當“政敵”成爲伴侶:老左派與極右派的愛情故事

VIENNA — When she says identity, he hears exclusion.

維也納——當她說身份時，他聽到的是排斥。

When he says diversity, she hears Islamization.

當他說多元化時，她聽到的是伊斯蘭化。

He accuses her of forgetting history. She accuses him of obsessing with history. He calls her a racist. She calls him a national masochist.

他指責她忘記歷史。她指責他沉迷歷史。他稱她爲種族主義者。她說他是民族受虐狂。

Helmut Lethen, 79, and Caroline Sommerfeld, 42, are both writers. They represent two generations and two intellectual camps in an ever more divided Germany. They are political enemies.

79歲的赫爾穆特·利滕(Helmut Lethen)和42歲的卡羅琳·佐默費爾德(Caroline Sommerfeld)都是作家。在一個空前分化的德國，他們代表着兩代人和兩個思想陣營。他們是政治上的敵人。

And they are married.

他們也是夫妻。

Their marriage is exceptional, incomprehensible even, but it is also a laboratory for tolerance and a window into how the other side thinks. Daily, they are having the conversation their country is not.

他們的婚姻不同尋常，甚至讓人難以理解，但也是一場對寬容的實驗，一扇可以看到另一陣營如何思考的窗口。每天，他們都進行着在他們的國家裏缺失的對話。

It is a very German love story (though the couple reside in Austria, where the husband teaches), one neatly pegged to the 50th anniversary of the counterculture movement that remains a touchstone of global postwar history — and to the ascent of the counter-counterculture movement of today.

這是一個非常德國的愛情故事（雖然這對夫婦住在奧地利，丈夫在這裏教書），這個故事準確地反映着反文化運動的50週年，而這場運動至今仍然是全球戰後歷史——以及對今天的反-反文化運動興起——的一個試金石。

May 1968 was as important in Europe as it was in the United States, fueled similarly by a youth bulge, sexual liberation, disgust with the Vietnam War and general discontent with the era’s political establishment.

1968年的5月在歐洲和在美國一樣重要，同樣被年青一代的騷動、性解放、對越南戰爭的厭惡以及對那個時代的政治建制階層的普遍不滿所激發。

And it spawned much the same trajectory for its baby boomers, from budding student revolutionaries to button-down liberal elites.

它帶給了嬰兒潮一代大約一致的人生軌跡，他們從新銳的學生革命者成爲了一本正經的自由派精英。

Germany was no exception. And neither was Lethen.

德國不是例外。利滕也不是。

A student activist at the time, Lethen toyed with communism, rebelling against Germany’s postwar elites which, as he put it, “still stank of the Nazis” — only to become part of the country’s cultural mainstream.

他當時是一名學生活動人士，對共產主義產生過興趣，反叛過德國戰後的精英階層——用他自己的話來說，那些人“仍然散發着納粹的惡臭”——最後卻成爲了這個國家的文化主流的一部分。

Sommerfeld, a philosopher in her own right, was swept up in another countercultural movement: In the summer of 2015, as hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived in Germany, she discovered the “New Right,” the intellectual spearhead of a nationalist movement that considers Islam and globalization existential threats.

佐默費爾德是一名自成一派的哲學家，她被捲入了另一場反文化運動：2015年的夏天，成百上千名難民抵達德國時，她發現了“新右派”，這個羣體是民族主義運動的思想先鋒隊，這場運動認爲伊斯蘭教和全球化是關乎德國存亡的威脅。

Her husband had celebrated the arrival of the refugees: “I think it is the first time in our cultural history that we have welcomed the foreign in this way,” he said.

她的丈夫慶祝難民的到來：“我覺得這是我們的文化史上第一次用這種方式接納外國人，”他說。

Sommerfeld, though, felt “anxious” and “repelled.”

然而，佐默費爾德感到“不安”和“反感”。

Today, she hopes her own fringe movement is tapping into a shifting zeitgeist that will reverberate in Germany and beyond, just as her husband’s did in its day.

如今，她希望她自己的邊緣運動正在與一個變化中的時代精神接軌，可以在德國和更遠的地方產生迴響，達到她丈夫的運動在自己的時代所達到的那種高度。

“We are the megaphone of a silent majority,” she claims.

