1 The simultaneity of different time scales

Time moves in a strange way in my head. Some time in the past I was a little boy of six, running along the Lindenstraße in Teplice in Czechia, which was then part of Germany. I don't remember this, but there is a family snapshot that shows me smiling as I run, and it was the summer of 1940, the second year of the war. I do remember that I had a Czech friend. Zde bydlí Peter Horn, narodil se 7. prosince 1934 v Teplicích-Šenovu. Czechs were second class citizens then in Teplice. Now in the year 2000, as I listen to my Turkish neighbours in the dilapidated building across my backyard in Berlin Kreuzberg, I remember Cape Town, the call to prayer from the mosque in Lansdown, which used to wake me early in the morning. I have memories, and where my memories cease, I have records, books, pictures, movies.

Yesterday evening I watched the third part of the film "Erfolg", based on the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, which describes his life with Bertolt Brecht and Luise Fleisser in the Munich of the early twenties, the novel is about a blatant miscarriage of justice in right-wing Bavaria, and the rise of Hitler up to the Putsch-attempt of the 9th November 1923. Later Brecht and Feuchtwanger moved to Berlin, the place to be, then and now. The film ends with Hitler, wounded, being carried off by his cronies, who commandeer the car of Tüverlin, the writer (a fictional portrait of Feuchtwanger himself), and drive off. The film ends with Tüverlin saying: "We will hear of this guy, still". That is, as far as I am concerned, prehistory. But this prehistory was becoming very potent at the very moment when I was born in 1934.

Not that fascism was an exclusively German invention. There were movements like that all over Europe, Mussolini and his fascists in Italy, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, the "Firecross" movement in France, the Quisling movement in Norway, the Belgian group under Léon Degrelle, the underground movement "Ustachi" in Croatia (which in 1934 was responsible for the murder of Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister Jean Louis Barthou), the Kukluxklan in America, the Integralistas in Brazil, the militarists and nationalists of the "Imperial Way" in Japan, the Ossewa Brandwag in South Africa. But while these movements mostly belonged to the lunatic fringe, in Germany they became the government one year before I was born. And in 1934 they started to murder those within the movement which were no longer in line with this new role of the party, the leader of the S.A., Ernst Röhm and his friends. While the Nazis were demonstrating to all the world that they were really peaceful by concluding a nonaggression pact with Poland, they organised a revolt in Austria, and murdered Engelbert Dollfuß. In 1934 Arnold J. Toynbee starts to publish »A Study of History« which will grow to ten volumes until 1954, by which time I will have completed my matric. But what is the use of history? Paul Hindemith (39) composes »Mathis der Maler«, which years later became one of my most admired pieces of modern music.

Then, there is a present, which in some ways seems to be a replay of the past, half outrageous, half burlesque. Jörg Haider and his neo-fascists become part of a democratically elected government in Austria. The theatre director Schlingensief in Vienna organises a bitterly satirical replay of the most popular German TV reality show, "Big Brother", where people spend a month in a container, constantly under surveillance of TV cameras which broadcast their every move over satellites into every German home; but the people in Schlingensief's show are not exhibitionists, they are real asylum seekers who play themselves. He asks the public to vote, on who should be deported. It seems, the Austrians don't like foreigners, especially those who are poor and non-European. Neither do the Germans, particularly in the ex-socialist ex-GDR, who regularly beat up non-European-looking individuals who happen to venture into the less populated rural areas. On June 14, for example, in the dreary little town of Dessau three rightwing thugs murdered a Mozambican who lived in Germany since the eighties. Neither do the neo-nazis in every other European country.

But then, neither do South Africans, who do not like people who are black like themselves, but do not speak any one of the eleven official languages. "Illegal aliens" from Maputo or Nigeria are occasionally beaten up or beaten to death here, too. Of course, these murderous xenophobes are nowhere in the majority yet, I say: yet. Kreuzberg, a suburb of Berlin, at least as far as I can gather, seems to be a place where people of all derivations and languages seem to mix quite happily, and where even Africans speak a faultless Berlin dialect. It is reputed to be the second biggest Turkish town in the world. It is one of the most lively places in Berlin at the moment.

Besides watching reality TV, Germans, who used to keep their money in a box under their bed not so long ago, have discovered the stock market and go really crazy on technology stock which is long in promise and short in delivery. In 1929 Americans used easy credit to do the same, until the whole bubble burst on a very black Friday. I am not the only one who sees the analogies. In the year I was born, the United States devalued the dollar to 59,6% of its previous value. Again, not something unknown in present day South Africa. Times intertwine, and I remember that I lived through a Währungsreform in 1948, when the mark was devalued one to ten. And my parents lived through an inflation when one billion Marks bought a postage stamp. The rise of Hitler had something to do with this capitalism run wild, with globalization, the feeling of many that they were left out of this wonderful world, and that their identity was getting lost in an unloved modernity and cosmopolitan sameness. The resurgence of neo-nazism in Europe and of xenophobia is an answer to the same experience, although definitely the wrong one.

Not everything is present at the same time in my consciousness. Things surface and often I do not even know why. While Turkish teenagers play soccer in the yard below, and bang the ball forcefully against the wooden gate of the yard, the sound reverberating in the echo chamber of the yard surrounded by six stories of forty square metre flats, I ask myself why I am so sensitive when it comes to noise. Perhaps it has something to do with the two earthshaking bangs which the Americans used to end the war against Japan. I was ten years old then, but it took me another ten years to understand more or less what it meant. The scientific basis for these super bombs, by the way, was found by Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot in the year of my birth, when they produced the first radioactive elements.

In order to reconcile us with these horrifying prospects the scientists told us that there were peaceful uses for atomic power and built these clean and shining nuclear reactors, and we were prepared to believe them until Chernobyl. Germany has decided to give up nuclear power (very slowly, it will take about 32 years until the last reactor is switched off). The cost of switching off one reactor is in excess of three billion Rand. Until the last one is switched off, there will probably be a few more Chernobyls. Until this very day nobody knows how to evacuate one and a half million Capetonians when our own little plaything blows up accidentally. Technology is always prone to blowing up, and as I use the computer as a daily tool, I have little faith in computers controlling anything, let alone nuclear power stations. Too often complete stories and essays have disappeared in inexplicable crashes of the virus called Windows.

The great artists have always known that underneath the hectic pace of daily news and progress, constantly speeding up and enveloping us in a haze of incomprehensible and indigestible information, history has another pace, slowly, inexorably, but much less visible. That is why so few can foresee what is going to happen suddenly tomorrow. Hardly anybody foresaw the fall of the apartheid system so soon, and even fewer predicted when the Berlin wall was going to fall, but looking back now, being much wiser, we can trace the cracks which made their fall a certainty. And even underneath that is a time which moves in millions of years and slowly deposits sand, mud and the skeletons of extinct animals on the sea floor and then slowly lifts them up again to form mountains. From time to time we experience these very slow movements as sudden violent jolts of the earth in Izmit in Turkey or in Sumatra.

There are those that live by the hectic twitches of the Dow Jones, from second to second, their fate bound to the rise and fall of a curve, to the information which travels through wires and by way of satellites, and declare that that alone is reality, the rest is for dreamers. But then maybe the dreamers know something which the jumping jacks whose strings are pulled by the anonymous market do not know. Goethe once said: "The one who acts is without a conscience. Only the one who contemplates has a conscience." The problem is that the one who contemplates does nothing to change what he contemplates with horror like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, always looking towards the ruins of the past. Tüverlin, the mouthpiece and alter ego of Lion Feuchtwanger, ponders the sentence of Karl Marx, that the philosophers have explained the world, but now we should change it. He counters: the only way to change the world, is to explain it. If one explains it in a plausible way one changes it in a quiet way by reason which continues to have an effect. Feuchtwanger's, and for that matter nobody's explanations have saved us from Hitler, Verwoerd, or the Americans in Vietnam. Power corrupts, but not having power makes one helpless.

