁹ was clamorously manifest in the convulsive social violence—in what the Great Chronicle of Saint-Denis aptly called “the plague of a rebellion”¹⁰—that spread as if by contagion in the wake of the Black Death from the Mediterranean coast up through France to Flanders, England, the Empire, and points east, ultimately engulfing the entire continent by the mid-1370s much like the first wave of the grim pandemic a generation before. Prior to 1347-1352 there had been sporadic local popular protests in Europe with no overlap of calendars or agendas from one to the next. The plague then spawned an accompaniment of plague-related mass violence that was both Christianized and leaderless: penitential processions, flagellants scourging themselves together in public, so-called chorisants dancing themselves sick in unison, ritualized burnings of

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Jews absurdly blamed for the plague, all with no class cleavages and no concrete worldly goals. These morbid religious jitters yielded in turn to popular rebellions with definite political, economic, and social aims right after the first wave of the pandemic. A mounting trend by the mid-1350s, these fierce and bloody uprisings reached a crescendo of popularity in the mid-1370s with a common thrust against social privilege, or towards human equality.¹¹ Just as this social contagion reflected the plague both in its deadly brutality and in the way it spread, so did its egalitarian thrust throw back to the plague theme of social equality before death–of “Death the Leveler,” as the phrase then went. To be sure, those bloody insurrections were all grounded in local conditions of life and labor, of property and power. They nonetheless replicated the Black Death trauma of mass mayhem within the rules of traumatic reliving: in disguise, with active perpetrators replacing passive victims, and with a vicarious overlay of purpose and meaning onto the original senseless hecatomb.

Europeans relived the traumatic Black Death figuratively too, in high culture and folk culture alike, above all through the wildly popular and singularly grisly Dance of the Dead. The plague often attacked the nervous system, inducing muscular spasms in extremis that looked like macabre dancing. This so-called Saint Vitus Dance was no doubt the source of the imaginative vision of the plague as a Dance of the Dead. Evidently the Dance of the Dead was first performed to the tune of churchyard sermons, then also set to poetry all across Europe, before being engraved and painted as well. In the end it had been traced on the walls of all the churches and charnel houses of Europe besides being circulated in numberless prints, chapbooks, and books of hours. Germany and France dispute the literary priority for it; the stronger claim is for a south German authorship (by Dominican monks) shortly after 1348, but the French text that fast

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followed inspired the most foreign imitations. In its basic early form, stock figures from the Pope, Emperor, or King all the way down the medieval social scale were brusquely danced off to damnation one after the other, each by a different mummified or skeletal emissary of death fiddling or drumming, trumpeting or piping, deaf to all protestations or supplications. In this simplistic scenario of wholesale serial perishing, the replay of the plague trauma was transparent, notwithstanding departures from the historic original such as are fairly routine in traumatic reliving. Already by reconfiguring the plague imaginatively in dance and music, verse and image, Europeans took imaginary control of the massive catastrophe that had in fact caught them short. They also scaled up its death toll to the limit in that the stereotypical victims representing all social categories thereby stood for not just anyone, but everyone—for European society as a whole. And each victim was danced off to hell no matter what, with no room for reprieve and no Last Judgment ahead: in this brusquely fantasized Christianization of the plague, sudden death was escalated to sudden, universal damnation. To the opposite effect of tempering the traumatic blow, as is equally characteristic of traumatic reliving, the Dance assimilated the Black Death on a rampage to the ineluctability of death no matter what—to death as our fated common lot, plague or no. Finally, built into the Dance of the Dead as into all traumatic replays was a failing effort to ward off the traumatic blow, in this case to hold real death at bay magically by its emblematic presence. The dance motif in particular had this magical purpose, dancing being superstitiously regarded as a specific against death. Indeed, that graveyard Dance of the Dead threw back to the so-called dance of love, a venerable fleshly frolic at pagan funerals that was meant to counteract or cancel the particular death at hand. Beneath its grim exterior, then, the Dance of the Dead sneaked a sexy pagan revelry into cruel death—and indeed, over time the mummified or skeletal emissaries or agents of

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death in the Dance of the Dead grew weirdly jocular in popular engravings, as if they shared in some naughty, roguish secret. They also grew less impudent toward the newcomers to death in that they contracted in time from sinister, cynical dance partners one-on-one into a single sermonizing dance master. With this, the Dance of the Dead evolved into an abstract Dance of Death sounded on a universal note, into a metaphoric image of dying now wholly detached from its implicit traumatic referent,¹² before it lapsed from the cultural agenda by the 1530s–until further notice.

