In 2009, an exhibition on the Iron Curtain was held at the Kunsthalle Wien, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall; 35 well-known artists from both East and West took part, including Chantal Akerman, Johan Grimonprez, Anna Jermolaewa, Marcel Odenbach, Ewa Partum and Neo Rauch. The exhibition, curated by Cathérine Hug and Gerald Matt, not only tried to depict an event through art, it also tried to detect pictorial worlds that could subconsciously and critically reflect and capture these intense, hopeful atmospheres.
It was a completely interdisciplinary exhibition, with a number of lectures and discussions taking place simultaneously, for example with the artists Erik Bulatov and Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, as well as Barbara Kruger, with the psychologist Hans-Joachim Maaz, the writer Bora Ćosić, the priest Helmut Schüller, the philosopher Boris Buden, the Slavist Svetlana Boym, the politicians Alexander van der Bellen and Ursula Pasterk, and the economist Rainer Münz, to name but a few. The following conversation with Robert Menasse in Vienna and Zurich at the end of March 2014 took place in this context and against the backdrop of the topicality of European issues. Menasse is a poet and novelist living in Vienna, whose work deals intensely and recurrently with European topics and their complex genealogy. He has been awarded the Heinrich Mann Award (Berlin 2013) and the Max Frisch Award (Zurich 2014) for his work.
Catherine Hug (CH): 25 years ago, on 27th July 1989, the former Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock, together with his Hungarian college Gyula Horn, cut a hole into the border fence between Austria and Hungary. How do you remember this?
Robert Menasse (RM): History was faked at the Austrian-Hungarian border on 27th July 1989; it was done for a good reason, namely the hope that this falsification would develop its own momentum and actually become steeped in history. The dismantling of the monitoring systems and borders had actually begun much earlier, at the end of February and the beginning of March, if I remember rightly, so almost three months earlier.
Obviously, this did not yet represent the true fall of the Iron Curtain, it was just a symbolical act by the Hungarian government, in accordance with Gorbachev’s policy of détente. The border systems were indeed reduced, but the borders were still guarded by soldiers. On 27th June, the image that turned this symbol into a historical fact was deliberately produced. This was a combination of Pop Art and political voodoo. The political stakeholders involved were aware that this had to be included in future history books and that it had to become history. They succeeded in this. It became an iconic photo in the history of 20th century press-photography. However, if you look at it carefully, you can see that it is a fake: the border systems no longer existed, so it was arranged to make it look real, but it looks more like a wire mesh fence on an allotment. And look here: Horn is cutting something that looks like a white ribbon. Well, the Iron Curtain was certainly not secured with white ribbons. A journalist later told me that the picture was taken many times and repeated until the counselors, press and politicians were satisfied with it, so it really was an artistic shot. In fact, it is surprising that they didn’t do it in a studio. I later processed this journalist’s stories in my book Schubumkehr (Reverse Thrust).
If I remember rightly, the immediate impact of the picture was not huge, either. As far as I know, it was not published on the front page of any newspaper, which it certainly would have been if what the picture meant to portray had been true. But the picture had a gradual effect, especially on the minds of the people of the GDR. And so the photo was subsequently overtaken by its message, firstly, on 19th August 1989, during the mass exodus of GDR citizens over the Austrian-Hungarian border near Sopron. That truly was a historic day! I have a much clearer memory of that. Nothing was staged or acted, the cameras were just pointing at what was happening and I was sitting in front of the TV, stunned, I was totally fascinated. In reality, the border had not been opened, it was only open symbolically. But hundreds of GDR citizens just crossed it, as if it had actually fallen. The officer on duty on the border that day, Arpad Bella, had received orders to open fire, however he gave orders not to shoot and to simply ignore the refugees. This soldier could have caused a bloodbath, in fact he had been required to do so! And he could later have used the excuse of “orders from above”. But he did not do it. He was a hero. But nobody could have known that at the time, nobody could have anticipated that, completely by chance, a hero of humanity was on duty that day. And here you see what an important role the human factor plays in this story! I later visited and interviewed Arpad Bella. He told me that he returned home late in the evening and his wife slapped him, screaming and crying. She had seen the scenes on TV and had heard that he was guilty of insubordination. She was beside herself with fear; afraid that he would go to jail and she would be left alone with the kids.
Anyhow, the hole in the fence really began to exist at that moment, the hole that Alois Mock and Gyula Horn had created for a photo. As I said, it was fascinating, it was touching, but… how can I describe it?
CH: But…?
