Issue 17 (Fall 2008) PDF - American Academy in Berlin

Transcription

A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Seventeen | Fall 2008
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
Celebrating
Ten Years
of Berlin Prize
Fellowships
In this issue:
H. G. Adler
Leora Auslander
Patty Chang
Robert Finn
Kenneth Gross
Lawrence F. Kaplan
Lawrence Lessig
Daniel Mendelsohn
Sam Nunn
Adam Posen
Dennis Ross
David Warren Sabean
Volker Schlöndorff
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Fall 2008 | Number Seventeen | The Berlin Journal | 1
Contents
Courtesy of the artist and the guggenheim Museum
The Berlin Journal | Number Seventeen | Fall 2008
Rachel Rabhan, Dream Warriors: Jacob vs. the Angel
8
sam nunn details the strategic necessity of
working together to rid the globe of nuclear
weapons.
14
volker schlöndorff offers an intimate
N1
On the Waterfront
The Academy’s newsletter, with the
latest on fellows, alumni, and friends, as
well as happenings in and around the
Hans Arnhold Center.
glimpse of a youth spent transfixed in
Parisian cinématèques.
18
leora auslander explains approaching
history through domestic objects often
neglected.
22
29
34
Surge plan in Iraq was honed on the
ground, years before it became official
doctrine.
38
daniel mendelsohn envisions an
43
alternate life for his Uncle Shmiel and
Aunt Ester. An unpublished excerpt from
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.
david warren sabean probes the ways
Western kinship has oddly shifted family
bonds.
70
adam posen reframes Germany’s
distracting obsession with being the
Exportweltmeister.
74
dennis ross discusses both sides of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – and why
stalemate is so often the result.
robert finn breaks open some
mysteries surrounding Central Asia
and argues for the region’s incipient
geopolitical importance.
kenneth gross visits the myriad stages
of Berlin and reports on the city’s dramatic
vitality.
50
64
lawrence lessig stumps for sensible
copyright reform amidst booming
electronic creativity.
h.g. adler (1910–1988), the
modernist Czech novelist who
survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz,
re-imagines a family’s dark ousting. A new
translation by alumnus Peter Filkins.
patty chang explains her fascination
with a Chinese actress and a mistranslated
encounter with Walter Benjamin in 1928.
lawrence f. kaplan argues that the
57
81
Donations to the Academy
2 | The Berlin Journal | Number Seventeen | Fall 2008
We gratefully acknowledge The Halle Foundation’s
special grant in support of the
anniversary issue of the Berlin Journal.
Director’s Note
A New Optics
T
www.hallefoundation.org
The Berlin Journal
The American Academy
A magazine from the Hans Arnhold
in Berlin
Center published twice a year by
the American Academy in Berlin
Number Seventeen – Fall 2008
Publisher Gary Smith
Editor R. Jay Magill Jr.
Managing Editor
Katharina Pilaski
Associate Editors
Executive Director
Gary Smith
CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE
OFFICER
Philip Blood
Chief Financial Officer
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Am Sandwerder 17–19
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14109 Berlin
Advertising
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Fax
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Printed by Ruksaldruck, Berlin
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Copyright © 2008 The American
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Cover: Detail of a sculpture by
Berlin-based Japanese artist
Chiharu Shiota; hundreds of shoes
stuck to a building in Berlin Mitte.
Photo (from 2008-09-25) courtesy of
John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images.
Honorary Chairmen Thomas L. Farmer, Henry A. Kissinger,
Richard von Weizsäcker
Chairman Richard C. Holbrooke
Vice Chair Gahl Hodges Burt
President Norman Pearlstine
Treasurer Karl M. von der Heyden
Trustees Barbara Balaj, John P. Birkelund, Manfred Bischoff,
Diethart Breipohl, Stephen Burbank, Gahl Hodges Burt,
Caroline Walker Bynum, Gerhard Casper, Mathias Döpfner,
Marina Kellen French, Michael Geyer, Richard K. Goeltz, Vartan Gregorian,
Andrew S. Gundlach, Franz Haniel, Karl M. von der Heyden,
Richard C. Holbrooke, Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Josef Joffe, Michael Klein,
John C. Kornblum, Regine Leibinger, Lawrence Lessig, Nina von Maltzahn,
Erich Marx, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, William von Mueffling,
Christopher von Oppenheim, Norman Pearlstine, David Rubenstein,
Volker Schlöndorff, Fritz Stern, Tilman Todenhöfer, Kurt Viermetz,
Manfred Wennemer, Klaus Wowereit (ex-officio), Pauline Yu
Honorary Trustee Otto Graf Lambsdorff
Senior Counselors Richard Gaul, Franz Xaver Ohnesorg,
Bernhard von der Planitz, Karen Roth, Yoram Roth, Victoria Scheibler
o a ppropri at e an insigh t from Walter Benjamin’s
essay “Moscow”: more quickly than Berlin itself, one learns
to see America through Berlin. To someone arriving in
the German capital, the city seems calm and untroubled. More
Wings of Desire than Symphonie einer Großstadt. Its architectural
incoherence is in part the consequence of warfare, but also
of battles over building heights and cosmopolitan aesthetics
in a city rich in Schinkel and Knobelsdorff, and, meanwhile,
Scharoun, Rossi, and Piano.
“What is true of the image of the city and its people,”
Benjamin continues, “applies also to the intellectual situation:
a new optics is the most undoubted gain from a stay.” Yet Berlin
is a city in flux, “always becoming, and never is,” as critic Karl
Scheffler observed in 1910. Berlin’s fondness for the unfinished, openness, and reinvention oft seems American, whether
in its emulation of Chelsea galleries in the Zimmerstrasse,
the splattering of graffiti reminiscent of Manhattan subways
decades ago, the entrepreneurial dynamism spawning schools
of governance, universities of energy, and underground clubs.
Scheffler saw in Berlin’s ambitious urban culture of modernity
the desire to meld “the cultural conscience of Europe with
America’s sense of reality.”
Americans are confronted with many Americas in Berlin;
we learn to observe and judge Europe, but also to experience
America through many optics. A stay in Berlin becomes a
touchstone for every American scholar, writer, and artist –
just as Berliners are reminded by their rich diversity of the
Whitmanesque breadth of our country.
The Academy welcomed its first class exactly ten years ago
thanks to the resourceful determination of Richard Holbrooke
and the distinguished Germans and Americans he recruited
to establish an enduring post-Cold War American cultural
and policy presence in Berlin. The Academy, both private and
independent, has become a tribute to the generosity of many
who care deeply about the Atlantic bond, none more so than the
family of the great private banker Hans Arnhold and his wife,
Ludmilla, whose magnanimous commitment has greatly contributed to the Academy’s viability and excellence.
We were gratified when Der Spiegel recently described the
Academy as “the most important center of American intel
lectual life outside the United States.” In the coming decade
we will try to do justice to that high praise, to build upon
the optimism and striving for excellence that exemplifies
America’s Berlin.
– Gary Smith
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The Race Between
Cooperation and
Catastrophe
A plea from the co-Chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative
By Sam Nunn
Adam Bartos, Soyuz TM 28, 8/13/1998, Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
A
t t he daw n of the nuclear age,
after the devastation of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, General Omar
Bradley said, “The world has achieved
brilliance without wisdom….We know
more about war than we know about peace,
more about killing than we know about
living.”
It might have surprised General
Bradley, if he were alive today, to know that
we have made it sixty years without another nuclear attack. Thousands of men and
women worked diligently on both sides of
the Iron Curtain to prevent nuclear war, to
avoid overreacting to false warnings, and
to reduce risk.
We were good – we were diligent – but
we were also very lucky. We had more than
a few close calls. By far the most dangerous was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,
but there were a number of other edge-ofdisaster moments on both sides during
the cold war. Making it through sixty
years without a nuclear attack should not,
however, make us complacent. If we are to
continue to avoid a catastrophe, all nuclear
powers today will have to be highly capable, careful, competent, rational – and, if
things go wrong, lucky – every single time.
We do have important global efforts
underway, and some important successes:
the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat
Reduction program, the Global Threat
Reduction Initiative, the Proliferation
Security Initiative, and the Global
Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism.
While these all mark progress and potential, the risk of a nuclear weapon being
used today is growing, not receding.
The storm clouds are gathering: terrorists are seeking nuclear weapons, and
there should be little doubt that if they
acquire a weapon, they will use it. There
are nuclear weapons materials in more
than forty countries, some secured by
nothing more than a chain-link fence. At
the current pace, it will be decades before
this material is adequately secured or
eliminated. Moreover, the know-how and
expertise to build nuclear weapons is far
more available today than ever before
because of an explosion of information
and commerce.
Add to this the fact that the number of
nuclear weapons states is increasing. A
world with twelve or twenty nuclear weapons states will be immeasurably more dangerous than it is now. It will also increase
the likelihood that weapons or materials
will fall into the hands of terrorists with
no return address. Cyber-terrorism also
poses new threats that could have disastrous consequences if the command-andcontrol systems of any nuclear-weapons
state were compromised.
With the growing interest in nuclear
energy, a number of countries are considering developing the capacity to enrich
uranium as fuel. Yet this would also
give them the capacity to move quickly
to a nuclear weapons program if they so
chose. Meanwhile, the United States and
Russia continue to deploy thousands of
nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles
that can hit their targets in less than
thirty minutes, encouraging both sides
to continue a prompt-launch capability
that carries an increasingly unacceptable
risk of an accidental, mistaken, or unauthorized launch.
With these growing dangers in mind,
former US Secretaries of State George
Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former US
Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, and I
published an op-ed in January 2007, and a
follow-up piece in 2008, in The Wall Street
Journal. It called for a different direction
for our global nuclear policy with both
vision and steps.
The four of us, and the many other
security leaders who have joined us, are
keenly aware that the quest for a nuclearweapons-free world is fraught with
practical and political challenges. As The
There are nuclear weapons
materials in more than
forty countries, some
secured by nothing more
than a chain-link fence.
Economist wisely wrote in 2006: “By simply demanding the goal of a world without
nuclear weapons without a readiness to
tackle the practical problems raised by it,
ensures that it will never happen.”
We have taken aim at the practical problems by linking the vision of a nuclearweapons-free world with a series of concrete steps for reducing nuclear dangers
and carving a path towards a world free
of the nuclear threat. Without the bold
vision, the actions will not be perceived
as fair or urgent. Without the actions, the
vision will not be perceived as realistic or
possible.
While we do not believe that our
example is likely to inspire Iran, North
Korea, or al-Qaeda to drop their weapons
ambitions, we do believe that it will make
it more likely that nations will join us in
a firm approach to stop the proliferation
of nuclear weapons and materials and to
prevent catastrophic terrorism.
This w ill be a ch a llenging process
that must be accomplished in stages. The
United States must keep nuclear weapons
as long as other nations do. But we will be
safer, and the world will be safer, if we are
working toward the goal of deemphasizing nuclear weapons and keeping them
out of dangerous hands – and ultimately
ridding our world of them.
Strategic cooperation must become
the cornerstone of our national defense
against nuclear weapons. This is not
because cooperation gives us a warm and
fuzzy feeling, but because every other
method will fail. None of the steps we are
proposing can be accomplished by the
United States and our close allies alone:
–– Changing nuclear-force postures in
the United States and Russia to greatly
increase warning time and ease our
fingers away from the nuclear trigger.
–– Reducing nuclear forces substantially
in all states that possess them.
–– Moving toward developing cooperative,
multilateral ballistic-missile defense
and early-warning systems to reduce
tensions over defensive systems and
enhance the possibility of progress in
other areas.
–– Eliminating short-range “tactical”
nuclear weapons, beginning with
accountability and transparency among
the United States, NATO, and Russia.
–– Working to bring the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty into force in the United
States and other key states.
–– Securing nuclear weapons and materials around the world to the highest
standards.
–– Developing a multinational approach
to civil nuclear fuel production, phasing out the use of highly enriched
uranium in civil commerce and halting
the production of fissile material for
weapons.
–– Enhancing verification and enforcement capabilities – and our political
will to do both.
–– Building an international consensus
regarding ways to deter and, when
necessary, strongly and effectively
respond to countries that breach their
commitments. fi
Adam Bartos, Oleg Ivanovsky’s memorabilia, Moscow, 1996
I
belie v e t h at w e c annot defend
ourselves against the nuclear threats
facing the world today without taking
these steps. We cannot take these steps
without the cooperation of other nations.
We cannot get the cooperation of other
nations without the vision and hope of a
world that will someday end these weapons
as a threat to mankind.
The most difficult and challenging step
is the need to redouble our efforts to resolve
regional conflicts that give rise to new
nuclear powers. The obvious candidates
can be found readily in Asia, Africa, and
the Middle East. We also must urgently
address the security concerns that give
existing nuclear powers the reasons or
excuses to keep their nuclear weapons operationally on the front burner, which in turn
causes much of the world to believe that we
are not living up to our Nonproliferation
Treaty commitments.
There can be no coherent, effective
security strategy to reduce nuclear dangers
that does not take into account Russia – its
strengths, weaknesses, aims, and ambitions. So, it is remarkable – and dangerous –
that the United States, Russia, and nato
have not developed an answer to one of the
most fundamental security questions we
face: What is the long-term role for Russia in
the Euro-Atlantic arc? Whether caused by
the absence of vision, a lack of political will,
or nostalgia for the cold war, the failure of
both sides to forge a mutually beneficial and
Welcome to the end of the
Cold War: battlefield nukes
are still in vogue and, for the
first time, both Russia and
NATO have reserved the right
to use nuclear weapons
preemptively.
durable security relationship marks a collective failure of leadership in Washington,
European capitals, and Moscow.
During the cold war, the United States
spent trillions of dollars containing communism and preserving freedom. Our
European allies – particularly Germany –
devoted a large portion of territory and
national treasure for the same purpose.
While the cost was immense, it paid off. We
preserved freedom, and we avoided a war
that could have escalated to a nuclear holocaust. In our military defense of Western
Europe, nato was one of the most successful alliances in history. Our members
shared the same security goals, and we
were all dedicated to containing communism – even though we were not all democracies. We had a clear perspective of our
vital interests, and for more than forty years
we were able to give priority to these interests over other concerns that were often in
the headlines, but not vital.
Former US Secretary of State Dean
Acheson once defined foreign policy
as “just one damn thing after another.”
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the most
common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do. nato today is
a combination of both sentiments: it faces
one damn thing after another, but unlike
during the cold war, it seems that we are
not quite sure what it is we are trying to do.
We have not developed a sustainable postcold war security strategy.
nato operations in Afghanistan are
crucial to the future of that country and to
the security and credibility of nato, but
Adam Bartos, NPO Energomash, Moscow, 1996
success is doubtful without a larger economic, political, and military effort. nato
has many important priorities, but I believe
the priority that must be at the top of our
list is to prevent the spread of weapons
of mass destruction and to prevent catastrophic terrorism by keeping dangerous
nuclear weapons material out of the hands
of terrorists.
I
f w e a re to succeed in dealing with
the hydra-headed threats of emerging
nuclear weapons states, proliferation
of enrichment, poorly secured nuclear
material, and catastrophic terrorism, many
nations must cooperate. We must recognize, however, that these tasks are virtually impossible without the cooperation of
Russia. It is abundantly clear that Russia
faces these same threats and that its own
security is dependent on cooperation with
nato and the United States. Russia’s erosion of conventional military capability has
led it to increase dependency on nuclear
weapons, including tactical battlefield
nuclear weapons. And now Russia has
declared – as nato did during the cold
war – that it may use nuclear weapons first.
Welcome to the end of the cold war:
battlefield nukes are still in vogue and, for
the first time, both Russia and nato have
reserved the right to use nuclear weapons
preemptively. Together, are we inadvertently and unthinkingly headed back to the
future?
Winston Churchill once said, “However
beautiful the strategy, you must occasionally look at the result.” I believe that nato,
the United States, and Russia must look at
both the trajectory and the results of our
current policies.
As nato prepares for its sixtieth anniversary, we must address a fundamental
question: In the years ahead, does nato
want Russia to be inside or outside the EuroAtlantic security arc? The Russians must
ask themselves that same question. If we
both answer “outside,” then our strategy
is simple: we both just keep doing what
we are now doing. If the answer is “inside,”
we and Russia must make adjustments in
strategy informed by answering, at least,
the following questions:
1. From a nato and US perspective, is the
early entry of additional members to the
alliance more important than gaining
Russia’s cooperation on reducing clear
and present nuclear risks – including
preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear state?
2.From nato’s perspective, does the
expansion of membership to distant
states obligate us to incur enormous
increases in defense budgets or to be
forever committed to cold war concepts
of deterrence, including the possible
first use of nuclear weapons? Are we
really examining the security implications of expansion over the long term,
or has this become primarily a political
exercise?
3. From a Russian perspective, is it wise
to keep pressuring its neighbors so that
they hurry to join the strongest alliance
available today – in the form of nato?
Ratcheting up the pressure in various
ways on Ukraine or Georgia does not
encourage those countries to work with
Moscow. Instead, it drives them to seek
nato’s protection. Is this what Russia
really wants?
4. Can the West, which stood together
coherently and tenaciously during the
entire cold war, manage to stand for fi
rule of law and human rights today
without giving the Russian people the
impression that we are lecturing them?
Can we accept Henry Kissinger’s advice
to avoid the “American tendency to insist
on global tutelage” while we work on
crucial issues with Russia that affect the
security of the US and our close allies?
5. Can Russia avoid the temptation to
employ its emerging energy superpower
status to achieve political ends? Will it
become a reliable and responsible market participant following the rule of law?
6.Are we and Russia destined to continue the assumption that Russia will
always be outside the Euro-Atlantic
security arc?
the fall of the Berlin Wall, establishing a
more cooperative and productive relationship with Russia will require leadership in
Europe and the United States. Historically,
Germany has been at the center of the
nato alliance; today it can play a unique
bridge-building role in encouraging nato
and Russia to begin to ask – and answer –
these questions.
T
Nearly twenty years ago, President
Ronald Reagan asked an audience to imagine that “we were threatened by a power
from outer space – from another planet.”
He then asked: “Wouldn’t we come together to fight that particular threat?” After
allowing the scenario to sink in, President
Reagan came to his point: “We now have
a weapon that can destroy the world. Why
don’t we recognize that threat more clearly
and then come together with one aim in
mind: how safely, sanely, and quickly we
can rid the world of this threat to our civilization and our existence.”
If we want our children and grandchildren to inherit a world without the
threat of nuclear disaster, our generation
must begin to answer Reagan’s question
right now. µ
he use of a nucle a r weapon
anywhere will affect every nation
everywhere. The reaction of many
people to the vision and steps to eliminate
the nuclear threat comes in two parts: on
one hand they say, “That would be great.”
And the second thought is: “We can never
get there.”
he common in t erest s of the
To me, the goal of a world free of nucleUnited States, Europe, Russia, China, ar weapons is like the top of a very tall
Sam Nunn is a former US Senator from
Japan, and many other nations are
mountain. It is tempting and easy to say,
Georgia and the current co-Chairman of
more aligned today than at any point in
“We can’t get there from here.” It is true
the Nuclear Threat Initiative. This essay
modern history. I believe that we must
that today in our troubled world we can’t
is adapted from a speech he delivered
seize this historic opportunity and act
see the top of the mountain.
in Berlin at the Hotel Adlon on June 12,
accordingly.
But we can see that we are heading
2008, as a guest of the American Academy.
In an age fraught with the dangers of
down, not up. We can see that we must
nuclear proliferation and catastrophic terturn around, that we must take paths leadrorism, global security always depends
ing to higher ground, and that we must get
Anzeige – Berlin Journal – CSR Dachmotiv englisch – 210 x 135 mm – 27.08.2008, 14:15 Uhr
on regional security. Twenty years after
others to move with us.
T
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A Moviegoer in Paris
Recollections from a youth awakened by the cinématèque
By Volker Schlöndorff
A
s much a s t hese memories
sound very La Bohème, the experience itself was as hard to live
through. Studying in Paris had nothing to
do with the sweetness of Pucini, nothing to
do with the “gay Paree” of American movies. The whole thing was closer to the poverty of the nineteenth century – to Mimi’s
tuberculosis and to Verlaine’s absinthe –
than to the happy anarchy of the late 1960s.
There were no empty rooms in Cité
Universitaire’s student housing, the bourgeoisie didn’t rent to students, and group
living was not yet known, so we had to bunk
in cheap hotels. Or we rented cramped
quarters that used to shelter domestic servants under the roofs of Paris. Agnes Varda
made her first movie, La Mouffe, in the rundown old section of the city, where I had
found a room. The houses were decrepit,
held up by heavy beams leaning across the
street; the entire architecture looked like
the stage set of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Nailed onto a small door wedged
between two support beams, an enamel
sign read “Entre de l’Hotel.” In the shop
next to the entrance was a librairie Africaine.
Through its tarnished windows one
could barely make out masks and spears
lying around. A dark hall lead to a rickety
wooden staircase. An arrow pointed to an
office on the first floor. There you picked up
the key from an Algerian family that was
responsible for building maintenance and
room cleaning. Only North African guest
workers lived in this “hotel.” Two more
staircases led to the next story. On each
floor was a squat toilet so tiny that to actually use it you had to balance yourself on
the floor, wedge your back against the pipe
behind you, and smash your knees against
the door. My room, at the end of the hall,
was furnished with an iron bed, a washtable with bowl and pitcher, and a small
bureau. The window, which did not close
all the way, opened to the back yard. And if
you extended your arms, you could touch
both walls of the neighboring house.
The only place I could read was in bed.
We went to the libraries to study. There
was the impressive and intimidating
Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, which was
part of the Sorbonne; the much adored
library of the Centre Culturel Américain,
which was good for flirting; and last, but
not least: the sober reading room on the
Rue d’Ulm, which was like being inside the
hull of a steamship, its tireless iron-piped
heating system perpetually knocking and
clamoring.
The lectures at the university were
mandatory for me: the stipend I had for
400-Deutschmarks a month required I
attend – and that is what covered my living
expenses: 100 Deutschmarks went to the
hotel, the same amount went for meals in
the Israeli cafeteria at the university, and
the rest I could spend as I wished. I could
even save a little bit.
But the evenings were when my real
studies began: at 6:30, 8:30, and 10:30,
the Cinématèque Français on Rue d’Ulm
showed movies. I still have copies of the
yellowed programs from 1958 –1960 with
all the movie titles and my notes scratched
all over them. There must have been a
thousand movies I saw during those two
years. The entrance fee was about one
Deutschmark. Soon enough, though,
I wouldn’t even have to pay that.
It was Lotte Eisner, the wonderful film
historian and colleague of Henri Langlois,
the director of the film museum, who
somehow noticed me. She introduced me to
Fritz Lang and hired me as an interpreter/
translator. This meant that I sat with my
microphone in the first row and tried to
follow the film’s dialogue. The scene titles
of German silent movies were easy; the
movies with sound were more difficult. But
Fritz Lang’s M and Josef von Sternberg’s
Der Blaue Engel were screened so often that
I did better with each showing.
A specialty was Kurosawa’s movie Ikuru,
which only existed as a copy of the Japanese
original with German subtitles. This classic was screened so frequently that soon I
knew it by heart. To this day I can still recite
most of the dialogue. This story of a cancerridden employee who wanted to do one last
thing became one of my favorite films. A
few years ago I wanted to purchase the
rights to remake it, but Steven Spielberg got
there faster.
It was the silent movies I loved the most.
They emitted something magical. The
actors were the ones about whose faces
Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard says
“We had faces!” They flickered like abstractions, huge and silent on the screen in front
of hand-painted sets. And nearly all of them
were dead. The silence in the theater was a
deadly silence. The hum of the projectors
was like that of gears that grinded down
time. The passions and feelings of these
phantoms were thus even more intense and
eternal.
Outside scenes were just as unreal in the
overexposure of old black-and-white copies, regardless of whether they were made
Courtesy of Hanser Verlag and Volker Schlöndorff
in the birch forests, like in Gösta Berling’s
Sweden, city landscapes in Brooklyn, or
on the bridges of Paris. I wasn’t able to
memorize exact content or story lines;
I only remember the atmosphere, scene
sequences, various situations, and totally
disconnected views: the white in the eye of
the Andalusian dog, the deserted steppes
in Storm over Asia, the young and pudgy
Garbo who brushes her face against her fur
coat in Freudlosen Gasse, Fred McTeague’s
brutal mug in Greed, the rowboat on the
Marne in Renoir’s film, a slithering and
flexuous bride in Asphalt, a dew-covered
apple on a branch in Dowschenko’s Earth.
Here it was: lost and rediscovered time,
immortalized in the moment, the awakening of an unquenchable desire that left a
nostalgia for some past era.
During these years I saw an average of
three movies a day. The traumatic experiences occurred when I saw a movie the
first time: “On Thursday, May 21, 1959, at
10:30 in the evening: saw Faust for the first
time. Captivating, the elegance of a resolution that permits one scene to flow visually
into the other,” I noted like a smartass.
“Astonishingly big close-ups, changing
with magical camera movements – driving,
crane, and even flight.”
Not one word about the actors, whom
I discovered much later – namely, on
March 20, when Faust was screened again.
Now I noticed the tender and proud face
of Gretchen, played by Camilla Horn;
the wonderful affectation of Mephisto,
played by Emil Jannings; and the down-toearthnessof Gösta Ekman’s Faust.
Other movies impressed me more.
I wanted to discover a new world, one I
Volker Schlöndorff circa 1956
did not yet know: The New Babylon, for
example, by Kosinzew and Trauberg. Or
the artistic extreme of Stroheim’s Blind
Husbands, his Wedding March, or Buñuel’s
L’age D’or. And always that deep Germanic
tragedy of fate found in Fritz Lang, the
wickedness of Pabst. But then on one hot
summer evening came Nosferatu. It was
July 2, 1960, at 10:30pm, and my blood
froze in my veins for the misery of those
poor, eternally fleeing souls.
