Book on remigration

 Foreword  by Martin Sellner

Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. And the time for remigration has clearly arrived! This term, now on everyone’s lips around the world, was first coined in France as a political rallying cry by the Identitarians. Like so many revolutionary ideas, the concept of remigration springs from the Gallic spirit. The decisive notion at the heart of the diagnosis — that of the “Great Replacement” — has already been formulated by Renaud Camus, a representative of this revolutionary people.

This “replacement migration” which the globalist establishment cynically presents as a “solution for aging societies” is in reality an unprecedented political crime with devastating consequences. This transformation of European nation-states into Islamized, multi-ethnic entities constitutes an historic catastrophe unique in its kind. It erodes the irreplaceable “social capital” founded on relative ethnocultural homogeneity. The mass naturalization of unassimilated migrants raises the question of “ethnic voting.” Demography devours democracy: we are losing our right to self-determination, and with it the possibility of a turning point. If we do not stop this process and reverse it, Europeans will become minorities in their own countries.

This diagnosis has united the European right since the beginning of the 21st century. The common enemy has given us, as Carl Schmitt put it, a figure. The question of population replacement has given rise to a community of destiny that transcends national borders. But what this identitarian and international movement long lacked was a unifying rallying cry, a clear objective toward which everything could converge. Thus came the hour of remigration.

It is profoundly significant that the rise of this idea is the fruit of a collective European effort. In the autumn of 2015, the slogan appeared for the first time on a banner in eastern Austria. Alongside fifty activists, we stood against the flood and blocked one of the routes through which millions of illegal migrants were being funneled into the heart of Europe.

The success of the term “remigration” is that of applied metapolitics. While the old New Right long contented itself with speaking of a right-wing Gramscianism, the Identitarians, from 2012 onward, put it into practice. Words are weapons, but they must first be forged. An idea becomes a blade for the mind when it is carried into the streets, painted on banners, broadcast in videos, and proclaimed through actions. The aura of political ideas must be charged through deeds. Years of tireless work, thousands of flyers, dozens of banners, and the idealism of hundreds of young women and men across Europe were indispensable to bring “remigration” out of the niche of patriotic circles and propel it right into the heart of public debate.

Millions of people now understand the same thing when they hear this term: with “remigration,” in 50 years, France will become more French again, Germany more German, and Europe more European than it is today. Remigration is therefore more than a political program. It is a mobilizing myth and a vector of unity. As the lowest common denominator, it directs, just like the lambda of the Identitarian movement, patriots from all European countries toward the same point of convergence.

Remigration is so essential because it constitutes an axis. It is the junction point between activists and political leaders, progressive dreamers and conservative pragmatists. It is the axis that links party politics to counterculture. Boomers and zoomers, men and women, Christians and pagans, socialists and libertarians find themselves united and strengthened around remigration.

What unites them is this unshakeable certainty: either remigration becomes the central axis of the political agenda, or tomorrow there will simply be no more German, Italian, or European politics.

Unlike defensive conservatives’ incessant complaints about migrant violence, cultural decline, or Islamization, the rallying cry of remigration is not limited to mere observation. It is a call to action. This is where it becomes a mobilizing myth.

Sorel writes: “The myth is not a description of things, but the expression of a will by which a man or a group gathers to act.” In other words, myths do not explain the world, but rather drive men to transform it. Compilations of facts about demographic replacement may shock us, but only myths like that of remigration inspire political action.

Why, then, do we need books on remigration? Activism in the streets and on the Internet needs to be supported by theoretical work. As Alex Kurtagić wrote: “A slogan on a poster, a punchy formula […] all rest on a theory: they are distilled from complex concepts and value systems belonging to an abstract level. Millions of words are written before a banner is unfurled, before a slogan appears in a discussion.” With my book, I was able to offer a contribution from the German-speaking world.1  With Jean-Yves Le Gallou, it is now a Frenchman who in turn presents his own conception, thus completing the loop in the elaboration of this notion.

With typically French clarity and a brilliant command of language, he examines the phenomenon from every angle. He considers both the legitimacy of remigration based on our several-thousand-year-old European history and its logistical and legal feasibility. On the decisive points, our conceptions of remigration fully coincide. We demand the immediate halt of all new immigration (“the great pause”), the expulsion of illegal migrants and criminals, the dismantling of parallel societies, and the fight against Islamization. When it comes to the sensitive question that “moderate” right-wing leaders often avoid, Jean-Yves Le Gallou does not mince words. Unassimilated, hostile citizens who have been wrongly naturalized constitute a problem that a serious remigration policy cannot evade. Le Gallou naturally respects the principles of the rule of law and shows that there are many constitutional paths to exert pressure on such hostile parallel communities.

This manifesto is all the more valuable because its author is one of vast erudition and reasons on the scale of millennia. He deepens the foundation of the legitimacy of remigration and specifies the political-legal implications necessary for its implementation. In the 21st century, remigration is morally anchored in the unbroken historical continuity of European peoples on their continent. A line unfolds over more than 40,000 years: from the Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG) to the Yamnaya, to the Early European Farmers (EEF). Expressed by a Frenchman, this decried — even “heretical” — message may perhaps be more easily receivable to a German audience: “We are the indigenous people of Europe.”

The “JUGEXIT” is also a decisive contribution to the theory of remigration. The dictatorship of judges is targeted without restraint. With striking clarity, this book explains how the invocation of the “rule of law,” when diverted from its meaning, becomes in reality a double negation of national sovereignty and popular sovereignty. A caste of judges, never directly elected, permeated by a progressive and globalist ideology, has seized control of migration policy. This is a coup d’état which has wrested from millions of Europeans control over their borders and their people.

This “government of judges” systematically obstructs deportations by ignoring — to the benefit of migrants — threats to public safety. It blocks laws aimed at limiting family reunification or combating welfare abuse. This dictatorship of judges transforms Europe into a ship of fools. Its motto is: “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus” — let justice be done, though the world may perish. Abstract principles are imposed without regard for their collective consequences.

This is why the demand for a JUGEXIT as formulated by Le Gallou imposes itself as a necessary consequence. We must return to the primacy of the nation and to the right of European peoples to historical continuity.

This book is a precious intellectual fuel, fit to further feed the fire of remigration. I am grateful for this welcome French support in the metapolitical battle for this idea. Others must follow.

All of the European intelligentsia is now called upon to develop political projects for remigration. We need analyses of the economic benefits. We need a comprehensive database and an assimilation tracking tool in order to develop detailed remigration programs. We need in-depth historical studies on remigration projects throughout world history. And we need justifications — in political science, philosophy, and on moral grounds — of the notion of peoplehood, of ethnocultural continuity, and of the deportation of foreigners.

This project is the vastest and most decisive in all of European history. One example is sufficient to convey its urgency: in 2025, Germany had 83 million inhabitants, yet there remain only about 11 million German women under the age of 40 without a migration background. This is less than the population of Germany in 1684, in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War. The birth rate of these 11 million would be between 1 and 1.3. The next generation of women will therefore not exceed 6 million. From 80 million in theory to 6 million in only two generations. We are living in a demographic illusion, a mere optical effect created by the “majority” of baby boomers. When they disappear, the balance will tip. Our countries already carry within them a multi-ethnic state dominated by Islam. In 20 years, most baby boomers will be dead. This is the disturbing truth the media hide from us: we have only a window of 15 to 20 years to save our 40,000-year-old European heritage.

All the great battles of the last two millennia pale in comparison. All the great victories of the last two millennia will be worth nothing if we lose this fight. Neither Thermopylae, nor Tours and Poitiers, nor Vienna, nor Lepanto were more important than our struggle for remigration is today.

Over the next 20 years, the hopes and sufferings, the faith, blood, sweat, and tears of tens of thousands of years will converge toward a single point. This is the decisive message of this book, addressed to each reader: Europe must unite under the banner of remigration and accomplish this monumental work, or else it will sink forever into failure.2

**

Remigration: A Mobilizing Myth  

The only battles one is sure to lose are those which one does not fight. Remigration is a mobilizing myth. It affirms the right of Europeans to not be “Great-Replaced” or colonized. It affirms Europeans’ right to historical and cultural continuity. And let us be clear: the choice is between remigration or submersion. Without remigration, Europeans will become minorities in their own lands between 2050 and 2100, depending on the country. We have no right to leave this to the generations that are coming. This is the meaning of the message brought forth by the powerful Dutch influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek: “Being at home in your own country and being safe there is not a privilege, it is your right, and therefore I demand to take back possession of my country. We Europeans must demand and reclaim our countries. I was born in 1996 and I am part of the Remigration generation.”

Jean-Yves Le Gallou

**

Consciousness of Being European  

The European Union is part of the problem, but European consciousness, the consciousness of being European, is one of the keys to the solution. Let us open our eyes: nationality has become meaningless, cheapened by birthright citizenship and naturalizations of convenience. What does it mean to be French when some speak of their (presumed) compatriots as “céfrans” or “gwers”?6 What does it mean to be German for those who bear the title but first pledge allegiance to Istanbul? What does it mean to be Swedish when your “countrymen” cover you with shame in the Danish islands? What is the value of being Irish when, after two centuries of emancipation struggle and a century of independence, the country finds itself overwhelmed by populations from elsewhere? What future is there for a Briton when his new “fellow citizens” intend to impose sharia on him? Hence, in patriotic demonstrations across the United Kingdom, the gradual replacement of the Union Jack by the Cross of Saint George (English), the Welsh dragon, or the Norman leopards of Sussex.

