I often say that reading basically exercises the weakest muscle in mankind - which is the muscle of empathy. The moment that you read about someone who lives in a different society, something about the humanity of his situation reaches you. If I read a Palestinian poet I don't think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I think about him and his pain, his suffering and his yearning. I think that there is something about art that brings out the ambiguity of life and puts it in a safe environment where we can contain that ambiguity. In real life we want to know if somebody is our friend or our enemy, but art allows us to deal with more complex narratives. [...]
I have a very delicate kind of seismograph for anti-Semitism or racism in general. My wife said that every place we go it takes me five minutes to find the swastika graffiti on the wall. But I must say that there are very few places that I find more liberal and less racist than Berlin as a city and Germany as a country. I think there is something about the shadow of the horrible past of this country, and the fact that the country assumed responsibility for it.
If you talk about fair and liberal and open-minded societies it is easier for me to say that about Germany than to say that about the US or many other countries in Europe. I'm not saying that there are no fascist powers here. I think the difference is that once there was a fascist power in Germany, so the association you automatically have are the Nazis. Because you have this strong association, it makes people much more careful and reserved about it. [...]
If the clashes in the past were nationalistic, now they are on religious grounds. You see that all the wars - whether in Iraq or Syria or the clashes in Lebanon - are more between Shia and Sunni and less between people who belong to a nation. The world is changing. Nationalism is becoming redundant. Today you have companies like Apple and Google that are stronger than most countries, and they transcend those countries. So you feel like there is an old structure, and this old structure can not contain the new reality.
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