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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Navid Kermani is not only one of Germany's most distinguished writers and public intellectuals, he is also an outstanding public speaker who mesmerizes audiences with his well-crafted sentences and turns of phrase. Whether he is speaking about the plight of refugees or delivering a eulogy at his father's graveside, Kermani finds words that surprise his listeners, enlighten them, provoke them, disturb them or move them to tears. As a German of Iranian descent whose parents settled in Germany, Kermani is particularly sensitive to the issues raised by migration and the perceived tensions between Islam and the West. His speeches are a powerful demonstration of how much we stand to gain by adhering to the values of openness, tolerance and mutual respect for the beliefs and practices of those from other cultures who live among us.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Editorial Note
Preface
On the Presentation of the Special Award of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize to the Iranian Writers’ Association
On the Death of the Unborn Sofía
Notes
On the 65th Anniversary of the Promulgation of the German Constitution
On Receiving the Joseph Breitbach Prize
Notes
At the Public Commemoration of the Victims of the Paris Attacks
Notes
On Receiving the Peace Prize of the German Publishers’ Association
Notes
Eulogy for Rupert Neudeck
Notes
Eulogy for Jaki Liebezeit
On the 20th Anniversary of the Founding of the Department of Jewish History and Culture
Notes
On Receiving the State Prize of North Rhine-Westphalia
Notes
Eulogy for Djavad Kermani
Notes
Eulogy for Karl Schlamminger
On the 70th Birthday of FC Cologne
Notes
In Memory of Egon Ammann
Notes
Dinner Speech at the Investment Conference of Flossbach von Storch AG
Notes
Keynote Address to the Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology
Notes
Statement before the Opening Reading of the Harbour Front Literature Festival
On Receiving the Hölderlin Prize of the City of Bad Homburg vor der Höhe
Notes
On a Concert by the WDR Symphony Orchestra in the Broadcast Series ‘Music in Dialogue’
On the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of the State of Lower Saxony
Epilogue: On My Bookseller, Ömer Özerturgut
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Editorial Note
Preface
Begin Reading
Epilogue: On My Bookseller, Ömer Özerturgut
End User License Agreement
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TOMORROW IS HERE
SPEECHES
NAVID KERMANI
TRANSLATED BY TONY CRAWFORD
polity
Originally published in German as Morgen ist da by Navid Kermani© Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, München 2019, 2021
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5058-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932467
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
EDITORIAL NOTE
Except for five speeches and the preface, all of the twenty texts collected in this book were first published in German in other places: in newspapers and magazines, in yearbooks and jubilee volumes, as brochures or e-books. One of the speeches was also printed in one of my earlier books, Between Quran and Kafka: West-Eastern Affinities (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). However, most of the early printings diverged from the original spoken versions, which are retained in the present book. This English edition is based on the German edition published by C. H. Beck in 2021. Twelve speeches which appeared in the German edition have not been included here.
All of the speeches were read before presentation by friends, relatives, hosts or colleagues, and all the final versions incorporate their corrections, objections and comments. Although it would be fitting to list them all, after twenty years I can no longer remember who checked and improved which particular speech. For that reason, I would like here to mention only those readers to whom I sent almost all my manuscripts over those twenty years, asking them what they thought of them: my editor Ulrich Nolte; my late publisher Egon Ammann; my friends Carl Hegemann and Stefan Otteni; and Katajun Amirpur.
PREFACE
Of all the forms of public communication, the most peculiar seems to me to be the delivery of a prepared speech. When a person speaks without a script, whether at a lectern or as a member of a panel, they finish their ideas as they are speaking, all advance preparation and practice notwithstanding. They can react to the incomprehension, the sympathy, the surprise, the boredom, the displeasure they read in the faces of the audience or hear in the form of interjections, applause and coughing. They can hurl interjections of their own at those leaving the room before the end, and in many cases that makes the speech all the more lively, especially if the protest becomes a dialogue, heated though it may be.
At an author’s reading, on the other hand, one of the conventions is that the text being read aloud does not directly address the listeners present. Hence the reading is a more pleasant format for most writers, more closely aligned with their working situation. The reading adheres to the stylistics of written text; the speaker’s modulation is not aimed at any particular addressee. For that reason, the speaker rarely looks up to make eye contact, to establish a connection with the listeners. I myself, at least, instinctively tend to concentrate during my readings on the book lying on the table in front of me, shutting out everything that impinges on me from outside. Even the clicking of a camera – which wouldn’t bother me during the introductory remarks or the conversation with the host afterwards – can be so disturbing that I interrupt my reading to ask people not to take photographs. It looks affected when that happens, I know, but it is still better for the audience than if I were to go on being distracted and annoyed by every click.
