The Most Honest Place
Manos Tsangaris and Anh-Linh Ngo in conversation with Sasha Marianna Salzmann

The in-between is something I know as a normal state of being. I was born in a country that no longer exists – the Soviet Union. As part of a minority that has always been made to feel that it should not get too comfortable – the Jewish minority. The Germany I grew up in as a so-called quota refugee was a Germany where the shelters for asylum seekers were being torched. I live as a non-binary person in a binary world; the list could go on. But I haven’t experienced any of these aspects of my identity as a deficiency. On the contrary. All of the experiences that come with this in-between help me to train my muscles for seeing and for feeling empathy. I believe that as someone who writes, this helps me to get closer to the world, because I see things from different perspectives. I have to. With a kind of multifaceted gaze. And because my coordinates were at times so uncertain, I often had to go looking for my own spaces of belonging. They were not a given, and there is much to be said for that. Friendships and political alliances that grow over the years can be more stable than nation-states.

It’s understandable. People long for the tectonic plates beneath their feet to stop drifting further apart. It’s hard to accept that security has become no more than an illusion. The current direction is clear: we’re heading towards a period of ever greater inequality. And struggles over distribution have never made people better. People feel insecure. People feel aggrieved. The part of the world that has learned to think of itself as privileged is beginning to understand: we are now like the rest of the world; here too, resources are becoming scarce, and that is putting a strain on the thin veneer of civilised coexistence. Many people are now looking for someone to blame for the fact that we can no longer carry on as comfortably as before. And they find that someone in the supposed Other. We can draw different conclusions from the fact that we’re sliding into darkness: we could decide, for example, to supply each other with light – with support, empathy, acceptance. In other words, to go against the zeitgeist. Plenty of people are doing just that. I don’t know whether it will be sufficient, but those people do exist.

Memory resides in the senses, quite clearly. Often a single smell is all it takes for us to close our eyes and see someone again, a person we’ve missed. Or we hear a song, a melody, and we are transported back to a place that’s become unreachable. Memory is not something we find in the history books, and it’s not set in stone – and therein lies the crux of the matter: it’s the reason it’s so easy to manipulate. Because above all, memory has to do with emotions, not facts. We imagine all kinds of things, painting rosy pictures of situations that were actually awful, while glorifying others. I have memories of my grandfather that keep changing. They undergo their own metamorphoses – and this is especially true since his death. That is incredibly fruitful for writing, of course. Writing is not where memory is preserved anyway, it’s where a life is created as it might have been.

I doubt that we’ve forgotten what happened in the last century. It’s all been written down, recorded, archived. Our cities are full of monuments and memorials. But many people don’t want to know – they just don’t care. It is a deliberate forgetting, and that’s the worst part of it. The indifference. All the dead, all the massacres, all the destruction. The vast majority of people don’t seem to be moved by that. If that were the case, we would draw different conclusions from it. We would vote for different parties. We’d insist on a different form of remembrance and commemoration, and we wouldn’t resist everything that could entail a change to our way of life and our perceived entitlements.

Perhaps that’s precisely what so many of us struggle with: accepting the simultaneity of events, and with it the simultaneity of different perspectives. Was it ever any different? I think that now, in the digital age, we simply experience it much more intensely; we’re much more exposed to this kind of disorder. This is something that starts back in school, in history lessons, but we also get it in the news – we’re presented with a linear sequence of events. First this happened, then that. As if in every case there were a logical consistency. But these chains of causality only emerge in hindsight. And in looking back at events, we claim the right – and feel the need – to establish an overview of the sheer abundance of the simultaneous.

Places really are unique storytellers, their architecture in particular. They contain so much capacity to illustrate and make things tangible. The bullet holes in Berlin’s building facades, the derelict lots in back courtyards left behind by bomb strikes, the system of tunnels under Gaza that my grandfather kept asking about in his final weeks. The light that he saw despite everything. Apparently, it came through doors set in the ceiling, which he mentioned so often towards the end. So places aren’t just repositories of history and of stories; they speak for themselves too.

