Heimatfilm 2
In “Das Posthaus im Schwarzwald”, the setting is apparently 1905 but elements of the costumes and so on seem to come from a much earlier time. The female lead is the holder of a postal contract, that is for local public transport (post-coaches) as well as the mail and a coaching inn. A prince (nephew of the reigning Grand Duke of the local petty kingdom) is annoyed with an unfaithful actress and decides to take a holiday, incognito, at the coaching inn. He falls in love with the postmistress. She is played by Christina Görtner, who is a terrific singer, pretty, and a non-actress. The prince does not sing, apparently cannot act at all, and looks like a model in a fashion plate. At about minute 60, the Grand Duke dies and bequeathes the dukedom, unexpectedly, to the nephew in question. This means that he cannot marry the postmistress, who after all is not of noble blood. The last half hour is about star-crossed love, sacrifice, duty, noble regret. And this passage actually is kitsch. The high feelings don’t convince in a musical comedy. The two leads can’t act and they can’t express the emotions required. And the first part of the film showed the prince as a collector of actresses, so the idea that he would fall deeply in love with this rural beauty is just inconsistent with what we have already been shown. This story line seems to have been borrowed from quite another film – presumably one of the films about Crown Prince Rudolf, of which at least one was made during the 1950s. But, in the end, I don’t think Heimatfilms are usually kitsch– this is an exception.
One of the texts I looked at quotes a “rule” of writing Heimat films: people are never in charge of their own destiny. (Actually, “To want to take decisions yourself is a breach of the rules in the world of Heimat films.”) This comes from an Internet text which we can no longer access. Anyway, it is suggestive. The saleable element of these films is not their relation to rural life but the sense of comfort and irresponsibility which they are all flooded with. If you look at You-Tube playlists, one of them has 266 different films on it. It is evident that quite a few of these are not “rural films”, and that the label speaks to the potential audience as a promise of uncritical cheerfulness irrespective of geography.
One of Eliot’s characters says “in the mountains, there you feel free”, which is the premise of quite a few of these films. He has one passage set in a hotel by the Starnberger See, south of Munich, which also involves a refugee (stamm aus Litauen), and a second passage set in mountains during a drought. “The road winding above among the mountains”, surely Görtner sang that one. Is “The Waste Land” a crypto-Heimatfilm? More research needed.
When I looked at the Heimat novel, quite a few years ago, I was interested in the fact that one of its founders was Jewish; Berthold Auerbach (1812-86), author of Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (4 vols, 1843 to 1854). We can't bypass the fact that Heimat films never have Jewish characters – a clear-out which is uneasily reminiscent of a more brutal clearing up of the ethnic pattern in Germany. The audience probably thought that Jews were not part of rural German life – which isn't even true. The films didn’t want to show diversity, or outsiders, or the possibility of being outside the community. Their audience actually wanted to lose consciousness of themselves as something separate from a group, and sociability.
A feature of the few films I have managed to watch is incompetence and forgiveness. For example, in Das Haut Hin (1960, probable non-Heimatfilm but on a Heimat playlist), the Peter Alexander character starts by going to a sauna, as preparation for a key oral exam. He is studying zoology so as to find a solution to the phylloxera louse (Reblaus) problem in his aunt’s vineyard. The sauna attendant simply fails to wake him up at the agreed time, and he misses the exam, and is exiled (relegiert) from the university. His aunt throws him out. So this is an example of banal incompetence which we often see repeated. More vitally, the films show repeated forgiveness for incompetence– endlessly. They go against the productivity ethos which is the central story of West Germany and its hard-working inhabitants. The film gets some laughs from the aunt not knowing what relegiert means, and at first thinking it is a brilliant result. Managerial types either do not feature in Heimatfilms, or give up ordering people around and merge into the cheerful and vague group identity. Calling them anti-authoritarian would be misleading, except so far as comedy is always about arrogant people. You would have to invent a category of “uncritical and conservative anti-authoritarianism”, which just isn't very useful.
The texts indicate that the Allied authorities classed Heimat films as “unbedenklich”, innocuous, in 1947. This was to do with licensing films – entertainment films set in villages did not pose a threat of Nazi mobs roaming the streets. So a high proportion of people making Heimat films, at the higher levels, directors and scriptwriters, had been active under the Third Reich, and (at least) acceptable to Dr Goebbels. After significant unemployment between roughly 1945 and 1950, they were ready in 1950 to do something lucrative but inconspicuous. The theme of “forgiveness” in the scripts may be connecting with the director wishing people to forgive and forget his filmography. It is conspicuous that the films are neither anti-Nazi nor anti-communist. If the Weimar system broke up, in its last years, into communists and Nazis, a simply “restorative” cinema would have connected with one side or the other. But Heimatfilm doesn't connect, it is all about forgetting. (I left out the conservatives, who de facto supported Hitler but who would have included quite a few monarchists.)
The texts refer to these films having a “function” of integrating the refugees into modern life. Just to clarify, the settlement at the end of the Second World War meant some 12 million Germans fleeing Eastern or Central Europe and resettling in West Germany. They were a factor in any political or cultural scene, just by numbers. The ”economic miracle” involved building homes for them all to live in and jobs for them all to do. It was an era of “forced savings” and of many people living in camps while they saved up to move into a flat. I am not sure about the “function”, because Heimatfilms are obviously designed to make money, not to fulfil some political doctrine, and the West German government was not in charge of the film industry. But, the representation of a Heimat to 12 million people who quite literally had lost their Heimat is part of the story. Some of the films show refugees starting out unhappy and reaching integration during the film. Commentators usually point out how artificial the geography of the Heimatfilm is. The films are always either set in the Alps, or in the Lüneburger Heide, or in the Black Forest. As this implies, these are not films recalling how great life was before 1937 in Mazovia, or East Prussia, or Silesia, or anywhere outside the 1946 borders. That would have been revanchism, and while I suspect you could have sold a lot of tickets like that, the Heimatfilm really is non-political, and this just wouldn't fit in a Heimatfilm. (Provinces then in East Germany were also not eligible. Really, you get the impression that film crews were falling over each other in the Black Forest, in around 1956.)
The areas chosen were not densely populated. Most migrants to the cities came from the densely populated rural regions, quite obviously! The regions chosen were picturesque, and the suggestion is that there chosen because they were holiday destinations. They were unspoilt because they were not very suitable for agriculture, often full of forests and mountains, and so they were not usually “home” at all. As Kristina Kaiser points out, most of the population couldn't afford a holiday, at the start of the 1950s. They could see posters and postcards. And Kaiser points out, again, that the colouring of the films resembles postcards. It is vital that some of the characters wear “Tracht”, regional costume, which was not in fact daily working wear in the regions.
The author quantitatively most exploited in Heimatfilm is Ludwig Ganghofer (1855-1920), not someone much read outside old films.
