Chronicles of a Liquid Society

  And yet we should all remember that forty-one million Europeans died massacring each other during World War II (and that’s just Europeans, not including Americans and Asians). Since then, apart from the tragic episode in the Balkans, Europe has witnessed sixty-eight—yes, sixty-eight—years of peace. And if we tell young people that the French today might dig trenches along the Maginot Line to hold back the Germans, that the Italians might want to smash Greece, that Belgium might be invaded, or that the British might bomb Milan, these young people (who are perhaps going off to spend a year in some other European country on a university scholarship, and perhaps at the end of this experience will meet a kindred spirit who speaks a language other than their own and their children will grow up bilingual) would think we’re inventing a science-fiction story. Nor do adults realize that the borders they now cross without a passport had been crossed by their fathers and grandfathers carrying guns.

  But is it true that Europeans have failed to be seduced by the idea of Europe? Bernard-Henri Lévy recently launched a passionate manifesto for the rediscovery of a European identity, Europe ou chaos?, which starts off with a disturbing warning: “Europe is not in crisis, it is dying. Not Europe as a territory, of course, but Europe as an Idea. Europe as a dream and as a plan.” The manifesto was signed by António Lobo Antunes, Vassilis Alexakis, Juan Luis Cebrián, Fernando Savater, Peter Schneider, Hans Christoph Buch, Julia Kristeva, Claudio Magris, Gÿorgy Konrád, and Salman Rushdie, who isn’t European but found his first place of refuge in Europe at the beginning of his persecution. Since I too have signed, I found myself with some of my co-signatories at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris for a debate on these questions. A theme that immediately emerged, and with which I broadly agree, is that there is an awareness of European identity, and I happened to quote several passages from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. It is World War I, we are in Paris, the city fears night attacks from German zeppelins, and public opinion accuses the hated Boche of every kind of cruelty. And yet, in the pages of Proust one breathes a Germanophile air, which emerges in the conversations of his characters. Charlus is a Germanophile, though his admiration for the Germans seems to depend not so much on cultural identity as on his sexual preferences: “‘Our admiration for the French must not allow us to underestimate our enemies, that diminishes ourselves. And you don’t know what a German soldier is, you’ve never seen them as I have, on parade doing the goose-step in Unter den Linden.’ In returning to the ideal of virility he had touched on at Balbec . . . ‘You see,’ he said, ‘that superb fellow, the German soldier, is a strong, healthy being, who only thinks of the greatness of his country, “Deutschland über Alles.”’”

  Let’s move on from Charlus, even if his philo-Teutonic discourses stir literary reminiscences, and talk instead about Robert de Saint-Loup, a brave soldier who would die in battle. “To make me grasp contrasts of shade and light which had been ‘the enchantment of the morning,’ [Saint-Loup] alluded to a page of Romain Rolland or of Nietzsche with the independence of those at the front who unlike those at the rear, were not afraid to utter a German name . . . Saint-Loup, when he spoke to me of a melody of Schumann gave it its German title and made no circumlocution to tell me, when he had heard the first warble at the edge of a forest, that he had been intoxicated as though the bird of that ‘sublime Siegfried’ which he hoped to hear again after the war, had sung to him.”

  Or further on: “I had learnt, in fact, of the death of Robert Saint-Loup, killed, protecting the retreat of his men, on the day following his return to the front. No man less than he, felt hatred towards a people . . . The last words I heard him utter six days before, were those at the beginning of a Schumann song which he hummed to me in German on my staircase; indeed on account of neighbors I had to ask him to keep quiet.”

  And Proust hastened to add that French culture made no prohibition on studying German culture, even in those days, though with some precaution: “A professor wrote a remarkable book on Schiller of which the papers took notice. But before mentioning the author, the publishers inscribed the volume with a statement like a printing license, to the effect that he had been at the Marne and at Verdun, that he had had five mentions, and two sons killed. Upon that, there was loud praise of the lucidity and depth of the author’s work upon Schiller, who could be qualified as great as long as he was alluded to as a great Boche and not as a great German.”

