I owe you a word

»Revolution starts with reading and writing. Revolution starts with theater and public talks. With debating and sharing. Revolution starts with friendship«. 

Xenia — from the Greek ξενία, the ancient concept of guest-friendship, of ritualized hospitality, the moral and political obligation to welcome the stranger. Every time someone calls my name, they are, without knowing it, invoking an ethics and reciprocity. A gift economy older than the nation-state.

In the autumn of 2024, I arrived in Athens after a series of life-changing events. The city smelled of exhaust. I had moved there alone, partly for reasons I could explain and partly for the older, less articulable reason that one sometimes needs to become a stranger in order to stop being one in the wrong place. But what I hadn't anticipated was that loneliness is not a geography. You carry it with you and moving cities does not dissolve the unwanted; at best, it makes the loneliness more honest — strips it of the camouflage that familiarity provides.

This was not my first time in Athens. I was here already in 2017, during the documenta 14, when the Parliament of Bodies convened not in a parliamentary chamber but in a former military police headquarters at Parko Eleftherias. The building had been the site of detention and torture during the military junta between 1967 and 1974. But in 2017 it was a space for "exercises of freedom" — for artists, activists, migrants, workers, theorists to come together and invent new forms of public life. The Parliament had no ministers. It had no agenda in the bureaucratic sense. It had instead a set of Open Form Societies constituted by unrepresented bodies.

I keep returning to that phrase: unrepresented bodies. Bodies that had arrived, as the curator Paul B. Preciado wrote, from "the long summer of migration in Europe, which revealed the simultaneous failure not only of modern representative democratic institutions but also of ethical practices of hospitality." The Parliament was a response not only to austerity but to a deeper bankruptcy — the bankruptcy of xenia itself, of the ancient obligation to receive the stranger. 

What does it mean that the word for hospitality became a proper name? That I carry it as an identity, that I am, in some sense, named after a moral demand?

*

In 1787, eleven friends founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London. They wrote pamphlets, organized lectures, commissioned prints. They were organized as societies of friends — the form itself was a statement, since friendship, in the Aristotelian tradition, was understood as a relationship between equals who chose each other freely. To extend friendship across the legal boundary between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised was already a political act. La Société des Amis des Noirs followed in France the following year. Both societies understood that revolution begins with forms of relation, with the invention of new bonds between those who are not supposed to share the same space.

I think about this when I think about loneliness. Not the loneliness of being without company — that is simply solitude, and solitude can be rich — but the loneliness of the Apatride, the stateless. Hannah Arendt, who personally knew something about this, understood friendship not as a private comfort but as a political practice — what she called die Anerkennung der Andersartigkeit des oder der Anderen. Not tolerance (which is still a form of condescension), but recognition. The friend as someone whose difference you hold as irreducible, whose perspective on the shared world you need precisely because it is not your own. For Arendt, the political realm only becomes possible when distinct people agree to share it without erasing what distinguishes them. The crisis she diagnosed was not merely that of totalitarianism but of superfluousness — the condition of the person whom no one has thought to include in the human covenant.

Simone Weil, on the other hand, wrote of friendship as a balancing act between nearness and distance — the capacity to be genuinely present to another without absorbing them, or erasing the precious space between. The true friend, for her, is the one who says: I do not need you to become me in order to love you. This is harder than it sounds because it requires the ability to live with ambiguity, with the person who remains finally unknowable even as you know them well. Weil was suspicious of the warmth of collectives, the pull of shared belonging — what she considered a kind of enracinement gone wrong, a rootedness that becomes enclosure. 

In this sense, Jacques Derrida offered what he called the friendliest of love declarations: Je te laisse, je le veux ainsi. I let you go; I want it this way. Friendship as the willingness to let the other be, to resist the temptation to fix them in place. To hold without grasping. It is possible that the Greek concept of xenia understood something close to this — hospitality not as possession of the guest but as their temporary unconditional sheltering, after which both host and traveler depart changed, and neither owes the other continuation.

