For hundreds of years, the capstone of a “proper” young man’s education was the Grand Tour. A long sojourn through Europe, thousands of wealthy and aristocratic (read: Oxbridge) young men would travel the continent, seeking firsthand exposure to the arts, classical civilization, and foreign cultures far away from dreary old England.
The route was fairly standard, a tour of the centers of European art, culture, and power of the day. First, they’d set off from Dover towards France, spending time in Paris learning French manners and customs. Then, they’d traverse the Alps to Italy, admiring the great works of Renaissance art in Florence, classical ruins in Rome, and the highlight of ‘Italianate decadence’, Venice. Turning northwards, a visit to the great cultural capitals of the Teutonic world was in order: Vienna, Dresden, and Berlin. To round it all off, they’d sail from one of the Low Countries’ ports, typically Amsterdam, to finally return to Britain.
Amidst the continent-wide upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the advent of steam power and mass travel, the Grand Tour disappeared from the popular conception. Yet more than two centuries after the decline of the Grand Tour, I embarked on my own version of it. As someone who grew up in Asia and the Americas, Europe was always a bit of a terra incognita for me. And knowing I’d likely spend much of my career outside of Europe, I knew my time to (relatively cheaply) explore the continent was limited. As a final year student at Oxford, acutely aware my time in this region was coming to an end, I decided to cap off my education in Europe, broadly speaking, with a Grand Tour.
My Grand Tour has largely followed the antique original, in both spirit and execution. The route — Nice, Milan, Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris — is much the same, with Paris moved from the beginning to the end in order to liaise with friends, and the more modern destinations of Nice and Milan added in for good measure. Alongside twenty-nine art galleries and countless historical sites visited, new diversions — from Amsterdam’s legal pleasures to Berlin’s insane New Year’s Eve festivities (would not recommend) — have joined the gallery-going and sight-seeing that defined the original Grand Tour. And like young men in centuries past, I’ve returned to Britain with a suitcase full of artifacts from the continent: art prints, perfume, wine, music, and even a historical item or two.
But the most obvious difference is that instead of travelling by horse and boat, my trip has been light years faster, due to the train and the airplane. Instead of the steady trek of thirty miles or so per day in Casanova’s time, I went from Berlin to Amsterdam in six hours flat. Contrary to those ads that suggest trains are a traditional and elegant alternative to the flurry of speed and technology that is air travel, travel by train is its own sort of shock, especially after the exhaustion of thirty-one days of nonstop travelling.
Boarding a train in one city, and waking up after a (not nearly long enough) nap in another, the first thing that hits you is language; trying to remember what little French you know after eleven days of struggling to communicate in German and Dutch is a recipe for disaster. Even between areas that nominally speak the same language, it’s the little things that you notice — like how “Grüß Gott” is used in Austria, while Berliners use “Guten Tag”. And beyond language, the rapid shift in topography and architecture is its own surprise; substituting Paris’ Haussmannian grandeur for Amsterdam’s quaint canals in just under three and a half hours is an exercise in rapid acclimatization.
For me, the starkest contrast was when I took the night train from Venice to Vienna. Leaving behind the electric-blue lagoons and Gothic architecture of Venice on Christmas evening, I awoke on St. Stephen’s Day to the endless grey skies of Vienna, its imposing Baroque edifices rudely interrupted with heavy doses of ’70s Postmodernism. Having had limited prior contact with the Teutonic world, I was absolutely taken aback. I had awoken in an entirely different and foreign world, one where my beginner’s Italian, spoken with relish over the last two weeks, would help me none in a sea of High German.
But the shock I experienced was beyond just language, climate, and architecture. Amidst numerous buildings displaying the once-prized k.u.k. (imperial and royal) mark of Habsburg favor in Vienna’s Innere Stadt (city center), the incongruous and often random placing of Modernist buildings hinted at something much darker than simply bad architectural taste. I began to realize that I had entered a different world, one fundamentally overshadowed by the legacy of the world wars, from the disappearance of Zweig and Musil’s Austro-Hungarian ‘Kakania’ in the chaos of World War I to the wholesale murder of Austrian Jewry in the Shoah and the destruction of 20% of Vienna by Allied bombing in World War II — a point driven home by numerous references to the “crimes of National Socialism” found throughout the city.
