How does it feel to be in a refugee camp in Germany, with its historical and cultural baggage?
A NEW HISTORICAL PHENOMENON
Imagine a massive crowd of people in a fairly limited space, where almost 800 people from various nations, races, cultures, educational backgrounds and social milieus live in four tents, around 200 to each tent. Such an agglomeration of people is an extraordinary example of cohabitation, and is rare in Europe’s history.
In these conditions, each person’s personal space is limited to the confines of a single mattress on a barracks bunk, along with the other 11 people there, and any individual, regardless of personal qualities, is condemned to become a part of the mass, where there is almost no personal life, only the communal.
Despite the obvious complexity and existential problems of migration, the streams of refugees to Germany are only growing. In recent years, this phenomenon, deepened by the Syrian crisis, is being regarded as a
new historical phenomenon.
THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES
Russian philosopher Lev Gumilev asserted that there is a certain power that moves through the masses, naming it “passionarity”, and he viewed passionarians (those in the heat of passionarity) as the archaic, primordial moving power of history, obliterating the high and pampered, like the Nietzschean “Eternal return” (the so-called
Die ewige Wiederkunft
, the concept of viewing the world as a sort of eternal recurrence).
In his seminal work
The Revolt of the Masses
(
La rebelión de las masas
, 1930), the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset described the distinct situation of the 1930s, when the number of people increased thank to technical achievements, and the “mass of people” acquired the sensation of a certain “ease of living”, and lost its “moral self-discipline”, the feeling of responsibility to the present and the future, and respect for hard work. He labelled this
The
Revolt of the Masses
.
Perhaps this is the great secret of the historical phenomenon of our time and the reason for the willing enthusiasm of the “revolting masses” for “ease of living” in camps on German soil, despite that country’s dreadful past?
MUSIC AS THE SOUL OF REDEMPTION?
While watching the Third Migration Period live at the Recklinghausen Flüchtlingslager (where there were Arabs, Kurds, Afghans, Indians, Chinese, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Chechens, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Belarusians, Mongolians and Africans), and being a composer by profession, I could not rid myself of the idea voiced by philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno in his work
The Philosophy of New Music
(
Philosophie der neuen Musik
, 1949): “
New music has taken on itself all the world’s darkness and guilt
.”
He undoubtedly had the concentration camps in mind.
Maybe it really is no accident that the great German romantics composed their prescient works, like Brahms’s
Deutsches Requiem
op. 45 (1868) or Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
(“Death of the Gods”, 1872)? The other significant figure of German music, Arnold Schoenberg, the prototype for the composer Adrian Leverkühn, hero of Thomas Mann’s novel
Doctor Faustus
(1947), wrote the cantata
A Survivor from Warsaw
op. 46 (1947) on this same topic, though by that point his piece was an epilogue to the fact.
CARRIED AWAY BY THE WIND
Residents of the camp were people with varied histories, many of whom didn’t realize that they had requested
political asylum
from Germany. One of my countrymen, in response to the question of whether he’d had problems with the government in Azerbaijan, burst out in response: not at all, don’t mix me up in politics!
R., a 63 year-old bazaar sentry from Chechnya once made some pointed remarks about the Russian President Putin, for which he wound up in the torture chambers of Ramzan Kadyrov’s intelligence services, where, as a result of torture, his teeth fell out and he developed a rupture in his stomach. After hiding out for a long time in the forests of Chechnya from the persecution of all sorts of members of the Chechen security forces, he was finally able to make a run for it, and got to Germany, travelling by foot almost all of Russia and Poland. Previous to our acquaintance, he had been in the camps for several months and was awaiting an urgent surgery.
My 38 year-old countryman Z. had already suffered heavily for more than ten years from diabetes; in his home country, he had been involved in the pharmaceutical business, but this sector, in Azerbaijan, suffocating from corruption, belongs to the First Lady and her clan. After threats from the intelligence services, he was strongly persuaded to immigrate with his family.
52 year-old V. from Mongolia crossed the enormous spaces of Eurasia, reaching Germany with her 11 year-old daughter – they were both very moving. They were relocated to a different camp after the girl was sexually mistreated by a middle-aged Arab – the infuriated father threatened to cut his throat.
And then there was Sh., the 33 year-old Tajik who had come from Moscow (where he’d worked) – after a month’s stay in the camp, he decided to put a stop to his application and go back, having understood that this wasn’t the place for him.
TO SAY “YES!” TO LIFE
An interesting tendency could be observed in the camp: almost all the married women of child-bearing age from the former USSR were pregnant: as if some behind-the-scenes director had signaled an
Auftakt
(from the German, a musical term meaning the director’s preliminary arm movement before the music begins, and also indicating a breath before the sound begins) to all the couples with his imaginary baton and there began a mass act of conception, vast in geographical scope, in which people of all tribes to part. On only my second day in the camp, I wound up having to accompany a pregnant woman as her translator, in the ambulance (Rettungswagen) on the way to give birth. She gave birth to a boy, it was almost a miracle!
It’s likely that the post-Soviet mafia was at work here, engaged in human trafficking, as opposed to some sort of metaphysical power of fate. Every other day one of my countrywomen would ask: “Is it true that the German government will pay €45,000 for every baby born?”
Evidently this phantasmal grant for diligently fulfilling one’s spousal duties, promised by those who deal in migration, gave people stimulus, and as a result, pregnant women wound up in the difficult conditions of a hospital ward for refugees. But you couldn’t come up with a more symbolic act: the act of being a refugee catalyzed new life!
Live goes on, always and in spite of everything – among the endless shouting and crying of children, the jostling in line for food and the grime of the bathrooms, the noise in the tents deep into the night and the endless fighting.
THE PSYCHE AS A FACTOR OF SURVIVAL
According to Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and author of the enormous work “Say ‘Yes!’ to Life” (…
trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen
, 1946) who endured the Nazi camps himself, it wasn’t those with strong health who stood the best chances of surviving, but rather those with a strong spirit, who had a reason to live.
The psyche of women in the camp turned out to be stronger than that of the men – it was men who’d made several attempts at suicide. One of my countrymen, the 34 year-old Kh., a former inmate of a Russian prison, hung himself; he was saved by two Armenians living in the camp, V. and B., whose government has been in a bloody conflict with Azerbaijan for more than a quarter-century. But humanity won out and they managed to pull his life from the noose. Then a native of Pakistan cut his veins – he was also saved.
IN A CONFINED SPACE
In the camp, every person, finding themselves in a confined space,
was forced to socialize
: the social situation of a refugee requires this: the refugee lives in a commune where everything is collective, from bed to communal food and toilets. There can be no thought for solitude: everything, everywhere is in plain sight and in your face, “here and now”, as some Sufi adepts say.
On June 22, 2016, when the doors of the camp at Cranger Str. 11 opened before me, I remembered my composition,
Intra Cancellos
(In a Confined Space, 1994), created 22 years ago in a master-class on composition at the University of Gothenburg. “
From the depths of time I beheld the future…
”.
P.S. At some point the Russian poet Tyutchev wrote: “
Blessed is he who visited this world, in his fatal moments, he was called by all the blessed, as a companion to a feast
.
”
