Cassandra Voices

Tag: Joseph Roth

  • The Austrian Mind

    There still exists – even today – a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness – or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ – had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe.
    Joseph Roth, On the End of the World (first published in 1933).

    Late last month 28.9% of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by Herbert Kickl, an avowedly anti-migrant, anti-Islamic party, founded in the 1950s by former Nazis. The governing conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) gained 27.5% lost 20 seats, while its coalition partner, the Greens received 8.2%, losing 10 seats. In third place, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) received 21.1%, marking its worst result ever. In fourth place, the liberal NEOS increased its share to 9.1%.

    We can only hope that the conservatives do not enter into a coalition with Kickl’s party as Hindenburg did with Hitler’s Nazi party. Perhaps a Dutch solution will at least dilute the forces of darkness. Kickl was formerly the speech writer of the now-deceased long-time leader of the Freedom Party, Jörg Haider, but Kickl is far less ambiguous in his pronouncements than his former boss.

    What’s clear is that the far right is on the rise across Europe, Ireland and the world. My own childhood in Ireland, as a half-Austrian, not unlike Hugo Hamilton’s experience as recounted in his autobiography The Speckled People, involved casual racism and bullying on account of my background.

    At one level Austria is among the most cultured of nations.  So, I defend it. Ma Vlast as Smetana said about Czech Bohemia, albeit a defensive posture often leads to a failure in understanding. Why Kickl? What is the Austrian Mind that has created this?

    Mozart family, c. 1780 (della Croce); the portrait on the wall is of Mozart’s mother.

    Mozart of Salzburg

    My family, who I am close to, hail from Salzburg, home of the Fespiele. Mozart was, of course, born in Salzburg where a little museum glorifies his brief tenure on Earth. Mozart’s music combines lyricism, frivolity and profundity in equal parts. What it points to in the human condition is not just chocolate-box fripperies, or the texture of lightness that is Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, but the darkness therein. Darkness threads through the Austrian mind, juxtaposed with light.

    Thus, Don Giovanni is about the destructive powers of rakish satanism, also evident in Stefan Zweig’s arguably best book beautifully filmed by Max Ophuls’ Letters from an Unknown Women.

    In Mozart also the incomparable Magic Flute splendidly rendered into film by Ingmar Bergman, is in effect about the dubious justification of freemasonry to which Mozart belonged; and also, a cri de coeur, in praise of enlightened and benevolent monarchism against the vectors of state and, in particular, church authoritarianism. This assertion of a wise moderation against extremism resonates today.

    The great enfant terrible of Austrian letters and its greatest post-war writer Thomas Bernhard was gloriously insulting about Austria. His masterpiece Woodcutters (1984) is about a man in a chair at a party sipping Champagne. Letting fly at Austrian bourgeois hypocrisy, he says:

    Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretence, never genuine, never real.

    In his will, Bernhard ordered that none of his works should be performed in Austria. This has been deliberately avoided. All cultures have their tropes.

    The Merry Widow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv1GNZCyL64

    Austrian Kitsch

    Culturally, Austrians, along with the Irish and British, have far too close a relationship with kitsch. The Merry Widow light operetta, like a jaded ritual, is still performed in the Lehrer Theatre in Bad Ischl and elsewhere. The Blue Danube is not unlike a classic Britpop song.

    The great Herman Broch was fascinated by kitsch, linking it correctly to a decline in values:

    The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.”

    In some respects, the triumph of kitsch paves the way for Nazism, as Broch and indeed Robert Musil have both argued. Radical evil and bad art is evident in our age too. This is a kind of camp fascism which Susan Sontag also identified.

    Beethoven was of course German, but lived and died in Vienna. His darkness is a counterpart to Mozart’s light. His deafness influences the isolated pessimism of the later atonal dark sonatas, and are close to the finality of expression in musical terms that Beckett created in language.

    His final string quartet is integral to Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, where the satanic composer, modelled on Heidegger, sells his soul to the devil.

    I have found that it must not be. The good and the noble, what they call the human, even though it is good and noble, what men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and in their moment of fulfilment, have jubilant proclaimed it is not to be. It is not to be, it will be taken back. I will take it back.

    Mann, the great German conservative, had the moral integrity to decamp to the U.S. and to Switzerland, but a crucial point to appreciate is that conservatism is not all bad if it conserves the good and the ethical too. So, the Christian Democrats in Austria have a stark choice, whether to embrace satanism or not.

    Sleepwalkers

    The rise of Nazism is also anticipated brilliantly in Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, one of the great novels of Austrian heritage. In the character of Hugenau, a man solely motivated by profit – homo economicus to use the term favoured by the nefarious law and economics movement in Chicago – we have a real sense in 1918 of a brutalised generation containing the seeds of fascism. The book culminates in the murder of a journalist and the rape of his wife.

    This is akin to neoliberal Europe today where meaningful journalism has been effectively killed and defiled, as state-sponsored criminals launch hatred at ‘the other.’ Off with their heads, or to Rwanda, or now Albania.

    The legendary Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke in The White Ribbon, based in pre-war Germany at the turn of the twentieth, demonstrated how damage had been done to a whole generation by a cruel form of authoritarianism. Today, social media has augmented the problem of semi-literacy. Strange fruit, as Billie Holiday would say, is ready for demonisation. In Ireland the neoliberal governing parties have generated the social conditions for riots and a new decadence.

    As for Italy, the land of Fellini and Da Vinci, where the far-right mayor of Monfalcone near Joycean Trieste has banned cricket as she does not like Bangladeshi people in her town; they only play cricket she says and contribute nothing. The fact that such football clubs as AC Milan was originally a cricket club seems lost on her. Mayor Anna Maria Casing, elected on an anti-immigration platform is now an MEP. Her far-right colleague, prime minister Meloni prosecuted Roberto Saviano the legendary journalist for calling her a bastard over her immigration policies.

    So, Austria is not alone in its infamy.

    The darkly pessimistic Herman Broch shows how the far right and populism go hand-in-hand with hatred:

    It is always he, unfortunate wretch, who assumes the role of executioner in the process of value-disintegration, and on the day when the trumpets of judgment sound it is the man released from all values who becomes the executioner of a world that has pronounced its own sentence.

    The Rathaus (City Hall), the seat of the local government.

