Europe’s Perspective on the Orient

View transcript: Europe’s Perspective on the Orient

Text: Hans Magnus Enzensberger visited the Maghreb, the “Western Orient” / How to deal with orientalist fantasies? / What is Orientalism? / After 1000 years, is an adjustment of the European perspective on the Orient necessary? / Conversation with the poet HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER -
Text: EUROPE’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE ORIENT / A travelogue by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Enzensberger: The word Orient is not a neutral expression, it is part of the baggage, and of course we can consider that, when we travel there, we can try to reassess, to verify things, to see if there is some truth to it.
Kluge: It is necessarily false consciousness, as Marx would say, and one of the most precious sources of curiosity.
Enzensberger: Yes. Of course I think that we Germans are always in a very particular position, I always say that we Germans have with themselves a South Pole and a North Pole, a West Pole and an East Pole, we have an entire compass rose.
Text: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer
Enzensberger: And all four directions are full of fantasies. The West, whether it’s the Wild West, or America in general, the East is Russia, the Slavic world …
Kluge: … and the arch enemy France.
Enzensberger: Yes. Then the North, there is also a Nordic fantasy. I mean, there are people who go on a trip to Lapland every year because they are hoping to find something there. And there are people who travel south, and of course that is because of all the historical connotations attached to the idea of the Mediterranean See, the Mare Nostrum. So people travel, and depending on their pre-history, it influences their experience. Of course I should also mention that the North-African countries do not form a unity, the Maghreb is a construction, since politically and socially speaking, the countries are rather back-to-back. It is like Spain and Portugal, they don’t want to have anything to do with each other either. And that’s what it is like there as well. There are conflicts, the unity of the Arabic world is a delusion, it does not actually exist.
Kluge: Travel reports have a long tradition …
Enzensberger: Yeah well, with all reservations, but Morocco is a very patriarchal country, where you can still see a lot of old traditions. Despite tourism, despite all the problems … It is a monarchy, the King is very powerful and he is superior to the political parties; it also means that – whether Islamists or pro-Western intellectuals – everyone is hesitant to insult the King, it’s impossible. And that has an impact on the entire society, there is something, well, patriarchal about it, but without the fanaticism. That is why Morocco is a comfortable country to travel in, because the intensity of those conflicts has not yet reached the West, the Atlantic side – Maghreb means West, by the way. Okay, if you talk about Palestine, some people get upset, but domestically, there is no alternative, and the slow development that an economist would lament, might not be a bad thing, culturally speaking.
Kluge: It is obviously a very old country. The Berbers make up 60 percent of the population, and they have lived there since even before the Romans, before the Carthaginians, so for about 3000 years.
Enzensberger: Yes. And when you’ve developed an eye for it, you can see immediately what people are wearing. Berbers wear different clothes, they wear colorful clothing… the women are not veiled …
Kluge: … They have their own laws, their own legal customs, which compete with Arabic law, with the Talmud, with French law, that means, there are many legal systems – actually very urban in that regard.
Enzensberger: Yes, and in that regard all those countries, because I would not exclude the others – you can feel it. The presence of Ancient Rome for instance is very impressive. There are cities which back then used to be located at the very last border, and on the maps it says: “Hic sunt leones”, “Here come the lions”, the desert, so to speak. There are cities we visited, one of them near Fes, and then in Tunisia, there are huge Roman cities, very impressive big cities, and there is a Colosseum in Southern Tunisia that is almost as big as, and in better shape than, the one in Rome. And it is amazing how forceful the Romans were, and the wealth they apparently accumulated – because in order to erect such enormous buildings …
Kluge: … thermal springs, theaters …
Enzensberger: Everything, everything, a forum … it is all there. It is strange. And if you get into it a little, you can see all those layers, like the Phoenicians in Tunisia …
Kluge: Merchants, they don’t build that much, but they have ports …
Enzensberger: … ports, boats …
Kluge: … and the Vandals, who come from our area, so to speak, and who also occupied that place for a few centuries, is there anything left of them other than the occasional blue eyes?
