Benjamin Barber Richard Freeman Sander Gilman Richard

Transcription

The Berlin Journal
A N E WS L E T T E R F ROM T H E A M E R I C A N AC A D E M Y I N B E R L I N • N U M B E R T H R E E • FA L L 2 0 0 1
IN THIS ISSUE
Benjamin Barber
Richard Freeman
Sander Gilman
Richard Holbrooke
Jane Kramer
Susan Sontag
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
In the Aftermath
Th e
American
Acad e my
in Berlin
Trustees of
the American Academy
Honorary Chairmen
Thomas L. Farmer
Henry A. Kissinger
Richard von Weizsäcker
Chairman
Richard C. Holbrooke
Vice Chairman
Gahl Hodges Burt
President
Robert H. Mundheim
Treasurer
Karl M. von der Heyden
Trustees
Gahl Hodges Burt
Gerhard Casper
Lloyd Cutler
Jonathan F. Fanton
Thomas L. Farmer
Julie Finley
Vartan Gregorian
Jon Vanden Heuvel
Dieter von Holtzbrinck
Dietrich Hoppenstedt
Josef Joffe
Stephen M. Kellen
Henry Kissinger
Horst Köhler
John C. Kornblum
Otto Graf Lambsdorff
Nina von Maltzahn
Klaus Mangold
Erich Marx
Wolfgang Mayrhuber
Robert H. Mundheim
Franz Xaver Ohnesorg
Robert Pozen
Volker Schlöndorff
Fritz Stern
Kurt Viermetz
Alberto W. Vilar
Richard von Weizsäcker
Klaus Wowereit, ex officio
My first evening in New York Barber in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. A
last month was spent in the studio public discussion in the Schauof Alex Katz, who had just finished bühne with sociologist Nathan
a large painting begun last spring Glazer was sold out; my debate
in the bosky haven of the Hans with Green Bundestag deputy
Arnhold Center. In
Hans-Christian
the image which
Ströbele and CDU
graces our cover, he
representative Friedcaptured the tranbert Pflüger was
quility of the Acanationally televidemy’s ambience
sed; and Jane Krain a unique gramer will challenge
phic statement.
the philosopher Jean
It was the accomBaudrillard later this
plishments of our
year on the Gerambitious transatman-French chanlantic project that
nel arte.
were celebrated on
What this means
September 9 when
is that the AmeriJohannes Rau joincan Academy is inAlex Katz: »Berlin«
ed Henry Kissincreasingly seen as a
Courtesy of the Artist
ger, Richard Holrichly heterogenebrooke, Bob Mundheim, and over ous, bipartisan American resource
three hundred academic, political, and voice. The discussions in
and business leaders in inaugura- September 11th’s aftermath underting a new class of Academy Fellows. score just how imperative the
Yet the changes in life at the Academy’s strategy of bringing
Academy only two days later have American scholars, writers, and
been as discernible as the flowers policy experts to Berlin for extenand candles which appeared before ded periods of study and interacour gate that afternoon. Fellows tion with colleagues actually is.
have been called upon to comment
These American Fellows serve as
on international developments, emissaries of American sensibiliNew Yorker correspondent Jane ties. The Berlin Journal is the comKramer wrote in Die Zeit, writer municative instrument of this effSusan Sontag and anthropologist ort, and thus this issue includes
Vincent Crapanzano in the Frankfur- two special contributions on curGa ry S m i t h
ter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Benjamin rent events.
In this Issue
speaks about U.S. foreign policy in
the light of September 11. Page 10
Susan Sontag
looks at photojournalism and war
with a different eye. Page 20
Benjamin Barber
revisits the economic frontline of
Jihad vs. McWorld. Page 13
Sander L. Gilman
writes a life of the late dissident
novelist Jurek Becker. Page 23
Jane Kramer
draws a profile of German opera
director Nikolaus Lehnhoff. Page 16
Richard Freeman
explains with statistics why German
women work differently. Page 28
Plus: Our regular columns on intellectual life at the Hans Arnhold Center,
reflected in reviews, news, and notes on the scholarly work in progress of
the fall class of Berlin Prize Fellows. A poem by Christopher Middleton,
and reflections by Richard Holbrooke on the changing image of Berlin.
The Berlin Journal
A Newsletter from the American Academy in Berlin
Published at the Hans Arnhold Center
Number Three · Fall 2001
Edited by Gary Smith
•
Assistant Editor: Miranda Robbins
Managing Editor: Teresa Go
Illustrations: Natascha Vlahovic
Design: Hans Puttnies
Advertising: Renate Pöppel
Email: [email protected]
Subscriptions: $20 per annum
All Rights Reserved
C o n t r i b u to r s
to t h i s i s s u e
Benjamin R. Barber is Kekst Professor of Civil
Society at the University of Maryland and the
author of Jihad vs. McWorld, a new edition of
which was published in October.
Richard Freeman holds the Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard and is
co-director of the London School of Economics Center for Economic Performance.
Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor
of the Liberal Arts and Medicine at the
University of Illinois at Chicago and director
of its Humanities Lab.
Richard C. Holbrooke, chairman of the
Academy, has been a regular commentator
on U.S. response to terrorism and co-chairs a
task force at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jane Kramer is European correspondent for
The New Yorker and has just completed a
book on America’s radical right, to be
published in the spring of 2002.
Susan Sontag spent a week at the Academy
in early September. Her new collection of
essays Where the Stress Falls has just been
published.
The American Academy
in Berlin
Executive Director
Gary Smith
Development Director
Anne-Marie McGonnigal
Program Director
Paul Stoop
External Affairs Director
Renate Pöppel
Fellows Services Director
Marie Unger
Fellows Selection Coordinator
Teresa Go
Office Manager, N.Y.
Jennifer Montemayor
The American Academy in Berlin
Am Sandwerder 17-19 · 14109 Berlin
Tel. (+ 49 30) 80 48 3-0
Fax (+ 49 30) 80 48 3-111
AMERICAN ACADEMY
The Notebook of the Academy
Chronicles
of Philanthropy
New Fellowships Sharpen Academy Profile
ities and social sciences.
The Holtzbrinck Fellowship in
Journalism has been generously
established by the publisher and
Academy board member Dieter
von Holtzbrinck. It allows a distinguished journalist to take up a
semester’s residency at the Academy to work on a large project,
such as a book or series of articles.
To expand Academy’s forum
for economics and financial policy
issues, the J.P. Morgan Inter-
or composer to work with musical
colleagues in Berlin during a shortterm residency.
These additions join forces with
a distinguished set of named fellowships that have been in place
since the Academy’s founding in
1998: the DaimlerChrysler Fellowships, which focus on politics and
society; the Philip Morris Emerging and Distinguished Artist Fellowships in the Fine Arts; and the
Bosch Public Policy Fellowships.
All of the Fellows at the American Academy will rejoice at the
progress being made in the Hans
Arnhold Center’s library. Academy
Trustee Kurt Viermetz has made a
donation to cover the library’s operating costs and enable it to acquire a
respectable set of reference volumes.
ANNETTE FRICK
his fall, several scholars,
artists, and professionals in
residence at the Academy are inaugurating new named fellowships.
The Academy is very proud to
acknowledge the generous individuals and corporations who are
helping to bring American experts
to the Hans Arnhold Center semester after semester.
New fellowships in the 2001–
2002 year bear the names of Holtzbrinck, Ellen Maria Gorrissen,
Anna-Maria Kellen, Guna Mundheim, Alberto Vilar, and J.P.
Morgan, joining a list that already
includes DaimlerChrysler, Philip
Morris, and Bosch.
Each semester, Arnhold family
relatives select from among the
winners of the Berlin Prize, two
recipients of fellowships honoring
the daughters of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold. The Ellen Maria
Gorrissen Fellowship was established in memory of the Arnhold’s
elder daughter Ellen Maria Gorrissen, and the Anna-Maria Kellen
Fellowship honors their younger
daughter, who together with her
husband Stephen Kellen, continues to play an active role in the
life of the Academy. Neither prize
has a stipulated field attached to
it, but recipients are generally
engaged in the study of the human-
T
national Prize in Financial Policy
and Economics is awarded to
scholars for terms ranging from
four weeks to an entire semester.
Every other year, the Academy
will welcome a Guna Mundheim
Fellow in honor of the painter
Guna Mundheim, wife of Academy
President Robert H. Mundheim.
The fellowship is geared toward
but not limited to the fine arts, reflecting Guna Mundheim’s achievements as a painter, a teacher of
painting, and an active participant
in institutions that nurture the arts.
The annual Alberto Vilar Music
Fellowship brings a professional
in the field of classical music to
Berlin, and in addition, the annual Alberto Vilar Distinguished
Fellowship enables a performer
Founding Sponsors Stephen M. Kellen, Anna-Maria Kellen,
and their Daughter Marina French, with Academy friends Trudi Kearl (ctr)
and Elisabeth von Janota-Bzowski (right)
Surplus Value
Distinguished Visitors Sontag, Levy, and Glazer
Speak to Current Debates
hree Distinguished
Visitors, Susan Sontag,
Nathan Glazer, and Harold O.
Levy, took up brief residencies at
the Hans Arnhold Center this fall,
delivering Academy Lectures and
engaging resident Fellows in the
course of a variety of informal discussions and seminars.
Susan Sontag, one of America’s
best-known public intellectuals
and an influential writer of fiction
and criticism, spent a week at the
Academy in early September. Her
books and essays have been widely
translated. In addition to directing plays in the U.S. and Europe,
she has written and directed four
feature-length films, and her new
collection of essays, Where the
T
Stress Falls, was just published by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
A public dialogue on »The Conscience of Words« between Sontag
and author György Konrád (president of Berlin’s Akademie der
Künste) was scheduled to take
place on September 11, and a small,
private meeting was held in its stead.
Later that week, Sontag read
from her fourth novel, In America,
which received the National Book
Award for Fiction in 2000, and prefaced the evening with thoughts
about media politics in the wake
of the World Trade Center attack.
The sociologist and educator
Nathan Glazer spent a month at
the Academy. He is Professor
Emeritus of Sociology at Harvard,
co-editor of the journal The Public
Interest, and Contributing Editor
of the weekly magazine The New
Republic. Among the many topics
Glazer’s work addresses are ethnicity, American Jewish society,
social policy, urbanism, and public architecture. In the weekly
Fellows seminar, he presented a
working paper on the contemporary challenges of public architecture and monuments, with a focus
on the capitals of Berlin and
Washington. Glazer, who has
served on presidential task forces
on education and urban policy,
also delivered a public American
Academy Lecture, »Dual Citizens
in America: A Problem or a
Solution?«
The early November visit of
Harold Levy, Chancellor of the New
York City Board of Education,
generated robust interest among
Berlin’s educators and public
figures. The corporate attorney
and alumnus of the New York
GERD ENGELSMANN/ BERLINER ZEITUNG
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
Harold O. Levy
City public schools visited a number of schools in Berlin and Potsdam, where teachers and students
were always pleasantly surprised
by his childhood command of
Moseldeutsch. He met with Brandenburg’s Education Minister
Steffen Reiche, advised the Chancellery and DaimlerChrysler on
their initiative to bring World
Trade Center orphans to Germany
AMERICAN ACADEMY
Institute for Research on Women
and Gender; urban sociologist
Saskia Sassen from the University
of Chicago; the sociologist
Richard Sennett of New York
University and the London School
of Economics; Leon Wieseltier,
editor of the weekly magazine
The New Republic; and Walter
Laqueur of the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in
Washington, D.C.
M. PFEIFFER
next month, and held a seminar
with educational experts of the
Heinrich Böll Foundation. His
Academy lecture on the New York
City school system was moderated
by Bundestag deputy Cem Özdemir.
Distinguished Visitors for the
spring term will include composer
John Corigliano (under the auspices of the Alberto Vilar Music
Program); Laura Carstensen,
director of Stanford University’s
Dresden Heritage
Henry Arnhold
in Dresden
Academy Lecture Series
Recalls Arnhold Discussion Circle
eginning this year,
two of the American Academy in Berlin’s events will be taking place in Dresden. Each semester, a remarkable lecture series in
memory of Lisa and Heinrich
Arnhold brings a Fellow, Trustee,
or Distinguished Visitor from the
American Academy to speak at
the Villa Salzburg in Dresden.
The lectures are a collaboration
between the American Academy
in Berlin and Dresden Heritage e.V,
a young association that promotes
transatlantic intellectual dialogue.
B
merica’s Voices, a cultural festival conceived by
philanthropists Bill Rollnick and
Nancy Ellison and co-hosted by
the American Academy and the
U.S. Embassy, returns to Berlin
for a brief season of music, public
intellectual conversation, and art.
The series was launched with a
special concert-lecture at the Academy by members of the Orpheus
Chamber Orchestra. The group
performed works by Arnold
Schoenberg and the contemporary American composer Charles
Wuorinen and discussed the orchestra’s distinctive collaborative
management style. The evening
was produced in cooperation with
the U.S. Embassy, the Gemäldegalerie, and the Konzerthaus Berlin.
A
among their guests. According to
Lisa Arnhold’s diary notes, guests
often left the villa long after midnight after an evening of stimulating debate.
The Salzburg Villa has a history
similar to that of the Hans Arnhold
Villa in Berlin, the American Academy’s home. Like the families of
Hans and Heinrich Arnhold, the
Salzburg family was also forced to
leave Germany under Nazi rule.
The villa, freshly restored, is located close to where the Dresden
Arnhold family once held their
cultural evenings. Their home no
longer exists.
The series is organized under the
patronage of Saxony’s Minister
President Kurt Biedenkopf.
The lectures are conceived in
the spirit of the Dresden branch
of the Arnhold family. Until they
left the city in 1933, the banker
and benefactor Heinrich Arnold
and his wife Lisa regularly invited
writers, artists, philosophers, and
performers to their home to present music and discuss current
themes with other Dresden intellectuals. Wassily Kandinsky, Paul
Tillich, and Mary Wigman were
America’s Voices
Cultural Festival Brings Highlights
to Berlin for a Second Year
Theological scholars Jack Miles
and Daniel Boyarin discussed
Miles’ new book, Christ: a Crisis
in the Life of God, published this
October by Knopf. Berlin Prize
Fellow Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Organist Thomas Murray performed works by Beethoven, SaintSaëns, Gade, and Rheinberger,
among others, at the Church of
the Heilig-Kreuz in Kreuzberg.
Murray, a professor of music at
Yale, performed on an American-
built Hook organ (1870), originally housed in The First Unitarian
Church of Woburn, Massachusetts.
With the closing of its original
home in 1991, the grand threemanual instrument was shipped
to Berlin, restored by the Eule
firm of Bautzen, Germany, and
installed in the Kreuzberg church,
whose own nineteenth-century
organ had been destroyed in
World War II.
Further events in the series included a November performance
of Kurt Weill’s musical »One Touch
6
The series was inaugurated this
May with a lecture by Sander L.
Gilman (Berlin Prize Fellow 20002001) entitled »Border Land:
Jewish History beyond Center,
Periphery, and Diaspora.« Heinrich Arnhold’s son Henry Arnhold
came from New York, and other
members of the Arnhold family
came from the U.S., Portugal, and
Brazil. Minister President Biedenkopf, the Prince of Saxony, several
cabinet ministers of the State of
Saxony, and the city’s mayor also
attended the lecture.