Nationality bound to citizenship has been cheapened; it is no longer sufficient to define identity. Other criteria must therefore now be used: origin, civilization, culture, religion. And to answer Samuel Huntington’s question in Who Are We?: we are Whites. White Europeans. White European Christians. Each person can then express this civilizational belonging through language and history, according to their national expression: French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Flemish, Portuguese, Irish, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, Baltic, Romanian, or Croatian…

The Chain of Solidarity of Peoples in Revolt  

These different expressions must not oppose each other, but converge. Europeans must stop quarreling over who gets stuck with the hot potato of invasion and distributing migrants that no one (rightly) wants. They must stop limiting themselves to pushing back, beyond the Alps or the Channel, illegal immigrants whose place is outside Europe. European realities demand a European response. Not the one promoted by the Brussels bureaucracy, but just the opposite. A chain of solidarity of peoples in revolt must be built: from the demonstrations in Dresden to those in London, from Dublin to Lisbon, from Porto to Warsaw, from Amsterdam to Krakow, or from Callac to Bélâbre (in rural France). Similarly, the growing solidarity between dissident governments and alternative political forces should be welcomed. No country in isolation will be able to escape a fundamentally cross-border phenomenon.

At Home Among Our Own  

In a depressed Europe, remigration can be a mobilizing myth, a project bearing hope. The hope of finding one’s country again, of reclaiming one’s history, of fully living one’s culture and civilization — with one’s peers and one’s own kind. The hope also of rediscovering the trust necessary to live in peace, the joy of walking the streets without fear.”

At home among our own” could be the slogan of remigration: understanding one another in one’s own neighborhood and sharing the same customs and traditions; allowing women to move freely, without needing reserved train cars or taxis; enabling young White boys to play football again without risking stab wounds; going to the swimming pool without being subjected to the antics of troublemakers; moving closer to a society with more freedom and less surveillance; gaining easier access to housing; finding reduced waiting times for care and less crowded emergency services; refocusing public assistance on our own and not on others. 

After the failure of living together, which became a living side by side, then a living face to face, let us rediscover the happiness of being among ourselves. This is also the condition for rediscovering Philia, civic friendship between citizens, the sharing of common values that allows, according to Aristotle, for avoiding discord and civil war. It also means responding to the expectations of the young generation that looks with nostalgia at sepia photos from the 1960s: an era they did not know, when Europeans still lived among Europeans, sharing the same customs, the same traditions, the same culture, and the same values. Finally, it is a matter of assuming one’s duty: transmitting to one’s descendants the heritage one has received.

Remigration: A Mobilizing Myth with Wind in its Sails  

Remigration is the myth that can empower peoples to take back the power seized by oligarchies. It is a double reconquest of sovereignty. First, internal sovereignty, that of the people, through the humbling of the mediacracy and the dictatorship of judges: JUGEXIT. Then, external sovereignty, through the revision of European treaties according to a triple orientation: the effective implementation of the principle of subsidiarity, implying a strict limitation of the competences devolved to the European Union; the primacy of national constitutions; the strengthening of the European Council, in accordance with the logic defended by Hungarian and Polish conservative circles.

European Identitarians, Unite! Remigration entered the field of political debate in 2014–2015. Ten years later, in 2025, three summits devoted to remigration were held in Milan, Oslo (in the presence of Renaud Camus), and Porto. Very many political formations, reaching up to 38% of the vote in Austria, have included remigration in their program: the FPÖ (Austria), the AfD (Germany), the SDS (Slovenia), Vlaams Belang (Flanders), the Forum for Democracy (Netherlands), the Sweden Democrats, the Democrats of Norway, the Danish People’s Party, Vox (Spain), Chega (Portugal), the Lega (Italy), Reconquête (France), the Homeland Party (Great Britain), as well as Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland. These parties work together in the European Parliament, associated either with the Patriots group, the Sovereign Nations group, or the European Conservatives and Reformists group. 

The American “big brother” is not disinterested in this struggle of White Europeans. Elon Musk participated via video conference in the great demonstration in London on September 13, 2025 under the slogan “Unite the Kingdom.” President Trump, on many occasions, and Vice President J. D. Vance, in his Munich speech (Spring 2025), have underscored the risk that the demographic submersion of Europe poses to civilization. Moreover, American policy shows that the reversal of migratory flows is possible, since they are now implementing it. But one must have the will to do so. Hence the importance of developing a common consciousness. European identitarians, unite!

Europeans today share a common mythology, drawing on Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Finnish, and Greek sources, while being inspired by Christian themes. This mythology finds a powerful expression in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. They must heed the call to the “free peoples of the West” raised by King Théoden at the dawn of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields:

“Arise, arise, riders of Rohan!”

Reemigration: For A Europe For Our Children 

Jean-Yves Le Gallou

Being human mean running oneself as a workshop of self-realization

 What began in the Modern Age was no less than a new form of large-scale anthropotechnic regime, a fundamentally changed battle formation of disciplines. Need we repeat that it was Foucault whose studies on the history of modern disciplinary procedures, which had no models to speak of, sensitized us to this previously almost unnoticed field?

The decisive changes primarily concern the traditional division in the world of the practising life, which I call the ‘ontological local government reorganization’. In the course of this process, the practising of antiquity, the adepts of the philosophical modus vivendi, and later the monks, the pentitential warriors and athletes of Christ, had withdrawn from worldly matters in order to devote themselves exclusively to what each viewed as ‘their own’. Their whole existence revolved around the concern for their own ability to remain intact in the midst of the ominous century. Their aim was no less than the final immunization of their own lives in the face of the constant threat of injuries and ubiquitous distractions. Suum tantum curare had been the salvific formula for the era of self-discovery in retreat from the world, applying to both philosophical and religioid life plans.

One cannot remotely claim that the Modern Age disabled the world-averse and radically metanoetic forms of religiously or philosophically coded cura sui overnight. Nothing would be more deluded than to believe that in early modernity, the escapists of yesterday suddenly turned into new worldlings who regretted their gloomy absences. The legend of the ‘modern individual’s’ suddenly recovered affirmation of the world and life should be approached with suspicion. More than a few sound thinkers of the Modern Age placed their lives program-matically under the sign of Saturn – the planet of distance from the world. The homines novi who entered the stage in the fourteenth century, the early virtuoso era, were not runaway monks who had abruptly embraced the joys of the extroverted life, as if they wanted to erase the memory of their thousand-year recession like some regrettable episode. They normally clung doggedly to their ontological exile, indeed claimed more than ever a noble exterritoriality in relation to impoverished ordinariness. Even an exemplary new human like Petrarch – one of the first moderns to wear a poet’s crown, the emblem of a new type of aristocracy – had very strong personal reasons to hide in his refuge in the Vaucluse for so many years, searching for a non-monastic form of vita solitaria. Where else could he shelter his noble sickness, the world-hatred of the man of black-galled constitution, the evil discovered and fought by the abbots in the Egyptian desert under the name akédia, if not in his study cell, far from vulgar concerns?

For the early moderns, devotion to the spiritual sphere still assumed a refusal to participate in profane affairs. And yet they, the proto-virtuosos, vacillating between the older monks’ cells and the newer studios of the humanists,23 found themselves drawn into a heightened learning dynamic. They were pulled along by a drift towards self-intensification that only formed a contradictory unity with conventional monastic de-selfing courses. This intensification resulted in tendencies towards a restricted new participation of spiritual persons in the world. Using a term coined by the neo-phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, albeit in a modified fashion, I call this return a ‘re-embedding’ of the excluded subject.24 The first embedding enables individuals to participate directly in their situations; through re-embedding, they find their way back to these after phases of estrangement. Whoever affirms an immersion in the situation is on the way to becoming what Goethe, referring to himself, occasionally called ‘the worldling in the middle’ [das Weltkind in der Mitte].25Nonetheless: even at the start of the Modern Age, the exiles of the practising were chosen just as resolutely as in antiquity, when the ethical distinction began to take effect. How else can one explain the popularity of the icon of St Jerome, which inspired countless variations on the joys of retreat in the early Modern Age? The scholar with the lion at his feet still testifies to the attraction of the contemplative life on the outskirts of a convivially transformed, in fact a bourgeoisified desert – and in a turbulent time that, one might think, was knowledgeable about everything but deserts and refuges. But note: the escapism of the moderns was as urgently motivated as it was in the days of the earliest disgust at circumstances. It still gave hope to those without worldly hope, still offered those with no social prospects the prospect of an alternative existence. Nonetheless, the newer retreats often accumulated worldly meanings with a value and scope of their own, to the point where recessively excluded subjectivity, within its enclave of self-concern, emerged as a figure of the world in its own right. Now, from the starting point of a methodically sought unworldliness, a virtuoso industry blossomed. Its masters took themselves up as workpieces of the art of living, moulding themselves into humane valuables. What Nietzsche’s confession in Ecce Homo – ‘I took myself in hand’ – renders audible, as well as the auto-therapeutic impulse of a chronically ill man, are overtones that recall the turn of the early moderns towards a transformation of themselves into living artifices. Perhaps the habit26 maketh not the monk, but study gets the scholar in shape, writing exercises make the humanist skilled at his subject, and virtù allows the virtuoso to shine. In the midst of a subjectivity excluded through regression into itself, the practising discover a distant coast within themselves – the promise of an unknown world. More than a hundred years before the actual continent, a symbolic America appeared on the horizon: its coast is the place where the practising of modernity set foot in the small world of themselves.

