AfD took ~44% in Saxony-Anhalt yesterday — former East Germany, which sharpens the point. Draft:
AfD just took 44% in Saxony-Anhalt. Former East Germany. Highest far-right result in a German state since 1945.
It sent me back to a Georgian philosopher almost nobody outside the post-Soviet world has heard of: Merab Mamardashvili. I first read him in the 90s as a teenager. One sentence of his I couldn't crack: life in the Soviet Union is an experience you can learn nothing from.
Learn nothing? Everyone around me had suffered plenty. Suffering teaches, no?
No. That was his point. An event only becomes experience when you think it through and give it a form — a word, a memory you can argue with, an institution that holds it. The USSR killed that step. Language was replaced by slogans, every event arrived pre-explained by the Party, nothing was ever finished. People suffered enormously and the suffering led nowhere. Zombies with biographies that never happened to them.
That is why post-Soviet nostalgia exists. You can't reject what you never actually lived through. What's left is the feeling without the content: "it was stable." No it wasn't. You just never got to think about it.
That is why Russia repeats itself like a metronome. Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine. Same mistake, same graves, same silence. The lesson was never learned because it was never experienced.
And that is why the old GDR votes the way it does. Two dictatorships, zero processing. Forty years of "as if" — then 1990 changed the furniture and called it a day. Now someone sells them a past that never existed, and they buy it, because they never got to process the one that did.
The West isn't immune. The moment your politics runs on pseudo-speech — slogans that describe nobody's life, spectacle instead of argument — you start manufacturing the same thing: events that pass through people and leave nothing behind.
Mamardashvili died in 1990 in a Moscow airport, flying home to Georgia. Took me thirty years to understand one sentence of his. Saxony-Anhalt just proved him right again.
La Peste (Albert Camus), épilogue.
Ecoutant, en effet, les cris d’allégresse qui montaient de la ville, Rieux se souvenait que cette allégresse était toujours menacée. Car il savait ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et qu’on peut lire dans les livres, que le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparaît jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’années endormi dans les meubles et le linge, qu’il attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et que, peut-être, le jour viendrait où, pour le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse.
CAMUS, La Peste, 1947.