Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

I returned to Berlin frequently after 1989 and discovered odd surprises each time. The reunification of the two parts of Germany didn’t reunify the people on the two sides of the old Wall. The “Ossies” (the Easterners) were frustrated to discover themselves second-rate citizens in a capitalist state. They were enraged by the cynicism of what they perceived as a selfish and vulgar society, with big and painful social gaps, and with everyone obsessed with comfort and domesticity. The “Wessies” (the Westerners) saw their former brothers as a financial burden, because they were forced to pay for the professional and social training of these new and maldeveloped citizens, whom they saw as seething with prejudices and resentments, as well as being lazy and demanding. Both sides were far from the much-hoped-for brotherhood.

For a visitor with my background it was ironical to see that the Germans were experiencing a social conflict provoked not by some inferior foreign race, but by sons and daughters of their own people, with the same language and religion, with the same historical and cultural heritage, and with a long common past, for which the last forty years proved to be more than an ignorable misfortune. I took all this as yet another paradoxical and sardonic lesson of history on human nature and its dynamics.

The situation in other Eastern countries has proved to be even more complicated since the wall came down. This should not come as a surprise, yet many people were caught off guard as the new post-communist societies became breeding grounds for a revived nationalism, the return of the old slogans of Nation and Land, the obsolete pastoral ideal of a sheltered homogeneous and heroic community facing the hostility and misunderstanding of a corrupt and degenerate outside world.

A cheap and manipulated populism invaded the public discourse of the new “democratic” politicians in some of these countries, many of whom found their support by backing a new kind of cheap and profitable Bolshevik anticommunism in the game for power.

Those who fought for a democratic future, for a new solidarity among all citizens, confronted a political landscape often obsessed with revenge and resentment, with the fierce fight for social status and the spoils of power. Ethnocentricity, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism flourished. Darwinian competition for enrichment stimulated corruption, nepotism, underground and illegal schemes, and a new demagogy in the public arena.

In this chaotic burst of freedom, some of the former nomenklatura activists and secret police employees became the new political parvenus and nouveau riche — well aware that the power of money was much more efficient than the unstable privileges given by the omnipotent Party.

One of the most outrageous examples of this sort of quickchange act occurred in Romania, where a former court poet of the Ceau sescu clan, a fierce nationalist and anti-Semite, Comrade Corneliu Vadim Tudor became the leader of a new extreme-right party called, no surprise, Great Romania. Barely changing his old slogans, this noisy old-new agitator was elected a member of Romania’s Parliament, even becoming at one point a serious candidate for the presidency. Today, Comrade Corneliu is a member of the European Parliament. Nobody can say that the afterlife isn’t interesting …

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, public debates in Eastern Europe started to exhibit a fierce and quite astonishing confrontation between two different hidden memories, memories that were impossible to discuss openly during the communist era: the memory of the Holocaust and that of the communist terror and crimes. A rhetorical and stupid competition in suffering quickly sprang up between these two nightmares, the Holocaust and Gulag, totalitarian Nazism and totalitarian communism.

During the first turbulent years after 1989, some people looked with a kind of nostalgia to the idealized pre-communist period of their countries. The Christian orthodox countries of Eastern Europe seemed to face much greater difficulties than the Catholic or Protestant ones in adjusting to the modernity of the end of the twentieth century. But even countries that, historically, were more connected to Western civilization displayed many of the same prejudices and resentment as those situated beyond the religious border in the east of Eastern Europe.

It became obvious during this time that the contradiction between two different memories was also alive in the relationship between East and West. Both Holocaust and Gulag happened mainly in the East. After the war, the West European countries debated the Holocaust repeatedly, recognized their complicity and guilt in this horrible crime and so educated a new generation in the spirit of cordiality and responsibility. The Gulag was less of a preoccupation in public debate, not only because it didn’t involve Western participation, but because it also shamed the great rhetoric of “progress,” constantly manipulated by communist propaganda in the East as well as in the West. To this day, the huge crimes of the communist dictatorships, from the Soviet Union to Cambodia and China, from Romania to Albania and Afghanistan, have yet to become a central topic for discussion.

The post-communist turmoil of Eastern Europe was followed by the dismembering of the Soviet Union, the war and ethnic atrocities of Yugoslavia, the Chechnya nightmare, the Kosovo deadlock, the divorce in Czechoslovakia, Putin’s authoritarian rule in Russia with its energy policy of blackmail and old imperial bullying, the stumbling Velvet Revolution in Ukraine and the conflict in Georgia, and xenophobia everywhere toward the new Gypsy scapegoat. These are only a few of the tense additions to the big central issues of immigration and terrorism which are dangers to Europe and the world.

In the face of all this, Europe cannot afford to remain an idyllic venue for spas and museums, a great historical monument of culture and art for global tourism. It cannot afford to be complacent about new totalitarian ideologies and fanaticisms, as happened in the past with Nazism and communism. Europe must defend itself courageously and lucidly against the new dangers of our time and of the future.

We must disappoint those who believe that the end of some totalitarian states meant the end of totalitarianism, or that the happy rupture of 1989 marked the beginning of perfect cooperation by the people and for the people. The great religious or secular dreams of a New Man and of a happy utopian society have been brutally compromised by bloody, extreme ideologies and totalitarian systems of governing.

Yet the consumer capitalist society has also become compromised through its vulgarity and illiteracy; its self-centered ignorance; its ever more mediocre political leaders; its political debates; its TV shows with the same rules of entertainment and mass approval as a rap diva or a skating competition. Nothing seems perceptible in this cacophony unless it’s scandalous and the scandals are soon forgotten.

In 1989, at the end of World War II and its heir, the Cold War, new hopeful and utopian predictions were filling the public arena: the end of history, the end of ideologies. Many people bought into these hollow thoughts.

Soon after the start of our new century and millennium, the religious terrorists of September 11, 2001 proved, with their murderous spectacle of fanaticism, that we are still far from a serene earthly paradise beyond history and ideologies. The human story and mankind’s history go on, as before, through ideas and conflicts, through new — old projects of happiness, and through cruel unhappiness and disasters in daily reality.

The blinded pilots of sacred barbarism of September 11 were fulfilling, paradoxically, the prediction that the twenty-first century would be religious or it would not be at all. But such a prophesy went only so far. It forgot to tell us what would happen if our century did, indeed, become religious. The loudest answer to this question seems to come from the new chevaliers de la mort, crying “God is great!” Not the God of all people, of course, only their God who is fighting all other gods and all the followers of other gods and all the godless sinners of the world as well. Paradoxically, this God becomes the supreme counter-argument against the most important commandment of all religions: thou shall not kill!