“For two months the news was more interesting than any TV show.” A BIG Europe Interview with Peter Sloterdijk

In their ‘Project 1989’ BIG Europe publishes witness interviews about this historic moment in time. Their project is a collaboration with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). ECF supports the project. Below you will find excerpts of the original interview published on the site of  BIG Europe.

Luuk van Middelaar: How should we now look back at the moment when others believed, or perhaps wanted to believe, that ’89 was a turning point? Now we are at a point where it is no longer ‘working’, so to speak, neither for the Europeans nor for the rest of the world, where our narrative is no longer credible either. When did this disappointment begin for you? Did you also believe in ’89 that something new had arrived, as almost everyone did? Or was it already quite clear to you early on that it was only a performance or ‘self-narrative’ within this long history?

Peter Sloterdijk: Well, what was not yet quite clear in 1989 was the German exception and this miracle of November ’89, and the fact that we lived for two months in a state of exception. For two months the news was more interesting than any TV show. Those last two months were, in that sense, truly a time of grace. For our generation, it was the only moment in which history was happening in real time, surpassing all other interests, because one suddenly had the feeling of being at the heart of reality and of feeling the heartbeat of reality.

Rem Koolhaas: Isn’t it an incredible mistake to interpret that exact moment as the end of history? It was the beginning of history. It was also not the triumph of democracy, but of the market economy. Where did that mistake come from?

Peter Sloterdijk: The whole problem was essentially created by the fact that Francis Fukuyama produced an ultimately perverse and superficial reading of Kojève’s theories of the end of history. Kojève had already defined the end of history under Stalin: with Stalin creating the realm of working people, the actual motor of history – namely the struggle for recognition – had come to a standstill. Fukuyama acted as if everyone could now feel sufficiently recognized. He did not grasp that Kojève himself had in turn produced a false and caricatured interpretation of Alfred Adler’s theory of neurosis. It is not the sexual neuroses that are the motor of history; the actual drama-generators between people are inferiority complexes, the struggles for recognition among those who believe they must overcompensate for a deficiency within themselves. Kojève projected the struggle for recognition and the dialectic of master and slave onto the erotic relationship. Fukuyama believed that Kojève’s theory was a valid theory of the present age.

Rem Koolhaas: I would like to come back to 1989 in a kind of banal form. When I was working in 1989 as an architect, I was very aware of Mitterrand and of Gorbachev, and I felt that Europe could be reinvented in a new way. There was kind of a pressure on me to articulate the new Europe and what it could be. To what extent do you feel self-criticism of our generation? Why did that not happen, and are we complicit in that failure? And why did we tolerate America driving that whole process?

Peter Sloterdijk: I believe the most important factor is this: Germany, after the opportunity of reunification, had to carry this enormous burden of integrating and normalizing Germany. A great deal of old material was destroyed, industrial capacities were partly dissolved and partly rebuilt, and Germany was politically paralysed for at least ten years. It looked like a euphoric historical moment, a rare case where a border could be changed without war. But this shows the other side: had the East Germans, rather than merely returning to the national community, won their return through a real struggle, today they would be genuine participants in the whole undertaking. But instead, they received this freedom as a gift from Gorbachev, and then the welfare state as a gift from the West Germans.

Image of Peter Sloterdijk, courtesy of Fronteiras do Pensamento (CC)