Having Your Cake (and Eating it Too)
Yesterday I went to a book opening that was lauded for its touching account of Croatian war victims in the 1990s Bosnia, particularly in the central part where nowadays only a fraction of them remains when compared to the initial situation. What was supposed to be a celebration of a young author and her success turned into a feast of whataboutism and an endless lecture by presenters who clearly just wanted an excuse for a rant sprinkled with academic quotes of Heidegger, Barthes and Socrates. A bit like seasoning a bean soup with black truffles. It’s an understatement to say they stole the show and it took an effort to endure their occasionally eloquent rhetorics.
It was a grand occasion by all means: there were political leaders in attendance, a piano and a flautist, as well as a slide-show of photos from the book. Patience helped to get through the program before they actually handed the microphone to the author Glorija Lujanović, who should have had been the focus all the time. Instead, her work was weaponised as a political statement to be used however the top hats in attendance see fit. Which is likely going to happen. The house was full as well as the buffet table at the cocktail party afterwards, with finger food and wine.
I’m not going to sneer at her because she doesn’t deserve it. If this was an attempt at a political career, it worked. However if it wasn’t, she was just a pawn in the right-wing narrative and the book is primarily a prop. Apart from having one more “on our team”, the rest is purely performative. Since she’s consistent with this particular subject in her work, you can’t accuse her of hypocrisy. We’re always in need of a female voice in a discourse that’s full of men, and the women are reduced to entertainers. On the other hand, this one has her own voice and isn’t afraid to use it. Partly because she speaks of things that the top hats happen to want to hear.
This isn’t the first time that art is held hostage by politics, which is what happened at the last edition of Berlinale as well. The Jewish film director Yuval Abraham, won an award for the movie No Other Land, about the destruction of Palestinian villages in Masafer Yatta. At the ceremony, he spoke out against the atrocities in Gaza, which he described as “apartheid”. This expression of sympathy for Palestinians caused quite a stir in the German media, some of which accused him of antisemitism. It killed the mood so much the establishment clumsily started to distance themselves from this fiasco. Sometimes it borders on ridiculous and absurd.
Claudia Roth, the German culture minister, exused her applauding by saying it was directed to the Jewish director instead of Basel Matra, his Palestinian filming partner who received the award together with him. According to The Guardian, Matra said he “struggled to celebrate his film’s success” due to the situation at home. It went so far that a CDU delegate in the Bundestag called for her resignation. The mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, condemned their speech too. Another politician pleaded for the withdrawing of state funding from the Festival. It didn’t matter the film was awarded by an independent jury at all because of the cultural taboo it dared to adress. The fact that victims can sometimes be agressors too.
I didn’t watch the film so I can’t competently talk about it, yet there’s something that I as a writer can talk about: the aforementioned weaponisation, misinterpretation and manipulation of art in the context of ideological agendas. It was the Ukrainian minister of culture, Oleksandr Tkachenko, after all, who published a piece in The Guardian aptly titled As Ukraine’s culture minister, I’m asking you to boycott Tchaikovsky until this war is over. It’s quite tiresome to have to repeat it all over again, but Tchaikovsky doesn’t have much to do with Vladimir Putin’s hegemonism. Attempting to silence artists who criticise Israel doesn’t contribute to a solution either.
While it is certainly easy to understand why official German politics feel historically so indebted to help Israel, the whole thing loses a bit of its appeal when Yuval Abraham starts receiving death threats and his family’s property is being disturbed by disapproving intruders. It’s one step away from a fatwa. This paradox of swimming against the stream can bring you in a very risky situation, as witnessed by Salman Rushdie’s “refurbished” face. When we call out the faults of our own tribe, the waves go up, because it goes against the core principle of loyalty. But true art is a calling that doesn’t bend over to convenience. The truth is like sandpaper: harsh.
During the Cold War, the Unaligned Bloc occupied a fragile middle ground that more or less collapsed after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Capitalism prevailed and there was no one left to balance the other side of the teeter. With the whole mess in the Ukraine, a new Bloc seems to be emerging, though Orban’s surprising support to Sweden’s Nato membership triggered a flicker of light in the darkness we’re being flooded with from the media on the daily basis. It’s getting impossible to keep up with human suffering everywhere and to top it off, the enviromental disasters. What is achieved is the exact opposite: isolation and escapism.
Even my own private life is sometimes too much to handle so I prefer distraction like the Eurovision season and its fan community instead of political parties. Who is it going to be this year? The Croatian entry, Baby Lasagna seems to be headed straight to the top. While it may sound completely unrelated to the scandal in Berlin, that’s my point exactly. I’ve had enough and I can’t keep up. Wearing keffiyeh, which you can buy on Amazon under the description “turban plaid fringe scarf for tactical outdoor camping”, isn’t a political statement unless the implied outdoor camping takes place in Gaza. Which does require a lot of tactics indeed.
The ability to both belong and to take a stand against what you belong to commands respect. It’s regarded as betrayal in communities that confuse criticism with disrespect. Should you dare to undress your own naked king, be prepared for a retribution. It went through my head at the book opening. After all, the royal cohort was right there in front of her. But to do that, we need to confront our own equivalent of the Deutsche Schuld. This post-war awareness of their own sins is integral to the German national identity. When and if the same happens in Bosnia, we’ll be close to success as a country. Mostly because where we’re at right now is very far from it.
The purge has got to come from within the community itself. Anything else will be just life support for a rotting political corpse. Sooner or later there won’t be any tubes left to feed it. As humans, we are learning to share an awareness of the dangers of pollution and human suffering in various forms: war, famine, poverty. It’s all interconnected whether you choose to believe it or not. An economic crisis as severe as the one we’re currently stuck in is being remedied through a massive war industry that in turn causes even more suffering through wars on a global scale.
In a sketch in Saturday Night Life, goddess Athena recommends going to war to solve the Greek financial crisis. If even a mythical creature can’t come up with a better idea, it’s a real pickle. When Sesame Street’s Elmo asked the twitterati how they’re doing, it opened the floodgates of hidden anxieties. Many replied with tweets that almost resembled a suicide note. Is it any surprise people prefer showbusiness to the reality they’re unable to hide from? I don’t think so. No matter whose side you’re on in the bloody showdown in the Middle East, victims deserve our unilateral support. If you’re unable to do that for the living, the least you can do is to bow your head to the dead. I’m sorry. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
