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I’ve taken advantage of my stay in Paris to unearth in a library a book of poems that for years have been nestling, half-remembered, in my head. These are the

Chansons des filles de mai

, produced by an Italian writer, Alba de Cespedes, who was living in Paris during ’68. They aren’t her personal story, but a kind of emotional documentary of the young women she met during that year’s rebellion, a patchwork of very simple poems constructed from their conversations and self-justifications. This lets her capture both the angry euphoria of the girls who know themselves to be at the centre (or the start?) of a storm — and also the uncertainty of those feeling isolated, uncertain, constrained by motherhood or shyness, by their parents of by their own depressive lack of interest.

My friend Sara dramatised the collection in 2003, in the immediate aftermath of failed anti-war protests, and the slightly more distant aftermath of the Genoa G8 summit. But while the connections between times are real, they are also oddly insignificant. The poems are infused with politics, but they aren’t political poems. Sara writes of them as about ‘the will to live out ideals through your own life’. For me, what is even more touching is the recognition that desire can be worthwhile, even when the dreams are impossible. Or when the dreams are failing: this poem, describing the end of the protests, is the one I keep on remembering:

30 Mai 1968




Ce soir, notre quartier,

sur la rive

gauche,

porte le deuil de ses rêves.

Derrière les fenêtres sans lumières

— orbites noires dans la pâleur des façads —

des yeux vides de regards

fixent les rues désertes.

Encore un soir,

le dernier,

nous serons entre nous:

les fous d’amour et de révolte.

Cette rive sera encore

la nôtre;

à nous seuls, prison, ghetto,

léproserie.

Ils resterons sur la leur.

Ils n’oseront pas traverser

la frontière

de la Seine.

Ils nous reconnaissent le droit

à cete veilée funèbre,

à cette liberté

surveillée — de loin —

par une armée qui veille

elle aussi,

qui épie

notre silence méprisant,

inquiétant.

Quartier Latin, les étudiants

veillent dans la cour

de la Sorbonne.

La place de l’Odéon

serre entre ses bras

ronds

cette belle nuit de printemps.

Les mots des graffiti

qui pavoisent les fac,

circulent comme des feux follets

parmi les tables des cafés-tabac

du boulevard Saint-Germain.

Dans nos rues, coupables

de complicité,

les pavés-munitions arrachés

ont été replacés hâtivement,

sévèrement.

C’est sur les mains de la jeunesse,

sur les pierres de son chemin

qu’ils rouleront demain,

de l’autre rive,

vers le week-end rassurant.

Dans leurs mansardes

autour de la Sorbonne,

dans des chambres de bonne

tapissées de posters

— le regard fier du Che –,

des garçons et des filles, armés

de poésie et de colère,

font l’amour avec un plaisir

désespéré,

mouillé des larmes.

Ces garçons aux cheveux longs,

ces filles aux jupes courtes,

sont les citoyens de nos rues

de la rive

gauche.

L’odeur âpre de leurs corps

d’écoliers,

est l’air même

de notre quartier.

Partout, dans le Sixième,

sont affichés des tracts

en forme de poèmes.

Demain matin,

de bonne heure,

on les recouvrira

avec des publicités

de machines à laver

det de frigidaires.

Les hirondelles du Luxembourg

poussent des cris d’adieu.

Des pranches amassées sur le boulevard

s’exhale un dernier relent

de gaz;

mais rien n’en restera

lorsqu’ils viendront de l’autre rive

se faire photographier,

sur les squelettes des voitures

brûlées.

O nos enfants de mai,

héros de nuits criblées d’étoiles

et de coups.

On oppose le fer et l’acier

aux roses de l’imagination.

Aux carrefours, le long

des boulevards,

les yeux perçants

sur les toits des voitures

de police;

les paniers à salade, les ambulances,

les hommes habillés, casqués,

masqués de noir,

les boucliers noirs;

toute la panoplie

sinistre

de la répression est prête

contre une révolution

qui n’aura pas lieu.

Les câbles du téléphone

traversent le ciel silencieux:

Littré, Odéon, Médicis

ne répondent pas

ce soir.

Derrière nos fenêtres closes,

près des téléphones muets,

des transistors éteints,

nous veillons en silence

nos espoirs matraqués.

Mais les gestes de nos enfants

de mai

restent — ineffaçables —

dans l’air le temps l’espace

de ce quartier,

sur la rive

gauche.



— Alba de Cespedes

Oh, Dresden. You never did have a great reputation for open-mindedness, but this story takes the biscuit. An Egyptian woman living in Dresden takes somebody to court for racial abuse. She wins, he appeals, then

stabs her to death in the courtroom

. Police in the court step in, and heroically

shoot her husband

, him being the only person trying to stop the murder in progress. It’s not much surprise that [Egyptians are pretty pissed off](http://mideasti.blogspot.com/2009/07/marwa-al-sherbini-case-and-outrage-of.html)

In somewhat more trivial news from the city, Dresden zoo has [come to its senses](http://www.thelocal.de/society/20090710-20513.html), and accepted that

naming a baboon after Barack Obama

might not be the best way of honouring the President’s recent visit to the city. Thank God for small mercies.

[Rowenna](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/25/environmentalism-religion) has just dug up the old cliché about environmentalism being a religion. This one tends to irritate me — not because it’s wrong, but because it only gets interesting if you push it a little further.

Rowenna’s approach is to take a comically minimalist definition of religion, one which includes any moral code. So of her conversion from Christianity to environmentalism, she writes that “

being good was no longer doing right by God, but doing right by the planet

“.