But Vienna was just the start. Journeying through the Teutonic world, these elements only grew in strength as I moved ever closer to the dark heart of National Socialism — Berlin. If I thought Vienna’s abrupt Brutalist interruptions and Dresden’s ‘Commie blocks’ were grim, nothing could have prepared me for Berlin itself, a city as far from antique, Latinate Italy as one can get. The vast expanses of Modernist architecture tell a story of a city completely levelled in the course of war. Everywhere, memorials to the victims of terror and oppression: an immense Denkmal (memorial) to the murdered Jews of Europe just a block away from the Brandenburg Gate, a Denkmal to persecuted homosexuals, a Denkmal to the murdered Sinti and Roma.
Germany’s culture of remembrance — its Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”) — is clearly a very necessary challenge. Walking through the Unter den Linden, I gazed upon a street sign pointing the way to Wannsee with a mixture of shock and horror. Wannsee — where Nazi Germany’s top officials planned the Final Solution in 1942 — an all-too-real place, right here in Berlin. The darkest legacies of history, something out of history books, come to life. To learn to live with what former German President Richard von Weizsäcker termed Germany’s “difficult inheritance”, an inheritance very much inscribed upon this land and people, is not just an obligation, but a necessity.
Yet contemporary Germany goes beyond merely repenting for past actions. German society rightly criticizes the 1933–45 period, but it also minimizes the pre-1914 past. Precious little in Berlin refers to what came before the destruction of two world wars, to past ages where Germany was a state well within European norms. While a monument to Napoleon’s victories lies at the center of the Place de l’Etoile in Paris, Bismarck’s shrapnel-flecked monument in his own capital is almost hidden away in a corner of Tiergarten’s Großer Stern. More than a thousand years of German history, of Emperor Barbarossa, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck, are left to the margins of political and social consciousness; can one imagine Britain without Richard the Lionheart, Henry VIII, and Wellington, or France without Charlemagne, Louis XIV, and Napoleon?
As someone largely brought up between Singapore and the United States, both countries proud of their historic legacies despite their many flaws, I found this disconnect between past and present very disturbing — a place without a heritage, a land without a history. But this is not a mere question of societal aesthetics. The net effect of the combination of deserved regretful self-examination and a ‘Year Zero’ approach to the pre-1914 past is that contemporary German political culture is built around a project of constructing a new society, shorn of attachment to the past, based on perpetual atonement and regret. But a country cannot base itself indefinitely and primarily on shame and self-flagellation. To do so, especially in light of the almost four generations since the end of World War II, is a recipe for disaster. In conversation with a young lady from Thuringia while in the queue for Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie, one thing she said sticks with me: “Why do we keep getting blamed for World War II? I had nothing to do with it!” Though I have no doubt that she, like the vast majority of my generation, has no love for the extreme right and the AfD, it is exactly these sentiments that the AfD both espouses and preys on to drive its extremist agenda — especially in its strongholds like her home state, Thuringia, where it is today the second-largest party. In short, a project meant to prevent the rise of neo-Nazis has helped create just that.
Beyond Germany’s borders, it seems too that Germans are beholden to atone for the past, regardless of the rapidly transforming international order of the present. Chancellor Olaf Scholtz dragged his feet for nearly a year on sending substantial military aid to Ukraine, no doubt wary, in line with large segments of the German public, of the last time German arms went to war on the steppes of Eastern Europe. Similarly, German leaders were noticeably subdued in their response to Israel’s actions in Gaza, which have thus far resulted in by far the highest rate of civilian casualties in any 21st-century conflict, according to an investigation by the Washington Post. A substantial part of this might be due to Chancellors Merkel and Scholtz’s policy that “Israel’s security is German raison d’état” — a truly extraordinary statement suggesting that Germany’s responsibilities to Israeli security, in light of the legacy of the Shoah, override all other legal or moral considerations. But Germany is not a state that can afford to live purely in the past. With the world’s fourth largest economy and an integral position in both the Atlantic alliance as well as the EU, Germany has responsibilities to European and global security — responsibilities that demand its foreign policy move beyond meditating on the past and into the realities of the present.
