Dear A.L. Kennedy,

Is it possible to write you a letter while watching a football match? That’s what I’m trying to do right now. It’s the quarter-final and Europe is feverish with excitement, so they say, Poland versus Portugal, at least that rhymes, or it does when you think it backwards, because the only way things ever rhyme in Europe is topsy-turvy. Oh yes, football events have been taking place for some time in my life, which began entirely football-free (because I come from Austria, not really a football country). In Berlin at least, public viewing is a big deal, or maybe not a big deal – just an everyday thing in a city that refuses to fend off its total tourism takeover and is always gagging for social moments. People now come to Berlin to drink and take drugs. They called it Easyjet tourism to begin with, when they thought the people coming were tourists from the Baltic republics or somewhere in that direction, but now pretty much everyone, including the Berliners, practices party tourism. I didn’t understand the attraction for British visitors, though, until I was on a panel with the London urbanist Anna Minton, who told us about “Security by Design”, social housing and CCTV, including photos in her presentation. The question of public security seems to have turned England into a prison, something we’re still some way away from in Berlin, so party people might well feel “freer” here. I admit this is entirely speculative. But: is it possible to write you a letter while watching a football match? I’m feeling almost encouraged to do so, especially because I have your short story collection All the Rage on my lap (Der letzte Schrei came out here two years ago) and it has a wonderful multi-track essence to it (impressive!), both heralding catastrophe and announcing the emergency exit route if you like, an escape through simultaneity.
We don’t have to herald catastrophe for Europe, though, we’re facing the wreckage and staring at it as if we might still find something in there (miracle, miracle), might discover strategic rubble. For instance, the question of which city might take London’s place as the biggest finance arena (what a wonderful term!), which comes with all kinds of succession questions (who will be Cameron’s successor in the EU Council? Who will be Cameron’s successor in government? Who will be Cameron’s successor in xyz?). The villains exit stage-right, leaving their dark anti-European stage, Farrage and Johnson, no one knows what to do next, Europe’s boos and hisses still echoing in all the press reviews, and the only PR strategy is to open up tax havens again, as if they weren’t open already. Yet only few people are currently calling for a new narrative for Europe – perhaps that’s too controversial now. Has that happened to you too, being encouraged to “work on a new European story” as a participant on so-called artists’ panels? It makes me feel bad every time, I can never think of much to say for this instant European narrative demanded of me, even though I’m deeply convinced that Europe is the only solution and the only meaningful project we could carry out on this continent and that island. Perhaps that’s to do with the way political narratives always make me slightly nervous, because they have so little reflection in them. I’ve always simply thought it was a mix-up, that they’d got the wrong address. Aside from that, on political matters I’ve always assumed we ought to work less on narratives and more on the structures, which I found insufficient, but now that even this call for new myths is limping behind the media discourse – because it’s obvious that this work has long since been taken over so thoroughly and comprehensively by right-wing populists, so that even the idea of counter-narratives is evaporating in the general furore – I am getting anxious.
Europe seems to be nothing more now than a conglomerate of exit fantasies (you’re Scottish and you live in England, that has presumably taken on a desperate piquancy, an exit fantasy in the exit fantasy), an obstacle course of right-wing populist arenas where the all too transparent rhetoric sounds out: Europe solely as a project of the elites, enriching themselves, Europe as anti-democratic, Europe heading for Islamization, etc. – rhetoric that we writers have always opposed. It is always the others who are now 100% Austria, 100% France, 100% Italy, so actually like that, and just as actually, they always win every election even if they lose it. We, in the meantime, have no choice any more, no ballot on the matter. Of course one can now raise an admonishing finger and describe this form of crude anti-elitism or this form of promising equality (in the midst of a promise of exclusion – “not them, they have to stay outside!”) as perfidious strategy and confidence trickery, but I am still in that strange state of shock that makes every gesture look questionable, I have lost my thread somehow, lost my understanding of what’s up with these people who vote for Hofer and his FPÖ in Austria, for example, even though I know – that ground was prepared, none of this has come out of nowhere.
Perhaps I’m too politically questionable myself, rinsed to a pulp by a social democracy that has been gradually bowing out for decades in favour of the fake humanism of a shrinking middle class and a strangely neoliberal agenda (Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder shake hands and look briefly at the camera, until the camera gives in and reluctantly produces a picture). And perhaps it’s not possible to write letters while watching a football match, at least they seem to accumulate platitudes which I can’t blame on the commentator right now… as far as I remember – the game is over now and I’m still writing the letter, we’ve now got something like a semi-final ahead of us, Germany versus France, a classic, and it has now been decided that I also come from a country that has to repeat its presidential elections under OSCE observation due to alleged irregularities (the main irregularity was that the opponent to the FPÖ candidate narrowly won the election, which of course is not possible – after all, the FPÖ is 100% Austria and the candidate would sorely love to “look after our beautiful Austria”). Decisions like this are made by the hour. There’s speed in the matter, so to speak.
And yet I ask myself, how might our necessary speedy reactions look at the moment? They say you’re quick-witted and resolute, you’re smart and have a sharp political tongue – can you help me out here? What can we do beyond protests and petitions? Should we be producing work like the Centre for Political Beauty, media-savvy agitprop in juicy PR format?
I have just been on a judging panel for the Berlin Stückemarkt, an international call for submissions that brought us a lot of plays from Britain. There were doomsday plays, dystopias, dark and wordy text monsters that were somehow entertaining and yet oppressive, and the biggest difference to German theatre texts was that they still addressed such a category as society at all. (In Germany that was only the case with what we call “writers with a background of migration”, who are working on exactly the same subject). I liked it, even if it was a genre, a lot of it came from spoken word contexts, and I was impressed at how many words could be said in an insanely short time. It had force (and standstill at the same time), and yet I asked myself what is up with Britain. People say that’s our future – Britain is our future. Thatcher was the beginning, she set the tone, now we’re limping after her and ending the process with Merkel. What political fantasy can ignite something for this future that doesn’t instantly lose the thread? And what would it have to do with literature? How can we escape the neoliberal propaganda that instantly usurps any pleas for a pluralist and open way of life? (Slavoj Žizek sends his regards.) Or is all of this unnecessary because literature does its differentiating work anyway?
But now: kick-off for Germany versus France (and Der letzte Schrei on my lap)!
With very friendly and European regards,
Kathrin Röggla
P.S.: A year ago, I’d have said we needed a different structure that works more democratically, a strengthening of parliament, to prevent us from speeding headfirst into micronationalism. Now I take out my catalogue of Kleinstaaterei, easily found on Wikipedia: imaginary countries, freely invented states. States simply thought up by individuals or small groups who had developed a taste for it, for the idea. A flower-growers’ cooperative had the idea of founding a medieval principality in Italy, bourgeois homebuilders have set up a private state on border territory, republics were proclaimed in Berlin bars in and around reunification, there are mini-sovereign states that ended up as street parties in Dresden, no-man’s-lands, terra nulla on river islands in the Danube, Ruhr and co., republics on roundabouts grown out of administrative errors, there is even a Kingdom of Talossa in a bedroom in Milwaukee, founded by a 14-year-old after his mother’s death, others have worked on a kingdom of dominant women in the Czech Republic – et voilà, there it is: Other World Kingdom, and you can buy tickets to get in. All manifestations of political direct fantasies. Temporary realms, transitory states, subjected to individual and group imaginations that are at least not prepared to flip over into larger, collective fantasies, and that’s something, isn’t it? These are my thoughts on political narratives, which may not take us far, but at least they don’t lead to currency problems.