A written speech is a contradiction in terms, and the thing designated by those terms is still more paradoxical: the speaker speaks to a specific audience, directly addressing the listeners present in the salutation and in the delivery, but what the speaker seems to be saying spontaneously has actually been thought out in advance, word for word. In a way, the speaker is imitating an extempore speech. Naturally, the speaker can deviate from the script if a new idea occurs to him; he can respond to listeners who interject comments or applaud. But afterwards he generally goes on with his speech as planned, reading the text as he prepared it well ahead of time, even if he now realizes that different words would be more fitting. If the discrepancy between the written thoughts and those of the moment becomes too great, the speaker can also put aside the script completely. In writing the speech, however, he is not likely to have planned an improvisation, since that brings with it new imponderables. No, the intention in writing a speech is to imagine a situation so well, although it is still in the future, that you will say at every moment exactly what you want to say – only more precisely, more elegantly and more profoundly than you ever could spontaneously. Because speaking from a script is by no means simply deficient, as speakers are occasionally told: putting a text in writing, and thus making it literary, can also be an advantage and, on many occasions, or for some rhetorical talents, may be imperative. The impromptu speech is not necessarily more free. In order to be artful, persuasive and memorable, it must – if only to fit in the speaker’s own memory – follow rhetorical, homiletic rules and topoi – that is, literally, ‘commonplaces’. In the best case, because the prepared speech permits more complex sentence structures and thematic sequences, it gives the mind more space. It is admirable that people speak without a script in Parliament, let’s say, and the listeners gladly tolerate a certain amount of imprecision, awkward syntax or polemics born of the fervour of the moment. But it is no less imperative that, in a speech about Auschwitz, let’s say, no word is spoken rashly. To be exact, we are talking about two different genres, and so the present volume contains not speeches but texts which have been delivered publicly.
A person writing a novel or an essay also takes the readers’ reactions into account. Hoping he knows the reader’s expectations, the author plans to fulfil, disappoint or disregard them. Writing a speech is no different in this respect: the speaker at his desk allows the imagined applause, annoyance, disappointed expectations, and even the protest he anticipates at certain points, to take their places in his train of thought. The difference from a book or an essay, of course, is this: a person writing a speech has the advantage, or the disadvantage, that he will experience those reactions in person. The author looks at the people he is addressing and immediately notices, as a rule, if they bristle, lose the thread, approve enthusiastically, or roll their eyes. In the worst case, the speaker will wish he could vanish into thin air – something not given to any speaker so far, unfortunately. The suspense and the strain that I feel at the beginning of every speech come from the uncertainty whether the audience will actually follow the ideas that I have already set down – and the knowledge that, even if they turn away, figuratively or literally, I will have to persevere.
When, for example, I stepped up to the lectern in St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt in 2015 to deliver my thanks for the Peace Prize of the German Publishers’ Association, only a few friends with whom I had discussed my manuscript knew how the speech would end: that I would ask my listeners to stand up to pray, or to meditate on their wishes, for Father Jacques Mourad, Father Paolo Dall’Oglio and the other hostages in Iraq and Syria. Thus I imagined, as I began to speak, the embarrassment that would be mine when the audience remained sitting in spite of my request. I was also nervous because my script was about twice as long as the time allotted for the ceremony, which was being televised live, and the speaker who had introduced me had already gone over time. By the end of my speech, I imagined, there would be hardly anyone left to stand up, and the television crew would long since have gone off the air. Only as I gradually gained confidence, because I read the attentiveness in the faces of the audience and heard the silence between my sentences, my fears dissipated and I was able while I spoke to think of Father Jacques Mourad, Father Paolo and the other hostages, with whom I was carrying on my inner dialogue. The strength, the love and the courage of desperation that the speech may have conveyed did not come from me, I felt; they came – and this was what kept me going and enabled me to ignore the organizers’ expectations, the listeners’ possible fatigue and the television programme – the strength, love and courage came from the prisoners in Syria and Iraq.