  What lies at the base of the European cultural identity is a long dialogue among literatures, philosophies, and musical and theatrical works. Nothing that can be canceled out in spite of war, and this is the core identity of a community that holds out against the greatest of barriers, that of language.

  Although this sense of European identity is strong among intellectual elites, is it the same with everyone else? I found myself thinking that, even today, every European country, in schools and in public commemorations, celebrates its own heroes, all people who have valiantly slaughtered other Europeans, beginning with Arminius, who exterminated the Roman legions of Publius Quinctilius Varus in AD 9, then Joan of Arc, El Cid (the Muslims against whom he fought had been Europeans for centuries), and the Italian and Hungarian heroes of the nineteenth century, including those Italian soldiers who fell to the Austrian enemy. Has anyone talked about a European hero? Have there never been any? And who were the Byrons or Santorre Santarosas who fought for Greek independence, or the many Schindlers who saved the lives of thousands of Jews regardless of what nation they belonged to, or the heroes who were not warriors, such as Alcide De Gasperi, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Altiero Spinelli? And by searching in the recesses of history we could find others to tell our children about.

  2013

  From Maus to Charlie

  I consider my friend Art Spiegelman to be a genius. His graphic novel Maus, though a comic, is one of the most important pieces of literature on the Holocaust. But this time I disagree with him. Spiegelman was asked to do a cover illustration for the New Statesman on freedom of thought. The cover he delivered is of a woman brutally gagged. It has been published in other magazines, and is magnificent. But Spiegelman had asked the New Statesman to publish one of his caricatures of Muhammad as well, and the magazine said no. So he withdrew the cover.

  There has been much confusion over the business of Charlie Hebdo. I haven’t written about it since I gave two interviews immediately after the tragedy, and I was deeply upset by it, not least because Georges Wolinski, who was killed in the massacre, was a friend. He had done an amusing caricature of me when we were on the editorial team of linus, the Italian comic-strip magazine, and used to meet at a neighborhood bar.

  I’ll now get to the point. I believe that two rights and two duties were involved. Bear in mind Pope Francis, who worried many when he said that if anyone had insulted his mother he would have punched them. He didn’t say he would have killed them. He knew there was a commandment against killing and therefore he could only condemn the actions of terrorists, who, with their cutthroat allies of ISIS, represent a new form of Nazism—racism, elimination of other ethnic groups, a plan to conquer the world. People had to condemn the massacre and had to march, as they did, to defend freedom of expression.

  Voltaire teaches us that we have to defend the freedom of thought even of those who don’t think as we do. But if the journalists of Charlie Hebdo hadn’t suffered the atrocious revenge attack, and if the massacre hadn’t taken place, anyone would have had the right to criticize their cartoons, not only of Muhammad, but of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, which are similar to those nineteenth-century cartoons by Leo Taxil representing Mary pregnant with a dove and Joseph cuckolded.

  It is a moral principle that the religious sensibilities of others should not be offended, which is why those who swear in their own home should not swear in church. People mustn’t stop drawing cartoons of Muhammad for fear of retaliation, but because—and I regret if the expression sounds too delicate—it is “uncivil.” And people shouldn??
?t draw cartoons of the Holy Virgin, even if Catholics are against the idea, as they are, at least today, of slaughtering those who do it. There again, I have searched the Internet and have observed that none of the sites condemning the censorship of the New Statesman have reproduced Spiegelman’s picture. Why? Out of respect for others or out of fear?

  With the Charlie Hebdo affair, two basic principles came into play, but because we were confronted by the slaughter, it was difficult to see them separately. And so it was legitimate to defend the right of expression, even in an uncivil manner, by declaring, Je suis Charlie. But if I were Charlie, I wouldn’t go fooling around with Muslim sensibilities, nor Christian sensibilities, nor Buddhist ones.

