Pricey Arnon,
Thanks to your honest letter. Maybe it’s as a result of again in the exact same 12 months of 1995 you and I travelled the identical airway in reverse instructions (we may have even been travelling on the identical time, and might need even crossed paths, not figuring out it, someplace over espresso in Schiphol): you had been going from Europe to New York, whereas I returned from New York (after spending nearly two years within the US) to Europe with the agency conviction, tempered and examined over the earlier two years, that regardless of all my love of journey and thirst for undiscovered lands, I might not have the option and didn’t wish to reside wherever else – that your letter stirred up in me a nostalgia for the world that now not exists.
For my very own youth, for the euphoria, nonetheless sizzling within the air, of the Berlin wall coming down and the Soviet Union collapsing, for the all-conquering religion we held that the renewed Europe would lastly present the world “the top of historical past” Francis Fukuyama had promised, that even age-old tyrannies, like Russia and China, had been about to realize liberal democracy having seen that it was good, that the wolf would lie down with the lamb, and those that needed to kill you’ll agree as a substitute to have dinner with you, received over by the nice gesture of your invitation…
By no means once more, so long as I can keep in mind, was the world dominated by such candy – candy because the cotton sweet at a youngsters’s truthful with merry-go-rounds – political naivete, and now the reminiscence of it brings up in me one thing akin to a wave of maternal tenderness: it was a beautiful time; pity it was so brief.
The place’s the battle in Ukraine?
I needed to learn your letter thrice, most lately this morning. Final night time, Kyiv survived the eleventh Russian air assault this Could, this time with thirty “Kalibr” rockets which had been, fortunately, shot down by our air defence forces, however a month of ruined sleep (as a result of, I’m right here to inform you, these things is loud as all hell when it explodes!) has its simple results, and I needed to verify I didn’t miss one thing in my foggy state: whether or not it was actually doable in your imagined Europe, the one you might be setting up from the opposite facet of the Atlantic [Grunberg lives in New York, Editor’s note] these exact same spring days of 2023, to faux that none of that is taking place – that essentially the most terrifying battle since WWII (and similar to it now within the quantity of armaments and the size of the entrance), a battle to annihilate forty million folks, shouldn’t be being fought, proper now, on this continent – and easily omit it as one thing irrelevant to the theme of Europe’s future? And for the third time I confirmed that no, I didn’t miss something: you actually refuse to see right this moment’s Europe as a product of two world wars – the one European battle you point out is the collapse of Yugoslavia thirty years in the past.
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I understand how simply, on the opposite facet of the Atlantic, wars are moved into the web format: there have been none within the dwelling reminiscence of these lands, and that modifications the cultural optics. While you arrived in New York, avenue musicians on the metro stations had been nonetheless singing “Assist Bosnia now” – I keep in mind them. They’ve modified their repertoire since then, and also you confidently write that that battle “has largely disappeared from the collective unconscious, at the very least exterior Yugoslavia.”
I want to be extra cautious with apodictic statements and intend to show that that battle has not, in truth, disappeared from the European consciousness, to not point out, the unconscious (given anybody is aware of how one can scan this!): the flood of Balkan migrants that has ceaselessly modified the lives of a whole bunch of Italian, Swiss and German cities is not going to let or not it’s forgotten – simply because the eight-million-strong avalanche of Ukrainian ladies refugees is now altering the lives of Czech, Baltic, and Polish cities – and neither will it let be forgotten (since we’re speaking concerning the unconsciousness) the swallowed, like a stone in a single’s abdomen, and so deeply European sense of guilt for the primary severe betrayal of the post-Yalta authorized system: the primary fiasco of the UN peacekeeping troops who turned out to be simply as impotent when going through the raging Ratko Mladic in Srebrenica as the complete European diplomatic edifice when going through Putin in 2008 and 2014 [the Russian invasions respectively of Georgia and Ukraine, Editor’s note].
What you might be calling a disaster of liberal democracy – and I determine because the disaster of worldwide democratic establishments – started again in the identical Nineteen Nineties, and on this regard, the battle within the Balkans shouldn’t be solely not forgotten – it’s not even completed.
