The Latest at Goethe

The Goethe Institut was the only western cultural institute that stayed open throughout the Lebanese civil war, thanks to the courage of one of its program assistants. By Michael Kleeberg

Last spring I went cycling through the countryside in Mühlenbecker, just north of Berlin. On the way, I came across a barn with a sign advertising a rummage sale and decided to take a well-deserved break. While browsing, I came across an album, not one full of old photos but of postcards from countries around the world. I lingered over one of them. It was an old, Technicolor-style photo of a scene that looked familiar, yet so different: Beirut’s Corniche, the legendary Palmyra Hotel with its seaside swimming pool, surrounded by palm trees, and behind it the glistening, white seven-story apartment buildings and lavender and pink Ottoman villas with their lush green gardens.

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The stamps and postmark on the back were gone, but guessing from the architecture it must have been from the early 1970s. The card’s sender described to his grandmother in Berlin how beautiful life in Beirut was, adding that in a few days he would be travelling on to Teheran. It was clear: the postcard was a message from another time and another world, now gone forever.

Yussuf and Ursula Assaf: A synthesis of eastern douceur de vivre and western modernity (Photo: Yussuf Assaf)

Lebanon, the Switzerland of the Middle East? It must have seemed like that back then. The hustle and bustle of Martyr’s Square; Jounieh Bay, the most beautiful and romantic of all of the Mediterranean; the smell of orange blossoms in the air as you approached Tripoli, which was surrounded by orchards that looked like something from “Spring” by Botticelli. But in reality, the country was sitting on a powder keg, and the fuse was already lit.

In fact, Lebanon then was more like Batista’s Cuba than Switzerland, and it was ripe for revolution. It was a paradise for the rich, a class society ruled by Christian, Sunni and Druze clans from the hills, with a poor Shiite minority in the rural south. The Yom Kippur / October War had driven hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into south Beirut’s refugee camps, and the country’s Left took up their cause. Arab Socialism was still the dominant ideology in the region. The ever-present Syrian secret police gladly stoked the embers of latent conflicts in the country, and Lebanon was what it always was, is and will be: the pawn of cynical powers that plot and plan in its power vacuum. In 1975, the tensions culminated in a civil war that would last fifteen years. But now, on the postcard, there is no reason to suspect any of that. Lebanon looks like an oriental dream, one that a German-Lebanese couple decided to live.

Meeting Assaf for the first time

The first time we met Assaf, I intently studied his old, lined, tired, earnest, hopeful, disciplined face, topped with thick white hair and with its prominent chin. And the dark circles under the eyes.

Next to him was his wife, who wore her long hair down, like a young girl would, even though it was gray. It was a very curious, very confusing mix of age, tested by experience and by suffering, and of girlish innocence. In their books, there are old pictures of them from back when he was a good-looking man, when he looked like a young Omar Sharif, as if he was Pan, fiery and dark-haired, a hero from 1001 Nights, and as if she was a young, blonde, fair-skinned girl that he had kidnapped: Europa and the Steer. Or better yet, for she is anything but dumb, as if she had convinced him that he kidnapped her, but really it was all her idea.

She was a young female academic, who would become a renowned translator of the work of Gibran and would publish many anthologies of Lebanese texts, and he was a theologian and poet, who would become a program assistant and the symbol of the Goethe Institut. When they arrived, they dreamed of a life of spirituality and science, a synthesis of eastern douceur de vivre and western modernity. Until the war turned everything upside down.

Crossing the border in a tank

He may have been a dreamer, but was an example of moral courage and decency during the civil war. In my travel journal, I described how Assaf would drive from Jounieh every day and, in the most troubled phases of the war, would cross the Green Line in a tank, and continue through Muslim-controlled West Beirut, like a Maronite Christ. He would finally arrive at the Goethe Institut, which thanks to his efforts was the only western cultural institute to remain open through all fifteen years of the war, long after headquarters ordered all the German employees home and left the “natives” to their own devices.

Why, I wondered then, did Yussuf risk his own life for years to keep the Goethe Institut open, long after all the Germans were gone? Why risk losing his life and leaving his wife alone? Out of idealism, or love for culture? Or a sense of duty that he had learned to appreciate in Germany? Now I believe that he did it out of love for German culture, and precisely because Assaf is not a German.

The history of German psychopathology post-1945 is still not complete. It is a history of a people that continues to be traumatized by its crimes and its suffering, and this trauma has led to individual and collective psychoses that result in the elimination of the self. The deep damage to the feeling of the national self has a positive side to it: a general mistrust of chauvinistic bogeymen as public figures. Our neighbors in Europe, much less interested in debating their national untruths, tend to tolerate these figures. This same damaged feeling of the national self must have influenced the Goethe Institut, with its mission to stimulate interested in our language and our arts throughout the world. It is destined to be a mirror of our national self-consciousness.

It took a foreigner, a naive dreamer and utopian like Yussuf Assaf, to turn the Institut next to the old lighthouse in Manara into a symbol of the endurance of culture and of hope. It took someone with much admiration for the image of Germany that exists in the Middle East today, that of poets and thinkers of old, and the stronghold of peace and world literature in the sense of Goethe, admiration that was strong enough to justify great personal sacrifice.

May old Philemon and his Baucis Ursula be rewarded for their hospitality by the gods, just as Ovid would have depicted it.

Michael Kleeberg, born in Stuttgart in 1959, resides as a freelance writer and translator in Berlin. In 2007 he published the novel Karlmann and in August 2010 his latest novel Das amerikanische Hospital. Kleeberg has translated works by Marcel Proust, Joris-Karl Huysmans, John Dos Passos and others. He has received numerous awards for his literary work, such as the Anna Seghers Prize (1996) and the Lion Feuchtwanger Prize (2000).

This is an abridged version of the article. The full version can be found in the Goethe-Institut’s magazine on 60 Years at the Goethe-Institut (read the PDF).