ELit Literaturhaus Europa invites European writers to take a chance to present their ideas about the future, while still under the impression of the crisis.
Defence of the Continent
by Helena Janeczek
translated by Suzanne Kirkbright
When Italy announced a lockdown, there was talk in The Netherlands of “folly and melodrama”. Europe will falter with national clichés like this.
When he cycled home late in the evening, the consultant at the emergency department in a major hospital close to the Milan-Bergamo motorway responded to my worried messages. His parents were the closest friends of my parents, no, more than that: they were our adoptive family who for our whole lives replaced the family that was murdered in Auschwitz. He and his brothers have known me since I was born.
Sandro is a slender man; he has a strict face, resembling figures of Christ painted by Spanish old masters. He always had a dry wit and a dislike of rhetorical exaggerations. But now he talks about “Dante’s Inferno”, drawing on metaphors of hell of the kind he thought never existed. Soon his tone is composed again, even when he describes the terrible routine of his phone calls to family members at home who are not allowed to be by their relatives’ side. Shortly before the end of the call, a phrase drops into the conversation that I cannot get out of my head. “When all of this is over, there will be one, two deaths in every family.”
This call took place on 17 March, according to the display on my mobile phone. A day when the official number of deaths in Italy was lower than in China. Two weeks ago, which seems like an eternity.
There is not yet the time to devote to the trauma and the grief
Day by day, this incomprehensible statement has become more real here in Lombardy. Day by day, I have to cope with the fear that Sandro, his wife Laura and his daughter Marta, all three working in Milan hospitals, get sick with the virus. More than sixty Italian doctors died already; a young nurse took her own life. Retired doctors, including Laura too, immediately volunteered their service again, but they are still a tiny minority. Now almost eight thousand doctors and about ten thousand nurses and carers have pledged to relieve their colleagues suffering from burnout. So, they will hopefully have time to recuperate. There is not yet the time to devote to the trauma and the grief.
Even though as a child I was always told by Holocaust survivors that catastrophe is always lurking somewhere, a few weeks ago I could not have imagined that I would so quickly adjust to a survival mode. It’s not about the hand washing, cleaning handles or going shopping as quickly as possible to stockpile what’s lacking: face masks, disinfectants and so on. The highest-risk shortage was the imagination. Despite my commitment for refugees, war victims and the persecuted, things were basically no different for me than for my fellow citizens of any political persuasion. Who already knew how to organize daily life in mortal danger?
Although I live in the less affected province of Varese, near Milan, I now daily count my “drowned and saved”, as Primo Levi called them. Deceased: the much admired former parish priest (and with him, so far, almost seventy priests), the wonderful poet Mario Benedetti, numerous grandparents of friends and acquaintances. Survived: the young Milanese writer Jonathan Bazzi, who has still lost his sense of smell and taste, a feverish friend living alone whose neighbours in Brescia put the shopping outside the door, two other friends in a vulnerable age group over sixty who survived shortness of breath by a whisker, without needing to visit hospital.
The Madonna, the national flag and the “shutdown”: in the village of Vertova near Bergamo in northern Italy, in March, in 23 days there were 26 deaths out of 5,000 inhabitants due to the coronavirus epidemic.
My house neighbour, the husband of the physics teacher who is also sick, who was collected the day before yesterday by an ambulance, will he pull through? The ambulance sirens are the only sound to rip through the ghostly stillness of our towns. You listen, you guess how many drive past in a day. Today, ambulances sound like drowning and not like saving.
This is the reality in the richest, most productive region of Italy. There is a shortage of staff, laboratories, face masks, oxygen, hospital beds, especially in ICU, which has already been expanded threefold.
The virus doesn’t care about differences among Europeans
The humanitarian disaster results primarily from a combination of these shortages, always only with makeshift remedies, while the virus was spreading at exponential speed. Certainly, there were also other relevant mistakes. For instance, the misjudgement at the outset by politicians out of consideration for the economy, for not completely isolating the small districts of Alzano and Nembro close to Bergamo, which are crucial for production.
But the disaster movie ran almost exactly to the same script in all European countries and in the West, despite the reminder of Italy as a precedent case. This probably has to do with human defence mechanisms and with old nationalist stereotypes. What’s happening in Italy is definitely not threatening us. The Italians are slapdash and undisciplined, they live in large family units and naturally have much worse health services than us. A British commentator remarked about “taking a Siesta” when the lockdown was announced for Italy, while there was talk in The Netherlands of folly and melodrama.
That struck everybody as grotesque who knows that the tight-lipped people in Lombardy and the Veneto have a work ethic that is just as good as the German one. That’s why they loyally vote by the majority for the Lega that, until Salvini’s national populist upsurge, based their racist-tinged consensus on the demarcation of the efficient, productive North from the lazy, scrounging South. The speech in parliament given on 25 March by the Lega MP, Daniele Belotti, from Bergamo was heart-rending. A tall middle-aged man, conspicuously dressed in an Alpine mountain jacket, who described the mass mortality in his province in a down-to-earth mountain accent and fought back tears. His voice finally broke when he uttered the popular phrase: “noi bergamaschi non ci fermiamo mai”. We, the people of Bergamo, we never stop. His whole pride in his home is destroyed by a micro-organism that is more relentless than the most industrious, most stubborn Bergamasco. That is tragic.
The coronavirus cares little about the differences to which Italians, Europeans or people elsewhere attach their cultural identity. It spreads everywhere at the same rate; it can only be effectively slowed down by scores of ICU beds and citizens’ quick learning, particularly health workers. In northern Italy, there is a higher number of intensive care beds per citizen than in The Netherlands or Great Britain, where the situation is becoming trickier by the day.
Relief aid, so it’s said, can certainly not look as though it is unconditional.
I am someone who feels at home wherever people live who are close to me. So, I’m immensely relieved that I need to be less anxious about my friends in Germany than about the people I’m fond of all around the world. Only in Germany there are on average more intensive care beds, which enables people to gain time, so the tsunami of sick patients doesn’t flood the entire healthcare system. I’m especially pleased that many German states, including Bavaria, are accepting acute cases from Italy.
But then I had another sleepless night again: not because of fear of the virus and its devastations, but out of dread about Europe’s future. Since I’ve read Robert Menasse’s novel “The Capital” and his polemical essay “Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits”, it’s clear to me that the European Union is not an abstract entity that you can only have a positive or negative opinion about. There is the European Parliament, the European Commission, the ECB and the Council of Europe. That’s why it’s equally clear to me that it’s not “the Germans” and not even “Germany”, which because of its dominant position unfortunately bears the greatest responsibility, that will decide how things will continue with the EU. The EU has many voices and it is indecisive. Will it succeed in this form to achieve strong solidarity with member states, which are the worst hit, like Italy and Spain? Or will there be continued insistence that even now any support, however generous, cannot look as though it is unconditional?
I’m a writer, not an economist. For that reason, I feel responsible for an aspect that has to do with language: with what it also conveys emotionally, and to whom it says what. Is it a priority for the detail of what is negotiated on a European level to be communicated to the German voters in a reassuring manner? Of course, that’s important; of course, the people in Germany are now anxious about their health and their future. Yet, unless a signal is also sent to the citizens of the other EU states, and quite candidly, that their lives and their future are just as valuable and worth saving, given the scale of the death and misery that we’re going through in Italy and Spain, that would be the end of the European Union.
How would the defence of our continent appear, if the Mediterranean countries were to exit the EU and to turn to Russia and China, which in Italy have already put on a show as Samaritans in the hour of need? Are we happy about embellishing things with national clichés, that in Italy and Spain, like everywhere, the socially underprivileged pay the highest price for the coronavirus crisis? The nurses, the ambulance drivers, the cleaning squads, the workers at supermarket checkouts, the post office personnel, the Amazon warehouse employees: these are the people who are often putting their life at risk for a low wage, while millions of Italians, proving all prejudices wrong, wait with self-discipline and metres apart outside the supermarkets to spend their last money, without knowing whether their job will still be there, or whether they will be able to re-open their small business or shop. Your money or your life? In essence, it’s that simple, the matter of deciding on Europe’s future.
This text appears courtesy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung for which it was specially commissioned.
