Can Europe survive the crisis?

Juli Zeh (left) and Constantine Giannaris compare German and Greek perspectives on the eurozone crisis. Photograph: David Finck; Panagiotis Moschandreou for the Guardian
As elections across Europe this week threaten to deepen the Eurozone crisis still further, Athens-based filmmaker Constantine Giannaris shares his experience of austerity with German novelist Juli Zeh. Oliver Laughland listens as both lament the potential decline of the European project.

Constantine Giannaris: I live downtown in the old historic centre, abandoned by the middle classes over the past 30 years. It's a poor, migrant and traditional working-class area. The scenes here at the moment are horrifying, the kind of scenes unthinkable in London or Berlin. Not third world, but fourth world. Many immigrants and asylum seekers here are looking through rubbish cans [for food], and now impoverished workers, hundreds of them, are having to sift through recycling, taking the scraps of metal and paper to sell in order to make ends meet. We have junkies with no methadone or needle programmes, and prostitution is rife. It's not a pretty picture at all.

Juli Zeh: That's not a picture many Germans understand. They don't have the slightest idea what is going on in Greece. They talk about the crisis on a very abstract level and are more interested in how our economy will develop in the coming years. We don't think about the impact on real people. Many don't consider Greece a real country: it's far away, it's small, a place we used to go on holiday, but I get the feeling many normal people never really realised Greece was a country with politics, with an economy, with problems, and now it's a huge crisis and everyone is only afraid about their personal belongings.

CG: We're living through our own version of the Weimar Republic. It's not just an economic crisis, but a fundamental social crisis and a collapse in the very structures of parliamentary democracy. Especially since last weekend, with the delegitimisation and destabilisation of parliamentary order. This is partly our own fault in terms of the way politics, the economy and society have been run since the fall of the junta. People are beginning to lose hope in terms of the traditional parties, and in my area we've seen the rise of extreme far-right and radical left movements. The price of the policies imposed in order to get the bailouts is vast suffering. It's the pauperisation of a whole section of the middle class. It's a dangerous situation that's leading to immense frustration, not only with political parties, politicians and the ruling elite within this country, but also the ruling elite within the EU. As one eloquent Greek economist put it, this medicine is not a medicine: it's a poison.

JZ: And it's not clear those measures will lead to any success in the future, right? I feel a huge sense of resignation here, especially since the weekend, that our ideas on how to keep catastrophe at bay have failed. We're not feeling any impact of the crisis here, but people talk about it in a very apocalyptic manner, as if everything is going to break down, the Euro is going to collapse. But it's really on a level of discourse. The economy here is rising, we are better off than we were three or four years ago, we've gained from the crisis – it's only something that affects our heads, not our everyday life.

CG: One thing that has really infuriated people here is the idea that we're all lazy and none of us work, we're all absolutely unproductive, that life down here is just one long siesta or party. It's very insulting. People work very hard here. Maybe that doesn't reflect itself in terms of productivity or competitiveness because of various endemic problems within the country and the economy.

JZ: And Germans don't work as much as they think! The trouble is that dealing with the crisis hasn't been purely rational, right from the beginning. There was a huge emotional reaction here, and Germans have always had the feeling we are the ones who pay all the time. We are the rich brother who is paying for the poor brothers, as if it's a charity or something. What was clear from the beginning, and shocked me deeply, was that there was no feeling of European solidarity. Germans were not willing to understand that we benefit from Europe, even from the crisis itself.

CG: Indeed, it's not possible for Germany to be a surplus economy without the deficits of the so-called Club Med.

JZ: I think the reason for the severity of the saving measures now imposed on Greece was political, so that the German politicians could explain to their voters that we lent you the money, generous as we are, but now you owe us obedience.

CG: What German politicans did with the German people, I think, in a lot of ways, Greek politicians did with the Greeks. They say: "We're not really responsible," or "We have to do this because Merko and Sarkozy say so … ", so there was no attempt by them, the political formations that have ruled here for decades, to offer a way out with hope and real negotiation. They didn't want to affect their own clientelist relationship with their voters and upset particular interest groups, and definitely not the rich.

JZ: Then they identified the old enemy again: the force of German colonisation.

CG: That's definitely a paradigm influencing both the extreme national left and Nazi right. You know: "We're under the jackboot of the EU," and this is very, very dangerous, it's a complete cul de sac. The whole idea of a European Union, however faulty it is, is to overcome the history of this dark continent.

JZ: I really thought Germany had understood that the EU was a great gift to us, and comes out of our historical role in the continent. That we live in peaceful, prosperous times, and this is all a result of this great union. But since the crisis started, this whole belief has revealed itself to be superficial. I fear the trust, wish and hope to go on with this European project is not so deep in our souls.

CG: Part of the problem is the lack of leadership throughout Europe. There's nothing to really inspire people. It's all negative. Everything is beginning to splinter along traditional national and ethnic lines, which is completely tragic. Dark forces have taken over.

Oliver Laughland: Does Hollande's victory in France allay those fears?

JZ: I'm not sure Hollande will be able to change much. He came in with great promises, but I don't think he can do much different from Sarkozy. The French president has to co-operate with the German leader. This connection is so important for the EU, and both countries know there's no possibility of splitting off. They have to stand side by side.

CG: Here, we have a lot of hopes about Hollande. But in the end I think he will just toe the line. There's a lot of rhetoric around how the package has to change – more development, more growth to sustain this stablisation of Europe – I'm not sure to what extent this is just rhetoric or whether they really mean it.

JZ: I just hope that my newborn child, when he is 20 years old, will still be able to travel in a Europe without boundaries, and will inherit a peaceful Europe where we consider each other as friends. I still think it's possible, but my optimism towards the European project was much greater a couple of years ago than today.