"The Swastika on Jan Kubis's Ass" - Laurent Binet, Hegel, and Historical Judgement

Lidice

Unsuspecting eyes might mistake Lidice, a pleasant strip of countryside just outside of Prague, for an oddly situated national park. From the viewing platform on the crest of its northern slope a few nondescript public artworks - grey statues ringed with stone met by a few winding paths - can be made out at the bottom of the valley's shallow basin. A bright spring day has brought people from the neighbouring villages out to play frisbee and tussle with their dogs on the grass. If people remember what this place is famous for it goes unspoken. On the night of 10th June 1942 German soldiers arrived in the then-village to destroy it. They gathered the men together at Horak's Barn and proceeded systematically to shoot them. Nine other men, who were not from Lidice but whose bad luck it was to be stranded after dark in the village, were met with a brief reprieve. The local mayor, tasked with pointing out the men to the SS troops, let it be known they were not locals. They would be taken to Prague and later shot anyway. As soon as his work was done the mayor was also shot. The women were taken to Ravensbruck; most of the children were sent to the extermination camp at Chelmno, a decision made personally by Adolf Eichman. The buildings themselves were not only ruined but literally pulled from the ground. Nothing was to remain. In the middle of Lidice's bare northern slope stands a memorial - its text in English, Czech and German - to the children. On the day of our visit a few flowers set around it are tugged lightly by a fresh spring breeze. Second-hand toys addressed from England sit looking up at the huddled statues. The eyes of the children gaze past us in either fear or reproach.

Almost immediately after its destruction, Lidice became a cause celebre. A famous campaign in Stoke-on-Trent galantly, if naively, pledged to rebuild the village entirely. Streets, towns and factories around the non-fascist world were renamed in tribute to it. The reason for this propaganda victory - considering the relative quiet surrounding other Nazi crimes at this point in the war - was its direct relation to the successful assassination of Rienhard Heydreich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, in Prague just days before. Though the two assassins bore no connection to Lidice, the occupying Nazi regime, in a blind fury coaxed on by Hitler's extraordinary viciousness, decided vengeance was necessary no matter the victims. This was hardly an isolated conclusion in Nazi history (another being the desperate, orgiastic destruction of Warsaw following the 1944 Uprising), but it lit a very specific torch. The Czechoslovak Government-in-exile, still headed by the frenetic plotter and pre-war President Edvard Beneš, had been behind the startling, courageous murder of Heydrich by two Czechoslovak agents. Flown over from London, and parachuting into the Bohemian countryside, Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík, later joined by Jozef Valčík, had studied the movements of Heydrich for months before confronting his unprotected limo on a bend in a road in the Libeň district of Prague. It was Kubiš who hurled a bomb at the Blond Beast, already on his feet and aiming at Gabčík, whose English Sten had jammed in his hands. The bomb destroyed the car and chaos quickly ensued. Heydrich looked at first to have survived. Then, after an operation removing his spleen, he was hit by a fever and shortly died. Apoplectic with rage - apparently at Heydrich's naivety as much as the gall of the Czechs - Hitler ordered revenge. Nazi investigators had soon 'uncovered' conspiratorial connections of the Resistance with Lidice.

The story has been told many times, a fact repeatedly recounted in Laurent Binet's own racy, buoyant effort, HHhH. Throughout Binet's book, established fact intersects with the reports of others and the author's own memory:

[New information] has forced me to qualify my opinion of Seven Men at Daybreak, the Allan Burgess novel I had previously thought rather fanciful. I had been particularly skeptical about the swastika branded on Kubis’s ass. I also condescendingly picked up on a glaring error regarding the colour of Heydrich’s Mercedes which the author claimed was green.... Anyway, I’m probably attaching too much importance to what is, at the end of the day, just a background detail. I know that. In fact, it is a classic symptom of neurosis. I must be anal-retentive. Let’s move on……

...I asked Natacha about the Mercedes. She remembers it being black as well.

With some cunning, Binet transforms his own neurosis into a narratorial device. By framing this obsessive concern with detail as a quest for truth, however, Binet dodges over-familiar postmodern reflexivity. Though the novel's pre-history, its method of production and its factual and textual shortcomings, are made explicit parts of the story, this is done for quite specific ends. Here truth is expressed in the form of scrupulous self-doubt and self-qualification. Motivating Binet's modesty is a thoroughly traditional, realist concern with justice and the passing of historical judgement. Memory - that notoriously unreliable relayer of facts - constantly interweaves itself with established truths, undermining them and also adapting them. Thus the author's own memories of Košice, the Slovakian town where he was once stationed as a French teacher to the Slovakian military, forms the basis of Jozef Gabčík's introduction to the story. As it turns out, Gabčík couldn't have been in Košice in 1938 because it had already been absorbed by Hungary. How and when did Gabčík and Kubiš first meet? Binet asks himself. "I'm not yet sure if I'm going to visualize (that is, 'invent') this meeting or not. If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything." Inevitably the novel ends with Gabčík and Kubiš meeting for the first time on a rusty boat on the moonlit Baltic ("like in a Nezval poem").