2 The reflection of the flames of Dresden in my subconscious

In the night from the 13th to the 14th February 1945 two of my cousins and an uncle died of asphyxiation in the firestorm of Dresden. The flames were visible across the mountains of the Erzgebirge in Teplice, and I remember standing on the darkened street and watching the red sky in the North, not really understanding what had happened. I was ten then. I did not understand that this atrocity was the consequence of many other atrocities like the bombardment of Rotterdam, which initiated the total war against civilians. On the last day of the war, the 8th of May, I nearly became the victim of what must have been one of the very last bombings of the war, one day after the capitulation of the German Wehrmacht was signed by general Alfred Jodl. During war kids play war games. I and two friends were deploying vast armies of tin soldiers and plastic tanks in a landscape of barbed wire and trenches on the terrace above my father's workshop, closed at the time because all workers had been called up as soldiers. I was ten at the time, and war and soldiers to us were still exciting. When we met a wounded German officer in the park of our town which had many military hospitals because of its thermal springs, we marched past them in style, saluting in the best Prussian manner. Teplice-Sanov was the place Goethe and Beethoven used to spent their summer holidays, because of its thermal springs, and it is still a spa today. Not that I was much concerned about Goethe or Beethoven then. We had not been to school for months because school was interrupted every day by lengthy air raids, and because every teacher except the oldest and most unfit had been called up for the last desperate attempt to stop the Russian army, the Volkssturm. Even women had been conscripted for war services of various kinds.

Suddenly there were the sounds of aircraft, and although there had been no air raid warning, we jumped up and started to race towards the door of my bedroom, not a moment too soon. Although the five low-flying aircraft carried the German national emblem, they turned towards our house and started to fire their machine guns. I do not know how we reached the staircase of our second floor flat: both the bed room walls and the walls of the long passage to the front part of the flat were riddled with bullet holes and every window was shattered. As we opened the front door of the flat, pieces of rubble were rolling towards us over the staircase from further up the house, where, as we found out later, a small bomb had hit, and thick clouds of dust were enveloping the interior of the house. From below I heard my mother screaming my name, until I answered her hoarsely. My father, who was on leave from the army, after he had been severely wounded the third time in Russia, raced up the stairs towards us. The house was filled with people who had run in from the street — there was a sale of military surplus clothing going on at that time in my father's shop which no longer sold his wonderful hand carved articles — and there was pandemonium because some people were streaming in, others were attempting to get out of the house, because they believed the house was about to collapse from the bomb which had hit it.

Finally we struggled through the narrow passage and the door onto the street and across into the park, and as we flopped down under the trees, a little girl of my age was hit in the stomach. An air raid protection officer came racing along the street, shouting that we should file down to the central air raid shelter in a tunnel under the mountain. There we sat for the rest of the day in semidarkness, the electricity was out, a few flickering candles were illuminating gaunt faces.

I started to remember this vividly, not only because the older one gets, the nearer the memories of one's youth tend to become, but because I was watching reports about the fighting in Chechenya, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia. The atrocities there, the fugitives from the war, mutilation and starvation, are not essentially different from the terror unleashed on the civilians of nearly all European countries by the warring nations in the Second World War. In Sierra Leone hands and arms of civilians are amputated to demonstrate the power of warlords over a few diamond mines. Wole Soyinka reminded us recently that it was Belgian King Leopold of the so-called Congo Free State who started the practice of amputating the hands of the children of his enemies. But, says Soyinka: "This brutal method now seems to have spread like some psycho virus to warlords, including Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in Sierra Leone." The causes for strife and war in Europe were as ridiculous then as they are now in Africa or Russia: a strip of barren sand, the prestige of a leader, access to a harbour, to which everybody could have access peacefully, an oil well or a diamond mine to enrich a greedy politician. Like Hitler, when he talks to foreigners, Putin is all for peace and a negotiated settlement in Chechenya, but at home he knows that he has been elected because of the war, and he finds one excuse after another why the negotiations cannot yet start, and why the atrocities have to continue. The fact that Russia was humiliated after the fall of Communism, that it was cut up and is in political and economic turmoil, not unlike Germany after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, does not bode well for the future.

In Ethiopia millions of people are starving, while the army uses up a million dollar a day to fight a senseless war. The multitude of regional conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa led to a near-doubling in arms sales there. Compared to the traditional big-spenders, of course, such as Saudi Arabia and Taiwan, sub-Saharan Africa represents only a small fraction of the world market. But its share rose from 1.8 percent to 3.0 percent last year, as much as Latin America which has incomparably more wealth. Three-quarters of sub-Saharan countries are in conflict, or threatened by armed groups, for reasons as much to do with economics as politics. More than half the world's conflicts are in the region. And while Africa no doubt still feels the consequences of colonialism, Wole Soyinka is certainly right, when he reminds us: "Certainly, in Africa today the terrible suffering is not caused by external enemies, but from within. African leaders have created one another as their own worst enemies. And they are dragging their populations down into the abyss as they seek to establish their own individual domination."

In June 1945 my family was deported from the country where my ancestors had lived at least since the time of the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648), probably since the thirteenth century, when Slav princes invited German peasants to populate their swamps and forests. That is as far back as the records go, the Thirty Years War devastated Bohemia, and most churches and their records went up in flames. That war ostensibly was about religion: Protestants were fighting against Catholics. In reality it was about power and wealth, and the Catholic king of France fought on the side of the Protestant princes of the North against his Catholic Archenemy, the Habsburg emperor of Austria. It seems that wars were part of my family as far back as one can remember.

In June 1945 we trekked on foot across the mountains, pulling an open-frame handcart with a few of our possessions, my mother pushing a pram with my youngest brother who was just over one year old then. A friendly Russian soldier who overtook us in his truck offered us a lift. My mother and my youngest brother were given a seat in the cabin of one truck, my father and I sat on the back of the next one. When we reached the border, the Czech customs officers did not see my mother but they stopped the truck we were on and ordered us down, with our handcart. They rummaged through our meagre possessions and took whatever took their fancy and finally let us go, to walk on foot the many weary kilometres to Dresden.

One of my very vivid memories is, how eventually we walked through the devastated streets of Dresden, miles and miles of ruins, not knowing whether I would ever see my mother again. As a ten year old I had innocently and ignorantly played with war toys on the terrace of my home in Teplice. The sight of Dresden has cured me forever from this dangerous addiction.

We had all hoped in 1945 that everybody had learned the lesson: war does not benefit anybody but the producers of weapons and war material and a few politicians who put their hands in the till when weapons are sold or bought for billions of dollars. Instead we lived for another 45 years in a history of cold and hot wars, with the fear that a single bomb could accomplish more effectively what hundreds of bombers had achieved in that night of the 13th to the 14th February 1945 in Dresden. When the cold war was finally over in 1990, military budgets were drastically reduced, and we all heaved a sigh of relief. There was even a hope that the superpowers would dismantle their monstrous atom bombs. But, as a recent study has shown, military budgets are increasing again, even in South Africa, where no serious enemy can be seen on the horizon, but where the military insist they need their very expensive toys to protect us against poachers on our coastlines. And the president of the United States indulges in the same fantasies of omnipotence and inviolability which his predecessor had given the name Star Wars.