The Yugoslav “battle era”
This final level, by the way in which, is definitely borne out for those who learn the Balkan novels that emerged from the battle – one of the attention-grabbing phenomena in European literature of the twenty first century, so far as I’m involved. I couldn’t agree with you extra whenever you write {that a} author should not do the work of evangelising (until they’re pressured to take action by historic circumstances poisonous to humanity, equivalent to battle, tyranny, and so on.), however our societal obligations do embrace, whether or not we prefer it or not, the responsibility to go away a portrait of our time for future generations; this is without doubt one of the abilities we receives a commission for, and, from this angle, “the battle era” of the Balkan authors has earned their charges with sincere work.
When confronted with a collective existential menace, it seems, folks discover it important to know that “somebody has been right here earlier than us” – somebody who survived to inform the story
As proof of this I can provide the remark of the nice urgency with which modern Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian literature started to be translated and browse in Ukraine with the onset of the Russian aggression, i.e. since 2014: when confronted with a collective existential menace, it seems, folks discover it important to know that “somebody has been right here earlier than us” – somebody who survived to inform the story. Literature exists to be able to create such “trans-generational” communities as nicely – to sign to a person, throughout time and area, that they don’t seem to be alone, and to an awesome extent, it’s exactly such communities which were holding Europe collectively as a cultural continuum for the final 5 thousand years.
The Diary of Anne Frank
The diary of Ann Frank seems to be a letter to a lady from the city of Yahidne in Chernihiv area, who, within the spring of 2022, was stored for a month, together with 4 hundred different residents, as a “human defend” in a basement with out water, air flow, or mild: all by that month she stored the tally of days and the useless on the wall with a marker, as a result of she had the language for it, the prepared types of behaviour she had absorbed from the air of the identical tradition that eighty years earlier guided the pen of her German peer.
All these are pretty apparent issues and I really feel just a little silly bringing them up with you, the son of a German Jewish lady who had survived the Holocaust, and, on prime of that, a person who has the expertise of navy service, which I lack. As an alternative, I’ve a distinct expertise, and it’s making me write these traces proper now: within the 12 months of the Russian-Ukrainian battle, I’ve, if Google is to be trusted, made displays in 21 of Europe’s nations and 93 of its cities (which suggests not solely the capitals, equivalent to Strasbourg, however a reasonably consultant pattern, from Poland to the UK) in an try and, as my Italian writer put it, “clarify to the West all the pieces about this battle that we had missed within the final eight years”.
I’ve seen how shortly and decisively, actually, in entrance of our very eyes, this battle (which earlier than February 24, 2022 appeared, to many, unthinkable, and extra nonsense has been stated in an effort to rationalise it than is acceptable for the tradition of millennia-old universities) is altering Europe. And the way in another way it does so.
One may write a whole guide about this: how the injuries of a number of generations that had been pushed into oblivion open and bleed once more, in numerous methods in numerous nations, how psychological constructions, constructed over many years and typically centuries to cover inconvenient truths crack and shatter, how the grandchildren discover themselves turning to the behavioural patterns (and fears, and traumas) of their grandparents and great-grandparents – and the way Europe, unexpectedly for a lot of, seems to be nonetheless divided alongside the road of the Berlin wall, besides it’s not divided into “previous” and “new” democracies as had been optimistically believed up until now, however into nations of various formative expertise of the First World Battle and the Second World Battle respectively, or, to simplify it additional (and leaving apart the exception that’s Britain), into former empires and former colonies.
Unpaid historic payments
Closets have opened, and the skeletons are falling out. All our unlearned classes and unpaid historic payments have been set free and are flying into our faces just like the deck of playing cards into Alice’s within the Wonderland court docket. [Finnish writer] Sofi Oksanen advised of nervous seniors all throughout Finland, who, on 24 February 2022, rushed to name their grandchildren with directions on how one can pack go-bags and the way, in case the Russian military entered Finland, to bribe Russians “the appropriate approach” (later it turned out that such information elevated one’s possibilities of survival even in Bucha and Izyum).