On October 19, the second
Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold Lecture was given by the distinguished
historian Fritz Stern, emeritus
professor at Columbia University
and a member of the Academy’s
Board of Trustees. It drew a large
and engaged audience from the
intersecting worlds of academe,
politics, public life, the arts, and
the media. Stern was introduced
by Minister President Biedenkopf
and delivered his lecture »Verzerrungen deutscher Geschichte«
(Distortions of German History)
in German. The talk was followed
by a lively discussion, moderated
by historian and publisher of
Berlin’s newspaper Der Tagesspiegel Hermann Rudolph.
of Venus.« This was preceded by a
discussion, »The German Weill –
the American Weill,« among
Kim H. Kowalke of the Kurt Weill
Foundation, »Venus« producer
Frank Buecheler, and journalist
Bernd Feuchtner.
Also in November, Lawrence
Friedman, Guest Professor at the
Humboldt University, lectured at
the Amerika Haus on philanthropy in the U.S..
In early February, the American
pop art painter Ed Ruscha will
speak, during a visit to Berlin that
coincides with the opening of a
retrospective of his work at the
Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum.
America’s Voices is made possible
with the generous support of
FirstMark Communications.
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
MIKE MINEHAN
Life and Letters at the Hans Arnhold Center
Daniel Boyarin
Profiles in Scholarship
Most scholars, religious leaders,
and lay persons take it as a given
that Judaism and Christianity
were separate religions by late in
the first century – or very, very
soon thereafter. The precise date
of this »Parting of the Ways« is
debatable, but most hold that it
took place in a singular, cataclysmic event (such as the Council of
Yavneh, in the year 85, or the Bar
Kochba Rebellion in 135).
Berkeley professor of Talmudic
culture Daniel Boyarin is completing a book this fall that challenges
this assumption. He argues that it
was, in fact, possible for people to
be simultaneously Christian and
Jewish for centuries. Although
religious arbiters »on both sides«
sought absolute difference, the
notion of having or belonging to a
particular »religion« did not yet
exist (much as the concept of having a »sexuality« was only formed
in the nineteenth century).
It was not, Boyarin argues, until
early in the fifth century that rabbinic Judaism and Christian
orthodoxy became two distinct
institutions and both the churchmen and the Rabbis were able to
promote their respective orthodoxies. The episteme of religion
was thus born.
The Berlin Projects
of the Academy’s Fall Fellows
An intellectual hors d’oeuvre before the evening meal:
Academy Fellows present current projects in an informal afternoon seminar.
Barbara Balaj
In regions that have been broken by war, a strong peace cannot
be built on a fragile economy – no
more than a strong economy can
be built on a fragile peace. World
Bank Consultant Dr. Barbara
Balaj has a long-standing interest
in collaborative post-conflict reconstruction efforts, particularly
those that address the Middle
East and the Balkans.
Unlike the earlier model of unilateral assitance (embodied by the
American Marshall Plan in Europe
after World War II), the job of
providing reconstruction assistance has become too large for
any one country or organization.
Multilateral alliances have been
forged to encourage peace – providing post-conflict countries and
entities with help for infrastructure and reconstruction, as well as
debt relief, and support for institution building.
This fall, Dr. Balaj takes up a
Bosch Fellowship to study Germany’s progressive approach to
conflict prevention and resolution.
A major contributor to the European Union’s international efforts,
Germany helped formulate the
1999 Southeastern Europe Stability Pact. Dr. Balaj will be drawing
on contacts at German governmental agencies, the European
Union, non-governmental organizations, and research institutes.
and why do society’s »imaginative
frontiers« vary according to culture, historical moment, and personal experience?
Vincent Crapanzano, a professor
of anthropology and comparative
literature at the CUNY Graduate
Center in New York and the Academy’s first Ellen Maria Gorrissen
Fellow, is completing a book
based on the Jensen Lectures he
gave in Spring 1999 in Frankfurt,
under the auspices of Literaturhaus and the Frobenius Institute.
The book, tentatively entitled
Imaginative Horizons, is decidedly
interdisciplinary – a provocative
montage of anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis,
art history, and literary criticism.
Crapanzano is concerned with the
construction of frontiers and the
way we imagine what lies beyond
them. Specific chapters examine:
symbolic geographies, risk, pain,
Vincent Crapanzano
Our world is surrounded by
symbolically charged spatial and
temporal frontiers, few of which
are entirely open or closed. How
7
hope, ecstasy, memory, and millenarianism – an effort to create
greater openness.
AMERICAN ACADEMY
Sue de Beer
Most of Sue de Beer’s photography, sculptural video installations,
and performance art explores
America’s relationship to violence.
In late 2000, when she began outlining a project for a two-channel
video installation dealing with
terrorism and the glamorization
of violence, the events of September 11 were unimaginable.
»In America,« she wrote, »those
public acts of violence that seem
to have had the strongest cultural
impact have not been made by
revolutionaries but by a few lost
and very screwed up school kids.«
The New York artist witnessed the
attack on the World Trade Center
shortly before arriving in Berlin
and taking up her fellowship as
Philip Morris Emerging Artist.
The experience has, if anything,
fueled her resolve to take on the
publicity, pornography, and popularity of violence in popular culture – from within.
The simultaneous videos, presented in a distinctive setting, will
borrow and twist the language of
mainstream movies and present a
disturbing set of American teenagers, including a would-be mass
murderer. Their largely inchoate
but excruciatingly intense opinions about power, history, and
justice form the core of the work.
De Beer, 27, earned an MFA from
Columbia University’s School of
the Arts in 1998.
Aris Fioretos
»Someone one day will write a
monograph on the color blue,«
declared the poet Rainer Maria
Rilke in a letter to his wife. Aris
Fioretos, whose extended essay on
writing, The Gray Book, was published in English in 1999, found
the challenge irresistable. This fall
the novelist and literary scholar is
working on »Six Studies in Blue,«
a cultural biography of the color,
from the German romantics
through the postwar period. The
project explores the question of
Impact of the Internet on the
Economy: Revolutionary Force or
Overblown Hype?« He has recently led research teams of economists in studies of the Swedish
economy (The Welfare State in
Transition, 1997) and the British
economy (Seeking a Premiere
League Economy, forthcoming in
2002). Two other books are also
forthcoming in 2002, Visible
Hands: Labor Institutions in the
Economy; and The Labor Market
Comes to China. He is currently collaborating with German economist
Ronald Schettkat on a comparative study of women in the German and American workforces.
how color in the visual arts is
related to, and sometimes translated into, color in the fields of literature and aesthetics. He examines a spectrum of blues, demarcated at one end by the blue-gray
mist of a Caspar David Friedrich
seascape and on the other by Yves
Klein’s intense ultramarine – the
»International Klein Blue«
patented by the painter in 1956.
The hues in between denote a
subtle range of emotions, aesthetic efforts, philosophical and literary developments – even political
reactions. Fioretos lives in New
York. His next novel will be published in Sweden and Germany in
the fall of 2002.
Jane Kramer
Jane Kramer, European correspondent for The New Yorker and
winner of the Academy’s first
Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize in Journalism, continues to probe Berlin’s
contemporary musical culture.
The first glimpse of this ongoing
project was published this fall in a
New Yorker article on Germany’s
»Opera Wars.«
Kramer has spent two decades
exploring various skirmishes and
controversies in the German arts
– in architecture, letters, the visual arts, theater, and now, music –
and it is in large part through her
pieces in The New Yorker that
Americans have been introduced
to the cultural scene in Berlin.
Describing last year’s national
flare-up over how Berlin should
fund and manage its three opera
Richard Freeman
Economist Richard Freeman
spent the month of September at
the Hans Arnhold Center as an
inaugural J.P. Morgan Fellow in
Economics. He holds the Herbert
Ascherman Chair in Economics at
Harvard and is co-director of the
London School of Economics
Center for Economic Performance.
His wide-ranging research
interests include the growth and
decline of unions; the effects of
immigration and trade on inequality; restructuring European welfare states; Chinese labor markets;
poverty and crime; self-organizing
non-union in the labor market;
and employee involvement
programs.
He delivered the J.P. Morgan
Lecture in September, »The
8
houses, Kramer suggested that
the debates involved far more
than state and city subsidies.
Rather, they exposed core questions »about the Germanness of
German music – about who
understands it, and who gets to
play it, and how it should be performed, and whether Germany
loses some vital narrative of itself
when those decisions are in the
hands of strangers.« The working
title of her project is »The Politics
of Meaning: Negotiations in
German Music and Arts.«
Evonne Levy
Art history came of age in the
nineteenth century, contemporaneously with the rise of nationalism. Indeed, the question of how
architecture embodied a »national character« was central to the
nationalist debates of the day.
Evonne Levy is Associate
Professor of Art History at the
University of Toronto. While in
Berlin, she is researching the political context of the term »Jesuit
style« in German art history, tracing it from the 1840s through
World War II. The term, first used
by Jacob Burckhardt, designated
an Italianate architectural style
(generally called baroque), which
was exported to Germany, Belgium,
and elsewhere by the international Catholic order during the
Counter Reformation.
German-speaking art historians
offered the Jesuit style to contemporary architects as an example of
the style in which they should not
build, as an architecture entirely
at odds with the Germanic character. These assumptions were
revised in the early twentieth century, but the term was on the
table once again during the
National Socialist period, a time
of renewed interest in national
styles of architecture. »The Jesuit
style,« writes Levy, »is one of the
most piquant examples of the
intersection – indeed the total
interdependence – of art history
and politics.«
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
Richard Maxwell
Panorama paintings were enormously popular in the nineteenth
century. Huge crowds were drawn
to the circular exhibits, which
simulated prospects of cities,
landscapes, and historical events.
Only a small number survive
today, mostly in Europe.
Richard Maxwell, an English
professor at Valparaiso University,
sees panoramas as a clue to modernist culture. They were site-specific and resisted the sort of mass
reprodution that characterized so
much of nineteenth-century mass
culture. Prints of famous exhibits,
though generously documented
in periodicals of the day, could
not convey the effect of the 360degree view. One had to buy one’s
ticket. One had to be there – literally – in the middle of things.
This peculiar power to immerse
visitors in an enveloping scene
made the panorama an ideal
would say – instruct. This fall in
Berlin, he is preparing a book on
the subject.
Christopher Middleton
repository of collective fantasies,
both utopian and dystopian. The
perfect world as well as its frightening opposite were depicted.
Maxwell is also tracing the
genre’s legacy in contemporary
art. A small set of highly self-conscious works by painters, photographers, and architects today
suggests that the panorama still
retains its capacity to charm,
shock, and – as the Victorians
British poet, essayist, and
translator Christopher Middleton
is no stranger to Berlin. He has
been visiting the city since the
1950s. During his stay this fall on
the eastern shore of the Wannsee,
he is working on poems and finishing a volume of prose entitled
Crypto-Topographia: Stories of
Secret Places.
Having already written an essay
»On the Apotropaic Element in
Poetry,« he also proposes to translate some more texts by Robert
Walser (1878-1956), a Swiss
writer whose work has interested
him since the mid 1950s. Walser
spent a brief but intensely productive period in Berlin (19051913), publishing, among other
texts, the celebrated novel Jakob
von Gunten, first translated into
English by Middleton in 1969.
Often acknowledged as one of
the finest translators from German
into English today, Middleton is
also a highly-regarded poet and
author, most recently, of Twenty
Tropes for Doctor Dark (2000) and
The Word Pavilion and Selected
Poems, published in May 2001.
He is Emeritus David J. Bruton
Centennial Professor of Modern
Languages at the University of
Texas, and remains in Austin.
Kenneth Scott
How do corporations protect
outside investors who commit
their capital to managers and
decision makers on the inside?
Shareholder protection policies
vary widely from country to
country, depending on the laws
in place. Kenneth Scott, who has
compared systems of corporate
governance Continued on page 26
AMERICAN ACADEMY
After September 11
C R E AT ING T H E T HIR D T R A NSAT L A NT I C A L L I A NC E
By Richard C. Holbrooke
e p t e m b e r 1 1 , 2 0 0 1 marked the
start of a new era in world politics,
one that appears more threatening
but also presents new possibilities. This was
not an attack just on the United States – it was
an attack on the world. Hundreds of citizens
from more than sixty nations were killed. The
World Trade Center, a symbol of global prosperity and freedom, a symbol of tolerance and
opportunity, was destroyed.
This is our test. We must wage a sustained
battle with all our resources. Within the U.S.,
Americans of all political persuasions have
come together – Republicans and Democrats
are united in purpose. Victory is only possible
if we act together with all nations of goodwill.
This is why the support of our NATO allies is
so important. The whole world sees that it is
not just Americans who are willing to risk
their lives to combat the scourge of terrorism,
but British, Canadian, Spanish, French, and
German forces as well.
The American people were deeply touched
by expressions of concern they received from
friends and allies in Europe. Prime Minister
Blair spoke for both sides of the Atlantic when
he said that »we were with you at the first,
and we will stay with you till the last.« Blair’s
words sum up the fundamental underpinning
of the transatlantic partnership, the core tenet
that has made ours the most successful alliance
in history. More than ever, Europe needs the
United States, and the United States needs Europe.
Prior to the terrorist attacks, there was a
tremendous debate in Washington and throughout Europe about the future of U.S. foreign
policy. There were fears that the U.S. might
try »go it alone« on issues ranging from global
warming to missile defense to peacekeeping to
the fight against global disease. Today, with
the Bush Administration’s commitment to
S
building an international coalition against terror, I believe we have seen the retreat of the
unilateralist impulse. Unilateralism is simply
not an option in this new era.
The support among our common political
institutions has been remarkable: the G-8 is
working to freeze terrorist assets; the EU has
pledged to help; NATO, for the first time in its
52-year history, invoked Article V, declaring
that the attack is one against every member of
the alliance; and the UN Security Council has
unanimously adopted U.S.-sponsored resolution that, for the first time, compels states to
sever all ties with suspected terrorists. But we
have to remember that in terms of any military
response, the UN itself has no operational role
to play. That is why NATO remains so critical.
The transatlantic alliance is at the heart of
this set of overlapping alliances and coalitions
now fighting terrorism. September 11 reinvigorated our sense of common mission. We have
experienced such turning points before. Today,
Europe is stable – for the first time in history,
there is not a major threat to Europe from
inside Europe. But in many ways, September 11
is the end of the post-cold-war era.
The 1990s bear some resemblance to the
1930s, a period when the world stood by (and
America disengaged) and a new threat developed. Our generation may have already lived
through its own interwar period – lasting from
the fall of the Soviet Union to the fall of the
World Trade Center. While we tried to clean
up old problems, like the legacy of Europe’s
division, and grappled with immediate crises,
like the Balkans and Iraq, a new evil lurked,
Richard C. Holbrooke, chairman of the
American Academy, is a partner and vice chairman
at Perseus LLC. He is currently co-chair of a task
force at the Council on Foreign Relations on the
U.S. response to terrorism.
10
capable of far more destruction than we imagined. It is now before us.
Now, we must put all our energy into creating the transatlantic community’s third great
alliance, like the ones we established to fight
World War II and the Cold War. In 1945, Europe
and the United States embarked on an historic
partnership. Together, with the hard work of
Europeans and the full financial and political
backing of the Marshall Plan, we forged a new,
united Europe. And our common interests
extended to building a new era’s institutional
architecture, designed to promote democracy
and defend freedom: NATO; the IMF; GATT
and then the WTO; the OECD; the CSCE and
then OSCE; the UN.