    Golden Age

    The golden age of Vienna ended peremptorily with the dismembering of the Austrian empire, after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo sparked the inferno of World War I, when leaders sleepwalked into war. This is the state of somnambulism that Broch also identified evident in Musil.

    The word Kaakinen is Broch’s playful word for Vienna which, in effectively means shit. Thus, he writes in The Man Without Qualities:

    Stupidity is active in every direction and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

    In Zweig’s retroactive memoir The World of Yesterday there are references to Freud and Herzl (one of the founders of Zionism), among the titanic intellectual figures of pre-war Vienna. These are curiously name-dropped like the celebs of our time, but in a curious state of derealisation of how history is closing in. Freud, who was Austrian, died as an emigre from fascism in the U.K..

    Whether the concept of hysteria is sexual or not, no doubt this is a hysterical age where all sorts of fantasises are being sublimated into nefarious activities and agendas – and indeed where persecution delusions are omnipresent. This leads to the scapegoating of immigrants.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1930.

    The Sound of Silence

    Ludwig Wittgenstein is central to our age of distortion and manipulative language. The fundamental achievement of his Tractatus is a recognition of the limitations of language. It can only show and represent, he argues, and, within limitations, clarify. Thus, language is context-specific, self-limiting and denuded of ethical and moral context.

    Reading Wittgenstein, like reading Hemingway, Camus, and Beckett, clarifies how language should be used clearly, and is most useful for everyday life, but not ethics. The final line of the Tractatus has acquired a mythical status: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

    Silence is important, but when we can speak let us speak out ethically. A recent Austrian Nobel laureate is Peter Handke is a great writer, though not in Thomas Bernhard’s league. Handke’s flirtation with the Serbian cause, however well-intentioned and misconstrued, leave a degree of doubt, given the Austrian mindset, but there is a rich warm humanism in his work.

    Handke argues you must create silence or, rather, the effect of silence, through words. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams his recent recollections of his mother’s suicide is jaw-dropping, and among the best books published in the last ten years. So let us create the silence of words, before it is too late.

    Feature Image ‘Avenue in the park of Schloss Kammer’ produced by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt in 1912 whilst he was living near the village of Unterach on the southern shore of lake Attersee in Austria.

  • Travels in Ukraine 2015

    Frank Armstrong recalls two overland trips into Ukraine in 2015. The first was through the former Czechoslovak territory around Uzhhorod, as well as the former Polish city of Lviv or Lviv. Later that year he travelled by bus as far as Kiev and then east as far as Dniperpetrovsk.

    Part 1 Summer, 2015

    Crossing from Slovakia into Trans-Carpathian Ukraine at the Çop junction, trains from the West halt in deference to the different rail gauges used on the other side. Stalin contrived this to prevent easy entry for invading armies; or escape. Crossing the frontier into the former Soviet Union might instil a little trepidation even into a seasoned traveller.

    Çop train station.

    An illuminating mural in the cavernous train station depicts heroic scenes of a triumphant Socialism. Beyond at the platforms, trains retain wooden benches that recall another age. I knew I had left a rapidly converging Europe when the conductor smilingly declined payment after I presented too large a denomination.

    I was among three other visitors to Ukraine arriving by train from Slovakia, although a border guard told me frequent car trips are made to avail of cheap petrol. The frustration of waiting inside a stationary carriage – akin to a panelled sardine tin – during a heatwave was offset by the friendliness of customs officials who simply checked for contraband medicines. No visa is required for EU visitors but the continued low-level warfare in the faraway east is deterring visitors despite a favourable Euro to Hryvnia exchange rate.

    The River Uzh in Uhherod.

    Borders are often a legacy of ancient battles or coincide with impassable mountain ranges or rivers that deterred conquest and absorption. A change in topography often gives rise to socio-economic boundaries; shifts from upland, semi-nomadic pastoralism to settled arable land bringing larger settlements: different political regimes and ethnic compositions may arise.

    On the road between Uzhhorod and Lviv.

    But twentieth-century Europe brought more artificial borders imposed by distant remote peace treaties or later omnipotent Superpowers, and saw the decline of multi-ethnic empires. Thus, Hungary was reduced from one part of a dual Austro-Hungarian Empire to a disgruntled rump that ruefully surveys its over two million ethnic brethren in neighbouring countries. The hated Treaty of Trianon after World War I was reflected in that country’s alignment with Nazi Germany during World War II. Revanchist Hungary remains a potential source of instability.

    Traditional hay stacks between Lviv and Uzhhorod.

    There is no obvious difference in terrain between Trans-Carpathian Ukraine and eastern Slovakia, and the region contains a sizeable Hungarian minority. Yet as one travels into the surrounding countryside a different agriculture becomes apparent: a shift from the ubiquitous cash crop of maize on the Slovak side to traditional hay stacks in Ukraine, seemingly gathered in traditional manner with scythe and pitch fork. Since the twentieth century, political frontiers have acted like natural boundaries accentuating patterns of development.

    On the road between Uzhhorod and Lviv.

    In Eastern Europe north of the Balkans, the legacy of Soviet victory in World War II remains largely intact. Apart from the relatively amicable separation of Czech Republic from Slovakia in 1993 the frontiers are unchanged. The recent land grab by Russia of Crimea and incursion of irregular troops into Donetsk may herald a more turbulent phase in European history. Borders rarely shift without an accompanying tide of blood, even more perilous in an era of mutually assured destruction.

    Lviv

    The most dramatic territorial legacy of World War II was Poland’s westward shift, forcibly ceding significant territory to the Soviet Union in return for large swathes of eastern Germany. Millions of Poles were removed from their ancestral homes and re-located in the west. Among the territory lost was the historic city of Lviv (Lvov to Poles) to Ukraine.

    Prior to World War II, it contained a population two-thirds Polish. It is now almost entirely Ukrainian although reminders of the Polish period include a statue to their national poet Adam Mickiewicz, who was actually born in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

    Lviv.

    Lvov was annexed by the Austrian Hapsburg Empire (and re-named Lemberg) in 1772, in the first Partition of Poland, becoming capital of Galicia which was the poorest province of the Empire. But this period left a remarkable architectural legacy that prompted UNESCO to designate the historic centre as ‘World Heritage’.

    Today Lviv as it is now called is relatively prosperous, drawing a large number of tourists from neighbouring Poland. Predictably the old city is fringed by a swathe of functionalist Soviet-era apartment blocks, but it retains an abundance of old world charm and the hum of cafés that spill onto carless streets.

