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5completely disregards the will of at least half of its own population and the majority of Scots. Thestatement in our last editorial "it seems that the real period of uncertainty is about to begin" hasturned out to be completely true. We still do not know what Brexit will actually look like, nor whatwill happen after March 2019, and when Scotland will at last be independent. Uncertainty is, ofcourse, an essential characteristic of life, as change is inevitable, a perennial process, simply part ofconstant evolution. It is, however, never sure that life will eventually improve. That requires activehuman participation in trying to bring improvements about, the vigilance and thoughtful activityKennedy and Macwhirter call for and which we, too, support.Our students Josip Brekalo / Marco Giovanazzi, Simona Hildebrand, Marsida Toska, and Jessica Völkel have been active, visited Scottish universities, increased their knowledge and experience in this way and reported about this in their texts. Involving students in the production of theNewsletter has been a constant endeavour of ours, as writing texts will be an important part of theirfuture lives.The fact that there are eight reviews in this issue is a strong indication of the excellent work byRon, who has taken care of this section as well as of poetry, conference announcements, andawards. The range of books and their various topics, discussed by Peter Auger (on Barbour's'Bruce'), Chelsea Hartlen (on Women and Violent Crime), Richie McCaffery (on Scotland inEurope / Europe in Scotland), James M. Morris (on Facts and Inventions in Boswell's journalism),Peter (on Walter Scott), Carla Sassi (on Opium and Empire), Ilka Schwittlinsky (on The Space ofFiction), and Kathrin Zickermann (on Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions), are once more intriguing examples of the diversity we have intended to offer our readers. Diversity and multiple perspectives on the same events are also an essential idea behind the two reports on the Second WorldCongress of Scottish Literatures in Vancouver in June 2017, respectively written by Leith Davis,the organiser, and Rhona Brown, both a participant and the Secretary of the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures (IASSL).We are glad to have Peter McCarey as the representative of new Scottish poetry in this edition.Find out whether you'll agree with the characterisation his work has received as "contrary, generous, intermittently barmy, always readable", or give it your own characteristics. Ron's cooperationwith poets and poetry associations has been remarkable, while Lothar has above all supplied us withhis technical know-how in getting the Newsletter into print and on to the web.Those who have been following the growing revival of interest in John Galt in recent years, orwho would like to find out more about the writer and the work of the John Galt Society, can turn tothe article by Society secretary John McGhee in this issue. Stewart Whyte's piece, 'SwitheringWhytes', on the work and legacy of his father, the writer, journalist and pioneer of BBC Scotlandchildren's broadcasting, Don Whyte, may well also help inspire a revival of interest in another Scottish writer who deserves to be better known.Paddy Bort died in 2016, and he is commemorated here as a German who worked at the University of Edinburgh and was a constant advocate of cultural exchange between Scotland, Germany,and Europe in various areas, especially politics, music, literature. He will be sorely missed in all ofhis different communities.People die, publications end, like most other things. Whether the universe is endless, we stilldon't know. But we do know that human beings must never give up trying to improve the humancondition. The endless need to continue human efforts to improve life and to enhance intelligentcommunication between all cultures has repeatedly been expressed in the Scottish Studies Newsletter and is evident in this edition once again. So let's finish by thanking you for your support, andlet's continue our common efforts to improve humankind as well as Scottish and European relations.The Editors: Lothar Görke –Klaus Peter Müller – Ron Walker - Germersheim, August 2018Scottish Studies Newsletter 47, September 2018

