Flying Café Europa

Members: Jurij Andruchowycz (Ivano-Frankivsk), David Antin, Ester Babarczy (Budapest), Eqrem Basha (Priština), Magda Carneci (Bucharest), Krzysztof Czyżewski (Sejny), Chris Keulemans, Aleš Debeljak (Ljubljana), Ferida Duraković (Sarajevo), Paweł Huelle (Gdańsk), Aleksandra Jacovskyte (Vilnius), Peter Jukes (London), Marzanna B. Kielar (Warszawa), Zbigniew Machej (Cieszyn), Christopher Merrill (Baltimore), Ana Pejcinowa (Prague), Andrzej Sosnowski (Warszawa) Antonije Žalica (Sarajevo/Amsterdam).

Writings: Magda Carneci, Christopher Merrill, Aleš Debeljak, Zbigniew Machej, Marzanna B. Kielar, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Chris Keulemans.

The starting point for this enterprise was the idea to set up a literary café. Just that. But a genuine one. Let its name be Café Éurope, as it formerly was in Chernovtsy, Sarajevo, Vienna or Paris. The Late Tadeusz Kantor wrote a text entitled "Café Éurope" and it is worth rembering. The idea is to have a place for people to meet in a relaxed atmosphere to hold disputes and arguments on artistic and ideological issues. Literary cafés to a large extent contributed to the development of cultural life in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Today they are very rare. However, there is still a need for places to motivate artistic circles, to issue artistic manifestos, to present a chance for ideological debates and face-to-face contact for artistic people. It seems that the closer we come to the end of the century and the more power modern communication technology exercises over us, the more we long for a literary café - be it cramped, smoky and bustling, but cosy and teeming with life.

Wersja polska tej strony.

CHRIS KEULEMANS

Café Europa

There's a café traveling through Europe. It is an old-fashioned and at the same time very modern café. The deep red velvet curtains, the pastel shaded chairs, the cigarette haze and the scent of coffee remind you of Central Europe, a pre-war continent where everything has remained the same. But this café travels. It picks itself up and moves with virtual ease. Where it alights, it opens its doors as if it has always been there. And then it's gone again.

The idea comes from Krzysztof Czyzewski, a small Pole with a beard and black eyes. He leads the Borderland Foundation, a cultural centre in a village on the border with Lithuania and Bjelorussia. Without a cappuccino in front of him, on a table filled with books and paper, he is not a complete man. To speak softly is his style. 1989 freed him from demagogy, but things can change just like that. 'We live on the edge of squares and wide streets,' he writes, 'where new stands can rise any moment, and maybe we will hear new booming, or the shouting of a mass of people.'

That's why he invented a meeting place as familiar as it is elusive: Café Europa. A coffeehouse on the corner of the century, that turns up where people need to speak to each other. He chooses the visitors himself. In this way, it becomes a quickly growing network of mobile spirits that continue their conversation across borders old and new, and meet wherever the café opens its doors.

Writers somewhere around forty, experienced and at the same time curious, a new, unbound elite. Most of them are from the former socialist states. They published their first books in the final days of the system, that collapsed soon after. The status that lay ready for them to take, in a society where a writer was an influential figure in any case, went up in smoke.

'Intellectuals used to fantasize about their universal role,' says Eszter Babarczy from Budapest one night in the café, 'their being a link between all classes of society, and especially the downtrodden, their long journeys in underworlds, their role as spokesmen for people who populated them.' Eszter is inoffensive in appearance, like a butterfly; her essays are merciless. 'And now they have to acknowledge that this underworld is strange and dangerous for them. None of the new worlds are very welcoming, in fact. So some intellectuals changed into yuppies and some stay at home, tired and resentful. Some, again, try their hands at capitalism, a quasi or a tougher version, and some donned suits and entered parliament.'