Thus there is another paradox in delivering a speech that has long since been written down: although the reactions that the speaker witnesses are quite immediate, the speaker is the more persuasive the more apathetic he is to the audience and the less he cares about the audience’s expectations. I have often experienced, both as a listener and as a speaker, that you are more likely to reach other people the more you are in touch with yourself; that is, the more your statement expresses an inner concern – ‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise …’. The opposite can be observed on any anniversary or formal occasion when the speaker is speaking not as an individual but as the representative of a nation, a religion, a business, a city or a congregation of mourners. Literature never comes about vicariously; it is individualistic in the extreme; otherwise it is not literature. It can express common afflictions, longings and demands only by finding the most personal and distinctive words: those moulded by the individual’s life experience, personality and situations. But the less literary a speech is, and the more it is influenced by external pressures to be balanced out – the concerns of advisors and advocates, political constraints, commercial expectations, concessions to diplomacy or respect – the greater is the danger of sound bites, stereotypes, run-of-the-mill truths which no one would contradict and which are immediately forgotten. The highest art of public oratory would be to speak for many while saying what only one single person can say: to be literary and at the same time representative. This paradoxical challenge was not obvious to me, as my older speeches especially attest; hence few of them are included in this collection. The self-confidence to retain my own style in speech as in writing, with its rhythmic idiosyncrasies and its convoluted sentences, is something I had to acquire, and so is the chutzpah to say unfitting things at a ceremonial gathering – indecent things, all too heartrending things, discursive, personal, even banal things – if they happen to be important to me at the moment.
It is only natural that, in retrospect, there are some things I would state differently, in spite of the strength of my conviction at the time, and that I have occasionally erred, plain and simple. A speech, more than a book or even a newspaper article, is written for a very specific moment, a specific place and a sharply circumscribed audience. Later, elsewhere and for an indeterminate readership, the world necessarily looks different. Furthermore, an essay, a novel or an academic study may be revised after its publication, but at the lectern there is only the spoken word. I have taken the liberty here of making minor corrections of wording only in those speeches that were not recorded on their public delivery; in other cases, I have to live with my own mistakes and inadequacies, which, of course, are displeasing to me more than anyone. The hopes for the reform process that inspired the Iranian Writers’ Association in 1999 have long since been dashed. In my 2014 speech to the Bundestag, I should have pointed out the distinction between refugees in the sense of the Geneva Conventions and the comparatively few victims of political persecution who are the subject of Article 16 of the German constitution. I would also have spared myself some objections if I had given an example to clarify exactly what I meant with my criticism that, since the reform of Article 16, ‘asylum has practically ceased to be a fundamental right in Germany’ (note that I did not say it had ‘ceased to exist’, as some have misquoted me), because in substance, alas, I was right: under the third-country rule, human rights activists who are in danger of arrest, torture or execution at home technically have no legal way to apply for asylum in Germany – unless they arrive here by parachute. The following year, when hundreds of thousands of refugees sought shelter in Germany, the vast majority of them were not victims of political persecution in the sense of Article 16, and, even if they had been, they would not have been claiming a fundamental right. They were admitted at the discretion of the German government, and it is still a subject of controversy today whether it was legitimate to take such a momentous decision without parliamentary approval.
And so on: in the Peace Prize acceptance speech, as in many earlier and later publications, I should have denounced Shiite extremism and the Iranian policy in Syria more explicitly so that my condemnation of Wahhabism could not be discounted as a Shiite position. In the eulogy for my father, hastily written while I was still overwhelmed with grief, I probably mentioned myself a few times too often. In the eulogy for Karl Schlamminger, who died the night after my father’s funeral, I ought to have said so much more to do justice to his work, his character, his family and his love. The list of mistakes and possible improvements goes on, and the question I faced in preparing this publication was not which errors I must correct, but whether each speech as a whole, with all its inaccuracies, shortcomings and references unfamiliar to an English-speaking readership (who are not as well versed in the history of FC Cologne, for example, as the guests present at the club’s internal jubilee celebration were) – whether each speech seemed important enough to be printed in this form (although, as the fan I am, I must say FC Cologne is of global importance in itself). In truth, that is not the case with all the speeches I have given – or have had to break off to improvise. Many of those commentaries which received the greatest attention at the time proved dispensable because they dealt with current political developments. Some of my literary speeches – on Lessing, Goethe, Kleist and the idea of Europe – are not included in this English collection because they are already published in expanded versions in Between Quran and Kafka: West-Eastern Affinities (Polity, 2016). Strangely enough, the more intimate speeches in particular, the more personal ones, seemed to the publisher, the translator Tony Crawford and myself to be of general significance, and for this reason they make up a greater proportion of the English edition of Tomorrow is Here than of the German first edition. In any case, I hope that this book will speak to readers some of whom could hardly be more remote, geographically and temporally as well as linguistically, from the original audience, for therein lie the purpose and the power of literature. And public oratory is one of its genres.
