Raise Your Soul
Also by yA nis V A rouf A kis
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Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism
Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability
The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy
Raise Your Soul
A Personal History of Resistance
yA nis V A rouf A kis
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First published by The Bodley Head in 2025
Copyright © Yanis Varoufakis 2025
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For the fearless women who turn whispers into soul-raising roars
Prologue
The year 2024 was marked by an unrelenting personal slump. The darkness didn’t just loom – it consumed. It stretched endlessly across my horizon, not a gentle twilight that comes with the setting sun, but a deeper, more insidious gloom that seeped into the very fabric of existence.
Fascism was in the air – a sour, metallic taste that clung to the back of my throat. Somewhere to the north of our island home, the killing fields of Ukraine devoured lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision. Woman, Life, Freedom, the campaign by Kurdish heroines, had been trampled by the manosphere’s unyielding juggernaut, lost, as though the three little words had never been whispered at all. And from Palestine, the acrid stench of genocide drifted on the wind across the eastern Mediterranean, which grimly confirmed to me the fragility of humanity’s most solemn promises to itself.
Authoritarianism was entrenching itself as the new world order. My political struggles against it had met with three consecutive electoral defeats in the space of one year, making me feel like a doomed character in some twisted simulation.
And then came the violence, the thugs who broke my face in front of my wife and friends. It was the anguish in their eyes that haunted me, their expressions of pained helplessness that cut far deeper than the ringleader’s iron fist ever could.
For the first time, I felt my age, the gravity of my sixty-plus years a remorseless force that weighed me down like a stone, cold,
heavy and inevitable. I was in injury time now and, all around, the world seemed to shudder, the grapes of wrath swelling, heavy and black, ready for yet another cruel harvest.
It was then that I turned to the five women who had shaped me, whose incredible stories I carried like a secret flame. I would write them down, I decided, not to escape the darkness but to confront it, to let their strength, their love, lift me as my mother used to. She had always known how to find the light even in the deepest dark. And so, I would save their stories from oblivion, not for glory or for gain, but for the simple, stubborn hope of rising again.
It proved one of my better decisions. Recording their lives opened a portal to something far greater: it revealed the origins of our current predicament, and it linked Europe and America to north Africa and the Near East. Every word I wrote raised my soul a little.
This book belongs to the tradition of fictionalised history, an earnest attempt to bridge the gaps between the available facts and what I remember, while keeping at bay the urge to colonise the past with my myths. In writing it, I had an advantage: unlike historians studying distant subjects, I was deeply involved in the lives of the protagonists. Besides my vivid memories of them, I was also aided by the sources that had been lying around the house I was born and raised in: letters, diaries, photo albums, one of them dating to 1920s Egypt, as well as thirty-seven 8mm home movies made by my father, which I keep in an orange box by my desk.
Throughout, every time I put words into someone’s mouth, it is because I’ve been told it is something they said, or because it is something they could plausibly have said, judging by conversations I witnessed over the years. And whenever there is dialogue, I have tried to capture the essence of the person I knew – their voice, their spirit.
Two younger women appear fleetingly in these pages – my sister and my daughter – yet it is for them too that I wrote this book, hoping that they will see themselves in its marrow, that they too will recognise their heritage. It is also my solemn hope that in immersing yourself in the worlds of Eleni, Anna, Trisevgeni, Georgia and Danaë, you too, dear reader, might rediscover your resolve to resist authoritarianism, fascism and chauvinism, and feel your soul growing lighter, even if just a little.
Yanis
Varoufakis, April 2025
PA r T one Eleni
1. Hotel Pefkakia
Eleni’s lips stiffened as the taxi set us down at the entrance of the boutique hotel in Drosia, a leafy northern suburb of Athens. Before we got out, she put her arm around me and whispered, ‘Raise your soul, my son,’ into my ear. The shuttered windows and lifeless facade were the first signal that something was amiss. The second was the two fierce men standing on the pavement, adorned in military police uniforms emblazoned with the logo of ESA , our version of the Gestapo.
It was early September 1969. Hotel Pefkakia had been commandeered by ESA and converted into a temporary holding gaol for the regime’s most embarrassing political prisoners. One of them was Panayis – Eleni’s older brother, my favourite uncle, whom we had come to visit. Heavily pregnant with my sister, Eleni struggled out of the taxi and swayed unsteadily towards the entrance. I still treasure the memory of her leaning on me for support.