“我們是沉默的大多數的擴音器，”她這樣主張。

Lethen dismisses the analogy.

利滕對這個比喻很不屑。

“We were moved by a yearning for the world, we looked to the future,” he said. “They are moved by the yearning to go back to the womb of Teutonic tradition. It is a nostalgia for a past that never was.”

“我們是被一個對世界的渴望所驅動，我們看向未來，”他說。“他們是被一個回到過去、迴歸日耳曼傳統起源的渴望所驅動。這是對一個從來都不存在的過去的懷舊情緒。”

So far-reaching are their ideological differences that they seem impossible to reconcile with a relationship borne from romance that began when she was a university student and wrote a dissertation titled “How to Be Moral.” She caught Lethen’s eye in his seminar.

他們在思想上的分歧如此深遠，連這樣一段綿延數十載的愛情關係都無法化解，兩人初識時她還是一名大學生，寫了一篇題爲《如何遵循道德》的畢業論文。利滕在他的講座中注意到了這個人。

After sharing a bed for two decades and interests in Kant and gardening and bringing up their three sons, they are still talking.

在同牀共枕，分享對康德、園藝和養育三個兒子的興趣二十年後，他們仍然在對話。

“Familiarity with the other side is good,” she said.

“瞭解另一方是好事，”她說。

“Talking is better than not talking,” he said.

“交談比不交談好，”他說。

This much they can agree on.

他們能在這一點上達成一致。

Sommerfeld, who had toasted the election victory of President Donald Trump with Champagne, has co-written a book called “Living with the Left.” (“Living with Lethen,” Lethen calls it.)

佐默費爾德曾用香檳慶祝特朗普的大選勝利，她參與合寫了一本名爲《與左派一起生活》(Living with the Left)的書。（利滕稱之爲《和利滕一起生活》。）

She describes it as a self-help book for the far-right, offering readers advice on how to counter leftists’ arguments — and how to provoke them (for example, by comparing the 20 million who died under Stalin to the 6 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis).

她把這本書描述爲極右派的自助指南，建議讀者如何反駁左派觀點，以及如何刺激他們。（例如，把2000萬在斯大林統治下死去的人和被納粹殺害的600萬人進行比較。）

As for Lethen’s latest book, a critically acclaimed volume about the cultural elite under the Nazis, it can also be read like a letter to the intellectual far-right. Among the dedications is a thank you to Sommerfeld “who electrified this book.”

而利滕廣受好評的最新作品是關於納粹統治下的文化精英，它也可以被解讀爲給思想上的極右派的一封信。鳴謝中包括了對佐默費爾德的感謝，稱她“給這本書注入了活力”。

The book talks about four German luminaries — a musical conductor, an actor, a surgeon and a law professor — who unlike many others decided to stay in Nazi Germany and helped legitimize it.

這本書講述了四位德國名人——一名音樂指揮、一名演員、一名外科醫生、一名法學教授。和其他人不同，他們決定留在納粹德國，爲它正名。

It had always troubled him: “How could it come to an alliance of high culture and this murdering state?” Lethen said.

這一直令他困擾：“高雅文化和國家殺戮之間的結盟是如何達到的？”利滕說。

Lethen’s father had joined Hitler’s Nazi party in 1928 and agitated in its favor. He never spoke about it after the war.

利滕的父親曾於1928年加入希特勒的納粹黨併爲其積極宣傳。戰爭結束後，他從沒說起過這件事。

In nine years of high school in the 1950s, Lethen said, no history class ever touched on the Holocaust. He learned about concentration camps in the cinema, where he watched “Night and Fog,” a French documentary, in 1957.

利滕說，1950年代，在他高中的九年時間裏，沒有一節歷史課提到過對猶太人的大屠殺。1957年在看一部法國紀錄片《夜與霧》(Night and Fog)時，他纔在電影院裏瞭解了集中營。

He has carried the memory with him “like stones in his chest.”

這段記憶就像“壓在胸口的石頭”揮之不去。

The student movement of the 1960s, he said, was about “breaking open the silent archives of our fathers.”

他說，1960年代的學生運動是要“打開我們的父輩的沉默檔案”。

He became a member of a Maoist splinter group, one of many minuscule communist organizations whose leaders later mellowed into academics, teachers or center-left politicians.

