The news that we had been chosen to receive the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade came as an overwhelming surprise to us. We have followed the ceremony for many years and seen it provide a podium and an audience to so many extraordinary voices. We never dreamed that we would be invited to make the leap from audience to podium. This is why we are all the more grateful to the Board of Trustees of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association for this great honour and the recognition it brings to our joint work. We see this prize as a letter offering us honorary citizenship in the Res publica litteraria, a homeland that knows no national borders.
This homeland was founded on the cusp of the age of the printing press by poets, humanists, publishers and booksellers. These are the figures who mediated between old and new languages, thereby laying the foundation of European diversity. In doing so, they fashioned the library as their realm of communication and set into motion a true Geister-Gespräch – a dialogue of exalted spirits– that continued across centuries and national borders.
In 1950, the newly launched tradition of the Peace Prize brought this dialogue of exalted spirits – upheld to this day by writers, publishers, booksellers and readers – back into the public sphere. Indeed, we should never forget that the term Res publica litteraria contains the word “public.” Although books open up “thinking spaces” for the spirit and libraries are vast archives of information containing a universe of fantasy and imagination, does this automatically mean that they, too, generate a public sphere? The halls of the book fair here in Frankfurt create a massive labyrinth that opens up ever new paths and an infinite number of meeting points. In contrast, the public sphere is born of something else; it is created when we focus our attention in the same direction, when we concentrate on our common interests, presence and participation. Whereas reading scatters and isolates, the public sphere pulls us together and addresses each and every one of us. In this sense, the Church of St. Paul is the necessary supplement to the Frankfurt Book Fair.
By virtue of hosting the Peace Prize, the Church of St. Paul has become a site of dialogue and exchange across time and over generations. By gathering here today, we enter into this space of resonance. And it is here that we would like to speak of some of our predecessors – with particular preference, of course, for those who appeared here in pairs. For us, the first such pair is Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, who stood on this very spot 60 years ago and likewise took up the notion of the Res publica litteraria. In her speech honouring the recipient Jaspers, Arendt argued that her mentor – whom she referred to as an “incorruptible philosopher and dissident” – while no doubt isolated and on his own during the Third Reich, was never alone, because he had a spiritual home in “the realm of humanitas, which everyone can come to out of their own origins”.
The “public”, as we all know, is the opposite of the “private”. “Public”, however, can also mean the opposite of a repressive silence, for example, the silence that has been broken with regard to the treatment of victims of sexual violence since 2010. Jaspers, too, saw the public sphere as a battlefield upon which truth must do constant battle with untruth. He considered untruth to be “the true evil destroying every peace.” And, for Jaspers, untruth had many guises: “from concealment to blind indifference, from lies to inner mendacity, from foolishness to a rigid truth fanaticism, from the untruthfulness of the individual condition to the untruthfulness of the public condition.” Since Jasper’s day, the universe of communication has become infinitely more abundant and flexible, with many more voices joining in; however, it has also become much more difficult and – above all – more dangerous to navigate.
When we speak of the “media”, we must distinguish between the organs of the public sphere, such as newspapers, television and radio, on the one hand, and their technical infrastructures, on the other. Indeed, each individual technological base creates the public realm in a different way. Whereas the printing age and analogue photography were still calibrated to serve values such as truth, evidence and verifiability, in the digital age, the door has been left wide open to data manipulation. For example, while it has long since been possible to manipulate images at will, IT engineers in Germany and the US are now working on a very disturbing AI face-swapping technology that makes it possible to create fake photorealistic videos, thus making it look like a person is speaking words they never spoke. In April of this year, a Google engineer presented a video he had made while still a student showing Barack Obama uttering a number of things he never said, all deceptively real and matched perfectly to his physiognomy and facial expressions.In other words, we will soon, quite literally, be able to put words into anyone’s mouth without being able to judge definitively where an expression or an opinion originated. And yet, we not only have to deal with ever-increasing levels of obfuscation thanks to fake news and the latest technologies; we’ve also had to confrontintentionally deceptive behavior, for example, in the auto industry with regard to the manipulation of emission levels. Only now, as this type of obfuscation grows more prevalent, is it becoming clear to us how desperately we rely on particular achievements – such as truth, credibility, reliability and accountability – for our peaceful coexistence.
In a true democracy, the work of thinking cannot be delegated, that is, it cannot be left up to experts, performers and demagogues. Eight years ago, in his bestselling essay Indignez-vous!, 93-year-old Stéphane Hessel let us all know that it was “a time for outrage!” Since then, that indignation has switched sides – and it has done so all over the world. While it is true that democracies gain in strength through disputes and debate, this does not mean that everything in a democracy is subject to negotiation. A democracy must have inviolable convictions and be based on a shared consensus, for example, in the form of a constitution, the separation of powers, an independent legal system and human rights. Not every dissenting voice deserves to be heard. A voice that seeks to undermine the pillars upon which the diversity of opinion is built forfeits in that moment any respect it may have had. In other words, democracy thrives not on disputes, but rather on good arguments. Loutish behaviour, verbal attacks and the increasing use of polarising symbols, such as we saw recently in Chemnitz, can only lead to a state of general confusion, which, in turn, inevitably leads to a paralysis of democracy, ultimately rendering it incapable of carrying out important tasks.