6Scotland and the Turmoil of BrexitA Toxic CultureA. L. KennedyAL Kennedy was awarded the Heine Prize in Dusseldorf, Germany [in December 2016]. Theprize is “to personalities who serve by their intellectual heritage in terms of fundamental humanrights, for which Heinrich Heine used to promote social and political progress, international understanding or the realization of the unity of people”. The Heine Prize jury said: “The HeinrichHeine Prize of the City of Dusseldorf 2016 is awarded to the excellent AL Kennedy, well known forher idiosyncratic literary work, which plumbs the limits of the human soul. Her views on politicaland social conditions sharpen social discussions about the Iraq war and the proposed referendumon the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union in the tradition of Heinrich Heine. ALKennedy is a great literary figure and European”. This is her acceptance speech.I would like to thank the judges of the Heine Preis for allowing me to receive this honour, to bethought of as a good writer by people of intellectual rigour and good judgment is always a kind surprise. To be thought of as in any way worthy of a prize which also seeks to celebrate the promise ofhumanity and the role of writing within the ongoing project which is human civilisation is verymoving. To be associated with the spirit of Heine's writing, his compassion, his imagination, hisdaring, his mourning and his outrage – this is beyond what I would have hoped for myself, or mywork.So thank you all.But, as you know, the arts today cannot simply be about maybe some happy press releases anda congenial event where we congratulate each other on knowing about values. We are all aware thatthe values which keep us all safe, promise us the best possible opportunities to fulfil our humanityand to see and cherish what is human in others – those values are currently being forgotten, derided,or quietly buried alive.As Germany clings to the lessons it learned about cultural toxicity long ago, I speak to you as acitizen of the UK, a country where books do not have to be burned – epidemic library closures and amassively compressed literary culture quietly prevent books ever being read or even born. Mine is acountry which would rather leave traumatised and undefended children in the Calais mud, or nowwho knows where, than offer them the welcome we once extended to the kinder transports and to100's of thousands of refugees before and after World War II. This is a country where the availability of the arts has narrowed shockingly in the last decades and where community arts are especiallyunder threat. This is a country – a wealthy country – where around 130,000 of our own children arehomeless.This is a country which tortures in black sites abroad and police stations at home, which incarcerates citizens without trial. This is a country with a wrecked education system for the massesbased on monetisation and testing and an emotionally traumatising and entitling education for theelite. This is a country where there is less and less mass media arts coverage. This is a countrywhere the public discourse is a hell's broth of gossip, malign invention, racism, rabble-rousinghatred and smut. This is a country where civil servants despair, where politicians base decisions onfaith and feeling which does not include faith in our species or fellow feeling, where any attempt torise above the gutter is reframed as smugness, or otherworldly insanity. This is a country where – asthe UN recently pointed out, our government's treatment of the disabled contravenes their humanrights and where there is no need for an equivalent of Aktion T4 to organise the extinction of humanbeings with disabilities. We have simply withdrawn all their means of support, subjected them toofficial harassment and mass-media demonisation and waited for them to die in their tens of thouScottish Studies Newsletter 47, September 2018

7sands – of stress, starvation, or else driven to suicide by their pain and despair. Make no mistake;we have been lost for some time – long before Brexit advertised that fact to the world. There is nomorning when I could not wake up and say, like Max Liebermann – who once illustrated an editionof Der Rabbi Von Bacherach – “Ich kann gar nicht soviel fressen, wie ich kotzen mochte.” [There'sno way I could eat enough to vomit as much as I would like to.']And this lack of art and this lack of humanity – they are connected. You know it, I know it, wehave known it all along, but we have allowed the dominant discourse to forget. But as FranklinDelano Roosevelt said, “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”The practice of arts, contact with the arts, is our lifelong education – right here – it prepares usto choose wisely. It exercises our imagination, the force that allows us to visualise any change, allconsequences, to empathise with each other. Without it, hope is a form of delusion. Art is at theheart of democracy. If we doubt ourselves, if we feel we may simply be making ourselves feel important because we are artists, then we can look to science, we can read about situation pressure andits massive power – what is culture but situational pressure. We can read about empathy, aboutcompassion – how to diminish it and how to enlarge