Speech at the Opening of the General Assembly of the German PEN Centre, Gotha, 12 May 2022
[delivered on the eve of his resignation]
»Never Again War« or »Never Again Fascism«?
By Deniz Yücel
The task of honoring the prizewinners I am happy to leave to the laudators, who can do this far better than I. Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words about the subject that in recent months has shaken much of the world – and, of course, also us at PEN – and has since dominated political life: Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Do not worry: I intend to remain within the framework of this evening – the awarding of a poetry prize – and I certainly make no claim to any expertise in poetry beyond the knowledge and judgment of an interested reader and the husband of a poet. If you wish, you may regard what follows as the reflections of an unqualified outsider.
The Momentous Year 1947
Well, let’s talk about war and poetry. In the German or German-language context, this combination of words very quickly calls to mind one particular text: Wolfgang Borchert’s »Then There’s Only One Choice«.
Half prose, half manifesto, especially memorable in its lyrical part with the famous refrain: »Say NO!« Not merely a depiction, but a call to action, reinforced by the capital letters, formulated as a direct address in the »you« form, and published in the year 1947 – so momentous for German postwar literature.
In Western Germany, hardly any other text was as formative for so many people, or encouraged more young men once and for all to refuse military service – especially in a time when conscientious objection was not yet routinely treated as registration for social service, but still meant political and moral resistance. And perhaps this applies even more to the GDR.
Wolfgang Borchert experienced the Nazi reign of terror as a soldier on the Eastern Front, interrupted by two prison terms. Only a few weeks after the publication of this text, he died at the age of just twenty-six. He therefore had no chance to take the experiences of others into his reflections, which is why my critique comes with this caveat: it applies only in part to his person, but all the more to his reception.
Borchert’s confrontation with his own war experiences, which runs through his slim oeuvre, followed in the literary tradition of Erich Maria Remarque, Ludwig Renn, or Arnold Zweig, and laid the foundation for an entire library whose shelves, in the years and decades to come, would be filled in their own ways by Günter Grass and Heinz Konsalik, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Gudrun Pausewang, among many others. Borchert’s »Say NO!« also echoed in popular culture – in Udo Lindenberg’s song »What Are Wars For?«, for example, or in Wolfgang Petersen’s film adaptation »Das Boot«.
Lessons of Two World Wars
In this arc from the antiwar literature of the Weimar era to that of the postwar period, National Socialism received specific attention only insofar as it was treated as a regime that was extremely dictatorial internally and warlike externally – in other words, in the categories of fascism and resistance. With Anna Seghers, Alfred Andersch, or Peter Weiss, for example.
Yet to classify the Second World War essentially within the same matrix as the First, and then to extend this matrix to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear threat of the East–West conflict, and the (post-)colonial wars in Algeria or Vietnam, required an omission that can already be found in Borchert: »Man in the village and man in the city. When they come tomorrow and bring you the draft notice, then there’s only one choice: Say NO!«
Two years after the end of the Hitler regime, the question could – indeed should – have arisen here whether it would have been morally right if the men who liberated Auschwitz and Buchenwald had also said »No«. Whether Bertha von Suttner’s slogan, published as the title of a novel as early as 1889, »Lay Down Your Arms!«, or the motto »Never Again War!«, which arose after the First World War and was artistically immortalized in Käthe Kollwitz’s famous poster, was truly the main lesson of the Second World War.
To be clear: I do not consider it open to debate whether »Never Again War!« is suitable as a wish and as a goal – of course it is. The question is rather whether it can serve, under all circumstances, as a political and moral maxim for action.
The Buchenwald Oath
In the oath of the surviving prisoners of Buchenwald, which is often mistakenly cited as the source of the slogan »Never Again War!«, the pledge was »We will take up the fight until the last culprit stands before the judges of the people. Our watchword is the destruction of Nazism from its roots. Our goal is to build a new world of peace and freedom.« At the same time, however, the oath included an explicit expression of gratitude to the »armies of the Americans, the English, the Soviets, and all the armies of freedom that won life for us and for the whole world«.
According to eyewitness accounts, when this oath was taken in April 1945, the cry »Never Again Fascism« echoed across the roll-call ground of the former concentration camp. But not: »Never Again War«.
Yet under the impression of the new nuclear threat, »Never Again War!« and »Never Again Fascism!« merged in both parts of Germany – in the GDR imposed and embedded in state ideology, in the West above all on the Left. This also meant placing at the center of the confrontation with National Socialism – including the literary confrontation – war and dictatorship, and not exterminatory antisemitism, not the Holocaust, which is by no means identical with the concept of fascism. It was a German perspective: that of soldiers, resistance fighters, or the civilian population – but not the perspective of the (German and non-German) Jews murdered by Germans.
The »Vergangenheitsbewältiger« and Their Defense
Significant exceptions were two poems also first published in 1947, whose authors not coincidentally had a Jewish background and did not return to Germany: Nelly Sachs’ »O the Chimneys« and Paul Celan’s »Death Fugue«, on which I would like to dwell in what follows.
So concrete that the horror becomes palpable and visible, yet so closed that the monstrous remains incomprehensible and indescribable, veiled beneath the dark central metaphor of the »Black milk of dawn«.
Indeed, it was the »Death Fugue« that moved Theodor W. Adorno to withdraw his dictum that after Auschwitz it would be »barbaric« to write poetry. Yet this poem at first received little recognition. When, in 1952, Celan recited the »Death Fugue« at a meeting of Group 47 – an influential and prominent circle of postwar writers – at the invitation of Ingeborg Bachmann, he encountered incomprehension, resistance, and scorn. Some participants laughed at him; one even went so far as to remark that Celan read like Goebbels.
