Alexander Langer, 30 years without the man who challenged the world: “Continue in what was right”

1. Leather shoulder bag, thin and lanky, thick brown hair, prominent nose, eyes like headlights due to the shortsighted lenses and the large nerd glasses, sincere smile, light posture, gentle and brotherly voice. Already " at first sight pleasantly strange" ( Adriano Sofri ): this is how Alexander Langer appeared to the many who met him in his infinite wandering. Langer was many things in his short life, which began in Vipiteno on February 22, 1946 and ended at just 49 years old, on the evening of July 3, 1995, with the choice to hang himself from an apricot tree, in a field near his Tuscan home, in San Miniato. That life can be summed up using the allegory of the four natural elements: earth, air, water, fire. And not only because they marked the annual events in Città di Castello, dedicated to experiences and projects of ecological conversion, promoted by the Fiera delle Utopie Concrete (one of the countless initiatives created by Langer). Each of them, in fact, evokes important parts of his biography.

2. The land, understood as Heimat, is for Langer the South Tyrol with which he will maintain an uninterrupted bond. He will deal with the issue of the autonomy of his homeland throughout his life: in 1968 he graduated with full marks in Law, in Florence, under the guidance of Paolo Barile with a thesis on the provincial autonomy of Bolzano within the framework of regional autonomy in Trentino-Alto Adige ; three times (in 1978, 1983, 1988) he will be a councilor in Bolzano; he will run (in 1995) for mayor of the city. It is here that Langer develops a very particular sensitivity for minorities: ethnic, religious, linguistic. And it is always here that he develops a method of political action – summarized in a 1994 text entitled « Attempt at a Decalogue for Interethnic Coexistence » – which he will draw on in the conflict situations he will face in life. His is a simple but powerfully generative practice: forming nuclei of people from opposing ethnic groups, willing to deepen their mutual knowledge, without fearing the defamatory accusation of betrayal, because " whoever uses this term has probably never made an effort to achieve true coexistence".

3. The air, instead, evokes travel. His, in fact, was a life in constant movement, preferably by train, by car or hitchhiking. The biography that Fabio Levi dedicated to him ( Traveling with Alex. The life and encounters of Alexander Langer, Feltrinelli, 2007) is marked by the many cities in which he worked: Vipiteno, Bolzano, Florence, Prague, Tubinga, Saluzzo, Frankfurt, Rome, Manaus, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Brussels, Strasbourg, Tirana, Verona, Jerusalem, Tbilisi, Pristina, Sarajevo, Tuzla. He conceived of encounters as an extraordinary resource, a source of inspiration, an opportunity for exchange. He always returned full of new addresses and people to take care of. Not a tourist, then, but rather an explorer of frontiers, accustomed to jumping over walls: in fact, the precious collection of his writings, edited by Edi Rabini and Adriano Sofri, is entitled Il viaggiatore leggero (Sellerio, 2015). They are written while traveling: especially on the train, even at night, stealing time from time. They are travel writings: reports, interventions, assessments. Reflections of great value, entrusted to sheets of paper often of very little circulation, if not to postcards of yesteryear sent to everyone from everywhere, thus dispersed "in a thousand streams not always communicating with each other" (notes Marco Boato in Alexander Langer. Costruttore di ponti , La Scuola publisher, 2015). In fact, Langer much preferred grassroots meetings inside and outside national borders to theoretical reflection, where ideology gives way to the concreteness of problems and the warmth of human relationships.

4. The element of water evokes the theme – existential for Langer – of environmental protection. He is among the first to grasp the connection between debt relief, ecological disruption and the development of democracy. He is also among the first to place ecological issues in a maximally inclusive horizon: all living beings (including animals), future generations, the excluded from the poorest countries. Above all, Langer combines the planetary dimension of the defense of the biosphere with the invitation to individual responsibility, in the name of a necessary " ecological conversion ": a choice that appears in his very personal "Catalogue of green virtues" (together with "awareness of limits", " conscientious objection" and " privileging use value over exchange value "). Langer's struggles on issues that are now very topical, and then almost prophetic, must be ascribed to this chapter: the exit from nuclear power; the protection of biodiversity; bioethics; the risks of biotechnology; the virtuous exchange between debt relief and ecological conservation policies in the poorest countries; the establishment of an International Court for the Environment, accessible not only to States but also to citizens and associations. He carried out much of this political work for the Green group in the European Parliament. Yet, when he sensed the risks of sclerotic party politics, Langer (with Luigi Manconi, Gad Lerner and Mauro Paissan ) called for the dissolution of the Federation of Italian Greens. In the name of biodegradability in politics (expressed in the motto " solve et coagula "), he was convinced that the absence of an environmentalist party implied more initiatives organized on the territory, not less. He was, for this reason, inundated with criticism.