Yet in many ways, the opposite — a lack of confrontation with the past — is on the march in the Latin countries, particularly Italy. Italians are rightly proud of much — from the Roman Empire to Raphael, from Garibaldi to Gucci. Walking the orange-yellow streets of Rome’s centro storico (historic center), one is acutely aware of the palimpsest one treads on with every step: a short twenty-minute walk between the rioni (neighborhoods) of Parione and Campitelli will take you on an odyssey through Italian history, from the ruins of the ancient Forum to the Baroque splendor of Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi and the Eternal City’s monument to the Risorgimento, the Vittoriano. Yet there is a curious hole in Italian historical memory: the twenty-three years between the 1922 March on Rome and the stringing up of its leader on the roof of an Esso station in 1945. The INA building on Rome’s Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, built in a Fascist architectural style, still maintains on its facade a she-wolf flanked by two fasces; a mausoleum housing Mussolini’s body stands in his hometown of Predappio, a shrine to which neo-Fascists regularly pay homage.
To be sure, part of why many Italians tend to gloss over the Fascist past may be because it is simply easier to do so than with Germany’s Nazi legacy. Fascist Italy did not deliberately start a world war or embark upon a campaign of mass genocide; in many ways, it was ‘as bad’ as other totalitarian states, not uniquely problematic as the Nazi regime was. Both in Italy and internationally, Fascism is often written off as Nazism’s diminutive little brother, despite it predating the Nazi dictatorship by a decade, and serving as a principal source of inspiration for Hitler, especially in his earlier years. Indeed, in legendary director Federico Fellini’s depiction of his childhood days during Mussolini’s Italy in his 1974 film Amarcord, Fascists are shown as farcical, immature buffoons, much like the average small-town Italian in Fellini’s view. Yet perhaps this refusal to really come to terms with Fascism contributes to why Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party, a political descendant of neo-Fascist parties, remain popular today; an IPSOS poll in 2021 found that 66% of Italians between ages 18–25 agreed that Mussolini’s regime was “a dictatorship to condemn in part but which also brought benefits”.
To travel Europe today is to travel to a continent in crisis. Beset externally with a malevolent Russia and a full-scale conventional war in Ukraine, an increasingly bloody conflict breeding instability in the Middle East, and an unreliable but nonetheless absolutely indispensable partner in America, it needs all the unity it can muster in an increasingly perilous age. But no such unity is forthcoming in a Europe internally wracked by economic malaise, the rise of new powers challenging the traditional dominance of the ‘Big Four’ in European affairs, and perhaps most importantly, fundamental differences as to what Europe ought to be.
In many senses, the battle over the future of Europe is one over Europe’s past. A young man travelling the same itinerary in 1913 would have found, in a way, a much more homogenous continent — cities unscarred by mass bombing, peoples united through the shared belief, whether rightly or wrongly, in nationalism and a glorious heritage worth defending. Today, the debate between EU governments on Europe’s role in the world — whether to embrace a globally engaged traditional great-power stance as advocated by President Macron (much in line with French and pre-1914 European tradition), or to embrace a pacifist, humanist economic and legalistic stance, as Germany and much of Europe have done since 1945 — is one largely rooted in competing interpretations of the past: of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, and the devastating, destabilizing, and radicalizing effects of total war on societies and individuals. Similarly, on a domestic level, the debate over what Europe ought to be — a welcoming social democracy, or a xenophobic crypto-totalitarian state — depends on whether countries and societies will be able to find a middle ground between excessive glorification of the past and counterproductive self-flagellation.
The purpose of the original Grand Tour was not just to view art and architecture, but to observe and explore the societies of Europe, especially the relationship between the antique past and the present, and report one’s findings to those back home — while having some fun along the way. In this sense, a Grand Tour is still relevant, if not more so, in the 21st century. Europe, in many ways, is more divided than any point in recent memory — a split playing out in its very heart. An exploration of the European core of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries — the Grand Tour — can still teach us much, as it is largely those same powers whose political, economic, military, and cultural might still tower over the rest, and therefore, where current battles over the European inheritance will shape the fate of the continent. Yet in the coming century, much will change — Spain and Poland, for instance, will likely become centers of influence in their own right, joining Germany, France, and Italy at the heart of the European project. And when that time comes, the Grand Tour will no longer be quite so relevant — and must evolve, much like the continent itself, in the face of a changing and challenging new world.
