I.
History has become a horror again.
It has always been this way, except in the eight decades of peace that what is now the European Union experienced after the Second World War.
But even that peace was relative, since we should not forget the atrocities of the Yugoslav war.
Whenever we are tempted to harbor too high an opinion of the human species, we should temper it by thinking that, throughout our entire history, this period of eight decades is the longest period of relative peace that we have managed to create.
However, the oldest works of rock art dedicated to war date back to around 10,000 years BC.
c.
12,000 years of wars.
80 peace.
For every year of peace, 150 of war.
This simple account should have been enough to believe unconditionally in the “liberalism of fear” spoken of by Judith Shklar, who tried to teach us to fear the collapse of liberal institutions and their replacement by ones based on horror.
Shklar was right: we should have feared our destructive nature more.
Sloterdijk also had it when he pointed out, in
Anger and Time: Psychopolitical Essay
, that, contrary to what is usually thought today, war has been the natural state of our species, while peace was the exception.
As Amos Oz bitterly noted in December 2016, we are no longer terrified by the legacy of Hitler and Stalin, hence the impulse to once again test their totalitarian and undemocratic ideologies.
The barbaric war launched by Russia against Ukraine is exactly that: an attempt to refute everything that liberal democracies managed to build after the Second World War, and to return to an undemocratic order in which the States are not governed by the civilians we elect to protect us from war, but militarists who destroy any institution and any human being that opposes the war ideology.
From a Freudian point of view, the barbaric Russian war constitutes the return of our repressed militaristic and antidemocratic ego: the one responsible for 12,000 years of uninterrupted war.
While Vladimir Putin is the living embodiment of that militaristic ego, which Hitler and Stalin incarnated in their time, Ukraine represents a metonymy of our other ego: the one that, using the fragile institutions of liberal democracy, has managed to create the most consistent and continuous period of peace and prosperity known in the history of humanity.
In barbaric times, perhaps the only advantage we have is that the stories are simplified: we know exactly where barbarism is, just as we know exactly where humanity is located.
In the most recent version of this story, siding with Russia means siding with our militaristic ego, which truly represents the dominant political past of our species;
To be with Ukraine is to trust that our pacifist ego, favorable to democracy and the human being, continues to represent the future of our species.
Taking Ukraine's side means truly believing that the human species has a future.
Not only as a species, but as a species characterized by humanity.
II.
“The horror, the horror.”
I think of Joseph Conrad's words in
Heart of Darkness
every time I read the news, which is to say, every day.
And in those where I began to read about the horrors of Bucha, I remembered the gruesome story of Miklós Radnóti.
As he was of Jewish origin, the great Hungarian poet was murdered in November 1944 and thrown into a mass grave.
There he was found in June 1946 by his wife Fanni Gyarmati, and when she exhumed him he found in one of her pockets a notebook with poems: half of them were love letters to her, the other half described everyday life. in that hell.
Fanni's love has brought literature back from the grave;
she has truly made it stronger than death.
Radnóti's literature showed that barbarism will never have the last word.
If there is enough love, our words will always return from the grave to attest that our pro-human ego is stronger than the anti-human one.
And, therefore, to give meaning to all the attempts that art makes to attest to the existence of that ego.
That we are not only the species that creates mass graves, but also the one that creates beauty and kindness.
I also thought of Radnóti's story when I heard about the murder of Ukrainian writer Volodímir Vakulenko at the hands of Russian troops between March and May 2022, in a village near Izium.
Vakulenko told his father that he kept a diary of those hellish days, and that he would bury it in the garden if he saw his life in danger.
After his murder and the village was retaken by Ukrainian forces, the poet's father and writer Victoria Amelina, winner of the Joseph Conrad Prize and finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature, dug in the garden, found the newspaper and published it.
It is exactly the same story: a literature that comes out of the grave, without allowing barbarism to have the last word.
Beauty attests that if there is enough love, our species will still have a chance.
A year later, in July 2023, Victoria Amelina was killed by the explosion of a Russian bomb while she was in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk with other writers and journalists.
She was 37 years old.
Once again, her extraordinary work demonstrates that barbarism will never have the last word.
In January 2024, the Ukrainian poet Maksim Krivtsov also died, two days after posting his last poem on Facebook, in which he wrote precisely about his own death.
He was 34 years old.
His extraordinary poems also demonstrate that our humanity has a future.
III.
