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here is a legend that the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who piped all the children out of Germany, piped them over the mountains to my hometown in Transylvania. It's an interesting story, I'm sure you know it. The Pied Piper of Hamelin rid the town of rats and mice by charming them away with his flute playing in the year 1284, about seven hundred years ago. When the citizens of Hamelin refused to pay him the price they agreed on, he charmed away their children in revenge.
It's an amazing story if you really think about it, which is what I doâthink about storiesâand I'm in good company because a lot of writers retold and thought about this story, Goethe, Browning, and the Brothers Grimm among them. What interests me about this story is what happened to these children after they were piped away. If indeed they were piped away to my hometown, what possibly happened to them is that they grew up into rather dour and humorless businessmen who built big walls around the city, kept very much to themselves, and traded with other people until they became rich. When they became rich, they attracted a lot of attention and were attacked by their neighbors who burned down their big houses and took their stuff. One of those who attacked was Vlad the Impaler who came to be known as Dracula, but who wasn't a vampire, only a Wallachian prince who liked to conquer places and then skewer their inhabitants on
stakes. After Dracula left, the inhabitants built even bigger walls and became even more suspicious of strangers than they'd been before. They watched out for anyone who wasn't like them and either expelled them from town or killed them. In the seven hundred years that have passed since they first got to my hometown, the good citizens expelled Jews, if any of them were foolish enough to settle there, banished or tortured anyone who worshipped in a style different from their own Catholic religion, and burned witches in the town square.
In this, they were no different from the rest of their European neighbors who, in those seven hundred years, made war against each other for reasons of religion, class difference, or personal animosity. Christians made war against the Islamic Turks and against each other. Catholics made war against Protestants, one kind of Catholic made war against another kind of Catholic, one kind of Protestant made war against another kind. Anyone who challenged the official doctrines of their religious leaders was tortured and burned. The Inquisition went even further than that, and tortured and killed anyone who dared to think differently. In fact, freethinkers were viewed as more dangerous than just about anyone else, and the Inquisition made sure that ideas like “the earth revolves around the sun” were promptly squelched. Even after it became common knowledge that the earth does indeed revolve around the sun, the Church took a very long time to acknowledge that fact. Only recently did the pope say that, yes, perhaps Galileo was right and the Church wrong. But what is the value of an apology hundreds of years after the wrong? About zero, I'd say. The Church has also grudgingly acknowledged recently that Darwin may have been right, that God didn't make the earth in six days, and that, perhaps, before he made man he made something like a monkey first. Duh. Welcome to the nineteenth century, Mr. Pope! And yes, by the way, wouldn't it be nice if our own fundamentalist Christians right here in the state of Louisiana would come at least as far as the nineteenth century. Living in medieval Europe as they do is no picnic â¦
Now and then there rose among the Europeans the still-radical thought that people of different beliefs might live in peace with each other. In the mid-sixteenth century, a man named Francis David founded something called the anti-Trinitarian movement, also known as Unitarianism. Francis David wrote, “There is only one Father for whom and by whom is everything ⦠. Outside of this God there is no other God, neither three nor four, neither in substance, neither in persons.”
Later, Francis David taught that Jesus was a man. The son of God certainly, but not God. Normally, he would have been killed on the spot for this idea, but Transylvania, where Francis David proposed such a radical thing, was a pretty unstable place at the time. John Sigismund, the prince of the independent principality of Transylvania, ruled over a population of German Catholics and Protestants, Protestant Hungarians, Orthodox Romanians, and some Jews. The Turkish empire extracted tribute from Transylvania but it hadn't conquered it. Turkish policy did not interfere with people's religious beliefs. In that respect, Islam during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was much more tolerant than Christianity. Transylvania was a quintessentially multicultural region, and Prince Sigismund's rule depended on keeping this unstable religious and ethnic gumbo in a state of peaceful coexistence. Francis David's religion appealed to him. He asked the representatives of the major religions to tell him what they would do if they became the official religion of his principality. Both Catholics and Protestants answered that they would rid the country of all the others. Only Francis David said that he would let them be to worship as they pleased. And so, for a brief period of time, Transylvania became the freest, most tolerant region of Europe. When Prince Sigismund died, things reverted to their usual form. Francis David was imprisoned and torturedâand died not long after.
At just about this time, and just about when Europeans were all set on killing each other completely, the world became startlingly bigger with the discovery of America. Here, suddenly, was a place that was described by explorers as “heaven on earth,” a place of bountiful riches and beauty where the Garden of Eden, inhabited by innocent and naked savages, could be found. In less than a century, Europeans populated this Garden of Eden and began killing its innocent savages, in no small part because they were “naked,” which is to say, defenseless in the face of European weapons and diseases. It didn't take very long for Europeans to take their hatreds and animosities to the New World but, for reasons that I will explain later, these did not transplant as well as the bigots of the Old World might have wished.
In the nineteenth century, long after the settlement of the New World, a new religion, the most deadly yet, appeared in Europe: it was called nationalism. Different ethnic groups asserted first their independence, then their superiority over their neighbors. In the 1930s another German pied piper made his appearance and piped away a whole generation of children. This time, he wasn't satisfied to merely take them over the mountains to settle there in relative comfort. He piped them to war and by the time it was all
over, in 1945, Hitler's magic flute had piped to death about one-fourth of the world's entire population. Hitler's nationalist religion was based on hatred of what he called “inferior races,” particularly Jews and Slavs. Intolerance was the official state religion of Nazism, and it did not disappear with Hitler and Germany's defeat.