RM: It might sound strange, but it was still unreal. In terms of the meaning that this event should have had, and indeed gained later. This was still not the fall of the Iron Curtain; even then, nobody could imagine that it would actually fall. There was a hole in the Iron Curtain, yes, but a hole can be fixed, and even if it was not closed, it was still unimaginable that the power and might of the Eastern Bloc could leak out of this little hole in the Hungarian border, the Berlin Wall could fall and the Soviet Union could collapse. The excitement, this unbelievably emotive feeling that I was witnessing a major event in world history, an epochal change, did not hit me until 9th November 1989, when the Berlin Wall opened. Then I consciously and comprehendingly experienced something that I had not expected to happen in my lifetime, as up to that moment, everything had seemed to be carved in stone for eternity; this was the great upheaval of history that turned everything upside-down.
CH: The shock waves even reached my school in Switzerland; on 10th November, our history teacher came into our class and gave us the day off, after announcing that it had been a historical night. The general euphoria was so great that during the 25th and 26th November 1989 referendum about the abolition of the army, 35.6% voted in favor. In the Canton of Jura, where I lived at that time, the initiative was actually accepted. This was interpreted as a clear sign that the policy of deterrence could no longer be effective and that it was gradually making way for other ideological viewpoints.
RM: Yes, gradually – but at the same time suddenly. At that time, everything happened simultaneously in slow-motion and ‘fast-motion’. It was no longer a process being steered pragmatically by the political elite; it was now a political meltdown, in which reality and possibility merged. There was no tracking of time, because a sense of time became a sense of history, and every second was equally historic. This has never really been looked back on and reappraised. Firstly, why did nobody see it coming, despite many indications and signals? On 8th November, anybody claiming that the Berlin Wall would fall, the Iron Curtain would disappear and the Soviet Union would implode would have been called a dreamer, a utopian or even a lunatic. Secondly, why did nobody back then even vaguely think it was possible to anticipate the impact that 9th November would have beyond the first moments, even though all of a sudden, everything seemed possible and all possibilities seemed to simultaneously become reality. The atmosphere suggested that this was the end of the era of crises and hostilities. Every citizen of the GDR, who suddenly could now go through the Brandenburg Gate, actually took these steps before the eyes of the global public, with the pathos of the astronaut Neil Armstrong, “…one giant leap for mankind!” But isn’t it strange that nobody anticipated where these steps would actually lead, i.e. to entirely new conflicts, world-policy crises and new wars with new stereotypical enemies and the dramatic growth of misery and poverty amongst the “winners”, i.e. Western societies? The prevailing sentiment was that everything would now be possible, but nobody really thought in terms of possibilities! And thirdly, why until today did nobody understand the most obvious, simplest and clearest message of this historical momentum?
CH: Which message do you mean?
RM: Let me take a trip down memory lane. I can remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday – that’s why it bewilders me so much -, that today there is a generation of grown-ups who were born after these events, and for whom the world has always been as it is today. However, I can remember sitting in front of the TV crying. I sobbed – out of affection, happiness and literally FELLOW feeling with this euphoria of liberation felt by all these people stumbling across the Berlin Wall, climbing over it, singing and dancing. Apart from the day my daughter was born, there is no day in my life I can remember that clearly. I instantly thought, this is the decisive, the defining experience of my lifetime, from today my life has a new system of bearings, from today everything will rearrange itself around this new point of reference and stand in relation to it. But today, we have to admit that this has not happened. Before November 1989, the political elites, the opinion leaders and the media had always been of the opinion that the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain were unalterable political realities, entities that could not be eliminated, one could only try to ease the situation and improve life for the people “over there”. From the Western point of view, the so-called arms race was merely a lever for easing the situation and, at the same time, a multi-billion dollar business. But nobody seriously believed that the Soviet Union would collapse. Maybe it had been said in political speeches, with that frivolous audacity that does not expect consequences, that the Berlin Wall had to fall. But from Monday to Friday, the division of the world was a self-evident and acknowledged precondition of all global political affairs, accepted as a political law of nature, one it was in no way possible to abolish. Just as we do business today with China, the Tiananmen Square murderers, while at home we gripe with rhetorical disgust about their human rights situation.