Forty years later, at the end of the cold war,
the U.S. and Europe embraced a new set of challenges. We sought to rebuild Eastern Europe
and stabilize Russia, to promote peace and
stability in other parts of the world, to enhance
free trade, confront global warming, and most
importantly, to end the conflicts in the Balkans.
We redefined NATO, forging important relationships throughout the former Soviet-bloc.
And through the Founding Act with Russia,
NATO established a critical link between
Russia and NATO. The link is now proving its
value as President Putin, the first Russian
President to visit NATO, is working cooperatively with the alliance in the current crisis.
At the same time, the U.S.-European partnership began to show serious signs of stress
as it confronted the varied effects of increasing
globalization. For much of the past year, there
was grumbling on both sides of the Atlantic.
Many in Europe were wary of the new administration’s unilateralism. Others felt that the
U.S. was a »hyperpower.« Many in U.S. were
wary of European willingness to sacrifice sovereignty for lofty, if perhaps unrealistic ideals
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
like the International Criminal Court, or frustrated by the EU’s sluggish bureaucracies. Some
even asked if our partnership was worth the
trouble, why we bothered having a transatlantic security relationship at all.
Such concerns now seem naïve. It is now
clear that we must look outside our transatlantic space to meet new challenges and fight
new threats. This is not a time for our relationship to get bogged down in intramural
squabbles. Our common interest is far more
important.
Indeed, the real point of the transatlantic
security relationship in the twenty-first century is to confront threats outside our common
space. The greatest security threats to the U.S.
and Europe today stem from problems that
defy borders: the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction; pandemics like HIV/AIDS;
international crime; and of course, most urgently, terrorism. Concerns like »out-of-area
peacekeeping« have not traditionally been
part of our security dialogue. And they emanate from places that, for the most part, the
transatlantic alliance has largely ignored:
South and Central Asia, the Middle East,
and Africa.
We stand together because we must. The
attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon were just a taste of what the forces
of extremism and terror are capable of doing.
The threat from weapons of mass destruction
– whether chemical, biological or even nuclear
– is real. Does anyone doubt that the nihilistic
murderers of September 11 would use such
weapons if they could obtain them?
The War of Ideas
Even as our armed forces have already
begun to punish those who harbor terrorists,
it is clear that this will not be a conventional
war. This is more than a challenge for the government, the military, the intelligence community and the police. It is also an immense
challenge for firefighters and other »first
responders,« for public health experts, for
transportation planners, for taxpayers, and for
average citizens who must be constantly vigilant and prepared. This struggle against terrorism, like all wars, requires broad and deep
social mobilization.
This is also a war of ideas, not unlike the
war we fought against communist totalitarian-
ism. The task ahead may prove even more difficult. For this is not a war against ideologues
and party apparatchiks. We are fighting fanatics who believe that they are serving God. Our
greatest mistake would be to allow it to become
a war between the West and Islam. Osama bin
Laden wants more than anything for us to
mount a crusade against his Jihad, and we need
to make clear that this is not a war on Islam.
This is not a clash of civilizations. Islam is
one of the world’s great religions, a religion
that teaches peace and morality. But there are
those who would abuse Islam to foment hatred
for their own cynical – and murderous – ends.
This is not a war on one country or a bloc
of countries. The September 11 attacks were
not micromanaged directly from a cave in
Afghanistan. The war on terrorism will not be
over when we have flushed Osama bin Laden
from his hiding place and removed the Taliban
from power. Invisible networks exist throughout the U.S. and Europe. From places like
Hamburg, Jersey City, London, and Virginia,
these enemies of freedom used our freedoms
against us.
Now as we fight them, we must not sacrifice what we hold most dear. We must seize
AMERICAN ACADEMY
this moment to create lasting institutions to
address the long-term response to terrorism.
Until the current crisis, our efforts to combat
terrorism had been, quite frankly, paltry. Three
years ago, President Clinton used his annual
appearance before the UN General Assembly
to deliver a major speech on terrorism.
Terrorism is »a clear and present danger to
tolerant and open societies and innocent people everywhere. . . . No one [is] immune.«
Since 1963, the UN has negotiated twelve
conventions against terrorism. But we still do
not have a comprehensive international legal
framework in place. Nor do we have adequate
mechanisms for information sharing, law enforcement, interdiction, or disaster response.
This will not be done in a single conference,
nor will it be accomplished by any single institution. Success will require a new architecture,
as visionary and as ambitious as that designed
by our predecessors following World War II.
The new architecture will not supplant the
postwar institutions but rather harness them
and build on them.
Five Steps
to Counter Terrorism
First, we must hammer out an agreement
on the new norms that shall govern the new
era. The UN Security Council recently passed
a significant anti-terrorism resolution, but as
Kofi Annan has made clear, we still lack an
over-arching framework. Now is the time to
resolve the long-standing differences and agree
on a comprehensive, binding convention to tie
together previous conventions, fill in their
gaps, and create new mechanisms to ensure
compliance. It needs key provisions on financing terrorism, law enforcement cooperation,
and information and intelligence sharing.
Now is the time to act – with a newly reinvigorated transatlantic alliance and key Islamic
allies working together.
A second institutional reform regards the
ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan. While the international community is
gearing up to meet the needs of those Afghans
who cross an international border and become
refugees, a far greater challenge will be meeting the needs of the so-called »internally displaced persons,« and the estimated 7.5 million people who remain inside the country.
Daily airdrops are part of the effort to ease the
burden on the Afghani people. We need to
make a political decision to do whatever it
takes to help them and to update our institu-
tional architecture to protect and support the
»internally displaced.«
A third area in need of new architecture is
that of law enforcement cooperation. September 11 represents a massive law enforcement
failure – a failure to share information and
coordinate it among countries, and among
agencies within countries. The links between
the world’s law enforcement agencies need to
be dramatically changed. This applies not only
to information sharing but also to enforcement and interdiction. Interpol is little more
than a shadow operation, weak and ineffectual. The G-8 work on terrorism and the Financial Action Task Force prove that cooperation
can be organized, but these efforts will have to
be broadened and deepened. Moreover, Europeans and Americans will need to expand
assistance for strengthening law enforcement
mechanisms (and the rule of law more generally) in developing countries.
Our fourth concern is to build up a more
effective system of choking off the money that
funds terrorist networks. More than a trillion
dollars flow daily through international financial markets, and this will be extremely challenging. But it is not impossible. We need
aggressive international efforts, not only from
world financial centers in New York, Frankfurt,
London, Tokyo, Switzerland, and Singapore,
but also from all OECD countries. Even smaller financial centers must be central to the
effort. A serious multilateral effort should be
undertaken to revise bank secrecy law, and we
must work together to tighten the holes in
own financial systems. We must also engage
our many partners in the Islamic world. Until
we find ways to monitor the halawa banking
system, and other informal financing and
business networks used throughout the Middle
East and Asia, it will be impossible to break
up terror networks worldwide.
A fifth area of attention is the management
of borders. Together we must find the right
balance between openness and vigilance. We
do not have the luxury of over-reacting either
way. The five-thousand-mile U.S.-Canadian
border is the longest unprotected border in
the world. Canada is our largest trading partner and one of our closest friends in the world,
and keeping our common border open is
indispensable to the strength of our economies.
But we must also do a great deal more to ensure that border’s security. At present, we have
completely different security and surveillance
systems. Washington and Ottowa must build
a more effective border system to maintain
12
openness but improve security. Europe, which
has long struggled to find this balance itself,
may help us in this respect.
Unfinished Business
Beyond September 11
Even as we mobilize in these five new areas,
we cannot be detracted from other unfinished
business of the transatlantic alliance. If anything, the tragedy of September 11 increases
the urgency and eases the difficulty of enlarging NATO. We should enlarge the alliance to
include at least Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia,
Slovenia, Slovakia, and Romania at the Prague
summit next year. NATO enlargement is not
against Russia. Rather, it is about increasing
the zone of stability in Europe.
We must continue to protect our peoples
from instability and strife. The United States
should not use the new crisis as an excuse to
withdraw from its obligations in the Balkans.
Though America’s military presence in Bosnia
and Kosovo is modest, its importance for
security there is indispensable. We must redouble our combined efforts in the Balkans.
And we must strengthen the mechanisms of
UN and regional peacekeeping elsewhere as
well, preventing conflicts in Africa from consuming the continent.
Alongside the new »war« on terrorism, we
cannot forget the other issues on our massive
global agenda: the spread of HIV/AIDS, the
proliferation of weapons technologies and small
arms, and the specter of global warming. We
must continue to advance the well being of the
world’s people by continuing to hone the system of free trade, but we must also heed the
calls from the street that the benefits of globalization be shared by all. These ongoing challenges will require total commitment, engagement, and partnership between Europe and
the U.S.. As we built an international framework out of the ruins of Europe after 1945, so
too must we now rise from the rubble in New
York and Washington and work to bring security, freedom, and prosperity to our citizens,
and indeed, to all peoples. We must draw on
our historic bonds and once again alter the
course of history.
This text is based on the Nexus Lecture 2001
given on October 12th in the Dutch city of Tilburg,
home of the Nexus Institute, an independent, nonprofit foundation. Holbrooke further developed his
arguments on this topic in The Washington Post
of October 28 and November 14.
BARBAR A KLEMM / FR ANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
How do you spell globalization? A family-run firewood business at the main railroad station in Calcutta
Jihad vs.McWorld Revisited
Opening a Democratic Front in the Fight Against Terrorism
By Benjamin Barber
w e e k a f t e r t h e f i r s t large-scale assault on the
disintegral tribalism and reactionary fundamentalism (which I call Jihad)
American homeland – an attack even more devastating than
and integrative modernization and aggressive economic and cultural
its perpetrators could have hoped for – President George W.
globalization (which I call McWorld). As we mount a new military
Bush declared war on terrorism. The rhetoric he deployed was that of
offense against Jihad (understood not as Islam but as militant fundaretributive justice: »We will bring the terrorists to justice,« he said
mentalism), it is now apparent that democracy rather than terrorism
gravely to a joint session of Congress, »or we will bring justice to the
may become the principal victim of the battle.
terrorists.« The language of justice was surely appropriate, but it will
Only the globalization of civic and democratic institutions can offer
remain appropriate only if the compass of its meaning is extended
a way out of the war between global capitalism and its aggrieved critics,
from retributive to distributive justice.
between sterile cultural monism and raging
In my book Jihad vs. McWorld, I warned that
cultural fundamentalism. Only democracy can
Benjamin R. Barber is Kekst Professor
democracy was caught between two clashing
address the resentment and spiritual unease
of Civil Society at the University of Maryland
and the author of Jihad vs. McWorld, a
movements, each of which – for its own reasons
of those whose cultural diversity and moral
new edition of which is being published this
– seem indifferent to freedom’s fate. Two seembeliefs are affronted by McWorld’s trivializamonth. He will be a DaimlerChrysler Fellow
ingly oppositional sets of forces are in fact
tion and homogenization of values. Only demoat the Academy in Spring 2002.
trapped in a brutal dialectical interdependence:
cracy offers hope to those mired in poverty,
A
13
AMERICAN ACADEMY
tempted in their despair to turn to Jihad. Only
global democracy can regulate global markets
and a capitalism uprooted from the constraints of the democratic nation state.
Extending the compass of democracy to the
global market sector will enable people to take
advantage of its economic blessings and enjoy
opportunities for accountability, participation, and governance. Democracy, by protecting cultural diversity and religious differences can
address the anxieties of those who
fear the shallow orthodoxies of secularist materialism.
America, Britain, and their allies
must open a second, democratic
front in the war against terrorism.
The military campaign to eliminate
terrorists makes anxious spectators
of the majority of citizens in America
and throughout the world, and as
they watch on the sidelines, the nausea that accompanies fear will dull
their appetite for revenge. The second front engages every citizen and
transforms passive observers into
resolute participants. It is more likely than the military front to determine the war’s outcome.
terms and can be given none in exchange.
Justice here can only take the form of extirpation – root, trunk, and branch. Fostering participatory democracy will not appease the terrorists, who are scarcely students of globalization’s contractual insufficiencies. Yet terrorists
swim in a sea of tacit popular support and
What Price McWorld?
Hyperbolic commentators such
as Samuel Huntington have described the current divide in the
world as a global clash of civilizations and warn of a cultural war
between democracy and Islam.
But this apes the messianic rhetoric
of Osama Bin Laden – who has called
for precisely such a war. The difference between Bin Laden’s terrorists
and the poverty-stricken thirdworld constituents he tries to call
to arms, however, is the difference
between the radical Jihadic fundamentalists and ordinary men and
women concerned to feed their children and nurture their religious
communities. Fundamentalists can
be found among every religious sect
and represent a tiny, aggravated
minority whose ideology often contradicts the very religions in whose
names they act.
From Seattle and Prague to Stockholm and Genoa, street demonstrators have protested the costs of globalization.
They have for the most part been written off as
anarchists and know-nothings, and the media
has paid more attention to their theatrics than
to the deep problems those theatrics are
intended to highlight. As French president
Jacques Chirac acknowledged after the dissident violence of Genoa, however, one hundred
thousand protestors do not take to the streets
unless something is amiss.
Some critics have, in the wake of September 11, tried to equate anti-globalization protestors with the terrorists: irresponsible destabilizers of world order. But the protestors are
the children of McWorld. Their objections are
democratic not Jihadic. They are aggrieved not
BARBAR A KLEMM / FAZ
Market for Democracy
This civic and democratic front is
aimed not at terrorism per se but at
anarchism and social chaos. It takes
on both McWorld’s economic reductionism and commercializing homogeneity and the climate of hopelessness in which Jihad thrives. It entails
readjudicating the responsibilities
between North and South; redefining the obligations of global capital
as it faces the claims of global justice and comity; repositioning democratic institutions as
they follow markets from the domestic to the
international sector; and, finally, recognizing
the place and requirements of faith in an aggressively secular market society. This second
front will advance not only in the name of retributive justice and secularist interests but in
the name of distributive justice and religious
pluralism.
This democratic front does not aim to dissuade terrorists from their campaigns of annihilation. Their deeds are unspeakable. Their
purposes can neither be rationalized nor negotiated. They seek to recover the dead past by
annihilating the living present. They offer no
costs. They seek justice not vengeance. A desperate few seemed to welcome the slaughter of
six thousand Americans in a single morning,
and a larger number want to use American
suffering to draw attention to their own. They
want to make clear that they too suffer from
violence – a less visible violence that destroys
with greater stealth and over a longer period of time. Given the opportunity, many of McWorld’s »enemies«
would prefer to enjoy modernity and
its blessings. More often, however,
they are the victims of the modern
world’s unevenly distributed costs.
Beyond the designer market’s rainbow:
Parasol and sunglasses in Nigeria
acquiescence, and these waters roil with anger
and resentment. Immediately after the attacks
of September 11, we saw disturbing scenes of
ordinary men, women and children apparently jubilating the deaths of American civilians.
American viewers were first enraged, then
deeply puzzled: how could anyone cheer such
acts of wanton slaughter? But there is no doubt
that despairing rage exists in too many parts
of the third world – and in many third-world
neighborhoods of first-world cities as well. Such
despair endows terrorism with a false legitimacy.