That’s a very nice thought. For me, literature arises out of doubt, out of a question, out of despair and often enough out of anger. And also out of a feeling of being overwhelmed. Similar to the state that arises out of a linguistic inability to understand. On stage, especially in the theatre, that kind of state can be expressed through multilingualism. The audience doesn’t have to understand everything. On the contrary. The experience of not-understanding is a necessary part of the story. Literature, and art in general, arises out of the ambiguous, out of uncertainty. Out of experiencing that very in-between we’re talking about here. That’s how I know it, at least. If you’re entirely certain about a subject, you write non-fiction. And as far as multilingualism is concerned, specifically in my play, yes, it has an atmospheric function, but it is also an essential part of the story I’m telling. After all, it is about a man who has lived in so many languages. For me it was important that the play begins in Ukrainian. Because my grandfather, who grew up in Western Ukraine and always insisted that he didn’t speak the local language there, suddenly started speaking Ukrainian to me after his first stroke. Not Russian, not Yiddish, which were the two languages that were supposedly his own.

It only stands to gain. The moment literature lets itself be put in the service of something – a state, a nation, a system – it loses its power and will be forgotten. It becomes replaceable. Before too long, bots will produce that kind of literature en masse – and far better than we can. While I was writing Vor dem Paradies, I was reading a lot of Kleist, and I asked myself which of his texts would likely endure. Hardly his fervently nationalist texts, I would say. But certainly Penthesilea. Certainly The Earthquake in Chile. Works that illustrate, in inimitable fashion, how fallible all of us are. 

At the very least it takes an enormous effort not to get swept up in the wave of hysterical opinion-mongering. Because that’s precisely what ails our political coexistence: the empty demands for simple buzzwords whose only purpose is to signal a position. Sometimes I think we’re all full of that sort of thing, like vessels – overfull, in fact. There’s no room left for a single thought about the suffering of the supposed others. But there has to be one simple political position we can all agree on: that there is no justification for people being killed. No suffering is worth less, or more, than another. There must be no “but” allowed after the statements “Yes, the 7th of October was a crime …” or “Yes, the war in Gaza is a crime …”

Mourning and remembrance are a central cultural practice all over the world. And since the dawn of humanity, the question has always been which lives are worthy of mourning. Whom do we recognise as human, and whom do we dehumanise in order to justify our crimes? As for the specific situation in Germany, the question that arises is: What do we mean by “never again”? Does this mean that IT should never happen again or that it should never again happen TO ONE PARTICULAR GROUP? And what does it actually say about us if we grant the right to physical inviolacy only to one particular group and not to others? 

Most societies on this planet exist in fractures, in an in-between. Their national borders are shifting, or they live in a state of war or amid political upheaval, or the rapidly changing climate is impacting their everyday existence and limits access to the resources they need to survive. In fact, it’s really only a small part of the world – the part we’ve come to call the West – that felt untouchable, believing it could exist in blissful ignorance. One might think that people here had always lived in safety, within an unbroken narrative of prosperity and growth. And yet the history of Europe and North America is a history of wars, exploitation, genocides and dispossession. At no point in our history have things been just. What I find troubling is the desire, among many in our part of the world, to live in a fairy tale. In a version of history that says: Once upon a time, we had it good. And now all these other people are coming and disturbing our peace. They want a piece of our cake, the cake we alone baked through our hard work and our values. So now we hold these others back at our borders, and that will give us our peace, and our well-deserved prosperity will remain secure.

If a society wants to move forward, it must be willing to live in reality. Not in a fairy tale. Living amid upheaval is reality. Every single one of us is implicated in these upheavals and shares responsibility for them. No one can exempt themselves from that. You can only build something if you abide by the laws of physics. We can all feel the fractures, even if we don’t want to accept them. And what we are feeling is a force of gravity that applies to everyone. 

Freedom is not primarily what I would associate with it, but I think that the in-between is the most honest place. For me, it’s only there that art can be born. 

Sasha Marianna Salzmann lives and works as a writer and curator in Berlin.