For the first time, I was not just an
observer, but really inside the movie. I had
this feeling soon again in Letzter Mann,
regardless of Jannings’ histrionic performance. What drew me in was the free-roaming camera that went through the revolving
door; what moved me was the old man on
the tiled bathroom floor. He could have
been the brother of Watanabe in Ikiru, or of
– I just realized this – Willy Loman, Arthur
Miller’s salesman.
I didn’t have a lot to translate in Letzter
Mann; there was just one scene title. How
literal Murnau’s movie style, how true
his melodrama – this is something I
understood only later. I experienced these
movies in a state somewhere between fi
John Malkovich, Dustin Hoffman, Volker Schlöndorff, and Michael Ballhaus on
the set of Death of A Salesman
Courtesy of Hanser Verlag and VS DIF Collection
wakefulness and dreaming. Others in the
audience must have felt the same, because
when the lights went on, their silence was
sustained. Only by low whispers and fluttering blinks did we slowly return to the reality
of the shabby movie theater. In the bright
light it was we who looked like ghosts.
It was a tight-knit community, but one
nonetheless divided into sects. Sitting in
the first row – with legs outstretched– were
the purists, the film historians. This group
was further divided into those that followed
the socio-political ideas of Georges Sadouls,
and those that insisted on experiencing
movies simply, according to a purely aesthetic criteria. A few Germans appeared
regularly: Enno Patalas, Frieda Grafe,
and Ulrich Gregor, all of whom borrowed
their criteria from the Frankfurt School,
Rudolph Arnheim, and Siegfried Kracauer.
Lotte Eisner was their idol, and it was she
who introduced us.
In the first third of the movie theater
were the Cahiers du Cinema people, who
always arrived in a small group – collars up,
closed coats, arms crossed, sitting with conspiratorial, dogmatic sternness. Truffaut
was there only on occasion. But Jean-Luc
Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer,
Charles Bitsch – they were there quite often.
Michel Delahaye and Louis Marcorelles
were individualists, outsiders that sometimes came with the Cahiers people and
sometimes with the rival clan of the Positif
people, all centered around Pierre Rissient
and Michel Ciment. They sat with deliberate coolness, sunk deep into their seats,
legs hanging over the back of the row in
front of them. They celebrated the sensuality of the movie, the adventurousness of the
great Western filmmakers, and the women,
who were not just beautiful but, of course,
“heavenly, sublime, eternal, fantastic, phantasmagorical, otherworldly” – no matter if
they were Louise Brooks, Rita Hayworth,
Ida Lupino, or Gloria Graham.
As long as it was dark in the movie
theater, we were all under a spell, like the
school class in Fellini’s Amarcord – the
theater, a dark womb. But as soon as the
lights went on, the rude insults began
to fly. They called each other troglodytes,
cavemen, lobotomized idiots, traitors, and
criminals, because they differed in their
analyses of the movies and their authors.
This intensified into show fights and dialectical theater battles whenever the director
Henri Langlois and his companion Marie
Meerson introduced esteemed guests after
a movie: Abel Gance, Fritz Lang, William
Courtesy of Hanser Verlag and Bioskop
Filming of Michael Kohlhaas, 1968: Volker Schlöndorff, David Warner
Wyler, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and, one
time, even Jean Renoir.
The great American filmmakers were
impressive because of their silence. They
didn’t have to add any message, testimony,
or “deeper meaning” to their movies. It
took years until they took the admiration of
their French intellectual fans seriously.
At one opening, the greats Fritz Lang
and Luis Buñuel were both present. Lotte
Eisner wanted so badly to introduce them.
She said to Buñuel, “Look, over there! It’s
Fritz Lang.” And standing next to Fritz
Lang, she gestured towards Buñuel. But
because one of them was blind and the
other one deaf, neither one of these masters
of sight and sound could acknowledge the
other. µ
Volker Schlöndorff, the renowned German
filmmaker, is a trustee of the American
Academy in Berlin. This adapted English
translation is from his new autobiography,
Licht, Schatten und Bewegung, (Hanser
Verlag, 2008). Translation by Tanja Maka
and R.Jay Magill, Jr.
Hello
Culture creates
the closest bonds.
Wir freuen uns mit der American Academy
über das kulturelle Miteinander.
History from Things
How everyday objects lead one historian to her craft
By Leora Auslander
Shinique Smith, Untitled (Rodeo Beach Bundle), 2007
© Shinique Smith. Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert New York, Paris, London
A
t age fif t een I wanted to become
a historian; I can still remember
why. My family lived and traveled
abroad extensively, and I keep in my mind’s
eye the views from various bedroom windows: the beautiful oak tree I saw from
my bed in our suburban New England
home; pigeons free-falling from a neighboring apartment building in Paris’s 14th
arrondissement; shards of broken glass
atop the wall surrounding the house we
inhabited briefly in Mexico City’s Zona
Rosa; the red roses blooming, to my amazement, in Montevideo’s mild winter; the feet,
wheels, and occasional hooves that passed
by our basement flat in London.
With each new home not only did these
intimate views change, but so did what I
experienced as I walked to school. In some
places I followed paths through a built
environment little more than a century old;
in others, that daily route took me in front
of buildings standing for seven or eight
hundred years. In some places, the human-
many other Jews, I could often distinguish
Jews from non-Jews by their carriage, clothing, and speech styles, as we moved around
the world. I was also fascinated (and, of
course, hurt) by the frequently shocked
reactions of my non-Jewish friends when
they encountered my observance of a version of Jewish dietary law. Why did how
one dressed, what one ate, whether one
shook hands or embraced (or didn’t touch
at all) upon greeting and parting, silently
and unconsciously build either unity or
mistrust?
It was to answer those basic – and,
I would later learn, complex – questions
that I became a historian. In retrospect I
should perhaps have chosen anthropology,
but as a teenager I didn’t know exactly what
that was. By the time I reached college I
was stubbornly committed to the historical
profession. And as a young Jewish woman
from suburban Boston who was fascinated
by difference, I chose to study a past that
reflected that interest: medieval Christian
Did kids who grew up protected by aggressive glass
or who looked through barred windows become different
from those who saw trees or plummeting pigeons?
made cohabited with the natural world; in
others it overwhelmed it. I came to wonder
as an adolescent about the impact of these
different views: were Europeans somehow
different from North and South Americans
because their built environment was so
old? Because there was no more wilderness? How did encounters with a cathedral
influence a person’s sense of time, of place,
and of God? Did kids who grew up protected by aggressive glass or who had to look
through barred windows become different
from those who saw trees or plummeting
pigeons?
Equally striking to me then was the
salience of the passing elements of material culture and everyday life – clothing,
food, posture, gestures – that would make
people either belong to or not belong to a
certain group. Some things were national:
one could identify North Americans from
a block away on the streets of Mexico City,
Tel Aviv, Paris, or Aachen. They didn’t
dress, walk, stand, or gesture in the same
way as those who had grown up in those cities. Some of the affinities and boundaries
between people were transnational. Having
grown up in a Jewish household, and sometimes in neighborhoods where there were
Western Europe. Its distance from the contemporary United States was one source of
attraction; another was the relative paucity
of written sources. That I found the scarcity
of documentary texts a positive feature of
the medieval period may appear perverse,
since it obviously limits the issues that can
be addressed.
When historians seek an answer to a
question, they most often turn to texts. The
nature and content of queries are also, of
course, profoundly but unconsciously influenced by the primacy of the evidentiary
word. Once the research is done, the results
are also reported in prose. Historians
tend to pay relatively little attention to the
visual and spatial qualities of the texts they
generate. They may include images, but if
so, those will most often be illustrations
of the arguments made verbally; rarely are
visual materials used to convince. Graduate
students are trained to use an archive, decipher challenging handwriting, and read
texts critically; they are not usually taught
how to interpret space, place, object, building, or image. While these generalizations
hold for historians who lived during the
early modern and modern periods, they do
not for historians of the ancient and fi
medieval periods in Europe, nor for those
of pre-colonial Africa or South, Central,
and North America. Among Europeanists,
medievalists have tended to be far more
eclectic in their source base than most.
Studying Medieval and Renaissance
Studies at the University of Michigan as
an undergraduate, I was allowed to roam
among buildings, listen to music, enjoy
illuminated manuscripts and tapestries.
The distance from the world in which I
actually lived, however, became less appealing to me as I grew older and more politically engaged. After a year of graduate study as
a medievalist, I decided to leave academia –
permanently, I thought at the time – to seek
more direct engagement with material culture and politics. I decided to learn a trade,
with an eye towards becoming involved in
union organizing and other forms of collective action. I began working as a cabinetmaker in a factory near Boston.
It was the early 1980s, and I assumed
that my co-workers would be contesting
hours, wages, and working conditions
through union organizing. I soon discovered, however, that although they would
have appreciated improved material circumstances, they were far more distraught
about the aesthetic failure of their labor.
They found the objects we made ugly,
devoid of artistry or imagination, and useless. The workers’ response to this form of
the alienation of labor was not to organize
collectively but to stay in the factory after
hours, using the machines and stealing
wood to make things they considered
beautiful and useful. Two colleagues built
guitars – one acoustic, the other electric –
while another crafted a maple sled with
runner carved from bubinga, an African
wood. A fourth even redid the interior of
his ’72 Ford in mahogany veneer. It was
these objects that established respect
among the workers in the factory and
gave them satisfaction, these objects that
allowed them to talk with pride about their
mastery. I eventually moved on to other
cabinetmaking jobs, but my co-workers
at F. W. Dixon left me with the question
that continues to drive my work today:
what are people really doing when they
design, make, buy, sell, use, destroy, and
write about or sketch objects of style, that
is, objects that are not purely functional?
To put it simply: what do things mean? It
was the same question I had been asking
myself for decades.
So I went back to academia. And in trying to puzzle out this question over my
career, I can say that I have come the closest to something resembling a satisfying
answer by studying the work of scholars
of the mind, including psychoanalysts,
psychologists, and phenomenologicallyinclined philosophers. They all start with
an assumption that there are certain traits
shared by human beings across time and
space resulting from our universal embodiedness. Because we are all born small and
dependent, grow and mature relatively
slowly, and eventually die, and because we
exist in three-dimensions and possess five
senses, we share a common relation to the
material world. One crucial shared attribute resulting from this form of embodiedness is a need for objects: human beings
need things to individuate, differentiate,
and identify; human beings need things to
express and communicate the unsaid and
the unsayable; human beings need things
to situate themselves in space and time, as
extensions of the body (and to compensate
for the body’s limits), as well as for sensory
pleasure; human beings need objects to
effectively remember and forget; we need
objects to cope with absence, loss, and
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death. These things carry such affective
weight that in virtually all societies, key
transitional moments – birth and birthdays,
coming of age ceremonies, weddings, and
nent loss by death, often lodge the mourned
person in his or her left-behind clothing.
This is an ambivalent relation, however. We
expect things to outlive us, embodying and
Historians seeking to understand the meanings of
migration, war, and natural disaster may find in the evidence
of things a guide to how such events were lived.
deaths – are marked by the transmission
of objects.
“Transitional objects” – most famously
Linus’ blanket in the Peanuts cartoon – provide a clear and familiar example of coping with absence. These objects literally
embody absent parents until the child is
able to keep the parents securely present in
his or her mind’s eye. The panic generated
by even the temporary loss of these objects
is such that parents become as obsessed
with them as their children and look forward to the moment when they will no
longer be needed. It is not so certain, however, that people ever outgrow their need
to transmute into objects those they love.
These materializations of love objects only
change form. Adult psyches, facing perma-
carrying a trace of our physical selves into
a future in which we are no longer present.
Yet the continued existence of intimately
used objects – pens, eyeglasses, jewelry,
toothbrushes – can be both cruel and comforting. In the short-term they move us to
tears; in the long-term they provide a sensory experience of continued contact. The
rings I never take off, which belonged to
my dead grandmothers, provide a daily connection to them, as if our fingers could still
touch. A novelist’s account of a forsaken
lover taking a pair of scissors to a closetful of left-behind clothes is an economical,
instantly comprehensible way to communicate the character’s rage and despair.
The absent or dead do of course live on in
memory, but a dematerialized memory is
both fragile and unsatisfying to human
beings who are, after all, of flesh and blood.
Even in literate societies, people use (and
need) three-dimensional objects, as well
as familiar sights and smells, as memorycues – souvenirs in the most literal sense.
Historians seeking to understand the
meanings of migration, war, natural disaster, and even of urban renewal may find in
the evidence of things a guide to how such
events were lived by their protagonists.
Struggles against the loss of even terribly
dilapidated housing, claims for the restitution of lost homes and lost property, and
dangers risked by refugees to carry “mere”
things with them would be more accurately
interpreted if historians took the psychological meanings of objects and homes more
seriously. In my own work, most recently on
French and German Jews reclaiming their
ransacked possessions after World War II,
I have tried to honor the memories that
objects make and contain by doing so. µ
Leora Auslander is a professor of
European Social History at the
University of Chicago and the fall
2008 Berthold Leibinger Fellow at the
American Academy.
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The Colonels’ War
Prior to becoming official policy, the Surge plan in Iraq had been in operation for four
years – but nobody in Washington was listening
Courtesy of US Army
By Lawrence F. Kaplan
US Army meeting with Sons of Iraq leaders in southern Baghdad. Photograph by staff sgt. brent williams
F
or a ll t he euphori a that has
accompanied the elevation of General
David Petraeus and the success of his
“surge” strategy in Iraq, for years prior, less
senior commanders – typically colonels,
commanding brigades, or battalions – had
been translating the essential tenets of
his counterinsurgency manual into facts
on the ground. Yet most of these success
stories, because they ran counter to the
earlier policy of “standing down” (handing
over control to Iraqi forces, often without
condition and regardless of consequence),
were purposefully discounted. As Colonel
Pete Mansoor, a member of Petraeus’ brain
trust, summarized the era before his boss
arrived in Baghdad: “Our forces were
poorly positioned, on large bases, unable to
protect the Iraqi people.”
The assertion contains a kernel of truth,
but just that. America’s problem in Iraq
was never a lack of military prowess. The
problem was confusion – at the top – over
how to use it. The laissez-faire policies
embraced by Generals Ricardo Sanchez
and George Casey created a self-defeating
tautology in the management of the war.
On the one hand, and because it was so
entirely disconnected from reality, the
guidance to “stand down” all but forced
commanders to innovate. With no strategy
to guide them because no strategy had
been offered, Army colonels operated on
T
he t w ist ed roa d to the surge
begins, even by the account of
Petraeus supporters, two years before
he assumed command, in a small city
along the Syrian border in northwest Iraq.
Until recently, the better units in Iraq multiplied in direct proportion to their distance
from the war managers in Baghdad, and
in 2005 that was very much the case in Tal
Afar, where the Third Armored Cavarly
stations across the province fell to insurgent attacks, and Tal Afar itself fell under
guerilla control. On the western side of
the city, tension between Sunni and Shiite
tribes escalated into open warfare. The
remnant of the Shiite-dominated police
force launched brutal reprisals against
the population. Forces loyal to Abu-Musab
Zarqawi moved into the city, mounting
their own campaign of atrocities: killing
Courtesy of US Army
their own, their brigades fighting their
own wars – some successfully, others
disastrously. One would patrol constantly;
another would never leave the wire; and
another would get things just right. On the
other hand, when innovations did result,
they would be minimized, ignored, or summarily dismissed.
That is, until Gen. Petraeus finally
enshrined them in official policy. Alas,
CAPTION
US and iraqi special operations preparing for an air assault. photograph by army specialist michael howard
he did so about four years too late. Hence,
the awful question that may double as the
epitaph of the US enterprise in Iraq: What
if there was one true path all along? If there
was, historians will trace it back through
Ramadi in 2006 and Tal Afar in 2005.
These places and others – Mosul, South
Baghdad, Sinjar – shared this: commanders who walked away from Army doctrine,
becoming, in effect, strangers to their own
tradition.
Regiment (3d acr) had planted itself in the
center of the city.
For a glimpse of what Iraq looked like
under the “stand down” strategy, one
need to have looked no farther than Tal
Afar, where, in 2004, the Americans did
exactly that. The city, like Fallujah before
it, quickly descended into a horror show.
With only 400 soldiers from the 25th
Infantry Division patrolling the roughly
10,000-square-mile sector around it, police
patients in the local hospital and beheading
hostages. Then, in September 2005, the
cavalry arrived.
Police headquarters in Tal Afar is located
on the grounds of a centuries-old Ottoman
castle, which sits on a large hill in the center of the city. From its parapets, one can
usually see the entire city, but on this particular wintry day in late 2005, it is pouring rain, and even tanks slide in the mud.
The castle houses Tal Afar’s mayor, fi
Courtesy of US Army
MAnned us checkpoint. photograph by staff sgt. tony white
Najim Abdullah Jabouri. The power has
gone out, and it’s freezing and nearly pitch
black, but Najim seems relieved just to
be here. Only a few months ago, he says,
“Zarqawi was ejecting Shia from the city
and the sky; it was raining mortars.” Today,
3d acr has Tal Afar locked down, with
tanks on street corners and patrols crisscrossing the city. “The American Army is
mediator and judge,” the mayor says. “It
is a higher authority than any institution
in Iraq.” So desperate, in fact, is the mayor
to block 3d acr from leaving that he has
penned a letter to President Bush, pleading
for the unit to stay. “We are under-trained,”
he explains. “[We’re] nowhere near the
situation where we can take care of our
own responsibilities.” One hears the point
constantly. But it’s given fresh punctuation when the Iraqi Police and the Iraqi
Army open fire on each other outside the
castle gate.
Still, the violence in
Tal Afar has declined
sharply. Following 3d acr’s
operation to retake the city,
attacks dropped immediately from seven per day
to one. At first the city’s
Sunni leaders refused to
cooperate with US forces,
citing the brutality of a
Shiite commando brigade
operating in the area. The
commander of 3d acr,
Col. H.R. McMaster, had
the brigade pulled back,
and he released detainees
the sheiks would vouch
for. In addition, explains
Lt. Col. Christopher Hickey,
whose Sabre Squadron
operates out of the castle
that houses police headquarters, “I knew I needed
Sunni police to get information from the population.” After pressing local
leaders to encourage police
recruits, Sunnis began to
sign up; eventually their
ranks swelled an exclusively Shia force of 200
into a majority Sunni force
of 1700. And, as Hickey
predicted, intelligence
tips began flowing in. The
regiment also poured millions of dollars into the city,
funding water, electricity,
school, and cleanup projects. At the same time, it
embedded advisers with
Iraqi army and police units.
Personnel lived among
Iraqi platoons and among
the population itself, having fanned out across the
city and establishing 29
patrol bases – including
directly between warring
Sunni and Shiite tribes.
Having melted into a once-hostile
population center, the Americans became
an essential part of the landscape – their
own tribe, in effect. Seen from a helicopter
roaring above Nineveh province, telephone
wires provide the only evidence of modernity among the ancient forts, castles, and clay
huts that dot the plain below. In this primitive universe, it’s easy to confuse the door
gunners, their aviation helmets embla-
zoned with Superman logos, with the real
thing – which some Iraqis did: the Yazedi,
a regal and persecuted people living in
Ninevah, wedged between tribes of Sunnis
Arabs, Turkomen, Shia, and Kurds, initially
confused the arrival of the Americans with
the Second Coming.
To be sure, 3d acr, which a Pentagon
review of dozens of units in Iraq rated
as the most adept at counterinsurgency,
hardly counts as a typical unit. There is,
to begin with, the commander himself,
whom, but for the fact of his existence,
only a novelist could invent. Col. McMaster
is an Army legend three-times over – for
decimating a Republican Guard division
as a tank company commander during
the Gulf War, as the author of a canonical
text within the ranks (Dereliction of Duty,
a bestseller that scored the Joint Chiefs of
Staff for not challenging Lyndon Johnson’s
march to war in Vietnam), and now for
pacifying Tal Afar. With his raspy voice,
profane mouth, and head shaved bald, he
bears a closer likeness to the brusque officers that Robert Duvall brought to life in
Apocalypse Now and The Great Santini than
to the tweedy scholar on the book jacket
that made him famous.
When it comes to the operational realm,
McMaster freely concedes to drawing
from the Army’s experience in Vietnam.
“The important thing that emerges from
Vietnam is that the political, economic,
and military have to go together,” he
says. “You have to isolate insurgents from
external support. …You have to provide
security for the population.” Which is
exactly what he did in Tal Afar, having
adapted the principles of counterinsurgency in his unit’s tactics well before the
term returned to favor in Washington. In
an Army that spent three years launching big-unit sweeps, hunkering down in
bases, relying heavily on firepower, and
otherwise heeding then ground commander Gen. Thomas Metz’s admonition
not to “put much energy into trying the old
saying ‘win the hearts and minds,’” 3d acr
did exactly the reverse. In March 2006
President Bush devoted an entire address
to the remote outpost’s lessons, offering it
up as a model for his new “clear, hold, and
build” strategy.
Then an odd thing happened: nothing. Rather than enshrine the lessons
of the city in a coherent approach to the
war, officials in Washington and Baghdad
argued that US forces were supposed to
be moving out of the cities, not into them.
In any case, the counterinsurgency template in Tal Afar could never be duplicated
outside of Tal Afar. But it could – and it
was. Anbar province, which America’s
Baghdad-centric policy always regarded as
something of an outlier, offered a prime
example. In August 2006, Marine colonel
Peter Devlin authored a subsequently
leaked report – “State of the Insurgency in
Al-Anbar” – which described al-Qaeda as
an “integral part of the social fabric” and
cautioned that “nearly all government
institutions from the village to provincial
levels have disintegrated or have been
thoroughly corrupted and infiltrated
by al-Qaeda in Iraq.” Applying textbook
methods of counterinsurgency to Anbar’s
capital, the 1st Brigade Combat Team,
1st Armored Division (1-1AD) reversed
the trend.
I
t ’s now t he second week of
December 2006, yet apart from a palm
tree strung with Christmas lights outside the headquarters of 1-1AD, Ramadi
shows no trace of the season. But at the
house of Sheik Abdul Sittar, nothing can
interrupt the festive spirit, or the sheik.
Waving a lit cigarette, the former al-Qaeda
assures the sheik, who’s so busy shouting and being shouted at that it isn’t clear
he actually hears the soft-spoken colonel: “So, um, get your men inside so we
don’t hit them.” In the space of a couple
of minutes, radio antennae relay a flurry
of coordinates; one of the Marine F-18’s
always on station above Ramadi banks
toward the insurgents; a 500-pound bomb
incinerates them; smoke swirls. As Sittar
paces the courtyard with his walkie-talkie,
broadcasting orders for an operation his
American counterpart has already brought
to a decisive end, MacFarland surveys the
sand-blown landscape. “The sheik’s a little
bit of a warlord,” he shrugs.
No one directed the colonel to recruit
hitherto enemy sheiks to the American
side, much less to raise a local force with
their tribesmen. He just thought up the
idea and did it. MacFarland has courted
such figures relentlessly. When 1-1AD
arrived in Ramadi in the summer of
2006, six cooperative tribes and twelve
hostile ones welcomed the brigade. By
December it boasted the support of fifteen
and the enmity of just three. Of the tribal
leaders whose allegiance MacFarland
has gained, Sittar wields by far the most
America’s problem in Iraq was never a lack of military
prowess. The problem was confusion – at the top –
over how to use it.
ally has been advertising his fealty to the
American cause for nearly an hour now. He
insists his militia be set loose alongside the
Marine river patrols that ply the Euphrates
each night. “We burn the terrorist boats
now!” Sittar shouts. Army Colonel Sean
MacFarland, a lanky man from upstate New
York with an uncommonly self-effacing
demeanor for a brigade commander, gently
declines the offer. “Then give me one helicopter,” the sheik suggests. “We will fight
in Baghdad!” Encouraged by MacFarland’s
chuckles, Sittar claps excitedly. “After
that, we fight in Afghanistan, we fight in
Darfur!”
Alas, Sittar’s military challenges run
somewhat closer to home. Even as he
offers MacFarland his transcontinental
assistance, the sheik’s walkie-talkie
crackles and panicked tribesmen on
the other end relay news of insurgents
besieging them at a nearby police station. MacFarland gestures quietly toward
a captain across the room, who hurries
outside. “We’ll bring in air,” MacFarland
power. The sheik heads up an alliance
called the “Awakening,” a collection of
Anbar tribes who have thrown in their
lot with the Americans. Seated beneath
the Awakening’s gilded flag, which he
designed and which features a sword,
scales of justice, and less explicably, a
coffee pot, he recounts his three arrests
by the Americans. How, then, was he
converted to the cause of his one-time jailers? Sittar credits al-Qaeda’s excesses in
Ramadi – including the murder of two of
his brothers (Sittar himself was murdered
in 2007) – and the fact that “the old US
leadership here was a disaster, but now the
Americans work with us.”
Another of Ramadi’s powerful sheiks,
Ahmed Bezia – who, unlike Sittar, favors
Western attire and has built himself a
full-scale replica of 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue, albeit painted salmon – explains
that, in a gathering of Ramadi’s elders, the
sheiks signed a document pledging, in
Ahmed’s words, “that any US losses are
tribal losses.” And, indeed, later at his fi
headquarters, MacFarland displays a map
of Ramadi color-coded to reflect tribal
boundaries. Pointing to the Western outskirts of Ramadi, he explains, “We were
hit almost every day in these places before
[the alliance], but we haven’t been hit
there in months.” Pressed on the wisdom
of essentially handing Ramadi over to
militias with no allegiance to the central
government in Baghdad, MacFarland says
simply, “There is no government here.”
