THE DIVIDE

 "Exotic, yet familiar. Sensual, yet not savage. More childish, yet not completely foolish."

I once had a conversation about this divide in the Occident, and this conversation is now transcribed in this blog. It contains these words:

Una de las dos Europas te partirá el corazón.

There once was an Iron Curtain that split Europe in twain.

What most people don't know is that there has been an even older Iron Curtain before the World Wars.

One that ran along with the Alps and the Danube.

On one side, feudal kingdoms with wooden Great Halls and fair, tall, blue-eyed people. Runes, mead, and iron. And golden amber washed upon the shores.

On the other side, sophisticated empires with marble palaces and dark-haired, shorter, dark-eyed people. Letters, wine, and steel. And purple dye obtained from prickly shells.

The former called the latter "velsh" or "welsh" (meaning "foreign"), while the latter called the former "barbarians" (a slur for foreignness implying the language barrier, id est, the belief that the others can only say "bara bara bara"): in the same way. And both worlds saw the Other as Strange: the former as attractive. valuable partners for trade; the latter as wild things, closer to beasts, that couldn't be cultured.

In the wake of time, organized religion tied these two worlds so close, yet so far to each other.

Yet, centuries later, as religious authorities lapsed into decadence, the fair-haired Northerners decided to secede and create their own faith, worshipping the same deity, yet devoid of trappings. 

The mother religion, or sister religion, of the dark-haired ones tried, time after time, to try to convince those who had strayed from the flock to rejoin it, conveniently threatening them with fire.

Those who had seceded resisted, this struggle turned to war, and both groups were obliged by the want of post-war to reunite.

The divide between northern and southern Europe is older than the Reformation, in fact, but it was the Reformation that strengthened it, in creating identities of "loyalist" vs. "heretic", or "freedom fighter" vs. "oppressed vassal", depending on whose side you were.

The dark ones, the warm ones, were the most cultured ones from the start, also being the most decadent unto our days. They even coined the "carpe diem" that might as well be their motto.

While the fair ones, the cold ones, have always been the more pristine, those who said that the "child's sense" of innocence must be kept alive during adulthood.

Catholic and Protestant, Latin and Germanic, dark-haired and blond, sophisticated and pristine: there are two Occidents, two sister cultures, with as much in common as they have apart.

Una de las dos Europas te partirá el corazón.

Historically viewing each other as enemies and either of them to play big sister or guardian to the other.
Before the Reformation, the Germanic peoples were seen by the Romance peoples as  "Exotic, yet familiar. Sensual, yet not savage. More childish, yet not completely foolish." After the Reformation and Enlightenment, the latter saw the former with those very prejudices: the roles had been reversed.
The light comes from the north, the warmth comes from the south... yet both cold light and dark warmth have always been missing something to attain fulfilment. And expressed that yearning through the creative arts, longing for the other half of the worldview that both our peoples have in common.
Nowadays, at the end of the day of blood and sword, united into a single entity, yet still maintaining those slight differences:

Jules Verne (on a German industrialist's worldview and view of Latin people):

A struggle between the 
Saxon and Latin races, besides being always meritorious, 
would not fail, if set about properly, to turn to the advantage 
of the former. 

The enterprise appeared to him absurd, and, to his ideas, 
sure to fail, as it opposed the law of progress, which decreed 
the uprooting of the Latin race, its subjection to the Saxon, 
and eventually its disappearance from the surface of the 
globe. 

This struggle, which will set the Latin and Saxon races by 
the ears.
 
Josep Feliu i Codina (deeming peace between both peoples possible?)
Es indispensable
que se mezcle en él, la sangre vigorosa del Norte con la ardiente
y arrebatada del Mediodía; la fuerza y valor del germano con
la fantasía bullidora del latino; la prudencia del uno con el arrojo
insensato del otro. Así, pues, el amor de Driva ha de ser
gozado por un hombre del Sur.