Hence what Jacob Burckhardt, following the trail of Michelet, had presented as the formula for the Renaissance – ‘the discovery of the world and man’ – was initially, seemingly paradoxically, an inner-world event. It led to the discovery of the world in humans, or rather the discovery of the human being as a model of the world, a microcosmic abbreviation of the universe. Friedrich Hebbel still had a notion of this phrase when he noted in his journal: ‘Great men are humanity’s tables of contents.’ The secret of the humane ability to be whole would no longer be founded on the biblically certified image of God: it pointed equally to the image of the world, which makes suffering, active and contemplative humans view themselves as universal mirrors and cosmic oracles. This launched the train that would not stop until it arrived at the Baroque equation of God and nature – with the human being as a copula and living sign of equality. For the subject of the Modern Age, this meant that it had to understand itself as a reality-hungry potential. From that point on, being human meant running oneself as a workshop of self-realization.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics 

PETER SLOTERDIJK

The Holy Grail

 

Scotland spread this consolation through every fold of its moors: fairies survive everywhere, even under the cataracts of sadness.

Daniel Du Lac joined me in the port of Thurso, facing the Orkney Islands. The archipelago shimmered on the horizon, less than thirty miles away.

We were heading towards the Old Man of Hoy, king of the stacks, in the south of the archipelago. Du Lac had arrived from Paris with a bag of ropes. For twenty years, my friend, a high-mountain guide, a wanderer of the peaks, always showed up whenever there was a summit to climb.

I had Benoît for the sea, Du Lac for the cliffs, Humann for the steppes: I was ready to travel the world. I compensated for my shortcomings with the art of knowing how to surround myself with the right people.

At the helm, Benoît grazed the base of the stack. The sandstone column rose a few dozen meters from the coastal cliff.

"It's a Celtic-Shaivite lingam," I said to Du Lac.

"There is a route to be opened on the south face," said Du Lac.

The sea stack rose, its 160 meters of sandstone covered in green moss. Its summit was crowned with thundering petrels and moderate gulls. Behind it, the coastline crumbled. It held firm. " I will maintain ," say the kings of Holland. "I am here," said the sea stack. We sailed in silence past the dead castles. The cathedrals had drowned. Only a spire remained.At the port of Stromness, while I was reading a translation of Ivanhoe , Du Lac's favorite phrase—the one that had been propelling me to the world's peaks for twenty years—ringed out in the cabin: "Tesson! We're leaving." As usual, I closed my book, buckled my bag, and obeyed. I never said no to Du Lac. Chardonne had experienced this kind of hypnotism: "You think you're acting, but you're being swept along." {5} . »

We took the ferry, disembarked at Hoy, and walked for two hours under a grey sky along the road that connected the port to Rackwick Bay. Du Lac carried the ropes, and I wore a kilt out of respect for the wind.

At Rackwick, a sign warned visitors: "Climbers are hereby strongly advised that no one will come to their rescue." Typical British manner: when you leave everyone to die in their own corner, there's no harm in being polite. In Chamonix, the soldiers of the high-mountain gendarmerie platoon preferred to save everyone, without any niceties. Their motto: "Your suffering gives rise to our duties." It was a different breed altogether from the obsequiousness of the British.

We camped in the moor, near a fern-covered spring. Twilight lingered, and so did the stack. Its summit protruded above the crest of the cliff. The wind howled. Du Lac protected the tent behind a rampart of sandstone slabs, which he erected with heavy panting. He was resuming the old megalithic labor.

At dawn, we climbed the Old Man. First, we had to descend the cliff to the sea via ledges of salty grass, then cross a basalt plateau to the foot of the majestic column. The cracks were damp. Du Lac was exultant, climbing quickly, securing himself to the few English pitons. With us was Benoît, who had never climbed any major rock routes. Since he made us do night watches, we got our revenge by dangling him over the sixth-grade overhangs. He didn't feel dizzy at all and found it amusing, though quite pointless, to play the monkey on a rock stained with guano. An Englishman we had met the day before on the ferry was returning from climbing the Old Man. We asked him his impressions: " Pretty horrible. "The seals' cries didn't help matters. Their bagpipe-like death throes echoed off the ruins. The birds were cursing us. The sea foamed. The sky rolled. The wind wailed and lifted my kilt. We felt out of place in this sepulcher. Suddenly, we were at the summit. Again, that feeling of complete gratitude, a fleeting moment. For a brief instant, the universe grants you at the summit what you didn't know you needed before reaching it.

The next day, I was belaying Du Lac on the south face. We forced a new four-pitch line of climbing, graded sixth and seventh, on unstable rock. Du Lac, moving from layer to layer, secured himself with tiny metal nuts wedged into the sandy cracks.

Then he reassured me, and I joined him. Everything was flaking away. Below, everything sparkled. The sun in the foam. The foam on the rock. The air vibrated. The seals bellowed. The birds were wild. The lake was blowing. If it had fallen, our metal armor would have torn away. We were once again on the summit of the Old Man of Hoy, bathed in complex splendor and primal joy.

What were we looking for when we were looking for the Grail? A cup of the most precious craftsmanship? A modest bowl filled with the blood of Christ? A vessel full of whatever we wanted to find there? Therein lay the genius of Chrétien de Troyes: to have revealed nothing, compelling the knight to never cease his quest, compelling the novel to never end, offering the reader to imagine whatever he wanted, encouraging him to always reread the tale.

"Grail": the Tao of the West, nothingness filled with its own mystery, a representation born of absence and poured into the void. The name of the Grail was legion. But unlike the satanic legion, this legion shimmered with meanings associated with the noblest virtues. Through the interpretations of the Grail, the motifs of the Western soul were gathered. It was the stained-glass window of the grandeur of being. Purity, prowess, valor, adventure, love, or faith—everything made sense, everything was Grail. O blessed century (the twelfth) when chivalry anchored a society to these virtues of strength and beauty. Then, high and low, pure and filthy, light and darkness, good and evil, white and black were not equal.

The knight on his journey sought the meaning of his existence and the means to elevate it to its highest definition. Under no circumstances would the Grail be reduced to a mere object—even one resembling Christ's cup. It was something else entirely. It could signify the culmination of the highest ambitions.

Another possibility: the Grail would correspond to the quest itself. Only the movement leading from darkness to light, that is, from question to answer, would then matter. The quest for the Grail would thus be defined by its own impetus. Born of its desire, living by its own mechanism, nourished by its own existence, the Grail was the quest. "The selfhood of the Grail," the pedants would say. One could imagine a lay:

— What are you looking for, knight?

— I'm trying to search.

— Will you find it?

— I don't want to find it.

— Where are you going?

— Where the quest continues.

— Will it ever end?

— Its purpose is not to have one.

Had I reached the Holy Grail atop this stack? On the platform, suspended between sky and sea, I stood at the point of contact between reality and the ideal. Reality was the sandstone. The ideal, the feeling that swelled in my heart of being where I was meant to be. Nothing made me want to descend. Neither the wind blew strong enough, nor had the rain yet fallen. My sense of plenitude beneath the immensity of the sky found a homeland of ten square meters bordered by one hundred and sixty-five meters of void.

For over two months, I had called this convergence of sensations, emotions, and observations, this crossroads of paths , the "emergence of the fairy ." Something could appear if one were willing to make the effort. The arrival of the fairy contradicted Yeats; life was certainly not " a perpetual preparation for something that never happens . "

Here, with bruised hands, standing at the crossroads of space, time and effort, I had reached the "fine point" invented by Vladimir Jankélévitch, the total instant where everything was accomplished, where man finally experienced the awareness of having achieved what he had desired without even knowing that he dreamed of it.

Du Lac put an end to these digressions. It's easy to drift in muddy meditations when fulmars howl over the churning seas. "Tesson, we must go down."

It was foolish to think oneself at home on the tip of a needle. Everything pointed to leaving.

A summit is never a sharp point or an end point.

Du Lac was right: we only knew how to unleash stages.

The race continued. They had to get out. Keep searching for somewhere else. And for now, get off the train. The quest resumed, the movement was reborn.

Moreover, Du Lac had already swung the fifty meters of rope into the void, its strands whipping against the rock in the wind. The Holy Grail was to set off again.

As long as we had to go and get it, it meant we had found it.

Sylvian Tesson

With the Fairies 

Samuel Crowell: In Memoriam!

By Richard A. Widmann ∙ May 1, 2017
Last updated on August 19, 2024

I learned of the passing of Samuel Crowell as I have learned of the passing of several friends over the past year—via email. I had been away for the day but decided to check my messages prior to retiring for the evening. There were several stacked up regarding my late friend; the subject of the first was simply “Crowell.” Nearly three weeks had already passed since the heart attack that claimed his life on 1 April – news doesn’t necessarily travel fast on the Internet.

As revisionists, we are naturally skeptical and therefore question reports of contemporary events as well as historical accounts. The attachment of an obituary quickly removed all doubt. It is widely known that “Samuel Crowell” was a pseudonym – one of several which my colleague chose to assign to his articles; I shall for the sake of the privacy of his family use that name throughout this article. Crowell selected his nom de plume due to the threat of persecution that revisionists suffered from the mid-1990s on. It was in fact legislation throughout Europe trampling free speech with regard to the Holocaust story that first caught Crowell’s eye and resulted in his immersion in the subject.

