There exists in German a wonderful word, both oddly haunting and untranslatable: Geschichtsmüde, which translates into something roughly akin to being “weary of history”. The unparalleled George Steiner once condensed Europe into five key concepts, the fifth being an ever-present feeling that European civilisation is awaiting its own imminent demise, crushed “under the paradoxical weight of its achievements and the unparalleled wealth and complication of its history”.
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