The country without national borders
The real European historical readers of the Balkan peoples would be those in which there would be more cultural memory and less patriotic ideology.
Due to a different interpretation of history, today Russia is at war with Ukraine. Due to the different interpretation of history in the Macedonia region, Bulgaria blocked the start of Macedonia's negotiations with the EU. Due to its interpretation of history, Greece claimed for itself for almost three decades an "exclusive right" to the name Macedonia.
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers, taught by the bitter experience of the two world wars in the twentieth century, believed that a new European peaceful vision was possible only if European arrogance in relation to other countries and cultures was overcome. What Jaspers calls "European arrogance" is today called "cultural imperialism". It is, unfortunately, still alive in those Balkan states, whose national narratives were formed in the nineteenth century, after the collapse of the national narratives of the old European states. They learned the lesson from the two world wars and from Auschwitz, and tried to overcome their own national arrogance first. Because they knew that that arrogance would eventually lead to a new war. That's why today they perceive history more as a cultural memory, and less as a national, patriotic ideology.
The formula of European reconciliation
Unfortunately, the Balkans are always a century behind the rest of Europe. As far as history is concerned, the nineteenth century still rules in all the Balkan countries. History in these countries is inextricably linked with the nation, which, in turn, has attributes of the absolute: it is eternal, unchanged over long centuries, beginning with Adam and Eve and deeply "rooted" in the territory where the past took place. That national narrative is often biological, and often racist. Living people are sacrificed on the "altar" of the new "deity" of the Balkan peoples – the nation. In the wars that the Balkan and Slavic peoples waged and still wage, calling the nations they kill "brotherly".
Modern Russia is the saddest example of this national idolatry. Both Ukraine and Russia could have been united in peace, if Russia had not dreamed of the greatness of its people "retrogradely" - as a restoration of the collapsed Russian imperial empire. If Russia were a European country, it would have absolved its critical confrontation with its own imperial past, both imperial and Soviet, as Germany did in the process of reconciliation with its neighbors France and Poland. If Bulgaria and Greece were real European countries, they would first of all in their society have completed the process of critical confrontation with their past, and to a particular extent, with the times of wars.
What is the formula of European reconciliation? It is the detoxification of historical narratives from their absolutist, imperial nationalist "poisons". National narratives become much more "peaceful" when the past is not only experienced as a patriotic and state ideology, but as a cultural memory. In the idea of cultural memory, there is enough space for two or more countries to "experience" the biography of the same historical person as "their own", as shared. Because each of them identifies with one aspect of his biography. Remembering the past means remembering names, events, stories and biographies. History as chronology and science in national narratives is limited in the "tight corset" of national ideology, to which the past must be submitted, which, for its part, is never a dead fact, but a living testimony as a collective memory.
The power of the "motherland without national borders"
If Russia had treated Ukraine like Germany did to Poland or France, then together they would have sought and enriched the cultural symbols of their shared history. For example, Ukraine and Russia would meet in culture in the biography and work of Nikolai Gogol. He was born in Ukraine, and he wrote mostly in Russian, although many things in his literary fantasy come from Ukrainian folk art. Why then can't both countries be proud of Gogol's literary work? Or of Kazimir Malevich, who was born in Kiev and worked in both Kiev and Moscow? This is still not possible for these countries today because the national narrative as an ideology "confuses" the great artists and rulers as "trophies" for the glory of their own nation and, thus, does not allow them to belong to the national narrative of the neighboring country.
This absurdity of national narcissism can only be overcome by the strength of the "motherland which has no national borders". It does not distinguish people only by blood and soil, but by spirit and creativity.
That homeland is not imperial and exclusive, but inclusive and cosmopolitan. In that homeland, without national borders, lives a breed of people who know that in addition to the geographical country in which they were born, their native country, without national borders, is the one in which they became humane and cultivated, creative or thinking persons. That strain is the people of the spirit, the thinkers and the artists. It is the land that remembers from Homer to Murakami, from Sophocles to Beckett, from Sappho to Marguerite Duras. The homeland without national borders is the realm of the spirit, of literacy, of education, of art and philosophy. It is the kingdom of books, printing presses, libraries and museums. It has no borders, least of all national ones, because its "kingdom" is the whole world. It exists across all national and state borders.
The German literary theorists Alayda and Jan Assmann called that country "Res publica literaria" in their thank you speech at the awarding of the 2018 Peace Prize of German Literature. They say that "when the era of the printing press began, this country was founded by poets and humanists, publishers and booksellers." In the homeland without national borders, libraries are the places where the "conversation of the spirits" of all times takes place. He is not limited by state borders. According to Alaida and Jan Asman, libraries, the gigantic archives that preserve the memory of the human creative spirit, "open spaces for thought." Jan Assmann, who died aged 86 in February 2024, believed that "culture originates in the knowledge of death and finitude". Culture, like art and creativity, remembers past life – as opposed to death. Life is remembering, and literature is the best example of that. Cultural memory remembers the past through biographies that always reflect the spirit of the times.
Literature remembers more lavishly
The real European historical readers of the Balkan peoples would be those in which there would be more cultural memory and less patriotic ideology. In them, children in Greece would learn about the Macedonian past from the poetry of Kocho Racin or Grigor Prlichev. And Macedonian children would learn more about the peculiarity of the "Greek trauma" from Angelopoulos' films. Macedonian and Bulgarian students could learn much more about their cultural memory from the works of Georgi Gospodinov and Petre M. Andreevski. Literature remembers more lavishly and "more vividly" than historical ideology, because in it events and persons are not black and white. That is why literature has the power to "revive" before us the past time and its special spirit. The real encounter with the spirit of the past happens only in art.
At the same time, for the society that remembers and enters into a creative dialogue with the spirit of past eras, the stage on which it plays out is necessary. It is the public as a sphere of the spirit, as a space for dialogue in culture and art. Only in those societies is the "toxicity" of narrow national narratives overcome, in which their corrective is a strong, lively and critical intellectual public. National narcissism only conceals the feeling of inferiority, the cause of which is precisely the closure of a society in a narrow national discourse. It is not surprising that in totalitarian regimes there is no free creativity, but only propaganda art. Hannah Arendt points to the strength of that different homeland, without national borders, when in her 1958 eulogy for the Peace Prize of German Literature to her professor and friend, Karl Jaspers, she says that the incorruptible philosopher in the Third Reich was isolated, but he was not lonely, because his "spiritual homeland" was the "realm of Humanitas, to which every man can approach, with his own origin".
(The author is a philosopher and Macedonian and German writer)
