Without Justice there is no Peace 47. Meeting of the Inititiative for Peace and Solidarity with Ukraine on January, 1st in Weimar.

Our Pain does not allow us to be silent

Ms. Okzana steps up to the microphone, silence falls in the audience. More than 70 people have come on January 1st to the 47th rally in Weimar "For Peace and Solidarity with Ukraine. "We are all hurt by what is happening in our homeland, our pain does not allow us to be silent. Putin is waging a war of extermination, not only against soldiers but also against us, against civilians. He thinks his people are better than ours. This is not how a brother nation acts. In Ukraine we lived together in peace for a long tim with many minorities until January 24, 2022. Hungarians, Slovaks, Tartars who fled Crimea in 2014 and many others have integrated well in our country - why not the Russians?

Mr. Mykola from Zaporizha takes spontanly the microphone. He talks about his small village which was recently bombed six times a night. A little newborn girl was killed in a hospital. "Why is Putin doing this? There is no explanation for his terror." For him the people who oppose Putin are heroes and he he admonishes all to support the Ukraine with all strength.

After this emotional speech Rudolf Kessner takes the floor. He is no stranger in Weimar. Almost everyone knows him as city councilor. Since 1990 he was the voice for the civil rights movement NEUES FORUM, from 1994 for Bündnis 90/Die Grünen. Rudolf Ke?ner is always on the side of the free and self-determined citizens, and citizens for him are all inhabitants of a country, regardless of their origin or ideology. His statemt is short and clear: "The German fascists brought a lot of misery to the world. Also Ukrainian soldiers liberated Germany. We should recognize that Slovaks and Poles are experienced with the Soviet occupation." For him the comparison between Putin and Stalin is obvious.

Some of the speakers in Weimar mentionned the speech of Serhij Shada on October 23, 2022.?He accepted on this day the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt's Paulskirche. The following text is an excerpt from his speech.

What do Ukrainians want most of all? Of course, the End of the War

"What do Ukrainians want most of all? Of course, the end of the war. Of course, peace. Of course, the cessation of fighting. I, who live in the center of Kharkiv on the eighteenth floor and can watch from the window how the Russians fire rockets from Belgorod, want nothing more than the cessation of rocket fire, the end of the war, the return to normality, to a natural existence.... The civilian population in Butscha, Hostomel and Irpin had no weapons at all. What did not save people from a terrible death. The residents of Kharkiv, who are constantly and savagely shelled with rockets by the Russians, have no weapons either. What should they do, according to the supporters of a peace concluded quickly at any cost? Where should the line be for them between a yes to peace and a no to resistance? ... There is no peace without justice. There are various forms of frozen conflict, there are temporarily occupied territories, there are time bombs disguised as political compromises, but peace, real peace, a peace that offers security and perspective, unfortunately does not exist."

Serhij Shadans talks about the Situation at the Front, about his Brigade, about the technology with which he - the Driver of a Unit - is on the Road.

Serhij Shadans hands are black and worn, the lubricating oil has eaten into his skin and sits under his nails. People with hands like that actually know how to work and like to do it. What they work on is another matter. Small, quiet and worried, he stands there and talks about the situation at the front, about his brigade, about the technology with which he - the driver of a unit - is on the road. Suddenly he takes heart and says, "You're volunteers," he says, "buy us a refrigerator." "What are you going to do on the front lines with a refrigerator?" We don't understand. "But if you need it, we'll go to the supermarket, you pick one out, and we'll buy it." "No," he explains, "you misunderstood me: I need a vehicle with a refrigerator. A refrigerated truck. To transport away the fallen. We find bodies that have been in the sun for more than a month. We'll move them in a van, you won't be able to breathe." He talks about the bodies - his job - calmly and measuredly, without pomposity or even hysteria. We exchange numbers. A week later, we found a refrigerated truck in Lithuania and bring it to Kharkiv. Our acquaintance and his fighters arrive with the whole crew, solemnly they receive the vehicle and take a selfie with us for a post. This time our acquaintance carries a weapon and clean clothes. The hands are - if you look closer - as black as before, the daily hard work, you can see that most on the hands.