    Lviv.

    There are nonetheless signs of a country at war with stands erected by the extreme nationalist Svoboda Party supporting the war effort and offensive toilet roll featuring a picture of Vladimir Putin available in souvenir shops. I spoke to one women of student age who railed against a terrorist, separatist threat to the integrity of the state. She could have been mistaken for someone referring to the existential threat posed by ‘enemies of the people’ in Soviet times. The uncompromising language of extremism is unmistakable.

    Lviv.

    The demise of the archaic, multinational Hapsburg Empire after World War I might be seen as the death knell for so-called Mitteleuropa. Most successor states that emerged in the Versailles settlement were inspired by a nationalist vision promoting a singular cultural identity, and hostile to diversity within the confines of the state. In contrast during the imperial era cities at least were a mosaic of religious and linguistic groups.

    Market stall, Lviv.

    The population of ethnically variegated Mitteleuropa was particularly unsuited to the identification of a nation with a single state that reached a violent apotheosis with the Nazi ideology of the master race.

    Lviv.

    Transnational Jewry were the most obvious victims, but anti-Semitism was not limited to the Nazis, continuing into the Cold War-era: as late as the 1960s thousands of Jews fled Poland in the wake of a number of purges.

    Jews had flocked to Poland in great numbers at the end of the Middle Ages due to the tolerance shown there compared with in the rest of Europe. It became known as paradisus Iudaeorum (paradise for the Jews) and contained two thirds of the continent’s Jewish population. Great centres of learning were establish in cities including Lviv, and agrarian settlements known as shtetl that contained many layers of Jewish life dotted the countryside. There Yiddish, a Germanic language written in Hebrew script, found its highest expression.

    Lviv.

    The writings of Joseph Roth (1894-1939) recall the extraordinary cultural diversity of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire. Born a Jew in the city of Brody near Lviv in the province of Galicia, The Radetzky March is a paean to the fallibility of that Empire; his journalistic account of Eastern European Jews, The Wandering Jews, remains a valuable insight into the remarkable diversity of the Jewish populace.

    Roth despised the numerous frontiers erected in his lifetime, that impeded his passage and that of many others throughout Europe. He wrote

    a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread. The scissors once wielded by the Fates have come into the possession of consulates, embassies and plain clothes men.

    The possession of a particular passport at that time was indeed a matter of life or death.

    A melancholic alcoholic, Roth committed suicide in Paris in 1939 just before the Europe he knew was consumed by the fires of hatred.

    The Versailles settlement also created what now seems the curious state of Czechoslovakia, stretching almost a thousand miles from east to west, as a homeland for Czechs, Slovaks and Ukrainians (or Rusyns as they were then known), but also containing large and disgruntled German and Hungarian minorities.

    In the aftermath of the Munich Agreement of 1938 which dismembered that country, the far eastern province of Ruthenia containing most of that Ukrainian population was annexed by Hungary, but was transferred to Ukraine itself after the arrival of the Red Army in 1945.

    The First Czechoslovak Republic was a microcosm of the Hapsburg Empire with republican institutions. Although clearly dominated by its Czech constituent, many of its first leaders such as Thomas Masaryk were socially progressive, and eschewed narrow-minded nationalism.

    It is perhaps Europe’s tragedy that his vision of a multi-ethnic democratic state did not endure.

    The Europe of Joseph Roth and Thomas Masarky was torn asunder by the twin hydras of Nazism and Stalinism. Ironically one of the groups that suffered most was the German populations who were forced out of their ancestral lands across Eastern Europe, many thousands perishing in the process.

    Europe is the poorer for the homogeneity of many states.

    Perhaps the arrival of the idea of a political and cultural Europe might generate a more accommodating reaction to minorities, but unfortunately attitudes in Ukraine suggest the idea of Europe itself can be exclusionary, as if humans feel the need to find an oppositional Other.

    Lviv.

    This exclusionary idea of Europe is not limited to Ukraine as vociferous Hungary and several nearby states also identify enemies within. The Romany people remain a pitiable underclass in most places they live.

    Latterly migrants fleeing political turmoil in the Middle East have been greeted by barbed wire fences on the Hungarian border.

    We have yet to reach an epoch when cultural diversity is seen as a boon. It would be tragic if the political idea of a Europe, a response to the conflagrations of the early twentieth century could become the case of further conflict.

    Part II, Autumn, 2015

    Ukrainians like to say they live in the largest fully European country. That scale is enhanced by a transport infrastructure relying on unwieldy, Soviet-era rail and roads that are mostly potholed outside of a few stretches of motorway, as I discovered to my discomfort on a recent trip into eastern Ukraine. Moreover, with average salaries less than €200 per month travel is a rare luxury for most in this profoundly unequal society. In a country of great diversity and relative youth, national identity is fragile.

    Kyiv.

    The depredations of the Soviet era when Ukraine was theoretically an autonomous republic but really an integral part of a vast imperium are apparent in the unforgiving architecture of its cities. In the outskirts of Kiev, as elsewhere, tower blocks loom at heights unknown in Western Europe, and inside the capital concrete monoliths sully the splendour of a pre-Revolutionary heritage that includes the UNESCO medieval site of Santa Sophia Cathedral.

    Kyiv.

    The deadening weight of the Communist aesthetic recalls the advice of Marxist theorist George Lukács:

    What is crucial is that reality as it seems to be should be thought of as something man cannot change and its unchangeability should have the force of a moral imperative.

    In the long shadow of imposing structures and heroic monuments people would accept the inevitability of the triumph of Communism. Alas, since independence in 1991 the trend has been to replace this with the brash sheen of American capitalism, an implicit genuflection to the Cold War victor and its consumerism.

    Kyiv.

    Obviously architecture was the least of the excesses of Communism in Ukraine. That mantle is reserved for their great famine known as Holodomor when Stalin’s policy of de-kulakization (1929-1932) killed something between two and seven million Ukrainians and annihilated the social fabric of village life: either you took a job in a collective or went to a city elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

    Kyiv.

    Simultaneously, entire nations, including the Tartars who once occupied Crimea, were forcibly relocated to different parts of the empire. This destruction was compounded by the German invasion in World War II, although Ukrainians had an ambivalent, and in some cases collaborative, relationship with the Nazis during over two years of occupation.

    Kyiv.

