Authors: Neal Ascherson
A good many of the older Lazi generation think in this way. But far more spectacular examples of this approach can be found in the Caucasus. The row about Mingrelian and Georgian — whether Mingrelian should be taught in schools, and if so in what script, and whether it is a 'language' at all or just a peasant argot of Georgian -has been raging for a century. It is fairly easy to understand (if not to accept) Georgian cultural imperialism and Georgian paranoia about separatist movements within Georgia which are deliberately fomented from distant Moscow. What is much more startling is the furious involvement of Mingrelian intellectuals and politicians in the fight to prevent the upgrading of their own tongue to a literary language, from the pre-Revolutionary scholar Tedo Zhordania to Zviad Gamzakhurdia himself, that sputtering meteorite who became first President of independent Georgia in
1991,
and died a rebel and fugitive three years later. Both men were frantic Georgian patriots, for whom anything short of total assimilation was treachery to the joint Kartvelian destiny.
Lavrenti Beria, head of the Communist Party in Georgia in the
1930s
and then Stalin's last and most terrible head of the secret police, was the most famous Mingrelian of them all. He exterminated the flower of Georgia's intellectuals, taking care to destroy their families as well. But he showed no favour to his own people. Quite the opposite: in Beria's time, the forcible integration of Mingrelian culture with Georgian was hurried forward.
In the pre-nationalist age, there were leading figures in the Gaelic-speaking communities of Ireland and Scotland, as there were Czech-speakers in Bohemia, who believed that their languages should remain in the kitchen and the byre in case they became obstacles to the full participation of their peoples in the progress of the English- or German-speaking empires in which they lived. A tiny example from the Caucasus is the pathetic fate of the Ubykh people, a Moslem group related to the Abkhazians, who were driven into the Ottoman Empire by the Russians in
1864.
Their leaders took a deliberate decision that their followers should adapt to other languages, Turkish and Circassian above all, and the last Ubykh-speaker, an old man named Tevfik Esenc, died in
1992.
The Lazi were spared these open conflicts and tragic decisions. Safely settled in their remote corner of Turkey, they behaved as if the private language of home and the public language of schools and jobs could remain indefinitely in equilibrium. But then, in the late twentieth century, the balance began to tip. The coming of television and the huge expansion of the Turkish economy during the last twenty years have served the Lazi notice that a choice is becoming inevitable. The past suggested that they would choose passive assimilation, allowing the language and the culture to fade away into the general pattern of Turkish provincialism. They would regret this, but their sense of loss would be a private mourning. And yet, although this at first occurred to only a very few young men and women with experience of the world outside Turkey, there was another option.
In the Black Forest, in the pretty village of Schopfloch, lives a German scholar called Wolfgang Feurstein. He inhabits an old wooden house on the village's main street, a house filled with fair-haired children, books, papers and envelopes with foreign stamps. Feurstein, who has a yellow beard and very candid blue eyes, is not a rich man. He does not teach at any university and, unusually for a German intellectual approaching middle-age, he is not a Herr Professor or even a Herr Doktor. But he is a very busy man. In the wooden house at Schopfloch, he is creating a nation.
Feurstein first went to the Lazi country in the
1960s,
travelling around the villages and learning to speak and understand Lazuri. He found an elaborate oral culture, music and songs, fairy tales and rituals and a spoken tongue which had fascinated linguists before him. But he also found a community with no written language save Turkish, with no knowledge of their origins, with no memory that they had been Christians until the final Turkish conquest of the Pontos in the fifteenth century. Feurstein saw, too, that the tides of mass communication and social change were beginning to reach these distant Pontic valleys, and that, if nothing was done, the Lazi identity would be washed away within a few decades.
What came over this mild young man then was something like a religious revelation. It came to him that the Lazi were a
Volk -
an authentic national community, whose survival and growth and flowering was one of the precious components of humanity's inheritance. If nothing was done, this tiny people — defenceless, still at an almost foetal stage in its development — would be lost for ever. Feurstein resolved to save it.
He was soon in trouble. News of his interests and movements came to the Turkish authorities. Framed by the security police for 'illegally entering a frontier district', he was arrested, beaten up, threatened with death and then, after a brief imprisonment, expelled. Since then, for some fifteen years, Feurstein has carried on his life's mission from Germany. He and the small group of Lazi expatriates who form the 'Kachkar Cultural Circle' set about the task of building a written national culture for the Lazi.
First came an alphabet. That had to be the start. Then came little text-books in Lazuri for primary schools, which went out from Schopfloch towards Turkey through many clandestine channels. For a time, it seemed that nothing was happening. Possibly they were not reaching their destination. More probably, Lazi families who found the whole enterprise baffling and dangerous, as many did, were suppressing them. But then, gradually, the first echoes began to come back to Germany. The text-books were being photocopied, page by page. There were reports that they were being used discreetly among Lazi pupils in unofficial lessons after school. Here and there, a few young teachers were adopting this new idea and were prepared to take a risk for it. It was still very small, but it had begun.