他成爲一個毛派分支派別的成員。那是許多非常小的共產主義組織之一，它們的領導人後來成爲了學者、教師或是中左派政客。

After teaching at a Dutch university for 18 years, he returned to Germany to teach at Rostock University in the former East and met Sommerfeld in one of his seminars.

在荷蘭一所大學任教18年後，他回到德國，在前東德地區的羅斯托克大學(Rostock University)教書。在一堂討論課上，他認識了佐默費爾德。

Her father, too, came of age in 1968. She remembers her parents holding political meetings in their living room. And she remembers how her grandmother’s partner, a former Nazi, was never allowed into their house.

她的父親也在1968年成年。她記得她的父母會在起居室裏舉行政治會議，記得她祖母的伴侶——一個前納粹分子——始終不被允許進入他們的家裏。

“I was completely shaped by the ’68 generation,” she said. “They were my parents, my teachers, my professors. Everything I read in school was colored by their ideas.”

“我受到的完全是68年這一代人的影響，”她說。“他們是我的父母、我的老師、我的教授。我在學校裏讀到的一切都有他們的觀點色彩。”

That includes the experience of rebelling against the older generation and the cultural mainstream.

這就包括了反抗老一代人和老一代文化主流的經歷。

Even the methods of the New Right borrow heavily from 1968: provoking with language; staging sit-ins; infiltrating book fairs with far-right publishing houses; breaking taboos like throwing a burqa over the statue of the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna; forging international links to similar movements.

就連新右派的方法也向1968年進行了大量借鑑：挑釁語言，靜坐示威，極右翼出版社悄悄滲透進書展，打破禁忌——比如給維也納的瑪利亞·特雷西婭女皇雕像罩上布爾卡長袍，和類似的團體建立起國際聯繫。

Once, Lethen was so exasperated that he wrote down five conditions as a basis for discussion between them. Three of them had to do with acknowledging the Holocaust and the crimes of Germans during World War II.

有一次，利滕太過惱怒，寫下了五個條件作爲兩人之間談話的基礎。其中三條都與承認大屠殺的存在以及二戰期間德國人所犯下的罪行有關。

She rejected them all. Not, she says, because she denies the Holocaust, but because she rejects the notion that it should define modern German identity.

她全都拒絕了。她說，不是因爲她否認大屠殺，而是因爲她拒絕應該以此界定現代德國身份的這一觀點。

She wants to move on from “this extreme collective pathological obsession with the Holocaust which informs the entire moral discourse of the ’68 generation,” she said.

她說她想放下“這種左右着‘六八一代’一切道德話語的、對猶太大屠殺的極端集體病態執念”。

“I want to say: ‘Dear lefties, this obsession with those 12 years is all yours. You can stew in it but it’s something we don’t want to deal with every minute of the day,'” she said.

“我想說：‘親愛的左派，對那12年的這種執念都是你們的。你可以沉迷其中，但我們不想把每一天的每一分鐘都用來面對這個問題，’”她說。

“Why can’t we focus on the positive things in our history?” she asked.

“爲什麼我們不能關注我們歷史上正面的事情呢？”她問。

“It is a positive thing to deal honestly with history,” her husband insists.

“誠實對待歷史是件好事，”她的丈夫堅持認爲。

Since then, common ground has been stripped to the essence: An assumption of good will and rationality. And a focus on things they share — above all the well-being of their three sons. They have a rule: Neither parent is allowed to take the children on political marches.

從那以後，兩人之間的共同點已經只剩下最基本的東西：要以假定對方的善意和理性爲前提。還有對他們共同擁有的東西的關注——首先是他們三個兒子的幸福。他們有一條規矩：兩人都不能帶孩子參加政治遊行。

“We are tied to one another, for better or for worse,” Sommerfeld said, as she sipped the herbal tea her husband had just brewed to soothe her sore throat.

“不管是好事還是壞事，反正我們是拴在一起的，”佐默費爾德說着，喝了一口丈夫剛剛爲她泡好、緩解她喉嚨疼痛的花草茶。

It was not clear whether she was speaking about her marriage or her country. Or both.

不知道她說的是她的婚姻還是她的國家。還是兩者都有。