Summer Story or Europe between division and union

Last summer I had the great opportunity and good fortune to spend three months with around 10 people from all over Europe. We stayed in the small castle of Bettina and Achim Von Arnim, which is about hundred kilometers from Berlin and belongs to the Neue Bundesland, formerly called the GDR. The tiny village of Wiepersdorf, where the castle was built, has only thirty houses, no stores and one cafe. This Wiepersdorf cafe shop was at the time celebrating its 100th jubilee and resembled a relic more than anything else.

The village with its castle as a nest of artists, enclosed by a fence of endless woods, looked like an abandoned town. Almost all of its inhabitants knew that their castle was a place where artists came to stay for a while and the leave, therefore it was nearly impossible to establish a close relationship or a friendship with them.
It may sound logical, but this wasn’t the main reason why one could not start a connection with the villagers. Having experienced political changes for over a decade, among them the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, and having had to swallow the fact that most of the young people had left for the West of the country in pursuit of work, prosperity and a better future, the village and the villagers gave the outsider a taste of a desert. To cut a long story short, this village didn’t really have much to offer yet, at the same time, it offered a lot.
Because the castle in which our artists’ colony lived was practically separated from the outside world and traveling to Berlin by bus or train took over two hours, the majority of my colleagues, including myself, preferred to go for a walk or a stroll in the endless forests around Wiepersdorf.
Who were these colleagues?
They were from different parts of Europe and I will leave them nameless, not because of any fear of inflicting a scandal or giving away secrets, but because of the beauty of the memories from the three months that I spent together with them – in the dining hall, in our joint readings, and in the long evenings with many emptied bottles of wine in the balcony of Lady Von Arnim’s castle.
Now, many months later, when I try to reflect and look back on that summer with a lot of endless rain (although at our arrival we’d been told that in this town it never rained), I feel that a lot of episodes are deeply rooted in my conscience. Especially so the long conversations with my colleagues, who, some to a greater and some to a lesser degree, had brought with them a piece of the sorrow and sadness of the problems that reigned or still reign in their countries. To my surprise it was very interesting to observe and come to the conclusion that all of these problems were reflected in their eating habits. Some preferred cheese from the Balkans, some cheese from Holland, some preferred wine over beer while those of the Muslim faith drank neither beer nor wine. However, the most interesting times were our talks after dinner, when all of us ventured into other worlds, which are geographically so near and yet so far apart.
Since Wiepersdorf is in Germany, it was understandable that Germans, from both Germanies (the one of Adenauer and Brand as well as the one of Ulbricht and Honecker), made up the majority of the people sojourning in the castle. I say from both Germanies because the differences (which in the following I will exert in more details) were very recognizable and distinguishable. There was a composer from Poland, a writer from Russia, a Bosnian from the Sandjak region (which lays in between what is today called Serbia and Montenegro), myself from Kosova, a female artist (white) from South Africa, an essay writer from the US and a poet from China. A melting pot- a bunch of people gathered, one could say by chance, in that strange place, who even if they tried, could not escape from each other.
It is well known that every beginning is hard, and so was ours. In the first days when we ate breakfast or lunch together, our behavior was surprisingly childlike. Like children meeting for the first time, we looked at each other, measured each others “power”, tested the waters, saw who spoke whose or which languages, tried to find out who did what or how, who had or who faced which problems, and finally greeted each other politely but with strong doses of reserve.
There is a saying that a word produces another word, and just like that, sometimes out of completely spontaneous encounters and sometimes just through mutual sympathies and likeness, we sat around tables and opened up conversations about art, politics, the food served in the castle, and especially about the weather and Wiepersdorf. Chemistry is the ingredient that unifies people. This statement proved to be more than true especially after groups or circles of friends as they’re usually called in the artistic world had started to be formed.
Perhaps because I feel an uncommon love for the Polish culture and a strong passion for its writers, I somehow sensed and created from the very beginning a special friendship with my Polish colleague. He wasn’t a direct participant of the literary world of his country, but with his bright knowledge about his culture he was generous and patient enough to quench my thirst about anything I would ask. However, one thing didn’t fit into the whole picture. The more conversations we had about the city he lived, the more my admiration for the city of Gdansk fainted and eventually vanished.
Why did this happen?
The port workers of Gdasnk (Danzig), those very same workers who about a decade ago rebelled in the most powerful uprising against communism, are today either unemployed or work as taxi drivers or as a street vendors just to survive and feed their families. This has happened because the port of Gdansk has been closed for many years with no hope in sight of it being reopened.
