Celebrating Europe: An Asian Journey

3. The Berlin Wall

3 The Berlin Wall loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away But if to live means to exist in the eyes of those we love… — Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being The defeat of Nazism in 1945 was the high point of contemporary European history. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a comparable event, although the two events belonged to different moral frames. Jan Kott, the Polish theatre critic and theoretician who witnessed both Nazi terror and Stalinist repression, is remembered best for his daring book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary.1 In his preface to the book, Peter Brook, the British director, describes how he first met Kott. It was midnight in a nightclub in Warsaw. Kott was “squashed between a wildly excited” group of students, and “we became friends at once”. A beautiful girl was arrested by mistake, he leaped to her defence and, with Brook in tow, went all the way to the Polish police headquarters to try and win her release. Brook noticed that the police were calling his new friend “professor”. On the way back home at four in the morning, he found out that Kott was a professor of drama. The Berlin Wall 37 Brook extends to Kott the ultimate compliment of calling him an Elizabethan. Like Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Kott’s life is one in which “the poet has a foot in the mud, an eye on the stars, and a dagger in his hand”. Shakespeare and Kott are contemporaries because it is Poland in the 1960s that comes closest to “the tumult, the danger, the intensity, the imaginativeness and the daily involvement with the social process that made life so horrible, subtle and ecstatic to an Elizabethan’’.2 Much of that energy would be suppressed in the deadly 1970s, but even then, it would be possible for the protagonist of Tadeusz Konwicki’s novel, A Minor Apocalypse, to exclaim that intellectual dissidents like him, “us cosmic castaways”, are obliged “to shout through the ages into starry space”. “We’ve become intimate with the universe.”3 Western Europe, too, had its Elizabethan interlude, particularly in that magical year of 1968, when revolution became “the ecstasy of history”.4 “I take my desires for reality, because I believe in the reality of my desires.” Now, that piece of grafitti could have come from Shakespeare, perhaps as a shred of the dream of Caliban in The Tempest. “When the General Assembly becomes a bourgeois theatre, bourgeois theatres must become the General Assembly.” That, plausibly, could have appeared in Julius Caesar. “Society is a carnivorous flower.” That is rather more Christopher Marlowe than Shakespeare. But the defiant declaration — “Young blood goes further than old ideals”5 — now, that cannot but be Hamlet. “To forbid is forbidden.” Could that be Hamlet, again, speaking to his sinning mother? “The undertakers are on strike, the dead wait for the new era, too.”6 That sounds Jacobean — John 38 Celebrating Europe Webster perhaps — but still in the warm aftermath of the Elizabethan period. All in all, the world dared to be young again in May 1968. The year turned the whole world into an Elizabethan stage that saw parts of the same play being acted out nearly simultaneously in Prague and Paris, in Mexico City, and Kent State University. The universal language of the new Elizabethan age was napalmed Vietnamese. In the East Bloc, it is this Elizabethan tenor that made life sing. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the protagonist Franz’s mother is Viennese, his father is French, and he himself is Swiss. Thus embodying Europe, the left-liberal academic is very much a 1968-er cast ashore the affluent society epitomized by Geneva, that safe, sanitized, and loveless boutique of a city where no political demonstrations interrupt his banally successful life as a professor. He rebels against the modern condition — really the European condition with marked French characteristics — that is immortalised in Albert Camus’ formulation: “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”7 Camus is archly critical of the harmless bourgeois pursuits that remove man from the great theatres of human choice — political and moral engagement, commitment, and action — and make him a spectator and a voyeur, a coward and a veteran of every unfought war. In Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno is even more scathing of...