By assuming that all fictional intrusions on the facticity of history are artificial, Binet permits himself errors but only insofar as he tries to atone for them. The overriding goal is to overcome one's factual shortcomings by acknowledging them, and through such acknowledgement pass judgement on history itself. Thus by passing judgement, Binet can bring the protagonists of the past to justice. It is in the grey areas between which parts of history - Tukhachevsky's defeat outside Warsaw and Heydrich's role in his later downfall under Stalin; or the ghosts of the thousands of anonymous Czech resistance members who are "haunting" Binet with their demands for inclusion - truly form part of the story that Binet's concern with justice is most pronounced. Here the author explicitly takes on the role of a historical judge.

Justice can be understood in two related senses: on the one hand there is just representation, or the writer's responsibility to do justice to her subject. On the other, there is the need to bring people to justice through the passing of certain normative moral judgements. Binet deals with the former on a regular, explicit basis (though in French justice would be substituted here for honneur). The book is punctuated at steady intervals with Binet's concerns about his own adequacy to the task of representation. More controversial for contemporary readers is the latter notion, conferred by the author and legitimate only if one accepts the right of the author to pose as transhistorical moral judge. Thus naming and describing the families who aided and sheltered Gabčík and Kubiš gives them fitting and appropriate representation and also confers justice on their sacrifices (they would mostly be murdered after Heydrich's assassination). However, it is only when the story comes to the climactic moment of Lidice's destruction that Binet allows his concern with judgement and justice to directly seize the narrative.

As it happens Kubiš and Gabčík were still alive when the Nazis attacked Lidice. In fact, the assassins were hiding in a church on Karlovo náměstí (Charles Square) in Prague. Binet tells us that they knew about the Nazis' terrible retribution. The assassins sat with their comrades in a dank cellar and could do nothing but blame themselves for the town's destruction. No amount of pleading would convince them they were not personally responsible for the slaughter. Indeed they were sure that Heydrich's death had achieved nothing. "Perhaps I am writing this book," Binet says, "to make them understand that they are wrong." The obsessive compiling of facts is thus less significant for Binet than justifying the assassination of Heydrich.

In the same chapter, Binet makes clear what exactly the destruction of Lidice meant for the world resistance to Nazism:

With Lidice, the scales have fallen from the whole world's eyes. In the days that follow, Hitler will understand. For once, it is not his SS who will be let loose, but an entity he does not fully understand: world opinion. Soviet newspapers declare that, from today, people will fight with the name of Lidice on their lips - and they're right... By reacting like the crude psychopath he is (rather than the head of state that he also is), Hitler will suffer his most devastating defeat in a domain he once mastered: by the end of the month the propaganda war will be irredeemably lost.

That was no mean feat in a world where European ruling classes had long been anticipating, and indeed making, compromises with Nazism. World opinion aside, however, the actual job of bringing history's protagonists to justice is undertaken by the novel itself. More than a catalogue of events, HHhH attempts to formulate a moral judgement about Heydrich's assassination and the consequent destruction of Lidice; in other words, a kind of post-mortal redemption of the assassins ("I am writing this book to make them understand..."). Redemption through testimony; justice through perspicacious analysis of the facts; judgement through the exercise of universal moral norms. Binet himself admits he's a scion of Communist parents and a believer in French Enlightenment values. Whatever the self-conscious, postmodern form, Binet's ambition is to conjure a classically modern moral universe.

There is something of Hegel's system of historical judgement to this ambition, the account of which given by Angelica Nuzzo in her book Memory, History, Justice in Hegel (2012) I am entirely indebted to. Nuzzo understands Hegel as having two separate philosophical models of historical process, the cumulative moment of which comes in the Philosophy of Right when Hegel describes how the ethical collective system of historical understanding is "overcome"(aufgehoben) by a properly universal system of judgement - in Hegel's own words, from "objective" to "absolute", in which Weltgeschichte (world history) emerges as Weltgericht (the world's tribunal). This being Hegel, there is no fine line drawn between the working of the logical system and the actual material stuff of history upon which the interpretive intellect acts (ideas being history's motive force). Nuzzo argues that historical judgement and justice are systemically possible because, in a Hegelian way, history is grounded in the logic of the dialectic. In sum, history is not just the accumulation of random effects, of chaos producing further unintended chaos, but proceeds via contradiction, and contains conflictual stages which are themselves subject to the logic Hegel describes as belonging to the dialectic.

What does "absolute judgement" mean in the context of history? Nuzzo separates the dialectical logic of history proper, which achieves universality in art, philosophy and religious representation, from memory, which is always enclosed by particular ethical-collective "national" consciousness. In short, the collective memory of particular national identities - subject to the social structuring of meaning - is not adequate for historical judgement. One cannot adequately write history from a particular, narrow perspective, but must aim for this universal possibility of judgement and justice. To take a concrete example, no adherence to, say, Serbian or Croatian "national consciousness" will provide a convincingly full explanation of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. That task falls to a kind of "absolute" philosophical judgement, though how one articulates such an unbiased judgement is hard to say.

To return to Binet's HHhH, the textual demand for historical justice, or the demand for a kind of redemption of the novel's heroes and condemnation of its villains, stems from just such a Hegelian urge for universality - that is, an urge for a form of judgement not constrained by particular considerations but one able to take a "God's-eye-view" of historical events. Appropriately for a Hegelian project, however, historical judgement is interwoven throughout the novel with its opposite - the act or process of remembrance. Yet whereas the latter always takes place within a particular ideological configuration of social values, history proper exists in a space of "absolute" or universal judgement.

