[Reader-list] Susan Sontag's speech at Frankfurt Book Fair

[Harsh Kapoor]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1065133,00.html
The Guardian
October 18, 2003

The fragile alliance

Last week at the Frankfurt book fair, Susan 
Sontag was awarded the prestigious Friedenspreis 
peace prize. In her acceptance speech, in which 
she explored the conflicts and connections 
between Europe and America, she regretted the 
'deliberate absence' from the ceremony of the 
American ambassador to Germany, Daniel Coats


The fragile alliance
Susan Sontag

Mr Daniel Coats shows he is more interested in affirming the ideological
stance and the rancorous re-activeness of the Bush administration than he
is, by fulfilling a normal diplomatic duty, in representing the interests
and reputation of his - and my - country.

An American ambassador has the duty to represent his country, all of it. I,
of course, do not represent America, not even that substantial minority that
does not support the imperial programme of Mr Bush and his advisers. I like
to think I do not represent anything but literature, a certain idea of
literature, and conscience, a certain idea of conscience or duty. But,
mindful of the citation for this prize, which mentions my role as an
"intellectual ambassador" between the two continents, I cannot resist
offering a few thoughts about the renowned gap between Europe and the United
States, which my interests and enthusiasms purportedly bridge.

There has always been a latent antagonism between Europe and America, one at
least as complex and ambivalent as that between parent and child. America is
a neo-European country and, until the last few decades, was largely
populated by European peoples. And yet it is always the differences between
Europe and America that have struck the most perceptive foreign observers:
Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the young nation in 1831 and returned to
France to write Democracy in America, still, some 170 years later, the best
book about my country, and DH Lawrence, who, 80 years ago, published the
most interesting book ever written about American culture, his influential,
exasperating Studies in Classic American Literature, both understood that
America, the child of Europe, was becoming, or had become, the antithesis of
Europe.

Rome and Athens. Mars and Venus. The authors of recent popular tracts
promoting the idea of an inevitable clash of interests and values between
Europe and America did not invent these antitheses. Foreigners brooded over
them - and they provide the palette, the recurrent melody, in much of
American literature throughout the 19th century, from James Fenimore Cooper
and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, Henry James, William Dean Howells
and Mark Twain. American innocence and European sophistication; American
pragmatism and European intellectualising; American energy and European
world-weariness; American naïveté and European cynicism; American
goodheartedness and European malice; American moralism and the European arts
of compromise -you know the tunes.

You can choreograph them differently; indeed, they have been danced with
every kind of evaluation or tilt for two tumultuous centuries. Europhiles
can use the venerable antitheses to identify America with commerce-driven
barbarism and Europe with high culture, while the Europhobes draw on a
readymade view in which America stands for idealism and openness and
democracy and Europe a debilitating, snobbish refinement. De Tocqueville and
Lawrence observed something fiercer: not just a declaration of independence
from Europe, and European values, but a steady undermining, an assassination
of European values and European power. "You can never have a new thing
without breaking an old," Lawrence wrote. "Europe happened to be the old
thing. America should be the new thing. The new thing is the death of the
old." America, Lawrence divined, was on a Europe-destroying mission, using
democracy - particularly cultural democracy, democracy of manners - as an
instrument. And when that task is accomplished, he wrote, America might well
turn from democracy to something else. (What that might be is, perhaps,
emerging now.)

One function of literature - of important literature, of necessary
literature - is to be prophetic. What we have here, writ large, is the
perennial literary - or cultural - quarrel: between the ancients and the
moderns.

The past is (or was) Europe, and America was founded on the idea of breaking
with the past, which is viewed as encumbering, stultifying, and - in its
forms of deference and precedence, its standards of what is superior and
what is best - fundamentally undemocratic; or "elitist", the reigning
current synonym. Those who speak for a triumphal America continue to
intimate that American democracy implies repudiating Europe, and, yes,
embracing a certain liberating, salutary barbarism. If, today, Europe is
regarded by most Americans as more socialist than elitist, that still makes
Europe, by American standards, a retrograde continent, obstinately attached
to old standards: the welfare state. "Make it new" is not only a slogan for
culture; it describes an ever-advancing, world-encompassing economic
machine.

