 Thank you for coming, and I'm going to speak this evening about community. In the spirit, I'd like to use this occasion to remember a friend and a comraddian mentor Jacques Beaux-Tou, who passed away recently. So I'd like us to remember him. I'm talking about Conrad the amazing or an amazing bloody foreigner, and the legend is well known. Joseph Conrad was the Polish emigre who learned to speak English while serving as a sailor, and he rose to the rank of captain in the British merchant service before leaving the sea in 1895 to become one of the country's most celebrated authors. So celebrated, as Philip said, that when F.R. Libas identified the great tradition of the English novel, he included Conrad alongside Jane Austen, George Elliot, Charles Dickens, Henry James and D.H. Lawrence. This too is part of the legend because Conrad, as everybody knows, was writing in his third language after Polish and French. Conrad was naturalised as a British subject in 1886 at the age of 28, just before passing his certificate for his master's certificate. This meant that well over half of his life was spent as a British subject. Conrad's engagement with his adopted homeland was a professional. He was a professional twice over. He was a professional sailor, and he was a professional writer. And professionalism, by definition, is exclusive. Citizenship, I'll get to it in a moment. Citizenship, by contrast. I think I'll get to this last one. Citizenship, I'm arguing, is inclusive. From citizenship we get the sense of interiority. Marlowe's claim that Lord Jim is one of us. So Conrad engages with England, he becomes a citizen, and yet in Virginia Woolf's fine obituary, published in the Times Literary Supplement, she begins, our guess has left us. At what point, if any, does the outsider become an insider? When and how does one join the club? With a problematically dual national identity, Conrad lived out the modern condition of alienation, while his writing has reflected its philosophy. Writing to a fellow countryman in 1903. I kind of feel I've got a wand. This is a sort of geriatric Harry Potter. Conrad said that both at sea and on land, my point of view is English, from which the conclusion should not be drawn that I've become an Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning. How Conrad engaged with England and Englishness, and transformed himself in the process, provides my subject this evening. And that issue is the difficult process of adopting and being adopted by a homeland, and the attendant codes of inclusion and exclusion that confer belonging. I'm going to be using the terms England and Britain interchangeably as they were used during the period. For instance, in 1881, Sir John Sealy told his students of Cambridge that the empire was a vast English nation, and the term Anglicter was used by Proust and most French people at the time as a general term to cover Britain and even Ireland. With that out of the way, let's turn to Conrad's beginnings. It's always quite fun to talk about Conrad. I get the feeling I'm talking about someone who pays the bills in my house. When we turn to Conrad, we discover that nothing's quite what it seems, and the first thing to say about Joseph Conrad is that his name wasn't Joseph Conrad. He was born Joseph Conrad Theodor Korzenioffski, and he was born in December 1857. He never officially changed his name to Joseph Conrad, the Anglicised form by which he's adopted homeland, and the wider world would come to know him. He's buried in Canterbury Cemetery, where, bearing his transnational identity, the name on his tombstone is a combination of the Anglicised and Polish forms, with one of its terms, Theodor misspelled. The second thing to note is that technically he wasn't Polish. Conrad's birthplace, Berdycheff, is in Podolia, a part of the Polish Commonwealth appropriated into the Russian Ukraine in 1793. The Polish Republic would only be restored in 1918 after the First World War, so while Conrad was certainly born into a Polish heritage, and his parents, Apollo and Ava, would sacrifice themselves and Conrad's early years to the cause of Polish nationalism and to resisting imperialist Russia, his Poland was a Poland of the heart, a homeland of the heart, rather than a geographical fact. So strictly speaking, he was born a citizen of the imperial Russian Empire. Conrad spoke of having two lives, and so to place him in his time, I shall take as my cue Bob Dylan's injunction, you didn't think you were going to go back without me, to take what you have gathered from coincidence. And I'm going to consider the coincidence of two years. 1857, the year of his birth, and 1895, the year in which he published his first novel. And as we shall see, the contours of Joseph Conrad's life are designed, or seen designed, to shape our response to his art and to his engagement with England. So 1857, and to orient ourselves, this is the year of Little Dorot, it's the year of Barchester Towers, and the year of Tom Brown's school days. On the continent, it's the year of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. But Conrad's birth year 1857 links him through historical coincidence to the great national fact of the age, the British Empire. He shares the year of his birth with Sir Edward Elgar, whose music captured and contributed towards the popular patriotic mood. In such well-known pieces as Imperial March 1897, The Coronation March 1901, and Empire March 1924, coincidentally the year of Conrad's death. Also in 1857, in his Cambridge University address, David Livingston urged, I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity, carry out the work which I have begun. I leave it with you. This was the year in which the British explorers Richard Burton and John Speak discovered Lake Tanganica, the following year Speak found Lake Victoria. Recalling his boyhood and his education, Conrad wrote, I stand here confessed as a contemporary of the Great Lakes. 