Our second front in the war against terrorism must target this facilitating environment.
Its constituents are not terrorists; they are
themselves terrified by globalization and its
14
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
by world order but by world disorder, and if
their methods are occasionally foolish and
their proposed solutions unrealistic, they grasp
– with a sophistication that their leaders
apparently lack – the fact that globalization’s
current architecture breeds anarchy, nihilism,
and violence. Hypocrisy not democracy is the
target of their rage.
Too often those living in the second and
third worlds to the south of the United States,
Europe, and Japan perceive globalization as a
form of first-world economic imperialism. Too
often what we describe as opportunities to
expand the sphere of liberty and prosperity
seem to them to be so many empty promises –
a rationalization for exploitation and oppression. Too often what we call the international
order is for them an international disorder.
America’s neo-liberal antagonism toward
political regulation in the global sector; toward
institutions of legal and political oversight;
toward attempts to democratize globalization
and institutionalize economic justice looks to
them like brute indifference.
We celebrate our market ideology, with its
commitment to the privatization of all things
public and the commercialization of all things
private. We insist on freedom from government interference in the global economic sector. Yet the laissez-faire rule of private power
over public goods is another form of anarchy.
And terror is merely one of the diseases that
anarchy spawns.
America clings
to its 19th–Century Destiny
Many suffer the economic and political consequences of such international anarchy. At
the same time, many in the first world benefit
from free markets in capital, labor, and goods
– the same markets that leave ordinary people
in the third world unprotected.
September 11 made clear that terrorism
depends on the same deregulated disorder
that allegedly benefits financial and trade institutions. Just as jobs hemorrhage from one
country to another in a wage race to the bottom; just as safety, health, and environmental
standards lack an international benchmark for
states and regions to organize employment; so
too terrorists – loyal to no state, accountable
to no people – move freely across the world.
No borders can detain them. No united global
opinion can isolate them. No international
police or juridical institutions can interdict
them.
In recent years Americans have complained
bitterly about deferring to NATO commanders,
to supranational institutions, and to international treaties such as those banning landmines
or regulating fossil fuels. By refusing to surrender one scintilla of its own national sovereignty, the U.S. has – ironically – chosen to foster
an anarchic absence of sovereignty at the
global level. Even as it launches a military campaign against terrorism surrounded by a prudently constructed coalition, the U.S. has made
clear its preference for »coalitions« over
»alliances.« It wants to be free to target objectives, develop strategy, and wage war exactly
as it wishes, free of the need to persuade allies
of the wisdom of its intentions.
Yet international terrorism makes a mockery of national sovereignty, as the brash attacks
of September 11 made all too clear. It is the
negative and depraved form of that interdependence which, in its positive and beneficial
Continued on page 30
ANNE KIRCHBACH
AMERICAN ACADEMY
Inside the great hall of Wagner’s legacy: Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s »Götterdämmerung« in Munich, 1987
The Music Seer
Wagner and German Identity Through the Eyes of Opera Director Nikolaus Lehnhoff
By Jane Kramer
o u rt e e n y e a r s ag o , starting a long drive from France
or a pass to the front lines in a war nobody else has had a chance to
to Austria, I decided to break in Munich and take my chances
cover. So I threw principles to the wind, called the press office, and
on whatever was playing that night at the Bayerische Staatsdemanded a seat, claiming that a night at »Siegfried« was (at least in
oper. It turned out to be the premiere of »Siegfried,« the third opera
my memory of the conversation) »absolutely essential to my work in
in Nikolaus Lehnhoff ’s new production of »The Ring« – not something
Germany,« and, to my huge surprise, it was. Lehnhoff ’s »Ring« was
to drop in on and arguably less soothing than a good meal, a warm
one of the landmark »Rings« of post-war Germany, less a reference to
bath, and bed. Of course, there were no seats
the emblems of a Wagnerian past than a kind
left, and hadn’t been for a month or two, and
of history of the future. It quickly became
Jane Kramer is European correspondent
for The New Yorker and has just completed
after twelve hours on the road I didn't really
known among Wagner buffs as the »sci-fi
a book on America’s radical right. The Acacare. But I felt uneasy, the way reporters often
Ring« or the »spaceship Ring« – after Brundemy’s first recipient of the Holtzbrinck
feel when they think they might be missing
hilde’s space station, hurtling toward an Earth
Fellowship in Journalism, she is continuing
something important – and never mind if
in apocalypse – the way, say, Rolf Liebermann’s
work on German national identity in the arts.
»important« means a ticket to a new »Ring«
»Parsifal,« with its nuclear wasteland smolder16
F
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
the bad guys guarding the watering hole while
the good guys search for it and and the Hopi
flower maidens dance to distract them. But
if Wagner was my indulgence before seeing
Nikolaus Lehnhoff ’s »Siegfried,« I now consider Wagner as an indulgence in the line of
journalistic duty – having decided that night
that the staging of Richard Wagner in Germany
was likely to be a more accurate bellwether of
that country’s famous Zeitgeist than the pronouncements of any pollster or pundit, or indeed, of any politician on the campaign trail.
A Landscape
of Kitsch and Memory
the West of the East, people called it before
the Wall came down. It’s a beautifully restored
building, just down the street from the Berliner Ensemble, and the studio looks out on a
cityscape of checkpoint Berlin. From the window, you can see the dingy aquatinted glass
building that not so long ago was the official
»reception hall« of the German Democratic
Republic. (Unofficially, it was called the
Tränenpalast – the Palace of Tears – because
of the tears shed there, and it is still called the
Tränen, in its latest re-invention, as a disco.)
You can see the Metropol Theater, where
Furtwängler conducted the first postwar German »Tristan,« in 1947. »A landscape of kitsch
and memory,« Lehnhoff called it in one of our
conversations, saying that it was a landscape
he cherished, a landscape that fed the »psychic
archeology« of his imagination with its own.
Still, when I asked him about his favorite landscape, the landscape on which his soul fed, he
said straight off, »The country, always the
country,« and began to describe the house he
has rented in the countryside near Düsseldorf,
for twenty years, and visits whenever he can,
»for the beauty.« His passion for the German
countryside surprised me, a least at first, since
My research for a profile of the soon-to-be
Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, began with
Peter Konwitschny’s new production of
»Tristan und Isolde,« in Munich in 1998 – a
production in which the lovers kept flinging
away their props and even their costumes and
stepping forward in plain black shifts to sing.
The message that year was clear: music was
divine and love was certainly redemptive, but
Germany was just a country now and its myths
were, after all, only fairy tales with lances.
And that seemed to
be Schröder’s message too. It may
even be why, today,
at a moment of so
much terror, he is
able to hold together
a German government that can reasonably weigh the
balance between
civil liberty and civil
security, like a »normal« country –
which is to say without indulging in
either paralyzing
self-doubt or blind
entitlement.
Lehnhoff himself
is working on his
third »Tristan,«
which will open the
festival in Glyndebourne in May of
2003. His »office«
is a long pinewood
table in a studio
on the River Spree,
A Staging of One’s Own:
only a block from
Nikolaus Lehnhoff in his Düsseldorf apartment, 1991
Friedrichstrasse –
17
FEODOR A HOHENLOHE-OEHRINGEN
ing in the jungles of Angkor Vat, was known
as the »atomic Parsifal.« Lehnhoff's »Ring«
was astonishing enough in 1987. It seems eerily
prophetic now, with its images of terror and
madness and sacrifice and high surveillance.
There is no avoiding the fact that Richard
Wagner is Germany’s blessing and Germany’s
burden – perhaps because so many Germans
still look to the fairy-tale Fatwas of Wagner’s
imagined world for a way to construct – and
de-construct – their meaning as a people. Or
perhaps because they read the ecstatic genius
of his music into the overwrought narratives it
frames. Or perhaps because they confuse his
theories of a Gesamtkunstwerk with their own
utopian illusions of a German destiny and
even a German »mission.« There have been so
many theories – so much scholarship and
speculation – as to why Germans continue to
seek out the soul of Germany in the thickets of
Richard Wagner’s imagination that people can
recite them like Catechism: Germany never
had a Revolution; Germany never had an
Enlightenment; Germany was never even a
country until Bismarck decided to put »Germany« together; Germany was German language and German music but never, until the
end of World War II, anything like an idea of
citizenship or a social contract – and that was
only West Germany.
Lehnhoff himself doesn’t waste time theorizing. He thinks that the most you can say
about Germany’s Wagner problem is that
Germans were always, in the deepest sense or
the word, provincial. They were profoundly
uncomfortable away from home, and this
produced in them either an enviable clarity of
mind and purpose – »Kant never left Königsberg; Bach made two little journeys,« he likes
to say – or an annihilating disregard of any
»home« but theirs. Lehnhoff, of course, is like
any other German in savoring his own images
of a Wagnerian world. There is probably no
Wagnerite who hasn’t at one time or another
had his own fantasy of the way Wagner
should »look.«
My husband and I once spent the better
part of a summer holiday inventing Wagner
stagings. His favorite, at the time, was a »Parsifal« set on a Freudian couch, though he was
never sure who should be lying on the couch
and who should be listening or, indeed, what
any Freudian except, possibly, Lacan would
make of a four-and-a-half hour psychoanalytic
session. Mine was (and clearly continues to
be, since I keep toying with an American libretto)
a cowboy »Parsifal,« set somewhere in Georgia
O'Keefe-land, with cacti and cattle skulls, and
AMERICAN ACADEMY
ILSE BUHS
he easily qualifies as the worldliest of Germany's
when he described it to me he began this way:
with a syncretic imagination. He »sees« music.
great directors. But it didn't surprise me when
»Think of the Roman amphitheater in Orange.
(»The prelude to Lohengrin isn’t music, it’s a
I thought back on the Lehnhoff stagings I’d
Think of Karl Böhm. Now think of Christa
color,« he once told me) He knows every
seen in the course of our fourteen years of
Ludwig, Birgit Nielsen, Jon Vickers, Walter
word and every note from every score he has
friendship, and realized the extent to which
Berry.« (Granted, he went on to tell me that
ever staged. He can show you a picture from,
the vision of an accomodation between what
Le Monde had called it »The Tristan of the Censay, that first »Tristan« and start to talk about
Germans call »Kultur und Natur« – or, as
tury,« and that the sail he’d ordered was seven
the »moment,« and then to recite that moment,
Lehnhoff prefers to put it, between »Faust and
hundred square meters – it ripped in a freak
and then to sing it. He’ll interrupt himself to
the Eternal Woman« – was what, in fact,
Mistral – and that the concentric circles of
quote you a line from Rilke, or a story about
defined them.
light he’d created with three hundred and fifty
the letter he found last year on Chopin’s tombLehnhoff is the first to acknowledge Goethe’s
projectors had wrapped the audience and the
stone, in Pere Lachaise, that read, »Je vous
influence on his work. And not just Goethe.
orchestra into the dissolving »spirit light« of
aime, je vous ardore! Une fille allemande.«
Rilke, whom he venerates. Schinkel, whose
the Liebestod.)
Lehnhoff once told me that Germans like
eight »Zauberflöte« designs hang in the small
him – by which he meant the children of the
sitting room off his studio. Caspar David FriedWieland Wagner
bourgeoisie – had got their music with their
rich, whose landscapes inspired his first »Ring,«
and the Theater of Abstraction
mother’s milk, that music was as »necessary«
in San Francisco in 1985. The animated films
to them as a bowl of quark and muesli in the
of the Harvard professor Susan Pitt. His studio
He described his first »Fidelio« (he is planmorning. And he was probably right, given
is really a gallery of the art that has inspired
ning a new one now, with Simon Rattle, for
that even now, in a world of distraction, there
him, and the music that inspired the art.
the Salzburg Easter Festival in 2003) as the
are still more than six hundred choral societies
There are two of Fantin La Tour’s prints for
»Fidelio« with Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s
in Germany, 150 classical orchestras, and, at
the opening of the first Bayreuth »Ring,« in
litany for a libretto and Günther Uecker’s prislast count, 85 opera houses. »Music and
1876, inscribed by La Tour to »Dr. Eiser.«
on, made entirely of long knives dropping from
philosophy are the two things dearest to the
(Eiser has since entered the footnotes of Gerthe ceiling. The people he talks about are ineviGerman soul,« is the way he explains it. »And
man history as the physician who treated both
tably his friends. He knows everybody in the
after the war, philosophy – well, that’s a danRichard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, and
arts in Germany, from the writers and artists
ger. We invested our souls in music.«
was so famously indiscreet that Wagner is said
and conductors to the patrons; he says he loves
His own family was an old Hannover merto have kept him around for the gossip he disthem all – maybe because, to his mind, most of
chant family, shattered by the war – his father
pensed with his pills and tonics, and Nietzsche
them have been smart enough or collegial
is still officially »missing in action« – and
to have sacked him for the same reason.)
enough to choose to work with him. In the bitpatched together by a maternal grandmother
There is a large Liebermann drawing of
ing world of opera, his embrace can amount to
who died, years later, convinced that Nikolaus
Richard Strauss – one of the few remaining
a prodigious suspension of disbelief, but people
and his older brother would one day go on
studies for the portrait that still hangs in
warm to it, and the result is usually a meeting
a kind of grail quest to Russia, find him alive
Strauss’s Garmisch house. There is one of
of minds and talents as enthusiastic as his own.
there, and bring him home. »A strong grandRudolf Schlichter’s erotic drawings for »TannTo call him an homme de theatre is to miss
ma,« he calls her, sometimes with a smile and
häuser«: Venus, pointedly naked in her long
the point. He is a man of the Gesamtkunstwerk,
more often with a smile and a slight shudder.
black stockings, pursuing a
In the event, he credits her
Tannhäuser who crawls,
with his career. She took
propped on a shepherd’s staff,
him to Bayreuth in the
toward some Wagnerian resummers; she insisted on
demption. And one of Max
Bayreuth, and because of
Ernst’s drawings for »Elektra,«
her insistence, Lehnhoff,
– a decapitated female torso,
as a boy, was witness to
with its organs spilling out of
Wieland Wagner’s astonthe gaping hole, entwining it
ishing rearticulations of
like moss or ivy on a tree
Wagnerian theater as a
trunk.
theater of modernist disciWhen Lehnhoff talks about
pline and an almost cleansthe operas he has directed, he
ing clarity. (»Wieland
always talks about a collaboWagner worked a miracle,
ration of peers. I have never
he cleansed his grandfather
heard him say, »my« anything.
of ethnic cleansing,« Peter
The »Tristan« that made his
Jonas, the great Staatsreputation, in 1973, was, to
intendant of the Bayerische
judge from the photographs
Staatsoper, has described it.
