The Latest at Goethe

There is no doubt that a nation needs culture. But, does culture need one nation? Cultures are always parts of one another, at least according to writer Aris Fioretos. In his essay for the symposium National Culture Revisited he even explains the “sch” in Deutschland.

Minute one

Allow a Swede to take a brief journey back in time to the days before the fall of the wall, early autumn of 1989. The place is New Haven, Connecticut. We are in a seminar room, or in other words, in my last life but two when I was still teaching. At a seminar on French poetry, a student of Korean-American origin who had attended the German School in Cairo greeted me with the words, “Hallo, du alter Schwede!”

Until that moment, this teacher was unfamiliar with the German expression. Old Swede? Me? Although still not a truly old Swede – that is, not one of those compatriots who remained following the Thirty Years’ War to teach German lansquenets the martial arts – today I am older than I was when the wall fell. And after four years (that felt like thirty) as the counsellor of culture at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin (my next to last life) I imagine that I have had enough experience with German wishful thinking regarding the paradise to the north – a pathology known as the “Bullerby Syndrome” – to be able to say: A Swede is not only what he believes himself to be.



Let’s fear, let’s hope that the same applies to people south of Trelleborg. Just like the soon-to-be old Swede who unexpectedly finds himself related to Pippi Longstocking and Henning Mankell – at least in spirit –, a German is always what others take, imagine, fear, marvel at him or her to be, like it or not. In short, identity is always contingent upon beliefs of others. And thus presupposes differences.

Minute two

In the world after the fall of the wall – often considered one in which the political, social and media conditions of human trade have been globalized – we often hear of “nation branding,” the attempt to treat a nation as merchandise whose value needs to be positioned on the market of public perception. We can think this good or bad; irrefutable is only the fact that regardless of how big the budget (may it remain big, grow bigger) no person and no company and certainly no nation can decide entirely how and as what it will be defined.

That is why culture is so often praised as the medium in which differences may be shaped and managed – for the sake of cross-border understanding. It is difficult to imagine a kind of diplomacy that does not treat differences as the basic conditions of negotiations. Yet, what does it mean to consider differences a precondition? What does it imply to construct them as an identity, and thusly to write history? Surely, such an undertaking would not be any pure or simple Leitkultur, that much-discussed “guiding culture” once suggested by the CDU politician Friedrich Merz, that always knows the direction to take – a culture that sets the tone like a tuning fork and considers notes that do not belong to the chosen harmony merely as noise or disturbances outside the chosen scale. Such a guiding culture pledges itself to a melody whose adherence to specific values must work like a refrain – a repetition of the ever same, over and over again. Hence, a culture that is unable, or merely unwilling, to recognize transformation; a culture that sounds, indeed, like whistling in the dark.

Allow me to make a small, almost imperceptible change of key, without changing the fundamental preconditions and already this guiding culture becomes something different. That is, allow me to shift two letters, L and T, so that Leitkultur becomes Teilkultur. Instead of a “guiding culture,” we would now have a “shared culture” – a culture in shares for which partaking is always also understood as binding and separating, a culture that negotiates differences, a culture that does not ignore or falsely reconcile differences, but also does not sentimentalize, fetishize or demonize them. In brief, a culture that does not exist, but for which it might be worthwhile to invent tones. Why? Because unlike its geography, the culture of a nation is never merely of territorial nature.

Minutes three and four

At the opening of the symposium National Culture Revisited, Udo Jürgens was offered as a spoken – or rather sung – example from the cultural sector that articulated the differentness experienced by “guest workers,” as immigrants were called well into the 1960s. Not in film, not in literature and not in the theatre of the former Federal Republic did we hear of them but, according to Ms. Kiyak, in the medium of popular song. Quite probably so. As a not-very-old-Swede, I am hardly fit to judge this breakthrough of foreign experience in a tearjerker. As much as I like vintage 1975 Greek wine – and even in spite of Jürgens’s notion that the Greek guest workers drink “the blood of the earth” in suburban German taverns – I’d prefer to go back yet another ten years, to the year 1965, to find the lead for our topic. Back then, the “Ballad of a Thin Man” was playing on the radio, which asked:

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

When speaking of a “guiding” or “national culture,” about different perceptions of history and historiography, these words by Bob Dylan often come to my mind. He sang of the whistler in the dark, of Mister Jones – or shall we say Jürgens – who realizes that something is happening, but who really has no idea what it might be. And who therefore prefers to sing of the nostalgia of his barely assimilated friends, who, “being strangers [in this town],” who prefer inebriation rather than to ponder its consequences. Let’s talk instead about the welcome hangover termed national culture.

There is no doubt that a nation needs culture, but it remains debatable whether culture needs one nation. Cultures are always parts of one another. Please consider the no doubt carefully chosen illustration of this symposium’s topic. There he is on the programme, cover boy Friedrich Schiller, the poet who saw aesthetic education as the mission of a culture, in youthfully determined pose, not without sober pride, poised between a fire extinguisher and something I can only identify as a modern confessional. In other words, there he is, the efficient embodiment of a specific concept of culture: positioned between disaster prevention and confession, between a prevention device and claims of transcendence, or, in more brutal words, between barbarians and gods. Not an uninteresting position.

But is a nation an aesthetic project? Do we not already know too well what happens when states strive to edify their citizens and shape their forms of appearance according to aesthetic criteria? If a nation is to be understood through its culture, but a culture not necessarily through this one nation, no country will be able to make an artwork of the historiography of its interpersonal practices without considerable, even violent contradictions. The differences that come to light are part of its identity. This requires a more alert grasp of differences – inside and outside territorial boundaries. Who’s to say that the “guest worker” who came here in the 1960s and now, back in his homeland watching German television via satellite, as Ms. Kiyak described for us, is not, in a certain way, a piece of exported Germany? Perhaps he is more a challenge for Turkish historiography; at least he is more “German” than his neighbours. It is important that historiography depicts the embodiment of such differences, too, which neither begin nor end with the children of the second generation.

Minute five

After so many flippancies, allow this old Swede just one more. Take Germany – or better: take the word Deutschland. Is it not actually a synonym for the concept of national culture? There is the territory (Land), which remains the precondition for every nation. There is the morpheme Deut, as in words such as deutsch (“German”) and deuten (“signify,” “interpret”), and thus by implication the act of comprehension that underlies all culture. Yet, the morpheme also contains the word Deut, “tuppence,” as in the smallest possible difference – sometimes deadly, always critical – that decides between head and tails.

Now, you might ask, what about the rest, that is, that “sch” in Deutschland? In my frivolous interpretation, this sch would be the silence that resonates in every act of communication – part consent, part resistance, part divisive, part unifying. Certainly, it would sometimes be a silence like that of Paul Celan, who Mr. Steinmeier quoted yesterday and who, in his 1960 Büchner Prize Address, described the “terrifying silence” inherent in “the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” But, if we read a little further in Celan’s speech than Mr. Steinmeier was able to, he speaks of a silence that gives one “no words for what was happening” but “went through and could resurface ‘enriched’ by it all.” In all likelihood, the presence of a certain Reich in this sarcastically twisted phrase is not misheard …

Celan knew it. According to his notion of history and historiography, language and therefore also culture is never innocent. On the contrary, it is always “enriched” – both with evil and with good. Whether we like it or not, it is something in which paradoxically the unsaid also has a say – sometimes belatedly, and straightforwardly, sometimes through the notes that we only hear if we are not playing in harmony with a “guiding culture.” May this soft, inner core be preserved in what we term national culture. It both separates and unites; it allows us to continue asking questions without necessarily being able to answering them. A culture that one would wish not just for Germany is not only measured by how cleverly it handles that which is grasped and assimilated and understood, but also, and especially, how reasonably it handles the grasped and assimilated but not yet understood silence – don’t you agree, Mister Jones?