1857 is also the year of the Indian mutiny. Sometimes regarded as the first step towards the United Independence movement in India, the challenge posed to Imperial rule was slight. But like the Crimean warges before it and the two war wars later in the century, it was part of the gradual disenchantment with empire, part of the challenge to any lingering complacency in the existing order. So Elgar's music certainly celebrated Englishness, but did so in an era when the empire that provides so much of its definition was under threat. Perhaps inevitable was when Britain's global and industrial supremacy was waning when the expression of Englishness was at its most strident. Conrad described himself as the spoiled, adopted child of Great Britain and even of empire. But even as he was engaging with Great Britain, its relationship with Greater Britain was in the process of revision. In 1891 the poet of empire, Roger Kipling, could ask, and what should they know of England who only England know? A decade later G.K. Chesterton reformulated this to ask an alternative question. What can they know of England who know only the world? So Conrad espouses his new national identity at a moment when the sense of Englishness was itself being reformulated. So where does Conrad fit into empire? Just before he turned 17, Conrad made what he would describe as a standing jump out of my racial surroundings and associations. He travelled by train to Marse, securing work for a firm of ship owners, and his sea life began with three trips for the firm to the West Indies, each lasting about six months, after which he jumped ship as it were and joined a British vessel, thus beginning his 20 years in the British merchant's service. In a splendid piece of self-anthologising, Conrad describes this transformative moment in his life. He's working as a water clerk in Marse Harbour, ferrying a captain back to his ship, and he's dingy sails close to the ship's side. A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then that for the very first time in my life I heard myself addressed in English. The speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions, of my very dreams. And if, after being thus fashioned by it, in that part of me which cannot decay, I dare not claim it to loud as my own, then at any rate the speech of my children. The actual words addressed to Conrad, the words that inspired us, are nothing if not demonic, simply look out there. And yet they have the force of an epiphany, reminding us that one of the hallmarks of Conrad's writing is his capacity to transmute prosaic reality into art. The simple act of pushing against the ship to propel the dingy away is rendered insensuous, even sensual terms. And when I bore against the smooth flank of the first English ship I ever touched in my life, I felt it already throbbing under my open palm, each a harder answer. Memorably describing himself as a Polish nobleman cased in British tar, Conrad spent nearly 20 years as a sailor in British ships in the overseas trade at a time when Britain dominated the world shipping and owned nearly half of it. This had practical implications for the composition of crews because the national supply of sailors was unable to meet demand, so one third of the sailors in the British merchant marines were foreign, so they were like Conrad. The other side of this is that by the end of the century Britain was dependent upon imports for two thirds of her food. By this point Britain was imperial because she had to be. As Eric Hogsbound puts it, access to the non-European world was simply a matter of life and death for the British economy. Historically too, Conrad saw the world from the decks of British merchant ships at a moment when Britain's maritime dominance was under threat, from in particular the United States of America, after the economic effects of the Civil War and from Germany. Conrad's professional connection with the marine life of the nation continued after he left the sea after he signed off on his last trip in 1894. In the years that followed he lent his expert opinion to debates in the popular press, on the Titanic for instance, or he visited North Sea defence installations at the invitation of the Royal Navy during the First World War. But it's Conrad's contribution to our literature that concerns me here. He turned from travelling in and trading with the colonial world to writing about it at a moment when the popular taste was for exotic fiction, was fed by the likes of H Rider Haggard, whose King Solomon's Minds was declared the most amazing story ever written. So we turn to 1895, Conrad's beginnings as a writer. In 1895 he published his first novel, Ormire's Folly, followed a year later by an outcast of the islands. Recognition was immediate. H G Wells, then the peak of his fictional powers, declared an outcast of the islands, perhaps the finest piece of fiction published this year as Ormire's Folly was the finest that was published in 1895. With symmetrical elegance, Conrad's career as a published