The man who would become Samuel Crowell was born in San Francisco on 5 May 1955. Crowell loved his country and especially the freedoms that so many took for granted during the Eisenhower administration of his birth. He would join the Marine Corps where he served two tours of duty. He graduated from the University of California (Berkeley) where he studied philosophy, foreign languages, and modern European history. His continued love of history and amazing ability to recall facts resulted in his attainment of a Master’s degree in Eastern European History from Columbia University. He would later become a Professor of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

I first became aware of Crowell around 1994. I spotted his comments on the alt-revisionism newsgroup in the days before the appearance of any websites on the Holocaust (or just about any other matter). His user ID at the time was “Ehrlich606” and for the first couple years, I referred to him simply as Ehrlich. I noticed his comments initially because they were utterly free of cant. His questions were sharp. His comments were direct – but never derogatory. Crowell would later describe himself as a “moderate revisionist.” This was more than a label but rather a school of thought that he hoped would find more adherents. Crowell was genuinely interested in debunking the exaggerations and excesses of the Holocaust story but did so without any intention of offending anyone – especially the Jewish people.

Shortly after our first exchanges on the Internet, I introduced Crowell to Bradley R. Smith and the small cadre of volunteers around CODOH. Crowell was immediately drawn to Smith’s style, charm, and cause – namely to argue for intellectual freedom with regard to the Holocaust story. It was not long after this that I had the opportunity to meet Crowell face-to-face. It was the first of many such occasions in which we would gather with other revisionists for food, drink, and discussion of the latest turns in Holocaust studies. During that first meeting, we visited the home of Friedrich Berg, who was well known for his studies surrounding the absurdity of the diesel-gas-chamber story.

The Repal company of Leipzig offers “air defense shelter doors and shutters, in steel” in this advertisement, which appeared in a 1942 issue of the German trade periodical Baulicher Luftschutz. Such doors were gas resistant. Note the protected peep hole.

Berg shared documents from his personal files including several having to do with the construction and sale of German air-raid-shelter components. While going through these wartime materials, we first saw the Repal advertisement for “air defense shelter doors and shutters, in steel.” We immediately recognized that the gas-resistant door with protected peephole was identical to the Majdanek “gas-chamber door” replica that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) had put on display for an American audience at their new museum on the National Mall.

By early 1997, Crowell’s first article appeared on the CODOH Website, “Wartime Germany’s Anti-Gas Air-Raid Shelters: A Refutation of Pressac’s ‘Criminal Traces.’” Crowell’s approach was to address the leading “exterminationist” writers with a positive rather than negative approach. His idea was, rather than saying something could not have been used as a gas chamber, to explain what it may more likely have been used for. Beginning with Jean-Claude Pressac’s noted 39 “Criminal Traces” – what he called “indirect proofs” of the Holocaust, Crowell presented benign explanations. When his article appeared in The Journal of Historical Review, the editor explained:[1]

“His basic argument is that the documents cited by Pressac as ‘traces’ of homicidal ‘gas chambers’ are references to air-raid shelters, or to their fittings or equipment. Specifically, he contends, the Birkenau crematory morgue rooms – the supposed ‘gas chambers’ where, it is alleged, hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed with ‘Zyklon’ pesticide – were modified to also serve as air-raid shelters with features to protect against possible Allied attacks with poison gas.”

By July of 1997, Crowell penned his second article dealing with the “bomb shelter thesis” – this time expanding his argument and leveraging newly found materials.

“Defending Against the Allied Bombing Campaign: Air Raid Shelters and Gas Protection in Germany” quickly found adherents and detractors from both the revisionist and exterminationist camps. While Crowell never claimed to be the first to make the air-raid-shelter argument, he clearly developed it beyond what others had done.[2] For revisionists who had argued for years that the gas chambers were all disinfection or delousing chambers, the “bomb-shelter thesis” seemed to take direct aim at their work. Likewise, a letter to Walter Reich, the Director of the USHMM explaining that the door displayed in the Washington DC museum was the replica of a common mass-produced air-raid-shelter door, went unanswered.[3]

Beyond various short book reviews, editorials, and commentary that Crowell penned at the time under various pseudonyms, he set to work to complete his revisionist magnum opus, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes: An Attempt at a Literary Analysis of the Holocaust Gassing Claim. Crowell’s book-length effort now went beyond the “bomb-shelter thesis” and examined the origin of the gas-chamber stories from the first reports through the disinfection procedures, the confessions of key witnesses and even the euthanasia campaign. Again, using his standard approach, Crowell sought to find logical explanations for the stories, which developed into what he termed “the Canonical Holocaust.” His approach was again a unique one. He applied the methodology of literary analysis and considered the sources and reports in a chronological and comparative method.

The title of Crowell’s definitive work was based on his discovery that the gassing narrative by “witness” Alexander Werth bore a stark similarity to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s description of a poisonous gassing in his Sherlock Holmes tale, “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman” of the 1920s. Crowell observed that there were causes for the gassing claims and did not accept the often-repeated explanations of the more extreme revisionists that the entire tale amounted to a lie, a hoax, or some sort of Jewish conspiracy. Rather Crowell would call the gassing claims “the delusion of the Twentieth Century.”

Bradley Smith published the first copies of Sherlock (as we referred to it) in an inexpensive Xerox-copied, plastic covered, spiral-bound edition. Smith began a public relations campaign called “Operation Sherlock” in which over a hundred copies of the book were sent to an elite of authors, intellectuals, and activists.[4] Needless to say, there were few who would respond publicly, or honestly.

In 2000, Crowell would tackle the bomb-shelter thesis once again. Based on additional research, Crowell wrote his highly provocative “Bomb Shelters in Birkenau: A Reappraisal.” In “Bomb Shelters in Birkenau,” Crowell argued that the crematoria at Birkenau had been equipped with gas-tight fixtures as part of a civil-defense measure and that this is the most plausible argument for their existence.

As Lao Tzu commented, “The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long,” Crowell’s bright revisionist career abruptly ended as the millennium began. If interesting events occurred or new discoveries were made, Crowell would continue to comment among friends, but his public writing had all but ceased. It was a great surprise when in 2011 publisher Chip Smith decided to publish a proper volume of Sherlock now titled, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes and Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding.

The new 400-page edition by Nine-Banded Books included a new preface, and new chapters including “Revisiting the Bomb Shelter Thesis: A Postscript to ‘Bomb Shelters in Birkenau,’” and “The Holocaust in Retrospect: A Historical and Revisionist Assessment.” For a moment it seemed that Crowell was back. A prototype for a website was drawn up, but it was really not to be. The final words that Crowell would write on the subject were these:

“The destruction of the Jews in World War Two will remain an important object for study and commemoration among the Jewish people and the German people. The wars, revolutions, ethnic cleansings, famines, epidemics, and grand experiments in social engineering that dislocated many tens of millions of human beings, and killed a large proportion of them, and of which the Holocaust was a part, will be remembered by everyone who has a stake in the European inheritance. Like any series of events, it will be romanticized. Like any series of events, it will be mythologized. And, like any series of events, it will be properly understood only after the passage of time.”

Crowell was done with the Holocaust story. As such he turned his attention to other subjects. Foremost in his mind was another historical controversy—one that he claimed to wrestle with for 50 years — that of the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare. His final book was William Fortyhands: Disintegration and Reinvention of the Shakespeare Canon (2016). Crowell stated that his disintegration of the Shakespeare canon was the work that he was most proud of. Crowell inscribed the copy that he gave me, “The H. is over, so time for other things.” Indeed, for Crowell, he had said all that he could say on the Holocaust.

In early 2016, following news of the passing of his old friend, Bradley Smith, Crowell wrote what would be his last article – a memorial for Smith – “Bradley Smith: In Memoriam.” Here, once again, Crowell used the phrase “In Memoriam” just as he had dedicated his magnum opus many years prior. As used in Sherlock the Latin phrase seemed like a seal on the tomb of the Holocaust story itself, forever relegating it to memory. The meaning of these words shifted however when applied to Bradley Smith. The words had transformed into a requiem for a dear departed friend. It seems fitting that they be used once again to remember my friend Samuel Crowell. You will be missed.

Notes
[1] Samuel Crowell, “Wartime Germany’s Anti-Gas Air-Raid Shelters: A Refutation of Pressac’s ‘Criminal Traces,’” The Journal of Historical Review Vol. 18, No. 4, July / August 1999, p. 7.
[2] Crowell credited Arthur Butz for example and his 1996 article, “Vergasungskeller.” Online: https://codoh.com/library/document/vergasungskeller/
[3]Samuel Crowell, “Samuel Crowell’s Letter to the Director of the USHMM.” Online: https://codoh.com/library/document/samuel-crowells-letter-to-the-director-of-the/
[4]“CODOH Launches a New Revisionist Masterpiece: ‘The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes’.” Smith’s Report No. 62, Feb./Mar. 1999; https://codoh.com/media/files/sr62.pdf.https://codoh.com/library/document/vergasungskeller/

[3] Samuel Crowell, “Samuel Crowell’s Letter to the Director of the USHMM.” Online: https://codoh.com/library/document/samuel-crowells-letter-to-the-director-of-the/

[4] “CODOH Launches a New Revisionist Masterpiece: ‘The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes’.” Smith’s Report No. 62, Feb./Mar. 1999; https://codoh.com/media/files/sr62.pdf
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Richard A. Widmann

Richard A. Widmann, together with David Thomas, created modern CODOH as we know it, when he talked Bradley Smith into creating what was then called CODOHWeb, CODOH's online presence in 1995/1996. In 1999, Richard Widmann was among the team that launched and ran the revisionist periodical The Revisionist, until it was taken over by Germar Rudolf in 2003. When this project collapsed in 2005 with Rudolf's arrest, deportation and 44-months imprisonment, Richard Widmann, after some hesitation, created a new revisionist periodical in 2009 called Inconvenient History, which he issued until 2017, when this project, too, was once more taken over by Germar Rudolf.
***
A New Approach to Shakespeare Authorship
Christopher Pankhurst
1,075 words

Samuel Crowell
William Fortyhands: Disintegration and Reinvention of the Shakespeare Canon
Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2016

The idea that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare is a well-established motif in literary conspiracy theories. Starting in the mid-19th century, numerous and varied writers have gone into great detail to prove that the Shakespeare corpus was actually written by Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or Edward de Vere, amongst others. These theories are entertaining enough, partly because they convey that gratifying feeling of having discovered hidden knowledge, and partly because they shine light into the puzzling lacunae of Shakespeare’s biography. But they have never been particularly convincing.