3 The Berlin Wall Memorial in the Bernauer Straße:
In memory of Jürgen Fuchs

All that which is past (the title of a book by Jürgen Fuchs's friend Manès Sperber), is not yet over and done with, as Jürgen Fuchs said in the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena in November 1997 at the conference Literature and Freedom - Literature and Dictatorship: "It is written in books, we can quote it and relate it to other events. But the hatred, too, is alive, the killing of people, the persecution, the threats, the evictions, the intimidations and the ethnic cleansing are still occurring here and now."

When I met Jürgen Fuchs at the Faultline Conference in July 1996 in Cape Town, he was already a dead man waiting for the inevitable end. I did not know it then, nor later. He was, for a dead man, extremely alive, until the very last time when we met in Berlin in October 1998. He knew, and fought his fate with all the weapons of modern medicine, but he also knew that there was no hope. If you live without hope, you do not despair any more.

The cancer which was eating up his blood may have been an ordinary illness, aggravated by the wrong treatment while he was in jail in the GDR. It is, however, nearly certain that he was subjected to radiation in jail. The final proof has not been found, but a number of documents of the Stasi, the secret police of the GDR, point in that direction.

On the 18th of May this year, the anniversary of Jürgen Fuchs's death, friends of Jürgen Fuchs and the ex-GDR songwriter Gerulf Pannach, who died under suspicious circumstances one year earlier, assembled at the Berlin Wall Memorial in the Bernauer Straße, where a fragment of the Wall still stands, and where a cemetery reminds us of those who died in their attempt to flee from East Berlin. A tape was played, which was smuggled out from the GDR under the most difficult circumstances and which was broadcast shortly after Jürgen Fuchs was jailed. On this tape Fuchs reads some of his stories and poems and Pannach sings some of his songs. It was moving to hear the matter of fact, yet passionate voice of the young student, recorded in his own home under the most difficult circumstances, with the Stasi parked outside.

In Jena he said of others, writers from Iran and Algeria, Bosnia and Serbia, Russia and India, but what he said is true in the first instance about his own life: "Contributions by authors and journalists, who only accept the facts and their conscience, often come about in hardship, in inner or external custody, without any guarantees, perhaps without a chance to find their way to an audience. Things like these come about as a never-the-less, as a resistance, without any patronage, without prizes. There is a price to pay, however. It could be one's own life, that of one's next of kin, friends and colleagues. To do it or to leave it alone, to stay or to flee, to be silent or to talk, to write it down or to forget it, that is not an easy decision under these circumstances." Jürgen Fuchs paid the ultimate price for speaking out.

In Jena Fuchs quoted Sperber, who said about the intellectuals: "They have to lift their voice, every time when a great injustice - even if the victim is a single person - threatens to make the citizens of a state or the contemporaries indifferent, unscrupulous accomplices of the infamy. Thus the intellectual is called upon - what do I say? - is obliged to intervene wherever one needs to prevent certain deeds or to accuse, if a moral or spiritual hardship threatens to become a general danger."

Writers and journalists are still very much under fire, literally, many of them die in many countries both as war victims and as victims of state oppression. Many land in jail and are subjected to torture and intimidation. Recently the Russian media owner Vladimir Gussinsky was jailed by the same Putin, who, now on a visit in Berlin, swears he will do everything to create a climate for Western investors. And nearer home, press freedom in many African states is still a swear word. Nigeria has made international headlines with its ecological war. Shell, Agip and Elf are exploiting the oil in the Niger Delta and that has led to conflicts between the original inhabitants of the delta, the Ogoni, and the oil concerns and the government. In this escalating conflict the dictatorship of general Sani Abacha and the military junta have been accused of many human rights violations, including political murders. One of the murdered was the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, winner of the alternative Nobel Prize. With him died eleven other Ogoni. He was executed after a farcical political trial without a defence. Nearly the entire political opposition in Nigeria was either in jail or in exile. But even after the change in Nigeria, writers and intellectuals from many countries in Africa live in exile, because their life is under threat in their own countries.

Hamid Skif, an exile from Algeria, said: "I fight for my daughter and for all children in the world, so that they will not be tortured and murdered by the thieves of dreams. I do not want my country to become a cemetery. ... I will tell you about a dictatorship which I have experienced with a gun at my temple, and I will talk about the responsibility of the intellectuals and above all the writers." Alluding to one of my poems he continued: "For there are too many intellectuals who collaborate with the dictators, too many clowns with orange coloured ties, who call themselves writers and who justify dictatorships and serve them willingly." The French colonisers, he said, have murdered or exiled many Algerian writers, but the dictatorship did not end, when Algeria became independent. Skif has been silenced in Algeria to this day.

Shortly before our conference, on 18th September 1997, PEN American Center received a report concerning the trial of imprisoned Iranian writer and editor Faraj Sarkuhi, who has been charged with "espionage" -- a charge that can carry the death penalty in Iran -- and "attempting to flee Iran." The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in a speech at Qum, reported in Time-magazine January 7, 1980, said: "There is no room for play in Islam... It is deadly serious about everything." What he meant was spelled out by Behzad, the Iranian interpreter for the Western journalist V.S. Naipaul: "What he [Stalin] did in Russia we have to do in Iran. We, too, have to do a lot of killing. A lot." And the Ayatollah Khalkhali added: "The mullahs are going to rule now. We are going to have ten thousand years of the Islamic republic. The Marxists are going to go on with their Lenin. We are going to go on in the way of Khomeini." Much more modest, Hitler was satisfied with a Tausendjähriges Reich, which lasted for twelve years after all. Exiled writer Bahram Choubine from Iran quoted the Iranian muslim scholar Zamakshari: "Should I tell you about the country of disaster? It is the country of the violent regent. Tyranny crushes more than the hooves of horses, and washes away more than rivers in flood, destroys more than hot winds from the South and brings more misery than years of hunger." In his moving speech he recounted some of the horrors of the tyranny in his home country.

One of the writers, who was invited to come to Jena, but could not, because, on February 14, 1989, the religious leader of one country issued a death threat against a citizen of another country, was Salman Rushdie. On that day Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the following FATWA against Salman Rushdie: "I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death." The novel that provoked the death sentence, The Satanic Verses, is a cultural epic and so is the controversy. It involves the anger of Britain's immigrants from Pakistan, India and other countries. It includes riots and book-burnings. It has involved mullahs, presidents, demonstrators, diplomats -- and a murdered Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi. Rushdie is alive, yes, but the principle of free expression, the democratic shout, is far less audible than it was before the death edict tightened the binds between language and religious dogma. In a real sense Rushdie has become a messenger between readers and writers. He reminds us all how sensitive and precious this collaboration is, how deeply dependent on individual thought and free choice. Every book carries the burden of giving offence. But there is an intimate contract between the two participants, a joint effort of mind and heart that allows for thoughtful differences and that thrives on the prospect of understanding and conciliation.

At the time of that conference Jürgen Fuchs spent one year in the Stasi archives in the Magdalena street in Berlin. Out of that unsettling experience came his last novel, Magdalena, in which he also mentions his stay in Cape Town. In it, he, who had been jailed by a government which called itself socialist and communist, talks with the greatest respect about Jeremy Cronin, a communist, who was jailed by apartheid regime for seven years. Despite his incarceration Fuchs had remained a "democratic socialist", and he quotes the definition of that socialism by Manès Sperber: "solidarity with all those, who are victims of injustice." Fuchs remained implacably opposed to any such injustice, from whichever side: "The cholera does not make the plague more agreeable. Hitler's crimes do not justify Stalinism, Stalin's atrocities in no way justify the vile mass murders of the Nazis."

