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All right. I want to hide behind the girl, she’s my mask, as you know, the mask I wear so that I can run naked across the playing field. So the girl can’t look like me. And she can’t act as I would act. While I turn a smiling face to the world, a face that always makes me look younger than I really am, while people give me friendly advice because they think I need it, while things come easily to me because people aren’t afraid of me — the girl has to be uncouth and unshapely, dirty where I’m clean, timid where I’m confident, uptight where I’m uninhibited, weak where I’m strong, but nevertheless this girl is my mask, nevertheless this girl still has to accept advice when someone thinks she needs it, she can’t make others afraid, she has to be able to be happy. And the reverse is true, too: I also have to be uncouth, unshapely, dirty, timid, uptight, and weak. Because otherwise I wouldn’t know this character well enough to wear her as a mask. The mask has to fit me but nevertheless hide me, the story has to be my story but still someone else’s, if I’m going to be able to tell it at all. That’s why Josef Winkler can write in his book Roppongi: “When my father died, we were staying in Japan . . . , we drove from Tokyo into the mountains of Nagano, past smoking volcanoes, to a literature symposium,” but the Josef Winkler in the book isn’t identical to the writer Josef Winkler; and Thomas Bernhard can write in his book A Child: “At the age of eight I rode my first few yards on a bicycle in the street below our apartment in the Taubenmarkt in Traunstein. It was midday, and the streets of the self-important little provincial town were empty.”1 And the eight-year-old child is not identical with the child that Thomas Bernhard, the author of the book, was, because of course it’s also possible to wear a mask that shows your own face.
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?