Essays:
Lingering over Language Reforms
Exile out of Free Will in Italy and Sweden
Lingering over Language Reforms
1. Amongst the many marvels of human evolution, the development of language and languages, both singular and plural, remains the most outstanding collective feat of the human species. To reproduce and transport orally thoughts and dreams, facts and fictions meant to create memory, to do so in written form, history. Without, there would be no culture and no civilization. In fact, it is said that the use of language defines and constitutes mankind.
Because of its immanent power, language has always been an instrument of the rulers, be it the gods in heaven or the would-be gods on earth. The Lord of the Old Testament, for example, upon seeing HIS people in the eminent city of Babylon build a gigantic tower to get a closer look at his eternal secrets instead of simply worshipping HIM, decreed what should be named the second expulsion from paradise. In his fury about their pert behavior, he split their simple common language into many different complicated ones, so that they could not communicate any longer. If you don’t want to believe in what I keep telling you, he said like any angry father probably would, you must learn the hard way. I’m not going to offer you any further gratis information on how the universe ticks. Go and find out yourselves!
The divine punishment led to the most important evolutionary leap of the cerebrum. The division of languages replaced the statics of inherent understanding by the dynamics of acquired learning and exploration. A prehistoric era of intellectual containment in one tongue ended. The history of the diversification of human thinking began. The marvelous multitude of languages and literatures resulting from this is still preserved in UNESCO’s notion of “our cultural diversity”. And since the first ingenious statement of the Bible is “At the beginning, there was the word”, it becomes evident that God rules, and has always ruled, by language.
In other religions and other regions of the globe, very similar interventions of the responsible deities took place at an early stage, I’m sure. But in this context, just this one mythical example might suffice to highlight the significance of language variety in the long and cumbersome process of civilization.
Meanwhile, there are of course more empiric explanations of how the various language families, like the reconstructed Indo-European, are derived from their original source, which most experts locate somewhere between India and Mesopotamia. However, I will not enter here into complex comparative language promulgations, exciting as they might be.
Instead, I shall stick to a case study, which I am confronted with every day as a writer. I’m talking about the various attempts to reform the German idiom.
The most fundamental language reform in Germany was carried out single-handedly, so to speak, in the fifteenth century by the religious reformer Martin Luther. Aiming to brake away from the almighty Roman Catholic Church, which was based to a good deal on the exclusive command of written Latin, Luther ventured to translate the bible into German. As a priest, in order to free himself from his Latin grammar, he went on the market places and into the pubs to “look on the people’s muzzle”. He then proceeded to blend his knowledge of Old and Middle High German, as handed down by medieval troubadours, and also of Latin, Greek, and the gone under Gothic, with the lingoes of his days into modern High German. Doing this, he broke the definition monopoly of the Pope. Other religious reformers like Calvin and Zwingli followed. A century later, the horrible Thirty Years’ War ensued, resulting in the division of Europe in catholic and protestant states.
However this historical break may be judged, there are many who say that without Luther’s translation of the book of books there would be no nation by the name of Germany at all. Notwithstanding the fact that before and after him, there existed the inter-European Holy Roman Empire of German Nations as represented by Charlemagne, or Karl der Grosse, just to mention the same initial ruler in two of the languages involved. One has to keep in mind that despite this first construct of a united Europe, the medieval map was largely composed of dukedoms, small kingdoms and even tribal territories rather than nations in the modern sense.
Luther’s monumental rendering of the Bible created some sort of corporate cultural identity amongst German speaking people. Looking at it from today, we find it no coincidence that during the same period Gutenberg introduced printing. Both achievements were instrumental to replace the Middle Ages based on religious believe, by the lay and scientific Renaissance and, eventually, the époque of European Enlightenment.
If the rugged, yet elaborate prose of Luther’s bible constitutes the basis of German language and literature, it still took the skills and the efforts of hundreds of subsequent authors, above all those of the classic and romantic period, to smoothen
style and vocabulary to its present form.