Enzensberger: Sometimes you can recognize them in the people, but they did not build anything, and in that regard they actually live up to their reputation.
Kluge: … the Vandals, once they conquered Rome from there.
Enzensberger: Yes, that is true.
Kluge: And then the Byzantine rule returns.
Enzensberger: Well, that one did not reach up to Morocco, but then, the Turks, the Ottoman empire made it all the way to Algiers. And you have to make a clear distinction: for instance, Algeria was a colony, a department of the mother country, it belonged to France, was annexed while Morocco was only a protectorate. And those nuances actually make a difference, it is much more relaxed. They also did not have a huge war like the Algerians, the war against France, a very brutal war for both sides, the Moroccans did not have that, and the Tunisians did not either. And I mean, when one is there, even someone who is ignorant of the region should look for those nuances, the differences. It is very fascinating, because it turns out that in a way, nothing is forgotten. For instance, the Algerians have a monstrous museum dedicated to their War of Independence, full of rusty machine guns, old radios, it is kind of touching, but also horrible, because their founding myth is a war. And that is different from a country that took a more peaceful path …
Kluge: While Morocco does not need a founding myth …
Enzensberger: … they do not need one, because they have a King.
Kluge: And ancient grandeur. That’s why there are all these beautiful movies, that’s why American presidents have been so fascinated by Morocco.
Enzensberger: Yes. And that raises the question as to what this world of images actually means.
Text: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer
Enzensberger: In the last decades, the dominant opinion or theory in Cultural Studies has been based on Edward Said’s work “Orientialism”. He knows his stuff well, he has done research on how Europeans imagine the Orient. But the conclusions he has drawn from his research are very strange, namely that it is all rotten, racist, colonialist nonsense, which is completely untrue, because European Orientalism has given these countries part of their memory back; all the linguists, the Cultural Studies scholars, historians, and ethnologists - they worked incredibly hard and found so much! I would say that there is also a certain lack of gratitude about it, when he condemns all of it because of colonial history. That is a theory that I find questionable for many reasons. You could also turn the tables and say: what image do the Orientals have – let’s just call them Orientals for now – what image do they have of the West? You could also find Occidentalism, they have a distorted image too, they also don’t see things 1:1, they also have fantasies, they also have an image of us that we would find strange. But that is just how it is.
Kluge: And it would not be insulting if they came here to study the natives and found out about this weird guy Charles the Great, who murdered 5,000 Saxons, his subjects …
Enzensberger: Yes, that is very educational. Or … it continues up to this day, even what the mass media, Hollywood, or commercials show, creates a picture of the West that does not necessarily comply with reality, to put it mildly. I mean, it is give-and-take. Those images are necessary.
Kluge: So insight is one thing. Insights should eventually end up being precise, though.
Enzensberger: They should be double-checked, sure.
Kluge: … they have to be assessed. But on the other hand, the motivation is that I want to know something about the other, and that requires imagination and … to ignite curiosity, it does not matter if the image is correct or false.
Enzensberger: Yes, you cannot be too sensitive, I mean, of course, when Ingres paints a harem … there is this famous painting of Ingres, these women in a vapor-bath … of course you can say that is a male fantasy, first of all …
Kluge: … a Parisian fantasy …
Enzensberger: … a male fantasy, a Western fantasy, all that.
Kluge: … an urban fantasy …
Enzensberger: … but still, I mean the Turkish bathhouse is a great accomplishment. You simply have to see the hygiene … they had much better hygiene than Europeans, Europeans were dirty. Until the 18th century, they smelled badly … at Versailles, that is common knowledge.