A
t t he t ime, Gen. Pe t r a eus’s
yet-to-be published counterinsurgency manual advised recruiting
police forces from the local population,
but MacFarland had already taken the
practice to its furthest boundary in
Ramadi, where tribes even had their
own police stations. The success of the
strategy could be gleaned in the number
of recruits swelling the ranks, which
contained 140 officers in May and by
December boasted over 2000. To check
on their progress, Lt. Col. Jim Lechner – a
squat, bulldog of a commander whom
MacFarland plucked from a tank and
installed as his deputy and chief diplomat – leads a patrol to Ramadi’s al-Jazeera
police station.
A few months ago a suicide bomber
ignited an oil-truck at al-Jazeera’s gate,
drenching the station – along with its
Iraqi and American tenants – in burning fuel. 1-1AD would soon christen a
new station here, but, in the meantime,
Ramadi’s police chiefs have gathered for
a meeting down by the river, about a mile
away. Lechner sets off on foot, proceeding down a dirt road that winds through
a dried-up orange grove and toward the
bank of the Euphrates, where a dozen or
so police chiefs wait in a circle of plastic
chairs. They set on Lechner, complaining
that Baghdad refuses to pay their latest
recruits. “I am Sheik Sittar’s cousin,” one
shouts. “I represent him!” The chiefs
crowd closer, but Lechner seems unfazed.
“This is nothing, a tantrum,” Lechner says.
“I’ve had a hundred of them throw their
weapons in the dirt.” Even this low-grade
riot conceals progress: in a war where
police recruiting drives often do not generate a single applicant, the day’s uproar
comes as the result of a recruiting glut.
In Tom Ricks’ book Fiasco, 82nd
Airborne Division commander Maj. Gen.
Charles Swannack recounts how he cautioned that “al-Anbar province wasn’t
ready for [a counterinsurgency campaign],
and may [never] be, because they didn’t
want us downtown.” Taking a cue from
McMaster, though, MacFarland has
upended Swannack’s admonition, putting nearly all of his combat forces in the
downtown of Anbar’s most dangerous
city. The logic is straightforward: the path
to defeating an insurgency runs through
the population, without whose support
insurgents can be forced to fight in the
open. Securing control of the population
depends, in turn, on guaranteeing its
physical security and – through social programs, civic assistance, and the like – its
“hearts and minds.”
Another patrol through Ramadi neatly
illustrates how the theory works. The
areas where 1-1AD has yet to erect combat
outposts (cops) contain no trace of life
whatsoever. En route to cop Falcon in
western Ramadi, the landscape resembles
one of those aerial photos of Berlin in
1945. Only, seen from the ground, the
devastation appears even more thorough.
Then something unreal happens: a block
of utter devastation gives way to a block
that bustles with shops, women carrying
bags of groceries – the everyday vibrancy
of a living community.
W
h at McM a st er accomplished
in Tal Afar and MacFarland
achieved in Ramadi eventually
will become the basis for a theater-wide
counterinsurgency strategy that, by
early 2008, begins to generate indisputable battlefield successes. With the
operational clock in Iraq and the political clock in Washington so badly out of
sync, however, time had nearly run out in
the United States. Where all this leads is
clear. Writing in Parameters, the journal
of the Army War College, Col. Stuart
Herrington (Ret.), notes that “having
wasted more than three years (until 1968)
pursuing a flawed strategy, the Pentagon
lost the support of the American population, and was not given the time to get it
right, even when it was clear that General
Creighton Abrams’ pacification and
Vietnamization approach might have
worked.”
Herrington does not blame the
American public, but rather the three
wasted years that collapsed its will. In Iraq,
too, the Army leadership wasted more
than three years pursuing a flawed strategy – this, even as it refused to acknowledge that commanders like McMaster
Then something unreal happens: a block of utter devastation
gives way to a block that bustles with shops, women
carrying bags of groceries – the everyday vibrancy of a
living community.
cop Falcon, which consists of a couple
of abandoned homes and a row of tanks
parked in a bulldozed clearing, oversees
the avenue, guaranteeing its security and
functioning as a magnet for daily life. In
the days after the cop was first established,
explains Captain Michael Bajema, “we had
taxis full of gunmen, fifty at a time, coming
at us.” But the violence receded once the
next cop went up a few blocks away. It’s
a familiar pattern: the insurgents contest
each new cop – MacFarland has built 24 in
all – but eventually fall back to areas with
no American presence. Now, says Bajema,
“people tell us where ieds are, who planted
them, everything.” Since 1-1AD’s arrival,
enemy attacks have declined by 40 percent,
ied attacks by 60 percent. Tellingly, the
violence now centers around the only two
neighborhoods where the brigade has
yet to install cops – a shrinking zone, as
Americans now control 80 percent of the
city, compared to the 15 percent when 1-1AD
first arrived.
and MacFarland had been employing the
correct approach from the outset. By the
time the generals noticed, it was too late.
With the American public exhausted, the
solution to the war in Iraq could no longer
be found in the realm of technique, or anywhere else. µ
Lawrence F. Kaplan is the editor of World
Affairs and the author of a forthcoming
book about four US Army brigades in
Iraq. He was a David Rubenstein Foreign
Policy Forum Distinguished Visitor at the
American Academy in spring 2008.
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A CUT FROM
THE LOST
An alternate ending for Aunt Ester and Uncle Shmiel
Courtesy of the artist and the guggenheim museum
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Rachel Rabhan, The Garden of Eden: Adam + Eve
S
hmiel , of course, w e know a little
Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost:
by this point. In the prime of his life
A Search for Six of Six Million,
he was haughty, a bit of a show-off, a
traces the author’s jourman who liked to be noticed, who enjoys
ney over four continents,
being a somebody in the town, the head
of
the butchers’ cartel, a man who doesn’t
thirteen countries, and five
mind if people’s nickname for him is the
years, as he tried to learn
Król, the king, a person who very likely
precisely what happened to
thought, until the very end, that returning
his great-uncle Shmiel Jäger
to Bolechow from New York was the best
decision
he’d ever made. He was tall, as
and his family, a family of
was (we now know) his second daughter,
Jews living in eastern Poland,
Frydka. Later on, as we also know, things
during the Holocaust. In
became difficult, and to this difficult period belongs the Shmiel of the letters, a vivid
the following passage – cut
if perhaps a slightly less appealing figure
from the final manuscript
than the earlier, more grandiose figure, a
and published here for the
middle-aged and prematurely white-haired
first time – Mendelsohn
businessman and the brother, cousin,
mishpuchah to his many correspondents
interrupts his historical
in New York, with whom he was reduced,
account of Shmiel and his
as time went on, to pleading, hectoring,
wife, Ester, to imagine, briefly,
cajoling rather desperately and, it must
an alternative fate for the
be said, a little pathetically as he tried to
find a way to preserve his family or, indeed,
pair:
even a small part of it, the children, even
one daughter, the dear Lorka. (Why her?
Because she was the oldest? Because she
was the favorite? Impossible to know, now.)
Still, at least it’s possible to hear
Shmiel’s voice, through the letters. Of
his wife, our great-aunt Ester, very little
remains, now – at least in part because
years ago, in my grandfather’s Miami
Beach, I didn’t want to talk to a woman
called Minnie Spieler who (as I learned by
accident, thirty years later) was Ester’s sister. Having now talked to every living per-
I can now report that
almost nothing remains
of this woman, apart from
a handful of snapshots
and the fact that someone
had said she was very warm
and friendly.
son still alive who had the opportunity to
see and know her, however obliquely, I can
now report that almost nothing remains of
this woman, apart from a handful of snapshots and the fact that someone had said
she was very warm and friendly; a woman
who, I can’t help thinking as I contemplate
the utter erasure of her life, would, in the
normal course of things, have died of (let’s
politkommunik ation
presse arbeit rednervermit tlung
medientraining
I=??OCi^DÜNaejd]n`popn]£a0-Ü-,--3>anhejÜPahabkj'05/,.403.2),0ÜPahab]t),2,Üi]eh<i]__o*aqÜsss*i]__o*aq
say) colon cancer in a hospital in Lwów
in – I’ll won’t be overly generous here –
1973, at the age of 77, having only once
made the long and difficult journey to the
United States, in (say) 1969, a trip made
not without certain exasperating bureaucratic frustrations typical of Communist
Poland, the country in which Bolechów
ended up, frustrations about which she
and Shmiel (who at 78 is a bit stooped and
quite deaf and, although nobody knows it
yet, riddled with the pancreatic cancer that
will kill him two months after they return
home to Bolechów) will have everyone
laughing uproariously at my mother’s
kitchen table on Long Island during
the big family reunion that my mother
organizes, that day in 1969, to welcome
to America the storied Uncle Shmiel and
Aunt Ester, Uncle Shmiel who went back
to the old c ountry!, my grandfather always
says of his beloved older brother, laughing
with a little incredulous shake of his head;
the big welcome that my mother hosts
that day, with the platters of smoked fishes
and the glasses of whiskey and schnaps
and my grandfather and Shmiel sitting on
the sofa
in the
room and choking
S_City 27.08.2008
16:29
Uhrliving
Seite 2
with laughter over some shared memory
of their childhood, or about something
poor gluttonous Uncle Julius, the nebukhl
of the family, has said as he wolfs down
stuffed cabbage in the kitchen; a visit
during which – because I am only nine at
the time, because I haven’t yet been bar
mitzvahed and pricked by a strange curiosity that will, one day, change my life – I
avoid these old people and their irritating
because I haven’t yet been
bar mitzvahed and pricked
by a strange curiosity that
will, one day, change my life –
I avoid these old people and
their irritating tendency to
clasp and clutch me.
tendency to clasp and clutch me and to
remark, gasping a little stagily, that when
Shmiel was a little yingling of my age he
looked just like me; a remark that Uncle
Shmiel overhears with no little pleasure
on this particular occasion and, having
heard it, raises his white head and looks
to see where I’m standing and, finding
me, gives me an indulgent, knowing look
with the eyes that are the same blue as
mine before turning his head and returning to the conversation he is having with
my grandfather in a Yiddish that I do not
understand.
So there is very little that remains of
Aunt Ester on the face of the wide world
today – a face much of which I have looked
at from above, during the trips I made
to find something out about her – very
little of what Aunt Ester had been during
the 46 years she lived, 46 years in which
she was born and grew up and fell in
love and married and bore four children,
46 unknown and, now, unknowable years
before she disappears from sight during
the first few days of (almost certainly)
September, 1942, when – for of course this
is what really happened – she was dragged
from her home and loaded onto a cattle car
that bore her to Belzec and the gas. µ
Daniel Mendelsohn, a Richard C.
Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor at the
Academy in spring 2008, is the Charles
Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at
Bard College in New York.
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Notebook of the American Academy in Berlin | Number Seventeen | Fall 2008
On the Waterfront
News from the Hans Arnhold Center
N1Academy Notebook: George
H.W. Bush is awarded the
2008 Henry A. Kissinger
Prize – the personal laudatio
by Dr. Kissinger
N5Academy Notebook: Three
new Trustees at the American
Academy in Berlin
N6Sketches & Dispatches: Reports
on visits from Bill Baker, Mitch
Epstein, Michael Stolleis, Paul
Krugman, and a celebration of
trustee Nina von Maltzahn
N11Life & Letters: Academy
Fellows and their projects,
plus a preview of the spring
2009 class, recent alumni
books, and the fall calendar
Honoring George H.W. Bush
The 2008 Henry A. Kissinger Prize — and the personal laudatio
greatly admires – and yet it has
happened.
It is a symbol of what has been
achieved by several generations
who made their dreams become
reality. Among those people,
nobody has contributed more
than our honoree today. The task
of any national leader – or the
leader of any organization – is to
help move his society from where
it is to where it has never been.
This movement is often described
as the difference between idealists and realists, but the art of
leading societies depends first
on understanding the necessities
© Hornischer
M
r . Pr esiden t,
President von
Weizsäcker, distinguished guests, when I look at
this assemblage and see so many
friends, colleagues, and comrades of joint efforts, I am deeply
honored to be able to say a few
words about our honoree.
When my family left
Germany in 1938, it would have
been an impossible dream to
think that their son would one
day participate in a ceremony
honoring a former president
of the United States, whom he
knows personally and admires,
in the presence of a former president of Germany, whom he also
Henry A. Kissinger, Richard C. Holbrooke,
» continued on Page N2
Gabriela von Habsburg, and George H.W. Bush
Epstein’s Berlin
Bacteria and the Bridge
A native New Yorker discovers the German capital
Nobel prize winner fights for Dresden’s cultural heritage
S
ince he came to the
American Academy as
a fellow in January, he
hasn’t seen too much sun.
Instead, he’s seen many other
things: the Olympic Stadium,
the Tempelhof Airport, and the
German Treasury Department,
where the Imperial Air Ministry
once sat before it became the
House of the Ministries of the
gdr and, following reunification,
the Treuhand. Places where the
Jewish-American discovers the
multiple layers of Germany’s past
and present. The photographer
explored the city, read a pile of
books, did Internet research, and
talked to people. And he has done
what he didn’t want to do: photograph Berlin. At first, he was just
grateful to get the opportunity to
escape the routine, to get to some
space between himself and his
G
ün t er Blobel is outraged. Tonight at the
American Academy in
Berlin, the Rockefeller University
cell researcher disproves the
prejudice that scientists are dry,
calculating people with no sense
of humor.
The reason for Blobel’s
anger has the harmless name
“Waldschlösschenbrücke,” a
24-meter-long, four-lane highway that is supposed to relieve
the traffic on Dresden’s other
bridges. As it would lead through
the idyllic Elbe river valley, however, dispute over the project is
dividing the city.
Blobel, a Nobel Prize winner who immigrated to the US,
is a declared – and likely the
most influential – opponent of
the planned bridge. Ever since
he witnessed the destruction
N2 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
All photos © Hornischer
• Academy Notebook •
1.
Honoring George H.W. Bush
» continued from N1
and then moving to goals beyond
the immediate.
I mention this because
President Bush, throughout the
decades in which I have observed
public life, has made an extraordinary contribution to this task.
I heard him say once that when
he came home from school after
some sporting event and told
his mother what he had accomplished, his mother said that
there is no “I” in the word “team.”
He has contributed to the elevation of our society not only by the
actions which I will describe in a
moment, but also by the quality
of his personality. He described
his convictions as follows:
“Everything I learned from history and from my father, Prescott
Bush, along with everything I
valued from my service in the
Navy, reinforced the words ‘duty,’
‘honor,’ and ‘country.’ I believe
one’s duty is to serve the country.
It was difficult for me to give dramatic speeches on my vision for
the nation. I was certain, however,
that results which could lead to
a more peaceful world would be
far better than trying to convince
people through rhetoric.”
This conviction is exactly why
we are here tonight.
There is some discussion
among historians about who won,
or who was most responsible
for winning, the cold war. But
there can be little debate about
who led the transition from the
cold war to the world in which
we live today. When President
Bush took office he faced not
only the challenge of German
unification, but also a crisis over
the future of Sino-American relations. President Bush faced the
challenge of balancing the necessities of a long-term relationship
with the imperative to stand for
our convictions with respect to
human rights, human dignity,
and democratic values. Without
the fortitude, patience, and wisdom that President Bush showed
in that period, we would not today
be in a world where we can participate in a continuing dialogue
with a growing China.
Almost simultaneously, he
had to deal with a strange evolution in Russia – strange in the
sense that nobody expected
that the Soviet system would
1.George H.W. Bush,
Hans-Dietrich Genscher,
and Klaus Wowereit
2.George H.W. Bush,
Nina von Maltzahn,
and Sue Timken
3.Richard C. Holbrooke,
George H.W. Bush,
Henry kissinger,
Sue Timken,
and William timken, Jr.
4.David Rubenstein,
Richard von Weizsäcker,
Richard C. Holbrooke,
and George H.W. Bush
5.otto graf lambsdorff
and gahl hodges burt
6.Robert M. Kimmitt
and C. Boyden Gray
7.George H.W. Bush
and richard C. holbrooke
All photos © Hornischer
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N3
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
N4 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
7.
disintegrate in the manner that
it did. At that moment, when
it suddenly became obvious
that Eastern Europe could be
liberated, German unification
suddenly became a possibility.
This unification had long been
our goal, though nobody knew
precisely by what road we would
reach it. Nobody could predict
how the various elements of the
international community would
react. Yet President Bush succeeded, first by winning enough
of President Gorbachev’s confidence to permit a dialogue about
a topic which had been inconceivable, practically unmentionable,
and provocative.
And then arose the problem
of the future of Germany. In
1871, when Germany was unified, Disraeli said: “This is a
greater event for the future
of Europe than the French
Revolution.” Suddenly there
emerged in the center of Europe
a unified nation that was stronger than many of its neighbors
and was therefore difficult to
fit into the international community. But now, after the fall
of the Wall, a similar situation
arose: one had always believed
that Russia identified its security
with a physical border. It was
not clear how one would move
from the collapse of the Wall to
the unification of Germany. And
it was not clear, either to us or
to our allies, how Russia would
react. To keep all these elements
moving in the same direction,
and to do it on the basis of cooperation and friendship with
the German government, so
that unification became not the
action of foreign nations deciding Germany’s fate but rather
the action of Germans avowing
their future and i ntegrating into
an international system – that
was a unique performance in
diplomatic history.
This was followed not just by
the collapse of the satellite system but by the disintegration of
the Soviet Union itself, leaving
us with a new problem: how to
deal with a nation that had lost
300 years of its history but at the
same time was an integral part of
the future of Europe and of transatlantic relations.
President Bush could have
retired on these achievements,
but history had its own timetable.
Almost simultaneously with
those events, the disintegration
of the state system in the Middle
East began when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded
Kuwait. As with all these issues,
they look inevitable in retrospect, but they were complex
and at first ambiguous. Under
President Bush’s leadership, it
proved possible to create a coalition to achieve consensus on war
aims and to end aggression in
a manner consistent with the
resolutions of the United Nations.
Almost all of history since that
time has, therefore, had its origin
in the presidency of our honoree.
As he said in the quotation that I mentioned earlier,
President Bush did not choose
to encompass his presidency in
great rhetorical flourish. Indeed,
he thought that rhetorical flourish was a kind of derogation
of duty. But as we assembled
here know, the unification of
Germany and the unification of
Europe would have been much
more difficult without the initiatives taken in Bush’s presidency.
The directions that were set in
our relations with China and
Russia are still those that need
to be pursued. The beginning
of the disintegration of the state
system in the Middle East cannot
– and could not – be rectified in
any relatively short time period,
but it remains before us as a common duty.
So, Mr. President, thank you
for giving me this opportunity to
pay tribute to a great American
and to pay tribute to a common destiny that can never be
completed. We will have to work
together, sometimes agreeing,
sometimes disagreeing, but
always convinced that the perpetuation of our values and the
achievement of our ideals are
not simply personal tasks, but
the efforts of generations. Let
me thank you, Mr. President,
for what you have contributed to
the generations assembled here.
Please allow Mr. Holbrooke and
me to give you this award, which
is being presented by its designer,
Gabriela von Habsburg. Thank
you, Mr. President.
On July 3, 2008 President
George H.W. Bush was
awarded the second annual
Henry A. Kissinger Prize at
the Hans Arnhold Center. The
American Academy in Berlin
would like to express its sincere gratitude to Special Envoy
C. Boyden Gray, who underwrote the evening, and David
Rubenstein, who personally
arranged for our honoree’s
travel to Berlin.
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N5
New Academy Trustees
Lawrence Lessig, Pauline Yu, and Richard Karl Goeltz
A
t t he spr ing 2008
board meeting in Berlin,
the Academy welcomed
three new members: Lawrence
Lessig, Richard Karl Goeltz, and
Pauline Yu.
Until now, just three alumni
have rejoined the American
Academy as trustees: Barbara
Lawrence Lessig
Balaj, Caroline Walker Bynum,
and Michael Geyer. But with the
addition of another, Lawrence
Lessig, a 2007 J.P. Morgan Fellow,
the Academy’s board welcomes
one of the nation’s preeminent
legal experts on constitutional
law, contracts, and the regulation of cyberspace. A professor
at Stanford Law School, Lessig
was named one of Scientific
American’s “Top 50 Visionaries”
and is the founder of two groundbreaking institutes: Stanford Law
School’s Center for Internet and
Society, which explores the evolving field of legal doctrine surrounding the technical innovations of the Internet; and Creative
Commons, a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote innovation and online discourse by
promoting copyright licenses that
allow others to disseminate and
expand upon a creator’s original
work.
Prior to coming to Stanford,
Lessig was the Berkman
Professor of Law at Harvard
Law School, the director of the
Berkman Center for Internet
and Society, and a professor at
the University of Chicago Law
School. He has contributed
regular columns to the Financial
Times, Wired, Red Herring, and
cio Insight and is the author of
four books on technology and
society, including the bestselling Free Culture: How Big Media
Uses Technology and the Law to
Lock Down Creativity (Penguin
Press, 2004). Lessig earned a
BA in economics and a BS in
management from the University
of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from the University of
Cambridge, and a JD from Yale
Law School. While Lessig’s work
has taken him to many institutions, he says of his time as an
Academy fellow: “There is no
better opportunity to work and
understand, anywhere.”
Pauline Yu is deeply familiar with the executive work
necessary to the success of
Pauline Yu
institutions that foster humanistic scholarship and creativity.
Since July 2003 she has been
President of the American
Council of Learned Societies
(acl s), an institution established in 1919 to support the
humanities and social sciences
Richard Karl Goeltz
through individual fellowships,
conference grants, and scholarly
exchange. “I’m delighted to be
joining this very distinguished
Board,” Yu says of her Academy
trusteeship. “I’ll be especially
interested in exploring how to
bring even more outstanding
scholars – particularly in the
humanities – to the Academy,
where the opportunities for
unfettered yet engaged research
are extraordinary.”
Immediately prior to her
assuming the lead role at
acl s, Yu served as Dean of
Humanities in the College
of Letters and Science at the
University of California, Los
Angeles, and as a professor
of East Asian Languages and
Cultures. She has written and
edited five books and dozens
of articles on classical Chinese
poetry, comparative literature,
and literary theory, and she has
received fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, acl s,
and the National Endowment
for the Humanities. Having
completed her undergraduate
degree in history and literature at Harvard University, Yu
now serves on the university’s
Board of Overseers, as well
as on the Board of Trustees
of the National Humanities
Center, the Board of Directors
of the Teagle Foundation, the
Scholars’ Council of the Library
of Congress, and the Board of
Trustees of the Asian Cultural
Council. She received both her
MA and PhD in Comparative
Literature from Stanford
University.
The Academy is pleased to welcome another representative wellversed in the world of business:
Richard Karl Goeltz, who was
Vice Chairman, Chief Financial
Officer, and member of the
Office of the Chief Executive of
the American Express Company
from 1996 to 2000. Prior to
that, he was Chief Financial
Officer and board member of
the NatWest Group from 1992
to 1996. An economics graduate
of Brown College and Columbia
University, Goeltz also held
various finance positions at The
Seagram Company Ltd., including Executive Vice President of
Finance from 1986 to 1992.
“Close, constructive relations between Germany and the
United States,” Goeltz says of his
new role at the Academy, “are
requisite not only for the two
countries but also for the global
community. The American
Academy in Berlin provides a
vital, effective forum for debate
and scholarly analysis, enhancing
mutual understanding, respect,
and cooperation along many
dimensions.” Currently serving
on the Board of Governors for
the London School of Economics,
Goeltz also serves on the Board of
Directors of the Opera Orchestra
of New York, formerly as president, and is an overseer of the
Columbia Business School. He
also serves on the boards of Delta
Air Lines, Aviva, Warnaco Group,
Inc., the Federal Home Loan
Mortgage Corp (Freddie Mac),
and the New Germany Fund.
The Academy wishes to extend
a warm welcome to all three new
members of its board.
N6 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
• Sketches & Dispatches •
Singing Her Praises
The American Academy honors Nina von Maltzahn
S
Berlin, which has since 1994
been strengthening the transatlantic relationship by promoting intellectual and cultural
exchange. At the reception and
dinner in her honor were former
Federal President and co-founder
of the Academy Richard von
Weizsäcker and Brandenburg’s
Secretary of the Interior, Jörg
Schönbohm, among dozens of
other Berlin luminaries.
Before the dinner and the
Curtis musicians’ concert, featuring the music of Bernstein,
Handel, and Schumann, Frau
von Maltzahn stood on the ter-
race of the American Academy’s
Hans Arnhold Center welcoming guests. Everyone knows
each other in the house where
her mother, Ellen Maria
Gorrissen, was raised, and
which now bears the name
of her maternal grandfather,
Hans Arnhold.
Freifrau von Maltzahn was
born in New York, where she
lived for some time before
attending boarding school in
Switzerland. And while she has
been living in Uruguay for the
past thirty years, since becoming involved at the Academy
as a trustee, she visits Berlin
more often.
On Thursday evening she
was honored primarily for her
generous support of the Curtis
Institute, a first-time guest of the
Academy. Asked why she supports the Institute, Freifrau von
Maltzahn raved, “I love music,
I love young people!”
By Florian Höhne
Der Tagesspiegel
June 7, 2008
Translated by Sonja Janositz
© Hornischer
he is a silent donor. Nina
Freifrau von Maltzahn
supports both the SingAkademie zu Berlin and the
Curtis Institute, one of the
world’s leading music schools.
Located in Philadelphia, Curtis
has turned out greats such as
composer Leonard Bernstein and
pianist Lang Lang.
