Towards Europe
Whoever wants to discover how valuable this bureaucratic, apathetic, fat, indecisive body known as the European Union actually is need only travel to where it stops.
By NAVID KERMANI
Last year the Burgtheater in Vienna celebrated the 50th anniversary of the reopening, and the keynote speech was delivered by the German-Iranian writer Navid Kermani. The theme was Europe, which was all the more fitting as he’d just returned from Morocco where, after a short stay in Tangiers and Ceuta, he witnessed a dramatic situation that was shocking Europe at the time: African refugees, furiously trying to get over barriers into Europe. A shortened version of the speech follows.
I’ve got a route planner on my laptop. To take measure of what has gone on in Europe over the last 50 years, I don’t need to do anything more than type in North Cape, and then, Tarifa, the southernmost town in Spain. After fifteen or twenty seconds, the laptop announces its results: In North Cape, I drive 700 meters down a local road, hang a left twice and, after driving 280 meters, get on the E 69. After 5930.20 kilometers, I turn left from the Spanish N 5 to the CN 340 which, 400 meters down, becomes the Avenida Mirador de los Ríos. I drive on 600 meters into Tarifa. My laptop estimates a traveling time of seven days, three hours, and 57 minutes. The laptop makes no mention of any border controls. I trace the route precisely, all 5931 kilometers: five border crossings, but no mention of any waiting time for a border control. When this theater was reopened 50 years ago, few who were present would have been able to believe what we now take for granted: a Europe without borders.
Heinrich Mann once argued that a sense of community among Europeans was the invention of poets. He might have been exaggerating, but it is nevertheless noteworthy how, over the last 200 years, writers in particular have spoken up for Europe. They were ahead of the politicians by decades. When, in 1851, Victor Hugo went before the French National Assembly and called for a union of democratic European nations, not a single representative took him seriously. Hugo’s speech was drowned out by the protest and laughter of his colleagues. 50 years ago, when the Burgtheater was reopened, Europe still had not defused European nationalism, as could be seen in the uproar over the opening program. Public pressure forced the direction of the Burgtheater at the time to open Austria’s national theater with an Austrian play. A few of the most important Europeans to come from Austria were not sitting in the parquet. They hadn’t survived.
As late as 1932, Stefan Zweig wrote that Europe had “finally, once again, reached a high point of European humanitarianism.” Zweig was not in any way overlooking the strength of nationalism. Never before had “the expulsion from state to state in Europe been greater, more vehement, conscious, and organized than it is today.” Even so, Zweig sensed that Europe, after a long epoch of brutality and alienation, seemed ready to work on “a commonality;” “I believe we all now feel deep in our nerves an electric charge derived from the friction of opposites. We all feel that one of the two tendencies for the coming years must win the upper hand. Which will it be? Will Europe proceed with its self-destruction or become one?”
Zweig was not deluding himself when it came to power relations in 1932 between individual national interests and a super-national European idea, between resentment and a vision of a linguistic and cultural diversity within a collective political entity. Zweig’s faith in Europe arose not from an analysis of the political present but from an exasperation with it. His plea for Europe was not realistic in 1932; it was messianic. Zweig believed, as he wrote himself, “in Europe as in the gospel.” True faith did not require confirmation from reality to seem right and true. “And so now, already, no one can be kept from writing a letter home as a European, from calling oneself a citizen of this not-yet-founded state of Europe and, despite borders which persist today, from regarding our diverse world in a brotherly manner as a single entity.”
In 1934, Stefan Zweig had to flee Austria. In 1942, he killed himself in Brazil. Today, Europe is a reality. As utopian as Zweig seemed even to himself, he was right after all and has won the battle against those who drove him to his death. Zweig won, and with him, Heine, Nietzsche, Benjamin, the Mann brothers, Hesse, Hoffmansthal, Tucholsky, Döblin, to name only a few of those who wrote in German in favor of Europe only, in the best of cases, to be laughed off, or worse, exiled or even killed.
The freedom and freedom of movement we enjoy today is not to be taken for granted, neither in the light of European history nor in the light of our contemporary world. I become frustrated when Europe is reduced to questions of agricultural subsidies and free trade zones and to a bloated bureaucracy. It scares me when the European project is increasingly or routinely scoffed at and more and more mainstream political parties campaign with Eurosceptic slogans. I don’t understand how frivolously the European constitution was gambled away in France and Holland. We now travel, without passports, among countries that, just a few decades ago, were engaged in bloody battle.
As with so many Jewish intellectuals of his day, Europe for Zweig was more than just a project or a grand idea. It was a necessity, a matter of life and death. As a Jew, there was no place for him in European nationalism. He could only thrive in a transnational humanitarianism united by values, by a process of secularization and not by ethnicity, language, or religion. Today, too, one finds enthusiastic Europeans where Europe is not taken for granted – in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, or in Turkey, among Jews or Muslims. Whoever wants to discover how valuable this overly bureaucratic, apathetic, fat, indecisive body known as the European Union actually needs only travel to where it stops.
