A Family
Discussion about
Right-Wing Populism,
Values, and Political
Engagement
Translated by
David Dollenmayer
TRANSLATION © 2018 BY DAVID DOLLENMAYER
FOREWORD FOR THE ENGLISH EDITION
TALKING BACK!
Foreword by André Wilkens
INTRODUCTION BY JOHANNA HENKEL-WAIDHOFER: WHY THIS BOOK NOW?
MARTIN ROTH: WHY I CANNOT KEEP SILENT
WHO WE ARE
LET’S TALK ABOUT THE WORLD.
LET’S TALK ABOUT EUROPE.
LET’S TALK ABOUT GERMANY
LET’S TALK ABOUT OURSELVES.
MARTIN ROTH IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHANNA HENKEL-WAIDHOFER
AFTERWORD: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
IMPRINT
Back in Summer 2017, when the discussions that formed the content of this book first took place in Berlin, none of the participants ever considered the possibility of an English translation.
It is thanks to the initiative of George and Karen Killy, who opened the conversation about the importance of an English edition, that we hold the result in our hands today.
The authors’ thanks go out particularly to Kurt Hübner at the University of British Columbia, who with great perseverance, empathy and knowledge managed to find the right translator and oversaw the entire production.
Moreover, without the financial means and support of the Killy Foundation as well as Inna and Michael O’Brian, we would not be able to find the book in its present English version today.
Our thanks go out to all of the supporters mentioned above, who with great conviction made the book’s crucially relevant topic readily available to a wider audience - not just across Europe but also in the rest of the world. Its availability in North America, where nationalisms and generational differences are as much discussed and of utter relevance as they are in Germany and Europe, the publication seems only fitting. With the translation, we hope to achieve the initial goal of the book’s family-based discussions: to make these topics part of everyday discourse with your children at home, in schools and between all generations.
The English publication would have been the wish of the late Martin Roth in whose memory this translation has come about.
Clara, Roman and Mascha Roth
Berlin, April 2018
We live in interesting times. In America, the outrageous Donald Trump reigns. The West is destroying itself. China is becoming the hope of liberals. Russia is the world’s new Chaos Computer Club.1 Europe is gradually recovering from a midlife crisis, but England has asked for a divorce anyway. And the digital world questions the meaning of life as we know it. Seventy years after the end of the Nazi era, Germany is the beacon of the liberal West and its chancellor the most powerful woman in the world. Lies are no longer called lies, but post-factual statements. Welcome to George Orwell’s world. If you continue to call post-factual statements lies, you’re outing yourself as a liberal cosmopolitan, i. e., behind the times. Bob Dylan’s songs are Nobel Prize-worthy literature, David Bowie will soon be canonized, and the pope is a world revolutionary.
I first met Martin Roth in China, where he had curated a brilliant exhibition on The Art of the Enlightenment – in Tiananmen Square, of all places. Ever since, I’ve found myself thinking about the Enlightenment. It was a movement that influenced science, art, philosophy, technology, culture, economy, and politics for three hundred years. It seemed to give our society an irreversible forward direction, an impetus to become always a little better: a little more enlightened, a little more self-confident – more or less unto the end of history. Already in Peking, I saw it was a utopia that also created a good deal of dystopia. And today one wonders sometimes if the Enlightenment is perhaps coming to an end. Are we in for an anti-Enlightenment, a new era of tsars, despots, oligarchs, and demagogues?
How will people look back on these times in five or twenty or a hundred years? Will they be seen as times of beginnings or endings? Were they just a historical misstep or a turning point? Whatever may be the case, they will be seen as interesting and in many ways stunning times.
1Europe’s largest association of hackers, with over 5,000 members and local chapters in many German cities.
People will tell stories about them. Some will be true and some will be later inventions. More interesting, of course, are the personal and political stories that are being written now as events unfold, stories like those in this book. People in the future will try to understand how all this could have happened, what today’s people thought and what they did or did not do. And if they did nothing, why was that? People will try to construct the course of world history from many little histories.
What we do now will decide how we look back at these times. What sort of Brexit will it be? A Brexit that radicalizes Europe and the U.K., or a divorce between grown-ups who still remain friends? What sort of America will it be? An America that becomes a dangerously real Trump reality show, or an America that will file Trump away as a tragic-comic interlude? A European Union that re-nationalizes itself from one election to the next, or one that recollects its founding idea, pulls together, and becomes a stabilizing world power? A Germany whose history will catch up with it, or a Germany that shows the world how a country can learn from its history? A world that surrenders to lies, or a world that again cultivates the truth, whether digital or analogue?