This brings us to a crucial moral impasse pertaining to three events, all of which are covered in Binet's book. Can the decision to assassinate Heydrich be justified, despite the destruction of Lidice and the terror inflicted after it, because of its achievement in mobilizing anti-Nazi sentiment? And does it matter that the widest propaganda success in the wake of the assassination came about as a result of Lidice's destruction? Debates about the wisdom - on the part, especially, of Beneš, comfortably housed in Britain - of the assassination of Heydrich will continue interminably. Aside from Lidice and later the village of Ležáky (which was also utterly destroyed), an estimated 1,357 Czechs were executed and 3,188 arrests made as a result of the Heydrichiada (the month-long terror that resulted from Heydrich's assassination). It was, in the assessment of the historian Mary Heimann, "the most horrifying chapter of the war" for protectorate Czechs "since the brutal assault on the universities at its beginning. Worse, because it resulted in the liquidation of the underground resistance, it represented the loss of the bravest and most steadfast patriots, the flower of the Czech nation." Being the "politically savvy" operator he was, Beneš was able to capitalize on Heydrich's assassination for the benefit of his own propaganda effort. Even at the time UVOD had advised the government-in-exile that the assassination of a Czech quisling would have been a wiser tactical move. But Beneš plumped for a major German target, reprisals be damned. Binet, fulsome in his praise for the exiled Czechoslovak president, will have none of this. He sees the agents of Operation Anthropoid's sacrifice as among the greatest of the war.

At stake here is more than just the tactical salience of Beneš's wartime decision-making or the heroism of Gabčík and Kubiš. The thousands of Czechs murdered in the aftermath of Operation Anthropoid beg a broader moral view. In a certain sense, and despite his streak of heroic romanticism, Binet provides it. Historical fiction of the type he creates in HHhH escapes morally unanswerable questions of historical cause and effect, and instead, by reflecting on the lives involved, produces a representation of the aspect of a priori goodness of certain historical acts without having to measure them against the unintended tragedies which followed from them. This, then, might be the the value behind Hegel's dialectical "absolute" judgement: not to paint the impossibly complex web of historical interconnection, of cause and effect, in its entirety; but rather to pronounce the universal, properly philosophical "goodness" of acts - say, the assassination of Heydrich or the sheltering and protection of his assassins by various families who put themselves at extreme risk and very often died because of it - irrespective of ethical or pragmatic considerations about such actions' effects. It would be impossible to inhabit a day-to-day world ordered only by such "absolute" philosophical considerations; art, however, can provide the space for such reflections.                      

Ukraine: An Explanatory Note

I was recently contacted by a dubious sounding pro-Russian magazine for an interview on Ukrainian oligarchy. Feeling I wasn't qualified to comment and not really understanding the magazine's editorial position or how my words might be used my initial decision was to ignore the request. Then I decided that it was worth restating my own view to be as clear as possible on the subject. Here's what I ended up sending by way of reply to numerous questions, among them one I found particularly worrying on "European Jewry" and its perceived relation to "new money" in the region. It was partly the whiff of anti-semitism in the question that provoked my reply. Anyway, here it is:

  

Ukraine - defined variously as a loose geographical unit; a linguistically self-contained national entity; or, as in its current form, a multi-ethnic sovereign nation-state - is a long-term victim of Great Power imperial politics. 

For a very long time the aspirations of its people have been subject in one way or another to geopolitical and territorial contests between competing imperial interests. One of the most pronounced ways Ukraine has been made subject to Great Russian, and later Soviet, interests has been through the deliberate fostering of "vertical" political and economic power relations. The centre in Moscow, both under autocratic rulers and Soviet ones, was historically able to win the allegiance of ethnic elites through their partial incorporation in a highly unequal, differentiated system of rule, awarding rights and privileges unevenly throughout the lands of the empire. Thus "vertical" relations of local elites to the emperor replaced "horizontal" relations between citizens.

If this selective favouritism was crucial politically to the Russian empire, it was more pronounced economically under the Soviet regime. Ukraine was economically divided under the the Soviet regime - with different economic centres such as as Kiev, Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk fulfilling different jobs within the wider Soviet economy. As such, territorial homogeneity proved elusive. Arbitrary reorganisation of territories was a regular staple of the Soviet regime - the awarding of the Crimean peninsula to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic being one example. Though the Soviet regime consistently "promoted" national minorities within its territories, it did so as part of a policy of incorporation, pulling particularly promising members of national minorities into the Party's centralising orbit. This did not help foster local territorial and national integrity, but rather made sure all politics was mediated by the "imperial" centre. 

With the collapse of the USSR Ukraine took its place in the very different "imperial" imaginary of sovereign nation states and free trade, as managed by the USA. The US, with its tradition of skepticism towards both patrimonial and colonial empires and "systems of development," had long since advocated a world of nation states (after its own image) interacting in a space of formal equality, though all with close economic ties to the US. The expansion of NATO and the EU both, in their different ways, represent the growing institutional influence of the US-inspired vision of the world.   

