I’m writing to you from above the clouds, flying at 500 mph

7 November 2024: Khuê to Deniz

I’m writing to you from Taiwan, a country I’m visiting for the first time and whose warm, heavy air immediately smelled like home to me. Maybe it’s the exhaust from the mopeds, or the spicy smell of the soup cooking in open pots at the roadside, beef bones boiling away in the broth until it takes on the colour of dirty puddles. As I walk through the streets, I see Tokyo’s garish neon adverts, Hong Kong’s labyrinthine shopping centres, and Singapore’s juxtaposition of old and new. Above all, I see houses like those in Vietnam, where my parents are from: tall and thin like towers built of Lego bricks, sticking up into the air, with steel shutters instead of doors.

I also see people of slight build with black hair, like me. They approach me in Chinese and are surprised to hear me replying: ‘Sorry, I don’t speak Mandarin. I’m from Germany.’

Some of them help me—out of Asian solidarity, or so I tell myself. In a shopping centre, a man I asked for directions to a Taiwanese noodle soup restaurant he didn’t know spoke to a storekeeper, who took me there. The restaurant was a small place in a basement, no windows, cash only, soup for less than five euros a bowl. The wall was adorned with the red plaques issued by the Michelin Guide, which has recommended ‘Lao Shan Dong’ six years running. The waitresses were speaking Vietnamese to each other, and when it was time to order I was relieved: at last, I was able to make myself understood.

While I was eating my (excellent) noodle soup, I remembered a group of young Vietnamese women I’d seen at the airport, and the fact that all the signage there was in Mandarin, Taiwanese, English, and Vietnamese. People from Vietnam come here to work, some marry as a way of joining a more affluent society. I became almost painfully aware of the hierarchy of Asian countries, and of the fact that the Vietnamese, my people, are at the lower end of the scale. In Germany, where there are so few Asians that everyone’s on the same level, I never think about this.

At the noodle soup restaurant, it came back into focus, and with it my upbringing in Germany: the constant feeling of having to work my way up. The constant attempts to assert my own position because I didn’t automatically belong there. For a long time, this led me to understand the word ‘home’ as a term of exclusion: other people had a home they could claim, I had to fight for one. Do you know this feeling?
 

10 November 2024: Deniz to Khuê

I read your mail from Taiwan on the train from Berlin to Hannover, on my way from the city where I live to the city where I grew up. There’s a sense in which travel can be a home. Not as a shelter, but as a lived rejection of being radically sedentary, which offers nothing to hold on to, in this world that becomes ever more interwoven even as it breaks apart. We’re supposed to be thinking about ‘homelands’—or Heimat in German, a term difficult to translate in its expression of local and national attachment—and I realize I’m blocking before even I’ve formed my first thought. Many people can’t enter the countries where they want to live, often enough they can’t enter those where they were born, they put themselves in danger, dying or losing their homes and loved ones. The very human desire for belonging is becoming an obstacle to people’s solidarity with each other. More and more, the desire for togetherness is proving to be a mark of desperation.

Like you, I grew up knowing I had to work twice as hard as others—my parents came to Germany from Turkey in 1962 and 1981. Today I ask myself where all this effort, that I loved so much in spite of the injustice—yes, really, I love making an effort—is supposed to lead. The world is falling apart. Bombs are dropping. Children, who should not be made to bear any responsibility, are being orphaned, crippled, and killed. Around the world, fascism is stepping out of the shadows into the light. Yesterday, it was eighty-six years since the November pogroms in Germany. Homeland? Heimat? Is it not a form of escapism to think about such an antiquated concept today?

13 November 2024: Khuê to Deniz

For a long time, I felt just like you, more comfortable in transit than when I was actually at home. Being in motion gave me security and something to do, whereas there was something threatening about standing still. Even as a child, I was restless and hectic, everywhere all at once, in my body, and in my head. Later, much later, I explored mindfulness as a way of tackling my recurring bouts of insomnia. Only then did I realize how much discipline it takes not to constantly flee the moment, but to remain inside it instead.