Kluge: While over there …
Enzensberger: While over there, they had amazing hygiene …
Kluge: A continuation of Roman hygiene, they carried on the custom of the Roman bath …
Enzensberger: Yes, or maybe you can even trace it back to Mesopotamia. It could be very old. But anyway, it was great for their general well-being. And you can see that in Ingres’ painting, not just the harem fantasy, but also the dream of having such a bath as well. You could read that into it just as well. Really, it is unfair to say that it is a politically incorrect fantasy. Fantasy is never politically correct, you can just forget about that. Our fantasy cannot be repressed by restrictions. And the ban on images that is implied here, I think that is complete nonsense, and I even suspect that it might have something to do with the ban on images in the Koran. And the enlightened Mister Said actually reproduces a religious hate of images without explicitly saying it. According to the Koran, they are not allowed to create representations of the human body, hence the ornaments – all the art, the wonderful art in the mosques is completely non-representational.
Kluge: There is a high mountain range, the High Atlas, 700 kilometers long, and one mountain top is 4,000 meters high, higher than any mountain tops in the Alps, and behind it is an Anti-Atlas, could you explain where you can see something like that?
Enzensberger: Well, I am not an Alpinist, I couldn’t say that I have actually been there, but of course you can see the mountain range from the plain, and also from an airplane you can see that the country has horizontal stripes, in a way. And besides, in the mountain areas the ancient people survive, the Kabyle people and the Berbers, especially the Berbers play a big role, because they were there before the Arabs, that is true, the Berbers were the native people of these countries. And for a long time, they were also oppressed, of course, when the conquerors came. And there is still a latent tension. Especially in Algeria there are serious political differences.
Kluge: … but as a result of 3,000 years of occupation.
Enzensberger: Yes. And when it gets serious, they retreat to their valleys, to their mountains, and the villages show that very clearly …
Kluge: They were never really defeated by the French.
Enzensberger: No, never.
Kluge: Emir Abd al-Qadir is a Berber, isn’t he?
Text: Emir Abd al-Qadir, leader of the Berber revolt (1832-1847)
Enzensberger: Yes. The government has to be very careful, they are not allowed to antagonize them too much. And these circumstances make compromises possible. In the meantime there are also very educated Berbers, of course. In Algeria we met several people, who have become part of the urban intelligentsia in the city. It is strange, there is a similar situation with the Kurdish people in Turkey. In Istanbul you meet a lot of people who don’t self-identify as Kurdish, but if you keep digging a little, it turns out that they are Kurds. But that is only the Kurds who actually play a role, who are, well, not integrated, but who occupy a position, and who are actually very important for the future of their people. A kind of diaspora in the city. They are from the countryside, of course, that is the classic career path … so it is not the case that they are just hicks, that is not true.
Text: Hercules’ pillars
Kluge: And here, at the border between the continents, the Greek imagination needed to secure the West. Where the sun sets in an unsettling way, we need a pillar, and the mountain range fulfills that purpose.
Enzensberger: Yes, that is true, even if the etymology was false, there is still some truth to it: the Atlas is a fortification, yes. And it is strange, because it goes so far that to this day Spain and Great Britain are still fighting over Gibralter … that is another rock, the rock of Gibraltar …
Kluge: Another rock that somehow supports the sky.
Enzensberger: Yes, yes, and that’s why neither can let go of it, it is a political conflict. The people who live there don’t all want to be part of Spain …
Kluge: And there is also the Parsley Island, what is that again?
Enzensberger: Well, that has really been exaggerated, there is nothing behind it.
Kluge: An island that not even Robinson could live on?
Enzensberger: Nothing. There is literally nothing. But it is a question of prestige, like it tends to happen in politics, where it becomes difficult to step back from a position once it has been taken.
Kluge: Spanish frigates and war ships pass by it …
Enzensberger: Yes, it is a kind of game, as if someone at the map table at HQ had come up with it. A maneuver, it is basically almost a maneuver. By now, things have calmed down somewhat again, it has been settled …
Kluge: Because of an American guarantee, just like with big international conflicts.