Though apparently noble, the world of equally sovereign nation states envisioned by America is in essence an ideological weapon used to help reproduce American "imperial" hegemony. Territorial sovereignty based on linguistic unity and cultural affinity has always worked imperfectly and been applied inconsistently (the US and its allies reserving the right to impinge on the right of national self-determination as they felt fit). Ukraine is caught up in its own territorial contradictions between geographical regions, economic elites, and national ethnicities, fostered over centuries by its inclusion in various forms of Russian imperial rule; the contemporary geopolitical insecurities of Russia and its concern over the influence of NATO in its "own backyard"; and also the expansionary thrust of NATO and the socio-economic and political project of the EU, both of which can be reduced in Russian eyes to "US-backed institutions."  

As far as the future of Ukraine is concerned, it seems quite clear that, as you say, Ukraine's oligarchs stand to benefit a great deal politically even as the country's former territory is lost. This is indeed a worrying phenomenon. One result of the long historical weakness of Ukraine's territorial unity - with its division between competing economic power-bases and shifting borders - has been the emergence of multiple competing economic power blocs. Ukraine is thus carved up regionally between a few industrial barons. Among them, Viktor Pinchuk makes for an interesting example: something of a celebrity among western elites for his philanthropic endeavours (bank-rolling Tony Blair's Faith Foundation to the tune of $80 million), he is also experiencing problems financing the debt on his Interpipe company. Not only is he an example of the interweaving of political and business class interests in Ukraine (he was an MP between 1998 and 2005) but also the mutual support and self-congratulatory systems that cushion the rich globally (he is apparently close to Bill Clinton and Damien Hirst, and owns a house in Kensington). You mention Kolomoyskyi - fittingly given his recent elevation to governorship of the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast; his history of quasi-military mobilizations and his long-term influence as Ukraine's thrid richest individual. Your mention of his Jewish background - and his open celebration of Ukraine's Jewish heritage - seems misguided if not anti-semitic.

I categorically reject explanations of political and/or economic actions purely according to religious affiliation or particular racial characteristics. I find particularly worrying your mention of Kolomoyskyi's representation of the interests of "European Jewry." As far as I'm concerned, Kolomoyskyi has every right to celebrate the historical contribution of Jewish communities to Ukraine and Europe's history - a contribution cut brutally short by Nazi atrocities, many of which were committed on Ukrainian soil. Moreover, Ukraine's oligarchic politics is divided in many complex ways - regionally, economically, and in relation to wider geopolitical affinity. I find it highly unlikely that Jewishness (or for that matter any other religious affiliation) plays any role in dictating political coalitions (except in the eyes of the already prejudiced). In fact, the most worrying development in Ukrainian politics is the growing acceptance in the west of the country of extreme right wing groups (such as Praviy Sektor). It is possible that, owing to the historical division of the country and international power politics, the possibility for a pan-Ukrainian opposition to corruption has been lost. For that we should blame Putin and NATO as well as the fascists on the margins of politics in Kiev.

Munich: "Vorsprung Durch Remix"

One approaches Munich with loaded ambivalence. After all, its star attraction is a jolly annual piss up, a kind of binge-drinker's Disneyland, which dominates the schedules of stag-dos the world over. In its spare time, however, this quietly dazzling metropole has become one of capitalism's greatest success stories. Beneath the jocular Gemütlichkeit displayed on its sleepy boulevards works a fierce, battle-ready complex of institutions promoting a truly solid culture of capitalist innovation. Indeed there is something pleasingly solid about Munich - from its weighty cuisine to its rather heavy-set men and the grand, squat halls the city authorities congregate in. Even its most recognisable landmark, the Frauenkirche, pumps its twinned towers into the air like two plump, celebratory fists. Everything exudes an attitude of satiated good health, a kind of post-masticatory glow. Yet the world of Hefeweizen and pork cutlets is not the first thing to come to mind when one pictures the cultural tropes of economic innovation. From what recesses does this dynamism spring?

The answer has something to do with Bavaria's insatiable rulers, a group composed of researchers, enlightened mandarins, and a local investment class alert to its Bildungsburgertum mission. Solidly Bavarian though its rulers mights be, one of its crucial characteristics most certainly sprang from the knotty Germanic Heimat: a historical self-awareness that manifests itself not in UKIP-style jingoist spluttering but in a keen ability to adapt to change and always come out on top. Combine this with a typically thorough mandarin culture - whose job it is to sublimate capital's appetites into a manageable routine of spectacle and grandeur - and you have an unarguable recipe for success. Through various remixes of its industrial base, things just keep getting better for the bullish Bavarian ruling class.

More startling than economic success is Munich's buried legacy of radicalism. Hard to believe, mooching about the city's royal avenues and shopping passages, that there was briefly a Bavarian Soviet Republic, declared after the end of World War One. This tantalising entree of German social revolution briefly had Bolsheviks believing their own prophecies about the irresistible spread of insurrection. Germany was always considered the grand prize and key state to be won in the battle for Permanent Revolution. Here was floundering evidence of its birth pangs. But even in its short life the Republic was not gaffe-free. The Deputy for Foreign Affairs declared war on - of all places - Switzerland for not sending the Bavarians enough tractors. The usual murders were carried out, apparently on Lenin's advice. Still, given the utter chaos elsewhere, housing the homeless and redistributing food supplies look like pretty impressive achievements.