What the future will be depends on all of us. We’re not just extras in the play. There are things we can do. We can refuse to be intimidated by religious terrorists and right-wing extremists. We can break out of our “filter bubbles.” We can vote, continue to call a lie a lie, organize local initiatives. We can help people in trouble, do our jobs, make friends not just on Facebook, raise our children to be good human beings, seek the truth, argue with one another, and always make the world a little better.
This book by Martin Roth and his children will help the readers of the future to better understand and classify the times in which we live. But we should read it now and ponder what we ourselves can do to give our times meaning.
André Wilkens
Juli 2017
»What the future will be depends on all of us. We’re not just extras in the play. There are things we can do.«
is a political scientist and co-founder and executive director of the Initiative Offene Gesellschaft (Initiative for an Open Society).
Martin Roth is a citizen of the world with Swabian roots, an authority known and respected all over the world. Yet he no longer understands a world in which Western values are being eroded, Europe threatens to come apart at the seams, and helplessness has become endemic. When, if not now, is the time to talk back? He and his three grown children want to encourage people to sit down together and talk about their experiences, their successes and failures, about politics, the state, and society. And not just in order to come to terms with the past and provide support for one another, but to protest together what is happening now, so that coming generations do not have to ask their forefathers what they did to combat the new malicious populism and its rabble-rousing attempt to turn back the wheels of progress.
Martin Roth was born in 1955. He and his children Clara, Roman, and Mascha think of themselves as encouragers. They hope to inspire other families and circles of friends to have urgently needed discussions and seek clarity about our global responsibilities, the lessons we have learned—especially from the German past—the state of our society, and at the most basic level, about truth and falsehood. But we also need clarity about unrealistic expectations and the painful insight that there are many large topics and important questions too complicated for quick—to say nothing of easy—answers.
Talk Back! is a personal plea for a new openness and for bringing politics back to the dinner table.
Johanna Henkel-Waidhofer
Juli 2017
You may wonder why I am raising my voice to galvanize families into action across generations. Why do I think that politics, the discussion of values, and an honest exchange about the right and wrong ways to set the course for our common future need to infuse our daily lives much more than they do now. I am a European by conviction, which of course has to do with my age. I am a German, born in 1955, and even as a young man I was looking for a different—or better, a second—identity. I was a European first, then a German. Months before the Brexit vote, it was clear to me that I could not reconcile the discussion of Brexit, permeated and tainted with propaganda as it was, with my European identity.
The lies and polemics that accompanied the exit campaign, especially from turncoats like Boris Johnson, were both ugly and tragic. Although the world capital London with its grandiose and infectious dynamic will not lose its attraction even for the avant-garde, that dynamic is based more and more on a dubious foundation. For me, London was always a functioning city, exciting, alive, cosmopolitan. I always had the feeling that if London could function, there was hope for other metropolises. If so many people from so many countries could live together in relative peace, and at the same time the city could live and be productive at this tempo, then that success was transmissible.
But the Brexit referendum was dominated by inexplicable aggression, an aggression that—we have to be honest if we want to change anything—exists not just in Great Britain. We can observe it in Bavaria and Saxony as well, and not just in the Alternative für Deutschland1 but also among the right-wing populists and opponents of European Union in the Netherlands, France, Austria, Poland, and Hungary. Education, seriousness of purpose, and expertise count for too little. Facts are simply swept aside. Half-truths (13) and lies are in fashion. People like Nigel Farage complain about how bad things are for us while thousands of human beings are drowning in the Mediterranean. What have we come to when our standards have slipped so far?
For the first time in my life, an extremely right-wing Europe is being constructed before our very eyes, something I simply cannot comprehend. It is happening so quickly that I have to wonder if we Europeans with hearts and brains—we who wanted to create a peaceful continent for our children and grandchildren—have suddenly lost our sense of reality. Where are our Christian values, the commandment to love our fellow man? For me, the concepts of freedom, tolerance, and solidarity are sacred. Sacred is a big word, but the stakes are also large. I refuse to allow people like Marine Le Pen to set the terms of the debate for the future. I refuse to accept nationalism as legitimate. The rhetoric in England was so belligerent that any thinking German had to see parallels to our own history in the 1920s and 30s. Didn’t many people back then also think and say, “What’s happening isn’t good, but it won’t turn out to be so bad”?
»For me, the concepts of freedom, tolerance, and solidarity are sacred.«
demonstrators in Dresden held up mock gallows for Angela Merkel and Sigmar Gabriel?3