当“政敌”成为伴侣:老左派与极右派的爱情故事

VIENNA — When she says identity, he hears exclusion.

维也纳——当她说身份时，他听到的是排斥。

When he says diversity, she hears Islamization.

当他说多元化时，她听到的是伊斯兰化。

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

他指责她忘记历史。她指责他沉迷历史。他称她为种族主义者。她说他是民族受虐狂。

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岁的赫尔穆特·利滕(Helmut Lethen)和42岁的卡罗琳·佐默费尔德(Caroline Sommerfeld)都是作家。在一个空前分化的德国，他们代表着两代人和两个思想阵营。他们是政治上的敌人。

And they are married.

他们也是夫妻。

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.

他们的婚姻不同寻常，甚至让人难以理解，但也是一场对宽容的实验，一扇可以看到另一阵营如何思考的窗口。每天，他们都进行着在他们的国家里缺失的对话。

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.

这是一个非常德国的爱情故事（虽然这对夫妇住在奥地利，丈夫在这里教书），这个故事准确地反映着反文化运动的50周年，而这场运动至今仍然是全球战后历史——以及对今天的反-反文化运动兴起——的一个试金石。

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月在欧洲和在美国一样重要，同样被年青一代的骚动、性解放、对越南战争的厌恶以及对那个时代的政治建制阶层的普遍不满所激发。

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

它带给了婴儿潮一代大约一致的人生轨迹，他们从新锐的学生革命者成为了一本正经的自由派精英。

Germany was no exception. And neither was Lethen.

德国不是例外。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.

他当时是一名学生活动人士，对共产主义产生过兴趣，反叛过德国战后的精英阶层——用他自己的话来说，那些人“仍然散发着纳粹的恶臭”——最后却成为了这个国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.

佐默费尔德是一名自成一派的哲学家，她被卷入了另一场反文化运动：2015年的夏天，成百上千名难民抵达德国时，她发现了“新右派”，这个群体是民族主义运动的思想先锋队，这场运动认为伊斯兰教和全球化是关乎德国存亡的威胁。

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.

她的丈夫庆祝难民的到来：“我觉得这是我们的文化史上第一次用这种方式接纳外国人，”他说。

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

然而，佐默费尔德感到“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，她希望她自己的边缘运动正在与一个变化中的时代精神接轨，可以在德国和更远的地方产生回响，达到她丈夫的运动在自己的时代所达到的那种高度。

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

“我们是沉默的大多数的扩音器，”她这样主张。

Lethen dismisses the analogy.

利滕对这个比喻很不屑。

“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.”

“我们是被一个对世界的渴望所驱动，我们看向未来，”他说。“他们是被一个回到过去、回归日耳曼传统起源的渴望所驱动。这是对一个从来都不存在的过去的怀旧情绪。”

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.

他们在思想上的分歧如此深远，连这样一段绵延数十载的爱情关系都无法化解，两人初识时她还是一名大学生，写了一篇题为《如何遵循道德》的毕业论文。利滕在他的讲座中注意到了这个人。

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

在同床共枕，分享对康德、园艺和养育三个儿子的兴趣二十年后，他们仍然在对话。

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

“了解另一方是好事，”她说。

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

“交谈比不交谈好，”他说。

This much they can agree on.

他们能在这一点上达成一致。

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.)

佐默费尔德曾用香槟庆祝特朗普的大选胜利，她参与合写了一本名为《与左派一起生活》(Living with the Left)的书。（利滕称之为《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).

她把这本书描述为极右派的自助指南，建议读者如何反驳左派观点，以及如何刺激他们。（例如，把2000万在斯大林统治下死去的人和被纳粹杀害的600万人进行比较。）

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.”

而利滕广受好评的最新作品是关于纳粹统治下的文化精英，它也可以被解读为给思想上的极右派的一封信。鸣谢中包括了对佐默费尔德的感谢，称她“给这本书注入了活力”。

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.

这本书讲述了四位德国名人——一名音乐指挥、一名演员、一名外科医生、一名法学教授。和其他人不同，他们决定留在纳粹德国，为它正名。

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

这一直令他困扰：“高雅文化和国家杀戮之间的结盟是如何达到的？”利滕说。

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

利滕的父亲曾于1928年加入希特勒的纳粹党并为其积极宣传。战争结束后，他从没说起过这件事。

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.

利滕说，1950年代，在他高中的九年时间里，没有一节历史课提到过对犹太人的大屠杀。1957年在看一部法国纪录片《夜与雾》(Night and Fog)时，他才在电影院里了解了集中营。

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

这段记忆就像“压在胸口的石头”挥之不去。

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

他说，1960年代的学生运动是要“打开我们的父辈的沉默档案”。

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.

他成为一个毛派分支派别的成员。那是许多非常小的共产主义组织之一，它们的领导人后来成为了学者、教师或是中左派政客。

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.

在荷兰一所大学任教18年后，他回到德国，在前东德地区的罗斯托克大学(Rostock University)教书。在一堂讨论课上，他认识了佐默费尔德。

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.

她的父亲也在1968年成年。她记得她的父母会在起居室里举行政治会议，记得她祖母的伴侣——一个前纳粹分子——始终不被允许进入他们的家里。

“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年这一代人的影响，”她说。“他们是我的父母、我的老师、我的教授。我在学校里读到的一切都有他们的观点色彩。”

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

这就包括了反抗老一代人和老一代文化主流的经历。

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.

就连新右派的方法也向1968年进行了大量借鉴：挑衅语言，静坐示威，极右翼出版社悄悄渗透进书展，打破禁忌——比如给维也纳的玛利亚·特雷西娅女皇雕像罩上布尔卡长袍，和类似的团体建立起国际联系。

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，利滕太过恼怒，写下了五个条件作为两人之间谈话的基础。其中三条都与承认大屠杀的存在以及二战期间德国人所犯下的罪行有关。

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.

她全都拒绝了。她说，不是因为她否认大屠杀，而是因为她拒绝应该以此界定现代德国身份的这一观点。

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.

她说她想放下“这种左右着‘六八一代’一切道德话语的、对犹太大屠杀的极端集体病态执念”。

“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.

“我想说：‘亲爱的左派，对那12年的这种执念都是你们的。你可以沉迷其中，但我们不想把每一天的每一分钟都用来面对这个问题，’”她说。

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

“为什么我们不能关注我们历史上正面的事情呢？”她问。

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

“诚实对待历史是件好事，”她的丈夫坚持认为。

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.

从那以后，两人之间的共同点已经只剩下最基本的东西：要以假定对方的善意和理性为前提。还有对他们共同拥有的东西的关注——首先是他们三个儿子的幸福。他们有一条规矩：两人都不能带孩子参加政治游行。

“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.

“不管是好事还是坏事，反正我们是拴在一起的，”佐默费尔德说着，喝了一口丈夫刚刚为她泡好、缓解她喉咙疼痛的花草茶。

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

不知道她说的是她的婚姻还是她的国家。还是两者都有。