The Soviet Republic's demise was enforced by a rallying ruling class who, for the first but by no means last time, enlisted ultra-nationalist militias in their cause. Among them was the infamous Freikorps who had already by 1919 debuted that arcane, Oriental symbol, the Swastika, on their uniforms. As they say, behind every Fascism is a failed socialist revolution. Rapid war-time industrialisation, combined with mass food shortages and even starvation, produced Munich's most tumultuous era of class struggle. But with the demise of Bavarian radicalism and the precarious hegemony of Weimar liberalism, space would be created for the Nazis' rise. Bavaria was, in the end, Nazism's incubator and bedrock.

Munich's, and by extension Bavaria's, contemporary eminence is partly the result of its uneven inclusion in the German industrial machine and partly the state's good fortune. It landed on the American side of the immediate postwar carve up and became host to a landslide of skilled eastern European refugees. Its delayed incorporation into German capitalism meant that it was perfectly poised to benefit from the postwar Wirtschaftswunder that took hold of the West's redeveloping economy. Bavaria was instrumental in capital's postwar achievements in Germany, an intensive zone of growth to which capital could relocate as the old, creaky industries of the Ruhr declined. Karl Marx might have labelled this the "annihilation of space through time", saving capital from its own ossification and driving it into new, innovative terrains.

One shocker about Munich, however, is its U-Bahn. Given the city's reputation for technical elegance, I had anticipated stepping inside an ululating, cylindrical womb, an unworldly, sterile calm issuing from its artificially regulated atmosphere. Sort of like being inside the brain of Hal, the computer from 2001, at least before it starts reaching for the lasers. Yet here it rolled up more tugboat than spacecraft, clanking laboriously to a halt and hissing expectantly at our toes. If it ain't broke, why fix it? Not an apothegm I had expected to cast light on the Munich metro. Truer for the state as a whole would be: even if it ain't broke, remix it. Vorsprung durch remix, I thought to myself as I strolled through the various perspex confections of postmodern consumerism artificially implanted in the city's neoclassical avenues. But then, this damaged metro with its grouchy cargo of labourers and old women, the windows strewn with graffiti, and the upholstery a rather insalubrious 1970s beige, could work as a metaphor for the two faces of the city itself.

Munich is home to one of the most skilled, professional and over-achieving coordinator classes in the world. The famous Munich mix of research institutions, public funding and a vast array of services and high-tech manufactures makes the city the envy of the world. Yet precedent suggests capital's tendency to move on to pastures new, having exhausted a region's potential for profitability. What keeps it in Munich? Capital fails to ditch Munich for the same reasons it cannot ditch London: the city's innovative potential is limitless; the state's power to incentivise capitalist activity irresistible (though the British capital is markedly more interested in speculative financial flows). Yet this success can only be reproduced indefinitely if the cushion supporting German profits - the moribund European market for investment and trade - sputters back to life. If this doesn't happen soon, and there is a decline in the EU's power to compensate for market collapses, capital will be forced to move on no matter what Munich's economy remixes next.

There are no such conflicts visible in Munich's centre, which exudes enviable charm and a uniquely Bavarian self-confidence. That latter trait is most in evidence in the city's royal avenues, which stretch out in faultless grandeur around the old town. All the clustered symbols of Bavarian monarchical history, however obscure, unfurl along them. A rather ill maintained Bismarck idles under a leafy canopy near the Deutsches Museum on a bend in the Isar River, while the altogether less world-straddling Ludwig I von Bayern gets pride of place on Odeonsplatz. Bavarians are understandably choosy about what in their history gets officially celebrated. Yet there is a second, buried history - malingering beneath the perfect fetish-object of the city's surfaces - which the frozen past of the statues effaces.

It was on Odeonsplatz in 1923 that Hitler's first stab at power - the ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch - was repudiated at gunpoint. His amatuerishness was not to last. By all accounts, the beer halls cultivated more than just dreamers. In fact they produced a whole brace of professional revolutionaries. It was in Munich's beer halls that, according to many interpreters, Hitler got his political education. Much as the beer halls and the squares contain a trace of their chaotic history, so a seed of the labour of past generations is splashed across the city's confident facades. The chaotic history of capitalist uneven geographical development emits a telluric pulse from beneath the cobbled pavements. It is this uneven development which is contained today by Munich's innovative mix. Yet even as Bavaria basks in its tech driven miracle, those past tensions have not yet been resolved, only displaced.

Four Underrated Things about Living Abroad

There are some nice bits abroad

What's properly worthwhile about living in a foreign country? Actually, not the things you'd assume.

It's not down to learning a foreign language, which is of course a perfectly justifiable thing to do but something that can really be done anywhere. It's certainly not down to meeting new people, which again can be done more or less anywhere. People are probably all the same and certainly someone's foreignness doesn't mark them out as intrinsically more valuable. Of course, here I'm the foreigner, a fact which marks me out either for curiosity - like a baffling pet that occasionally, parrot-like, says a proper word, much to everyone's amusement - or casual disinterest.