This leaves us with a situation where the known facts of Shakespeare’s life seem too paltry to tell us much about the writing of the plays, but the alternative candidates seem no more plausible. Consequently, we find a majority of scholars coalescing around the conventional attribution of the plays to Shakespeare (the Stratfordians) and smaller groups advocating for one or other of the alternative candidates (the anti-Stratfordians). In the absence of any greatly compelling evidence, positions on all sides tend to become rather fixed.

In his new book, William Fortyhands, Samuel Crowell gives an erudite and entertaining history of the background to the Shakespeare controversy, weighs the merits of all sides, and offers his own, surprisingly plausible solution.

Crowell characterises the literary milieu in which the plays were produced as the “Elizabethan Beats.” This description applies to the group of dissolute young men who congregated on the London theatrical world in the late 16th century, men like Christopher Marlowe. Like their 20th-century counterparts, these young writers embodied a “live fast, die young” ethos, and unlike the later beats mostly did die young. There were hundreds of plays being produced in England at this time and the Elizabethan Beats seem to have been an important engine of this industry. It is within this milieu that William Shakespeare left his legacy.

Famously, following Shakespeare’s death a folio of plays bearing his name was published. This has forever been the foundational document of Shakespeare studies but the situation is complicated because many of the plays had also appeared in quarto editions which were usually much shorter than the folio versions. Some of these quartos bore the name of Shakespeare but others were published anonymously. Even more confusingly, some of the individual plays were published in differing versions as quartos. Just to complete the confusion, earlier versions of the “Shakespeare” plays seem to have existed, written by other authors and upon which the Shakespeare versions seem to have been based, such as the Ur-Hamlet.

Crowell marshals all of this material expertly and gives an excellent and lucid account of the rise of Shakespeare studies culminating in David Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee festival in Stratford. Ironically, the increase in Shakespeare’s popularity and growing interest in his life led to the uncovering of certain documents (most notoriously his will) that began to provoke questions about authorship. Crowell documents the history of the authorship question in great detail and is careful to contextualize his study with various theoretical perspectives, too much so in my opinion. But this does at least demonstrate his good faith in seeking to approach an objective view rather than promoting a personal hobby horse.

Ultimately, Crowell concludes that the plays were probably written by a number of those Elizabethan Beats, either singly or collaboratively, and that a final position on who wrote exactly what is probably unknowable. The reason that Shakespeare’s name was so definitively associated with so many of the plays, Crowell argues, is that his role was something like editor and theatrical producer. Essentially, he sourced texts, edited them down for performance (the shorter quartos) and funded the whole enterprise. He would have been “informally presented” (p. 214) as the writer of the plays. Unlike the actual writers, Shakespeare appears to have been very wealthy at a time when playwrights were treated as cheap hacks.

This is an elegant interpretation of the available evidence. Even though it leaves us with a situation vastly more complex than attribution to any one single author, it allows us to go beyond all of the evidential problems that such attributions caused. It is an excellent application of Occam’s Razor because Crowell follows the evidence and accepts what it tells him, even if doing so seems to shatter our idea of what it means to be an author. It would appear that in the 18th century the person who actually wrote the words of the plays was not much of a consideration. The “pull” would have been the name of the producer who would have been associated with a string of hits. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see the sort of contemporary parallels with this. For example, films are generally more closely identified with their directors than their screenwriters. Perhaps an even better example would be the mythical creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. It is quite possible that Satoshi is a pseudonym hiding a number of cryptocurrency experts. Perhaps we should start calling him Satoshi Fortyhands?

Despite Crowell’s compelling assessment of the evidence there are still questions remaining. Crowell points out that if Shakespeare really did write the plays then he must have amassed a great deal of knowledge from somewhere. It is pretty much agreed by everyone that he didn’t have an extensive education so perhaps he picked his knowledge up by socializing with a range of interesting and knowledgeable people?

If Shakespeare really was the sort of person who went to local drinking establishments to get the lowdown on legal terminology, Italian geography, hawking, or what have you, then one would expect more contemporary references to him as a real person. This is not what we find. Almost all the references to him are based strictly on the title page attributions of the plays and poems. (p. 236)

But if this mitigates against Shakespeare as a writer, which is primarily a solitary occupation, then surely it mitigates even more against Shakespeare as impresario, with all the organizational and publicity work that that would imply.

Such questions are unlikely to resolve into definitive answers, and Crowell is surely right to conclude that we will never come to a definitive conclusion about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. The scenario he paints in William Fortyhands is remarkable for being at once a sober handling of the evidence and a radical reassessment of the authorship question.

Christopher Pankhurst
https://counter-currents.com/

The Owls of Afrasiab: The Secret Story of Constantinopole 1453

 Principal Characters: A Presentation

The Emperor

Constantine XI Dragases (after his Serbian mother Helena Dragas) descends from a long line of imperial rulers of the Palaiologos dynasty that recovered Constantinople in the mid 13th century from alien Frankish lords, who had been ruling Constantinople for half a century after taking it during the Fourth Crusade. He’s the eighth child of ten. Although he rules the city in the absence of his emperor brother John between 1440-43, he probably never imagines that he is one day going to be its officially appointed head. The death of John changes all that. Even so, Constantine can only, and in competition with another brother, claim the imperial title through arbitration by his arch enemy, the Turkish sultan Murad II.

Once emperor his political position is difficult to say the least. On the one hand he has to oblige the sultan in order to sustain the truce concluded after the latter’s latest unsuccessful attempt in 1422 to conquer the city. On the other hand he has to take steps to protect it from simply being engulfed within the relentlessly expanding Ottoman empire. To do so, Constantine, in spite of the resistance among his people, must rely on the continued support of the Aragonese Kingdom of Catalonia, the City Republics of Genoa and Venice, as well as the Papal State, all of which have vested commercial and military interests in the eastern Mediterranean. Consequently, he has no choice but to uphold the union of the Orthodox and the Catholic churches agreed in writing at a Church council held in Florence a decade earlier. But this union is not only bitterly resented by the common people. Considered heresy and treason, it has its fierce opponents among the upper clergy, yes, even among Constantine’s own generals and ministers.

With hindsight it’s easy to see that Constantine and the people backing his views were right in considering the union an absolute political necessity. But what could he have done to win the others – still piously holding on to the millenarian Nicene creed – over to his side? His was a time when miracles authored by God were not only prophesied but fervently believed in. To the people everything seemed to indicate that the time of Christ’s promised second coming was imminent.

In the historical documents Constantine comes across as an experienced military leader and a responsible monarch eager to secure a modicum of safety, prosperity and peace for his sadly reduced and war-ravaged people. But there is also something melancholy, even lonely about him. Two wives die young without securing him an heir – he had loved them both. As we enter the scene he has, aged fifty, been forced to relinquish the hope of finding a third wife. Like so many other people of his status in society, his personality at times has a tendency to disappear behind its official and ceremonial embodiment.

As a man of honour – obliged by the noble institution and tradition created by the first of the Constantines more than a thousand years earlier – he knows that in the last instance he will have no choice but to make the city’s destiny his own. I thus envisage his imperial crown to also be a wreath of thorns. Not that he consciously tries to emulate our Lord and Saviour; as the plot thickens, though, he willy-nilly seems to grow into his sandals.

Old, dilapidated, a mere shadow of its former glory, Constantinople remains the city of God parexcellence, the very pillar on which the Holy Trinity rests. Moreover it is precisely the definition of the Trinity that lays at the heart of the endless theological disputes between the two churches, at a time when not only Islamic fundamentalists, but many Christians too, found it worthwhile to sometimes die for their faith. I find one quote attributed to the emperor especially pertinent in this regard: “What would posterity think of us if we didn’t even put up a fight to defend our holy churches?”

Legend has it that Constantine during the decisive great battle was petrified by an angel and laid to rest as a marble statue under the Golden Gate. Ever since he is abiding the time when Christians will again unite. He will then come alive, rise to the occasion and drive the Moslems out of Europe. Lord Byron and other prominent people of his day hoped the moment had come during the Greek war for independence – he gave his own life for the cause while trying to swim across the Bosporus.

To Byron and other romantic characters (to this very day) the last of the Constantines was an indisputable hero, the double-headed eagle incarnate. In truth, he did obey the dramaturgic rules incumbent upon a hero of a Greek tragedy and could subsequently see his maker eye to eye. Posterity too has exonerated him. What he himself felt deep at heart about the whole thing is, perhaps, an altogether different matter, parts of which might be glimpsed through the cracks of this story.

The Commander – Giovanni Giustiniani Longo

(all three names are alternately used in

reference to him throughout the book)

A Genoese noble man, blond, blue-eyed, in his mid-thirties, of Norman descent on his mother’s side. His influential family (its Coat of Arms carries an eagle similar to that of the empire) is represented both in the actual Republic of Genoa, and in the Aegean island of Chios, at this time under Genoese rule.

