Westsplaining or Understanding
Perspectives by German Authors on Russia's War in Ukraine
Shortly after the start of the war against Ukraine, various German authors formulated how Germany should behave as a state and as a society. This article uncovers the different strategies that have been used to influence the political debate through literature.
German reporting on the war in Ukraine is filtered through the German language narratives written about Ukraine, Russia and the war. Those who have their say in these narratives can thus also influence political debates. These voices often take a German perspective: the narrative "I" of the reports, accounts, and features often has no experience or knowledge about Ukraine. In open letters, as in literature, the "I" often becomes the "we," which then speaks from a collective perspective. These narrative perspectives shape German interaction, speaking and writing in German about Ukraine and thus influence the general debate for and against its support.
How fact and fiction, I and we, literature and reality mix with and influence public opinion on the war will be analyzed in this paper. All literary works considered here were written after February 2022, published in German and received by the German (speaking) public. The texts are written by authors who have no close connection to Ukraine or Russia, but who have spoken out publicly about the events―in newspapers, interviews, and at panel discussions―and thus have had a specific influence on the German public.
1. Shifts in Perspective: Perpetrators and Victims
The novel Zwischen Welten (Between Worlds) by
Juli Zeh
Juli Zeh
Juli Zeh, born in Bonn in 1974, is a writer and lawyer. Her books address current political debates: The novels <em>Unterleuten</em> and <em>Über Menschen</em> negotiate social tensions in a village in Brandenburg. The author also repeatedly expresses her political views in talk shows and newspaper articles.
and
Simon Urban
Simon Urban
Simon Urban, born in 1975, works as a writer, copywriter and journalist. His debut novel <em>Plan D</em> was published in 2011. He studied German language and literature and trained at the Texterschmiede Hamburg (Hamburg School of Ideas).
, published in early 2023, was touted as a social novel, a critique of the times, a commentary on current events, and rose to number two on Der Spiegel's bestseller list immediately after it went on sale. In the book, two longtime friends, the Hamburg journalist Stefan and the farmer Theresa from Brandenburg, argue and debate about political conditions and their current living conditions in fictitious Whatsapp messages and emails. The two stereotypically drawn protagonists are explicitly characterized as representatives of different opinions within a society that is portrayed as divided. On the one hand, there is the (pseudo-)liberal, feminist Stefan, with diverse views and who sips fair-trade coffee from a coffee machine in his chic fully appointed kitchen; on the other hand, there is the 'down-to-earth' farmer Theresa, who, in addition to her husband, child and farm, also has a lot of sympathy for the frustrated Nazis and non-conformists in her neighborhood.
The war in Ukraine is the subject of WhatsApp messages in the novel, which I will use to briefly illustrate the relationship between the narrative of victim and perpetrator:
Zeh u. Urban 2023, 83.
"07:21, Stefan via WhatsApp: Oh God. Have you heard yet? It really happened. Putin is invading Ukraine. I can't believe it. Nobody in this house thought it was possible. If he interferes, he is threatening Western countries with consequences the likes of which we have never seen before. What the hell is this? A bloody doomsday movie?
09:02, Stefan via WhatsApp: Am now in the editorial office. Everyone is already there, as if they couldn't stand it at home anymore. Stunned shock. Everyone is glued to their mobile phones, there is hardly any conversation. Afterwards an extraordinary conference."
The perpetrator is named, it is Putin, not Russia, who is referred to here as the actor. He, Putin, then threatens, the message continues, with consequences for the West. This sentence leads to shifting the focus to the consequences of the attack for the Western states. With just a few words, the perspective has shifted from the actual victim of the war, Ukraine and the people living there, to the Western states, the colleauges in the newsroom, and ultimately Stefan himself.
In Theresa's response, the German perspective becomes even more apparent, namely as that of Theresa and her coworkers on the farm:
Zeh u. Urban 2023, 83
"_13:38, Theresa via WhatsApp_: Sorry, but this is all too much for me. I feel really sick."