But Freifrau von Maltzahn
is a patron who does not like to
take much credit: “I’m rather
unobtrusive,” she says. On the
evening of June 5, however, she
stood at the center of attention
at the American Academy in
Mikael Eliasen and Rinnat moriah
Dinner guests at the june 5 celebration
Florian Höhne interviewing Nina von Maltzahn
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N7
Jefferson’s Wish
Bill Baker is out to save American media
I
n 2007 American newspapers’ advertising revenues,
which constitute nearly half of
their budgets, declined 5.6 percent. But Internet advertising, a
comparatively new phenomenon,
is already a $21 billion business.
And while only 43 percent of
Americans say that they read a
newspaper yesterday, the average US citizen spends between
four and five hours daily on the
Web. This raises two related questions: have traditional forms of
media become outmoded? If so,
how can they regain a foothold in
American civic life without altering their fundamental character?
In a May 27 speech at the
American Academy, from his
peak atop the American media
landscape, Bill Baker, the longtime head of the Educational
Broadcasting Corporation (ebc),
gave a stern forecast of the fate of
the American press. He advised
that both public and privatesector journalism need to adapt
to the technology and economy
of the century, while looking to
the past for models of frankness,
courage, and integrity. Thomas
Jefferson once rhetorically asked
whether he would choose a “government without newspapers”
or “newspapers without government,” Baker recited. Jefferson
concluded, “I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Baker
would like to see Jefferson’s wish
fulfilled that information, not
authority, be the cornerstone of
free societies.
For 21 years Baker has led the
ebc, championing public broadcasting despite the fiscal challenges that surround journalism
in the twenty-first century. At the
ebc’s helm he has created a number of award-winning programs,
including the Charlie Rose Show
and the local series City Arts,
which received both a Peabody
and an Emmy. Baker is also
recognized as one of the most
prolific fundraisers in America:
he has created a $1 billion endowment, the largest in public television history.
But even this cannot stave off
the danger to free speech that
has occurred over the last decade,
Baker says. This threat comes
from a nexus of influences: the
economic pressures of media
outlets by advertisers, the hulking expense of having a team
of reporters and bureaus, and
the fragmentation of the media
landscape: 500 cable channels,
thousands of blogs, and online
classified ads, a traditional source
of newspaper revenue. In such
an environment, he argues,
democratic fostering is lost to the
drum of ideological voices, each
vying for influence and attention.
The days of Edward R. Murrow,
whose reasoned voice stood up to
Senator Joseph McCarthy during
the Red Scare, have given way
to partisan pundits. In such an
environment, investigative journalism has been pushed aside;
it’s too expensive and requires too
many resources. And so the more
that giant, deregulated media
comes to represent the interests
of shareholders and serve its corporate parent companies, Baker
says, the less room for fact-based,
less “entertaining” investigative
journalism.
Especially in times of war,
Baker reminds, the media faces
the challenge of seeking an
appropriate balance between the
preservation of secrecy that saves
human life and the preservation
of free discourse that allows free
societies to flourish.
Bacteria and the Bridge
of Dresden in February 1945
as a Silesian refugee child, the
doctor has had a strong connection to the city. He donated his
entire Nobel Prize award funds
for the reconstruction of the
Frauenkirche and for the building of a new synagogue.
“Cell Culture” was the title
of the lecture he gave at the
American Academy. It consisted
of two parts – appropriate for a
researcher split in his passions
for both science and art. The
white-haired, bow-tied 72-yearold first spoke about his lecture
topic: cell research. Blobel starts
with a quote by Berlin pathologist Rudolf Virchow about how
all life on earth resulted from
a “primordial cell,” whose
offspring have multiplied diligently for the last four million
years. “Everyone of us is four
million years old,” Blobel says.
One might also say that the
entire planet is one single “cell
culture.”
Blobel then shows a few film
vignettes to an astonished audience: a white blood cell hunts
and then devours a small bacteria pile like a slimy monster.
“Ten times more bacteria than
cells are living in and on our
bodies,” he says. Most impressive is the animation of the
bacterium flagellum. The end
of the microbe is formed like a
whip and consists of thousand of
proteins. It is powered by a nanomotor, a biological machine powered by hydrogen.
Then Blobel changes from
English to German, and instead
of computer animation he
shows some old black-and-white
photos: sheep grazing upon the
Elbe’s meadows, behind them
the silhouette of demolished
Dresden. Germany should not
turn into a “highway system”
Baker pointed out another fact
of today’s media landscape that
is cause for alarm: the number
of truly different media outlets
is rapidly shrinking. In radio, for
example, the largest conglomerate,
Clear Channel, owns 1,200 stations nationwide, often nationally
syndicating content. Baker cites
the case of one AM news station in
New Haven, Connecticut, that no
longer has a single news reporter
on staff. All of its news is instead
rebroadcast from its source – in
Syracuse, New York.
Baker’s current work seeks to
refocus investigative journalism
to serve the public over profit. The
online news agency Pro Publica,
begun by the Wall Street Journal’s
former managing editor Paul
Steiger, is a model organ for doing
so. But there are others, and Baker
has been leading an online project
at Channel Thirteen to see why
America’s decline in newspaper
readership is countered by a flourishing reading public in Europe;
some 72.4 percent of Germans, for
example, read a newspaper each
day. Recovering true freedom,
diversity, and vitality of the press
in the US might require herculean
effort, Baker says, but its essential
role in the survival of democracy
makes the task a fundamental one
for our time.
between Poland and France,
Blobel says. Building a bridge
would destroy the Elysium of
the Elbe meadows. He quotes
Saxony’s former chief conservationist Heinrich Magirius: “The
bell of the Frauenkirche reverberates so because of the vastness of this river landscape.”
The construction of the
bridge began in November 2007.
On July 3 unesco will decide
whether to revoke Dresden’s
designation as a site of world cultural heritage.
By Hartmut Wewetzer
Der Tagesspiegel
June 12, 2008
Translated by Tanja Maka
Epstein’s Berlin
element, which he emphasizes
first and foremost, is expressed
without any humans. In the Crisis
Conference Room of the German
State Department, for instance, in
the former vault of the Imperial
Bank, he was delighted by the
water bottle and the name tag in
the corner: “Herr Dodi, StudiosusReisen.” Right between the
weathered, crooked gravestones,
overgrown by ivy at the Jewish
Cemetery Weißensee, the gnarly
trunks and branches, between
all the greens and browns, sits a
white laptop, which one discovers
only by a mere second glance; a
researcher had set up his office
there; here, the present, planted
in history. In Epstein’s studio in
Kreuzberg the small bouquet of
buttercups on the little table in
Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New york / Galerie Thomas Zander, Köln
great project “American Power,”
which he has been working on for
five years. But maybe, he says at
one point, and smiles with irony
and amusement, it was just a
trumped-up justification for not
having to take pictures and then
being able to take pictures. He
realized, however: now I know
enough.
Mitch Epstein is not somebody
who sets out and takes snapshots.
That wouldn’t work anyway; his
camera could hardly fit in any
pants pocket. The 55- year old
works with a huge plate-camera
on a high tripod, “the kind that
was invented in the nineteenth
century.” The bulky – and expensive – camera forces him to concentrate and to be exact. Only two
pictures fit onto one plate, and
when he looks through the lens,
he sees everything upside down.
“Thus,” he says, “one pays more
attention to the formal configuration.” The camera forces him to
work conceptually – and yet to be
simultaneously open to surprises,
like the other day when he stumbled upon elephants between the
Plattenbauten in Lichtenberg.
Mitch Epstein speaks the way
he photographs: with a great
deal of consideration, striving
towards accurateness, “towards
honesty,” as he says. He does not
give many interviews. But when
he does, he gives them properly:
he takes almost the entire day.
He used adhesive strip to tape
the 1.78 x 2.34-meter prints of
his Berlin pictures on top of each
other to the wall of his altbau
apartment in Kreuzberg, which
serves as his studio, setting up
high spotlights to illuminate
them correctly. With the help
of his assistant, he rolls out the
pictures bit by bit. From right to
left, from left to right. It is as if he
would expose the layers of Berlin,
cleaving a book, page by page.
Epstein’s pictures are like movies: huge, dramatic, tragic, comic,
touching. Often the human
Mitch Epstein, Tempelhof International Airport, Berlin, 2008
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N9
the oriel seem, too, like a personal
stroke of the brush, like a still life
of a working place.
His cinema gleams with
strong colors. Epstein is a fan of
Fassbinder, who worked at a time
when color print was regarded
simply as brassy and commercial.
True art showed up in black-andwhite in the ’70s. Today, Epstein,
whose pictures can be seen at the
Museum of Modern Art and at
the Getty Museum, is regarded as
one of the pioneers of the genre.
Epstein’s cinema has certainly
nothing to do with Hollywood. It
is too quiet. Too demanding. The
artist demands from the beholder,
as well, “that he does his homework.” The titles tell no more than
the location. To be able to “read”
the pictures, as Epstein says, the
beholder has to know the story
behind the motif. It is of no coincidence that books are an important medium in his photography,
which unfold sequentially. They
are as uncomfortable as his camera: they don’t fit in any purse.
In 2001 Epstein came to
Germany for the first time to
print a book with Gerhard Steidl,
who has published all of his books arouses suspicion, can’t even get
close to the Capitol – and forget
since. He exhibits at Thomas
Zander’s gallery in Cologne. What getting inside. The impartiality
characterizing Americans’ attiimpressed him with Germany
tudes toward the photographer
was the serious discussion of its
in the 1970s has disappeared.
own history, but also of its art. In
Today, he says, he is eyed with
Berlin, the American Academy
great distrust, like when he was
opened many doors for him. He
being interrogated by the fbi:
shows up at heavily secured and
“One always has to prove his
sensitive locations, such as the
innocence.”
German Ministries, with his
archaic-looking equipment, ready
to shoot. Germans seem to regard By Susanne Kippenberger
Der Tagesspiegel
the bulky equipment as a sign of
May 4, 2008
the seriousness of his endeavor.
Translated by Sonja Janositz
In Washington, however, he
Against the Prevailing
World Opinion
A scholarly dispute in honor of trustee Fritz Stern
“T
her e is no way
back to innocence.”
At the end of a long
and lively discussion, Fritz
Stern returned to the sentence
Michael Stolleis had offered at
the very beginning of his lecture “Teaching International
Law under the Swastika.” For an
American, this sentence today
has special meaning, noted the
German-American historian,
“in times when one has to deal
– under very different premises –
with the question of how the law
is interpreted – and misinterpreted.” Stern demurred that he
would leave out detail, but named
as an example John Yoo, the
former legal advisor in the Bush
Administration who justified the
American practice of torture.
This year’s Fritz Stern Lecture
at the American Academy in
Berlin lead to an enlivened debate
about the relationship between
law and politics, about the tendency of lawyers to corrupt under
power, and about new beginnings
and continuities in transnational
legal developments in the twentieth century. The legal historian Michael Stolleis, director of
Frankfurt’s Max Planck Institute
for European Legal History,
however, limited his focus to a
precisely outlined chapter in the
history of German public law. But
this limitation opened up broad
space for reflection.
In 1933, Stolleis explained,
public international law in
Germany was a scholarly field
shaped by professors, many of
whom were Jewish. They were
murdered or, like Hans Kelsen,
Erich Kaufmann, and Georg
Schwarzenberger, pressured to
emigrate. For legal scholars who
stayed in Germany, public international law became a particularly attractive discipline because
it offered – in the context of the
gradual dissolution of the Treaty
of Versailles and Germany’s
withdrawal from the League of
Nations – the possibility of practical effectiveness, of dealing with
“a sequence of relevant events
in public international law” and
allowed at the same time a “window on the outside world.”
Until the Munich Agreement,
German experts of international
law were – as Stolleis responded
to an inquiry by Berlin European
constitutional law expert Ingolf
Pernice – naturally part of the
universal Gelehrtenrepublik
(republic of letters). In 1934
Rostock-based constitutional
lawyer Edgar Tatarin-Tarnheyden
wrote that “the welfare of the
German people can lie in respecting international law.” Friedrich
Berber had a very different
approach: he sought to bring public international law into the service of National Socialist foreign
policy, emphasizing in 1939 that
international law should no longer be the “playground of internationalist and pacifist ideologies.”
Nevertheless, there were
islands on which the classical
tradition of the academic field
was cultivated until the end of the
National Socialist dictatorship –
outside of the law departments,
where career-focused junior
researchers had become subservient to the regime. Stolleis
emphasized the role of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Foreign
Public Law and International
Law in Berlin, where men like
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke,
Hermann Mosler, and Berthold
Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg
worked as experts on humanitarian law, under the leadership of
Viktor Bruns.
Stolleis concluded his lecture
by quoting from the essay “Der
Streit um das Völkerrecht,” written in the fall of 1944 by Viktor
Bruns’s successor, Carl Bilfinger.
In the essay, Bilfinger dealt in
an elegiac tone with the Allies’
“postwar plans.” He articulated
the hope that Germany might
not be entirely excluded in a
still-dark postwar world by,
for example, being part of the
establishment of “regional and
particular systems, in the sense
of Großraum systems,” through
interstate institutions and cooperation. At that time, the extent
of the crime and the subsequent
international disparagement of
Germany were not entirely clear
to Bilfinger.
“It is not my intention to take
the position of a judge here, and
to judge the generation of my
father, the experts of public
international law, the directors of institutes, and editors of
scholarly journals,” Stolleis said.
“Historians are neither judges
nor prophets. But in hindsight,
it becomes recognizable that
with the founding of the United
Nations, with the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights,
and the Nuremberg Trials, there
has truly been a new beginning.”
By Alexandra Kemmerer
From the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung
June 3, 2008
Translated by Tanja Maka
A New Gilded Age?
Paul Krugman sees echoes of the past in today’s economic crisis
I
n 2006, significantly before
widespread agreement that
the American economy was
suffering, New York Times columnist and Princeton economics
professor Paul Krugman offered
what seemed a deliberately
contrarian assessment: average
Americans were on target when
they rated the American economy
as “fair to poor.” While the gdp
rose, the Dow floated over 12,000,
and unemployment declined,
Krugman set out to explain why
many Americans were reporting
economic discontent. He cited
troubling indicators that pointed
to the widening gap between the
nation’s wealthy and poor. He
concluded: “Not only can few
Americans hope to join the ranks
of the rich, but no matter how
well educated or hardworking
they may be, their opportunities
to do so are actually shrinking.”
This year, as the spectres of
energy, lending, and real-estate
crises haunt the American economy, Krugman’s warning seems
portentous. On May 21 he joined
the American Academy in Berlin
to explain how growing inequality is affecting the future of the
US economy, and what government can do about it. He was in
Berlin for the release of his new
book The Conscience of A Liberal
(W.W. Norton, 2007), which
had just appeared in German
as Nach Bush: Das Ende der
Neokonservativen und die Stunde
der Demokraten (Campus Verlag).
In the world’s wealthiest country, Krugman reminds, 47 million Americans have no health
insurance. The top 1 percent of
the population owns 38 percent
of the nation’s wealth. And while
the ceo of America’s biggest
corporation, Wal-Mart, earns
$23 million a year, the average
wage-earner for that company
earns just $19,000. The result
of this disparity has been the
slow eradication of the American
middle class. This, Krugman
believes, is the fault of politics:
“Middle-class societies don’t
emerge automatically as an economy matures,” he says. “They
have to be created through political action.”
No other advanced industrial
nation has seen anything like
the economic disparity that has
developed in the United States
over the past three decades. And
the current gap, Krugman says,
actually looks much as it did in
the pre-New Deal economy. After
the 1920s the US experienced
what economists call the “Great
Compression”: the shrinking
of the rich-poor divide, or the
political creation of a middle
class – the one of Krugman’s
1950s childhood. But the economic world we see today is, he
says, “so vastly different that it’s
no longer recognizable.” This,
even though the US now has
an immensely more productive
economy than it had at midcentury. The benefits of that
increased productivity, however
– vast economic growth – have
nearly all gone to the wealthy.
So who’s to blame? Krugman
says it’s conservative economic
legislation. The gap between top
managerial pay and employee
compensation has skyrocketed,
he says, since the dawn of the
Reagan Revolution. Another
important factor, Krugman
believes, is the mid-century
conservative reaction to the civil
rights movement. This is because
resistance to civil rights caused
From Bali to Copenhagen
Climate change policy and national interests
C
l im at e ch a nge is
the most dire problem
mankind has ever faced,
says Thomas Heller, a professor
of international legal studies at
Stanford University and a bm w
Distinguished Visitor at the
Academy last spring. The irony of
this situation is that the negative
effects we face stem from the very
accomplishments we prize – and
to which the less-developed world
still aspires. Heller has worked
on climate policy in several capacities, including as an advisor in
drafting the Kyoto Protocol. And
in sketching the international
climate change regimes from
Kyoto, through Bali, and on to
Copenhagen, he has also charted
the progression of global deals
on climate change for what they
really signify.
While climate change policy
is a hard sell – costs are incurred
today but the results would come
much later – the general global
deal on climate change policy
has already been agreed upon:
a long-term goal of carbon reduc-
tion by 2050 to 80 percent below
1990 levels, a 20–40 percent cut
in the “Annex 1” state (US and
Europe) emissions by 2020, and
the “graduation” of emerging
markets into making comprehensive caps on carbon. Further
steps include the deepening and
expansion of carbon markets, as
well as the creation of large technology innovation funds. These
would provide compensation for
poor countries that may not emit
but that need aid in adapting to
modern standards.
many white Southern voters to
abandon the Democratic party,
joining the Republicans while
recasting its platform around an
agenda of traditional values – and
thus neglecting their own economic class interests. While this
is the argument that has been
repeated by, among others, economist Thomas Frank in What’s the
Matter with Kansas?, President
Lyndon Johnson said to a young
aide after the he signed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, “We have just
lost the South for a generation.”
But that just might be changing, Krugman says. Voters’
minds are now more often decided by perceptions of the economy
than by so-called questions of
values, as they were during the
1990s’ culture wars. “Elections
are won by the economy,” he says,
“and this one will be no different.”
Regardless of who wins the US
presidential race, Krugman foresees a moratorium on liberalized
trade agreements, such as na f ta,
as struggling middle-class
Americans sense that their wellbeing and economic parity have
suffered because of globalization
and job outsourcing. Either candidate will have to do something
to get America back on an equal
economic playing field. And this
all begins, Krugman says, with
universal healthcare.
Still, “the global deal is a
lousy deal,” Heller says. He
predicts that rich countries will
take national action, creating
their own domestic legislation.
Denmark, for example, is investing heavily in wind energy in
order to dominate the market
early on. Other nations do the
same: create climate-policy incentives in the national interest. But
this means that when the major
nations meet at Copenhagen in
November 2009, they will package their domestic programs,
rather than negotiate new ones.
If Copenhagen is to be effective,
Heller says, nations will have to
find much more room for cooperation than they are now.
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | N11
• Life & Letters •
Alumni Books
Recent and forthcoming releases
Andrew Bacevich
Joy Haslam Calico
Lawrence Lessig
Elizabeth Sears (with
The Limits of Power: The End of
American Exceptionalism
Metropolitan Books
(August 2008)
Brecht at the Opera
University of California Press
(August 2008)
Remix: Making Art and Commerce
Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
Penguin Press HC
(October 2008)
Charlotte Schoell-Glass)
Daniel Boyarin
David Levering Lewis
Socrates and the Fat Rabbis
University of Chicago Press
(Spring 2009)
W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography
Henry Holt and Co.
(December 2008)
Edward P. Djerejian
Charles Molesworth
Danger and Opportunity: An
American Ambassador’s Journey
Through the Middle East
Simon & Schuster Threshold
Editions
(September 2008)
(with Leonard Harris)
Nicholas Eberstadt
The Poverty of ‘The Poverty Rate’:
Measure and Mismeasure of Want
in America
AEI Press
(Fall 2008)
Peter Filkins
Translator
The Journey (by H.G. Adler)
Random House
(Fall 2008)
Alain L. Locke: Biography of A
Philosopher
(November 2008)
Martin Indyk
Innocent Abroad: An Intimate
History of American Peace
Diplomacy in the Middle East
Simon & Schuster
(January 2009)
THomAS Powers
The Military Error: Baghdad and
Beyond in America’s War of Choice
New York Review Books
(August 2008)
Helmut Walser Smith
The Continuities of German
History: Nation, Religion, and
Race across the Long Nineteenth
Century
Cambridge University Press
(April 2008)
Pierre Joris
Brian Ladd
Rosanna Warren
Paul A. Rahe
Soft Despotism, Democracy’s
Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and
Tocqueville on the Modern Prospect
Yale University Press
(Spring 2009)
Aris Fioretos
Dana Villa
Public Freedom
Princeton University Press
(August 2008)
Aljibar II (bilingual edition, with a
French translation by Eric Sarner)
Editions PHI
(Spring 2008)
Autophobia: Love and Hate in the
Automotive Age
(November 2008)
Das Maß eines Fußes: Essays
Carl Hanser Verlag
(September 2008)
Verzetteln als Methode. Der
humanistische Ikonologe William
S. Heckscher
Akademie Verlag
(June 2008)
Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric
Poetry
W.W. Norton
(September 2008)
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis
Sappho in the Making: The Early
Reception
Harvard University Press
(March 2008)
N12 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
Profiles in
Scholarship
The fall 2008 class of fellows
Erich Nossack’s Der Untergang
Joel Agee arrived in East
respectively won the 1999 Helen
Germany in 1948; he was eight
and Kurt Wolff and the 2005 Lois
years old. He came along with his Roth prizes. In 2007 Agee was a
two siblings, his mother, and his
finalist for the esteemed Oxfordstepfather, Bodo Uhse, a German Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
exile writer who would become a
While at the Academy this
leader of social reconstruction in
fall, Agee will be working on a
the Soviet sector.
novel that inhabits a land between
Growing up in communist
fiction and fact: it’s about a boy
East Germany was not easy for the living in Mexico in the mid-1940s
young Agee. He recounts in his
with his expatriate German
memoir Twelve Years: An American stepfather, his American mother,
Boyhood in East Germany (2000)
and a Mexican maid, exploring
that school was a gray factory over- national mythos and identity
seen by blunt Marxist doctrinaires from the child’s point of view.
hostile to talent. He was truant
Leora Auslander
and failing classes. Bricklaying
What will posterity make of our
soon replaced his formal educahastily composed e-mails, our
tion, a change that the boy Agee
scrawled notes tacked to the
actually welcomed.
refrigerator door – or even the
His young adulthood during
the explosive 1960s became expo- geometry and aesthetics of the
door itself?
nentially more strange: he found
Implicit in Leora Auslander’s
himself in a baseball game with
work is the assumption that there
the Castro brothers in Cuba, crying in a café with Bob Dylan in the is much indeed to be made of
such things; the acts and paraEast Village, getting shot, experiphernalia that surround our hismenting heavily with psychedelic
tory become our history – or at
drugs, and then, temporarily, losleast the physical evidence of its
ing his wife, infant daughter, and
passing.
his mind. Agee’s tortured, soulAuslander, a professor of
searching journey is heroically
Modern European Social History
recounted in his 2004 memoir
at the University of Chicago, has
In The House of My Fear (2004), a
embarked time and again on
book that plunges so forcefully
novel strategies for uncovering
back into that ecstatic decade that
truth about the past through its
critic Andrei Codrescu called it
objects. Her 1996 book, Taste and
“the account of the Sixties we so
Power: Furnishing Modern France,
long bemoaned the lack of.”
detected the latent political and
One of America’s most
cultural values that registered in
cherished autobiographers and
popular French furniture, from
German literary translators,
the age of absolutism to modern
Agee’s essays have appeared
mass-production.
in, among other publications,
Last year Auslander published
Harper’s, The New Yorker, and
another historical investigation,
The Yale Review. He has received
this time analyzing how “goods,
a Guggenheim Fellowship
habits, and rituals” fostered a
and a grant from the National
spirit of republicanism in modEndowment for the Arts; his
ern Britain, North America, and
translations of Heinrich von
France. Her forthcoming project,
Kleist’s Penthesilea and Hans
Joel Agee
which compares twentieth-century Jewish culture in Paris and
Berlin, will deepen the material
historian’s acquaintance with the
German capital. Weaved throughout the project is the theme of
an anguished loss of homeland,
particularly since “home” is such
a hybrid creature – half material,
half ineffable. It is in that space
that Auslander will again begin
to cajole life, ideas, wishes, and
fears from the domestic artifacts
of passed European lives.
to drink her own image, projecting the act into the gallery space.
Many of her early films revolve
around Chang herself; they have
accordingly been described by
Holland Carter of The New York
Times as “hair-raisingly narcissistic.” The Times also went
on to call her “one of our most
consistently exciting young artists” in 2006. Her latest work,
Touch Would, is a multilayered
video project that delves into the
tangled interlace of translation,
From left to right: Ha Jin, Thomas Holt, Leora Auslander,
Patty Chang
In one of the artist Patty Chang’s
short films, she French kisses
her mother and her father while
they chew a raw onion. In another,
panic streaks across the artist’s
face as live eels squirm inside her
blouse. In a recent work, she toys
with the idea of Shangri-La, flying
to the real city on the ChineseTibetan border to reconstruct a
model fantasyland out of wood
and mirrors. Boundary crossing,
stereotypes, uneasiness, taboo,
physical and emotional discomfort: these are the weapons in
Chang’s artistic arsenal.
Schooled as a painter at
UC-San Diego, Chang moved
to New York in 1995 and began
doing performance art and film,
such as Fountain (1999), in which
she sips water off of a mirror as if
mistranslation, interpretation,
and performance.
