A poem about the continent

My Song
for Europe

by Georges Forrestier

The old Europe cannot die yet, beneath her charred scars strong pulses her blood, drives through channels, arteries and veins, shoots through limbs and the heart's own vessels, washes over rubble and ash and ruins, all the way to the Nogat, the Vistula and the Oder, pulses deep in the coastal fringe of the Channel and the Atlantic.
Rome is her heart, Paris another, London, Berlin, The Hague and Madrid. The old Europe has many hearts, has many crowns that never darken.
Say Moscow and feel: you are alone. Name New York and you are a stranger. Shanghai, Benares are adventures, Sydney and Rio: a greeting from afar.
Wherever your dream may sweep you, you always return home to Athens to Vienna or Oslo.
Say only Europe and listen to your heart. Between fire and ice April air glows. The sky is closer and sweeter the earth. The rooms are narrow and steeped in feeling.
Close together you feel the graves, you feel the fathers with every step.
Listen to your heart: Europe is not dying. She cannot die as long as you love her.

About the poet

The poet who invented himself

Georges Forrestier was a poet in two senses. He wrote verses. And he composed his own life.

Behind the name stood the German philologist and publishing editor Karl Emerich Krämer (1918–1987). The poems appeared in 1952, presented as the posthumous work of a young Alsatian foreign legionary lost in the Indochina War — a figure Krämer had entirely invented: homeless between two nations, romantic, tragic, vanished. The critics were enraptured. Gottfried Benn praised the verses as "wonderfully delicate, muted, melancholy." Stefan Andres declared: "We Germans had not yet had our Rimbaud. With Forestier, we have him." The book went through eight editions.

What carried the success was precisely the fiction. The verses of a tragic adventurer who had vanished in the jungle read differently than those of a West German publishing editor. In 1955 the hoax became public — and with the success of the invented biography, the success of the book vanished almost overnight. What had been celebrated was suddenly called a fraud. Krämer's own past as a committed National Socialist, which he had overwritten with the invention of Forrestier, also came to light.

The question remains whether an author's biography changes what we read in their verses — or whether a poem can stand on its own, once it is set into the world. "My Song for Europe" is a hymn to this continent. One that was once celebrated and then discarded because the story around it changed. The text itself has not changed. Perhaps we should simply hold on to it.

About this page

Why this page

I created this page because this poem has meant a great deal to me since I was young. It made clear to me how much we Europeans have in common — and how diverse we are at the same time. It helped make me a convinced European.

I have no commercial interests with this page. I want to use Georges Forrestier's words to express my love for our continent — and hope that there are others out there who feel the same way.

Contributors

Voices that have improved this page

This page is curated. Incoming notes are read and, where they improve the framing, the sound, or the precision of a version, taken into the respective language edition — with the contributor's name credited, if so wished.