Thomas Elsaesser has said that the Heimatfilm is the only genre which was actually originated in Germany, and this is much quoted. I am not immediately convinced by this, partly because these films were not of export quality, and so they were not visible even to film fans in cities in other countries. I am quite aware that there is a “non-export sector” in every country, and that I am unable to make generalisations about this sector – cinemas in London show films by intellectual directors which were often not even popular in their home countries. So you could probably locate Russian, or Swedish, Heimat films, with a bit of effort. And this is much easier via You-tube. Also, you could argue that either the Expressionist film, or the horror film, were German inventions.
I was disappointed by how few films actually have peasant characters. A high proportion of the films are about characters who are simply in the country on holiday, and this could also be part of the “Urlaubs-Welle”, the “holiday wave”, which saw numerous films set in a Mediterranean land– Capri seems to be favoured. One function of the “economic miracle” was to destroy the popularity of the Heimatfilm – advancing prosperity coincided, in the Sixties, with a loss of interest in such films. The idea of a holiday in a warm country, and by a warm sea, was competing with the idyllic break somewhere in the Alps. Girls appeared in bathing costumes rather than in Tracht.
“Posthaus” has a supposed plot about the post coach being replaced by buses using the internal combustion engine. This is a State contract, so the prince has a role in allocating it. On his holiday, he takes with him Dr Haberle, a poet who also drinks rather a lot. He dresses up in a suit of armour and then witnesses a dance rehearsal by two very long-legged dancers – practising to please the prince. They are obviously nightclub dancers and obviously of the 1950s, so they have nothing to do with the Black Forest in 1905. They do get to do five dances. The poet pretends to be the prince to protect the latter's incognito so that he can woo the postmistress without her realising he is a blue blood. The poet gets to give speeches, receive loyal addresses, finally the dancers come and do a striptease for him because they wish to become official court dancers. He enjoys all this. This all may be a parody of the pretension of some German poets, wishing to displace the small-scale autocrats of 19th C Germany by becoming miniature autocrats. Stefan George impersonating a prince, that is instantly credible. The poet is played by Gunther Philipp, who is in most of the films I have watched so far – not a great comic, but better than most of the films he is in. The Internet shows him as having made 147 films – part of a whole world which we don’t see, I doubt any of these films got released in Britain or could be classified as a “good” film. Like the blonde shikses, he is there to make us forget how bored we are with the film and its plot. I was hoping to write that the Heimatfilm shows a shift towards stories about peasant characters and away from a preoccupation with small-scale Courts, and court officials of whom the writer is one, in one way or another. But, “Posthaus” exactly disproves that, I don't think there are any peasant characters, the coach service is a State contract, the dancers want a court appointment, and their uncle is a schnapps brewer who wants to be “schnapps seether by appointment to his majesty”. So, minor court intrigues. Of course this is an alternative to capitalism, and sidelining the whole world of productivity and performance measurement is key to the Heimat film feeling. Literati who were involved in court life were a feature of 17th and 18th C German language literature, that is one of the main reasons why we can't read their works any more.
Literally, you could have found monarchists in West Germany in 1955 (and, more so, in Austria). The Bavarian variant (Bayerische Heimat- und Königspartei) got 0.8% of the vote in the 1950 elections. But it was all a bit theoretical, it had a dream-like quality for most cinema-goers – court life was picked because the plots could be borrowed from older works, and mainly because it was completely unreal to the audience. It was part of avoiding politics. We have to add that it was an excuse for elaborate costumes. Chocolate soldiers, playing-card monarchs. If you look at an anti-progress doctrine in Heidegger, let’s say, or amongst the Greens, that is really a long way away from Heimatfilms. They are just entertainment. 'King' in Bavarian is "kini". In “Posthaus”, the dancers discover that Dr Haberle has been pretending, and that they have unsheathed their not very rural striptease for him in vain – but they don’t express any anger. This is partly to do with their limited range as actors, but more deeply part of the “forgiveness” aspect of these films, nothing has any consequences. In fact he goes to jail for impersonating royalty, and they visit him in jail.
It is quite hard to devise a script in which nobody says anything intelligent during the entire story, but maybe that is what a lot of consumers would prefer. A central point about these films is that they were a site where typically someone intelligent points out that what some quite stupid people enjoy is rather stupid, and this isn’t as helpful as you might imagine. They sum up “affirmative culture”. I am thinking more of a ten-year holiday where we don’t criticise affirmative films, and instead possibly try to enjoy them. I don’t really want to replace art with critical analysis.
But, of course, we have to admit then that the people who made the films were intelligent and, it follows, manipulative. The films are nothing like naive art even if they present naive characters. In fact, the films are a contact line where intelligent and culturally sophisticated creators came into contact with a very large audience of whom a high proportion were nothing like sophisticated. This is essentially benign, although I think that populist phases of Weimar culture and Hollywood were more creative and more benign.
Sunday, 28 February 2021
Tuesday, 23 February 2021
Heimat films
Wo der Wildbach rauscht
There is a Kling poem in his Tyrolese series which has fragments about WODA WILBA and WODA WILBA RAUSCHT which I found completely baffling. Someone (I think it was Ulf) told me it was a blurred version of “Wo der Wildbach rauscht”, a 1956 Bavarian Heimatfilm. Which I watched quite a lot of on You-Tube yesterday. So I am acquiring knowledge of 50s kitsch. I read that 300 Heimatfilms were made during the 1950s (German or Austrian). Kling’s poem actually refers to the opening shot of the film, he is describing a forested hillside and you are supposed to visualise the title and opening sequence of the film, showing a rapid and deep mountain torrent (the Wildbach) flowing down. I was told while living in Edenkoben that there is a channel, the Bavarian one, which shows a Heimatfilm every Sunday afternoon. I got the impression that this had been true since the 1950s (German TV began in about 1952, national transmission from 1954). But ‘Wildbach’ was the first Heimatfilm I have ever watched.
band (rauscht), ein rauschen da
untn; ein weisses, das, tannenbe-
pelztes rauh WODAWIL… WODAWILBA, rau
chende massive (eingenebelt), breitere na-
tur; WODAWIL!, NATURBREITE GERADEZU!
(‘schwarzgelbes stirn’)
A book summary links the genre with “germandom, blood and soil, and kitsch”, and this is the hill we have to climb. I only watched the first half hour of ‘Wildbach’, but my impression is that it is a good film. I had trouble with the dialogue because it is in dialect (most probably, very highly modified to reach an audience outside the region) and my education did not include Bavarian. Part of the set-up is that it is a (fictionally?) complete peasant society, so that everyone speaks the same dialect. (There is one Italian character.) This means that dialect-speaking characters sound natural, they are not forced into a culturally inferior position by the intrusion of people speaking the standard language, who would immediately seem to have better contacts and wider knowledge of the world. I just can't imagine a rural English film which would not have the gentry as part of the set-up. I don’t think you can find an English film which is purely in dialect. I did wonder if the Heimatfilm prefers the Alps because the low surplus possible in a cold climate and (probably) rather leached, hill soils did not permit the rise, historically, of feudalism and a parasitical landlord class. So, linked to the freedom of the Swiss people. This is just a guess, and anyway I read that such films are also set in the Black Forest and Luneburg Heath (near Hamburg). A link with landscape painting, so that the visual and landscape component of the films is very important to their appeal, is more likely.
