Update on local abominations, written for Wildcat (Germany): where recent events in other countries are also cut to the quick.

A season in (the vestibule of) hell

It has been 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are ‘celebrating' this anniversary at a time when global capitalism and liberal democracy, the so-called winners of the Cold War struggle between East and West, find themselves in one of the deepest economic and political crises since the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the global turmoil that followed.

The famous Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky once described the experience of exile for a Russian as “nostalghia” – he insisted that the word not be translated into proper English, but rather retain the Italian translation of the Russian word "??????????." For Tarkovsky, who evinced a peculiar brand of medievalist Russian nationalism throughout his work, a Russian leaving their homeland would experience a form of spiritual and physical death; and, indeed, the central character, the semi-autobiographical poet, Andrei Gorchakov, does actually die at the end of his film Nostalghia.

 Books reviewed in this essay are:   

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer (1944)