However, if necessary, even the "old" can be rebaptised as the "new."

It is not a coincidence that the strong-minded American secretary of defence
tried to drive a wedge within Europe - distinguishing unforgettably between
an "old" Europe (bad) and a "new" Europe (good). How did Germany, France and
Belgium come to be consigned to "old" Europe, while the UK,Spain, Italy,
Poland, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria
find themselves part of "new" Europe? Answer: to support the United States
in its present extensions of political and military power is to pass, by
definition, into the more desirable category of the "new". Whoever is with
us is "new".

All modern wars, even when their motives are the traditional ones, such as
territorial aggrandisement or the acquisition of scarce resources, are cast
as clashes of civilisations - culture wars - with each side claiming the
high ground, and characterising the other as barbaric. The enemy is
invariably a threat to "our way of life", an infidel, a desecrator, a
polluter, a defiler of higher or better values. The war against the very
real threat posed by militant Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly clear
example. What is worth remarking is that a milder version of the same terms
of disparagement underlie the antagonism between Europe and America. It
should also be remembered that, historically, the most virulent anti-
American rhetoric ever heard in Europe - consisting essentially in the
charge that Americans are barbarians - came not from the so-called left but
from the extreme right. Both Hitler and Franco repeatedly inveighed against
an America (and a world Jewry) engaged in polluting European civilisation
with its base, business values.

Of course, much of European public opinion continues to admire American
energy, the American version of "the modern". And, to be sure, there have
always been American fellow-travellers of the European cultural ideals (one
stands here before you), who find in the old arts of Europe a liberation and
correction to the strenuous mercantilist biases of American culture. And
there have always been the counterparts of such Americans on the European
side: Europeans who are fascinated, enthralled, profoundly attracted to the
United States, precisely because of its difference from Europe.

What the Americans see is almost the reverse of the Europhile cliché: they
see themselves defending civilisation. The barbarian hordes are no longer
outside the gates. They are within, in every prosperous city, plotting
havoc. The "chocolate-producing" countries (France, Germany, Belgium) will
have to stand aside, while a country with "will" - and God on its side -
pursues the battle against terrorism (now conflated with barbarism).
According to secretary of state Colin Powell, it is ridiculous for old
Europe (sometimes it seems only France is meant) to aspire to play a role in
governing or administering the territories won by the coalition of the
conqueror. It has neither the military resources nor the taste for violence
nor the support of its cosseted, all-too-pacific populations. And the
Americans have it right. Europeans are not in an evangelical - or a
bellicose - mood.

Indeed, sometimes I have to pinch myself to be sure I am not dreaming: that
what many people in my own country now hold against Germany, which wreaked
such horrors on the world for nearly a century - the new "German problem",
as it were - is that Germans are repelled by war; that much of German public
opinion is now virtually ... pacifist.

Were America and Europe never partners, never friends? Of course. But
perhaps it is true that the periods of unity - of common feeling - have been
exceptions, rather than the rule. One such time was from the second world
war through the early cold war, when Europeans were profoundly grateful for
America's intervention, succour and support. Americans are comfortable
seeing themselves in the role of Europe's saviour. But then, America will
expect the Europeans to be forever grateful, which is not what Europeans are
feeling right now.

>From "old" Europe's point of view, America seems bent on squandering the
admiration - and gratitude - felt by most Europeans. The immense sympathy
for the United States in the aftermath of the attack on September 11, 2001
was genuine. But what has followed is an increasing estrangement on both
sides.