Dear European Colleague,
Ah… Football. This is quite a serious topic. In Glasgow (where I lived for many years) the sectarian divide (Catholic/Protestant) was expressed in terms of football support. Rangers versus Celtic and the undecideds or unwilling to participates would claim Partick Thistle. At its best this can be a laugh amongst friends – at its worst it’s an excuse for violence, bullying, domestic violence and all the rest. Rangers supporters are buying into a kind of violent, Empire-loving Unionism that is pretty vile and still fears Catholicism as a dreadful, alien threat from King Phillip II’s Spain. Not exactly up to date. But very up to date in terms of a fear of the Other… Catholics may wish to support Celtic and sing songs in support of the Irish Republican cause and even the IRA. The wars and injuries mentioned may stretch back centuries…
Then again the UK as a whole is hardly up to date – we still won’t allow a Catholic to sit on the throne. Perhaps because this would reanimate the Armada in some way and leave us overrun with ghost ships… And it’s not so long since UK forces were occupying Northern Ireland, detaining without trial, torturing and – as the secrecy time limit on security files are revealing – taking part in undercover acts of violence on behalf of both sides… All very Elizabethan in the 16th century sense. For some reason, we blanked out this, along with our other Empire legacies. Since the huge anti-war marches against the Iraq disaster the military has been very anxious to train our minds to love them better. So TV programmes have celebrated the Empire as something everyone could enjoy and no one has apologised for the slavery, the abductions, the world’s first concentration camps, the rape of Kenya by soldiers who had recently defeated Nazism… And, of course, Brexit – with its dreams of time travel and some bizarre access to Empire and its spoils – threatens to unravel the peace agreement in Northern Ireland in another generation of bloodshed. Those of us in Britain who are also Irish can still recall when Irishness was the Other – the same rules, rumours, slanders and accusations repeat, no matter who is the target. And eventually people do notice – if every new wave of arrivals puts “our way of life” under threat, how can it be that “our way of life” hasn’t disappeared? How has it survived? How can we be us and not pure, when we are tild that inly purity can be us? How coul any of this alarmist bullshit make sense to anyone without a head injury?
Scottish unionism is under pressure anew from the Independence movement, which is – uniquely in Europe – a left progressive movement in Scotland. The SNP model is one of citizen’s rights within a country opposing corporate rights and commercial exploitation. Set foot on Scotland’s soil and declare yourself in and you’re Scottish. That’s it. You’re included in the plan. It’s enlarging the Highland tradition of all being wlecome. (And an underlying Celtic tradition – which is of course originally a Mesopotamian tradition.) Rather modern and optimistic. The government is operated by politicians so therefore flawed in execution, but the idea of a premier writing letters to each new immigrant to say that it’s a priviledge to have them here (Nicola Sturgeon has just done so – and also written to resident EU citizens) is impressive. The blessing of citizenship begins to take effect as soon as you set foot in the country and integration is planned, supported and imaginatively promoted – and therefore pretty smooth and positive. In a way, the strategies available are wide and various. What we have been doing – which is nothing. While commercial mouthpieces have simply doggedly told us to hate each other and ISIS/Daesh/Trump/Westboro Baptists/Farage have encouraged us to hate each other and every headline is designed to stoke up hatred of each other… Well, it’s a clue. Everything we do has to have love at its core. There have to be practical demonstrations of love. Rather than, for example, writing for ourselves, we write for ourselves and love of others. When we make characters it is not just professionally necessary to make them real and deep and true and possible to enter, as one can never in reality eneter another… Now this is a social necessity. The proper, full-strength practice of art as a unifying, challenging, vital force – that’s now not an indulgenec or something for which we have to apologise – we can see it again as something that Stalin suppressed and polluted for a reason, that Goebbels suppressed and polluted for a reason, that Pol Pot and Mao and so and so forth suppress and polluted for a reason – we have a power. We can use it. And imaginatice thinking, sustainable banking, crowdfunded objects like the Fairphone, use of social media to promote freedom and transparency… There’s a lot out there to use and delight in. I think we are seeing the last savage gasp of forces that know they are being revealed as essentially weak, parasitic, an invitation to a murder-suicied pact which we don’t have to accept.