In the first months of 1940, less than half a year after the start of World War II, when another fundamental confrontation between humanity and barbarism was taking place, Walter Benjamin wrote: “There is no document of culture that is not, at the same time , of barbarism” (
On the concept of history
).
For me, one of the fundamental conclusions derived from Benjamin's maxim concerns our role as artists: perhaps our essential task is not to allow documents of barbarism to define us, and to turn them into documents of culture, of civilization.
Attest to our humanity.
Demonstrate that, even if they kill us and other human beings, our humanity cannot be destroyed.
It is a difficult task.
And, for too many reasons, also dangerous.
But there are luminous examples that indicate how it can be done.
I think, for example, of Benjamin Britten, who used eight of Wilfred Owen's extraordinary poems about war in his no less extraordinary
War Requiem
(1962).
Owen died in combat at the end of World War I, exactly one week before the armistice.
He was 25 years old, and, according to Harold Bloom, he was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century in the English language.
Almost half a century later, Benjamin Britten used Owen's art to support his own, while composing his
Requiem
for the Victims of the Two World Wars.
Owen's death, as well as that of tens of millions of other people, were documents of barbarism;
His poems, as well as Britten's music, are documents of civilization, demonstrating that barbarism will never have the last word.
That it is Owen and Britten, not Hitler, Stalin or Putin, who define our humanity.
Although these last three can unleash wars and mass murders that end the lives of tens of millions of human beings, they will not be able to destroy the humanity that we know can and must exist.
Our art demonstrates that what defines humanity is its victims, not its executioners.
Another shining example is that of Paul Celan.
This great poet, whose existence spanned Ukraine, Romania, France and Germany, used his words to transform a document of barbarism (that is, the murder of his parents in the Romanian Holocaust) into a document of civilization.
As he said in a November 1947 letter to the Swiss critic Max Rychner, he had decided to write in German (after writing some 18 poems in Romanian) because, although this was the language of his mother's murderers, it was also the one he I was talking to her.
So he used his words to recreate a verbal space in which communion with his mother was still possible;
In its most literal sense, it was poetry written against death.
And to bear witness to those who had been murdered by the exterminating Nazi ideology.
On the occasion of his acceptance speech for the Bremen Prize, Celan wrote directly that, after “passing through the thousands of obscurities of homicidal speeches,” the language survived the murder of human beings, and was enriched (
angereichert
) with their humanity.
According to Celan, poetry attests to the existence of these murdered human beings;
he demonstrates that even if they died violently, they can never be destroyed.
A critic once noted that all of Celan's poems have an immediate intertextual relationship with the Holocaust.
I agree, and I would add that, that being the case, they refuse to give the Holocaust the last word.
His poems are what the victims declare after “the thousands of darknesses of homicidal speeches” have long ceased to take effect.
Here I can also mention Carolyn Forché's extraordinary 1993 anthology,
Against Forgetting.
Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness
.
With the wonderful capacity for perception and demand of the great poet that she is, Forché brought together some 150 poets of the 20th century who wrote in times of war, genocide, totalitarianism, extermination camps, etc.
Some have survived, others have not;
Her poems always attest to the survival of humanity, even in the most inhuman conditions.
“Poetry as testimony,” is how both Celan and Forché describe it;
above all testimony that our humanity is real, not a simple utopia.
I might also mention another extraordinary anthology,
Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and
Beyond.
This book, edited in 2008 by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, with an introduction by Forché herself, includes poems by some 400 authors, who in some cases sent their works from prisons or war zones.
Barbarism cannot destroy us: that is what all these works say, each one from its own language and tradition.
The existence of humanity is evident, and its art truly has the capacity to transform all documents of barbarism into documents of civilizations.
This is the world we must build with our words: a world in which they are not used to refer to exterminating ideologies.
A world in which, on the contrary, words are a testimony against barbarism.
A testimony that affirms that people can be killed, but not destroyed.
A testimony at the service of other human beings, not of ideologies.
Because now we know that, when words disappoint, history disappoints.
And it becomes horror again.
We must build a Europe and a world in which words do not disappoint human beings.
Not again.
Otherwise, everything that literature or the arts have come to represent will simply be a lie.
The only humanity that is not a dead civilization is the one whose words do not disappoint the human being.
IV.
In the same historical essay written less than half a year after the start of the Second World War, Walter Benjamin points out that the astonishment produced by the fact that barbarism is still possible in the 20th century is in favor of fascism.
