What to say to your daughter tonight News and analyzes from Bulgaria DW
Have we reached this point … To start the war in Europe, to return the bomb shelters to use, the bomb shelters … To refill with blood what we thought about history and literature.
I have been dealing with the discreet monster for a long time in the past and in 1939 in my last novel “Shelter Time”. It ends with a scene of detailed reconstruction at the beginning of World War II, troops are gathered at the border and waiting. And suddenly a real shot is fired from the reconstruction and…
No war can be won
From this experience of the writer I want to say again: no war of the past and the past has been won. No war can be won at all. War is a breakdown in time, a breakdown in general. Outlining layers of culture from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle through Shakespeare and Goethe to Chekhov and Brodsky…
Putin is looking to return to Europe before 1997, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and now he wants to reach 1939. Will we always be on the eve of 1939? Even the time of the attack was the same as on September 1. When does everyday life really become (again) history? And why – after all that has already happened. We didn’t tell well somewhere. We were sure that this could not happen again, not in Europe, which survived both wars. Despite all the books and movies, despite all the archives and conversations – it turned out that we did not understand. Or we forgot. We have fallen into a severe social Alzheimer’s. This war breaks out at a time when you have no living memory of World War II. We are right on that generational edge when our users, who keep this memory alive, the last camps, the last of the trenches go away. And many people here still like dictators.
The world of yesterday, which Stefan Zweig wrote about on the eve of World War II, has now abruptly become the world of that day. There are days that click something in the mechanism of history, and today’s is one of suffering. Everyone will remember where he was, what he did. As on September 1, as well as on September 11, as today …
In the report, evaluate how people are looking for bomb shelters. Hell, you think you’re thinking of a “bomb shelter” for something that should already be on the line for young readers. In my novel, I insisted that we seek more and more shelters. This should have sounded like a dystopia, a warning for the future – I had set the year 2039, exactly one hundred years after the Second World War.
Putin turned the clock back
When dystopian began to transform into documentary, it did not happen to transform backwards. My dystopia was still democratic. European countries have chosen by referendum in which year of the 20th century to return. Referendums for the past. Today, Putin turned the clock back with no choice. It brings the 21st century back to the 20th century with war. And he decides it not only for his country, but also for a neighboring country, for the whole of Europe, maybe for the whole world. You can’t force anyone back into solitary confinement. Not the individual, much less whole nations.
Georgi Gospodinov with his daughter
And what can I say to my daughter tonight, after every night I promised her that there would be no war? What to tell my children? How do I decide that the world’s children’s room is not ready for them?
We need to clean the basement, my wife said. Good thing there’s a fountain downstairs. It can take a long time.
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