ON THE PRESENTATION OF THE SPECIAL AWARD OF THE ERICH MARIA REMARQUE PEACE PRIZE TO THE IRANIAN WRITERS’ ASSOCIATIONOSNABRÜCK CITY HALL, 3 JULY 1999
Mr President of the Bundestag, Mr Mayor, dear Ms Sari, dear Mr Golshiri, ladies and gentlemen,
Over thirty years ago, Iran’s most important writers met in Tehran to found the Iranian Writers’ Association. They resolved to apply for official recognition and presented their application to the competent official in the Ministry of Culture. The official agreed to consider the application. But he never sent an answer. Many other officials succeeded him. After a while, they no longer wore ties, but had beards instead. Yet they never said what decision they had reached.
Since the Iranian writers’ first attempt to found an independent association, Iran has undergone a revolution, an eight-year war, tens of thousands of executions, the return of hundreds of thousands of Iranians from exile, the emigration of millions of Iranians and a simultaneous influx of at least 3 million refugees from other countries, an unprecedented economic crisis, internal power struggles, political assassinations, terrorism by the state and by the armed opposition, the unending persecution of those who think differently from the rulers and, over and over again, hopes that have turned out to be in vain. The time could not have been more turbulent; a time in which no stone has been left standing, and still, more than thirty years later, the Writers’ Association is in the process of being founded. That is a continuity one might be tempted to snicker at, if it weren’t for all the epochal disappointment that comes with it.
Of course there were phases, especially just before and just after the revolution of 1979, when the writers were able to meet and issue joint statements in relative safety, but those phases were short in comparison with the long period underground when they met only in private homes, the years when the friends could never be sure from one meeting to the next whether they would all still be free, alive and in the country. Thus the history of the Iranian Writers’ Association could be told as one of oppression: a history of dangers, a history of the people murdered, arrested, tortured, driven into exile. But there is also a history of resistance to be told: a history of patience, of defiance, self-assertion and the power of literature. If, after thirty years, a Committee to Found the Iranian Writers’ Association still exists – or exists again – that is not only an indication of the adversities to which writers in Iran are exposed; it is also an indication of their persistence.
That dictatorships deny writers the right to associate in an independent federation almost goes without saying. But that the writers have pursued their intention over such a long time, that they have insisted, under the most difficult conditions imaginable, on the single, central demand of all writers in the world – the freedom of the written word – is not something to be taken for granted. We must bear witness to it, because it shows what literature is capable of. I do not say: human beings; I do not say: what resistance fighters, freedom lovers, intellectuals are capable of. I say: what literature is capable of, because this history begins with literature and must end with literature. ‘We are writers,’ reads the first sentence of the protest declaration of autumn of 1994, in which 134 Iranian authors demanded the abolition of censorship and the authorization of the Writers’ Association. ‘We are writers.’ It sounds like a trivial statement, but in fact it was a manifesto and a contentious demand. In a country ideologized by the revolution, where every television quiz show tests political beliefs and every book is censored for its political convictions, it is a tedious and a highly political struggle to reconquer spaces for the personal, the artistic, the apolitical, and to insist: We are writers, nothing else.
And yet there is another reason why I spoke of the power of literature. No matter how wise and courageous the statements writers might make on the political situation in their country – if they did not write great novels, poems, stories, plays, who would listen to them? It is poetry that makes their struggle for freedom of thought an existential struggle, because it is a struggle for their existence as poets. And it is their literary work that lends their protest the authority that not even the most powerful can ignore. This is the only explanation for the efforts which two state security systems have made – that of the monarchy and that of the Islamic Republic – to silence this quite small core of one or two hundred authors. This is the only explanation for the special departments of the various intelligence agencies, the coordinated arrests, the rabid sentences, the military-style campaigns in the state media to which the Writers’ Association has been subjected from its inception.
