Karl Schlögel: A European Intellectual
‘Museums of its kind offered guided tours for groups, often from schools. Devoid of the technologically advanced multimedia and interactive mumbo-jumbo of their Western counterparts, they were also time capsules preserving the history of museum culture. The visitor was left to his own devices and free to take notes.’[i]
These thoughts provoked by a remnant of
Soviet Ukraine, the Donbass Regional Museum of Local History, from Karl
Schlögel’s Ukraine (2018), point towards Schlögel’s preoccupation with the
rôle of the intellectual in the digital era – with how he can exercise
cognitive freedom and agency, for example when learning from European history,
at a time of growing technological control. For the writer Boris Akunin, quoted
by Schlögel, the obfuscations of Putin’s Russia attest to an ‘age of widespread
clouded thinking’ (43). When, as Schlögel notes, ‘Russian aggression wraps
itself in the mantle of antifascism and a “Revolution of Dignity” [Ukraine’s]
is branded as a “fascist coup d’état”’, this is truly an ‘age of purposeful
conceptual confusion’ (77).
Schlögel sees how our current global
condition of undeclared, hybrid war is maintained by strategies of confusion
deployed across online and mass media technologies, ranging from ‘targeted
disinformation campaigns on social networks’ to the ‘information war whose
masterminds deftly employ the postmodernist rhetoric of the multiplicity of
perspectives and the relativity of everything’. He presents a distracted intelligentsia which is
either postmodernized and diverted by notions that ‘truth is always somewhere
in the middle rather than something that can be determined’ (72), or perhaps locked
in a fact-grubbing positivist historicism such as that which ensured that in
2014, ‘academic circles worked themselves into a criminological frenzy over
minutiae in their efforts to reconstruct the outbreak of the First World War,
while the military conflict [in Ukraine] incubating right before their eyes
failed to catch their attention’ (73). This is why Schlögel advises that ‘we
must not surrender the distinction between fact and fiction, between truth and
lie’ (77). He recalls that it was out of his schoolboy encounters with Russian
culture in the early 1960s – such as an Evgenii Evtushenko poetry reading in
Munich – that ‘my fascination with the phenomenon known as the “intelligentsia”
was born, that small and marginal group of people who believed in their moral
right and fought for their convictions, risking to sacrifice everything and
bending the course of history’ (26).
Ukraine thus suggests that an exercise of
intellectual freedom and agency in the face of today’s technological strategies
of confusion, can take the form of an assertion of belief in one’s moral convictions
about contemporary Europe. Remembering the distinction ‘between truth and lie’,
Schlögel continued, ‘begins with looking around and seeing for ourselves so
that we can begin to assess the gravity of the situation and grasp the
distress, but also the strength, of a country that is standing its ground’ (77)
– Ukraine. Writing in 2015, Schlögel recalled that even in the 1980s, before
the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘Ukraine was not altogether beyond the European
horizon’ (15). Yet ‘because of the German fixation on Russia, Ukraine, like
other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, is always cast as derivative and
secondary’ (56). He noted how ‘until recently, Ukraine figured in most Germans’
worldview as mere periphery, a backyard, glacis, sphere of influence or buffer
zone’, rather than being viewed as ‘a subject with its own vision of its
history and the right to organize its life as it sees fit’ (39). The issue of
Ukrainian nation-formation is therefore of particular concern to Schlögel as a (German)
European intellectual; as is Russian aggression towards Ukraine, not least
because Putin is ‘the great destroyer of the work of reconciliation undertaken
by Russians as well as Germans after the catastrophe that arose from German
soil’. The intellectual’s exercise of her moral convictions regarding
contemporary Europe involves a choice: whether to ‘make common cause with
Putin’s Russia’, or instead ‘hold faith with those who, in defending the
integrity of Ukraine and the “Revolution of Dignity”, defend also the Russia
that will come after Putin’ (46).
Schlögel makes the important observation
that ‘the fragmentary, the particular, the regional are the crucial registers
in which the specific nature of Ukraine’s emergence as a nation and nation
state finds expression’ (15). A focus on the regional relates to the
discontinuous nature of Ukraine’s history and its shifting historiography,
because ‘the reconstruction of the plural “local histories” may in fact turn
out to be an especially helpful way to do justice to the heterogeneity of the
skeins of history that are interwoven in Ukraine’ (59). Histories of
nation-building and military conflict are intimately bound up with the urban
narrative of Lviv, for example. Lviv, Schlögel underlines, was ‘a vital source
of the civic energy that propelled Ukraine’s quest for national independence’;
more recently the city has become a ‘safe haven’ (249) for those fleeing the
war in Eastern Ukraine.