Sat down in front of what used to be the quaint reception, we waited, dread and expectation drawn on Eleni’s face. Before long, a rigid man in a dusty brown suit arrived with a gang of uniformed henchmen in tow. As he passed us, he stopped and expressionlessly peered down, first at me, then at Eleni. Furious that she would not make eye contact, he grabbed her jaw violently, forcing her gaze, and slapped her across the face yelling: ‘When I look at you, you look at me. Got it, whore?’ Satisfied, he turned towards me, grinned widely and, with the same hand,
patted my head saying, ‘That’s a good boy,’ before receding into the hotel’s interior. Eleni looked at me. ‘Remember what I said?’ she said, squeezing my left hand. ‘Keep your soul up high, let it soar above the filth.’
I cannot remember how long we waited before we were eventually ushered by one of the guards into the room in which Panayis was being held. Even though it was morning, the closed shutters kept the room dark, concealing his state after weeks of relentless interrogation and torture. Long before my eyes had adjusted to make out his features, I heard his distinctive voice, and felt his gentle embrace. He showered me with questions about school, jokes about Eleni and lashes of almost grotesque exuberance which, nonetheless, made me giggle. Eleni looked on while her brother and her son pretended to be somewhere else. Panayis then said: ‘I’ve got something for you, to make amends for being such a terrible godfather.’ He reached under his bed and pulled out a model aeroplane, which, thanks to his considerable engineering skills, he had fashioned out of matchsticks, cigarette paper and carton. As Eleni and Panayis chatted in muted voices, I sat on the bed, mesmerised by the plane which, courtesy of the countless war movies I had watched, I recognised instantly. It was a Stuka, a Junkers Ju 87 to be precise, with black iron crosses and swastikas that Panayis had somehow painted on its wings and tail, eerily resembling the infamous Luftwaffe dive bomber that had terrorised populations across Europe and north Africa. When the guard terminated our brief reunion, Panayis hugged us and made sure I did not leave my gift behind. ‘A Nazi plane? Really?’ Eleni asked disapprovingly. ‘Of course, this they may let him keep – as good Nazis, they ought to appreciate it,’ he replied, smiling mischievously. He was not wrong. Once we were out in the corridor, a passing petty officer spotted my Stuka and smirked with approval. At the reception, where Eleni was frisked before
collecting her identity card, a couple of ESA nasties spotted my plane. ‘What’s this?’ the taller of the two asked in a menacing voice feigning intrigue. ‘He made you a Stuka, did he now? Let me see. Does it fly?’ Before I could protest, he snatched it from me and launched it violently against the wall. It was his way of provoking Eleni, seeking a confrontation. But Eleni did not bite. She quietly picked up the broken Stuka from the carpeted floor, took my hand and, looking straight ahead, led me to the fresh air outside.
We walked for what felt like ages, never looking back, until Eleni hailed a taxi. Despite its crash, my Stuka was in relatively good nick. Nothing a little glue couldn’t fix. I could not wait to show my dad, Yorgo, my new toy at home.
It all looked promising, at first. Yorgo welcomed us at the front door with a generous smile and the three of us strolled into the kitchen. Eleni took my Stuka and gave it to Yorgo, who placed it on the kitchen table, without either of them exchanging a word, leading me to believe that they had telepathically communicated with one another about how to fix it. But to my horror, instead of mending it, they cut its fuselage in half, and carefully retrieved a tiny piece of paper, on which Panayis had written a message to his comrades on how to coordinate their testimonies during their forthcoming court martial.
My model plane was a ruse. Nevertheless, once lovingly repaired, it remained a prized possession, until sometime in the late 1990s when its fragile materials succumbed to the sands of time. To this day, when I think of my little Stuka, my heart fills with unalloyed delight.
2. Roof with a view
Eleni liberated my childhood from any sense of shame by keeping me in the know. With a simple, proud and steady narrative that a young boy could grasp, I was never left in any doubt that we were in history’s good books. The idea that, as a nine-year-old, I had smuggled out a message from a prisoner to his accomplices was intoxicating. Months later, once my sister was born, I would do so again, this time knowingly. I smuggled a message into the notorious Averof prison complex, on Alexandras Avenue, where Panayis had been transferred after the court martial convicted him for ‘sedition and acts of armed subversion’.