Jaspers’ agenda for peace started at a cultural level. As scholars of culture, this approach speaks to both of us. However, it also presents us with a number of challenges. Our research, too, is based on the observation that some so-called advanced civilisations used writing and other forms of transmission to create traditions that have lasted for thousands of years. This sense of contemporaneity with great thinkers, poets and founders – this connection and comprehensibility between their and our time upheld through traditions – is exactly what we refer to as “cultural memory”. However, unlike Jaspers and Arendt, who presupposed the “realm of exalted spirits” as something self-evident, we focused the lens of our research on the very question of how traditions are built.
First, our thesis posits that cultural memory is the result of ceaseless cultural work. Here, it would suffice to recall the unbelievable efforts made by ancient Egyptian culture to maintain its recognisability across the millennia, that is, to make it possible for us to read inscriptions even after two-and-a-half centuries and to continue to practise the formal language of art and architecture. This was no “dull perseverance,” as Max Weber put it, but instead the result of intensive work on cultural memory.
Second, a cultural memory requires dialogue and vigorous engagement with each respective present. The texts, books and authors that are closest to us are those we reinterpret time and again – the ones into which we are able to input our own thoughts. Those that become unfamiliar to us are doomed to disappear in an archive – from which they can nevertheless be rediscovered at a later date.
Remaining recognisable is the task of a cultural as well as a national memory. In this sphere, however, a number of things have changed in recent years. We can no longer seamlessly draw on old fantasies of national pride and greatness. The national memory, which served as a pedestal for honour, pride and heroism for a long time, has become more complex, more inclusive and more self-critical. Still, it is not only a pedestal that makes the nation larger and more powerful, but also a mirror of self-knowledge, remorse and change. The nation is not a holy grail that needs to be protected from defilement and desecration – the key word here being “Vogelschiss”. Instead, the nation is a union of people who are also capable of remembering shameful episodes in their history and taking responsibility for the monstrous crimes committed in their name.
We must keep one important difference in mind here: it is the history alone that is shameful, not the liberating memory of it, which is something we share with the victims. This is why identity does not emerge through denial, ignoring or forgetting; instead, identity requires the act remembering in order for it to become accountable, that is, to take on responsibility and foster a change in values and national self-image.
Still, Myrdal also had no illusions about the forces of opposition that stand ubiquitously in the way of our willingness to express solidarity with others. People find it easy to show solidarity with others when those others have the same attitudes and pursue the same goals. We are all familiar with the type of solidarity that comes in the form of a nation’s “collective egoism” – the model here being “America First!” In recent years, we have also come to know the transnational collective egoism of populist parties, their model being that of a “Fortress Europe”. These forms of solidarity are exclusionary and aim to keep others out. Integration, on the other hand, calls for an inclusive form of solidarity that extends to people who are different from us – people with whom we nevertheless want to build a common future.
Money and greed neutralise cultural foreignness, however they, too, divide the world – into the rich and the poor. Nationalist political forces are very adept at diminishing solidarity in many areas; for example, by inciting hatred for those who are weaker or foreign. This leads to what Gunnar Myrdal called a Milieuvergiftung, a poisoning of the social atmosphere with which he drew parallels to an Umweltvergiftung, the contamination of the physical environment. On the path to achieving a welfare world, as he envisioned it, Myrdal argued that solidarity must therefore be cultivated on all levels: as social solidarity on the level of society, as transnational solidarity on the EU level and, above all, as global solidarity in the handling of economic and natural resources so as to ensure that subsequent generations can even have a future. Today, we must add to this our solidarity with refugees – people who have had their futures destroyed by war, hardship, violence and thievery. It simply cannot be the case that we endorse a neoliberal freedom of movement with regard to capital, goods and raw materials, while migrants are stranded at national borders and we forget the people, their suffering and their future.
The key question here is no longer whether or not we are going to succeed at achieving integration, but instead how we are going to go about achieving it. Unfortunately, at the moment, it almost appears as if this development is moving backwards. When the scope of public discourse is narrowed down to include only a few issues, this serves only to fan the flames of the debate while doing very little to assist in clarifying and handling current problems. I spoke recently to a social worker – a woman who works with foreigners and has lived in Dresden for 15 years – and she told me in perfect German: “When I open my mouth and people hear my Russian accent, I am suddenly a migrant again, and nothing else.” Still others, many of whom have been living here three times as long, have told me that they, too, have been gripped by naked fear in recent days.