    Today in Ukraine most cities in the south and east are Russian-speaking. Parentage is often, unsurprisingly, mixed: a group of young professionals I met in the city of Dniperpetrovsk revealed ancestry Ukrainian, Russian and even Tartar. All spoke Russian as their first language but considered themselves Ukrainian. Even religion, historically, did not separate Ukrainians from Russians as both followed the Greek Orthodox rite. It evoked the question: what does it mean to be Ukrainian beyond living within the borders of that state?

    Kyiv

    A civic nationalism divorced from the kind of destructive ethnic identification that bedevilled the break-up of Yugoslavia would minimise lethal divides. But the current taste for symbols of Ukrainian identity, such as the surge in popularity for traditional dress, suggests this is not on the agenda. Pride in cultural inheritance can easily be skewed towards atavistic violence.

    Kyiv.

    I discovered an increasing despondency among my new-found friends at the capacity of Ukraine’s politicians to bring meaningful improvement to the country. Each revolution, including the latest Euromaidan against the staggering corruption of former President Victor Yanukovych has brought disappointment. The oligarchs remain dominant, led from the front by billionaire President Petro Poroshenko, the richest man in the country.

    According to a recent report from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group a desultory one in five cases against high-ranking officials ends with conviction and imprisonment.

    River Dniper, Dniperpetrovsk.

    The aspirations of the young and dynamic quivering at the possibility of joining the European mainstream remain frustrated. Inevitably in some quarters there is nostalgia for a more authoritarian era proximately represented by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. According to my friends in Dniperpetrovsk the divisions in Ukraine are often generational.

    Dniperpetrovsk.

    Nearby Donetsk is still controlled by Russian-led insurgents. An unsteady ceasefire has held there since September. There have even been attempts, as in Russia, to rehabilitate Stalin. The city was previously called Stalino. Nostalgia for the Soviet Empire is being incubated.

    Russian aggression feeds extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Military build-ups have pernicious effects wherever they are found. In Kiev an array of tanks is parked outside the foreign ministry and the distinctive grey camouflage of the Ukrainian army now seems a fashion accessory, most of all for supporters of the far-right Svoboda (Truth) party.

    Kyiv.

    An encounter I had with one character in a Kiev hostel was revealing. When I said I was Irish he proclaimed his admiration for the IRA, and was a little put out to hear that I was not a supporter of what he perceived as another underdog fighting an imperial foe. The fighters against the Russian-led rebels in Donetsk were his heroes.

    Ukraine offers huge rewards for Russia. It is an agricultural powerhouse, once the bread basket of the Soviet Union, and today is the world’s fifth largest corn producer and the largest producer of sunflower oil. Further, although corruption even extends to the awarding of degrees, its educated population especially in technical disciplines are an important asset.

    Kyiv.

    All nations have their myths that bind disparate groups together inside one state. The complication for Ukraine is that its history is deeply entwined with that of Russia’s. Even the name ‘Rus’ originates in the medieval kingdom with its capital Kiev established by Viking colonists before it was gradually Slavicised. Ukrainian identity was forged through contact with neighbouring empires: first the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that once stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and afterwards the partitions of Poland beginning in the eighteenth century, under the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire which served as a hothouse for numerous nationalist identities, including Zionism and Nazism.

    Memorial to victims of the Holocaust, Dniperpetrovsk.

    As their language crystallised in a form and with a script different to that of Russian, and poets especially Taras Shevchenko illuminated a national character, nineteenth century nationalists turned to the Cossacks as a distinguishing source of identity.

    Historical Museum, Dniperpetrovsk.

    Translated as ‘free man’, Cossacks were bands of escaped serfs that resisted the Catholicism of their Polish landlords and established military settlements along the Dniper and elsewhere, in the late Middle Ages. Their indomitable spirit strikes a chord with modern Ukrainians and is resurrected in re-creating of their settlements in Dniperpetrovsk’s impressive historical museum. The tragedy for the Cossacks was that after throwing off the shackles of the Polish nobility they succumbed to the Russian Empire. This has an obvious contemporary resonance.

    Passing through the interior, where vast fields stretch beyond the horizon, one sees the great possibilities for this country. Encountering the wide-eyed interest of people in world affairs, their knowledge generally beyond that of their Western European counterparts, fosters a visitor’s optimism; witnessing small kindnesses from those with few possessions is touching. But the current system is failing people and the longer that endures the further the already pronounced wealth inequalities will grow, and with that the entrenchment of petty tyrannies.

    Russian Dolls, Kyiv.

    Membership of the European Union is not a panacea for Ukraine. Ensuing emigration could lead to a crippling brain drain, and a free market could be problematic in some sectors. But equally Europe cannot allow a new Iron Curtain to develop. In the end Ukraine needs to find an accommodation with its Russian neighbour to whose fate it is bound.

    Young Ukrainians need reassurance that their country can be reformed. Countering Lukács: reality as it seems to be ought to be thought of as something we can change.

    Versions of these articles were originally published in Village Magazine.

  • Public Intellectuals: Hannah Arendt

    A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.
    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966)

    It is, perhaps, notable that as a young student Hannah Arendt was the Nazi-sympathising philosopher Martin Hedeigger’s lover. His little Jewess trophy, perhaps redolent in his mind of Weimar Republic decadency. Surprisingly, she never really developed a hated for him, intellectually at least, despite his stunning failure in selling his soul to the Nazis.

    In contrast to Heidegger, the ultra-conservative German burgher Thomas Mann chose exile. His rather clunky prose is excused on that point alone, and, suitably, his best work arrived after decamping to Switzerland. This includes especially Doctor Faustus (1947) an oblique portrayal of an actor and academic visited by a Mephistophelian figure, who sells his soul to the Nazis – a Heideggerean type in fact.

    Arendt’s background, steeped in the great German philosophical tradition, but rejected as a Jewess – and even subjected to a period under Gestapo confinement – gave her an unparalleled vantage on the great evils of the twentieth century, and the perils of ideological conformity that corrupted even the most elevated intellects. A failure to exercise a moral conscience in performing actions is a recurring failure, even where we do not see the extremes of totalitarian rule.

    Arendt and Albert Camus

    Arendt is among the most important public intellectual of our age for a variety of reasons.