That’s a definition of political pragmatism: take the world the way it is, and call anyone who does not a dreamer! Then silence the dreamers by telling them that their dreams are lovely and we have the same dreams. But then make it plain that anyone who now believes they could make these dreams come true is a lunatic! That’s why everyone was so surprised; the pragmatists, because they had never believed that what they had sometimes claimed, for ideological reasons, would really happen; and the dreamers, too, because they had long ago stopped building their illusions on political pragmatists. This is a historical fact and it also explains the enormous emotional euphoria of that time. We could have drawn a permanent lesson from this! Namely, that what is understood and acknowledged as political pragmatism is petty-minded and blind and will someday be overrun by history. What then enthralled me so much was exactly that: I was experiencing the death of petty-minded, unimaginative pragmatism!
Now we can more boldly and freely ask how we want to organize our life politically and socially, how we can construct a humane and free world. But even though this was the end of the pragmatists, today they once again sit in control of the levers and switches, sweep through governments and institutions and produce a political zombie-world in which people become aggressive but have no perspective beyond what the weather forecast is. I cannot understand how people who experienced 1989 and created a situation in which the Iron Curtain could be torn down, now believe that it is pragmatically unthinkable to regulate the financial markets… For the generation which experienced 1989, the persistent lesson should be that history is feasible, more is possible than you think, so think more boldly from the beginning, don’t think anything is forever, tomorrow it could already be history, because everything that has a beginning in history also has to have an end! It is a strange punchline that after 1989, the ideology of the “end of history” became fashionable, with what however the exact opposite of the experience of 1989 was meant. The experience was, in fact, that everything has an end, even those things we once thought would last forever. However, out of this experience emerged the philosophical idea that now, nothing would come to an end.
CH: How do you understand that?
RM: I don’t know. Maybe because, in the final analysis, the experience of 1989 touches on a taboo; anyone who thinks this experience through to the end must, in the final analysis, be able to imagine that capitalism will also collapse, that the national democracies to which we are accustomed will reach their end, that the ideology of everlasting growth in a confined world will be buried in rubble, and so on. We cannot and must not think like this. The fall of the Iron Curtain was admittedly not foreseeable in this way, but it did not touch on a taboo. On the contrary, it confirmed an ideology. And ideologies are philosophically regarded, necessarily wrong awareness.
However, the consequences of that do indeed touch on a taboo. It is complicated. And at the same time it is ridiculous in the light of history; on the precondition that we consider ourselves to be thinking beings, pursue historical science, fetishize memories, raise monuments, celebrate historical anniversaries and so on, it is almost preposterously ridiculous. Isn’t it ridiculous to believe that from now on, only technologies and medicine will further develop, but not our political and social systems? Isn’t it ridiculous to believe, in all seriousness, that revolutions will only take place in the virtual world of informatics or genetic engineering, but not in political reality? And don’t the agitations of Taksim Square, the Tahrir or the Maidan prove that history is still moving forward, anything but turned to stone – even if the people who start the revolutions are still betrayed…
CH: What visible and sustainably positive consequences did the political turnaround of 1989 have on art production and especially on your work as a writer? Let’s take, for example, your novel Schubumkehr (1995): terms like drawing of a border, shifts of borders and dissolution of borders, of hope, of encounters with strangers as well as the fear of the strange play an important role. Do you see yourself more as a commentator or an analyst? Or is it also or primarily about other things?
RM: As a writer, I have, from the outset, aspired to reflect upon my contemporaneity. I was shaped by theories of art and literature, which understand art as a reflection of an era and literature as a story about how it is lived and thought, so that contemporaries can recognize themselves and those who come after us can understand us. My trilogy of novels, Die Trilogie der Entgeisterung, which I had conceptualized in the first half of the ‘80s, was meant to be a mirror on our times; it was an irrelevantly disgusting time, the so-called postmodern era. The notion of postmodern era basically means that enlightenment had come to an end, to be replaced by unelightenment. What was disgusting was that the end of enlightenment was celebrated, that creativity was achievable solely in some form of eclecticism and that the ideologists of unlightenment preposterously celebrated themselves as “critical philosophers”. At the same time, it was of course a happy time. There was no big crisis, no anxiety about the future, principally because there was no future, just as there was no history. History was a trunk from which you could take what you fancied. Superficially, this time was esthetically nicer than the ‘70s, that’s why this was basically a time of extraordinary good luck for some people, namely a sensation of weightless floating on a slightly rippling surface. There are, of course, many objections to this point of view, but that’s how I experienced this time. That was how it was and that was the material that I had to hand. That’s what I wanted to reflect like a mirror, inverted. And while writing, I have methodically and technically reverted to reflection theory. But 1989 happened before I had finished the trilogy. That’s why I abandoned this theory in the end and created the third volume completely afresh. I then gave it the title “Schubumkehr” (“Reverse Thrust”) instead of “Endzeit (“Eschaton”), and instead of a story about the trickling away of history, I wrote a text in which the narrator disappears. History is simply bigger than a single spokesman! But at that time, the novel was not yet really analytical, something that probably benefited the book in the end. But since then, literature has interested me in a completely different way, no longer as a mirror-image, or reflection of the static, the status quo, but rather as some kind of laboratory, where experiments are performed with the liquids of history and where the changes in the condition of aggregation can be described. 1989 completely changed me. But when I observe how politics are pursued today, and also how they are written about today, I lose it. On the other hand, the feeling of losing it is omnipresent lately, so maybe I’m just a little symptom in a specific way, at least not unworldly!