SUICIDE BOMBERS
I went to those who had given up everything just to get into Europe, to the refugees at the gates of the European Union. I’d like to tell you about these travels and also about the books I had with me. Along with Stefan Zweig, I was reading another author from Austria: Josef Roth.
There’s an early book by Roth that describes Europe between the two World Wars, a world that has flown off the rails and the people who live in it suddenly find themselves in one new place after another, always fleeing, always finding themselves in new constellations. I’m talking about his novel Hotel Savoy, written in 1929. The ostentatious facade of the hotel that gives the novel its name still conjures the prewar epoch. Inside, a colorful gaggle of exhausted existences live in their provisional circumstances: millionaires, the bankrupt, currency traders, dancers.
Hotel Savoy is not part of a long-distant epoch. It can be found today in Tangiers, 30 kilometers south of Tarifa. It isn’t called Hotel Savoy, but instead, Pension de la Paix, Pension Andalus, Pension Fuentes, Pension Hope. In front of the Hotel Sevilla, I fell into a conversation with six guests, the youngest barely 20, the oldest maybe 40. I asked them what they wanted in Europe. Work, of course; a normal life, nothing more. To have a little security, not to have to fight to survive day after day, a shot at starting a family or at least taking a girlfriend out once in a while. A car and a vacation are not part of the life they dream of; more important to them is that there is enough money to send to their families now and then.
I ask if any of them has tried to get to Europe by boat. “I was already over there twice,” says the first one and looks to the others. “Three times,” says the next one; “once,” “four times,” and so on. They set out somewhere at night and are caught by the Spanish police on the high seas or on the beach and are brought back to Morocco.
Many will remember the images of the decrepit cargo ship of refugees that landed on the beach of Boulouris in southern France on February 17, 2001 with 911 passengers or of the death ship that was pulled to the coast near Lampedusa by the Italian authorities in October 2003. All the passengers had died of thirst. What few know is that over 80 percent of these refugees currently make their way to Europe in small dinghies. When their corpses wash up on European shores, there may be, at the most, a small story in the local paper of the coastal town. If it can be assumed that only one out of three of these bodies are found and registered, then over the last fifteen years, just in the area immediately surrounding the Strait of Gibraltar, 13,000 to 15,000 refugees have died. The Strait is the largest mass grave in Europe.
The Moroccans know the dangers of the crossing very well; they have, after all, been in the boats. And if they die? “Then that’s how it goes,” says one. “We’re not suicidal,” says a second one. “There are some who try to go over in the fall or winter. That’s suicide. We try to look at things realistically. We know exactly what the risks are. If we get into a boat, we have to know that the chance of making it is large enough to counter the risk.”
“But death does figure into your calculations?” I ask.
“Sure, we figure death into it, but it’s not any worse than life here.”
The other men nod. We’re quiet for a while. When the men turn to me again, one of them says, grinning, “It’s amaliyyât istischhâdiya, what we’re doing. Suicide bombers. The Europeans think all Arabs are suicide bombers. Yes, they’re right, all of us here are suicide bombers. The paradise we’re giving our lives up for is called Schengen.”
In 1929, Josef Roth foresaw his own future in Hotel Savoy, though he didn’t end up like his first-person narrator, Gabriel Dan. He, who again and again referred to biblical stories of flight and expulsion in his books, was himself forced to emigrate to France in 1933. In Paris, he lived in hotel rooms, worked for a few exile journals and became an alcoholic. On May 27, 1939, he died as a result of his drinking habit in Necker, a hospital for the poor in Paris. Some of the guests at the Hotel Sevilla, too, can’t make it any longer without drugs. Their lives trickle away like the money they’ve saved for their flight to Europe.
A lot of them will end up in the gutter. A lot of them are already in the gutter. Some of the children have never been anywhere else. Everywhere near the harbors, you see them on the squares and streets that lead to the ocean. Every night, they try again to slip out to the harbor, dig a hole for themselves or swim out to a pier. If they make it to the harbor, they usually hide under a truck and hope to roll with it unnoticed onto a ferry. It’s only 35 minutes to Europe.
WAITING FOR GODOT
In my hotel, situated above the harbor, I hear the dogs of the Moroccan police every night as they sniff out the children. Again and again, though, individual children make it onto a ship, or so one hears. Some of them are said to simply hold onto the ship on the outside, in the water.
Every day, the same scenes play out along Europe’s borders and on the opposite coasts. Rickety boats set out to sea from some abandoned place, loaded down with young men, pregnant women, children. Boats that capsize, refugees left out on the high seas until they die of thirst. We all know these things. Such scenes have been described many times in European literature. Nearly all the motifs of Roth’s Hotel Savoy are resurfacing in the pensions of Tangiers – the search for temporary jobs, the waiting for a transfer, the hope for the right papers, the shame of sinking into poverty, the temptation to sell one’s own soul or body, the death in the hotel bed because proper medicine cannot be afforded. In literature, art, and film, we have experienced countless stories of European refugees. Why, then, do we reflexively react with curses when we see them again from a different perspective? Illegals, criminals, people smugglers, economic asylum, the boat is full?