It’s an interesting time, we might say.
And I’ve bee thinking a good deal about football lately, because England and it’s pains and insecurities and trauma are all around me since I’ve moved South. The attitude towards the national team – over-inflated hopes, war metaphors, violent fans, desperation, ego and failure – it’s all so familiar to someone who grew up in Scotland in the 1970’s. Back then, Scotland was going through a painful identity crisis and also focussed a great deal on a national team as some kind of talisman. There was violence, there was insane hope, self-punishing defeat, anger, confusion, animal bewilderment. But we came through and gained in confidence and have become safe for ourselves and others. I’m hoping that England comes through.
The lurch into Brexit has woken up a lot of people and made it really much less possible to see our media, our newspapers in particular, and our governing class as anything other than a threat to us all. England has been trained to toe the line and aspire towards aristocracy, or at least aiding the aristocracy. (It’s fine, for example for the nation to support the children of a German immigrant family with Greek connections, as long as everyone involved is at least a Duke… Not so great if “our way of life” is being threatened by child refugees…) Many of us have known the situation was dire, but the media are, of course, influential and had kept a grip on many more of us. People are tired at the end of long, nasty days. People are distracted by the effort of surviving crazily oppressive and damaging “austerity” measures. People don’t want to think that they are being killed by the people they elect, or that a democratic government has been acting like an invading power; suppressing mass education, disrupting internal transportation, pumping out vile propaganda, exporting wealth and resources, appropriating funds… The levels of corruption take some getting used to. But more and more people – as the pantomime becomes increasingly surreal – are waking up.
The idea that a sly, irresponsible, racist, narcissistic buffoon with good media contacts could masquerade as a loveably eccentric buffoon and con the country into leaving the EU, simply so that he could get a crack at being Prime Minister would have been the stuff of TV drama, even ten years ago. And yet here we are – with Boris as a laughable, slack-mouthed inuslt of a Foreign Secretary. He and his helpers have left us facing an economic apocalypse. And this comes along with a revelation of our long-standing racism. Yes, more incidents are being reported, but these hatreds are not new – they have simply been in hiding, keeping their heads down, ashamed. The rampant racism of Rupert Murdoch’s media and our politicians have misled some, but simply emboldened others. And I now have to wear a safety pin in my lapel so that I, as a white person, do not seem a threat to any other kind of person I might meet. It’s crazy. I hope our chaos, utter ignorance of European history and punishments of misery and penury offer an example to any other would be exiters… We are a pre-genocide culture. We are what you get if the racists and isolationists win. We are what you get if lying pollutes the public discourse beyond the point of no return. We are what you get if leisure time simply becomes cheap drinking time and every weekend is a pretend holiday of irresponsibility and vented frustration. We are what happens if no value is ever placed above money. We are what happens if fascism dresses up nicely in suits and talks about Adam Smith and downsizing – it still wants to blend military force with industrial force, it still wants to view most citizens as work units, or nothing.
But as you say – new media are springing up all over the place and the generally docile, quiet and sleepy English public are waking and thinking of how they would like to live. We have been shown how bad we can get – that we can be a country where a much-loved progressive MP can be murdered for her opinions, that white “Christian” right wingers can be equally as hateful as brown “Muslim” ideologues… We may be learning something from our forcible education. And it’s very possible to miss the calm we thought we had, to miss the civility and opportunity which only ever really extended to the white middle classes… We may be on the brink of ensuring better times for us all – we certainly know we need to band together in order to overturn our status quo before it crushes us – first the weak and disabled, the non-Christian, the very young, the very old, the poor, the non-white… It’s clear that our government and media has only the interests of 200 or 300 people at heart…
But a lot of us are waving at Sankt Pauli from over the water and anxious to opt out of all this madness…. Here’s to football as simply a game…
ALK

