For the past three months, I’ve had the privilege of living and working in the magical artist’s mecca of Céret, a picturesque town tucked into the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Sometimes, it felt like an escape from a world where the face of humanity is retreating behind a hard mask as conflicts cut bloodlines in the soil.
Yet in every escape, there is the inevitable encounter with reality—there is no utopia in utopia—which the idyllic town of Céret promptly reminded me of as the region in which it is located entered a third year of drought and bewilderment.
The most fleeting look at the nature of our problems, whether poverty, hunger, war, environmental destruction, the decline of democracy and human rights, and whatever else, reveals that the only source of meaningful change is that invisible but vast and powerful place that none other than each of us can access and affect: our humanity (Note: technology helps or hinders, depending on whether its development and use remain consistent with values associated with human dignity). While this may seem daunting, it also comes as a relief. The dissonance of business-as-usual as our world stumbles toward the brink can be deafening; the sense of helplessness disorienting and paralyzing.
In this long read, which includes thoughts from life in a French town and the journey North, I reflect on that vast and powerful place, which can be as robust as we choose to make it. I share my notes on a subject I’ve been thinking more about of late: What does it mean to live humanely in a brutal time?
Putting truth and the universal first
During the years that I pursued my grandparents’ story in archives and among eyewitnesses in Europe and Latin America, some well-meaning people warned me not to ‘get lost in it.’ They feared that if I continued, I could drown in the horrors of a past I could not change. I valued their concern and took it seriously. But neither they nor I could foresee the paradox that would emerge by forging on: as I went ever deeper into the abyss of my grandparents’ time, tiny lights switched on everywhere, illuminating my path and helping me to see increasing dimensions of the truth. These lights, which together formed an alternative universe to my dark discoveries, were the humanity of many individuals, then strangers, who shared my belief that we could only make things better by facing as much of the truth about the past as possible.
But why poke around in the past? Nothing can come of it! complained a familiar echo from an old universe, the frightened twin of the new one I had discovered. The reply was steady, gentle, and clear: by confronting the past, we become aware of our complexity and the conditions and choices that divide us and put us in danger of becoming unmoored from dignity. Moreover, there is a healing in the doing: In the moment that each one of those lights switched on, someone I had never met decided to put their humanity, a universal sense of belonging, above other belongings to illuminate what had gone wrong so we could find another way.
Showing courage by insisting on learning, innovation and humor
During the months that I lived in the haven of Céret, Russia’s dictatorship attempted to extinguish a light that illuminated important truths. When I heard the news of Alexei Navalny’s murder in an Arctic prison, I looked out the window of my workroom in despair. There, I saw the ‘dancing women,’ the 500-year-old trees that lined my street, which led to the Place de la Liberté, and towered over us with branches like rhythmically swaying arms, reminding me that, so far, no one has succeeded in destroying the idea of freedom.
Though Navalny’s early record is problematic—one can only hope that it was a reflection of the stifling political landscape from which he emerged rather than what he became—if there is anything he left us with, apart from his determination to expose the corruption of the Russian state, it was a masterclass in how to hold onto one’s humanity in the most brutal of conditions.
According to his wife, Yulia, his greatest gift was to innovate, which he did to the end, overcoming attempts to crush his spirit by nurturing his interest in literature, exchanging letters with their authors, and maintaining a sharp sense of humor, the most effective bearer of truth. Those who knew him attest to a man who never lost “the courage to be a friend to his friends and a father to his children” (See Timothy Snyder, Thinking About, Beware the Weak Man), frequent casualties in the lives of revolutionaries.
Some outside Russia criticized the attention given to the funeral of this controversial figure rather than to the Ukrainian children being murdered daily in Russia’s war. Still, there is no denying that the substance of Navalny’s light, when he chose to shine it, was the type of courage that challenges all of us not to be silent. It is the only worthy promise anyone can make to those children.
The irony of living in a free society rather than a dictatorship is that it is more difficult to distinguish what living humanely is—the contrast is (fortunately) less clear. Still, as free democracies become embattled islands in a rising sea of troubles, the need to consider what it means becomes more urgent. In this regard, events during my stay in Céret and my later journey home to Sweden through the heart of Europe offered food for thought.
Creating social trust
While in Céret, I gained insights into the mounting challenges to its sense of joie de vivre, which depends on a strong social fabric held together by the mayor’s office, the citizens, the weekly street market, and, not least, the canal system which distributes water for irrigation. Throughout most of my winter stay, Le Canigou, the sacred mountain that supplies Céret and the surrounding towns and farmland with fresh water from the winter’s snowfall, remained a shady peak that reminded me of a monk’s hood, with only a few rivulets of icy snow left over from previous winters.
After weeks of walking past empty canals and drying rivers and saving household wastewater for our host’s thirsty potted plants, my morning walks became a pilgrimage up the hill to plead with the mountain to take care of us. While I’ve never been drawn to religious mysticism, I began to feel an affinity with the farmers who, for the first time in one hundred and fifty years, had performed a ceremony in which they carried a statue of St. Gauderique into the receding waters of the River Tet.
When the rain didn’t come, the farmers became more agitated, blaming their equally water-deprived Spanish counterparts across the border for unfair competition. I watched from behind the wheel of my car as they burnt tires at traffic intersections, the black smoke drifting across a landscape where merely lighting a match could send us all up in flames. Though I sympathized with the farmers’ fears, their manner of protesting deepened my worries about what the lack of water would do to the social fabric.
As if to answer my question, the elaborate medieval fortresses punctuating the landscape came into view. Built at great cost in strategic locations to keep out the ‘other’ in a fruitless struggle for resources, they haunted me with their inherent paranoia and the evident wretchedness of life in them.
Waiting while the tires burned, my thoughts wandered to a past I am more familiar with through my family, in which people were motivated by similar fears. I recalled the lines of my grandfather’s denazification papers, which I found in the German Federal Archives, in which he wrote that he’d only been drawn to the Nazi Party as he believed Hitler could bring about better economic conditions. In other words, joining the Party had nothing to do with Nazism’s racist political agenda, which led to genocide. It was a common argument made by former Nazis, SS, and SA to wriggle out of all too severe punishment. However, if there was any truth to his claim, which I am sure there was (next to other truths), it is spine-chilling to know what fear of lack of resources can drive us to.
On the following day, the smoke of burnt rubber still stinging my nostrils, I walked down the hill from my morning of pleading with Le Canigou, a mountain I was beginning to find irritatingly stubborn, and encountered a tree on fire. Dry twigs and leaves had been stuffed into the hollow and blazed in hungry flames, which likely had been started using the lighter that lay on the ground nearby. In my mind’s eye, I could already see the houses and the bustling street market below reduced to ash and ruins.
A jogger called the police while I ran down the hill to warn residents of nearby homes and people in the market. A fire engine soon whisked past me in the opposite direction, and the crisis was over before most of the townspeople noticed the siren. The police opened an investigation, though I don’t know where it led.
Afterward, in a daze, I walked through the market, past its colorful fruits and vegetables amid the shouts of vendors selling their produce and the market-goers from near and far filling the town’s main artery with life, laughter, and multilingual chatter. I wanted to shout to everyone who went about their day as usual: Le Canigou can do nothing for us if we continue to set the planet on fire! But then, looking through tears at the many faces and knowing that each of us did this every day because the organization of our society still offers us too few good options, I modified my plea: Whatever lies ahead, we cannot allow ourselves to be divided.
Eventually, when I poured my story of the burning tree out to a vendor who had become a friend over the weeks I’d been visiting the market, he looked at me solemnly and replied with a heartfelt “Thank you.” Thinking I had saved them from the fire, his wife pressed a fistful of herbs into my hand. “You should try the ruccola too—it’s very good,” said the vendor, offering me a leaf and beginning to stuff a paper bag full of it for me to take along. He’d explained that he had begun working with local farmers experimenting with using a third of the water previously used to grow food crops. While he understood the tire-burners, it wasn’t the way forward.
It struck me that we could have wound conspiracy theories and stoked our anger about what had just happened on the hill. He might even have quietly begun to suspect that I, a careless foreigner, had sloppily cast a lit cigarette on the ground and caused the fire (Note: I don’t smoke). Instead, gratitude, kindness, and a recognition of realities that had awakened the will to change and innovate held the space between us. It was gratifying to learn that a marketplace need not be purely transactional and that it, too, can be part of that vast, verdant landscape of humanity where those who try to burn the trust between us can never ultimately succeed.
When we left, Le Canigou gleamed white with new snow. Had I been a mystic, I would have seen it as a reward for the handling of that day.
Tapping into the wisdom of diversity’s unity
On the way North, my husband and I took a route through Germany so that I could visit the German Literature Archive on the Schiller Heights in Marbach and, later, conduct research in Berlin. On the way, we stayed in Neckarsteinach, another idyllic town, this one on the Neckar River near Heidelberg, where the medieval timber-framed houses had been spared during the bombing of WWII.