The Impossibility to breathe freely and speak easily

What does the war change above all? The sense of time and the sense of space. The contours of perspective, the contours of temporal expanse change incredibly quickly. Those who are in the space of war do not make plans for the future, do not continue to think about what the world will look like tomorrow. Only what happens to you here and now has meaning and weight, only things and people you have to deal with tomorrow at the latest - if you survive and wake up - have meaning. The most important task is to stay intact and fight through the next half day. Sometime later it will become apparent, it will become apparent what to undertake and how to behave, what to rely on in this life and what to break away from. This basically concerns both the military personnel and those who are in the contact zone of death as "civilians", that is, unarmed. It is precisely this feeling that accompanies you from the first day of the great war - the feeling of broken time, the lack of duration, the feeling of compressed air, you can hardly breathe because reality weighs on you and tries to push you away to the other side of life, to the other side of the visible. The superimposition of events and feelings, the absorption in a viscous bloody stream that grips and envelops you: this compression, the pressure, the impossibility of breathing freely and speaking easily, this is what fundamentally distinguishes the reality of war from the reality of peace. But one must speak. Even in times of war. Especially in times of war. Of course, war changes language, its architecture and its functional field. Like the boot of an intruder, of a stranger, war damages the anthill of speech. So the ants - the speakers of the damaged language - feverishly try to repair the destroyed structure, to restore what is familiar to them, what belongs to their life. Eventually, everything falls into place. But this inability to use the familiar means, more precisely, the inability to use the earlier constructs - dating back to peaceful pre-war times - to describe your condition, to explain your anger, your pain, your hope - is particularly painful and unbearable. Especially when you were used to trusting language and relying on its potential, which until now seemed inexhaustible. Suddenly, however, it becomes apparent that the possibilities of language are limited, limited by the new circumstances, by a new landscape: a landscape that inscribes itself in the space of death, in the space of catastrophe. Each individual ant has the task of restoring the congruence of collective speech, of the overall sound, of communication and understanding. Who is the writer in this case? Also an ant, silenced like all the others. Since the beginning of the war, we are recovering this damaged ability - the ability to make ourselves understood. We all try to explain: ourselves, our truth, the limits of our vulnerability and traumatization. Perhaps literature has an advantage here. Because it carries all the previous language catastrophes and ruptures.

How to speak about the War?

How to speak about the war? How to deal with the intonations that resonate with so much despair, anger, and hurt, but at the same time strength and a willingness to stand with each other, not to retreat? I think the problem with formulating the central things is not only with us at the moment - the world listening to us sometimes has a hard time understanding a simple thing - that when we speak, we show a high level of linguistic emotionality, linguistic tension, linguistic openness. Ukrainians do not have to justify their emotions, but certainly it would be good to explain these emotions. Why? If only so that they no longer have to deal with the anger and pain on their own. We can explain ourselves, we can describe what has happened to us and continues to happen. We have to be prepared that this will not be an easy conversation. But one way or another, we need to start that conversation today.

Peace does not come when the Victim of Aggression lays down his Arms

What seems important to me here is that the conceptual content and nuances of our vocabulary are shifting. It is about the optics, the other view, the other perspective, but above all it is about language. Sometimes it seems to me that the world, observing what has been going on in Eastern Europe for the past six months, is using words and concepts that have long since ceased to explain what is happening. What, for example, does the world mean - I am aware of the unreal and abstract nature of the term, but I have chosen it deliberately here - when it declares peace to be a necessity? Apparently it is about the end of war, the end of military confrontation, the moment when the artillery is silent and silence falls. Peace, after all, should be the thing that leads us to understanding. What do Ukrainians want most of all? The end of the war, of course. Peace, of course. Of course, the cessation of fighting. I, who live in the center of Kharkiv on the eighteenth floor and can watch from the window how the Russians fire rockets from Belgorod, would like nothing more than the cessation of rocket fire, the end of the war, the return to normality, to a natural existence.

Why, then, do Ukrainians so often prick up their ears when European intellectuals and politicians declare peace a necessity? Not because they deny the necessity of peace, but out of the knowledge that peace does not come when the victim of aggression lays down arms. The civilian population in Butscha, Hostomel and Irpen had no weapons at all. What did not save people from a terrible death. The residents of Kharkiv, who are constantly and savagely shelled with rockets by the Russians, have no weapons either. What should they do, then, according to the supporters of a peace concluded quickly at any cost? Where should the line be for them between a yes to peace and a no to resistance?

When we talk about peace now, in the face of this bloody, dramatic war unleashed by Russia, some do not want to take note of a simple fact: Without justice, there is no peace. There are various forms of frozen conflict, there are temporarily occupied territories, there are time bombs disguised as political compromises, but peace, real peace, a peace that offers security and perspective, unfortunately does not exist. And when some Europeans (admittedly only a very small part) blame Ukrainians for their refusal to surrender, almost as an expression of militarism and radicalism, they do something strange - trying to stay in their comfort zone, they circumstantially cross the boundaries of ethics. This is not a question for Ukrainians, this is a question for the world, for its existing (or non-existing) willingness to swallow total, disinhibited evil one more time for the sake of questionable material benefits and false pacifism.