it – by doing what art does. We can study history, we can learn all over again the beautiful and terrible truth of Heine's words from the play Almansor, “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auchMenschen” [That was just a prelude, where books are burnt, people will eventually burn too].We can look at the work of Raphael Lemkin, the man who invented the term Genocide beforethat crime had a name and who studied many culture's progressions into genocide – and see that theVorspiel is always the same – first the art is murdered, then the people. Always. Always.And speaking now for myself – I'm 51 years old and my life as a writer has failed. For something like 35 years I have produced work and I have loved the process of that and I have earned myliving – I have been paid to dream aloud, there could be no better life for me – and I have a nicehome and I've won some prizes and I have – from time to time – worked with writers in prisons, orcommunity centres, or hospitals, worked with new writers, with children, written in the media – andI have learned from that, but I haven't talked enough about what I have learned. I have seen art lightup lives, because that is what art does. But I haven't done enough. I haven't told enough people howprecious that is, I haven't fought to make a space within which that could be heard. Like many of us,perhaps, in comfortable, apparently stable democracies I have forgotten that the price of freedom iseternal vigilance and I have mistaken lazy silence, cowardice, for truly loving tolerance. Love tellsthe whole truth – when something is wrong there is no love in being silent and nodding as if it wereright. And I haven't said – at the start of every workshop – we will now make a part of culture – thething which tells us to be cruel or to be kind, alone or united, ignorant and frightened, or endlesslylearning and brave. And this matters – always – so we will now break our hearts to be extraordinarybecause anything else, anything imperfect, anything simply self-obsessed, weak and “conceptual”diminishes the place of art amongst us, wastes perhaps the only chance that art will have to improveand awaken and even save a life. This is life and death.Whenever we see reality TV shows that diminish humanity, articles that lie in a way fictionwouldn't dare to, words used to rob them of their sense, or cynical website pieces that feed off outrage, while creating more, I haven't said often enough – There cannot ever be a place for thisamongst us. It is not elitist to want the best for our fellow-man – it is insulting to stand by whileother human beings are fed manure, are shown, over and over, only how low humanity can go. Itcannot be that only our cars and electrical goods are aspirational. It must be that our dramas, or novels, songs, photographs, paintings, cartoons, poems, ballets, operas and all the rest are extraordin-Scottish Studies Newsletter 47, September 2018

8ary, diverse, unexpected and things of life. If we have no money, then we have no money – art canbe cheap without being bad, toxic, hateful. This is a necessary truth.And I owe my career, my artisan's satisfaction and any morality I might lay claim to as a person to art, to writing, to – for example – a single scene in a drama that haunted me in my childhoodand has ever since. In the drama a man who was not a torturer, but who was weak, stood in a torturechamber and was handed a pair of pliers – and there was the torture victim and there was the torturer and there were the pliers and there was the unspoken assurance that if the weak man did nottorture he would be tortured and there was the pause. And that drama, by German screenwriter Lukas Heller who was born in Kiel in 1930 – asked me and still asks me – and what would you do?How weak are you? How best can you control your weakness and your desire for self-preservation– how do you prevent your fall and keep yourself and others truly safe?And the how is what art always tells us – amongst everything else that it shows us and tells us.And it makes me think of lines from Heine's poem – Allnächtlich im Traume – which is largeenough to be about more than one kind of love Du sagst mir heimlich ein leises Wort,Und gibst mir den Strauß von Zypressen.Ich wache auf, und der Strauß ist fort,Und das Wort hab ich vergessen.You say to me secretly a soft word,and give me a garland of cypress.I wake up, and the garland is gone,and the word I have forgotten.As writers and artists we keep hold of the cypress that reminds us we all die and that we should bemerciful and we serve the dreams that come to us to be expressed. We make them articulate and letthem join the larger dreams that others make for us, the dreams that form our culture. Our culturemakes the reality we inhabit. As artists, as writers, we are paid to dream awake and that is very nicefor us. As human beings, which is more important, we have a duty never to forget those secretwords we hear in darkness and to guard each other from the worst of who we can be, the worst ofworlds that we can make and to do better. And we can love that, we can love that loudly. I wouldthank Heine and the Heine Preis for being part of what I love.