Where does this unrest come from, and does it have to do with the fact that we are uprooted? Is this explanation too simple? In my case, it may have something to do with speaking, or with remaining silent. In the history of my family there are many wounds that we’ve sought to heal by denial, from the wartime experiences of my parents and relatives in Vietnam to the battles my siblings and myself fought with our mother and father. The issue of ‘home’ played a part here, too: we wanted to be like German teenagers, wanted their freedom, but my parents saw us as Vietnamese children and took an authoritarian approach to parenting. This divide between us has never been discussed, neither then or since. Maybe that’s where my inner unrest comes from.

Here in Taiwan I’m thinking a great deal about Donald Trump’s nationalist revolution in the USA and about what it might mean for all of us. I’m on tour here with KIM, the stage adaptation of my novel Brothers and Ghosts, a global family story about escape, displacement, and the long shadow of the Vietnam War. One of the performers is from Ukraine and lives in Seattle with a special permit for Ukrainian refugees. Will she be able to stay there, or will she have to return to her home country? How much will be left of it if the new US government reduces its aid to Ukraine and imposes a ‘ceasefire’?

One evening in Xinying I discussed this with David Le Thai, a DJ, ballet dancer, and skater whose sense of humour shines through in every performance. Our legs were tired from rehearsals, we were sitting outside our thin-walled hotel. David is the son of a German mother and a Vietnamese father whom he didn’t meet until he was fifteen. (His stepfather, with whom he grew up in the 1990s in Saxony, is also Vietnamese.) David told me that back then, the windows of his family’s textiles business were smashed so often that eventually they had to shut the shop. Molotov cocktails were thrown at their car several times and finally exploded—luckily there was no one inside.

‘How did all this affect you?’, I asked him.
‘I had the feeling they were targeting us’, he replied. ‘Because we were the only Vietnamese there.’
He paused and blew out smoke from his hand-rolled cigarette.
‘I just remembered we used to have a house with a restaurant in Krögis that was set on fire, too. Totally forgot about that!’

I was amazed that he spoke without anger or bitterness. I wonder if you end up switching off your emotions when you’re exposed to racist violence so often. Maybe I’d been reading too much about Trump, Stephen Miller, and ‘they poison the blood of our country’, but I caught myself thinking that he would have had a far easier time if it hadn’t been for his Vietnamese father (or his fathers).

‘When I was small, we didn’t talk much about all that’, he said and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It was just that we eventually had to move.’

I wonder if the recognition one receives as an adult can ever make up for the ostracism one experienced as a child. Probably not. Psychologists say that our early experiences of belonging, acceptance, and safety mark us for life. I struggled with this for a long time, but now I think that the questions, gaps, and contradictions are also relevant. For me, they are the reason for writing. At my readings and performances, I often meet people whose upbringing was very different from mine but who nonetheless carry very similar questions within them. Even here in Taiwan.
 

25 November 2024: Deniz to Khuê

I’m writing to you from above the clouds, flying at 500 mph. Once again, I don’t have solid ground under my feet. But it has nothing to do with being uprooted. I don’t feel uprooted, I’ve never understood what that’s supposed to mean. My father’s city, Mardin, is 5,000 years old and sits on a mountainside overlooking Mesopotamia, where Gilgamesh, one of the earliest pieces of literature to be put into writing emerged more than 4,500 years ago. The melancholy I feel because the city has been transformed, no longer matching my father’s childhood memories of it, is the melancholy of change and of the knowledge that nothing lasts forever. If that’s what people mean by uprooting, then it’s part of the human condition.

I’ve just been listening to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship on the plane’s inflight entertainment system. Wilhelm is visiting an old harpist, a stranger who prefers to spend his evening with him rather than with the theatre group he has joined. The harpist sings him sad songs and Wilhelm says: ‘I think thee very happy, that [...], being everywhere a stranger, thou findest in thy own heart the most agreeable society.’ Life in transit and the tendency to start anew can help us to find a knowledge of finiteness and infinity in the depths of ourselves, and perhaps even the ability to enjoy our own existence in all its finiteness.