author begins in the year that Thomas Hardy's ends with his last novel, Jude the Obscure. By serendipity, there is the sense of a torch passing from one literary master to the next. Also published in fiction in 1895 with the likes of George Gissing, writer Haggard, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, George Meredith and H G Wells published a volume of short stories and two novels. One of which, the time machine in its parable of the effete decadent Eloi, dependent upon and yet at the mercy of and preyed upon by the dark subterranean mollocks linked the late 19th century anxieties of degeneration and class. This was an era in which British political life mirrored the changing configurations and realignments of national identity. The need for an increasingly unionised working class to be represented in the House of Commons led to the formation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. The campaign for women's votes politicised gender in the pursuit of a revised concept of British citizenship. The term feminism came into use in the 1890s. Conrad also arrived in the middle of the so-called Yellow Nineties. The years of the decadent movement. These were the years of Aubrey Beardsley and of course Oscar Wilde, whose trial took place in 1895. Also the year in which Freud published his first work on psychoanalysis. Internationally, the world of Greater Britain was also unsettled. 1895 ended with the ill-fated Jameson rate in South Africa. The pro-British attempt to overthrow the world government of President Kruger was easily repulsed. It's remembered chiefly because Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany sent a telegram congratulating Paul Kruger, thus declaring Germany's imperial interests. Kipling called the Jameson rate the first battle in the War of 1418. A little before its time, but necessary to clear the ground. None of this dimmed the pageantry or curved the celebrations for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. In her diary, Beatrice Webb summarised the certainly social mood. Imperialism in the air, all classes drunk with sightseeing and hysterical loyalty. Conrad's imperial fictions however offered oppositional counterblasts to this mood of jingoism. The late 18th century, or the late 1890s, saw works like Corraine, an outpost of progress and one of his most brilliant and problematic works, Heart of Darkness. Typical of Conrad's colonial narratives, it is characterised by variable perspectives, shifting and competing points of view, ensuring that the tale stands at a point of intersection between the colonial and what we now think of the colonial worlds. It is both of and transcending its historical moment. Now I want to turn to Conrad, the sea writer. This is the torrents, a ship that Conrad had a particular fondness for, in which he served. In this Jubilee year, in 1897, after two novels set in the Dutch East Indies, Conrad turned his attention to the sea, in the novel, The Nega of the Narcissus. The fund of material at his disposal led Henry James to comment, No one has known for intellectual use the things you know. And you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached. The sea echoes through our national story. Nowhere in Britain is one ever more than 70 miles from the sea. To Orden, the sea is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation emerged. And as the great American sailor historian Alfred Marne claimed, the English nation, more than any other, owed its greatness to the sea. The sea finds its visual expression in the work of England's greatest painter, J.M.W. Turner. And unsurprisingly, during the Age of Empire, the sea became a national obsession. Finding one outlet in the celebrations to mark the centenary of Trafalgar in 1905, to which Conrad contributed an essay on Nelson. The other art, too, responded to this national obsession. Musically, this is the period of Elgar's sea pictures and Bourne Williams' sea symphony. Henry Woods, Fantasia of British Seasongs with Royal Britannia as its stirring conclusion. And now the customary finale to the Last Night of the Trons was first performed in 1905 as part of the Trafalgar celebrations. The period's literature boasts Kipling, The Seven Seas, Newbolt, Admiral's Hall and John Mayesfield's Seawater or Saltwater Ballads. An inch at this moment steps Conrad, the author. Quickly to become our greatest sea writer. I don't know what there is but hang in there. Very well. In the second half I'll play electric music for those of you who don't know. An earlier review in The New York Times said Mr Conrad, like Britannia, rules the waves. However much he bought at being time cast as a sea writer, like youth, the Niagara of the Narcissus and typhoon, not only identify the nation's mood they also help to compose the national mythology of the sea. Conrad's first see if you just wait long enough someone will do it for you. Conrad and the Seas an earlier review in The New York Times argued that Conrad, like Britannia, rules the waves. And although Conrad aborted this categorisation him as a sea writer he was immediately appropriated. His writings about the sea were taken into the nation's myth kitty. Early reviewers found in youth for instance both the lyric note of the sagus and a modern English epic of the sea. The Nigger of the Narcissus published in 1897 is Conrad's first English novel. Conrad's the voyage of the sailing ship Narcissus, home to England. And at the end of the journey England