On the Far Side of Normality

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On the Far Side of Normality

Sympathetic or otherwise, the third generation Jewish intellectuals feel a calling to keep a moral vigil over the spiritual ascension of the majority in the name of normality, in other words that which Pascal Bruckner felt to be lacking is materialising. This is what Gàbor T. Szàntу euphemistically calls “a certain critical attitude to society” – the rest speak openly about normality. Elma Softic -Kaunitz explains unambiguously that she deliberately stayed in wartime Sarajevo and even gave birth to a child in those merciless times because her disappearance would have significantly reduced the number of “normal” people. “Considering the number of people who hate each other,” she writes “– and for the sole reason that they belong to a certain race or people – you can’t assert that they aren’t normal. There are too many of them. So many that I often used to wonder whether it wasn’t me that was on the far side of normality. Because I don’t hate.” In a text composed in less extreme circumstances, Maxim Biller writes frankly that the reason German contemporary literature is boring and flat is that to this day Germans are afraid to face the part their parents played in the war: “they are unwilling to tap the collective memory of their people.” In Victor Neumann’s trans-historical perspective, the shared inheritance of Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Polish and Romanian Jews is precisely the fact of having a “multiple identity”, which he considers to be the only rational response in a multi-ethnic state. Konstanty Gebert finishes his essay with the idea that, in the end, they got what they were struggling for before 1989, during the period of their identity formation: a small and banal Jewish community has come into existence, which is no better or worse than anywhere else on the planet, that is, a “normal state” has been resumed. Làszlу Màrton’s unrealisable “community of fate” was also written from a starting point of historical reconciliation, which is utter normality. Emi Baruh too, who shares a certain kindred spirit with him, quotes Hannah Arendt in the name of “universal normality” who asserts that “Europe is the home of the Jews” and that’s why they are battling against the idea of “Schengen-Europe”, because it deprives them – together with the Bulgarians, with whom she claims a genuine “community of fate” – of the pleasure of their shared fatherland.

I began this introduction by saying that the very existence of the generation I wanted to talk about is doubtful. It is possible that even now the existence of a new generation of Central and Eastern European writers is obvious only to me. To the extent that the intellectuals of an era can be regarded as the expression of a generational “world-view”, it can also be said of the “third generation” in general that they are those who are not concerned about leaving and staying, forgiveness and revenge, repression and sublimation. They wish, by means of self-reflection, to bring order to the mind and soul, and to complete the task shifted over to them, whether consciously or through absent-minded procrastination, by the second generation. And just as it is true that traditions are created, generations too can be created – through meeting, through the publication of a shared anthology, or even through the writing of an overview such as this. And if such a generation ever really arrives at self-knowledge, then it will also be to their credit that the most authoritative texts on future generations of Central and Eastern European Jews will not be written by psychologists.

Translation from Hungarian by: Stephen Humphreys

Quoted Essays
Albahari, Davi (Belgrade – Calgary): The Burden of Mimicry
Barouh, Emmy (Sofia): Fragments About the Conflicts and Cultural Adaptation of the Wondering Jew
Biller, Maxim (Prague – Köln): Writing History
Gebert, Konstanty (Warsaw): Dial-a-Jew
Neumann, Victor (Timisoara): Central-East European Jews and the Intercultural Idea
Màrton, Làszlу (Budapest): The Chosen Ones and the Mingled Ones
Szànto T. Gàbor (Budapest): To Be a (Hungarian-) Jewish Writer
Softic-Kaunittz, Elma (Sarajevo): Few Sentences about the Rhytm of Crime
Milos Ziak (Bratislava): “We Want Messiah Now”

Bibliographical Notes
Bruckner, Pascal: On Cosmopolitism, Magyar Lettre International, 1996/2.
Danto, Arthur: Narration and Knowledge. New York 1985
Eliade, Mircea: Az örök visszatèrès mitosza (The Myth of Eternal Return) Budapest,
1989.
Fehèr, Ferenc – Heller, Àgnes: Amodernitàs ingàjà (The Pendulum of Modernity) In: A modernitàs ingàjà, Budapest, 1993.
Hobsbawn, Erik: Inventing Traditions. In: The Invention of Traditions. (Ed. by:) E.
Hobsbawn and T. Ranger, Cambridge, 1983.
Howe, Neil – Strauss, William: The New Generation Gap, The Atlantic Monthly, 1992 December
Kestenberg, Judith: A túlèlok gyermekei ès a gyermek túlèlok (The Children of Survivals and Survived Children) Thalassa, 1994/1-2.
Toulmin, Richard: Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago, 1990.

AuthorPéter Krastzev
2018-08-21T17:23:58+00:00 April 1st, 1999|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 08|0 Comments