As I said, that inception dates back more than thirty years: to the year 1967. Even without an official authorization, the writers in those days rented an office where they could meet regularly for literary circles, readings and discussions. But the first arrests began soon afterwards. Gholam-Hossein Saedi, Abbas Milani, this year’s prize laureate Hushang Golshiri, and Ali Ashraf Darvishian, who is also present today, are among those who, in the late sixties and early seventies, were arrested and in some cases tortured for demanding freedom of speech. Some of you may not know the names I mention, but those who are familiar with the Persian literature of our time know that practically every major contemporary author I could name has been active in this Association, fought for this Association, whether Ahmad Shamlu or Simin Daneshvar, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi or Simin Behbahani, and also the winner of this year’s Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize, Hushang Golshiri.
In 1977, the regime loosened the reins to avert the impending rebellion. The writers resumed their public activities. The same year saw the most noteworthy days in the history of the Writers’ Association, and perhaps in the history of the German Goethe Institute as well. For ten autumn nights, some sixty of Iran’s most important writers assembled in the garden of the Goethe Institute in Tehran to read their texts, give speeches, and discuss literature and politics. Night after night, thousands of Iranians flocked to the poetry readings. There is something magical about those ten nights. It was cold; it was often pouring with rain. But the people held out for hours under umbrellas and tarpaulins to hear new poetry and avant-garde prose. When you talk to Iranians who attended those ten nights, whether as speakers or as guests, you immediately perceive a light in their eyes, and you hear adjectives that you would ordinarily expect to find in love stories. It must have been a great moment indeed, a moment of consummated love, when the writers were able to meet their readers unhindered. There have not been many such moments in the history of modern Iranian literature.
The revolution of 1979 at first brought the poets the freedom they had hoped for. Some of them – including Simin Daneshvar, Ahmad Shamlu and Hushang Golshiri – decided to go and visit the Leader of the Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, to present the ideas and demands of the Writers’ Association. It must have been a very disappointing meeting. Khomeini was disgruntled and didn’t understand what the poets wanted from him – perhaps he didn’t want to understand. By the time the writers were outside his door again a few minutes later, they knew that this Leader had a different revolution in mind than they did. In 1980, just a year after the deposition of the shah, the familiar attacks on literature started up again, now no longer in the name of the Nation and the Crown, but in the name of the Faith and the Leader of the Revolution, who cried, ‘Break their pens!’ The poet Said Soltanpour was arrested and executed. Many others had to surrender their teaching posts or were prohibited from publishing.
It would be more than ten years before the Writers’ Association resumed its regular meetings. Half a generation of poets had emigrated or died, and another generation had entered the literary stage, among them Abbas Maroufi and Amir Hassan Cheheltan, who are here today, and Fereshteh Sari, who will accept the prize today in the name of the Writers’ Association. Not until the spring of 1994 did the writers publish another declaration, this one in protest against the arrest of their colleague Ali-Akbar Saidi Sirjani, who would die in his cell eight months later, allegedly of heart failure. In October of the same year, the writers went a step further, drafting the ‘Declaration of the 134’, which demanded the abolition of censorship, the recognition of human rights and the authorization of the Writers’ Association. The declaration drew worldwide attention. I was in Iran at the time, and I remember being rung up by the cultural editor of a German daily. What surprised him most, the editor said, was that there were 134 opposition writers in Iran at all.
That was the perception of Iran in Germany at that time: it was seen as a theocracy with a compliant population of fanatical masses. This perception has since changed radically. The Western public has learned of the existence of an inventive art scene, important filmmakers, courageous intellectuals. They have taken note that the majority of the Iranian population desires democracy, freedom and a more open foreign policy. They may differ in their estimation of the chances of success, but they are amazed at the social movement which is shaking the ruling system. The writers have been instrumental in changing those perceptions, not only with their ‘Declaration of the 134’ but also with the interviews, statements and articles they have published in the international press since then.
When people talk about the Iranian reform movement today, it often seems as though it began two years ago with the surprising election of President Mohammad Khatami. Yet this movement formed much earlier in the society, in the schools and universities, in the colleges of theology, among women and among intellectuals. Khatami’s landslide victory, against the declared will of the Leader of the Revolution and in spite of the state’s propaganda machinery, was the result of this broad social movement, not its beginning. The discontent among the population had been tangible before; the first uprisings had taken place, and independent journals such as Kiyan, Gardun and Adineh had outlined the demands that are openly debated in Iran today.
