Getting under the skin

Let me explore more this question of how outsiders can hope to understand a foreign country. My strength as a school pupil was French and German basically because my parents took me to these countries in the 1950s - when such travel was very rare.

And I continued my studies of things French and German until my second year of University (after which I switched to politics and economics) although never losing my fascination with these two countries. It was, frankly, my love life which gave me a chance to develop my French language skills (in the 1980s); and writers such as Richard Cobb, Theodor Zeldin and Julian Barnes have helped sustain that interest.

But I have had more reasons actually to learn about Germany – with a brief but important 2 weeks in 1961 at a course at Gottingen University (which introduced me to the immediate post-war novels of Heinrich Boll); then a couple of months living in Berlin in 1964 and working in a Germany company (Robert Bosch Elektronik no less). This Berlin stay introduced me to the works of people such as Bertold Brecht, Kathe Kollwitz and the German Realist painters in the Berlin galleries.

And then there various visits to Berlin in the years immediately before and after 1989 – the latter thanks to a project in Prague with German company (which rather spoiled my perceptions of Germany – although the company was actually Prussian!

Things went further downhill in 2010 when I resigned from a project in China managed by the Germans – mainly because I felt so claustrophobic in the anthill which is Beijing but also because the German bureaucracy was so intensive.   

My readings of, and experiences with, German history, literature and society have been complemented recently with two major books – Peter Watson’s German Genius of 2010 (which righly criticises the contemporary fixation of Brits with the Nazi period) and Simon Winder’s Germania of the same year.  

But perhaps the best single text for understanding Germany is Germany – unravelling an enigma

I came across recently a fascinating collection of essays about this issue of understanding other cultures - Inner Lives of Cultures (2011) ed Eva Hoffman which had this to say -

We live in a world in which various kinds of cross-national movement – migrations, travel, various kinds of both enforced and voluntary nomadism – are ever on the rise; and in which flows of fast communication are multidirectional and constant. If we are to meet with each other on the basis of trust rather than tension or insidious indifference, we need to have ways of getting acquainted with each other which are more than cursory, or purely instrumental. But how can this be accomplished? What kind of knowledge is needed to feed meaningful cross-cultural contacts? To enter into the subjective life of another culture – its symbolic codes, its overt beliefs and implicit assumptions – requires, as any immigrant or nomad can tell you, a considerable effort of consciousness and imagination; a kind of stretching of self towards the other, and a gradual grasp of differences which are sometimes imperceptible and subtle.Of course, cultures are neither static nor monolithic organisms – they are complex, changeable and internally diverse. What is considered healthily assertive in one culture may be seen as aggressive or hostile in another; certain kinds of personal disclosure which may seem quite unproblematic in one society may be seen as embarrassing or entirely unacceptable elsewhere.

Finally some nice photographs celebrating Romania's landscape here

Writing about Romania - part III Histories

Three names stand out for English speakers for their efforts in trying to make sense of this complex country – Lucian Boia, Dennis Deletant and Tom Gallagher. The first for the sheer courage and fluent coherence of his prolific writings (he is 70) on the history of the country – particularly his valiant and so necessary work on demystification and demythologising; the second for the intensity of his focus on the communist period; and the latter for the uncompromising critique of the corruption of the post-communist political class. 

Boia is a delight to read – and two of his key books can be read in full and in English online -

• Romania; borderland of Europe (2001) - reviewed here 
• History and myth in Romanian Consciousness (published in Romanian in 2001)

Dennis Deletant’s Hitler’s Forgotten Ally – Ion Antonescu and his regime 1940-1944 (2006) is a departure from his books about the Communist period of the country.

In 2005 Tom Gallagher gave us in Theft of a nation – Romania since Communism and followed it up in 2010 with a typically trenchant expose Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong

An ex- Us diplomat, Ernest Latham, wrote recently Timeless and Transitory - 20th century relations between Romania and the English-speaking world 

A fourth historian deserves a mention - the Scot, Robert Seton-Watson who played an important role as journalist and academic a hundred years ago in assisting the aspirations of the various nationalities which were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire break free of Vienna. Sadly, however, his "History of Romanian People" is no longer available.  

Interestingly the lovely Pallas edition of "Romania" edited by John Villiers and produced in 2009 has a nice bibliography (at page 347) which lists almost 50 books about Romanian history!

Writing about Romania - part II novels

It’s important to recognise the various genres which can be used to try to penetrate the soul of a country. Travelogues may be the easiest but there are also

• novels;
• histories;
• social and cultural histories (including jokes);
• memoirs and diaries;

which I will cover in this series of posts. The other important genres are

• caricatures and paintings (most Romanian painters produced marvellous line drawings)
• films
• plays eg Ion Caragiale 
• photographs eg Andrei Pandele’s secretive shots of the 1980s 

to which I will try to do justice in 2014.