And the rest is sitting here at the small tables, smoking and talking. The Bosnian generation, Krzysztof calls them. A generation that only recognized the catastrophe when it was already too late. That is too late every time, all through the nineties. Extremely gifted, but never faster than the daily news. The war in Bosnia was the turning point for them personally, maybe even more so than the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the visitors of Café Europa 1989 meant a farewell to their youth, no more, no less. And what should follow, they couldn't say. The great freedom? The slaughter on the Balkans killed every hope. An alternative was nowhere in sight. The only thing left to do for these writers was to write. To look for a personal answer where the collective answer had been swept away.

And writing is exactly what they do. As if their life depends on it. Their productivity is impressive. Poetry, novels, theses, essays. And every week a column, to earn money. Commenting on the world, making a living. After the fall of the Wall they now live under the burden of columnism. They have become copywriters instead of grands seigneurs or dissidents.

Café Europa arrived in De Balie last week, in the context of 'Through the Grapevine', a week about everything that happened since 1989. I sat down and felt at home. From the first encounter onwards, the recognition was immediate. The sense of humor, the obsessions, the taste: we found similarities everywhere.

This congeniality of spirit didn't pop up out of nowhere. While these days all the newspapers arrive to the conclusion that the wall between East and West is in a sense still standing there, I discovered that for certain people, in a certain way it has never been there at all. That Europe did not consist of two separate worlds. I decided to do a completely unscientific test at random and handed out a small questionnaire to Krzysztof from Sejny, Eszter from Budapest, Ales Debeljak from Ljubljana, Mileta Prodanovic from Belgrade, Christopher Merrill from Woodstock, Pavel Huelle from Gdansk and Migjen Kelmendi from Prishtina. What did they like during the seventies, the eighties and the nineties?

The answers by Dirk van Weelden, Esther Jansma, Joost Zwagerman and Bas Heijne (four Dutch writers of the same age, ck) would hardly look different, I think. In the seventies, when they were still at school, the visitors of Café Europa watched movies by Coppola, Fellini, Bergman and Kubrick. They read Hesse, Salinger and Danilo Kis. They learned something about Plato and Socrates and played records by Bowie, Springsteen, the Stones and Pink Floyd.

In the eighties they studied philosophy, art history or literature, played in bands and entered their first editorial offices. They loved 'Paris, Texas', 'Down by Law' and everything by Tarkovsky, and discovered that there was more than rock music: not only Nick Cave but Miles Davis, not only local heroes like Idoli and Partibrejkers but Bach and Vivaldi. They studied the postmodern world of writers like Pynchon and Eco, and their predecessors Borges, Nabokov and Bruno Schulz, and thinkers like Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Barthes and Derrida.

In recent years their literary career became ever more serious. They married and had children. Their musical taste became milder: Cesaria Evora, Madredeus, Bueno Vista Social Club. In poetry the old greatness of Milosz and Celan comes to the surface. The most impressive movie was 'Before the Rain' by the Macedonian director Mancevski. The most durable thinkers proved to be Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, the most amusing the designers of the conspiracy theories that circulate as an explanation for the Balkan wars.

In the nineties their tastes diverge more and more. The individual personalities develop themselves. Now they are writing individuals, no longer members of a subculture or a movement. And that is where their dilemma lies: the choice between artistic isolation and political responsibility, between participating and keeping distance.

After 1989 the writers didn't remain free from political obligations for a very long time. Almost everyone in Café Europa can share this experience. They were thirty back then: too young for a suspicious history with the party and too old to stay indifferent towards the future of their country. Something was being expected from them. The postmodernists were called upon to become nationbuilders. An impossible task. They had become allergic to ideology for good, and couldn't join in with the retorics of the new republics that were created everywhere. That the names of people, minorities and regions became politicized infuriated them.

Above all: how should a writer who during the eighties discovers that identity is a fiction and reality is a construction of language contribute just a few years later to something like a new national identity?

