Other spheres that has allowed this latest movement to the far right to take place.

"The inability to put ourselves in another's shoes is the core of intolerance. In his novel The Book of Evidence, Irish author John Banville's narrator and murderer confesses to the unforgivable crime of having failed to imagine what it was like to be his victim. 'I could kill her,' he says, 'because for me she was not alive.' If we want to challenge hatred, emphatic imagination is central.

"As survivors of the Holocaust both Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi implored us 'to tell our stories.' And we must, not just to make real the oppressed and the oppressor. Not just to break down the idea of separateness, that we understand each other better. Not just so we don't forget! We tell our stories to put flesh and blood on new ideas—and to play them out, as the company of the Thalia Theatre has done for one hundred fifty years now with such wit and style. To them I would like to say thank you.

"We need to paint pictures and see them move. I think of the still frames of Helmut Hartzfeld, who changed his name to John Hartfield in protest against the original Nazis. I think of Berlin dadaists whose movement unzipped the starched trousers of the fascists, exposing them as serious—painfully serious—dickheads. Close to the poison you'll find the cure. As well as an antidote, humor, laughter is the evidence of freedom. I think of Gunter Grass's black, black comedy The Call of the Toad, or Volker Schlondorffs film of Grass's novel The Tin Drum. It was from a Mel Brooks movie called The Producers that U2 took the name of their last album. In the bizarre musical an S.S. officer is met with the greeting, 'Achtung, baby!' to which he replies, 'Ze fuhrer would never say baby!' Quite right. The fuhrer would never say baby. We are writers, artists, actors, scientists. I wish we were comedians. We would probably have more effect. 'Mock the devil and he will flee from thee.' 'Fear of the devil leads to devil worship.' Anyway, for all this: imagination. To tell our stories, to play them out, to paint pictures, moving and still, but above all to glimpse another way of being. Because as much as we need to describe the kind of world we do live in, we need to dream up the kind of world we want to live in. In the case of a rock & roll band that is to dream out loud, at high volume, to turn it up to eleven. Because we have fallen asleep in the comfort of our freedom.

Rock & roll is for some of us a kind of alarm clock. It wakes us up

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to dream! It has stopped me from becoming cynical in cynical times. Surely it is the inherited cynicism of our political and economic think­ing that contributes so much to the despair of the 1990s.

"The fascists at least recognize the void, their pseudostrong leader­ship a reaction to what feels like no leadership, their simplistic rascist analysis as to what ails the economy and why there is so much unem­ployment a reaction to our government's gobbledygook, which even the smartest among us cannot understand. . . .

"Fascism is about control. They know what we won't admit: that things are out of control. We started this century with so many compet­ing ideas as to how we should live together. We end it with so few.

"The machismo—and it is machismo—of the New Right has much to do with the impotence of an electorate who feel they have only one real choice anyway. It has much to do with a consumer society that equates manhood with spending power. Maleness is an elusive notion, distorted but made accessible and concrete by the Nazis. We shouldn't underestimate this. The fascists feed off youth culture and if we are to overcome them we must understand their sex appeal. And what is our appeal? The neo-Nazis have a perverted idealism, but do we have any idealism left? What is the ground we stand on politically? Economi­cally? Spiritually?

"I don't know, but I know that in the history books democracy is the oddity.

"Democracy is a fragile thing and though the Greeks invented it, they never could live it. The Judeo-Christian idea that all men are equal in God's eyes has been suppressed everywhere. It has raised its peculiar head. Obviously this is not a German problem. In fact, we look to a people who have survived not one but two totalitarian regimes in the last sixty years. The hundreds and thousands who took part in the candlelight marches all over this country last month sent a signal to the rest of us that Germany 'will not let it happen again.' But for that you need our support, because while it is fine to fight darkness with light, it is better to make the light brighter.

"I would like to thank Vanessa Redgrave and thank you for listening. Good night."

Back in Ireland, the newspapers report that when Prime Minister Albert Reynolds was introduced to President Clinton, the President told him that "that wonderful group U2" played a big part in getting

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him elected. Bono is startled when he hears this. Either Clinton is giving the band more credit than they deserve, or he's using U2 as shorthand for the whole Rock the Vote registration drive, or he's taking his introduction to the Irish leader as an occasion to demonstrate an ability to speak in blarney. The newspapers say Clinton told Reynolds that he had been trying to figure out Bono's last name. "After an hour with him I realized he didn't have one, but it didn't matter."

Approaching Naomi

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