My locations become part of my history, of the cartography of my memory, I don’t belong to them, and they don’t belong to me.

*

The next day, a Sunday, I’m sitting in a café on a street off 14th Street in Washington, D.C. Yesterday, on arrival, I went to the nearest ramen shop and the waiter asked me how spicy I wanted my food on a scale of one to ten. I said seven. It was perfect. I asked myself whether the soup was so amazing because I was so hungry, or because they do something differently here. My theory, with no empirical basis: in the United States, society’s tastes adapt to the cuisine introduced by migrants, whereas in Germany it’s the opposite—less spicy, less dangerous.

I grew up in the 1990s, like you. I clearly remember the racist attacks in Rostock-Lichtenhagen and Solingen. After Lichtenhagen, the German parliament hollowed out Article 16 of the country’s constitution, the right to asylum, even though the first twenty articles had been declared exempt from amendment by the so-called ‘eternity clause’. And my mother wouldn’t let me play in the street unsupervised because she was scared of neo-Nazis. This wasn’t paranoia. With their dogs they would roam the streets of the middle-class area where I grew up. I wasn’t afraid of them as I believed I was safe in our neighbourhood, and I also had the feeling that the older Turkish boys playing soccer were watching over me from a distance. 

I grew up in a liberal, secular family and I saw no real difference between our family life and that of my friends. Except that you had to take your shoes off at our place and it was important to respect your elders and to be protective of those younger than you. Bread was holy; if you found a piece on the street you had to pick it up. You were even supposed to kiss it and touch it to your forehead, because a piece of bread could be God’s hand. Which is why, for a long time, I imagined God as an infinite expanse of Turkish flatbread.

My parents had not lived through war, but they had experienced three military coups. They grew up with the Turkish republican values taught in state schools, oriented towards an illusory version of Europe. They were the children of a great lost empire and of a feudal society—their parents were born in the Ottoman era. As a result, they bore the contradictions of modernity within them—perhaps without noticing—a fact I later realized through the work on my novels.

While I’m writing all this down for you, I’m noticing that I need to be more modest in my views. We grew up in the same country, but our experiences are different. The experience of a Vietnamese family is not the same as mine, and as a woman your experience of being read as a migrant is different from mine.

Thank you for writing to me about your teenage years. When I was thirteen my father lost his ability to move. This fate is one I share with my narrator Yunus in My Father’s Sea. And for me that coloured everything else in the second half of the 1990s. In the 2000s, when there were films on TV written to portray the experience of a ‘multicultural’ Germany by showing a clumsy Hans asking Ayşe’s family for her hand in marriage, I’d had enough: Entire families are being murdered by neo-Nazis and you see the grand drama of integration in some kind of oriental wedding cliché? Really?
 

4 December 2024: Khuê to Deniz

I’m writing to you from my house in the very north of Berlin, where I grew up and where I’m now living again. I would never have thought I would return here one day, to a place I associate with the narrow-mindedness of the 1990s and the alienation of my teenage years. And yet I’ve ended up back here, and after every journey I’m happy to unlock my front door. The familiar surroundings comfort me. My parents and my sister live just round the corner; every morning I cycle through a nature reserve with my four-year-old son to kindergarten; in the afternoon my parents often pick him up. We’re now a small community with several generations. Sometimes I think: we’ve built ourselves a new home.

I can only guess how your life changed when your father lost his ability to move. The account in your book conveys a feeling of great, sad tenderness. Have I ever mentioned the first thing I noticed about you? A special sensitivity and a sincere attempt to understand the other person. The empathy you radiate is very rare. I think that’s one reason why your book touches so many people, even in the United States and Mexico. Do you think this empathy has something to do with your father?

For me, my father was a man who steadfastly kept going. A Vietnamese doctor in a German hospital, always on duty, never complaining. When his boss retired, he proudly said of my father: ‘In all these years Thoại never took a single day off sick!’