What makes living abroad really worthwhile is, at root, having a minimal level of estrangement from the everyday world around you. A few years ago I watched a TV show based around the idea of strapping a pillow to the front of one particularly bumbling man and seeing how he got on looking and feeling a bit like a pregnant woman. Foreignness is a bit like the pillow: a fixed, slightly embarrassing weight that accompanies you wherever you go and makes paying for shopping and using public transport slightly more annoying processes than they need to be.

Daily life

But that rather tenuous metaphor doesn't quite cover it, because the underlying sense of alienation needn't be unpleasant (obviously pregnancy needn't be either). In fact, living abroad gives one key advantage to those who do it: the time and repeated exposure needed to develop a sense of the small social contrasts that define and particularize places. My semi-permanent foreignness gets me closer to the reality of daily life than a tourist but still bars me from being absorbed entirely into it. I realize I sound a lot like a smug hippy, but living somewhere really does get you intimate access to things you just don't notice on a weekend trip. 

Here's four of those specific to Prague and the Czech Republic.

"Like frontier railways": Prague's heroic tramways

4. Public transport

I should preface this: I'm definitely not a trainspotter. Everyone hates public transport - that's a given. And in practice I hate it too. But strictly in theory I'm a believer in how a city's public transport can define it. The red and white trams of Prague are iconic, while its metro system is strikingly dingy and surreal. I'm not really interested in carriage numbers or what model of tram I'm riding - again, I swear I'm no anorak (well, I do secretly  have my favourites). More important than the models are the routes - the scouring of the city by twinned tram carriages, cutting between hills and over rivers like frontier railways (well, a bit). Not to mention the metro stations: bleakly austere dungeons of grey marble, often home to vast, semi-deserted underground shopping centres. In this permanently nocturnal habitat whole working lives play themselves out to the hum of escalators and the constant shuffle of feet. A few shoppers mill in the perma-gloom, bathed in bleary, flickering yellow lights. Bright fashions and fishing essentials are displayed inside shop-fronts, on pale mannequins never to see the light of day. All this marks a significant philosophical departure from London, where no one is ever encouraged to stop anywhere inside a tube station. After all, when have you ever found a toilet at a tube stop? In Prague they're everywhere, invariably guarded by a bouffanted, cigarette-puffing older lady and her rough-looking boyfriend, the walls jazzed up with a few stylish pictures of dogs or flowers, doilies covering the desk, obligatory 1970s radio crackling out forgotten hits. And always an ancient and dank looking armchair. Both above and under the ground, the transport system delineates a second city built into the margins of the first.

"A permanently nocturnal habitat": Under the ground

3. Neighbourhoods

Prague is not the most neighbourhoody of cities. It has them, like everywhere, and they have their unique characteristics, but broadly the demographic mix seems pretty consistent. True, there are more older people in Vrsovice than anywhere else and Prague Four, which is huge, seems to have a lot of young famlies. And of course no one's ever going to mistake the Old Town for Skalka. But the neighbourhoods I've always had a fondness for are the ones outside the historic centre, especially some of the big communist-era estates, and this is because some of them are really quite nice.

Picturesque housing estates

It's often difficult to picture nice housing blocks in western Europe: we're partly conditioned by the epic failures of the sixties and seventies to think of them as universally blighted. No doubt in Prague too there are blighted estates. But many of the ones I've been to are really quite peaceful. Last year we lived on one and I had a great time wandering around it in spring, cutting down sleepy, bushy pathways and sitting on benches overhung by enormous trees. At the time I described my estate as a sort of post-communist Butlin's, stuffed with greenery and young families. But now, again in spring, they feel more intimate, like small, self-enclosed towns lined with dozens of trees and little parks. OK, maybe growing up in one is dull or maybe it's not as nice as growing up in the actual countryside, but I wouldn't know and this is my blog so I get the right to conclude from my own impressions. And many communist-era housing estates seem like genuinely lovely places, where de-commodified public space is maintained in common and old and young mix "like in the old days." Although even the best are far from perfect, there's a rare few in Prague that have provided what looks like a convincing answer to the chronic problem of creating decent mass housing.

In the woods. Not sure what they're all looking for.

2. The countryside

It took moving to the Czech Republic to win me over to the countryside. Not that it's unique here but it is well loved. That said, the Czech countryside wins over a lot of places. Poland is as flat as a pancake run over by a big car or something (need to work on those similes). And southern Europe, with its bare rock and stubbly, straw strewn hills, always looks a bit barren to me. By contrast, nature in the Czech Republic was made for adjectives like "lush" and "verdant" (which in the name of decent writing I'll endeavour not to use). And to my surprise it turns out that being in it, as well as just looking at it, can be nice. Czechs also win on attitude to nature. Basically, they love it. Everyone flocks to it at the weekend. The names of trees and plants and sub-species of squirrel can be recited off-hand by the most settled of urbanites.  

Back to nature

There's proper countryside and then there's countryside-in-the-city. Prague is broken up by woody valleys and hills, which you can often walk into just by stepping off your estate and into some trees. Various hiking paths dissect the city. Yes, hiking paths. They're all over the place. Prague is, in essence, a sort of big, semi-rural town. So it surprises me a little when a student shakes their head and says, "I wasn't made for this big, dirty city life," while outside rows of trees wave in the breeze and there are signposts to a village cloaked in miles of lush, verdant woodland. 