Charged with two, perhaps three, different missions – one of state, one of family obligation and one of entirely private character – he has above all been entrusted with the Herculean task of protecting the city’s Genoese population and securing the Genoese trading town of Pera across the Golden Horn, a mere stone’s throw from Constantinople itself. Giustiniani is the pivotal point in this account of the siege. Without him there simply wouldn’t be any defence of Constantinople, and he is well aware of this. But although Pera is a point of utmost strategic interest to the Genoese by and large, Giustiniani’s own position is ambiguous. True, he has, at his own expense, brought seven hundred mercenary fighters to reinforce the depleted domestic troops. But if this mission has indeed been sanctioned by the Grand Council back in Genoa, how come Pera itself has received orders (or has decided by its own volition) to remain neutral in the case of a military conflict with the Turks? It seems the Genoese are trying to simultaneously play at least two different hands. Doing so they also appear willing to sacrifice Giustiniani himself if need be.

His agenda is not obvious, and it’s hard to guess in how many plots he is actually involved. One thing is for sure, though. The camaraderie which the ruthless siege forces upon the city’s defenders brings him ever closer to the emperor, who’s moral example in the midst of crisis makes a great impression upon him. An indivisible bond and a sense of mutual obligation between the two men is created. As time goes by Giustiniani finds himself more and more deeply involved in the “to be or not to be” of the celestial city. Tried to the utmost by the enemy and the wrath of God, maybe he too could in the end have been persuaded to become a tragic hero. But then we haven’t taken that fair, foreign woman into account. She has a very different idea in her head, and the corresponding strength of heart to see things through.

State Secretary Francis

Is a childhood friend of Emperor Constantine and a key player behind the scenes. As a man of learning and, above all, diplomacy, he can be petty and scheming if he deems it necessary. But he can also exercise his reason and act accordingly. All his life he has striven to merit the respect and esteem he a priori enjoys with Constantine, and he does have the vanity of a courtier. Nonetheless, his loyalty to his friend and master is genuine. The empire to him, though presently reduced to a very small point in space, is an eternal truth which in the end must prevail. But even though this is his true feeling, his levelheadedness luckily gets the better of him and he clearly realises that wishes, dreams and the belief in miracles won’t save the city from falling into the hands of the enemy.

As the drama opens Francis has been intensely preoccupied trying to rally the Christian powers to their aid. He has also tried to find his master a suitable new wife, but perhaps he has committed a major tactical error by single-handedly withdrawing the marriage proposal Constantine (then only a despot of Mistra in the Peloponnese) made to the only remaining daughter of the Duke of Venice. It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that the old Doge doesn’t exactly find it endearing to learn that the Byzantine Secretary of State suddenly, after Constantine has become crowned emperor, considers him, the head of the mighty Venetian Republic, too low in rank to come into question as a father-in-law.

Constantine has given Francis more or less carte blanche in finding him a suitable bride, but as time goes by, and the Venetians stubbornly refuse to show up at the scene of action, Constantine grows weary. It dawns on him that Doge Foscari – despite the Venetian Council of Ten meanwhile deciding in favour of a military intervention – probably does everything he can to delay the entire operation until it will be too late.

Constantine then begins to distrust his old friend and State Secretary’s political judgment. Francis himself is devastated by what he feels to be his master’s lack of appreciation for his unswerving loyalty to him and his family. This is also one of the reasons why he loathes their own local Grand Duke, Lucas Notaras. In Francis’ eyes the emperor has been duped by this man, whom Francis considers deceitful, disloyal, and only simulating patriotism and noble bravery to the galleries, while in reality not giving a damn about the fate of the city and its population.

Lucas Notaras, Megadux

Is a member of a noble and influential family of long standing within the empire. He prides himself with the title Grand Duke. In this capacity he is also Prime Minister and Chief Admiral of the Fleet – a position of some consequence as Constantinople becomes exposed to a series of fierce naval attacks. Whether or not he is at heart set against the union of the two churches is not clear. Even though Francis regards him as a traitor to the unionist cause, Notaras’ family has entertained privileged relations with the Catholic Republic of Venice for the better part of two centuries; he even has a second, Venetian, citizenship. In spite of this he has made himself rather popular among the sworn anti-unionists in the city, who are fond of attributing to him the saying: “I’d rather see the Sultan’s turban than the Pope’s mitre in Constantinople.”

Neither the emperor, nor Francis, have ever heard him say so in person. It might just have been an emotional outburst, subsequently, and maliciously, quoted out of context, since Notaras is known to be temperamental, at times paying scant attention to the decorum of his position. But this lack of diplomatic caution certainly has not ingratiated him with Francis, who continues to consider him a menace to them all.

Francis’ aversion on the other hand might be interpreted as his bad conscience for frivolously having waved a marriage proposal in the face of the Doge, only to pull it back when the latter readied himself to swallow the bait. It is possible that it is thanks to Lucas Notaras alone that so many Venetian galleys have in fact remained in the harbour, and that the Venetian population, fearing and loathing the Genoese both in the city and at Pera, and not really loving the Greeks either, could at all be persuaded to participate in the city’s defence.

The Turkish Princess

Hadije, once wife to the late Sultan Murad II, is to this story what mercurial salt is to the hermetic process, the yeast to the dough, the fermentation to the grape: she is the secret agent that brings about the transformation of substances. Her provenance is shrouded in mystery. Where does she really come from? Who sent her? What is her purpose?

To Hadije herself, the outcome of certain key events have been obvious long before they actually occur. This is one reason why at first she must sound like a cry in the wilderness. Once brought within the ambit of the city she has to fight the incredulity of all those who see nothing but a devilishly seductive embodiment of the enemy, hence of evil, in her appearance. But even though, from the outset, she has the cards stacked against her (and although her bosom is stacked slightly more in her favour), she manages to drive home an overwhelmingly strong point, namely that the memento mori mustn’t prevent us from realising that it is, above all, the exuberance of life we as human beings are meant to nourish and protect to the best of our capacity, and that dying for a lofty cause, however noble per se, may in the end prove to be an illusion without redemption.

With Hadije – or Felicia as her Christian name will be – the unforeseen factor enters the story, working as a catalyst, thus bringing the process to its last and perhaps inevitable consequence. I do charge her with la forza del destino, and she is the architect of treason, if you will. But in this capacity she is also a representation of the eternally feminine and that tenacious natural life which, no matter what, will always find a way.

The love story between her and the commander in chief is one of those that are simply bound to happen over and over again in the course of human history. In the semi-eternal light of archangels and apocalypses it is perhaps a banal story, meaning one we have heard many times before. But at the same time it is the symbol of an inner battle that bears the fatal hallmark of irresistible attraction combined with the determination of an indomitable soul. Whether or not she is in the end “right” in what she is doing is a moot point. It is not for nothing that the saying is so often repeated: “All is fair in love and war”.

Doge Foscari

Francesco Foscari, descending from an ancient noble family, was elected Doge in Venice in 1423, thereby temporarily defeating a man destined to become his life-long political adversary, Peter Loredan, who ultimately brought him down. As our story begins to unfold, Foscari is already 80 years old and marked by a life of endless political intrigue. During his long tenure Venice has been precipitated into numerous, and in the end very costly armed conflicts with the city state of Milan, first under the rule of Filippo Visconti, then by Francesco Sforza, a condottiere born in Venice who in 1447 became the implacable enemy of his native city by marrying Filippo Visconti’s only remaining natural heir, Bianca Maria.

However, it wasn’t just Foscari’s obsession with terra firma domination on the plains of Po that made him reluctant to engage in overseas activities and send military aid to Constantinople. There was also his sense of hurt pride for having been rejected as an imperial father-in-law (see presentation of Secretary Francis above). In addition, his only son, accused of having conspired against the republic and, to this end, to have committed murder, was exiled from Venice to Crete. Foscari senior tries everything in his power to have his reputation restored and dreams of the day when the prodigal son will be able to return home to eventually – although the title as yet is not heritable – succeed him as Doge of Venice.

The dazzling last act of this real-life political drama inspired two prominent 19th century artists to dramatise the destinies of father and son. Lord Byron wrote a play on the theme of double and mutually exclusive loyalities – in this case the artful preservation of virtue and truth in a republic as opposed to the natural but potentially corrupt promotion of family interests – and Giuseppe Verdi composed a today all but forgotten opera named I due Foscari.

Around this time northern Italy witnessed the appearance of the first Tarot deck in western history, designed by an artist working for the court of Milan (still today this first deck bears the name of Visconti-Sforza, indicating that it was indeed produced in the late 1440s). Foscari – haphazardly coming into possession of these cards – becomes deeply puzzled by their enigmatic symbolism and he consults the humanists around him to elucidate him on the subject. Shortly after he is seen turning into something of a magus, dabbling in occult sciences in the hope of not only being able to foretell the future, but to actually change the course of destiny.

Pope Nicholaus V

Exhibits many of the paradoxes of the highly talented renaissance man. As a learned humanist he allegedly possesses a private library comprising over nine thousand books – one of his close friends even says: “What he does not know is outside the range of human knowledge”. At the same time he can be a prelate of the most appalling bigotry, hurling intolerant decrees in all directions. One of his most infamous bulls, for example, gives the Portuguese the formal right to ruthlessly oppress, convert and then enslave all pagan populations they come across in their attempts to colonise the world. Simultaneously he envisages a morally irreproachable world of united Christians, but refuses to consider adjusting the dogmatic pillars of Catholicism even an inch. He advocates another crusade yet somehow fails to see what tremendous strategic importance the preservation of a Christian Constantinople, in the midst of a hostile Moslem world, would be to Rome itself. Although he eventually orders some ships to sail to the besieged city, it takes forever to get them under way since he refuses to pay his dues to his Venetian creditors.