As Benjamin writes, the objective is to know that barbarism is always possible, so we must “
promote a true state of emergency”
(the italics are the author's own).
We must always act (not only artists, but also human beings) as if humanity were truly in a state of emergency.
And do everything in our power, no matter how limited, to preserve the humanity we have left.
This defense by Benjamin of a permanent state of emergency that favors human beings struck me when I read Amos Oz's defense of the Order of the Spoon, whose first manifestation was a proposal included in 2004 in
Against Bigotry
.
The order was established two years later, on August 17, 2006, in Stockholm.
When you read this text, you get the feeling that it directly responds to the idea of a permanent state of emergency raised by Benjamin.
Almost 70 years after Benjamin wrote his petition, Amos Oz followed it up with the creation of the Order of the Spoon.
I am sure that Camus was right when he said that truth is everything that is continued;
There is a lot of continuity that is observed between Benjamin and Oz.
Here is the founding document of the Order of the Spoon:
“I believe that if a person witnesses a great calamity, for example, a conflagration, a fire, he can always choose between three basic options:
1. Run away, as far and as fast as possible, and let those who cannot run burn.
2. Write a very angry letter to the editor of your newspaper demanding that those responsible for the calamity be dishonorably removed.
Or, actually, you can also call a demonstration.
3. Bring a bucket of water and throw it on the fire, and if there is no bucket, bring a glass, and if not, a teaspoon, everyone has some.
Yes, I know that a spoon is small and that the fire is huge, but we are millions of people and we all have a spoon.
So I would like to establish the Order of the Spoon.
Those who share my attitude, not that of running away, nor that of writing a letter, but that of using a spoon, I would like them to go around with one on their jacket lapel, so that we know that we belong to the same movement, the "same brotherhood, the same order, the order of the spoon
.
"
I have met people who, with small spoons on their lapels, show us that they belong to a human community that no historical catastrophe can destroy.
Human values present a continuity (and, therefore, a truth) that no barbarism can destroy.
And there is no barbaric fire that our tiny humanist spoons cannot put out.
Art makes a good collection of used spoons like that;
They are already old, but they have fulfilled their function well, and will continue to fulfill it.
Now, in 2024, Amos Oz's idea turns exactly 20 years old, and in August the Order itself will turn 18. If you don't happen to be a part of it, it might be a good idea to join now that you're entering adulthood .
V.
Before ending this manifesto in defense of a humanity whose words do not disappoint human beings, let me tell you something about the fury currently unleashed against Russian culture, which is similar to that which hit German culture after the Second World War. .
The file “Russian culture versus Russian barbarism” reproduces the so-called “German culture versus German barbarism,” which in the 1950s dominated debates on the function of art in Europe.
Today, as yesterday, the same thing is being asked: if culture does not prevent barbarism, what good is it?
If German music, philosophy and literature, all of them superlative, could not make the German people human enough to prevent Nazism, what good was each of these manifestations?
What good is a culture that does not make us more human?
The rebellion contained in this question is what led Adorno to a bitter conclusion in 1951: writing poetry about Auschwitz constitutes an act of barbarism.
And that same rebellion led George Steiner to affirm, in an article published as early as 1960, entitled
The Empty Miracle: Notes on the German Language
, that “the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism,” and that Hitler found in she the “latent hysteria” she needed to concoct her exterminating ideology.
There is a similar fury against Russian culture today.
Just as Adorno denied the moral right to write poetry after Auschwitz, for any Ukrainian the moral right to Russian literature disappears after the massacres committed in Bucha and Mariupol.
In the same way that for Steiner the German language was complicit with Hitler, in the eyes of any Ukrainian Russian literature seems complicit with Putin.
And in fact, diachronically, it is easy to detect in the entire history of Russian literature a deep pan-Russian, anti-European and anti-democratic streak.
From Dostoevsky, through countless writers of all categories to contemporaries such as Zakhar Prilepin, it is understandable that this anti-European and anti-democratic streak is considered (by virtue of its continuity, persistence, breadth and intensity) the very backbone of all Russian literature. .
It is something that makes the visceral rejection that Ukrainians feel towards Russian literature immediately understandable;
in the same way that, in his time, the essential rejection of German culture after Nazism was immediately understandable.
Since both Adorno and Steiner were influential authority figures, their opinion soon became widespread.
It is little surprise that those who were most hurt, those who considered it unfair, were the poets themselves.