Prokopske Udoli. About ten minutes by tram from the centre of Prague.

1. Drinking

I've never seen a fight in Prague. I've seen at least one in every British town I've ever been to, so why not here? Why are Czechs such an apparently peaceable bunch? The answer, predictably, boils down to the drinking culture. Pubs are cheap; people often drink locally; they stay in one place over the course of the night; and at the end of it all they stagger home. Not much opportunity for a fight if there's no detour via a kebab van or a club. 

Now, I don't presume to fully understand Czech drinking culture. Actually, I probably don't understand Czech drinking culture at all. Conversation topics, manners, silent codes of conduct - all are alien to me. However, pubs are the perfect places to speculate about social etiquette. For example, the obsession with beer mats (presumably to protect the tables, which is practical enough). The insistence on table service as a crucial sign of civility (otherwise, I suppose, you're just like McDonald's). The precise manner in which toasts are made and drinks are paid for and tips are given. All of these knit society together in a way that largely dodges the need for pissed up brawling. No wonder Brits on holiday are considered so peculiar.

As it turns out, then, people aren't all exactly the same - some like to lamp each other more than others. Perhaps it's not the most philosophical sounding discovery but I consider this last fact well worth learning.          



       

Teaching Business

"Business English" is a grizzly little epithet. It suggests something too much at ease in conference centres and on team-building excursions. What business English teaching attempts is a tidy reduction of the language to  battle-ready nuggets of usefulness: thus such aggressively targeted niches of study as "language for describing key players in e-commerce." In theory I've nothing against this. Who wants to study the future perfect continuous when you only really want to be able to go on holiday and, in the words of one student, "not look stupid"? So, of course, teach students what they need. 

The problem comes when things get too obscure. When the basic value of learning English for most people is that it's a holiday necessity (like beachwear or sun-tan lotion), it's probably best not to push things too far.  I've never met anyone who really cared about learning the precise etiquette of email writing in English because, unless you're a sociopath, you'll generally intuit it. The same thing goes for "lexis relating to conference calls" or "chatting at the water-cooler".

Like everything else that happens there, people who study English at work are utterly alienated from it. That pretty much rules out homework. Or often attendance. The lessons are a routine only slightly more preoccupying than ordering something from a vending machine or going to make coffee. Indeed, in such conditions, my function is not wholly dissimilar to that of a vending machine: they make a selection, I spit out the right thing. This is consumed with the force at least of habit, though not with any noticeable satisfaction. Its memory is discarded moments later.

Providing such services can be oddly degrading. At least when I'm teaching seven year-olds can and can't there's actual learning going on. I arrive at companies feeling like a cheap door to door salesman, or worse, some kind of motivational speaker. 'Let's all get up and stand in a circle,' I've been known to say. Understandable, then, that the only response is a heavy sinking feeling. The distant whirr of photocopiers grows louder in the conference room quiet. Post-lunch jaws slacken around me. Ties are loosened. Chairs creak under the weight of impatient bottoms.

This quiet weight of expectation is hard to shoulder. I feel, in psychoanalytic terms,like  the classic hysteric: frantically trying to impress some inscrutable master. 'How about this one on over-fishing in the Indian Ocean?' Someone picks at a finger-nail. 'How about this one on the Notting Hill carnival?' A muted sigh. A cleared throat. My most frequently asked question of myself while I'm teaching is: How much of a dick am I being? Not what are they learning? But how annoying am I? This is, I suppose, as it should be, when you're asking for the attention of lots of people who are much older and more experienced than you are. In a business English class, however, the answer is necessarily: Quite a lot of a dick. That's because most people, when they're at work, just want to work. Or not work and talk about what they want. Or better, not work and not talk and stare out the window or do crosswords.

The most terrifying thing about business English and its invasion of the workplace is this: it participates in that postmodern managerial desire to make all time simultaneously recreational and productive. It's not so much a desire to eliminate relaxation, more that those in charge hanker for a world where the division between work and leisure no longer exists: massages and clay pigeon shooting and walking holidays and studying in your spare time and even staring out the window all become legitimate parts of the working day. It's with horror that I imagine myself a part of that.

There is the occasional, heart warming exception. Take Jirka and David. Two computer programmers who work for the incessantly modern Avast (rumoured to have "barefoot" days at the office), they are typically awkward IT types. Neither do any homework, of course. But that's fine: Jirka has a two year-old daughter. David, I think, just comes along for the company. While Jirka is a sort of quiet stoner who enjoys listening to Pink Floyd, David is a short, bald, very shy man in his thirties. Both come along for an hour and a half, and together we do very little. They talk about software, how rubbish they both think Apple is, their families, and what good beers I should try. Then they leave. Their only motivation in coming is, I think, to escape the office for a bit. It's a relief I'm more than happy to provide.

Prague Spring

Prague in Spring

Somebody has moved the Indian Chief on Francouzska street so that he faces away from the road. Where his arm used to shield his eyes from the sun it now cradles a drunken head, his elbow propping him up against the wall of the non-stop pub which is his lookout. My tram shunts past and a few of us crane our heads at it.

