The historic town of Weimar has played a pivotal role in shaping the German identity. John Matshikiza recently spent some time there
Another week, another airport. I was staring at an empty carousel revolving before me at Frankfurt International. My luggage wasn’t there, and I was beginning to do the now-familiar trot around every baggage carousel in the building, a look of desperation and murder on my face.
I had been through the same exercise a few hours before at Heathrow Airport, London, and had been assured that my baggage had been checked straight through to my next destination. Now I was in a mood to call everyone in Europe a liar. The experience of travelling through the Western airport system was beginning to feel like just another Third World adventure.
The lost luggage office was packed with disgruntled travellers. Hostile epithets flew back and forth between us and the surly airline officials who insisted that it wasn’t their fault. They took our details and promised, with a shrug, that they would do their best – which under the circumstances sounded like it wouldn’t amount to much.
By that time, what with the connecting flight from London arriving late anyway, I had missed the train that was to carry me deeper into Germany, towards the historic town of Weimar. I had no choice but to hang around Frankfurt Central Station for the next three hours, waiting for the 11.30pm Warsaw train that was scheduled to stop in Weimar at 2.30am the next morning.
It was 24 hours since I had left Johannesburg, and I was exhausted and doubtful that anything that was supposed to happen on this journey would really happen. Nobody seemed to be really sure where or what Weimar was, anyway, and I could imagine myself dozing off in the hurtling train and completely missing it in the freezing night, to emerge in Poland, like Pre Ubu, bedraggled and forlorn.
I killed time in a fancy bar in a corner of the station, watching the new Germany parading through the concourse.
Reunification has given the scary conglomeration that made up pre-war Germany a different profile to the one I was acquainted with when I used to live in Europe. But it’s not only the East Germans who have brought new influences into play after their long hibernation in the world created by Walter Ulbricht.
What is interesting is that the dominant racial complexion of the energetically commercial city of Frankfurt now looks distinctly Middle Eastern. Turks and Kurds are everywhere, as are West Africans, Somalis, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Indians, Chinese and East Europeans.
The assault of the barbarian hordes had come unexpectedly from two long and undefendable fronts: from the black south, as war and economic collapse caused an influx of more and more refugees; and from the white east after the destruction of the Berlin wall.
The symbolic and physical boundaries of the Western laager were no protection against the huge sea of hunger that has become the key image of the end of the 20th century, and that now imposes itself into the refined and exclusive consciousness of Europe. The dykes that protected the myths of Western culture have been permanently breached.
Weimar is located deep in the heart of the old East Germany. It’s central district looks like a cute, doll’s house town, 17th and 18th century buildings in pastel colours dotted round little squares and along the meandering cobbled roads that lead from them to link up with other squares. It is quaint, clean, and seemingly in a time warp. It has preserved its essential character in spite of the waves of history that have passed through it and over it. Or has it?
Weimar represents the contradictory character of the centre of a wheel: the hub appears to maintain its serene position while the rest of the world spins through several revolutions around it. In reality, the hub provides the ideal vantage point from which to observe the whole spectrum of ebbs and flows that make up contradictory human history. If the rest of the wheel has moved forward, the hub can hardly have remained behind.
Unlike the seethingly Turkish Frankfurt, Weimar is resolutely German. But what is ”German”?
In a sense, Weimar personifies that deep and turbulent question, too. It was to Weimar that Duke Karl August invited the best creative minds of the 18th and early 19th century, challenging them to define that elusive German identity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the father of German philosophy, was one of the first, and the composer Franz Liszt came hard on his heels. They were followed by an array of the best that the nascent German consciousness could offer – including the philosophers Friedrich Schiller and, much later, Friedrich Nietzsche, definitive composers like Johan Sebastian Bach and Richard Strauss, and scientists like Karl Zeiss.
