Towards a Transnational Ethics for Europe: Memory and Vulnerability as Gateways to Europe’s Future in Koen Peeters’s Grote Europese roman

Abstract

Lensen addresses the continued central importance of Holocaust memory for the construction of a common transnational European identity, taking the novel Grote Europese roman [Great European Novel] (2007) by Belgian author Koen Peeters as a case study. Lensen argues that the novel formulates an outspoken plea for the acknowledgement of the Holocaust as a fundamental component of a transnational European identity, and as a pre-requisite for developing an ethical and political attitude that allows for mutual understanding and a common future European community. Lensen further argues that while Grote Europese roman exemplifies a plain, almost propagandistic case for a joint European memory and identity, the novel, as a work of art, simultaneously rejects the idea of homogenous memory and identity by adopting a poetics that reflects a resistance to any kind of prescriptive master narrative.