The founder of the Pan-European movement recounts his life as a single campaign for European unity
A Life and a Cause Told as One Story
Crusade for Pan-Europe is an autobiography by Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, published in English in New York by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1943. Its subtitle, “autobiography of a man and a movement,” states plainly what kind of book it is and how it is framed: it does not present the author’s life as a private record, but as inseparable from the political cause to which he devoted it. Coudenhove-Kalergi — an Austrian count, philosopher and politician, and one of the earliest ideologists of European integration — is both the narrator and, in effect, the chronicler of the organization he led.
The Cause Behind the Title
The movement named in the title is the Pan-European Union, which Coudenhove-Kalergi founded in 1922 as the first organization dedicated to the peaceful unification of Europe. Its roster of supporters included figures such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Aristide Briand and Konrad Adenauer. The principles he set out for a united Europe in the 1920s were freedom, peace, economic prosperity and culture. A Europe integrated politically and economically was, on his argument, to serve as a counterweight to the United States, Russia and East Asia, and to help prevent another world war. He also urged France and Germany to settle their differences and concentrate on mutually beneficial cooperation, and he held that the Nordic countries might take the initiative in uniting Europe while acting as mediators between the continent’s quarrelling states.
A Campaign Carried On From Exile
The book appeared at a point when the movement had been driven underground in much of Europe. In Germany, after the Nazi seizure of power, the Pan-European Union was banned and Coudenhove-Kalergi’s books were placed on the lists of works to be burned; as war approached, European governments paid steadily less attention to his vision of a future Pan-Europe. After the Anschluss of 1938 he left for Czechoslovakia and Switzerland, and from there went to France; following the French capitulation in 1940 he emigrated through Portugal to the United States. There he resumed the work of promoting pan-European ideas, and from 1942 to 1945 he taught history at New York University, at first as an adjunct and from 1944 as a professor. In 1943, the year the autobiography was issued in New York, the Fifth Congress of the Pan-European Union convened in that same city — an indication of how closely the book’s appearance was bound up with the wartime relocation of the movement’s activity to America.
The word “crusade” in the title captures the temper of that undertaking: a cause pursued with missionary commitment through years in which its prospects in Europe were contracting rather than advancing. Read against the record of the movement it describes, the book stands as a first-person account of how the idea of European integration was conceived, organized and kept alive by its founder during the period before the Second World War and into the early years of his American exile.
Catalog records describe the New York edition as viii, 318 pages; the DNB entry identifies a second printing, and the HathiTrust record notes that the author’s name appears at the head of the title. Copyright is given as 1943.
Origins and Education
Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi, was born in Tokyo on 16 November 1894 and died in Schruns, Vorarlberg, on 27 July 1972. His father was Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat; his mother was Mitsuko Aoyama, daughter of an oil merchant, antiques dealer and major landowner in Tokyo. His Japanese childhood name was Eijiro Aoyama. On his father’s side the family is traced to the Brabant Coudenhove line, said to have been ennobled for participation in the First Crusade. In 1857 his grandfather married the daughter of pianist Maria Kalergis—described as a niece of Russian diplomacy chief K. V. Nesselrode—and a Greek (Cretan) millionaire. In the early twentieth century the sons petitioned to combine the parents’ surnames, and from 1903 they were called Coudenhove-Kalergi.
In 1896, when Richard was one and a half, his parents moved with both sons from Japan to Austria-Hungary and settled at the family estate in Pobezovice (formerly Ronsperg) in western Bohemia. His father left the diplomatic service and devoted himself to managing Czech estates and to scholarly-philosophical work. Richard was educated by private tutors and, thanks to his father, who knew 16 languages, learned Russian and Hungarian. He later attended the episcopal school in Brixen and the Theresian Academy in Vienna, then studied philosophy and history at the University of Vienna. In 1917 he defended his dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and in 1920 he received Czechoslovak citizenship.
Organizational and Postwar Activity
Coudenhove-Kalergi served as founding president of the Paneuropean Union for 49 years. In 1922 he joined the Vienna Masonic lodge “Humanitas”; he left it soon afterward but kept contacts with Masons in Central Europe, England and the United States. During his American years he also became close to Otto von Habsburg, who became an active member of the Paneuropean Union. In 1945 he returned to Europe. On 19 September 1946 Winston Churchill spoke at the University of Zurich in a speech in whose preparation Coudenhove took part; it declared the necessity of creating the “United States of Europe” on the basis of the pan-European idea.
In 1947, with the aim of uniting European parliamentarians, he founded the European Parliamentary Union (EPU). Initially the EPU rejected all proposals to merge with other organizations working for European unification; only in 1952 did it join the European Movement, and Coudenhove-Kalergi was elected honorary president of that movement. Some time later he presented a project for a European flag to the Council of Europe, but the project was rejected because the flag bore a Christian cross. In 1955 he proposed the “Ode to Joy,” set to Beethoven’s music, as a new European anthem.
Philosophy, Family, and Death
An aristocrat by origin and an elitist in his ideas, he identified with and collaborated with politicians Engelbert Dollfuss, Kurt Schuschnigg, Otto von Habsburg, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. His ideal political voter was a gentleman who respects and protects ladies, a person adhering to honesty, fair play, politeness and rational reasoning. He sought to replace the nationalist German ideal of racial community with the goal of an ethnically heterogeneous European nation based on a community of culture, a nation whose geniuses were “great Europeans” such as Charles Saint-Pierre, Immanuel Kant, Napoleon I, Giuseppe Mazzini, Victor Hugo and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The First World War spurred the growth of nationalism, and against that background Coudenhove-Kalergi’s ideas were notable. The concepts of “European idea,” “European consciousness” and “European identity” are traced to his post-war manifesto Pan-Europe (1923), which is said to have laid the basis of the European Union.
In 1915 Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi married Austrian actress Ida Klausner (Roland; 1881–1951), who was 13 years older and had a daughter from her first marriage. A year after her death he formalized relations with Swiss countess Alexandra von Thiele (1896–1968). His last wife, from 1969, was Mela(ni) Hoffmann (1909–1983), a Jewish woman and widow of Austrian composer Ralph Benatzky. His sister Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) is known for her biography of St. Therese of Lisieux; his niece Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi (b. 1932) became a well-known journalist.
He died on 27 July 1972 in Schruns, Vorarlberg. All scholarly biographies state that death came from natural causes, but his secretary Frau Desch wrote in her memoirs that Coudenhove-Kalergi killed himself. According to Dr. Anita Ziegerhofer-Prettenthaler, the count made every effort to conceal the suicide because he did not want to “disappoint others in the great myth he served.” He is buried near Gstaad, in Gruben, a village in the Bernese Oberland where he first settled with his family in 1931.
Recognition and Later Writings
On 18 May 1950 Coudenhove-Kalergi was awarded the first Charlemagne Prize for activity in uniting Europe that became the work of his life. In 1965 he received the Danish Sonning Prize, and in 1966 he became a laureate of the European Prize of the Sudeten German Homeland Association named after Charlemagne. In 2002 the European Union established the Coudenhove-Kalergi commemorative medal, awarded in Münster to individuals and organizations for strengthening European unity. A park in Vienna is named after Coudenhove, and he is depicted on an Austrian postage stamp from 1994.
His writings include Pan-Europa (1923), Praktischer Idealismus (1925), Kampf um Paneuropa (three volumes, 1925–1928), Totaler Mensch — Totaler Staat (1937), Die Europäische Nation (1953), Ein Leben für Europa (1966), Weltmacht Europa (1971), and Ausgewählte Schriften zu Europa (2006).
