S. Sontag: "The Fragile Alliance" (US-Europe)

Don't remember having seen this at DU when it was published. A long thoughtful speech which covers a lot of territory. I'll just quote one bit here.

The fragile alliance

Last week at the Frankfurt book fair, Susan Sontag was awarded the prestigious Friedenspreis peace prize. In her acceptance speech, in which she explored the conflicts and connections between Europe and America, she regretted the 'deliberate absence' from the ceremony of the American ambassador to Germany, Daniel Coats

Susan Sontag
Saturday October 18, 2003
The Guardian

<snip> So America now sees itself as the defender of civilisation and Europe's saviour, and wonders why Europeans don't get the point; and Europeans see Americans as a reckless warrior state - a description the Americans return by seeing Europe as the enemy of America: only pretending, so runs rhetoric heard increasingly in the United States, to be pacifist, in order to contribute to the weakening of American power. Americans have got used to thinking of the world in terms of enemies. Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always "over there", Islamic fundamentalism having replaced Russian and Chinese communism as the threat to "our way of life". And terrorist is a more flexible word than communist. It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless - since there will always be some terrorism (as there will always be poverty and cancer); that is, there will always be asymmetrical conflicts in which the weaker side uses that form of violence, which usually targets civilians. American rhetoric, if not the popular mood, would support this unhappy prospect, for the struggle for righteousness never ends.

It is the genius of the United States, a profoundly conservative country in ways that Europeans find difficult to fathom, to have devised a form of conservative think ing that celebrates the new rather than the old. But this is also to say, that in the very ways in which the United States seems extremely conservative, for example, in the extraordinary power of the consensus and the passivity and conformism of public opinion (as De Tocqueville remarked in 1831) and the media, it is also radical, even revolutionary, in ways that Europeans find equally difficult to fathom.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnection between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the centre of every politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined to promote "identities" that fit into the larger patterns of distinctiveness, co-operation, and openness to innovation.

Perhaps the most important source of the new (and not so new) American radicalism is what used to be viewed as a source of conservative values: namely, religion. Many commentators have noted that perhaps the biggest difference between the United States and most European countries (old as well as new in the current American distinction) is that in the United States religion still plays a central role in society and public language. But this is religion American style: namely, more the idea of religion than religion itself. </snip>

More: http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4776666-110738,00.html

Merci.

The article was great, but this alone was worth the read. And brought tears to my eyes.

found some relief from the tiresome duties of being a child by poring over Mr Starkie's tattered volumes of Goethe and Storm. At the time I am speaking of, 1943, I was aware there was a prison camp with thousands of German soldiers, Nazi soldiers as of course I thought of them, in the northern part of the state, and, knowing I was Jewish (only nominally, my family having been completely secular and assimilated for two generations, but nominally, as I knew, was enough for Nazis), I was beset by a recurrent nightmare in which Nazi soldiers had escaped from the prison and had made their way downstate to the bungalow on the outskirts of the town where I lived with my mother and sister, and were about to kill me.

Flash forward to many years later, the 1970s, when my books started to be published in Germany by Hanser Verlag, and I came to know the distinguished Fritz Arnold (he had joined the firm in 1965), who was my editor at Hanser until his death in February 1999.

One of the first times we were together, Fritz said he wanted to tell me - presuming, I suppose, that this was a prerequisite to any friendship that might arise between us - what he had done in Nazi times. I assured him that he did not owe me any such explanation; but, of course, I was touched by his bringing up the subject.

What Fritz told me was that he had been a university student of literature and art history, first in Munich, then in Cologne, when, at the start of the war, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht with the rank of corporal. His family was, of course, anything but pro-Nazi - his father was Karl Arnold, the legendary political cartoonist of Simplicissimus - but emigration seemed out of the question, and he accepted, with dread, the call to military service, hoping neither to kill anyone nor to be killed.

Fritz was one of the lucky ones. Lucky, to have been stationed first in Rome (where he refused his superior officer's invitation to be commissioned a lieutenant), then in Tunis; lucky enough to have remained behind the lines and never once to have fired a weapon; and finally, lucky, if that is the right word, to have been taken prisoner by the Americans in 1943, to have been transported by ship across the Atlantic with other captured German soldiers to Norfolk, Virginia, and then taken by train across the continent to spend the rest of the war in a prison camp in a small town ... in northern Arizona.

Then I had the pleasure of telling him, sighing with wonder, for I had already started to be very fond of this man - this was the beginning of a great friendship as well as an intense professional relationship - that while he was a prisoner of war in northern Arizona, I was in the southern part of the state, terrified of the Nazi soldiers who were there, here, and from whom there would be no escape.

And then Fritz told me that what got him through his nearly three years in the prison camp in Arizona was that he was allowed access to books: he had spent those years reading and rereading the English and American classics. And I told him that what saved me as a schoolchild in Arizona, waiting to grow up, waiting to escape into a larger reality, was reading books, books in translation as well as those written in English.

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.

Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom