Alter Ego: Twenty Confronting Views on the European Experience

161 Pages·2006·2 MB·English

by  Guido Snel

omslag.alterego.def 06-04-2004 16:27 Pagina 1
European Cultural Foundation | General Editor: Guido Snel
Alter Ego
Where is Europe? Who is Europe? What is G
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Guido Snel (1972) is a writer and a European? Whom do we actually id
translator, and teaches in the address when we speak of ‘our fellow o
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Slavic department of Europeans’? n
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the University of Amsterdam. We know that Europe is something entire- l (e Twenty Confronting Views
ly different from the European Union as d
an administrative entity. But the present .)
and future enlargement of the EU will create new borders, with new on the European Experience
exclusions. This again means waiting rooms, velvet curtains, and iron-
like walls. In the future as in the past, the individual European expe-
rience may be contradicted by the actual EU borders.
Alter Egopresents twenty perspectives on Europe and its other(s), from
both inside and outside the EU, from the acceding states and from the
new neighbour countries. Writers, poets, scientists, artists, and politi-
cians whose life and work are indistinguishable from Europe and yet
often offer the vantage point of an outsider. Twenty individuals who
by virtue of their talent, craft or profession are seasoned mediators
between various milieus, backgrounds, and languages. Their stories
make Europe palpable on the individual level. A
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ISBN 90 5356 688 0
SALOMÉ
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ALTER EGO
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ALTER EGO
Twenty Confronting Views
on the European Experience
European Cultural Foundation
General Editor: Guido Snel
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Alter Egohas been realised within the ‘Enlargement of Minds’ action-line of
the European Cultural Foundation (www.eurocult.org) that analyzed
through art and media work, research and seminars the cultural implica-
tions ofEU Enlargement.
Alter Ego was made possible thanks to the support of the Riksbankens
Jubileumsfond (www.rj.se), The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
Cover design: Sabine Mannel/NAP, Amsterdam
Lay-out: Het Steen Typografie, Maarssen
Cover illustration: ©Péter Zilahy and Tamás Fuchs
isbn90 5356 688 0
nur658/754
© Salomé – Amsterdam University Press, 2004
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part
of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans-
mitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of
the book.
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Table of Contents
Preface – the European Cultural Foundation 7
Foreword – Robert Maclennan 9
A Guide to Alter Ego – Guido Snel 13
1. Beauty and the East 19
A Tale from the Wild East – Goran Stefanovski 21
Luxurious Madness – Jachym Topol 28
Ego with Alter Ego – Emil Tode 35
Me, the Mirror and I – Yuri Andrukhovych 42
An Interview with Myself – David Albahari 48
2. Heimat and its (Dis)contents 53
Dreaming of Friends, Living with Foes – AleˇsDebeljak 55
The Right to Feel at Home – an interview with Jaak Aaviksoo 61
Heimat – Marlene Streeruwitz 67
The Enlargement Takes Place in the Centre of Europe – an interview
with Erhard Busek 69
The Corpse under the Table – an interview with István Eörsi 73
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3. Intimate Geographies 79
A Past Retrieved – an interview with Eva Hoffman 81
In the Reflected Light of the Alter Ego or: The Splendour and Misery of
My Identity – Nelly Bekus Goncharova 87
Eurotic I – Saviana Stanescu 95
We Are the Past of Europe – an interview
with Andrei Ple¸su 103
Alter (the) Ego – Ademir Arapovic´ 108
4. The Uses of Diversity 115
Nevin Aladag˘’s Alter Egos – Nevin Aladag˘ interviews herself 117
Mother Tongue, Stepmother Tongue – an interview
with Abdelkader Benali 123
How European – Péter Zilahy 129
The Point of the Commonality of Cultures – an interview
with Sami Zubaida 140
The Saga of the Feel-good Strudel(A Family Apocrypha) – Damir Sˇodan 145
Contributors 153
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Preface
On the verge of the EU’s challenging enlargement by ten new coun-
tries, the question of its raison d’être, identity and cohesion has become
even more topical, also with respect to its new borders and new neigh-
bours. Europe is more than a single market, a single currency, a set of le-
gal and technical rules.
Europe is about memories, mental maps, personal experiences and
emotional interpretations. Where does Europe start? Where does it
end? Are our commonalities more forceful than our differences? How
far does ‘Europeanness’ transcend local and regional feelings of be-
longing?
Alter Ego is a collection of essays and (self-) interviews on the Euro-
pean culture of dissent. It offers to share personal trajectories and re-
flections on ‘the otherness’, ‘the un-known’. Colourful contributions by
free thinkers and artists present a kaleidoscope of self-confrontations
on the notion of Europe, a different taste and feeling of Europe.
Guido Snel completed a thrilling exercise: He made the contributors
enter into dialogue with their Alter Egos, look behind well-defined ideas
about identity, interlace real and imaginary borders of Europe. The re-
sult is a non-academic but intellectually stimulating exploration of Eu-
ropean mind-sets and features.
We wish to thank Guido Snel and all contributors to Alter Ego.
We also wish to express our gratitude to The Bank of Sweden Ter-
centenary Foundation for its support to the realization of the project.
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Our thanks include the OC&W for its general support to the activities of
the European Cultural Foundation that tackle the cultural implications
of EU enlargement.
Isabelle Schwarz
Amsterdam, March 2004
Cultural Policy Development Manager
European Cultural Foundation
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Foreword
by Robert Maclennan
Two episodes in my own life – although they were separated by half a century
– helped me to recognise that Europe is not the mere representation of a geo-
graphical or historical reality. Europe is better understood as the emanation
of the will of those who sense that they belong to it. (I am not a philosopher
but a politician, so any echoes of Schopenhauer in that observation are unin-
tended.)
The varied offerings by the contributors to the Alter Ego project, which
make up this book, might be read as an emphasis on the diversity of the cir-
cumstances from which that will is emergent. Nonetheless, from the book’s
method of self-examination by the authors, and from their consequential
self-identification, the honest conclusion can be drawn that such a singular
will does exist. Readers from within the existing European Union might have
assumed that the will is not a cause but a consequence: the consequence of
the habit of belonging to the Union. But the reflections contained in this
book are not the result of that habit; the contributors are mostly from outside
that conditioning political framework. The self-analyses which they present
emerge from very different political cultures, but nevertheless they appear to
sustain the same conclusion: Europe results from the will of those who recog-
nise that they are part of it.
Some of us who are already citizens of the European Union may feel chal-
lenged by their reflections to re-examine the springs of our own sense of be-
longing. Since we do not face an obvious climacteric in the life of the Union
which might turn upon the answers we give, such vigorous honesty with our-
selves might prove difficult. We human beings find it easier to grumble about
others than to admit our own ambivalence. But surely this book will prompt
many west Europeans to make the effort. That, too, could be an enriching
consequence of the project.
Some caveats are required. For a few of the contributors that will which
gives Europe its reality is attenuated by a personal sense of alienation such as
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