The citizens of the richest and most powerful nation in history have to know
that America is loved, and envied ... and resented. More than a few who
travel abroad know that Americans are regarded as crude, boorish,
uncultivated by many Europeans, and don't hesitate to match these
expectations with behaviour that suggests the ressentiment of ex-colonials.
And some of the cultivated Europeans who seem most to enjoy visiting or
living in the United States attribute to it, condescendingly, the liberating
virtues of a colony where one throws off the restrictions and high-culture
burdens of "back home". I recall being told by a German film-maker, living
at the time in San Francisco, that he loved being in the States "because you
don't have any culture here". For more than a few Europeans, including, it
should be mentioned, DH Lawrence ("there the life comes up from the roots,
crude but vital", he wrote to a friend in 1915, when he was making plans to
live in America), America was the great escape. And vice versa: Europe was
the great escape for generations of Americans seeking "culture". Of course,
I am speaking only of minorities here, minorities of the privileged.

So America now sees itself as the defender of civilisation and Europe's
saviour, and wonders why Europeans don't get the point; and Europeans see
Americans as a reckless warrior state - a description the Americans return
by seeing Europe as the enemy of America: only pretending, so runs rhetoric
heard increasingly in the United States, to be pacifist, in order to
contribute to the weakening of American power. Americans have got used to
thinking of the world in terms of enemies. Enemies are somewhere else, as
the fighting is almost always "over there", Islamic fundamentalism having
replaced Russian and Chinese communism as the threat to "our way of life".
And terrorist is a more flexible word than communist. It can unify a larger
number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is
that the war will be endless - since there will always be some terrorism (as
there will always be poverty and cancer); that is, there will always be
asymmetrical conflicts in which the weaker side uses that form of violence,
which usually targets civilians. American rhetoric, if not the popular mood,
would support this unhappy prospect, for the struggle for righteousness
never ends.

It is the genius of the United States, a profoundly conservative country in
ways that Europeans find difficult to fathom, to have devised a form of
conservative think ing that celebrates the new rather than the old. But this
is also to say, that in the very ways in which the United States seems
extremely conservative, for example, in the extraordinary power of the
consensus and the passivity and conformism of public opinion (as De
Tocqueville remarked in 1831) and the media, it is also radical, even
revolutionary, in ways that Europeans find equally difficult to fathom.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnection between official
rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling
"traditions"; litanies to family values are at the centre of every
politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely
corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined to
promote "identities" that fit into the larger patterns of distinctiveness,
co-operation, and openness to innovation.

Perhaps the most important source of the new (and not so new) American
radicalism is what used to be viewed as a source of conservative values:
namely, religion. Many commentators have noted that perhaps the biggest
difference between the United States and most European countries (old as
well as new in the current American distinction) is that in the United
States religion still plays a central role in society and public language.
But this is religion American style: namely, more the idea of religion than
religion itself.

True, when, during George Bush's run for president in 2000, a journalist was
inspired to ask the candidate to name his "favourite philosopher", the
well-received answer - one that would make a candidate for high office from
any centrist party in any European country a laughing stock - was "Jesus
Christ". But, of course, Bush didn't mean, and was not understood to mean,
that, if elected, his administration would feel bound to any of the precepts
or social programmes actually expounded by Jesus.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as
long as you have one. A modern, relatively contentless idea of religion,
constructed along the lines of consumerist choice, is the basis of American
conformism, self-righteousness, and moralism (which Europeans often mistake,
condescendingly, for puritanism). Whatever historic faiths the different
American religious entities purport to represent, they all preach something
similar: reform of personal behaviour, the value of success, community
co-operativeness, tolerance of others' choices. (All virtues that further
and smooth functioning of consumer capitalism.) The very fact of being
religious ensures respectability, promotes order, and gives the guarantee of
virtuous intentions to the mission of the United States to lead the world.

What is being spread - whether it is called democracy, or freedom, or
civilisation - is part of a work in progress, as well as the essence of
progress itself. Nowhere in the world does the Enlightenment dream of
progress have such a fertile setting as it does in America.

