Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be 'good Europeans', avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-century. Yetas R. G. Collingwood observed in his last great inquiry into the nature of civilisation, Nietzsche was himself a victim of the disease he diagnosed. In The Good European Iain Bamforth reports on fifteen years of 'experimental living' during which his attachment to the old continent brought him from Berlin, in the week in which he saw the fall of the Wall in 1989, to Strasburg, heart of aboriginal Europe, a region whose divided loyalties have affected the nature of Europe itself. With his ear attuned to the complexities of culture and politics, Bamforth attempts to discover Europe through extra-diplomatic channels. He offers essays on writers and thinkers who have done much to define the small archipelago on the edge of Asia, including classics such as Kleist, Kafka, Roth and Benjamin, W. G. Sebald and Mavis Gallant. He provides a portrait of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a send-off for Bernard Pivot's classic literary chat-show Bouillon de Culture, a scrutiny of philosophising media pundit Peter Sloterdijk, landscapes from Provence and Bavaria, reports from Prague and Geneva, Franco-German shibboleths, a sarcastic letter from 'Kakania', and an anatomy of the Alsatian humorist Tomi Ungerer. Europe often reeks of the terminally nostalgic and the curatorial. Here, a sceptical Scots intelligence reaches out to Musil, Heine, Gogol, Sterne, Montaigne, Rabelais and beyond to the gallant, helpless, hero-smitten Don, in the hope that they can help him find the way towards a more generous Europe.
IAIN BAMFORTH has been living in Strasburg with his wife and two children since 1995. In addition to his previous books of poetry with Carcanet, Sons and Pioneers and Open Workings, Verso publish his literary history of medicine The Body in the Library, to be joined in 2005 by a book of essays on medicine and modernity. In his career, he has been general practitioner, outback doctor, lecturer, translator and literary journalist.
"Bamforth's language works hard with the eye and the ear to the degree that it mirrors patterns of synapse development, in which particular and even disparate stimuli trigger fresh and complex observations. As a result, such work is rich in perceptual acquaintance, making it not only intelligent but also extremely sensual. To read him makes the patterns of our minds richer too - as when we read Gerard Manley Hopkins or Wallace Stevens. The fact that these poems are readily accessible and inevitable is a small miracle of composition." The Guardian on A Place in the World "