    First,  she witnessed at first hand the rise of antisemitism in Germany, before migrating to the Americas, along with others from a golden generation of great mitteleuropean thinkers – many of them also Jewish – such as Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin. She was young and resilient enough to avoid the despair that led many to suicide, or to expire prematurely like Louis Althusser, whose structuralist influence has had a less than positive influence.

    A migratory professor with lifestyle “issues” including a nicotine habit that has become increasingly unacceptable in America, Arendt’s cosmopolitan “Europeanness” was tolerated in her time. In a bygone age the Frankfurt School colonised American academia, and a person such as Vladimir Nabokov – a different beast altogether – could became a professor in Columbia. Imagine the uproar if his Lolita was published today?

    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards
    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards

    In some respects her Gallic twin – and the other indispensable public intellectual for our time – Albert Camus also disavowed extremism, strict ideological conformity and what may be described as scientism. Both firmly rejected a positivism identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions according to Camus ‘are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.’

    According to Camus, Comte conceived of a society whose:

    [S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience ‘of action, of thought, and of feeling’ would be given to the high priest who reign over everything.[i]

    As today we hang on the pronouncement of anointed scientists who decide our intimate social lives, it would appear Comte’s vision has come to fruition. Thus, one of the latter-day hierarchy, Professor Niall Ferguson in an interview with The Times revealed his amazement at the power he wielded. After the British government followed Chinese policy in introducing a lockdown he observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

    Likewise, Arendt equated Comte’s hope for ‘a united, regenerated humanity under the leadership – présidence – of France’[ii] with the idea of a ‘national mission’ used by English imperialists to justify global expansion during the late nineteenth century. Arendt also pointed to the danger of the positivists’ assumption – evident in totalitarian Soviet propaganda – ‘that the future is eventually scientifically predictable’.[iii]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem

    Eichmann on trial in 1961.

    Arendt’s fame rests especially on the proverbial shitstorm caused by her coverage of the former SS officer Alfred Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She coined the immortal phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe how under Nazism ambitious functionaries and bean counters – such as Eichmann – climbed career ladders without regard for the supreme brutality of their regime. This was not apparent to them in their day-to-day lives; so out of sight was out of mind. In any age, including this, we should be wary of a cost-benefit analysis of life where board room decisions decide the fate of human beings and the natural world.

    Indicatively, in Ireland between 1996 and 2012 the number of qualified accountants grew by a staggering eight-three percent to number 27,112.[iv] It is now clear that bean counters and bureaucrats dominate our lives. Although many may not seem like villanous characters, any buffoonery on display should not be a source of reassurance. As Arendt describes Eichmann:

    Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.[v]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem highlights how an obsession with compliance and promotion blunts moral sensibility; and how a cognitive dissonance takes hold where slavish obedience leads to a failure to question one’s actions. This is the moral corrosion generated by a lack of consequentialist or moral thinking.

    The Human Condition

    I would argue that The Human Condition (1958) is central to understanding our age, in that it emphasizes the good life, and a need for Aristotelian measure and moderation in pursuit of eudaimonia. As the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics puts it: ‘Every art and every scientific inquiry, and similarly every action and purpose, may be said to aim at some good.’

    The Human Condition emphasizes a moral conscience that should ideally inform all our actions, especially politics. And she warns of a detachment from human realities that may occur once the “pensionopolis” of an entitled state class have no concern for trade or manufacturing:

    No activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sustaining only the life process, was permitted to enter the political realm, and this at the grave risk of abandoning trade and manufacture to the industriousness of slaves and foreigners, so that Athens indeed became the “pensionopolis” with a “proletariat of consumers”[vi]

    It is insufficient to perform a deed in isolation; you have to understand what you are doing and for whom and why. Or at the least investigate and interrogate your motivations, while avoiding the pitfalls of perfectionism. As Voltaire put it: ‘the best is the enemy of the good’, a point seemingly lost on certain scientific authorities in their utopian pursuit of ZeroCovid.

    Arendt also warns against the scientism in our public discourse, or more crucially the triumph of a form of mathematical intelligence, which is often divorced from moral decision-making, with Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ after the launch of the atomic bomb an obvious statement of this pitfall.

    It is a point the philosopher Mary Midgley (above) has also made in response to a letter Albert Einstein wrote to the wife of a deceased physicist that ‘people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’[vii]

    In response Midgley wrote:

    if reality was indeed something that only physicists could reach – if everybody else was wandering clueless through a hopeless maze of illusions – there would be a crucial difference between these scientists and the rest of us. We are being told that we are mere peasants, helpless “folk-psychologists”, and we may well hear this dictum as a simple insult “you are nothing.”[viii]

    Thus Arendt, along with Midgley, warns against placing too great a premium on mathematical intelligence – and those who may consider lesser mortals as mere nothings. Arguably, this can be seen in the all-too-ready acceptance of Professor Ferguson’s doomsday mathematical modelling for Covid-19 mortality last year, which proved to be wrong by a significant margin. According to Mark Landler and Stephen Castle in the New York Times, Ferguson’s interpretation was ‘treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’

    More widely, the contemporary veneration of science has spilled into worship of the ‘dismal science’ of economics, and the triumph of homo economicus. This represents a negation of critical human identity through a hyper-inflated economic reality of survival. That any critical intelligence endures, divorced from corporate ‘influencers’, is almost a minor miracle.

    The Human Condition also ably demonstrates that when the sphere of political engagement and the public sphere become redundant and private interests control democracy, then it has given way to something else

    Technocracy

    Arendt warns of the dangers of technocracy, pointing to the blunted moral conscience of an Eichmann, who reasoned that he was only putting people on trains, and did not have the intellectual curiosity to consider their destination and the likely outcome, or was casually indifferent. Arendt understood that he was more concerned with consorting with powerful people, and networking in a moral oblivion. One might add that being exclusively within one’s own silo bubble, or online echo chamber – as all too many are today – is recipe for serious trouble.

    Likewise, Jurgen Habermas has warned of the danger of technocratic solutions devoid of a moral compass, coining the phrase the public sphere.

    Juergen Habermas

    To offset growing consumerism Arendt advocates the Vita Activa of civic engagement. She remains even-handed, recognising that scientists should of course be listened to – providing crucial specialisation – but it should be understood that many lack a moral or philosophical education, and without ethical training ultimately hold no allegiance to the truth.

