Literature Is Freedom

Acceptance speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (the Peace Prizeof the German Booksellers' Association).

The Peace Prize, which comes with a cash award of €15,000, is awarded by the German Bookseller’sAssociation every year since 1950. It is given in recognition of an individual’s lifetime work in the fieldsof literature, art or science which contributes to the promotion of peace. Other illustrious recipientsinclude Hermann Hesse, Vaclav Havel, Jürgen Habermas, and last year’s winner Chinua Acheba from Nigeria.

Sontag was hailed for her "exceptional sense of morality and immorality". She is no diplomat,the association’s director Dieter Schormann said in his address at Frankfurt's Paulskirche, adding thatSontag sees her first duty in speaking the truth. "In a world of false images and distorted truths, shedefends the honor of free thought."

President Johannes Rau, Minister of the Interior Otto Schily, State Minister of Culture Christina Weiss,the Lord Mayor of Frankfurt Petra Roth, Vice-President of the Bundestag Antje Vollmer, your excellencies,other distinguished guests, honored colleagues, friends ... among them, dear Ivan Nagel:

To speak in the Paulskirche, before this audience, to receive the prize awarded in the last fifty-threeyears by the German Book Trade to so many writers, thinkers, and exemplary public figures whom I admire -- tospeak in this history-charged place and on this occasion, is a humbling and inspiring experience. I can onlythe more regret the deliberate absence of the American ambassador, Mr. Daniel Coats, whose immediate refusal,in June, of the invitation from the Booksellers Association, when this year's Friedenspreis was announced, toattend our gathering here today, shows he is more interested in affirming the ideological stance and therancorous reactiveness of the Bush administration than he is, by fulfilling a normal diplomatic duty, inrepresenting the interests and reputation of his -- and my -- country.

Ambassador Coats has chosen not to be here, I assume, because of criticisms I have voiced, in newspaper andtelevision interviews and in brief magazine articles, of the new radical bent of American foreign policy, asexemplified by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He should be here, I think, because a citizen of thecountry he represents in Germany has been honored with an important German prize.

An American ambassador has the duty to represent his country, all of it. I, of course, do not representAmerica, not even that substantial minority that does not support the imperial program of Mr. Bush and hisadvisors. I like to think I do not represent anything but literature, a certain idea of literature, andconscience, a certain idea of conscience or duty. But, mindful of the citation for this prize from a majorEuropean country, which mentions my role as an "intellectual ambassador" between the two continents(ambassador, needless to say, in the weakest, merely metaphorical sense), I cannot resist offering a fewthoughts about the renowned gap between Europe and the United States, which my interests and enthusiasmspurportedly bridge.

First, is it a gap -- which continues to be bridged? Or is it not also a conflict? Irate, dismissivestatements about Europe, certain European countries, are now the common coin of American political rhetoric;and here, at least in the rich countries on the western side of the continent, anti-American sentiments aremore common, more audible, more intemperate than ever. What is this conflict? Does it have deep roots? I thinkit does.

There has always been a latent antagonism between Europe and America, one at least as complex andambivalent as that between parent and child. America is a neo-European country and, until the last fewdecades, was largely populated by European peoples. And yet it is always the differences between Europe andAmerica that have struck the most perceptive European observers: Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the youngnation in 1831 and returned to France to write Democracy in America, still, some hundred and seventy yearslater, the best book about my country, and D.H. Lawrence, who, eighty years ago, published the mostinteresting book ever written about American culture, his influential, exasperating Studies in ClassicAmerican Literature, both understood that America, the child of Europe, was becoming, or had become, theantithesis of Europe.

Rome and Athens. Mars and Venus. The authors of recent popular tracts promoting the idea of an inevitableclash of interests and values between Europe and America did not invent these antitheses. Foreigners broodedover them -- and they provide the palette, the recurrent melody, in much of American literature throughout the19th century, from James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, Henry James, William DeanHowells, and Mark Twain. American innocence and European sophistication; American pragmatism and Europeanintellectualizing; American energy and European world-weariness; American naïveté and European cynicism;American goodheartedness and European malice; American moralism and the European arts of compromise -- youknow the tunes.