I know some will say there’s no comparison. I’m not comparing the causes. I’m comparing the effects. A refugee who drowns is a refugee who drowns. He doesn’t have to be tracked down because of his race or his politics in order to have had a reason to risk his life just to get to Europe. Whoever wants a piece of bread is not a freeloader and certainly not a criminal. He’s acting on an essential human right to live. He’s succumbing to the most immediate impulse of every human being. Every day, we’re keeping people from surviving.
To this day, hundreds of black Africans are trying with ladders they have made themselves to climb over the fences surrounding the Spanish enclave Ceuta on the Moroccan coast. A few of the refugees have made it; dozens of refugees remain behind on one side or another, severely injured. I arrived in Ceuta after the first storm and saw Moroccan soldiers along a path a few hundred meters away from the fences and, beside them, 20, maybe 25 black Africans sitting close together on the ground. They were cold. There was a thick fog and most of them weren’t wearing more than shorts and a T-shirt. All of those present knew what would happen next. The Africans would be interned for a few days and then released at the border to Algeria – in the middle of the desert. The Africans knew it, the soldiers knew it, even the taxi driver who talked about the “poor dogs” when we drove on knew it. Even if Europe shits on them they will come back.
The set-up at the border around Ceuta already looks like the German-German border used to: two barbed wire fences, three and six meters high, and between them, a street patrolled by the jeeps of the Guardia Civil; watch towers, of course, and video cameras and night vision equipment. The black Africans know that they won’t get over the border unnoticed. They try to storm the fences with so many men at the same time that they overwhelm the border guards. If 500 people with homemade ladders race up to the fences, 50 will make it. That’s the calculation. A few die during each of these attempts; the rest are deported to the desert between Morocco and Algeria, only to turn on their heels and race back to the gates of Europe. Anyone who has seen the blood on the barbed wire will flinch each time he hears the word “economic asylum.” I spoke with many of the black Africans in Tangiers. You don’t meet them in the hotels anymore, and hardly in the gutter, either. Ever since the European Union has intensified its cooperation with Morocco, the Moroccan police have been clamping down on the illegal immigrants. Whoever is caught without papers is deported to the desert. Fortunately, the authorities aren’t very forceful yet. Usually, they look the other way when they see a black person.
Even so, Europe could see to it that the pensions in Tangiers take in next to no more black Africans. They now live primarily in camps outside in the city or near the Spanish enclaves, in the woods, without any supplies or sanitary facilities, in tents of plastic sheets, or beneath the open sky. Many other black Africans have gone into hiding in the suburbs of Tangiers or in private homes in the inner city, in rooms where four, eight or twenty sit and wait, without electricity and with holes for toilets.
I sat down with Osman, Stephen, Osahan and Caesar. Osman showed me a notebook in which he’d written down the stations of his odyssey, particularly the weeks in the desert after the Moroccans had deported him. Each of them had been deported to the desert at least once. It almost seemed as if it were part of their job, being driven out to the desert in a truck and forced off the flatbed out in the middle of nowhere.
Most of them had been living two or three years in Morocco already. When they were still living in the pensions, it was easier, they say. Now they wait on their blankets day in and day out, listening to African music on a cassette player – when they have batteries – and stare out into the darkness. Now and then they light a candle. None of the European tourists that pass the house each day have any idea that behind the clay walls on the ground floor, Beckett is being performed, although it is a performance without an intermission, without an end, and without light. Waiting for Godot. Who would have known. Godot is us.
There are occasionally performances of Waiting for Godot played out against a realist backdrop. I’ve never been won over by these performances. For me, Beckett’s plays belong in a twilight world, a world between heaven and Earth. In Tangiers, I discovered that Waiting for Godot can also be played quite well in hell. Only, unfortunately, we can’t see it. There’s no light on the stage.
A former Interior Minister in Holland, talking about priests who gave asylum to refugees in their churches, spoke of an “excess of brotherly love.” I know it’s not all that usual to be quoting the Bible in the theater. Nevertheless, I’d like to tell one last story, namely the one about the Canaanite who asked Jesus to help her child. Jesus refuses because his mission is limited to those in the House of Israel. He doesn’t deny that the woman is not helped, but he can’t do anything about it. The woman won’t stop begging Jesus for help, but Jesus consistently replies by referring to “one’s own people first.” But the woman gets her way in the end because she doesn’t want a whole loaf of bread, only the crumbs. Jesus is deeply moved by her faith: “Let what you want be done for you.” And there was a second meal, only this time, not just for Israel, but for all people.
Europe is a wonderful land for Europeans. As difficult as its social and political problems may be, never in the history of the continent has there been such peace and tolerance. That’s quite something, and we forget it too often. But it is not enough. Only when Europe is humane to those who are not European will it be “the transnational realm of humanitarianism” that Stefan Zweig believed in like the gospel.