At least when people talked about communism as a ‘secular religion’, they had a few more elements to point to. The communists had their holy books in the works of Marx, their priesthood in the vanguard, and ascetic discipline in their terrifyingly dedicated lives.

You could find many other common points between religious and political movements: a sense of community and shared purpose, a gallery of martyred saints, holidays (think of May 1 as a spring holy-day for atheist workers).

I’m not so interested in debating whether or not political movements are religious ones,

per se

(briefly and non-rigorously: if it doesn’t include belief in the supernatural, I wouldn’t call it a religion). But I

do

think politics (in a broad sense) can occupy much of the same ground as religion. In Durkheim’s terms, they’re both cures for anomie, malaise confronted with the lack of any externally-imposed social order. Despite being very uncomfortable with the apparently conservative implications of the idea of anomie (i.e. the suggestion that the masters must give people rules and orders, to prevent them falling into devient despondency), I find it a useful concept for describing something that seemingly afflicts a lot of people (including me, and a lot of my friends). And the answer has to include building your own morals, and community, and saints and icons, and identity. Whether that comes from your religion, your politics, your family, your subculture, from music, art or even from the pursuit of money — it’s all the same. [My lodestone here, as everywhere else, is

The Invisibles

, with its existentialist vision of flexible, shared personalities, each inhabiting its own utopia].

From this perspective: if something looks like a religion, that probably just means it’s doing its cultural job of providing a bulwark against the meaninglessness of life. Greenies should be proud of being called cultists, and everybody else should be horrified that so few other political movements are strong enough to inspire more than grudging tolerance from their followers.

I appear to have no hair. This wasn’t exactly the haircut I was looking for.

Oh well, I’ll just have to find something else to hide behind.

ETA

: Maybe I should try getting it dyed, if I could manage that in a way that would work on dark hair, and wouldn’t eventually need to be grown out and cut. That, or a piercing somewhere.

I like to imagine that, within in the now-forgotten mass of Soviet-era culture, somebody must have tried a literal take on Marx’s rhetorical flourishes.

Because Marx was obviously a fan of horror. It’s in many of his catchiest phrases – the spectre of communism, tradition which “weights like a nightmare on the brains of the living”, or capital as “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour”

Derrida apparently devoted a [book](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415910455/dhalgrenstevensh) to this theme; personally, I’d much rather encounter it as children’s television.

A few weeks ago I finally saw my first Fassbinder film. [Fassbinder](http://jclarkmedia.com/fassbinder/index.html) was an obsessive prodigy who dominated German cinema of the 70s, churning out 41 films in 13 years before working and snorting himself to an early death at the age of 37. He has been mythologized as a romantic hero, as a driven man surrounded by a clique of neurotic hedonists, and as a sadomasochist obsessed with the cruelty underlying love.

‘[Angst essen seele auf](http://jclarkmedia.com/fassbinder/fassbinder19.html)’ (ali: fear eats the soul) fits into that stereotype, though perhaps not in the way a plot summary would suggest. Emmi, a middle-aged German cleaner, meets Moroccan migrant worker Ali in a Munich bar. They begin a relationship and, to the disgust of society at large, eventually marry.

Racism and social opprobrium are omnipresent, but as background rather than theme. The fear of the title isn’t of foreigners or violence or economic hardship; it is fear of small acts of cruelty from your friends, as they protect whatever small scraps of social respect they have by kicking out at anybody below them. The sole cure for fear is desperation; characters come together only when they have nothing to lose.

The first scene covers all this in microcosm. Emmi walks into an unfamiliar bar, half-full of migrant workers. She’s rigid with anxiety, not knowing where to look or where to put herself, aware that all eyes are upon her. But she’s here, overcoming fear and cultural barriers, because she has nothing else: her husband is long dead, her children ignore her, her work gives her nothing but shame. If she had just a little more self-respect, just a little more status to defend, she would retreat back into a world of petty closed-mindedness. Fairly soon, she will. So will everyone else in the film: all the characters betray themselves and their companions through small acts of social cowardice.

Maybe it’s because I’m leaving, but Berlin seems even more politically alive than usual at the moment. Today, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of students have been on the streets, as [part](http://www.taz.de/1/zukunft/wissen/artikel/1/bildung-statt-banken/) of a week-long [strike](http://www.bildungsstreik-berlin.de/page/index.php?show=call) against attempts to privatize and charge for education.

The government response has been, rather pathetically, to [call them](http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/0,1518,630965,00.html) ‘behind the times’. Bleating that markets = modernization = good was pretty shaky at the best of times, but now it seems positively ludicrous. And the students’ [demands](http://www.bildungsstreik-berlin.de/page/index.php?show=call) are much saner:

– Self-directed life and learning

– Free access to education, and the abolition of tuition fees, training fees, and childcare costs

– Public financing of the education system, without corporate influence

– Democratization of educational institutions, and strengthening of their self-government

I went along to support the Berlin demonstration earlier today, and found myself strangely weepy. I don’t know if they can win, mind, given the current hopelessness of the SPD and the rest of the European centre-left.

From a more radical corner, the squatting scene is [headed for a busy week](http://rockstar.blogsport.de/2009/05/27/heisser-juni/). [One place](http://brunnen183.blogsport.de/) is due for eviction tomorrow — and then on Saturday comes [something more ambitious](http://tempelhof.blogsport.de/) — a massive, and pre-announced, attempt to squat the currently disused Tempelhof airport. It sounds insane, but I’m gradually coming to see the logic of it. Turning an abandoned space into a temporary hippie playground appeals both to my head and my heart.