The 1934 Paneuropa-Verlag book that gave the European cause its rallying title
A German-Language Book from the Paneuropa Press
Europa erwacht! — “Europe Awakens!” — is a German-language book by Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, issued in 1934 by the Paneuropa-Verlag in Zürich. The author’s name is set at the head of the title page in the abbreviated form R. N. Coudenhove-Kalergi. Library holdings record the volume at 295 pages; a later printing, described as the third edition and covering the eleventh to thirteenth thousand copies, runs to 266 pages of text plus supplementary material, including illustrations and maps, and names Paris, Zürich and Vienna in its imprint. The first printing carried a statement that it covered the first to fifth thousand copies.
The Imprint of a Movement
The book appeared under the publishing house of the Pan-European movement itself. Coudenhove-Kalergi was the founding president of the Paneuropean Union, an office he held for forty-nine years, and the union’s first congress was convened in Vienna in 1926; his manifesto Pan-Europa had set out the case for European union more than a decade before this volume. The title’s image of a continent rousing itself belongs to the rhetoric of that campaign, and the exclamation mark gives it the character of an appeal rather than a description.
A Cause Already in the Public Eye
By the time the book was issued, the Pan-European idea had already reached official politics. Aristide Briand, elected honorary president of the movement in 1927, spoke in favour of European union at the League of Nations in September 1929 and followed this with a memorandum on the organisation of a European federal union in 1930. The movement’s congresses had attracted public figures of the first rank, among them Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud. The cause also had determined enemies: Adolf Hitler attacked Pan-Europeanism and its founder by name in his unpublished Second Book of 1928, deriding the movement as pacifist and unable to defend the continent. Europa erwacht! thus belongs to a body of writing produced in the years when the European idea was passing from private advocacy into diplomatic proposals — and, simultaneously, into open conflict with the nationalism then gaining power in Germany.
Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi, was born on 16 November 1894 and died on 27 July 1972. His parents were Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Mitsuko Aoyama, the daughter of an oil merchant, antiques-dealer and major landowner in Tokyo. His childhood name in Japan was Eijiro Aoyama (青山 栄次郎). Being a native Austrian-Hungarian citizen, he became a Czechoslovak citizen in 1919 and then took French citizenship from 1939 until his death.
He studied at the Augustiner-Gymnasium in Brixen before attending the Theresianische Akademie in Vienna from 1908 until 1913. In 1917 he obtained his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna with a thesis on Die Objectivität als Grundprinzip der Moral (Objectivity as the Fundamental Principle of Morals). During his student years, in April 1915, he married the Jewish Viennese actress Ida Roland; the marriage to a divorcée thirteen years his senior and a commoner caused a temporary split with his family. His mother Mitsuko did not accept Ida, considering her a “beggar living on the riverbank,” and as head of the family banned him temporarily, but relented when Coudenhove-Kalergi became renowned for his pan-European concept.
Publishing Before and Around the Volume
The 1923 Pan-Europa contained a membership form inviting the reader to become a member of the Pan-Europa movement. In April 1924, Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the journal Paneuropa (1924–1938), of which he was editor and principal author; the next year he started publishing Kampf um Paneuropa (The fight for Paneuropa, 1925–1928, three volumes).
In 1932, Coudenhove-Kalergi composed, and had his publishing house reissue, a preface for a new edition of his father Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi’s condemnation of antisemitism in his later life. In 1933, he responded to the ascendance of Nazism by collaborating with Heinrich Mann, Arthur Holitscher, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Max Brod in writing and publishing the pamphlet Gegen die Phrase vom jüdischen Schädling (“Against the Phrase ‘Jewish Parasite’”).
CiNii records the volume at 24 cm.
Later Publications and Honours
The volume was followed in the author’s bibliography by Judenhaß von heute: Graf H. Coudenhofe-Kalergi. Das Wesen des Antisemitismus and Paneuropa kämpft für Friede, Arbeit, Brot! in 1935, Europa ohne Elend: Ausgewählte Reden and Zusammenschluss oder Zusammenbruch! in 1936, and Judenhaß! and Totaler Staat – Totaler Mensch in 1937; the latter appeared from Paneuropa Verlag and was published in English as The Totalitarian State Against Man in 1938 with an introduction by Wickham Steed, translated by Sir Andrew Mc Fadyean.
In 1950 Coudenhove-Kalergi received the first annual Karlspreis (Charlemagne Award), given by the German city of Aachen to people who contributed to the European idea and European peace. The 1972–1973 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. He proposed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as the music for the European Anthem; he had proposed it in 1929 and later proposed it in 1955 as Anthem for the European Union. In 1930 he proposed a Europe Day in May, and in 1932 he proposed to celebrate every 17 May, the anniversary of Aristide Briand’s “Memorandum” being published in 1930. He also proposed a European postage stamp and many artifacts for the movement (e.g. badges and pennants).
