Jean-Paul Sartre once shocked the reading public by making the paradoxical claim that the French had never been as free as during the German occupation. It was, he claimed, only a seeming paradox since one gets trapped by free choice that disguises necessity – and for the French were deprived of the temptation of this trap by the German occupiers who left them no choice. And if the French were left with no choice, the same applies to the Poles a hundred times more so! After all, some of the German satraps tried to woo the French, promising them a […]

Motherland means safety – says Jean Améry. Writing these words in his 1966 book At the Mind’’s Limits, in the chapter entitled How Much Motherland Does a Man Need? the Frenchman Jean Améry, born Franz Meyer in Austria in 1912, knew what he was talking about. He had lost his homeland and it took him 27 years to fully grasp what that loss – by then irreversible and irretrievable – entailed: he realized that by returning to a space one never regains the time lost. Safety means certainty; and in turn, we can feel safe wherever we do not expect […]

Is there a way of making this world hospitable to Europe? For we, Europeans, are not feeling quite at ease in today’’s world. Heidegger once said that we begin to think about a problem only when things suddenly start behaving in a surprising way. Only then do we move from the sphere of handeln [acting] to the sphere of verhandeln [negotiating]. Until that point the facts are just a part of our everyday experience and we are not fully aware of their existence. Only when things start to go wrong do we transfer them into the realm of observeable nuisances […]