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Europe's oppressive legacy

The expansion of the EU to the east could have led to a dynamic of regeneration. Yet Nobel prize holder Imre Kertész sees rather an ideological vacuum in the EU at the beginning of the 21st century.

After the terrible trials of the last century, we witnessed an unexpected and happy development: the bloodless collapse of the Soviet empire. It was a shattering and almost unfathomable experience, which seemed to occur according to its own laws, rather like powerful phenomena in the natural world which we observe with either delight or horror, but which we cannot influence.

Photo:
Tramway in Budapest
Jakob Polacsek/photocase.de

When the colossus with feet of clay had collapsed, bonfires were lit and there was carefree celebration all over Europe. It was only as the initial euphoria wore off that people began to think of the legacy, of the horrifying things which the vanished giant had left behind, and it was in this atmosphere of trepidation that the European idea suddenly emerged.

To be more precise, it was the plan of a European currency and customs union which emerged. There was never any talk of any "idea". In fact, we were quite pleased that the age of ideas had passed. It seemed that with the disappearance of the last totalitarian empire, the last totalitarian ideology had also been extinguished. State socialism, now condemned as a heresy, no longer had any basis in Europe. The currency and customs union, this careful but far-seeing and meaningful thought, consequently seemed all the more appropriate. For as long as anyone could remember, Europe had devoted itself to the tradition of rationalism; although Europe has also brought forth irrational state forms and been in the service of absurd powers, such things were always condemned immediately afterwards. So why should one at this very moment furnish an – incidentally completely necessary – institutional system like the European Union with an idea? Why should it be idealised, or even perhaps ideologised?

This pragmatism, however, which dominated the negotiation rooms - from which one could hear only snatches of debates about finance, and banging on the table by the various sides trying to defend their own interests - turned out to be a language which few people understood in those Eastern European countries which had just regained their independence. Perhaps no one understood it at all. These countries were left to their own devices. However strange it may sound, after the wretched security they enjoyed under foreign occupation, fear and a sense of helplessness now gained the upper hand. Empty slaps on the shoulder were in vain, as were the grand phrases like "What belongs together, grows together". To this day, the wounds still have not healed and instead of a dynamic renewal, it is rather an ideological vacuum which has arisen instead.

It was an important moment, for the fate of Europe was decided at that point - the fate of all of us, which we are even now living through with the sense that deep changes are taking place; that the old ways of doing things has unexpectedly collapsed; that we are threatened by radicalism and terrorism; and that we are powerless. The Yugoslav genocide made it clear that Europe hesitates to accept the oppressive legacy which the Soviet colossus has left it. For several years people did not even dare to take on board of the fact that on Europe's Southeast borders, the jaws of the apocalypse were already opening which today threaten to devour the whole world.

Maybe these are strong words. But I am convinced that the moment of truth has come when instead of populist phrases, juridical arrogance and the political manipulation of people's convictions, it is essential to analyse the facts. Today there is a lot of talk about "old Europe”, its traditions and European culture, and there can be no doubt that the crisis – indeed, the split - which we can now observe all over Europe, is largely cultural in nature. If we remember that Europe in the 20th century did finally manage to achieve victory over the totalitarian powers - the two totalitarian ideologies of Nazism and Communism which threatened its most fundamental existential principles - and that the new millennium dawned precisely under the sign of this victory, then we could indeed feel satisfied. However, these totalitarian powers grew out of European soil, their roots were nourished in the poisoned earth of European culture, and it is a great question whether European vitality would have been sufficient to overcome them without the help of the United States of America.

One could say that this is a political question, not a cultural one. Perhaps this would be the case if we did not see that Europe today faces fundamental issues in a way which is very similar to the situation in 1919 or 1938, and that it is struggling just as indecisively with them now as it did then. How is this possible, when we have heard of nothing else in the half century since the Second World War than of how important it is to remember the horrors of war, and to keep our eyes fixed firmly on the lessons to be learned from the Holocaust and the Gulag, so that all these horrors, as they say, are not repeated?