Jürgen Fuchs knew that everyone of us lives in error, at least partially, all the time. That there is no absolute truth which we can claim as our private possession. He also knew how easy it is, to be on the wrong side: the victim can so easily be the torturer, given slightly different circumstances. That gave him humility, but also made him more convincing than any ideological drummer for the one and only truth.

4 Shoot them all, God will choose or Law and freedom

The driver of a car, who was stopped by police, because he did not wear a seat belt, shot and killed two policemen. He then drove off, was stopped again by police shot two more policemen, one fatally, the other is in hospital in intensive care. Later he shot himself, and died on the way to the hospital. This sounds like the stereotypical South African event, but it happened in Dortmund in Germany. The man, it was found, had a right-wing extremist background and was in psychiatric care. He had lost his drivers licence some time ago. In his flat the police found more weapons, guns, a handgranate, and a banner which said: Shoot them all, God will choose.

Germany is a country which feels on the whole like a place where one is fairly safe, where one can move about in a big city like Berlin even at night without fear of being robbed, murdered or raped. There is a lot of visible policing, public transport has employed sufficient security personnel to make rides on the underground and buses safe, and there are many other controls on lawless behaviour. But that, of course, does not mean that there are no murders and no violence, no corruption and no robbery. Even in Germany it is not advisable to leave your flat door unlocked. Foreigners are attacked, even murdered, from time to time. Hooligans battle with police before and after soccer matches, and smash shop windows and cars. Corruption occurs even in the highest level of government, as the recent case of Helmut Kohl and the Christian Democratic Party has demonstrated. Bribe money was flowing through dark channels into secret accounts in Switzerland and Lichtenstein from weapons manufacturers into the private pockets of politicians and into party funds. There are drug lords in Berlin and organised prostitution imports sex slaves from the countries in the East. And psychopaths are released by mistake from closed clinics to continue their serial murders. So the pilfering in the public sector unleashed by the appointments of many petty thieves to senior posts, is not the prerogative of South Africa alone, and the private sector crooks flourish in Berlin as they do in Johannesburg.

But because the law enforcement functions, criminals are caught sooner rather than later, crime is held in check. The social causes of crime are not eradicated, but at least some serious attempts to alleviate poverty and unemployment are made in a state which has a basic social net. The situation is different in countries like Russia or South Africa. On the one hand, the people of these states have experienced the excesses of a totalitarian police regime and have therefore decided to reduce the power of the police to the minimum by means of constitution and through the protection of the courts. On the other hand criminals and Mafia-like operations have made use of the inexperience of the police and the great freedoms guaranteed by law to set up shop in these havens of lawlessness. The people who had just now called for freedom, now call for the strong arm of the law. Strong men like Steve Tshwete and Putin are in demand. There are calls to amend the constitution to deal with organised crime. In Russia Putin has called for the dictatorship of the law, but in this way he introduced another element of lawlessness; the very police which should protect the law and the citizens, now act in a heavy-handed and unpredictable way, often extorting bribes. The dictatorship of the law looks very much like any other dictatorship in practice.

In 1794, contemplating the events of the French Revolution, Schiller wrote his Letters concerning the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. He did this after some thorough soul searching, admitting that in times like these maybe a concern for aesthetics was out of place, when fundamental ethical and political questions had to find an answer. He realised that what the time demanded was to built the most perfect of all works of art, the construction of a true political freedom. So, in these letters he pondered the problem, how rules, regulations and the authority of the state could be reconciled with the freedom of human beings, a freedom which he considered like Kant to be at the very heart of our ethical humanity. The state, he thought, ought to be the perfect expression of the moral imperative of humanity (which, of course it hardly ever is), and as such the full expression of the best moral insights of each individual. If a person opposes a state like that, he opposes the very moral law within himself. There are two ways in which a person can come in opposition to the state: he can be totally controlled by his untutored feelings, and then he is a savage, or his ideological principles can totally control his feelings, then he is a barbarian. The state in turn can, of course be, either anarchic, when it allows all or some to follow their whims, or totalitarian, when it demands that all its citizens believe the same and act identically. Both state and individuals ideally should be equidistant from uniformity and confusion. Schiller was very aware that the "subjective human being" who tends to follow his inclinations was in constant contradiction to the objective moral necessities of the state, and that the state could not but use the full gravity of the law against its citizens and to trample down such an inimical individuality.

These questions were for Schiller not merely abstract philosophical or aesthetic questions. They were occasioned by the violent overthrow of the absolutist state, which had controlled the criminal urges of its citizen, or what it considered criminal, with the utmost severity and ruthlessness, and with barbaric punishments attempted to control the antisocial urges of the individual. Although it was by no means ideal it had nevertheless exercised the control necessary to avoid total anarchy and lawlessness. The old state, while it was tyrannical, therefore was a monster which arose out of the fact that human beings do have criminal and antisocial tendencies which need to be controlled.

Despotic states have a sound and a smell, which any bearer of a dompas will instantly recognise, no matter where it might be encountered. Early in June we went to fetch a visum for Yugoslavia. Already over the phone I recognised the tone of voice: a bellowed non-sound, no curtesy, long waiting times, no respect for citizens and visitors alike. The embassy is a posh villa in the posh district of Grunewald. But the public is accommodated in the cellar in a dingy waiting room. Again long queues, we wait for two and a half hours, until we finally arrived at the one opened window. The other remained closed despite the long queues. The lady, which looks like one of those inept South African white ladies at any government office finally informed us that she cannot give us a visum for July yet. Come back towards the end of June. Two weeks later we come back, the same procedure, the same long queues. We hand over our applications with two photos, and the invitation from the house of culture in Novi Sad. She looks at this intently then says curtly: Wait! We wait for an hour. Then we are allowed to pay 150 Rand each. Wait! Finally we get our visum. In a democratic state civil servants know that they have to serve their citizens civilly. I knew that we were well on the way, when passport officers at Cape Town airport suddenly were friendly and helpful.

The new revolutionary state in France attempted to erect the state on the principle of individual freedom, but in fact it neither succeeded in controlling the anarchy of the individuals, nor the barbarity of an imposed ideological uniformity. The idealist concepts of the Rousseauist fathers of the revolution came to naught because of the hunger, the misery and the abject poverty of the masses, who were less impressed by abstract legal freedoms than by bitter economic deprivation. In the end the new democratic state resorted to equally barbaric methods of control, and acted even more arbitrary than the absolutist state. Contemplating the senseless cruelty of the French Revolution, Schiller was deeply shocked, and attributed this lawlessness to the lower and more numerous classes and their callous drives, which were unleashed by the destruction of civil order and hurried to their animal like satisfaction with unruly and intractable rage. Belonging to the educated and bourgeois class himself he overlooked how the bourgeois and educated leaders very much used the desperate material needs of the masses to further their own political careers. Georg Büchner, the revolutionary poet of the 1830 revolt understood that much better in his drama Danton's Death. He shows both the poverty of the masses and the way in which politicians like Danton and Robbespierre use this poverty to advance their enrichment or their political power. Büchner's play would be a good model to understand what is happening in Zimbabwe at the moment.

The transition from the tyrannical apartheid state to the new South African democracy puts us in a similar situation to the one Schiller describes: the old ruthless and barbaric methods of the control by the state have been largely abandoned, at least that is the intention, but the new way of dealing with antisocial behaviour has not yet been established. Our constitution and our constitutional court are of the highest standards, and when it comes to protect the rights of the individual in court there are few states our equal. But this very perfection is viewed by many, not only whites, as contributing to an inefficient control of criminality.

