Poetry from the Future by Srecko Horvat

Author:Srecko Horvat
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141987705
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

So, I said to Hessel, if progress is nothing but an unceasing cycle of despair, then the ‘Angel of History’ is hardly the hopeful messenger that people might think it if they were to read Indignez-vous!

Extraordinarily enough, the young Stéphane Hessel met up with Walter Benjamin, a family friend, in Marseille in 1940, just before Benjamin embarked on his escape from France across the Pyrenees with nothing but a gas mask and his toothbrush. As Hessel recalled, Benjamin was in despair; he himself, in his twenties, was hopeful. But as Hessel said to me seventy years later with determined calm: ‘We can be in despair and we have many good reasons to be in despair, but we must fight against our own despair with hope.’

Throughout his life Hessel’s actions gave shape to these words. Shortly after Walter Benjamin committed suicide in utter despair (exaspération) in Portbou, Hessel was fighting despair with hope (aspiration). Fleeing to London in 1941, he joined General Charles de Gaulle’s Resistance, before returning to France to organize Resistance communication networks in advance of the 1944 Allied invasion. There, he was captured by the Gestapo and deported to the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps. He managed to escape while being transferred to Bergen-Belsen, and reached Hanover, where he met the advancing Allied troops. After the war, he became a diplomat and was present at the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In October 2010 his small thirty-two-page pamphlet Indignez-vous! was published in a first edition of only 6,000 copies. Within ten weeks it had sold almost a million copies, in France alone.

In a world full of despair, this old, proud French Resistance fighter had reawakened hope. The 2011 Spanish protests and other examples of resistance, from cooperatives to communes, took the name Indignados (‘the outraged’) from the title of his work. That same year, the whole world – from Egypt and Tunisia, via Greece and Spain, to the United States – was occupying squares and streets, in the process bringing back hope.

All of which brings us back to 2017 and Bifo’s resignation letter. Over the last six years the spring of hope has turned into the winter of despair. New political parties, founded in hope and optimism, have become like the old ones, lacking the strength to change the course of history. Meanwhile, the refugee crisis has deepened and new walls have been built; new wars are being waged and new fascisms articulated; as the European Union disintegrates, global instability is upon us. We are back in Marseille of 1940 with Walter Benjamin and Steṕhane Hessel, at the crossroads of despair and hope.

Should we perhaps understand Bifo’s resignation letter of 2017 as another form of Walter Benjamin’s ‘withdrawal’: a desperate abandoning of any hope because there seems no way out? Or, perhaps Bifo thinks we need hope without optimism? Today, we are all faced with the same dilemma that confronted Benjamin and Hessel. It is not a matter of what is right and what is wrong (resignation or aspiration): both choices can be explained and understood.

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