What I did not know, arriving in Athens for the second time was whether this kind of friendship — demanding, asymmetric, politically serious — was something I was still capable of offering, or receiving.

Athens taught me something I am still processing.

The city in 2017 was full of informal solidarities — kitchens that fed people who had arrived from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, not as charity but as something more like the xenia of antiquity, the mutual recognition of need. I saw it operating in squares and on sidewalks. None of it was organized by the state. Some of it was organized by neighbors who did not share a language. The recognition was prior to the word: a body offers food to another body, and the transaction is complete, and complete without paperwork.

In 2024, I found those kitchens mostly gone. The squares I remembered had been cleared, redirected, beautified in the neoliberal idiom of the refurbished. The murals in Exarcheia were partially painted over; new ones had appeared in their place, bolder and more desperate. The city had been through another cycle of what the economists called recovery, which had recovered nothing for the people I was looking for. The tourist infrastructure had expanded magnificently. 

Jean-Luc Godard once observed, with his characteristic combination of wit and fury, that the Greek debt crisis could be resolved in days if Europe simply paid Greece for every word it had borrowed. Democracy. Politics. Philosophy. Economy. The entire vocabulary of the European project is Greek. The continent had spent centuries drawing on Athens' conceptual inheritance while, in the decade after 2008, dismantling the living city in the name of austerity. The Parthenon sculptures sit in London without asking to be there. The interest on that particular debt has never been calculated.

And xenia? Who owes whom for that?

I have paid my name forward into every country I have lived in. I have been the stranger who required hospitality, and I have tried to offer it in return, though I know that the obligation runs deeper than individual gesture. What the Code d'Athènes — that curious 1965 ethics code for public relations professionals, ratified in this same city — proposed as a set of professional obligations now reads to me less like professional ethics and more like a description of what friendship would have to be if it were serious: the obligation to promote genuine dialogue, to ensure both sides can speak and be heard, to act in ways that preserve the dignity of the other person. Not to use communication to bypass judgment. Not to treat the other as a means.

The gap between that codified ideal and any actual conversation, any actual morning in a city that smells of exhaust and centuries of borrowed vocabulary, is a city I left again, but can't stop thinking about. What interests me now is whether friendship, in its most demanding form, is still a revolutionary act. Whether the societies of friends who gathered in converted junta headquarters, who published pamphlets and offered food without documentation required, were doing something more than surviving. Whether they were genuinely inventing new forms of subjectivity. New ways of being a body in the world that do not require to be categorized, supervised in order to be received.

Revolution starts with friendship. 

I am still learning what this means. I suspect it begins with the willingness to be, for someone, a place of arrival — not a home, not a fixed address, but a temporary shelter in which the other remains entirely themselves. 

Zimmerreisen um 1945

The rooms were small and close and furnished as if in a newly purchased suburban house. In the kitchen were many aluminum utensils, and in the hallway hung gymnastic rings for exercise. The bed was covered in ice-blue satin, and in the nearly empty wardrobes were stacked padded boxes that had probably once held stockings and veils. Crockery and paper lay scattered across the floor, as in all houses that have been looted. Those who had been there had no idea whose house they had searched for food and wine. Yet the portraits of Hitler with tender dedications to Eva were plainly visible, and the stationery was printed with full name and address: at Wasserburgerstraße 12 stood Eva Braun's stucco villa, one of many in that modern quarter of Munich.

What Lee Miller found there was not the lair of power but its underside: the private rooms of a woman who had spent twelve years waiting in them. The aluminum utensils, the gymnastic rings, the ice-blue satin — these are the furnishings of a life arranged around the interior, around the cultivation of the body in the absence of the person for whom it was cultivated. The Damenzimmer in its most extreme form. Padded boxes for stockings and veils — garments of occasion, garments of ceremony, garments waiting to be worn. 

What a looted room records is not only the violence of looting but the strangeness of the life interrupted: the evidence that someone had organized things here, had lived inside a set of assumptions about the future that the future then refused.