Enzensberger: Yes, the Americans also play a role, even though the other governments are trying to downplay it. But because of the oil and for strategic reasons, the Americans are stronger than people suspect, in Algeria too – they have a lot of influence there, which does not make sense ideologically at all, but under the table it is very important. The American ambassador plays a big role there.
Kluge: And south of it, they just built a big monitoring station for the entire Sahara, it is basically like 1912.
Enzensberger: Yes, the game goes on. The illusion that foreign politics could somehow basically be shut down by the UN or whatever, that is an illusion, of course. The game goes on, very carefully, sometimes big mistakes occur, it is certainly risky. But maybe that is a good thing. And if I had something to do with it, I would study the history of foreign politics very closely. I would study Metternich, Bismarck, all these guys. And our favorite war criminal Kissinger has done that as well, he has written a big book about Metternich. Others have dealt with Bismarck, or the French … Napoleon. They have studied everything, the ‘continental sword’ . . . the concert of powers, all those things.
Text: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer
Kluge: It is more than metaphors, it is all experience …
Enzensberger: Yes, it is not over by any means.
Kluge: And it reads like a textbook, because some side-roads actually provided a solution. After all, the First World War had almost started there once. They call it the “Panther’s jump" to Agadir. Before, they had sent a cannon boat, a German cannon boat there, and the American President, Theodore Roosevelt, I believe, interfered.
Text: German cannon boat before Agadir.
Text: German Emperor visits Morocco
Kluge: And our Emperor visits Morocco and is almost murdered. Unbelievable. He was also very scared.
Enzensberger: Yes, and he carried the title “King of Jerusalem”, the German Emperor. That seems very strange to us now. But there is also a fantastical element to it, because of the image of the Holy Land and the image of the Panther’s Jump, I mean, even just the word Panther’s Jump …
Kluge: Even though it is just a simple little ship.
Enzensberger: Yes, very strange, yes.
Kluge: But it is fantasies of power, similar fantasies of power that lead to something like a preventive war in 2003. That also requires imagination.
Enzensberger: Yes, of course, yes, it requires imagination and pretenses as well. I mean, the Gulf of Tonkin, or the weapons of mass destruction, I mean, you have to lie a little if you do something like that.
Kluge: Yes, and I mean, the perception of Baghdad is just as imagery-laden as what you described earlier in regard to Morocco.
Enzensberger: Yes, strange, all those things.
Kluge: Is that valuable, economically speaking? The brothers Siemens traveled there, for instance, on behalf of the German industry … around the turn of the century, to occupy property, greenhouses for …
Enzensberger: Yes, that is the issue of property, which means, land, that is a big difference, because the extent to which you can still call it imperialism today, it is not like it used to be. It does not happen via annexation, they don’t annex, instead you need to have bases and you have to be the economic winner. That is the contemporary method, I think. That’s why it is something different when people talk about American imperialism. Occupation is rather annoying, it is a curse if I have to occupy the entire country with my people, it’s terrible. Instead, I have to do business there, and I have to be operational, that means I have to pursue base building politics, that’s enough. I don’t need to administer the entire country, that is completely wrong. This empire is a new type of empire. It is all about banks, the International Monetary Fund, those kinds of institutions. The military is basically only a threat.
Kluge: But in a time of crisis, when something is not working, for reasons that don’t have anything to do with the market, there is always a break, there is always a relapse to earlier time periods.
Enzensberger: Yes, at some point it reaches a point where …
Kluge: At some point we have another Boxer Rebellion like in China, at some point we have the phenomenon of the Morocco crisis.
Enzensberger: And prestige also plays a role, where you can’t go back, where you choose a position that is difficult to give up, without losing face. And of course that is also the problem of the Middle East. I mean, while we are at it, the Maghreb is not the real political disaster zone, that is the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. And I like to think … I have my private heroes in the Palestine conflict, the people, I mean, if you think about how the Oslo process started. It began with private connections, and the diaspora was involved. I know the chief editor of a Danish newspaper, who is Jewish, he was the first host abroad. He took the initiative himself … he met people, went to Israel a lot and to Palestine and he met a few people whose trust he earned, and he got them to sit down together at one table. Then it continued informally, but on a somewhat higher level in Oslo; there were people involved with the ministry of foreign affairs, and a critical mass came together, and only then non-papers were sent to the governments, the powerful people. And so a certain dynamic developed out of something like a positive conspiracy, I would call it, and a gap opened. And people snuck in through this gap, it did not work, because they were tricked by people on the highest levels …
Kluge: Or rather, they got rid of some important people by means of murder, by means of assassination.
