Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato

      "The commemorative practices that have accumulated about the figure of Columbus can doubtless be criticized for reproducing [(reproduzieren)] over and over again the dubious dichotomies of Middle Ages and Modernity, dogmatism and enlightenment, knowledge rooted in authority and knowledge rooted in empirical investigation, flat world and round earth; and so not just [for] reproducing [(nachformen)] the flat earth error, but [for] positively contributing to its establishment.  But that with the exception of [professional historians committed to] the historical sciences understood in the broadest sense, no one thinks to question critically the comprehensive darkening and flattening of the Middle Ages; indeed, that even the mass-medial corrections issued at regular intervals in books, films, and magazines [produced] for popular consumption appear to achieve at best a short-term Aha! effect before once more giving way to the picture of a disk-shaped Middle Ages—[all of this] shows that this type of discourse [(Diskursfigur)] is granted in the public consciousness afterwards just as before the status of an historical fact, and that the fiction [(Erzälung)] of a period of cosmo-, geo-, and ethnographical ignorance ended by Columbus meets obviously a need for [the] construction of historical meaning [(historischer Sinnstiftung)] that the 'true history [(Realhistorie)]' cannot—or can only with difficulty—satisfy.
     "One is almost tempted to speak of the scene [(Auftritt)] of the discoverer of America before the Talavera Commission [reproduced, for example, on the Columbus doors of the U.S. Capitol] as a mythologue [(Mythologem)].  Like most myths [(Mythen)], the [one] compressed into this scene [(Szene)] of the demonstration of the spherical shape of the earth does [but] one [thing]:  it explains the present—and as it became, so it is.  Enabled thereby is a positioning of modern man in time (important at none other than a time of global spatial expansion [(Entgrenzung)]), and the dissociation [of him] from [(Abgrenzung gegenüber)] an Other experienced as foreign, primitive, threatening, etc.  In 'reality' the world of the Middle Ages may [?!] have been less flat than many moderns believe.  But [summoning up] the will to correct the error [(Den Irrtum korrigieren zu wollen)] has turned out to be [a] rather hopeless undertaking:  Se non è vero, è ben trovato.  If not true, it is nevertheless well invented.  As one puts it with felicity today, it makes simply too much sense."

     Thomas Reinhardt, "Die Erfindung der flachen Erde:  der Mythos Kolumbus und die Konstruktion der Epochenschwelle zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit," Paideuma:  Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 53 (2007):  175-176 (161-180).