Wera Sager
When I studied German at Otago University, I was straight out of school with little life experience. It’s been said that children in a classroom may not remember much about their lessons, but they do remember how they felt. I clearly remember the warmth, tone, and cadence of each lecturer’s voice in the language departments at Otago University. Serious people discussing concepts and ideas with a ‘foetus’ like me. What did I know of the fear of living in East Berlin? Of possessing ideas ruled subversive by the state? Of love and marriage? Of eating only peas until you go mad?
At the time, it seemed all rather grim. Why read about such dark things when it’s a sunny day in Dunedin?
Such study stays with you. After a decade or two, or many more, it might only be “the vibe of the thing”, to quote an Australian masterpiece, but it’s an enrichment that stays with you and reappears at odd times.
And it’s odd times now.
Things don’t seem so sunny in Dunedin anymore. Or in New Zealand, Canada or Australia. Or in Germany or Austria. It has been frightening in recent years to realise that now I have ideas ruled subversive by those states. Ideas of bodily autonomy that I had thought were universal are now considered selfish, anti-social and despicable. Reading widely and deeply on a topic, something once valued, is now ‘doing your own research’ and something to be openly disparaged. Asking questions is asking for humiliation, in deference to the government as your “single source of truth”. Thinking critically in the 2020s is to be met with hysterics: “How many grannies do you want to kill?” “Don’t you want to save the planet?”
Small wonder that whole departments in the humanities are under threat at a time when reading and thinking for yourself are not valued but ridiculed. When expressing a thought can be considered a danger to public health and must be suppressed; when questions and ideas are met not with robust and open debate but with name calling, personal attacks and cancellation. “Conspiracy theorist”, “anti-vaxxer”, “climate change denialist” – all words to reinforce the idea that an individual is acting alone against an agreed consensus.
When places of ‘higher learning’ blindly enforce government mandates at the expense of ethics; when universities become uniform in thought. When a university forgets that ‘enrichment’ is about more than income and earnings and that ideas decades-long dormant might offer its alumni solace or inspiration at the oddest of times:
Christa Wolf’s Kassandra has no more luck than Aeschylus’s Cassandra: her warnings unheeded and the city of Troy destined for destruction. Incidentally, Troy aloud sounds like the German word treu – loyal, trusting. In New Zealand, people put their trust in the authorities, and friends and family tried to warn them to no avail. Some people have since had cause to lose that trust. None will thank their Kassandras.
Georg Buechner’s Woyzeck must eat only peas, as ordered by a doctor conducting medical experiments. It drives him to madness and murder. I’m reminded of Woyzeck’s peas in our diet of ‘news’ headlines today – maddeningly uniform in shape and substance. Just what the doctor ordered.
In “Biedermann und die Brandstifter” by Max Frisch, Biedermann (a Homer Simpson ‘everyman’) welcomes a group of arsonists into his home. Biedermann tries to avoid conflict and the truth, by giving the arsonists everything they ask for. Inevitably, he loses everything. It’s an allegory for 1939, and, let’s hope, completely irrelevant to recent times.
Tristan and Isolde, their love thwarted in life, are entwined in the form of a tree and vine for eternity. Chop them down and they will regrow.
What will regrow from the stumps of our hacked universities, I wonder. A gnarled, hollow monstrosity, staked and shaped by fear? Or a towering, robust beauty, wise to the whims of axes and arsonists, and daring, through all times, to grow towards the light?