Enzensberger: That, too. But even at Camp David already, they could not bring themselves to go through with it. But it is not a completely lost cause yet, we have seen that with that story in Geneva, which developed in a very similar way. And I find that very … they are heroes of peace, because it is very dangerous, they are threatened from both sides. The orthodox extremists in Israel threaten their lives. We have seen as an example what happened to Rabin, just how dangerous it is. And it is the same on the other side. These people are … well, you could draw a comparison between some of them, and the German resistance. Highly dangerous actions, containing a spark of possibility that you cannot find anywhere else. And something similar also exists in the Arabic countries …
Text: “Pre-established disharmony”
Kluge: You once wrote a poem about “Pre-established Disharmonie”, in reference to the concept of pre-established harmony. That means, there is an antidote for every poison. For every civil war, for every aggressive conspiracy, there is a counter-conspiracy.
Enzensberger: Yes. For the drugged child soldier, there is a surgeon who tries to sew people back together; and someone who repairs the water pipe. I mean, you can find that on the lowest level, because otherwise survival would not be possible.
Kluge: And you would say the same about the Orient, all the confusing interrelations.
Enzensberger: There will always be people who take the risk.
Kluge: There is no such thing as a hopeless situation, that is your motto, your poetic …
Enzensberger: Yes. I would like to be neutral … sometimes I get asked the following stupid question: Are you a pessimist? Are you an optimist? It is very simple.
Kluge: You are an observer …
Enzensberger: You have to be both. It is the wrong dichotomy. I always say: The game is never over, it is always an open game. And there is this belt … that is something else about the Mediterranean that I find really fascinating; all the cities there have an aura. It starts with Tangier, then Algiers, the capital, then Alexandria, Beirut and Istanbul. All those oriental capitals, they have always been very multicultural. There were the Greeks, the Italians, the French, and before them it was the Romans, the Turks, everyone was there. They all settled there for a while, and the flourishing of the cities had something to do with that. And of course a lot was destroyed in the process of displacement. There were expulsions happening all the time, everyone was kicked out, Alexandria was a wonderful, international, cosmopolitan city, the city of Kavafis the poet and so on, it has a lot of aura. Or take Beirut, back then it was a common cliché to call it “oriental Switzerland”, another very liberal, very cheerful, great city, Beirut, until all the political conflicts came to a head. The civil war did …
Kluge: … destroy them, one after another.
Enzensberger: … ruin everything. The Lebanese were, how shall I put it, they were basically the Jews of the Orient. Yes, they were the Jews of the Orient, merchants everywhere, very successful people …
Kluge: Basically Phoenicians.
Enzensberger: Phoenicians, yes. The Levant, that was the Levant. And I mean, even in a country like Algeria that has suffered a period of darkness, 40 years of darkness, a tragic story. And still, a part of it has survived in this city, you can feel it, despite all their conflicts, it is a city that still exists and cannot be … The fanatics cannot eliminate it, even the Brezhnev supporters cannot tear it down, it still exists.
Kluge: Even the torturers didn’t manage.
Enzensberger: When you look at the port, you can see the Kasbah, where the Bey resided and there is some architecture … you can see it in the architecture, for instance, down there is a beautiful palace, you cannot get rid of the French stuff. For instance, of course there was an Aryanization policy, for nationalist reasons, and they wanted to get rid of everything French. But that is impossible, that is something that has remained, despite everything, I would say.
