People Bridges
European heritage biographies
Possessiveness is a vice: true great minds are rarely nationalist and never narrow-minded.
The underlying idea of heritage, like that of love or virtues, is that it can be shared because it is virtually inexhaustible. If a certain heritage is claimed by two or more cultures, nations, communities, - that may represent a problem to politics but not to culture, because concept of heritage purports the spread and sharing.
​
The abundance of heritage, the inspiration and noble pride it can generate, the grandeur of its figures, denies or at least relativizes insistence upon national or cultural classification. Culture by its nature rejects possessiveness the very same way it repels ultimate commodification. Heritage and identity should not be regarded as commercial assets.
​
Our future will finally depend upon our ability of sharing. Are we able to see great personalities of European significance, as figures that connect us or as the causes of widening our disputes? European project must stem from the cultural unity as otherwise it can only count with the disputable or unstable economic and political agreements.
Ideal, united Europe is a network of bridges and shared values. The biographies of its great personalities do not deny their national affiliations nor their provenience but disclose their ease of existence and activity in more than one culture.
What follows is a short list as a starting proposal. The biographies in this gallery of common European inheritance would be presented without making their nationality or different claims an issue, but would choose affirmative, additive approach, assigning to them the aura of shared European heritage.
The dynamic value of their multiple identities is now vaguely suggested (in parentheses) just to make the case of the shared identities clearer but would later be omitted.
​
1. Kafka, Franz (Jewish, Czech, German….; writer)
2. Andrić, Ivo (Serb, Croat…; a Nobel prize writer)
3. Beckett, Samuel (Anglo-Irish, French…; writer)
4. Clovio, Giulio (Renaissance miniaturist; Croat, Italian….; painter)
5. El Greco (Greek, Italian, Spanish….; painter)
6. Van Dyck, Sir Anthony (Dutch, English…; painter)
7. Corbusier (Swiss, French…; architect; a crown of functionalism or a shared personality;)
8. Boscovich, Ruggiero Giuseppe (Croat, Italian…; astronomer, mathematician, philosopher)
9. Comenius (philosopher, reformer; Moravian…, but lived all over Europe: Germany, Poland, England, Sweden, Hungary, Transylvania, Holland, “I never had a homeland”)
10. Erasmus, Desiderius (Dutch….; scholar, philosopher, theologian, reformer, polymath; worked and travelled in France, England; a bridge between Protestants and Catholic; a bridge to liberal tradition of European culture
11. Duerrenmatt, Friedrich (Swiss, German…; playwright, novelist essayist)
12. Mahler, Gustav (Austrian, Jewish, German…./by the force of expressing the true German cultural traditions/; composer and conductor)
13. Laurana, Luciano (Croat, Italian…; Renaissance architect, sculptor)
14. Brancusi, Constantin (Romanian, French…; sculptor, a bridge to abstract sculpture)
15. Spinoza, Benedict de (Dutch, Jewish…; philosopher)
16. Marx, Karl (Jewish, German…; philosopher)
17. Liszt, Franz (Hungarian, Austrian….; composer)
18. Lind, Jenny (Sweden, Germany, England…; singer)
19. Lely, Sir Peter (Dutch, English…; painter)
20. Offenbach, Jacques (Jewish, German, French…; composer)
21. Curie, Marie (Polish, French…; physicist)
22. Holbach, Paul Henri Dietrich (German, French…; philosopher, encyclopaedist)
23. Paracelsus (German, Swiss….; physician, alchemist, mystic; travelled and worked literally all over Europe)
24. Handel, George Frederick (German, English….; composer)
25. Rousseau, Jean Jacques (Swiss, French…; philosopher, writer)
26. Chopin, Frederic (Polish, French…; composer and pianist)
27. Jean Jacques Rousseau (Swiss, French…; philosopher)
28. Samuel Beckett (Irish, French…; writer and poet)
So, this “exhibition”, an imaginary museum of important European personalities would contain biographies that occasionally cause disputes or are judged by different sides as arrogations. Therefore, the final site would not contain any mention of national claims. They are now mentioned only to suggest that claims are indeed there but also that great personalities are best understood as shared heritage. The site would simply offer an explanatory article and selected complementary material upon any of such personalities asserting their European-ness and illustrating the fact of them being representative of shared identities.
​
The closest we can get to life and justice is to leave the right to any nation, culture, community or individual to identify with great personalities of the past or other features of its heritage. Scientific research is always there for those eager to fathom ever deeper into the details of life and deeds of these personalities, - often too complex to be judged by the daily politics or constant need of commercial media for sensations and disputes.
​
This site, like any responsible, scientifically based public memory action would convey reliable, balanced testimony of great personalities whose identity resists the single definition. They have been born in a world different from ours, having their destiny decisively influenced by the character of their grand endeavour taking place in specific economic, political and cultural context and conditioned by their personal circumstances. Those great European personalities in many cases cannot fit the modern or contemporary classification of identities. Understood in their proper context they yield the best, sometimes immeasurable, contribution to what we now perceive as a common, shared European heritage.
The project, once started, could use the momentum to offer legitimacy to “ordinary” people experiencing shared identity or those simply valuating such condition as richness and opportunity. This site could grow into a unique platform for all those who feel no fear in spreading their sense of affiliation further. Closing oneself tightly into one’s own national identity is not necessarily a strength.