The writers were and are only a part of this broad movement, and they are by no means the only people who have made sacrifices: critical theologians, student representatives, members of religious minorities have been persecuted no less brutally in recent years, although awareness of their fates is often only marginal in the West. Thus today it is left largely to the clergy and religious intellectuals to confront the ideology of the Islamic Republic and to initiate the discussion most feared by the guardians of the Islamist order: the discussion of secularism, human rights and democracy. The writers cannot be responsible for developing or discarding theories. But it is the writers who lend a voice to the desire for freedom – a voice that is heard in the world, because they speak the language that is understood in all cultures: the language of images, rhythms and stories, of surprise, of shades and ambiguities, the language of poetry. Their responsibility is to describe the people’s fear so accurately that it can be known and to express the people’s hope so promisingly that all people may take part in it.
Because the ruling elite felt the ground trembling beneath their feet, they prepared to strike once more. A new wave of repression began soon after the ‘Declaration of the 134’. The translator Ahmad Miralai was murdered; so was the journalist Ghaffar Hosseini. Both of them had signed the Declaration. Others either were coerced by the secret police to withdraw their signatures or fled the country. The publisher Ebrahim Zalzadeh and the professor Ahmad Tafazzoli were also killed. The attempted murder of twenty writers on a trip to Armenia, the suppression of critical journals, the flogging and imprisonment of Abbas Maroufi, the kidnapping of Faraj Sarkohi – the terror in which the rulers took refuge was born of their fear, not their strength. Faced with the example of the Soviet Union, the examples of Ceaușescu and the Truth Commission in South Africa, they tried to suppress the struggle for freedom before it became too powerful, and to intimidate the writers in particular through sheer terror.
Last autumn, there was another series of murders. In addition to the political opposition leaders Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, the victims once again included two members of the Writers’ Association, Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Puyandeh. The fates of two other intellectuals are still unknown: Piruz Davani has been missing since the summer of 1998; Majid Sharif was found dead the same year. But then came the reaction that the murderers and those who command them least expected: instead of withdrawing in fear and resignation, the people fought back. Tens of thousands came to the funerals of the murdered intellectuals. The students demonstrated; newspapers demanded in bold headlines the investigation of the murders; the writers addressed the national and international public; politicians declared their solidarity with the people under threat. The public pressure forced the secret police to present an explanation that was unprecedented in Iranian history: the secret police admitted that they had committed the murders. The confession set off a political earthquake which led to the first local elections in the history of Iran, and for the first time an Iranian government explicitly supported the founding of the Writers’ Association.
We should judge this government by whether it keeps its word, because the Association which is being honoured today with a Special Award of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize has not been founded yet. It is still in the process of being founded, as it has been for over thirty years. To judge by the recent news, it may be a long time yet before independent political parties, associations and institutions, and among them a Writers’ Association, will exist in Iran and before violence as a means of political contention will finally have been done away with. But in the end – and if it takes another thirty years – in the end the swords that are still being drawn today, that may kill again tomorrow, in the end they will melt in the searing patience of the people, among them those people who believe in literature, in images, rhythms and stories, in surprise, in the shades and the ambiguity of life.
I thank you; I thank all the members of the Iranian Writers’ Association, and especially the murdered members Ahmad Miralai, Ghaffar Hosseini, Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Puyandeh.
ON THE DEATH OF THE UNBORN SOFÍACHURCH OF ST THOMAS AQUINAS, BERLIN, 27 APRIL 2003
Dear Maria, dear Gereon, dear Felix, dear friends,
Sofía Charlotte Hamm was a quiet child, quieter than her brother Felix. She evidently felt comfortable in the loving care of her parents, who surrounded her with their voices and their hands. The only thing that excited her was when her brother Felix spoke to her. Then she stretched out and kicked her legs with joy. There was a special bond between the children. Sofía looked quite like her brother, too. She had the same nose, the narrow mouth, the same dark, full curls that had surprised their parents at Felix’s birth, and she had the same long, thin lips as Felix. If she had grown to be a woman, those lips would certainly have driven her admirers mad. But Sofía did not grow to be a woman; she remained an angel. She died on the 11th of March. That was three weeks before the date the doctors had predicted for her birth. There was no reason for it: Sofía was healthy, 49 centimetres long, one centimetre less than Felix at his birth. She was slender, a pound lighter than her brother, yet her face seems to me somewhat broader than his: proper chubby cheeks she had, converging at the bottom to a pointed chin. Like her mother, Sofía was a very pretty girl.
