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Fallada is not only the man who writes the forbidden postcards, he is also each person who finds them, who is too afraid to pass them on. He is not only the man who risks his life, but also the man who fails. Fallada clearly knows his way around the dreary apartments of the alcoholics he describes, and it is his own fear that expresses itself in his characters’ fears of denunciation and torture.
He never lacked the courage to reveal what he knew, even at his own expense.
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.
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[...] 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.
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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.”
yep
How free can we actually be, as individuals, even when we are outwardly, politically free? Whose opinions are they really that we call our own? When can we say I and really mean I, and not the father, the mother, the teachers, the friends, whose convictions are reproduced in us? How much I is there really, beyond my upbringing? (Because even if I reject my upbringing, surely that can be seen as another consequence of my upbringing.) You probably know the famous Schopenhauer quote, it goes something like this: A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.
Can we exchange our own history for another? Discard it? Retract it? Can we take the convictions and beliefs that we have developed over the course of years, and replace them with a blank slate? Can we unlearn what we have learned, unfeel what we have felt?
[...] To me, poetry and thought are a system of communicating vessels. The source of both is my life. I write about what I have lived and am living. To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile, the pages on which I had scrawled my notes in India turned yellow, and a number of them were lost in moves to new quarters and in my travels. I abandoned the idea of writing the book.
PERCEPTIBLE REALITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SOURCE of surprises to me. Of proofs as well. In a long-ago article, written in 1940, I referred to poetry as “the testimony of the senses”. True testimony: its images are palpable, visible and audible. To be sure, poetry is made up of words linked together, which give off reflections, glints, iridescences. But what it shows us, are they realities or illusions? Rimbaud said: “Et j’ai quelquefois vu / ce que l’homme a cru voir” (And I sometimes saw / what man believed he saw). Fusion of seeing and believing. In the joining of these two words lies the secret of poetry and its testimony: what the poem shows us we do not see with our carnal eyes but with the eyes of the spirit. Poetry lets us touch the impalpable and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia. Poetic testimony reveals to us another world inside this world, the other world that is this world. The senses, without losing their powers, become servants of the imagination and let us hear the inaudible and see the invisible. But isn’t this what happens in dreams and in the erotic encounter? When we dream and when we couple, we embrace phantoms. Each of the two who constitute the couple possesses a body, a face and a name, but their real reality, precisely at the most intense moment of the embrace, disperses in a cascade of sensation which disperses in turn. There is a question that all lovers ask each other, and in it the erotic mystery is epitomized: Who are you? A question without an answer … The senses are and are not of this world. By means of them, poetry traces a bridge between seeing and believing. By that bridge, imagination is embodied and bodies turn into images.
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The relationship between eroticism and poetry is such that it can be said, without affectation, that the former is a poetry of the body and the latter an eroticism of language. They are in complementary opposition. Language – sound that carries meanings, a material trace that denotes non-material things – is able to give a name to what is most fleeting and evanescent: sensation. Nor is eroticism mere animal sexuality; it is ceremony, representation. It is sexuality transfigured, a metaphor. The agent that provokes both the erotic act and the poetic act is imagination. Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, language into rhythm and metaphor. The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme is a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because its operation is erotic to begin with. Likewise eroticism is a metaphor of animal sexuality. What does this metaphor say? Like all metaphors, it points to something that is beyond the reality that gave rise to it, something new and different from the terms that it comprises. If Góngora says “blood-red snowfall”, he invents or discovers a reality that, though containing both, is neither blood nor snow. The same happens with eroticism; it says, or, rather, it is, something different from mere sexuality.
In the figure of the libertine there is no union between religion and eroticism; on the contrary, there is a sharp and clear division. The libertine sees pleasure as an aim that excludes any other. He is almost always passionately opposed to values and beliefs, whether religious or ethical, that subordinate the body to a transcendent purpose. At one of its extremes, libertinism borders on criticism and becomes a philosophy; at the other, it borders on blasphemy, sacrilege, profanation, things that are the reverse of religious devotion. Sade boasted of professing an intransigent philosophical atheism, but in his books passages of irreligious religious fervour abound, and in his life he had to face a number of accusations of sacrilege and impiety, such as those brought against him at his trial in 1772 in Marseilles. André Breton once told me that Sade’s atheism was a belief: it could also be said that libertinism is a religion in reverse. The libertine denies the supernatural world with such vehemence that his attacks are a homage and, at times, a consecration. The real difference between the ascetic and the libertine is that the eroticism of the former is a solitary sublimation, one without intermediaries, while the eroticism of the latter is an act that, if it is to be carried out, requires the presence of an accomplice or a victim. The libertine always needs the Other, and this is his damnation: he depends on his object and is the slave of his victim.