On the identical time, on the opposite finish of the continent, a Belgian diplomat was earnestly making an attempt to persuade my good friend (a Ukrainian) that Ukrainians had been higher off surrendering to Russians and dwelling on in peace, like Belgium beneath the German occupation. “However what concerning the Belgian Jews?” my good friend, a quite caustic individual, inquired. “Did in addition they get to reside in peace?” When his interlocutor, understandably, couldn’t reply, my good friend added, “The factor about this battle, my good friend, is that we’re all Jews in it” – a press release whose accuracy was not appreciated within the Europe that by no means paid a lot consideration to the historical past of “the Bloodlands” (Timothy Snyder’s time period), the Europe of “the Trizone and the Marshall Plan” (my very own time period), till after a 12 months of cautious remark of mass Ukrainian Srebrenicas which the Kremlin had placed on an industrial scale.
“The factor about this battle, my good friend, is that we’re all Jews in it”
On this method – at the price of one other European genocide – the beforehand devalued expertise is being re-evaluated. Do you actually consider this doesn’t advantage your consideration?
I wish to make this clear: I’m not after some “renewal of historic justice” for the so-called (notice that this time period remains to be in use!) “Japanese Bloc” – God save me from believing in historic justice, I’m an enormous woman (though, I can’t deny it offers me nice pleasure to see these Lithuanian European MPs who for years had been fairly rudely advised by these from “the previous democracies”, in response to their warnings towards Wandel durch Handel [“Change through trade”, Editor’s note] with Moscow, that it was their “phantom pains” talking, all however stroll across the halls of the European Parliament sporting T-shirts that say “We advised you so!”– an mental is all the time completely happy to see competence win a victory over ignorance, regardless of the context).
A brand new fascist empire on the doorstep
Quite the opposite, I’m invested in one thing else: within the collective reminiscence and collective expertise with out which no literature is feasible. The present genocidal battle in Europe’s East has confirmed that all the pieces shouldn’t be in addition to we had believed with the European reminiscence and the complete European tradition of memorialisation, since hundreds of books and movies concerning the Nazis and the Holocaust did nothing to assist Europe acknowledge a thirty-year-long swelling of a brand new fascist empire on its doorstep, and didn’t forestall it from partaking, as if spell-bound, in all the identical appeasement measures it had made within the Thirties towards the Third Reich – proper up till the second this new empire was able to drive its tank into the home of Europe (and would have finished so had Ukraine not stopped it!).
What good, one may ask then, had been all these books and movies if we discovered nothing from them, not concerning the previous however concerning the future? (As a result of literature, if it’s price something in any respect, is all the time concerning the future even when it tells of Homeric instances).
I’m not the primary to pose this query. The primary individual I do know to have requested it was – again in 1994, whenever you and I had been each busy with, as Czeslaw Milosz put it, “the journey of America” – Marek Edelman, one of many ethical compasses of the Polish intelligentsia of his era and a frontrunner of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion: when journalists got here to interview him on an anniversary of the rebellion, he berated them for writing concerning the previous as a substitute of speaking about Bosnia – “We should cease this battle, in any other case all the pieces we had fought for again then loses its which means” (sic!).
Do you not suppose that is brilliantly put? A 12 months earlier than Srebrenica, Edelman, who had devoted half a century to the reminiscence of the Polish victims of the Holocaust, sensed unerringly that the brand new battle had already chosen “its Jews”– and that, for him, put into query the historic victory received by the Ghetto heroes. Hamlet will surely acknowledge such setting proper out of joint instances! (1).
Cultures differ, amongst different issues, of their methods of experiencing time, and on this sense, Marek Edelman’s formulation is, for me, the essence of Europeanness. Do you keep in mind how William Faulkner put it in Requiem for a Nun – “The previous is rarely useless. It isn’t even previous”? You’d dismiss historical past, identical to battle, with a rapid-fire evasion and a smile, at an acceptable second, for the common, in your opinion, human inclination to idealise the previous (which, by the way in which, shouldn’t be almost as common as we’ve been taught, and never each European nation has its personal delusion of the Golden Age – it’s additionally an attribute of former empires).