Kluge: And it is basically a poetical-political exercise, to look at our Europe, for instance from North-West-France, it looks completely different, even on the globe, and seen from Australia, it looks different again, and different again from Samarkand or Tiflis.
Enzensberger: Just picture those maps, I think there is an atlas where every world map has a different center.
Text: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer
Enzensberger: And that leads to a completely different perspective every time.
Kluge: Completely different.
Enzensberger: And as for Europe, I mean for a thousand years the Mediterranean Sea had been the center.
Kluge: So you drove around Morocco. What did you see?
Enzensberger: Well, the administration has its oddities, because the King appoints a Wali. The Wali is the governor of a province. But alongside him there are also elected representatives. So there is basically a diarchy.
Kluge: They have to communicate.
Enzensberger: Yes, they have to communicate.
Kluge: An administration that is close to nepotism.
Enzensberger: Yes, and we visited two of those Walis, and often the elected representative of the state parliament, something like a state parliament, was there too, and you could notice the tension, you noticed that they had to get along, as you say, because of course one of them knows that his roots are there, while the governor is delegated, by the King. And there are very antiquated rules, for instance the dean at a university explained to me that he would rather do his research, but he was appointed dean by the King, and only the King’s decree could release him from his office. Those are very old-fashioned conditions in a modernizing country. I mean, there are proper highways, there are airports. Morocco is not underdeveloped in that regard. You could not say that. The modernization is happening. But at the same time …
Kluge: But like after an earthquake, there is a rift between the globalized and the autochthonous world, so to speak.
Enzensberger: Yes, yes. Pressure from both sides, and they have to make compromises across this rift.
Kluge: And if I was an American secret service agent and needed a textbook to teach my junior agents how to handle or mediate certain situations in Afghanistan or in Iraq, technically I would have to study here, under these conditions.
Enzensberger: So you would have to study something like …
Kluge: Because I’d have a 3000 years old gold mine here …
Enzensberger: On a micro-level. You can study that very closely on a micro-level. For instance, the elected man was a land owner, for farmland, which plays an important role there. I mean, the entire unemployment issue has to do with rural exodus … because farming is not profitable enough, but he was an educated man with business acumen, and he wanted to push things through, he wanted to change some rules, and now the federal government comes and says: Well, but what about the other parts of the country? We can’t separate those, the floes cannot move apart. We need a united country, but it is not that simple, because things in the South are very different, I mean in a sense these countries are … there are nomads. The desert is in the South, and there are nomads. And then there are people, like in Tangier, the old Tangier with an absolutely …
Kluge: Completely urban.
Enzensberger: …with an urban, a city mentality and the King has the responsibility to keep everything together.
Kluge: And for that purpose, I need a lot of stories, irrationalism, fantasy, just like Spínola, the Portuguese President, who kept North Portugal and South Portugal together for a moment, during the revolution, and when he drops out, with his monocle, then everything falls apart.
Enzensberger: Well, I mean Morocco is the most accessible and the most interesting for us, while in Algiers you still run up against concrete walls. Things have hardened because of the unity party, because of the whole conflict with France. There are the old comrades, the old fighters, the phenomenon of the old warrior who does not go away … who lives in a world that does not exist anymore, but who has the power, the military …
Kluge: The blood of his comrades.
Enzensberger: Yes, the flag.
Kluge: Stacked, like a bench.
Enzensberger: All these nations have in the back of their mind a very formative memory of the prime of the Khalifate, when …
Kluge: When they advanced to Southern France.
Enzensberger: Yes, when the Arabic world was the dominant civilization in that area. They developed great agricultural techniques, they had amazing architecture, they had great philosophy …
Kluge: …Canal construction …
Enzensberger: … philosophy, they had medicine, mathematics, astronomy.
Text: Averroes, physician and scientist (1126-1198)
Enzensberger: It was simply the dominant …
Kluge: Even Aristotle we read because of their translation.