CH: Bold and very inspiring trains of thought; you are throwing new, rather self-critical light on my hitherto rather positive perception of eclecticism. Eclecticism is commonly perceived as a formula for success, at least in fine arts, architecture and design, as well as in philosophy, as you mentioned. If we think outside the box, we will come to the conclusion that not every cultural sphere deals with topics such as perceptions of history and crisis in the same way – a blessing of our kaleidoscopically multi-faceted world! 2014 also marks the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web, or the Internet, in short. Where do you see comparisons with 1989 and its consequences in this context? How did the WWW shape artistic practice?
RM: I don’t believe that 1989 and the WWW have a causal relationship beyond their random concurrency. In an emotional sense, the only thing which might be important for world history is the fact that even though the Internet emerged concurrently, it came too late for the GDR. If the possibilities arising from the Internet had existed sooner, if what the NSA is able to do today had been available to the Stasi, then the GDR might still exist. CH: Maybe yes, I completely agree! On the other hand, I also want to protect the achievements of the Internet. Positively seen, it is after all about the provision of more extensive information, where, for example, readers can follow this conversation in every corner of the world. Which brings me to my next question: what is the relationship between the free movement of people and homeland (Heimat: in German: region or place where you come from and where you feel at home and at ease, place where you belong)? The writer Max Frisch once pointed out the fact that there is no plural for the word homeland (Heimat), even though the definition of this notion is so heterogeneous. Artists embody a nomadic understanding of homeland (Heimat). They are unstoppable travelers within their trains of thought, but at the same time part of real life. What role does longing play in connection with that? Can it become a problem? Or is it first and foremost the instigator for finding a solution?
RM: That is an interesting question. It points to another, extremely dramatic symptom of the change of era following 1989, namely the fact that development since then, especially through the so-called Eastern enlargement of the EU, has extended the area described as homeland (Heimat) and at the same time given the notion of homeland (Heimat) a plural after all. Yes, homeland (Heimat) now has a plural, too! Due to the free movement of people, the freedom to travel and the freedom of establishment, the notion of homeland (Heimat) has radically changed, at least for us in Europe. It no longer refers to a nation, something that has always been fiction anyhow. I, as an Austrian, have for example never felt at home in Tyrol. What do I have in common with mountain-dwellers, just because they have the same passport? In Vienna, there are no mountains and therefore there is a completely different mentality! The Tyrolese can be nice and friendly, but people from Alentejo or the Peloponnese can also be nice and interesting… So why should I feel at home in Tyrol, just because it belongs to Austria? Homeland (Heimat) is therefore not a nation but, in a libertine and mobile Europe, increasingly a place to live, which I can, at least inside the Schengen-area, choose freely and without problems. Mobility, which has always been an aspiration, has nowadays become almost a compulsion. Many do not want to, but have to be mobile.
However, it still remains an opportunity, and this opportunity has increased, even though many still regard it as a threat to their homeland (Heimat). In 2012, there was a Eurobarometer survey about the concept of mobility, which showed that personal freedom of movement had the highest approval rates in Poland and the highest rejection rates in Austria. In Poland, mobility apparently means, “I can go somewhere else!”, whereas in Austria mobility means, “someone could come here”! That alone shows that there are at least two concepts of homeland (Heimat): the concept that my homeland is where I live and work, where I have dignity and a legal situation and the concept that this is all divisible, homeland (Heimat) is somewhere I can exclude everybody else from. One is an urban, enlightened concept, the other a village concept of homeland (Heimat), a concept of a narrow valley, of contractedness. What is interesting is the fact that conservative, narrow concepts of homeland (Heimat) are historically more recent. Visas, for example, were not introduced until 1914; before that, one could travel from Coimbra to Riga without a visa or passport and settle there.