A 2008 finalist for the
Guggenheim Museum’s prestigious Hugo Boss Prize, Chang has
staged solo shows in cities such
as Madrid, Visby, and New York,
where she lives and works. Chang
has taught at the Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture
in Maine, and her work has
been recognized by many cultural organizations, including
the Rockefeller Foundation, the
New York Foundation for the Arts,
and the Louise Comfort Tiffany
Foundation.
Heidi Fehrenbach
That Heidi Fehrenbach is at the
American Academy in Berlin
during the first US presidential
campaign to include an African-
democratization, and postwar
transitions in conceiving race and
gender in the US and Germany.
Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 2007–2008 and
a Haniel fellowship at the
American Academy in fall 2008,
Fehrenbach will work on her
project “From War Children to
Our Children: How World War II
Remade the Family and Fostered
Children’s Rights.” The book will
comparatively study the broad
effects of racialized war and post-
Juliet Floyd’s research picks
up Dr. Johnson’s torch: her interest is in the nature of objectivity – how it arises, why we should
care about it, and how we are
to construe it philosophically.
Floyd has focused on the intersection of philosophy of logic,
language, and mathematics, as
well as on the history of twentieth-century philosophy, particularly on topics in epistemology
and the philosophy of logic and
mathematics.
placing the history of attempts to
formalize rationality within the
context of twentieth-century intellectual history. She has already
begun the effort by co-editing
(with Sanford Shieh) Future Pasts:
The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth
Century Philosophy (2001).
Devin Fore
By the late 1920s German artists
found themselves in a peculiar
position: Western civilization was
becoming more mechanized and
© Hornischer
American Democratic candidate
seems apt: Fehrenbach, whose
three of four grandparents were
German, has long been probing
racial ideologies and their post1945 incarnations in both the US
and Germany. Her book Race after
Hitler: Black Occupation Children
in Postwar Germany and America
(2005) addresses the ways in
which tense race relations among
US occupying soldiers – and
black-white relationships within
the German population – aided
Joel Agee, David Sabean, Devin Fore, Patty Chang, Daniel Visconti, Juliet Floyd, Heide Fehrenbach
inadvertently in shaping postwar
German notions of race.
“The election of the first black
US president,” Fehrenbach has
written, “would mark the end of
an American history characterized, from its earliest revolutionary days, by race-based criteria
for inclusion in, and exclusion
from, the American body politic.” Whatever the outcome of the
2008 US Presidential race, then,
the swift rise of Illinois Senator
Barack Obama will be marked
as a shift in the American racial
imagination that Fehrenbach has
long studied.
Currently a professor of history
at Northern Illinois University,
Fehrenbach specializes as well
in the social and cultural effects
of Nazism and WWII, postwar
experiences of occupation and
war military occupation, which
impacted international child welfare work and national norms of
family constitution in Europe and
the United States.
Juliet Floyd
In an attempt to positively refute
the immaterialist philosophy
of Bishop Berkeley, Dr. Samuel
Johnson famously kicked a big
stone and exclaimed, “I refute
it thus!” So much for subjective
idealism.
But things were more complicated than Dr. Johnson anticipated, and philosophy would continue to wrestle with the notions of
objectivity and immateriality for
the next several centuries. After
all, the number-one assumption
of science is that there is a real
world out there to study.
A professor of philosophy at
Boston University since 1996,
Floyd’s extensive writings have
examined the unique interplay
of figures as diverse as Kant,
Frege, Wittgenstein, Gödel, and
Quine. She has also written on
the objectivity and nature of rulefollowing, the fate of empiricism
in the 1950s, and on the historical
significance of attempts at the
mathematical rigorization of
intuitive notions such as meaning, truth, proof, reference, and
algorithm.
Her current project, which
she will continue while in residence at the Academy, concerns
Wittgenstein’s reactions to the
limitative results of Gödel and
Turing in the 1930s and 1940s.
Pursuit of this subject will aid
an even more ambitious project:
industrial, not less. Around the
Continent, artistic movements
reveling in objects, products, and
mechanical power and precision held sway. Yet images of the
human body – abandoned as an
old-fashioned or pre-industrial
subject matter – were steadily
returning as motifs and subjects
for German art. Critics of the time
hailed this move as a “return to
order,” while later scholars have
often judged this neo-realism as
mere reactionary nostalgia. Fall
2008 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow
Devin Fore begs to differ. He will
set out to prove in his monograph
“Return to Order” that German
Realism’s devotion to the body was
new and important – even more so
than its practitioners realized.
Fore’s semester at the Academy and the spectrum of skin color on the power of literary expression
is nothing if not ambitious, as he
– and publishing his own – since
American faces is broader than
simultaneously undertakes a secthe late Eighties. Currently a
ever. Citigroup Fellow Thomas
ond monograph: “All the Graphs” Holt, long a seminal figure in
professor of English at Boston
investigates the invention of
University, Jin has most recently
the academic study of percep“documentary” by the Russian
authored the novels A Free Life,
tions of race, is now investigating
avant-garde. Now taken for grantWar Trash, The Crazed, and a volwhat it has meant to be of mixed
ed as an everyday form of media,
ume of poetry entitled Wreckage.
race, and why this interstitial
scholarship, and entertainment,
It has been eight years since
status has been a wellspring of
“documentary” was not so much
Ha Jin published a collection of
racial anxiety, mythology, and
born as detonated, rocking the
short stories, The Bridegroom,
pseudoscience.
Russian art world with ever-more
which has been translated into
Professor Holt’s project,
vigorous and ambitious manifes- “Racial Death or the Death of
seven languages and won both
tos and projects. Corps of artistthe Asian American Literary
Racism: The Problem of Race
“factographers” combed factories
Prize and the Townsend Fiction
Mixture,” will add to his impresand cities to document “technical
Prize. This fall Jin returns to the
sive academic output over a disculture,” often glorifying their
tinguished career. A former presi- genre of the short story with “The
subjects in the process.
Magic Fall,” the working title of
dent of the American Historical
Fore, an assistant professor
a new collection of interwoven
Association, Holt now teaches
at Princeton, embarks on these
stories set in Flushing, New York,
in the history department at the
monographs with a tone of familwhere nearly half of the residents
University of Chicago. Before
iarity: he has already translated
of the actual city identify themhis first lectureship – in 1972, at
seven essays and manifestos of
selves as Asian-American; many
Howard University – Holt was
the Russian avant-garde, with
are recent immigrants to the
deeply involved in the politics
titles like “The Biography of the
United States. It is in this turbuand policy of social equality,
Object” and “Art in the Revolution having worked for several years
lent, struggling community that
and the Revolution in Art.” No
the twelve stories of “The Magic
with the US Office of Economic
stranger to Germany, Fore has
Fall” will follow a varied cast of
Opportunity and the Office of
previously studied in Berlin
characters, each defining his or
Education, where he consulted
through a Whiting Foundation
her race, home, and loyalties.
on migrant and seasonal farmFellowship in 2002, a Social
Until recently, most of Jin’s
worker programs and emergency
Science Research Council felwork has been set in his native
school aid.
lowship in 2001, and, prior, at
China, from which he emigrated
History, Holt believes, is as
Humboldt Universität. For Devin
permanently after receiving
necessary to the human mind
Fore, then, “Return to Order” and
his doctorate from Brandeis
as its awareness of the present.
“All the Graphs” are a bit like the
University. His writing’s shift
Reading Heidegger’s Being and
reappearance of the Realist body
to American settings mirrors
Time as a lesson for the socioloin Weimar Germany: projects
this geographic mutability. Jin
gist and historian, Holt writes:
that hover a step backward while
remarks that perhaps the English
“Indeed, one cannot even conceptruly moving forward.
word “home,” with its double
tualize an individual conscioussense of one’s origin and one’s
ness, a self continuous from one
Thomas Holt
current abode, captures this more
time point to another, without
In 1900 the African-American
expressively than other languages
a concept of history, of memory.
essayist and fiction writer Charles To think ‘I am’ requires ‘I was,’
(such as Chinese) that make
Waddell Chesnutt predicted
stricter linguistic distinctions.
which needs in turn a narrative
that racial distinctions in the
“Now when we talk about home,
of ‘they’ and/or ‘we.’” The disUnited States would soon cease
it’s an issue of return. It’s also a
solution of racial otherness – the
to exist. In a “miscegenated”
dissolution of “we” – gives “misce- matter of arrival. If a home can
nation, he said, there “would be
be created… then home is in the
genation” its troubled position in
no inferior race to domineer over;
process of becoming.”
the American psyche.
there would be no superior race
Ha Jin
David Sabean
to oppress those who differed
Ha Jin speaks both Chinese and
It is difficult to imagine a research
from them in racial externals.”
English fluently. He has written
topic that could engage civil,
However we rate the progress
both prose and poetry stunningly. criminal, and canon law, theology,
of civil rights or the decline
In other words, Jin possesses at
sociology, biology, politics, pop
of racism in the past century,
least four different ways of comand high culture all at once. So it
Chesnutt’s prediction of a racemay come as a surprise that ucl a
less America has proven incorrect, municating with the world. With
this enviable literary toolbox,
history professor David Sabean’s
or, at best, hasty. Race still exists
he has been steadily teaching
capable foray through all of them
in the American consciousness,
is in pursuit of such an uncomfortable subject: incest. His monumental project, “Kinship and
Incest Discourse in Europe and
America since the Renaissance,”
argues that changes in social,
political, and family structures,
and attitudes toward incest move
in a synchronized interrelationship: a change in any one of these
signals a change in all.
Take the early nineteenth century, for example: with many new
ways of amassing wealth besides
patrimonial inheritances, it
became less important to protect
the integrity of the father-to-son
line and more important to network with other families in cooperative alliance. Thus households
might have groups of siblings
and cousins brought up together;
both affection and desire could
ensue. Add to the mix the rise of
the novel and the Hegelian assertion that the self could be discovered by seeing one’s reflection in
another, mirror-like person, and
suddenly it becomes clear why
novels and tales of brother-sister
incest abounded.
In the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, “incest” in the
popular or artistic imagination
is most often synonymous with
sexual relationships between parents and children. Freud provided
the background and buzzwords,
but this does not entirely explain
why the discourse about Oedipus
and Electra has hung around so
long. If primary cultural structures such as law, economy, and
religion are indeed tied to our
concept of incest, then Sabean’s
scholarship on incest might provide unexpected revelations about
the assumptions and institutions
that structure our everyday lives.
Angela Stent
Tension between Russia and
Georgia over the separatist
enclave of South Ossetia resulted
in clashes between the two
countries’ armies last August.
Diplomacy soon followed, lead
by French President Nicholas
Sarkozy, and the US sent medical
supplies and monetary aid. But
the ordeal caused a renewed coldwar-era suspicion of a revanchist
Russia anxious to flex its military
might. Further consequences for
the Russia-nato relationship are
sure to follow.
It is exactly on these sorts of
problematic situations – tensions
between post-Soviet Russia and
the West – which Angela Stent
has focused for her entire career
in government, academia, and the
private sector. Currently the director of the Center for Eurasian,
Russian, and East European
Studies at Georgetown University,
Stent has held positions on the
US State Department’s Policy
Planning Staff and on the
National Intelligence Council.
A specialist on both Soviet and
post-Soviet foreign policy, Stent,
a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, is specifically
concerned with the European –
and, above all, German – relationship with Russia. Her expertise
has resulted in myriad articles
and numerous books, including
the thoroughgoing Russia and
Germany Reborn: Unification, the
Soviet Collapse and the New Europe
(2000).
Stent’s work at the Academy
this fall will be a book project
called “Dueling Narratives: How
the United States, Europe, and
Russia Interpret the Collapse of
the ussr and the Rise of the PostSoviet Era.” The project will analyze what the West has learned
from its involvement during and
after the ussr’s collapse, raise the
question of why ties are no less
strained than in 1991, and make
some cautious predictions for the
future.
Daniel Visconti
Daniel Visconti’s orchestral
piece Storm Windows takes its
title from a poem by Howard
Nemerov. As the orchestra
plays, a narrator reads: “People
are putting up storm windows
now, / Or were, this morning,
Sneak Preview
The spring 2009 fellows
T
he Ac a dem y look s
forward to welcoming
an outstanding class of
scholars, writers, and artists to
the Hans Arnhold Center this
spring. Dona l d An t r im,
author of Must I Now Read All of
Wittgenstein?, becomes the second Mary Ellen von der Heyden
Fellow of Fiction. He will be
joined by Holtzbrinck Fellow
A dr i an L eBl anc, author of
Give It Up and a professor at the
New York University School
of Journalism. Bosch Fellows
in Public Policy this spring are
journalist Ch a r l es L a ne of
the Washington Post, and Susan
Pedersen, professor of history at
Columbia University. Edwa r d
Dimendberg, professor of
film and media at the University
Call for
Applications
until the heavy rain / Drove them
indoors…” The calming habits
that seem to show humanity’s
victory over forces of nature
are halted, postponed, then
destroyed altogether. Soon lawns
are flattened, window glass shattered. But the storm’s destruction allows a new kind of communication to exist: “something
of / A swaying clarity.”
It is this new clarity that
Visconti’s compositions attempt
to bring forth, working from the
rubble, detritus, and storm-wreck
of more habitual and conventional forms of music. Dan Visconti,
this year’s Leonore Annenberg
Fellow in Music Composition,
spent years as a jazz and rock guitarist, and traces of these genres –
as well as blues, gospel, and other
forms – remain detectable.
At 26, Visconti has already
received numerous accolades for
his work, including awards from
bmi and a sc a p, the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, and
the Society of Composers. In
the past three years, he has had
three major orchestral pieces
commissioned: Overdrive for
the Minnesota Orchestra, The
Breadth of Breaking Waves by the
Annapolis Symphony, and Some
Day the Sun Won’t Shine by the
New York Youth Symphony. The
forcefulness and energy of his
compositions are practically palpable: when describing his music,
reviewers call it “bristling,” “dazzling,” and an “assault on the
senses.”
The potency of Visconti’s compositions demonstrates again the
power of music to communicate
uniquely among the arts. Late
in Storm Windows, Nemerov’s
speaker interrupts his account
of the rainstorm with a parenthetical, bemused and bemusing
aside: “(Unspeakable the distance
in the mind!)” Should this be the
case, it is the great task of composers – including Dan Visconti –
to express it.
of California, Irvine, joins the
Academy as the spring 2009
Daimler Fellow. Historians at
the Hans Arnhold Center will
be Anna-Maria Kellen Fellows
Mi tchel l Mer b ack of The
Johns Hopkins University
and, continuing, De v in For e
of Princeton University. The
Academy also welcomes Ellen
Maria Gorrissen Fellows Jed
R a sul a, professor of English
at the University of Georgia,
and Jul ie t Koss, professor of art and art history at
Scripps College, in Claremont,
California. The George H.W.
Bush/Axel Springer Fellow,
Dona l d Kommer s, is a professor of political science and
law at the University of Notre
Dame and the author of Red,
Black, and Gold: Germany’s
Constitutional Odyssey. And
while Leonore Annenberg
Fellow in Music Composition,
Da niel Viscon t i, will continue his residency from the fall,
the new Guna S. Mundheim
Fellow in the Visual Arts will
be A m y Sil l m a n, a New Yorkbased artist.
The American Academy is accepting applications from scholars, writers, and professionals who wish to engage in independent study in Berlin during the 2010–2011 academic year. Most fellowships are for a single academic semester and include a monthly
stipend, round-trip airfare, partial board, and comfortable accommodations at the
Hans Arnhold Center. Only US citizens or permanent residents are eligible to apply.
Applications are due in Berlin on October 15, 2009. After a rigorous peer review
process, Berlin Prizes will be awarded by an independent selection committee and
announced in the spring of 2010. For further information on the fellowship program,
please visit the Academy’s website (www.americanacademy.de).
fi Calendar
From concerts, readings, forums, and
lectures, the Academy’s fall semester offers
a myriad of new perspectives on American
intellectual and cultural life. Herewith,
a listing of events in and around the Hans
Arnhold Center.
10/1 4 A Tr a ns at l a n t ic St r at egy
for t he Gr e at er Middl e
East
Kenneth Pollack, Director of
Research and Senior Fellow, Saban
Center for Middle East Policy,
Brookings Institution; moderated by
Volker Stanzel, Political Director,
German Federal Foreign Office
November
11/3 Who Runs t he Wor l d?
Parag Khanna, Director, Global
Governance Initiative and Senior
Research Fellow, American Strategy
Program, New America Foundation
Location: Internationaler Club im
Auswärtigen Amt, Berlin
September
9/2 Pr esen tat ion of t he Fa l l
2008 Fel l ow s
Introduced by the honorable
William R. Timken, Jr. – US
Ambassador to Germany
9/4 Rom a n t icism R esurgen t :
R el igion, Medic a l
Science, a nd t he R ise of
Subjec t i v i t y
Richard Sloan, Nathaniel Wharton
Professor of Behavioral Medicine,
Department of Psychiatry,
Columbia University Medical
Center, New York; moderated
by Dr. Stefan Etgeton, Head of
Department for Health and
Nutrition, Federation of German
Consumer Organisations
9/25 Bl ood Wor k : Fa bl es of
Iden t i t y, Science, a nd R ace
Thomas C. Holt, James Westfall
Thompson Distinguished Service
Professor, University of Chicago;
moderated by Patrick Bahners,
Cultural Editor, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung
October
10/6 A Con v er s at ion w i t h
Jagdish Bh agwat i
Jagdish Bhagwati, University
Professor of Economics and Law,
Columbia University; moderated
by Jürgen Stark, member of the
Executive Board and the Governing
Council, European Central Bank
Location: European Central Bank,
Frankfurt am Main
10/ 7 In Defense of
Gl ob a l iz at ion
Jagdish Bhagwati, University
Professor of Economics and Law,
Columbia University
Location: Magnus-Haus Berlin
10/15 The A mer ic a n Fu t ur e: A
His t ory – The C a mpa ign in
t he L igh t of t he Pa s t
Simon Schama, University
Professor of Art History and History,
Columbia University
10/16Wr i t ing a bou t t he US
Immigr a n t E x per ience
Ha Jin, Professor of English, Boston
University
10/22Touch Woul d
Patty Chang, Artist, New York;
moderated by Anette Hüsch,
Curator, Hamburger Bahnhof –
Museum für Gegenwart
10/27A es t he t ic s, M at hem at ic s,
a nd Phil osoph y : Is t her e
a n In t er sec t ion?
Juliet Floyd, Professor of Philosophy,
Boston University; moderated
by Jochen Brüning, Professor of
Mathematics, HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin, and
Executive Director, Hermann
von Helmholtz-Zentrum für
Kulturtechnik
10/29A mer ic a n Ac a dem y Gues t
Malcolm McLaren, Music Manager
(Sex Pistols), Artist, Designer,
and Musician, London
10/30Fol ding En t er pr ises
Sarah Oppenheimer, Artist, New
York
10/31Vol . 02 – The End of Oil –
The Economic s of A Pos t
Energy Er a
Keynote speeches by Sigmar Gabriel,
German Federal Minister for the
Environment, Nature Conservation
and Nuclear Safety, and Matthew
R. Simmons, ceo, Simmons &
Company International; hosted by
Süddeutsche Zeitung
Location: Hamburg
11/4 A mer ic a Vo t es: Die
Wa hl pa r t y
Location: Bertelsmann Residenz,
Unter den Linden 1
In cooperation with cnn, n-tv, rt l,
Audi, and Bertelsmann
Invitation only
11/5 Business Round ta bl e
Adam Posen, Deputy Director,
Peterson Institute for Economics,
Washington, DC
Time and place TBA
11/6 Mult i-A mer ic a nism a nd
t he Fu t ur e of Gl ob a l
Gov er na nce
Parag Khanna, Director, Global
Governance Initiative and Senior
Research Fellow, American
Strategy Program, New America
Foundation
11/1 7 Though t s on Inces t :
Shif t ing Discour ses since
t he R ena iss a nce
David Sabean, Professor of History,
University of California, Los
Angeles; moderated by Michaela
Hohkamp, Professor of History,
Freie Universität Berlin
11/18 In t he House of My Fe a r :
A Memoir of Sa ni t y L os t
a nd R ecov er ed in t he l at e
1960s, Se t in Cub a , Ne w
Yor k , L ondon, Ibiz a , a nd
Some St r a nge Pl aces in t he
Mind
Joel Agee, Writer, New York
11/20In t im at e In t er nat iona l
R el at ions: Wor l d Wa r ,
Pos t wa r Fa mil ies, a nd t he
Hum a ni ta r i a n Or igins of
In t ercoun t ry A dop t ion
Heide Fehrenbach, Presidential
Research Professor and Professor
of History, Northern Illinois
University; moderated by Gisela
Bock, Professor of History, Freie
Universität Berlin
11/2 4Russi a a nd t he Wes t –
A Way Forwa r d
Angela Stent, Professor of
Government and Foreign Service
and Director, Center for Eurasian,
Russian and East European Studies,
Georgetown University
11/ – Energy a nd Geopol i t ic s
Daniel Yergin, Chairman,
Cambridge Energy Research
Associates (cer a)
December
12/8 Commemor at ing
De at h, Obsc ur ing L ife?
Conundrums of Europe a n
Je w ish His t ory a f t er t he
Shoa h
Leora Auslander, Professor
of European Social History,
University of Chicago
12/9 Russi a a nd t he Wes t –
A Way Forwa r d
Angela Stent, Professor of
Government and Foreign Service
and Director, Center for Eurasian,
Russian and East European Studies,
Georgetown University; moderated by Brigitte Georgi-Findlay,
Professor of North American Studies,
Technische Universität Dresden
Location: Festsaal, Rektorats-Villa
der TU Dresden
12/11 In Honor of El l io t t C a r t er :
A Concer t m a r k ing his
100 t h Bir t hday
Gary Hoffman, Cello; Karl-Heinz
Steffens, Clarinet; and Michael
Friedlander, Piano
12/15 Gua r di a n of t he
Cons t i t u t ion
Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice,
United States Supreme Court;
moderated by Dieter Grimm, former
Justice, Federal Constitutional Court,
former Rector, Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin, and Professor of Law,
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Supplementing its core programs at the
Hans Arnhold Center and downtown Berlin
is a series of several additional talks by
Academy fellows in Baden-Württemberg,
co-organized with partner institutions in
that German state. More information on
the Baden-Württemberg Seminar is available at www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de
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Courtesy of the artist
From Touch Would–The Product Love, or Die Wahre Liebe, 2008
Touch Would
A 1928 homonym spurs cinematic reinterpretations
By Patty Chang
S
ound film wa s in v en t ed in the
1920s. It became a sensation with the
1928 Warner Brother’s hit, The Jazz
Singer. But new sound technology posed a
problem for studios’ international distribution in the new global marketplace: while
language could easily be changed in silent
films by splicing in new inter-titles, it was
not as simple for sound film. It would be
years before sound dubbing was perfected.
In the interim, studios had to find a
way to stay on top of the international film
market: they made Multiple Language
Version (mlv) films. For these, directors
re-shot the same film narrative in different languages. If actors were multilingual,
they would star in the different versions of
the films. And in 1930, Chinese-American
actress Anna May Wong starred in an
English version of the film The Flame of
Love with an English-speaking leading
man, a German version with a German
leading man, and a French version with a
French leading man.
I imagine the three films being projected simultaneously side-by-side in a cinema, the three versions being repetitions,
but not precisely so. What is lost between
the different languages in the films? Does
the dialogue fall into synchronicity? Or is
there an annoying repetition or uncanny
déjà vu? Does the actress move differently
as a French speaker? It fascinates me that
in each film she performs the other for that
culture, but as a trilogy she is the center.
There is a wavering energy in being ambivalently both.
For a variety of reasons, I could only
locate the English version of the film. So
to pass the time, I researched. And in one
biography, I came across some quotations
by Walter Benjamin.
In 1928 the two had actually met:
Benjamin interviewed Anna May Wong –
at the time a film starlet playing popular
melodrama – for the German literary magazine Die Literarische Welt.
In the article, which details their meeting, Benjamin asks Wong, “With what
form of representation would you express
yourself, if film was not available to you?”
Courtesy of the artist
From Touch Would–The Product Love, or Die Wahre Liebe, 2008
I imagine the three films being projected simultaneously
side-by-side in a cinema, the three versions being repetitions,
but not precisely so. What is lost between the different
languages in the films?
She answers with the expression “touch
wood,” as in the superstitious expression
“knock on wood,” to prevent an unwanted
event from occurring. In the original text,
though, “touch wood” is printed in English
as “touch would.”
What are the chances Walter Benjamin
actually believed that Anna May Wong
meant to say touch would become her form
of expression if film were not available
to her? Moreover, why would Benjamin,
whose work has had enormous influence
on film theory and contemporary culture,
write about an Asian-American film starlet
working in Berlin?
In my 2006 video A Chinoiserie Out of
the Old West, I had three scholars translate
this Benjamin article; they all translate this
“touch” part differently. One of them has
Wong saying that if film were not available
to her, touch would become her form of
expression.
In wordplay, Freud speaks of the breakdown of meaning to be a relief of the conscious mind and a subverting of the rules
of language and meaning. He theorizes
that “the unconscious takes the opportunity of a word or phrase to intrude a meaning that has been repressed.” This slip
interrupts our everyday reality and opens
imagination to a whole other world existing
simultaneously.
After considering all the possible meanings of touch wood/would, the tone of the
text changes. A break is created. I become
confused and unsure of the intentions of
the article. I become more conscious of
being deceived by the meaning presented.
I, too, question if Anna May Wong really
did mean to say “touch would.” Perhaps
she was purposefully enjoying the mischievous distortion of her speech because
it played with the ironic inversion of the
cultural critic as witness to her otherness.
