E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
Behr Politics: A Survivor's Guide
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ISBN: 978-1-83895-505-2
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A Waterstones best Politics book of 2023
E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-83895-505-2
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Rafael Behr is an award-winning political columnist for the Guardian and a regular commentator on TV and radio. He is a former political editor of the New Statesman, chief leader writer at the Observer. He began his journalism career as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. He has also written highly regarded long-form political essays for Prospect magazine. Rafael is a well-respected figure in Westminster, considered one of the most insightful and articulate commentators of his generation. He has a network of contacts across the party spectrum, developed over more than two decades. He is an engaging and lively public speaker with many years of experience chairing and appearing as a panelist at conferences and literary festivals. Since April 2020, Rafael has also hosted Politics on the Couch, a podcast with a loyal following that looks at the psychological processes and biases that operate beneath the surface of day to day politics.
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CHAPTER 1
THE OLD COUNTRY
Motherlands are castles made of glass. In order to leave them, you have to break something – a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart. What you have broken will haunt you. To be an émigré, therefore, means to forever bear shards of glass in your pockets. It is easy to forget they are there, light and minuscule as they are, and go on with your life, your little ambitions and important plans, but at the slightest contact the shards will remind you of their presence. They will cut you deep.
(i) Homeland insecurity
The little Lithuanian town of Linkuva, around 170 kilometres north of Vilnius, was uncertain about its Jewish past. The first person I asked, a woman at the bus station, was terse. ‘No one here knows anything.’ It sounded like a rebuke. ‘No one remembers anything.’ Many of the people I met walking into the centre of town didn’t want to speak at all.
Sometimes curiosity overcame suspicion. Foreign tourists don’t go to Linkuva, and visiting Lithuanians wouldn’t start asking about Jews. Some people had no idea what I was talking about. Others had heard tell of a thriving community, once upon a time, but couldn’t explain its disappearance.
After a succession of blank looks and sullen rejections, I finally met someone chatty. Danite was a middle-aged woman with a trapezoid frame and a silver-capped, nicotine-stained smile. She pointed out a yellow brick building set around 20 metres back from the town square. It had once been a synagogue. After the Second World War, it was converted to a cinema. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Lithuania gained its independence, the cinema fell into disuse and, judging by the smell, now served as a public toilet for people of all faiths and none.
Danite explained that many of the brick buildings in the centre of town had been the properties of Jewish tradesmen. They had been the urban middle class. The rest of the houses were wood. ‘There used to be lots of Jews here,’ she told me confidently, although she would have been too young to remember them. ‘But they all went away. Or they got killed.’
She told me where to find the Jewish cemetery on the road out of town and drew me a map. It was easily missed, although there was a small sign in Lithuanian and Hebrew. The lopsided, broken gravestones were overgrown with weeds. Their pale grey mottled faces were barely visible from the road. There was no boundary where the grassy roadside verge ended and the cemetery began, just a crop of fractured memorials that seemed to get more numerous the longer I stared at the field and my eyes got accustomed to their camouflage. It felt like they were emerging to meet me, wary creatures intuiting that I posed no threat.
I examined a few of the headstones, but the inscriptions were badly weathered and my Hebrew, also eroded by time, wouldn’t have been up to deciphering them anyway. I took some pictures with an old-style analogue camera. This was 2001, before smartphones.
When I was growing up in London, we had a stash of old sepia photographs dating back to the first decade of the twentieth century, taken in or around Linkuva. One shows a class, a group of around 30 Jewish schoolchildren with a couple of their teachers. The children mostly appear bored, or maybe resentful at being made to sit still. They are outside a rickety-looking wooden building that is presumably the school house. The boys all have their heads covered with flat caps. One, looking younger and more alarmed than insolent, has a badge of some sort on his cap. What it designated is unknown. He is Jacob Behr, my father’s father. The picture is thought to be from around 1906. Six years later, Jacob – Jack, as he would later be known – moved with his parents and a cousin to South Africa. Other cousins stayed in Lithuania.
