When it comes to willing — or the formulation of a wish to will — dictators have an advantage over democratic countries. In Europe, we can agree on what we don’t want, at least not here in our own countries: war, poverty, torture. But what we do want is a question that requires more consideration. The very big, but also very capacious, word “freedom” is not enough. First of all, because we have to ask: Whose freedom? And at whose expense? Second of all, because it requires us to take a step back from willing as such, to take back our own wishes, when in doubt, in the interest of equality. At this point, the freedom to which we so often appeal contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. “Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently,” the brilliant Rosa Luxemburg said, and there’s the rub, if we’re honest. Consumption is a constant process that offers the soul no satisfaction in the long run. Consumption is also a predatory process, a matter of life and death for people elsewhere. Taken together, these two facts mean that things can’t stay as they are. We are in an in-between state, and it will be important to understand what is growing there and where we are heading, where it is our will to go, before we are robbed of the ability to will anything at all.

[...] feeling and desire lead both characters to cross a border. And feeling and desire are, after all, the signs that someone is alive. Never more alive than in the face of death.

A manor house in East Prussia, paid for by the military salary of the absent owner, an officer. Inside, a Chekhovian personage — the lady of the manor, a languorous Berlin beauty — along with her twelve-year-old son Peter, his tutor, an elderly aunt who oversees the household, two Ukrainian maidservants, and a Polish groom who tends the horses. A Nazi lives in the new settlement across the way. The first refugees driven westward from the Baltic territories by the advancing front turn in for a few nights at the manor. We watch along with Kempowski as this old world, as if in slow motion, begins to sway. The Baltic refugees are delighted by the bread with sausage that is still served to them here, they mourn for their lost homeland, they move on. The Polish groom is already beginning to prepare the coach, to pack a few suitcases for his master’s family. But the lady of the manor gazes out the window, the son looks through his microscope, the tutor speaks of Goethe’s concept of “perfection.” How long does it take us to notice the end of the world? To notice that the end of the world might mean our own end?

Seen from the West, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc marked the victorious end of the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall signified the failure of Communist ideals and utopias. The bankruptcy of any economic system that rejected profit motives could be seen in the parade of Trabis, those iconic East German cars that made their way to West Berlin the night that the wall fell. By contrast, the images of the Spanish enclave of Melilla, the televised images of overcrowded refugee boats, and the designs for the Mexican border wall tell very different stories: stories of postcolonial exodus and of the one-way street of globalization, a system in which European and North American countries, and more recently China, move money around the world, forming alliances with the corrupt elites of other nations to exploit their raw materials, often with the aid of war and violence, while refusing to accept the people who flee from these exploited nations, viewing them as a sort of waste product unwelcome “on our shores.”