The National Socialist doctrine proposed a totalitarian centripetal model, centered on the idea of a pure race and the nationalist state as the embodiment of the will to power. It was an idea which found many advocates and adherents, since the Nazis came to power through free elections and ruled through a relative coherence of ideal and fact. The National Socialist state embodied the most violent negation of, and the most brutal aggression against, the stranger. A suspect citizen with “impure” roots and dangerous opinions, the stranger became the demonic embodiment of evil. The very premises of humanity were placed under a dark question mark. Not only has the Holocaust entirely reversed the terms of a debate about assimilation and the stranger, it has also reiterated, with gloomy precision, as Saul Bellow put it, the old question, with what should one be assimilated? With what should one be assimilated, when, in one of the most civilized European countries, the “final solution” could offer only one final and unique assimilation?
And with what could one assimilate oneself if, by a miracle, one survived what today is conventionally, and even commercially, called the Holocaust? To what can the stranger who has survived adapt after hell? The answer to this question is amazingly simple in its obviousness: to live, and nothing but. The survivor readapts to life; looks to live with that impertinence of banality which is life itself. The return, rebirth, and readaptation to the most elementary acts of life are at once pathetic and mysterious, both pitiable and grandiose.
I was destined to be reborn, to grow up, and mature in a society which in a byzantine way combined fascism with Stalinism.
Communism claimed a humanist vision of progress, came to power by revolution and was maintained in power by force. As the contrast between the ideal and the real sharpened, and as the prohibition on revealing and discussing this contrast was enforced, there developed a pathology of ambiguity in which apathy, hypocrisy, and duplicity became the ground rules of assimilation, that is, alienation. The centripetal communist system did not solve, as it had promised, the old contradictions, but supplemented them with new ones. The question of the stranger in a society that estranges everybody from it — while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation — takes cover under dubious and sinister masks. Today’s nationalist and extremist explosions in the former communist states can surprise only those who have not directly experienced the atomization of a society in which the indoctrination of duplicity began in the cradle.
Bertolt Brecht considered exile “the best school of dialectics.” Indeed, the exile, the refugee becomes a stranger as a result of change. By his very existence, the stranger is always forced to think about change.
In Berlin, during my first year in the West, I pondered daily the question of estrangement. I thought not only about the internal exile from which I had just escaped, but also about the concept of exile itself. I felt that once again history had spurned my aspirations and was forcing me into an adventure I had not desired. During my entire postwar life I had searched, thanks to reading and writing, for an inner resistance, against often unbearable external pressure. It is hard to believe that in a totalitarian society the “I” could survive, and yet interiority was a mode of resistance. It acted as a center for our moral being, a means of disinterring oneself from the corrupting aggression of the environment, as a hope, however uncertain, for the integrity of conscience. The “I” remains even in the totalitarian environment where external pressures are always dangerous, perhaps especially there, the site of a clash between the centripetal necessity to preserve the secret, codified identity and the centrifugal tendency towards liberation.
During my agonizing Berlin transition, I was overwhelmed by doubts and questions from the past. And precisely because that transition happened in Berlin, I also had to confront my ethnicity, as I had already confronted the invective “alien” in my own country. Precisely because the need for a homeland is more acute in those whose right to a homeland has been questioned, losing it also pains them more. On the threshold of a capital decision, facing a new and possibly final dislocation, I had to ask myself once more who I was.
During my stay in Berlin I was often advised to request from the German authorities the recognition of German ethnicity on the strength of my birth in Bukovina and my German linguistic roots. Many of my compatriots had done so and were already comfortably established in their new citizenship. I could have requested German citizenship, like many of my former neighbors and colleagues from Suceava, capital of the region called Buchenland, that is, country of beech trees (though Buchland, country of books, would have also been a fitting name. It is not by chance that the greatest German poet of the last half a century is the Bukovinian-born Paul Celan).
But it so happened that at that time I was told about Transylvanian Saxons and Swabians who proved their Germannes (German roots) “legally” through their or their families’ belonging to the SS or to the National Socialist Party. I did not have any such proof to show the German authorities; such stories troubled me and all of a sudden notions of identity and ethnicity acquired a new dimension.
The homeland unveils its ambiguous meanings especially during the violence of rupture, which renders more intense the need for self-questioning. The world of estrangement also means alienation from self as well as from others: exile in the most humble quotidian sense as much as in the purest transcendental form. So we may ask why I, guinea pig of two totalitarian systems, fascist and communist, why I, still agonized and bewildered, stumbled along the Berlin Wall terrified by the inevitability of exile. Was it because of the fear of freedom?
For the mature adult, exile tardily reformulates the premise of initiation and becoming, reopens the gate to life’s extreme risks and potential, calling into question all the steps of past experience. Moreover, for those prematurely traumatized, for those never truly free from the psychosis of the provisional, from the threat of being thrown once again into the chaos of the unknown, exile suddenly releases all the old fears.
One does not so much lose a precarious and dubious stability as discover oneself to be deeper in the abyss of never-ending instability. The writer, always a “suspect,” as Thomas Mann said, an exile par excellence, conquers his homeland, his placenta through language. To be exiled from even this last refuge represents a multiple dispossession, the most brutal and irredeemable decentering of his being, a tragic end. As Primo Levi said about the camp, “to accept the eclipse of the word, signaled the approach of definitive indifference.”
This is why, in the spring of 1988, at my first meeting with an American writer who later was to become a close friend, I pompously declared: “For me, another Holocaust has just begun.” There was a burning that reached all the way to the center of being, the language, the fathomless depths of creativity.
Five years have passed since I felt that burning, and I must confess that I now feel not only the curse, but also the privilege, of being an exile. I have finally accepted this honor, doing so in the name of all that is suffering and epiphany, in the name of loneliness and challenge, of all the doubts and never-ending apprenticeship it implies, for its emptiness and richness, for the unfettering of myself and clash within myself. And also for the wounds of liberty. If I have the strength to repeat Dante, “L’esilio, che m’e dato, onor mi tegno” (I hold in honor the exile I was given), I am probably in sympathy with our centrifugal century.