Paul Celan was hurt: in 1951, when Adorno published his statement, he had already written an impressive number of poems about the Holocaust (
Todesfuge
was written in 1945; its first version in Romanian,
Tangoul morții
, is from 1947; the German original is published in 1948).
As has already been said, his poetry written in German established a verbal community with his mother, and now the author felt that the moral prohibition that Adorno placed on poetry deprived him of the last possibility of reconnecting with the loved ones that Nazism gave him. had brutally taken away.
Czesław Miłosz was also hurt: he had written some extraordinary poems about the Polish Holocaust, such as
Campo dei Fiori
,
written during Easter 1943.
It took Adorno almost two decades to recognize that he was not entirely right.
In his last book,
Negative Dialectics
(1966), he admitted that, after reading Celan, he understood that poetry is our inalienable right to scream when we are tortured.
Consequently, writing it to attest to the victim's suffering in the language of his murderers is to defeat those murderers.
It would be unfair (and perhaps even barbaric) not to appreciate that Russian literature also participates in a pro-European, humanist and freedom-loving tradition.
Although it is probably weaker than the antidemocratic one, it is by no means negligible, since it covers two centuries and some important authors: starting with Chekhov and Turgenev, continuing with Akhmatova, Madelstam, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva, until reaching today Liudmila Ulítskaya and Mikhail Shishkin.
All of them clearly felt part of European culture;
some even identified themselves more as European than as Russian.
Turgenev, for example, in his last diatribe with Dostoevsky, when the author of
The Demons
accused him of betraying Russia with his philo-European attitude, he responded bluntly: “But I'm not Russian, I'm German!”
(the entire scene is reproduced in
The Europeans
by Orlando Figes).
Chekhov is one of the world's leading humanist artists.
Madelstam and Akhmatova are among the most freedom-loving poets of the entire 20th century;
precisely for this reason they were crushed mercilessly by the communist regime.
This is the Russian humanist culture that Europe (Ukraine included, it goes without saying) will also want to recover, since in it there are amounts of truth and beauty that are not found elsewhere, and because it is a culture that will decisively nourish the heart and the minds of us Europeans.
It took Adorno almost 20 years to understand that he had to moderate the harshness of his statement.
That there is an art that serves the barbarism of tyrants and justifies it, and that there is another that gives a voice to the victims.
The one they need to scream while they are tortured.
The one they need to give their testimony.
It is only this voice with which art is truly expressed.
And it is precisely this voice that demonstrates that no barbarism can definitively destroy human beings.
SAW.
If Germany once again became one of the main hearts of Europe, it was because it admitted its tragic and barbaric error and had the political and social will to develop awareness of its guilt.
This was and continues to be an educational program of a scope never seen before.
After 1945, Germany had a future because of this moral admission of its past faults.
If Russia wants to have a past after losing the war with Ukraine, it will have to go through a similar moral process of admission and repentance for its tragic and barbaric mistake.
Unfortunately for Russia, I do not see any political or social will in it that would lead to that moral reaction.
Put bluntly, Russia will have no future because of its impotence to face the guilt of its past.
For its part, in Ukraine we all observe and admire an extraordinary spirit, born of the moral reaction to barbarism.
President Zelensky's extraordinary words – “I need ammunition, not a walk” –, spoken in the face of quite probable death, were the beginning of this enormous moral reaction that served as a catalyst for an impressive present and future for Ukraine.
Which means that Russian barbarism has not managed to destroy that country.
Russian barbarism has destroyed Russia above all.
For their part, Ukrainian writers have done exactly what true artists do when history turns into horror: they have given a voice to those who needed it to scream in the face of barbarism.
They have used their words to bear witness in the face of atrocity.
They have not allowed barbarism to have the last word.
So Vakulenko, Amelina and Krivtsov, not Putin and his barbaric minions, will be the ones who define us as a human species.
If we want our art, and our humanity, to have a future, we must follow their example, and write from this permanent state of emergency for human beings.
Serving literature as members of the Order of the Spoon.
And building a humanity whose words will never again disappoint human beings.
If we do it this way, literature will reach us even if it has to travel between mass graves.
He has already done it.
But I hope I don't have to do it again.
It depends on us.
And our spoons.
Radu Vancu
is a Romanian writer.
This text is the speech that opened yesterday the Odessa Literary Festival, which this year is celebrated in Bucharest due to the war being fought in Ukraine.
Translation by
Jesús Cuéllar Menezo.
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