“That’s the price all of us are paying after the fall of communism!”- my close Polish friend would say.
Of course his answer doesn’t have to do anything with nostalgia or a support for the old system. Even if he’d wanted to feel this nostalgia and support he couldn’t since he was (now) only thirty-three years old. His problem was greater than this. He wanted his country and his people to find a connection, a bond, to Western Europe as soon as possible. More importantly, the bond had to be economical and above all a bond, as he would say, “with a quite normal western world”. There was another problem that disturbed my friend too. The spiritual revival of his country. He wasn’t happy at all as we emptied our glasses of red wine and talked about Gombrowitz, about the creators of the slogan “Central Europe” such as Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, Czeslav Milos or Danilo Kis.
Again, his unhappiness wasn’t a product of any desire not to see these representatives of art as respected people. It was a product of his disagreement with the main stream that he did not [want to] see their work, their intellectual and political influence as an important and a difficult part of the Central European heritage.
The story with my Polish friend, however, doesn’t end here. In his opinion, the young people (artists, politicians and economists) of Central Europe, who have to fight hard to survive not only against wild and real capitalism, but against the waves of globalization as well, haven’t found a strong connection to Western Europe. I think it is interesting to explore some of his thinking and the effect of his explanation in my eyes. Me being somebody from the Balkans who possesses one piece of luggage and lives always in between the Balkans, eternally smeared with blood, and that cold princess Europe with its “mad children” in the past, who walks today so impeccably dressed on the ground paved by perfectionism. The bad Balkans and the cold princess who strives at any cost to bury old-time grudges.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be somebody else than who he is. In other words, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to become a zealous European or if he wanted to preserve and keep his own identity, European too, but a little different. An identity that has been ornamented with pain from times and ideologies of the last century.
Ten years ago (he was 22 years old at the time) he went to Berlin just for the sake of seeing it. Ten years later, he insisted on buying me lunch at a restaurant called “Moevenpick”, because now he wasn’t just an immigrant with 50 DM in his pocket, but somebody with money, almost exactly like all the other tourists in the city.
All in all, my conclusion was that my Polish friend felt good and very European. At least this was my impression. The real debate, which could also be described as a fierce and rough dialogue, always started when he, and not only him, began a dialogue with the colleagues from West Germany. One of them, a female writer of the so called “generation of Guenter Grass’ grandchildren”, or a writer of the latest fashion, would not accept Kundera’s, Kis’ and Milozs’ categories of the separation of Europe into three parts, Western Europe, Central Europe and the Balkans. She didn’t agree with this qualification of Europe, because according to her all the people and nations of Europe and the world were the same.
Sounds like pure cosmopolitanism but did or does this make her a cosmopolitan?
Not at all!
Not at all, because as she told us, she was still working on her first novel, the grand and real novel, the breakthrough novel, about one of the makers of Adolf Hitler. At first sight this seemed very normal, but her statements were senseless. She lacked a real commitment to literature or an interest in deconstructing the maker or the makers of Adolf Hitler. Behind her “cosmopolitanism” was without any doubt, as she proved later, ignorance. (She asked me on more than one occasion if Sarajevo was in Croatia or in Belgrade!). Unfortunately it wasn’t only ignorance that defined her as a writer, but a feeling on her side that she had a responsibility to deal with difficult European realities.
Indeed one had to ask oneself (just like my Polish friend did) how it was possible that somebody like her could write a book about such a topic like Nazism, Hitler-makers and his volunteers. Somebody who ran after the latest fashionable German feuilletons, hoping they would print her picture, a picture that portrayed her as one of “G�nter Grass’ grandchildren” and praise her “courage” to separate herself from the current trend in German literature- the trend of provincialism and passion. How was it possible that this woman could write about Hitler and his maker and the consequences and the repercussions that he and not only he caused for all of Europe, if she didn’t know where Sarajevo was or that Germany is a part of Europe, not Europe itself?
After a couple of debates we realized that there was not a lot to discuss. Her compatriots, including those from the former GDR, didn’t get involved, but stayed silent. Now, from a distance, I see that the hesitant position of her compatriots was more of an inner fight than a choice between two perspectives (her and us) that were so contradictory and so far-off from each other. It was an inner fight against indetermination that couldn’t be turned into a clear determination between two poles, one of dry cosmopolitanism, which is so unbearably easy to convert into a generalization even if one doesn’t know if Sarajevo is in Croatia or in Belgrade, and the other, the side that I and most of those present in the castle represented. The side of a child who never knew what a phone was, or of a human being who never traveled abroad or went on vacation, or of a person who never had a magic box that showed cartoons, or of a dissident who in his nightmare expects the secret police to show up at his front door to deport him to a socialist camp for the re-education of the enemies of communism.
