OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL EVENT | Hitler's Cosmopolitan Bastard: Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and His Vision of Europe - Martyn Bond

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Academic, journalist and author Dr Martyn Bond uncovers the life of an Austrian count who set up a pro-European movement to rival the Nazis and was the first to create a European flag and call for a European stamp, a common currency, and a European passport in his book Hitler's Cosmopolitan Bastard: Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and His Vision of Europe.

Martyn Bond, former European civil servant and BBC foreign correspondent, is a distinguished senior fellow at Regent's University London and a senior fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In the turbulent period following the First World War the young Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-European Union, offering a vision of peaceful, democratic unity for Europe, with no borders, a common currency, and a single passport. His political congresses in Vienna, Berlin, and Basel attracted thousands from the intelligentsia and the cultural elite, including Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Sigmund Freud, who wanted a United States of Europe brought together by consent. The Count's commitment to this cooperative ideal infuriated Adolf Hitler, who referred to him as a "cosmopolitan bastard" in Mein Kampf.

Communists and nationalists, xenophobes and populists alike hated the Count and his political mission. When the Nazis annexed Austria, the Count and his wife, the famous actress Ida Roland, narrowly escaped the Gestapo. He fled to the United States, where he helped shape American policy for postwar Europe. Coudenhove-Kalergi's profile was such that he served as the basis for the fictional resistance hero Victor Laszlo in the film Casablanca.

For the Count, the United States of Europe was the answer to the challenges of communist Russia and capitalist America. Indeed, he launched his Pan-European Union thirty years before Jean Monnet set up the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to the European Union. Timely and capitivating, Martyn Bond's biography offers an opportunity to explore a remarkable life and revisit the impetus and origins of a unified Europe.