Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, Gesine Schwan said something about herself that felt like a diagnosis of many of the people around me.
She said the intellectual interest was never the main thing. It was only ever instrumental. She was never trying to understand the problem for the pleasure of understanding it. She was trying to get the tension out of the room, and the thinking was a tool for that, and nothing more. Which, she noted dryly, made her rather uninteresting to the pure theorists and philosophers, who were quite happy to go on turning the contradictions over and over.
Sit with that for a moment. Sixty years as a political scientist and her honest account of the whole enterprise is that she picked up the analysis the way you pick up a wrench.
I don’t know how to say this gently, so i won’t. Our bubble has an analysis problem. We have built one of the most sophisticated diagnostic apparatus in human history. We can name the multipolar traps, the generator functions, the metacrisis, the shape of the thing from six angles at once. We have podcasts about the diagnosis. We have podcasts about the podcasts. And when you ask what has actually moved, the answer usually is: “a conference/a gathering”.
Gesine is eighty-three. She is actively building towards the goal of upgrading the democratic setup. She raised something north of two hundred thousand euros this year to put people in a room about inheritance tax. She doesn’t stop for gatherings.
She traced back for me where this comes from.
She could not bear fairy tales as a child. Her mother tried to read her and her brother Nils Holgersson, and Gesine made her stop, because she could not tolerate that the boy had been taken away from his family. After that her mother read it to her brother alone. Literature, in her words, had to end well, which she cheerfully admits is a catastrophic requirement to bring to literature. Her brother-in-law, a professor of German, spent decades teasing her about it. He would come back from his seminars with something he was teaching and tell her, very solemnly, that he had found one she was allowed to read. “This one ends beautifully.”
She knows exactly how childish it sounds. She has been ironising it for seventy years. And she has also never let go of the underlying conviction, which she stated to me like this:
There is a good ending. But you have to do something for it.
That is not optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will probably be fine. Instead, it is a structural claim with a bill attached. The good ending exists as a real possibility in the world, but it does not arrive on its own. And the gap between the possibility and the arrival is filled with your labour. Or not at all.
So what does she actually do?
She builds rooms. This is the through-line of her life. A university on the Oder, situated where two countries had every historical reason not to speak, built around the premise that they would. Kommunale Entwicklungsbeiräte, now running in ten German municipalities, which sit local politics, administration, business and organised civil society at one table across a year and hand the council a set of recommendations they all signed. And now the trialogue on inheritance tax, funded in significant part by family businesses who would like to be taxed fairly, which is a sentence i had to hear twice.
Every one of these is the same engineering problem: how do you construct a space in which people who arrive as opponents leave as something else, maybe even allies.
She is very clear that this is not done by being right: these things are not a question of arguments. She herself is not short of arguments. She has never been short of arguments. The question is what the other person can actually bear, and if you have not built for that, arguments are noise.
Here is how she is building for it this time: she has secured a Catholic prelate to open the trialogue. Twenty minutes on the common good. The man has been the church’s link to Berlin politics for decades, he is thoroughly embedded in the conservative milieu, he is not remotely conservative, and he is extremely funny. Which means the party that is her main obstacle on the issue at hand will find it socially difficult to walk out. She was still enjoying it while she described it to me.
Call that manipulation if you like. I think it is the difference between wanting to be right and wanting the thing to happen.
What makes this perspective possible is a certain stance. She is a believer, and what her faith gives her is not comfort. It is a floor. The world was not made in order to end. Standing on that floor, she can look directly at the horrors, all of them, the full catalogue of what is currently being done to people and to the living world, without flinching and without dissociating, because she is not looking into the abyss while standing on nothing. She said this ability is precisely what the faith buys her. Without it she thinks she might hesitate to look.
And it obliges her. For her, believing is not obeying. It is being addressed as a partner, and being addressed as a partner means the work is yours. Giving up is simply not among the options on the table. She batted away the question of why anyone would take that on as irrelevant. You just do.
Near the end she quoted the Godesberg Programme at me, the line in it about a certain political project being a permanent task, and she applied it not to politics but to herself. To the daily, unfinishable work of getting the balance right between what she takes in and what she keeps out.
That is what i am taking from this hour, and it is what i want to hand to you.
The work is not a summit. It is not a framework you install and maintain. It is not a diagnosis you eventually complete, at which point the action phase begins. It is a permanent task, performed today, and then drifted from, and then performed again tomorrow.
Which means you are not late. There is no version of this where the analysis is finally finished and you are cleared to begin. There is only whether you did something today for the good ending.
This is the good starting of a series with Gesine. We laid the ground this time, because everything we want to get into afterwards depends on knowing how she sees.
PS: We spoke in German. English subtitles run the whole way, so nothing is lost.