Zeiss later perfected the artificial optical lens that would make cameras, telescopes, and microscopes an essential part of the huge strides in human progress that were to come in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Weimar, whose fame was made by a feudal duke, was also the site of the founding of the 1919 Constitution that would banish the idea of royal power in Germany, heralding in the republican age. Like today’s South African Constitution, it was regarded in its time as the most advanced and libertarian constitution that had ever been conceived. And yet, a few years later in 1930, Weimar was also to be the site of the first successes of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, and the nearest metropolis to the concentration camp at Buchenwald that was to follow.
And then, following Germany’s collapse at the end of World War II, came incorporation into the Soviet socialist empire.
Each succeeding orthodoxy, from feudalism to republicanism to fascism, and finally to socialism, absorbed Weimar into its world view, and projected the image of Weimar as the ultimate example of the infallibility of its own logic. And Weimar continued to survive, rolling with the punches, changing with the times.
I had been invited to Weimar to attend an curious event – the announcement of the winning entries in an international essay competition that had been launched by Lettres International, an organisation based in Berlin, supported by the Goethe Institute. Weimar had been chosen because of its role as ”Cultural Capital of Europe 1999”, and because of its particular place, as the home of Goethe and Schiller, in the history of world philosophy. In a Europe attempting to redefine itself after the seismic transformations of the last decades of the 20th century, Weimar seemed a suitable place to unveil the varied responses that had been made to the double-edged question that had been set as a theme for the essayists: ”Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Present?”
It was an ambitious project that received ambitious responses. The respondents were not just ambitious for the eminently respectable prize money (DM50E000 for the winner, second and third prizes of DM30E000 and DM20E000, and scholarships to various German institutions for the runners-up.) They were clearly fired by this philosophical challenge at the end of this most turbulent of centuries.
The organisers had chosen a philosophical question that ”had no cultural limitations”. They wanted the widest possible response to the challenge, and had deliberated long and hard to find a theme that would work, they felt, within the philosophical framework of any culture in the world. The only limitations imposed on entrants were that the essays had to be within a given length, and had to be written in one of the six official languages of the United Nations, with German, the language of the host country, as a seventh.
In the end, the organisers received 2E481 entries from 123 countries. The highest number of entries was in German, followed by English and Russian. There were some 60 entries from the African continent, while China, the world’s most populous country, and the seat of some of its most ancient schools of philosophy, could muster only 37. The organisers conceded that problems in spreading information about the competition accounted for some of these discrepancies.
But in the end, it was not about numbers, but about content. The essayists ranged into philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, science, fiction and science fiction, and autobiography to express their relationship with the subject.
Judging them was a nightmare of selection for the seven different juries that were given the task of sifting through the mass of submissions (one jury for each language).
”How do you choose between good and bad when there are such vast differences of style?” said one of the organisers. And yet, in the best of the essays, what shone through was an ”exciting array of creativity, originality, clarity of argument, and relevance” to that tricky, open-ended question that had been posed as a theme.
So who were the winners? In the end, the final jury found it so hard to make a choice of three winners that they decided to split the third prize between two people. One was a Frenchman who had adopted California as his home, and had chosen to write about the West’s post- colonial stranglehold on Africa, from an African point of view. The other was a painter and writer from Belgrade, in what remains of Yugoslavia, who wrote a wry account based on the theme of a man stuck between two houses – the past and the future. ”I live on a construction site,” he begins. ”On it, a ruin of an old house and a new, half-built one … For days on end the site resounds with the hum of concrete mixers, the squeaking of cranes. Then, all of a sudden, everything falls silent and stops, nowhere a builder or an engineer in sight … In a way, I still live in two houses, although my address is in the new, unfinished one …” A resonating and witty account of the old Yugoslavia trying to find a new identity in the world.
The second prize was awarded to an American professor who makes a comparative exploration of philosophical themes from East and West. He makes a striking comparison between the pessimistic stance of Franz Kafka’s Europe and the pragmatic simplicity of an early Chinese philosopher.
