Tell me about Europe

France meant something to him during his childhood, but Europe didn’t, recounts French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. In conversation with opera director Jeanne Pansard-Besson he talks about how he regarded his work in Germany shortly after the war and why he still feels ambivalent about European unity to this day.

Irena Vrkljan was born in Belgrade in 1930, her mother came from Vienna, her father read her poems by Morgenstern. “I actually lived in a European world,” says the writer. In 1941 her family fled to Zagreb. But it was not until after the war that she learnt about the war.

Jazz singer Karin Krog was just a little girl when Germany marched into her native Norway. “When a bomb struck nearby,” she recalls, “I simply slept right through it." She later recorded an album in Berlin. She talks about her love of jazz and Europe with Norwegian journalist and literary critic Erle Marie Sørheim.

Iceland’s Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was the first woman in the world to be elected head of state. Although she grew up in a cosmopolitan environment and went on to study in France, “We are on an island, bordered by the sea,” she says of her native country. In an interview with the writer Kristof Magnusson, she looks back on her life in Europe.

In the 1980s, Bartolomeo Sorge, an Italian Jesuit, became politically active in Palermo: “We wanted to change the world and we started with the people in the street.” His solution, then as now in Europe’s current crisis, is education. He explains why to philosopher and theologian Jörg Nies.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, “We thought we’d finally become part of the West,” says Slovakian philosopher Egon Gál. He tells author Tereza Reichelova, who studied philosophy and political science in Prague, why the reality was a whole different story and why he experienced the 1960s as a decade of reflection.

Professor Rexhep Qosja is an author, literary historian, literary critic, commentator, and, for a time, a politician. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Kosovo and an external member of the Academy of Sciences of Albania. As a literary historian, Qosja’s focus is the Albanian Renaissance, and as a political activist, the issue of Kosovo, the most significant component of the Albanian question. He is one of the most important intellectual voices of resistance to the Serb regime. Qosja was born in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia, grew up in socialist Yugoslavia, and today lives in independent Kosovo.