What about the reforms, then? Language being an ongoing process, it actually needs no re-forming. Just the same, there have been various attempts since Luther, including the ongoing one in Germany (in the archive of The Book and The Computer, you may find the still actual account of Niels Gurberg of 1999, “The New Orthography”). By far not all of these reforms made sense. Neither were they always meant to benefit people or to improve language.
For example, the legal language of the Prussian bureaucracy (known as the Prussian Chancellery style) was intended to enforce law, to support the work of tax officers and to draft soldiers for the many wars of the Prussian kings. But by a curious juxtaposition, it also influenced universities in Prussia, which in the period of enlightenment were still comparatively liberal. The strive for exactness of expression by both Prussian public servants as well as university teachers lead to a precision of abstract vocabulary which has remained useful in philosophy till today. Geographically and linguistically speaking, German philosophers like Nikolai, Kant, Hegel, Marx were all markedly Prussian, although their line of thinking at the end meant to abolish the implicit obedience to the king. Just the same, a certain submissiveness to authorities remained despite two world wars. And the very grammar and structure of German official talk, especially in courtrooms and in the army, by its nominal stile and lack of sensuality still echoes the rigidity of the Prussian past.
Hitler, for one, was aware of this. He, too, needed absolute obedience for his power-hungry ventures. But whereas the Prussian kings, regarding German as a rather clumsy and vulgar slang, took a delight in speaking French and having French philosophers like Voltaire as their guests, the “Fuehrer” was obsessed by the wrong idea that the High German language was infiltrated by subversive French vocabulary. It is true, a lot of French words had entered during the course of history, a great deal of them introduced during the industrial revolution, like Lokomotive and Perron and Automobil and Navigation. Nothing to worry about, one should think.
2. But Hitler and his Germanic propagandists were all too eager to clean the Aryan tongue from these alien influences. The automobile should be a “Kraftfahrzeug” (i.e., powered vehicle), but not driven by motor, because that again was a foreign intrusion, to be eventually replaced by the Nazi construct “Zerknalltreibling”. This ridiculous compound tried to describe the process of an explosion of the compressed mixture of gas and air, which in a gasoline motor then drives the connecting rod. It never made it to replace the good old “Motor”. However, the “Kraftfahrzeug” survived, if mainly in its abbreviated form Kfz. Still today, you will find “Kfz-Werkstatt” for a garage and “Kfz-Verordnung” for a traffic rule related to car safety.
But the Nazi language reform failed for good when they proceeded to rename such private matters as “Nase”, nose. Here, they wanted to introduce the absurd compound “Gesichtserker”, meaning oriel of the face. Hitler loved Nuremberg, as is known, for all its medieval half-timbered houses with oriels. Thus, not only the reform as such, but also the singular choice of changes displayed Nazi ideology.
It is because of these sinister memories, that any reform plans of democratic post-war governments raised immediate suspicion (see again Niels Gurberg). When the discussion first reached me, I was busy trying to solve the language problems of the re-united German writers’ union. It became soon apparent that during the long period of separation, our language had drifted apart. For example, in the years before, when approaching the city of Leipzig by car to visit the German Democratic Book Fair (the counterpart to the German Federal Republic’s book fair in Frankfurt), one could see a banner across the Autobahn advertising “Plaste und Elaste aus Schoppau”. For a West German, this was hard to interpret. You had to know that the town of Schoppau was a GDR center of chemical production, and that “Plaste” was the GDR name for polythene or plastic products. “Elaste” were essentially the same, implying that these goods were soft or elastic. In the West, those words did not even exist.
But it felt worse when the same words had developed into opposite directions. “Union”, in the East, meant a state agency to control the workers, and “writers’ union” implied a similar sort of big brotherly surveillance. In contrast, the independent unions in the West had always been the defenders of peoples’ rights against exploitation and governmental infringements. At this naïve concept, our new post-socialist colleagues could but laugh. It was hard to convince them to join a writers’ association, which called itself a “union”. Likewise, “solidarity” in the East used to be an official term, mostly linked with the attribute “international”. After half a century of communist abuse, the term had degenerated to an empty shell. Thus, having become president of a new German writers’ union, with every statement I had to carefully consider our two pasts to avoid blunders.