Or maybe Benjamin did it on purpose to
spite her. Having been known not to put
up with intellectual inferiors, perhaps he
was having a jab at her self-importance of
being a movie star by implying that the
film star is only a prostitute. My response
is a physical suspicion, as confusion is fi
often physical. Like film, the conscious and
the unconscious cohabitate, waver back and
forth, intentions unclear.
The meeting of Wong and Benjamin
and their point of contact as a Freudian slip
makes tenuous and wavering the relationship of theory over medium, intentions over
coincidences, conscious over subconscious.
Another narrative is forever hovering, even
if it is not visible, as a simultaneous and
alternative narrative.
In the Chinoiserie video, the translators’
confusion of touching as a form of expression brings to my mind the idea of sex
workers’ roles as “professional touchers.”
It also problematically frames Benjamin’s
Freudian slip as a subconscious desire
for Wong, or more generally, the West’s
subconscious desire for the East. In this
context, the use of “professional touchers”
in the form of sex workers could be standins for Wong, and the use of translators
could be stand-ins for Benjamin. Marx
claimed that “prostitution is only a specific
expression of the general prostitution of the
laborer.” From Brecht to Godard to Leftist
Chinese cinema, the prostitute has been
used as a symbol of the problems of ailing
modern society.
Touch Would: The Product Love, or Die
Wahre Liebe is my attempt at making a
pornographic film starring the characters
Wong and Benjamin, in China. Die Wahre
Liebe was a working title of Bertoldt Brecht’s
play The Good Person of Szechuan (1943). In
this play, three gods come to earth to find
out if there are any good persons left. They
meet a prostitute who is good, and they give
society”). The actress who plays Wong in
Touch Would is a restaurant owner in her
non-acting life. She juggles, on the one
hand, her ultimate desire in life to be an
actor, with being a business owner within
the changing economic landscape of China.
Both the characters of Wong and Benjamin
are played by Chinese television actors. By
requiring Chinese actors to perform both
By requiring Chinese actors to perform both the roles of
Anna May Wong and Benjamin, the video reverses the common
practice in early Hollywood of having all-white casts portray
Asian characters in “yellowface.”
her a gift of money in order to continue her
good deeds. With this money, she opens
a shop and immediately discovers the difficulties that come with continuing her
generosity while being a business owner.
To solve this problem, she creates a malecousin character who arrives to do any bad
deeds she, as a good person, cannot imagine
doing – becoming, in effect, two people.
An ethical question behind The Good
Person of Szechuan is how a person could
stay “good” in a capitalist society (or, as
they prefer to say in China, “market-driven
the roles of Anna May Wong and Benjamin,
the video reverses the common practice in
early Hollywood of having all-white casts
portray Asian characters in “yellowface.” It
also situates the making of a pornographic
film and soap opera within Wong’s authentic culture, thereby translating it from a
Chinoiserie into a Western. µ
Patty Chang is a New York-based video
and performance artist and the fall 2008
Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual
Arts at the Academy.
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James Rosenquist, The Hole in the Center of the Clock – Night Numbers, 2008
Down by law
Copyright and creativity in the age of YouTube
By Lawrence Lessig
I
n e a rly Februa ry 2007 Stephanie
Lenz’s 18-month-old son, Holden, started dancing. Pushing a walker across
the kitchen floor, Holden started moving
to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince
(that’s the current name of the artist formerly known as Prince), “Let’s Go Crazy.”
Holden had heard the song a couple of
Sometime over the next four months,
however, someone not a friend of Stephanie
Lenz also watched Holden dance. That
someone worked for Universal Music Group.
Universal either owns or administers some
of the copyrights of Prince. And Universal
has a long history of aggressively defending
the copyrights of its authors. In 1976 it was
it’s a bit hard to e-mail a 20-megabyte video file,
even to your family. So she did what any sensible
citizen of the twenty-first century would do:
she uploaded the file to YouTube and e-mailed her
relatives the link.
weeks before, when the family was watchone of the lead plaintiffs suing Sony for the
ing the Super Bowl. The beat had obviously “pirate technology” now known as the vcr.
stuck. So when he heard the song again,
In 2000 it was one of about ten companies
he did what any sensible 18-month-old
suing Eric Corely and his magazine 2600
would do: he accepted Prince’s invitation
for publishing a link to a site that contained
and went crazy – in the clumsy but insanecode that could enable someone to play
ly cute way that any precocious 18-montha dv d on Linux. And in 2007 Universal
old would.
would continue its crusade against copyHolden’s mom, understandably, thought right piracy by threatening Stephanie Lenz.
the scene hilarious. She grabbed her camIt fired off a letter to YouTube demanding
corder and captured the dance digitally. For that it remove the unauthorized perfor29 seconds she had the priceless image of
mance of Prince’s music. YouTube, to avoid
Holden dancing to the barely discernible
liability itself, complied.
Prince playing on a radio somewhere in the
This sort of thing happens all the time.
background.
Companies like YouTube are deluged with
Lenz wanted her parents to see the film.
demands to remove material from their
But it’s a bit hard to e-mail a 20-megabyte
systems. No doubt a significant portion
video file, even to your family. So she did
of those demands are fair and justified. If
what any sensible citizen of the twenty-first
you’re Viacom, funding a new television
century would do: she uploaded the file to
series with high-priced ads, it is perfectly
YouTube and e-mailed her relatives the link. understandable that when a perfect copy
They watched the video scores of times, no
of the latest episode is made available on
doubt sharing the link with friends and col- YouTube, you would be keen to have it taken
leagues at work. It was a perfect YouTube
down. Copyright law gives Viacom that
moment: a community of laughs around a
power by giving it a quick and inexpensive
homemade video, readily shared with anyway to get the YouTubes of the world to help
one who wanted to watch.
it protect its rights.
The Prince song on Lenz’s video, however, was something completely different.
First, the quality of the recording was terrible. No one would download Lenz’s video to
avoid paying Prince for his music. Likewise,
neither Prince nor Universal was in the
business of selling the right to video-cam
your baby dancing to their music. There is
no market in licensing music to amateur
video. Thus, there was no plausible way
in which Prince or Universal was being
harmed by Stephanie Lenz’s sharing this
video of her kid dancing with her family,
friends, and whoever else saw it. Some
parents might well be terrified by how
deeply commercial culture had penetrated
the brain of their 18-month-old. Stephanie
Lenz just thought it cute.
Not cute, however, from Lenz’s perspective at least, was the notice she received
from YouTube that it was removing her
video. What had she done wrong? Lenz
wondered. What possible rule – assuming,
as she did, that the rules regulating culture
and her (what we call “copyright”) were
sensible rules – could her maternal gloating have broken? She pressed that question through a number of channels until
it found its way to the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (eff), on whose board I sat
until the beginning of 2008.
The eff handles lots of cases like this.
The lawyers thought this case would quickly
go away. They filed a counternotice, asserting that no rights of Universal or Prince
were violated, and that Stephanie Lenz
certainly had the right to show her baby
dancing. The response was routine. No one
expected anything more would come of it.
But something did. The lawyers at
Universal were not going to back down.
There was a principle at stake here.
Ms. Lenz was not permitted to share fi
this bit of captured culture. They would
insist – indeed, would threaten her with
this claim directly – that sharing this home
movie was willful copyright infringement.
Under the laws of the United States, Ms.
Lenz was risking a $150,000 fine for sharing her home movie.
war has an important objective. Copyright
is, in my view at least, critically important
to a healthy culture. Properly balanced, it is
essential to inspiring certain forms of creativity. Without it, we would have a much
poorer culture. With it, at least properly balanced, we create the incentives to produce
he and I debated the issue. In his brilliant
and engaging opening, Valenti described
another talk he had just given at Stanford,
at which 90 percent of the students confessed to illegally downloading music from
Napster. He asked a student to defend this
“stealing.” The student’s response was simple: yes, this might be stealing, but everyone does it. How could it be wrong? Valenti
like all metaphoric wars, the copyright wars are not actual
then asked his Stanford hosts: “What are
conflicts of survival. Or at least, they are not conflicts
you teaching these kids? What kind of
for survival of a people or a society, even if they are wars
moral platform will sustain this young
of survival for certain businesses or, more accurately,
man in his later life?”
business models.
This wasn’t the question that interested
me in that debate. I blathered on about the
I want you to imagine the conference
great new works that otherwise would not
framers of our Constitution, about incenroom at Universal where the decision was
be produced.
tives, and about limiting monopolies. But
made to threaten Stephanie Lenz with a
But, like all metaphoric wars, the copyValenti’s question is precisely the quesfederal lawsuit: four or more participants,
right wars are not actual conflicts of surtion that interests me now: “What kind
most of them lawyers billing hundreds
vival. Or at least, they are not conflicts for
of moral platform will sustain this young
of dollars an hour. All of them wearing
survival of a people or a society, even if they man in his later life?” For me, “this young
thousand-dollar suits, sitting around lookare wars of survival for certain businesses
man” represents my two young sons. For
ing serious, drinking coffee brewed by an
or, more accurately, business models. Thus
you, it may be your daughter or your nephassistant, reading a memo drafted by a first- we must keep in mind the other values
ew. But for all of us, whether we have kids
year associate about the various rights that
or objectives that might also be affected
or not, Valenti’s question is exactly the
had been violated by the pirate Stephanie
by this war. We must make sure this war
question that should concern us most. In a
Lenz. After thirty minutes, maybe an
doesn’t cost more than it is worth. We must
world in which technology begs all of us to
hour, the executives come to their solemn
be sure it is winnable, or winnable at a price create and spread creative work differently
decision. A meeting that cost Universal
we’re willing to pay.
from how it was created and spread before,
$10,000? $50,000? (when you count the
I believe we should not be waging this
what kind of moral platform will sustain
value of the lawyers’ time, and the time
war. I believe so not because I think copyour kids, when their ordinary behavior is
to prepare the legal materials); a meeting
right is unimportant. Instead, I believe in
deemed criminal? Who will they become?
resolved to invoke the laws of Congress
peace because the costs of this war wildly
What other crimes will to them seem
against a mother merely giddy with love for
exceed any benefit, at least when you
natural?
her 18-month-old son.
consider changes to the current regime
Valenti asked this question to motivate
Picture all that, and then ask yourself:
of copyright that could end this war while
Congress – and anyone else who would
how is it that sensible people, people no
promising artists and authors the proteclisten – to wage an ever more effective
doubt educated at some of the best universi- tion that any copyright system is intended
war against “piracy.” I ask this question
ties and law schools in the country, would
to provide.
to motivate anyone who will listen (and
come to think it a sane use of corporate
Congress is certainly not in that category)
resources to threaten the mother of a dancI published a book called Free Culture
to think about a different question: what
ing infant? What is it that allows these lawjust as my first child was born. And in the
should we do if this war against “piracy”
yers and executives to take a case like this
four years since, my focus, or fears, about
as we currently conceive of it cannot be
seriously, to believe there’s some important this war have changed. I don’t doubt the
won? What should we do if we know that
social or corporate reason to deploy the
concerns I had about innovation, creativity,
the future will be one where our kids, and
federal scheme of regulation called copyand freedom. But they don’t keep me awake their kids, will use a digital network to
right to stop the spread of these images and
anymore. Now I worry about the effect this
access whatever content they want whenmusic? “Let’s Go Crazy”? Indeed! What has war is having upon our kids. What is this
ever they want it? What should we do if we
brought the American legal system to the
war doing to them? Who is it making them? know that the future is one where perfect
point that such behavior by a leading corpo- How is it changing how they think about
control over the distribution of “copies”
ration is considered anything but “crazy”?
normal, right-thinking behavior? What
simply will not exist?
Or to turn it around, who have we become
does it mean to a society when a whole genIn that world, should we continue our
that such behavior seems sane to anyone?
eration is raised as criminals?
ritual sacrifice of some kid caught downThese are not new questions. Indeed,
loading content? Should we continue the
n t he cop y righ t “wa rs,” of which
they are the questions that late head of the
expulsions from universities? The threat
this scene is but a minor skirmish, right- Motion Picture Association of America,
of multimillion-dollar civil judgments?
thinking sorts mean not the “war” on
Jack Valenti, asked again and again as
Should we increase the vigor with which we
copyright “waged” by “pirates,” but the
he fought what he called a “terrorist war”
wage war against these “terrorists”? Should
“war” on “piracy,” which threatens “the suragainst “piracy.” It was the question he
we sacrifice ten or a hundred to a federal
vival” of certain American industries. This
asked a Harvard audience the first time
prison (for their actions under current law
I
are felonies), so that others learn to stop
what today they do with ever-increasing
frequency?
In my view, the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously. At least when the war is not about
survival, the solution to an unwinnable war
dinarily good work by some of the very best
scholars in America, mapping and sketching alternatives to the existing system.
These alternatives would achieve the same
ends that copyright seeks, without making
felons of those who naturally do what new
technologies encourage them to do.
It is time we stop developing tools that do nothing more than
break the connectivity and efficiency of this network. It is
time we call a truce, and figure a better way. And a better way
means redefining the system of law we call copyright so that
ordinary, normal behavior is not called criminal.
is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to
achieve without war the ends that the war
sought. Criminalizing an entire generation is too high a price to pay for almost any
end. It is certainly too high a price to pay
for a copyright system crafted more than a
generation ago.
This war is especially pointless because
there are peaceful means to attain all of its
objectives – or at least, all of the legitimate
objectives. Artists and authors need incentives to28.08.2008
create. We can 12:01
craft a system
that 1
sfv_gay_publ
Uhr Seite
does exactly that without criminalizing our
kids. The last decade is filled with extraor-
It is time we take seriously these alternatives. It is time we stop wasting the
resources of our federal courts, our police,
and our universities to punish behavior
that we need not punish. It is time we stop
developing tools that do nothing more
than break the extraordinary connectivity
and efficiency of this network. It is time we
call a truce, and figure a better way. And
a better way means redefining the system
of law we call copyright so that ordinary,
normal behavior is not called criminal. We
need, in other words, more humility about
regulation.
The twentieth century changed us in
many obvious ways. But the one way we’re
likely not to notice is the presumption the
twentieth century gave us that government
regulation is plausibly successful. For most
of the history of modern government, the
struggle was not about what was good or
bad; the struggle was about whether it was
possible to imagine government affecting any good through regulation. Fears of
inevitable corruption, in part at least, drove
our framers to limit the size of the federal
government – not their idealism about libertarianism. Recognizing the uselessness
of certain sorts of rules led governments
to avoid regulation in obvious areas, or to
deregulate when they saw their regulation
failing. These are the historical expressions
of regulatory humility, a habit of mind for
most of human history. µ
The above essay is adapted from Remix:
Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the
Hybrid Economy (Penguin 2008),
by J.P. Morgan spring 2007 Academy
fellow and current trustee Lawrence
Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford
University and co-founder of Creative
Commons.
www.fischerverlage.de
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Peter Gays opus magnum:
»Reich, gelehrt, lebendig
geschrieben.« New York Times
Eine umfassende und glänzend geschriebene
Geschichte des Aufbruchs in den Künsten seit Mitte
des 19. Jahrhunderts, die erstmals alle Bereiche
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Staged in Berlin
The author visited a variety of Berlin theaters in the spring of 2008.
Herewith, the findings
By Kenneth Gross
Scene from Die Ratten at Deutsches Theater
T
he stage is b a re of furniture and
props – there is only a vast, rotating
wall at the back of the stage, yellow or
suffused in yellow light. Four actors – an
older and a younger woman, a shorter and
a taller man – speak all the parts. There is
a chorus of old men, a Persian queen, a battlefield survivor, a king’s ghost, and a king,
who enters alone at the very end of the play.
I am watching Aeschylus’s The Persians,
translated by Heiner Mueller and directed
by Dimitir Gotscheff at the Deutsches
Theater. The only extant Greek tragedy on
a historical subject – produced in Athens
in 472 BC, only eight years after the events
it depicts – the play shows how the Persian
court awaits and then receives news of the
catastrophic defeat of King Xerxes’ invading Persian fleet by much smaller Greek
forces at the battle of Salamis.
The actors deliver their lines with a
measured musical cadence, a choreography
of the voice, trying to catch the formality
of the original Greek but never sacrificing
immediacy or emotional resonance. Most
lines are delivered with the actors standing still, gazing directly at the audience.
No voice is quite singular, transparently
individual. The older woman speaks for
the whole chorus of worried, terrified
“I”
Ortega y Gasset makes much fuss somewhere speculating that Goethe,
glorious Goethe, mismanaged the project of realizing his selfhood,
that he was one of those “I”s who aren’t truly at one with themselves,
who in construing themselves betray the “I” they could/should have been.
This is as I recall it, though possibly I, who for the greater part of my life
have been involved in an adversarial relation with myself, berating, accusing,
demanding I be someone I’m not, shouldn’t be wholly trusted in this:
Ortega may well have meant something entirely else, (though what?)
Anyway, put things in perspective, go back past where it all starts,
past Heraclitus, Hephaestus, Baal, the bacteria-kings, to the inception,
when there were only some dream-strings, then a cosmos stuffed like a couch –
is it likely cosmos could have ever conceived of a butter-inner like “I”?
acknowledges his terrible defeat and asks
the Persians with ceremonious insistence
to mourn their dead, make lament, and
History presses in more sharply here, history that is, in
turn, continually being re-interrogated, restaged, and
re-monumentalized in ways I can find variously fascinating
and baffling.
mourning elders, registering the cost of
Xerxes’ aggressive pride, and even hinting that the shame of this defeat might
lessen the power of kings. The words of a
single messenger are spoken by both men
together, a kind of minimalist chorus.
With an impersonality that gradually fills
with rage and bitterness, they speak of the
horrors of battle, and even more of the horrors of the long march home. The subtle
sharing or dividing of roles suggests how
the fate of all Persians is bound together.
And then there are moments when some
more alien impulse breaks out – as when
Queen Atossa, despite the outward gravity
of her voice, gives vent to a wordless, almost
manic howl of glee (watched silently by
others) when she finds out that Xerxes is
still alive and that she will keep her crown.
Even more remarkable is when Xerxes
himself comes on stage at the end, stripped,
isolated, humiliated, an object of fear. He
speaks Aeschylus’s text, in which the king
make offerings to the gods. But the actor
delivers the lines with such focused rage,
tinged with hysteria, that we see Xerxes’
effort to recover, in the very moment of
defeat, his authority and his power to terrify. He is a fanatic and thug in the guise of
a king, still unaware of his own hybris.
The show’s opening scene is a silent,
super-added clownshow, in which the two
male actors struggle over how to place the
rotating wall between them, starting with
polite adjustments, pushing it back and
forth with increasing heat, until they find
themselves chased and overtaken by the
speed and momentum of the wall itself. It
is less a topical reference to the Berlin Wall
than an emblem of how human beings set
in motion forces they cannot control. It is
a physical emblem of the fact that, in this
staging of the tragedy, there was no fate or
necessity other than a human one.
Xerxes at the end is no particular
political terrorist but a mirror of all: if the
moment makes him inevitably a double
for George Bush in Iraq, he is also Hitler,
Stalin, or any number of minor tyrants
indifferent to the suffering of their people.
What strikes me is how much more immediate and charged such mirrorings are
when performed in Berlin as opposed to
New York or London. History presses in
more sharply here, history that is, in turn,
continually being re-interrogated, restaged,
and re-monumentalized in ways I can find
variously fascinating and baffling.
T
he house t h at serv es as the setting for Nora (Ibsen’s A Doll’s House,
as directed by Thomas Ostermeier at
the Schaubühne) is no claustrophobically
comfortable bourgeois box. It seems rather,
in its stylish European modernity, a place
of danger, with its sharp-edged furniture,
rail-less wooden stairs suspended in space,
sleek glass walls, and shifting floor levels.
Positioned on a rotating stage and always
glimpsed from new angles, this house has a
menacing life of its own.
Nora (played remarkably by Anne
Tismer – part of the oddness of theatergoing here is never to have heard the names
of obviously well-known artists) shows
her hysteria, physical energy, and anxiety
more openly than in any traditional ver-
Or that some maundering “I” would come up with mind, and then words? –
(oh, the prickling serifs, the barbs) – and that words would be used to test cosmos,
make certain it worked correctly? Could a self-swallowed black-hole
skidding and slipping on gravity’s dance-floor have ever dreamt that?
No surprise then that reality, having to know how sadly contingent it was,
would plot vengeance: a “thinker,” yes, who’d contrive a cunning conundrum:
an “I” not good enough for its “I,” inflicted on the vastest “I” in the stacks.
How could a barely competent, underachieving universe not applaud that?
… Although, as I say and probably should repeat, this might well be all me …
C.K. Williams
sion I have seen. Violence is sometimes a
form of play in this house. You see it in the
games with toy guns that Nora continually plays with her children, and in the
punk costume Nora wears to a fancy-dress
ball, which includes holstered pistols and
a t-shirt covered with fake blood over a
black miniskirt. Physical menace takes
more concrete forms as well. In one scene,
the couple’s friend Doctor Rank – here no
aging professional dying of syphilis, as
in Ibsen, but a young man dying of a ids –
makes rough, mocking sexual advances
toward Nora. And at the end, rather than
simply leaving a baffled Torvald alone in
the house, this Nora shoots him with his
own gun. More memorable than even this
directorial reinvention is the play’s close.
Ibsen’s iconic image of Nora walking out of
the house and slamming the door, entering
into a new, freer world offstage, is a hard
thing to make persuasive for modern audiences. In Ostermeier’s version, you see her
walking through the door, but then the set
rotates to show her standing on the other
side of that threshold. Stunned, as much in
shock as in triumph, she leans against the
door, slides down to a squat, and stays there
as the lights go down. The doorway marks
a house she cannot leave. It becomes a trap
rather than an escape hatch.
This production, staged first in 2004,
has become something of a classic on the
Berlin stage. If this is “director’s theater,”
the reshaping of the text to speak to the
present moment isn’t at all gratuitous. It
takes Ibsen’s play seriously, making its
hidden tensions more present and physical,
even as it probes the play’s dramatic limits,
the limits of Ibsen’s testing of the possible,
his sense of what can, or ought to, be visible and invisible. In an equally remarkable
version of Hedda Gabler, Ostermeier uses
the rotating stage to let us see what is otherwise always hidden – the body of the young,
proud, but morally trapped wife after she
shoots herself with her father’s pistol. She
is more alone even in death, since the other
characters, who cannot see her, don’t even
believe she has killed herself. They mistake
the gunshot for a game. The famous last
line – “People don’t do such things” – is
uttered with smugness and insouciance
rather than shock or horror.
T
he freedom and t he need to
grapple with a classical repertoire is
for me part of the pleasure of theater
here. It puts the director’s own will on display more nakedly. For all the excitement of
pieces like The Persians and Nora, however,
there are other cases where the updating
depends on a chilly, mechanical radicalism
– even a cruel, avant-garde kitsch – rather
than on a revisionary work bred into and
through the play.
Michael Thalheimer’s Hamlet at the
Deutsches Theater plays a game of relentless darkening, but in a way that often
merely displays its own proud contempt
for the original play. Claudius is a cowardly
idiot who spends most of the time groping
or having sex with Gertrude, who is usually
completely uninterested in her son. Hamlet
is often just bored and disgusted – with
little “antic disposition,” little rage, sorrow,
wit, compulsion, even thought. The ghost,
stark naked and impassive, hauling a huge
sword, tells the story of his poisoning as
if in a dream, while Hamlet stands beside
him equally expressionless, uttering his
response like an automaton. He delivers
the “To be or not to be” soliloquy twice,
once in a loud, unmodulated shout, and
then in a kind of bored, rapid drone spoken
directly to the audience. The levels of violence on stage seem all but arbitrary. The
climactic duel with Laertes is a perfunctory
slapping of wooden swords. On the other
hand, in the famous scene where the prince
invites Guildenstern to play a recorder that
he doesn’t know how to play, so as to frame
his attack on their poor powers of manipulation, Thalheimer’s Hamlet forces the
instrument into both Guildenstern’s and
Rosencrantz’s mouths with such force that
they spit blood.
There are moments of revelation.
The actress playing Ophelia shows real
wounded passion in her lines, sane and
mad. It is brilliant to make Polonius into a
sly, anxious, and manic Stasi agent trying
to keep the world under control. Equally
fascinating is the way actors move back and
forth on a deep stage, into and out of darkness. At the play’s opening, all the actors sit
in a line at the front of the stage, staring at
the audience in a kind of pained boredom
for perhaps five minutes before beginning
the opening court scene. It is stupefying,
an obvious trick, yet when the actors return
to this arrangement, corpses and all, at the
play’s end, the repetition makes it more
haunting. Throughout, one is reminded of
the potential emptiness of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet as a theatrical cliché, a dead robot
of melancholy. And something more dangerous: a figure whose influence is somehow implicated in the historical waste of a
civilization (the subject of Heiner Mueller’s
Hamletmaschine, whose influence is at
work here).
Still, what continues to baffle me is the
relentless abandonment of the play’s fi
Photo: Arno Declair
Scene from Hedda Gabler at Schaubühne
own resources of language, thought, and
feeling, including its own ways of articulating skepticism, rage, and contempt. No
appeals to Brecht’s “alienation-effect” or
Artaud’s “theater of cruelty,” even the idea
of a “post-dramatic theater” would be sufficient to overcome my sense of wasted
means. It is as if someone were to give you
a beautifully designed weapon, equipped
with night vision, laser-guided aim, a
silencer, untraceable bullets, and fantastic
range, and you used it to club someone over
the head.
