Lea Ypi: Free: Coming of Age at the End of History / Margo Rejmer: Mud Sweeter than Honey. Voices of Communist Albania

Two books that deal with the study of Enver Hoxha’s regime have been published in English almost at the same time (Rejmer’s Polish original is from 2018). More precisely, both authors give the so-called “declassified” voice, that is the regime opposers and dissidents who were punished with collective punishment. The authors arrive at surprisingly different conclusions even though they are both of hybrid identities with inverse migration destinations and combine both an internal and external perception. Lea Ypi was born in Tirana in 1979 and today lives in London, Margo (short for Małgorzata) Rejmer was born in Warsaw in 1985 and today lives in Tirana as well as Warsaw.

Ypi has created an autobiographical novel with a first-person narrator who tells the story of the Ypi family in the 1980s and 1990s which had already been famous during the Ottoman Empire. Rejmer chooses the approach of oral history in order to give a voice to a repressively marginalised group. She systematically conducted interviews with representatives of the second generation whose fathers fell from grace after 1945. Her account is a combination of Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: an insufferable read on camps, banishment, and imprisonment of the old middle-class elite. We would expect a similar take from Lea Ypi who represents the third generation of this group. However, the author surprises with a cheerful narrative style including over-smart aphorisms, and she seems unable to separate her experiences as a professor of political science at the London School of Economics from the narrator’s perspective. Only in the epilogue do we learn that the book (written in Berlin and sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) is supposed to be “about the overlapping ideas of freedom in the liberal and socialist traditions” (309) and not about the reconstruction of the Albanian reality of the 1980s–1990s. The book’s penultimate sentence “My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape” (310) must sound like a joke to many Albanians and victims of communism in general. The context of this sentence lies within a criticism of capitalism relativising the totalitarian experience in a highly questionable way. Namely, when the narrator’s father as the new director of Durrës’ harbour is supposed to dismiss some of his staff, his actions are compared to that of secret agents: “The sole thought of being like them, of complying with rules in the same abstract and heartless way, was enough to leave my father sleepless at night” (250). Ypi’s relativisations are grist for the old elite’s mills who hinder lustration and the study of the past until this day. Indeed, the question arises whether Ypi even intends to address the Albanian audience; her criticism of capitalism (likewise prominent in Kristen R. Ghodsee’s book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence from 2019) misappropriates a real socialist reality at the cost of being provocative.

Despite this fundamental criticism, the novel whose reminiscence for Francis Fukuyama from 1992 implicates a political scientist interpretation is an enjoyable and easy read. At times it even reminded me of the satirical humour that Thomas Brussig used to describe the late DDR-system (e.g. Heroes Like Us from 1995). The Ypi family’s situation is expressively marked by the grandmother who will only speak French with the first-person narrator for which she is teased on the streets. A third of the book is set during communism, and this world falls apart from chapter 10 on (“The End of History,” 123 ff.). Many insinuations, euphemisms and white lies within the family and neighbourhood are suddenly brought to the light of truth. Only in the early 1990s does the narrator find out about the prominent family she stems from, and which ancestors had “travelled” or “passed the final exam” (code for imprisonment or release). Ypi conducts a collective psychology of transition and stays within the nuclear family’s focus. Both parents suddenly have superb political and professional careers right up until the pyramid scheme failures in 1997, and this sends a fatal message to Tirana: their sudden career starts are not representative of the countless stories of victims and seem like a trivialisation of the totalitarian oppression. The technical mistake in the narrative style of transferring Professor Ypi’s political scientist aphorisms onto her younger self undermines much of the novel’s artistic power (the six-year-old reflects: “The mastery of subtle boundary between following rules and breaking them was, for us children, the true mark of growth, maturity and social integration,” 57–8). At times she successfully manages to present the child’s internalised ideologies and thus its totalitarian upbringing. However, the novel—which is in fact more of a political analysis than a work of fiction—misses the opportunity to lay open the totalitarian system by means of alienating the child’s perspective.

The subtitle of Margo Rejmer’s book also indicates that it does not deal with voices from, but of communist Albania. The choice of this preposition makes these voices inseparable from the communist experience. The book deals with a claim that Hoxha’s widow Nexhmije made in her famous Spiegel interview from 2003 (“we never killed without a reason”): “Under communism, nobody went to prison without a reason” (122). The title as a quotation from Mitrush Kuteli’s famous lines from 1944 about the “muddy Albanian soil” (7) is bitter irony, and sarcastic undertone is prevalent. As Tony Barber stresses in his short introduction (13–17), the unique feature of Albania’s communism was the lack of Thaw and 45 years of uninterrupted Stalinism. Two key terms are contrasted with this: “the irrepressible human yearning for freedom and dignity, and beauty” (17). Rejmer’s book is a work of oral history, an everyday method oriented at the history of mentalities. Within historical science it has emancipated itself from the study of archives and sources and aims to give a voice to deprivileged groups (migrants, women, and minorities). Oral history has been employed by Lutz Niethammer in the German case in order to illuminate the prior history as well as aftermath of national socialism within West German society.^[1] It became a prominent method after the collapse of Eastern European communism in order to empower victims of despotism and to document the experienced injustice. Similar to Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich, Rejmer does not only reproduce recordings but turns the narratives into stories. She thus accompanies her informants on different stations of imprisonment and banishment of the old upper class that was to be removed systematically after 1945. Akin to the classic of Stalinist cleansings from the 1930s (The Deserted House by Lydia Chukovskya from 1965), a terror regime is depicted that only intended to eliminate the class enemy at the beginning:

In paradise, everyone was equal, but people were divided into better and worse types—those with a good family background, who lead an upright life, and those with a bad one, who were oppressed from birth. The good had to keep company with the good, and the bad with the bad—sharing their suffering. The good could become bad at any moment. The bad generally remained the worst until death (22).

Rejmer, so to speak, provides a literary contribution to “The Black Book of Communism”: it’s about sadism, torture, and the relationship between the executors of state violence and their victims. In stark contrast to Ypi’s cheerful humour, Rejmer’s stories are tragic, grim, but also heroic. It is probably no coincidence that Rejmer is Polish and directly raises the question about involvement, guilt, and denunciation. Similar to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), one in four citizens was involved as an informant. Rejmer has thus given the floor to the children of Albania’s political and cultural elite from the 1940s–1980s that fell from grace: She begins with Bashkim, the son of Mehmet Shehu who committed suicide under mysterious circumstances in 1981. On the other hand, you can find impressive authentic narratives from Enverists such as the stonemason Nexhip Manga who represents the continuity of discourse and inclination to conspiracy theories (66–7):

The American secret service once sent a paid assassin to kill Enver, here, in Gjirokastër. But when the assassin saw how much the people loved Enver, how the children kissed his cheeks, how the adults wept with joy at the sight of their wonderful leader, he said ‘How could I kill such a good man?’ And he handed himself over to the Albanian police. Honestly!

The compelling story “The Bad Boy” (75–92) recounts how a teenager is affected by his encounter with Thoma Deljana, the minister of education in 1966–76 who then fell from grace as an adversary to Mehmet Shehu. Mari Kitty Harapi, niece of a member of anti-communist Balli Kombëtar, tells a similar story, as does the family of Qazim Mulleti (mayor and prefect of Tirana in 1940–41 and 1942–44). The stories’ leitmotif is the almost impossible approach to world literature in exile that is again and again described as salvation. The book is split up into five panels that finally end in the 1990s and describe numerous encounters and conversations between perpetrators and victims.

Maybe we would come closest to the truth if bookshops only sold a twin pack of the books?