“Gesine has made herself the centre of the class.”
A report card, Berlin, she was thirteen or fourteen. She read it and thought: damn, that is not right. Her mother, who thought about other people the way the rest of us breathe, had been telling her for years that being quick is not a licence to take up the room.
She told me this when i asked what education would have to look like for the rooms she builds, forty people who disagree at one table, to become unnecessary. For that kind of talking to be a habit.
Her answer is that education is not a canon. It is Verständigungsfähigkeit, the capacity to reach an understanding with people who are other.
She reached for Kant’s three maxims of common sense from the Critique of Judgement. Think for yourself. Think from the standpoint of everyone else. Think consistently. The second is not empathy, she insisted, it is cognitive: you put yourself where the other person stands and look. The third is what makes you trustworthy, to others and to yourself. Not this today and that tomorrow, but owning the contradiction between what you said on Tuesday and what you see on Thursday.
If you walk into a conversation assuming you are right and the only job is to convince, there is no understanding. There is domination, politely conducted.
Her teachers at the Lycée français had a habit. Exams came back as a stack, best on top, worst at the bottom. The boys who performed not caring would check, from the corner of an eye, whether their chequered cover was the one at the bottom. The fear is built into the stacking. And it is unearned, she said, because the ones at the bottom are not the worse thinkers. They think differently. Often more originally.
One of them stood at the blackboard not knowing what the lesson was about, because he had been somewhere else. He was the pianist of their pantomime group. Reinhard Mey. The school chronicle later listed him next to her among its distinguished alumni.
That stack is the whole problem in miniature. Propositions are easy to grade. Everything that matters more, the procedures, the perspectives, the participation, you cannot stack.
So i proposed an experiment: what if freedom from fear were the first principle of a school? She stopped me. Nobody lives without fear. She grew up on an unpaved street in the north of Berlin where the lamps did not always work, and at seven she ran for the garden gate in the dark. The question is whether fear paralyses you or you are stronger than it. I wrote once, about reading Fritz Riemann at sixteen, that a fear becomes bearable the moment you find the question it is the answer to. So i corrected myself. The goal is not no fear. The goal is no fear of the fear.
She made it concrete. No fear of people. A school in which saying what you think gets an answer instead of a humiliation.
Her father raised both children as what he called poor heathens, so that they would choose for themselves. It cost her Catholic mother the sacraments for years. Gesine chose baptism after reading Aquinas on why a decision taken out of obedience is not a moral decision. The Church could not command her. That, too, is education.
I told her about the walk along the Landwehrkanal ten years ago, and the answer that arrived only when i stopped demanding it be flattering. Our vulnerability. Machines can be wounded. Machines can be repaired. We cannot. I wrote it up as you cannot be repaired. My guess is that this shared wound is the red thread that makes a person want to learn at all. You learn in order to heal, and to stop the next wound, yours and theirs.
She was not sure it is the only thread, and gave me hers. What impresses her in a human being is not brilliance. Not Horowitz at speed. It is a strong will joined to goodwill for others, pointed at the difference between good and evil and held there, stubbornly. A model can compare every definition of evil ever written. Choosing, existentially, and then standing in it: that she does not see. Her party is writing a new programme. The machine takes excellent minutes and cannot draw a quintessence out of anything.
Then she went to the darkest version. Primo Levi, nearly dead of thirst, finding a dripping pipe in Auschwitz and keeping it for himself and one friend. He never forgave himself. How free is a man dying of thirst? Not very. Still a little. And wherever there is a little freedom, there is responsibility. Her father used to drive past Oranienburg and smell something. He went and found out what it was. Most people smelled it and chose not to know, because knowing would have asked something of them.
Education, then, is what you owe from the day you can read.
Verantwortung, the German word for responsibility, has the word for answer inside it. Antwort. An educated person is not someone who can recite Ronsard at a dinner in Paris, though she can, and has. It is someone who can stand up in public and answer for what they did, without fear of the fear.
And you can only answer if someone asks.
Next time we go concrete: what a politics, an economy, a school would look like that runs on good questions.
Ask.
PS: We spoke in German. English subtitles run the whole way.
