Love as a Political Force: We Need Islands of Love

: Mr. Schreiber, you call for love in your new book. Why?

Daniel Schreiber: For a long time I felt a great paralysis, a sense of powerlessness in the face of the political situation, the multitude of threatening developments, and above all in the face of this culture of hate that has confronted us for some time. As I thought about how to get out of the paralysis, the idea of love kept coming to mind. I believe we need it especially now.

: The world has lost every form of love, you write. What do you base this on?

Schreiber: On the one hand, in the blurring of our media and political discourses. I find it frightening that even within the democratic political spectrum enemies are increasingly manufactured from opponents. That which Hannah Arendt called the long, tedious processes of convincing, persuading, negotiating, and compromising apparently no longer work. This has to do with our allowing a rhetoric of hatred to be directed at a growing group of people. We are feeling the effects of this everywhere right now.

: You feel retraumatized by the political ascent of the AfD. What have you experienced?

Schreiber: I grew up in rural Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in a time that people today call the baseball-bat years. It was a fundamental experience for me to run away from neonazi gangs in heavy boots. To know that, even as a gay man, there are places you cannot go. When you look at the rise of right-wing attacks against people who think or look different, at the campaign offices of democratic parties, one must conclude: the baseball-bat years are back.

: Do you feel threatened?

Schreiber: The statistics show: the threat is real. Last year right-wing extremist crimes rose by 47 percent – and those are only the ones that became known. For me personally, the American elections were also a turning point. I felt that an era was ending in which many minorities and traditionally disadvantaged groups could move freely in society and express themselves, not for everyone, of course, but more than ever before. The right-wing backlash has undone that in a disturbingly short time.

: The political situation is depressing. What can love accomplish there?

Schreiber: The term initially provokes skepticism. Or resistance, with the question: Should we now also love the right-wing extremists, people who want to harm us? It is accused of naiveté, sentimentality. But none of that is love. Since antiquity, conceptions of love have illuminated dimensions of community that our society has lost: a focus on the common good and the sense of community. The responsibility for future generations in a society that practices solidarity, humanity, and care for the vulnerable. We have in recent decades moved away from a social market economy, from the dominance of neoliberal discourses. As if these things were a luxury. The truth, however, is that democratic societies cannot exist without these things.

: Still: Didn’t Hannah Arendt have a point, who thought love had no place in politics?

Schreiber: Hannah Arendt rejected love as a political aim because she recognized its potential for abuse. But she also described it as the indispensable basis for political participation. Throughout her life she asked herself: Why is it so hard to love the world? Why is it hard to shape our world and our society politically? I ask myself these questions today as well. Why have we refrained from wanting to make society better for everyone? Why have we banished the dimensions of love from our own vocabulary, including our political vocabulary? Why is it all about hardness, power questions, deals, and enemy images?

: You write about a politics driven by radical love, for example during Martin Luther King or Gandhi. In their times the fronts were clearer. Today the situation is more complex, also within the progressive spectrum.

Schreiber: The progressive part of the population has never been a single movement. But I find it alarming how, in recent years, a rhetoric of hostility has also taken hold here – instead of asking on which principles one agrees, for which goals one fights. We must return to that in order to counter the right-wing movement.

: Encountering the right with love – does that mean talking to the right?

Schreiber: I personally believe that it is not possible to talk with those who practice extreme-right politics. They are not interested in dialogue. But I think one must talk to right-wing voters. They often belong to the group of people who are politically not really represented anymore, for whom our society no longer works. It is important that we do not follow the right-wing cultural battles, because they divert us from the real problems and further polarize us. We should ignore these pseudo-debates. That also means for the media to recognize that this is a planned culture war that has nothing to do with our lived reality.

: Then the accusation quickly comes that the media are suppressing certain topics.

Schreiber: Yes, and if you fall for that argument, you unintentionally confirm that there are only two sides: the right-extremists and the rest. There are, in fact, many more than two sides. To break the logic of polarization, we must stand clearly for our own goals and form new political poles — and work in a cross-party alliance while looking for the common ground despite party differences. We have plenty of problems to solve politically.

: You quote Erich Fromm with a remarkably pessimistic thought: people are drawn more to destruction than to the love of life. Didn’t even the high priest of free love believe in love?

Schreiber: This fear, Fromm expressed in a letter to a British journalist. That was his personal fear, a danger he saw. Among other things, because many people, in the face of social decay and political crimes, are often opposed but do nothing.

: Almost prophetic, when one thinks of collective behavior in the face of the climate crisis.

Schreiber: Yes, but one must also see that Fromm opposed this fear with a broad understanding of love: not as a feeling, but as an action. Love and love for life, in his view, are fundamentally part of being human. This contradicts the neoliberal dogma that only things like competition and rivalry drive us. Fromm responded to the argument that it is naive to talk about love by saying that it is naive not to talk about love. Without the life-practice of love, societies simply cannot endure.

: You return repeatedly to a writing workshop you lead in a house in the countryside. Is that a form of love for you, creating small islands of togetherness?

Schreiber: Yes, and I think that is one of the fundamental things we can do in everyday life: build communities where another form of togetherness is possible, where we tell each other our stories and listen to one another without judgment, without shaming. These can be all kinds of communities; writing workshops are just one example from my life. We need these seeds of love. We need these islands of solace and resistance.

: You say it is not possible to not love the world. How does that fit with the collective paralysis you described at the outset?

Schreiber: I would say we ultimately have no choice but to love our world. We could follow our cynicism, our despair. But that would not change anything or make us feel better. There is no alternative to the loving co-creation of the world. Otherwise, it will be taken over by people who do not love the world and other people. That is why I wrote this book: to pull people out of their state of resignation, out of their despair-induced apathy, which I know too well myself. To awaken forces without moralizing. To strengthen our ethical muscles and to rekindle our common good.

: So: talk more with each other in the new year?

Schreiber: Why not? It is actually something you learn your whole life: to listen to other people, even when you disagree. And if you pay attention to what connects us despite everything, you might come together in a new way. And you might even rediscover your own political strength.