What freedom is, Eastern Europeans like Lea Ypi can often tell their own story about it. Born in Tirana in 1979, as a little girl she experienced the poverty, lies and survival skills of her family in Stone Age communist Albania. Today she is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, but her memoir is not so much about the intellectual superstructure of communism, but rather about the everyday life into which Enver Hodscha’s isolation and oppressive policies promoted his subjects.
In no other European country, not even in Romania, was the isolation from the world more thorough, nowhere were there more cruel camps than in the small Balkan state, whose partisans had liberated their homeland from the Wehrmacht and Mussolini’s troops themselves – and as a result a stubborn ghost trip derive modernity. After falling out with Tito’s Yugoslavia, then with Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and finally even with China, the Albanian cadres created their European North Korea behind countless bunkers.
European North Korea
This is the absurd but painfully real world that Ypi talks about: about the often rabid art of standing in line for days, about neighborhood wars over ownership of a battered Coke can, about state-imposed atheism. Little Lea was systematically deceived by her family about her origins so that she and her family would not be in greater danger. After 1990, she learned that a number of members of her once upper-class clan had been tortured to death in camps, locked away in psychiatric clinics or committed suicide out of fear.
Only then did the girl realize the secret language of her family: the numerous studies and universities that were mentioned were codes. “College dropouts” meant murdered people, “strict professors” meant torturers; “ambitious students” informers. Nobody in her troubled family should ever have been allowed to study in Albania, not even Lea Ypi. Laconically she describes her delusion as a child. As late as 1990, during the beginning of the popular uprising, she hugged a decapitated Stalin statue, because her admired teacher raised her hand in front of the class, who was once allowed to shake Enver Hodja’s right hand and which she then didn’t dare wash for days. Hodja and Stalin, she believed, loved children more than anything.
There were bunkers on all beaches
Quelle: Getty Images
One has to admire Lea Ypi for familiarizing students with Marxism and historical materialism in seminars today without hating them. Her equanimity towards the fate that brought her grandmother the death penalty in a labor camp and her grandfather is of course also based on the experiences after the liberation of her country. “Free” is the title of her memoirs, because this flexible term acquired a very special flavor for the isolated Albanians after 1990: “When freedom finally came, it was like a dish served frozen. We chewed little, swallowed hastily and never got full.”
First of all, the new freedom meant further impoverishment for many people. Ypi’s father perishes because, as provisional port director, he is unable to dismiss the ragged Roma laborers, as the economic reform plans stipulate. Her mother emigrated to Italy as a geriatric nurse when her last savings were lost in a bank failure. Only her grandmother, who went from being a French-educated bourgeois in Salonika to a humiliated enemy of the people, is able to maintain her austere dignity even in the collapse after 1990.
While the Albanians were previously imprisoned at gunpoint and pitied by the capitalist world, it is now Italian soldiers who are forcibly expelling the refugees back to Albania. While Lea Ypi locks herself away at home for fear of the crazy world and reads old novels, several school friends end up on the streets in western fairytale land. In the end, her family only manages to make ends meet thanks to the language skills of her grandmother, who teaches French and Italian in the kitchen, and also survived the bloody Albanian civil war of 1997, which hardly interested anyone in the West despite thousands of deaths.
By Lea Ypi
Quelle: Ypi © Stuart Simpson/Penguin Random House
What characterizes Lea Ypi’s biography, which has meanwhile led to a respectable academic career, is not cheap celebration of the freedom achieved in the West, but her deep-rooted skepticism as a result of violence, lies, and deprivation. “I learned,” she sums up, “to live with a feeling of insecurity that related to my own existence.” if you would still be able to do it the next day”. Lea Ypi paid the high price of a childhood under Enver Hodscha for this strength. Your beautiful book makes readers reflect that freedom sometimes doesn’t have a price tag – but always has a price.
Lea Ypi: “Free. Growing up at the end of the story”. Translated from the English by Eva Bonné. Suhrkamp, 332 pages, 28 euros