There is no doubt that remembrance is not easy. Some time ago I visited an exhibition which showed documents about crimes committed by the German army, and I surprised myself by how I, as a foreigner, tried politely and with a fixed expression to preserve a distant attitude in order that I would not be overcome by the horror of the material on display. Had I forgotten that I am myself a victim and a survivor of this horror? Had I forgotten the smell of the morning dew at dawn when the gun salvos thundered out? Sunday evenings in the camp, the crematorium guards still dreaming of the festive cakes they had eaten that day? Forgotten, no, but after I had formulated it in words, it was all cauterised and resting somehow within me.

I am reluctant to give up this sense of rest, even though that is precisely what is necessary. For the shame of which these documents and pictures speak concerns us all. It does not matter if we were there when people had to dig their own mass graves to be then shot into them by their fellow human beings, or whether it is simply through inheritance that we have come into possession of these enormous facts from which we can never more make ourselves free. Ecce homo – so is that what man is like? One day he is called away from his wife and children and elderly parents and the next day he is already shooting wives, children and old people into ditches, his face even displaying the evident pleasure with which he does it? How is that possible? Evidently with the help of a hatred which, together with lies, has become the indispensable need, the most important food for the human soul in our age.

It has never before been as obvious as now that at least two Europes exist, in which the common European experience is reflected in two different ways. According to the general understanding, democracy as a political system; but if you think about it more carefully, democracy is more a matter of culture than just a system - and I am using the word culture here to some extent in the sense in which the word is used in gardening. In Western Europe, democracies have grown up organically, democracy developed as a political system in the soil of social culture, out of economic and political necessity, conditioned by mentalities, and with the help of successful revolutions or great social compromises. By contrast, in Central and Eastern Europe, the political system was set up first – to the extent that it was set up at all – and society had to make great efforts to adapt to it. It was occasionally painful work. But was this not also the case with so-called socialism? In many places, socialism was built directly on top of the feudal system, and what is especially grotesque is that the ideology which was raised to the level of a state religion was completely the opposite of what happened in practice. This brutal contradiction was bridged only by means of terror, and the consequences of that are still being felt today.

We ought to be clear about the fact that the real novelty of the 20th century was the totalitarian state and Auschwitz. The anti-Semitism of the 19th century would have hardly been able to imagine the Final Solution, or want it. Auschwitz therefore cannot be understood in terms of the traditional, archaic, not to say classical concepts of anti-Semitism. We have to understand that there is no organic connection. Our age is not the age of anti-Semitism, but the age of Auschwitz. The anti-Semite of our day no longer struggles against Jews: instead, he wants Auschwitz, the Holocaust. Eichmann said at his trial in Jerusalem that he had never been an anti-Semite and however much the people present may have burst out laughing at the time, I do not rule out at all that he may have been telling the truth. In order to kill millions of Jews, the totalitarian state does not need anti-Semites so much as good organisers. Let us be quite clear: no party and state totalitarianism can exist without discrimination, and the totalitarian form of discrimination is necessarily mass murder.

It is not easy to live with the burden of our historical experiences. It is not easy to confront the brutal fact that those depths of existence which mankind plumbed do not represent the unique and unpleasant history of one or two generations but instead a general potentiality of all human beings. The ease with which totalitarian systems of dictatorship liquidate the autonomous personality shocks us, as does the way people are transformed into a perfectly fitting and submissive part of a dynamic state machinery. We are filled with fear and insecurity that so many people, including ourselves, for a particular period of their lives, became beings whom we later cannot recognise as reasonable people endowed with sense and civil morals, and with whom we neither can, nor want to, identify ourselves any longer.

Once, man was a creation of God's, a tragic creature who needed to be saved. Totalitarianism first caused this lonely being to be dissolved in mass society; it then imprisoned him in the walls of a closed state order and finally degraded him to a lifeless component of a machine. The being no longer needed salvation because he no longer bore responsibility for himself. Ideology robbed him of his cosmos, his loneliness and the tragic dimension of human fate. It forced him into a pre-determined existence, in which his fate depended on his origins in a particular race or class. And together with human fate, man was also robbed of human reality, the life of pure feeling. We stand uncomprehending before the crimes which are possible in totalitarian states, although we only need to bring to mind to what extent the new categorical imperative, the totalitarian ideology, had taken the place of moral life and human thought.

