European MPs also quickly fell in with the new trend, and soon the European Parliament began to resemble some German New Year’s special from the ’80s, as a Euronews journalist put it, recalling the A Kettle of Color program on television in the GDR—a shared and unifying memory for several generations of East Europeans.
The deputy prime minister of a southeastern country also put on a pair of full-bottomed breeches with decorative braid, a wide red cummerbund, and a shaggy shepherd’s hat, which was trimmed with popcorn like in the olden days. The minister of tourism donned a heavy red tunic and an embroidered shirt with wide sleeves. The coins adorning her costume gleamed like real gold and there was a rumor going around that she was wearing part of a Thracian gold treasure kept in the state vaults. Gradually all the ministers started wearing native costumes, and in the end meetings of the Council of Ministers resembled a village working bee. We’re breaking up the working bee, the prime minister would say instead of the official “The meeting is adjourned.” It was slightly embarrassing at first when the minister of defense showed up on horseback in a revolutionary uniform, girded with a long saber and with a silver-handled Nagant revolver tucked into his wide leather belt. The horse would stand all day tied up next to a row of black Mercedes in front of the Council of Ministers, and a cop would give it a bag of oats and sheepishly clean up the dung.
A few websites tried to poke fun at this, but their voices were so weak and even irritating against the background of the general euphoria that they quickly shut up.
A new life was beginning, life as a reenactment.
2.
One evening two quiet electric Teslas would pull up in front of the clinic on Heliosstrasse, and three men in dark blue suits would get out to see Gaustine. One of the men, the chairman in blue, had come there before, since his mother was a patient. Later he stopped by a few more times on his own to hold long conversations with Gaustine. His visits were discreet, incognito, he was one of the big three in the European Union.
That evening the whole triumvirate came. Gaustine would invite them into his favorite study from the ’60s. They would stay there all night, talking, raising their voices, and falling silent.
The past was rising up everywhere, filling with blood and coming to life. A radical move was needed, something unexpected and prescient, which would stop this irresistible centrifugal force. The time for love had ended, now came the time for hate. If hate were the gross domestic product, then the growth of prosperity in some countries would soon be sky-high. A certain delay, a way to inhibit the process and gain some time—that evening the three men in blue had come searching for something of the sort, it seemed to me.
When we talk about Alzheimer’s, about amnesia and memory loss, we skip over something important. People suffering from this not only forget what was, but they are also completely incapable of making plans, even for the near future. In fact, the first thing that goes in memory loss is the very concept of the future.
The task was as follows. How can we gain a little more time for tomorrow, when we face a critical deficit of future? The simple answer was: By going backward a bit. If anything is certain, it’s the past. Fifty years ago is more certain than fifty years from now. If you go two, three, even five decades back, you come out exactly that much ahead. Yes, it might already have been lived out, it might be a “secondhand” future, but it’s still a future. It’s still better than the nothingness yawning before us now. Since a Europe of the future is no longer possible, let’s choose a Europe of the past. It’s simple. When you have no future, you vote for the past.
Could Gaustine help?
He could create a clinic, a street, a neighborhood, even a small city set in a specific decade. But to turn a whole country or an entire continent back to another time—this is where medicine becomes politics. And the moment for that had clearly arrived.
Could Gaustine have stopped them?
Did he want to?
I can’t be sure. I suspect that he had secretly been dreaming about just such a development, that he even, forgive me for saying it, innocently suggested this idea to his acquaintance in blue. There’s no way to know for sure. Or there is, but I don’t want to know. Actually, the three of them wanted advice, expertise, some kind of instructions, but clearly the decision had already been made. Besides, Gaustine didn’t hold the exclusive rights to the past. Not for a whole continent.
In fact, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea, plus anyone could see with the naked eye that there was no other way out. The past was already bursting through all the barely plugged bullet holes in the hull of the present in any case. They needed a farsighted move to take control of the situation, to give it some kind of shape and order. Fine, since you want the past so badly, here’s the past for you, but let’s at least vote on it and choose it together.
A referendum on the past.
That’s what they would talk about that night. Or that’s how I would invent it, outside, in the entryway, with my notebook.
3.
I have a dream . . . My dream is that one day the sons of former victors and the sons of the former vanquished in the Referendum of the past will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood . . . My dream is that all of us can live in the nation of our happiest time . . .
I observed how Gaustine stormed into action, without leaving his ’60s study. Of course, he never gave a single public speech. But in everything the three men in blue said, you could hear his voice, words, and intonation, borrowed from everyone from Socrates to Martin Luther King.
To me, this seemed to be a project in which everyone was investing different dreams.
That was also why it would succeed in the end.
And why it would fail spectacularly.
4.
All elections up until this point had been about the future. This would be different.
TOTAL RECALL: EUROPE CHOOSES ITS PAST . . . EUROPE—THE NEW UTOPIA . . . EUROTOPIA . . . A EUROPEAN UNION OF THE COMMON PAST.
Those were the headlines in European newspapers. If nothing else, Europe was good at utopias. Yes, the Continent had been mined with a past that divided it, two world wars, hundreds of others, Balkan Wars, Thirty-Year Wars, Hundred-Year Wars . . . But there were also enough memories of alliances, of living as neighbors, memories of empires that gathered together supposedly ungatherable groups for centuries on end. People didn’t stop to think that in and of itself, the nation was a bawling historical infant masquerading as a biblical patriarch.
It was clear that a simple agreement on a unified Continental past was impossible at this stage. For that reason, as was to be expected, following good old liberal traditions (even though an election on the past is a conservative act) it was decided that each member-state would hold its own referendum. Due to the extraordinary nature of the procedure and so as not to lose time, alongside the question of whether there should be a return to the past, voters in favor also had to indicate which specific decade they chose. After that, temporal alliances would form, while further down the line it would even be possible to vote for a unified European time.