The city portraits assembled in Ukraine
follow the spatial archaeology proposed in Schlögel’s earlier book In
Space We Read Time (2016) – a method whereby cities ‘reveal themselves to
be the points in which the spaces of history and historical experience attain
their maximum density’ (14).[ii] Schlögel’s
vision of Lviv suggests that it is not just that the more history a place has
experienced, the greater the density or accretion of historical experience
occupying that place – there is also something about that place that has
attracted historical experience to accrete there: Lviv is conceivable as ‘the
primal cell of all European cities’ (258). Schlögel reads a quality of
organicity into Lviv which, I would like to suggest, relates not only to the
growth of history – of the accretion of historical experience – but also to its
survival. Schlögel’s understanding of Lviv thus suggests that
intellectual agency and moral life can be experienced by establishing a
relation to Lviv’s identity as a scene of the survival of history. This
survival entails the survival of a space: Central Europe. Already in the
mid-1980s, Schlögel writes, the process was underway through which ‘a region
resurfaced whose name had ceased to signify for a post-war world cleft into
East and West: Central Europe’. Valuing the survival of the history of Lviv
enables a legitimation of the survival of ‘that imaginary and yet real Central
Europe, which had overwintered the division of the continent and the world
during the Cold War’. For ‘Lviv was proof that […] here was an urban body, a
text in which one could read the fates of Europe’s provincial heart’ (247).
Schlögel’s use of the adjective
‘provincial’ points to the fact that this is ‘a region that is almost
impossible to characterize – it is both the centre of Europe and utterly
peripheral’ (254). He can ask whether in fact the journey to Lviv represents ‘a
journey to the pole of doubt: is Europe, at its very centre, still
conceivable?’ (255) Schlögel enables us to understand that Lviv’s quality of
being out of place, at once central and peripheral, derives from the peculiarly
traumatized nature of its survival. ‘An erstwhile capital found itself on the
margin’, because the region ‘had indeed been ground up between the frontlines
of the European civil war; what it had been had perished, its face altered
beyond recognition’ (247). Two murderous regimes: it is as if post-Soviet Lviv
is a mask over evisceration. ‘It has been infinitely difficult to address this
twofold experience of totalitarian violence at the hands of the Nazis as well
as Stalin’s henchmen.’ (252) Schlögel perhaps refers to the tortuously slowburn
quality of the spiritual consciousness beneath the city’s face – of the intellectual’s
miraculous historical and conceptual work of re-cognizing, of learning anew the
life which has been lost – when he adds that ‘a journey to Lvov takes the
visitor into the forgotten slow-beating heart of Europe’ (254).
Schlögel in fact shows the high-paced
surface-world of today’s city politics to supply one ‘altered’ form of a
notable lost city tradition. He records how, at the time when he was writing (2015),
Lviv’s mayor was Andrii Sadovy – founder of the post-Maidan party Samopomich
(Self-Reliance). No oligarch, Sadovy ‘advocates civic involvement, local
self-government and decentralization as well as the indivisibility of Ukraine’
(248). It strikes me that with these concerns, Sadovy was attempting to restore
the values of urban autonomy and responsibility which historically were
fostered across Europe by the assignation to cities of Magdeburg rights. King
Casimir the Great of Poland granted Lviv Magdeburg rights in 1356 (260). In his
account of the Podil area of Kiev, Schlögel maintains that the granting to
Podil of Magdeburg rights from 1494 to 1834 represented ‘a crucial factor in
the city’s development that is memorialized by a column down by the river’. Magdeburg law entailed an urban area with ‘the privilege to have its own judiciary,
administrative autonomy and the right to elect a mayor’ (89). The ‘forms of
self-government made possible by the awarding of town privileges’ are held by
Schlögel to be amongst the most important consequences for Ukraine of the union
of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the Kingdom of Poland (59-60).
Schlögel’s historical insight enables us
to see that Magdeburg rights constituted an important means of (East) Central
European urban defence, of social bonding and survival – the dissolution of
which ‘barriers’ as a result of the twentieth-century’s first international
catastrophe prepared the ground for the cities’ totalitarian traumas of the Nazi-Soviet
period:
‘The few years of the Second World War
were the culmination of the drama that cities like Czernowitz lived through,
yet that drama goes further back and runs deeper. It begins with the first
Great War, which breached the barriers that sheltered the tumultuous process in
which an urban culture accumulated. Without them, nothing shielded the city’s
civilization against seizure and destruction by order of those above and by the
demand of those below who wanted to live better at others’ expense.’ (245-46)
Just as Lviv’s urban autonomy was
‘sheltered’ by civic bonds such as Magdeburg law, for Schlögel, in Czernowitz
cultural difference was protected by an intelligentsia discourse which was
intrinsically insular. When ‘what was thought and written in Bucharest, Vienna
and Berlin was to them the thinking and writing of their peers’, and ‘felt more
connatural to them than the chatter of the peasantry in the surrounding
countryside’, Czernowitz was marked by an ‘aloofness of an insular urban
culture’. Perhaps just such an aloof form of urban discourse could model a way
in which a European intellectual today can exercise communicative freedom in
the face of our prevailing technological strategies of confusion. For just like
every alienated denizen of the global blogosphere, Czernowitzers ‘cast messages
in bottles adrift and hoped to receive messages in return’. The communicative
efficacy of these ‘residents of a city that stood apart from its environs like
an island’, rested precisely on their hope, intent and belief, so that they
‘inevitably formed a particular relationship with their world, which was
distant and yet, paradoxically, one in which distances mattered little’ (236).
9.8.20
[i] Karl
Schlögel, Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland, trans. by Gerrit Jackson
(London: Reaktion Books, 2018), p. 200 (further references to Ukraine are
given after quotations in the text).
[ii] In
Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, trans.
by Gerrit Jackson (New York: Bard Graduate Centre, 2016).
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