The plot of ‘Wildbach’ is briefly that there is a rich peasant, Muralt, in love with a farm girl, who however prefers to marry Lorenz, son of the village mayor. There is a plank bridge (Steg) over the mountain stream, and in a fight with Muralt Lorenz falls off it and drowns. Muralt then goes to prison for twenty years, innocent of murder but not helped by witnesses. On release he vows to destroy the village by cutting down the trees which hold the steep slope together. Without trees, it will be swept away and allow the torrent to sweep the village away towards the plain. There is another fight, he falls into the stream but is rescued. Regina, a village girl, is disclosed as his illegitimate daughter. New facts emerge. He forgives the village and there is reconciliation.
I have to mention politics. These films are apolitical. The problem is that they are uncritical. West Germany in the 1950s was profoundly split, in the way people interpreted the recent past and the beckoning future, and anyone making a popular film would have cut out any apolitical scenes to avoid alienating half the audience before even starting. So we are not facing right-wing politics, concealed Nazism, ‘blood and soil’ ideology, attacks on city life. The issue is only that critical ideas are rather interesting in art, and uncritical art can often make us feel sleepy. As a matter of fact, the moment of German culture we are capturing here is “bright 15 year old comes out of cinema and thinks ‘that was a really stupid film, there is a whole world which such films fail to deal with, and I am actually going to live in the latter’”. All the Germans you are going to encounter because they write novels, political works, intelligent film scripts, etc., went through this moment. But, lots of other Germans never had this golden moment, or at least if they did it didn’t discourage them from watching Heimatfilms. The book summary I read points out that, even if the genre went into a big decline after 1965, it reached improbably high audience figures on television, and in fact still does. The audience moved away from cinemas but that does not necessarily mean that the nation (and the Swiss and the Austrians) collectively gave up on “affirmative culture” and began reading Adorno and buying rock albums.
I noticed that there is a film “Grün ist die Heide” and that this is (probably) based on a story by Hermann Löns, a Heimat writer of the Second Empire who volunteered for the Western Front and was killed there. He did have those militarist-nationalist links and was clearly part of the current which later became Nazism. This is alarming. There was a heimat movement in around 1900-1914, it involved ideas of being anti-urban which quite clearly included being anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment and anti-Semitic, and it included a theorist named Adolf Bartels (1862-1945) who has a very doubtful political record. But, it doesn't follow that they owned the word heimat, or that any rural and nostalgic art in the German-speaking realm is significantly post-, or with, that movement in the era of the “drive for world power” (Griff nach der Weltmacht). This is a key question in writing about Heimatkunst. If you think back to the era of The Female Eunuch, (I may be showing my age here), Greer frequently refers in it to a work on “women” by Plöss and Bartels, which claims the widest knowledge of “women” and finds against them in every instance. It is by the same Bartels! It (Das Weib in der Natur- und Volkerkunde) is atypical and extreme, so Greer is not being totally candid in also presenting it as typical of male resistance to female authority. Using it as a guide to opinion in England and America is an eccentric move. But the Plöss and Bartels book probably is wrong about everything. Bartels was willing to translate his feelings of territorial defensiveness, against the rise of women and trade unions, into explicit ideology. It does not follow that writers of Heimat fiction, around 1910, actually needed him or agreed with his political positions. And there was a line of peasant realist fiction 60 years before Bartels tried to take the movement over.
If you actually go to Germany, you find that there are lots of parts of culture which never get exported to countries like England, and that for example the local “art” films you can see in English cinemas are watched by very few people, and there are whole realms of cinema that never get imported to Britain. Watching “Wildbach” is part of a not very well directed programme of trying to find out about popular culture.
My view of kitsch is that it involves grandiosity, the pretention to cultural height and formal powers which it does not possess. It may be that kitsch only happens when religion seeps into art, in a degraded form; this is what Karlheinz Deschner has argued. Heimat films are noticeably unpretentious, and for that reason I am doubtful that the word kitsch is correct. They may actually be unambitious, predictable, averse to ideas, “affirmative culture”, and in some cases badly acted. In “Saison in Salzburg” there is a hotel (“Zum schönen Reserl”), and in the atrium there is a polychrome wooden statue of a saint, I didn’t figure out which one. Importing this religious art into a secular story could be kitsch. But, it doesn't work that way – it’s just something you would expect to find in a rural hotel in Austria, a local artefact. Folk-baroque, I think you say. It’s just realistic décor, and the film isn’t kitsch.
In the 1950s, these rural films are clearly one of the typical cultural forms of West Germany (and of Austria and Switzerland). But in East Germany you also have officially favoured fiction which deals with idealised simple characters, in stories which avoid the political differences actually existing in the country. I haven’t worked out the relationship between the two forms of idyll.
There is a Kling poem in his Tyrolese series which has fragments about WODA WILBA and WODA WILBA RAUSCHT which I found completely baffling. Someone (I think it was Ulf) told me it was a blurred version of “Wo der Wildbach rauscht”, a 1956 Bavarian Heimatfilm. Which I watched quite a lot of on You-Tube yesterday. So I am acquiring knowledge of 50s kitsch. I read that 300 Heimatfilms were made during the 1950s (German or Austrian). Kling’s poem actually refers to the opening shot of the film, he is describing a forested hillside and you are supposed to visualise the title and opening sequence of the film, showing a rapid and deep mountain torrent (the Wildbach) flowing down. I was told while living in Edenkoben that there is a channel, the Bavarian one, which shows a Heimatfilm every Sunday afternoon. I got the impression that this had been true since the 1950s (German TV began in about 1952, national transmission from 1954). But ‘Wildbach’ was the first Heimatfilm I have ever watched.
band (rauscht), ein rauschen da
untn; ein weisses, das, tannenbe-
pelztes rauh WODAWIL… WODAWILBA, rau
chende massive (eingenebelt), breitere na-
tur; WODAWIL!, NATURBREITE GERADEZU!
(‘schwarzgelbes stirn’)
A book summary links the genre with “germandom, blood and soil, and kitsch”, and this is the hill we have to climb. I only watched the first half hour of ‘Wildbach’, but my impression is that it is a good film. I had trouble with the dialogue because it is in dialect (most probably, very highly modified to reach an audience outside the region) and my education did not include Bavarian. Part of the set-up is that it is a (fictionally?) complete peasant society, so that everyone speaks the same dialect. (There is one Italian character.) This means that dialect-speaking characters sound natural, they are not forced into a culturally inferior position by the intrusion of people speaking the standard language, who would immediately seem to have better contacts and wider knowledge of the world. I just can't imagine a rural English film which would not have the gentry as part of the set-up. I don’t think you can find an English film which is purely in dialect. I did wonder if the Heimatfilm prefers the Alps because the low surplus possible in a cold climate and (probably) rather leached, hill soils did not permit the rise, historically, of feudalism and a parasitical landlord class. So, linked to the freedom of the Swiss people. This is just a guess, and anyway I read that such films are also set in the Black Forest and Luneburg Heath (near Hamburg). A link with landscape painting, so that the visual and landscape component of the films is very important to their appeal, is more likely.