I have, a spectacular produc»He took those myths and
tion, almost entirely achieved
purged them of ideology
Bringing light, litany, and Leonore to Bremen: Lehnhoff (right) reinvents
»Fidelio« with writer Enzensberger (ctr) and artist Uecker in 1974
through an idea of light, but
and of the Nordic dream of
18
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
and forty years later he remains a modernist
in the intensely idiosyncratic »Wieland tradition« – more interested in the distillation of
narrative into images and what I would call
the evoked idea than in the clotted history of
meaning. It is a modernism that has less to do
with the modernist canon than with a kind of
was originally intended as a Wagner festival –
»a kind of English Bayreuth,« he said – or, for
that matter, that the »Tristan« he is preparing
for the festival now will be the first Wagner
ever staged there. I asked him how he imagined
this new »Tristan;« I wanted to know how different it would be from his first »Tristan«,
in Orange, with its brilliant cast and its magical lighting and the
almost comical disasters that left him eighteen pounds thinner
(»my anxiety diet,« he
calls it) and forever
indebted to the Italian
stagehand who was
brave enough to climb a
ladder in the middle of
a Mistral and sew up a
dangerously heavy,
ripped sail with a big
needle and some very
strong string. The
amphitheater in Orange
was an imperial space,
an Augustinian space,
while the new opera
house at Glyndebourne
– it was built in 1995 –
is intimate, almost a
chamber-opera hall in
its dimensions, and
what he calls »the flow
between orchestra,
stage and audience« is
even more intimate. It
occurs to him, thinking
about that space, how
intimate an opera »Tristan« itself is, really.
He says that if »Parsifal« is »the most complex
opera ever written« – »the first opera of
Schoenberg« is how he describes it – then
maybe »Tristan« is Wagner’s Kammeroper, and
his own job at Glyndebourne is to recreate
that Kammeroper quality.
He wonders if the »light« that Tristan
cries for at the end of his impossible last aria
– nearly impossible to sing, and to my own
mind nearly impossible to stage – the light
that dissolved the stage into »spirit« at
Orange in 1973, could be a softer light at
Glyndebourne, thirty years later, as deep
and illuminating as a candle. But, of course,
that was last week. There is nothing Nikolaus Lehnhoff likes more than rethinking
»Tristan.« His friends call him »Tristan
Lehnhoff.«
MACK
identity, and produced a theater of abstraction, of absolute integrity.«) There were two
masters of postwar German opera. (»Fathers,«
Lehnhoff calls them.) Wieland Wagner, with
his »theater of abstraction,« was one. Walter
Felsenstein, at the Komische Oper in East
Berlin, was the other – Felsenstein being the
The sail that shipped enthusiasm against the Mistral:
Lehnhoff’s »Tristan« in the Roman amphitheater in Orange, 1973
father of what is now known as the tradition
of »German opera realism.« And it was
Lehnhoff ’s particular fate, as a very young
man, to have to choose between them when,
in the course of a few months, both directors
invited him to sign on as their assistant. But
Felsenstein was insisting that he live in East
Berlin, which, at the time, »was not my
favorite place.« (Felsenstein himself, he says,
»was commuting to the Eastern sector from
Dahlem, by Mercedes«).
In the end, there was never really a doubt
as to which »father of opera« Lehnhoff preferred. »Wieland Wagner is absolutely my
god,« he says, whenever he talks about the
»great good luck« that brought him back to
Bayreuth, without Grandma, in his early twenties. He worked as Wieland Wagner’s assistantdirector for the last four years of Wagner’s life,
Kantian notion of aesthetics, a universalism
he likes to describe by repeating something
Wieland Wagner said, at the close of the
Bayreuth season in 1965, less than a year
before he died: that maybe the next Bayreuth
»Ring« should be performed in a »Disney
way,« because the »Ring« belonged to the
world and the weakness in it was, if anything,
his grandfather’s idea of nation. Lehnhoff
himself says that to limit the idea of Wagner
»to the German scale« still seems to him to
be as foolish and even arrogant as limiting
Shakespeare to »the English scale.« Freedom
interests him a lot; ideology, in art or life,
»not at all.«
Lehnhoff has been the director in residence
at Glyndebourne Festival since the year I saw
his »Siegfried,« but it was only last week that
he happened to mention that Glyndebourne
19
AMERICAN ACADEMY
War and Photography
Regarding the pain of Others
By Susan Sontag
This text is excerpted from a lecture
given at the Sheldonian Theatre at
Oxford University on February 22,
2001 as part of the annual Oxford
Amnesty Lecture series. The series
raises funds for the human rights
organization Amnesty International,
and lecturers receive no fee. The
entire text will be published by Oxford
University Press early next spring in
a volume of Amnesty lectures.
SAMMLUNG PUTTNIES
Photographs identify events.
Photographs confer importance on
events and make them memorable. We may understand
through narrative, but we remember through photographs, as David
Rieff has written, apropos of Ron
Haviv’s pictures of Serb-perpetrated atrocities and devastation in
Bosnia between 1992 and 1996.
In the first important wars
to be photographed, the Crimean
The iconography of suffering
War and the American Civil War,
has a long pedigree. The sufferindeed through World War I, phoing most often deemed worthy
tographs played only a small role
of representation is that underin whatever awareness the public
stood to be the product of wrath,
had of the cost of combat. Our
divine or human. (Suffering inknowledge of the human catastroduced by natural causes, such as
phe of the 1914–18 European war,
illness or childbirth, is scantily
for example, owes far more to the
represented in the history of art.)
testimony of journalists and the
The statue group of the writhing
drawings of war artists than to the
Laocoön and his sons, the innuphotographs that were taken at
merable representations in painthe front and published. The pubting and statuary of the Passion
lished photographs, insofar as they
of Christ, and the vast visual
conveyed something of the terrors
catalogue of the fiendish martyrand devastation being endured,
doms of the Christian saints –
were mostly in the epic or panothese are surely intended to move
ramic mode, and mostly depicand excite. But the images do not,
tions of an aftermath: the corpseJ’accuse and Kodachrome:
principally, protest against these
strewn or lunar landscapes left by
Color supplement with a photograph by Donald McCullin
horrors.
trench warfare; the gutted French
The Sunday Times Magazine. June 1, 1969
The practice of representing atrovillages that the war had passed
stant recall. Cite the most famous photograph
cious suffering as something to be deplored,
through. Regular »coverage« of a war, on the
taken during the Spanish Civil War, the Repuband if possible stopped, enters the history of
front lines, had to wait for the Spanish Civil
lican soldier »shot« by Robert Capa’s camera
images fairly recently, and the sufferings depicWar, the first war to be extensively surveyed
just as he was shot by a bullet, and I wager
ted are those endured by a civilian population
by the camera with an eye to the immediate
that virtually everyone who has heard of that
at the hands of a victorious army on the rampublication of images – in this instance, in
war can summon the grainy black-and-white
page. The project begins in the era of handthe daily and weekly press in Britain and France.
figure collapsing on the slope, his right arm
made images, and its most celebrated practiAnd new kinds of photographs were taken.
flung backward as he loses his grip on his rifle.
tioners are Jacques Callot and Francisco Goya.
In the intervening two decades, equipment
Since 1839, when cameras were invented, the
had become more portable; pictures could be
suffering caused by war has become a widely
taken in the thick of battle; civilian victims
Susan Sontag spent a week at the Academy
in early September, where she was originally
disseminated, canonical subject.
and exhausted begrimed soldiers could be studscheduled to speak the evening of September 11.
A photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim,
ied close up. The photographs of the Spanish
Her new collection of essays Where the Stress
or a proverb. Easy to retain. All of us mentally
Civil War set the standards for the photojourFalls has just been published.
stock hundreds of photographs, subject to innalists of all subsequent wars, most notably
20
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
the wars in Vietnam and the Balkan wars of
the 1990s. Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner,
and Timothy O’Sullivan did not think of themselves as expressing an opinion about the war
with their wide-angle photographs of dead soldiers lying on American Civil War battlefields,
any more than such a thought would have
occurred to the great photographers of World
War II, such as Margaret Bourke-White.
But in recent years the most ambitious
photographers who bring us news of war and
other human-made devastations think of themselves as witnesses and accusers. Don McCullin.
Sebastião Salgado. Gilles Peress. Luc Delahaye.
James Nachtwey, whose work has recently
been collected in a book called Inferno, has
been described as a former war photographer
who is now an anti-war photographer.
Photojournalism, which some of its practitioners call »concerned photography« or »the
photography of conscience,« has become a
principal vehicle of the protest against war.
Even absent such a message, since photographs
are »mass images« – reproducible images
designed for the widest possible circulation –
our understanding of war is now chiefly a product of the impact of images made with cameras.
Photographic images have become essential.
To make a crisis take up residence in the consciousness of those who follow the »news« requires a non-stop photographic account, diffused through television and video streaming.
Something is not »real« – to those who are
not experiencing it, but following it, consuming it, as »news« – until it is photographed.
Take the most neglected theatre of horrors,
postcolonial Africa. Our knowledge – our
sense – of the catastrophes taking place there
is largely pointed, and framed, by appalling
images we carry in our heads, starting with
photographs taken during the famine in Biafra
to, in the mid-1990s, the photographic documentation of the genocide of the Rwandan
Tutsis and, most recently, photographs of the
limbless victims, children and adults, of a program of terror inflicted upon thousands by the
»RUF,« the rebel forces in Sierra Leone. The
cruelties and loss of life in the conflicts in Angola, lacking extensive photographic evidence
(though we have every other kind of evidence),
have hardly registered on mainstream consciousness.
There are two widespread views – one could
call them idées reçues, in the Flaubertian sense –
on the impact of photography. Since I find
these ideas formulated in my own essays on
photography – the earliest of which was written
nearly thirty years ago – I feel an irresistible
temptation to quarrel with them.
The first idea is that public attention is
steered by the attentions of »the media,« which
means, most decisively, images. When there
are photographs, a war becomes »real.« Thus,
the revulsion against the war in Vietnam was
crystalized by Nick Ut’s photograph: a child
doused in napalm, naked, arms upraised,
shrieking with pain, running down the road . . .
toward us. The feeling that something had to
be done about the war in Bosnia was built
from the attentions of journalists – »the CNN
effect« it was sometimes called, which brought
images of besieged Sarajevo into hundreds of
millions of living rooms night after night for
the almost three years of the siege.
The second idea – which may seem the converse of what I’ve just described – is that in a
world hypersaturated by images, those that
should matter to us have a diminishing effect:
we become inured. In the end, such images
make us more callous, a little less able to feel
and respond as we should.
AMERICAN ACADEMY
From the earliest of the essays, this one
written in 1972, in my book, On Photography:
Images transfix. Images anaesthetize. An event known
through photographs certainly becomes more real than it
would have been if one had never seen the photographs –
think of the Vietnam War. (For a counter-example, think
of the Gulag Archipelago, of which we have no photographs.) But after repeated exposure to images, it also
becomes less real.
The same holds for evil as for photography. The shock
of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings. . . . The vast photographic catalogue of misery and
in-justice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem
more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote (»it’s
only a photograph«), inevitable. At the time of the first
photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal
about these images. After thirty years, a saturation point
may have been reached. In the last decades, »concerned«
photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.*
that images have never been so powerful.
Starting with the formation of Médecins Sans
Frontières, which was created in response to
the Biafran famine, the rise of humanitarian
organisations (NGOs) is directly related to a
shift in both elite and public opinion, in the
mobilisation of which a principal instrument
has been painful-to-look-at photographs.
Sometimes even governments consider
themselves obliged to make at least a token
response to the events named by widely disseminated horrific photographs. And occasionally a change of public stance on the part of
someone politically prominent can be keyed
to the impact of a photograph.
For example, the senior Senator from California, Diane Feinstein, said that she changed
her vote about the proposed NATO action in
1995 after seeing a photograph of a refugee
from Srebrenice who, after having been gangraped by Serb soldiers, had hanged herself in
the woods outside Tuzla. But this does not dispel the suspicion that surrounds these images
from two extremes of the spectrum: cynics who
have never been near a war and the people who
are enduring the miseries being photo graphed.
Ordinary Sarajevans called them »angels of
death.« And the truth was, the photographer
might have been lurking about waiting for
such a photograph.
•
SAMMLUNG PUTTNIES
Citizens of modernity, consumers of events
as spectacle, are schooled to be cynical about
»the sincere.« Thus, deriding »concerned«
photography as the »tourism of misery« is a
recurrent cliché. It seems as if some people
will do anything to prevent themselves from
being moved. How much easier it is to establish one’s position of superiority, risking nothing.
What is true, however, is that there are too
many things to which we are invited to pay
attention, and it is quite understandable that
we turn away from images that simply make
us feel bad. A woman in Sarajevo whom I met
not long after I arrived in the city the first
Well . . . No.
time in April 1993 (a year after the siege began),
In another variant of the argument of the
told me: »In 1991 I was here in my nice apartuselessness of images for moral mobilisation –
ment in peaceful Sarajevo while the Serbs
an argument which I did not make in On Photoinvaded Croatia just a couple of hundred miles
graphy – our relation to these images is comaway. I remember when the TV showed
promised by the fact that they are, in a certain
footage of the destruction of
sense, pornographic. Surely the
Vukovar, I thought to myself,
undertow of this despised impulse
»Oh, how terrible,« and switched
must be taken into account when
the channel.
discussing the effect of images of
So how can I be indignant
suffering and atrocity.
when people in France or Italy
The view I proposed in On Photoor Germany see the massacres
graphy – that reality, or rather our
of civilians taking place here in
capacity to respond with emotional
Sarajevo on their evening news,
freshness and ethical pertinence to
say, ›Oh, how terrible,‹ and switch
reality, is being sapped by the proto another channel. It’s normal.
fusion of vulgar and appalling
It’s human.«
images – is the conservative criParked in front of our TV
tique of the omnipresence of such
screens and computers, we reimages.
ceive images and brief reports of
I call this critique conservative
disasters happening everywhere
because it takes for granted the
in the world. We have gone far
existence of »reality« and our
Protect your hair when men are falling:
Magazine spread with Robert Capa’s »Spanish Soldier«.
beyond the bourgeois breakfastability to respond to it. In the radiLife Magazine. July 12, 1937
ing with his newspaper. New
cal version of the argument, there
technologies give us a non-stop
is no reality to defend. The vast
feed: as many images of disaster and atrocity
maw of modernity has chewed up reality and
The feeling persists that the creation of
as we can make time to look at. In fact, we’re
spat the whole mess out as images. According
such images satisfies a vulgar or low appetite;
being invited to respond to everything, and
to a highly influential analysis of modernity,
that it is commercial ghoulishness. In Sarajevo
we’re not hard-wired to do this. It’s normal that
ours is a »society of spectacle.« Something
in the years of siege, it was not uncommon to
most people not directly affected will want to
has to be turned into a spectacle to be real –
hear somebody yelling at the photojournalists,
avert their eyes.
that is, interesting to us. People themselves
easily recognisable by the equipment hanging
But it’s not true, I think, that because of
become images: celebrities. There are only
round their necks. The Sarajevans themselves
the surfeit of images we’re responding to less.
media, representations. Reality is obsolete. It
knew how much the city’s survival owed to the
(Less compared to when? When was the basemay even be that exactly the opposite is true:
advocacy of the foreign journalists who stayed
line for optimum responsiveness?) We’re
on to cover the story. Nevertheless, the foreign
probably responding to more.
journalists – but more particularly the war
* Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 20
photographers – were derided and mocked.