As a child, I always had my father and his career path in mind. Although my parents never said it in so many words, I had internalized the expectation that I must get even further ahead, since I was born here and speak perfect German. Anything else would have seemed not only like a personal failure, but also a betrayal of all the sacrifices that they, as the first generation, had made for me, the second generation. That was and remains my understanding of life in Germany: it is a distance to be conquered on the way to a higher, as-yet-undefined goal.

For a long time, I both idealized Germany (because I wanted to belong) and dismissed it (because I didn’t feel accepted). Since the massacre committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023, I’ve been thinking about this again. It has cost tens of thousands of civilian victims in Israel, Lebanon, and especially Gaza their lives. In Germany, it has also brought a debate about what it means to be German.

I’m noticing that my emotional response is different to that of many of my friends and colleagues whose families have ‘always’ been German. In my family there are no perpetrators, bystanders, or heroes from the period of the Holocaust; I have neither a ‘personal link’ to this period (I can’t think of a better word for it) nor the feeling of bearing the historical guilt of my ancestors on my shoulders.

Again, this is rather an awkward way of putting it, but this awkwardness probably reflects my broader uncertainty, since no other issue is so loaded and delicate in terms of national identity. For those born German, too, there is this passing on from one generation to the next, the long road to be travelled. One wrong word, one ambiguous post or, as in the case of the former commissioner for culture Claudia Roth during the Berlinale awards ceremony in 2024, one moment of dubious applause, and you’re consigned to the no-go area of the German debate and accused of anti-Semitism. With its many taboos, this debate makes it even more unbearable to be witnessing this horrific war in which innocent people are held captive in tunnels, children are pulled from the rubble of their schools, and Gaza is bombed back to the stone age.

How did you experience your days in the United States? What was it like in Washington, so soon after Trump’s second election victory?
 

14 December 2024: Deniz to Khuê

I’m writing to you from the back corner of a jazz bar in Mexico City, by hand, on the last pages of my notebook. The room is red. The walls, the drumkit, the waitress’s jacket, all red. Groups in evening dress or lumberjack shirts sit at round tables on bentwood chairs. They talk loudly, in grating voices. The bar is a grand apartment in the colonial style. The rooms are cozily furnished with sofas and armchairs, which are also red. The walls are hung with mirrors that multiply the red. If you’ve ever felt at home in Kreuzberg, you’ll also feel at home in Beyoğlu, in Williamsburg, or here in Roma Norte.

Which is why I’m amazed when people talk about different ‘homelands’. As if we were still beholden to the debates of the industrial era. Even if the word didn’t exist in the nineteenth century, globalization is already described by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto as a ‘cosmopolitan’ homogenization of the world: ‘The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.’ The privileged of all countries, including writers and artists, meet in the brightly lit, mirror-walled bar that the world has become.

The band starts playing. As their opener, the musicians choose a piece by John Coltrane. They look like rockers, but they’re playing jazz. The guitarist sweats with gratification while he improvises. The audience is young. Much younger than in Berlin’s jazz bars.

It’s nice here. Really. But the picture’s incomplete; there’s a back room that you don’t always get to see. While we’re listening to a jazz band out here, the drug cartels have the power. I don’t know whether there’s a back room here, in this bar, where dirty deals are done. In any case, such a room does exist somewhere.

But this isn’t about Mexico. Those of us who’ve been spared for the time being are globally interwoven with suffering: via supply chains, arms shipments, decisions made by governments we have elected, and via the knowledge we possess. In a world where material and ‘intellectual creations become common property’, there exists the potential for salvation, for thinking together, and there also exists the risk of generalizing the destruction.