The plot of ‘Wildbach’ is briefly that there is a rich peasant, Muralt, in love with a farm girl, who however prefers to marry Lorenz, son of the village mayor. There is a plank bridge (Steg) over the mountain stream, and in a fight with Muralt Lorenz falls off it and drowns. Muralt then goes to prison for twenty years, innocent of murder but not helped by witnesses. On release he vows to destroy the village by cutting down the trees which hold the steep slope together. Without trees, it will be swept away and allow the torrent to sweep the village away towards the plain. There is another fight, he falls into the stream but is rescued. Regina, a village girl, is disclosed as his illegitimate daughter. New facts emerge. He forgives the village and there is reconciliation.
I have to mention politics. These films are apolitical. The problem is that they are uncritical. West Germany in the 1950s was profoundly split, in the way people interpreted the recent past and the beckoning future, and anyone making a popular film would have cut out any apolitical scenes to avoid alienating half the audience before even starting. So we are not facing right-wing politics, concealed Nazism, ‘blood and soil’ ideology, attacks on city life. The issue is only that critical ideas are rather interesting in art, and uncritical art can often make us feel sleepy. As a matter of fact, the moment of German culture we are capturing here is “bright 15 year old comes out of cinema and thinks ‘that was a really stupid film, there is a whole world which such films fail to deal with, and I am actually going to live in the latter’”. All the Germans you are going to encounter because they write novels, political works, intelligent film scripts, etc., went through this moment. But, lots of other Germans never had this golden moment, or at least if they did it didn’t discourage them from watching Heimatfilms. The book summary I read points out that, even if the genre went into a big decline after 1965, it reached improbably high audience figures on television, and in fact still does. The audience moved away from cinemas but that does not necessarily mean that the nation (and the Swiss and the Austrians) collectively gave up on “affirmative culture” and began reading Adorno and buying rock albums.
I noticed that there is a film “Grün ist die Heide” and that this is (probably) based on a story by Hermann Löns, a Heimat writer of the Second Empire who volunteered for the Western Front and was killed there. He did have those militarist-nationalist links and was clearly part of the current which later became Nazism. This is alarming. There was a heimat movement in around 1900-1914, it involved ideas of being anti-urban which quite clearly included being anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment and anti-Semitic, and it included a theorist named Adolf Bartels (1862-1945) who has a very doubtful political record. But, it doesn't follow that they owned the word heimat, or that any rural and nostalgic art in the German-speaking realm is significantly post-, or with, that movement in the era of the “drive for world power” (Griff nach der Weltmacht). This is a key question in writing about Heimatkunst. If you think back to the era of The Female Eunuch, (I may be showing my age here), Greer frequently refers in it to a work on “women” by Plöss and Bartels, which claims the widest knowledge of “women” and finds against them in every instance. It is by the same Bartels! It (Das Weib in der Natur- und Volkerkunde) is atypical and extreme, so Greer is not being totally candid in also presenting it as typical of male resistance to female authority. Using it as a guide to opinion in England and America is an eccentric move. But the Plöss and Bartels book probably is wrong about everything. Bartels was willing to translate his feelings of territorial defensiveness, against the rise of women and trade unions, into explicit ideology. It does not follow that writers of Heimat fiction, around 1910, actually needed him or agreed with his political positions. And there was a line of peasant realist fiction 60 years before Bartels tried to take the movement over.
If you actually go to Germany, you find that there are lots of parts of culture which never get exported to countries like England, and that for example the local “art” films you can see in English cinemas are watched by very few people, and there are whole realms of cinema that never get imported to Britain. Watching “Wildbach” is part of a not very well directed programme of trying to find out about popular culture.
My view of kitsch is that it involves grandiosity, the pretention to cultural height and formal powers which it does not possess. It may be that kitsch only happens when religion seeps into art, in a degraded form; this is what Karlheinz Deschner has argued. Heimat films are noticeably unpretentious, and for that reason I am doubtful that the word kitsch is correct. They may actually be unambitious, predictable, averse to ideas, “affirmative culture”, and in some cases badly acted. In “Saison in Salzburg” there is a hotel (“Zum schönen Reserl”), and in the atrium there is a polychrome wooden statue of a saint, I didn’t figure out which one. Importing this religious art into a secular story could be kitsch. But, it doesn't work that way – it’s just something you would expect to find in a rural hotel in Austria, a local artefact. Folk-baroque, I think you say. It’s just realistic décor, and the film isn’t kitsch.
In the 1950s, these rural films are clearly one of the typical cultural forms of West Germany (and of Austria and Switzerland). But in East Germany you also have officially favoured fiction which deals with idealised simple characters, in stories which avoid the political differences actually existing in the country. I haven’t worked out the relationship between the two forms of idyll.
Sunday, 7 February 2021
Homo balcanicus
Homo balcanicus
Peter Handke won the Nobel and is from the South-east. To be exact, he is half Slovene and half Austrian, from a border village where both languages are (or were) spoken. Other Balkan writers who won the grand Nobel are Herta Müller and Elias Canetti. It is noticeable that both of them wrote in German and went into exile in the West at quite an early stage in their careers. There are filters, it is presumably hard to translate a Balkan original into a Western language, and the Swedes can only read such languages– probably German, and English. But a feeling pervades that they got the Stockholm accolade because they weren’t wholly Balkan – they were halfway to being non-Balkan. Handke deserves credit for his efforts to interpret the South Slav world to the rest of Europe.
I read an anthology of travel writing about the Balkans in which the introduction pointed out with some asperity that all the writers included had passed thorough the target areas briefly and that none of them had had command of any of the local languages, so that their interactions with the locals were stylised or non-existent. What they came back and wrote was theatrical and able to reach a wide public essentially because it was not weighed down by detailed information. The travellers saw the locals through a mile-thick lens of diminished reality. The reports, even at the length of books, were effectively a joke based on ethnic stereotypes. All western nations participated in this joke, and as time went on the validation came from other westerners rather than from direct injections of local knowledge. This situation changed eventually, with someone like Edith Durham in the early 20th C, but even then much of what was published was based on very questionable basic data. This gave me a twinge – I certainly had acquired a full equipment of Western stereotypes about the Balkans, but I had a feeling that the book was destroying the information I already owned rather than giving me new and solid information, as an asset.