In more recent times, the literary scholar and PEN colleague Klaus Briegleb used this reaction to Celan in his tract on Group 47 as a vivid example for his conclusion that »no other cultural agency in postwar West Germany so thoroughly pursued the exclusion of the Shoah« as did Group 47.
In 2003, this was a decidedly unsettling thesis, since it contradicted the myth of »Vergangenheitsbewältigung« (»struggle of overcoming the past«), in which the authors of Group 47 were thought to have earned great merit. Yet Briegleb conceded that this exclusion corresponded to the spirit of the 1950s, in which elements of Nazi ideology continued to live on throughout German society.
Following Briegleb, I would summarize: The authors of Group 47, most of them members of the so-called flak helper generation, did not ignore the Holocaust, but they excluded it by relegating it to the backdrop of German narratives of war and dictatorship.
In West Germany, Celan’s oeuvre, entirely marked by the confrontation with Auschwitz, gradually gained the recognition it deserved in the following years and decades. The »Death Fugue« became part of the school curriculum and was recited in the Bundestag in 1988 at the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the pogrom night.
In East Germany, by contrast, Celan remained largely unknown to a broader public – until 1986, when a group of young dissidents were inspired by a collective reading of Celan to found the underground magazine radix-blätter, even taking its title from a Celan poem (»Radix-Matrix«).
From the 1980s, and at the latest in the 1990s, the Holocaust moved to the center of the confrontation with National Socialism, while at the same time the fear of nuclear war in Europe faded. Today, Celan’s »Death Fugue« is among the best-known works of German-language poetry, both at home and internationally – perhaps even ahead of »Evening Song (Abendlied)«, the »Ode to Joy«, or »Wanderer’s Night Song (Wanderers Nachtlied)«, and now well ahead of »Then There’s Only One Choice«. Two years ago, Thomas Sparr even published a »biography of a poem« dedicated to the »Death Fugue«.
War as the »Executor of Humanity«
Yet this change of perspective in the confrontation with National Socialism did not lead to any broader questioning of the conviction—by no means confined to the Left, though identity-forming there—that »Never Again War« and »Never Again Fascism« were inseparably linked.
Voices such as Wolfgang Pohrt, who as early as the beginning of the 1980s had written to the address of the peace movement and its unconditional condemnation of war that it was »the fateful achievement of this country« to have »introduced the army as a true liberator and war as the genuine trustee and executor of humanity into world history«, remained marginal figures.
After 1989 the question of whether military means could be the ultima ratio of humanity flared up a few times. Not on the occasion of the genocide in Rwanda, which preoccupied neither politics nor the public in the Western world. But to a limited extent in connection with the Bosnian war—even within PEN.
In 1994, shortly before the genocide at Srebrenica, Fritz Beer, as president of Exile PEN, spoke as a guest at the assembly of what was then still West German PEN in Düsseldorf. There is such a thing as just violence, Beer said. And: »It is immoral when moralists do not resist immorality.« Yet contrary to all expectation, this provoked neither contradiction nor debate among the assembled PEN members; »bravely, in silence, they extinguished the fuse«, noted Die Zeit in a report on the assembly.
It was only in 1999, on the occasion of the Kosovo war, that this debate was carried out—when Joschka Fischer justified German participation by saying that he had learned not only »Never Again War« but also »Never Again Genocide«.
The first German military deployment after 1945 provoked no broader public opposition, nor did participation in the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, however, the Schröder/Fischer government refused to support the United States.
Return of the Nuclear Threat
Yet whether successive German governments over the past thirty years—always in step with broad public opinion, the media, and intellectuals—chose to take part in a military intervention or not, it never felt like war in Germany. The threat to Germany and Europe was limited to terrorist attacks by jihadist groups. Murderous and terrible enough, but no comparison to what has once again come to the fore since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: the by no means far-fetched fear of a possible nuclear escalation, the well-founded anxiety about a Third World War.
If one sets aside what in this debate plays a certain, though not dominant, role—namely the mixture of Putin admiration and anti-American resentments—it marks a »Zeitenwende« in another sense as well, as it disrupts political constellations that in the major issues and crises of recent years had repeated themselves more or less predictably. The question of whether and to what extent Germany should provide military support to Ukraine divides people who were more or less aligned on climate, refugees, or the pandemic—and at the same time brings them together with others who on those matters held very different, if not outright contrary, views, and vice versa.
One can describe the core of this debate in political categories or in moral-philosophical ones. But I believe this tornness between »Never Again War« and »Never Again Fascism« can also be expressed in lyrical terms: Wolfgang Borchert or Paul Celan? »Say No« or »We are digging a grave in the skies«?
I assume that the great majority of the initial signatories of the open letter to Olaf Scholz initiated by Alice Schwarzer did not oppose further arms deliveries to Ukraine for base reasons (anti-Western, pseudo-anti-imperialist, Putin-admiring), and I regard their fear of a nuclear escalation as justified. But I myself was one of the initial signatories of the other open letter, which responded with the opposite demand. Because in my conviction the restoration of peace can require military measures. Because for me the first lesson from National Socialism is »Never Again Fascism«. Or because the reading of Paul Celan has shaped me more than the reading of Wolfgang Borchert.
Slightly revised editorial version of the reprint published in Die Welt on 17 May 2022