In Kafka’s HE, a man fights hopelessly against two equal antagonists, the past which attacks from behind, and the future which blocks the road ahead. ”His dream though,” says Kafka, ”is that some time in an unguarded moment – and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet – he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.”
The Chinese philosopher Shih-t’ou, in contrast, puts the problem differently. When asked, ”How does one get liberated?” he replies, ”Who has put you in bondage?” The answer, of course, is not as straightforward as it would seem. We imprison ourselves as much as we are imprisoned by others, using nostalgia for the past and outrageous expectation of the future to do so, and to imprison others.
Thus far, as the ceremony progressed, the prizes were all going to white males. One could not accuse the jury of prejudice, since the whole process, drawn out over two years, had been done under conditions of strict anonymity. But one still felt slightly uncomfortable about the predictability of it, all the same. In the hall, spectators and photographers alike were all staring towards yet another bearded, middle-aged gentleman sitting in the row with the rest of the prizewinners, concluding that he would be the one to walk off with the top trophy.
But when the winner of the first prize was announced, the whole room was taken by surprise. The essay the jury had judged a world-beater had been written by a 20-year-old female student who had just graduated from Moscow University. She was pale, wide-eyed, and looked even younger than her years. She was as surprised as everyone else.
Ivetta Gerasimchuk had written an essay called Dictionary of the Winds. Once again, given the anonymity under which all the essays were scrutinised, one could not accuse the jury of tokenism. And indeed, Gerasimchuk’s essay was a tour-de-force of philosophy and analysis, underscored with that inevitable dark, Slavonic humour.
‘Questions without answers do not exist,” she begins. ”These answers are known to God, but may be unknown to us. We seek these answers, feeling intuitively that they exist … But often what we find does not satisfy us. We doubt and seek again, striving to approach the perfection of an all-knowing God. Such is the nature of man. In our incessant arguments we often do not notice that, in essence, we have reached agreement, and are merely calling the same things by different names.”
All of this incessant and often unreasonable questing for perfection, she argues, is so much wasted endeavour carried off into the winds. It has always been like that, and it will always be like that. Mankind is so obsessed with shouting into the wind that it has become a worshipper of the wind itself, above all else.
All the winning essays shared this rather pessimistic view of humanity’s relationship with its past, and used the competition’s philosophical platform to express the moral confusion of today’s world. It is perhaps appropriate that the winner should come from Russia, the country that has suffered one of the greatest upheavals of recent times, with the resulting lack of focus and direction. It is also appropriate that she should be of the generation that will make its mark in the early years of the new century. If we choose to look at it simplistically, Gerasimchuk is the future – and the future is already angry and confused, and articulately aware of its confusion.
But if anything can demonstrate the importance and power of that challenging idea of liberating the future from the past and the past from the future, and whether either scenario is possible, it is in the way in which the past still visibly has its claws into Ivetta Gerasimchuk. Quite apart from anything else, there was the constant presence of her mother, the archetypal Russian devotchka, gold-capped teeth and all, who had insisted on chaperoning her to Weimar, and who never let the young woman out of her sight. One could feel Gerasimchuk’s mixture of gratitude for and frustration with this widowed parent who had raised her, and who had probably hounded her to the extraordinary successes she had already achieved in her short life.
But there was also the reality of the academic life that had moulded her. Apart from an interest in philosophy and science, she was also studying Afrikaans, of all languages, at the Institute of International Relations of Moscow State University. Had she been to South Africa? I asked. No. Was she ever likely to go there, and therefore have a need for that language? No. So why Afrikaans?
The answer is that the remnants of the Soviet system are still firmly in place. The state had a policy of language quotas designed to feed their sophisticated diplomatic (read espionage) apparatus. Language training was not a question of choice, but of fulfilling the needs of the state.
So poor Ivetta Gerasimchuk, bright as she is, had no choice but to prepare herself for a role in the Soviet Union’s support for the struggle against apartheid. Except that she is now living in a post-Soviet world, in the post- apartheid era.
Listen to the Wind.