Novellists can presumably give fuller vent to their imagination than other categories of writers and 

Miklos Banffy’s Writing on the wall – The Transylvanian Trilogy gave us a wonderful picture of the privileged slice of Transylvanians living in the first couple of decades of the 20^th century  .

Banffy’s trilogy was originally published in Hungarian in the 1930s and has taken all of 75 years to become appreciated in the English-speaking world as the literary masterpiece it is  - the three books are

• They Were Counted 
• They Were Found Wanting ; and
• They Were Divided 

Gregor von Rezzori is one of the most neglected of writers from this area which has been variously part of Austro-Hungary, Romania and now Ukraine.

An Ermine in Czernopol (1958) ostensibly centred on the curious tragicomic fate of an Austrian officer of supreme ineffectuality gathers a host of unlikely characters and their unlikelier stories by way of engaging the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears-a city of discordant voices, of wild ugliness and sometimes heartbreaking disappointment. Rezzori "summons the disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world is seemingly mixed up together, a multicultural society that existed long before the idea of multiculturalism". This book is effectivelt part of a trilogy - with the other two books appearing in the "memoir" section which follows.

Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy is rather now overshadowed by Banffy’s magnum opus. The first part of Manning’s trilogy focuses on life in Bucharest at the commencement of the Second World War   and was produced in Britain in the early 1960s

Novels by Romanian authors focusing on Romania which are worthy of mention include -

• Norman Manea's "Compulsory Happiness" (published in 2012 – but written in the 1980s)
• Mircea Carterescu Nostalgia (2005 in English – 1993 Romanian) and Blinding
• Nobel prize- winner (but oh so depressive!) Hertha Mueller 
• Domnica Radulescu's rather lighter Train to Trieste (2009) 

If you want to know more about Romanian writers - then there's a good list of 100 contemporary writers here (although the most famous - Carterescu - is missing!!); and an excellent book Romanian writers on writing (2011) edited by Norman Manea. The link will give you the list of another 100 more classic writers.  

Foreign novelists’ works using Bucharest as a location include -

• Dean’s December; Saul Bellow (1982) 
• Rates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury (1982)  
• The Long Shadows; Alan Brownjohn (1999)
• Uncle Rudolf by Paul Bailey (2002) 
• The Last hundred Days; Patrick McGuinnes (2011) 
• Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (2012) 

update; I’ve since come across this ten-page bibliography on writing about....Transylvania 

Travelogues - about Romania

Romania is a large country – but remote - several days of driving are required before travellers from northern Europe will reach Bucharest in its south. Hardly surprising therefore some have chosen to walk or cycle!

I have identified at least a dozen Travelogues for this first part of a series about books about Romania -

The most famous was Patrick Leigh Fermour whose trilogy of his walk from the English Channel to Istanbul in the 1930s was finished only this year.

• A Time of Gifts (1977) covered mainly his experience of Nazi Germany;
• Between the Woods and the Water (1986) of Hungarian aristocratic houses in Transylvania; and, after a 25-year gap,
• The Broken Road (2013) dealt mainly with the Bulgarian and Greek sections of his trip.

A few years later Sacharverwell Sitwell used motorised transport and gave us Romanian Journey (1938) 

In 1999 Alan Ogden published “Romania Revisited – on the trail of English travellers 1602-1941” but the same author also edited an Englishman’s description of Romanian villages in the 1930s – “Romanian Furrow - Colourful Experiences of Village Life”; Donald Hall (Author) and Alan Ogden (Editor) (2007). Sadly neither of these books are currently available.

“Stealing from a deep place” by Brian Hall (1985) recounts experiences touring by bicycle through Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, a two-year trip (1982-1984) made possible by a travel fellowship. "He focuses", the blurb tells us, "on the political milieu which has led to food shortages and inadequate housing for a growing proportion of the population. Among the private citizens of the countries visited, he found great warmth and curiosity coexisting with an avarice and mistrust brought about by necessity".

Clearly travel was easier after 1989 – although only 4 books seem to cover the 1990s -

• In another Europe - a journey to Romania Georgina Harding (1990) - see also part 2 of this post (novels)
• Transylvania and Beyond; another bicycle trip, this time by the indefatigable and great Irish writer, Dervla Murphy (1992) 
• Looking for Gheorge; Love and Death in Romania; by Helena Drysdale (1992) 
• Clear Waters Arising by Nicolas Crane (1997)  was actually a walk over the mountains which stretch from Spain to Romania.