Shall we speak, for a change, about areas in which efforts are actually bearing fruit? We would like to provide three examples.
Example number one: Olga, whom we just quoted, belongs to a group of Russian-speaking citizens who found a home here in Germany at the end of the 1990s. This group of parents are anything but indifferent about what happens to their adopted country and its democracy, which is why they founded an association called “Phoenix.” These people are the new patriots. As individuals who have undergone the process of integration themselves, they know best how integration works. And this is why they are putting their experience and commitment to work as mediators between German authorities and immigrants looking for employment. By the way, these citizens are currently working in a race with the AfD, a political party that has proven very clever and effective at using new immigrants for their own political ends.
Example number two: Migrants helping migrants; this is also the principle behind the second group we would like to mention here, a project called “Back on Track – Syria.” This group of Berliners works with Syrian teachers to give Syrian children a proper education. Their aim is to get these children – who were torn from their daily lives due to civil war and flight – “back on track”. Using their newly developed method of “guided self-learning”, they have succeeded at reaching a large number of “derailed” children.
Example number three: The third association we would like to mention here is called “Helfende Hände” (Helping hands) and was founded by two Austrian couples. This group manages schooling and medical care in an underprivileged area of Kenya. With the help of donations and sponsorships, they were able to build a school that welcomes children from the poorest families. Their work in education helps save families from the misery that prompts so many Africans to flee to Europe. This year, 19 of the 33 pupils in their last year of secondary school were able to make the transition from school to university. This is five times the national average. The demand is great, and it is our hope that the school will be able to grow even further.
We mention these three initiatives in particular because it is to them that we will be donating the money we receive as part of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. But we’re not done yet.
The borders between cultures – and we would like to emphasise this one more time – are permeable. Indeed, translators and interpreters are among the oldest professions in the world, having accompanied tradesmen on their routes for as long as those routes existed. Cultures can cross borders through the import and export of books, but also by means of translations, appropriations and reinterpretations. Through this contact with other cultures, cultures are transformed: they overlap with one another, inspire each other and leave lasting changes on one another. It is not possible to bring cultures to a standstill, nor can they be confined to national borders.
Cultural memory comprises not only books and sacred texts, but also monuments, landscapes and locations. One current example is Hebron, the largest city in West Jordan, and one occupied by Israel. One year ago, Hebron submitted an application to UNESCO requesting acknowledgment of its Old Town as a World Heritage Site. The application was granted. An acknowledgment such as this helps with the recognition and preservation of old buildings, while also boosting tourism marketing and national pride. However, this specific application also had a political component to it, seeing as it made only selective reference to the history of the site. The application spoke of the site’s historic buildings, beginning in the late medieval Mamluk period and including the Al-Ibrahimi Mosque in the city’s centre. Herod had built this gigantic structure 2,000 years ago on the Machpelah – the burial place of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. With the emergence of Islam in the 7th century, that building became a Mosque. In the 12th century, it served as a cathedral for Christian crusaders, until it became a mosque again after being retaken by Saladin. In other words, the architecture of the Mamluk era marked not the first but the fifth historical layer of this building’s uniquely complex and multi-religious architectural history. And yet, the application mentioned nothing of the four previous layers.
It did not take long for sharp reactions to come in from Israel and the US. Both countries announced that they would be leaving UNESCO in protest by the end of the year. The Old City of Hebron has a Jewish, Christian and Islamic history that is equally present, sacred and vibrant in the cultural memory of the three monotheisms, because they all refer to Abraham as their founding father. And, if we look closer, it is the very grounds of the conflict itself that could simultaneously provide us with the solution to the conflict; that is, if only we were able to unite these layers of history and accept them as our “common heritage”. Indeed, the EU has declared 2018 to be the year of common cultural heritage. An application submitted jointly by Israel and the Palestinians could recognise the full history of this site and thereby also be its best protection.
As a Palestinian – hyphen – Israeli World Heritage Site, the Old City of Hebron bears the potential to shift away from being a site of violence and terror and toward becoming a site of rapprochement, cooperation and peace. The German UNESCO website makes it very clear that World Heritage Sites “provide the world community with tremendous potential for understanding among peoples as a result of their visibility and value”. In this case, the name of the site also strengthens our argument: “Hebron” is “Chevron” in Hebrew, which itself comes from the word “Chaver”, which means “friend” and refers to Abraham as a “Friend of God”. The Arabic name “Al-Khalil” also means “friend” and refers to Abraham, as well. In other words, the name Hebron means nothing other than “City of the Friend”.
 In June 2018, Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, described the Nazi era as a brief blemish in the country’s otherwise grand history, stating “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history”.