Driving up the new motorway from Schweinefurt to Erfurt, across the Thuringian forest into the former German Democratic Republic, I suddenly understood the concept of ‘Reich’: a large, solid expanse of land and peoples that belong together through shared language, history and tradition. Traversed as it were by the deep currents of a collective sub-conscious – powerful if Christianized, outright dangerous if not. Stretching beyond Germany's pre-1919 borders, mutilated by the Treaty of Versailles, its territorial integrity restored under the Nazis and then repaganized, this Reich became so scary to both Russia and France that after the war they sought to break it up irrevocably.
I ask two questions: first, is the German ‘Volk- und Bodenmystik’ is so very different from that of ‘Holy Russia’? Second, what of Europe? Is it too something given, deep-rooted, like Germany or Russia, or just the artificial construct of economic pragmatism?