Using the on-line site Scribd, which has sixty million books and papers uploaded by enthusiasts (misguided or not), I have done a little reading to open up a different view of the Balkans. A different view, emerging from what I have just read rather than from deep personal knowledge, is that the south-east is much like the rest of Europe, although in other ways resembling the ex-colonial part of the world – states founded by armed revolt against local empires, with civil wars following rapidly on the convulsions of liberation.
Paschalis Kitromilides has written a series of papers about the ”Balkan mentality” which start out from the idea that in about 1780 there was no such thing as Balkan nationalism. He gives a close analysis of texts of the period, rather rare, in which there is a sense of “homeland”, home town, but the writers have an essentially international view of politics – they identified with the whole of Orthodox Christendom. So the nationalism was part of a local awakening – the literate part of the population awoke very suddenly to a new world, like someone who had been in jail for 50 years. (Arguably, 350 years.) There were very few local books which were not spiritual, saints’ lives and so forth. There was a deluge of books available, from modern printworks – all of them Western. So the nationalism, as a new factor, came from the West, and it predominated because the West was so preoccupied with nationalism at that time. The French Revolution looked, close up, more like a convulsion of French nationalism than like the enactment of noble Enlightenment ideas into legislation. Imitating France meant invading your neighbours.
One part of the Balkan stereotype is that Westerners try to find out what the facts are and are frustrated because any piece of regional politics involves three factions and these three have as many incompatible versions of what actually happened. This applies, for example, to what language is spoken in a region or how many people live there. So to deal with Balkan affairs is to become Balkan. This has some truth, but it is also true that westerners are disproportionately interested in disputes between countries, which may lead to wars, and so that areas where local experts have given very clear and detailed narratives and descriptions do not surface – and, do not get translated, and then do not contribute to the stereotype. The question is whether the West is more objective about western processes – reading accounts of the Second World War from, say, England, France, and Germany might give you the opposite conclusion. Of course there is a level of Western scholarship which rises above these things – but that is also true in, say, Serbia or Bulgaria, and anyway the most austere western scholarship is not what you are most likely to find in the bookshops.
Arguments about territorial claims are like relatives disputing a large and desirable legacy. No-one is at their best in that situation. The dismemberment of (Hapsburg) Hungary in around 1919 and 1920 was just such a legacy. People got carried away by the joy of acquisition and the delights of polemic. Hungary lost 60% of its territory. Serbia apparently doubled its extent (after losing the war, in effect). People got excited about this at a moment when people in France or Britain or Spain were not getting excited. However, a few years before, another rush for undefended territiories, the scrabble for Africa, had swept the West away. Over several decades, writers in the West were quite preoccupied by this unearned acquisition of wealth. Nationalism at home took on outrageous forms as a reflection of the land grab in other continents.
As for Macedonian, the status of the language is genuinely interesting if you are a linguist. Arguing about its relationship to Bulgarian or to other South Slav languages is therefore not eccentric or obsessive. It is certainly strange to read about someone writing an article in Macedonian and sending it to a newspaper where the editor translates it into Bulgarian because to publish an article in Macedonian would give it the status of a language (and so impugn Bulgaria's eventual claim to annex Macedonia to a new Greater Bulgaria). Haarmann’s classic 1975 account of European languages (67 of them) says that the first printing press in Macedonia was founded in 1838 in Solun, by Theodosius Sinaitskii, and he launched a weekly newspaper printed in Macedonian, Greek, and Yiddish. Some problems with this! For “jiddisch” we should surely read “ladino”, the Spanish-derived language used by the Jewish community of Thessalonica. And, the town ‘Solun’ is ‘Thessalonika’, older English form “Salonica” (and standard German form Saloniki). My guess is the reference book is wrong here.
Of the hundred or so writers from south-east Europe you are most likely to read, based on translations into Western European languages, none are nationalists (this might withstand checking, but let us move on). The legend of committed nationalists is based on summaries in reports by western journalists. Obviously, there is a very limited market for a nationalist writer from, say, Serbia or Rumania, in the West. Those translations don't exist. The question, then, is how important that current of nationalism, with ethnic pride and matching disparagement of neighbouring peoples and their institutions, actually is.
Kitromilides gives a very astute analysis of the so-called Balkan Sprachbund. All linguistic scholars agree that there are features of grammar which appear in most (never all) languages associated in the Balkan regional group. Irrespective of ancestry, there is a shared grammar, actually parts of a shared grammar, present in all the regional languages. It follows that there has been extensive bilingualism in the past. In a village, a man from language A would marry a bride speaking language B, and even if the children grew up speaking language A only, they spoke it with habitual patterns which unmistakably came from language B. This variant has, in each case, contaminated, or brilliantly tinted, the standard language of the area. It is striking that the mixed dialects did not remain confined to border villages, mocked by all the other speakers, but spread their influence to become standard Bulgarian, standard Serbo-Croat, and so forth. Border dialects are in some cases more mixed than these standards, with their Balkan-regional features. In that village, everybody had cousins who spoke a different language. Political nationalism based on language was poorly suited to the facts of Balkan society and had, certainly, not been the principle observed by Balkan people over the thousand or so years prior to the anti-Turkish rebellions of the early 19th century. The bilingual villages were the product, probably, of constant migration - over time, any static community would end up speaking the same language. There are quite similar patterns in folklore, where material seems to have diffused across the entire area, no doubt as a direct product of the bilinguals, readily able to re-create a ballad or a tale in their second personal language. How do you get from a region of bilinguals to a region of nationalists?
I have not seen, in many descriptions of this Sprachbund, an account of when its features emerged and spread. None of the reports mention Old Church Slavonic (geographically, this is Old Macedonian) so I presume that the translinguistic regional features had not emerged at the point when OCS was standardised and written, as a vehicle for translating liturgies, sermons, scriptures, and so forth. (This was the 9th C AD.) When I refer to past bilingualism, that is possibly misleading – actually there were numerous bilinguals in the “present”, say 1900 to 1980.
The essays I read are less strong at explaining the civil wars in the region, and the ethnic nationalist discourse which has incited and justified them. Over a 200 year period, the ethnic wars are confined to specific bands of time, and these were aspects of a general crisis in the region. That is, the crisis could be the surge of optimism involved in the collapse of the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, as well as the panic induced by aggressive advances and invasions by neighbouring states. The phases in question are the Yugoslav civil war of the first half of the 1990s and the Balkan War period of 1905 to 1912 (although some earlier wars took place between the Christian nations of the area). The popular nationalism which was a reaction to crises of that kind was not also the basic political culture of the whole 220 year period.
