That some of the staff of Charlie Hebdo left the magazine after the attacks is only too understandable. And the fact that other journalists no longer dare to express themselves freely about Islam is shocking. Perhaps prizes like this one can offer them some support.
However, the more profound truth is that it is not terrorists who will destroy our society. They cannot do that. We ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, are the only ones who can seriously endanger our values. Only we, the democrats, can damage democracy. And that can happen quickly. The populists are now on the rise. Politicians are demanding tougher laws and the secret services greater powers. Parties everywhere talk of a ‘threat of the Islamisation of Europe’ and feel ‘vindicated’ by the attacks in Paris. There are demands for a database of suspicious persons and intensive surveillance of the internet. This is the real effect of terrorism, one that is indirect and therefore dangerous.
A few weeks ago I was queuing at Zurich airport behind a very elegant lady who was around ninety years old. She appeared a little confused and unable to cope with the situation. Her hand baggage was checked, she had to take off her shoes and her body was patted down. I could see how unpleasant she found it all. In her handbag there was a small bottle of perfume. The security guard said she had to put it in a plastic bag. Of course the old lady didn’t have one with her. The guard wanted to take the bottle away from her. And then something unusual happened. The other passengers began to protest. They got quite loud and in the end the guard hesitantly returned the lady’s perfume. The terrorists, ladies and gentlemen, have nearly won already. We need to be careful.
It is silly to believe that the state is defenceless against terrorism. But neither war cries nor acts of blind rage are any use to us now. It is only prudence, only the constitution, only the rule of law that can provide us with lasting protection. If we betray the rules we have given ourselves, we will lose. On 22nd July 2011 Anders Breivik murdered seventy-seven people in Norway, including thirty-two children and young people, out of completely insane pseudo-political motives. But afterwards Norway passed no new surveillance laws and did not set up body scanners outside schools and holiday camps. Prime Minister Stoltenberg did the opposite. At the memorial service in Oslo Cathedral he said: ‘We will never give up our values. Our response is: more democracy, more openness, more humanity. We will show the world that democracy gets stronger when most depends on it.’ Stoltenberg’s words moved me a great deal at the time and they still do now. They are the core of what should matter to us. We must confront fanatics with what they fear and hate most of alclass="underline" our tolerance, our sense of humanity, our freedom and our laws.
Tucholsky died in 1935. Erich Kästner would later describe him as the ‘short, fat Berliner who tried to avert a catastrophe with a typewriter’. But do you know, ladies and gentlemen, what drove him, just like his role model Heinrich Heine and later Stefan Zweig, Elias Canetti, Thomas Mann and so many others to criticise their countries? It was not malice, hatred or wilful destruction. It was the opposite. To put it in one word – one that might be too pathetic by today’s standards – it was their profound love of freedom, of the wonderful richness of life. Or, in more modern terms, their conviction that we should live only in an enlightened, nuanced and liberal society.
Recently I spent a while watching the Christopher Street Day parade. A tall, incredibly beautiful black man was dancing in the street. He was naked apart from an awfully tight pair of briefs and the white angel wings he wore on his back. Passers-by stared at him. A short Arab man was standing by the kerb with his wife and child. He was no more than five feet two inches tall, bearded and rather hunched. As the dancer approached the Arab, I thought: this is not going to go well. He stopped in front of him, bent down, took his face in both hands and kissed him on the mouth. The Arab went red, but then he beamed and chuckled silently.
The world we live in is not perfect, but it is better than in previous centuries. And in this world we need Charlie Hebdo, and we need you, Monsieur Biard. Your magazine is irreverent and flippant and angry and every now and again it is insufferable. It often oversteps the mark of what is allowed. But this makes it an expression and representation of our liberty. It is part of the world that was created through so many centuries of struggle, repression and pain. No one in their right mind can want us to retreat back behind the Enlightenment once again, and Benjamin Franklin’s warning is even more pertinent now than it was in his own time: ‘If we restrict liberty to attain security we will lose them both.’
Dear Monsieur Biard, we therefore ask you to keep going with Charlie Hebdo. Keep going come what may, keep doing exactly what you are doing for as long as you possibly can.
About the Authors
Ferdinand von Schirach is a German lawyer and writer, who lives in Berlin. His story collections Crime and Guilt and novels The Collini Case and The Girl Who Wasn’t There (Tabu) have been published in more than forty countries and sold millions of copies worldwide. The first production of Terror took place on the same evening in October 2015 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Schauspiel Frankfurt. It has since been staged in Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Japan, Poland, Switzerland, Turkey, the USA and Venezuela. Further openings are to follow in China, Greece, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
David Tushingham is a dramaturg and translator who has worked extensively as a curator for European festivals including the Wiener Festwochen, the Ruhrtriennale, Theater der Welt and the Salzburg Festival. As a translator he specialises in the work of contemporary German playwrights, including Roland Schimmelpfennig, Dea Loher, Falk Richter and Rainald Goetz. He has also adapted Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories for the National Theatre.
Copyright
First published in 2017
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2017
All rights reserved
© Ferdinand von Schirach, 2016
Translations © David Tushingham, 2017
Ferdinand von Schirach is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Performing rights are represented by Gustav Kiepenheuer, Bühnenvertriebs-GmbH, Berlin, Schweinfurthstr. 60, D-14195 Berlin, Germany (info@kiepenheuer-medien.de), and in the UK by International Performing Rights Ltd, Top Floor, 3 Macroom Road, London W9 3HY (info@iprltd.co.uk). No performance may be given