(Reprinted with the permission of A. L. Kennedy. This text is also available with readers' commentsat lture/.There is information on the Heinrich-Heine-Preis, the people in the jury, their reasons for choosingKennedy, etc. here teilung/pld/heine-preis-fuera-l-kennedy.html), and this is a text on how Kennedy's pertinent speech was received in Düsseldorfwith a thoughtful, intelligent comment on the occasion (Rheinische Post 12-12-16 vorkulturverlust-aid-1.6457940).How to win Indyref 2? Keep it simple.Iain MacwhirterCIVIL servants in the Scottish Office have reportedly been put to work preparing for the next independence referendum. If so, what should they be urged to do? Actually, not very much.If Nicola Sturgeon is going to push the button on indyref 2 she should learn from the Brexiteers. They didn't produce a 670-page White Paper, as the Scottish Government did in 2013, whichraised more questions than it answered. They didn't produce anything at all, just anecdotes aboutbent bananas and a droning dog whistle about immigration.Scottish Studies Newsletter 47, September 2018

9The Leave campaign demonstrated that it is possible to win a referendum without experts – asMichael Gove said, Britain has had enough of them. Indeed, they managed to win the EU referendum without having the foggiest idea of how Britain could leave the wealthiest and most comprehensive free trade zone on the planet, the European Single Market, and still, somehow, have freeand unfettered access to it. Six months after the referendum, they still haven't.I'm not saying that the Scottish Government should emulate the post-truth of the Brexiteers.Even the American Alt Right would have been ashamed of Leave's red bus claim that the NHSwould be 350m a week better off out of Europe. But it was largely irrelevant because no-one believes anyone's statistics any more. The 2013 Independence White Paper, "Scotland's Future”, was acreditable attempt to address the complexities, and it avoided alternative facts – but there is no needto repeat it.The next Yes campaign should play smart and remain studiously vague about life after independence. The precise nature of Scotland's relationship to the EU and the UK is a post-independence issue because we don't yet know the precise terms of Brexit – only that it will be hard. Aboutthe only thing that can be said with any certainty is that, whatever happens, there needn't be a hardborder between Scotland and England, because everyone is agreed that it isn't going to be onebetween the Republic and Northern Ireland.There may be economic disturbance from Scotland leaving the UK, but it will be as nothingcompared to the turbulence from the UK leaving the EU. All the cards are in the air now, and noone knows where any of them will come down. All we know is that the most successful countries inthe world are small, dynamic, social democratic – and part of the EU. As Mark Littlewood of theIEA put it on Question Time, Scotland has the GDP of Portugal and the population of Slovakia, sothere's no reason on earth why it couldn't be independent.We don't know if it is going to be a WTO Brexit, a Commonwealth Brexit, a free trade Brexitor a Trump Brexit. So the Yes campaign should avoid premature debate about whether Scotlandshould join the European Free Trade Area, the European Economic Area or the Customs Union.Just stick to the EU, or better still, "Europe". We don't yet know how Scotland's accession to the EUwill work – only that it will.Nor should Yes 2 resort to monetary metaphysics that no-one will understand. Scottish pound,currency union, euro, bitcoin or whatever – it all depends on the circumstances that exist at the time,and these are imponderable. So much is in flux with the UK preparing for tariff and currency warswith the EU. Scotland doesn't have a dog in that fight. Sturgeon should just say that a future Scot tish government will ensure that, yes, there will be a currency.The lesson of Brexit is that independence is essentially about sovereignty. You don't have todot all the i's, just find a form of w

Scottish Studies Newsletter 47, September 2018. 2 Table of Contents Scottish Studies Newsletter . 21-25 June 2017, by Rhona Brown and Leith Davis) Remembering Paddy Bort 153 Scottish Studies Newsletter 47, September . Stirling, Vancouver etc. Now is the time for others to take over and continue this intriguing work in their own way. We wish .