Appealing to people defending their lives, blaming victims, shifting accents, using good and positive slogans in a manipulative way is quite a convenient way for some to shift responsibility. But everything is quite simple: We support our army not because we want war, but because we desperately want peace. It's just that the soft and discreet form of surrender offered to us under the pretext of peace is not the appropriate way to live peacefully and rebuild our cities. Maybe the Europeans would have to spend less money on energy sources if the Ukrainians surrendered, but how would the people of Europe feel if they realized (which there is no way around) that they bought their warm homes with destroyed existences and destroyed houses of people who also wanted to live in a peaceful and quiet country?

A Criminal is a Criminal

The issue here, I would like to reiterate, is language. About how precise and accurate are the words we use, how striking our intonation when we speak about our existence at the breaking point of life and death. To what extent is our vocabulary - that is, the vocabulary we used yesterday to describe the world - to what extent is it sufficient now to speak about what pains us or makes us strong? After all, we are all at a point of speaking today from which we did not speak before; we have a shifted system of perception and evaluation, changed references to meaning, changed standards of appropriateness. What from the outside, from a distance, may look like a conversation about death is actually a desperate attempt to hold on to life, its existence and its duration. Where, then, in this new, fractured and displaced reality, does war end and peace begin? The refrigerated truck with the bodies of the fallen - is it still about peace or already about war? When women are taken to places where there is no fighting - what is that support for? For the peaceful resolution of the conflict? The tourniquet you bought for a soldier that saves his life - is that still humanitarian aid or already direct support for those fighting? And if you help those who are fighting for you, for the civilians in the basements, for the children in the metro, have you crossed the boundaries of a respectable conversation about goodness and empathy? Do we need to recall our right to exist in this world, or is this right obvious and inviolable?

Many things, phenomena and concepts currently require, if not an explanation, at least a mention, a new presentation, a new acceptance. As always, war exposes what has been deliberately ignored for a long time, war is the time of unpleasant questions and complicated answers. This war, started by the Russian army, also raises a whole set of questions that go far beyond the Russian-Ukrainian context. In the coming years, we will not be able to avoid discussing thorny issues - populism and double standards, irresponsibility and political conformism, ethics, a term that has long been sought in vain in the vocabulary of those who make momentous decisions in today's world. These issues, you might say, concern politics, and that's why we need to talk about politics. But politics here is just a cover, a loophole, an opportunity to avoid sharp edges and not state things clearly. Yet that's exactly what things require: that they be named clearly. A criminal is a criminal. Freedom is freedom. Baseness is baseness. In times of war, lexemes like these sound particularly clear and pointed. One can hardly avoid them without hurting oneself. And one should not avoid them either, not at all.

To what extent is Europe ready to face the Reality of War?

It is sad and significant that we are talking about the Peace Prize while war is again raging in Europe. The war is not far from us. And it has been going on for several years. In all the years that the war has been going on, the Peace Prize has also been awarded. Of course, this is not about the prize as such. It is about the question to what extent Europe is ready to face this new reality - a reality in which there are destroyed cities - with which until recently it was possible to cooperate economically; a reality in which there are mass graves - in which lie people from Ukraine who only yesterday could come to German cities to go shopping and visit museums; a reality in which there are filtration camps for captured Ukrainians - camps, occupation, collaborators are hardly words that Europeans use in their everyday language. And it is also about how we all live on in this new reality - with the destroyed cities, the bombed out schools, the destroyed books. And above all with the thousands of dead, with those who only yesterday were living peaceful lives, making plans, coping with their daily worries and relying on their own memories.

The war changes our Memory

Talking about memory is also important for the following reason. War does not simply mean a different experience. Those who claim it does, speak only about the superficial, about what is obvious, that which only describes but explains little. War changes our memory and fills it with extremely painful experiences, extremely deep traumas and extremely bitter conversations. You cannot erase these memories, you cannot correct the past. From now on, it is part of you. And not the best part, of course. The stalling and resumption of breath, the experience of falling silent and searching for a new language - this process is too painful for you to talk mindlessly about the wonderful world outside now. Of course, poetry after Butscha and Isjum is still possible, even necessary. But the shadow of Butscha and Isjum, the presence of these places will leave deep traces in post-war poetry and shape its content and sound. This is the painful and at the same time indispensable realization that mass graves and bombed-out residential areas will from now on be the resonating space for the poems written in your country - this, of course, does not exactly convey optimism, but an understanding of the fact that language needs our daily action, our daily touch, our daily attention. What do we have, then, to express ourselves, to explain ourselves? Our language and our memory.