You asked about Washington. I can tell you about how I walked up and down 14th Street and how happy the people seemed, so healthy in their yoga pants, with broad shoulders and muscular arms, in spite of being sixty years old. But every fifty or hundred yards there would be a person with madness in their eyes. Someone who’s been broken by society. It’s nice here, really, but the back room…

A few days ago I visited a school in the countryside, around fifty miles outside of the city of Guadalajara. There were hundreds of teenagers there from modest, provincial backgrounds. I read from My Father’s Sea with one of the students—she in Spanish, I in German. Then the other students asked questions. Many wonderful, profound questions. One girl asked whether there was a specific theme for me as a writer. I replied: ‘I look for ways to grapple with the finiteness of life. That’s the one thing we know for sure: life will end. How do we deal with that? I believe violence and the desire for power are based on a misunderstanding: we forget what we have in common, that our time here is limited. Faced with this shared fate, we can be either destructive towards one another or loving. It’s a choice. Destruction may be intuitive: destroy or subjugate the other to get more for myself in the short time available. And precisely that is the misunderstanding. All of life lies in encounters. Faced with a finite life, the only meaningful way of being with one another is with love.’ Once what I said had been translated, the whole schoolyard cheered. I asked the interpreter what had happened. She said: ‘They agree with you.’

*

You write that the discussion about Israel and Gaza implicitly deals with what it means to be German. That may be the case for Germany, but where the people are dying it makes no difference whether or not we’re German or how German we feel. At the same time, these debates do have an influence on politics and the scope for solidarity. I ask myself: What does this mean for our humanity and our responsibility?

I discussed this on stage with Sasha Marianna Salzmann. Or rather, we searched for the words to make a conversation possible. We spoke about our novels, about how they and we relate to one another, about writing as a shared thought process over a period of decades, about how the country we live in has changed over time, and about how this has impacted our thinking. Something has happened to the culture of dialogue. Listening and understanding have been replaced by suspicion and resentment.

On that evening, the focus was on Sasha’s play Danja, My Demented Century. It’s about a Jewish grandfather who grew up in the Soviet Union and who suffers three strokes in Germany after the Hamas attack of 7 October. It was so quiet in the room as we gathered the remains of a language still available to us for an honest conversation. Sasha and I thought about what responsibility means in a world where everyone knows and can see what’s happening in Gaza. One idea was whether personal responsibility should be limited to the place where you can actually make a difference, so in our case to Germany.

Wouldn’t responsibility then consist in rendering the implicit discourse of belonging explicit? Or at least understanding its modalities? Shouldn’t we be taking a closer look at the concepts used in such debates? Afterwards, some of those who took part told me that they’d been longing for such an open discussion for some time and that they were relieved to see that it is (‘still’, as they said) possible. And it’s true that while the risks of public discourse are growing, leading German politicians are calling the law of the land and the values behind it into question: the German government is dealing recklessly with the principle of the rule of law by failing to state clearly whether it would implement the ICC warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu; in a speech, a Social Democrat chancellor cites restrictive immigration policy as an achievement of the recently collapsed government; the citizenship law anchored in the constitution on account of the experience of Nazism is once again coming under attack. Everyone wants to be part of a ‘firewall’ against fascism, but to me, many of those who call themselves democrats don’t seem to respect the rule of law, human rights, and democracy. I see nothing but their desire for power.

Does thinking about all this already count as taking responsibility?

Perhaps belonging begins with a search for one’s own ways of taking responsibility. 

Perhaps taking responsibility can mean calling one’s own belonging into question.

This is a time when conversations are breaking down. Maybe the form of letters—or an honest discussion on stage—is a way of keeping the dialogue going. At a time when every truth is being called into doubt and facts are being replaced by opinions, an encounter with another person may be the only way to break out of one’s own self-assuredness.

If such a thing as a home exists, then maybe it can be found underneath the fabric of thoughts stretching between two people.

Which is why I’m grateful to you, Khuê, for this exchange. I remember meeting you after the book launch for My Father’s Sea. I remember the look in your eyes that showed me you’d let my words get through to you. Maybe a sympathetic and sincere form of reading, listening, writing, and speaking is already part of taking responsibility for one another?
 

1 January 2025: Khuê to Deniz

The evening I received your letter from Mexico I was at a party. An apartment in an old building, with artworks by Olafur Eliasson and Wolfgang Tillmans, the chef was an artist flown in from Paris. Many of the guests wore chains and earrings made of gold. I moved shyly through the rooms until I met a diplomat I knew casually at the bar.

