A exceptional annual convention of the German writers PEN affiliation passed off within the German metropolis of Gotha in mid-May. The convention got here simply months after the worldwide writers’ affiliation celebrated its a hundredth anniversary final October. According to media experiences, the assembly in Gotha degenerated into tumultuous scenes, mutual insults and shouting. The president of PEN Germany, Deniz Yücel, resigned on the assembly after simply seven months in workplace.
Yücel is a journalist who has gained a repute as an opponent of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. At the Gotha assembly Yücel was reelected to his submit by a slim majority however then promptly resigned when his opponent, PEN General Secretary Heinrich Peuckmann, was additionally reelected with significantly more votes. Yücel threw within the towel in spectacular vogue—leaping up within the assembly with a roar and shouting that he not wished to be the “figurehead of this bratwurst (German sausage) shop.”
The dispute started in March on the worldwide literature truthful Lit.Cologne held within the metropolis of Cologne. At that assembly, Yücel demanded more weapons for Ukraine and the institution of a no-fly zone—a requirement which might result in the direct involvement of NATO within the struggle towards Russia.
In a protest letter, 5 former presidents of PEN Germany—Christoph Hein, Gert Heidenreich, Johano Strasser, Josef Haslinger and Regula Venske—accused Yücel of abusing his operate as PEN president. They mentioned his initiative had not been agreed with the PEN govt and was additionally in breach of the International PEN Charter, which obliges members to “work with the utmost vigour for the ideal of humanity living in peace.” The 5 former presidents then demanded he resign. Another 36 PEN members subsequently additionally expressed their opposition and filed a movement to vote Yücel out of workplace.
A majority of German media shops sided with Yücel, gleefully citing his vulgar outbursts in Gotha and dismissing his critics as small-minded.
In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Yücel denounced PEN as a “bunch of philistines and crack-pots” wallowing of their “ancestral gallery” primarily based on the organisation’s historic ties to main literary figures similar to “Alfred Kerr, Dolf Sternberger and Heinrich Böll.” According to Yücel, PEN had been taken hostage “by a bunch of self-righteous, ridiculous wannabe literati.”
In a cynical remark, SZ author Cornelius Pollmer, who had interviewed Yücel, wrote about “scenes of one of the most spectacular intellectual stands ever taken.” He described PEN as a “slowly drying out foundation of senior citizens” and Yücel as a “tragic hero.”
Germany’s main every day for the upper-class Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), ran the headline “Hauptsache laut gebrüllt” (Main factor—shout loudly), and had no downside with Yücel’s aggressive behaviour, however as an alternative railed towards the unhealthy manners of different PEN members. Der Spiegel editor Jan Fleischhauer was amused by the comparability with a “bratwurst shop” and described Yücel’s name for a no-fly zone as a commendable intervention by a “combative intellectual.”
Under the headline “Bratwurstbude zum Schämen” (Shameful bratwurst store), the taz newspaper quoted one observer who referred to the “toxic masculinity of a squad of old West German gentlemen” dominating PEN. After Lit.Cologne, the taz wrote: “There’s a war going on in Europe! You can’t retreat to the ‘ideal of a humanity living in peace’.”
Last and never least, Die Zeit author Jana Hensel described the Gotha convention as “torture.” She wrote that one felt as if one had been within the “stadium stands of a fifth league football club” or at “a party conference of the AfD” (the far-right Alternative for Germany). The anti-Yücel camp specifically stood out with their “hooting and hollering, caustic interjections or threats of legal action,” Hensel wrote. At the top of her article, she went as far as to say that Yücel stood “in the tradition of Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, Ludwig Börne,” who had additionally suffered beneath the “philistines.”
The background to the affair
Who had been the “philistines” who made Yücel’s life so troublesome? And how can German literary greats similar to Heinrich Heine and Georg Büchner be rescued from this mudslinging?
The struggle in Ukraine has induced the tensions already present within the writers’ affiliation to blow up. Many German journalists and cultural staff are waging a hysterical struggle marketing campaign towards Russia, and well-known authors and journalists in PEN are additionally concerned.
Deniz Yücel, born in Flörsheim in 1973, started his profession as a journalist on the weekly Jungle World, the place he’s nonetheless a co-editor. He then went on to the taz newspaper, which is historically near the Green Party. Finally he moved on to the right-wing every day Die Welt, revealed by the Springer press, as correspondent for Turkey. On the premise of an interview with a Kurdish PKK commander in 2017, he was accused of terrorist propaganda by the Turkish judiciary and spent a yr in jail in Turkey. After negotiations with the German authorities, he was launched in February 2018.
Now, within the context of the Ukraine struggle, Yücel is utilizing his picture as an opponent of political oppression to assist the warmongering by NATO and American imperialism.
At a panel dialogue on the sidelines of the Gotha convention, he strongly defended the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, who reveres the WWII Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a hero. Melnyk is the “voice of Ukraine” and is doing a “great job,” Yücel mentioned. Stepan Bandera was accountable for the deaths of tens of 1000’s of Jews, Poles and Soviet residents within the course of WWII.
