Deniz Yücel is President of the PEN Center Germany, in which many writers organize themselves. A conversation about the possibilities and limits of protest in times of war.
Mr. Yücel, more than a thousand writers have in one open letter Condemns Putin’s war in Ukraine. Nobel laureates in literature such as Svetlana Alexievich, Orhan Pamuk and Olga Tokarczuk supported the declaration of the Authors Association PEN International signed. They call for an “urgent end to the bloodshed”. What is the use of such explanations?
I think it’s the wrong approach if you look at individual actions and ask: What did a demonstration in Cologne, in Lisbon, in Toronto achieve? When you approach it like that, the answer is always: nothing. But I not only consider all practical help to be useful, but also symbolic actions such as demonstrations, readings or open letters make a difference – in the multitude of many individual actions.
Why?
Because they create a way for participants to express their anger, despair, fear or compassion. But that’s not all. I don’t think that Vladimir Putin doesn’t give a damn about public opinion in the West. Otherwise he would not have built up a whole apparatus of foreign-language media and would not have invented the principle of the paid troll army. If the public in as many countries around the world as possible says “No!” to Putin, then it carries weight.
But what role do writers play in this?
Still a special one because they speak for others, because they are prominent, because in a tradition of Émile Zola or Jean-Paul Sartre they still have a function as public conscience.
Is that really the case in a media-crazed world with new word and picture reports every second on all channels?
Of course it’s not like it was in the days of Zola, Sartre or Heinrich Böll. Not everyone has become a writer, but everyone can be outraged. That’s why it’s no longer the same function, this: If you and I say something, nobody will hear it, but if Sartre says something, everyone will hear it. And yet: making yourself heard via social media may still work within a country, but not internationally. There are language barriers, which Habermas already spoke about and which he identified as Europe’s structural problem: Democracy needs publicity. And language is a barrier that has to be overcome first.
And that doesn’t apply to open letters from writers?
Well, that’s what writers can do. Speaking publicly, in speeches, in letters, in articles. I couldn’t have included Ukraine in NATO and I can’t provide anti-aircraft defenses. In the worst case, what we do is, in Wolfgang Borchert’s sense, “active desperation”. And then that’s still better than sitting around at home stunned and doing nothing.
You always read that this or that voice carries weight. What does that actually mean?
This means, for example, that you are now conducting this interview because of this open letter. So that interests your editors and hopefully your readers. It is precisely in such things that range is shown, by international writers of stature. Especially when people like Paul Auster, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and Olga Tokarczuk get together. And this time we’re not talking about the usual excitement in social media, where everyone says: I think that’s stupid too! It’s about something now. It is about a war of aggression on a country with 44 million inhabitants. And now that something is at stake, I believe that the word of writers has a certain weight across national borders in terms of a global public.
…as a post among other posts.
Yes, I don’t mean that writers speak to us from an Elysium. Schalke 04’s voice also carries weight. Schalke finally managed to break away from Gazprom. I like that. However, even after the separation, Schalke still have a moral obligation to help, after all the club played internationally with Gazprom coal for years. I am very reassured that there is a very broad social consensus in Germany against the Russian war of aggression. Even a large majority can be wrong, in this case it is not.
Heiner Müller’s sentence certainly doesn’t apply here: ten Germans are of course dumber than five. However, there is the accusation that such letters and other actions are not necessarily are wrong, but above all: free of charge.
This accusation, in turn, is gratuitous.
You took part in a solidarity reading in the Maxim Gorki Theater a few days ago. Who does it reach?
Such events are more than just cozy theater evenings. These are always political events. When there are a few hundred people in the audience and a few more on the live stream, that’s an important show of solidarity. Such evenings create a different form of empathy than simply following the news can do.
Deniz Yücel at the reading for Ukraine on February 26, 2022 in the Maxim Gorki Theater.
(Photo: Gerald Matzka/picture alliance/dpa)
Has anything changed in the protest culture of intellectuals in general over the past few decades?
In any case, the certainties and sometimes platitudes from the peace movement of the 1980s seem to me to be out of place, and not just because we are no longer dealing with a predictable dictatorship like under Brezhnev. We have an authoritarian regime that works differently in a world that works differently. I think it’s morally and politically wrong to simply say: no weapons.
Not everyone who demonstrated with you on Sunday in Berlin, for example, will see it that way.
I don’t share a lot of what was said at this demo, but above all I’m reassured that my fears didn’t come true: War is when the Americans get involved, then you go to the demonstration, otherwise you don’t care.
What else do you want to do with the PEN association in the near future, for example with the “Writers in Exile” program?
Not only do we have the program, we are also committed to it. Last week we very practically helped to get Ugandan author Kakwenza Rukirabashaija out of the torture hell in his country and now we support him. At the moment we have one scholarship holder from Belarus and one from Russia, one shouldn’t forget that repression is even stronger there. But everything we do in this regard affects individual authors. Otherwise, you can always do something practical. I only got today heard about a fundraiser for vests and helmets for journalists traveling in Ukraine. Supporting the work of reporters and cameramen is important because they often work in the front line and because the power of images sometimes exceeds the power of even 1000 words.