The first Lazuri dictionary is now being prepared at Schopfloch. So are the first volumes of what will be - not a history, for it is too early for that, but a source-book and bibliography of the Lazi past. In periodicals which are now finding their way to the valleys, folktales and traditional poetry are edited and written down. These are the basic raw materials with which the first Lazi 'national intelligentsia' can begin its work and go on to compose a national literature. And already, something is starting to flow back, through the post or in the bags of migrant Lazi workers returning to Germany. Feurstein says reverently, 'With every poem, there come new, unknown Lazuri words!'
To bring an alphabet to a people who have never written down their speech ... that is something given to few human beings. In myth, it is gods who bring letters down from heaven. When I held in my hand Feurstein's Lazuri alphabet, done in Turkish Latin script for clarity, with Georgian characters opposite, I felt a sense of awe, as if I were holding something like a seed but also like a bomb. With an alphabet, a people - even a tiny one - sets out upon a journey. Ahead lie printed novels and poems, newspapers and concert programmes, handwritten family letters and love letters, angry polemics and posters, the proceedings of assemblies, the scripts of Shakespeare translations for a theatre and of soap-operas for television, the timetables of ferries, the announcements of births and deaths. Perhaps, one day, laws. But perhaps, too, leaflets with a last speech from the condemned cell. This is a long journey, and it may be a dangerous one.
What is at once astounding and touching about Wolfgang Feurstein's work for the Lazi is that he seems, at first glance, to have walked straight out of the European past. He is repeating, step by step, the process of creating 'modern nations' out of folk-cultures which was first outlined by Johann Herder in the
1770s,
and which was to form the political project of most Central and Eastern European revolutions for the next century-and-a-half.
Herder, in his
Essay on the Origin of Language
(1772),
suggested a dialectical philosophy of social development in which language — the medium in which natural 'feeling' and human 'reflection' could be reconciled — was the most powerful dynamic. Societies passed through growth-phases analogous to the ages of human individuals. Language was supremely important in the 'childhood' phase, above all in the form of epic and 'uncivilised' poetry: Homer, the Edda, Ossian. 'What a treasure language is when kinship groups grow into tribes and nations! Even the smallest of nations ... cherishes in and through its language the history, the poetry and songs about the great deeds of its forefathers.' And Herder went further, casting the leading actor for the tragedies and comedies that were to be acted out on the barricades of the nineteenth century: 'A poet is the creator of the nation around him; he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.'
In these writings about the nation (
Volk
), Herder prefigured at least three elements of Romantic nationalism. The first was the idea of a
Volk
as something dynamic rather than static, a living organism subject to 'natural' laws of development. The second was the central importance of language in this development - which led Herder away from the universalism of the Enlightenment towards a celebration of national differences and particularity. The third was the supreme role to be played in this process by the intellectual, as literary creator but also as national historian and as lexicographer-and, often enough, as insurrectionary leader on the barricades.
Popularised, elaborated and often vulgarised, Herder's ideas flowed into the mainstream of European radical thought after the end of the French Revolution. Above all, they helped to form the political programme of nationalism. European intellectuals had no doubt about where this journey with an alphabet should end. A
Volk
which became literate and culturally self-aware was headed for 'nationhood’, which was held to culminate in the establishment of independent nation-states. It was in that spirit that Frantisek Palacky standardised the Czech language and reconstructed a Czech history, that Vuk Karadzic plunged his hands into treasure-chests of words to select a single 'Serbo-Croat' language, and that -at the end of the nineteenth century — Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League to 'de-Anglicise' Ireland.
These intellectuals were the forgers of nations, often in more than one sense of the word. Using peasant speech and oral tradition as a foundation, they set out to build what were, in fact, entirely new models of political community designed to fit into a modern world of nation-states. The patriotic need to discover lost Homeric epics (which, in Herderian terms, would justify the whole national project) was sometimes stronger than probity. James Macpherson, the real author of Ossian, was the first deceiver. Palacky himself was fooled by Vaclav Hanka, librarian of the new National Museum in Prague, who faked a succession of 'ancient' manuscripts
(The Song of Vyiehrad
and
The Love Song of King
W
encestas)
to bolster the Czech claim to authentic nationhood. From Finland to Wales, Romantic nationalism still has many literary skeletons in its cupboards.
Since then, the intellectual world has changed almost out of recognition. Nationalism still thrives, whether in the open-hearted, modernising form of the
1989
revolutions or in the genocidal land-grabs in Bosnia and Croatia. But the old Herderian underpinning has been discredited. The sovereign nation-state is beginning to grow obsolete, while Herder's comparison of a nation to a living organism which must develop and change according to laws of nature is dismissed as empty metaphysic. The concept of ethnicity is still a dangerous minefield, fifty years after European Fascism was overthrown. Most students of nationalism play safe by suggesting that what they evasively term an 'ethnie' exists only as a subjective conviction: an imagined sense of community in which a shared language or a religion or a belief in some common biological descent are usually present, but in widely varying proportions.
If there were no more to be said, then Wolfgang Feurstein would be no more than an anachronism. He would be the last Herderian, the last European intellectual to invent a nation. He would be another Lord Jim, who took 'the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people' (except that Patusan already existed and Jim was required only to save it, not to devise it). But there is a great deal more to be said.