The temptation to avoid confronting tourists with the history of the Third Reich must have been great in this pretty town, one of the origins of the Niebelungenlied, which offered river cruises and cafés serving towering cream cakes. And yet a plaque on a building around the corner from our rental apartment didn’t mince words: this building, now in private ownership, had been one of the few synagogues not burnt to the ground in Germany after the pogrom of 9 November 1938. Doing so would have meant burning down the town. Instead, it was ransacked, its contents thrown out the windows, and those that were not stolen eventually destroyed. Its members were humiliated and persecuted.
Depressed by the reminder of this history, which some in my family had refused to recognize fully, I cast my glance across the shelves of the well-organized library in our rental apartment. Many of the books seemed new, part of a deliberately curated collection placed behind a glass cabinet for guests to peruse. The instruction folder in our apartment welcomed readers to take any book from the private library they had not finished during their stay.
There I found a compendium of perspectives on human dignity reaching back to Classical Antiquity entitled Reading Between Years (Lektüre Zwischen Jahren, Insel Verlag, 1997, compiled by Hans Joachim Simm). It opened with these lines from Goethe:
“The highest culture… would prove to be that everything worthy, values that are actually human, should be able to exist side by side in different forms and that therefore different ways of thinking, without wanting to suppress each other, should be able to exist in one and the same region, walking quietly next to each other.”
Such a book, though short, could never be “finished,” and so I took it with me.
Embracing reconciliation and understanding
Over decades, the courage to behold different facets of the past at once and not to avert one’s gaze from “inconvenient” chapters has become a deeply humane German strength. This is no more evident than in Berlin and Potsdam, where I spent two days conducting book research.
Though my interest in memorials may seem obsessive, their presence and details often reflect how we see ourselves and the values we choose to emphasize. On an early morning walk in Gross Glienecke, Potsdam, I encountered a leafy alcove with what may be the most insightful and honest local memorial I have ever visited.
In the center was a column erected in 1926 to remember the town’s WWI “heroes;” to the left of this column was a boulder with a plaque commemorating the town’s WWII dead, and to the right, another plaque remembering “the victims of the violent dictatorship.”
A sign explaining the relationship between this trinity showed a spine-chilling timeline of German history up to the building of the Berlin Wall. It pointed out that those who wanted to see the original 1926 memorial in the spirit of reconciliation and understanding had been in the minority in the inter-war years. Instead, the majority chose to make it a gathering point for a cult of hero worship designed to justify ideological remilitarization during the Third Reich. A national day of mourning became a national day of heroism, recycling the violence.
“Pity the nation that needs a hero,” I thought, recalling the words of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann as I stood in this extraordinary alcove on a glistening spring morning when, in various parts of the world, demagogues and despots, including in Germany, were stoking new fascist-style cults of martyrdom (see, for example, Timothy Snyder's The Bloodbath Candidate).
Later, as I drove around Berlin listening to the growing popularity of the far right on the radio, I longed for the dancing women of Céret and their call to resilience, freedom, and responsibility.
At home, I keep the vision of them close to me in a 1913 rendering that hangs on my study wall (see below). Now and again, I reread the lines from Goethe’s great friend, Schiller, from the opening of my new compendium of human dignity:
The dignity of humanity
Is given into your hand,
Preserve her!
She sinks with you!
With you she will rise!
--Friedrich Schiller, Die Künstler
For those who would like to read Goethe’s and Schiller’s lines in the original German:
“Die höchste Kultur…erwiese sich wohl darin: dass alles Würdige, dem Menschen eigentlich Werte, in verschiedenen Formen neben einander müsste bestehen können und dass daher verschiedene Denkweisen, ohne sich verdrängen zu wollen, in einer und derselben Region ruhig neben einander fortwandelten.” -- Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Vorbetrachtung
Der Menschheit Würde
Ist in eure Hand gegeben,
Bewahret sie!
Sie sinkt mit euch!
Mit euch wird sie sich heben!
--Friedrich Schiller, Die Künstler
For the closely related article I wrote from Céret for Holocaust Remembrance Day in January this year, please see:
Thank you, Julie. You write about so many things, but from my perspective of a rainy and therefore green San Diego, I can appreciate what water means. I miss Europe which changes languages and nations the way I drive from one state to another. I will miss you this summer. Love, Charlotte