22
CORNELIUS MEFFERT / STERN
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
Jurek Becker with his family in Marzahn, 1970, a year after the publication of his novel Jacob the Liar
Jacob the Liar
Exploring the Ambiguous Origins of East-German Writer Jurek Becker’s Jewish Identity
By Sander L. Gilman
Sander Gilman spent two semesters last year at the Hans Arnhold Center
that of the ornithologist and the bird. I was the ornithologist; he was
working on a biography of his friend the East German author Jurek Becker
the bird. But my task as a critic was never scientific. Rather it was em(1937–97). The following texts are excerpted from the introduction and
pathetic. I am a bird watcher rather than an ornithologist.
fourth chapter. The book will be published in German in the spring of 2002
And Jurek Becker was a rara avis. Born in Lódz, Poland in 1937, he
by Ullstein Berlin.
was a Jewish child-survivor author, a little bit like the child in Jerzy
I first met Jurek Becker in the late 1960s when he was the darling
Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird (1965), Kosinski’s testament to the
of young writers in East Berlin. I hosted him during his stay at Cornell
mindless torture that marked human relationships in the Shoah. But
University in 1984, and we taught his works together for a month. I had
Becker was also a completely secular Polish Jew transformed into a
written about Jurek and his work analytically,
good, if critical, German by his upbringing in
but after his death in 1997 I wanted to underthe German Democratic Republic. From his
Sa n d e r L . G i l m a n is a professor at
stand his writing in all of its registers. To do
childhood in the Lódz ghetto and the concenthe University of Illinois at Chicago and was a
this I needed to capture his life.
tration camps of Ravensbrück and SachsenBerlin Prize Fellow in 2000-2001. The cultural
Jurek once wrote that he felt that the tasks
hausen, the prize-winning author would later
critic and literary historian is the author, most
of the critic and those of the writer were very
witness the rise and fall of Socialism, the founrecently, of The Fortunes of the Humanities.
different. The metaphor he often used was
ding of two fundamentally opposed German
23
AMERICAN ACADEMY
have illustrated the stories that he told about
his life and shown how they, too, became part
of his creative world.
One way of doing this was to create a set of
various »worlds« for Jurek Becker’s life, using
the various names he was given. He was born
Jerzy; his »German« name after 1945 was
Georg; and he signed his books with his childhood nickname Jurek. The shift of names signifies a restructuring of an identity, as well as
recall this: »Let them know that you don’t
belong to them,« he would say. After 1949
Max spoke only about »the Germans.«
»How do the Germans treat you in school?«
he would ask. But Georg wanted to become a
»good« German like the other students at the
Käthe Kollwitz School. To do so, he would
need to change his body, his language, and his
attitude, and this was a struggle. The identity
of the »Victim of the Nazi Regime« was literally written on his fragile body even as he
trained to be a boxer. Sports became one of
his ways of becoming »German.«
Another way to avoid the problems of his
tenuous Jewish identity was to assume a more
and more active role in the FDJ, the communist
youth group, which he had joined in eighth
grade at his father’s insistence. With no remembered past – a tabula rasa – Georg sought to
transform himself into a proud member of the
first generation of GDR citizens. Most importantly, even as a child, Becker wanted to be a
writer. As a writer, he could reshape himself
as a young German, a young socialist, and he
could be better at it than anyone else. He
would write his way into belonging to this
new society.
NIKOL AUS BECKER
states, and their reunification. He held a major
position in the culture of both Germanys.
After 1977, he was a feature of the literary and
media scene in West Berlin, and after 1991 he
was at home as much as he could be anywhere
in the newly reunited Germany.
Becker’s importance as an author rests on a
trilogy of novels about the Shoah that is truly
unique in post-war German writing: Jacob the
Liar (1969), Sleepless Days (1978), and Bronstein’s
The sceptical son: Georg with his father Max Becker in the early 1960s
Children (1986). To contemporary Germans,
he is perhaps better known for having written
one of the country’s smartest, most successful
television series, the hugely popular »Liebling/
Kreuzberg.«
Jurek Becker’s biography – as Jew, Pole, and
East German, as oppositional writer and
spokesman for a united Germany, as novelist
and scriptwriter – is unusual enough to encompass many of the questions about identity
and culture in Central Europe from the 1930s
to the 1990s. To explore them, I felt it was necessary to make as much sense of his life as well
as his texts as I could. This was something that
he truly feared. He did not want his works to be
simply reduced to the »biographical sources«
that critics love to find.
My biography explores aspects of his life,
but uses them only as reference points. Such
aspects were incorporated and changed in the
narratives that Jurek created in his novels,
films, and television shows. I have not pointed
toward any of Jurek’s works and said, »here is
a truth about Jurek’s life.« Rather, I hope to
a restructuring of emotions and attitudes that
were shaped in his earliest childhood and reinforced over the rest of his life.
•
M a x B e c k e r found his emaciated sevenyear-old son at an UNNRA orphanage in 1945,
and the two settled in East Berlin. His wife
had perished at Sachsenhausen. Max Becker
worked first on the black market and was by
1953 a »businessman in the inter-zone business.« He stifled his only son with material
things, overprotected and overfed him, but
he neither spoke about his past nor shared his
feelings with him. Gradually, Max Becker
turned alcoholic.
Georg, who began attending school in East
Berlin at the age of ten, was constantly reminded by his teachers and his schoolmates of his
status as a »Victim of Nazi Persecution.« Even
the small state pension he received signaled
that he would remain different. Jurek records
in an essay that his father, too, urged him to
24
What is a Jew?
»What is a Jew?« asked the protagonist of
The Boxer (1976). As a student, Georg began to
believe that the label “»Jewish« belonged only
to his heavily accented father. He preferred the
GDR’s official designation, »citizen of Jewish
ancestry.« He and his father lived in Germany
with the official status of »returnees,« since
Max had claimed a German birthplace. But
this invented ancestry did not mitigate his
son’s sense of being an outsider, because he
had to learn a new language. The more he
became a German, the more Max wanted him
to understand his difference from his classmates. His father taught him: »Let them know
that you don’t belong to them.«
This sense of belonging but also not belonging – of being a German but also of being
inexorably different – marked Jurek Becker’s
work as a German writer. The negative quality
ascribed to being Jewish haunted his literary
work. In his first novel Jacob the Liar he
introduced a Polish Jewish figure, Dr. Kirschbaum from Krakow. His identity was clearly
more Polish than Jewish: »He was a surgeon,
not a Jew: What does it mean, of Jewish origin? They force you to be a Jew while you
yourself have no idea what it really is. Now he
is surrounded only by Jews, for the first time
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
in his life nothing but Jews. He has racked his
brain about them wanting to find out what
they all have in common, in vain. They have
nothing recognizably in common, and he
most certainly nothing with them.«*
The narrator of The Boxer describes how a
survivor father discovers his son in an orphanage and takes him to Berlin, where he is raised
as a young German. The father changes his
name from the very Jewish Aron to the very
German Arno. His inability to speak to his son
about his experiences in the camps means that,
as the son matures, he has no sense of who he
is and what he can do. Years later, during the
Six-Day War the young communist goes to
Israel and dies defending the Jewish state. The
father, numb with grief, can only speculate
about what had made his son become a Jew.
When Jurek gave me a pre-publication copy
of his last (and most commercially successful)
novel, Amanda Herzlos (Amanda Heartless)
(1992), over breakfast at a cafe on the Kurfürstendamm, he winked and said: »You’ll
even find something in it that interests you!«
Indeed, there was. The book deals in the final
* Jacob the Liar, trans. Leila Vennevitz (New York:
Arcade, 1990.
section with Amanda’s attempts to leave the
GDR to marry her Western lover – though
neither knows that they are leaving on the eve
of the communist state’s collapse. The couple
turns to a well-placed lawyer named Colombier.
Amanda, curious about his name, asks the
lawyer’s wife if he was a Huguenot:
O no, we are not Huguenots – we are Jews.
We are not Jews – we are of Jewish descent. Do
you know the difference? We don’t keep kosher;
we have no knowledge of prayers; our two
youngest sons are not even circumcised. If you
are a Catholic and leave the Church, then you
aren’t a Catholic any more. With the Jews it is
sadly different. Therefore I answered for simplicity’s sake: we are Jews. It is unimportant that
until our emigration to France we were called
Tauber. (My translation).
And so on. They chose a new name but remained Jews – or at least retained their Jewish
ancestry – even after their return to the GDR.
Jurek implies that the more hidden one’s identity as a Jew is thought to be, the more public
it actually is – especially in the GDR. This paradox of the visibility and invisibility of Jewishness strikes me as the key to all of his work
and an essential part of his sense of self.
In the early years of the German Democratic Republic, Becker understood being
Jewish as the potential to be unmasked. That
never changed, neither in the reconstruction
of Jewish identities in his fiction nor in his
own life. A passage of the diary he briefly kept
in 1986 describes his uncensored response to
his second wife Christine’s suggestion thay
they name their child Aron Becker. It would
be like running around with his zipper unzipped, he wrote.
Whether he wanted to or not, Georg Becker
had as a young man taken part in the constitution of a Jewish identity in the GDR. He wrote
in 1996 that he »neither sought nor avoided
the presence of Jews. I experienced most accidentally, if at all, [the question of] whether I
was a Jew or not. If someone drew my attention to it, I always asked myself, ‘Why is she
telling me this?’ Perhaps I was even a bit alienated. Because I thought a person would expect
me to relate to him differently after such an
admission of his Jewishness.« It is the sense of
being and not being, of the desire to pass as
merely a human being, not as a human being
who is also a Jew.
MIKE MINEHAN
AMERICAN ACADEMY
The Piano Lesson
Composer Michael Hersch Inaugurates Vilar Music Program
»The more I compose, the more difficult it becomes,« says Michael
Hersch, 30. He has been at it for just over ten years. As the Academy’s
inaugural Alberto Vilar Music Fellow, Hersch, who is talented pianist,
arrived in Berlin on the heels of a year’s stay at the American Academy
in Rome. He is the first Berlin Prize Fellow to pursue work at the two
American academies within the space of a year.
The composer insists that, despite the comparative benefits of working in Europe, he has no wish to remain an expatriate. It is nearly impossible for a classical composer to make a living in America today,
even – as in Hersch’s own case – with a steady flow of commissions
from prestigious musical institutions. There is simply no equivalent
in the U.S. to the broad public support and government-sponsored
encouragement given to composers in Europe. Only a safety net of private philanthropic grants and foundations keeps many an American
composer able to focus on his work.
Yet it is to America, and its potential audience of 250 million, that
Hersch adamantly wants to return. »Anything else,« he says, »would
seem like running away.« Hersch’s faith in, and feeling of responsibility
toward, American audiences may have something to do with the fact
26
that he encountered classical
music almost by accident, when
he was in his late teens. His conversion experience has become
something of a legend; enthralled
by a videotape of Sir Georg Solti
conducting Beethoven’s Fifth, the
nineteen-year-old Hersch knew
immediately that he wanted to
compose. He went on to get degrees in composition from the
Moscow Conservatory in Russia
and the Peabody Conservatory in
Baltimore. Despite his late start,
he is now widely recognized as
one of the most gifted composers
of his generation. He has already
written large works for the Dallas
Symphony Orchestra, the Brooklyn
Philharmonic, the New York
Chamber Symphony, and the Pittsburgh Symphony, among others.
Two years ago, Tim Page wrote
in the Washington Post that Hersch
»inspired remarkable – and sometimes ecstatic – excitement in the
world of classical music.... One has
the sense of a real romantic in the
time-honored sense of the word –
of a Promethean creator who has
been charged with relaying his
particular message.... He combines a mixture of urgency and
facility that is dazzling.«
Earlier this year, Matthew
Gurewitsch of The New York
Times wrote: »If the symmetries
and proportions of Mr. Hersch’s
music evoke the grounded fixity
of architecture, its dynamism and
spontaneous evolution are those
of the natural world.... Within
the sober palatte, the expressive
power and range are vast.«
In addition to the Prix de
Rome, Hersch has also received
awards from The American
Composers Association and the
American Academy of Arts &
Letters, among others, and is one
of the youngest composers to
have received a Guggenheim
Fellowship in Music (1997).
During this fall he completed his
second symphony, commissioned
by conductor Mariss Jansons and
the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
for an April 2002 premiere.
Berlin Prize Fellows / Kenneth Scott
continued from page 9
in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., is
especially interested in gauging
their efficiency at a time of unprecedented market enlargement
and global competition. As an
inaugural J.P. Morgan Fellow in
Financial Policy, the Stanford senior research fellow and emeritus
professor of law and business will
focus on Germany, a country in
which banks currently control
sixty to ninety percent of the votes
at annual meetings of many
major companies.
Katie Trumpener
Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow Katie
Trumpener is putting the final
touches on her forthcoming book
The Divided Screen: The Cinemas of
Postwar Germany, the first fulllength comparative account of
fifty years of East and West
German film. Audiences in both
halves of the divided Germany
managed to see many of the same
films – by regularly crossing the
border before 1961 and via television after the wall was built. Surprisingly, the difference between
the bodies of films available in
cinemas and video shops in the
former East and the former West
remains substantial even today.
The University of Chicago professor is also doing research for a
book on early childhood experience in the work of modernist
writers, composers and painters.
The comparative study gives
special attention to the place of
nursemaids. French impressionists often painted nursemaids
supervising children at play in the
newly public parks of Paris;
British novelists – both realist and
stream-of-consciousness – detailed
nursery life and routines.
For the German segment of her
study, Trumpener is reading her
way through many Wilhelmine
memoirs and working with the
Staatsbibliothek’s collection of
historical children’s books.
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
War and Photography
Continued from page 22
The arousal of conscience is not generally
regarded as an end in itself. It is understood as
a prelude, the necessary prelude, to embarking on some course of action. An image seems
an appeal to do something, not just to feel disturbed. Indignant. The image says: Stop this.
Intervene. Take action. And, in an important
sense, this is the correct response. For it says
that these situations are human-made. And
not inevitable. The kinds of images I am referring to ought not to be objects of contemplation, like the Passion of Christ.
To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell
us anything about how to extract people from
that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still,
I would like to suggest that it is a good in itself
to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense
of how much suffering caused by human
wickedness there is in the world we share with
others. And that someone who is perennially
surprised that depravity exists, who continues
to experience disillusionment (even incredulity)
when confronted with evidence of what humans
are capable of inflicting upon other humans,
has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right
to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to
this degree of ignorance, of amnesia.
We now have a vast repository of images
that makes it harder to maintain this kind of
moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images
haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and
cannot possibly encompass most of the reality
to which they refer, they still perform a vital
function. The images say: keep these events in
your memory.
The fact that we are not totally transformed,
that we can turn away, turn the page, switch
the channel, does not impugn the ethical value
of the image-aggression. (It is not a defect that
we do not suffer enough when we see these
images.) Neither is the fact that a photograph
won’t repair our ignorance about the history
and causes of the suffering it picks out and
frames. To see something in the form of an
image is an invitation to observe, to learn, to
attend to. Photographs can’t do the moral or
the intellectual work for us. But they can start us
on our way.
Jacob the Liar
Over time, Jurek came to acknowledge a
sense of a »common mental construction,« to
use Freud’s definition of the salient quality of
Jewishness. In a 1996 television interview, he
almost paraphrased Freud, noting that he had
been exposed to myriad influences and that
their combination was what he understood as
Jewish. He reported that, if asked, he always
said that his parents were Jewish, never »I am
a Jew.« And yet while he was dying of cancer
in 1997, Jurek noted in the last interview he
ever gave (to Herlinde Koelbl for Der Spiegel):
»I would argue with you about the question of
whether I am or am not a Jew. . . . I am also
conscious that what you call »being Jewish« –
that is, Jewish culture – played a role for me in
a hundred different ways.« During Jurek
Becker’s lifetime, the meaning of being Jewish
moved from something negative – something
the young man needed to abandon to become
a good citizen of the GDR – to an inexorable
part of his identity.
