You wake up. You don’t know who you are or how you got here. The story begins. A story where you have to find out what the world is like, who the people are, who you can trust.
Anyone who played computer games around the turn of the millennium knows this type of story. Stories in which danger and tension are created by ignorance, by the fact that everything could be very different from what you first think. And, that dawns on you when you read Lea Ypi’s book “Free – Growing Up at the End of History”, anyone who lived through a childhood in the Eastern Bloc in the two decades before the turn of the millennium also knows this story. For Lea Ypi it is her own.
She tells them in a memoir, the content of which could be reproduced in detail here (the author’s childhood and youth story in communist Albania, glasnost, civil war, “West”) if one does not take away a considerable part of the reading pleasure, precisely those George Orwell typical computer game tension, would destroy. Suffice it to say: Lea was born in 1979 in Tirana, Albania. Lea loves “Uncle Enver”, the socialist dictator of Albania, and her family loves her too. Above all, you learn one thing about her: that she has a “biography” – a biography that little Lea doesn’t know. She only knows that she always has to serve as an explanation: “Biography was the universal answer to all kinds of questions, the basis without which any knowledge was just an opinion.”
In a socialist dictatorship, empty coke cans are sometimes worth more than friendships
After her childhood, after the war, Lea Ypi studied literature and philosophy. Today she is Professor of Political Theory at the British elite university London School of Economics. You can see all of this in the book, and also in how little you can tell from the book: how much space Professor Ypi leaves to the perspective of the child Lea.
That’s a smart decision. It would have been more conventional to spread out the biographical facts and then draw connections with professorial theoretical knowledge. Instead, she leaves the reader free. She doesn’t immediately dictate how things are to be interpreted. People act, the child Lea observes, the reader gradually experiences different perspectives on “Uncle Enver” and socialism, on the West, on freedom and democracy. Perspectives that diverge more and more: father, mother and grandparents belong together, linked by their “biography”, but they remain separated in their values and ideas, in their hopes and truths.
Lea Ypi: Free – growing up at the end of the story. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2022. 332 pages, 28 euros.
Of course, the reader is never completely free here either, he always sees only what the author is willing to show. Ypi tells every detail – the regularity of the queues, the significance of Coke cans in the neighborly community – from a child’s limited perspective, but this perspective was chosen by an adult. And an adult who always wants to show something with it. For example, how social constructs work – grocery bags and bricks can replace a person in a queue, but only just until the much-desired goods arrive, then there are no more rules. Or what cultural imperialism is: In a socialist dictatorship, empty Coke cans are sometimes worth more than friendships.
The promise of freedom and democracy leads to a new, freely and secretly chosen lack of freedom
And maybe the child does know too much after all, for example when the parents’ reaction to the first (long-awaited) free and secret election is described as “reluctant”: “the false indecisiveness gave the impression that they hadn’t felt up to it all these years concrete events, but rather abstract possibilities”. Of course they have, thinks the adult reader, who knows that little is more disillusioning than when something long awaited threatens to become reality in the end and only disappointment remains. You don’t trust an eleven-year-old to make such an observation – and whether you perceive this analytical intervention as cheating or as intellectual enrichment is ultimately just a question of perspective.
In any case, Ypi introduces what makes up the second part of the book: disappointment. The promise of freedom and democracy leads to a new, freely and secretly chosen lack of freedom. The end of socialism brings capitalism and with it a pyramid scheme, which plunges the Albanian population, inexperienced in capitalism, into an economic crisis and finally into war – and war, so much is certain, is worse than socialism.
The lack of freedom to leave the country becomes the lack of freedom to flee to another country: “In the past, you would have been arrested for wanting to leave the country. But now that no one was preventing you from leaving the country, we were on the other side of the border no longer welcome. The only thing that had changed was the color of the police uniforms. Now we were no longer being arrested on behalf of our governments, but on behalf of other states whose governments had previously called on us to set out for freedom.”
It’s all very depressing and most importantly it’s not free. And if there’s one thing that can be said against Ypi, this clever author, it’s that she doesn’t seem to be aware of it. That she is writing a book that destroys with every page the possibility of freedom and the hope for an improvement in political systems. A book in which the protagonists fight their way from one bondage to the next with the greatest fervor, from one corrupt system to another, equally corrupt system. A book that Ypi nevertheless ends with a hopeful, combative epilogue. It is the only time that the adult Ypi represents her own political position.
Man is free to do what is right, but he is not free to choose what he thinks is right
And if one can criticize this exciting, clever, humorous, complex book, it is that it neither justifies nor explains its central concept “freedom”. Ypi does not address that there is a time-honored discourse about “freedom” and “free will,” that it is tremendously difficult to justify how biological beings, which are the result of genes and socialization, are even “free.” In fact, Ypi never seems as naive as a child as when she writes as an adult in the epilogue: “And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do the right thing.”
That’s a great conclusion after 300 pages, which shows one thing above all again and again: people don’t know what the right thing is, are endlessly manipulated in their idea of ”the right thing”, make mistakes again and again, do exactly that with the best of intentions Wrong or not, who knows. Man, it seems after reading it, is free to do what is right, but not free to decide what he thinks is right. And it is only in hindsight that he knows how wrong he is.
In other words: “Frei” is a mediocre book about “freedom” and an excellent book about “truth” – that means: about lies and complexity, about hopes and disappointments, about polyphony and multiple perspectives, about the propaganda of the East and the empty promises Of the West. In times like these, it seems obligatory to point out here that this is just the right book for “times like these”. But right now it’s not the right book because it teaches something about the collapse of the Eastern bloc or even about war. But because it is a reminder that every person wakes up in a world in which they do not know who they are or what the world is, in which one tries to do the right thing without being able to rule out that it is the wrong thing. This is no different at the end of the story than at the beginning.