Not since the early years of the 19th century has Greece roused such strong feeling in the rest of Europe. At that time, the Greek War of Independence proved to be a rallying point for thousands of sympathizers who joined together to liberate Greece from the Ottomans and their empire. In our day, politicians across the continent are delivering thundering speeches about Greece and the great crisis of the Eurozone. But it is especially in the German political class that we find loud voices insisting that the Greeks accept further austerity measures, undertake economic reforms, and meet their financial obligations; and it is the Germans for whom the Greeks reserve their strongest condemnations.
Why do the diatribes seem so fierce and violent on both sides? What are they so angry about? Yes, it's a question of debts and loans and repayments; and yes, the Greeks want to be liberated from the shackles which they feel have been imposed upon them by powerful international institutions such as the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the IMF.
I myself strongly believe that the Greek government is right to reject the austerity agenda being forced down its throats by technocrats, neo-liberals, and money-lenders. But the hard edge to the tone adopted by political leaders, economists, and bankers from the two countries suggests that something else is going on, and that the argument is not only about money - even if money is an important part of it. The notes of anger, bitterness, and petulance indicate that we ought to look to a deeper explanation for the intense passions stirred by the current dispute.
The memory of the Second World War is one reason why relations between the Greek and German governments have become so strained: the memory of the War, and the way in which that memory has been used. One of the earliest official actions of Alexis Tsipras after he was elected Prime Minister was to lay roses on the memorial in Athens for 200 Greek communists who were executed by the Nazis in 1944. In March, Tsipras asked Germany's Angela Merkel for 279 billion euros as reparations for the Nazi occupation during the War.
Germany claimed that the matter was settled financially after the war, that it had given a sum of 115 million marks to Greece in 1960, and that the Greek government had no legal or political basis for its present demand. How seriously the Greek claim should be taken is anyone's guess. Tsipras knows he has a snowball's chance in hell (as they say in Athens) of securing reparations from Angela Merkel. The War is a less visceral matter for Greeks of his era than it was for his parents' and grandparents' generations, and, until a couple of years ago, when tabloid headlines made the subject inescapable, I rarely heard Greek friends or colleagues bring up the subject unprompted.
Nor have memories of the war prevented Greeks from treating German visitors with respect: last year, 2.5 million German tourists visited Greece. Whatever officials are asserting about reparations, the Northerners are still flocking to Mediterranean beaches and islands in large numbers, and Greeks are still treating them with the hospitality for which they have been renowned historically.
There is, perhaps, another context to the intense feelings that have characterized the relationship between Greece and Germany, and, in order to appreciate what that might be, we need to look into elements besides the sun and sea. The tourists who fly, sail, or drive to the country in search of a sun-drenched vacationland also throng museums, archaeological sites, and some of the most famous ruins in Europe. The Nazis themselves were not immune to the lure of Greek antiquity, and, after the invasion of 1941, were actively involved in excavating, photographing, and salvaging memorials of ancient Hellas. The Greek culture industry is a space where antiquity and modernity support each other, and it is worth reflecting on how Greek antiquity acquired its singular, glittering appeal.
The modern study of classical Greece is, in some important respects, a German invention, and can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries. It was in the 18th century that JJ Winckelmann wrote his studies on classical art and inaugurated the waves of Hellenomania that swept across Germany and the rest of Europe. Winckelmann marked an influential beginning, and he was followed by figures such as FA Wolf and JG Herder, who completely transformed the study of Greek antiquity and raised the "genius" of the Greeks to unprecedented heights. The writings of Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, and Heine would look utterly different without figures such as Winckelmann who made Greece central to European cultural history. So pervasive was the Hellenic influence on these writers that EM Butler entitled her book on the subject "The Tyranny of Greece over Germany" and indeed wrote, "The extent of the Greek influence is incalculable throughout Europe; its intensity is at its highest in Germany."
The Hellenism that we associate with Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the English Romantics comes out of this context. This passion for all things Greek explains why Lord Elgin sought to carve out and carry off the Parthenon sculptures to England. This Hellenism also infected the young Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who took up the cause of Greek independence while teaching and writing in Calcutta. Derozio is known to schoolchildren as the author of "To India-My Native Land", but he was no less a Philhellene than many of his European counterparts. The poem he composed to commemorate the victory of the modern Greeks over the Turks at Marathon begins with the quotation of a famous passage from Byron:
The mountains look on Marathon -
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free . . .
The Philhellenism of Byron, Derozio, and numerous others was sparked in no small measure by ideas of Greekness and nationhood developed by Germans like Winckelmann, Wolf, and Herder in the eighteenth century. Thanks to their writings, the view became widespread that the accomplishments of the ancient Greeks were the products of a special Greek character, a character that could be found in the Greek people of antiquity and, in a mediated form, even in the Greeks of the present day.
While the powerful hold that classical Greece had on educated Germans, and Europeans more widely, has certainly waned in the last hundred years, many of the most deeply-rooted ideas about Greece and its culture remain in currency. Only last week, Timothy Garton Ash put out a
column in which he made an impassioned call for Europe to "save Greece".
Europe had to save Greece, he said, because the country "was once the cradle of both Europe and democracy". To observers such as Garton Ash, the idea of Grexit would be catastrophic not only for economic, human, and geopolitical reasons but also for historic reasons. Garton Ash is an astute and influential political writer: when he talks of Greece in these terms, he knows that he is recalling an idea on which European intellectuals and politicians have been brought up for generations, and he is doubtless hoping that his readers will respond positively to his counsel on those grounds.
These notions of Greece as the bedrock of European culture, democracy, and civilization were nurtured, shaped, and imbibed by scores of Germans over decades. German and other European negotiators need no lessons from anyone on the place of Greece in the history of the continent. Should any official involved in the talks want a reminder, even the first name of the chief economics spokesperson of the Greek government (Euclid Tsakalotos) has an appropriately ancient pedigree!
It would, of course, be misguided to think that the officials involved in the current round of negotiations have Greek antiquity at the forefront of their minds. Money is money, as a professor of literature once said to me, and German ministers may feel they cannot "save" Greece, even if the consequence is the eventual departure of Greece from the European Union or the Eurozone or both. And yet, I remain sanguine that despite all the grandstanding, Greece will never leave the European project. Hellas has been so vital to Europe's sense of itself across centuries, not least because of the efforts made by numerous German thinkers, that Greece will not stay out in the cold for long.
(Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London and the author, most recently, of 'The Classics and Colonial India' (Oxford, 2013)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.