  If Catholics are upset when you offend the Blessed Virgin, respect their feelings, and if necessary write a judicious historical essay that casts doubt on the Incarnation. If Catholics shoot at those who offend the Blessed Virgin, oppose them.

  Nazis and anti-Semites of every kind have circulated hideous caricatures of the “vile Jews,” but Western culture in the end has accepted these insults, respecting the freedom of those who circulated them. Yet when caricature is transformed into massacre, people have rebelled. In other words, they respected the freedom of Édouard Drumont, in the nineteenth century, to be ferociously anti-Semitic, but they hanged the Nazi murderers at Nuremberg.

  2015

  On Hatred and Death

  On hatred and on love

  Over the past few months I have written on racism, on inventing the enemy, and on the political role of hatred toward “others” or toward those who are “different.” I thought I had said everything, but a friend in a recent discussion raised considerations that were new to me, and it’s one of those cases in which you no longer remember who said what, though the conclusions were the same.

  With a rather pre-Socratic thoughtlessness we tend to think of hatred and love as opposites that face each other symmetrically, as though whatever we don’t like we hate, and vice versa. And yet between the two poles there are countless shades. Even if we use these two terms metaphorically, the fact that I love pizza but am not mad about sushi doesn’t mean I hate sushi. I like it less than pizza. And taking the two words in their proper sense, that I love one person doesn’t mean I hate everyone else. The opposite of love can perfectly well be indifference: I love my children and was indifferent to the taxi driver who gave me a lift two hours ago.

  But the real point is that love isolates. If I’m madly in love with a woman, I expect her to love me and no one else, at least not in the same way. A mother passionately loves her children and wants them to feel a special love for her (they have only one mother), and she would never love the children of another with the same intensity. Love, in its own way, is therefore selfish, possessive, selective.

  Of course, the commandment tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, all seven billion neighbors, but this commandment asks us in practice not to hate anyone, and it doesn’t expect us to love an unknown Eskimo in the same way as we do our father or our grandchild. Love will always favor my grandchild over a seal hunter.

  On the other hand, hatred can be collective, and in totalitarian regimes it must be so. When I was a child, the Fascist school required me to hate “all” sons of Albion, and every evening on the radio Mario Appelius proclaimed, “May God damn the English.” The same is true of dictatorships and populist regimes, and fundamentalist religions too, since hatred for the enemy unites peoples in their rage. Love moves the heart toward few people, while hatred moves my heart, and the hearts of those on my side, against millions of people, or a nation, or an ethnic group, or people of a different color or language. The Italian racist hates all Albanians or Romanians or Gypsies. Certain members of the Northern League hate all southerners, then draw their salaries from taxes paid also by southerners, a true masterstroke of malevolence where the pleasure of insult and mockery is united with hatred. Berlusconi hates all judges and demands that we do likewise, and that we hate all Communists, even at the risk of seeing them where they no longer exist.

  Hatred is therefore not individualistic but generous, philanthropic, and holds vast multitudes in a single embrace. Only in stories are we told that it is beautiful to die for love, but in the newspapers, at least when I was a child, the death of the hero as he hurled a bomb against the hated enemy was portrayed as something beautiful.

  This is why the history of our species has been marked chiefly by hatred, and by wars and massacres, and not by acts of love, which are less comfortable and often wearing when extended beyond the circle of our egoism.

  2011

  Where has death gone?

  In France, Le Magazine Littéraire has devoted its November issue to “what literature knows about death.” I looked at a number of articles with interest, but was disappointed to find that, apart from some things I didn’t know, they were in the end restating a familiar concept: that literature has always been preoccupied with death—along, of course, with love. The articles deal eloquently with the presence of death in twentieth-century narrative as well as in pre-Romantic Gothic literature. But they could just as easily have described the death of Hector, or the grief of Andromache, or the suffering of martyrs in many medieval texts. To say nothing of the history of philosophy, which begins with the most common example of a major premise in a syllogism: “All men are mortal.”