It's spring-time in Prague.

Last week - the end of March - a Russian teenager got dressed up in army fatigues and took the tram to Krymská. His friends were waiting for him at the stop and they laughed in solidarity and recognition as he stepped off. Together they marched with their air rifles in mock formation down the road. A few passers by, mostly on the trams, craned their necks as they passed. Krym is Czech for the peninsula the west calls Crimea.

Today, like everyday, I go to Krymská, the street named after Crimea, and climb the hill to Slovenská. Ruská is not far away, if you follow the hill all the way down to the bottom. My street, Lužická runs not far from the top. I climb the blossoming paths that lead to Bezručovy Park, up the steepest side of the hill that separates two historical neighbourhoods - Královské Vinohrady and Vršovice. Though Neruda rarely left the villagey splendour of Mala Strana and Kafka had an abiding affection for the scuzzy working-class district of Žižkov, this anonymous hill packs in as much varied life and mystery as its more famous counterparts. Beyond Vršovice is Nusle, the smog-cloaked valley bisected by Nuselsky most (Nusle Bridge), Prague's great, rumbling road bridge, designed precisely in order to cut out the sultry, silty, stacked tenements below. Nuselský most connects the edge of the New Town (Nové Město), itself cut to shreds by hollering traffic, with the outcrop of Vyšehrad. This huge hill-top, jutting out over the Vltava was home to the first local settlement, belonging in some myths to Libuše, Queen of Vyšehrad, who would eventually prophesy the founding of Prague and the famous castle at neighbouring Hradčany. Thus, via Nuselsky most - a short modernist diversion - the hill between Vinohrady and Vršovice is joined to Hradčany, the seat of national power. The radio used by the Czechoslovak resistance in Prague - the resistance that assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the Blonde Beast, Himmler's right hand - was also called Libuše. Her anti-fascist credentials are beyond question. 

In Prague it is sometimes necessary to take these scrambled paths through history.

Vysehrad

I sit in our local beer garden, tucked away in a bushy corner of the hill between Vršovice and Vinohrady, and watch everyone looking up at a dog which, startled by some distant ricochet of a siren, lets out a long, maudlin whimper. Her owner hushes her and gets her to lie back down on their shared bench. The drinkers return to their drinking as the last of the cool spring sun peels back the clouds.

Across the valley, the jumbled, fume-streaked stacks of Nusle roll up the side of the hill, while behind them the glass-and-steel of last decade's modernity - the modernity of the boom and the bubble - fan out across the horizon. Interspersed are the concrete juggernauts of the panelaky peeking out of a light city mist.  

A few of my students tell me their families used to live in Vinohrady, when rents were affordable and the concrete was still crumbling. But oh, the high ceilings!

Krymská is not far from either Ruská or Ukrainská. Curiously, though, it runs parallel with Francouszká (France street). Nearby are Italská, Anglická Americká, Belgická, and so on. In fact almost all the roads are named after the Allies of the First World War, the victors in a conquest that saw the birth of Czechoslovakia and in the wake of which Královske Vinohrady, Vršovice, and other villages were formally incorporated into Prague. This fairytale city at the heart of Europe would become the anchor for what Benedict Anderson famously called an "imagined community". Yet isn't Europe itself an imagined community - an aspiration and an idea for balancing inter-imperial conflict - of which Prague was repeatedly the star player and the key to power? After all, without Prague's rebellion there would have been no Thirty Year's War and no Treaty of Westphalia - the key moment in the construction of an imaginary world of sovereign nations which would legitimate, restrain and extend imperialisms. In other words, the birth of the idea of Europe. Czechoslovakia-as-nation-state (and later just the Czech Republic) simply represented the territorial intensification of Prague's enduring significance.

The roads of Vinohrady and Vršovice - the roads of the Allied countries of the FirstWorld War - converge - in what could be a marvellous display of Czech humour - on Náměstí Míru or Peace Square.

Not all the road names are national. Some, like Jana Masaryka, lament and memorialize the dead. Jan Masaryk was the son of T.G. Masaryak, Czechoslovakia's first President. He was also Foreign Minister after World War Two. Bucking the national trend - or rather inverting it - he threw himself out of a window and died in 1948. A plaque dedicated to him on the road not far from where I live says "Pravda vítězí, ale dá to fušku" - "Truth wins, but it's hard work." Though his death has the whiff of Communist cover-up, it's never been fully established. Still, there's a certain bleak irony in a Czech leader defenestrating himself. The nobility has a habit here of falling out of windows. At least he took his destiny into his own hands. After he died people joked, "Jan Masaryk was a very tidy man. He was such a tidy man that when he jumped he shut the window after himself."

In the beer garden a Dutch man with long grey hair is pointedly telling a young woman, "It's best to save money for travel. Better than having things for your flat." He stops to drink his beer, which is already half-raised and has been bobbing around in his hand for some time. She nods and he goes on with his sermon until, somehow, he has started talking about Putin. "He wants his old satellites back," he says sagely. In the city of pastiche, of entangled and enmeshed historical time, perched on a hill in a quiet residential neighbourhood, he says, lowering his voice to a sweetly saddened pitch, "Even here in Czechoslovakia! It's terrible."