The demand that the death penalty be brought back is merely the expression of the feeling of many, that the new state does not control crime with the same efficiency as the old one. The people take the law into their own hands: Hard Livings gang boss Rashaad Staggie is lynched during a People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) demonstration in the presence of police, media and emergency workers on August 8 1996. Tit-for-Tat killings then hit the Cape Flats, as a complex net of revenge attacks unfolds in the ongoing violence between rival gangs, and between gangsters and anti-drug vigilantes. Chantine Veldsman, was shot in the head at point-blank range in June 1999 in Mitchells Plain. The attacker spotted Chantine, pointed the gun just above her right ear and pulled the trigger. As Chantine collapsed, he calmly walked to a bakkie and climbed in while the driver put the car into gear. The parents of Sadicka Hendricks (4) moved after their daughter was gunned down in the driveway of their Surrey Estate home. She was hit by an R-5 bullet while on her way to crèche with her father in November. Days earlier, Christel Abrahams (7) was playing in the yard of a block of flats in Ocean View when a group of men opened fire and she died in the crossfire. Raygana Abdurahman (11) was in a taxi driving between Mitchells Plain and Bokaap with her mother when a bullet killed her in November. In March, Taryn Bush (4) and her grandmother visited friends in Manenberg. Gangsters opened fire on the flat, killing the toddler. Sadieka Toffar (2) died after a hand grenade was thrown into her home in Surrey Estate almost three years ago. The list is endless and continues.

Schiller had a good understanding of the problems of such a transition: he compared it to the attempt of a watchmaker who was attempting to replace a wheel in a watch while the watch went on ticking. An apparently impossible task. Yet the physical society, with its needs to feed, clothe and house itself, and its needs for security of life and property, does not cease to exist, while the state is remade in the image of freedom. The problem is that freedom presupposes that the behaviour of human beings follows the law of ethics, as if that law were as natural as our natural drives, and could thus be anticipated to control the behaviour of people automatically. The assumption that people set in freedom would be good does not seem to work, either because indeed our makeup contains drives which are socially destructive, or because the education which we received in despotic times cannot be remodelled in the short term. It seems that morality is not something we carry in our genes, morality can only be produced by the suppression of some of our more atavistic aggressive tendencies through education. Schiller's idealistic notion that the individual can become the state and ennoble himself to become the human being in the idea seems unattainable.

Schiller was not naive. He understood very well that there was a conflict between what we want and what we ought to do. Schiller was therefore looking for a model where rules where not imposed from the outside, but arose from the objective situation and were accepted by the actors themselves as necessary out of their own free will and out of their own insight. Such a model, Schiller believed, was art, where the artist subjects himself to a discipline which is demanded by the object he creates. Art is a daughter of freedom, Schiller said, but that does not mean that it does not follow its own rules, the rules of the necessity of the spirit. In this way to Schiller art is the paradigm of a humane society. The rules are not imposed on it by a dictator or the absolute state or the party. The rules are simply the rules of the mind. Where art is forced to follow externally imposed rules, it suffers, be it the ideological rules of national socialism or socialist realism or the materialist rules of a capitalist society which subjects us to the needs of the economy. Schiller already lamented that profit is the idol of his time, and it is so increasingly in the new millenium. But where art is subjected to the tyranny of profit, it will finally disappear from the noisy market place of the century.

After Schiller's very Eurocentric analysis of the problem I turn to traditional African wisdom. The Traditional Doctor Shado Moses Dludlu, who was born in the small rural town of Barberton in Mpumalanga but grew up in the former homeland of Kangwane, offers us the following thoughts for the day: 1. Make use of your conscience bounty, internally and externally, you will soon see improvements in your life. 2. Choose and facilitate the relevant cocktail of your conscience that is unique and relevant for your lifestyle. His research shows that Mungoma's ancestral spiritual conscience in human existence provides the essentials for a healthy life and is an effective healer for the body and soul. While very down to earth, this too, does not seem to help tremendously in our dilemma. Like Schiller Dludlu relies on the "cocktail of our conscience", and regrettably this does not seem to be very reliable when it comes to control that dangerous mix of aggression, acquisitiveness and sexuality inside us that always overturns the best of our intentions.

5 A past centre of power

There is nothing which is as powerless as a centre of power which has had its day. We were invited to a conference in Bonn recently, and the main event took place in the Bundestag, the erstwhile houses of parliament, which has in the meantime been relocated to the old Reichstag in Berlin right next to the empty spaces where the Wall once stood. The notice on the door to the large hall with the German Eagle facing the auditorium still said: entrance restricted to members of parliament. But in these times the hoi polloi were given free access and 400 academics from 78 countries spread themselves out over the seating of both governing parties and the opposition. I was sitting in one of the seats which was once occupied by parliamentarians. Uncharacteristically I found myself in a seat previously occupied by a member of the Christian Democratic Union, a party which I neither support nor belong to. As the hall was now used for conferences it had lost the aura of being the centre of power, it had become just an ordinary hall.

As I was sitting there and listened to the brave speech of the mayor of Bonn, who tried to sound optimistic about the future of Bonn, and who announced plans to make Bonn the foremost centre of science in Germany, I reflected on what would change, if Cape Town lost parliament to Midrand or Pretoria. Would the old buildings in the Gardens become equally lost, mere halls to house conferences? Would Cape Town loose the flair it had, the well-known faces of politicians disappearing from its street. Surely not only he prostitutes in Seapoint would be sad contemplating such a loss.

What was even more fascinating, however, was a speech by a German professor of history, who gave us a potted version of Germany's stumbling way towards democracy. While it was apparently a victory speech celebrating the overcoming of the dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic, and even more so, the defeat of the 1968 student rebellion in West Germany, it reminded of me nothing more than the times of Konrad Adenauer and the fifties. Its rabid antisocialism and free market ideology were echoing Adenauer's then minister of finances, Ludwig Erhard. Somehow this throwback to the past was very fitting in a town which had become its own museum. Bonn was always referred to mockingly as the Bundesdorf, the Federal Village. Now it has become again what it always was, a rather conservative small university town.

The university was founded in 1818 by then minister of culture and education in the Prussian government, Wilhelm von Humboldt, as a "reform university", and it shows how soon such reforms and innovations can become obsolete. The university still bears the name of the then King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm, who was generally regarded as a nincompoop by his subjects. Not so Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was the mind behind the reform of German universities, which made them the most modern and exemplary institutions which they were during the 19th century. His most innovative idea was the "seminar" as the breeding ground for future scientists, who would learn by doing research together with their professor, rather than being lectured to ex cathedra. It is a most exciting idea, one which deserves a second life. But currently the winds are blowing in the opposite direction. Because of the huge number of students crowding the seminars, and the pre-eminence of English and American universities, German universities have begun to tinker with this excellent system and return to what was already oldfashioned in 1818, the British system of Bachelor and Master's degrees, a system which is essentially modelled on the medieval university with its doctores and masters and their way of reading books to the students, and then examining them regularly on their content. The tendency to convert universities into cram-colleges for future accountants, truck drivers, leisure time organisers, entrepreneurs of e-commerce, web-site critics, network managers and day-traders taught by Bill Gates Professors for Massive Profits is spreading to Germany as well, although some people by now understand that that would not be a viable solution even for those in business who in their short-sighted emphasis on a quick buck mistake the programming of human robots for the kind of education which supplies leaders in business or any other sphere of public life.

Early in the nineteenth century the philosopher Schelling argued: "The state would be indisputably authorised, to abolish the academies as a whole or to transform them into schools of industry - and other similar institutes", but neither the state nor industry would really be well served with that course of action. Which knowledge will be necessary tomorrow to solve entirely practical problems, can be foreseen just as little as which discoveries a scholar will make tomorrow morning after breakfast. Without a reservoir of knowledge which seems useless today the most pragmatic state can not survive. But in addition a university is always about the value of the knowledge in itself. If the universities have a function at all, argues Schelling further, then it is to educate persons, which are formed "by science. If one therefore desires this purpose of education, one must also value science. Science however ceases to be science, as soon as it is lowered to be a mere means and is not furthered for its own sake."