  But I think the problem lies elsewhere, and perhaps has to do with the simple fact that people today read fewer books. We have become incapable of dealing with death. Religions, myths, and ancient rituals made us familiar with death, however daunting it remained. We became familiar with it through funeral celebrations, the wailing of mourners, the great requiem masses. We were prepared for death by sermons on hell, and while still a child I was encouraged to read pages on death from The Companion of Youth by Don Bosco, who was not only a jolly priest who encouraged children to play, but had a fiery and visionary imagination. He reminded us that we cannot know where death will surprise us—whether in our bed, at work, in the street, through a burst vein, catarrh, a rush of blood, a fever, a sore, an earthquake, a thunderbolt, “perhaps just as you finish reading this consideration.” At that moment we will feel our head darken, our eyes fill with pain, our tongue burn, jaws closed, chest heavy, blood chilled, flesh consumed, heart pierced. From here comes the need to practice the Exercise for a Good Death: “When my motionless feet warn me that my career in this world is about to end . . . When my numb and tremulous hands can no longer grasp you, my blessed Crucifix, and against my will I let you fall onto the bed of my suffering . . . When my eyes, dimmed and stricken with horror at imminent death . . . When my cold and trembling glances . . . When my pale and leaden cheeks inspire compassion and terror in those around me, and my hair soaked with the sweat of death, rising up on my head announce that my end is near . . . When my imagination, agitated by terrible and fearsome ghosts is immersed in mortal sorrow . . . When I lose the use of all senses . . . merciful Jesus, have pity on me.”

  Pure sadism, it might be said. But what do we teach our young people today? That death takes place far away from us in a hospital, that people usually don’t walk behind the coffin to the cemetery, that we no longer see the dead. We no longer see them? We see them constantly blown up, crashed on the sidewalk, dropped into the sea with their feet in a cube of cement, their heads left rolling on the cobbles, their brains splattered over the windows of taxis. But they are not us, and they are not our loved ones; they are actors. Death is entertainment, even when the media reports about the girl actually raped or the victim of a serial killer. We don’t see the mutilated body that would remind us of death. The news bulletins let us see grieving friends who bring flowers to the scene of the crime or, far worse sadism, reporters ring the mother’s doorbell and ask, “What did you feel when they killed your daughter?” Rather than death, they show us friendship and maternal grief, which affect us less violently.

  And so the disappearance of death from our immedia
te experience will terrify us more when the moment approaches—the event that is part of us from birth, and to which every wise person grows accustomed throughout life.

  2012

  Our Paris

  On the night of the Paris massacre I stayed glued to the television, like so many others. Familiar with the streets of Paris, I was trying to understand where the events were taking place and to work out whether they were close to the homes of friends, how far they were from my publisher’s office, or from the restaurant where I regularly eat. I felt reassured by the thought that they were far away, on the Right Bank, whereas my own Parisian world is on the Left Bank.

  This did nothing to diminish the shock and horror, yet it was like knowing one had missed boarding the aircraft that had just crashed who knows where. No one that night had yet absorbed that this could possibly have happened in one of our own cities.

  But I began to feel a vague unease when I realized that Bataclan was a familiar name. Finally I remembered. It was there, around ten years ago, that one of my novels had been presented, with a magnificent concert by Gianni Coscia and Renato Sellani. So it was a place I had been to, and where I could have returned. Then—no, not then, but almost immediately—I recognized the name Boulevard Richard Lenoir: it was where Inspector Maigret used to live!

  You’ll tell me it’s not right to introduce something imaginary into the scene when such frighteningly “real” events were happening. And yet this explains why the Paris massacre affected everyone so deeply, even though terrible massacres had happened in other cities around the world. Paris is a place that many of us think of as home, because real cities and fictional cities merge in our memory, as if both were a part of us, or as if we had lived in both.