The sources suggest that nationalist intellectuals, the type represented by Milosevic, are a minority within each Balkan country, and that temporary political conjunctures give them the opportunity to exercise influence with the wider population, and with parts of the elite, so that their rather ill-nourished ideas briefly become national policy. Certainly most of the books I have read by Balkan writers are highly informative and not particularly nationalist. A proportion of the material deals with linguistics and cultural traditions, themes which also appeal to nationalists, but that is because I am interested in languages (and, secondarily, in literature and cultural forms). The language pattern of the south-east is especially interesting, and you certainly didn’t have to be a nationalist to be interested by the relationships between neighbouring languages, or between a “standard language”, new or not, and the speech variants of the peasants or the urban populations. The economics of the western media mean that a writer who makes a market, say Dubravka Ugresic, is repetitively asked to write about nationalism – this is what Western audiences want to hear about the inner life of Serbia, and Ugresic is always being asked to write about it – even though Ugresic certainly isn’t a nationalist and does not read modern history in simple nationalist colours. Editors want Balkan writers to produce articles about “the Balkan question”. As if Egypt produces cotton and the Balkans produce yard after yard of nationalism.
The Second World War was not a Balkan civil war, but we have to look at the exaggerations of the satellite fascist state in Croatia and its genocide against the Serbs, agreed to be very closely related, ethically, to the Croats. Milovan Djilas has analysed the build-up to this. He identifies a papal and Hapsburg crusading drive into the south-east, over centuries, which was primarily directed against the Ottomans but which acquired a second direction, against Orthodox Christians, with time. So, the border between Rome and Byzantium happens to run between the Croats and the Serbs. The Croatian alignment with Italy, and with the Power which Vienna had become associated with, led them to define the Serbs as the enemy – and their conversion, or massacre, was a continuation of a Europeans crusade. Again, the share of the West in this repays attention and perhaps criticism.
If we lose the inherited image of “homo balcanicus”, that opens the question of filling the gap with substantial and validated knowledge.
The interest in uncovering a whole realm of disinformation about the south-east of Europe is partly that it sheds light on a similar realm in the outer north-west. It is difficult to get very far with Celtic Studies without realising that fantasy projections onto the area, mainly from the 19th and 20th Cs and mainly from the “developed” nations nearby, cover the whole era, land and sea, in invisibility.
The Balkan area was ruled by the Ottoman Empire and its sociology is presumably derived from that long-term historical experience, and from the drama of exit from it. But millions of other Christians were ruled by the Byzantines and then by the Ottomans as their political heirs, and we have to ask if a “Balkan culture”, once identified, would also apply to Christian communities in Egypt, northern Iraq, Palestine, and other places.
I am reading the Alexiad of Anna Comnena. (Written in the 1130s and 1140s? The edition is unclear.) This is part of being in lockdown, I am reading all the books stacked up in the house which I never read before. This isn’t quite the first Byzantine book I have ever read, but it is certainly close to the first. It connects to our theme, as the campaign being described, in the 1080s, takes place in the Balkans – Robert of Sicily is attacking Dyrrachium, which is now in Albania, and the fighting is in the hinterland. It is hard to see any connection between the ruling class which Comnena describes (her father was the Emperor) and recent Balkan politics. Some of Michael Herzfeld’s papers talk about “crypto colonialism”, which, expansively described, is the idea that politics in Greece (and perhaps neighbouring countries) are specular, a mirror of the interests of the western agencies, which are unnaturally influential and which the locals are all too impressed by and anxious to please. So the Greek debt crisis would be a western crisis in which the Greeks are only spectators. This is not very convincing. However, Comnena’s book gives embarrassing confirmation. Her portrayal of Byzantine politics is dominated by the invasion of the Franks, or the Normans (a question of terminology). Robert and Bohemond land at Dyrrachium with an army recruited in Apulia and Lombardy, led by a Norman ruling and military class, with the intention of reaching and seizing Constantinople. A key unit of the Byzantine army is the Varangians, composed at this point mainly of exiles from Anglo-Saxon England, fleeing from a different but related Norman invasion. Greek nationalism of the period 1780 to 1830 (roughly) can be interpreted as a response to Western ideas and funding rather than as a pure expression of ingrained Greek patterns, inculcated at the mother’s knee and shared by the entire nation. For Herzfeld, modern Greece works like a colony of the West, even though legally it was a province of a Turkish Empire which liberated itself, and the westerners were offering help and admiration. Greeks are caught between an ideal (in which they are the continuation of a Classical Hellas which itself is seen only as an ideal) and a reality in which they are a halfway house between Europe and the Middle East. The fatal entry of Greece into the European Union and the Euro zone is a product both of a wish to have been “the first Europeans” and of self-deception and reams of fake figures. I suppose that unrealistic debt expresses a relationship, and both creditors and debtors are part of the drama; but I am less sure that this expressed domination or admiration.
Are Balkan intellectuals more nationalist than their western European colleagues? I don’t see a standard measure. I definitely avoid English nationalist historians, or journalists, and they make me feel rather ill. But, if you look at the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph, for example, it is arguable that a nationalist reading of history is still basic for them, and for their readers, and that their views on current events are firmly based in that reading of the last 5 centuries or so. There is that whole stream of English nationalism which you would have to measure, and which doesn't form part of my cultural diet. I possibly get it when I read military history, which I admit to doing. I relate more to the use of “operational research” in the Second World War than to the patriotic aspects. I don’t have a measure by which Croats are more or less nationalistic than English or Scottish people. My guess would be that educated people from south-east Europe know much more about foreign cultures than the literati in Britain normally do, because they know that the share of their country in world culture is fairly small, and that knowing about ideas in France, America, Germany and so on is a vital asset to them – something which they must have to gain the esteem of their peers. That is, intellectuals from south-eastern Europe know more about western Europe than vice versa.
I have left out the other influence, that is the flow from Russia and the Russian Communist Party. Most of the Balkan countries were attempting to imitate the Soviet system from about 1944 up to 1990. This is just not going to attract so much interest, partly because the model is irrelevant after 1990 and partly because the model is so dreary in the first place. But you can't just blame the West. You are bound to raise the question, “why can’t we give up foreign ideals and just act out who we are?” But, as soon as you say that, you are a nationalist. That is what being a nationalist means.
I spoke of nationalist writers not reaching the West. Without conducting a survey of the translations, by now impressive in their scope, I would hazard that Sikelianos and Kazantzakis, certainly available in English, were nationalists as well as being major writers.
Peter Handke won the Nobel and is from the South-east. To be exact, he is half Slovene and half Austrian, from a border village where both languages are (or were) spoken. Other Balkan writers who won the grand Nobel are Herta Müller and Elias Canetti. It is noticeable that both of them wrote in German and went into exile in the West at quite an early stage in their careers. There are filters, it is presumably hard to translate a Balkan original into a Western language, and the Swedes can only read such languages– probably German, and English. But a feeling pervades that they got the Stockholm accolade because they weren’t wholly Balkan – they were halfway to being non-Balkan. Handke deserves credit for his efforts to interpret the South Slav world to the rest of Europe.