You can choreograph them differently; indeed, they have been danced with every kind of evaluation or tiltfor two tumultuous centuries. Europhiles can use the venerable antitheses to identify America withcommerce-driven barbarism and Europe with high culture, while the Europhobes draw on a ready-made view inwhich America stands for idealism and openness and democracy and Europe a debilitating, snobbish refinement.Tocqueville and Lawrence observed something fiercer: not just a declaration of independence from Europe, andEuropean values, but a steady undermining, an assassination of European values and European power. "Youcan never have a new thing without breaking an old," Lawrence wrote. "Europe happened to be the oldthing. America should be the new thing. The new thing is the death of the old." America, Lawrencedivined, was on a Europe-destroying mission, using democracy -- particularly cultural democracy, democracy ofmanners -- as an instrument. And when that task is accomplished, he went on, America might well turn fromdemocracy to something else. (What that might be is, perhaps, emerging now.)

Bear with me if my references have been exclusively literary. After all, one function of literature -- ofimportant literature, of necessary literature -- is to be prophetic. What we have here, writ large, is theperennial literary -- or cultural -- quarrel: between the ancients and the moderns.

The past is (or was) Europe, and America was founded on the idea of breaking with the past, which is viewedas encumbering, stultifying, and -- in its forms of deference and precedence, its standards of what issuperior and what is best -- fundamentally undemocratic, or "elitist," the reigning current synonym.Those who speak for a triumphal America continue to intimate that American democracy implies repudiatingEurope, and, yes, embracing a certain liberating, salutary barbarism. If, today, Europe is regarded by mostAmericans as more socialist than elitist, that still makes Europe, by American standards, a retrogradecontinent, obstinately attached to old standards: the welfare state. "Make it new" is not only aslogan for culture; it describes an ever-advancing, world-encompassing economic machine.

However, if necessary, even the "old" can be rebaptized as the "new."

It is not a coincidence that the strong-minded American Secretary of Defense tried to drive a wedge withinEurope -- distinguishing unforgettably between an "old" Europe (bad) and a "new" Europe(good). How did Germany, France, and Belgium come to be consigned to "old" Europe, while Spain,Italy, Poland, Ukraine, The Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria find themselves part of"new" Europe? Answer: to support the United States in its present extensions of political andmilitary power is, by definition, to pass into the more desirable category of the "new." Whoever iswith us is "new."

All modern wars, even when their aims are the traditional ones, such as territorial aggrandizement or theacquisition of scarce resources, are cast as clashes of civilizations -- culture wars -- with each sideclaiming the high ground, and characterizing the other as barbaric. The enemy is invariably a threat to"our way of life," an infidel, a desecrator, a polluter, a defiler of higher or better values. Thecurrent war against the very real threat posed by militant Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly clearexample. What is worth remarking is that a milder version of the same terms of disparagement underlies theantagonism between Europe and America. It should also be remembered that, historically, the most virulentanti-American rhetoric ever heard in Europe -- consisting essentially in the charge that Americans arebarbarians -- came not from the so-called left but from the extreme right. Both Hitler and Franco repeatedlyinveighed against an America (and a world Jewry) engaged in polluting European civilization with its base,business values.

Of course, much of European public opinion continues to admire American energy, the American version of"the modern." And, to be sure, there have always been American fellow-travelers of the Europeancultural ideals (one stands here before you), who find in the old arts of Europe correction and a liberationfrom the strenuous mercantilist biases of American culture. And there have always been the counterparts ofsuch Americans on the European side: Europeans who are fascinated, enthralled, profoundly attracted to theUnited States, precisely because of its difference from Europe.

What the Americans see is almost the reverse of the Europhile cliché: they see themselves defendingcivilization. The barbarian hordes are no longer outside the gates. They are within, in every prosperous city,plotting havoc. The "chocolate-producing" countries (France, Germany, Belgium) will have to standaside, while a country with "will" -- and God on its side -- pursues the battle against terrorism(now conflated with barbarism). According to Secretary of State Powell, it is ridiculous for old Europe(sometimes it seems only France is meant) to aspire to play a role in governing or administering theterritories won by the coalition of the conqueror. It has neither the military resources nor the taste forviolence nor the support of its cosseted, all-too-pacific populations. And the Americans have it right.Europeans are not in an evangelical -- or a bellicose -- mood.

Indeed, sometimes I have to pinch myself to be sure I am not dreaming: that what many people in my owncountry now hold against Germany, which wreaked such horrors on the world for nearly a century -- the new"German problem," as it were -- is that Germans are repelled by war; that much of German publicopinion is now virtually ... pacifist!