In 1994, I quit this tightrope walker’s job. When, in 1996, I held a scholarship in the beautiful old village of Schreyahn, above the mighty river Elbe, which had functioned as the former border, the long disputed spelling reform finally was to become effective.
To tell the truth: it has not really succeeded till this very day. There are some basic simplifications, upon which the press agencies could agree, adding up to a list of ten spelling and grammar rules modified in an acceptable way. The magazine DER SPIEGEL follows these. The influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), by contrast, has returned to the old spelling and grammar, with equally good reasons. To my relieve, one can now write things more or less the way one likes to, without being accused of mistakes. But I do not envy our schoolteachers who have to find their way through this tohubohu.
Yet I still feel that even the failed reform harms our language. The way to hell is paved with good intentions (Ogden Nash). I had an uneasy feeling from the very beginning. To end this short lingering on language reforms in Germany, here are my very personal annotations from a diary of 1996:
“A amazing system, language is, reaching us from afar through time and space. I suppose, at the beginning language was something like the secret conspiracy of those who lived in the same ice age valley. Or, looked at from the present, the never doubted agreement with all their descendents. A table is a table, a chair a chair. You see it in front of you, upon mention of the word. From childhood onward, without ever being asked for approval.
But meanwhile, it ever so often happens to me that the words disassemble into their separate letters. I then cannot any more grasp the meaning of what I have just written down, as much as I might stare at it. Why is a table a table? Is not the Italian tavola so much more of a table? Tavola is like the German Tafel, instead of the every-day Tisch, which sounds rather vulgar. Una Tavola is made for menus. At a tavola you dine, not just gulp down some fast food. It corresponds with the more refined Italian cooking: saltinbocca instead of schnitzel, or hamburger. Fortunately enough, since the arrival of the first guest workers in Germany, there popped up Italian restaurants everywhere, even in the most remote corners like the one I live in right now, consuming my scholarship.
Just the same: Why should something named table actually be a table?
Come to think of it, I must add one or two thoughts on the so-called spelling reform, which was recently decreed in order to make things easier. As I learn from the paper, on the occasion of the Frankfurt Book Fair 1996 the authors Martin Walser, Günther Grass, Siegfried Lenz and others demanded an immediate stop of that reform. Otherwise, the whole German Literature from Luther to Lenz would have to be re-printed.
Now, that is a side issue, gentlemen! It would be far more alarming if by means of such a reform, the mythical agreement of the ice age valley were cancelled, only to be replaced by a synthetic ordinance. Compiled in offices! At governmental writing desks! Just like at the end of the Second World War, in order to gain space for squared functional buildings, certain city planners took down even the last remaining facades from the nineteenth century. Let’s get rid of balconies and ledges, caryatides and columns! They are but rubbish! Such reckoning they did not deem in the least barbaric. On the contrary: complicated structures were to be replaced by plain ones, the irregular by the regular, the superfluous by the useful. Such simplification through standardization seemed but democratic, since it was being done for the best of the majority – just like the spelling reform now. Because that, too, is performed in the name of those many who will be happy to make thirty percent less spelling mistakes in the future.
But such progress has its drawbacks. It goes at the expense of identity. Suddenly, we do not recognize any more our own street, let alone our own plain squared city, which we start to confound with other places. At the end, we helplessly ask ourselves who we are and where we came from. In fact, once we start to standardize language by stripping it of its inherent history, we are yet another step closer to collective madness.”
(originally pubished in The Book and The Computer, internet magazine, Berkley and Tokyo)
Exile out of free will in Italy and Sweden
There are languages that will not tolerate such a title. For example, the Russian does not know the notion of an exile out of free will. To the majority of the Russians, therefore, exile means to be expulsed by force, to be driven out of your home country by those in power. Mostly for political reasons. The exiled author is punished for having uttered in public an undesirable political opinion or having characterised a person in power or a religious belief in a way contradictory to present rule. He who gets away alive may call himself lucky not to be tortured, mutilated, deported to distant places like Siberia. Or, as it were, to the quarries of Syracuse in Sicily, where the Romans kept their Greek dissidents and made them work themselves to death, by braking and carrying big stones, a method that was copied in our time by the Nazis in their Concentration Camps.