herself is mythopoically transformed into a great ship. A great ship for ages had the ocean battered in vain her enduring size. She was there when the world was faster and darker when the sea was great and mysterious and ready to surrender the prize of fame to audacious men. A ship mother of fleets and nations the great flagship of the race stronger than the storms and anchored in the open sea. And we shouldn't be surprised that it took an outsider to become our great fabulous to the sea. It was after all another foreigner Nicholas Pefsner who opened English eyes to their own architectural traditions. Pefsner's outsiderness too was noted and chided by John Benjamin's public spat with the person that he called the hair professor doctor. And Conrad clearly believed that his writings reflected the national impulse. My expression such as it is has its source in English sentiment and none other. On this fact and on the consciousness of any originality I base my hope on what material from the public. No one can enter my field through my gate and work it in my way. But when you look at it without prejudice the field is an English field after all. When the critic Robert Lund described Conrad as without either country or language Conrad responded I thought that a man who has written The Nigger of the Narcissus and the Tether was safe from that sort of thing. But while he enriched the literature of his adopted homeland there was a price to pay. Back in Poland he was accused by the novelist Elijah Orzeszkova of betraying his nation. Dante regarded the business of the poet as being to purify the dialect of the tribe. And in this sense Conrad was no mean traitor. He was purifying the dialect of another tribe. Although he claimed to have had to work like a coal miner in his pit quarrying all my English sentences out of a black knight he's now regarded as one of our great stylists. Indeed he pronounced himself haunted mercilessly haunted by the necessity of style and as one contemporary reviewer put it Mr Conrad's English gets into one's veins. Of his relationship with the English language he wrote English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The nearest ideal choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption well yes there was an adoption but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language which directly I came out of the stammering stage made me its own. So completely that its very idioms I truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character. Aesthetically Conrad recognised and responded to the metaphorical impulses that make literary language. Writing to a friend explicitness is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work robbing it of suggestiveness destroying all illusion. Here we have Conrad describing the verbal expertise of another gifted creature Mr Curds in Heart of Darkness. The point was in his being a gifted creature and that of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently that carried with it a sense of real presence was his ability to talk his words the gift of expression the bewildering, the illuminating the most exalted and most contemptible the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness. The writing here is guided by metaphors that offer invitations to interpretation while never yielding a single meaning. In this matter or in this manner Conrad's style negotiates a correspondence the correspondence between words and the world that they describe but Conrad went further than this he brought English literature into relationship with colonial literature in particular through his intimate knowledge of the French masters like Flo Bair and Mo Casson. One measure of belonging to a literary community is intertextuality. In Michael Riftair's words literariness is sought at the level where texts combine or signify by referring to other texts rather than to lesser science systems. In Conrad's pages the English literary tradition is brought into dialogue with other literatures. The resulting hybrid form opens up new possibilities and gives new inflections to the English novel and he also accounts for some of the perceived indigenous in Conrad's writings leading more than one critique to conclude that the works read like translations. To take but one and perhaps rather obvious example of this here is a moment from early on in the nigger of the Narcissus involving two sailors who are new to the ship. All that happens is that one asks another for tobacco Don King changed his tone give us a bit of back he meant he breathed out confidentially I haven't had a smoke or chew for the last month I'm rounding man for it come on old man don't be familiar said the nigger Don King started and sat down on a chest near by of a sheer surprise we haven't kept pigs together continue James Wait in a deep undertone here's your tobacco The moment synthesises a range of conflicting historical and political themes Don King is a cockney whose first words in the novel include the claims I am an Englishman I am and I stood up for my rights like a good one his cockney status and Wait will later refer to him as East End Trash does not prevent linguistic ventriloquism the phrase old man sits oddly alongside dropped aspirants and colloquial speech habits Don King's Collocata James Wait is, we learn later a native of St. King's one of the leeward islands in the West Indies and then part of the British Empire it is Wait who gives the novel its stark racist title for all the talk