AMERICAN ACADEMY
No Mechanical Brides
Why are there fewer German Women in the Workforce?
By Richard Freeman
O
How hard do you work?
German
Women
American
Women
1989 1997
1989 1997
Only as hard
as I have to
18
6
6
6
Hard, but not
if it interferes
with the rest
of my life
50
36
34
40
Doing the
best work,
even if it
sometimes
interferes
with the rest
of my life
13
51
53
59
figures give percentages
Source: Tabulated from International Social Science
Programm surveys for 1989 and 1997
virtually identical to the 39 hours that American women report. The time budgets show
that the big difference in behaviour between
German and American women is found in
time spent in »household production« – time
spent working at home on a variety of activities,
such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of
family members.
The average woman in the western part
of Germany spends 36 hours a week in household production – nine hours more than the
27 hours that the average American woman
reports spending on the same activities. This
difference exceeds slightly the difference in
Richard Freeman holds the Herbert
Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard
and received the Academy’s J.P.Morgan Prize
in Financial and Economic Policy.
28
NATASCHA VLAHOVIC
ur study of work behavior
of German women has revealed
some astonishing facts. In the 1990s,
proportionately fewer west German women
were employed than American women, despite
the fact that women in the U.S. had higher
birth rates and thus greater child-rearing pressures. What does this tell us about the two
societies? In what ways is it connected to the
different economic performances of the
German and U.S. economies?
In the 1990s the ratio of female employment to the adult female population was on
the order of 55 percent in the former West
Germany compared to a ratio of 65 percent in
the U.S. This is an employment rate gap nearly
twice that found among men. Germany’s
lower percentage of employment of women
holds for both women with and without children. It also applies to both highly educated
women and less educated women. Ubiquitous
as the difference in employment rates in the
1990s may be, however, one should not view it
as a »law of nature« or the result of some permanent difference in culture or attitude between Germans and Americans.
The difference developed in the past three
decades. In fact, in 1970, West German women
had a markedly higher rate of employment
than American women. In ensuing years,
American women entered the job market in
huge numbers, so that even those with children less than one year of age began working
instead of keeping house. German women
increased their labor force participation more
slowly. Are German women choosing to enjoy
the fruits of rising prosperity in the form of
leisure while American women are not?
Attractive as the cafes and shops in Berlin
and the rest of Germany may be, this is not
the answer. Time budget studies conducted
during the 1990s – which asked men and
women to record the time spent on a host of
daily activities – show that in a normal work
week German women take 38 hours of leisure,
average weekly hours worked in the market,
where the German women spend 18 hours a
week and American women spend 25 hours.
Taking the hours spent in the market and the
time spent on household production together,
west German women actually work
a bit more than American women.
The difference is in the allocation of work
time between household and market: German
women work more at home, and American
women work more as employees in the market. The same time budget studies cited above
show some of the ways household work is allocated. In the 1990s west Ger-man women
spent nearly twenty hours a week preparing
meals, cleaning up after meals, and eating.
By contrast, American women spent just 13
hours a week on these activities – an hour less
a day. Americans have never eaten as well as
the the French or Italians. But neither have the
Germans. Since the time budget data shows
that American men haven’t taken over the
cooking, one might ask: how do Americans eat
without spending as much time preparing
meals at home?
Americans buy their meals in the market
rather than cooking at home. Fast food takeouts and frozen »TV dinners«? Yes. But the
U.S. also has a larger restaurant industry. In
the mid 1990s, Americans budgeted twice as
much money relative to their consumption
spending as Germans did for restaurants and
related goods and services.
German women with children under six
years of age spend 20.4 hours a week taking
care of them. American women spend just
11.6 hours – nearly nine hours less. Since the
time budget studies show that dads have not
taken over child-rearing activities, how do
Americans bring up their children without
watching them? Americans make greater use
of television as a baby-sitting tool, but the key
difference is that Americans once again use
the market more. Americans rely more on
day-care facilities – some provided by the firm
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
where the mother works, some by profit or
non-profit groups, and some through neighborhood arrangements. Before 1989, East German
women had the highest employment rate for
women in the world – and a network of staterun day-care facilities to go with it. These facilities no longer exist.
There is another marked difference in the
allocation of time between Germans and
Americans. This is in the much longer vacations
that Germans, both men and women, take.
Typically, Germans take between five and six
weeks of vacation per year, while the typical
American vacation is a mere two weeks per
year. I know of no study that compares how
Americans and Germans spend their time
while on vacation, but I would not be surprised
if here, too, there were a marked difference
between household and market production.
If all I have is two weeks of holiday a year,
I’m more likely to go to the market to plan it –
to buy the Super-Europe Tour: Monday, Paris;
Tuesday, Brussels; Wednesday, Berlin, etc..
If, on the other hand, we rent a cottage by the
sea for five weeks, who’s going to do the cooking and washing up while we’re there? In short,
the big difference between the work behavior
of German women and American women,
and a fundamental difference between the two
societies, is in the lesser marketization of life
in Germany. Americans put more time into the
market and buy more services from it than do
Germans (and most other Europeans). They,
in contrast, produce more at home. Why do
Germans make less use of the market than
Americans?
Lunch at Home
One reason for Germany’s smaller reliance
on the market for goods and services is the
difference in income distributions between
the two countries. Among economically advanced countries, Germany has one of the most
egalitarian income distributions while the U.S.
has the most unequal income distribution. An
unequal income distribution produces greater
incentives to marketize household activities
than a more equal distribution.
In egalitarian Germany, many highly skilled
women do not earn enough for it to be worthwhile to work and buy services and goods in
the market instead of producing them at home.
In the U.S., the wages of skilled women are
much higher than the cost of buying services
in the market. In fact, their families would suffer considerable economic loss if they were to
choose to produce those goods and services at
home. In 1995 twenty percent of American
women earned more than 1.66 times the average earnings in the economy, whereas less
than one percent of German women had such
high earnings. Furthermore, many Americans
obtain services at a relatively low cost from a
substantial population of low-paid and lowskilled immigrants, largely from Mexico and
other parts of Latin America. Germany has
nothing comparable.
Another difference is that German social
life is organized in ways that make it more difficult for women to work full-time, even when
they want to. German women serve a large
lunch for their schoolchildren, and many help
them study and prepare for exams. American
children get their lunch in school. American
men expect their wives to work full-time, especially if the wife has a good high-earnings job.
Upward of forty percent of American women
university graduates earn more per hour than
their husbands do, so the monetary incentive
for such women to work is actually greater
AMERICAN ACADEMY
than is the incentive for men. Is Germany likely
to marketize more of its household production as a way of increasing market output, following the American model?
If the changed attitudes of German women
toward work shown in the exhibit are any indication, Germany is likely to see more women
shifting from household to market production.
In 1989 and 1997, German and American
women were asked the question »How hard
do you work?« as part of a survey of attitudes
toward work in the market. In 1989, German
women were much less likely than American
women to say that they would work hard even
if it interfered with the rest of their lives. In
1997, however, there was virtually no difference in the responses. A similar change in the
attitudes of German women toward market
work was replicated in other questions as well.
If in the future German women spend
more time employed in market work, they will
almost certainly reduce the time they spend
working at home. This will lead them to buy
more goods and services in the market, which
will, in turn, have consequences for the economy. In one respect, the growth of the female
work force – particularly of university educated women – should give a significant boost to
the ability of the economy to grow and compete. At the same time, more working women
will create demands for a more extensive service sector to provide the goods and services
currently produced at home. There will be
great pressure for shops to be open longer.
This does not, however, mean that German
life should become as market-centered as
American life. Certainly, Germany ought to
reduce social barriers to women working and
should open paths for women to rise to the
top of the occupational and earnings distributions. But there is no reason for it to mimic
the U.S.’s unique devotion to market work.
Standard measures of Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) per capita show that Germany
produces less than the U.S. and thus has a
lower standard of living. They also show that
Germany has lower employment per adult.
These differences, however, are in large part
due to a false reading of the evidence. The
GDP is solely a measure of market production.
It measures neither the value of leisure time
nor the value of goods produced at home.
Taking account of vacation time and household production, Germany has a level of productivity and a living standard comparable to
the U.S. It just allocates its productive capacity
differently and has opted for a more egalitarian income distribution.
This is part of an ongoing study on the difference between the work behaviour of German women and American women. My colleagues and I hope to quantify the effects of
economic incentives and social barriers that
produce the differences we’ve observed so far.
Our work has concentrated on west Germany,
but the remarkable change in the employment
of women in the former east Germany, and
the work behaviour of immigrant women can
also teach us about how German women and
society are adjusting to the demands of a twentyfirst-century economy. Because women have
traditionally worked in the household or in
the household and market, their behaviour in
the job market is in many ways more illuminating and interesting than that of men.
Jihad vs. McWorld
Revisited
efficacy of citizenship in scores of unacknowledged and uncharted ways.
Jihadic warriors counted on the interdependence of America with the world and the
interdependence of shared economic and
technological systems everywhere when they
terrorized America on September 11. They
not only hijacked America’s air transportation
system, turning its airplanes into deadly missiles; they provoked the nation into closing it
down entirely for nearly a week. They not only
destroyed the cathedral of American capitalism at the World Trade Center, they forced
capitalism to shut down its markets and they
shocked the country into deep recession of
which the stock market in free fall was only
a leading indicator. How can any nation claim
independence under these conditions?
In the world before McWorld, there was
genuine independence for democratic sovereign
nations, and sovereignty represented a just
claim by autonomous peoples to autonomous
control over their lives. Ours is no longer the
isolated, pre-industrial, rural America of Andrew Jackson’s era. Today there is so highly
integrated a global network, so finely tuned an
integral communications technology, so much
systemic interactivity, that it has become as
easy to paralyze the system as to use it. Terrorists,
who freely acknowledge and exploit this interdependence, have learned to use McWorld’s
weight jujitsu-style against its massive power.
Today, would-be sovereign peoples do not
face the simple decision between secure independence and unwanted interdependence.
They face a far more sobering choice between
two forms of interdependence. Either they
choose a relatively legitimate, democratic, and
pragmatic interdependence (which, however
is still to be constructed and which makes tatters of the old forms of national sovereignty);
or a radically illegitimate and undemocratic
interdependence will triumph, the terms of
which have already been set by criminals,
anarchists, and terrorists.
We can let the Hollywood cowboys and
international desperadoes of McWorld and
Jihad set the terms of our interdependence; or
we can shape more equitable terms through
transnational treaties, new global democratic
bodies, and a new creative common will.
We can have our interactivity dictated to us
by violence and anarchy, or we can construct it
on the model of our own democratic aspirations.
We can build a democratic interdependence
on common ground, or we can stand on the
brink of anarchy and try to prevent criminals
and terrorists from pushing us into the abyss.
form, Americans stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. America clings to a nineteenth-century
view of its own destiny. It seeks to preserve an
ancient and blissfully secure independence.
The perceived alternative is to yield to a perverted and compulsory interdependence that
puts foreigners and alien international bodies
like the United Nations or the World Court in
charge.
In truth, however, Americans have not
enjoyed a real independence since sometime
before the great wars of the last century. It is
certainly not independent of AIDS or West
Nile Virus; of global warming and greenhouse
gasses; of a job »mobility« that has decimated
its industrial economy; or of restive speculators who have made the flight of capital a
more »sovereign« reality than any conceivable
government oversight. Interdependence is not
some foreign adversary against which citizens
need to muster resistance. It is a domestic
reality, and it has already compromised the
30
This article is based on joint work with Ronald
Schettkat, Professor of Economics at Utrecht
University.
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
On the Waterfront
German history, to describe the
current events in the U.S.. According to Stern, patriotism can provide people with a sense of unity,
a sense of common past. The historian commented that the present
global political situation would be
seen as initiating a time of great
instability, the likes of which has
not been experienced since the
Thirty Years’ War.
The audience consisted of delegates from the Dresden-Heritage
Committee and the American
Academy in Berlin. Questions
following the lecture focused on
Bismarck, patriotism, and the
Apolitical Triumph
Historian Fritz Stern Gives Arnhold Lecture
By Heidrun Hannusch
peppered with small talk, although
Fritz Stern, the invited speaker at
the second Arnhold Lecture, had
distinguished the evening from
today’s normal run of conversation.
It is the difference between the
current penchant for middlebrow
offerings –’talk-show-talk’ and
’sound-bite-speak’– and a more
intellectual concept of real conversation between people. Stern
reminded the audience of the art
of conversation as it was practiced
in the coffeehouse circles typified
by the Arnhold salon in 1933
Dresden. And if only for a short
while, the art was revived.
Fritz Stern, the GermanAmerican historian came to prominence with his book Gold and
Steel on Bismarck’s finance minister, Gerson von Bleichröder. One
would be tempted to call Stern a
living legend if it did not make
him sound so unapproachable.
In fact, the 75-year-old academic
proved quite the contrary. The
mutual respect shown between
Stern and Ministerpresident Kurt
Biedenkopf took the form of a
friendly hug and an easy, unforced
conversation that dispelled any
ideas of compulsory greetings between strangers. Biedenkopf referred to Stern as one of the »important liberals, possessing a profound understanding of mankind:
his fallibility and his greatness.«
Stern’s lecture on the »Contortions of German History« showed
just why he is considered a great
historian. He compared with consummate ease various periods of
German history – not as so many
movements but as interwoven
»contortions« (Verzerrungen).
The expansiveness of this approach
to all history was one aspect of his
argument. The other was that the
adversity which Germany, in particular, experienced, sets it apart.
Stern circumscribed two periods:
1848 to 1914 and 1945 to 1989.
He spoke of the »triumph of the
apolitical in Germany« and about
the abasement of its people – and
stressed that this is a notion to be
wary of, though it deserves profound consideration.
Stern cited the example of the
extraordinary courage of the people
in Leipzig and other cities when,
in 1989, they took to the streets.
The term »patriotism« has lately
been used, with reference to
Dresdner Neuste Nachrichten, Oct. 22, 2001
ANNETTE FRICK
riday evening at the Villa
Salzburg ended, like any
Fgathering,
with an atmosphere
golden age of German culture.
After a lecture that lasted over
two hours, the audience excitedly
engaged Stern informally with
further inquiries and comments.
The art historian Professor
Paul recapped the value of such
evenings in continuing the tradition of the Arnhold salon:
»Meetings such as these are direct
and subject-oriented. They are devoid of the media’s bias of interpretation and have nothing to do
with talk shows, where individuals vie for attention. This is a real
forum to discuss real issues.«
Fritz Stern
31
AMERICAN ACADEMY
FRANK RÖTH / FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
were faced with »a calculating,
well-financed, and well-organized
mortal threat. Terrorism is an evil
that knows no boundaries.«
Coats spoke in the DaimlerChrysler Services Building on
Potsdamer Platz, which he called
the former ‘ground zero’ of EastWest confrontation, the site on
which the common values of
Germany and the U.S. had grown.
