Arjen Venema

A Belgian Guy and his talks and how they relate to Romania

By Arjen Venema

If you would have turned on the television last Sunday, the 29^th of August, you would have had to make the very difficult choice between 3 alternatives; a) a very scary horror-film called Ice Age 2, b) a b-film that needs to be laughed about, starring Chuck Norris c) VPRO’s ‘Zomergasten’ (Summerguests), starring Guy Verhofstadt, the former prime-minister of Belgium. I was watching tv and choose to ignore options a) and b) because of their ridicule. I began watching Zomergasten, even though Zomergasten, normally, is a very forced interviewing program and, normally, the fragments that come in between are just bad working medicines for the program’s general dullness. In one way or another, this broadcast was tolerable.

Minutes later, the tolerability of this broadcast was explained because Verhofstadt was talking about things I knew something about, which was not the case with Rothko-art and wine-making. He was talking about Europe. Europe?! No, don’t zap away from this ‘essay’, he was (in the beginning, at least) not talking about euro’s and Finland and the Greeks and all those stupid difficult things which are so prominently in the news the today. He was talking about identity, multiculturalism and history.

‘The monster of national identity’

Our liberal Belgian Guy was talking melancholic about a time he only knew from books and some film fragments: Europe before the Great war of 1914-1918. Europe, he said, once was a cultural melting pot, like the United States are right now. There were cities in which you could order a nice bread speaking Hungarian, ‘Spaniolish’, gypsy-language, Romanian, Bulgarian, Polish, Greek, German, French or Jewish. People from all languages, cultures and religions were living across each other and there were almost no problems. It sounded as the ideal PvdA-world. I’m not an historian, but I thought for example of all the Jewish people that lived in Europe before 1930, most of them without even knowing they were Jewish. I thought of all the Germans living in Eastern Europe, of the French speaking Romanian upper-class, of Hungarians living in Romania, etc., and I thought: Guy, you’re right, it was a indeed melting pot.

A map of Austria-Hungary at 1911, ethnicities(what is an…?) are determined by language

Everyone, he continued, knows the tragedies of the 20^th century, and how this nice, multicultural Europe was perished by totalitarian ideologies, such as nationalism, that dictaturated identity to something which was uniform and tragically incomplete. This nationalism created Auschwitz, Srebrenica, and so further. So, Guy said; ‘The nation-state in its most extreme form, and in which we still live right now, though happily enough not in such an extreme way anymore, is an invention of the 20^th century. And the nation-state is responsible for the worst crimes in European history.’

The last German of the village

Now, let’s go and see Romania. Guy would say: a typical (Eastern) European state. It was founded in the 19^th century, was lying between the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia. People from all those countries also inhabited Romania, and then I haven’t spoken of all the Germans and Hungarians that lived across Transsylvania. We’ve been in these cute, poor, Saxon villages that, until the period of the big wars, were mainly inhabited by Germans. And in one of these villages there was an old man. He, we are living in 2011, lost his parents to the Russians who ‘sent his parents on wintersport vacation in Siberia’, because they were considered ‘Germans’. We all know the stories: in the name of the national identity millions of people in the period of 1914-1995(Yugoslavia) and maybe still now, were deported or killed.

He was sitting there, in his 70 or 80 year old body, telling us with the biggest smile on his face and with the greatest enthusiasm, what kind of hilarious devilment he did in his own church. He had been looking for the inheritance of his ancestors, and discovered that his church wasn’t only a church, but also some kind of temple, in which once Green men and vine were honored as Jesus himself.

If we would return to the identity thing, we can say that Green men(which stands for taking care of your environment) and vinemaking were part of the identity of the Saxons that made this church. These aspects of their identity were so important that they were displayed among saints and frescos.

One of the Green men, some early Celtic ‘Green politics’ adapter

Multi-level identities

Back to Verhofstadt, our Belgian friend. After his story about how his lovely multicultural Europe had been vanished, he speaks about some book that he read, written by Amartya Sen, some Indian man I hadn’t ever heard about. This Indian man seemed to be a very wise person: he said something I knew, but wasn’t ever outspoken to me. A translation what he’d said could be:

‘Identity is something multi-leveled, something fluent, something which adapts itself to its context. I am an Indian when I vote for the Indian parliament, I am a father when I raise up my children, I am an Asian man when I’m in Europe and I am an old man when I feel my bones hurt. I never use something like national identity in cases it isn’t relevant, such as politics.’

Then I thought back, again to our Grand German Grandpa. He was an optimistic, merry, gentle and enthusiastic old men: someone that showed us the art of getting old. And after the fragment up here, I partly understood(of course it’s also is optimistic nature) why this man looked so happy. It was because he had searched for his ancestors, and found out that they weren’t only Germans, or Saxons, the reason why his parents were sent away, but they were also winemakers, environmental farmers, religious persons. Of course he knew where he was looking for, but by discovering the reliefs and ornaments in his church, he saw that the identity of his ancestors, and so his own identity, wasn’t some boring, German, nationalist, uniform idea. It was full of great stories and logical histories that could explain the way he lived.

Maybe I’m over-romantizing this subject, I’m totally aware of that, and you may burn this story to the ground, but that doesn’t say that I’ve learned something in Romania: the story of an old man has more meaning to me than any vague nationalist idea will ever have.

Contrast in context

This Buitex was meant to have the nice theme ‘Contrast in context’, about differences and similarities between communist and capitalist Romania. I interpreted ‘Contrast in context’ somewhat else. I thought Romania was just a very good example to illustrate the whole ‘national identity’ case. There were people among us saying: people in Romania are struggling with their national identity, they only have Dracula to put on their postcards. I like postcards, because they make fun of their national or regional symbols without even knowing it. So, let’s hope they will never get further into thinking of their national identity, hope they won’t get it that far it will become their only identity. It would be healthier for the people in Romania to have at least a little contrast in their identities, a contrast founded by their own personal context.

For the Duinevelds among you, the book of this Indian guy, Amartya Sen, is called: Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny,