VIENNA – Three decades ago, history swept away communist regimes across Europe. Yet the habits, bureaucratic practices, and instincts of submission and obedience endure, even as societies have established democratic institutions – courts, parliaments, constitutions – and privatized state property.
Since 1989, the most stubborn barrier to democratic change in Central and Eastern Europe has been in the heads and hearts of the region’s people. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for example, has remained in power for 15 years of “single-party democracy” by offering voters a recognizable imitation of authoritarian predecessors like the fascist-era leader Admiral Miklós Horthy and the communist János Kádár and their brand of reactionary or communist national populism.
The persistence of authoritarian patterns tells us that opening to the global market and copying Western institutions can leave untouched the deepest reservoirs of allegiance within a population. Human consciousness remains haunted by vanished pasts. It clings to habits that have been repurposed by new demagogues, pushes back against the myriad new freedoms on offer, and maintains forms of inner obedience as protection against a headlong rush into an unknown future.
Freedom and Its Discontents
One of the most interesting observers of our inner reluctance to accept the acceleration of history is Lea Ypi, an Albanian-born political theorist who teaches at the London School of Economics. Her 2021 book Free made her famous, in part because of its ironic and ambiguous one-word title, which implied that one freedom – within her childhood home and among her vividly remembered parents and friends –was lost when the communist regime collapsed and the chaotic new “freedom” of the West prevailed.
Through a mordantly comic and ironic retelling of her childhood in the collapsing communist “paradise” of Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania for 41 years, Ypi put a question mark after the word freedom itself, stripping it of the self-congratulatory insularity of the West’s post-Cold War narrative. She revealed both what was lost when this freedom came and what was violent, rapacious, and corrupt about its arrival. Yet as Ypi herself understood when she left to study philosophy in Rome and later completed her doctorate at the European University Institute in Florence, once Western freedom arrived, there was no going back.
While there was no return, memories of Albania continued to haunt Ypi, just as the utopian promise of communism continues to inspire her politics. Several years ago, I heard her make the case for socialist freedom to a bewildered audience of Oxford academics. It was as if she was trying to rescue a discredited utopian dream from the ruins of actually existing socialism for the benefit of a capitalist reality that has long since abandoned any yearning for utopia – or for anything except its own perpetuation ad infinitum.
In many ways, Ypi is an arrestingly complex example of the survival of the “habits of the heart” that flourished in the vanished empire of communism. She has thrived professionally in the West while remaining obsessed with the world she left behind.
It is striking that someone in early middle age, as Ypi is, should keep revisiting her childhood in a long-extinct regime. Her latest foray into this vanished past is Indignity – another one-word title – subtitled A Life Reimagined.
The life reimagined, by means of an extended fictional recreation, is that of her grandmother, Leman. She was born in Thessaloniki – a city marked by its Jewish, Greek, and Ottoman heritage – at the end of World War I and was raised in a sophisticated Albanian milieu where French was the language of family conversation. Her granddaughter follows her departure from Thessaloniki to Tirana, tracing her life through the royalist period of King Zog I, her marriage to a former associate of the young Hoxha, Italy’s wartime occupation of Albania, and the Allied liberation of 1945, culminating in the imposition of Hoxha’s communist dictatorship.
What haunts Ypi, first, is that she was in London when Leman died in Albania in 2006, and thus broke her promise to be with her beloved grandmother at the end. Not being there, one might add, is the hidden price of the freedom that comes with expatriation.
Another reason for the book is a sudden gust of suspicion, provoked when someone – possibly motivated by jealousy at Ypi’s visibility and success in the West – posted online a photograph she had never seen before: her grandmother and grandfather at the Hotel Victoria in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, in December 1941. What, Ypi wondered, was her grandmother doing on holiday in fascist Italy? Why was she smiling into the camera? How could she possibly be happy with the Nazis at the gates of Moscow and her own country in Mussolini’s grip?
Answering these questions sent her back to Albania, to Thessaloniki, and to archives elsewhere in search of the buried truth about her grandmother. Had she been a spy for the fascists? Had she been a communist agent? Either possibility was repellent for a family whose members had endured long periods of imprisonment and poverty under Hoxha’s dictatorship. Finding the truth required excavating the edifice of moral self-worth that the family had constructed during the long decades of Albanian communism.
Dignity is Ypi’s word for this edifice. Her core theme is how one family retained its dignity through years of lies, repression, and poverty. Writing as a political philosopher, she is eloquent on the subject, if possibly a little sentimental:
“There is something about the human spirit, my grandmother would say, that withstands all attempts at offense, injury, or humiliation – something animals are incapable of, because they are incapable of thoughts disconnected from their immediate existence. We call it dignity.”
Survival as Dignity
The question at the heart of the book is whether, as history rained its blows on Ypi’s family, her grandmother had tumbled into indignity and betrayed her granddaughter’s image of her as “a moral saint.” A secondary theme is whether Ypi herself has succumbed to the indignity of Western celebrity in the wake of the publication of Free. In the social-media sewer, an anonymous critic denounced her defense of socialist ideals: “You dishonored not just your grandmother but all the victims of communism, you communist bitch.”