The last few years have seen a little more interest –

• Moons and Aurochs; a Romanian Journey; Alan Ogden (2007) is impossible to find
• Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker (2010) an upper-class Englishmen who chose to live first in Maramures and then in Transylvania for a few years, conducting a couple (admitted) of love affairs with gypsies in the course of the latter - but writing beautifully before disappearing to Italian and English country houses
• To Romania, with Love  by Tessa Dunlop (2012) perhaps belongs better to the memoir section which will follow shortly
• Never Mind the Balkans – here’s Romania by Mike Ormsby (2012) is difficult to categorise - amusing sketches of contemporary life in Romania written by an ex-pat
• The way of the Crosses; Peter Hurley (2013) is a genuine traveller's tale which I wrote about in my previous post

Kindness in Romania

One man who met with great kindness here was Irishman Peter Hurley who made a snowy pilgrimage from Sapanta on the border with Ukraine arriving in mid December last year in Bucharest, overnighting mostly in village houses on the rural tracks he was using.

I was prepared to dislike the book he has just published on his journey - as another example of outsiders imposing themselves on unsuspecting locals - noting that a quick flick indicated that there was no mention of other books written about the country. 

But Hurley is not your typical expat – resident in the country for almost 20 years and developing a variety of musical and rural networks from his work some of whom are tapped for hospitality. Most of his overnight stays, however, are made in houses he chances upon late in the evenings as he finishes his daily treks and whose impecunious residents clearly take to this eccentric visitor. His vignettes, with a different pen, might have been found intrusive but Hurley's help create a gallery of highly sympathetic portraits of people living off God's land.... 

The book’s descriptions of the landscape make it a charming read and it contains several positive stories of (sadly rare) cooperative work in some villages for the production of milk and apple juice; of those practising craft skills which are (also sadly) disappearing; and of at least one good priest doing (very) good work (interestingly in Cristian near my own village).  
The book is entitled The Way of the Crosses - from the habit he adopted of prayer at the small roadside crosses (troite) he meets on his way. He says early on that he does not consider himself a religious person but he certainly seems to have made amends during his journey! As an agnostic myself, I might have found this note jarring - but the author's basic goodness rescues that and clearly inspires those he met. We can do with more of this in our lives!

The book has spurred me to make a list of the books I know of in English about Romania. A year back I had posted about good guides to the country and referred to a list I had found in one website . And, in 20102, I also did a guide to blogs about Romania. 

But I know of only one (short) list of books which have Romania as their focus – whether novels, histories or whatever and that is in the blog Bucharest Life - although John Villier's "Romania" (Pallas Guide) had almost 100 book references (mainly histories) 

So thank you Peter for inspiring me to make what is probably the first real attempt at such a list of books in English about Romania. Currently it has 35 books on it - novels, travelogues, memoirs and histories.

Law-breaking in Romania

One of the few signs of public kindness left in Romania is.... hitch-hiking. At the exit of all cities you can see a few people waiting for lifts – which they will generally get in 10 minutes or so. As you leave the car – after a trip of 50 kilometres say – you will simply put a note worth a couple of euros in the driver’s hand as you leave. But hitch-hiking in Romania is being banned – with the guilty party now designated as the driver (as if we were the customers of prostitutes). 

So where does that place me when I am on the 6 kilometre stretch of track from the main road to the village where I live in the summer when I encounter villagers? No justification has been given for this stupid new law which, hopefully, will be ignored by all, not least the police (as it was for a previous effort some years back apparently). As if Romanians were not being crushed enough!

I referred some months back to a great book of black and white photographs of Ceaucescu‘s Romania by Andrei Pandele  which got a nice review on the BBC magazine. 

The author of the piece, Tessa Dunlop, wrote a novel recently about the period – To Romania with Love 

Finally, for those who want to know more about aspects of Romania’s history, there is an interesting review of the second-world war dictator Antonescu here

Ideas and Institutions

The last section of de Botton’s book deals with institutions and has a few simple but effective graphs comparing the scale of annual spending  eg (a) of the Catholic Church with that of Proctor and Gambles; and (b) of Pringle crisps in UK with that for all books and poetry published in that country! These graphs really make the point very powerfully about the impossibility of individual writers making any impact on national affairs. The text then offers the following sentence -

The challenge we face is how to ally the very many good ideas which currently slumber in the recesses of intellectual life with organisational tools (many religious in nature) which stand the best chance of giving these ideas due impact in the world (p299)

