Writing letters in the Ukraine war: This seems to be becoming a new hobby among German writers.

This week Ingo Schulze sent a nameless "dear friend" via the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" a letter asking him and himself "if and how and when the war can be ended and what kind of cooperation and opposition a promises a non-warlike balance".

Tobias Ruether

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Schulze noted that he "didn't think Putin's Russia was capable of such a war," "not just because it's criminal and, I mean literally, creates endless suffering in Ukraine, in Russia and all over the world, but because because it is also nonsensical and contrary to Russia's interests".

Just recently, the book prizewinner Antje Rávic Strubel published a "farewell letter to the country in which I live" in the FAZ, together with the announcement that she would "exit" from this Germany because it would continue to get gas from Russia so that the Russian bombs would go off funding Ukraine and thus making myself complicit.

"All I can do is sign this letter as a symbolic exit in the style of Kurt Tucholsky: 'Rávik, stopped Germans'."

Dear Ukraine war, how can I make you talk about me?

Schulze now writes to his friend about the war for half a page in a newspaper, but only gives the Ukrainians a supporting role in the verbose struggle with their own “being torn”: “You can dismiss it as disproportionate to talk about yourself,” explains Schulze, "but also in this country everyone seems to have their own story with this war."

No, maybe that applies to Gerhard Schröder, but Schulze's own story with this war is about Ingo Schulze's need to have his own Ukraine war story.

Or to get out of the story of having declared a Russian attack “unlikely” in the “SZ” days before the outbreak of war because Schulze didn’t trust the “American secret service”.

He wrote this text in mid-February “because he found it difficult to bear the imposition of being told that the war would start on the following Wednesday.”

Now Schulze doesn't really know what to do with it, but he's still not embarrassed that he thought at the time that his secret service expertise could help to find the truth - otherwise he might have started his letter to the unknown dear friend with to ask oneself whether one's own emotional needs (“imposition”) are suitable for assessing entry into the war.

Resignation from writing, but only maybe

Or, as a Western author, one could not resist such emotional needs for a moment.

Maxim Biller also announced in Die Zeit that he would be retiring from writing in view of the war, only to put it into perspective again in the same text.

Schulze admits self-doubt, but then immediately dismisses it and summons a key witness: "Isn't literature the school for this despised or pityed in-betweenness or being torn?" but: "The Russian attack has created a friend-foe image that seems to lead differentiations ad absurdum."

Indeed, the Russian incursion has created friends and foes.

At a time, Ukrainian writer Tanya Malyarchuk recently said to Western intellectuals, when “Ukrainians are facing their physical annihilation: why can't you find that sensibility?” But German writers defend nothing as passionately as their own sensibility.