The only reality in which they really feel at home is that of the city. How their cities have changed is something they discuss in the café. Difficult to say, according to Eszter Babarczy: the speed and the volume of city life have accelerated, but so has her perception of speed and volume. One thing is for sure, says Ales Debeljak, the most talented poet of his generation in Slovenia: after the fall of the Wall came the rise of the mall. The market is taking over, be it McDonald's or mafia.

Not a bad thing, he thinks, those contrasts: 'Even the most basic commerce teaches people that choices exist. This situation is preferable to the past. Nostalgia is the last refuge for people without imagination. Just like the false utopia of the multicultural society. Both exclude other possibilities. My city, Ljubljana, exists right on the crack in the middle, and that is why I like it there. A city is like a parachute: it only works when it's open.'

On the final evening two young men with grey hair sit at the table in the middle. Writers from war cities: Migjen Kelmendi from Pristina and Mileta Prodanovic from Belgrade. For a moment I imagine: this is November 1945, and we see a German and Jewish writer sitting there. What have they got to say to each other?

Earlier that night Antonije Zalica has read from his novel about Sarajevo, written after his escape to Amsterdam: how the inhabitants of the besieged city had to become magicians. And Eqrem Basha, the endearing francophone from Pristina, recited old poems already haunted by violence and desolation. This spring, he spent the whole war in his flat, on the ninth floor, with a view on the street below where people were being clubbed down in front of the police office. This too is the new Europe: cities that will not open and plunge into the depths below. Migjen and Mileta sit opposite of each other, their faces tight with concentration. The café is silent. The bustle has fallen still. They are courteous, do not utter accusations and honor one another's heroes: Kis from Belgrade, Surroi from Pristina. They speak mainly about the shortcomings of their own city.

Mileta calls Belgrade a ghetto encircled by a double wall. Neither Milosevic nor the European Union prefers anyone to leave or enter. In the city the new rich build kitsch palaces with stolen money, 'with the death of innumerable innocent people built into their walls.' The apathetic population allows itself to be robbed and deceived by those it elected to power itself. 'The fall of Belgrade is total,' he says, 'in visual, moral, material, intellectual and all other aspects.'

'If you want to cook a living frog you can do it in two ways - you can put the animal into a pot of boiling water and the frog will, naturally, squirm. But if you put the frog into a pot of cold water and start to heat readually up to the point of boiling, the frog will be cooked without any resistance. This slow but steady decay, impoverishment and anesthetisation op people is the main characteristic of life in Yugoslavia during the last decade.'

But at least Mileta still has the capacity of self-recflection. Migjen is worried that the people in Pristina might have lost that capacity, now that the war has come to an end. He tells a strange, true story. They don't have a river there. That is to say: they hád one, but it was buried entirely during communism, when the pollution and the smell became unbearable. 'So they literally built a cement sarcophagus for my river.'

For years no one mentioned the river. Almost everyone had forgotten about it. Only last spring, 'after the deportation of the citizens, when the city was empty of the living, wrapped in death silence, was it possible to hear the weeping and screaming of the river. And now my city and I have a big problem: how do we know how we look without the river? How will the city look at itself without the mirror of the river's surface?'

At that moment Christopher Merrill jumps in. 'We have the same thing in the States! Rivers that were covered are being dug up. Daylighting, is what we call that. Bringing things back into the light of day. And is that not exactly what every writer is trying to do?'

The writers in Café Europa uncover the past. Or the underworld, or countries abroad. This is their way to go and face the future. They may arrive too late, but that is no reason not to take off. Without traveling here and there they would sink away in the lethargy and the cynicism that surround them. It is not for nothing that most of these writers mention New York as their second city.

In the middle of these tirelessly talking men and women, who establish new contacts so easily, I understand the the function of an elite for a society. The new Europe needs a new elite, in the most positive sense of the word, and here they are. Pioneers, bordercrossers, daylighters, influential, but free of power and positions. Heavy drinkers they are not; light travellers they are. Magda Carneci, an elegant poet from Rumania, has already been talking to Krzysztof. Next summer Café Europa will open its doors, as long as it lasts, somewhere on a square in Bukarest.