You probably won’t have heard much about this while being away, but in December the PEN Berlin writers association passed a resolution mourning the writers killed in Gaza, Lebanon, and Israel. A number of members then quarrelled over it in public, signing open letters and posting social media statements, in which some attacked the statement (which had been passed by a slim majority) as too uncritical towards the Israeli government, while others condemned it for naming several killed Palestinians, out of solidarity.

As I was telling my acquaintance about this at the party, I realized how surreal the whole thing sounded: What difference does our opinion make to people fearing for their lives? None at all, of course, it was all about us and our conscience. But we writers had not been able, as a group, to find the right words for our sadness and horror over this war. Our dispute at PEN Berlin was yet another reflection of the German debate.

The diplomat sighed and poured me a glass of wine. We came to the conclusion that something is fundamentally broken. This applies not only to speaking about Israel, but to liberal politics as a whole. It seeks to represent democratic and moral values, but it often comes across as contradictory and dishonest. This year, we will probably be hearing a lot more about the ‘homeland’ from people who claim to be defending, saving, or preserving it. From Trump, of course, but also in the election campaign in Germany that’s already centring on the issue of who is welcome here, and who isn’t.

A few days later I travelled to Baden-Württemberg, a region I associate with small towns whose names end in ‘-ingen’. We were living in a tourist apartment in a village with cobbled streets, charmingly medieval with its restored half-timber houses, the village museum decorated for Christmas. All set in a landscape of hills and fields, each village with three butcher’s shops selling local specialities. On the first day, we hiked up a hill covered in winter vineyards and watched the sun go down. I thought: ‘This is what “home” looks like.’

As a child, I always thought of other people’s homelands as wholesome, while mine was broken. But now it became clear to me that this was an illusion. Many people from such places wanted to escape later in life, because they felt crushed by the small-minded norms and the narrowness of it all. How much energy had I wasted on imagining in other people’s lives what I lacked in mine? I, too, would probably have felt suffocated in a place where everyone tends their front gardens and people somehow all seem the same.

On the train back to Berlin I listened to a psychoanalysis podcast discussing the part of a person’s identity that they carry with them without being able to express it. C.G. Jung called it ‘the shadow’. I’ve often asked myself whether my biography harbors another life, maybe even two or three. Who would I have become if I’d grown up in Vietnam? Or in the Vietnamese community in Los Angeles, where everyone speaks Vietnamese while wholeheartedly identifying as American? There are so many paths in a person’s soul, so many homes.

I, too, am glad to be able to write to you in these times. I like the fact that someone else is ‘listening’ to my thoughts. It’s also good to know that there will be an answer. Our dialogue reminds me of the pen pals I corresponded with as a schoolgirl. Very old-fashioned and slow, but maybe that’s exactly what’s needed in these tumultuous times.
 

19 January 2025: Deniz to Khuê

I’m writing to you from Berlin. I’m back. I thought jet lag would have me lying awake all night and sleeping all day. But I slept both day and night, often sixteen hours at a time.

The episode with ‘your diplomat’ reminded me of the semi-official moments on my travels. As a writer you’re part of the German delegation, you’re talking to the German ambassador, you’re drinking mineral water at the German stand at the world’s second largest book fair in Guadalajara. Here and there people even use the term ‘cultural ambassador’. The word is based on the Latin ambactus—servant. But I think a writer only serves language itself.

You're right, we need each other, because language as such—the only home I know—is above all a connecting line. It needs at least two end points, but it can connect an infinite number.
 

17 February 2025: Khuê to Deniz

I’m in Berlin, one week to go before the elections, and I’m feeling restless again. I sleep badly, and every time I meet a friend or a stranger I ask: ‘Do you know who you plan to vote for?’ And every time, every single time, I find myself looking into a baffled, frustrated face.

I can’t make up my mind either; I have deep reservations about every lead candidate and after every conversation I conclude that I’ll have to grit my teeth and vote tactically. It’s not so much a vote for Merz, Scholz, or Habeck, but a vote against Weidel. It’s about what we can do to keep the AfD from gaining even more strength in the coming parliament and from becoming part of the government in 2029.

