Along the Trenches: a Journey Through Eastern Europe to Isfahan
By Navid Kermani Polity, 358pp, £18.99/$24.50
Navid Kermani, born and resident in Germany but of Iranian ancestry, is the best kind of scholar: one who writes with a touch as elegant as it is light. His reputation as an expert in Islamic studies and his own Muslim faith have not prevented him from exploring Christianity and Christian art, often with remarkable insight, as in Wonder Beyond Belief. His Between Quran and Kakfa reveals that it was his love of Kafka that drew him to study the Koran, more for its aesthetic than its religious aspects. Now, in this new book, brilliantly translated by Tony Crawford, he recounts recent travels from Cologne, where he lives and teaches, to Poland, parts of the former Soviet Union and Iran, the tormented land of his ancestors.
When I told a Persian friend I was reviewing this book, she exclaimed: “That’s a disgrace! It is like assigning the Scarlet Pimpernel to write about Dante!” I was flattered. As it is, Kermani’s travels here take him to areas whose sufferings over this last century call out for a figure like the Scarlet Pimpernel, who rescued captured aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution. The writer Douglas Murray has observed that Eastern Europe has not been given a holiday from history in the way the West has. This book, in which Kermani does not shirk the ghosts of the Holocaust and the nightmare that was Soviet communism, underlines the acuity of Murray’s judgment.
Kermani notes that aspects of the modern world can make sensitive souls feel that their land is no longer “home”. He finds this in decent people in Cologne who are alarmed by the refugees to whom Angela Merkel has opened the door.
He celebrates Kraków, perhaps Poland’s most beautiful city, with its “mixture of Renaissance, Art Nouveau and Neo-Gothic” that survived the war and “the communist wrecking ball”. But to his sorrow he finds in the city centre an identical backdrop of “the same ‘Coffee Shops’, ‘Quality Hamburgers’ … the same football jerseys – Real, Barcelona, Bayern, Manchester …
the itinerant pop songs” to be found in every other town throughout the world.
Polish intellectuals he meets share the general belief in “Europe”, he feels. This goes, he finds, with an estrangement from their own country and native traditions. Shades of British Remainers and American Democrats …
Kermani seems to have fallen into the same view shared by so many enlightened people that Trump is “authoritarian”. The President can be accused of many faults, including boorishness (at least in public) and self-aggrandisement. Nevertheless, his response to an American media which denounces him as worse than Hitler and Hollywood icons who call for his assassination is hardly that of a tyrant.
Kermani follows the standard line against nationalism as the root of all evil. Even so, he quotes others who feel differently. Paweł Lisicki, editor-in-chief of Do Rzeczy, a magazine aligned with Poland’s government, tells him that “without positive nationalism, there would be no Poland today”, adding that nationalism is “not necessarily aggressive”. Kermani is nevertheless worried about the rights of Muslims, something of a moot point in Poland, where they are a tiny minority.
Fr Adam Boniecki, who edits Tygodnik Powszechny, a controversial Catholic magazine often at odds with the hierarchy, says that the Church has been “a space for freedom, independent of the state”, defending the Poles from Protestant Prussians and Orthodox Russians and preserving the language.
According to Fr Boniecki, many young people are joining religious groups that have broken away from more conventional bodies, since the Church has less meaning for them, and perhaps the more so when the government is so strongly in favour of traditional Catholic practices.
From Poland to Lithuania, Belarus, Odessa, Kiev and Georgia: most of these territories, formerly under Soviet government, have their tragic elements. Lithuania’s Jewish population was largely wiped out during the Second World War. Belarus, which is now considered the least free region in Europe, is described as going from one trauma to another, the town built around the Svietlahorsk pipeline to Russia ravaged with alcoholism, Aids and drug addiction, as well as high rates of murder and suicide.
More comic is Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace. Kermani discovers that 45 per cent of Georgians think kindly of Georgia’s most famous son, whom they praise as a “great Georgian” rather than a Soviet leader. A museum celebrates the old monster as a “young daredevil, a down-to-earth comrade, a respected statesman, a friend to children and a lover of literature”. Georgia is altogether a relief, without remnants of death camps, mass graveyards or abandoned industrial sites.
The state of Iran is no more cheerful than expected. The dreams of Iranian intellectuals gave birth to such monsters as war, revolution, oppression, brain drain, murdered writers, expulsion and families only in touch through international calls. As so often, revolution reveals itself as Frankenstein’s monster. Perhaps now the nightmare of 40 years since the Shah’s downfall may be coming to an end.
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