So, Ypi’s project is to rescue not only her grandmother but herself. She is helped in her task by the fact that she is a vivid writer, with a sly, sardonic sense of humor that makes her self-obsessions bearable. The reader follows her into the archives of the Sigurimi, Albania’s communist-era secret police. She is soon lost in an archival hall of mirrors, trying to make sense of 80-year-old typescripts of interrogations and informers’ reports on her grandmother and grandfather, together with confusing allegations and counter-allegations that Leman was a spy for Greek intelligence or for the British intelligence officers who accompanied the victorious Allies into Tirana in 1945.
Ypi reads through pages of anonymous denunciations by informers with pseudonyms like Tribune, March Wind, and Pehlivan. She discovers her grandfather’s signed confession, attesting that he had known British intelligence officers, that he had sat in the Café Splendid in Tirana discussing Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, and had predicted a renewal of war that would destroy Albania and the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe. He confessed that he felt “very guilty” and condemned his actions. Such was the indignity that interrogation – and possibly torture – could inflict on a decent man. His confession led to a 15-year sentence in Hoxha’s prisons.
After her husband’s sentencing, Leman was banished from Tirana and sent to labor in the countryside. Her granddaughter found a letter in which she desperately protested that she had nowhere to go. Carrying a young child – Ypi’s father – she was nevertheless banished and forced to dig ditches. This too was the indignity inflicted by the communist regime. Leman and her husband were not reunited until his release in 1960.
In the archival hall of mirrors, Ypi finds herself baffled for a time, chasing a shadowy doppelgänger, Leman Ypi, who lived a similar life to her grandmother and died in 1973.
Eventually, Ypi establishes that her real grandmother had never been an agent of either the British or the Italian fascists and that she was betrayed by neighbors and friends who informed on her, though their identity remained undiscovered. Her granddaughter seeks to rescue her from the indignity of anonymous denunciation and commemorate the way she raised a child alone while her husband was a political prisoner.
To her granddaughter, Leman became an indomitable example of how to maintain agency in a regime, a culture, and a country that so often stripped its people of any sense of control over their lives. To be Albanian, after all, is to come from a poor, ignored country that is too often the plaything of more powerful neighbors. One of Ypi’s ancestors happened to be the prime minister of Albania in 1939 when the Italians marched in, and when her father reproached him for surrendering both his own dignity and that of his country by not resisting, according to family legend, the old man coolly replied:
“Dignity, you say? Our navy has just over a hundred men, the gendarmerie a couple of thousand, we possess a grand total of four patrol boats and two tanks, all supplied by Italy … does your dignity demand that we send the last few hundred men we have to the slaughter…?”
Dignity Reimagined
Albania was not exactly the type of place to nurture in its citizens a sense of historical agency, or even personal responsibility for life’s outcomes. As the old prime minister supposedly said to his son, “There may be nations out there who make history. We are not among them, dear boy.” It was much easier to conclude that historical outcomes like Italy’s invasion were not within his control, and even that private life was a matter of luck and fate. But this is the historical pessimism that her grandmother resisted:
“Leman did not believe in ‘luck.’ She was convinced that what people experience as luck, or call it that, is simply a way of converting human decisions into mysterious natural forces for the sake of reconciling oneself with their consequences. She insisted that somehow, somewhere down the line, a choice is always made: it could be a good choice or a bad one, made lightly or at some cost … But a choice it always was, always without fail.”
This is what it meant to retain dignity in a society that constantly inflicted indignity on Lemanand her family: to hold on tight to the idea that her life had been a series of choices, and that her fate, however unjust, was not her fault but was certainly her responsibility. And what was that responsibility exactly? To understand, justify, and explain what she had stood for, what she had withstood, and to tell the story to her granddaughter.
Ypi is a powerful writer – witty and allusive – but she burdens herself with the task of fictionalizing her grandmother’s life. She takes the stories her grandmother must have told her and turns them into a fully novelized, reimagined version that runs for several hundred pages and forms the core of the book.
Sometimes this fictionalized account results in very powerful scenes, such as when her aunt commits suicide rather than marry a man whose proximity makes her feel as if she is suffocating in a smoke-filled room. Another scene describes how the family’s Jewish doctor stumbles out of Nazi-occupied Thessaloniki after the exterminations there have begun. The doctor is so traumatized by his experience that he can only whisper his concentration camp number – 10017 – over and over.
At other times, the strain of imagining scenes Ypi could not have witnessed begins to show: “she knew his head was heavy with thoughts, like a truck full of unwanted furniture, and she felt she should wait for it to clear before adding another load.”
These passages read like a philosopher trying to be a novelist. Occasionally, Ypi makes a historical mistake. For example, she writes that Léon Blum, France’s socialist prime minister during the Popular Front government of 1936-37, was “dragged out of his car and beaten to death by royalist anti-Semites.” In fact, Blum died in his bed in 1950, honored by both the left and the right for his courage in surviving imprisonment in Buchenwald.
Indignity is at its strongest when it tackles deep philosophical questions – whether dignity is possible under authoritarian regimes, whether it can survive when history cruelly toys with people’s hopes – or when Ypi explores how real people, those who flit in and out of the hall of mirrors in the archives, confront these dilemmas. At such moments, it achieves more than what one might expect from the history of one Albanian woman’s life across the 20th century. Ypi’s book becomes a master class in recovering truth from history, regaining integrity after its wounds, and finding the meaning that time and memory conspire to prevent us from grasping.