Enzensberger: Yes, it was the leading cultural power. And since then this civilization has experienced a process of slow decline. And not just the Europeans had a hand in that, but also the Romans, the Turkish …
Kluge: …the Mongols …
Enzensberger: … the Mongols, they were all involved, yes. And since then they have this sense of a loss of meaning, they feel that they have become objects of history, when they used to be the subjects of history. And I think that also plays a huge role, right up to terrorism. They are taking revenge for the experienced humiliation, and it does not matter who the perpetrator was. Now it is the Americans, but of course back then they were completely irrelevant. The Americans weren’t there in the 18th century.
Enzensberger: If you go to the big square in one of these oriental cities, at night, when the sun is setting, be it Marrakesh or Sansaa, the atmosphere is going to be incredibly relaxed. There is still something left of what we always imagined as children, a kind of serenity, the remains of a joie-de-vivre, despite all the poverty …
Kluge: Is it the time of the agricultural revolution? Is it the time of the middle-ages? Could you say that?
Enzensberger: Something old is still there. Something that you can’t … the different ways people are dressed … in a place like that, if you know your way around, or if you have a good guide, you can see: this guy is from this part of the country, because he’s wearing a white djellabah, he has a white cloth, and headgear. Anyway, in that place, that night, everything is peaceful, relaxed, laid-back … and there is some activity, there is some conversation, and there is a fire-eater and a storyteller, and there is a marketeer with all kinds of goods. They bring their children along, it is informal, and there is something about it that comes very close to the beautiful side of our fantasy of the Orient.
Kluge: Put yourself in the position of Karl Marx in the year of his death.
Text: Karl Marx
Kluge: He has pneumonia, he travels to Algiers and dies there. If you try to put yourself in his place. What did he see? He gets there with the entire Occident in his head, the economy. Capitalism pushes things forward like in a greenhouse.
Enzensberger: Yes, yes. Maybe he was happy to get to a place where this merciless mechanism had not yet developed its full power.
Kluge: He travels 300 years into the past …
Enzensberger: Yes, yes. And that perspective, that we have these different layers of time that you deal with when you step outside your own world a little. You can encounter that anywhere, you can encounter that in the Chinese back-country, in a Chinese village. I think it teaches us something about the fact that we are never quite simultaneous.
Kluge: … that the time provision of the planet —
Enzensberger: Yes, that we are not just “people of the present”, that is very little of it.
Kluge: It would be a different kind of vacation and relaxation, to immerse yourself into a different time, during which …
Enzensberger: Yes, yes. With all the ambiguity, because of course there is also old things that are horrible. It isn’t as if it was idyllic.
Kluge: And it is boring too.
Enzensberger: Yes, it is kind of boring. Full of old conflicts, but also full of old beauty. I mean, one thing in Europe that has always terribly bothered me about our modernism is “the ban of the ornament” that this guy Loos declared in Vienna. That was completely forbidden. You have to be completely …
Kluge: … objective.
Enzensberger: Be objective. Blocks … everything has to be rectangular, and there can be no adornments. In the 1950s, they removed everything from our Wilhelminian style houses.
Kluge: Not because they took pleasure in reason, but in frugality.
Enzensberger: … they ripped everything down. Every house from the Wilhelminian era looks different, one has a few angels, one has a couple of lion’s heads … They tore everything down.
Kluge: The pathos of classical modernity.
Enzensberger: Yes. Everything had to be torn down, and of course, the Oriental is an antidote to this, because the ornament, beginning with writing …
Text: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer
Enzensberger: … with calligraphy. This was not the same kind of disenchantment of the world, rather there is still an incredible vegetation, aesthetic vegetation. Everything is basically sprawling. If you look at the Alhambra - I mean it is breathtaking! And I think we can regain some of that, regain some of the lost aesthetic of recognizeability. If all the houses look the same, isn’t that sad? But not over there, over there everyone is creating their own ornament. That is much better!