It is the truth that is driven out. During the Nazi regime in Germany, this meant exile for the very best authors, like Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Berthold Brecht, Irmgard Keun, Anna Seghers, just to mention five out of hundreds. Others committed suicide, like Walter Benjamin, Kurt Tucholsky, and Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. All of the glory of post war German literature is owed to these writers and intellectuals, who withstood barbarism and the virtual destruction of the morals of mankind. As a German writer who was six years old by the end of World War II, I bow my head in recognition and gratefulness for these men and woman who kept up humanity in times of genocide, or who paid with their own lives for their better believes.
Now you may rightly argue: why is it, that you, being a comparatively well established author, privileged to live in a democratic country of high intellectual standards, and ample literary facilities in the midst of Europe – why is it that you should spend years of your grown up life in Italy and Sweden, thus diminishing your own literary market?
The answer is both simple and complex. Simple: because I want to experience other environments and people. Because I want to look at my own country which still contains many unsolved mysteries to me from the outside. Because I want to write in seclusion, not exposed to the everyday trash language of abusive media, like commercial TV. Of course, these also emerge in Italy, just think of Signor Berlusconi, and in Sweden, where they import almost everything from US, even the most scum of series. But I don’t listen, because I’m only marginally interested in why the Italian government changes for the fiftieth time in fifty years or why the Swedish Foreign Minister calls Norway the last Stalinist regime in Europe, while the microphones are still switched on. I register these sensations, but do not feel involved. So I can concentrate on what I’m really engaged in, that is, my own writing.
I continue to write in German and for a German public, even though the contents may deal with Italy or Sweden. This fact, incidentally, marks an enormous difference to those who are exiled by force and whose publications are prohibited in their mother countries. I do not have the need and extreme difficulty to earn my living in my host country. This makes life much easier.
That is why the explanation for my living in exile is simple.
However, such a lifetime decision out of free will is also very complex and therefore not at all easy to explain in the remaining time of one and a half minutes. One of my close writer friends in Germany, Uwe Herms, who at present happens to live in Berlin, who has been a writer in residence in China as well as the United States, maintains that a writer is in exile by definition, because by his very writing he positions himself outside society in order to get a better look at things. He is a bit of an outlaw. He doesn’t follow general rules, such as career and moneymaking, and by no means is he an enthusiast for national glory. Thus, he becomes a stranger in his own country. Even our latest Nobel Prize winner, Mr Günter Grass, has expressed this last week.
But this is only the general truth. There is always an additional personal truth that has to do with your own psychic set up. In post-war Germany (and I’m aware that this means a period of some half century by now, and eighty years since world war I) I still have the feeling of discontinuity, of interruption, of destruction. Just look at our big cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, and Frankfort. Beautiful: but reconstructed. Where is the charm and metropolitan lifestyle of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” that Alfred Döblin described so vividly in his famous novel? Hamburg was destroyed by nearly 90%, with none of its historic centre left. Dresden was practically erased from the map. In contrast, if you come to a city like Rome, where your read some 3000 years of history just by looking at the architecture, or to a capital like Stockholm, which was never involved in any sort of war ever since her beginnings as the Viking settlement “Birka”, you have a feeling of continuous growth and wholeness. You experience a synchronisation of different epochs and characteristics.
Fascism never put an end to Rome. But Nazism did to Berlin.
The same feeling comes up when you talk to people. In Berlin, everything is recent history, shaped by separation and the Iron Curtain. There is no unification, as if half a century of divided history had not happened. Also this Günter Grass pointed out last week. The isolation of West Berlin has shaped psychic frames and social behaviour. During the time of cold war, the West Berliners (those whom John F. Kennedy addressed with his famous words “Ik byn ain Bälinna”) were exempt from two important German laws. One was military service. Living in West Berlin, you did not have to join the navy, or the army. The city was full of people who did not like German re-armament. This is one of the sources of the student movement of 1968. The other was the so-called “police hour”, i.e., official closing time for pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, strip tease and the like. The closing was abolished completely to compensate for the fact that Berlin was fenced in. The Berliners were imprisoned by surrounding communist territory. There were periods when one could get out only by plane.