Coats hopes during his tenure as
Ambassador to optimize the German-American security partnership. According to his speech, he
sees deficiencies in mutual judicial
assistance as well as in the collaborative policing of Internet crime,
which he called »a growing threat
to the development of electronic
commerce.«
In economic relations Coats
expects more German initiative
in the negotiations on the further
liberalization of world trade –
where there are numerous points
of tension between Europe and
the U.S., to which the diplomat
did not refer: Germany, the largest
business power of Europe, cannot
be »a voice among many,« but
must rather take the lead with the
world’s largest business power,
the U.S., »in forging the path to
economic rebound.«
Coats delivered the thanks of
U.S. President Bush for the German people’s solidarity after the
terrorist attacks. America will never
forget the two hundred thousand
Germans who came to the Brandenburger Gate to express their
pain and solidarity, said Bush’s
greeting. At the same time, Coats
indicated that the U.S. would not
only hold fast to controversial
positions on the matter of missile
defense. He defended the U.S. climate policy of refusing the Kyoto
Protocol by pointing to the high
expenditures U.S. had made for
climate research.
Prior to being named ambassador to Germany, Coats, a Republican, was a Senator from Indiana
for ten years, after serving in the
House of Representatives. He sat
on several congressional commit32
Taking the Lead
U.S. Ambassador Coats Calls for Cooperation
By Joachim Widmann
aniel R. Coats, the new
United States ambassador
D
in Germany, used his inaugural
address in Berlin to advocate the
development of international missile defense. In the face of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the
U.S. has further commited itself
to an »effective, limited missile
defense system, developed in cooperation with our NATO allies
and others, including Russia.«
Every party involved in the coalition against terror is, for Coats,
engaged in the defense of shared
values. He was referring to the increasing fears in Europe prior to
September 11 that the U.S. would
try to »go it alone« or choose to
focus on strengthening its strategic
interests in Asia or Latin America
rather than Europe:
»This debate has come to an end.
It was shattered along with a million tons of steel and glass. In its
place we greet the new task, the
centerpiece of transatlantic solidarity and German-American
friendship.« Coats says that Germany, the U.S., and their partners
tees that addressed issues in the
military and secret services. Not
only for this did Bush consider
him the ideal choice for the ambassadorship, says Gary Smith, director of the American Academy, the
institution Coats chose to host his
inaugural address.
Netzeitung, October 12, 2001
Refugees
Will They Dominate
the Twenty-first Century?
By Detlef Müller
recent discussion held at
the American Academy in
A
Berlin expressed with refreshing
clarity what only few Germans
have hitherto recognized: after
India and Pakistan, Germany has
accepted the largest number of
refugees worldwide – nine hundred thousand people in all.
In light of the enduring controversy in Germany over immigration, as well as the racism conference that was being held simultaneously in South Africa, the topic
of the discussion, »Refugees:
a Challenge for the International
Community« could not have been
more current. In the presence of
German Interior Minister Otto
Schily, two bone fide experts sat
across from one another in the
new American cultural center on
the Wannsee: Richard Holbrooke,
the U.S. negotiator who had a decisive influence in shaping the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the
war in Bosnia, and Ruud Lubbers,
the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugees.
The former Dutch prime minister Lubbers put his finger in an
open wound: denial. The problem
of refugees can no longer be ignored. »Immigration« has long
been a forbidden word in Europe,
although the influx of immigrants
has lasted for years. Most are still
of the opinion that refugees are
»poor, pitiful people« who merely
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
require humanitarian aid. It is
quite a different situation, said
Lubbers. Refugees have a capacity
to work that could be very useful
to any country. »Not all refugees
are Einsteins,« but they can do
much to counter Europe’s low
birth rate, and they are more of
an enrichment than a burden.
Holbrooke, too, warned that
the refugee problem should not
be swept under the rug. The problem is far larger than most governments want to admit. Nor is it
a temporary problem, said the
former US ambassador to Germany. In the face of continuing
civil wars – for example those in
Angola, the Republic of Congo,
and Sudan – which produce three
quarters of the world’s refugee
population, the stream of refugees
will grow even larger in the coming years. »Refugees will dominate the twenty-first century.
They will no longer disappear.«
Berliner Morgenpost
September 9, 2001
The Immigrant
Harold Levy address Bilingual Education at the Academy
By Desmond Butler
a guest of the American
A sAcademy
here this week, the
New York City schools chancellor,
Harold O. Levy, joins the ranks of
people like Arthur Miller and
Susan Sontag who have also been
lecturers at the Academy. During
his visit, Mr. Levy met privately
with the American and Israeli
ambassadors to Germany and visited schools. And at a news conference, he prompted a stir by
describing the sheer size of the
New York school system. Eyes
widened as he cited the numbers:
800,000 meals a day, 80,000
teachers and 4,000 school buses.
The main theme of his visit,
however, has been immigration
and bilingual education, which he
discussed Tuesday night with
German legislators and educators.
School administrators here face
problems like those in New York
stemming from the need to teach
foreign students who do not
speak the dominant language.
The large immigrant population
here includes many Turks, and
officials are debating a major legislative change to allow more
immigration.
In discussing the New York
bilingual program, Mr. Levy said:
»If you look to how the immi-
grant is treated, it defines in great
part what the society is. It speaks
to who we are.«
Mr. Levy’s parents fled Germany during the Nazi regime. He
grew up in New York speaking a
mixture of languages – including
Moseldeutsch, the dialect from his
parents’ childhood region – and
took questions at his lecture in his
mother’s tongue.
In a visit to a Berlin school, students were less interested in New
York City schools than in the
effects of the Sept. 11 attacks.
»One of them asked if we have to
meet violence with violence. I
responded with the question of
whether pacifism would have
been the right response to Hitler.«
The students agreed that there
were times to take up arms.
Mr. Levy, who was invited two
years ago, considered canceling
after Sept. 11, but decided to go
through with the trip, he said,
after being deeply moved by the
Berlin Philharmonic's determination to carry on with a concert at
Carnegie Hall. »I decided that in a
profound sense I had to come,«
he said, »in order not to be
deterred by terrorism.«
The New York Times
November 8, 2001
To a Talmudist
for Daniel Boyarin
If, as you say, the Lord of all,
Himself, is at a loss
To understand his metaphors,
And if those long approximate
Disputes of ours
Have been stratagems
For taking, here and there, control –
Surely it follows, either that it is time
For the old Fuddler to abdicate
(Which God forbid)
In favor of a She-Who-Knows,
Or that such sensitive aftergods
As played with fractions all along
Called it a day,
Said nothing, save in song?
Yet if all possible lands
To wander nimbly in are strange,
How much more strange it comes to us,
A song not his. No trees therein,
Only imaginary melodies
To hang our harping from.
In scores we of ourselves require
Contrapuntally, how might they number?
Still, some aspire, even if in labour
They listen to an absent
Ocean’s boom. Out of earshot
The whispering leaves
Can still instruct a few quaint
Other Daniels:
In mid-flight their cry
Mimics no fundament, from the inanimate
Up into the air, it compels
Four fresh springs to feed and quicken
The four old rivers of the night.
Christopher Middleton
AMERICAN ACADEMY
v e n a Ne w Yo rk e r i s s t ru c k by the raw, often
Foster’s transparent high-tech dome sits atop the battle-scarred
confusing, always impressive energy of the new Berlin.
Reichstag and enables the visitor to literally (and symbolically) look
Returning to the city this year to take up the Chairmanship
down upon the German Parliament that has recently taken up residence
of the American Academy in Berlin, I am once again
there. Daniel Libeskind’s architectural tour de force, the Jewish
struck by this. Yet, exciting as the capital’s life may be, the past is a
Museum, bears within it an abiding reminder of the Holocaust’s ravages:
relentless intruder, the engine that drives its current transformations.
an unavoidable and impenetrable void at the building’s center. A visit
To walk through Berlin is to enter a living version of a college survey
to the new home of the Ministry of Finance is especially bizarre, for it
course of twentieth-century European history. One passes the parade
is housed in Göring’s massive Air Ministry, which survived every Allied
grounds where Kaiser Wilhelm II, on his horse (and hiding his withered
attempt to destroy it during the war.
arm), reviewed the troops before World War I. The old Jewish quarter.
The battles over new and old architecture only underscore the
The plaza in which Nazi students built a bonfire of »non German«
dilemmas faced by contemporary Berlin. Every decision of the planbooks in 1933. The Pariser Platz, where
ning authority, every new building or
Hitler and Goebbels presided over
monument, triggers an argument
torchlight parades and, in 1945, Soviet
based on conflicting views of history.
tanks smashed through the Brandenburg
Should more of the Wall be preserved?
Gate. Hitler’s bunker. The ruins of the
Should war ruins be razed and paved
Gestapo headquarters, saved from the
over? How should the Holocaust be
wrecker’s ball and turned into a small
memorialized? Is the chancellor’s new
museum, »The Topography of Terror.«
office perhaps too grandiose – that is, is
The huge air terminal at Tempelhof,
it too reminiscent of the quarters of a
once Hitler’s pride and later the indiscertain earlier German leader?
pensable landing field through which
The Germans, who gave the word
the 1948 Airlift saved the city.
angst to the English language, worry conNo city on earth has gone on such a
stantly about how to deal with the
roller-coaster ride in such a short span
heavy burden of their history. One of
of time. There were the decades before
my friends – a prominent German
Nazi rule: first, the years of pre-World
politician – keeps in his study a portrait
War I innocence; then the Weimar era
of his grandfather, which clearly shows
(still strangely innocent) immortalized
his Nazi membership badge. »I could
in I am a Camera and Cabaret. Then
easily have had the badge painted over,«
there was Hitler and the Holocaust.
he told me, »but I felt I had to leave it
Berlin became the capital of Evil.
in; for it is a historical truth. My grandYet less than three years after the
father thought Hitler would be good
war’s end, the city’s Soviet liberators –
for Germany.«
by blockading it – transformed it into
»Berlin, Berlin, great city of misery,«
the ultimate symbol of the cold war, a
wrote Heinrich Heine. »In you there is
city of heroic, freedom-loving survivors.
nothing to find but anguish and marBerlin went from villain to victim, from
tyrdom.« Heine was prophetic, but I
horrors to heroics, almost overnight.
think Berlin’s years of excessive drama
The decades that followed were high
have finally come to an end. It is no
theater, and Berlin was often at center
longer a villain or a hero. Some Berstage: the East German uprising of June
liners may miss the exciting days
1953; JFK’s speech; Checkpoint Charlie;
when they were the center of the world’s
secret spy ex-changes; Reagan’s visit;
worried attention. Some may even miss
By Richard C. Holbrooke
the night in November 1989 when the
the wall, or at least some of the prowall came down; and, finally, in 1994 – one last photograph for the histection it afforded (and many still talk of a »wall in the head« – that is,
tory books – the Clintons and the Kohls walking side by side through the
of the different attitudes and expectations of Wessis and Ossis). But in
Brandenburg Gate into East Berlin, where they were greeted by an
my view, this is not a time for nostalgia. Having worked closely with
crowd of more than one hundred thousand.
many members of a new generation of Germans, I have more confi»Berlin is a city that never is, but is always in the process of becomdence in them, perhaps, than they have yet to find in themselves.
ing,« observed the noted German essayist Karl Scheffler in 1910.
With its overwhelming history Berlin will never be a »normal« city
(He added, disapprovingly, that its people are »lured by the promise
– even though it is no longer divided; even though American, British,
of Americanism.«)
French and Soviet troops no longer face each other across a death
Ninety years later, Berlin is indeed becoming something new:
zone; even though American presidents no longer fly to Berlin to
Europe’s greatest showcase for modern architecture – although some
reaffirm our commitment to freedom. But the ghosts will remain
Berliners, fulfilling their reputation for cynicism, like to say that the
forever. As they should.
world’s best architects have come here to build their worst buildings.
This text is based on an article published in the September 10 edition of
Newsweek International.
But even here, everything seems reflected through the past. Sir Norman
E
BerlinViews
Funding the
American Academy
in Berlin
The American Academy in Berlin is unique
in Germany as a major academic and cultural
institution funded almost exclusively from private sources. Many dedicated individuals and corporations have contributed generously to build
the Academy and to ensure its ongoing operations and long-term viability.
The Academy’s founding gift came from
Stephen M. Kellen and the descendents of Hans
and Ludmilla Arnhold, the parents of Mr. Kellen’s
wife, Anna-Maria. Through their continued generosity, the Kellen and Arnhold families remain
principal benefactors of the Academy.
During its first three years, many corporations, foundations, and private individuals enabled the Academy to establish a strong presence in Berlin. Additionally, the City of Berlin has
made the Academy’s home, the Hans Arnhold
Center, available at a nominal rent.
Supporters of the Academy are growing – in
number, amount, and types of contributions that
they provide. Through their personal involvement,
the American Academy in Berlin is able to enrich Berlin’s intellectual life. Likewise, the Academy can foster the American-German cultural and
academic exchange that is at the heart of its mission.
Major Gifts and Pledges
$10,000,000 and above
Anna-Maria and Stephen M.
Kellen and the descendants of
Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold
$1,000,000 and above
DaimlerChrysler AG
European Recovery Program
Verlagsgruppe
Georg von Holtzbrinck
John W. Kluge Foundation
Alberto W. Vilar
$500,000 and above
Allianz AG
Henry Arnhold
Deutscher Sparkassenund Giroverband
General Motors –
Adam Opel AG
Hauptstadtkulturfonds
Siemens AG
Southern Company –
(Mirant Europe)
$250,000 and above
Robert Bosch Stiftung
Coca Cola Foundation
DaimlerChrysler Fonds
Deutsche Stiftung
Denkmalschutz
Lufthansa AG (in-kind)
Philip Morris GmbH
Xerox Foundation
$100,000 and above
Compaq GmbH (in-kind)
Credit Suisse First Boston
DaimlerChrysler Services AG
(in-kind)
Klaus Groenke –
Intertec GmbH (in-kind)
Merrill Lynch
J. P. Morgan, Inc.
Morgan Stanley,
Dean Witter, Discover & Co
Open Society Institute –
George Soros
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
(in-kind)
Sara Lee Corporation
Tishman Speyer Properties
$50,000 and above
Chase Manhattan Foundation
Dow Europe
Freshfields Bruckhaus
Deringer (in-kind)
Goldman, Sachs & Co
Shearman & Sterling (in-kind)
Kurt Viermetz
White & Case, Feddersen
(in-kind)
$10,000 and above
Bösendorfer Klavierfabrik
GmbH (in-kind)
Gahl Hodges Burt
CitiGroup
Deutsche Bahn AG
Deutsche Bank, N.A.
Julie Finley
Gillette Deutschland GmbH
Goldman Sachs
Guardian Industries
Corporation
Hans-Michael und
Almut Giesen
IBM Berlin (in-kind)
Kissinger Foundation
Alfried Krupp von Bohlen
und Halbach Stiftung
Estee Lauder
Philanthropic Fund
Jerome and Kenneth Lipper
Foundation
Robert H. and
Guna Mundheim
Payne, Forrester & Olsson
(in-kind)
Dale L. Ponikvar
Annette and
Heinrich von Rantzau
David Rockefeller
Schering AG
Robert A. Towbin
Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering
WMP AG (in-kind)

Benjamin Barber Richard Freeman Sander Gilman Richard

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