T
h a lheimer’s staging of
Gerhard Hauptmann’s Die Ratten
(The Rats), also at the Deutsches
Theater, feels different. The aim to
strip down is no less at work. The setting described in the original text is the
depressed, crumbling, warren-like cham-
bers of a Berlin tenement. In this version,
we have an open performance space bare of
all detail, the floor elevated several meters
above the ordinary stage platform. It has
a low, deep ceiling, a good deal less than
two meters high, so the actors are forced to
move in an unnatural crouch, appearing
and disappearing from the darkened rear
of the stage. The visual game, the literalization of the metaphor of house and stage as
rat-hole, is clear enough. You can’t mistake
the display of the director and designer’s
revisionary will. And yet what is more compelling is the frightening ease with which
the characters live and move in that constrained space; they have made it a world
they belong in, stalking and searching.
And perhaps because Hauptmann’s characters are already so desolate and disconsolate,
victims of poverty, madness, ambition,
even of their own virtue, so full of cruelty
and vulnerability (one plot twist is the theft
and killing of a child) that the actors are
allowed emotionally to inhabit their roles
and their blunt, working-class language
without contempt, to give heat and blood
to their words – even if they also enact the
play’s potential for melodrama.
A
mong se v er a l v ersions of
Goethe’s Faust I see in Berlin, by
far the strangest is Gretchens Faust,
directed by and starring Martin Wuttke. It
is staged in a long, ornate, high-ceilinged
chamber in the Berliner Ensemble, the
walls faced in tall mirrors, the audience
seated in two rows around a long wooden
table and on a balcony that runs the length
of the room. On top of that table walks a
chorus of nine actresses, appearing by
turns as jailors and sylphs, ingénues and
witches, waitresses and cleaning women.
They are all incarnations of Faust’s alwayschanging view of the women he desires,
Photo: Helmut Pogerth
Scene from Spleen at Wilde & Vogel
flees, and betrays, displayed as the driving
forces of his career. They move and change
roles in endless dumb show. Almost all
speech comes from Wuttke, who utters
streams of verse-fragments from the plays,
assuming the voices of both Faust and
Mephistopheles. Black-clad and whitewigged, he is fierce, gleeful, manically
persuasive, even if also, at moments, a
child and idiot. (Much of the audience, a
friend tells me, will remember Wuttke’s
much-lauded performance as the grotesque Hitlerian gangster in Brecht’s The
Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui.) The mocking
dismemberment of character and language
is even more ruthless than in Thalheimer’s
staging of Faust, Part I (which I dislike
for some of the same reasons I dislike his
Hamlet). What makes Wuttke’s revisions
different is the show’s theatrical playfulness, as well as one’s awareness of the
actor’s pleasure, even ecstasy, in inhabiting
his different voices and postures.
At one moment Wuttke leaves the
chamber, calling loudly “Pudel, Pudel…” –
reminding us of the dog in whose shape
Mephistopheles first appears in Goethe’s
text. We hear him off-stage, crying out for
many minutes in the hallways, on the stairways, even in the theater courtyard. It is
amazing to hear his voice through the windows. Faust is at large in Mitte! He finally
does return with a small, black poodle who
walks up and down the tabletop and acquits
himself brilliantly among this company.
I
c a me to t he A meric an Academy
not to write not about human actors but
about the aesthetics of puppet theater.
Berlin, like many cities in Germany, has
numerous professional companies performing both traditional and experimental
puppet shows for adult and child audiences – assuming in the children an appetite
for curious invention, and in the adults a
readiness to take seriously both the puppets and their own child-like appetites. It is
a smaller world than that of actors’ theaters,
mysterious and relentlessly idiosyncratic,
but with its own immense ambitions to
reinterpret inherited texts.
I go to see a puppet show of Tristan
und Isolde in a production by the Theater
Handgemenge, not knowing what to expect.
(The venue is a small but well-appointed
theater in east Berlin called the Schaubude –
in fact a former ddr state puppet theater, a
relic of a time when puppet theater, as in
many Eastern bloc nations, received considerable state support and became a home
for serious artists, partly because it was
seen as a tool for education.) The show is
not Wagner’s opera but a staging based on
his source, the thirteenth-century poem of
Gottfried von Strassburg. It is played both
by realistic, fully-sculpted puppets moved
with hands and rods and by smaller shadowfigures projected on a backlit screen. The
use of the puppets brings out the legendary,
idealized, and dream-like aspects of the
story of love and adultery. But these small,
stark figures are also eloquent in conveying
the bluntness, the wordless rawness, of the
desire that drives and pulls the two lovers.
This desire is ruthless and cruel; the couple
seems to hide nothing. Isolde’s husband,
King Mark, is the more touching, but also
the more frightening, for seeing everything
and yet doing nothing. In this version, any
violence remains uncommitted. Mark’s cruelty, like that of the lovers, lies in the silence
by which they try to protect one another.
Director Tristan Vogt later tells me that the
puppets themselves somehow made this
directorial interpretation inevitable. The
puppets, he says, create a world in which
there are no secrets.
Puppets have a different relation to life
and death. They do not die and have no
human past or memory; they are close to
the realm of the inanimate. Their deathlessness gives them a closer attachment
to the demonic, to things ordinarily out of
sight. Yet it is harder to make them lie. It
puts them beyond certain genres, tragedy
perhaps being one of them.
T
he puppe t compan y Wilde &
Vogel performs a show based on
Baudelaire’s book of prose poems
Paris Spleen, directed by Hendrik Mannes.
At its center is a tiny marionette frog fi
© Freese/drama-berlin.de
with long legs, human breasts, and a devious, insinuating smile. There is also an impish, skeletal torso with long arms, wrapped
in gray rags; a larger, vaudevillian frog,
wielding ostrich plumes; a comic demon;
and the fierce creatures of a Kasper show –
all undertaking responses to Baudelaire’s
haunting, often grimly comical reflections
and stories. The puppets are all slightly
broken, slightly ruined. They are scattered
about the stage, and all set into motion by
a single puppeteer, Michael Vogel, who
remains alone and exposed to our view.
He handles the puppets with delicacy but
also freedom, coaxing them into life, picking them up and leaving them aside as
necessary, then reanimating those he’d
abandoned. Even as he moves the puppets,
he also interacts with them, part actor and
dancer. At moments he dons the mask of a
ghostly female face or of a nude female torso,
which assimilate him more fully to the
material world of the puppets, even as they
make his human sexual identity more fluid.
You hear Baudelaire’s texts read by the
recorded voices of young children – poems
that describe a poor boy gaily playing with
a rat, jealously watched by a rich boy; a poet
who cruelly breaks a glass-seller’s panes;
two boys fighting in the mud over a piece of
bread; a melancholy clown standing at the
margins of a bright, noisy circus; the death
of a conspiratorial court fool; the moon’s
invasion of the poet’s sleep. The children’s
voices lend a curious impersonality and
transparency to these texts, as if the children only sometimes know what they are
saying.
The puppets in their movements catch
the poems’ spirit of seductive histrionics
and violence, but never enact the texts literally. They have their own strange games
to perform: dances, songs, explorations,
flights, frights, and battles, obliquely doubling the stories. Some of the most astonishing moments are those when a silent
puppet stands still and seems just to listen
to the voices of the children, only half comprehending what they say. The puppets find
their way mysteriously into the poems and
make a home there. You never quite know
where the soul of the puppet or actor is.
B
Scene from Hamlet at Deutsches Theater
rech t ’s Dreig roschenoper,
direc t ed by Robert Wilson at the
Berliner Ensemble, is the hardest
ticket to get – always sold out, even when
the run is extended by months. Can this
be because it is so strangely different from
everything else there is to see on stage? It
is so purely beautiful, a crystalline visual
and theatrical artifact, with the actors
in their stylish, if often grotesque, black
costumes silhouetted against backdrops
of saturated reds, blues, and greens. Only
the shifting patterns of linear white lights
define the different spaces of the action –
street, tavern, whorehouse, jail, gallows. In
their stylized make-up and perfectly choreographed movements – keyed to small,
insistent impulses of sound – the actors are
themselves like puppets. It is a production
that is stripped down and abstract, yes, but
without the raw edges, the air of ruin, vulnerability, and contamination so visible in
other performances I have seen. Is that why
I feel so little sense of any historical world
of crime or coercion beyond the edges of
the play?
I
wonder a bou t t he quan t i t y of
stage-blood used on the Berlin stage.
I am made acutely aware here of
how fake blood can become its own kind
of empty gesture or kitsch, the more so
when it seems meant to mark some truth
about violence. So I become alert to places
where it seems used in a more calculated,
nuanced fashion. There is, for instance,
the blood on Nora’s fancy-dress costume,
which (a rare thing) acknowledges itself as
stage blood. One of the nastier characters
in Die Ratten, the thuggish brother Bruno,
seems to have a permanent nose-bleed
that gives him something like a red Hitler
moustache. (It makes me queasy, but I see
the point.)
Just before leaving Berlin, I see the
premier of Handel’s Belshazzar at the
Staatsoper unter den Linden, directed by
Christoph Nel, conducted by René Jacobs.
Based on the Book of Daniel, the piece
recounts how a tyrannical Babylonian king
is punished for his oppression of Jewish
captives and his defiling of sacred vessels stolen from the Temple in Jerusalem.
Belshazzar was originally written as an
oratorio whose action is supposed to be
imagined, but here the singers act it out.
The set and stage-action have great simplicity and economy – though Belshazzar
himself (Kenneth Tarver), as he stalks
about with exaggerated menace, wearing an oversized crown and holding up
an iconic, single-bladed axe, looks like
a weird survivor from some German
Expressionist play of the early 1920s. One
very stark effect sticks in my mind. For
the famous “handwriting on the wall,” the
mysterious Hebrew words Mene mene tekel
upharsin, written by a supernatural hand
that appears to Belshazzar at his feast,
we see nothing word-like at all. Rather,
blood suddenly seeps out of horizontal
seams that run the length of the white
wall, slowly running down in a web of thin,
wavering lines. All the stranger that when
Kristina Hammarström, who sings Daniel,
repeats aloud the words she “reads” on
the wall, her notes sound not like Baroque
ornamentation, but rather like Handel’s
attempt to imitate the sounds of a cantor
in a synagogue, intoning the words of
scripture. µ
Kenneth Gross is a professor of English
at the University of Rochester and a
Shakespeare scholar. An Ellen Maria
Gorrissen Fellow at the American
Academy in spring 2008, he is currently
writing about puppetry.
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Mutual Mistrust
Cynical disbelief has become the central roadblock to an Israeli–Palestinian peace
By Dennis Ross
T
oday w e face mult iple limitations that hamper peacemaking
between Israel and its neighbors.
Start with the Palestinians: the Palestinian
Authority (PA) holds sway in only part of its
territory. Hamas controls Gaza, rejects the
very idea of a two-state solution, and there
is no prospect any time soon of the PA reasserting its control over the area. Any agreement between Israel and the PA on peace
may have to include Gaza; no Palestinian
leadership would retain any credibility if
it looked like it was ready to forsake Gaza.
But such an agreement will likely exist for
some time only on paper.
This is an obvious limitation. But it’s not
the only obstacle – or even the most important – to peacemaking between Israelis and
Palestinians. Rather, it is the disbelief that
exists on both sides. That the Israeli and
Palestinian publics no longer believe that
peace is possible ultimately weakens their
leaders. No political head is likely to take
on the history and mythology of Jerusalem
or of the grievances of refugees if he or she
believes that the public will reject proposals
for peace and change. That does not mean
these leaders cannot lead. It means they
must have some reason to believe that the
public will follow them when they do.
Why do the publics disbelieve? In the
case of the Israelis, several factors have
contributed. First, there is the failing of
the Oslo Accords. From their standpoint,
right or wrong, Israelis saw in Ehud Barak
someone prepared to meet Palestinian
needs, first in accordance with the Camp
David Accords, and then with the more
far-reaching Clinton parameters. Israelis
saw in Barak a readiness to make unprecedented concessions on both withdrawal and
the sharing of Jerusalem. The Palestinian
response was not only rejection, but also
violence. The Palestinian response – or, to
be fair, Arafat’s rejection of Barak’s stance
and his support (or at least countenancing)
of violence – convinced the vast majority
of Israelis that the Palestinians were not
prepared for peace. Nothing has done
more to discredit the Israeli peace camp
within Israel than the combination of the
Intifada and the Arafat rejection of the
Clinton parameters. (In fact, most Israelis
concluded that if the Palestinians were
not prepared to accept the Clinton parameters, then they were not prepared to accept
anything.)
Another factor contributing to the
disenchantment of the Israeli public has
been Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from
Lebanon and Gaza. Though carried out
for two very different reasons, by two different prime ministers (Ehud Barak and
Ariel Sharon), these withdrawals have
been regarded by the Israeli public as two
of a kind. Israel departed from Lebanon in
May of 2000, and the UN confirmed that
Israel had fulfilled its obligations under the
Security Council’s Resolution 425. Yet in
stop for a single day, making life miserable
for Israelis living in towns like Sderot – and
this was even before Hamas seized control.
When Hamas subsequently did take control, the Israeli public concluded that withdrawal from the West Bank would result in
yet another Hamas takeover. Moreover, as
every Israeli knows, Gaza lies along Israel’s
periphery, while the West Bank sits astride
Israel’s heartland. Rockets fired from the
West Bank would make every Israeli community vulnerable on a daily basis – an
intolerable danger.
In short, Israeli disbelief has emerged
from a number of searing lessons. And
unfortunately, their perceptions are mirrored on the Palestinian side – equally
genuine and equally powerful. For
Palestinians, Oslo’s failure is just as pro-
Israelis may feel that Palestinians betrayed them by not
uniting against terrorism; Palestinians, however, counter
that Oslo actually strengthened Israeli occupation.
the eyes of the Israeli public, Hizbollah had
claimed a great victory: extending its power
in Lebanon. Making matters much worse,
Hizbollah provoked a conflict in 2006 by
crossing the border, kidnapping Israeli
soldiers, and, in the ensuing war, hitting
Israel with four thousand rockets.
If anything, the Gaza withdrawal
has soured the Israeli public even more.
Because this withdrawal was carried out
after Arafat was no longer on the scene, its
aftermath seemed to confirm all the worst
lessons of Lebanon. What’s more, whereas
there had been no Israeli settlers in
Lebanon, Gaza’s settler population fiercely
resisted Sharon’s attempt to pull them from
their homes. Many Israelis feared that this
could be a preview of what would happen in
the West Bank. Withdrawal was emotionally difficult for the Israeli public, but many
took pride in accomplishing it.
They were shocked, then, that the effort
to do so was met with unabated hostility.
Palestinian rocket-fire from Gaza did not
found: the Oslo Accords were supposed
to deliver the end of occupation. Israelis
may feel that Palestinians betrayed
them by not uniting against terrorism;
Palestinians, however, counter that Oslo
actually strengthened Israeli occupation.
Settlements did not stop post-Oslo; they
increased. Palestinians believed that the
Oslo Accords would slow or stop the presence of Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza,
yet for most of Oslo they saw the opposite:
more settlements, more roads to serve
only settlers, and more limitations on
Palestinian freedom of movement.
Palestinians feel thus as betrayed as
their Israeli counterparts. While Israelis
believe they have had no choice but to
impose restrictions on Palestinians in
order to curb terrorism, Palestinians see
these restrictions as deliberately punitive
and unrelated to security. They see Osloimposed obligations being flaunted by
Israel: prisoners not released, withdrawals postponed, and territorial status fi
Anselm Kiefer, Jakobs Traum, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg/Paris
Liszt, Overheard
Jet-lagged, half-insomniac, I lie in a dim tower
in a foreign college as piano notes ripple up
the winding stair. It’s medieval here,
spliced Renaissance spliced late Victorian.
I’m an emigrant from my life. Now a violin
teases the piano, a cello breathes heavily on both –
an audience must be straining forward in a panelled hall.
How many years have I half-heard
a music meant for others? The chestnut trees
shrug epaulets and fringes in the night wind.
Black tulips sway. An arpeggio falls downstairs.
Your face surges, known and strange, its history drawn
by an Old Master who worked only in the dark.
Rosanna Warren
080805_americanacademy.qxp
8/20/2008
1:16 PM
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ACELA
Childhood’s vanquished in clattering speed as the train
hurls through the dim, damp, befogged, waterlogged,
locked-in, locked-down coastal suburban landscape of the past –
shooting by my hometown station in such a blur
the name’s illegible…. Only in your arms do I wake up.
The city rasps below us. Two currents thrust
against each other, the East River struggles with itself,
its contradictions shoved in whorls the sun abrades.
And here, by your jungle plants, your carved black snake,
antelope horns, deer skull, statuettes, and stones,
we fall into another kind of math
where imaginary and natural numbers mate
and procreate new space, the bedclothes flung,
silvered light straining through the smudgy pane.
Rosanna Warren
constantly changed to Israeli advantage.
With the collapse of the Oslo Accords during the Bush era, Palestinians have experienced further draconian measures, with
devastating consequences for their economy, mobility, and opportunity for anything
resembling a normal life.
Of course, Israelis see their security
measures – including a security barrier,
checkpoints, and undercover arrest operations – as natural and essential counterterrorism responses that have succeeded in
stopping suicide bombing attacks in Israel.
Yet Palestinians blame Israel far more than
Hamas or Islamic Jihad for their predicament. With Palestinian per capita income
dropping 40 percent between 2001 and
2006 (as opposed to 25 percent during the
Great Depression), life became incredibly
difficult. For Palestinians, it was much
easier to focus on their anger and grievance
than on the possibility of coexistence. Most
concluded that Israel would never willingly
relinquish control.
Even the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza
did not impress Palestinians. Hamas, like
Hizbollah before them, claimed their violent “resistance” was responsible for Israel’s
exit. Palestinians also claimed that the
Israelis were giving up unwanted territory,
Gaza – which Israel was transforming into
a besieged prison anyhow – in order to keep
the West Bank. Even though the Gaza withdrawal happened after Mahmoud Abbas’s
election as PA president on a platform of
non-violence, Palestinians were not seeing any improvements in their day-to-day
existence to reward them for their choice of
leader. Israel did little to manage the withdrawal from Gaza in such a way that would
give Abbas implicit credit. In fact, nothing was done to make withdrawal appear
to be linked to his calls for moderation or
his negotiations with Israel. Sharon had
decided to withdraw, and he did not want
Palestinians to tell him how to do so. In
Sharon’s eyes, his tough decisions vis-à-vis
his own hard-line constituency should have
been matched by similar toughness from
Abbas. Since Abbas was deemed too soft
on Palestinian extremists, Sharon refused
to shape the withdrawal in a way that
would have given him credit for the Gaza
withdrawal.
Since Sharon was unprepared to
respond to Abbas while juggling his own
very real domestic challenges, the Bush
Administration needed to intervene. It
needed to see how important it was for a
new Palestinian leader, lacking the author-
ity and charisma of the icon he had replaced,
to show results. It needed to realize that the
Gaza withdrawal was a historic moment
that should be seized to re-establish belief in
peacemaking, and it needed to realize that
both Sharon and Abbas wanted vindication
for the consequences of withdrawal. But the
Administration, still governed by its neoconservative disengagement instincts, was
unable to see this necessity. It squandered
the moment.
The Bush Administration sought to
create a new peacemaking dialogue, reengaging in the peace process in January
2007, which led to the Annapolis conference in late November of that year. But this,
too, became yet another missed opportunity
to restore popular belief in the peace process. To be fair, US re-engagement in 2007
did not have the serendipitous timing of
2005; there was no Israeli action – such as
withdrawal from Arab lands – available as a
pretext for discussion. And whereas in 2005
Abbas had just been elected and had a clean
slate with the Palestinian public, by 2007
he had already lost much of his luster, having delivered nothing on daily life or Israeli
behavior, and having been weakened by the
Hamas election in 2006. On the Israeli side,
Ariel Sharon had great standing and fi
authority in 2005; in 2007 Prime Minister
clear that she could not achieve the political
Ehud Olmert had very little of either. He had horizon did she change her approach a few
been profoundly weakened by the mishanweeks before the Annapolis conference and
dling of the war with Hizbollah in the sum- declare that the aim was now simply to use
mer of 2006, and the Israeli public had little the conference to launch negotiations.
confidence in him.
Problematically, the conference never
So launching an initiative in January
drafted a “day after” strategy to show that
2007 was bound to be far more difficult.
this new negotiating process would produce
The circumstances should have put even
change. In fact, both sides continued to see
more of a premium on thinking the initiamore of the same. In the first two months
tive through and on achieving something
after Annapolis, there were several tertangible. When publics have lost faith in
rorist attacks against Israelis in the West
peacemaking for all the reasons noted above, Bank (actually connected to Palestinian
it is not simple to restore it. Loss of faith is
security forces), and Palestinians saw new
more profound than simple loss of confiannouncements of settlement construction.
dence. It will not be restored overnight, but
Moreover, while large amounts of assistance
only gradually – and even then it takes tanto Palestinians were pledged, nothing mategible demonstrations of change for it to take rialized as real economic improvements.
credible hold. Had Secretary Rice focused
When public skepticism required someon producing groundwork for peace that
thing dramatic to revive belief, each public
Israeli and Palestinian publics would have
saw more of what had made them cynical in
noticed, she might have done much for long- the first place.
term peacemaking. Instead, she sought a
So here we are. Over the course of 2008
political horizon – with each side signing
there have been very limited economic
up to the compromises they would make
improvements for Palestinians and no
on the core issues of the conflict – and she
meaningful changes in employment or
did little to affect the day-to-day realities on
mobility. Though the US and the EU have
the
ground
that
might
have
altered
the
two
trained
security-force
battalions for
AmAcademy_185x124mm 30.09.2008 17:08 Uhra few
Seite
1
publics’ perceptions. Only when it became
the PA, the Israeli military and security
forces see little evidence of active counterterrorism in the West Bank. At the same
time, political channels are slowly facilitating change. But this process takes place
in private – divorced from public realities.
These talks have been serious, but they
do not translate because of the involved
leaders’ weaknesses and the absence of
an environment that would give them the
confidence to compromise without fearing
public backlash.
The next American presidential administration must learn these lessons and understand these setbacks if it hopes to prevent
another cycle of mistrust, mismanagement,
and cynicism. Peacemaking requires a
foundation and a public context that gives
negotiations a chance to succeed; the next
administration must operate on such a basis
if it is to give peace a chance. µ
Dennis Ross was Middle East envoy and
the chief peace negotiator in the presidential administrations of George H.W.
Bush and Bill Clinton. He is currently a
counselor and Distinguished Fellow at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy
and was a Distinguished Visitor at the
American Academy in spring 2004.
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The Journey
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, new york & Galerie Berinson, Berlin
By H.G. Adler
P
aul closes t he door to the apartment behind him and thinks about
what he has left behind. Now Frau
Lischka no longer has any say and has to
keep quiet when her stairs are muddied.
Behind the door above, everything has
been left behind but not forgotten; it’s
there, simply there. No one can go back,
the stairs will not have their soundness
tested again, and who knows whether or
not these are the last steps that will be
allowed upon them. The rattle of keys
when the doors are locked sounds as familiar as ever, it was the same burst of clanging as ever, followed by the feeling of safety, the apartment was still there, we would
see it again, healthy and unharmed, ready
to receive us. But now the key is pointless,
you might as well leave it in the mailbox so
you won’t have to take it along on the journey. How ridiculous it was when one of the
messengers advised Paul to make sure and
lock up.
“Apartments left empty will gladly be
looted!”
“Gladly looted?”
“Gladly looted. But you still have to turn
in your key.”
The stairwell pressed towards the doors,
it descended deeper and deeper as the
yelling came down the frightened hallway,
Down, go down! The stairs yelled out that no
one was allowed to climb them. Afraid of
break-ins, Frau Lischka had an ever watchful eye. No one got past her ground floor
apartment without her noticing. “Where
are you going?... Ah, to the doctor!” Her
drunken husband would have let anyone
slip through, but his wife never tolerated the
door being left unlocked whenever she went
out. On Sundays the building remained
locked for the entire day, meaning that anyone who did not have a key had to ring the
bell. That way nothing could be looted.
The streets were quiet, heartened by the
winter cold. The impact of the heavy steps
pleased them, for that stamped life into
them; otherwise the streets would have
been sunk in sadness. They were forbidden
streets meant to be avoided in order not to
violate their pavement. Thus the streets
were crossed out on the maps, no longer
existing for anyone. It was too risky, danger
lay in wait there, especially at night. But one
must not simply accept what is forbidden
once you are not worth anything. And so the
streets were there again and were much longer and more beautiful than they had ever
been before. They rejoiced at being granted
life once again and didn’t ask to whom they
owed their good fortune. Zerlina said earnestly to an intruder, “These streets are forbidden.” But the stranger just smirked and
rubbed his hands. Because those words, so
often repeated, no longer meant anything,
for now the forbidden was allowed.
All that had been forbidden in the world
now meant nothing, for it had never been a
law but rather an arrangement that rested
on enforced custom. What was once taken in
stride now appeared all of a piece to the law,
which had the last word and did not allow
anything to contradict it. Life was reduced
to force, and the natural consequence was
fear, which was bound up with constant danger in order to rule life through terror. You
experienced what you never had before. You
rejoiced over that which you were allowed,
but even this did not last for long, because
any such comforts only had to be noticed and
the next day they were taken away. Thus the
tender juicy meat was taken away since you
who are made of flesh need no meat. Then
they banned fat, for your belly was full fi
of fat. They denied you vegetables for they
stunk when they rotted. They ripped chocolate out of your hands, fruit and wine as well.
You were told that there wasn’t any more.
Highways and byways were forbidden.
The days were shortened and the nights
lengthened, not to mention that the night
was forbidden and the day forbidden as well.
