Photo: Archive
The historian and writer Per Leo has left PEN Berlin with around 30 other authors. This is the result of an extremely narrow vote defeat on a resolution to protect journalists, authors and cultural institutions in the Gaza disaster war. With a majority of just one vote (83 against 82), an extraordinary general meeting last Sunday decided against a resolution that Leo and 27 other members had supported. It denounced Israel’s destruction of Gaza, but did not explicitly mention the Hamas massacre on October 7th. Instead, a draft won that explicitly stated that without this terrorist attack the war would not have started: “We mourn all the innocent victims of this conflict.”
After this defeat, Leo resigned from PEN Berlin, which was founded just two and a half years ago, along with other celebrities such as Ramy al-Asheq, Diedrich Diederichsen, Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus, Deborah Feldman and Susan Neiman. In the “Frankfurter Rundschau” they called the winning resolution “weak-as-nails” because it “cannot say no to excessive warfare without being followed by a tortured ‘But Hamas has started’.”
As a historian, Leo had previously attracted attention for his idiosyncratic historical politics. In 2017 he was involved in the book “Talking to Rights,” in which we did not talk face-to-face with rights, but mainly with a literary constructed counterpart, a kind of mixture of Peter Scholl-Latour, Ernst Jünger and Michael Kühnen. In 2021, he publicly challenged the singularity of the Holocaust with his book “Tears Without Mourning,” which Marion Detjen described in “Zeit” as a “national-liberal project.” Now she and Leo have left PEN Berlin.
She and the others in the “FR” accused the PEN leadership duo Deniz Yücel and Thea Dorn of being politically overwhelmed. Thea Dorn rejected this at DLF Kultur, because PEN Berlin is “not a religious association”. In the “Berliner Zeitung” Yücel said rather casually: Politics means “that a majority decides something that you yourself do not agree with. And that can have a cathartic effect in that some people say, “It’s not for me,” and others say, “That’s democracy.”
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