The rector of the university tried to impress us with its history, and the fact that such luminaries as August Wilhelm Schlegel, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Hertz studied and taught there. The reality, of course, was a little different. In his Romantische Schule Heinrich Heine mercilessly lampoons the lectures of August Wilhelm Schlegel, who was lecturing with fashionable kid gloves on his hands, and an elaborate candlestick on his lectern, while a servant in the Baron von Schlegel's livery was always in attendance. And Karl Marx was so desperately bored in Bonn that he spoiled his otherwise spotless record by being senselessly drunk, being a public nuisance and put into jail for one night. Friedrich Nietzsche did not take anything from Bonn but a bout of syphilis, an illness which might have been the root cause of his later madness. So, one might guess, the very good ideas of Wilhelm von Schlegel were somewhat difficult to put into practice.

6 A bridge blown up: Novi Sad

Novi Sad was known in the 19th century as the Athens of the Balkans. It was then the major centre of Serbo-Croatian culture and literature, even if many of its intellectuals lived in Vienna most of the time. Jura Soyfer was an Austrian Jew and a communist, and that sealed his fate. When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he died of pneumonia. It was fitting therefore to commemorate this writer who died before he could fully develop his talents, but who already had produced some remarkable plays against war, with a conference on "War, Theater, Jura Soyfer" in July 2000 in the very Novi Sad which was heavily bombed by NATO planes recently.

The conference was to be part of THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF ALTERNATIVE AND NEW THEATRE 2000 - Novi Sad, from June 25th to July 5th 2000, wich featured such plays as D.A.V.E. by Klaus Obermaier (Austria), LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY by Jadranka Anjelic (Belgrade), THE END AND BACK AGAIN, MY FRIEND by Kathy Randels (USA), MACHINE-ACTION by Theatre en Vol (Italy), ANTIGONA by the Novi Sad Art Academy, IRRELEVANCES, by the Theatre Association SPECCHI E MEMORIE (Italy), FLAME AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, a presentation by Maja Mitic, Dah Theatre (Belgrade), DAMAGE by the Ister Theatre, Belgrade, NOVI SAD-GERNICA-THE NATIONAL THEATRE by Bane Radosevic (Novi Sad), THE QUEEN IS DEATH by the Matarile teatro (Spain), and WHO TOLD YOU THAT YOU ARE NAKED by the Dagaz Theatre (Sweden). There were symposions, art exhibitions, panel discussions, presentations of work in progress, and workshops. Alas, it was not to be. When we arrived at the Westbahnhof in Vienna, we were told that one of the contributors had not been given a visum, despite countless calls to the embassies, the organisers of the festival and even to the ministry of foreign affairs in Belgrad. We decided that if one of the contributors was excluded that none of us would go to Novi Sad, and hastily arranged a venue in Vienna where we held the conference.

We do not know why this visum was not granted. It may have been bureaucratic incompetence or simple nastiness, but it was more likely a form of censorship, because Novi Sad is the centre of the opposition movement to Milosovic and the capital of the Vojvodina, which before Milosovic had enjoyed a limited autonomy. Most of the visa which were granted were granted so late that the contributors did not know until one day before they were to travel half way through Europe whether they would indeed be able to go, and the last visum was refused while we were all on the way to Vienna. So the bridge across the Danube, blown up by NATO bombers now became a metaphor for the inaccessibility of Novi Sad for our conference.

All our contributions dealt with the situation in Yugoslavia in an indirect way. Herbert Arlt sketched the general background of "War in the history of European Theatre", and Ulf Birbaumer talked about war in the plays of Jura Soyfer. The Serbian writer Branko Andric discussed his translation of the anti-war play "Vineta" of Jura Soyfer into Serbo-Croatian. Manuel Durand-Barthez presented the West Indian playwright Maryse Conde's play "Olouewmi d'Ajumako", Bernhard Doppler dealt with "Schlachten 2000!" and Shakespeare's on German stages. Jürgen Doll presented Karl Kraus anti-war play "The Last Days of Humanity" and Anette Horn discussed the anti-militarist novels of Jürgen Fuchs, the GDR-dissident. My own contribution dealt with the anti-Napoleonic wars of 1807 to 1815 and Kleist's drama "The Battle of Hermann".

Kleist's belated elevation to the classic dramatist of National-Socialism, and the fact that this play suddenly performed ten times as often as before 1933, are not simply a misunderstanding of Kleist. The drama contains sufficient ambiguous elements which made such an appropriation possible. It is the ending above all else which contradicts the apparently merely defensive concept of the popular war against the foreign oppressor in that it now proclaims an aggressive war against the Romans. The ending of his play could and was used to create an apology for the aggressive wars of Germany against France in 1870/1, 1914/18 and 1939/45. Even more problematic is Kleist's inability to conceive the liberation war as a popular war from below: thus his play was easily adapted to a play about the charismatic leader, in which Hermann plays the role of the all-knowing and all-directing Führer who for security reasons cannot take the people into his confidence and must therefore manipulate the people by war propaganda for their own good. Kleist's Hermannsschlacht was thus used by the Nazis - by identifying Hermann with Hitler (just as the Wilhelminian era had identified Hermann with Bismarck) - to portray Hitler as the great saviour on whose singular genius the entire nation was dependent.

But there is another way in which Kleist's drama can be read: as a play of an anti-colonialist struggle. Kleist's Hermann is not one of the conventional, liberal, humanist heroes of liberation like Goethe's Egmont: he is an extremist, a radical, who is prepared to face the ultimate consequence of the insight that freedom is the highest good and the existence of the slave the worst of all evils. It is from these (Rousseauistic) principles that Kleist derives his "ethics" of revolution and of the war of liberation, an ethics which must shock those who have been educated in the fold of classical humanism. Ruth Angress went so far as to say that it was Kleist who introduced the modern terrorist and guerilla leader into literature in his Hermann and in Congo Hoango in his novella Verlobung in St. Domingo. Just as the party in Brecht's Measures taken, Hermann has no use for anybody who does good deeds within an evil system: the violence which enslaves human beings can only be destroyed by counter violence, and if the counter violence is too weak to overthrow the evil system then the freedom fighter has to use all means, even the dirtiest, to change the world in such a way that human beings can act morally again, i.e. take their own decisions again in freedom. One may sink into the dirt, one may embrace the butcher, as long as one can change the world through these dirty manoeuvres. It is precisely the unheroic qualities in Hermann which make him the only consistently political character in Kleist's oeuvre.

This is the reality of the liberation war, and it is not "nice". The wars for autonomy in the various parts of Yugoslavia bear witness to this insight. Violence, murder, destruction, lies, and genocide are part of that gruesome mix. The rhetorical strategies of liberation movements were used to cover a horrific war of destruction. We were told that the West had to intervene in Yugoslavia because of the human rights violations in Kosovo. NATO forces intervened not for any specific economic or strategic interests, but simply because a country was violating the human rights of an ethnic group. It really all began with the ascension to power of Milosevic: he promised to improve the underprivileged situation of Serbia within the Yugoslav federation, especially with regard to the Albanian "separatism." Albanians were Milosevic's first target; afterwards, he shifted his wrath onto other Yugoslav republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia), until, finally, the focus of the conflict returned to Kosovo. But Yugoslavia did not start to disintegrate when the Slovene "secession" triggered a domino-effect (first Croatia, then Bosnia, Macedonia.); when Milosevic's pushed through his constitutional reforms in 1987, depriving Kosovo and Vojvodina of their limited autonomy, the fragile balance on which Yugoslavia rested was irretrievably disturbed.

