“These ridiculous visas belong back in the depths of the 19th century!”

The historian and journalist Karl Schlögel is a traveller, observer and storyteller who perceives processes of change and reinterprets them unusually in a manner that is more essayistic than academic.
The Berlin journalist Bert Rebhandl talked with Karl Schlögel in the following interview.

Bert Rebhandl: Mr. Schlögel, where exactly is Marijampole, the city mentioned in the title of your new book?
Karl Schlögel: Marijampole is not all that well-known a place. Even when you mention it to Lithuanians, they look at you sceptically. The name probably makes them think of dubious dealings. I had my attention drawn to it because in the nineties there were always these convoys of Lithuanian cars on the Berlin Ring Road, both private cars and car transporters. I investigated where these treks led to, and found out that at the place where Poland, Byelorussia and Lithuania meet, there is this town Marijampole, which is known for its huge car bazaar.
Later, I even once saw it from a plane – one enormous car park. Marijampole seems to me to be one of the relays that make up Europe: it is a bazaar, but one that specialises in cars. For me it represents a place for catching up on automobilisation, and thus a significant transformation factor. You can see here that people did not wait for the state to come up with some programme or other for them when they lost their jobs. Hundreds, thousands of people went into this business, which extends to the west between the Ruhr area and Belgium and Lithuania. These are people who became unemployed overnight, who have somehow got over it and now study the used-car adverts in regional German newspapers. They have taken responsibility for themselves.
There is a third aspect that interests me: Marijampole is only a mediatory point. The cars go on to Dushanbe or Tashkent, sometimes in bulk. Much more happens than just the sale of a car. I always have to think of the word “caravanserai”, and the cosmopolitanism it implies. To me, these people are really heroes, because they carry on the everyday business of normalisation.

You call these people the “contrabandists of compensation” – a nice description. But it also involves a problem. European institutions and politicians want a transformation from the top, regulated change and compensation. But what you describe is a huge informal sector.
I have undertaken various attempts to bring these two spheres into contact with one another. It would be much better if there were fewer conferences on cultural self-images and more contact between these spheres. Here, the industrious and eager EU bureaucrats moving in their corridors; there, the streams of lorries, the customs checkpoints, the railway stations, the cheap airlines, the queues in front of embassies, and naturally the trade in women as well. These are streams that barely intersect with those of bureaucracy.
Malgorzata Irek, who did a long-term study on smuggling between Berlin and Warsaw, found out that something has changed. That the famous “Polish cleaning lady” in Berlin stands for a whole generation of extremely successful businesswomen. It is in these crawling streams that things happen. If Europe is to become something, it has to adapt to this ant-like activity. The heroic phase of individuals coping with crises is over; a certain stabilisation has taken place.

Does that mean there is too little knowledge about everyday life in Europe?
No, the knowledge is there. For example, if you meet someone who tells you that he went to the Ukraine from Bavaria to modernise an old brewery in Odessa that was already Bavarian before the war, then this person basically lives out the whole history of New Europe.
These people who work on the spot, sometimes as if they had been dropped in by parachute, who are not experts on eastern Europe or on transformation: they rely for their existence on taking things extremely seriously. Opening a bank, a branch of a supermarket – that requires unbelievably concrete expert knowledge that you cannot obtain at any institute these days.

Within eastern Europe there is a north-south divide. The Baltic region seems to be adapting faster than Bulgaria or Romania, for example. Turkey is an interface – in a religious and cultural regard as well. How do you see Turkey’s future in Europe.
I am not in favour of Turkey’s becoming a full member of the EU. I am in favour of taking the European inheritance of the Ottoman Empire seriously and offensively pulling Turkey towards Europe. But I am against any comprehensive, schematic integration. The EU will not be able to take that in the long term.
We must develop ways of activating the European element in Turkey that are more intelligent and precise. I use the image of dovetailing. Hinges need to be created, irreversible points of cooperation. This is of course difficult as long as anything but full membership seems inferior,
Against the background of the Russian experience, the modernisation of Turkey is one of the big success stories of the 20th century. If we compare the dissolution of the Russian empire with that of the Ottoman Empire, there are many amazing parallels, including the large-scale crime that took place at the start of modern Turkey and the huge development of violence in the Soviet Union. In the long term, the modernisation of Turkey has actually been more lasting.

Full accession to the EU is now a question of national pride in Turkey as well.
It has been turned into that, and that’s a bad thing. I am a fan of Turkey, I’m very impressed by the combination of tradition and modernity, by the traditional working culture and the things that have come into the country by virtue of its belonging to NATO, to the “West”. I am full of admiration for the way modern Turkish cities “tick” – especially against the background of my experiences in Russia, where things are extremely slow and difficult.

So where does “your” Europe end?
Europe is primarily a place, a small peninsula in the Eurasian land mass, as Paul Valéry said. Normally, people say: Europe is not only a place, but a system of values. I define Europe as a place. Here, there were Adolf Hitler and Walter Benjamin, Lenin and Chagall, glory and disaster. We cannot just choose the good things. This place, with all its uncertainties, is simply the continent, up to the Urals, up to Asia Minor. The whole Aegean was a European sea.
I am naturally of the opinion that Russia is a part of European culture, but I would never say that Russia should be taken into the Union, because it is really a continent in its own right that extends to the Pacific.
I am in favour of increasing the permeability of borders and mobility. These days there are already corridors between the cities, for example, between Moscow, Minsk and Warsaw. What is happening in the Ukraine, for example, is sensational. There, there is a one-sided opening; it is like the Wall coming down a second time. You can go to Kiev without a visa and look at the first mother of eastern European cities. Neighbourhood that becomes routine is the foundation of Europe. These visas belong back in the depths of the 19th century! We must find other forms of security. The people who would benefit most from a modern visa practice would not be the criminals, but ordinary people.

You are neither a sociologist in the classical sense, nor a statistician. How would you term the method of observation that you employ?
I have a different matrix. I have to visit certain cities regularly (you even have to go to Moscow every three months), regularly travel certain routes, and keep a sort of long-term diary. These are my attempts to measure the process of transformation. There are cities that are “out of the woods”. You can say that about Krakow, Poznań, Wrocław. There, a certain permanence has prevailed against the “bombshell” effects. There have been not only cosmetic corrections, but a regeneration. I look for signs of a renewal, the opposite indications to those of collapse and bitterness. You can see the forced industrialisation with your bare eyes. What is much more interesting is the almost invisible first signs: Is something in the air? Will it be strong enough to prevail? That is my matrix of observation.

You are now teaching at the European University Viadrina. Does this institution already do justice to this title?
I have to say yes and no. Almost forty percent of the students come from eastern Europe, mostly Poland. The situation is therefore more a bi-national one, not a plural one. This does not yet mean that everyone has adapted to this Europeanness. There are also very strong conventional elements. The opportunities of operating in a new territory are not being used enough yet. The generation of students being educated now has grown up without any historical memory of Solidarnosc and East Germany, and moves on both sides of the border as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This generation will have the task of shaping a real European university.


Karl Schlögel, born in 1948, was a professor of eastern European history at Constance University before taking up a position at the European University Viadrina in 1994. In 2002 he published the book “Die Mitte liegt ostwärts. Europa in Übergang”. His most recent publication is “Marjampole oder Europas Wiederkehr aus dem Geist der Städte” (both published by Hanser Verlag).

The interview was carried out by Bert Rebhandl, who lives in Berlin as a freelance journalist and author.