Klaus opens up
CROSSING MANY BORDERS TO REACH HOME: A GERMAN STORY
By Klaus Zeller
Inkwell Publishing Co., 251pages
I cannot remember exactly how I got to meet Klaus Zeller but I know that, as an ubiquitous social climber, it must have been at one of those Makati receptions in 1983 when he first came to Manila as West Germany’s ambassador. Soon after there was a most memorable PEN meeting which he attended to meet other Filipino writers; memorable because an ambassador from a foreign and influential country brought a case of delightful German wine. Behind that visit was a gesture of subtle importance. Let us go back to 1983 — the times were perilous. PEN — the international organization of writers — was openly opposed to the Marcos regime. Some PEN members were imprisoned; as founder and secretary I was harassed and not allowed to travel for four years. Although the regime was in its twilight — this we didn’t know — it still had plenty of bile, individuals who opposed Marcos still disappeared and there were all sorts of blacklists of people who were to be arrested.
It is in this light that Ambassador Zeller’s visit was important to us — an expression of support, of solidarity with those who stood for freedom.
In the course of our acquaintance, he asked if I would like to go to Germany to follow Rizal’s footsteps there. It was a request I gladly accepted — after all, my greatest influence as a writer is our own National Hero. I remember that visit very well; for one, the ambassador accompanied me to the airport to be sure that I would be able to leave. I was once leaving for some conference abroad when the immigration people stopped me — I was accused of stealing a P900 Seiko watch! I was able to get the address of the complainant from the judge in whose sala the case was filed, traced it to a fictitious address in Tondo. I had to execute an affidavit to show that the name on the hold list in immigration was not mine.
In college, I read Thomas Mann, Goethe, Schiller and, of course, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The last German novel I read was The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. One aspect of the novel puzzled me: Is it possible for a German before World War II to be illiterate? I posed this question to Dr. Zeller and he said it was near to impossible; before World War II, universal education was already well entrenched in Germany.
German writers are often ponderous and discursive, which requires of readers patience, concentration and introspection — reader qualities that are now rare, for most desire instant gratification. But there is also a rich reward in the form of insights, confirmation and intellectual nourishment that accrues from reading German literature. Still, I was uneasy with Thomas Mann, and my kind of uneasiness was confirmed by Dr. Zeller recently when he said he did not like Thomas Mann at all.
In the light of our own dilemmas and problems, I have always been interested in how nations are formed from disparate ethnic groups with divided loyalties. Who are the leaders who welded these tribes into nations? Garibaldi in Italy? Ataturk in Turkey? Bismarck in Germany?
Dr. Zeller said, “Not Bismarck, but Goethe, Beethoven.”
Bertolt Brecht, one of my favorites, is quoted by Dr. Zeller in this book. The playwright is, of course, familiar to so many Filipinos who admire his plays. I will always remember these lines from his poem,
“To the Next Generation”:
“Shouting about injustice hoarsens the voice.”
“We who want the world to be kind, cannot ourselves be kind.”
For sure, the Zeller autobiography may not interest insular-minded Filipinos except those who know him and his wife personally. Those who have also benefited from his learned lectures on European history — if they read it — will be in for a very pleasant surprise. One, it is not written in the opaque language of diplomacy — it is an emollient story of a traveler and researcher absolutely sure and comfy in his identity. It also enables the reader to take a peek at the verities of German life, its perspicacious educational system, the hard workers that Germans are.
For the Filipino reader, the first and the last chapters will be relevant for, in these chapters, the “old man” which Zeller claims he is sums up some conclusions about his adopted country.
Economists — pragmatists and realists that they are — tend to interpret progress or development and decay in terms of statistics. What they do not do is go to the pith, and answer the whys of such developments. They do not examine “the heart of the matter” which only those with profound perceptions do — the artists who work not just with the mind but with the heart. I remember only too well what that giant of American jurisprudence, Judge Learned Hand, said way back that “Liberty is in the heart; when it dies there, no constitution, no court of law can revive it.”
Nations progress and decay, empires grow then vanish in the course of history. These happen because the people who rule grow old, they are corrupted and weakened, and they destroy themselves. Some countries are capable of renewal though and others are not because there is no strength in the leaders and the people themselves. This is the story not just of people but of civilizations. We can see this in our own country, in our weakness and shallowness and in the corruption of our leaders who are without any sense of nation, without compassion for the plight of our people.
When a Filipino in Hong Kong passes by the Star Ferry there on Sundays and holidays and sees the Filipino maids on the pavement, on the sidewalks, talking, gossiping, eating, and he is not shamed by the sight, it is because he is no longer a Filipino. If he did not react when that Hong Kong columnist called us a nation of servants, it is because he is no longer a Filipino. I bring this painful subject up because there is this scene in this book: how Klaus and his wife, Pinky, went to a church in Hong Kong and in the church were hundreds of Filipino maids, singing, dancing. At this piteous sight, both wept bitterly.
Klaus Zeller, welcome to my unhappy country.
Not too long ago, at one of those intellectual social gatherings in my bookshop, I must have given an obviously evasive reply to one of his questions and he said, “At our age, we must no longer be afraid to tell the truth.”
Most autobiographies are confessions, attempts at rationalization and self-justification. They can also be skilful evasions of the larger truths we have denied, an effort to enlarge that gray area between right and wrong — that limbo in which so many of us live and act out our fates. This is human nature, this is part of the natural impulse to survive, to give meaning to otherwise empty lives, for as we grow old, we reminisce and look back at the rubble we have left, at the so-called dirty linen — or skeletons, if you will — tucked away in our most secret of closets, in the recondite recesses of the mind.
Having known Klaus Zeller for so long, I can assure his readers that he has been faithful to man’s truest virtue — honesty.
* * *
At a recent forum, the distinguished artist Juvenal Sanso asked how abstract art can be relevant. A very interesting question; abstract art, after all, does not represent reality. It can be symbolic and be subject to many interpretations and not really be as defining as figurative art, which mirrors reality, illustrates pain, doom, or whatever the artist wants to show. Picasso’s giant mural, “Guernica,” may express the horror of war, or one Spaniard’s nationality, but such depiction is not as explicit as Luna’s “Spoliarium.”
Juvenal’s question came to mind recently when I attended the opening of Fred Liongoren’s “Hulog” exhibition at the Crucible Gallery at SM Megamall. For so long, the avant-garde artist has been an abstractionist, and now this abrupt turnaround. The dozen canvases have that amazing quality to surprise, to evoke images of childhood, of social struggle. Liongoren confidently fulfills what I have often told our pretty-pretty artists: that they will be rich and famous but not great until they portray social consciousness, the way Goya and so many other Western masters have done.
Here is this huge frame of the bearded Fred à la Moses holding up the tablets to his people. Liongoren has been vastly successful as abstractionist — he need not prove his skills as a ranking member of the academy but here, with his joyous figurative signaling, he is also saying, now let us be Filipinos.
“Pasanin ni Juan,” a major frame in the show, shows a crocodile head quite recognizable in the slab of stone in which it is embedded, with two men straining against its weight. Says Liongoren, “All revolutions are not revolutionary enough. True revolution is not instituted by power, not by might, but by the spirit of God. All systems come and go but the system that reigns with love shall remain.”
Amen.
