A town is lost among the wooded hills separating the Western Czech Republic and Bavaria. The town is Poběžovice, or Ronsperg, as it is called by Germans.
Removed from the main roads and big cities, it has nevertheless played a large role in history. It is in the old Poběžovice Castle that a man who made significant contributions to creation of a Europe without borders grew up. “Architects did not build this castle in a definite style or according to a definite plan. It has been developing over the centuries, from one wing to another, laterally, occupying more and more space... Its ivied, 3-metre-wide walls have withstood more than one siege,” – it is with these words that Richard Nicolas von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972) described the family seat.
The creator of paneuropeanism was born thousands of kilometres from the Czech Republic, in Tokyo, the son of an Austrian diplomat, Count Heinrich von Coudenhove- Kalergi, and a Japanese woman, Mitsuko Aoyama. During his life he was a subject of Austria-Hungary and a citizen of Czechoslovakia and France; he escaped to the USA fromthe Nazis – who burned his books in town squares, – worked on the rebirth of post-war Europe, died in Austria, and was buried in Gstaad, Switzerland. Although his mother was Japanese, on his father’s side he united possibly all European nations. The two parts of his surname linked the old Dutch Coudenhove family with the Greek Kalergis family, whose roots stretch back to ancient Byzantium.
When Richard’s father retired from diplomatic service and settled down in 1896 in the family castle, he turned his house into a cosmopolitan centre that was visited by Indian gurus, Jewish rabbis, and eminent politicians of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here, Heinrich Coudenhove wrote works dedicated to the improvement of social order; and here the idea of a Europe without borders began to take shape in the mind of young Richard. He wrote in his memoirs: “Behind the walls of Ronsperg Castle, this oasis of cosmopolitanism, surrounded by Czech-German lands, a pingpong ball in national conflicts between the Czechs and the Germans. Ronsperg lay between two borders: to the west, within ten kilometres of the castle, there was an Austrian border separating Austria from Germany, but to the south, within five kilometres, there was a language border separating the Germanspeaking world from the Slavic… Astride the border the same people spoke one and the same dialect. It seemed absurd to us that at this unnatural border we were stopped by custom officers and asked each time if we had something to declare. “We children were exasperated.” By the time Richard Coudenhove, the Czech provincial, entered into the world of Austrian aristocracy and joined a Masonic lodge in Vienna, he had not ceased thinking about the need for unification of the European continent. In 1923 his life’s work was published – a manifesto entitled “Pan-Europa”, in which he argued the necessity of creating a united Europe “from Portugal to Poland.” To promote his idea Coudenhove co-founded the Pan-European Union, which was joined by prominent politicians, writers, and scientists. This “European visionary”, as Coudenhove was often called, described the threat of a new European war, the danger of American economic domination of Europe, and the endeavours of Soviet Russia to force new territories into submission.
As early as 1924 he spoke of the need to introduce a single European currency and to create a European bank; he was the first to propose a European flag, European anthem, and European passport, and to evoke the ideas of a single European political party, European armed forces, and a European constitution.
The Coudenhove-Kalergi family castle was inherited by Richard’s older brother Hans, who in 1945, under the so called “Beneš decrees”, was deprived of his property and expelled from Czechoslovakia. Border troops were then accommodated in the castle complex. Now the ancient building, the walls of which are still decorated with its former owners’ coats of arms, is empty in spite of all efforts of follows of Paneuropean ideas and locals to vitalize it. We can only hope that thankful Europeans will not forget about Poběžovice Castle, which has played such an important role in the history of the unification of Europe.