For all the similarities in the daily lives of citizens in rich European
countries and the daily lives of Americans, the gap between the European and
the American experience is a genuine one, founded on important differences
of history, of notions of the role of culture, of real and imagined
memories. The antagonism - for there is antagonism - is not to be resolved
in the immediate future, for all the goodwill of many people on both sides
of the Atlantic. And yet one can only deplore those who want to maximise
those differences, when we do have so much in common.

The dominance of America is a fact. But America, as the present
administration is starting to see, cannot do everything alone. The future of
our world - the world we share - is syncretistic, impure. We are not shut
off from each other. More and more, we leak into each other.

In the end, the model for whatever understanding - conciliation - we might
reach lies in thinking more about that venerable opposition, "old" and
"new". The opposition between "civilisation" and "barbarism" is essentially
stipulatory; it is corrupting to think about and pontificate about - however
much it may reflect certain realities. But the opposition of "old" and "new"
is genuine, ineradicable, at the centre of what we understand to be
experience itself.

"Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of
orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is
old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our
sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is
new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind
biological yearning, our ability to forget - the healing ability without
which all reconciliation is not possible.

The inner life tends to mistrust the new. A strongly developed inner life
will be particularly resistant to the new. We are told we must choose - the
old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series
of negotiations between the old and the new?

Old versus new, nature versus culture - perhaps it is inevitable that the
great myths of our cultural life be played out as geography, not only as
history. Still, they are myths, clichés, stereotypes, no more; the realities
are much more complex.

A good deal of my life has been spent trying to demystify ways of thinking
that polarise and oppose. Translated into politics, this means supporting
whatever is pluralistic and secular. Like some Americans and many Europeans,
I would far prefer to live in a multilateral world - a world not dominated
by any one country (including my own). I could express my support, in a
century that already promises to be another century of extremes, of horrors,
for a whole panoply of meliorist attitudes - in particular, for what
Virginia Woolf calls "the melancholy virtue of tolerance".

THE writer in me distrusts the good citizen, the "intellectual ambassador",
the human-rights activist - those roles that are mentioned in the citation
for the Friedenspreis, much as I am committed to them. The writer is more
sceptical, more self-doubting, than the person who tries to do (and to
support) the right thing.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct
counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not
oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is
dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of
human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures
evolve and interact with one another.

Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our
difference - for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths.
Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers
counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you
thought, or felt, or believed.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means
trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings
are capable of; and not being corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by
this understanding.

Literature can tell us what the world is like.

Literature can give standards and pass on deep knowledge, incarnated in
language, in narrative.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are
not us or ours.

Who would we be if we could not sympathise with those who are not us or
ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the
time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Forgive? Become something other
than we are?

***

I was born, a third-generation American of Polish and Lithuanian Jewish
descent, two weeks before Hitler came to power. I grew up in the American
provinces (Arizona and California), far from Germany, and yet my entire
childhood was haunted by Germany, by the monstrousness of Germany, and by
the German books and the German music I loved, which set my standard for
what is exalted and intense.

Even before Bach and Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms, there were a few
German books. I am thinking of a teacher in an elementary school in a small
town in southern Arizona, Mr Starkie, who had awed his pupils by telling us
that he had fought with Pershing's army in Mexico against Pancho Villa: this
grizzled veteran of an earlier American imperialist venture had, it seems,
been touched - in translation - by the idealism of German literature, and,
having taken in my particular hunger for books, lent me his own copies of
Werther and Immensee .