Enzensberger: Of course a central place in any oriental city is the bazaar, or the souk, and if you are lucky … you have to imagine, a German Studies scholar at the University of Fes who speaks a wonderful German … if you talk to him about literature, he is a very international man; he accompanies me through the Medina of Fes, so basically the souk. But then it turns out that he was born there, he shows us the house, a pretty run down house that was originally inhabited by his family. But by now people, migrants from the countryside, unemployed people, have settled down in the Medina. So the Medina decays, but it remains irreplaceable as marketplace and is still the heart of the city. We walk around there, and he knows everyone. Everyone recognizes him, he is greeted by everyone, and we are safe, no one advertises anything, but we are welcome anywhere, we get samples, people say “Please, try this.” Nuts, everything. And he is a kind of Vergil, the Psychopompos, he shows me around, and we get to the alley of the hatters, where you can find headgear that basically no one is wearing anymore. They still make Fez, they prepare the felt, they have a steam press that they use to shape the hat. Then there is an alley where they recycle shoes, broken shoes, as the people there are poor. A worn out shoe with holes that is no longer good – there are specialists. There is someone who buys these broken shoes, then he auctions them off to cobblers who repair the shoes. They are special cobblers, almost their own “caste”, their own alley at the bazaar, where the shoes are fixed and then resold to people who cannot afford new shoes. The souk – the whole thing is an incredibly complex structure. Of course there is also a lot of tacky things. The Orientals are irresistibly attracted to pomp, so that even the poor buy presents for baptisms, for weddings that are incredibly, frenetically kitschy, you could say. They are not necessarily nice things, but that is taken care of also. The poor – the poorer one is, the more one has to …
Kluge: … invest.
Enzensberger: … to celebrate, to spend. If it is a once in a lifetime thing, they go all out, and there are these sprawling, silver, splendid baskets … a raving …
Kluge: Completely useless, in regard to their practical value.
Enzensberger: Yes, nonsense, complete nonsense! Of course there are also specific alleys for that, so that this entire structure, the souk, is a cosmos that mirrors the entire society with all its things. Of course there is also all the plastic stuff. Then there are internet cafés, or shops where you can make a phone call to Europe, because they are all emigrating, all the working immigrants in Europe, you have to be able to talk to them on the phone! But people don’t have phones, that’s why there are little booths where you can make a phone call to France or Spain for very little money, by means of some kind of ploy, where the exploited worker in Andalusia can talk to his family. He also sends money home, so there are also informal banking systems, where you do not wire money, but use “confidence men”, and they also sit there. The more hours you spend in a souk, if you have a guide like this German Studies scholar, the more likely you are to experience how the whole thing is articulated, very delicately, the products differentiated by needs that are all available in the micro-cosmos of the souk.
Text: Hymn on the travel report
Kluge: So, the travelogue, let us praise the travelogue. After all, it is basically the literary form in Ancient Times, and it explodes in the 18th century.
Enzensberger: Yes, sure. I mean the greatest of all is Herodot, he’s fantastic!
Kluge: One long travelogue reaching back to the origins of the world.
Enzensberger: And partly from hearsay, you don’t have to have been everywhere yourself, you also have to keep an ear out for what other people are saying, what they have to tell! Or Khaldun, the great Arabic traveler who wrote a description of the entire world, he traveled the entire world that was known back then, this guy Ibn Khaldun. A great book! Characters like that. We also have a few, we have Humboldt, for instance. He also was someone like that, they are “poets of reality”, if that’s what you want to call them. The most intelligent among the scientists say:
Text: Alexander von Humboldt
Enzensberger: The more we discover, that is, the more we know, the more the amount of things we don’t know grows as well. It’s very interesting.
Text: EUROPE’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE ORIENT / A travelogue by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Kluge: But also the curiosity.
Enzensberger: Yes, that doesn’t stop, but I mean, it is very clear that for the cosmologists, for instance, the world they want to explore becomes bigger and bigger; first they looked at the moon, the shape of the Earth, then the solar system and so on. We will never run out of things unknown.