A little later, she writes:
Zeh u. Urban 2023, 87-88
"Yesterday, my dairyman Denis wanted to know from me in what radius a nuclear bomb would destroy everything if it fell on Berlin. He asked me if I could look it up for him on the Internet. I tried to calm him down while my heart was hammering against my chest and my stomach felt like I had swallowed a brick.“
Within a few sentences and pages, the concrete outbreak of war in Ukraine by the Russian army becomes a threat scenario for the book's protagonists in Germany. Further mentions of Ukraine in the novel follow this victim-shifting form of narrative.
There is no mention of the attacks on Kyiv and numerous other Ukrainian cities on the morning of February 24th 2022, or the civilian casualties during the first days of the war. This strategy, here justified by fear of World War III and a nuclear armed Russia, is called derailment in Argumentation Theory. Derailing is an argumentative strategy that distracts a debate from the actual topic and leads to another topic that seems to the discussion partner better able to win the debate. The actual topic is lost in the process.
Juli Zeh spoke out early and repeatedly in statements and interviews on Germany's position on the war in Ukraine. In the open letters signed by her, the focus is also diverted from the war victim Ukraine to the possible victim Germany. Likewise, derailment is an Argumentation Strategy of the open letters against arms deliveries,1 which were signed, among others, by the author Juli Zeh, the author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, and other German media and cultural figures.2 In the letter, the very first sentence shows that the real existing attack on Ukraine is extended to the risk of a European and thus German victim: The letter warns of the "risk of a IIIrd World War."3 The novel reflects extra-literary political opinions and internal literary arguments, consciously linked by author Juli Zeh. Literature and the construction of reality reinforce each other. The fictionality of the work places itself in question. The novel helps shift the debate from Ukraine to a German discourse of victimhood.
2. Multiperspectivity and the Western view, or photomontages as an argument
Alexander Kluge
Alexander Kluge
Alexander Kluge, born in 1932, is a filmmaker, writer, television producer and lawyer. In the 1960s and 70s, he was one of the most influential representatives of Neuer Deutscher Film (New German Cinema). In 1987 he founded the television platform DCTP, which also repeatedly shows his own content.
, another signatory of the calls against arms deliveries to Ukraine, published his contribution to war literature in April 2023. Under the title War Primer 2023, he takes up Bertolt Brecht's call to learn to read and write again in war.4 Brecht's own Kriegsfibel,5 which appeared in 1955 and combined headlines, photos, poems and captions, was intended to sharpen viewing and reading habits after the Second World War.6
Through this intertextual reference to Brecht, Kluge establishes a connection between the post-war situation in Germany, which as a belligerent party caused the Second World War, and the current war situation in Ukraine. Like Brecht, Kluge uses photos and photo collages with captions, but the volume also contains more extensive text sections as well as QR codes that lead to short film montages hosted by Kluge's TV station DCTP.7 Under the heading “Station 1 'The War is back'” an autobiographical first-person narrator, the 12 and later 13 year old Alexander Kluge, anecdotally recounts experiences of the war in Halberstadt in 1944 and 1945. In addition to his perspective as a student, which is supposed to make him a “contemporary witness",8 the voices of his mother and two other mothers in the war also appear. Each of the textual parts are introduced by a heading or a (fictitious) quote.
The first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book. It breaks expectations: it's not about the war in Ukraine, a war that will take place in 2023. It's about the narrator's autobiographical memories of war in 1944-45. It creates an ambivalence: the title of the book, the images and the reference to the film montages indirectly allude to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. From the pictures in the book it is not initially clear which war it is about. The reference only becomes explicit when the film montage becomes visible. In the montage, the black and white photos from the book are in color. The motto “children are the true chroniclers of war” appears there in the colors blue and yellow, the national colors of Ukraine. An image then appears, which shows a drawing of two children writing. It is colored in the Russian national colors of red, blue and white. The ambivalence becomes an equation: Ukrainian children and Russian children are in the same situation, everyone is experiencing and describing a war over which they have no influence, although in reality the lives of the Ukrainian children are in danger.