I read an anthology of travel writing about the Balkans in which the introduction pointed out with some asperity that all the writers included had passed thorough the target areas briefly and that none of them had had command of any of the local languages, so that their interactions with the locals were stylised or non-existent. What they came back and wrote was theatrical and able to reach a wide public essentially because it was not weighed down by detailed information. The travellers saw the locals through a mile-thick lens of diminished reality. The reports, even at the length of books, were effectively a joke based on ethnic stereotypes. All western nations participated in this joke, and as time went on the validation came from other westerners rather than from direct injections of local knowledge. This situation changed eventually, with someone like Edith Durham in the early 20th C, but even then much of what was published was based on very questionable basic data. This gave me a twinge – I certainly had acquired a full equipment of Western stereotypes about the Balkans, but I had a feeling that the book was destroying the information I already owned rather than giving me new and solid information, as an asset.
Using the on-line site Scribd, which has sixty million books and papers uploaded by enthusiasts (misguided or not), I have done a little reading to open up a different view of the Balkans. A different view, emerging from what I have just read rather than from deep personal knowledge, is that the south-east is much like the rest of Europe, although in other ways resembling the ex-colonial part of the world – states founded by armed revolt against local empires, with civil wars following rapidly on the convulsions of liberation.
Paschalis Kitromilides has written a series of papers about the ”Balkan mentality” which start out from the idea that in about 1780 there was no such thing as Balkan nationalism. He gives a close analysis of texts of the period, rather rare, in which there is a sense of “homeland”, home town, but the writers have an essentially international view of politics – they identified with the whole of Orthodox Christendom. So the nationalism was part of a local awakening – the literate part of the population awoke very suddenly to a new world, like someone who had been in jail for 50 years. (Arguably, 350 years.) There were very few local books which were not spiritual, saints’ lives and so forth. There was a deluge of books available, from modern printworks – all of them Western. So the nationalism, as a new factor, came from the West, and it predominated because the West was so preoccupied with nationalism at that time. The French Revolution looked, close up, more like a convulsion of French nationalism than like the enactment of noble Enlightenment ideas into legislation. Imitating France meant invading your neighbours.
One part of the Balkan stereotype is that Westerners try to find out what the facts are and are frustrated because any piece of regional politics involves three factions and these three have as many incompatible versions of what actually happened. This applies, for example, to what language is spoken in a region or how many people live there. So to deal with Balkan affairs is to become Balkan. This has some truth, but it is also true that westerners are disproportionately interested in disputes between countries, which may lead to wars, and so that areas where local experts have given very clear and detailed narratives and descriptions do not surface – and, do not get translated, and then do not contribute to the stereotype. The question is whether the West is more objective about western processes – reading accounts of the Second World War from, say, England, France, and Germany might give you the opposite conclusion. Of course there is a level of Western scholarship which rises above these things – but that is also true in, say, Serbia or Bulgaria, and anyway the most austere western scholarship is not what you are most likely to find in the bookshops.
Arguments about territorial claims are like relatives disputing a large and desirable legacy. No-one is at their best in that situation. The dismemberment of (Hapsburg) Hungary in around 1919 and 1920 was just such a legacy. People got carried away by the joy of acquisition and the delights of polemic. Hungary lost 60% of its territory. Serbia apparently doubled its extent (after losing the war, in effect). People got excited about this at a moment when people in France or Britain or Spain were not getting excited. However, a few years before, another rush for undefended territiories, the scrabble for Africa, had swept the West away. Over several decades, writers in the West were quite preoccupied by this unearned acquisition of wealth. Nationalism at home took on outrageous forms as a reflection of the land grab in other continents.
As for Macedonian, the status of the language is genuinely interesting if you are a linguist. Arguing about its relationship to Bulgarian or to other South Slav languages is therefore not eccentric or obsessive. It is certainly strange to read about someone writing an article in Macedonian and sending it to a newspaper where the editor translates it into Bulgarian because to publish an article in Macedonian would give it the status of a language (and so impugn Bulgaria's eventual claim to annex Macedonia to a new Greater Bulgaria). Haarmann’s classic 1975 account of European languages (67 of them) says that the first printing press in Macedonia was founded in 1838 in Solun, by Theodosius Sinaitskii, and he launched a weekly newspaper printed in Macedonian, Greek, and Yiddish. Some problems with this! For “jiddisch” we should surely read “ladino”, the Spanish-derived language used by the Jewish community of Thessalonica. And, the town ‘Solun’ is ‘Thessalonika’, older English form “Salonica” (and standard German form Saloniki). My guess is the reference book is wrong here.
Of the hundred or so writers from south-east Europe you are most likely to read, based on translations into Western European languages, none are nationalists (this might withstand checking, but let us move on). The legend of committed nationalists is based on summaries in reports by western journalists. Obviously, there is a very limited market for a nationalist writer from, say, Serbia or Rumania, in the West. Those translations don't exist. The question, then, is how important that current of nationalism, with ethnic pride and matching disparagement of neighbouring peoples and their institutions, actually is.
Kitromilides gives a very astute analysis of the so-called Balkan Sprachbund. All linguistic scholars agree that there are features of grammar which appear in most (never all) languages associated in the Balkan regional group. Irrespective of ancestry, there is a shared grammar, actually parts of a shared grammar, present in all the regional languages. It follows that there has been extensive bilingualism in the past. In a village, a man from language A would marry a bride speaking language B, and even if the children grew up speaking language A only, they spoke it with habitual patterns which unmistakably came from language B. This variant has, in each case, contaminated, or brilliantly tinted, the standard language of the area. It is striking that the mixed dialects did not remain confined to border villages, mocked by all the other speakers, but spread their influence to become standard Bulgarian, standard Serbo-Croat, and so forth. Border dialects are in some cases more mixed than these standards, with their Balkan-regional features. In that village, everybody had cousins who spoke a different language. Political nationalism based on language was poorly suited to the facts of Balkan society and had, certainly, not been the principle observed by Balkan people over the thousand or so years prior to the anti-Turkish rebellions of the early 19th century. The bilingual villages were the product, probably, of constant migration - over time, any static community would end up speaking the same language. There are quite similar patterns in folklore, where material seems to have diffused across the entire area, no doubt as a direct product of the bilinguals, readily able to re-create a ballad or a tale in their second personal language. How do you get from a region of bilinguals to a region of nationalists?
I have not seen, in many descriptions of this Sprachbund, an account of when its features emerged and spread. None of the reports mention Old Church Slavonic (geographically, this is Old Macedonian) so I presume that the translinguistic regional features had not emerged at the point when OCS was standardised and written, as a vehicle for translating liturgies, sermons, scriptures, and so forth. (This was the 9th C AD.) When I refer to past bilingualism, that is possibly misleading – actually there were numerous bilinguals in the “present”, say 1900 to 1980.
The essays I read are less strong at explaining the civil wars in the region, and the ethnic nationalist discourse which has incited and justified them. Over a 200 year period, the ethnic wars are confined to specific bands of time, and these were aspects of a general crisis in the region. That is, the crisis could be the surge of optimism involved in the collapse of the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, as well as the panic induced by aggressive advances and invasions by neighbouring states. The phases in question are the Yugoslav civil war of the first half of the 1990s and the Balkan War period of 1905 to 1912 (although some earlier wars took place between the Christian nations of the area). The popular nationalism which was a reaction to crises of that kind was not also the basic political culture of the whole 220 year period.
The sources suggest that nationalist intellectuals, the type represented by Milosevic, are a minority within each Balkan country, and that temporary political conjunctures give them the opportunity to exercise influence with the wider population, and with parts of the elite, so that their rather ill-nourished ideas briefly become national policy. Certainly most of the books I have read by Balkan writers are highly informative and not particularly nationalist. A proportion of the material deals with linguistics and cultural traditions, themes which also appeal to nationalists, but that is because I am interested in languages (and, secondarily, in literature and cultural forms). The language pattern of the south-east is especially interesting, and you certainly didn’t have to be a nationalist to be interested by the relationships between neighbouring languages, or between a “standard language”, new or not, and the speech variants of the peasants or the urban populations. The economics of the western media mean that a writer who makes a market, say Dubravka Ugresic, is repetitively asked to write about nationalism – this is what Western audiences want to hear about the inner life of Serbia, and Ugresic is always being asked to write about it – even though Ugresic certainly isn’t a nationalist and does not read modern history in simple nationalist colours. Editors want Balkan writers to produce articles about “the Balkan question”. As if Egypt produces cotton and the Balkans produce yard after yard of nationalism.
The Second World War was not a Balkan civil war, but we have to look at the exaggerations of the satellite fascist state in Croatia and its genocide against the Serbs, agreed to be very closely related, ethically, to the Croats. Milovan Djilas has analysed the build-up to this. He identifies a papal and Hapsburg crusading drive into the south-east, over centuries, which was primarily directed against the Ottomans but which acquired a second direction, against Orthodox Christians, with time. So, the border between Rome and Byzantium happens to run between the Croats and the Serbs. The Croatian alignment with Italy, and with the Power which Vienna had become associated with, led them to define the Serbs as the enemy – and their conversion, or massacre, was a continuation of a Europeans crusade. Again, the share of the West in this repays attention and perhaps criticism.
If we lose the inherited image of “homo balcanicus”, that opens the question of filling the gap with substantial and validated knowledge.
The interest in uncovering a whole realm of disinformation about the south-east of Europe is partly that it sheds light on a similar realm in the outer north-west. It is difficult to get very far with Celtic Studies without realising that fantasy projections onto the area, mainly from the 19th and 20th Cs and mainly from the “developed” nations nearby, cover the whole era, land and sea, in invisibility.
The Balkan area was ruled by the Ottoman Empire and its sociology is presumably derived from that long-term historical experience, and from the drama of exit from it. But millions of other Christians were ruled by the Byzantines and then by the Ottomans as their political heirs, and we have to ask if a “Balkan culture”, once identified, would also apply to Christian communities in Egypt, northern Iraq, Palestine, and other places.
I am reading the Alexiad of Anna Comnena. (Written in the 1130s and 1140s? The edition is unclear.) This is part of being in lockdown, I am reading all the books stacked up in the house which I never read before. This isn’t quite the first Byzantine book I have ever read, but it is certainly close to the first. It connects to our theme, as the campaign being described, in the 1080s, takes place in the Balkans – Robert of Sicily is attacking Dyrrachium, which is now in Albania, and the fighting is in the hinterland. It is hard to see any connection between the ruling class which Comnena describes (her father was the Emperor) and recent Balkan politics. Some of Michael Herzfeld’s papers talk about “crypto colonialism”, which, expansively described, is the idea that politics in Greece (and perhaps neighbouring countries) are specular, a mirror of the interests of the western agencies, which are unnaturally influential and which the locals are all too impressed by and anxious to please. So the Greek debt crisis would be a western crisis in which the Greeks are only spectators. This is not very convincing. However, Comnena’s book gives embarrassing confirmation. Her portrayal of Byzantine politics is dominated by the invasion of the Franks, or the Normans (a question of terminology). Robert and Bohemond land at Dyrrachium with an army recruited in Apulia and Lombardy, led by a Norman ruling and military class, with the intention of reaching and seizing Constantinople. A key unit of the Byzantine army is the Varangians, composed at this point mainly of exiles from Anglo-Saxon England, fleeing from a different but related Norman invasion. Greek nationalism of the period 1780 to 1830 (roughly) can be interpreted as a response to Western ideas and funding rather than as a pure expression of ingrained Greek patterns, inculcated at the mother’s knee and shared by the entire nation. For Herzfeld, modern Greece works like a colony of the West, even though legally it was a province of a Turkish Empire which liberated itself, and the westerners were offering help and admiration. Greeks are caught between an ideal (in which they are the continuation of a Classical Hellas which itself is seen only as an ideal) and a reality in which they are a halfway house between Europe and the Middle East. The fatal entry of Greece into the European Union and the Euro zone is a product both of a wish to have been “the first Europeans” and of self-deception and reams of fake figures. I suppose that unrealistic debt expresses a relationship, and both creditors and debtors are part of the drama; but I am less sure that this expressed domination or admiration.
Are Balkan intellectuals more nationalist than their western European colleagues? I don’t see a standard measure. I definitely avoid English nationalist historians, or journalists, and they make me feel rather ill. But, if you look at the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph, for example, it is arguable that a nationalist reading of history is still basic for them, and for their readers, and that their views on current events are firmly based in that reading of the last 5 centuries or so. There is that whole stream of English nationalism which you would have to measure, and which doesn't form part of my cultural diet. I possibly get it when I read military history, which I admit to doing. I relate more to the use of “operational research” in the Second World War than to the patriotic aspects. I don’t have a measure by which Croats are more or less nationalistic than English or Scottish people. My guess would be that educated people from south-east Europe know much more about foreign cultures than the literati in Britain normally do, because they know that the share of their country in world culture is fairly small, and that knowing about ideas in France, America, Germany and so on is a vital asset to them – something which they must have to gain the esteem of their peers. That is, intellectuals from south-eastern Europe know more about western Europe than vice versa.
I have left out the other influence, that is the flow from Russia and the Russian Communist Party. Most of the Balkan countries were attempting to imitate the Soviet system from about 1944 up to 1990. This is just not going to attract so much interest, partly because the model is irrelevant after 1990 and partly because the model is so dreary in the first place. But you can't just blame the West. You are bound to raise the question, “why can’t we give up foreign ideals and just act out who we are?” But, as soon as you say that, you are a nationalist. That is what being a nationalist means.
I spoke of nationalist writers not reaching the West. Without conducting a survey of the translations, by now impressive in their scope, I would hazard that Sikelianos and Kazantzakis, certainly available in English, were nationalists as well as being major writers.
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