De Botton’s book is one of those rare ones which emerge from my reading with a mass of underlining, pencilled strokes, ticks and just a few question marks. It helped remind me of various issues which have cropped up from time to time in the blogs over the past few years but to which I have not devoted enough consideration, such as -

• How we can reinvent the ethic of social responsibility
• The need to honour those individuals who embody the “good life”
• How the discontent if not rage so many people have about the commercial, political and financial elites can be translated into effective social action.  
• The importance (but marginalisation) of cross-boundary (inter-disciplinary) work and writing 
• the neglect (and importance of) literature and history in giving insights to contemporary issues

Against technocracy

We talk loosely about the moral emptiness of the modern world – perhaps particularly at this time of year when consumerism is so much in our faces. “Me-me” has become the central driving force and egocentricity the name of the only game in town. An increasing question for many of my generation is how to develop a coherent set of stories and messages capable of persuading our societies of the need to change track – and in what way? To some of us it seems that a rediscovery of the ethic of social responsibility is an important part of the answer. But our educational institutions seem unable to deal with values

 We are by nature, says de Botton in Religion for Atheists, "fragile and capricious - beset by fantasies of omnipotence, worlds away from being able to command even a modicum of the good sense and calm that secular education takes as the starting point for its own pedagogy". However, he continues -

...ideas need not just to be presented, but also repeated. The Christian calendar does this, as does the set daily liturgy.
Secular society, on the other hand, leaves us free - presenting us with a constant stream of new information, and prompting us to forget the lot. It expects us to spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us, and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It’s the ‘news’ which occupies the position of authority in the secular sphere which the liturgical calendar has in the religious one. Matins become the breakfast bulletin, vespers the evening report. Its prestige is founded on the assumptions that our lives are poised on the verge of transformation due to the 2 driving forces of modern history: politics and technology. Religious texts, by contrast, are written on stone, books are few and thoroughly absorbed.We are familiar enough with the major categories of the humanities as they are taught in secular universities – history and anthropology, literature and philosophy - as well as with the sorts of examination questions they produce: Who were the Carolingians? Where did phenomenology originate? What did Emerson want? We know too that this scheme leaves the emotional aspects of our characters to develop spontaneously, or at the very least in private, perhaps when we are with our families or out on solitary walks in the countryside.

In contrast, Christianity concerns itself from the outset with the inner confused side of us, declaring that we are none of us born knowing how to live; Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another, even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension - and to which we may as well refer, following Christian terminology, as the soul. It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our souls. p112-13

I rarely miss an opportunity to castigate the modern university for its ever-increasing compartmentalisation of knowledge and marginalisation, indeed stigmatisation, of inter-disciplinary work. If ever an occupation deserved the accusation of insidious conduct of the “trahison des clercs” it is the modern academic – in their ivory towers and, with a few honourable exceptions, being indifferent to the fate of humanity. As de Botton puts it -

The modern university appears to have little interest in teaching emotional or ethical life skills, much less how to love their neighbours and leave the world happier than they found it. Scripture used to do this; and since the C19th the hope has been that culture could replace scripture in helping people find meaning, understand themselves, behave morally, forgive others and confront their own mortality. So we could turn to Marcus Aurelius, Boccaccio, Wagner and Turner instead. It’s an odd proposition – but maybe not so much absurd as unfamiliar. Novels do impart moral instruction; paintings do make suggestions about happiness; literature can change our lives, philosophy can offer consolations.But while universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual info about culture, they remain uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom. ‘So opposed have many atheists been to the content of religious belief that they have omitted to appreciate its inspiring and still valid overall object: to provide us with well-structured advice on how to lead our lives.’ (page 111).

Christianity meanwhile looks at the purpose of education from another angle, because it has an entirely different concept of human nature. It has no patience with theories that dwell on our independence or our maturity. It instead believes us to be at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge of anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death - and most of all in need of God.

John Wesley used to preach on being kind, staying obedient to parents, visiting the sick, caution against bigotry. He said ‘I design plain truth for plain people: therefore… I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and as far as possible, from even the show of learning. My design is… to forget all that ever I have read in my life.’ (page 120). 

‘We on the other hand have constructed an intellectual world whose most celebrated institutions rarely consent to ask, let alone answer, the most serious questions of the soul.’ (p 121) Maybe we need a new kind of university, one which had a dept for relationships, an institute of dying and a centre for self knowledge.Then there’s the method – impassioned preaching makes a difference to the engagement and impact. ‘Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers.’ (p131). Summary: Religions teach wisdom; secular societies offer information.

This was a good post - exactly two years ago - on some lessons from trying to build the capacity of democratic institutions in transition countries