For me, this corresponds to what you write about escape: I, too, know this methodology of saving your self from trauma, be it hereditary, familial, or collective (literature, in any case, is one other methodology of doing the identical, at the very least till you get persecuted for what you write!) – I, too, have it in my psychological repertoire, as much as and together with a pressured escape in 2014 (luckily, not for lengthy, just a few months) from employed hitmen (spoiler: individuals who wish to kill you’ll not dine with you, Arnon, and I urge you to not sit down with them in the event that they immediately invite you!). However, since that very same 2014 I’ve absorbed one other lesson: this methodology now not works.
To ensure that escape to work, the escapee should in the beginning have someplace to flee to, should have a psychological map of the “security zones” assured to her or him inside a dependable civilizational order, maintained and defended by another person. And on this century, humanity is beginning to run out of such “security zones”, at the very least within the a part of the worldwide village that has legislation, police, electrical energy and working water: each Europe and the USA are ceasing, earlier than our personal eyes, to be secure locations (after we meet, I may inform you of how in Germany, Poland and another EU nations teams of pro-Russian neo-Nazis develop bolder in terrorising the Ukrainian refugee ladies whereas the native police doesn’t know how one can cease them). I’m afraid solely Australia and Western Canada stay unspoiled, however given the anticipated variety of local weather refugees by 2050…
Now we have no approach out, Arnon. That’s the factor. Now we have nowhere else on this planet to run away from those that wish to kill one thing or somebody. And that’s the reason my nation is combating as ferociously because the Warsaw Ghetto eighty years in the past: we had been simply the primary to understand this.
This letter has already grown to indecent size, and with remorse I need to omit of it the topic I discover most painful within the destiny of Europe, and one on which (had the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion not disrupted all the pieces) I might now be ending a brand new novel I’ve been carrying lovingly for a few years: specifically, the top of the guide tradition, or, extra typically, of the complete Enlightenment mission.
A while, after we win this battle, I’ll undoubtedly end that novel. Sadly, for the second, the escape into it’s not accessible to me – till our victory, the very language during which I write stays in danger: on the territories occupied by Russia, folks get killed for talking it, and all the pieces written in it’s being expunged from libraries and archives – an unambiguous message of what awaits me and my tradition ought to we lose. For this reason so many writers, musicians, actors, and scientists have volunteered to go to the entrance: earlier than we are able to get well the escape choice for ourselves, we’ve got to equip the “security zone” to flee to with our personal palms. And to do that, we have to win this battle – and repel the assault on ourselves and Europe.
So the very last thing I’ll ask you to do – since you aren’t sure if Europe “is greater than mere geography” (I’m misplaced right here: the geography of what? The European plain? With out the British Isles, however together with the Urals and Kazakhstan, the Nice Steppe? The place precisely do the geographical borders of your Europe lie – and the place, after the 20th century, can there nonetheless be discovered a geography impartial of the cartographer’s hand? Did the 1985 Soviet maps Russia used to enter Ukraine in agency perception that nothing may have modified in our nation over thirty years of independence, not show the ultimate demise of the pondering born of the period of geographic discoveries?) – sure, the very last thing, is to recollect just a few geographical names.
Truly, I ought to begin with those that represent the symbolic markers of my Europe, and are acquainted to everybody, if not on this very capability: Rome-Paris-Canossa-Magdeburg. Rome on this quartet signifies the rule of legislation, Paris – human rights (the primary Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen!), Canossa – the separation of ecclesiastical and secular authority (thanks, Henry IV, that we’re not obliged, like Russians, to deify our rulers!), and Magdeburg – native self-governance (city-polises are, in fact, an Historic Greek invention, however for the sake of continuity, let’s begin our rely from the Magdeburg rights of Otto the Nice).