A late spinoff of the Dance of the Dead that briefly eclipsed it in popularity was Death and the Maiden. This even more elemental and more macabre motif emerged in German art around 1500. At its most naïve, it consisted of a lush lass in the nude about to be, or even already being, grabbed by a grinning mummified or skeletal rapist devoid of the anatomical wherewithal to follow through. The crude and stunted eroticism at the heart of Death and the Maiden peaked in a 1517 engraving by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch that hangs in the art museum of Basel: there the bosomy Maiden is clad for a change, but she makes up for it by guiding the hideous, leering bone man’s hand up her skirts. Artists otherwise left more to the imagination in keeping with the celebrated Rhenish folk rhyme of the time, “Death and the Maiden in the Flower Garden,” which carried only a muffled hint of deathly sexual traffic and next to none of luscious female flesh. In that ravishing Rhenish flower garden, “Grim Death,” armed with a scythe, will not let the tender Maiden off the hook for love or money. Just join the dance, he tells her: the worms are waiting to devour your carcass in all its earthly, earthy pulchritude. Scorning her tears, he grabs her “in the middle, where she was weakest,” and hurls her to the ground, there to die writhing.¹³ That tender Maiden’s grim fate brought this sadistic, misogynic offshoot of the Dance of the Dead to a nearly full halt. Indeed, the entire artistic rep-

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ertoire spawned by the Black Death fast sank into near oblivion along with that hapless Maiden until–curiously—the recurrent pestilence itself was laid to rest at long last.

The recurrent pestilence was laid to rest in 1772, with over 100,000 new victims, right where it had first halted in 1352: in the area of Moscow. But Europeans thus terminated their physical reliving of the mass trauma pestilence only to resume their figurative reliving of it left in abeyance, or more exactly to relive that figurative reliving in its turn. Beginning punctually in 1773, the year after the plague stopped recurring, with a mock medieval folk ballad (Gottfried Bürger’s Lenore) featuring the Dance of the Dead three times over, followed in 1775 by a beguiling rewrite (signed Matthias Claudius) of the folk rhyme “Death and the Maiden,” the whole cultural legacy of the Black Death revived item for item, though with the items all singly and collectively overhauled. That is, it revived with variations galore on the original motifs in a new vein of free and loose fantasy play, devoid of all the old biblical resonances or social implications, as if emboldened now that it was at a safe remove from its bygone, real-life referent of pus boils, sweat, fever, stench, and decay. In particular, the eroticism latent in the spectral two-step of the old Dance of the Dead, after having been tabooed anew as soon as it had surfaced around 1500 in Death and the Maiden, now swept the field as over the whole long nineteenth century, from the Romantics to the Decadents, death was eroticized in all the arts. High culture and low reveled equally as the Dance of the Dead and its companion Black Death themes were now variously decomposed and recomposed, twisted round and about and topsy turvy, and infused with a new sexy morbidity. Death was no longer a terrifying spiritual event; on the contrary, the cultural legacy of the traumatic mass massacre of 1347-1352 was reconfigured as a pornography of death verging on spoof. In the visual arts specifically, death and dying ceased being stylized as

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in the Middle Ages, idealized as in the Renaissance, or dramatized as in the Baroque; instead, the imagery of human rot in the raw was pushed to a shocking extreme of crass matter-of-factness wherever the artistic heritage of the Black Death was not being re-edited in a vein of ironic levity, or black humor.¹⁴ Less tongue-in-cheek than this inventive reprise of the cultural fall-out from the traumatic European mass contagion was a spectacular update of the political and social revolts, or “plague of a rebellion,” that had followed in the wake of the physical contagion: Europe marked the five-hundredth anniversary of the Black Death with an epochal new “plague of a rebellion,” the epidemic of popular revolts and revolutions that duly broke out in Sicily in late 1847 and swept the European mainland beginning in early 1848.

Such was the symptomatic precipitate of Europe’s traumatic formative experience, the Black Death: periodic literal reissues of the contagion, social and cultural re-enactments of it, then re-editions of those re-enactments once the contagion itself was extinct. Those centuries-long running aftereffects of the massive Black Death trauma attest to its singular intensity. Of greater import for Europe today, however, is the indelible birthmark that Europe’s constitutive trauma left on the continental consciousness that it created. The pandemic spread its poison throughout Europe in all walks of life indifferently, threatening the very survival of the population that it thereby joined together psychologically. Accordingly, the lasting bond that it created among Europeans amounts to a crisis solidarity in the face of a deadly common danger—a crisis solidarity operant on the deepest existential level of Europe’s population as a whole. The workings of that traumatic solidarity are invisible to the naked eye, but they are sharp and clear when seen through the prism of group process. To consider a single, vivid instance of those workings, they were the moving force behind the so-called European fertility transition, or massive curtailment of fertil-

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ity across Europe that began in the mid-1870s. France alone in Europe had cut down on births before then, at the time of its great Revolution; this, though, was a separate, national development with its own dynamic, and the French fell in no less with the later, broader transition. This later transition has rightly been called European ever since its massive contours were first delineated, and it has increasingly been explained by historic demographers in terms of homeostasis, that is, of the tendency inherent in human, as indeed in all animal, populations to adjust their fertility to changing conditions of survival. It remains only to recognize that, as the adjustment that began in the mid-1870s was all-European and only European, its author was ipso facto Europe as a whole, meaning Europeans acting collectively.