But NATO also justified its intervention by a vague, but ominous reference to "strategic interests." The story of NATO as the enforcer of the respect for human rights is thus only one of the two coherent stories that can be told about the recent bombings of Yugoslavia. The second story is one where one is allowed to violate a state's sovereignty to redress its violation of human rights. Western media declare some local "warlord" or dictator like Sadam Hussein or Milosevic to be the embodiment of Evil. If we look at the situation in a certain way, we see the international community enforcing minimal human rights standards on a nationalist neo-Communist leader engaged in ethnic cleansing, ready to ruin his own nation just to retain power. If we shift the focus, we see NATO, the armed hand of the new capitalist global order, defending the strategic interests of the capital in the guise of a disgusting travesty, posing as a disinterested enforcer of human rights, attacking a sovereign country which, in spite of the problematic nature of its regime, nonetheless acts as an obstacle to the unbridled assertion of the New World Order.

As it is, we are subjected to a form of double blackmail: if you are against NATO strikes, you are for Milosevic's proto-Fascist regime of ethnic cleansing, and if you are against Milosevic, you support the global capitalist New World Order. But this very opposition between enlightened international intervention against ethnic fundamentalists, and the heroic last pockets of resistance against the New World Order, is a false one. Western powers have been playing for years into Milosevic's hands, acknowledging him as a key factor of stability in the region. The West fights Milosevic is fighting its own creature, a monster that grew as the result of the compromises and inconsistencies of the Western politics itself. In the recent struggle of the "democratic opposition" in Serbia against the Milosevic's regime, the touchy topic is the stance towards Kosovo: the large majority of the "democratic opposition" unconditionally endorses Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, one of the regular slogans of the demonstrators was: "Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the Albanians!"

My point in analysing Kleist's drama was thus that a liberation war which is based on lies and deceptions - not only of the enemy, but of the very people themselves, who are to be liberated - can only end in the further deception of these same people by a populist leader of the liberation movement, whose only interest is then to continue his access to power. The sad consequence of such liberation politics is that criminal figures like Milosevic will be elevated into the model fighters against the New World Order.

7 One hundred words of the century

Time is sedimented in words. Some words are merely fashionable, and drop out of use soon after they are invented. Others characterise the epoch. Some are burning like wounds for decades. Some are like chewing gum, when you have chewed on them long enough they become tasteless. The German news magazine Der Spiegel has drawn up a list of hundred words which characterise the twentieth century. Of course, the list is in German and a bit Eurocentric, but it does contain Apartheid next to Aids and atom bomb, Bolshevism and Fascism, Führer, fundamentalism, cold war, iron curtain, concentration camp, deportation, and holocaust. Although remembering is very much out of fashion in these times when CNN updates us every hour and makes us forget at the same speed, it is important that we do not forget these words and what they mean. I doubt, whether many people still remember what a Blockwart was, that lowest kind of spy who controlled the adherence of every German to the Nazi government. Neither the League of Nations nor the UN could hinder the Two World Wars and the many wars and genocides since World War II. The invention of the aeroplane added arial warfare to our vocabulary, and tanks, submarines and radar have since been overtaken by computer controlled rockets which Schreibtischtäter, criminals acting from their desk, can direct against any state declared to be a rogue nation. Cleansing and purging the nation from ethnic minorities and ideological deviants, as well as the elaborately staged Schauprozesse served the paranoiac minds to regain their well-being.

In the GDR the Blockwart was replaced by the IM, the informal collaborator, who noted down everything about your life and fed it to the Stasi, and who might have been your husband, lover, wife, son or daughter. At a conference in Vancouver in 1995, five years after the democratisation of the GDR, the German writers Joachim Schädlich and Monica Marron were taking part in a podium discussion. Schädlich had read a day before in the German press that his lover Monica had been spying on him in the bald old days of the GDR, pretending to be an opponent of the regime. The discussion was quite painful, despite the efforts of the other participants to smooth the waves.

Many of these words trace important stages in my own life history, signposts of change and continuity over the years. There are still some Germans about, who deny that the holocaust ever took place and believe that Hitler has left us at least one good thing, the Autobahn. Although the Greens are violently opposed to building new ones to carry the ever increasing number of fourseaters occupied by one person, more of these concrete monsters will cut not only through the German landscape in future. But despite the fall of Russia, we still recognise a word like October Revolution. Germans by now are not so sure whether Perestroika, Wende, and Wiedervereinigung were such a good idea, and many Ossis and Wessis wish for the Wall to be re-erected.

Reading a novel by Balzac, Jane Austen, Fontane or Flaubert reminds us, that people live differently now, at least in urbanised, Westernised areas of the globe. The Youth revolution which inverted the old scale of values from those of the wise old men to those of the dynamic yuppies occured at the turn of the century and brought about an art style called Jugendstil (Literally: Youth Style, Art nouveau). Since then, being young has become a value in itself. Emancipation from repression in order to attain the highest fulfilment of the self, became a lifelong pursuit, even if one had to use violent demonstrations, Molotow-Cocktails and terrorism to achieve that goal. In 1934 Mao and the communists were driven out of the Southern provinces of China by Chiang Kai-shek, and started their march through the mountains to Yen-an and made this the core of their rule. In 1970 young people in Germany carried the red book of Mao, dressed like Che Guevara, and shouted Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi Min! After all the members of the radical terrorists were either made to commit suicide in jail, killed off in self-defence or safely behind bars, the youth movement discovered the energy crisis, the catastrophe of the climate, global warming, the protection of the environment, the dangers of nuclear energy and the Entsorgung. Nobody has yet discovered what to do with those radiating remnants of the "cleanest" of all forms of energy production, which will continue to radiate for thousands of years, how to "unworry", how to take them "out of our care". In East and West the peace movements gained in strength, but made little impact on the realpolitik of governments and armaments industry.

The century changed our life style: The word bikini reminds us that swimming in the sea as a leisure activity is relatively new, and that showing large portions of the naked body was considered offensive until not so long ago, and is still considered so in many countries. The zip allowed one to undress in record time and get down to the naked facts much faster than was good for romance. The young people of the turn of the century, driven by a romantic urge to meet mother nature went camping, roughing it in the wild, sleeping in sleeping bags on mother Earth, and eating burned meat overdone over the camping fire, an activity which their elders considered crazy. The very concept of leisure time is an invention of our century, so much so, that today tens of thousands travel by air, rail or ship to the furthest corners of the world as tourists, to swim in the warm waters of Durban, Mauritius or Thailand. The car became a symbol of freedom, and the idea of building a car for the people, a Volkswagen, led to the severe limitation of that freedom in hour-long traffic jams, where one can admire the advertisements which block out raw nature by showing sexy young women leaning against sexy cars. The word sex is also fairly recent. Of course, people had sex before, but they did not talk about in good society, at least. Certainly they did not discuss such things as the pill, another new word, or their periods, except in a very veiled and roundabout way. Homosexuality was something one did very much in the privacy of one's bedroom, and it certainly was not openly gay. With the help of the demoscopes we know exactly which proportion of the population indulges in which sexual practices, and that makes us less severe about our own sins. For the decrepit and ailing elderly, the century invented the Sterbehilfe, the assistance towards a worthy death.

