MY PEACE TESTIMONY 
(Lecture at the Swiss Yearly Meeting, May 2010) 
	Work for peace, as I see it, is putting into practice what it means to me to be a Quaker.  My contribution consists in seeking, where I live, to enhance awareness of our personal responsibility for peace.  Often it is really a question, first of all, of just bringing the topic of peace to people’s attention. 
	By professional training I am a psychoanalyst and a therapist, although I decided many years ago to translate the basic insights of psychoanalysis into training offers, because prevention seems to me more important than healing.  I am convinced that many therapies would not be necessary if our basic knowledge about the psychodynamic development of human beings from early childhood were passed on in schools like reading, writing, arithmetic and other cultural techniques.  But because in our present times so much is decided by the market, and since more can be earned with therapies than in educational work, the original enlightenment concept of pedagogic psychoanalysis is given very little importance.  I realize, of course, that psychotherapy can be illuminating, strengthening and consoling for people who are wounded, hurt and ill.  I am equally convinced, however, that those who make a contribution to peace perform an illuminating, strengthening and consoling function in our wounded, injured and sick society. 
	With these comments I have, in essence, explained why I think that work for peace makes a vital contribution to the healing of our world, weighed down as it is by private and public, regional, national and global problems. 
	I understand being peace-loving as trying to live one’s life in a way that is characterized by love and respect for oneself, others, nature and the whole of creation.  Peace shows itself in one’s handling of private and social conflicts.  Peace as an attitude of mind does not just recognize injustice but involves itself, in whatever way one’s personal capacities allow, in the positive constructive transformation of tensions.  As a Quaker I have our testimonies in mind when I speak of peace.  The peace testimony, when all is said and done, incorporates all other testimonies.  It is not simply that we do not wish to use violence.  That is only one aspect of peace.  Simplicity of life, social community, equality, equal rights for all and the quest for truth and for “that of God” in everyone and in all creation – all that is already contained in the peace testimony. 
	The language in which we describe this attitude has, to be sure, changed over the centuries.  I hesitate, for example, to use the concept “non-violence”.  In my view, being emphatically “against something” is merely the other side of being, just as emphatically, “for something”.  These are two faces of the same coin.  What we are against and what we are for - are equally in the focus of our attention.  I know, of course, that violence is continually being perpetrated on a terrible scale and in all possible forms, and I have no intention of closing my eyes to it.  But I always look for a positive way to approach everything.  That is an attitude that is part of my nature.  Perhaps it is a special gift to be able to find something positive in every experience, where possible even something pleasurable, endearing or beautiful. 
	In peace circles, people are mobilized against violence, against wars, against social injustice and against oppression.  Sometimes, even, we fight against these things.  Here a question is involved that has always accompanied the peace movement.  Will peace be possible only after successful struggles and confrontations?  Any social change that is sought through struggle involves violence.  How is peace to be obtained and secured when the preconditions are social changes that cannot be brought about non-violently?  Will peace come about in the future when it is imposed by means of a radical transformation of social structures?  And again and again the question arises: can there be a just war? 
	I think that these questions reflect a dilemma that we must in each case answer and decide for ourselves.  There will be no definitive, universally valid answers.  For my part, I support protest and resistance, but cannot advocate combat.  Civil disobedience, civil courage and saying a clear “no” out of conviction are often decisive prerequisites if one is not to join a coalition with the mighty in conflicts that are escalating.  But history shows that, after a victory over their enemies, the previously oppressed almost always become the new oppressors. 
	As a Quaker, my engagement for peace has necessarily a religious reference.  I would describe a way of life characterized by a conscious commitment to active peace by using a concept that is unusual today even in peace circles – a life that is “pleasing to God”. 
	Creation, with a recognition of the need for equal chances of life for all living creatures and the whole of nature, is seen in various cultures as the expression and manifestation of the divine.  If God is the driving force, pure being, the light and life in all things, then everything is in God.  The experience of such a reciprocal relationship with God supports the concretization of an ideal order for all living creatures and for nature as a whole.  To adjust oneself actively to this order and to work for a fair society is in line, to my mind, with Quaker traditions and a commitment to peace in a God-related life. 
	When it is clear to us that peace is more than the absence of war, peace projects, as learning workshops, can prompt one to grapple with the basic questions relating to the theme of peace.  What does peace mean?  What has peace to do with freedom, justice, responsibility and love?  Is spirituality an important component of active peace? 
	In all projects, workshops and seminars that I organize and manage, it becomes clear how difficult it is to describe active peace and to express it artistically and creatively.  This begins with the problem of representing peace positively without resorting to outworn symbols.  The rainbow and the dove with the olive branch in its beak, symbols since Genesis of God’s covenant with humankind, or the cottage with the mother, the father and the children standing in the garden in front of it and the fence all round safeguarding their peaceful lives, and last but not least all the different variations of the theme of hearts in harmony – these are the usual representations of peace. 
	When it comes to formulating a clear definition of peace, we are faced with a similar problem.   Peace is the opposite of war, or the absence of war.  I remember how often as a child I found myself wondering how it could be possible, in a war, to be happy and to lead a more or less “normal” day-to-day life.  I grew up in the post-war period and the horrors of war were a frequent subject of conversation in my family.  And yet they had lived, loved and laughed all through such horrors.  How was that possible? 
	Much later I understood that, alongside courageous acts of resistance and confrontation, there also exists an inner withdrawal, depending on circumstances and possibilities, allowing one to escape from permanent despair.  At the same time, the conscious experiences of the surrounding war doubtless have repercussions on feelings, thoughts, conversation and one’s whole being.  The more directly the war affects one’s own personal life, the profounder this impact will be. 
	In this connection it suddenly became clear to me that we are living through war-time even today.  It is just that the wars, as a general rule, are far removed from our everyday life.  We learn about them from the media.  Possibly we see refugees, we are asked for donations and we get involved in some campaign or other.  In general, however, we resort to inner withdrawal, probably because the complexity of what is going on overtaxes us. 
	Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian poet, once said that war is actually what we call peace and “war, real war, is merely the explosion of the war we call peace”.  This peace is ambiguous and precarious, but we adapt ourselves to the situation.  Those of us who make contributions to active peace are derided, our so-called idealism is ridiculed by the supposed realists and we are called “do-gooders”.  “Why do you make all that effort?” a woman asked me, “you can see that violence and cynicism are gaining ground everywhere and continually come out on top!” 
	Yes, I realize that that is the case.  It is sometimes hard to bear, and the dark forces seem overpowering.  But I also see people all over the world, individually and in networks and organizations, spreading light and love.  The light shines far into the darkness.  Peace work must not become dependent on hope and success.  Sometimes I have the feeling that both light and darkness have always existed and always will.  God’s freedom to permit everything makes us alone responsible for our decisions. 
	I am convinced that the difficulties we have in describing active peace simply and clearly are symptomatic of how difficult the actual, concrete implementation of this active peace is for us.  I think that the problems of naming and representing the positive make clear that we are still at the stage of saying “no” to the negative.  Sigmund Freud once said of saying “no” that “no” is the precondition for a really successful “yes”.  Establishing a distance permits intellectual understanding and the determination of a standpoint.  Only following this process will an autonomous decision to say “yes” be possible.  Are we in the process of getting to “yes”? 
	In my projects, the first aim is always to create awareness.  I direct attention and thinking to the question of what peace actually is.  Creative approaches support the process.  What is called for is a conscious consideration of feelings, perceptions and thoughts.  There are no wrong answers.  The decisive thing is to come to grips with the theme and to express insights in one’s own words and other creative forms.  I am convinced that our thinking must change if we wish to change our lives and our world. 
	All these considerations lead me to invest a large part of my time, energy and financial possibilities in projects that create awareness of these questions and make possible initiatives and networking.  Awareness means thinking actively about these questions and reaching a standpoint of one’s own.  When it is clear to us that we have, in the organizations of civil society, an influence on political events, the strength and the courage for active intervention grows. 
	In the fourteen years, almost exactly, that I have been living in Vienna again, and since I opened a new chapter in my life with the association “Konfliktkultur” in May 1996, I have developed and carried out many projects.  Ralla, P.A.K.T., Fehdehandschuh, veto-online, Imagine Peace and Bertha von Suttner 2005, and now Peace Matters.  All projects are described briefly on the Web page www.konfliktkultur.at  
 