of period usage the term they go was racially in their soom at the time and Wait responds to it as such within the novel so although one would not guess it from their speech habits this moment represents a meeting of coloniser and colonised but what strikes one most when reading this exchange is that odd non-English put down that associates familiarity with keeping pigs together I would have killed a keyboard off with any of you and we are right to find it strange because it's based on a Polish progo so Conrad has turned to his first language to find an idiom required in his third the fact that this is employed by a St. Kid's native only adds to the complex humour of the moment this is further inflected when one adds that the Narcissus is about to sail home to England from Bombay Harbour the year of publication of the novel is 1897 the year when Queen Victoria Empress of India celebrated her diamond jubilee and I want to stay with this novel just a bit longer in the great storm scene later on the Narcissus is turned onto her side as of the coast of southern Africa and the sailors are forced to cling to the decks in order to to survive whilst doing so they suddenly realise that James Wait is trapped in his cabin presumably below the waterline he's in a sick bay since he's clearly dying and he's trapped so a small rescue party is assembled and sets off they discover that in order to free weight they're going to have to drop into a carpenter's room through the doorway and break through war to get into the adjoining cabin it's dangerous there's a mess of the carpenter's tools that have been thrown off of shells as the ship has lurched once they get down they discover the contents of the carpenter's store on what is now the floor and they have to pick their way through this to get it before and this is what they have to dig through at the bottom the nails lay in a layer several inches thick it was ghastly every nail in the world in somewhere seemed to have found its way to that carpenter's shop there they were of all kinds the remnants of stalls from seven voyages tin tacks copper tacks sharp as needles hump nails with big heads like tiny iron mushrooms nails without any heads horrible French nails polished and slim they lay in a solid mass more inabordable than a hedgehog the odd word inabordable is French meaning inaccessible the point here though is this drop into the carpenter's shop is simultaneously a descent into the quotidian heroic rescue encounters prosaith reality a feature of art is its capacity to find the extra ordinary in the ordinary as Beaulieu said in his paintings he captures the infant in the finite in one of his late great poems entitled the circus animal's desertion W.B. Yates traced the source of his inspiration to what he called the foul rag and bone shop of the heart here the carpenter's shop in a British merchant's shop serves as a comparable image of the humdrum source of inspiration and the fact that its portrayal involves delving for a word in his second language only dramatises the process you can go ahead and check my notes by general agreement Conrad's major literary achievement is the trilogy of novels that spans the Edwardian period Nostromo 1904 The Secret Agent 1907 Under Western Eyes 1911 their combined subject matter is national and international politics The Edwardian era the years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War is often regarded as a sunlit period of calm between the old and the new orders personified and presided over by the genial somewhat self-indulgent figure of Edward VII which I refer to as Edward the Caresa by Henry James Conrad's true political novels provide ominous counterpoint to the period's optimism his capacity to sustain a rigorously political focus at a moment when western Europe teated unknowingly on the edge of oblivion led George Orwell to declare that Conrad possessed a sort of grown-up-ness and political understanding which would have been almost impossible for him to a native English writer at the time To George Steiner the skepticism often detected in Conrad's fiction too has a political edge Steiner writes almost alone among his contemporaries he has seen through both the media-ist and civilising promises of imperialism and technology and the utopian messianic illusions of socialism and communist revolution it is precisely from this two-fold disenchantment that springs his masterpieces in the secret agent Conrad's great London novel inspired by the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 he turns from international to domestic politics to expose the inequalities in British society the anarchist's bomb clock backfires but it is replaced by something even more combustible a society primed to explode and even while the plot is concerned with the factual contemporary debate over whether Britain should provide a haven for those fleeing political oppression the sub-plot is concerned with the vexed state of the nation even the simple-minded Stevie can see that it's a bad world of poor people Edward Garnard began his review of the novel it is good for us English to have Mr Conrad in our midst visualising for us life as we are constitutionally unable to perceive it Conrad's most famous narrator the sea captain Marlowe is English and he brings an English perspective to bear on his subject when eulogising that home is distant enough for all its half-stones to be like one half-stone in Lord Jim home is England Marlowe's status though as character