Freedom of the Border. Paul Scheffer

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Introduction: Exploring boundaries

      I was eighteen when I first stood at the Wall that cut Berlin in two. In the summer of 1973, as one of my country’s representatives at the World Festival of Youth and Students, I saw at first hand the ghostly tableau of the East German side. We were housed at the edge of the city and from my window I could see the watchtowers and searchlights at the Wall a short distance away. Its official name was the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the Antifascist Protection Rampart, but in reality it had been built to prevent East German citizens from leaving.

      One Sunday morning sixteen years later I watched as an excavator removed its first segment of the Wall at the Potsdamer Platz, three days after that historic 9 November 1989 when the Wall fell.¹ A huge crowd thronged the square. I leaned on the shoulder of a smiling border guard to get a better view. For twenty-eight years this former traffic intersection at the heart of the city had been an impassable barrier. Now no-man’s-land was filling up with a cheerful multitude, and together we experienced the beginnings of a new vision of the old continent.

I well remember the sense of relief in the years that followed the end of the Cold War. At last we were rid of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe so brutally. The oppression of the Eastern part of the continent was over and the ‘peace dividend’ was quickly cashed in. Major cuts to defence expenditure became possible, with worries about territorial integrity and border security resolved. After 1989 everything was going to be different.

      Now, more than thirty years later, we again find ourselves talking endlessly about borders. The influx of refugees provokes emotional responses. There is apparent agreement about the need to improve the security of Europe’s external borders, but still no sign of a real determination to act. In fact European division on this point is greater than ever, partly as a result of moral diffidence: on what grounds can we deny others the right to settle in our part of the world?

      This book is about the open society and its borders. I’ve always been suspicious of the notion that we live in a borderless world. It’s a self-image that betokens a rather inward-looking attitude. Because what is left to be discovered if there’s no outside world? The value of crossing borders can be understood only by those willing to acknowledge their significance.

      My approach to the issue has been shaped in part by the history of my own family. One of my grandfathers, Herman Wolf, was born in Cologne; the other, Lou Scheffer, in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. It was made clear to me at a very early age that the world is bigger than the country into which I was born. I grew up in a liberal environment in which the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Heinrich Böll were venerated (a minor rapprochement between the French and the Germans), while at the same time the jazz of Nina Simone and Stan Getz was embraced (a minor rapprochement between black and white).

Along with curiosity, I inherited anxiety, which manifested itself from an early age. While clearing my mother’s flat after she died, I came upon my father’s wartime arrest warrant and a couple of letters he had written to his parents from the prison camp in Amersfoort. The war was never a subject of conversation between us at home, since my parents didn’t want to see their children burdened by it. All the same, that period in history was a looming presence, all the more so because it was unthinkable that any of us would ever mention it.

      For me the border is first of all a childhood memory. There was one border we were never allowed to cross, between the Netherlands and Germany. My mother refused to step beyond it until well into the 1970s, which was strange, because we lived quite close by, in Arnhem. Her refusal was a gesture of respect for her Jewish father, Herman Wolf, who moved to Amsterdam with his parents around the turn of the twentieth century.² We were not allowed past the border that, many years before, he had crossed in the opposite direction along with his parents.

      His life and work in Amsterdam in the 1930s were those of a literary generation, enthusiastic about humanism but at the same time filled with a deep pessimism. Influenced philosophically by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, yet also marked by the First World War, they were at the start of a century now sometimes described as an age of extremes. Wolf witnessed the СКАЧАТЬ