Anthem - Intellect

Signifying Europe
The hymn confirms the emblematic position of the ‘Great Composer’
Beethoven within a mythology of ‘Great Europeans’. But by excluding
Schiller’s lyrics from its performance, the hymn refuses the ritual,
established since the first modern national hymns, of using a single
voice to express a community of citizens. This paradox has sometimes
been felt to represent a failure, a sign of the ‘unfinished’ character of the
symbol. But at the same time it may be taken to suggest the openness of
Europe. In this sense, the hymn signifies Europe’s refusal to adopt a fixed
identity, and marks a deliberate break with nationalist discourses. 419
Buch sees two possibilities. Either Europe copies national symbols in defining
European identity through a gesture of excluding all others: ‘strangers, immigrants,
other states, other continents, the excluded of all sorts—all that “whole world” that
was united in the universal brotherhood Schiller and Beethoven sang of ’. Or else,
Europe could be faithful to the unfinished anthem in striving to remain a land of
hospitality and openness. 420 The whole discussion about this anthem thus links back
to central and unresolved dilemmas for renewing a transnational European identity.
There is a great political problem in how to integrate the experience of brutal wars and
of Nazi genocide in Europe’s historically anchored identity. Beethoven’s Ninth can be
heard to do precisely that, as did in a way the Europa myth. Whether Karajan’s anthem
manages to do the same is open to debate.
With Foucault or Adorno, one may perhaps want to step out of the interpretive
entanglement and refrain from offering any new meaning for this tune, but rather
respond to it with silence. Cook and Žižek walk another way and instead offer new
and critical interpretations as their method to go against ideological uses of the music.
This is also in line with Paul Ricoeur’s recurring hermeneutical argument that the
only way to react to problematic readings of a text is by proposing better ones, and
thus to contribute to the unstoppable conflict of interpretations. This is precisely what
I have strived to do here as well.
A brief look at how the anthem has been received indicates that some voices have
really found it difficult to accept a song that was venerated by Nazi Germany as well
as by apartheid Rhodesia under Ian Smith. In 2008 European Parliament, Jim Allister
(NI, UK) was one of the few who went against both the anthem and the flag:
Ode to Joy which we are going to purloin may be a very nice tune, but
so is Jingle Bells and like Jingle Bells it heralds a fantasy, the fantasy
that the EU is good for you. But unlike Jingle Bells, it will damage your
national sovereignty and the right to control your own destiny. More,
like code to destroy, than Ode to Joy. 421
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