Just like, in the final conclusion, 12 year old Alexander in Halberstadt in 1944. This apparently historical parallel is made clear by several quotes. The narrator puts it into the mouth of a German war mother: “When you reach a certain point of cruelty, it doesn’t matter who committed it, it just needs to stop.”9
This argument that the war must end at all costs is repeated in numerous open letters from German writers and intellectuals. Kluge's book suggests that he has already paid the price as a German child of war. The argument is aesthetically manifested through complex literary and aesthetic procedures:
intertextuality
intertextuality
Intertextuality describes relationships between texts. Sometimes these textual relationships can become very complex. Cultural references play a role that should not be underestimated, which can arise through textual references. Texts from the present can also refer to older texts, so that temporal references can also be established.
,
intermediality
intermediality
Intermediality is a generic term for relationships between two or more media. This can mean, for example, media comparisons, media connections or media combinations. There is no clear definition for the term intermediality, which is due to the fact that there is already no clear concept of media.
. Ultimately, however, it is based on a basic false assumption: the German perspective, despite all its (post-)modern complexity, historically remains the perpetrator's perspective. The current situation in Ukraine as a target of a Russian war of aggression is not a parallel. Ukraine hardly appears in the book; it remains, as in the color marking of the picture, pure decoration. Kluge's post-realist, multimedia approach is a commentary from a German sensibility, not a war primer in the Brechtian, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist sense.
3. “Czuły narrator” and participant observation
Descriptions of images, not the images and photos themselves, shape Marcel Beyer's poetry lectures entitled The toneless voices at the sight of the dead on the streets of Butscha (2023). On May 18, 2022, he begins his lecture with the following words: “I don’t want to invent anything. I want to report what I saw."10 This seeing is always conveyed through photographs, videos, news, radio reports and social media, which the author follows with fascination. He describes how he noticed the lack of crows in the pictures―a reference to the essay on the blockade of Petersburg (1921-22) by the Russian literary theorist Viktor Šklovskij.11
At the same time, he reflects on the description of the images from a safe distance: “It may sound obscene to pay attention to the presence or absence of crows in photographs […] when we are talking about images from the war that is now, as I write these sentences, being waged with bestial force against a country that is two hours away by plane.“12
By reflecting on his own position in space and time, the simultaneity of war and observing from a distance, Beyer approaches war on different levels. In describing a frightened dog being calmed by a man in the midst of war, he points to the acoustic dimension that photography lacks but can explain the situation.13 The empathy that exists for animal and man in this image that emerges through the detailed description is a form of tender storytelling, as outlined by Olga Tokarczuk in her Nobel Prize speech in 2019: “tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities.“14
Beyer's texts help to reflect on one's own position of observing from Germany and to see similarities between the Ukrainian and German perspectives, without lecturing or distracting.
German literature offers two modes. A Western view of Ukraine that blurs the perspectives of victims and perpetrators and makes it impossible to engage in a dialogue on equal terms; and literature that enters into an emphatic exchange and is aware of its own limitations.
In the public eye, however, texts that distract from Ukraine and instead focus on domestic German debates attract attention. Zeh and Urban were on the bestseller lists for weeks. Pointing out this gap in attention is also the task of literary studies.
This article is part of a series of articles based on the conference German Narratives on Russia's War in Ukraine. The conference took place as part of the Volkswagen Foundation's War in Ukraine theme week from February 22 to 24, 2023 at Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover. The organizers: Dr. Cornelia Ilbrig (Lower Saxony Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen), Dr. Jana-Katharina Mende (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg) and Prof. Dr. Monika Wolting (University of Wrocław). Both the conference and the translation of this article were made possible by the Volkswagen Foundation.