As a man in constant self-contradiction it is no wonder he falls under the spell of Ramon Lull’s magic wheel, inviting man to reflect on apparently irreconcilable opposites, such as: is it possible to be at the same time a good Catholic and a liar? In this spirit he also entertains a lengthy correspondence with Foscari, whom he suspects of not always being altogether sincere in his professed affirmation of the formal supremacy of the Papal State in matters mundane and religious.

It takes one to know one...

Mehmet the Sultan

To introduce to the reader the legendary Mehmet II, nemesis of Constantinople, I find no words better than the ones uttered by the awestruck State Secretary Francis at a state visit to the kingdom of Trebizond on the Black Sea coast:

“– Your Majesty. With all due respect. We should perhaps do well in reminding ourselves that for every head cut off from the Lernian hydra two new ones emerged. The new Sultan is such a hydra. Although hardly twenty years of age he has developed several heads. One is belligerent, another deviously diplomatic.

A third loves hunting, a fourth one speaks Persian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin fluently. A fifth knows the entire Islamic jurisprudence by heart, a sixth is accurately informed about the fathers of our church. A seventh drinks copious amounts of wine while the yet another studies maps, siege engines and weapons of mass destruction. The scope of his general intelligence and single-minded ambition is matched only by the fierceness of his many passions. He already has children but is said to prefer hardly mature boys to satisfy his lusts. He is, as you can understand, a perfect monster, but one to whom the designation of neither intelligence nor discipline can be denied. Above all, he’s the most formidable, the most ruthless and implacable opponent to our Christian world since Tamerlane. And he will never give up the ambition to conquer every area within his reach still in Christian hands. Therefore, most venerable Majesty of the glorious House of the Comneni, I dare to disagree with the optimism expressed among our many friends around this table. Instead we should all concentrate on how to best unite and counter this formidable new threat to our peace and prosperity.”

Bishop Leonard and Cardinal Isidore

Appear in this story as a couple of theological detectives. Leonard is born to Greek parents of what he himself refers to as “humble origins” on the island of Chios, at the time governed by the Genoese. Chios furthermore is the island on which the family of Giovanni Giustiniani – the right hand of the emperor during the siege – is in power. Leonard is consequently better informed than most others about the various motives that might have played a role in Giustiniani’s decision to come to the rescue of the city.

As a young man Leonard becomes a Catholic and joins the Dominican order. Subsequent studies in Italy and contacts within the papal sphere make him eminently suited to mediate between the two churches, and a part of his mission to Constantinople is to make sure the Greeks are not in theory alone celebrating the Laetentur Coeli (“may the heavens rejoice”), which is the visible and audible liturgical expression of the unity of the two churches, concluded at the church Council in Ferrara and Florence in 1438.

Cardinal Isidorus, also Greek born and the former Metropolitan (Arch Bishop) of Kiev is the official papal legate to Constantinople and the highest ranking Catholic church official to be present during the siege. Both he and Cardinal Isidorus are forced to conclude that this new article of faith remains a paper construction as far as the divine worship by the people of Constantinople is concerned. At a high mass in Hagia Sophia on December 12, 1452, the hymn is recited, but the service is poorly attended. Lucas Notaras, the Megadux, is present but shows open hostility; the emperor himself seems listless.

The learned George Scholarius, also and better known under his monastic name Brother Gennadi, is conspicuously absent.

Brother Gennadi

Is the monk whom both Leonard and Isidorus suspect of conspiring against both the pope and the emperor. In spite of his erudition he is a very popular figure advocating blind faith in God and his capacity to work miracles when need be. For him to alter the millenarian creed in any way simply does not come into question. He is a typical example of the illuminated, inspired fanatic always to be found in communities held together by strong religious and traditional beliefs. It goes without saying that he is also an ascetic, carrying out countless daily prostrations and practising self-mortification by means of a knotted whip. In the eyes of the people he is the haggard prophet incarnate. That is one thing. But Isidore and Leonard from early on suspect his divine madness is not only simulated, but also that there is definite method to it. In the midst of the turmoil they do everything in their power to find out what he is, in reality, up to. When they finally do find out what is in the making, it has become too late to kill either him or the messenger.

Iannis Papanikolaou and his family

With the possible exception of the city itself, I believe Iannis and his family are the centre of gravity in this drama. In a way one could also say that they are the city. They are also the only members of the common people to detach themselves from the staffage in this account, and their role in so doing is crucial.

Iannis, the father, is a fisherman and it could well have stayed at that if he did not also possess a poet’s soul. This soul in turn is linked to being a child at heart, which also could have been just fine had the circumstances been just a bit more favourable for poets and children. As it is he becomes entangled in a power-plot that his reason cannot fathom. Nonetheless he remains confident that he is participating in events that by far surpasses ordinary human understanding. To him this drama, no matter how fantastic, is real, and he is immensely proud to have been singled out to be the first to receive into the city of God our Lord and Saviour.

Iannis’ wife and two children all carry names associated with imperial dynasties since times immemorial. There is the mother, Irene, who clearly sees that her husband’s penchant for story-telling sometimes gets the better of his veracity. She herself struggles to keep family and home together under very trying circumstances while remaining calm and resourceful in critical moments. She has to her aid the clever eleven year old daughter Anna, whom she calls Princess and has promised a regal marriage in the fullness of time.

The eight year old Manuel, the namesake of so many legendary emperors, has inherited his father’s psychic disposition. In addition he is from time to time afflicted with epileptic seizures. He too sees things hidden to the ordinary mortal eye, and his mother and older sister are not only worried about his physical health, but about his mental state too.

It would be fair to surmise that young Manuel, based on the evidence, is the one closest to God of all the men and women involved in this apocalyptic battle. It is through his eyes that I would finally like to view this story, namely as an instant in time and space where fact and fiction have temporarily been suspended in a higher union, not to say – reality.

**

The City

Consecrated by Emperor Constantine I in AD 330 as the new capital of Rome, it subsequently became the capital of the Byzantine empire. It was to remain so through a checkered history of more than 1100 years until finally conquered by the Turkish Ottomans in 1453. The city, which ever since has remained in Turkish hands, was officially renamed Istanbul in 1950.

Through its famous basilica, the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), raised at a time when Rome lay in ruins after having been sacked and violated by one barbarian tribe after the other, Constantinople in the Middle Ages became known as the epitome of Christianity on Earth. Jerusalem would have been another candidate, but it was never on par with Constantinople in terms of architectural and artistic splendour.Secondly, it was never lastingly held by Christians.

Constantinople was able to withstand so many protracted sieges first and foremost because of its strategic and protected location – the Golden Horn is not only an excellent natural harbour; once the famous floating boom across its inlet was in place it could also be easily defended. The city itself, heavily fortified, is located at the southern end of the Bosporus which makes it both easily accessible and an excellent point for control and surveillance of all maritime traffic through the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean with the Black Sea.

In the 5th century, during the reign of emperor Theodosius, the original city walls were declared obsolete and a magnificent new defence system, designed by master engineer Anthemius, was erected further to the west, along the line where its remnants now cut right through modern Istanbul.

Ironically the weakest link in that chain is still today an open wound in the cityscape. A multi-lane highway runs through the completely leveled walls in both directions. The remaining ramparts on both sides are used as outdoor toilets, aptly garnished with general rubbish, crushed bottles, cans and condoms. A part of the wall system a bit higher up on the eastern side serves as a refuge for male prostitution. A highway bridge runs perpendicularly to the wall. Under it, the gypsies have taken shelter and hang around in improvised lounges consisting of discarded furniture, as an alternative venue to occupying their make-shift shacks nearby. To be honest, it’s not one of the more quaint places of the city, and it is not frequented by tourists.

Nonetheless it was right here that the destiny of Constantinople was decided. It was right here – on a rainy day in September, overwhelmed by the humdrum of the megapolis – that I was granted a secret glimpse of the city as she might have presented herself to a single witness during one foggy evening, full of strange omens, decay and despair, at the end of the month of May, 1453. And it was right here that the idea came to me to write the story of her fall as I see it.

This, strangely, was the image that opened the gate to the hidden chambers of imagination:

“Fields, orchards, churches, monasteries, houses, villas, palaces, squares, streets and alleys – all enveloped in the same thick moisture, slowly depositing itself on every roof, dripping down, drop by drop, as though descending the insides of a gigantic watery time glass: tick, tock, tick, tock, like a clock still moving but showing no time. In once bustling loggias and open court yards made slippery by fungus and lichen, vast mosaic frescoes majestically sunk into a sea of no return. Neptunes, tritons, sirens and dolphins, dispossessed of their pagan innocence and exuberant gaiety, gaping empty-eyed at the forlorn silence over and around as they disappear into the depths of oblivion. Neptune’s horses, the very emblem of the Meltemmia at the height of summer, dragged out of sight by a giant octopus; the sirens dissolving into foam. Strewn all over the floors, flowers massacred in the prime of youth, left to wither and litter the cool marble turned sickly green and sulphurously yellow in a misplaced autumn. Red roses nipped in their bud and thrown to the ground by showers of hail, rain, pumice and sand. All exquisite art, all venerable tradition, covered in debris, disintegrating, rotting, sinking, and, most disheartening of them all, a magnificent statue of Nike, split in two by a falling beam infested with snails.”

