Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Do the minutes of the meeting of the Council of Idiots end here? No, they continue a bit, something along these lines: in the current era, ancient enmities between peoples, usually going back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, had flared up again. After a period in which we thought we had finally and definitively been saved from them, at least on our continent (what deserved the name of salvation here, if not that?), all the hereditary enmities had bubbled to the surface in Europe, in their most naked form. Long ago, very long ago, even among the prejudices peoples had against one another, there had been a few affectionate ones and many that were at least ambivalent: if the X were lazy, at least they were jolly; if brutal, at least reliable; if bad cooks, at least good musicians; if bandits, at least not sociopaths; if reeking of garlic, at least the best beekeepers. But now all that mattered between peoples were the terrible memories, the most terrible ones, which completely dominated the present. Where did people today get these memories, when they had grown up with history books from which any trace of antagonistic allusions to other countries had been expunged?

Grotesque memories in our part of the world, meanwhile unified as a legal and economic entity and thus almost a single state, as once before in time immemorial; all intracontinental borders eliminated meanwhile, so that one could travel by reindeer sled from Lapland to Thessaloniki, on water skis from the Wörthersee to St. Petersburg: “You Spaniards stabbed my brother with a spear in Cambrai in July 1532”; “The Liechtensteiners betrayed us to the Turks back in the Middle Ages”; “The British are mining the English Channel as they did under Henry VIII”; “The Swiss are swearing fealty just as they did long ago to a land where the sun never rises”; “There’s not a single Frenchman who does not bear collective guilt and will not have to make amends for the beheading of Marie Antoinette …”; “Your goalkeeper killed our defender.” End of the Council of Idiots executive summary?

By now every people detested every other — and detested completely — detested each other as never before in human history. Declarations of friendship between peoples and celebrations of eternal reconciliation held official significance only, and were merely temporary, not for the long haul: soon evil thoughts emerged among the official representatives, too, among them especially (what the population as a whole thought was not expressed openly, as had always been the case? and only a god could have articulated it?).

The “people’s representatives” on the one hand and the “political educators” on the other were the first to drop all restraint toward the opposing country and appoint themselves leaders in the war of words. This phenomenon, too, was no novelty in history. What was new and unheard-of in this transitional period — or will it turn out to have been the end of time? — is that the “leading statesmen” and the “opinion-molders” were saying precisely those things, which they then put into action, for which in previous historical eras the mob had been known, or which had at any rate been ascribed to it.

There were no longer any borders? Yet restrictions and prohibitions as perhaps never before. When a current leader of one sort or another found his prohibitions colliding with the many recent restrictions, something coalesced in his person that we had thought consigned to the distant past, long buried in the obscurity of legend: in him, things that played a role only in historical-recreation films, and were increasingly fading from human memory, all the malice, murderous impulses, lynching fantasies, and bestialities buried in the ancient rubbish heap of his country’s mob, found their new mouthpiece and third rail. Everywhere the perhaps overrated mob of formerly existing countries, reduced long since to dust and bone fragments, was reembodied in the current leaders; and each of these revenants rivaled his predecessors in defiance of the law, blind rage, and homicidal hatred.

But strangely enough: the old mob now became visible to us only and exclusively in the person of the revenant — no mass of people presented itself as the new mob, only those who in each other’s company styled themselves the “leaders.” Our memory preserves from earlier times a specific image of the traditional mob: how after a speech in a hall or a stadium by the leader of the day, in the surrounding streets and squares, up to then deserted or peaceful, the manhole covers begin to pop up, and his followers, who have been lurking underground, are catapulted into the light, an instant majority, for the moment just grinning palely like ghosts and shoving a bit, not yet pouncing and crushing — but wait, just you wait.

And almost the same image fits the modern mob: it, too, in the guise of the so-called leaders, suddenly hoists itself out of a sewer opening, one over here, another over there, ready to pounce and strike — except that they remain isolated, without a trace of a following or a people behind them — and why do they not wage their wars in single combat, as used to happen in the Middle Ages or in legend, man-to-man, woman-to-woman, etc., stabbing, shooting, bombing each other out of existence — instead of their respective peoples — after posing for a photo opportunity for posterity, for all I care?

The prewar gloom: the wars between the countries of the continent, outwardly united and border-free, had not yet broken out; would perhaps not even break out in the true sense; would not be declared and would also no longer be called “war” but, for instance, “peace operation” or “love action” (see above). Yet one of the new leaders, from the former cornflowers-in-the-gun-barrel movement, made a revealing slip of the tongue when his favorite slogan—“Not war — love!”—reversed itself in his mouth into “War and love!”; and in fact, during his last “Operation Outstretched Hand” (against another country), his wife, barren for many years, finally got pregnant (his caressing of her belly in public).

And at any rate, the incidents preliminary to war were piling up, and again it was indicative that they were always mob actions committed by the leading personages, and that these mob actions were directed against what was probably one of the first basic laws of primitive, still stateless, societies — that more and more leaders, invited to visit another country, trampled the ancient law of hospitality underfoot, worse than any old-time mob.

One of these characters took his morning jog, dressed accordingly, by zigzagging through the valley where the host country’s kings were buried (a photo that later appeared on the dust jacket of his how-to book for joggers). A picture of another leader made the rounds showing him in a bomber flying over a country that had been almost completely wiped out in the last world war by his forefathers. He was laughing uproariously, his feet in tennis shoes propped on the improvised map table at 5,000 meters. A third leader (wasn’t it always the same one) could be seen at a compulsory peace conference jabbing the host in the chest with both hands, one finger on each hand extended like a dagger. And a fourth, while touring a foreign city destroyed in civil unrest, did not go on foot or by car but had himself pulled in a small cart by a couple of natives, so that he towered above the crowd, with an expression on his face as if he were also the camera by which he was having himself filmed for television, along with the city and the victims.

And the fighter-bombers now far below the passenger plane, menacingly close to the plateau: Wasn’t this the long-awaited open war against the legendary people — these days a mere tribe, a mere sect — that had allegedly retreated into the most remote reaches of the Sierra de Gredos?