    In our time, all too often, political debates reach a point of paralysis in endless arguments over statistics; we are to quote Peter Greenaway ‘Drowning By Numbers’. Arendt’s analysis demonstrates how number can give rise to anti-humanism, perfectionism including an obsessions with tidiness, and other forms of anal retentiveness that inhibit our development as human beings.

    Science detached from philosophy is divorced from ethical considerations, and thus can be deployed for great evil. Therefore, ‘totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which ‘science’ [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.’[ix]

    Banner of Stalin in Budapest.

    The Origins of Totalitarianism

    The Origins Of Totalitarianism (1951) is the seminal account of twentieth century totalitarianism – as distinct from the ‘mere’ fascism of figure such as Mussolini – of both the Nazis under Hitler and Communism under Stalin. It offers a series of reflections that should serve as a warning in our time – when we cannot be said to live under totalitarianism – but where, nonetheless, an unmistakable shift has occurred in the relationship between the state and the individual. Thus measures that no government would previously have contemplated – from lockdowns to curfews – have been normalised in many countries, and controls have even been tightened in Ireland at precisely the point when a declining number are dying from the disease. Coincidentally, ‘terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition.’[x]

    We cannot overlook the damage of enforced social isolation, as Arendt put it:

    What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the nontotalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of ever-growing masses of our century.[xi]

    Arendt also well understood the fictions that underpin our understanding of the world, and a tendency to embrace conspiratorial ideas in the absence of reasonable explanations:

    Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. Man, who has not been granted the gifts of undoing, who is always an unconsulted heir of other men’s deeds, and who is always burdened with a responsibility that appears to be the consequences of an unending chain of events rather than unconscious acts, demands an explanation and interpretation of the past in which the mysterious key to his future seems to be concealed. Legends were the spiritual foundation of every ancient city, empire, people, promising safe guidance through the limitless space of the future. Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.[xii]

    Thus, it is essential that in responding to the damage of contemporary social atomisation that we do not succumb to ideologies that sow further division.

    Arendt observed how allegiances break down when Populist mobs gain traction. Initially the targets are those of no influence or assets, but essentially anyone is guilty under the arbitrary laws of totalitarianism in power. Thus she recalls:

    It is obvious that the most elementary caution demands that one avoid all intimate contacts, if possible – not in order to prevent discovery of one’s secret thoughts, but rather to eliminate, in the almost certain sense of future trouble, all persons who might not only who might have an ordinary cheap interest in your denunciation but an irresistible need to bring about your ruin simply because they are in danger of their own lives.

    Sadly, this agitation seems reminiscent of the states of mind actually cultivated by government scientists, who have deployed ‘fear, shame and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China,’ according to Gary Sidley, a retired clinical psychologist. Nowadays, instead of being imprisoned, we contend with social shame and even loss of a job for heinous crimes such as meeting a friend for a pint or taking a hill walk.

    Radical Evil

    Arendt observes a failure ‘inherent in our entire philosophical tradition’ to conceive of a radical evil.[xiii] Such a blind spot she argues means, ‘Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’[xiv]

    Moreover, it is important to note in our present state of enforced isolation:

    [I]t has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical governments is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror, it certainly is its most fertile ground, it always is its result.[xv]

    So let us be wary of the strongman leaders who have emerged to ‘guide’ us to the promised land during a pandemic, which shows up the damage of their own making; and who now argue that solutions lie in asserting the very neoliberal values that brought us to this impasse in in the first place.

    Sadly Burkean and Habermasean moderation has been lost in an age of tribal nationalism. The handmaiden’s of the strongman leaders are in fact a grasping “pensionopolis” that are removed from the dramatically worsening poverty in countries such as Ireland caused by the pandemic.

    This sadly is the digital generation of what are, in effect, fabricated human identities – a kind of unreal Blade Runner replicant. Homo faber has given way to homo economicus, as the law and economics ideologues put it. Craftsmanship and intellectualism are despised, and the public space denuded of significance.

    Finally, and perhaps more optimistically, Arendt clearly distinguishes between loneliness, and solitude: ‘Solitude requires being alone, where loneliness only shows itself most sharply in company with others.’ Let us thus endeavour to accept solitude as a temporary gift and resist the loneliness which is fertile ground for the infliction of terror.

    [i] Albert Camus, The Rebel, Translated by Anthony Bower, Penguin, London, 2013, p.145

    [ii] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.237

    [iii] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.454

    [iv] Tony Farmar, The History of Irish Book Publishing, Stroud, The History Press, 2018, p.12

    [v] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking Press, New York, 1963, p.55

    [vi] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958, p.37

    [vii] Mary Midgley, Are You an Illusion, p.136

    [viii] Beard, Ibid, p.138

    [ix] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.453

    [x] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.514

    [xi] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.627

    [xii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.271

    [xiii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.602

    [xiv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.603

    [xv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.623

  • Can the European Project be Kept on Track?

    Czech border police snoop along the rail carriage as we pass the frontier from Germany. They seem to linger outside our compartment long enough to survey the light pigmentation of the young Dutch couple and this Hiberno-Norman specimen inside, passing by without seeking identification.

    White skin remains a passport – carte blanche – to unspoken liberties in ways most of us carriers hardly understand; a darker hue, with an out-of-date visa, might bring quiet indignities inside a dank room in some god-forsaken border-town.

    Born in the city of Brody, near Lviv in present-day Ukraine in 1894, the novelist Joseph Roth wrote: ‘a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread. The scissors once wielded by the Fates have come into the possession of consulates, embassies and plain clothes men.’ A melancholic alcoholic and wandering Jew, Roth committed suicide in Paris in 1939 before the cosmopolitan Old Europe he had evoked was consumed by the flames of racial hatred.

    Human lives are dangling like threads from passports in Europe again as borders perceptibly harden: the sword of Damocles hangs over the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland, while in the UK at large, drawers are being scoured for the birth certificate of that long-lost grandparent that will yield the Paddy-pass. Throughout Europe, dour forms of patriotism exclude diversity; even in liberal, social-democratic Scandinavia shutters are coming down, as the Far Right surges.

    Entirely open borders might be unworkable, but widespread anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is rarely based on any rational assessment of the pros and cons of migration, but appears as an unconscious turning away from the world. After all, the European population is aging and many countries are short of workers in fields indigenous populations are reluctant to enter.