Since the end of February, since the beginning of the massacre, it is very clear how time loses its normal dimension, its course. It now resembles a winter river that freezes to the bottom, stops flowing and paralyzes all those who are caught in this frozen stream. We are stuck in this dense solidification, in the cold non-time. I can remember very well this helplessness - you don't feel any movement, you get lost in the silence and you can't see what is there, in front of you, in the darkness and in the silence. The time of war is really a time of distorted panorama, of torn off communication between the past and the future, a time of extremely sharp and bitter perception of the present, a sinking into the space that surrounds you, a concentration on the moment that fills you. These are definitely signs of fatalism, you stop making plans and thinking about the future, you try first and foremost to root yourself in the present, under that sky that arches over you and alone reminds you that time does pass, that day and night change, that summer follows spring and that life goes on despite the paralysis of your emotions, despite all the rigidity, that it doesn't stop for a moment to take in all our joys and fears, all our despair and hope. It has simply changed the distance between you and reality. Reality is closer now. Reality is now more terrible. We have to live with that.

What else is there but Language and Memory?

What else is there but language and memory? What else has changed about us? What now lifts us out of any community, out of any crowd? Perhaps the eyes. They catch the outer fire and from now on they always have this reflection. The look of a person who has looked beyond the visible, looked into the darkness and even recognized something there - this look is forever different, because all too significant things are reflected in it.

What will our Language be like after the War?

In the spring, sometime in May, we went for a performance to an army unit that had a break from fighting after long heavy battles. We have known the unit for a long time, we have performed there regularly since 2014. A Kharkiv suburb, fresh greenery, a soccer field, a small auditorium. Many fighters we know personally. Many people, old friends, people from Kharkiv went to the front this spring. It is unusual to see them in uniform and with a weapon in their hands. And it is even more unusual to see their eyes - like solidified metal, like glass reflecting fire. The great war had already lasted two months, they had all been in the trenches under Russian fire. Now they stood here, smiling and cracking jokes. With those eyes where you could read two months of hell. "I've already made it to the military hospital," one told me. "The Russians were firing phosphorus bombs, I got hit. Not too bad, I'm alive and well. Soon I'll be going back to the front." At such a moment, you don't know what to say - the language fails you, the language is not enough, the appropriate words have yet to be found. And they will be found.

What will our language be like after the war? What will we have to explain to each other? Above all, we will have to say aloud the names of the dead. The names must be mentioned. Otherwise, there will be a deep rift in the language, a void between the voices, a rupture in the memory. We will need much strength and faith to speak about our fallen. For from their names will come our dictionaries. But we will need just as much strength, confidence and love to speak about the future, to set it to music, to verbalize it, to describe it. Either way, we need to restore our sense of time, our sense of perspective, our sense of duration. We are doomed to the future, indeed we are responsible for it. It arises now from our visions, from our convictions, from our willingness to take responsibility. We will reclaim the sense of our future, for much survives in our memory that will require our participation tomorrow. We are all part of this stream that carries us, does not let us go, connects us. We are all connected through our language. And even if it may seem for a moment that the possibilities of language are limited or insufficient, we will have to make use, willy-nilly, of its means, which give us hope that in the future there will be no unspoken things or misunderstandings between us. Sometimes language seems weak to us. But often it is the language that gives us strength. Maybe for a moment the language goes at a distance from you, but it does not abandon you. And that is important and decisive. As long as we have our language, as long as we have at least the vague chance to explain ourselves, to tell our truth, to order our memory. That's why we speak and don't stop. Even when our throats get sore from the words. Even when you feel abandoned and empty by the words. The voice gives truth a chance. And it's important to take that chance. Maybe that's the most important thing that can happen to all of us, anyway.

This speech was given by the author at the acceptance of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on October 23, 2022 in Frankfurt's Paulskirche; the translation from Ukrainian is by Claudia Dathe. For more information, visit www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de . All speeches of the award ceremony are also published in the book "Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels 2022 - Serhij Zhadan. Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung" in German, English, Ukrainian, edited by the B?rsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, Verlag MVB GmbH.

Glory and Freedom of Ukraine have not yet died

70 participants of the 47th Rally for Peace and Solidarity with Ukraine sang the Ukrainian national anthem together in Weimar on January 1, 2022.That was a touching moment.

The glory and freedom of Ukraine have not yet died, nor, young brothers, will fate smile on us. Our enemies will disappear like dew in the sun, and we, brothers, will be masters in our own land. Body and soul we give for our freedom, and testify that our origin is the Cossack brotherhood.

The organizers thank all people who supported the initiative. For example, the son of a Ukrainian driver, Marko from Lviv played flute and sang, or Andrej, who exhorted everyone to keep a good and open heart. "Only in this way will the evil and devilish disappear. God bless you! Our eyes are afraid, but our hands do not let go."??