All of this is still present in the talks of Easterners and Westerners of today. Collective memory is a cage that does not seem to be easy to escape from.
By escaping into another culture, like the Mediterranean, you manage to regain a broader view on the wholeness of history. Just think of Charlemagne, Karl der Große, or Barbarossa, Kaiser Rotbart, who were European figures long before Europe was talked about in terms of national states uniting. In the early medieval (which was no dark ages at all, by the way) “The Holy Roman Empire of German Nations” stretched out from Sicily in the South up to the North Sea, without any major wars or sufferings. At the times of German classic authors like Goethe and Schiller, the territory of Germany consisted of more than 300 Dukedoms and Kingdoms and other –doms, with only the German language to unite them. This year’s Cultural Capital of Europe, Weimar, was a small place of a few square miles, where Mr Goethe was in charge of street construction. He went on a two years trip to Italy to discover the ancient world, and, as it were, the world as such.
It meant to discover civilisation and intellect as opposed to his own notion of culture and ingenuity. It also meant to discover another dimension of hospitality.
An easier way of life. The happiness of improvisation in contrast to the wariness of planning. Chaos may function, Goethe learnt. And so did I, whose father was a German policeman serving the Prussians, the Weimar Republic, the Hitler Großdeutschland, and the Adenauer, and Willy Brandt West Germany, before he finally was pensioned.
That’s why I’m living outside. I’m perfectly happy. I feel better balanced, eating saltimbocca instead of Schnitzel, drinking wine instead of beer, and having pasta instead of potatoes all the time. It’s a whole dimension of difference.
Thus, the one who lives in exile out of free will – “freiwilliges Exil”, the German language permits to say – is a privileged person. I am most grateful for the lessons I had to learn and the overwhelming hospitality I was to meet, both in Italy and Sweden. So I say “Mille grazie a tutti i miei amici italiani” and “Tack så mycket till mina svenska vänner” for letting me live amongst you as a friend. And in this “Thank you!”, as you may well understand, I now include the Rhodes Centre and all the people who make this wonderful work here possible. It is great hospitality. It is civilisation. It is humane. Thank you.
(published in Two Realities simoultaneously, Podium, Stockholm 2000)
The Old and the New
Sometimes, one is too close to one’s own conditions. One’s history. One clings to old habits and does not see, what’s up. Then it takes a stranger to tell you who you are and were you came from.
We Europeans have many reasons to forget about the positive sides of our heritage. It seems as if two horrible world wars (in which my own nation plaid an infamous role) as well as nearly half a century of imposed satellite communism have filled, for each and everyone, a whole rucksack of unpleasant memories not to be proud of. Even the younger generation carries that rucksack around. It’s just there. Or is it the sheer length and contradiction of recorded history – Greek, Roman, medieval, Renaissance, modern times – that sometimes makes Europeans so tired and indecisive?
But then, upon closer inspection, we discovered that there was also half a century of capitalistic dominance. It was a kind of capitalism that felt as imported as Soviet communism, which was a far cry from what Kant, Hegel, Marx had contemplated in the 19th century.
But weren’t there some decisive differences? Wasn’t it exactly the American concept of freedom and democracy, to which West Germany owed its political, moral and economic resurrection after 1945?
Yes, by all means.
Notwithstanding, under the surface and rather hard to sort out, there were contradictions. To make a long story short, suffices it to say that the American way of life is far more homogenous than is the life of so many European nations with so many different histories and languages?
Just how difficult it is to unite them under one European roof can be perceived when looking at the most recent EU past. It is actually only now, after the creation of a common currency (the Euro) and the abolishing of boundaries between most parties (the Schengen agreement), that Europe can be called a union of some sort.
But then, amidst the slow and cumbersome process of defining common goals and seeking for a new corporate identity on the European stage, entered a certain Mr. Rumsfield. Like the magician does with the rabbit, he unexpectedly drew a whole new definition of Europe out of Uncle Sam’s top hat. And, what’s more, by his magic he produced a new division of the old continent such as had not existed even before 1989 when the Berlin wall still stood firmly. Namely, he spoke of an Old and a New Europe.