narrator means that he is both inside and outside his tales according to John Ballsworthy Marlowe though English in name is not so in nature for his part Conrad was stunned by any reminder of his foreignness the title of this talk stems from one such occasion when he responded exasperatedly to criticism of the secret agent I've been so tried up of late as a sort of freak an amazing bloody foreigner writing in English Conrad went out of his way to present himself as an English gentleman for instance, recalling his visit to Conrad at home when critic James Hunnaker said his shrug and play of hands are gallic or Polish and his eyes, shiny or clouded are not of our race in a word he's more foreign looking than I expected and then he continues yet he astonished me later in the afternoon by suddenly transforming himself into an Englishman he sported a monocle his expression was almost haughty as he drove me in his car on these cantish roads the slav had disappeared Conrad's circle of friends provides a measure of his insider outsider status they include such anti-establishment figures as Edward and Constance Gard and Cunningham Graham the pioneer socialist and Scottish nationalist but also embraced such establishment figures as Sir Sydney Colvin and Edmund Goss by the end of his life he was the grand old man of English letters and faded as such when he visited New York in 1923 the year before his death he turned down honorary degrees from various universities including Oxford and Cambridge and in 1924 he also refused the offer of a knighthood from the Prime Minister, Rosie MacDonald Conrad's life and writing can be configured in terms of his sense of community he spent nearly a quarter of his life as a sailor and while crew life gave him a sense of stability and belonging it also, as some critics have argued encouraged a conservative attitude towards hierarchy and knowing one's place his commitment to the collective to the group is everywhere it was dereliction of duty in Lord June for instance Marlowe declares the real significance of crime is in it being a breach of faith with the community of mankind but as his flawed heroes demonstrate Conrad's was not an idealised vision of humanity and in later life he would define the difference between himself and HG Wells as fundamental in these terms he said you don't care for humanity but think they are to be improved I love humanity but I know they are not some courageous in that in that acceptance I began by saying that nothing is quite what it seems with Conrad and this is no less true of his sense of England and Englishness when he travelled the world in the service of the British merchant marine ended up living as Virginia Woolf observed in the depths of the country out of his shot of gossips beyond reach of hostesses for Conrad's moved house frequently occupying eight rented residents in all all in southern England mainly in Kent and he settled finally in the small Kentish village of Bishop's ball in the English village life the degree to which this absorption was complete provided for us by another visitor to Conrad in the home Oswald's in Bishop's ball in 1921 having gained the invitation to Conrad's he got to Bishop's ball another American interviewer and decided that rather than going straight to the house he would ask the people in the village what they knew about a man of English letters and they missed here is his account citing a man in the field I called to him he knew there were two boys one at work in London the other playing at farm and he pointed to the hillock behind which he went on to say was the farm no he couldn't say anything about their father he's a writing man was the son of his knowledge no one I approached in the village had read his writings and I thought of the prophet who remained a stranger to those about him on a balloting board on the rear wall of the church I saw his name among others listed for parish duty of the sword the son had bleached the writing into invisibility almost is that something crucial about blending in becoming anonymous becoming part of village life but co-existent with this narrow so much wider world is the wider world outside at the end of a writing career that began with novels set in the colonial world Conrad's late fiction returns to European settings turns to an engagement date with 19th century European history for its frame of reference in a letter of 1923 he wrote I think that I'm not taking too much upon myself in saying that I'm a good European not exactly in the superficial cosmopolitan sense but in the blood and bones as it were and as the result of a long heritity because unlike his parents Conrad was not nationalist he was internationalist proud of being British and clearly committed to the life of England he yet viewed Britain as part of a community a community of nations Written in 1905 at the beginning of the 20th century a century when the boundaries of nationality assumed ever greater significance and when historical amnesia became a political weapon Conrad's great essay The Apostle of War anticipates the European Union In it he calls for the solidarity of Europeanism claiming that the solidarity must be the next step towards the advent of concord and justice an advent with however delayed by ffapal worship of force and the errors of national selfishness has been and remains the only possible of our program The cantishman is simultaneously Conrad the European truly homo duplex an amazing bloody forum Thank you