The One Who Leaves

The forced kind is horrible. To have to leave behind all that is yours—this is practically to abandon your very self. But it could also be that you want to escape from here, from the cage, where threats ring you in and the anxiety is crippling. In which case it is exile denied that is horrible.

If you must—if you would be in mortal danger to remain—then obviously you will go. For some reason, not entirely clear, you stay and happen to survive it: this time you were right. But it could happen that you do not survive it. And even then, for some reason, not entirely clear, you were also right.

There are some émigrés who have not had time to weigh their decision. Many have sensed that, if they remained, they would be killed. Such were the odds for Jews in Hitler's Europe. Sentimental attachment to home generally proved suicidal.

The only ones who have a moral right to emigrate are those in mortal danger, said Solzhenitsyn, with characteristic strictness. I had thought that everyone had a right to it, even though I have never granted it to myself.

Writers who emigrate have always experienced how people always get by somehow, everywhere, and sooner or later make some kind of a home for themselves. Writers will write in any situation; language keeps on functioning, like sexuality. In Siberian wooden huts, concentration camp barracks, on prison bunks, or under a cattle car during a bombing—masterpieces have come out of all environments. There are no rules. Great talents slip by all the traps, while mediocre ones get caught in them.

There is a book of Camus's entitled Exile and the Kingdom. Those are the two poles. Though mine is admittedly an absolutist position, still I see these two as ever present and always together. You are an exile everywhere, and you always have your kingdom around you, even in a hospital bed.

It is best to free emigration from the moral judgments that weigh it down. There are those who reject the word itself: "I did not emigrate. I simply moved," said a writer who went from East Germany to West before the Wall went up.

During the Cold War, there were many who made a big issue of the question of going or staying, which eventually became mired in moralizing clichés. Whoever left "chose freedom," and whoever did not "remained faithful to the homeland." Both are rhetorical exaggerations. Emigration, and those who choose it, are inherently neither good nor bad. The same is true of the locals. Some people stay, and some go. Over the course of our twentieth-century lives, an entire mythology evolved around this dilemma. And that fact does not do literature any harm either.

The writer is always on a study tour, even at his own desk. As a result, he is everywhere somewhat foreign. His eyes, and his scrutiny, make him so. He has just landed from the moon, can look even at his wife as if seeing her for the first time.

But let us now take a practical look at the subject. Is exile bad for writing, or good for it? The exile, as the possessor of a compulsory distance, knows something that the local does not. With a moderately philosophical attitude, the writer can overlook that he is not particularly liked either here or at home. Even so, he gets to feel more than the average person, and that should be all he needs. Besides, is it really so interesting whether emigration is good for a writer or bad? Maybe it is bad for him but good for his book. The converse is also possible. Which is more important, to us, here?

The writer in exile looks homeward from a distance and obtains a complete picture in all its outlines. And his language? He cannot feed on the living speech of the moment in his native land, but that is not such a problem since he is by the same token freed from short-lived catchphrases...