    Racists identify the physical features of classes of people with defined cultural traits. This error is often a product of isolation, usually emanating from individuals living in ethnically homogeneous areas, especially small towns. Demagogues prey on those left behind by free-wheeling market economies, but the imagining of ‘them’ and ‘us’ is not purely economic in origin. It is also linked to a patriarchal sense of traditional family units being undermined by liberated women, open sexuality and even dietary choices. The ‘person of colour’ is another unwelcome intrusion of a modern world in flux.

    Thus Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s offer to make women who bear four or more (presumably ‘pure-blooded’) children exempt from taxation is a chilling reminder of a time when women’s bodies were pressed into service for the imagined community of the nation. Across Europe an irrational fear of a ‘promiscuous’ Semitic ‘other’ is used to stoke hatred by unscrupulous politicians.

    There is also a growing reassertion of the nation state, beyond Brexit. Thus the French government has withdrawn its embassy from Rome in the wake of the Populist Italian administration’s outspoken support for the revolutionary gilets jaune ‘yellow vest’ movement.[i]

    Is this a turning of Europe’s mythological gyres: a cycle of one hundred years of recovery and prosperity, before decline and confrontation? The continent really needs to outgrow the truculent teenager phase, and instead rise to the challenge of making our way of life sustainable, and ultimately assist other parts of a world we have made in our own image of nation states.

    Any retreat into sullen autarky appears untenable unless most of us are prepared to revert to being small farmers. We are, nevertheless, right to wonder whether European institutions have been overtaken by shadowy lobbyists serving multinational corporations. Big brands are strangling small enterprise, homogenising streetscapes, and upholding the grand theft of in-built-obsolesce underpinning our model of economic-growth-without-end. It begs the question: what keeps the European dream on track?

    Romantic Travel

    An extensive rail network is perhaps Europe’s greatest asset, and guarantor of a fluid community. Like the capillaries of a great oak, it connects the high branches of Scandinavia to the roots of Italy, and beyond. Whether high-speed behemoth, or squealing rust-heap, train-travel permits a form of contemplation distinctively European; where a delay is simply an invitation to read one’s book, engage in light conversation with travelling companions, or fix lunch.

    I wonder whether future generations will experience the slow transitions in scenery, the fading grandeur of old world stations, and the whistle of the guard to set you on your way. Perhaps railways will give way to electric pods or warp drives, but I fear the best-laid techno-Utopian plans of Elon Musk and others will only cater to a select wealthy few. The benefits of railways, a technology that catalysed the Industrial Revolution, altering life on Earth forever, are likely to endure.

    As Minister for Transport the current Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar described train travel as being for romantics.[ii] This suggests it is sensible to depend on stifling airports with queues and intrusive searches, before the deep vein thrombosis and ear-popping altitude of air travel. The rapid conveyance of tourists to safe spaces in historic cities has brought uniform hotels, chain restaurants and stores selling the same products, in different selfie locations.

    For those unable to afford air travel there are bus services leaving from anonymous stations on the asphalt fringes of cities, before cramped seating and desolate road stops. Otherwise, there is the false freedom of a car, wheeling at high speed along a motorway from which nothing can be seen, and where road deaths are a permitted tribute to the car gods evoked by advertisers. All other passenger experiences pale by comparison with a train journey.

    Sail-Rail

    At times even I, a born-again railer, weary of train travel in Britain. The effects of a decidedly unromantic privatisation are apparent in the sardine can-spacing between seats, the gaudy plastic furnishings, and staggering crowds at peak times, which no doubt make bean counters beam. Wholescale privatisation of an inherently monopolistic service seems to have been the height of folly.

    Unmistakably London.

    Ticket prices are jarringly expensive too. For example, a journey of eighty-odd miles from Oxford to Birmingham costs over £38 one-way. A return costs much the same, which is of little use if you aren’t going back on your tracks.

    There are cheap deals if you reserve in advance – though not on the Oxford-Birmingham line as it happens. A one-way ticket from Oxford to London is available for under £10, compared to the standard rate of £27. But booking weeks in advance negates the old world appeal of train travel, which is to turn up at a station, purchase a ticket and catch the next available service – setting off on a whim perhaps, along with a picnic basket.

    One of the great mysteries of this life is how the Sail-Rail deal between the UK and Ireland has endured into present, unromantic, times. I can simply turn up at Dublin Port, purchase my ticket which includes the price of the ferry, before catching a train at a flat rate from Holyhead – with marginal increments depending on distance and speed of ferry – to anywhere in the UK. Very occasionally, after Christmas, or at summer’s end, there is insufficient space on the ferry for all passengers, but this is rare indeed. I only book in advance to avoid the small handling fee charged by Irish Ferries when you purchase at the Port.

    Going Sail-Rail from the UK is even easier, as you purchase your ticket at any station – without the handling fee – just like a regular ticket. The full price of approximately €50 between London and Dublin may not be as low as the ludicrous cost of some plane tickets – a form of transport which, perversely, is not subject to the added cost of VAT on its fuel. But by the time you have born the cost of the Stansted train to London (usually costing £18), having avoided the crushing two-and-a-half-hour cheap bus alternative, you won’t be thanking uncle Michael.

    Last time on Sail-Rail I went as far as Oxford, met friends for a lavish Indian supper, before wobbling cheerfully back to the station to resume my journey to London. At such times the Sail-Rail pass seems like a golden ticket inside Willy Wonka’s factory, as bemused attendants waive you onwards.

    On the Irish side, the main inconvenience is the lack of a decent public transport connection between Dublin city and Port, which has no trains running along the tracks out to it. The 7.15am 153 bus from Westmoreland Street won’t even get you to the Port in time for the 8am sailing. Alas, the Dún Laoghaire-Holyhead connection, conveniently linked to a DART rail service, came to an end in 2015.

    The other annoyance is the apparent unwillingness of the UK train companies to align their timetables with the arrival of the ferries, often meaning delays on arrival in insalubrious Holyhead. Contrast this with how on some European train-ferry lines – between Sicily and the Italian mainland, and Denmark and Germany – trains actually mount a ferry and trundle out the other side.

    Delays, usually on Wales’s underfunded Arriva line, may require a longer stretch in the less than charming entrepôt, on an otherwise underrated coastline. The town’s appeal has changed little since Jonathan Swift’s 1727 evocation:

    Lo here I sit at Holyhead
    With muddy ale and mouldy bread
    All Christian victuals stink of fish
    I’m where my enemies would wish
    Convict of lies is every sign,
    The inn has not one drop of wine
    I’m fasten’d both by wind and tide
    I see the ship at anchor ride
    The Captain swears the sea’s too rough
    He has not passengers enough.