Many thanks for your letter, which addresses a lot of things that are on my mind. For example the question: since when have we writers actually been mainly Synchronicity Officers? Responsible for lugging the layers of time with their different effects into the visible present, paying sufficient heed to the work of asynchronicities, clarifying their political uncertainties. This is to pick up on your description of the state of British affairs, where plenty of things don’t seem quite up to date, retarded somewhere in unholy history, mired in the past, Catholic-Protestant ghost battles still fought out – something equally applicable to Germany or Austria, be it the spectre of inflation leading to compulsive austerity, Nazism, or the ghost of the forever foundered Austro-Hungarian Empire still haunting us. ‘The past is not dead. It’s not even past,’ I’d say here with William Faulkner, if it weren’t for the question of why then the new European alliance of right-wing populists, brute-force chauvinism and not-so-retro-fascism raising its head in so many places must keep coming about.
I’m very surprised that this is accompanied in Germany and Austria by a strange rhetoric of emotions, a sensibility apparently newly claimed by the right. Victims and perpetrators are swiftly turned around, as visible in the banner unfurled during a refugee theatre project in Vienna’s Audimax (the birthplace of Viennese Actionism, flagship of Austria’s 1968 activities) by the new grassroots-like right-wing ‘Identitarian’ movement: ‘Multiculti kills’. So-called thymotic feelings are invoked just as quickly, or a sense of patriotism is seen as violated, one’s own culture seen as threatened, etc., just as you write, but it is this emotional rhetoric of hurt and injury that makes me nervous, the insistence on being a victim oneself. For that reason in particular, I will always distrust a rhetoric of emotions that is incapable of forming any link with its parameters, i.e. with its contradictions. Add to that a public contemplation of the territorial coming back into fashion in Germany, with the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk commenting this past spring in this direction, quasi as a reaction to the practiced humanism of the refugee aid movement, voicing fantasies of border protection that can be easily linked to such public emotional rhetoric. And then, whoops, suddenly we’re supposed to understand the neo-fascists, or for the time being the famous ‘man on the street’. But does that very act of empathy with the wrong people, sympathy for decision-makers who have messed up, not provide a good literary approach for you? What are wrong feelings, things like sentimentality, resentment, lachrymosity?
The ability to climb inside characters is actually a concept of our work as peculiar as it is remarkable, you’re right about that, even though I always back climb out of them, for my part. It’s a wild kind of motion. How long do we let someone climb in, how far? Whose stories do we claim we can tell – that comes up over and over among the younger generation of writers. Empathy and fiction can be contradictory. If I didn’t know how much you plumb the closeness and distance to your characters, which movements you open up in your writing, how you create careful characters, quiet and tentative, I might have understood that point in your last letter wrongly, but perhaps that would be more down to the late hour of the night when I read it and the many little insects crawling around me, up and down the old walls here in the south of Europe, creatures that always take on a prehistoric nature: millipedes, scorpions, woodlice. But for heaven’s sake – what kind of political semantics will this end up at? In my defence I’d like to add that I’m currently practicing what is these days called slow tourism, on a remote island in retro-Croatia, very slow tourism, too slow perhaps (the Internet has broken down again, my letter will arrive too late), but at least the thought comes about that a writer ought perhaps to write slow fiction or very slow fiction. But what would that be? David Foster Wallace or Adalbert Stifter? Obsessing over detail or delighting in multilingualism? Precision fiction or research furore – sticking to one thing? As Synchronicity Officers, we know that the different tempos are always on the move simultaneously at the moment, and your writing in particular gives a prime example of skilled changes of tempo. So is it less a question of slowness and more one of the famous working level that we ought to reach at last? I mean that working level I’ve been told about (as part of my research) by simultaneous interpreters for political conferences, a level said to exist in the politics business, where ideological issues aren’t quite as noticeable. Where suddenly everyone speaks one language and the interpretation services are no longer needed. No, they told me, it’s not technocracy, it’s a truly problem-conscious way of working among political professionals, which is then systematically counteracted, subverted and destroyed by the level above it in power terms – sadly, they said – a level which I was told functions ideologically and based purely on interests. Through the media, all we ever see is a further level of political rhetoric, a simulation of ideology, lobbying, a rhetoric angling for voters. The interpreters told me these things as though the world would work perfectly if only we could eliminate just one of the levels above that working level. That did make me a little suspicious, let’s say… but what would our working level be? In this dialogue, I mean? Or are you even willing and capable of following me? Am I writing typically German crude stuff, having learned the art of being German…? (By the way, as an Austrian in Germany I spent some time playing with my outsider status – the true luxury version of migration being when a person is allowed to address their foreignness without being instantly accused of having an integration problem, is allowed to feel distances, in other words.)
Hmmm, so this rhetoric thing is really troubling me. Alarmism, the feeling of looming disaster, etc. How can we find a dialogue in the midst of that mood, just the two of us, a dialogue that does justice to our European colleagues and yet manages to find a way out of this slipstream. (By the way again – I was promptly astounded to be addressed that way in your letter: as a European colleague. It seemed almost too big a term, which also speaks volumes…) But how do we get out of what we call in German and English ‘preaching to the own crowd’ (whereby in German, which includes plenty of pseudo-English, the phrase also contains a tiny elitist marker. We have a second English at our disposal that seems to bestow us with instant urbanity and education).
And how do we find joint diagnoses without ending up in the slipstream of superlatives? You expressed it so precisely, so down to the point – recalling the pre-genocidal country we have long since become, and also calling up a counter-movement to that country – that I didn’t know for a moment what I had left to add. Perhaps the orderly civil society that showed itself in Germany last year? The new political protest net culture with all its limits, all the burnout, the exhaustion, because civil society can’t possibly deal with all of politics on its own as people are always demanding.
The political class is busy with Erdogan, Putin and Trump, encircling Europe and answering everything with autocracy. Do we still have a few structures in petto that would render that impossible in Europe? And is there something more than preventing characters like Le Pen, Wilders, Hofer, Orban, etc.? Yes and no, wouldn’t you say? I wish at least I could tell a similar story about Austria as you do about Scotland. It sounds fantastic, very likeable. I wish something were possible from my side, perhaps from the golden Kreisky Age, the superb and truly Social Democratic years, but on the other hand Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard were the most typical Austrian writers even then, and that presumably says it all. In one way or another, they both refuse any overly affectionate empathy with their characters, treat them rather roughly, no, roughly is the wrong word, but with the severity appropriate to the societal parameters. It is communication with readers and with ourselves as writers that elicits this severity, and it’s because of this communication that I write, too. I can’t only ever be outward-facing.
Ultimately, though, we are Synchronicity Officers and we ought to go on digging. Excavating layers of time that are instrumentalised in the background to help the 200 people along, the people you mention, the 200 people who really matter. We ought at least to distort that to the point of recognition, shouldn’t we? For it has long been visible.
There’s another remarkable aspect to this work of the background, by the way: at the very moment something becomes current, it is already yesterday’s news. While people are talking on the radio beside me about why the intellectuals in Germany are taking so long to react to the situation in Turkey, I notice this story becoming yesterday’s news as it happens. Brexit is also yesterday’s news, even though it hasn’t yet happened. The Greek crisis was the day before yesterday, although it won’t get really started until tomorrow. How are we ever to deal with the present, by literary means, if it has sacrificed all topicality? It’s hard to plan a cultural event on a subject like ‘flight and migration’ when you don’t know where the constantly shifting discursive parameters will be. The constant disintegration of the current to dust – is that something that troubles you? Are you familiar with the phenomenon from your writing desk in the present? What literary counter-time-travel are you planning for England’s Brexit tunnel?
With warm regards,
Kathrin Röggla