One was Bertha Gilman – Baska to her family. We have a couple of photographs of her, too. In one, she is maybe three or four years old, fair-haired, sitting on a simple wooden chair set on the hard ground. In another picture, dated 1923, Baska is a young woman, standing for a formal portrait. She wears a long plain dark dress; her hair has turned darker too. She has a black bow or scarf tied into her hair, falling down over her shoulder. There is an inscription in Yiddish on the back, written to my grandfather and his parents. The translation:
When you take this picture in hand may you remind yourself of the face, which was at one time well known to you, and may you remember your relative who is over the sea, and may you think happily of a time when we can be together. As a reminder of your dear niece and cousin.
The record goes silent after that.
The road out of Linkuva past the cemetery leads to Pashvitinys, another small town that was home to my paternal grandmother’s side of the family (they called it Pashvitin). And there I stood, 27 years of age, roughly a hundred years after my great-grandparents had left, in a meadow somewhere between their home towns, staring at illegible tombstones that might have belonged to some distant family member but probably didn’t. I waited solemnly for a few minutes, long enough to justify the journey to myself, reaching for some transcendental connection to the place, not feeling much more than the brush of gnats against my arms. What was Linkuva to me? A place in a story I had been told about a land we once came from called Lithuania; a point of origin in family folklore. But when I foraged for roots on the outskirts of the town, I found nothing to hold on to.
Deracinated. Literally it means uprooted. Britain was my home. But did I think of it as my home The word implies ancestral connection, although less explicitly than ‘motherland’ and ‘fatherland’. Those terms seemed to me atavistic as well as archaic. They spoke of intimate bloodlines in a way that I associated with demagoguery and war.
As for patriotism, it was something I was still discovering in myself. I was intensifying fondness for the place I grew up by the reliable method of absence abroad. Even then, I found it easiest to be proud of British culture when it was squeamish about effusive displays of national pride, self-deprecating, understated. Asked to name the quality of Britishness I most admired, I would probably have identified the ironic humour that can’t itemize national greatness without wanting to mock the pomposity of the exercise. And nationalism? I thought of it as an antique doctrine from previous centuries, a crude instrument that people had once used to dig their independence out from under foreign domination.
Nationalism was a big part of politics in Lithuania at that time, as it was in neighbouring Latvia and Estonia. The three Baltic states had only recently broken free from the Soviet Union. The engine of their liberation had been defiant assertion of national cultures – folk songs and stories in the native tongue – stubbornly preserved through decades of forced Russification.
I was there as a correspondent for the , my first overseas posting, awarded to a rookie reporter on the basis that big stories rarely came out of such small countries. When the Baltic states had stood heroically against Kremlin crackdowns in the late 1980s, they had briefly felt like the centre of the world. They were the loose thread that pulled at the edge of Soviet power and unravelled the whole shoddy weave.
It was a much more slow-moving story by the time I got there a decade later. When I told people I was heading off to the Baltic, they would congratulate me for being so intrepid but wondered whether I would be safe. It usually turned out they thought I had said Balkans. They thought I was going to Europe’s most notorious crucible of armed national vendettas.
Phonetic similarity wasn’t the only point the two regions had in common. In the mid nineties, when civil war was ripping apart countries of the former Yugoslavia, there was some speculation among Western analysts that inter-ethnic grievances could also turn violent in the Baltic states. The fear was that communist rule had bottled a load of nationalist rage that would spill blood wherever it was uncorked. But it didn’t happen. The Baltic transition to democracy was not effortless, but nor was it botched. A lot of the success was down to the twin prospects of European Union and NATO membership. That was what I spent most of my time covering as a journalist. Britain was an enthusiastic sponsor of EU enlargement to include former Warsaw Pact countries. I saw at ground level how the European project incentivized democratic reform and embedded the rule of law in places where many worse trajectories looked plausible. It was a bureaucratic miracle, which is to say it was a wonderful thing that was boring to write about as a journalist. I was happy for the Baltics that their politics were becoming more boring to the outside world.
Boring was good. Boring meant nationalist ferment subsiding.
Post-Soviet tension didn’t dissipate overnight. The trickiest issue – and one where the EU and NATO leaned on nationalistic governments to adopt more liberal policies* – was citizenship rights for local Russians. There were millions of them. To many Balts, the Russians were ethnic jetsam deposited on their land when the Soviet tide rolled back eastwards. Some had family roots in the region going back generations, but most were there as a consequence of Kremlin policies that used migration of the Soviet...