The very language during which I write stays in danger: on the territories occupied by Russia, folks get killed for talking it, and all the pieces written in it’s being expunged from libraries and archives – an unambiguous message of what awaits me and my tradition ought to we lose
This quartet compactly encapsulates for me all the pieces Most worthy that humanity owes to Europe, and the explanation, regardless of the crusades, ethnic cleansings and different numerous manifestations of barbarity current in its CV, to like, cherish, and defend Europe, until the top, on the value, if obligatory, of 1’s personal life.
Let me return to geography and borders. In her most up-to-date column in The Atlantic (“Incompetence and Torture in Occupied Ukraine”), Anne Applebaum makes an essential remark: the Russian occupiers discovered it sudden and completely incomprehensible that in Ukraine the mayors of cities and heads of rural communities are, in truth, elected by their friends and never appointed “from above”, and so they stay accountable to their voters even after they lose communication with Kyiv, which means (in Russian phrases), their “bosses”. (Sadly, when Russians don’t perceive one thing, they destroy it, so these people represent, beneath occupation, the highest danger group – the best share of arrests, deaths, and disappearances is registered amongst them).
I learn Anne Applebaum’s textual content as a requiem for Fukuyama’s writings from the Nineteen Nineties: it makes it very clear democracy can’t be exported like potatoes. I used to be reminded that the Magdeburg proper lasted for nearly 600 years in Ukraine: it started getting used within the thirteenth century, throughout the Galicia-Volhynia dynasty, and was liquidated by the Russian Empire within the eighteenth century together with the autonomous Cossack Hetmanate’s different establishments.
In the event you have a look at the map of this battle, just a few particularly dramatic, multi-episode, already legendary battles stand out: Hostomel, the place on 24 February 2022, the Russian paratroopers did not take management of the airport and retreated, unaware that the one drive opposing them was the native territorial defence; Chernihiv – town of millennia-old church buildings on the UNESCO checklist of world cultural heritage, which the Russians razed to the bottom from 24 February 24 to 1st of April, as they might later raze Mariupol and Bakhmut, however by no means managed to take; Nizhyn that held out beneath siege, as if again within the Center Ages, for a month, (when meals began to expire, the native farmers snuck milk and flour into town by roundabout routes and distributed them to the residents) however didn’t enable the invaders in – I can not fail to say that these have for hundreds of years been cities of free residents: Hostomel since 1614, Chernihiv since 1622, Nizhyn since 1625. It’s a great factor they’d defended their proper to be free.
The border of Europe now lies – and never metaphorically in any respect – right here, alongside the previous jap attain of the Magdeburg proper: each Japanese-Ukrainian metropolis (city, village) that faces the enemy is a fortress on the frontier. And the way forward for Europe relies upon instantly on whether or not they’ll stand their floor or fall.
I don’t know if that is “greater than mere geography” as a result of I don’t know what “mere geography” is. I simply repeat the names of the cities to myself now and again, as one repeats the names of beloved folks – to benefit from the sound of them, the bodily materiality of them, the dependable elasticity and softness of their consonants, the hollows of the vowels: Hostomel. Chernihiv. Nizhyn. I’m weak with gratitude each time.
It will make me very completely happy for those who remembered these names as nicely.
With kindest regards,
Oksana Zabuzhko
1) “The time is out of joint! O cursed spite,/ That ever I used to be born to set it proper!” Hamlet, Act I, scene V
This letter is without doubt one of the “Letters on Democracy”, a mission of the 4th Discussion board on European Tradition happening in June 2023 in Amsterdam. Organised by De Balie, the Discussion board focuses on the which means and way forward for democracy in Europe, bringing collectively artists, activists and intellectuals to discover democracy as a cultural quite than a political expression.
For the Letters on Democracy, 5 writers envision the way forward for Europe in a sequence of 5 letters initiated by Arnon Grunberg. The writers – Arnon Grunberg, Drago Jančar, Lana Bastašić, Oksana Zabuzhko and Kamel Daoud – come collectively throughout the Discussion board, in a dialog concerning the Europe that lies forward of us and the position of the author in it.