Karl-Markus Gauss on Europe’s borders and migration

Mr. Gauss, in March you received the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding for your literary work about our continent, which the jury as a “building in danger of collapsing” designated. How much more collapse-prone has this gotten since the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

We were all convinced that there could be no more wars in Europe because of the strong economic ties and the supposed consensus that even the biggest conflicts between sovereign states can and must be solved differently. Russia has shown that this was an illusion. In doing so, however, it also created awareness that the building is in danger of collapsing. Those who know this begin to think about what they can do to prevent it from collapsing.

And what would that be?

The European Union now has an external enemy, which strengthens internal cohesion. But also distracts from the real contradictions. There are states that habitually violate not only the so-called European values, but also rules and laws. There are wealthy countries that poach workers from poorer countries, and states in the East in which entire regions are deserted as a result.

The relationship to countries on the periphery of the EU was often ambivalent. Has this now been clarified with regard to Ukraine?

It has become enormously important for Europe with Putin’s war of aggression, because it defends European democracy, even though it is by no means a flawless democracy itself.

Russia claims that Ukraine is not a real nation and that Russian speakers are oppressed.

I have been to Ukraine a number of times over the past 25 years and have been able to experience in real time how this country is changing. National consciousness – the belief of Ukrainians that they are not Russian – grew stronger, but at the same time more open. The many nationalities that exist in Ukraine are included in this national movement.

You studied this diversity not only in the Ukraine, but throughout Europe – you dedicated your life’s work to the minorities. Where did this fascination come from?

Even as a student, I considered the national, linguistic and religious minorities to be the salt of Europe. I was impressed that people remain loyal to their ethnic group, even though this puts them at a lot of disadvantages. I have great admiration for this persistence in standing up for one’s own origins. And my sympathy also had something to do with the fact that I primarily sought out minorities who tended to be among the losers, or at least not among the winners, of national and social developments. However, after five books and twenty years, I finished the project.

Why?

Because I gradually discovered not only fascinating but also less sympathetic traits that some members and many political representatives of minorities have: for example, the narcissistic pride in the smallest difference, in certain forms of customs that differ minimally from those of the neighbor different, but inflated to grandiose significance for one’s own identity.

You have also documented the disappearance of many groups, for example in Ukraine.

yes i have me in my book “The Dispersed Germans” went in search of the last Black Sea Germans. A very sad ethnic group that got caught up in the mills of Stalinist persecution and most of whose members would like to emigrate to Germany. In order to prove to the immigration authorities that they are of “German origin”, they had to present the most bizarre evidence. Anyone who had a grandfather who had fought in the Waffen SS was considered German and was allowed to enter West Germany. But anyone who had grandparents who had been deported to Kazakhstan was considered Russian and had no chance.

You yourself come from a family of so-called Danube Swabians. Her parents lived in Batschka and Vojvodina, multi-ethnic regions in present-day Serbia, on the border with Hungary, before being expelled at the end of World War II. How did you approach this family story?

Of course, as a child I noticed a lot, but it was only after the death of my parents that I traveled to the mythical country of their ancestors for the first time. Perhaps I didn’t want the picture they had given me of the “old homeland” to be spoiled by the real experience.

And how did your parents describe this lost world? Her father was a publisher and publicist who, unlike other Danube Swabians, had no Nazi sympathies.

Not only no Nazi sympathies, but also no revanchist ambitions. In her stories, the small world of her childhood was close to the idyll. In addition to German, both parents also spoke Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian. But they also reported that in Vojvodina the Serbs, Hungarians, Slovaks, Croats, Danube Swabians had to do with each other every day, but lived side by side rather than with each other. Hardly any marriages crossed national borders.

What is left of it after the Second World War?

Vojvodina is still an interesting multi-ethnic region today. However, the Danube Swabians are largely missing. And of course the Jews, who were exterminated by the German and Hungarian special units, which unfortunately also had Danube-Swabian collaborators.

You were born in Salzburg in 1954 as an “ethnic German”. Have you been made to feel your difference?

I am the youngest of four brothers and the only “native Austrian”. In fact, I can’t remember a single hostility I’ve received because of my background. However, my brothers, who were born in Yugoslavia during the war, told me about all sorts of setbacks. Mainly because the Danube Swabians lived in large shantytowns for a long time and they were considered “the ones from the shacks” at school.

the Austrians saw them expellees in the crisis-ridden immediate post-war period as unwelcome competition.

Yes, but despite everything that was difficult and went wrong, the bottom line is that the integration of ethnic Germans in Germany and Austria was a success story.

Austria did not find it easy to integrate new influences after the Second World War. They reinvented themselves as a small state. . .

Austria became a small state as early as 1918. After 1945 it was a question of discovering and asserting itself as a nation independent of the Germans. The First Republic, with its misery and inner turmoil, was not a suitable model for this purpose. The concepts of a democratic Austrian nation, such as those developed by the exiles fleeing the “Anschluss” in 1938, went almost unnoticed.

What took their place?

The Habsburg monarchy created identity. But in a curiously distorted way, because the fact that the monarchy was a multi-ethnic state was glorified in the manner of an operetta, but had no practical political consequences. So that the image of a happy people’s idyll with xenophobic resentments fit together. And fits together.

Did the social developments of the late monarchy nevertheless influence the development of Austrian society?

In the last fifty years of the monarchy, hundreds of thousands of workers from Bohemia immigrated to Vienna. And later just as many starving people from Galicia. Within a generation they even changed Austria’s language. What is dear to us today as the specifically Austrian language is also thanks to this constant immigration. It is no different with the Yugoslav refugees and the Turkish migrant workers. What may still seem strange to us today, we will later accept and much later see as typically Austrian.

National identity changes because of migration, while nationalists want to preserve it in an idealized form.

Nation and nationalism are not identical. I am disgusted to see how nationalist politics are being pursued. But I don’t think the nation itself is completely outdated. It still forms a community of solidarity and a reservoir from which one can not only draw vices and prejudices, but also memories of social attitudes, subversive traditions, and democratic movements.

The defensive reflexes seem to be all the greater, the more culturally different the migrants are.

I observe with displeasure that there are first-class and second-class refugees – and migrants who are courted, wanted, tolerated and hostile to. But of course there are immigrants who can adapt more quickly to our old and their new world and add something enriching to it than others who are as alien to our way of life as we are to theirs. Anyone who denies this is a nerd in the moralism elective. And by the way, it does nothing for the migrants.

With the Ukraine war, several million people have now fled from this country to the EU. How do you see their prospects?

That depends on how long the war lasts. Most of the displaced people still want to return as soon as possible. Which would be absolutely vital for Ukraine, which lost millions of its citizens to emigration even before the war.

Western Ukraine once belonged to the crown land of Galicia in the Habsburg Empire. Is she closer to the Austrians?

Hardly anyone in Austria knows what Galicia means. The Habsburg Empire is an omnipresent fiction and at the same time a completely unknown thing. The sympathy for the Ukrainians has nothing to do with this, and it is already waning as we feel the consequences of this war more.