P.S.: Perhaps a part of the working level would also be a kind of statistical work that counteracts the alarmism without playing it down. For instance by showing that we’re more likely to be accidentally shot dead by a toddler (they always add that, as though anyone might be shot dead unaccidentally by a toddler) than killed by an extremist, terrorist – you name it – not of course without making clear at the same time what dangerous consequences political extremism has, or where its work actually takes place. Not making anything sound banal, but shifting the parameters – I’m afraid I’d be no good at something like that. I’m an alarmist, totally addicted to alarmism, and the only way I can deal with the culture of fear surrounding us is in extremes.

In the UK we’ve been incredibly complacent – we’ve assumed that we have a civil society because we were born this way. Only foreigners dabble in tyrrany and don’t get away with it. And we’ve been incredibly trusting of our leaders who have reached perhaps the event horizon of their immense stupidity. I would imagine politicians have always been self-serving, damaged and short-sighted, but we used to balance them with a civil service which coul point out facts, realities and real workd consequences. As our leaders have become more faith-based (which is the polite word for it “delusional” is probably better) the more they have shyed away from taking any kind of advice, or even arranging for advce to be available. This has had catastrophic effects. Thatcher dumped our industrial workers on to benefits and wrecked whole communities – they are now desperate places, council housing stock sold off and not replenished, no jobs available or no jobs with dignity… This is now blamed on foreigners. It is the fault of our governments over the last 3 decades. Blair believed in himself as a peace-bringing messiah and has trashed the Middle East and flooded displaced victims of war across the globe – we blame the victims.
I think there’s this especial stridency now, though, because we’re on the brink of politicians being constantly actually exposed to democracy – they can’t keep their dirty secrets, thier outrages can provoke dynamic reaction that happens within hours or minutes, the internet can create solidarity as never before. Attempts to close that down are in motion, but I think the genie is out of the bottle. So our leaders insist they should be treated like princes and princesses just when we know they’re charlatans and rogues. Crowfunding could undermine the big business donors who buy politics… And Murdoch is now so toxically out of control (and losing money on his papers) that he’s whiskers away from all kinds of backlash against advertisers and boycotts of publications…
The vile influence of Murdoch is, naturally, one of the most utterly negative seams of destruction running through our last decades – he buys politicians andtheir secrets, he acts with impunity,he poisons the public discourse. He has signle-handedly destroyed public trust in any journalism and good practice in journalism.
The agenda on the right has always been to dismantle the education system and the health care safetly net that offered the lower orders a chance of social mobility. The jobs would go and we would live in a “service economy” which is to say whole generations would be forced into zero hours contracts with no time to watch their remaining rights removed. The advances made after World War II and the lessons learned from it have been forgotten, or actively distorted and suppressed. In the UK we’re back to assuming that we will always have a civil society no matter how appallingly we treat people and that our newspapers can be as vile as they like without consequence. At the moment we almost have a legal system but it is coming under intense pressure. The law can still defend disabled people who have had their benefits removed arbitrarily, highlight human rights, resist a deeply undemoratic government, resist the insanity of Brexit and a non-binding national opinion poll and around a third of possible voters wrecking our economy. The hope is that somehow Britain will return to a time when it had industry in advance of most of the world’s and industrialised weapons it could use to defeat and rob any less well-defended nations it felt like attacking. That’s not possible. There is an assumption that as long as we shout that we are the finest of people and the best of all nations we somehow will be – when no one whose home hasn’t been atomised wants to come anywhere near us and our own citizens are those most likely in the EU to take advantage of working abroad in the rest of the EU. We are about to be trapped on an unhappy rock with very few friends in the world. “We” will get what “we” said “we” wanted and it will be an intensification of the disaster our disaster capitalists have been enjoying thus far – shorting the pound and UK stocks and shares. In a way, we could be good for the rest of Europe – they can watch our destruction and misery and see what kind of promise bigotry and loathing will deliver. It will be appalling for us. We may pull our of the death spiral but some very nasty forces have been unleashed and are already paramilitary.
All we can do is keep encouraging each other and being ourselves and encompassing difference. If we did all have a common language – and we do as humans, we are the language, our pains and joys are fundamental, running beneath words – then it would immediately begin to fragment and turn into different languages – as happened with Latin, as is happening with English. I think we need to give our brains the excercise of stranger tongues. (And the joy of Brexit for Europe would be that you don’t have to print and speak everything in English for our doggedly stupid monolglot culture – we would actually have to learn other languages to be able to negotiate. It would do us good.)
I’m writing this before the US election results, hoping that the madness hasn’t spread too far yet – that we can at least claw a little back from that complete surrender to hatred. I couldn’t face writing if it goes to Trump…

Dear A.L.,

it was so good to meet you in Berlin, to have a real-life-exchange, which is for me especially for this project  important. We sometimes have to meet as real people and not only on the web, especially when talking about Europe. To see, that there IS somebody out there. (Despite I am not trusting the word “real” and “people” anymore) Thank you for your letter, written right before the US-election, I hope you are fine and full of courageous energy to encounter the really bad political situation.

Since your last letter we learned that a lot is possible, what at least I didn’t expect, and I can imagine, that you are like me quite uneasy with the result. What happened to me was the curious fact of my surprise. I was surprised as any stupid fellow that this is possible in the US. I am astonished and puzzled because of the rise of extreme right wing parties in Europe and I am feeling already better, because Norbert Hofer did not win the Austrian presidential election, as if this would mean a lot. It means something, but not too much. Anyway, my surprise needs to be deconstructed, it’s part of the game, I know, but I can’t help. To point it out: I am surprised despite my knowledge of the situation. I don’t want to believe myself. This is a quite literary feeling, and I will work on that, because I think it’s really dangerous.