Stefan Zweig wrote about this in 1914, “Nationalism has destroyed European culture!” It is insane that today there are once again so many people demanding the devastation and ruin caused by nationalism, literally as a human right, establishing these situations through referenda and celebrating this devastation of intelligence as democratic reason, just so they can defiantly feel better. I have always had the desire to live and work in different cities; I have spent the greater part of my adult life in the so-called outlands, in São Paulo, Lisbon, Berlin and Amsterdam. Nowadays, I live in Brussels part-time. Political borders are one thing, they can be abolished, as we have seen, however it is crucial to break open the narrow borders of mentalities. When we do, we will also feel better in our homes and only then will homeland (Heimat) be a part of the world and not a castle built to withstand the world.
CH: In the meantime, a whole post-1989 generation has grown up, a generation that knows about the time of the Cold War and a bipolar world-order only through stories. These narratives and depictions are generally ideologically biased. Nostalgia, frustration and fatalism, as well as hope, can be found in the implementation of new perspectives. Do you agree with me that young people today think more freely? And that they might have learnt to cope better with what is foreign to them? At the same time, I have the impression – but maybe I am wrong - that we, especially young people, are more apolitical. Where does this come from? However, I want to hold against this assertion the visionary power of initiatives such as the Occupy movement on Wall Street and the demonstrations on Taksim Square or, more recently, in Ukraine. As different as they might be, what is their common denominator, what do they reveal about our understanding of democracy?
RM: First of all, I have to clear up a misunderstanding that appears repeatedly. One can no longer split a society into generations with regard to social awareness, social discourse, way of thinking, political behavior, et cetera. If we take a transient picture of how a society works as a collective, what unites it and what kind of contradictions prevail within it, then at this moment, all living people are contemporaries, no matter how old the individual is. Contemporaneity establishes itself in living beings as a whole, and not in dates of birth. If I, as a sixty-year-old, encounter a thirty-year-old, he might belong to another generation, but basically we are both equally characterized by what is impressed upon us by contemporary conditions, much more than by the erstwhile experiences that I might have had due to my greater age and that the other person has not had. Expressed very primitively, I am influenced by the smartphone culture to the very same degree as someone who has never experienced telephone booths. This is also the reason why age no longer necessarily commands respect, as it did in the olden days, when age meant many years of experience with respect to problems which young people also faced, as nothing really changed except for the seasons, and even they don’t change, they just alternate. This means that when I meet a thirty year-old, I as an adult encounter an adult, and we could both be dead tomorrow, even him, though he would not have lived as long. We are both inherently the same: contemporaries. That’s also why we cannot say that young today think more freely, or that they are more apolitical, or whatever. There are older people thinking more freely, and older people who are completely apolitical; this does not even depend on class consciousness any more. There are younger people from privileged families who are solidary, and working-class children who know no solidarity when it comes to fighting for their workplace. There are all kinds of things, but if it can be integrated into a description of contemporary zeitgeist, it has to do with today and not with age. Admittedly, it is true that the Erasmus-generation has opportunities and experiences that the older generation could barely dream of, but that is unfortunately a minority, and no politicians who check their slogans via opinion-polls would let themselves be guided by that. So if we want to understand ourselves in our contemporaneity, then the question of why younger people today are in part apolitical and whether that has something to do with the fact that they did not experience ’89, is completely nonsensical. There are younger people who are not apolitical and there are older people who experienced ’89 who are apolitical.
The truth is that the applicable parameters have changed again since 1989, and these new parameters are the pegs between which everyone today, both young and old, has to move and find their bearings. Younger people did not experience ’89, well yes, but for older people, the experience of ’89 vanished just as quickly as the time when they did not yet have cellphones. My daughter, for example, speaks five languages and has studied and lived in three different European cities. That is representative of today’s possibilities, but definitely not of her generation. That’s what I mean. The question of what might be typical for a generation is relatively insignificant to me; I have the impression that what is typical for our contemporaneity is typical for all generations, roughly speaking. And, bearing in mind all individual exceptions, that is the backlash of renationalization, the curse of the lucky year of 1989.