There it popped up, out of the blue, that clear and undisturbed-by-history insight of a stranger. One look, and the man knew it all. His revolutionary new way of splitting Europe, by dividing it in Old and New, was so stunning that at first, even the most ardent of US friends and admirers did not know what to think. But then they started to think. Very short and down to earth as always were the theatre people. The Hamburg based director Juergen Flimm declared that he shall not let persons like Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfield mar his good memories of America. Luc Bondy, based in Basel and Berlin, said: “If the Old Europe (…) finally disposes of enough good sense not to want wars any more, then I’m all for it. Because it is the New Europe.”
More elaborate were the philosophers. “It means putting things upside down in a rather queer way,” wrote Juergen Habermass on January 24th in the conservative paper FAZ, “if Rumsfield calls this new Europe the ‘Old’. He himself is responsible for a security doctrine, which defies all principles of international law. In the criticism of true European friends, he meets America’s own – obviously now abandoned – ideals of the 18th century.” And his younger colleague Peter Sloterdijk writes in the same edition: “The Old Europe, represented in an honorable way by France and Germany, is the advanced fraction of the West which has (…) evolved to a post-heroic stile of culture and politics. Whereas (…) heroes like Rumsfield and Bush actually believe that only by violence can peace be achieved, while culture and laws are valid only when the weather is nice.”
But it needed more time to elapse before the deeper implications of the “Old Europe” verdict were seen. In May 2003, at the congress of the German section of international P.E.N., the General Secretary Wilfried F. Schoeller stated: “The war in Iraq has not finished yet. It continues in guerilla activities and organized raids. To the losers one must count the freedom of press and media in America. But not only there direct censorship is on the march. Already September 2002, at the international P.E.N. –meeting in Ohrid, Macedonia, we promoted a peace resolution. It found a vast majority amongst the delegates. However, when after Rumsfield’s platitude ‘Old Europe’, we tried to initiate a common declaration of European P.E.N. centers, we failed. (…) Most of the centers declined signing a clear-cut text.”
Thus, the audience of writers was made aware of how subtly censorship functions even without a censor, in our own heads. These mechanisms were further dwelled on by the president Johano Strasser. In his welcoming address, he pointed out, that “again the validity of the old saying is proven how in times of war, truth is one of the first victims. The media in which we live and work (…) is language. Long before the beginning of this war could we observe how all around us language changed, how a vocabulary of martial connotations started to invade. (…) The work of the author always implies criticism of language, as he is forced to work with words and phrases on which the dust of history has gathered and in which the traces of so many different uses and abuses are engraved. The language used by President George W. Bush and his Secretary of Defense Rumsfield is especially familiar to us Germans – if we do not completely ignore history, that is. (…) ‘Who is not for us is against us’ (…) – don’t we know this from the infamous ‘Hunnenrede’ (Speech against the Huns) of Emperor Wilhelm II in front of German soldiers before they embarked towards far away China to put down the so-called Boxer uproars? Likewise, the religious sense of mission (…) is familiar by the phrase of the Kaiser, ‘ A man with God is always the majority’. We in Old Europe are all too well acquainted with this kind of rhetoric (…) and know to what terrible arrogance it may pave the way.”
In other words, Mr. Rumsfield’s one short remark triggered off rather long reverberations. But miraculously, now, our rucksack of history feels much lighter to carry. Suddenly, there is a renewed sense that for all our diversities, we are actually Europeans, most of us.
Thank you, Mr. Rumsfield: and should you happen to put you foot on Old Europe one of these days, don’t miss to visit Lower Saxony, Germany, where your ancestors stem from. After so much re-appreciation of old values resulting from your dazzling remark, I'm sure you'll be welcome even by your own relatives.
(originally pubished in The Book and The Computer, internet magazine, Berkley and Tokyo)
Peace and Poetry
After World War II, when the so-called Marshall-Plan for the reconstruction of Europe was proclaimed, a historical photograph was taken. A number of gentlemen in dark suits are standing on a staircase, applauding. In the first row, we recognize the poet T.S. Eliot, the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Foreign Secretary of the United States George C. Marshall and the General Omar Bradley, the latter wearing uniform.
