What We Talk About When We Talk About Us

First of all, I have to rather shamefacedly admit that the title of this article is not particularly original. It is a play on two book titles by two authors. I'm sure most of you will have read their books, or at least heard of them. The first of these is Raymond Carver, the American short story writer. In his book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love he tackles married life, the neighbourhood, family, deathbeds, cakes, cathedrals, buses, casinos, trains, exile and home in a totally accessible way. His work covers every area of human drama in the last century.

The second book title belongs to his friend and the translator of his books into Japanese, Haruki Murakami, who is one of today's most popular authors. The title is: “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”.

This made me spontaneously decide to give this essay its title. Once again I admit rather shamefacedly that I did this without having the slightest idea about what I really wanted to say. I wanted to say something about myself and hence about us. Because, as the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa tells us, each of us is not just a single 'I'. Within us we all have a number of 'I's, not always the best. Or vice versa.

In an attempt to avoid any kind of theorizing and moralizing, I will try to stick to what is perhaps the only thing I can do: tell stories. But I will be constantly aware that I am going to fail. You know it yourself: the whole depends on the extent to which you fail. The more, the better. The less, the worse.

Last year I gave a few readings from my latest novel in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but apart from that, this is the first time for twelve months that I have brought my writing to the public. This applies equally to my writings in German (my second language) and in Albanian (my native tongue). It doesn't mean that I haven't written anything.

What I am trying to say is that being an artist, and particularly a writer, is a special kind of madness.

On the contrary, in my retreat from public life, whether in Germany, Kosovo, Albania or the Balkans as a whole, I have never stopped writing. I have spent months sitting at my desk in Stuttgart, but failed in every respect. Without knowing where I would go and what I should even want in this still indeterminate place, and of course beset by all the risks that are the responsibility of a father and husband.

Without a satisfactory result and with the attendant danger of continuing to lead the same life. What I am trying to say is that being an artist, and particularly a writer, is a special kind of madness. Particularly in our present times.

I know that many of my colleagues have already said this in different times and circumstances. But now this particularly applies to the times we are living in.

Up to ten years ago, as in the preceding hundreds of years, being an artist was not a curse but a privilege. But today we are all artists and writers, painters and musicians. In today's modern world, you can write a poem, story or novel at your desk, on your smartphone or on your laptop. You can take photos, design, sing, paint, create. Then you can post it on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or somewhere else where your family, friends and thousands and thousands of others can take a look at this or that 'work', which can remain within a small circle.

Life moves fast, and we forget even faster. The new technologies have certainly brought progress but also the danger that their users can be easily controlled.

Sometimes this can lead to totally unexpected success. If Max Brod had burned his friend Franz Kafka's manuscripts at his request, or if the handwritten works of Fernando Pessoa had not remained packed in boxes for many decades, then these two authors would never have been discovered and immortalized. Today we are living in a new phase when it is quite scary to be faced with the unknown and wondering what is to come. Life moves fast, and we forget even faster. The new technologies have certainly brought progress but also the danger that their users can be easily controlled.

Without coming up with a healthy explanation for collective insanity, man and mankind are preordained to destroy themselves, far beyond any logic provided by ideology or mass manipulation. I pondered all this as I travelled out of Normandy towards Waterloo in Belgium and saw the house where Napoleon based himself, believing he could still win a victory. What victory? The victory that today remains one of the greatest defeats of mankind. Where Belgian farmers still stumble upon the bones of soldiers who were killed more than 150 years ago when they are laying the foundations for their houses. And despite the advances made by forensic science, it is still difficult to identify whether these soldiers were French, German, Belgian, Russian, Austrian or even Balkan!

The same can be said of the massacre of Leipzig... from where I had a difficult journey to Austria, avoiding my second home, Stuttgart! I don't know why. Or I do know why. I simply wanted to touch the past without the influence of the virtual world (the Internet) and the mobile world (and so with reduced contact). My journey took me to the central cemetery in Vienna.