In the meantime the far right and the very left united in Italy against Renzi and the political class. It’s always „the political class“, which is accused – so the political class has failed or there is something rotten in the whole system, startened by Thatcher and company….until Merkels austerity system.  European austerity is not anymore a solution for the European system. It will split. But speaking in terms of currency, maybe it’s a possibility.

This morning I read “Twenty Proposals to save Freedom in Unfree Times” by Timothy Snyder in Lettre which estranged me a lot. It tells me a lot about politics without politics.  It’s all about fascism as if the fascism is only a problem of violence and stupidity. As if it would be enough to defend institutions, delete fascist signs and ways of speaking in public language, and, most puzzling, meet other people and march with them (why should I –  and it’s very vague, it could also mean, march with fascists). So I find it most important, what you pointed out: the cause of the hate as social  fabricated. We need a new left movement which addresses a collective like the one, which was former called by Negri/Hardt as multitude. I don’t know. Which kind of solidarity can we build?  For example the german very left start to be the new right. They start to address “german” workers. This is so wrong. It’s the same imagined common ground which will deliver fascism.  But the question if the far right wing voters really want fascism or if it’s only  a possibility to become visible is occupying me.

As you write in your last letter this crisis is homemade. And it’s cruel because we victimize the victims of “our” political tactics. And the Murdochs of this world are speeding up and spreading the whole story, infiltrating the minds of the people. Speaking in terms of media critic last week something strange happened to me in Austria- I was there for a small reading tour and met an old friend who is editorial journalist of the Falter, a weekly democratic left wing paper in Vienna, who answered to my furious statement “They are voting for a fascist!”, that it makes no sense to use this antifascistic rhetoric anymore, because you can’t win a flowerpot by doing it. (Do you know the proverb?) The whole communication situation has frozen to the mechanic of fascist vs. antifascist, the two groups wouldn’t listen to each other anymore (like in the US, where the system of media filter bubble  is dividing the whole country). His collegue, Florian Klenk, at the Falter had been threatened by a hate-poster in the internet with words like: I want to burn you! Etc. But at a point he was stopping it and telling him, that this was too much. And Mr. Klenk was answering: “Yes, I forgive you, if you are ready to meet me. “ They met, Mr. Klenk wrote a reportage about this guy who was not matching the stereotypes. And 100.000 people (which is 20 times more then usual on the website) read this article online.  Which told me, parts of the Austrian public wants to get rid of this hardened and deadlocked situation. Maybe Timothy Snyder is right: We have to meet new people. But we have to do it very carefully. And we should not forget that there is a history. That meeting new doesn’t mean that we haven’t met before, and that the “we” is strongly constructed. (I point that out, because I read a very interesting article about the amnesia of the middle class in Germany, which causes this rhetorics of the refugee crisis as a NEW problem. Good willing people meet now (to help) for “the first time” refugees but would never talk to their Arabic neighbours, or understand that they are Germans like themselves.)

So on my taskboard as a writer “amnesia”, “wrong surprise” are standing next to the question as “narcissm and empathy” and “humour as a weapon?” As to say; Fragile tools and topics. I will find out strategies, hence I know, that it will be too less. And that culture is seen by the “unseen” as an elite project, not interesting for them. Most of the time you can turn this a little bit by meeting pupil, kids, old people, but only in small groups. You can help the social workers maybe. Maybe it’s a real point to try to avoid stereotype rhetorics in public. I am at the moment not sure to be able to do it, and this is another working site of mine. Tell me more about your plans!

 

Good to meet you, too. It make things easier. On the one hand we are in a world where a peaceful struggle like that at Standing Rock can echo very quickly from computer to computer and on the other hand. The oppressed can be heard as never before. On the other hand we can be estranged from each other as emotional entities and human beings and scream in CAPITALS in the safety of our own homes, banging our keyboards and reading uncontrolled fictions being presented as fact. Certainly, we are at a turning point.

It was hopeful that Austria rejected a fascist. Italy’s result is portrayed as being anti-EU in the UK press, but I can see why all kinds of people right now (and after the Bush/Blair years) don’t want to see power concentrated in the hands of perhaps a new dictator.

Recently a poll emerged in the UK showing that politicians and journalists are among the least trusted by public – nurses, doctors and teachers at the top as most trusted. Although we are told that no one likes experts any more and we live in a post-truth world and facts don’t matter – people still want information that is useful to them, they still want to live in the real world. Or course Murdoch and Rothermere have their own poisonous agendas and politicians chase at their heels, begging favours – there is a problem to do with moral failings, weak personalities, greed and the usual. But we also have a deep problem of competence. Our UK journalists are often unable to make a whole coherent article, research isn’t carried out, skill levels have crashed. Our politicians have terrifyingly low levels of knowledge. They genuinely lack a grip of historical knowledge, particalities, long-term thinking and they combine this with an arrogance which keeps them in ignorance. Although politicians have always been prome to demagogery this immense and triumphant ignoranec is probably new – and may well bring about the downfall of those who prefer to use us as resources, cheap labour, bodies to fight in wars, useful idiots to regularly offer them power. We can hope.

Certainly the push for factual reporting, factual information is important. But as Arendt pointed out, once someone has crossed an emotional and psychlogcal  line into hatred, they automatically discount facts that disagree with their world view. Bonhoeffer also saw this – he stated it was necessary for some kind of psychic or emotional shock to occur, a Damascus experience before someone would agree to be at peace with humanity. Art certainly can provide experiences that change people in depth, bu the reach of art has been reduced. That is its power, though – this abilit to transform, to produce felxibility from rigidity, to turn the easy-to-hate mass into individuals. Art can be that conversation with an individual where you begin to exist as people. It can help the real-world progress of conversations.

So much of power and politics is now intentionally divorced from real world results – the policies that promise wealth to all, give wealth to the few, the “efficiencies” of privatisation emerge as sabotage and porfiteering, the victims are blamed and the perpetrators exhalted, etc. This means that, more than ever we are dealing with a battle of narratives and a contest of imaginations. If we can move forward with imagination and, as artists, a skill with narrative, we can remind humanity of its humanity. We are being handed a battle on our home ground. We are being reminded that the truths we have to explore in order to make fictions that seem real are the important ones that allow us to live and have lives of quality. That offers great strength.

I remember watching a film loop in the House of Terror museum in Budapest – it showed a man in an Arrow Cross Hungarian fascist uniform undressing and putting on a Hungarian Communist unifrom and undressing and putting on the Arrow Cross uniform and round and round it went. The building was used as a torture chamber by fascists and communists. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism – left or right it leads to the same abuses, left or right this desire to perpetuate power and concentrate wealth is identical. As delicate human beings, easily crushed, we have to be eternall vigilan to prevent either side trying to change our world so that we can’t survive in it, we have to disperse power. There are lots of models out there for ways to do that and – as at Standing Rock – these are becoming more mainstream. The idea of courteous, non-violent resistance can be effective up to a point. If we move to armed conflict then obviously that approach leads to mass suicide and can becom unsustainable, but it prepares a society best for what comes next, it causes the fewest wounds. I am impressed by the constant imaginative energy of people, just now. We may be able to wake up and act before we are condemned to years of war, or quietly bloody dictatorships, or the kind of nuclear mistake that someone like Trump could propel us towards.

We have to hope, or act as if we can sustain hope in order to act at all. A great deal of the propaganda at the moment is about how vile people are and, having been told that everyone is vile, many people are behaving in vile ways, decency is being rebranded as smugness (just as fascism is fighting to be rebranded as “alt-right” or “nationalist”, etc) but we can certainly resist that. Use of language is massively important and people are becoming more vigilant about any push to obscure truth.

We live, as they say, in interesting times.

Hi,

I absolutely agree, as artists, it’s our job to change reality (hopefully for the better) to comment on reality and to communicate across realities. And – just looking at something small like the speech on the occasion of the Heine Preis, there’s a great appetite for new strategies and a confirmation of lasting, creative and non-harmful values.

Academic culture has – across Europe – has for some time been unwell. A number of faults have appeared and not been challeneged. There has been this race to be the most “aware”, the most sensitive to all issues – and yet this hasn’t led to genuine sensitivity, this hasn’t often led to interraction with marginalised people. I think, in part because much of academia is compromised by having  been reformed to be concerned with money rather than learning. We’ve also seen this idea that we must be “sensitive” to everyone’s opinion and that doesn’t actually preserve democracy. A racist’s opinion, someone who is hate-filled’s opinion is dangerous, it needs to be challenged, not excused. Opinions based on prejudice rather than facts are easily overturned with the appication of facts and yet academia and the “thoughtful” media have allowed false equivalence between lies and truth to arise and have counted opinions, prejudcies and superstitions as being of equal worth as real information from the real world. This isn’t about censorship, or “no platforming” this is about pushing back when we are told lies, pushing back when hate is promulgated. I think partly theres a sort of laziness/weariness in academic circles, there is so much work to do, students are so hyper-sensitive and, of course, not quite attuned to the real world and how to deal with it. Lecturers have allowed themselve sto slide back and to give control to money men, to a structure of ideas that is non-reality based and to student prejudices and superstitions. None of this is healthy. And it breeds a lack of confidence in skills, in facts, in information, education, learning as a life-long and life-enhancing thing.

At the moment the concerned left spends huge amounts of time criticising itself in rather self-loving, narcissitic ways and avoiding the big issues. And meanwhile real people suffer and poverty destroys their lives and their children’s lives. The situation everywhere is very hard when “austerity” takes precedence over the support of social relationships and the fabric of lives.

In the UK austerity has been driven by extreme ideologues and is at its most harsh in Europe. All our social and practical support systems are breaking down. But this does seem to be waking people up and giving them the kind of sharp, horribel education that is necessary for a life and death struggle.

I think that, as artists promote empathy, imagination, processes of change, we can be part of what allows everyone to think oustide of the vile boxes provided by self-interested politicians and the media.

It’s a very dark time and Trump will make the world immeasuably more dangerous, but it does seem that the new media and alternative means of communication aren’t all bad, can unite people, can make electorates more agile and creative. If you look at the vast rise in finances for NGO that support everything Trump will try to destroy – that represents millions of people who have decuded to make one easy small action and create finding for necessities. If you look at Standing Rock and the ongoing fight there you can see a very old struggle being renewed, reaching out around the old media, organising, raising funds, creating methods of non-violent resistance, having a strong sense of identity, skills and dignity. That’s very inspiring and a great example for the future, I think.

Dear A.L.,

In fact what you write tells me that there are two main things we as authors have to do: First to tell models for a better survival for most of the people and for the very special ones, all the minorities we need for an open society – there will have to be juridical models, artistic models (models of perception), social models of learning and organizing society of protest and regaining territories of everyday life and sometimes they have to work together.