By the time I was born, in 1946, shortly after World War II, the adversaries had changed, but the hatreds prevailed. Instead of Catholics and Protestants and nationalists, we had communists and capitalists. The fascists had just been defeated but class struggle replaced religious intolerance. But for the quirks of Transylvanian politics I should not have been born. The Nazis certainly intended to kill my entire family because they were Jewish. But as fate would have it, they only killed half of them, the half that stayed behind in Northern Transylvania, which was occupied by pro-Nazi Hungarians. My mother, my grandmother, her sister, and her sister's husband escaped over the mountains into Romanian Transylvania on the night of the Hungarian occupation. They survived the war because the Romanians, while fascists, were not as good and as efficient at killing Jews as were the Hungarians and the Germans.
The Soviet Union liberated or occupiedâdepending on whom you askâRomania in 1944. In 1947 they established a communist regime, and for the next four and a half decades, this regime did its best to eliminate anyone who questioned or disbelieved the communist ideology. My uncle Rihard, who had escaped the Nazis, ended up in a communist prison.
It became evident to us, as it had to millions of Europeans since the eighteenth century, that Europe was a nasty and unlivable place and that the ideal place to go to try to live in peace was America. We saw America as a place where one was free to believe whatever one chose. Besides, America was rich. “In America,” my grandmother used to say, “dogs walk around with pretzels on their tails.” Loose translation: “The sidewalks are paved with gold.” But it wasn't riches that counted foremost: It was the simple and yet so complicated right to live your life without being killed for thinking or worshipping differently. This right, as we all knew, had been written into the founding of the United States of America by the constitutional Bill of Rights. Foremost among these was “the right to free speech and freedom of assembly.”
This idea, originally born among the eighteenth-century revolutionaries of Europe, had taken genuine root in the New World. In 1965, following in
the footsteps of millions of immigrants, my mother and I were able to obtain exit visas and head for the U.S. We arrived in New York in March 1966 and headed for Detroit, where a refugee organization sponsored us.
America was not at all like I'd imagined it. Detroit was a big, industrial city where people of different colors lived in segregated neighborhoods. The city had no cultural center where one could stroll about on foot. Everyone, it seemed, lived inside cars and drove long, exhausting miles to and from work. Some young people at that time were at war with their elders over the war in Vietnam, while the rest of young people my age were
at
war, in Vietnam. Everywhere I looked, I saw fierce and seemingly unbridgeable conflicts between people on account of their political beliefs, their race, or (surprise!) their religious beliefs. In 1967 Detroit burst into flames during a huge riot, and I saw what I had never actually seen in Romania: army tanks rumbling up the middle of the city, on Woodward Avenue, enforcing a 6 P.M. curfew with machine-gun fire. I was living in a combat zone in a neighborhood torn by strife, in a country divided by the war.
It would have been a true nightmare, if it hadn't been for something I observed right away. The expression of divergent points of view, no matter how different or how seemingly incompatible, was conducted publicly, without any censorship. The newspapers, the television and radio, gave every point of view a forum, and when these media became insufficient to accommodate public discourse, many people founded their own media, a so-called underground media that took public discourse to places I could barely imagine. In Romania, the press had been censored and unauthorized publishing landed one promptly in jail. And so, although I was only an immigrant, I found myself able to discuss in public matters I had only whispered about in private.
The U.S., I soon observed, was a place of tremendous diversity, as well as tension. Varying interests competed for attention with great intensity. This has been the case since the very beginning, when Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman to whom we return so often when we reassess American democracy, noted, “In Europe we are wont to look upon a restless disposition, an unbounded desire for riches, and an excessive love of independence as propensities very dangerous to society. Yet these are the very elements that ensure a long and peaceful future to the republics of America.”
How was it possible that unrest, civic strife, demands and counterdemands contributed not to dissolution but to greater freedoms? The sixties were an extreme time, when the contradictions that make up our society appeared
in stark contrast. Life has become considerably calmer since then, but the animosities and conflicts that were revealed so dramatically back then haven't gone away.
When I first came to America, Romanian immigrants were a rarity, and immigrants, in general, were not treated with the suspicion with which they are viewed today. Differences that were acknowledged back then, though not fully tolerated, have taken on much fuller dimensions now. There is something paradoxical about this: Today, after the Cold War, the United States is the most powerful country in the world. We are enjoying a time of unprecedented prosperity. There is discussion in Congress now of huge upcoming budget surpluses, something unthinkable a few decades ago. But instead of satisfaction, American people feel anxious. Right-wing nuts blow up buildings with children in them. Religious fanatics are attempting to censor books in the library and programs on television. Racists are crawling out of the slimelight and into the limelight, blaming minorities for their own shortcomings. David Duke and Pat Buchanan want to close our borders both to immigration and to the free trade that is partly responsible for our new prosperity. The policy of human rights that was largely responsible for the collapse of the communist empire has been abandoned to the point where our president can receive a dictator like Jian Zemin of China and allow him to pronounce bold-faced lies to our Congress and press. The reason is that China wants to buy our nuclear technology and jets and, when it comes to business, human rights must take a backseat, at least to this administration. In other words, intolerance is increasing while tolerance is being paid only lip service.
On the other hand, the facts are pointing elsewhere. Immigrants are enriching this country, just as they have since they started arriving. The Chinese are reviving the economies of the inner cities, while Hispanics in California, Texas, and elsewhere are doing the jobs that Americans no longer want to perform, for wages Americans no longer accept. Business has proven now and then that flexible hours, concern for worker morale, respect for the environment, and ethical principles pay off in the long run. Tolerance for other people's religious beliefs and reasonable trust in science work to make us all better. Strong ethical stands and compassion for oppressed people still living under dictatorships gains America the gratitude of the world.