When I studied at Wits in the late fifties, wearing anything but a suit and tie prevented you from entering the library, and jeans were definitely a no-no. Lecturers were still strutting in front of the class in their dusty gowns. When I taught at the German School in Johannesburg in the early sixties, comics were considered as dangerous for school children and confiscated in the classroom. Writing with ball points was not allowed, although teachers did not go as far as bringing back quills. Fountain pens were quite OK. Schools always use the technology which is at least 50 years out of date. My hair cut at that time was considered revolutionary for a teacher, and everybody was railing against beat, rock ´n roll and pop music. The first worldwide means of communication, long before the internet was radio. In the years after World War Two I constructed elaborate antennas and preselectors to receive shortwaves from Australia and Hongkong. There was more crackle than information, but the excitement of hearing voices half way around the globe was great. I don't have to remind you that the rulers of our own little Europestan at the Southern end of Africa had the greatest fear of modern mass media: not only did they constantly rail against the pernicious influence of the English press, half of the world's books, journals and films were banned, and when they finally made up their mind to allow TV, they made sure that this instrument of the devil was firmly controlled by the government. In the end the apartheid government gave in for various reasons. It discovered that it could use the invention of the devil as a first class propaganda instrument for its own ideology, and it used sports and entertainment on the box to distract the masses from politics. But the lefties also discovered that press freedom involved a lot of manipulation, and in the early seventies the revolutionary youth in Germany started to burn the trucks of the newspaper Bild, to protect unweary citizens from its bad influence.

Robert Musil once wrote about a horse which had been described in the press as a genius. He was quite shocked by that statement. Today horses and sportspeople have become stars, and everyone considers them geniuses. This week I heard that a Spanish soccer player has a contract which gives him an income of 90 million Rand a year. If that is not genius then I don't know what is. Most people who do something useful, like medical doctors, engineers, teachers don't earn anything like that figure, and one has to assume that one soccer player is worth more than a hundred teachers. At these prices the competition is of course tremendous, and if you can improve your performance with a little bit of doping, you do, and just hope that you are not caught. In Berlin there was a recent court case where the highest sports officials of the GDR were on trial for doping young girls in their swimming team. When money or the prestige of your socialist fatherland is involved, even civil servants resort to a little cheating, it seems. On the other hand, drugs in the nineteenth century was something which one did, but did not talk about, and if you wanted to indulge in some cocaine or opium, it was a question of money and connections, and the British government Mafia even fought a war so as to be able to smuggle opium into China. These days even smokers are under heavy attack, and one day soon we will have another prohibition on alcohol, coffee and tea, I assume. Smokers and drinkers will again assemble in speakeasies and illegal shebeens and will be raided by narcotics police.

Socialism and the planned economy is "mega-out", even the social market economy has been replaced by what is generally called the "free" market, which is even freer for the G7 countries, although somebody must be planning, how to make money and how to produce and sell goods. The globalization of the market, or to say it differently, the removal of all obstacles to the market dominance of the great economic powers, which the colonising nations of the 19th century were striving for, is now nearly complete, and anyone who does not comply with the rules of this game is threatened with heavy economic penalties. The globe has become a little village of 6 billion inhabitants, everybody knows everybody, virtually, and distances have shrunk with planes, computers, the Internet and cell phones which talk to each other by satellite. Big firms ("Global players"), and multinational corporations, shift their money and their factories to wherever the worker is cheap and willing to work hard without the protection of a trade union and without threats of a strike for a pittance, that is mainly in the Third World, and what remains of the Second World. But they still have to sell their products to those who are in the money, and so Sony built an extravagant skyscraper, the see-through glass covered Sony-Center, in the middle of Berlin, in the wasteland of the Potsdamer Platz, where the Wall used to cut through Berlin. This shiny glass palace cost 4,5 billion Rand. Its function is to make sure that Germans buy Sony. If you can't shift your factory for some reason or another, you can automate the assembly lines of your factory and save on labour costs by retrenching most of your workers. Pity, that that makes a few more workers unemployed, and that the unemployed are not very good consumers. If you own a few factories, you can leave your money wherever you want, and there are tax havens where whatever you earn is safe from the grasp of the taxman. You can leave your debts in your own country and ask the government to bail you out to save a few thousand workers from unemployment. Ordinary citizens who are not that mobile, can only make a tax-free buck by doing some Schwarzarbeit (work on the side which is not declared on your tax return). In a situation where most people are unemployed it is dangerous to carry around cash, so the credit card was invented, which allows you to buy now and pay later. Money circulates through the Internet at a speed which makes one dizzy, and the latest share prices in New York appear instantly on screens in Johannesburg or Jakarta, and that creates some stress in those who have put their money on the wrong IT share. Such mobility makes it difficult for the banks of various states to keep their inflation in check. So currencies like the Rand are constantly devalued, and we do not even need a Währungsreform like the one in Germany in 1948 which slashed the savings of all citizens to about 10% of their nominal value. It also allows some smart manipulators to make a lot of money on the stock exchanges, but creates the fear of another Black Friday, like the one in 1929. Information and communication is the word, and information technology makes it possible, but you have to know how to use that information, and good old knowledge is still in demand, because without knowledge communication is just small talk and psychobabble. Yesterday I heard that archaeologists had for the first time reconstructed the Tower of Babel. What a symbol for our current state of the art of communication.

After some quibbles about port and grappa by the Italian and Spanish mafia, South African wines, apples and mangoes are available in the supermarket here in Berlin, and the South African Tourism Board adds a few colourful photos of birds, animals and plants to lure the German wine drinkers to South Africa. South Africa is also present on the World Expo in Hannover, and President Mbeki came to the opening of this grand spectacle. In contrast to other African countries, South Africa did not present itself with African tradition and tribal dances, but as a modern, Western, European country. Image is everything, and it seems that the African Renaissance is reserved for home consumption. The global village is quite useful. To those who have, that is.

Psychoanalysis was invented just when we needed it most, because who is without at least some little neurosis nowadays? The Russians shot a Sputnik into space, and it was followed by so many satellites that there is hardly space to move up there. Men have landed on the moon, although what the use of that is, we have not really found out. But in the meantime there are satellites which can monitor what you do in your bedroom, satellites that can pinpoint your position on the globe to within a few centimetres, and that monitor the ozone depletion around the poles and the destruction of the tropical forests without doing much about it. Scientists can now manipulate the genes of tomatoes and human beings, and they assure us that it will be extremely beneficial to us. But then they told us the same about the atom bomb and nuclear reactors, and I must confess that I simply do not have much faith any more in scientists. Most people, myself included, have still not understood what the big bang really was, or what relativity is. But I do understand that Hiroshima was extremely unhealthy for a lot of Japanese. So until the scientists swear and keep to a Hippocratic oath never again to produce something which can harm human beings, I am very anti-science and -technology. But perhaps, some day in the future, the century will be remembered more by the fact that it invented vitamins and antibiotics, which after all did improve our lives tremendously.

One hundred words - in German, of course. Will anyone know what they mean in fifty years time? One of the questions which agitate some linguists at the moment is, how long German will survive under the onslaught of English. The French and the Poles have already formulated laws which make it unlawful to use English words in certain contexts, such as billboards. For native English speakers, the anglicisms that at times pervade the German language can be mind-boggling. Can a country which speaks of das Marketing, der Call-Center and das Handy be far away from the total adoption of English as its official language? Germany is a place where der Computer and downloaden can be used in casual conversation. Watching business news on TV the number of anglophone words (sometimes with very strange meanings for a native English speaker) by far outnumbers the few German props to hold them together in a recognizably German sentence. Advertising agencies, in particular, consider English to be, quite simply, the most appropriate language for a cosmopolitan marketing strategy. German? Not if you want to build up a brand name in all of Europe. "If I want to claim that a product has a cosmopolitan flair, then I'm going to use English."

Peter Horn