Soon after, in my childhood orgy of reading, chance led me to other German
books, including Kafka's "In the Penal Colony", where I discovered dread and
injustice. And a few years later, when I was a high-school student in Los
Angeles, I found all of Europe in a German novel. No book has been more
important in my life than The Magic Mountain - whose subject is, precisely,
the clash of ideals at the heart of European civilisation. And so on,
through a long life that has been steeped in German high culture. Indeed,
after the books and the music, which were, given the cultural desert in
which I lived, virtually clandestine experiences, came a real experience.
For I am also a late beneficiary of the German cultural diaspora, having had
the great good fortune of knowing well some of the incomparably brilliant
Hitler refugees, those writers and artists and musicians and scholars that
America received, starting in the 1930s, and who so enriched the country,
particularly its universities. I was privileged to count as friends when I
was in my late teens and early 20s, Hans Gerth and Herbert Marcuse. I
studied at the University of Chicago and at Harvard, with Christian Mackauer
and Paul Tillich and Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagen, and in private
seminars, Aron Gurwitsch and Nahum Glatzer; and Hannah Arendt, whom I knew
after I moved to New York in my mid-20s - so many models of the serious.

But I shall never forget that my engagement with German culture, with German
seriousness, all started with obscure, eccentric Mr Starkie (I don't think I
ever knew his first name), who was my teacher when I was 10, and whom I
never saw afterwards.

I found some relief from the tiresome duties of being a child by poring over
Mr Starkie's tattered volumes of Goethe and Storm. At the time I am speaking
of, 1943, I was aware there was a prison camp with thousands of German
soldiers, Nazi soldiers as of course I thought of them, in the northern part
of the state, and, knowing I was Jewish (only nominally, my family having
been completely secular and assimilated for two generations, but nominally,
as I knew, was enough for Nazis), I was beset by a recurrent nightmare in
which Nazi soldiers had escaped from the prison and had made their way
downstate to the bungalow on the outskirts of the town where I lived with my
mother and sister, and were about to kill me.

Flash forward to many years later, the 1970s, when my books started to be
published in Germany by Hanser Verlag, and I came to know the distinguished
Fritz Arnold (he had joined the firm in 1965), who was my editor at Hanser
until his death in February 1999.

One of the first times we were together, Fritz said he wanted to tell me -
presuming, I suppose, that this was a prerequisite to any friendship that
might arise between us - what he had done in Nazi times. I assured him that
he did not owe me any such explanation; but, of course, I was touched by his
bringing up the subject.

What Fritz told me was that he had been a university student of literature
and art history, first in Munich, then in Cologne, when, at the start of the
war, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht with the rank of corporal. His family
was, of course, anything but pro-Nazi - his father was Karl Arnold, the
legendary political cartoonist of Simplicissimus - but emigration seemed out
of the question, and he accepted, with dread, the call to military service,
hoping neither to kill anyone nor to be killed.

Fritz was one of the lucky ones. Lucky, to have been stationed first in Rome
(where he refused his superior officer's invitation to be commissioned a
lieutenant), then in Tunis; lucky enough to have remained behind the lines
and never once to have fired a weapon; and finally, lucky, if that is the
right word, to have been taken prisoner by the Americans in 1943, to have
been transported by ship across the Atlantic with other captured German
soldiers to Norfolk, Virginia, and then taken by train across the continent
to spend the rest of the war in a prison camp in a small town ... in
northern Arizona.

Then I had the pleasure of telling him, sighing with wonder, for I had
already started to be very fond of this man - this was the beginning of a
great friendship as well as an intense professional relationship - that
while he was a prisoner of war in northern Arizona, I was in the southern
part of the state, terrified of the Nazi soldiers who were there, here, and
from whom there would be no escape.

And then Fritz told me that what got him through his nearly three years in
the prison camp in Arizona was that he was allowed access to books: he had
spent those years reading and rereading the English and American classics.
And I told him that what saved me as a schoolchild in Arizona, waiting to
grow up, waiting to escape into a larger reality, was reading books, books
in translation as well as those written in English.

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of
national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane
schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport
to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.

Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading
and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

© Susan Sontag 2003 The Friedenspreis was awarded by the German book trade
association.

Susan Sontag's most recent work is Regarding the Pain of Others (Hamish
Hamilton). Buy it at Amazon.co.uk