Ralla - Computer-Story 
Ralla is the story of the extraterrestrial skateboard which arrives to help Bettina deal with difficult problems and conflicts.  Bettina, 11 years old, and her friend Jasmin as well as other children in Vienna Floridsdorf experience the change of conflict situations as soon as they deal differently with these problems. Ralla, the skateboard, teaches the children to transform conflicts by talking about them and developing creative strategies. 
In each chapter Ralla offers questions and proposals for Bettina, Jasmin and Patrik to think about. They should try to find words for their emotions, feelings, secrets and viewpoints, and to reflect on their prejudices.  
Ralla’s story is a kind of personal conflict manual, after each chapter several questions appear in a special folder, requesting to be answered in a personal reflection on similar experiences like Bettina’s and her friends’.  And to make sure that all personal answers stay safeguarded against any possible spy a personal code hides confidential information on the disc. 

P.A.K.T. 
The objective of this project was to help young people and school classes in their preparation for a visit to the Peace Museum in Stadtschlaining in Burgenland, Austria. 
2.500 packages with 7 learning modules were distributed in schools. Teachers were invited to introduce basic competences of peace education to their pupils.  
The aim of the P.A.K.T. project was to improve conflict-intelligence, to stimulate curiosity, creativity and decision-making abilities. In the course of the project, conflict education modules should be used to make young people aware of how conflicts can be handled constructively and to support the implementation of non-violent conflict coping in Austrian schools. Also to prove that arguing can be fun if the point is not to win but to turn the conflict into a win-win situation for everybody involved.
The P.A.K.T. pilot project offered information material and networking to schools and pupils in preparation of visiting the Peace Museum in the province of Burgenland, “Krieg oder Frieden” (“War or Peace”), which takes place at Schlaining Castle. Conflict education modules in the BUNTPACK package were offered to interested schools. The P.A.K.T. pilot project was distributed to 40,000 pupils aged 6 to 18 in all types of schools throughout the province of Burgenland and was also made available in all other schools nation-wide on request. In a relevant circular, the school authorities of the Burgenland recommended to all schools in the province to carry out the P.A.K.T. project.