Some weeks ago I met a Berlin based artist from Belarus, Marina Naprushkina, who was creating a social and artistic space “Neue Nachbarschaft Moabit” (New Neighbourhood Moabit) with workshops (from arts, cooking, language courses, cinema) in the last 3-4 years – every evening you have there 200-300 people using it and co-creating it. It is a little Berlin wonder, because she invented it in the first moment on her own and is until today arranging it without any governmental help or public money, only the help of the neighbours donating their little money they have. She doesn’t want to interact with the official public institutions. No state, she said on a panel in the Academy of Arts. Sitting next to her was a co-founder of a grassroot organization teaching other grassroot organizations how to gain money and get political contacts. You wouldn’t find a deeper contradict between two people wanting to establish this open society we are longing for. But I felt more attracted by Marina, it had this real feeling, this certain smell of “just doing something and meaning it”, which I normally distrust. But this time…

The other thing to do is (for us writers) to reconsider and define more precisely what empathy can be and how it can help. Because…. it is a weird thing! Meeting you in words and as a person I feel encouraged to do so. I was starting by reading a book by Fritz Breithaupt about the “Cultures of Empathy”, who leaves me with the idea that it is a contradictionary and ambivalent mind process, linking the self with the others we construct we seem to be someone else what we in fact can’t. We overestimate similarities when we are empathizing with someone and we need to understand in the same process that we are not these persons (otherwise we would be panicking). It is for sure not easy to be defined. Empathy can also be the empathy for the devil. The Stockholm-Syndrome tells us a lot about empathy, Breithaupt writes. It is also a hegemonial question. Maybe we need a lot of empathies, or an architecture of empathy, we have to understand that empathy is politically used . And we have to ask when and why and with whom it stops, what it needs to increase. A complex process. Anyway it is connected (Breithaupt connects it clearly) with narration. You need narration to develope empathy. You need a time setting (or a time frame). And the time-setting is one of the big problems we have, because there is no time left in a just-in-time-world, there is no before and after. And you need a clear self to create empathy…but writing this I feel a little like your quoted and portrayed academic people always trying to know better, to be aware and not able to do something. Speaking for myself I feel in those moments better when I am meeting people like Marina Naprushkina or others organizing themselves and not only talking, and living with my family in a poor former proletarian neighbourhood which is at the moment gentrified but still socially well organized (a lot of neighbourhood and parental organizations, the school is “filled” with the work of the parents despite or because 70 percent of the families there need social welfare), I can see the benefits of political grassroot work, but I am aware that a lot of this grassroot work is only possible in a certain democratic frame (with all those sometimes ugly institutions). And there we are again….

Dear A.L., it seems we are left with this: We have to write and yes it will be too little, we will allways have this feeling. I don’t feel well writing it, but anything else would be a little megalomaniac (speaking as an authors) and therefore not really helpful. These are no ending words for our exchange– maybe you’ll find them? Or we don’t have to find them…

Anyway: I wish us all a better 2017!

Hello again,

Yes – let’s hope for  better 2017. And also work towards one.

I find it interesting, this new attack on empathy. First there were no charities, then they existed but they were ignored, then they were mocked, then attacked – we are now in the stage where the possibility of helping anyone at all, ever is being negated by repressive forces and answered with progressive self-doubt. It seems the conversation has moved on to empathy.

For a while now empathy has been ignored by our leaders – for example the outpouring of public and NGO funding, compared to minor, corrupt/corrupting or contradictory government efforts in the face of major and minor tragedy. Now any empathy is being portrayed as weakness, stupidity – but it’s the key.

Empathy is the chisel that breaks the wall. We know that art creates it and that long forms like the novel generate it very well. We know that forms like “created reality” and the toxic narratives of mainstream media seek to manipulate or diminish empathy. And yet we have a capacity for it – it will always operate – we are creatures who wish to be safe in a group. Either we allow ourselves to be told that our group is very small and very wonderful, or we address the challenge which is empathy for our species, engagement with our species, understanding of our species. Good journalism, politicians of vision and compassion (should there be any) independent leaders and actors, thinkers, commentators, creators – they all aid that task.

It’s perfectly valid to say that – for example – it is illogica to pour money into a wonderful end of life experience for a terminal patient, easing their end and easing the end of their loved ones and friends. That money might be better spent in wider research. The thing is that the patient him/herself, or loved ones allow us a way into caring and engaging with the wider issues and quite often do say – “I am dying, but you can help others who are not yet dead.” Or “Our child is dead, but other children can be saved – help us. Understand our pain and that we wish to save others from it.” This can be very compelling.

I think the freedom hat we have as artists to maybe not make the maximum amount of money, but to do good work, to push the wheel forward, can be an example of a way to live for other professions, and a useful possible attitude for other workers and for people who don’t work. The model of existance in the UK (and other places) is at the moment very much the model of Monowitz Buna Werke, of Cambodia’s Year Zero of Jonestown and the rest of such terrible places and times. If you don’t or can’t labour, you have no purpose. If you don’t obey, you have no worth. If you don’t serve savage political and corporate aims then you are expendable. Many people have been force into accepting this, or are simply too stressed and panicked and tired to do anything other than drag themselves along – at which point acts of the imagination, moments of freedom, nw ways of existing seem frivolous and impossible and yet are also at their most precious. A change of heart and mind, changes everything. I think the schemes and projects you describe are parts of that change.

We are all about changes of heart and mind. We are all about small internal, invisible alterations that change everything. We are enormously powerful because of this, but we seem to  have forgotten our power. We live in very dark times and we may not ourselves survive them, but by working for the future we can save our children and our grandchildren and the children of strangers. Which is an act of empathy, I think.

Here we go into the dark, but together.

I’ll leave you with a wonderful letter from E.B. White – this alone would qualify him to be called a writer and to be called an artist and to be called a human being…
North Brooklin, Maine

30 March 1973

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,
(Signed, ‘E. B. White’)
Yours in friendship and solidarity and creation,
ALK