Like all German writing desks, Eva Braun's was fully equipped with paper clips, pens, blotting paper, rulers, new pencils, and stacks of letter-paper (cf. ibid. 2015: 244). The full desk is its own kind of document. It speaks of an intention to correspond, to produce, to leave a mark — and the almost total absence of what such a desk is meant to generate. What has survived are not letters but merely a few diary entries, held today in the National Archives in Washington. Braun began writing on February 6, 1935, her twenty-third birthday, and continued sporadically until May 28, 1935, when the last entry breaks off in the middle of a page.

A diary that breaks off in the middle of a sentence is an archive of incompletion. It does not conclude; it simply stops. And what stops with it is the attempt to make the waiting legible — to herself, perhaps, or to some imagined future reader who would understand what it had cost. The handwritten pages that remain are disturbingly narrow in their preoccupations: a lovesick teenager with a tendency toward narcissism, melodrama, and an ever-deepening obsession with Hitler. "I am so endlessly happy that he loves me so, and I pray it will always remain so" (February 18, 1935) — a few weeks later, he broke a promised meeting, and she was again utterly wretched. She began to wish she were gravely ill, for then perhaps he would pay her some attention.

The obscenity of this juxtaposition requires no commentary, and yet it demands one. While Eva Braun wished herself ill in order to be noticed, Hitler was building Germany's Luftwaffe and a submarine fleet, both violations of the Versailles Treaty. He was also promulgating the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship rights. These preoccupations Eva Braun found tiresome and incomprehensible, unable to understand why they demanded so much of his time. For three months Hitler had barely spoken a word to her, and she did nothing but wait in desperation:

"Is this the mad love he has assured me of so many times, when he gives me not a kind word for 3 months. Granted he has had his head full of political problems in this time, but isn't there a relaxation now?"

The political problems she names and dismisses in the same breath — the machinery of genocide referred to as a scheduling inconvenience. This is not naivety in any simple sense. It is something more disturbing: the absolute enclosure of subjectivity within the private, within the waiting room of the self, such that the systematic murder of millions remains, in the diary, a matter of competing for attention. The room with its aluminum utensils and padded boxes is also this: a space in which the political has been successfully expelled, or rather never admitted. A space designed for waiting, and for nothing else.

The long-desired wish to "rise" through marriage would fulfill itself for Eva Braun only after a long season of longing. By then the Third Reich had already collapsed and stood on the verge of capitulation, and on April 30, 1945, the day after the wedding, she went into death alongside Adolf Hitler. The marriage lasted less than forty hours. The waiting lasted twelve years.

“Well then, Hitler was dead. For me he had never really been alive until now. All these years he had been an evil machine-monster — until I saw the places he had made famous, talked to people who had known him, tracked down the backstairs gossip, and ate and slept in his house. He became less grand there and therefore all the more horrible; there were also a few hints that he had some almost human habits, almost like an ape that embarrasses you with its gestures, yes, shames you, because it holds up a distorted mirror. You think: it could have caught you too” (Miller 2015: 229).

For a long time the war correspondent and photographic artist Lee Miller, who wrote these lines, had speculated about where she would be when the time came to celebrate the end of the war. On the first of May 1945, when Hitler's death was announced, she found herself in his Munich apartment, washing the dust of the concentration camps from her body in his bathtub — camps she had moved through with her Rolleiflex to document the incomprehensible as completely as possible.

The photograph Miller's colleague David Scherman took of her in that bathtub has become iconic in ways that still sit uneasily. Miller, naked, composed, washing herself clean, while on the floor beside the tub sits a muddy boot that has walked through Dachau, and on the ledge above the taps, propped against the wall, a small portrait of Hitler watches. The image has been read as transgression, as desecration, as dark humor, as testimony. It is all of these, and it is also something harder to name: a document of the impossibility of cleaning oneself of what one has seen. The water is running but the boot stays dirty. She is in the room of the monster and the monster is still there, watching. The body that moves through history cannot step out of it simply by stepping into a bath.

