Anthem - Intellect

Signifying Europe
The mode then becomes one of a carnivalesque parade, a mocking
spectacle—critics have even compared the sounds of the bassoons
and bass drum that accompany the beginning of the marcia turca to
flatulence. After this point, such critics feel, everything goes wrong,
the simple solemn dignity of the first part of the movement is never
recovered.
But what if these critics are only partly correct—what if things do
not go wrong only with the entrance of the marcia turca? What if
they go wrong from the very beginning? Perhaps one should accept
that there is something of an insipid fake in the very ‘Ode to Joy’, so
that the chaos that enters after Bar 331 is a kind of the ‘return of the
repressed’, a symptom of what was errant from the beginning.
If this is the case, we should thus shift the entire perspective and
perceive the marcia as a return to normality that cuts short the
display of preposterous portentousness of what precedes it—it is the
moment the music brings us back to earth, as if saying: ‘You want to
celebrate the brotherhood of men? Here they are, the real humanity’.
And does the same not hold for Europe today? The second stanza
of Friedrich Schiller’s poem that is set to the music in ‘Ode to Joy’,
coming on the heels of a chorus that invites the world’s ‘millions’
to ‘be embraced’, ominously ends: ‘But he who cannot rejoice, let
him steal weeping away.’ With this in mind, one recent paradox
of the marcia turca is difficult to miss: as Europe makes the final
adjustments to its continental solidarity in Lisbon, the Turks, despite
their hopes, are outside the embrace.
So, when in the forthcoming days we hear again and again the
‘Ode to Joy’, it would be appropriate to remember what comes after
this triumphant melody. Before succumbing to the warm sentiment
of how we are all one big family, I think my fellow Europeans should
spare a thought for all those who cannot rejoice with us, all those
who are forced to ‘steal weeping away’. It is, perhaps, the only way
we’ll put an end to the rioting and car burnings and other forms of
the Turkish march we now see in our very own cities. 393
Žižek thus links Beethoven’s composition to an argument about contemporary
obstacles for unifying Europe, particularly on its eastern border:
The main sign of today’s crisis of the European Union is precisely
Turkey: According to most of the polls, the main reason of those who
voted ‘no’ at the last referendums in France and Netherlands was
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