While Eleni ensured that I regarded prison sentences as a badge of honour, she did not hesitate to expose her loved one’s darker side. Several years later, in 1979, catching a glimpse of the Stuka in our summer house, she sighed with her characteristic honesty: ‘It was not just a ploy to get it out. Love at first sight came first.’ Puzzled, I asked her to elaborate. She began in 1941, on the sixth day of that cruel April. The sun had hardly risen over Mount Hymettus when fourteen-yearold Panayis woke Eleni up and breathlessly dragged her up the narrow spiral metal staircase to their house’s rooftop. As she ascended, she was overwhelmed by the roar of engines. Never having seen or heard an aeroplane before, Eleni was terrified by the rumble of two waves of low-flying Luftwaffe bombers, eleven of them emanating from the outskirts of Vienna and twenty from Catania, heading for Piraeus, Athens’ ancient port city.
Holding back tears, she was appalled by Panayis’ delight. Jumping up and down, he was waving frantically at the planes overhead, cheering them on – not even pausing when the bombs started dropping and the sound reached their ears. Later that evening, gathered around the wireless, they listened to the news of Greece’s Pearl Harbor. The British merchant ship Clan Fraser and another six Allied vessels, which had brought munitions and troops to Piraeus in anticipation of the Nazi invasion of Greece, had been sunk. A good number of Greek navy and merchant ships were lost too. Hundreds had been killed or maimed. But that was not the worst news. As the Luftwaffe was destroying Piraeus, Hitler’s troops had invaded Greece from Yugoslavia, in coordination with Bulgarian troops that were descending towards the Aegean coast through Thrace.
Eleni was not coy about it. When the two of them were alone again, she confronted her brother. ‘How dare you cheer them on?’ she demanded. Panayis did not defer to his twelve-year-old sister. He defended his earlier enthusiasm with a thesis about Greece’s chronic backwardness, its need to industrialise-or-perish, Germany’s magnificent engineering feats and, lastly, how only by being occupied by a superior industrial power would our country be forced to join advanced, civilised Europe. Eleni, though two years younger, looked the brother she adored up and down, screwed up her face and called him a ‘disgusting cad’.
A fortnight later, on Easter Sunday, the Battle of Athens unfolded over Attica’s blue skies, pitting the ageing Royal Air Force Hurricanes against almost two hundred of the Luftwaffe’s Stukas and Messerschmitts. Eleni and Panayis watched from their rooftop as nine British and more than twenty German planes fell out of the sky, with only a handful of pilots managing to bail out in time. ‘This time he did not cheer but, from the corner of my eye, I could see him smiling when a Stuka would hit a British
e leni plane. Now you know why I hate this,’ she said, pointing to the model Stuka from Hotel Pefkakia.
Eleni recounted that at the time of the battle, ‘Tsolakoglou had already begun his long act of treachery,’ naming the Greek general who, without authorisation from the government, had ordered our troops to surrender to the Wehrmacht. A few days later, he would become Greece’s Quisling – the Nazis’ first appointed ‘prime minister’.
On the following Sunday, the sky was a leaden grey. As German troops entered Athens’ northern suburbs, Penelope Delta, the author whose books have nourished generations of Greek girls and boys, myself included, drank her version of the poison hemlock, unwilling to live to see the Nazis waltzing past her home on their way to the city centre. Soon after, Radio Athens would transmit its final message:
Brothers and sisters, a few minutes from now, our radio station will no longer be Greek. Do not tune in. Brothers and sisters, keep your souls up.
Less than an hour later, Eleni and Panayis watched from their rooftop as the swastika was raised over the Acropolis.
3. Dawn of ghosts
Eleni and Panayis grew up in Gouva – an unbearably poor Athenian neighbourhood which literally translates as ‘The Depression’. The first four decades of the twentieth century in Greece were marked by continuous war and military dictatorships. This created a society steeped in sadness, discord and mistrust. Greece was, geopolitically, in the British sphere of influence, but its fledgling modern industry had largely been funded by German capital and supplied with German machinery. Determined from the age of eight to become an engineer, Panayis saw German flying machines as harbingers of the future he craved.
‘Thankfully,’ Eleni contended, ‘the stench of the Occupation put paid to his illusions. Soon, he grew to loathe the Nazis as much as I did.’ I believed her. But, nevertheless, my mind raced to our fridge, the washing machine in our bathroom and the telephone resting on a stool next to the settee in our living room, all displaying proudly the Siemens logo – everyday reminders of discounts Panayis secured as managing director of Siemens Hellas, a job he retained even as he was crafting my Stuka at Hotel Pefkakia, locked up and ritually abused by dyed-in- thewool Greek Nazi sympathisers. Eleni explained: ‘Germany’s deNazification drive enabled my brother to have his cake and eat it – to wire himself into German tech without the guilt that weighed him down that bleak Sunday on our rooftop.’