We don’t know why Sofía died before she was born. Medicine can answer that question only with statistics, and its figures can only mask our helplessness. The only thing we have an inkling of is why we cannot explain it. Sofía was alive: she had eyes, ears, a little nose; she could feel with her fingers, taste with her tongue and express by her movements when something pleased or displeased her. Her heart beat. She could perceive our world; she reacted to the signals by which her parents and her brother spoke to her. But at the same time she still belonged to another world in which the logic of our understanding has no force – a transcendent world.
What distinguishes our world? The fact that everything in it is, in principle, explicable. We can understand why a child grows up and an old man dies; we know the biological laws by which a plant grows and a flower wilts. Everything has a reason for becoming. Yet our understanding cannot explain why something is. Because, to be something, it must first be nothing. But we don’t know anything about being nothing – we don’t even know whether to imagine it as a not-being, or as a different kind of being. And what would that be – that not-being? We know how a person is born, but we don’t know how it is not to be born. We know why a person dies, but we don’t know what death is. If our world is characterized by the fact that everything in it is, in principle, explicable, then the world beyond it is distinguished by its fundamental inexplicability. And Sofía still belonged to the world beyond ours. Although she had come into our world, she had not yet closed the door behind her. Because she lived between two worlds, she was an angel. And because she was an angel, she was not subject to any of the reasons that govern us people. We can feel her, and sometimes even see her. I know with certainty that she is here among us – but we cannot explain her presence any more than we can her disappearance.
Angels are known in every culture: they are those beings who can leave the other world without losing it and move in our world without belonging to it. Angels embody the possibility of an in-between. With one wing they touch Heaven; with the other wing they brush our souls. And angels are pure: every culture says so; they do no one ill; they are good in the strong sense of the word. That is why most religions say that children go directly to Paradise. Even those who, unlike me, don’t believe in angels may accept them as a metaphor for a moral and aesthetic purity. After all, that is exactly what we do when we speak of angels, or of God: we express in parables what language cannot say; find an expression for what has no explanation in our world alone – the first and last things, which some of us feel, but none of us know.
During her first pregnancy, Maria painted a series of red pictures that seemed to show something like an exploding ball of energy. That, as it turned out, was a fairly succinct idea of Felix. During her second pregnancy, when she was pregnant with Sofía, Maria also painted a series of red pictures. But this time they showed something like a female figure standing gracefully on slender feet. The strange thing about this geometrical figure was the arches spreading out in the upper third of the picture, sometimes wider, sometimes smaller. Perhaps it wasn’t a woman, but a bird. Now we know that the arches were actually wings fluttering. And at the same time it is a woman, a girl, a little child. Without knowing it, Maria had drawn the outlines of an angel. It was a picture of Sofía in Heaven.
As we can see on the invitation to this observance, the drawing of Sofía is not exactly a portrait. It is a geometrical figure; it is an outline; it is like a shadow produced by hatching. That is probably as it must be; it’s probably impossible to draw anything but the shadow of angels. That is quite a bit. It is more than it would be possible to draw of God, the absolute Other. Angels are different from people, but they also are people: they have human features; they can feel and rejoice, they care and empathize as no god could. We can draw at least the shadows of the angels, unlike God, because they cast their shadows on our world: we have an idea what they look like; we can imagine it – but we cannot draw a picture of it. In Judaism it is said, ‘You don’t recognize an angel until after he has gone by.’
All images of angels in art history and in the culture industry teach us that anyone who gives angels an exact appearance must inevitably be lying. The shadow doesn’t show what angels look like. But it shows that they exist. And so it is with Sofía. We got to know something about her, but it isn’t anything precise. We don’t know how she would have become if she had gone on living. But we feel how much we have lost by not getting to know her better. We got an inkling of her. That is quite a bit – it is much more than we will ever know of other angels. And, at the same time, it is little: precisely because we had an inkling of her nature, her beauty, it is dreadfully little.
I am not here to give consolation. That is more than I can do. The death of a child is sheer horror – although only for us, most likely; not for Sofía, who remained where she would have returned one day in any case, in Paradise, or in not-being, or in the Paradise that not-being may be. But, for the survivors, her death is horror: for her parents, her brother. And for many others, Sofía’s death is a loss that they can never measure: for the friends she will not meet, for the admirers she will not desire, for the colleagues she will not work with; and for the neighbours she will not live next door to, for the people she will not love; and for the children whose mother she will not be. There are no pious words or philosophical thoughts that can make sense of Sofía’s premature death – none that I know, at least. All I can do, all we can do, is to share Maria’s, Gereon’s and Felix’s pain, knowing that it will not make their pain any less.