Dispute about Artwork 
„Museums are productive scenes for conflictculture“ – this was our beginning idea for the project „Pass me the Gauntlet“. 
We organized a meeting “Dialogue of Generations” in the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna’s Museum Quarter. Very old people (between 80 and 92 years old) met young students of the University of Applied Arts and talked about the pros and contras of disputing in general. After that each student accompanied an elderly person on a walk in the museum, discussing about modern art. 
The task was to practice now what had first been talked about theoretically. It was about the difference of viewpoints: How do we react to modern art? How do we express criticism? How do we talk in a constructive way about different views and attitudes? 
Finally the group met again and exchanged their experiences. It became clear that modern art is an ideal field to practice constructive disputing. 

Veto Online 
The object of the project veto-online was to develop e-learning modules for constructive conflict behaviour. Students (16 to 22) of five European countries were to developing playful creative electronic learning modules –hence strengthening their own intercultural democratic conflict culture.
The modules contain examples of conflict situations. Questions and suggestions lead to various stages of the conflict’s development using images (illustrations, comics, photos) and music. By answering to multiple choice questions at specific conflict turning points and through practical explanations the users experience step by step whether the appropriate rules of constructive communication are being utilized. 
The narratives are supposed to lead users through mazes with handicaps and wrong ways. Finding their way and following directions of basic information about escalation and decision making the users gain know-how and in the end build consensus. 
One main principle of this project was to learn theoretically and, simultaneously, practice these techniques. The participating students observed and also learned to understand better their own conflict behaviour.
Homepage: www.veto-online-org 

Remembering Bertha von Suttner and celebrating her as the first female laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize, which she had received 1905. 
Imagine Peace
'Imagine Peace' was an international network-project from 2003 till 2006 in remembrance on Bertha von Suttner. The objective of our project was to bring about new images of peace in distinction to the general negative-definition of peace as the absence of war. 
We presented the results of this project and a discussion on the idea of conflicts as the potentialities for personal growth in the festive hall of the Vienna Town Hall. Children and young people from 11 European countries participated producing creative work like paintings, music, dances and poetry, hence demonstrating peace as the result of dealing with tensions and conflict-experiences of all kind in an active and constructive way. 

Peace Matters
‚Peace Matters’ is a new project which aims to combine different fields of peace activities. Peace is not a condition of life that develops or disappears by itself, or that gets decided by the leaders. Peace is the result of our ways of dealing with each other, dealing with ourselves, realizing our needs and ideas. Peace depends on how we act in our conflicts, how we care for our planet, how we handle technologies, how we use our freedom, how we take responsibilities and so on. Understanding all these different meanings of peace and doing our individual share in developing peace will give us peace. 
For this reason we initiate, organize and support different creative informative projects, workshops, events, discussions and campaigns about living active peace. And we invite participation through ideas, proposals and activities. Peace Matters will offer several possibilities to join in. 
We want to develop with ‘Peace Matters’ the preparation of several different activities which could act as an important opposing point of view to the foreseeable abundance of First World War mementos in the anniversary year 2014. 
Website: www.peace-matters.info 

So that it is possible for projects that are financed from public funds to be carried out, an organizational umbrella constituting a “juridical person” is required.  For this reason I founded a non-profit association for the Konfliktkultur project, as a formal concession.  But at heart I am a free spirit and have, my life long, been unable to tie myself to an institution or organization.  The association Konfliktkultur is a member of national and international peace networks, but cannot play any major part because it is too small and weak organizationally. 
	It is clear to me that my strong desire for independence limits my possibilities for having an influence.  In the projects described above, splendidly committed young people participate voluntarily.   I also teach at universities in the area of “social competence” and work as a supervisor of teams of doctors and therapists at psychiatric hospitals.  Out of these professional contacts, interest in collaboration often develops.  I am very happy when people affected by my enthusiasm then organize new projects in loose cooperation. 
	In the various phases of my life I have reached small circles of interested people.  In this limited, familiar area I find my security.  Nothing is more secure for me than uncertainty.  The only organization that I have ever joined is the Quakers.  Even that took me a long time.  But when it came it was a good decision – one of my best ever.  For me, the areas of faith and knowledge largely coincide.  My faith is, at the same time, my knowledge and my security, supporting and holding me.  That is why I am a peace lobbyist. 

Vienna, May 2010 					Jalka  

Translation from German into English by Alan Chisholm and Jalka