"What people don't realise is that for our generation, nothing was normal." Rudolf Garmatz, my grandfather, is of the generation born at the same time as the ill-fated Weimar Republic. He knows all about the simple strangeness of life. His life began in what's now Poland, formerly the province of Pommern,from which he left, as one friend pointed out, as if predestined. His life was not bound to the earth of the east. Berlin, the front, north Africa and all the awfulness of the Ardennes, to Hamburg, where his first home was as simple as it was strange. An old map room in a school, he received a letter from my grandmother that they had been allocated it by a school comptroller who took pity on them. No electricity, he wired it with with old power lines he gathered up from the rubble of early 1950's Hamburg.
Nothing was normal. This thought came to mind again when I went to see Robert Fisk in the National Concert Hall, thanks to my wife who thought I'd like it. She was spellbound. I was distracted by the inordinate number of know alls using the opportunity to ask Fisk questions in order to make inane, crass and stupid statements in the deluded belief that he, the great Fisk, would reveal them as a true prophet. Any hope for intelligent discourse was hardly going to come from this audience, surely.
Towards the front, an elderly lady sat with her hand up, the only woman who asked question. When she was finally brought a microphone, she asked question which was staggering in its simplicity, honesty and genuine curiousity.
"I'm 78 years old" - she can talk as long as she wishes to, whispered my wife - "and you may find my questions silly."
"They are not!" Fisk assured her, as if he'd been impugned himself. It was charming. "Well, I was wondering, where do the israeli's get their oil from? And, How's Mordechai Vanunu? Is he dead?"
Fisk seemed startled and took a brief moment to bring himself back to her question. He answered her questions with as much detail and clarity as he could. She seemed satisfied. Older people can sometimes see through the world, that we younger people can't. If we're to have any hope of progress as a society, then our discourse needs to be both simple and inspired. No joy yet, though some hope exists.