Perhaps you will wonder why I should start these remarks on peace and poetry with the words of a general who died in 1981. But then, his two most famous sentences are as actual today as they were then: “Ours is a world of atomic giants with ethics still in their childhood” is the first, the second “We know more about war than about peace, more about killing than about life.”
These words have philosophical dimensions hardly to be expected from politicians, let alone military generals.
So here we have on one photograph
– a general who could justly claim that he had fought for peace;
– a foreign secretary who was awarded the Nobel Peace Price because of his reconstruction efforts even in Germany, i. e. the country of the former enemy;
– a scientist who got into the centre of the post-war clash between capitalism and communism called the cold war because he knew that the possession of the hydrogen bomb would destroy the fragile balance of power of those days;
– and last not least, a celebrated author who from a Christian point of view wrote against a possible world catastrophe.
Maybe it should be noted here that all of them were Americans.
Politicians of democratic states are expected to work for peace. That is why the assault on Iraq by the USA with its ever-changing motives was so shocking for the rest of the world. However, only very few politicians have the ambition to create peace. And only the most charismatic amongst them do find words worthwhile to be commemorated by the people. There is, for one, Indira Ghandi with the phrase “You cannot do a handshake with clenched fists.” Or her namesake Mahatma Ghandi, inventor of non-violent resistance, with the eye-opening half-sentence “an eye for an eye … until the whole world is blind.”
These two quotations unmask most of present day’s politics for what they are: bare relapses to atavism, mostly to nationalistic war doctrines of the 19th century. Already the social democratic German politician Willy Brandt, bearer of the Nobel Peace Price, commented this with the saying: “ Not war is the father of all things, but peace is the mother of all things.”
To be fair, people in power seldom have the chance to stand for peaceful politics in an unequivocal manner. Mostly, circumstances seem to demand the opposite. If then, in spite of political surroundings, they insist on starting a peace process, they are often murdered from among their own ranks, like Ghandi himself. Or take the Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat. He, too, was shot dead by his own officers because he wanted peace with Israel. Some twenty years later, in 1995, it was the Israeli bearer of the Nobel Peace Prize, Yitzhak Rabin, who was murderd by a fanatic orthodox Jew, because together with Yassir Arafat he strove for a peaceful solution in Palestine. A recent European example is the murder of Anna Lindt, the Swedish foreign Minister. She was stabbed in midday in a Stockholm department store by a Serbian ultra, because she tried to help securing a peaceful future in the Balkans.
I do not have to remind here of the very sad happenings in this country.
Hate and Peace, then, is as relevant a pair of basic antagonism, as is War and Peace. The exiled XIV Dalai Lama, likewise bearing the Nobel Peace Price, defines in a seemingly private way what peace means: “Keeping peace starts with the single human being loving peace and personally being happy and satisfied.”
At this point of the argument, philosophy and politics meet. Maybe, one could also add religious belief. Philosophers and Believers have often confessed in public to peaceful convictions. For that, they have paid with imprisonment, torture or the loss of their lives. Jesus Christ, for example.
Christ stood up for the poor. Therefore, at the beginning of the third millennium, we should commemorate the countless martyrs of an enlightened Church from below, namely in Africa and South America, who towards the end of last century were persecuted and murdered by governmental gangs. Also, in this context, we must not forget the countless Christian and Jewish victims of the Stalinist regime, let alone Hitler’s terrible regime. The twentieth century was the most murderous ever known in history. What for heaven’s sake should make us hope that the twenty-first will be more humane?
The ideal of peace is dangerous for everybody who tries to live it. Without any illusion, the Brazilian bishop Dom Hélder Câmara noted down: “Being pilgrims of equal rights and of peace, we must expect the desert.” The so-called Red Bishop of Rio wasn’t killed, alas, but for his courageous fight against terror, establishing his Church from below, he was sentenced to twenty years of silence by his own catholic Church from above who collaborated with the regimes everywhere in South-America.