Did he mean it, I asked, when he branded his guards Nazis? Eleni replied that unlike those left-wingers who recklessly brand
any right-wingers they dislike Nazis or Fascists, Panayis chose his words carefully. He, himself, had been a recalcitrant rightist who would never have called the ESA Nazis before they staged the putsch that brought them to power. He would have dismissed them as, at most, uncouth nationalists. This is exactly, Eleni suggested, why they loathed Panayis with perhaps greater passion than they did the communists: they expected him to defer to them, to keep quiet and carry on making a fortune at Siemens. That someone like Panayis would turn against them had not been on their radar. It was their sadistic reaction to his resistance that convinced Panayis they were Nazis.
Thinking back, the choice of Hotel Pefkakia to detain Panayis was deliciously suggestive of the military government’s bewilderment. Rounding up leftists by the thousands into a network of dingy prisons, black sites and barren island concentration camps was second nature to the thugs who had staged their coup d’état in the early hours of 21 April 1967. They had been doing it since the 1930s under successive Greek governments that relied on them to harass, torture and intern communists, socialists, student organisers, anarchists and trades unionists. Except now, emboldened by the full backing of the CIA and the tacit support of the United States government, they were also forming a government themselves. Within days, they had swapped their drab uniforms for shiny suits which, they hoped, would make them look the part as ministers of state.
In their warped minds, Eleni explained, they were killing democracy to save it. Not so much from the dastardly leftists but from the woolly centrists, wet conservatives and assorted degenerates whom they blamed for the nation’s moral decline and political paralysis. What they had never expected, however, was armed resistance from establishment figures like Panayis, whose suits were considerably sharper than theirs.
The military government were baffled by this new breed of respectable insurgents. It included royalist navy officers, intellectuals with impeccable conservative credentials, reputable law professors, even the army general who had recruited Panayis – himself a powerful figure in his capacity as de facto ambassador of German industrial capital. Stunned at first, they soon recovered their poise and captured the improbable rebels. For Eleni, Hotel Pefkakia symbolised the regime’s descent into confounded absurdity. Though they tortured them, occasionally up to the thin boundary separating life from death, they felt a strange duty to keep them separate from the usual leftist riff-raff.
During their court martial, a classic show trial that took place in March 1970, the defendants looked like ministers, a ‘cabinet in waiting’ as the Guardian reported at the time. This image was grossly at odds with that of dangerous subversives the regime aimed to paint. In the midst of her anguish, sitting on the hard benches, listening to the prosecutor wax lyrical about the state’s duty to seek the death penalty, Eleni could not help but admire her brother’s imposing presence – his greying black hair, the striking architecture of his profile and his air of superiority that weighed heavily on the little men who struggled to pretend they were passing legitimate judgement.
The question that baffled the military government also troubled Eleni: what had got into these bourgeois insurrectionaries? What had made Panayis, her dear, affluent, conservative businessman of a brother, fill up a Samsonite briefcase with explosives one fine morning with the intent to blow up the Ministry of Industry?
Whenever I asked her, her answer was always the same, fluent and unforced: my uncle was a brilliant but cavalier young man who saw himself as a potential captain of the universe. In 1945 Panayis gained admission to Greece’s top engineering school, the
National Technical University of Athens – known as the Polytechneio. By the time he graduated, in 1950, his cohort was in great demand due to the mini industrial revolution spearheaded by the Marshall Plan – and Panayis was top of his class. After a year or so of additional training in West Germany, he was snapped up by Siemens. Two years later he was top dog at Siemens Hellas, a post he held until 1977.
Panayis’ career path would have been inconsequential had it not embodied the three-way marriage of qualities that make men like him stand out: ambition, ability and authoritarianism. Siemens Hellas was more than a company. It was a state-withinthe-state, the wholesale supplier of the machinery and know-how that built, almost from scratch, Greece’s electricity and telephone systems. Every time Panayis visited the Ministry of Industry, he would be greeted by the minister himself, with the fanfare normally reserved for visiting foreign dignitaries. He loved every minute of it, Eleni recalled. His devotion to the established order was absolute because he considered it to be his very own realm. When Eleni would broach the small matter of the state executions of leftists throughout the 1950s, including women, or the 1963 state-sponsored brutal murder of Grigoris Lambrakis, a left-wing member of parliament, or the massive electoral fraud in 1961 organised by the palace, Panayis would spring to their defence with an argument not too dissimilar to the attitudes of the current generation of hard-nosed American or northern European liberals: Sometimes, he would retort, we must deploy authoritarian means to save democracy from authoritarianism. Sometimes, to safeguard the constitution and the rule of law from its greatest foes – communists and their fellow travellers – we must bend it to our will.