In these crazy days when our future chancellor is willing to use extreme right-wing votes to pass legislation, and when the new US vice president calls for the anti-AfD firewall to be abolished, you start asking yourself crazy questions: how bad could it get here? What future is there for families like mine? If we have to leave, where will we go?

As we’ve been saying, there are many ways to find something like a home. But there are just as many ways to lose it.

I’ve experienced this once before, when I was reporting on Brexit for Die Zeit in 2016. I’ll never forget the morning after the ‘Leave’ vote when I staggered through Westminster, ending up in a pub full of exuberant Brexit fans. My heart had been torn out, I felt depressed like at the end of a relationship. But they had travelled to London from somewhere in the south of England to celebrate their triumph.

‘We who thought that society more or less shared our values now realized that we had never known this society’, I wrote in my article. I’ve often thought of this in recent days. Brexit was the start of the populist era that has now culminated in the second Trump presidency, also threatening to consume Germany. We, the liberals, are losing ground.

Maybe the events of 2016 have made me overly pessimistic. But all around me I sense a climate of fear. What gives you hope in these days? Whatever it is, I could do with a dose of it.
 

18 March 2025: Deniz to Khuê

Once again, I’m writing while flying. Beneath me a patchwork: the austere green of endless flatlands, fields, lakes, wind turbines, a little industry.

A month has passed since you wrote to me. We’re living in a different world. The system of the twentieth century is collapsing.

Yesterday I was eating supper with senior academics from the United States. All people who’ve given their lives to thinking and teaching. They looked earnestly through their steamed-up glasses. They said: the country we left a few weeks ago no longer exists, we’ll be returning to a different country. They said: what to do what to do what to do.

They spoke about the end of democracy. They see it in the way that politics, the president, no longer bows to the authority of the courts.

We’ve already discussed the attacks on the principle of the rule of law, and since then it’s continued: the non-profit status of organizations like ‘Omas gegen Rechts’ is being called into question because they protested against the AfD-CDU alliance in the Bundestag. You ask whether you see things too pessimistically. I say: let’s say a fond farewell to hope. It won’t help us. We’re deceiving ourselves, wasting energy in the wrong place. Let’s remain capable of action, without hope.

Hopelessly able to act. Unscrupulously tender. Darkly clear. Preserving the freedom to hold on to another world, even if it currently seems impossible—this is not the same as giving up. An idea is taking shape for me: the things I value are not the achievements of those who have won, but can be attributed instead to the efforts of those who lost, who often knew they would lose, and who fought on nonetheless. In Berlin I live on the so-called ‘Red Island’. I regularly walk past the old coal business where Julius Leber organized a plot against Hitler in the cellar. He failed. The plot was uncovered. All of those involved were executed. No, they were not able to prevent the worst from happening. There is no comfort. No hope. But the fact that someone once fought against injustice gives me strength to live in this crumbling world. One of the academics yesterday was Marianne Hirsch, whose parents fled from fascism in Bukovina. She said that we must keep doing what we’ve always done: keep thinking. Keep taking words seriously. Regardless of who is still capable of hearing.

I’m flying over tiny islands off the Swedish coast, like breadcrumbs on a blue plate. I have The Aesthetics of Resistance with me, not to reread the whole book, but to fish out a sentence here, to let a moment of Peter Weiss’s writing affect me there. This writer who never stopped fighting, and who made exile his homeland. He stayed in Sweden, he died there. I’ve been commissioned to do some research and I’m flying to Stockholm for a text on European identity. These commissions come too late. Twenty or thirty years too late. There must be a way to find the right question that articulates the needs of our time better than the words ‘Europe’, ‘identity’, and ‘homeland’. There are plenty of claims and assertions, but where are the questions? I want to search for them.

I’m about to land. There are endless forests here, interrupted by patches of blue that become more numerous towards the horizon and then, at the end of the landscape, under a blanket of clouds, they vanish in an explosion of dazzling turquoise light.
 

Translated from German by Nicholas Grindell