CH: Okay, then please forgive me my slightly naïve interjection concerning the generation question. Anyhow, one also speaks of youth mania nowadays. In cultural production, for example, everything has an extremely short half-life – partly artificially created, but partly because it has not historically evolved. Careers are short, memories fade… That is, of course, not the fault of the producers per se, but of an overheated art market, so maybe something similar is happening on the book market. A friend of mine, who is an author, recently told me how frustrating it can be to spend two or more years writing a novel, which is quickly out of date, if significant commercial success does not follow or no acknowledging prices are recorded. Something comparative is happening in fine art: young artists today concentrate far more on being well placed in the art market early on; unfortunately this mainly happens at the expense of creative ideas, as they are too keen to satisfy the market. That’s why free art spaces are so important as a counterbalance! In my previous remark, I might have wanted to create an analogy between this cultural phenomenon and the superordinate society. Obviously, it is not that easy to do this.
RM: Yes, for a simple reason: the “youth mania” which exists today is without a doubt a societal phenomenon. It is not a generational phenomenon. Your examples show that young people today have no advantages, even though youth has become a fetish. This fetish is not recognition of the self-evident beauty and strength of youth, but a lever forcing older people to somehow stay young in order to function and be needed. The sweat in fitness centers and the blood on the operating tables of plastic surgeons are the sweat and blood of the war of markets. Turbo-capitalism demands the faster reproduction of the capital invested, the product has to be fresh, the profits easily disposable. Man himself enters the market as a product, the art market too… But I was originally driving at something else.
CH: Yes, you mentioned the curse of the lucky year of 1989. What do you mean by that?
RM: 1989 was not only the opening of the Berlin Wall. 1989 also represented the beginning of the developments which quickly led to German reunification. At that time, as I have already said, everything was possible; however, the fall of the Berlin Wall, as if on an inclined plain, led unstoppably and almost unopposed to reunification and the national rebirth of Germany, as if there were no alternative. National rebirth! And that took place in the midst of the post-national development of Europe via the EU and the internal market. The train of history had, after all, been driving in a completely different direction for four decades. Now, the redemption of German trauma could take place and the liberation of all the misfortunes and crimes connected with the history of the German nation-building process. All of a sudden, the German nation stood there great and proud. And this fact, that there had actually been a misunderstanding, became completely lost in the initial euphoria: the world was celebrating the liberation of the people; Germany, however, was celebrating the liberation of a nation. And today, Germany is what the EU was founded to oppose, namely a leading power in Europe. This is rooted deep in the heart of Europe, knowingly or unknowingly, but in any case as an enduring political rage. The Germans have demonstrated that re-nationalization is a concept which can lead to success. And even if Germany honestly and sensibly seeks European policy solutions in some key issues, the reactionary and national forces in Europe are becoming stronger, as is the impetus for German nationalism. CH: And in Hungary, of all countries, where 25 years ago there was significant hope for the future of Europe, the most reactionary forces in Europe are in power today! And recently in Switzerland, the question arose of whether the free movement of people should be regulated within nation states –contrary to all the fundamental principles of the EU and the law of nations; this was unfortunately (although admittedly narrowly) accepted by the people. As a citizen of that country, this is a decision I deeply regret. Although democracy in this specific case openly displays its shortfalls, what would be the alternative? How responsible are neighboring states and what measures and initiatives could particularly creative artists use to participate actively in the process of redefining democracy?
RM: Yes, those are the misunderstood consequences of 1989 and also the pragmatic preconditions we have to deal with today. What should be done now and what artists can do, are two different questions. Artists accompany the process, knowingly or unknowingly, no matter how history develops. But it obviously matters how history develops further. What is necessary now, in my opinion, in the light of recent experiences in Switzerland, Hungary, the Crimean, etc., is in fact a new definition of democracy, the liberation of the perception that democracy has to express and defend national sovereignty, and that personal happiness thus depends on national pride and the enforcement of national stubbornness.
The world long ago became a transnational entity, as nothing of any importance can still be regulated within or stopped at national borders. We have transnational economic processes and financial currents, markets, investments and repayments of profits, everything functions transnationally, there is no such thing as a national economy anymore, ecological problems don’t stop at borders, streams of information, including their downsides such as surveillance, cultural exchanges, everything is completely without boundaries; all this can be handled and configured for the purposes of public welfare only through the development of a transnational democracy. 1989 was, and remains, the year that stood for an epoch change. But 2014/15 will be an even more important date, as it will have to result in a decision. Do you know what is strange? Centuries take a further one and a half decades to really die. In 1814/15, the 18th century died with the Congress of Vienna. In 1914, the 19th century died.
And in 2014/15, the 20th century, the century shaped by the criminal energy of nationalism and its consequences, will have to die. And if it does not die now, it will be the fault of world-history.
CH: Thank you for this conversation, Robert Menasse!