Lars Holger Holm

The age of metaphysical homelessness

Now one sees more clearly what the principle of desert means for the ecology of spirit. Whoever goes into the desert seeks out the worldly location that is uniquely suited to the minimization of the world. The desert is the option of acquiescing only to the world’s unavoidable remainder; the least evil place in the evil world is that which is most hostile to life. The desert forms only a translucent film of being holding the souls back from immediate disappearance into the ultimate ground [Grund]; it is the real almost-not-being that demands no interest for itself but stands open like an empty cosmic therapy-room for the staging [Inszenierungen] of the soul. It is the pure projection-space in which the experience of self and God, including what foils and interrupts it, can be brought to emergence. The alliance with the desert as a sort of transitional thirdness that tends toward zero thus represents a pact with a growth-hostile principle. Inasmuch as growth rep-resents the world-characteristic par excellence, the refusal of it also severs the root of the expansivity of worldly interests.8 Thereby they dry out the birth-friendliness of worldly misfortune that the force of continuation of evil sinks together into itself, the influx of forces into the reproduction of old miseries comes to a halt. Where nothing grows, spurious Becoming is also deprived of its foundation. [96] In its place, the desert offers itself as a stage for exclusive adventures into fusion; these lead, if one believes the aretalogies or glorious speeches concerning the stars of the desert, through sufferings and euphorias to an ever-higher grade of purity, to an ever more empty and sublime form of drunken soberness. If it is the virtuosity of the saints to challenge the desert, then it is the virtuosity of the desert to be amply gruesome in order to induce or elicit or call forth a salu-tary desperation; wherever she gives her best, there the desert becomes the bad-enough mother.9 By giving nothing more than barrenness, scantness, she gives the sovereign emptiness. The desert is hostile and strenuous enough to agitate individuals to a permanent commitment to the extension of the struggle for divinization; it is raw and inhumane enough to exterminate all tenderness for fleeting things. As a zone on the margins of the inhabitable world, it can house the paradoxical movements that want no other status than that of disappearance.

In this empty field,10 which seems to await signs and miracles since long ago, the first outbreakers from the antique social cosmos inscribed their hyper-bolic gestures. Like no other space the desert indeed invites one to act out psychotheological imagery. There, men who at some time in their childhood have absorbed the lectures [97] concerning the captivity of the resistant bodies by the will, move about through the driest areas of Palestine for decades with real fifty-pound iron chains around the hips. They lock themselves for many years into huge graves to prepare themselves for ascension through Christ— and if this is postponed, this is only because of the lethargy of the flesh, in which the nights pass in hard battles with sensual simulacra and the midday hours in the struggle against demons of heat. Famously the life of St. Anthony filled the image arsenals of European nightmare culture up to modernity with inexhaustible impulses. The emergence of gruesome images became possible because the deserted space framed the specter of associating and projecting souls like therapeutic brackets; above the delirious holy patients, the neutral attention of God floats as a saving ear. In this regard, the desert experiment had to lead to a spontaneous discovery of what the nineteenth century calls the unconscious; whoever was there knows more about the area out of which temptations [Versuchungen] and symptoms emerge.
If the human decides to go into the desert, he elevates his life into the state of metaphysical alertness—awakeness is everything. The metaphor of keeping oneself alert for the lord translates for these extremists of orthodoxy into an unprecedented battle against sleep, which is for the most part reduced to a few hours and in many cases only sitting, even hanging attached to ropes in vertical position. The saints spark themselves up like living eternal lights who illuminate the desert nights with their awakeness; thus, they correspond to the fixed stars, [98] whose light radiates from yonder into the black space of creation. John of Moschus, the poetic eulogist of anchoritism, saw in the people of solitary prayer out there a blooming “spiritual meadow,” and when that meadow laughed, as accords with the rules of rhetoric, its laugh already bore witness to the glamour of the overworld. In contrast, in the literal desert, over centuries people wept more than ever before or after in the history of humanity. Without the gift of tears, hardly one of these athletes could have been capable of elevation into the higher grades of dyadic unity. Tears were at all times held in the highest regard as means and signs of purification by the world-escapists. Together with persistent prayer, that inner monologue of the dyadic monad, tears were incomparably well suited to liquidate the world-blockage and to flush away the separating layers between “God” and soul. If prayers and tears have become identical, nothing is left of the subject but a supplication to be allowed to abandon itself; the supplication makes to its god the unspeakable confession that it wants to be nothing but a part of him; even the anchorite’s desperation belongs to God; in his final weakness the desperate one encounters non-being before the beloved. Then the anchorite wants to not be his own anymore, and above all to have no will of his own and no world of his own. For the sake of becoming unworldly [Entweltlichung], the monks forbid themselves laughter; many spent their whole lives naked, like animals in ecstasy; others abandoned the use of shoes, some even the use of first-person possessive pronouns. John of Cassian said about the undergarments of the Egyptian monks: “The cutoff sleeves [99] should remind them that they are cut off from all deeds and works of this world. The linen garments say to them that they are dead to all life on earth.”11 How far the concern for the destruction of all worldliness reached among the holy solitaries reveals itself above all in the mythlike episodes of anachoretic literature, which, from the fourth century onward, submerges the whole Near East in a climate of desert fanaticism.

(...)

But then the question of where the monks are going would have to be reformulated so radically that it would no longer be about monks at all. The question would instead be: how does human acosmicity manifest itself under modern conditions? How do the forces oriented toward resettlement organize themselves in post-metaphysical times? How do modern subjects conduct themselves with their element-changing tendencies, if anachoretic, monastic or psychotheological “paths” no longer stand open? What, in general, will become of the escapist, path-forging impulses of the polyvalent animal?

It bears repeating that an adequate response to these questions would amount to a cultural history of modernity. For the moment, it should suffice to indicate that the unexampled development of western music can only be understood on the basis of the necessity of producing a convincing culture-wide substitute for the lost desert and for the barred monastic refuge. European art music between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries touches, with its combination of ascesis and metaphysical tension, on the secrets of dyadic extremism formerly accessible only to hermits and mystics—it too had its athletes and its lonely protagonists, it too was oriented toward an external public, which already consisted more of spectators than of listeners. In the last hundred years, music has established itself as a universal transitional thirdness with which the world-age seeks to address its need for world-flight without recourse to the desert. The artificial sonic attack on the exterior world-noises has in this century reached an intensity unprecedented in the entire history of the species. But unlike the desert, which helped free the interior, the mass-medial musicalization of all spaces [115] floods the last breaches of free interiority: the oblivion of being out of every loudspeaker;
low-level worldlessness in every household at every time of day. Ever since headphones have existed, the principle of world-shutoff in the modern use of music has taken effect purely at the level of apparatuses. Here a drug-theoretical account of all forms of “light” ambience in modernity suggests itself.

There is hardly any phenomenon of contemporary culture in which no traces of quasi-musical world-distancing techniques can be found. The new wave of cocooning, the mass-emigration of modern subjects into the unreachable interior of solitudes, trips and symbioses, would be quite impossible without immersion in the tonal menu of sound-systems. World-distance is the lowest common denominator of a poly-escapist society.

The age of metaphysical homelessness (to recall Lukács’ formula for modernity) generalizes the habitus of flight. With its progressive constitution the world flees from itself in itself; from each point of the fleeing world, further flights are prepared. The accelerated world of money and of absolu-tized communication parodies the metaphysical relation to impermanence; it possesses neither an idea of the pleroma of metaphysics nor a conception of positive emptiness. The acosmic needs of people in a monkless time must seek other outlets—routes that, for all their differentiation, have in common that they run perpendicular to the abundance principle of the secular bourgeoisie. The word bourgeoisie here stands for the type of human that seeks wealth not in the expansion of inner space, but in stuffing oneself with content that ensures seamless self-filling. Flightiness, expanded to an element, makes a compromise between the fluid and the dead. In it move people who recognize themselves neither in the monk nor in the worldling. In a conversation with Boris Groys, the Russian avant-garde artist Ilya Kabakow issued the following statement:

The willingness to feel out of place is highly developed in me. It was always an especially comforting experience for me to not be anywhere. Whenever I go on a journey, even the foretaste of driving away already makes me happy. This obviously is an infantile trauma expressing the lack of the wish to come to the world. The world in which I was born and the form into which I was born leave me deeply unsatisfied. I don’t like my appearance and I don’t identify myself with it. I still remember when I saw my profile for the first time in the mirror; I literally moaned in pain: I couldn’t believe that that’s me. This is the desire to run away from my body, from my things, from my home. . .

I don’t have a home, I always feel that I am in a state of transit. Of such people one often says: they are well nowhere.

Instead of a commentary, I confront this statement with a temporally distant echo that responds to the artist from a nearness, and with a temporally near counterpart that distances itself from it milky-way-wide. In the Manichaean cosmogony that Theodore bar Koni quoted in the seventh century, it is said:

The shining Jesus approached the naïve Adam and awoke him from deathly sleep thereby to redeem him from the many spectres . . . so it was also with Adam, for the friend found him as he was sunken in deep sleep. He woke him, gave him movement, made him lively and drove the false spirit out of him. . . Thereafter Adam examined himself and recognized who he was. And he showed to him the fathers of the heights and how his soul was thrown into everything, devoured by those who devour, swallowed by those who swallow. . .

He erected him and let him eat from the tree of life. Thereafter Adam came to see and wept and cried with a loud voice like a roaring lion. He shook his hair, hit his chest and spoke: “Woe! Woe to him who built my body and to him who bound my soul.”

The distant echo resonates in the closing stanzas of Goethe’s poem “To the Moon”:

Blessed is he who walks apart,
Though no hate he bears,
Holds a friend within his heart;
And with him he shares
All that steals, by men unguessed,
Or by men unknown,
Through the maze of his own breast
In the night alone.

Out of the World
Peter Sloterdijk