The concentration camp at Dachau had everything one would ever hear about a camp, or refuse to hear. The great dusty expanses, for instance, trampled by a thousand damned feet: "feet that ached and shuffled and stamped away cold and moved to relieve the pain and finally only served to lead them to the death chamber" (Miller 2015: 230). As with almost every camp system, no complete count of victims exists. In total, the Holocaust resulted in the murder of up to six million Jews, seven million Soviet civilians, nearly two million non-Jewish Poles, two hundred thousand Roma and Sinti, and more.

The numbers accumulate and resist accumulation. They are the opposite of the diary entries: where Braun's pages narrow and narrow toward a single point of private feeling, the statistics of the Holocaust expand beyond what any single consciousness can hold. Miller's photographs attempt something between these two failures of language — neither the enclosure of the diary nor the abstraction of the statistic, but the specific, unignorable face of the singular case. The foot in the mud. 

"After the liberation, the corpses were cleared away and those who looked as if they might fall dead at any moment were in hospitals. All had already had one or two meals and felt ill in accordance with their shrunken stomachs and their feelings" (cf. ibid. 2015: 202f.).

The body as archive. Shrunken stomachs, hair fallen out, skin over bone — the body that has been made to record what was done to it, whether or not words are ever found. Miller photographed these bodies too, and Vogue published the photographs, to the editors' visible discomfort. The images did not fit the magazine's logic of consumption and desire. They exceeded it. They were meant to.

The more Lee Miller saw of what the Nazis had done, the more outraged she became at a people that denied all guilt and shared responsibility for the catastrophe. Many contemporaries — accomplices and fellow-travelers, opportunists and the indifferent — simply had difficulty accepting that the war was over; the proportion of those who regarded National Socialism as a good idea badly implemented stood at 50 percent at the end of 1945 and at 55 percent by 1947, reaching 68 percent among those under thirty-six (cf. Bittermann 2015: 263). Hitler's Reich, with its hypertrophied national pride and its racist delusion, had been crushed:

“Yet nowhere is this nightmare of destruction and terror less felt, and nowhere is less said about it, than in Germany. One notices everywhere that there is no reaction to what has happened, but it is difficult to say whether this is some deliberate refusal to mourn or the expression of a genuine incapacity for feeling. Among the ruins the Germans are sending one another postcards of the churches and market squares, the public buildings and bridges that no longer exist. And the indifference with which they move through the rubble finds its exact correspondence in the fact that no one mourns the dead; it is mirrored in the apathy with which they react, or rather fail to react, to the fate of the refugees in their midst. This general lack of feeling — or at any rate the evident heartlessness, which is sometimes masked by cheap sentimentality — is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and occasionally brutal refusal to face and come to terms with what actually happened” (ibid. 2015: 266f., cited after Arendt, A Visit to Germany, 1950).

Hannah Arendt and Lee Miller arrived at the same observation by different routes — Arendt through the systematic thinking of the political philosopher, Miller through the camera's enforced proximity to the thing itself. What Arendt calls the refusal to mourn, Miller experienced as a kind of violence directed against her own seeing: she had looked, and the looking had cost her something, and then she was surrounded by people who had not looked, would not look, and expected her to accept their not-looking as normal. The Verdrängung — the repression, the displacement — was not passive. It was organized. It had a social architecture as deliberate as the Damenzimmer with its padded boxes.

This hypocritical peace was for Lee Miller like a shock. She could not bear that the Nazis were soon again respectable citizens, and she could not bear that her articles accomplished so little — as if they had been written in invisible ink and thrown to the wind. Her photographs Lee Miller stored in nothing more than shoeboxes in the attic of an English country house, where they outlasted the years until her death in 1977 — hardly waiting, one might say, but without any doubt ripening: they belong today to the most significant photographic works of the twentieth century.

The shoeboxes on the attic floor. The stacked padded boxes in Eva Braun's wardrobe. The diary that breaks off mid-sentence. The photographs that were not published, or published once and then forgotten, or published and disbelieved. The archive of the twentieth century is full of things that had to wait — not patiently, not willingly, but simply because the world was not yet ready to receive them. Whether it is ready now is a question the shoeboxes do not answer. They only establish that the images survived. What we do with that survival is, as always, still open.