The editor of Philosophie Magazin, Svenja Flasspöhler, who had raised her fears of a nuclear struggle, was ridiculed by Yücel who declared she was not ready to assist Ukraine as a result of she was frightened about small nuclear bombs. He merely shrugged off her reference to tactical nuclear bombs which have many instances the explosive energy of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
Yücel additionally responded to calls by Ukrainian PEN writers to ban works by the Russian literary giants Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy for allegedly “brutalising the Russian soul” by declaring that Russian literature was not harmless. Yücel sought to underline his argument by citing the instance of the Russian creator Saschar Prilepin, who was celebrated as an opponent of Putin 10 years in the past and now fights for Putin as a militia chief within the Donbass. Prilepin had justified his change of coronary heart by his studying of works by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837).
At this level, former PEN president Johano Strasser misplaced his persistence: one might simply as properly declare that “because Hitler’s soldiers had Goethe books in their knapsacks,” one ought to boycott Goethe as an confederate of Nazi crimes.
Finally, Yücel slandered the famend anti-war slogan “Never again fascism, never again war!” He claimed that after the liberation of the Buchenwald focus camp on April 11, 1945, prisoners had solely demanded “Never again fascism!” however not “Never again war!” He had learn this in paperwork, he claimed.
This is fake. In truth, the well-known “Oath of Buchenwald” reads: “We will only cease the struggle when the last guilty person stands before the people’s judges. The destruction of Nazism and its roots is our slogan. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our goal. We owe this to our murdered comrades and their relatives.”
Yücel’s falsification had a transparent purpose. Arguing that as a result of Hitler had been defeated by the united struggle efforts of the Allied powers, it was now obligatory, Yücel claims, to wage a struggle towards “fascist Russia.” This comparability of Hitler’s struggle of extermination towards the Soviet Union—during which nearly 30 million Soviet residents, together with numerous victims from Ukraine in addition to thousands and thousands of Jews, had been murdered—with the Putin regime’s struggle towards Ukraine quantities to a brazen trivialisation of Nazi crimes.
PEN at a turning level
PEN is at a turning level. PEN stands for “Poets, Essayists, Novelists.” When the International Writers’ Union was based in London in 1921, just a few years after World War I and within the midst of revolutionary struggles, it was meant to convey collectively writers all around the world, regardless of their origin, faith or nation, and thus make a dedication to worldwide peace. The rules of the worldwide constitution, which members should signal, set out the targets of peace, worldwide understanding and the battle towards political persecution and censorship.
Founded in 1924, the German part rapidly grew to become embroiled within the political struggles of the Weimar Republic. In 1930, it led a marketing campaign towards the banning of the anti-war movie “All Quiet on the Western Front,” primarily based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. When Hitler got here to energy, many German authors had been pressured to flee the nation, together with the PEN president at the moment, Alfred Kerr, along with Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Toller and Heinrich Mann. The latter grew to become president of the exile organisation based in 1934.
In Nazi Germany, PEN tried to adapt. It did nothing when the Nazis held their ebook burning ceremony in 1933. In 1934, on the instigation of Gottfried Benn and Hanns Johst, the organisation was reworked right into a nationwide German writers’ affiliation that carried out professional Nazi struggle propaganda and anti-Semitic agitation. After WWII, the German PEN Centre reestablished itself, however quickly cut up into East and West German sections.
The best-known German authors of the time—Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz and Heinrich Böll (PEN president from 1970-72)—all performed an vital function in coming to grips with the Nazi period. A pan-German PEN was solely fashioned once more in 1998, and additionally it is open to representatives of different professions, together with journalists similar to Deniz Yücel.
Today, the literary world is as soon as once more confronted with social upheaval, class wrestle and struggle. Thirty years after the reunification of German and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, capitalism is as soon as once more displaying its true face within the type of outrageous ranges of social inequality, exploitation, police violence, whereas threatening the longer term of humanity with a 3rd, nuclear, world struggle.
Deniz Yücel’s try and combine PEN into the struggle coverage of German imperialism failed on the affiliation’s convention. The vociferous intervention of Yücel’s opponents and the appreciable applause when he resigned shocked many media representatives who consider that their very own every day lies concerning the Ukraine struggle and the function of NATO mirror majority opinion in Germany.
The tumultuous scenes in Gotha mirror a really totally different temper among the many inhabitants, the bulk of whom reject the official coverage. In the wake of many tens of 1000’s of coronavirus deaths because of the prioritising of earnings, the identical irresponsible representatives of the ruling class are fomenting an all-out struggle and foisting the fee on working households. The indisputable fact that many PEN members expressed their opposition is a growth to be welcomed.
President of PEN Germany resigns after demanding more weapons for Ukraine & More Latest News Update
President of PEN Germany resigns after demanding more weapons for Ukraine & More Live News
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