During the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had reduced their death rates, child mortality foremost, to the point where, despite a steady, massive emigration overseas, their total numbers were headed for a sixfold increase within another three generations—a literally unendurable prospect. This demographic groundswell in the offing, or imminent European crisis of survival, fell in with the European crisis solidarity induced by the Black Death. What resulted was no new traumatic replay, but a salutary defensive measure instead. Europeans defended collectively against the looming demographic danger in a simple, direct, yet revolutionary way: they cut back on births by normalizing birth control within marriage in all walks of life alike and in every corner of the continent. They did so roughly in unison, with Russia again last as when the Black Death had come and again when it had gone. Most significantly, they did so by group reflex, with no couples restricting births for Europe’s sake as far as they were aware: that is how group process works. Previously, natural fertility in marriage had been a universal moral imperative in Page 61 Europe as far back as the historic records go. So it should come as no surprise in

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retrospect that, during the fertility transition, Europe’s novelists and dramatists all competed in exposing marriage with its shrinking issue as hypocritical, degenerative, and immoral–as, in a word, guilty.¹⁵ Nominally, this guilt attached to the reproductive act then first being widely performed for its own non-reproductive sake within marriage. At the same time, this new guilt over contraceptive marriage was a remote, dreamlike reflection of the old guilt felt by Europeans when they construed the Black Death as God’s punishment for their iniquity. As against that senseless old guilt, the new guilt made pseudo-sense in that Europe had itself generated the demographic threat that it met by marital birth control, whereas in 1348 Europeans only imagined that they had brought the Black Death upon themselves.

History dies hard, if ever. Europe’s present, faltering effort at political integration reflects the traumatic historic source of felt European identity. For one thing, the current, ill-starred initiative for political integration, like all its predecessors, came from Western Europe, where the plague hit first. For another, that initiative has followed the plague’s own trajectory from west to east. More, the inspiration for it was one of repentance for Europe’s deadly sins on the precedent of the Black Death—notably for the two world wars, which were European in origin and which heaped up cadavers cruelly and senselessly like the Black Death itself. The nationalisms impeding European integration are reminiscent of the cities and regions of Europe quarantining themselves in 1348 against an advancing plague that nonetheless bound them together psychologically. Europeans’ widespread instinctive mistrust of Turkey as a candidate for admission into federative Europe has a conspicuous referent in the trauma of 1347-1352 in that it was by way of what is today Turkey that the plague came to Europe. Project Europe is further reminiscent of plagued Europe in being egalitarian toward Europeans, like Death the Leveler, but anxiously defensive to-

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ward the outside world whether the menace from without is seen by Europe as military or commercial, whether as political intimidation or as cultural corruption, whether as terrorism or illegal immigration or even as pandemic disease. Overall, then, Europeans’ gut feeling of being European, for all its fine civility, is mired in the deathly trauma whence it issued. Nor, finally, is this European traumatic legacy of 1347-1352 distinctive in kind. In fact, in its protean afterlife it can be seen as the very model of the traumatic pathology to which human history as a whole is prey, and the more dangerously on balance the longer such pathology goes misunderstood, overlooked, or ignored.

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Endnotes:

¹Peter Burke, “Did Europe Exist Before 1700?”, History of European Ideas, Vol. 1 (1980), 23.

² Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York 1996), 118.

³ Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh 1957), dated the idea of Europe from the time of the Black Death without, however, drawing a causal connection.

⁴ Burke, op. cit., 23.

⁵ Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge 2004), 245-384.

⁶ Rudolph Binion, Past Impersonal: Group Process in Human History (DeKalb IL 2005).

⁷ Samuel K. Cohn, The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London 2002), and “The Black Death: End of a Paradigm”, American Historical Review, Vol. 107 (2002), 703-38, has conclusively refuted the previous identification of the nineteenth-century rat-and-flea-borne Asian plague Yersinia pestis with the Black Death.

⁸ For patterns of plague deaths: Cohn, op. cit., 188-219.

⁹ Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, Ongles bleus: Jacques et Ciompi: Les révolutions populaires en Europe aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris 1970), 143, 271.

¹⁰ Quoted ibid., 180. For earlier comparable instances of this usage see William H. TeBrake, A Plague of Insurrection: Popular Politics and Peasant Revolt in Flanders, 1323-1328 (Philadelphia 1993).

¹¹ The best source for patterns of labor revolts in the period of the Black Death is Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Cambridge MA 2006), 205-27.

¹² Hellmut Rosenfeld, Der mittelalterliche Totentanz: Entstehung, Entwicklung, Bedeutung (Cologne 1954), 83. Rosenfeld remains the best of the numerous sources for the Dance of the Dead overall.

¹³ The folk lyric, which was included in the first volume of Ludwig Achim von Arnem and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, is reprinted in L. Erk and F. M. Böhme, eds., Deutscher Liederhort (Hildesheim 1963), vol. 3, 850-52. Erk and Böhme date the song from about 1600, bt the text appears to be a good century older.

¹⁴ On the heady sex-death mix in the arts in Europe during the long nineteenth century, see my Love Beyond Death: The Anatomy of A Myth in the Arts (New York 1993) and “Europe’s Culture of Death” in Jerry S. Piven, ed., The Psychology of Death in Fantasy and History (Westport CT 2004).

¹⁵ Binion, Past Impersonal, 14-31 (“The Guilty Family”).