This problematic situation has not been made any easier by the (necessary and long overdue) Eastern expansion of the European Union. The Eastern European peoples attained their freedom without doing very much for it themselves. To be sure, there was the uprising in Berlin in 1953, the Prague Spring in 1968, the Polish Solidarity Movement of 1980: each and every one of them a school of bitterness. An important historical event can be recognised from the fact that it has a continuation, as we know from the French historian, Fernand Braudel. Not one of these events had any organic continuation. Instead, they had only consequences: repression, disillusionment, the ever more depressing of experience of being left to one's own devices and simply having to accept things. In the end the peoples in question no longer believed that they could change their own fate. They all wished for the collapse but no one believed in it, no one did anything about it. And after it had happened, without having been caused by them, they looked around uncomprehendingly, their eyes swimming, if not even displeased at the new situation.

Precisely because these peoples had not won their freedom by their own struggle, and because their values, which had served above all as individual and national strategies for survival, suddenly appeared useless, if not even as shameful collaborationism, a considerable part of this society experienced the freedom which had fallen into its lap more as a collapse than a liberation. And when, in the search for support, they stretched out their arms to the Western European democracies, all they got in return was a short handshake and an encouraging pat on the shoulders. Western Europe could not decide what it should do with its East European neighbours, and that appeared to them as arrogance. Their feelings were hurt, as if they were a poor relative. With freedom, therefore, it was not so much the spirit of renewal which was liberated, but more the spirit of the unpleasant past, of resentment and the reopening of old wounds. In some places, this took the form of national frenzy which degenerated into murder and genocide, in others it was a reserved nationalism, hiding behind the mask of democracy.

Even sceptics and those most prone to see the black side of things were astonished by the vitality of ideas which had been buried long ago, and of ways of thinking and attitudes which most people thought had long since been overtaken. It was as if, in the soundless world-explosion which was brought off with such care and discipline, an important element of the fusion process had been forgotten. Loosened from the chain, this element is now spinning around and hissing like an old hand grenade from an earlier war which has suddenly started to smoulder again. Who would have thought that the "velvet revolutions” would turn out to be a time machine for the peoples of Eastern Europe, which took them not forward but backwards in time, and that they would carry on with their children's games just where they left off them around 1919, at the end of the First World War? It is as if nothing had happened, as if in the meantime the bloodiest and the most traumatic history of Europe had not been played out, in which even they, and particularly they, had played an especially active and suffering role, for which they have never given an account to themselves, and which they have preferred quickly to forget.

There is no doubt that at the beginning of the 21st century we are left to our own devices in respect of ethics. The salvation of man, understood in the higher sense of the term, lies beyond its historical existence – not however in the avoidance of historical experiences, but on the contrary in living through them, in appropriating them, and in tragic identification with them. Only knowledge can raise man above history. In times when the discouraging omnipresence of totalitarian history, which takes all our hope away, knowledge is our only dignified deliverance, the only good. It is only in the light of this knowledge, based on experience, that we are in a position to ask whether we can create values out of all that which we have committed and suffered. In other words, the question is whether we attribute any value to our own life, or whether we are prepared to forget it like people suffering from amnesia, or even to throw it away like suicides. For the radical spirit, which makes scandal, ignominy and shame into the inheritance of human knowledge, is also a liberating spirit which does not restlessly uncover the plague of nihilism in order to leave the field open for these forces but, on the contrary, because its own vital forces are thereby strengthened.

It may be objected that I have not made a single concrete, palpable suggestion here. It is true that I understand nothing about politics, economics or administration. I do not know how questions of refugees, social problems, the inclusion of poorer countries and their valued people can be solved. I do not know how terrorism can be defeated and a new security system created. But there is one thing I definitely do know: a civilisation which does not clearly declare its values, or which leaves its declared values by the wayside, is on the path to collapse and decrepitude. Soon others will proclaim these values, but in the mouths of these others they will no longer be values but instead mere pretexts for limitless power and destruction. We are abandoned to our own devices and we have neither heavenly nor earthly signposts to guide us. We must create our own values, day by day, through that persistent though invisible work which finally brings such values to light, and which can inaugurate a new European culture. When I think of the Europe of the future, I see a strong self-assured Europe which is always ready to negotiate but which is not opportunistic. Let us not forget that Europe was born out of a heroic decision: when Athens resolved to oppose the Persians.

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