Anyhow, after all, for my Polish friend, all of this was just a part of the past and his pride stemmed from the success of his music. It started slowly and modestly. He was able to make money with the successes of his creation and later it became a real pleasure. By making money he could resist his subordination to the dry cosmopolitanism represented so fiercely by the German writer. If I didn’t misunderstand him, he disagreed with this dry cosmopolitanism because he wanted to work against oblivion, against an oblivion that can lead one (even if as a utilitarian cosmopolite) back to the same mistakes of their predecessors in the past. In the case of the German writer, back to the mistakes that her grandparents made more than fifty years ago. For it is the mistakes of her grandparents that even nowadays we, the nephews of that generation, still pay.
The only issue that my friend wouldn’t give way to anybody on was that of his identity as a part of Central Europe. Though this stubborn in the question of his identity, he was always very tolerant and open-minded in other issues, like the view that we must move forward despite the past, also supported by Kundera, Milosz and Kis.
The colleague from South Africa, herself originally from a country full of troubles and tension, which have only recently found an end, was almost never surprised at these debates. On the contrary, for her it was quite “normal” when we mentioned this or that demonstration, wars and dictators.The Russian colleague nostalgically had close ties to the past and the power of the Soviet Union. He tried on all possible occasions to convince us that even the fifteen-year-old Chechens were unimproved terrorists.
The American colleague wasn’t that interested in our discussions on nations and wars, but was rather eager to initiate debates on ways to advance in an era of hyper-capitalism and globalization and on how the human race could use the teaching of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein or Heidegger to prosper.
The Chinese poet hardly participated in our debates. We never knew when he worked, when he was happy or when sad. He created an iron curtain with his behavior, a curtain that never lifted until the end.
The Bosnian colleague from Serbia and myself perceived that the world had shifted way ahead of our original countries. As our people kept swimming in the warm blood of wars and hatred, Europe seemed to have moved forward in its progress without hesitation.
It is an unwritten rule that when two Balkanians meet in a foreign country, the degree of mutual understanding is usually higher. The case of my Bosnian colleague was similar to mine, but was not the same. He is politically persecuted, I am not anymore. However, our experiences were similar. Our people have experienced suppression, prosecution, terror and genocide by the Serbs.
Of course it was not necessary to talk at length to our colleagues from Western or Central Europe about the Balkans or what has happened there in the last ten years. This subject was in fact interesting and not shocking for me, my Bosnian colleague and the other artists who found ourselves together in Bettina Von Arnim’s castle. It was shocking, though, for the German colleagues who seemed to see everything in black or white.
When we talked about Serbia, the Russian colleague proved a typical traditionalist of publicistic chauvinism in the vein of the genial writer Fyodor Dostoyevski. The American essayist supported the American engagement in the Balkans without a second thought (the Balkans needed a process of re-education � la the process of re-education for Europe after the Second World War!).
All in all this was the story of a castle which stimulated our imaginations and our reflections beyond belief. The story of a castle that has seen so much in the hundreds of years of its existence from the time of the strange love of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Bettina Von Arnim to the times of the terrible wars of Bismarck, to the times of the “Ordnung-Madness” of the Nazis and through the bizarre and tragic-comic times of Ulbricht and Honecker. We gathered in this castle, a little Europe, and talked about the Balkans, Central Europe and their joining Europe, because there was and there is no other way.
Today, the Balkans although liberated from Serbian chauvinism and egocentrism, still is miles away – politically, economically and spiritually – from joining the family of the European nations. However, this process is under way. Tens of thousands of soldiers, humanitarian and aid workers, economists, journalists and publicists are there to help the wounded spirits from the small and big tragedies. An attempt to break the vicious circle, to tear down the crazy borders and to feel a part of the same house, the house of Europe.
This century hasn’t started badly for the people in the Balkans, in spite of a lot of pain and difficulties that have occurred and are expected to occur in the future. It seems that the wheel of history keeps turning and nothing can stop it. Almost as my thoughts about my friends from Wiepersdorf keep turning and I can’t stop them.
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