by Holly A. Case
Last November in Vienna, a number of us met to discuss what the outcome of the US election could mean. Because it was too early to tell, much of the conversation focused on parts of the world where leaders who had honed rhetoric and positions like Trump's years earlier had begun to translate them into concrete policies, namely in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and Poland.
The group included a Bulgarian novelist, two Austrian high school students who had spent a year abroad in the US, a magazine editor, a cultural entrepreneur, and a spattering of graduate students and academics from various disciplines—from medieval studies to political science—and countries (the US, India, Canada, Poland, Hungary, Mexico, Austria, and Bulgaria, to name a few). What those present had in common was middle-class status and a penchant for reading, thinking, and studying, even if some of our lineages were often humbler (more than a few of us were first generation off the farm or factory, and as many had grown up in rural areas). Once all this was established, one of the Bulgarians wondered: "What if this isn't the end of the world. What if it's just the end of our world?"
Those two sentences have haunted me ever since. The late East German novelist Christa Wolf, who was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (the ruling party of East Germany) from 1949 until a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, once recalled the first time she watched a Bertolt Brecht play. The year was 1950, and Brecht himself was sitting nearby in the audience. Wolf watched as the leftist playwright "shook with laughter" throughout the performance: "I would not have dared to laugh at all the places where Brecht had to laugh," she admitted. "His disrespect for the ‘bourgeois tragedy' drove us to distraction." It reminded me of my own reaction to Michael Haneke's Funny Games. Not funny.