Camille de Toledo's 'Le hêtre et le bouleau' bids farewell to the 20th century

In his new essay 'Le hêtre et le bouleau' (Seuil), Camille de Toledo argues that Europe must abandon its 20th-century utopian dreams and confront its traumatic memory. He describes a paradoxical sadness felt at the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ended the possibility of utopia and left Europe 'drunk on memory, haunted by its ghosts.' Using the beech tree as a metaphor for decaying past and the birch for literary transmission of tragedy (citing Primo Levi and Aharon Appelfeld), he introduces the banyan as a postcolonial, diasporic tree of exile and multiple uprootings. The essay turns autobiographical, tracing his origins from Turkey to Toledo, Spain. A shorter second essay, 'L'utopie linguistique,' presents a Ubu-esque scene where Djinns disrupt European parliamentarians, forcing them to remove translation headsets and confront the linguistic utopia of Babel. Toledo proposes a program for Europe centered on multilingualism and translation, replacing the duty of memory with a forward-looking linguistic project.