I cannot give consolation, but I know that there can be consolation. Consolation is the love that we give and receive. The loss of a person we love makes our sight keener for the gift we have been given up to then. That too cannot lessen the pain, but it helps us to bear it. And there is also consolation in two things which seem contradictory, but which can go together: in forgetting and in remembering. As we remember Sofía, she goes on living. As time helps us to forget our despair, we can go on living. That is why we are here today: to remember, with Maria, Gereon and Felix, the girl we did not get to know, and to begin the life that will go on. Permit me to quote the German poet who knew most about angels, Rainer Maria Rilke:
To the angel praise the world, not the unsayable; to him
you cannot boast of feeling the sublime; in the universe
he has more feeling to feel, and you are a newcomer. So show
him a simple thing that, wrought from generation to generations,
lives as something of ours, beside our hand and in our sight.
Say the things to him. He will stand more astonished; as you stood
before the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how guiltless and ours,
how even keening grief resolves to be pure shape,
serves as a thing, or dies to be a thing; and hereafter
blissfully escapes the harp. – And these things, living
by passing, understand that you praise them; ephemeral,
they entrust a salvation to us, most ephemeral of all.
Desire we might transmute them wholly, in our invisible hearts,
into – endlessly – us! Whoever we are in the end.
On behalf of Maria, Gereon and Felix, I would like to thank you all for coming and for sharing the pain, the love and the memory with them. So many people have stood by these three in the past few weeks, bestowing great kindness on them, that I must ask you to forgive me for not addressing each one of you personally. On behalf of all of us, I want to thank at this point only Felix, who probably saved Maria’s life when she was in danger of bleeding to death. Felix, alone, left his home and rang the neighbour’s doorbell, even though it was so high that he had to jump as high as he could to reach it. We owe our thanks also to Maria’s and Gereon’s neighbour Rob Groth, who saw to it that Maria got medical care, within minutes, and just in time. Maria, Gereon and Felix have also asked me to thank the children Naomi and David, who steadfastly took care of Felix when his mother could not take care of him because she was unconscious. And we thank Selina, who awaited Sofía almost as joyfully as Felix did, and always kissed Maria’s belly during her pregnancy, and her mother Melanie Müller von Hindenburg. When Felix lived with her in the days that followed the death of his sister, Selina was herself a sister to him.
And I would like to thank Maria, Gereon and Felix for the love and strength with which they cared for and looked after Sofía during her short visit on Earth. Their love and strength will be an example to us in our own difficult hours.
I said, all we can see of angels is their shadow. I ought to have said: we ordinary people can see only their shadows. Maria, Gereon, Felix spent a day and a night with Sofía. When Felix saw his sister, he asked, Where are her wings? The other angels will bring them when they come to fetch Sofía, Gereon explained to him. Felix wanted to know everything: Would the wings be glued on or screwed on? They just grow out when you go with the angels, said Gereon. Now she has gone with them, and she has surely grown the wings that Maria had unwittingly drawn. What remains in the urn that Isabel Hamm has made are ashes – not Sofía’s ashes, Felix told me, but the ashes of the candles that the angels had with them when they took Sofía with them to Heaven.
I said, all that we ordinary people can see of angels is their shadow. But there is a photograph of Sofía, and in it we can see her lying swaddled in a blanket, her hands resting on her chest. Since Maria sent it to me, I have taken out this picture to look at it again and again. The peace that is in her face is not of an earthly kind. To me this is a photograph from Heaven, and, if it doesn’t lie, she is comfortable there.
This observance began with a song invoking the angels. It ends now with a song that Sofía always heard as she lay in Maria’s womb. It is by the band The Durutti Column and is called ‘4 Sophia’.1 Now it is no longer a song ‘for’ Sofía, but Sofía’s song: the song in which we meet the girl we never got to know.
Notes
1.
‘4 Sophia’ by the Durutti Column. From the album
Rebellion
, Artful Records 2001.
ON THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PROMULGATION OF THE GERMAN CONSTITUTIONIN THE BUNDESTAG, BERLIN, 23 MAY 2014
Messrs Presidents, Madam Chancellor, honourable members of the Bundestag, your Excellencies, dear guests,