    Holyhead notwithstanding, it is now possible to travel in one day, using Sail-Rail and Eurostar, from Dublin Port, via London Euston, proceeding by foot to King’s Cross St. Pancras, to Brussels or Paris. I dream of more links from Holyhead to major UK cities, especially London, and perhaps even a high speed spur through Wales. That might tempt a few more romantics out of taking flights, and make life on our island seem less insular.

    Inter-Rail

    Last month I purchased an Inter-Rail pass, giving me five days of unlimited travel within a month throughout Europe for €300; albeit with some high-speed lines (especially, inconveniently, in France if you are arriving from Ireland) requiring a reservation, and/or the payment of a supplement. There are, however, reductions available on ferry prices, and with an overnight journey you only need to use up one day of your allotment.

    Having taken the Eurostar from London on the new service to Amsterdam, I proceeded immediately to Hamburg, Germany’s understated and cosmopolitan second city. I then headed north, through Denmark, crossing the Copenhagen-Malmo bridge into Sweden, arriving above the snowline in Oslo. I had not maximised my first three day’s travel, but made it as far as I needed.

    Cross-country skiing near Oslo, Norway.

    After enjoying an all-too-brief cross-country skiing trip with Irish friends now resident there, which included another short train journey into the hills, along with our skis, I returned south. This time taking two days (overnighting in Copenhagen) to get to the Czech Republic.

    Arriving in a continental climate with further snow cover, I proceeded east by train out of Prague towards the Jesiniky mountains. This involved a journey on one of a growing number of private lines – the Leo Express – which provides a degree of pampering and efficiency beyond that associated with the state railway company, Cesky Drahy, and cheap deals if you book in advance.

    At first blush, this would suggest partial or limited privatisation brings benefits. But I rather suspect that once this neo-liberal genii of de-regulation is let out of the bottle it will be reluctant to return. I expect further calls (in a subservient media) for privatisation in the name of efficiency, preceding a carve-up unfavourable to Czech rail-users, with ‘uneconomic’ lines phased out – as occurred in the UK – and prices hiked, once the ‘dead wood’ of the state company is phased out of existence.

    The Czech Republic is endowed with almost ten million kilometres of track, giving it one of the densest networks in the world, and making it a Mecca for train-lovers. Most people, even those living in rural villages, can reach their place of work without a car. The capital, Prague, also has two metro lines and an extensive tram network. It still costs a pittance to get to the airport by Metro and feeder bus.

    But more and more Czechs are embracing car culture, in part, no doubt, due to the skillful advertising of this ‘indispensable’ source of freedom. A way of life is being jeopardised by the appeal of autonomous vehicles, but for the moment the railway blood still flows.

    Jesiniky Mountains, Czech Republic.

    ‘the enemy within’

    In a worryingly development last January a seventy-one year-old man, Jaromir Balda was sentenced to four years imprisonment for terrorism. He felled trees to block railway lines, pretending Islamists were responsible by leaving messages at the scene proclaiming Allahu Akbar – ‘God is great’ in Arabic. Two passenger trains hit the trees, but fortunately no one was injured. The far-right sympathiser admitted he had hoped to spread fear of Muslim migrants.[iii]

    One may assume Balda – like the really murderous Anders Breivik in Norway – considered his actions a form of tough love to his countrymen: waking them up to the danger posed by the ‘enemy within’ – the miniscule Islamic population of the Czech Republic, a country that has, by and large, displayed an unsympathetic attitude to the plight of refugees, especially those with darker skin.

    This racism can partly be attributed to long-standing antipathy towards the indigenous Romany (‘gypsy’) people. In contrast, the pale-skinned foreigner, ‘the ex-pat’, is treated with deference, and a little envy, albeit marauding stag parties have sullied the reputation of the English at least.

    Balda’s choice of target was darkly symbolic, potentially evoking fears in day trippers from rural parts into cities; and among city dwellers who take trains all the way to remote regions, along with their bikes and skis. This gives way to the delusion of safety offered by the autonomous car journey, and further fracturing of community.

    Inter-continental

    Three years ago I travelled by train and bus from Portugal as far as Ukraine, on what was a redemptive trip, fulfilling an ambition to visit the former Soviet Union. Crossing the border from Slovakia into Trans-Carpathian Ukraine a distinct culture came into view. At the interchange of Çop trains halt on account of the different rail gauges used on either side. Stalin had ordered this inconvenience in order to slow down invading armies, and prevent people from easily escaping. An enduring cultural fault line is the result. It felt as if I had reached the limit of a Europe I know as a backyard I have not fully investigated.

    I hope to continue regular overland peregrinations, ideally by train, but the cost seems to rise each year, with further privatisations on the horizon. I fear that as train connections lapse, the life blood of Europe will cease to flow. Then we will experience the false freedom of driving our cars on anonymous highways, or taking flights to green zones in historic cities, conveniently cleared of native populations that don’t fit with the desired impression the authorities wish to leave.

    As Europeans grow wary of diversity it is worth considering the vital role played by railways in fostering community and tolerance. An annual holiday by train ought to be available to anyone living on the continent, even those on a peripheral island that tore away its tracks after independence. Connecting Europeans, in real comfort, to cities, mountains and the sea is perhaps the greatest service the railways still provide, and with continued intermingling our heterogeneous communities might seem more inviting.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

    [i] Angelique Chrisafis, ‘France recalls Rome envoy over worst verbal onslaught ‘since the war’’, 7th of February, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/07/france-italy-ambassador-macron-di-maio-salvini-second-world-war, accessed 18/2/19.

    [ii] Online Editors, ‘Leo Varadkar: ‘I’m romantic. I love the railways. I had a train set as a kid’’ April 3rd, 2014, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/leo-varadkar-im-romantic-i-love-the-railways-i-had-a-train-set-as-a-kid-30152502.html, accessed 18/2/19.

    [iii] Untitled, ‘Czech pensioner jailed for terror attacks on trains’, January 14th, 2019, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46862508?fbclid=IwAR1rLbhjW_fpVyao8MjooDZe4muAR8bYCyyg5I_x1JzL6HytguW0PPoPFPU, accessed 18/2/19.