Were America and Europe never partners, never friends? Of course. But perhaps it is true that the periodsof unity -- of common feeling ---have been exceptions, rather than the rule. One such time was from the SecondWorld War through the early Cold War, when Europeans were profoundly grateful for America's intervention,succor, and support. Americans are comfortable seeing themselves in the role of Europe's savior. But then,America will expect the Europeans to be forever grateful, which is not what Europeans are feeling right now.

From "old" Europe's point of view, America seems bent on squandering the admiration -- andgratitude -- felt by most Europeans. The immense sympathy for the United States in the aftermath of the attackon September 11, 2001 was genuine. (I can testify to its resounding ardor and sincerity in Germany; I was inBerlin at the time.) But what has followed is an increasing estrangement on both sides. The citizens of therichest and most powerful nation in history have to know that America is loved, and envied ... and resented.More than a few who travel abroad know that Americans are regarded as crude, boorish, uncultivated by manyEuropeans, and don't hesitate to match these expectations with behavior that suggests the ressentiment of theex-colonials. And some of the cultivated Europeans who seem most to enjoy visiting or living in the UnitedStates attribute to it, condescendingly, the liberating ambiance of a colony where one can throw off therestrictions and high-culture burdens of "back home." I recall being told by a German film-maker,living at the time in San Francisco, that he loved being in the States "because you don't have anyculture here." For more than a few Europeans, including, it should be mentioned, D.H. Lawrence("there the life comes up from the roots, crude but vital," he wrote to a friend in 1915, when hewas making plans to live in America), America was the great escape. And vice versa: Europe was the greatescape for generations of Americans seeking "culture." Of course, I am speaking only of minoritieshere, minorities of the privileged.

So America now sees itself as the defender of civilization and Europe's savior, and wonders why Europeansdon't get the point; and Europeans see America as a reckless warrior state -- a description that the Americansreturn by seeing Europe as the enemy of America: only pretending, so runs rhetoric heard increasingly in theUnited States, to be pacifist, in order to contribute to the weakening of American power. France in particularis thought to be scheming to become America's equal, even its superior, in shaping world affairs --"Operation America Must Fail" is the name invented by a columnist in the New York Times to describethe French drive toward dominance -- instead of realizing that an American defeat in Iraq will encourage"radical Muslim groups -- from Baghdad to the Muslim slums of Paris" to pursue their jihad againsttolerance and democracy.

It is hard for people not to see the world in polarizing terms ("them" and us") and theseterms have in the past strengthened the isolationist theme in American foreign policy as much as they nowstrengthen the imperialist theme. Americans have got used to thinking of the world in terms of enemies.Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always "over there," with Islamicfundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace to "our wayof life." And terrorist is a more flexible word than communist. It can unify a larger number of quitedifferent struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless -- since there willalways be some terrorism (as there will always be poverty and cancer); that is, there will always beasymmetrical conflicts in which the weaker side uses that form of violence, which usually targets civilians.American rhetoric, if not the popular mood, would support this unhappy prospect, for the struggle forrighteousness never ends.

It is the genius of the United States, a profoundly conservative country in ways that Europeans finddifficult to fathom, to have devised a form of conservative thinking that celebrates the new rather than theold. But this is also to say, that in the very ways in which the United States seems extremely conservative -for example, the extraordinary power of the consensus and the passivity and conformism of public opinion (asTocqueville remarked in 1831) and the media – it is also radical, even revolutionary, in ways that Europeansfind equally difficult to fathom.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americansare constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the center of everypolitician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of alltraditions except those redefined as "identities" that can be accepted as part of larger patterns ofdistinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

Perhaps the most important source of the new (and not so new) American radicalism is what used to be viewedas a source of conservative values: namely, religion. Many commentators have noted that perhaps the biggestdifference between the United States and most European countries (old as well as new according to currentAmerican distinction) is that in the United States religion still plays a central role in society and publiclanguage. But this is religion American style: more the idea of religion than religion itself.

True, when, during George Bush's run for president in 2000, a journalist was inspired to ask the candidateto name his "favorite philosopher," the well-received answer -- one that would make a candidate forhigh office from any centrist party here in any European country a laughing stock -- was "JesusChrist." But, of course, Bush didn't mean, and was not understood to mean, that, if elected, hisadministration would actually feel bound by any of the precepts or social programs expounded by Jesus.

The United States is a generically religious society. That is, in the United States it's not importantwhich religion you adhere to, as long as you have one. To have a ruling religion, even a theocracy, that wouldbe just Christian (or a particular Christian denomination) would be impossible. Religion in America must be amatter of choice.