Echoing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous dictum that Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, ‘may be a
bastard but he is our bastard’, Panayis considered the ruffians who ended up torturing him in 1969 ‘his’ bastards – louts who kept troubled Greece a democracy, albeit an imperfect one. They were, he thought, the steep insurance premia democracy must pay. But that was before the Dawn of Ghosts, as Eleni liked to refer to the early hours of 21 April 1967. For it was then that, as Athens slept, Panayis’ boorish guardians of democracy, led by George Papadopoulos, a boorish colonel, dissolved parliament, imposed martial law, trashed the constitution and broke down our front door to drag Eleni’s husband, my father, to a football stadium along with thousands of others on their list of potential ‘enemies of the state’. That morning, Panayis flipped.
For more than a year he ran on empty. He continued to drive to work in his scrumptious white Alfa Romeo GTV coupé and carried on, in an au fait style, representing Siemens’ business interests in regular meetings with the stooges the military had appointed to ministerial posts. To outsiders, he seemed unabashed, as if nothing had changed. But it was all a show. Inside, he was broken.
Life acquired meaning again in November 1968, as he told me years later, when a retired general recruited him to Democratic Defence, the hodgepodge of incensed bourgeois men determined to plant small bombs, whose blasts would, in the words the general used in his defence during their court martial, ‘express the cry of the nation’.
4. Like an owl before an earthquake
Eleni had her own theory of why Panayis flipped. When the axioms sustaining our worldview dissolve in the harsh light of brutality, she believed, our true character comes to the fore. The timid recoil. The wise are humbled. The cunning seek scapegoats. Women try to find fault in themselves. But men accustomed to power reach for its most masculine version to restore the shattered equilibrium in a world they consider their estate. ‘Panayis’, she pronounced, ‘was a cad on our rooftop, he was a cad when he championed our nasty post-war pseudo-democracy, and he was a cad when he decided to plant bombs against those other cads who overthrew it. Only when in custody, stripped of his dignity, did I see in him the decent boy I knew he was.’
Eleni trod a fine line between censuring and praising Panayis. I knew she adored the ground he walked on. I had experienced her grief during his incarceration. I sensed her intense pride that, unlike other men of influence, Panayis never bowed to our tyrants, choosing to risk his life and fortune to resist them. And yet, like an owl before an earthquake, Eleni was alive to good men’s vulnerability to the corrupting influence of power. Observing her relationship with her brother was, thinking back, an effective inoculation against today’s descent into incendiary identity politics that began with the George W. Bush doctrine: ‘If you are not with us, you are against us.’ She knew how to love and to loathe him without allowing the contradiction to destabilise her, to make her lose her moral poise.
I once asked her how she felt about his decision to join a group espousing violence, which I knew she abhorred. ‘I never succumbed to the enormous pressure from friends and foes to condemn his stupid bombs,’ she replied. ‘Violence has its uses against beasts like Theofiloyiannakos who are always ready and willing to use it indiscriminately,’ a reference to the man who had slapped her at Hotel Pefkakia and who, I learned later, had personally tortured Panayis. I was more intrigued than ever. ‘Why then call his bombs stupid?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she snapped back with a venomous look usually reserved for her brother during one of their tense exchanges.
Eleni gave no quarter to anyone who dared dismiss her as meek. Though I had not meant it that way, my question awakened in her a memory of when Panayis had dismissed her objections to his group’s bombs as the reaction of a ‘jumpy female’. As a chemist who had spent years on the floor of a fertiliser factory mixing deadly chemicals, she was not afraid of explosions. But to her mind, his readiness to resort to bombs came from the same place as his earlier deference to violent thugs – perhaps even the same place as his rooftop speech in 1941. ‘Once you look for solutions in the abyss that is violence,’ she concluded, ‘the abyss swallows you whole and, before you know it, you can’t even begin to imagine non-violent resolutions.’
That conversation left me feeling self- conscious. How different was my boyish excitement at having smuggled messages in and out of Panayis’ prison? Eleni’s magnetic words threw off course an inner compass which, as in most boys raised in patriarchal societies, was calibrated to point to the celebration of brute force. Eleni made me appreciate a softer type of power.
That Eleni’s power was silkier did not, however, guarantee us a quiet life. When Panayis debated with other men, their waltz was well rehearsed. But with Eleni in the room, his fury