The debate about the Ukraine war and how to react to it has led to upheavals in the German PEN Club: Deniz Yücel, acting president of the writers’ association and WELT journalist, announced the closure at an event of the Lit.Cologne literature festival last week of the airspace over Ukraine was considered a possible option. As a result, the former President of the German PEN, Regula Venske, and the former Presidents Gert Heidenreich, Christoph Hein, Josef Haslinger and Johano Strasser publicly called for Yücel to resign. Herbert Wiesner, Secretary General of the German PEN from 2009 to 2013, reacted below with an open letter, which we document below.
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Dear Regula, dear former presidents of the German PEN, dear colleagues,
If my friend Wilfried F. Schoeller were still alive, I would have summoned a group of former General Secretaries with him and a few others and would have asked him, as my predecessor in office, to explain why the German writers who had fled Hitler in the International Brigades opposed the Spanish Republic the fascists defended. As someone who knew about that civil war, I would have asked him why so many German left-wing intellectuals were involved there, even though they were certainly not militarists. And I would also have wanted to discuss Thomas Mann’s speeches to his “German listeners” with Wilfried and why Thomas Mann was convinced that the destruction of Lübeck was right; numerous German readers were outraged.
I don’t want to join Secretary General Peuckmann now. He has not attended the meetings of his Executive Committee for weeks and is now – using the office’s digital transmission options – waving through the second call for his colleagues and his President to be dismissed or resigned. This is what happened at the opening of the alternative Leipzig Book Fair, which crowned our PEN on Saturday with three outstanding events. The public will be more surprised; this is not good for the reputation of our PEN.
Think of PEN Charter, Figure 4
You, the former presidents, are now accusing your successor, who was only elected in October, of having spoken at the opening of Lit.Cologne for a military-backed closure of the airspace over Ukraine, as demanded by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and thus risk a dangerous escalation. Deniz Yücel had no mandate from our PEN members for such a statement.
No, he did not have such a specific mandate. How? Our PEN does not speak with a single voice. Deniz Yücel, who was of course also presented as PEN President, freely expressed his opinion as an author and made use of this freedom, as provided for in Section 4 of the Charter of International PEN. Friedrich Schiller called this freedom of thought. Former presidents have also freely declared their political beliefs on public platforms without first consulting the members. Having been voted a vote of confidence in them has not deprived them of their right to freedom of speech.
No isolated opinion
Deniz Yücel demanded nothing else in Cologne than Sasha Marianna Salzmann, the German writer born in Volgograd in 1985, did, or elsewhere the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize winner Katja Petrowskaja, who was born in Kyiv, or the world-famous Ukrainian writer Katja Petrowskaja Writer Jurij Andruchowytsch or the most prominent German historian of Eastern Europe, Karl Schlögel, whose voice breaks when he talks about the victims of this war ordered by Putin, which one cannot call war in Russia. Karl Schlögel is a member of the German PEN center and he is married to a Russian.
We know that if you want to secure the skies over Ukraine, then if necessary NATO troops have to intervene in this war – with technical and electronic means, but also militarily. It is justified to shy away from such dangerous expansions. I admit to being afraid of having to send my grandson, who is still a student, to the war. But I also know that if Russian military planes were systematically prevented from overflying Ukrainian territory and firing their missiles, many Ukrainian children, pregnant women, fighting men, or their mothers and fathers would still be alive. One must be allowed to think about the pros and cons, about this or that horror of war. There is no decision about war or peace here.
Modernization of the PEN
Let’s go to Gotha (where this year’s PEN annual conference will take place in May, ed. editor) discuss it, but do not call on our incumbent President to resign because he came to a different conclusion out of the same deep concern that concerns you. Do not deprive him of the freedom of his thought. Talk to him and also talk about the manners of this presidium, about rudeness that led to injuries, and talk about the disturbed relationship between the presidium and the office. There has been misconduct on all sides. You can learn from this if everyone first learns to approach each other again – with mutual respect, but also with intelligent curiosity about what this presidency wants to contribute to the modernization of our association and can contribute.
Please give all these very committed colleagues a good chance, and please do not call for resignation or deselection in the first half of their term of office without even hinting at how and with whom things should go on. And one more thing: It cannot be your wish that Deniz Yücel, for whose freedom we fought, is no longer allowed to say what he thinks.
Herbert Wiesner, born in 1937, headed the Literaturhaus Berlin until 2003. As a literary critic, he regularly writes for WELT.