5. Fire, finally, sums up two constitutive traits of Langer's personality. First of all, the radical rejection of violence - the fire of weapons - as a political practice. At twenty-two, he had been accused of contempt of institutions and incitement to disobey the laws, for having promoted in Bolzano, on the 50th anniversary of the victory, a demonstration on the nature and costs of the Great War. When Lotta Continua dissolved in 1976, he did his utmost to prevent many of his comrades from choosing armed struggle: having experienced the terrorist attacks in South Tyrol, he understood the risks of drift better than others. From 1982 he collaborated with the Movimento Nonviolento and the magazine Azione Nonviolenta , animating the campaign for tax objection to military spending and the experiment of the Verona Forum. However, he was not a pacifist. Faced with the immense ethnic slaughter in the former Yugoslavia , Langer calls for a distinction between the attacked and the aggressor. He supports the creation of an ad hoc International Criminal Court for the crimes committed in that conflict. Within the left, he was among the few to question himself deeply (and painfully) on legitimate defense, on responsibility for failure to provide humanitarian aid, on the international interference that he justified in the name of human rights and environmental emergencies. He even promoted, in June 1995, a dramatic appeal (" Europe is born or dies in Sarajevo" ) in which, unheard, he called for an international police intervention in Bosnia, where the siege of his capital had been going on for three years. He believed it was essential to stop the exterminating hand of the aggressors with military means: a position that cost him, at the time, isolation and stigma.

6. Fire also evokes an overflowing side of Langer's biography: political militancy and his way of interpreting it. A true internal fire that, in the end, burned his existence prematurely. To the "unhappy conscience" of the avant-gardes who " believe they have to take others to where they themselves think they have arrived", he preferred "individual testimony, conscientious objection, when I believe I have to do something that is important to me and that others do not see, hoping - rather - that this will provoke autonomous effects in other people" . To the fundamental question "Who is my neighbor?", Langer's answer has always been: everyone. Without half measures. The ubiquity of his incessant traveling demonstrates this. The census of the many political-cultural areas in which he spent himself to the point of self-dispelling attests to this: the Catholic and Christian world and that of other religions; the student movement of '68; the extra-parliamentary left in the '70s; the “new left” between the 70s and 80s; the eco-pacifist movement in the 80s and 90s; the galaxy of environmental associations; the historical left; the Radical Party with its referendum campaigns; the Nonviolent Movement; even the “conservative” areas sensitive to the defense of creation and life. The osmosis between the personal and public spheres was the hallmark of those years. But such an unlimited altruistic impulse also had a religious matrix – more specifically Franciscan – typical of Langer's youthful education, which would forge his adult mettle. For him, it is more correct to speak not of militancy but of apostolate. Langer embodied the secularity in politics of tolerance, curiosity, gradualness in action, the empirical verification of ideals, openness to change, the plurality of instruments of struggle well beyond the organizational form of the party. He will lack secularism, however, for a decisive aspect: the acceptance of the inevitable gap between expectations and answers given, between what one wants to achieve and the limits (even personal ones) in achieving it. A failure that, for him, will prove tragically unsustainable.

7. It will all end at Pian dei Giullari, on the tragic night thirty years ago. His extreme gesture is explained in a handwritten message, written in German: «The burdens have become truly unbearable for me, I can't take it anymore. Please forgive me all for this departure of mine. A thank you to those who helped me move forward. I have no bitterness towards those who have aggravated my problems. “Come to me, you who are tired and burdened”. Even in accepting this invitation I lack the strength. So I leave more desperate than ever. Don't be sad, continue in what was right». That gesture comes from afar. It is rooted in the unfulfilled desire – shared with those closest to me – to take leave of an all-encompassing political life, lived without reserve for decades, thirteen of which in representative institutions. A few years earlier, on October 21, 1992, writing about the tragic death of the leader of the German Grunen, Petra Kelly , who died in a murder-suicide with her partner, Langer also seemed to be talking about himself: « Perhaps it is too difficult to be individually […] bearers of hope: too many expectations that one feels burdened by, too many failures and disappointments that inevitably accumulate, too many envies and jealousies to which one becomes the object, too great a load of love for humanity and of human loves that intertwine and are not resolved, too great a distance between what one proclaims and what one manages to accomplish». That gesture short-circuits everything: the light traveler who succumbs to too many burdens. The brother of many who goes away alone. The theoretician of the “ sense of limits” who dies of his own unlimited fervor. The supporter of the need for the world to recover its natural balance who loses his own, letting himself fall from the wire. As if to seal the sense of failure, a few days after his death the Srebrenica massacre took place.

8. It is difficult to reconcile Langer's existence with his end. In the face of his farewell to life, the utmost modesty is needed: that which can be found, for example, in the intense collection of poems, articles and testimonies edited by Marco Boato ( Le parole del commiato. Alexander Langer, dieci anni dopo , edizioni Verdi del Trentino, 2005). Now as then, there remains the regret of a premature death. Thirty years later, his ability to see far and to bear witness to the future would still be useful in trying to repair the world.

FROM

Andrea Pugiotto