Looking for peace, we better stop to believe in institutionalized church. Instead, we should look upon their deeds. The engagement of the last popes seems rather belated, Roman Catholic history being full of bloody crusades, inquisitions and so-called Christianizing. Verily, the Catholic Church has returned its own sufferings to millions of victims. And those who make war, don’t they always seek religious justification? Saddam was an atheist and a murderer, yet he talked of fighting a Holy War. At the same time, George W. Bush pointed out his Christian responsibility.
How about philosophy, then?
Let me give you here just one example from my own country and historic background, that of Immanuel Kant. At the time of the French Revolution he lived in Eastern Prussia, in Königsberg, which today is called Kaliningrad and belongs to Russia. One evening when he was walking near the graveyard of the city he observed the sign of a pub called “Toward Eternal Peace”, meaning the hopes of the dead to enter paradise. But Kant was a thinker, not a believer. What does it take, he asked himself, to gain eternal peace already here on earth? First, he postulated, there must be a binding international law that every state has to obey. This, he realized, was only to be achieved by mutual efforts of republics – or maybe, today we might call them democracies with free elections. Secondly, talking about peace treaties, he says that “no peace agreement should be considered valid which was achieved under the secret reservation of a future war to correct it.” He knew, what he was talking about, considering the many wars of his time going on all around him, especially those of Prussia. And of course, he knew that his thoughts would have been considered treason, had they been discovered. That’s why he called his essay on peace “a philosophical fragment”, hidden away somewhere amongst his writings. Thirdly, he proposes: “Standing armies (…) should cease to exist totally.” Why that? Because he knew that the possession of a formidable army forces the other side to maintain one as well. What he describes is our modern problem of balance of power. If Pakistan has the atomic bomb, India must have it too. And of course both sides must test them for demonstration. A far cry from Ghandi, one should say. Also France must urgently destroy an atoll in the Silent Ocean with an atomic test bomb, as if the glory of la Grande Nation would depend on it! Of course, the Greenpeace ship that protested against it had to be sunk.
As a normal behaviour between nations, what did our philosopher consider equally important? “No state should ever interfere by force in the constitution and government of another state.” A clear-cut observation, useful indeed as a guideline for the United Nations. But one can easily see why George W. Bush and his advisers did not like the UN as long as this multinational organisation stuck to Kant’s enlightened ideas. And why shouldn’t it? After all, the League of Nations, which was the predecessor of the UN at the end of the 19th century, had based its whole constitution on this little utopian essay on eternal peace by Immanuel Kant. Also amongst Americans, you could always find those who knew it better from Kant. Our eminent American colleague, Mr. Gore Vidal, published in 2002 a book with the sly title “Eternal War for Eternal Peace?” You only need to give this rhetorical question one single thought to know how absurd it is.
What is waiting for a poet who writes peace poems? Not anything idyllic, to be sure. Peace poems are not pastoral or bucolic. They are not merely anti-war-lyrics either, because they are neither heroic, nor do they fight opposite ideologies. They try to achieve something far more simple and yet far more complex, that is, to find new and uncompromising words for our everlasting dream of peace. They deplore the killing. They mourn the victims. They plead for life.
In 1931, the German author Kurt Tucholsky noted down: “ The military police of any country will shoot the soldier who deserts his army. That is to say, they kill those, who do not want to kill any more.” He lived as a Jewish exile in Sweden. In 1935, seeing what was going on in Germany, he committed suicide.
This is the past and yet, it is bitter reality. It remains to be seen how the Israeli Government will handle those pilots who refused to attack settlements in Gaza. We shall see what the German government does to those soldiers, who do not want to shoot people in Afghanistan.
Those poets whose lyrics deal with peace do not pretend to know it better. They voice their fears and their hopes because they feel committed to humanity. For some of them, the cause may be personal persecution and expulsion from their home country, for others just a visit to Sarajevo or Palestine. Maybe, they have heard in television some politicians or military leaders talk about so-called “collateral damages”, even apologizing, because they only wanted to deal out “chirurgical blows”.
Such official language is altogether cynical. We who are authors must be careful with language. Otherwise, we’ll get used to think of war as the normal condition of mankind.
(Lecture for the conference "Sufism and Peace" in Islamabad, 2010)
