A Seventh Man

"Berger used half of the money from the Booker prize to travel around Europe with Jean Mohr, the photographer, and document the lives of migrant workers in Europe, who were and are being exploited to ensure the European standard of life. Going back to your earlier question about whether his politics make him more difficult to read, here they’re precisely one of the reasons one would want to read him now. At the launch of P ortraits Andrew Marr put up his hand and started talking about how important A Seventh Man was to him as a book. It feels like a response to things that are happening now. Yes. It’s precisely about making it easier not to think about these people as humans, and we don’t have to think about them and engage with them in the way we might with people we know and love. It’s strange because often the way it’s presented is that if you’re arguing against certain border policies you’re being unrealistic, dodging the reality, while that’s precisely what you’re not doing. The book is largely about Turkish Gastarbeiter in Germany. Through talking to them, he realised a lot of these people came from villages in Turkey, and they were largely the sons (sometimes daughters) of peasant communities, who had gone off to seek their fortunes. In doing that, they represented the breakdown of their community. All of the traditions and ways of life of those communities were collapsing. He describes it as a form of human dignity that was being lost. I think that was what got him interested in the decline of the peasantry."