Suddenly I read the name of a well-known friend, who must be in her eighties. I had not seen her for some years. I read her name and thought she must have died. But no. This well-known Jewish lady had immortalised herself to some extent by inscribing her own date of birth. When death comes and she is laid to rest next to her husband, a stranger will inscribe her date of death. In contrast to her parents and siblings, she will rest in peace and not be reduced to dust and ashes by an insane ideology.

 At the end of this terrible year, Srebrenica was a place where death could be felt in the earth and sky, in the trees, the bushes, the houses, the street, the squares, valleys and hills. And particularly in the dark, desperately unhappy faces of Serbs and Muslims alike.

From here, it was a short and easy trip to Serbia. My German nationality and passport meant I could travel freely (despite my Kosovo Albanian name) and without fear of being stopped or treated as an enemy, a terrorist fought against by the Milosevic regime in the last war in Kosovo in 1999. This regime was responsible for a decade of the bloodiest war to be waged in Europe since the Second World War. The scars from this war have not yet healed.

Serbia is a country that I simply must spend time in. In Novi Sad and Novi Becej in Vojvodina, but also in Belgrade and Raska. I want to see the area where my grandfather was killed during the Second World War – although I still don't know exactly where his remains lie. My father and my two brothers are dead. They never managed to find out whether his murder took place during the final offensive by the partisans against the Nazis and their collaborators (who seem to have included my grandfather).

Srebrenica was a place where death could be felt in the earth and sky, in the trees, the bushes, the houses, the street, the squares, valleys and hills.

They never managed to find his grave. After the Second World War and the war in the 1990s, and armed with my German passport, I finally wanted to see the place where my grandfather's remains most probably lie. Without the slightest hope of learning anything. And I can only repeat that more than fifteen years later the bodies of over 1,000 Albanians, Kosovan civilians, are still missing. They were massacred and transported to Serbia in refrigerated vehicles, placed in cold storage, tipped in the Sava river and buried beneath the roads which have subsequently been asphalted and carry vehicles from Serbia, the Balkans and all over Europe.

My reply is: a great deal. While I try to gather together my recollections of this long, deeply painful journey, two things appear before me here on the 10th floor of a block erected with EU funding in the centre of the capital of this youngest European nation, the Republic of Kosovo. The actionpacked journey to every corner of this land and Stuttgart. The still unhealed wounds of the last war in Kosovo, in which thousands upon thousands of innocent people died; and the arrival of the NATO forces, which included the German Bundeswehr for the first time since the Second World War, both in the military operations against the Milosevic troops and in the invasion of ground troops after their surrender.

Even after the "Never again!", we Germans found ourselves drawn into a new war, this time as part of a new alliance, an alliance that opposed the Nazis in the Second World War. And this just nine years after German reunification, so in 1999, when the red-green ruling coalition displayed the Federal Republic's growing sense of responsibility in every area and every direction. Today, 25 years later, this reunification not only makes Europe Europe, but also makes Europe inconceivable without Germany's role and influence. That is both positive and worrying. Because it revives old memories about German dominance of the old continent and beyond.

There were crazy people with the time and energy to seek the impossible in desperation, to discover the sense of evil in man and mankind.

The second image that appears before my eyes is that of Germany, of Stuttgart, in the 1950s. Were there crazy people like me with the time and energy to seek the impossible in desperation, to discover the sense of evil in man and mankind, when innocent young people were dying because someone told them, ordered them, to become murderers so that they too could end up among the dead lying on the endless fields of Europe. For hundreds of years. I think about all this and look out over the Kosovan capital, Pristina, where I spent the first half of my life.

The times we live in are not so difficult, so a person can feel both to some extent. This is thanks to my upbringing in my native land. But also, I have to admit, thanks to the traumas of the war in the 1990s. In other words, as soon as I am in Kosovo I inevitably feel like a German who does not see this half-destroyed and half-rebuilt, half-wounded and half-healed, half-traumatized and half-overtraumatized, half-poor and half-very poor, half-decolonized and half-corrupt country that is partly oriented towards Europe and partly towards Turkey, this half-Muslim and 20 percent Christian country that has partly joined the UN and partly seeks new recognition.