Shops were forbidden, doctors, hospitals,
vehicles, and resting places, forbidden, all
forbidden. Laundries were forbidden, libraries were forbidden. Music was forbidden,
dancing forbidden. Shoes forbidden. Baths
forbidden. And as long as there still was
money, it was forbidden. What was and what
could be were forbidden. It was announced:
“What you can buy is forbidden, and you
can’t buy anything!” Since people could no
longer buy anything, they wanted to sell
what they had, for they hoped to eke out a
living from what they made off their belongings. Yet they were told: “What you can sell
is forbidden, and you are forbidden to sell
anything.” Thus everything became sadder
and they mourned their very lives, but they
didn’t want to take their lives, because that
was forbidden.
Once everything in the world was forbidden, and there was nothing normal left
to forbid, the height of unhappiness was
surpassed and everything became easier, no
one having to become anxious with lengthy
considerations about what to do next.
Everyone did what was forbidden without
a bad conscience, even though it was dangerous and they were afraid. Yet since you
couldn’t do anything without feeling afraid,
you didn’t do everything that was forbidden.
Sad and fearful people suffered under these
conditions, but others hardly seem bothered, each following his own disposition. If
there seems no end to the danger, then it
has accomplished its goal already; anything
excessive shuts people down more quickly
than a discreet act of kindness, through
which alone the simple truths of the world
can still be perceived. Because one could not
perceive this simple truth or at least had no
respect for it, everything fell apart. Nothing
more could happen and therefore orders
were merely carried out.
Their gaze swept over the rows of houses
and the street crossings as soon as their eyes
got used to the darkness, and soon they were
ready to escape, for they knew the area well
and there were plenty of good places to hide.
An escape was possible; it would not be too
hard, since there was no one near or far who
would hear them. But steps followed the
women and the brave messengers accompanying them, and thus only their gaze stole
forth, sending thoughts and memories
ahead which thwarted cowardice sooner
than weary bodies that, with the weight of
all they carried, slunk along in order to avoid
their proscribed fate.
Was such servility really due to cowardice alone? Old Leopold and fragile Ida
had been taken away and were waiting for
Caroline and the children in the Technology
Museum. Ida felt helpless and Leopold confused. Both were incapable of handling that
which threatened one surprise after another.
What could be done for them? There was no
Private Collection, courtesy Ubu Gallery, new york & Galerie Berinson, Berlin
clear answer, but one had to stand by them
and not leave, because that was forbidden.
Disloyalty was forbidden, also reason was
forbidden, as it belittled the will to live.
Paul’s thoughts hardly went this far,
for already he had struggled too long to
vanquish the inevitable. After his battle suffered its first and, he feared, decisive defeat,
he could no longer worry about every threat
that occured. Paul was extremely tired and
smiled at Zerlina, who smiled back. Then
Caroline smiled as well. When the others
saw this, they cheered up and also began to
smile, as one of them said:
“You’re right. It’s not so bad there. You
can eat pretty well. Almost every day there’s
meat and dumplings. But if they find money
or jewelry or tobacco, then you’re in trouble
and don’t get anything to eat.”
“It’s not so bad?”
“You’ll see, Frau Lustig. So many have
already stuck it out. Only a few are beaten.
But nobody has been beaten to death.”
“Beaten...?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean anything. Only
the stupid ones are beaten. Whoever doesn’t
deliver or hides something forbidden. When
they get caught they’re the scum of the
earth... condemned....”
The voices defiled the street, therefore it
was better to keep silent and to quietly march
on with irregular steps. Legs marched now
over the bridges. Each wanted to walk along
the balustrade in order to gaze at the frozen
river. But here it was particularly dark, and
so there was hardly anything to see. Only
dirty flecks of foam flickered silver-grey
Private Collection, courtesy Ubu Gallery, new york & Galerie Berinson, Berlin
among the dolorous depths, and far off by
the dam, where the water never froze, the
thundering sound of the raging water could
be heard. Here was the island on which Paul
and Zerlina had often played as children.
There had also been a swimming school
that one could visit before such things were
forbidden. There had been carts belonging to vendors who had colorful drinks
for sale, as well as colorful ices and cheap
candy, all of it meant to seduce folks with
delight and requiring only a small sacrifice
of money. Now the island was quiet and
empty, certainly no longer ready to receive
its regular visitors, and above all not the
forbidden ones, especially since the island
was now forbidden to everyone. It could no
longer be reached, the entrance to it was
closed, fenced in with barbed wire because
something had occurred there that was now
forbidden, and no one should know about it.
gathering place for those people who were
no longer wanted and yet who nonetheless
were still there, since anyone who is condemned still exists before being destroyed,
just as there must be a place for it all to
occur, and so it all began here. Hundreds
of bodies lay squeezed tightly together in
the darkness which was only here and there
broken by the muffled light of an occasional
flashlight. But the night was constantly full
of the sounds of rustling and groans.
It was impossible to find Ida and Leopold
in the darkness. In surly fashion the nervous commander from the office in charge
of new detentions recommended waiting
until morning.
“In six hours there will be enough light.
You’ll find them both then. No one gets lost
here.”
But all are already lost, and it is necessary
to make fine distinctions. Whoever comes
too late and has to be taken in should be
happy to find a little spot on which he can
Now the island lay behind the wanderrest. Now it is night and you have to make
ers, sunken, an old playground to which no
sure to find a place to rest. But where? It
path led any longer. The travelers no longer
doesn’t matter, the main thing is that you
thought about it, and the bridge was gone
are there. The cross-eyed youth with the seras well. Slowly the piers gave way and colvice cap aslant on his head smoked one cigalapsed, sinking into one another and falling rette after another. Wasn’t that forbidden?
almost soundlessly onto the ice. Then the
For a commander nothing was forbidden,
place was gone, the traffic disappeared, after and he could run off at the mouth. He could
which there was a long road and everything fill the reeking hall with orders, as well
melted together, and yet another road, gone, as with the anger that unconsciously and
gone, everything forbidden now finished,
without restraint accompanied the power
no longer there, not a single memory even
conferred on him, and which he could vent
attempting to assert itself with a shudder,
on the prisoners in the museum at will.
the forbidden now completely dead behind
Those formerly known as human beings
the gate that was sealed tight and would last now appeared made of wax, but they were
and was there and locked the forbidden up
still alive. As the morning dawned its grey,
for good.
they sat upon their bundles and rocked their
Some halls of the Technology Museum
upper bodies to and fro, though they did not
that lay in the adjacent building had been
pray. They had no future, nor was the past
cleaned out, nothing left in them but empty recognizable within them any longer. “Here
booths and whitewashed walls. That was the you can’t remember anything.” fi
Born in Prague in 1910, H.G. Adler published 26 books of
poetry, short stories, novels, philosophy, and social science,
before his death in London in 1988. A survivor of Theresienstadt
and Auschwitz, he first drew acclaim for his encyclopedic study,
Theresienstadt 1941–1945, published in 1955. Adler, however,
had great difficulty in gaining acceptance for his literary work,
despite the help of Elias Canetti and Heinrich Böll. The Journey
was written in 1950 but not published until 1962. It soon disappeared, however, having been issued by a very small publisher
unable to garner proper attention for it. The book was reissued
in 1999 to wide critical acclaim. Academy alumnus Peter Filkins
has translated this most recent version, published by Random
House in fall 2008.
Jindrich Štyrský (1899–1942) was a Czech Surrealist
painter, poet, collagist, photographer, editor, and graphic artist. A founding member of the Czech avant-garde artists’ group,
Devetsil, he directed several of the group’s theater productions.
In the 1920s and 1930s Štyrský was considered a polemic and
radical critic of his generation. The vintage gelatin silver prints
reproduced here originally appeared under the then-prohibited
Edition des Surrealismus, in Prague, in 1941. Republished in
1945, On The Needles of These Days is known arguably as
Štyrský’s surrealist masterpiece. The images reproduced here
are from this book, are all untitled, and in the order of their
appearance from pages 16, 18, 52, 22, and 6.
The cross-eyed youth walked back and
The unhappy woman began to rant.
“Who says so? One can’t jeopardize the
forth among the cowering people. He was
Since no one knew how to calm her down,
whole group.”
almost completely dressed in leather. It was Leopold stepped in.
“What do you mean jeopardize? This madforbidden to those whose lives had been
“I’ve been a general practitioner for years. ness is what’s really jeopardizing us.”
snuffed out to wear anything upon their
The woman is delusional. Her condition
“They should be quick and be done with it.”
heads inside the halls, but Cross Eyes wore
is dangerous. She needs to be isolated and
Leopold cried: “That’s not right! You
a leather cap. In his right hand he swung
to have a shot of camphor. She can’t come
should call someone who is in charge so that
a leather whip with which he could strike
along in this condition.”
order is kept!”
whenever it pleased him. And yet he didn’t
Cross Eyes appeared out of nowhere.
“I’m in charge of order.”
harm anyone, silent threats being enough
“Mind your own business, old man! She’s
“You don’t bring any order at all!”
to satisfy him. Sometimes he murmured:
coming along. Regulations say so. Listen,
“What does it matter to you? Does she
“Soon they’ll be here, so order must be kept.
old woman! Get a hold of yourself! If
belong to you?”
No one can be sick.”
anyone hears this ruckus, it could mean
Caroline took her husband by the hand
An old woman next to Ida lifted herself
trouble for you!”
and tried to pull him away in order to appease
up and stood in front of him: “What will it
“The soup stinks! I want to get out! Let me them, but Leopold was very upset and didn’t
be like, Herr Commander?”
go, let me go! The pope called me!”
want to leave the site of the incident.
Cross Eyes maintained his haughty
“Who does the old lady belong to?”
“It’s not right! This patient doesn’t belong
stance: “Don’t worry, don’t worry.”
No one said a word. A stretcher was
here! She needs to be admitted!”
The old woman wanted to sit down
brought out. Two young men loaded the
Waves of subdued laughter erupted.
again, but she lost her balance and fell
ranting woman onto it, though she des“Admitted? Admitted? Tell us, are you perbackwards over her bags. Others also sank
perately tried to fight them off and bit
haps free to take care of it?”
down. A young woman pulled together
one of their hands so badly it bled. Other
“Caroline, this is unheard of! This case
some whining boys and girls and distracted attendants rushed to help the young
needs to be reported to the medical authorithem with games. They sang and clapped
men, and Cross Eyes ordered them to
ties! This is not how you treat human beings.
their hands.
strap the raving old lady down on the
If I had known that such an injustice was
Amid the singing a mad woman howled: stretcher.
going to take place here I would have stayed
“Let me be! The soup scorched my tongue!
Someone yelled: “That’s an outrage!
home and not allowed my family to take part
You can’t eat my soup! I want to get out! The That’s inhuman! No one declares war on
in this journey. The preparations for it are
pope ordered it! Ha!”
the sick!”
simply miserable.”
5&!ISONEOF'ERMANY´SOLDESTANDMOSTDISTINGUISHEDENTERTAINMENTBRANDSHAVINGCONTINUOUSLYEXTENDEDITSMARKET
LEADERSHIPAMONG'ERMANY´S½LMANDTELEVISIONPRODUCERS5&!´SPROGRAMMESTHRILLANDINSPIREMILLIONSOFVIEWERSEVERYDAY
Leopold wandered off proud and angry,
Caroline leading him away as the laughter
grew behind him. Cross Eyes tapped his
head with the tip of his finger three times:
“Totally nuts!”
In the courtyard Cross Eyes stands in
the first light of dawn and is wrapped up in
a heavy coat. Nearby are some helpers who
for the most part stand by quietly, but who
at a sign suddenly start running around
like raving madmen before returning to
stand motionless again. They are dressed
alike, but not as smartly as Cross Eyes, for
not as much leather clings to them. Some
calls over to Cross Eyes, who then stands
at attention after he has yanked his leather
cap off his head.
“Begin!”
Cross Eyes gives his helpers a sign, at
which the pack fans out. One runs to the
entrance and remains standing there as
he pulls a list from his breast pocket and
unfolds it with great seriousness. After
a short while the forbidden people head
through the gate in twos, bent over with the
weight of their bags. They call out a number
and their former name. The helper writes
with his pencil and sometimes waves his
the shoulder, calling out loud: “Four! Eight!
Twelve! Sixteen....”
Yet not all one thousand could present
themselves, even though there was space
enough for a much larger group. Twentyfour members of the traveling group lay on
stretchers. Between their legs and on top of
them the sick ones’ belongings were piled
such that they could not move. After Cross
Eyes had also counted the figures on the
stretchers, he yanked his cap off his head
and strode without a horse as fast as his
crooked legs would carry his fat body to the
mighty heroes, gathered himself together,
and stood at attention.
“One thousand gathered. Twenty four of
The forbidden gather themselves in the courtyard and
them lying down.”
organize themselves in rows of four.
“Well done!”
One of the mighty heroes reached for
policemen plod back and forth and look
list back and forth and barks at the swarm:
the list and counted the number of the anxup at the sky. It’s not their concern. They
“Faster! Move on!” The forbidden gather
iously expectant once again. He hardly paid
rub their hands. There are also three men
themselves in the courtyard and organize
attention to the standing, which he quickly
in full battledress with their medals and
themselves in rows of four. Altogether there passed by, choosing instead to spend more
badges of honor. They are proud men who
are a thousand who used to be known as
time among the stretchers.
hold their little heads high with a decisive
human beings. Cross Eyes marches in front
Across the courtyard a cry rattled out:
air. Their legs fidget with impatience. One
of the rows, turns over his whip, and strides “Medical report!”
of them is somewhat small and yawns,
without a horse slowly along the length of
Cross Eyes yelled: “Medical report!”
blowing a little cloud of smoke from his
the front row, while with the whip handle
One of his assistants charged into the
JMB_ImgAnz_184x124_EN2_RZ:Layout
1 on
throat.
Another one, who is their leader, 1 11.08.2008
he gives every 9:25
fourthUhr
man aSeite
light swat
Technology Museum. fi
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M O N D AYS O P E N U N T I L 1 0 P M
Lindenstr. 9–14 , 10969 Berlin
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The hero barked: “Filthy pigs!”
have a fever of 102 degrees. Nonetheless, it
Cross Eyes cried: “They’ll be right back
was obvious that almost all of those on the
in line!”
stretchers were very sick. Only two old men
Then the hero barked: “Why aren’t they
over eighty and a woman who had given
ready?”
birth to a stillborn the previous night were
Cross Eyes cried: “Whoever’s fault it is
allowed to stay. Otherwise all of the weak
will pay!”
and sick stood in rank and file, as well as
Then the hero barked even louder: “Shut the old woman whose attack of madness
your trap, you pig! It’s all your fault!”
had so disturbed Leopold. As the hero
Cross Eyes bowed and cried: “Yes, sir!”
finished checking the list, he nodded that
Yet the assistant had returned with the
he was satisfied. The authority’s honor had
list of the sick, wanting to hand it over to
been preserved, and only through an act of
Cross Eyes.
grace had the forbidden been transformed
But then the hero yelled at him loudly:
into the allowed.
“Bring it here, or I’ll smack you in the mouth!
“Load it up!”
Nussbaum, you come as well!”
It began to snow. Heavy flakes fell from
The assistant and Cross Eyes hurried
above. They didn’t worry themselves about
towards the mighty hero, who began to
those gathered below. They blanketed
review what they had written.
the copper green roof of the Technology
“What a miserable typewriter ribbon!
Museum. If you stuck out your tongue
Look at this, Nussbaum! Next time I’ll break between your lips you could perhaps catch
your knees if the report is not typed more
a flake, but it was dangerous to do that since
clearly!”
it was forbidden. Zerlina was happy when
“Sorry, we put in for a new one. But no one a flake stuck to her eyelash and hung there.
sent us a new ribbon.”
How easily she could have gotten rid of it
“Disgraceful! There’ll be trouble for that.” with a finger or with a shake of her head or
210x135_KUK Book 22.08.2008 12:55 Uhr Seite 1
Cross Eyes read the names of the ill to
with a blink of her eyelids. But Zerlina stood
the hero, who then ordered that no one
still, making sure not to move. The flake
should be allowed to lie down who did not
melted and ran cautiously away.
As long as the heroes are there, it’s forbidden to move, which Zerlina knew, even
if it was not underscored that often. Life is
forbidden, something which never quite
hits home, because it has not ceased to go
on. Even in the courtyard of the Technology
Museum no order has been given. They simply have forgotten to enforce what is forbidden, and thus life is frozen and has turned
to snow. The same flakes could fall on the
heroes or be carried by the wind and drift
down outside of the museum courtyard and
onto one of the surrounding houses or onto
a street. There are no exceptions as to who
is part of the moment. There are differences
only in how fate is meted out, but not in fate
itself, everything now being frozen. One no
longer had to forbid movement, for there
was none. What you saw with your own eyes
could hardly be believed. It was null and
void and could only be believed if you closed
your eyes. Then the snow melted. µ
Translated by Peter Filkins, a professor of
English at Bard College at Simon’s Rock
and a spring 2005 Commerzbank Fellow
at the Academy.
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Her Brother’s Keeper
Not quite sibling rivalry
By David Warren Sabean
D
uring t he long nine t een t h
century, throughout political revolutions and social upheavals, something more intimate was in the process of
being radically altered: ideas of kinship.
After remaining static for over three hundred years, traditional familial structures
that had been organized around the development and maintenance of “stable” properties – estates, farms, tenancies, monopolies, privileges, and offices – were suddenly
abandoned and replaced. In their stead
would come a new way of thinking about
family relations that would introduce some
inter-family emotional tangles to the onset
of modernity.
Prior to this shift, what mattered most
were succession, devolution, and descent –
vertical genealogy. Two families or clans
would avoid making repeated marital
exchanges, partly because both the state
and church prohibited cousin marriages,
a bond that unites blood kinsmen and
makes in-laws of cousins. In such a case,
issues of inheritance would be made doubly contentious. Moreover, a marriage to
a first cousin repeats an alliance between
two families one generation after the initial tie; marriage between second cousins
amounts to the replication of the grandparents’ marriage by their grandchildren.
And so when European society began
to change and favor endogamous (intergroup) marriage around the year 1750, it
was a sign that notions of identity, wealth,
and power were also being redefined.
By 1800, marriages previously deemed
incestuous – those between first and
second cousins, and those with relatives
of a deceased spouse – became frequent
among all property-holding groups
throughout Europe. Such marriages created interlocking kindred through repeated
alliances, sometimes over many generations. Unlike earlier, Baroque Europe, the
marriage system that developed after 1750
allied individuals with the familiar (in
both senses), with same rather than other.
This massive alteration in ideas of kinship arrived alongside an increasing fluidity in the channels of European wealth and
public office. More tightly coordinating
allied kin helped European society cope
with the expansive freedoms of a market
economy and the liberal state. Kinship
became socially horizontal instead of
vertical, so to speak, with alliance becoming more important than inheritance.
Succession to office was no longer affected
by inherited property rights, but rather
through the systematic promotion of cousins – one’s horizontally linked kin. In business, too, monopolies dwindled and oligarchies flourished. The new economy could
be viewed as a vast network not unlike an
extended family.
To accommodate this immense change,
new mechanisms had to be implemented
to channel familial energies and regulate
socially sanctioned marital choices. And
while more choice was given to children
in courtship, parents still maintained a
measure of control over family destiny. But
now, importantly, families became the
focal point for developing moral sentiment,
managing cultural style, and directing
erotic desires. Socialization into the aesthetics of choice was all the more crucial,
given the alliance system’s fundamental
problem of managing the flow of capital.
But this modification in European
society was not without its emotional
incursions into the intimate realm of the
family. From the period from 1740 to 1840
brothers and sisters schooled themselves
in sentiment and developed for each other
a language of pure affection and love.
Attachment for a future spouse grew out
of a moral style developed among siblings
and cousins who grew up together. The
incredible outpouring of correspondence
among siblings during this period offers
insight into the practices of what one
might call “the new intimacy.” So, too, do
the scores of novels, epic poems, plays, and
theological treatises that attempt to sort
out legitimate and illegitimate feelings
between brothers and sisters.
I
n l at e eigh t een t h- cen t ury
Germ an literature, two once-popular
novelists display how individuals tried to
make sense of incestuous desires wrought
by changes in larger European social
life. In Friedrich Klinger’s 1794 novel
Geschichte Giafers des Barmeciden, set in
Persia, the caliph is obsessively in love with
his sister and rails against the laws prohibiting sibling marriage:
She grew up on my bosom – I found
her – awoke the first sentiments of her
heart, developed with care the blossoming of the beauty of her body, her spirit.
© 2000 Alan Feltus. Courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York
Alan Feltus, Behind Mt. Subasio, 2001
Mine were the first feelings which now
flow more radiant, more beautiful in
her heart. I heard my own thoughts
again, ornamented and newly inspired.
The narrator’s description is a commonplace motif of the period: the self’s formation through an intimate dialectic with
a beloved in which “same” and “other”
became totally implicated in each other.
In some ways, the text is a debate about
the distinction between sexual desire and
sibling love.
The same problem is handled in
many novels of the time, including in
Fürchtegott Gellert’s 1739 Schwedische
Gräfin, by the ruse of a marriage between
siblings ignorant of their relationship.
While the feelings that first drew them
together are understood to stem from their
blood connection – their sameness – the
moral or emotional issue occurs with the
restructuring of their sentiments after
they discover their true relations.
In Christoph Martin Wieland’s Agathon
(1794), another example, the hero first falls
in love with Psyche: “their souls recognized each other immediately and seemed
at one glance to flow into one another.”
Unfortunately, she turns out to be his
sister. Even when Agathon later becomes
attached to the erotically charged Danae,
Psyche continued to retain the most
important place in his heart. As Danae
replaces Psyche as his object of love, he
attempts to direct the second experience
based on the insights he acquired from the
first: “Indeed he loved [Danae] with such
an unselfish, so spiritual, so desire-free
love, that his boldest wish went no further
than to be with her in that sympathetic
union of souls that Psyche had given him
to experience.” And so the entire model of
future possibility grows out of the relationship of brother to sister, the relationship
that also created man’s moral character.
Agathon says:
I have thought, knowing so much about
our souls, that with each of them, in
their considerable development over
time, I conceive progressively a specific
ideal beauty, which unconsciously
determines our taste and our moral
judgment and which provides the
general model by which our imagination projects those pictures that we call
great, beautiful, and splendid.
At the end of the story Psyche and Danae
themselves develop a completely fulfilling
friendship, the childless Danae helps raise
Psyche’s children so that they think they
have two mothers, and the two women
begin to call each other “sister.” Finally
Agathon loses all sexual desire for Danae
and begins to consider her, too, his sister.
Wieland’s suggestion is that the only pure
attachments are those between siblings,
not lovers.
This distinguishing of familial overlaps
impinged into hearts at the inception of
the nineteenth century, where several
commentators felt the need to explain the
difference in feelings one has towards a
sister and a wife. Some put the issue in
to Kantian terms, suggesting that with
one’s wife there was always an objective
moment that instrumentalized the relationship. The theologian Carl Ludwig
Nitzsch thought that that element was sex.
For him, the sexual drive was completely
selfish, but he also thought that sexual
desire developed only after a benevolent
disposition was formed within the family, setting up proper objects of desire. He
also believed that the tenderness between
spouses never attains the level of intensity
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characteristic of siblings. Love between
brother and sister is the model of purity,
selflessness, and the relationship as an
end in itself.
Part and parcel of this new discourse
about sentiment was the assumption
that marriage takes place among people
who share the same culture, class, and
affinities; marriage was the union of true
equals and true intimates. The developing
brother–sister fascination underscored
this desire for homogamy – the search for
the same instead of the other. Thus the
intense structuring of new social milieus
based on allied families also made cousins – who were then often raised in the
same household – into objects of desire.
T
he roa d from homogom y to
erotic desire is sometimes short.
The anthropologist Christopher
Johnson, who recently studied a large
18th century French bourgeois family
network, notes that the rise of erotically
charged sibling ties provided a new focal
point for familial dynamics. As such, the
language of cousinship, too, became
conflated with the charged discourse
of siblings. One sister (whose letters of
longing for her brother bordered on the
incestuous) wrote to her brother about
his impending marriage to their cousin:
“Habituated from your childhood to your
chérie as a sister, and she loving you as a
brother, you have developed an affection
that can only end with life itself.” Later in
their marriage, the cousin/wife addressed
her husband in her letters as “my love,
my friend, my spouse, my brother.” Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), too, offers
a similar example: Dr. Frankenstein’s
orphaned cousin, raised in his family as a
sister, becomes his and his family’s object
of choice for his wife. The cousin/sister
ambiguity was only one part of a new
eroticism that searched for sameness in
the object of erotic or spiritual love.
Desire between siblings and cousins
during this period was not merely a literary conceit. The life and work of the
writer Clemens Brentano, for example,
shows how reality and literary imagery
intersected. His novel Godwi (1801) and
his long poem Romanzen vom Rosenkranz
(1803–12) both dwell on sibling incest,
while his lifelong attraction to his sister,
Bettine, brought this literary preoccupation to life. Growing up in separate house-
holds, Clemens and Bettine saw little of
each other until he was twenty and she
fourteen. While writing Godwi at about the
same time, he describes his growing erotic
attraction to her, expressing pleasure at
her maturing breasts. He and Bettine
began an intense relationship, frequently
exchanging letters – some of which she
later heavily edited in Clemens Brentano’s
Frühlingskranz. The pairing off of two
siblings was typical of many families of
the period, but Bettine became Clemens’
ideal; their relationship was the model of
love. Soon Brentano could only see her
as an extension of himself. To Bettine’s
future husband, Brentano’s friend Achim
Von Arnim, he wrote: “My love for her is
itself not genuine. I stand shyly next to
her because she shows me nothing other
than a more beautiful image of my self.”
To another friend he wrote, “Bettine is my
double.”
Soon Brentano had a fiancée of his own,
Sophie Moreau. He described his love for
Bettine even to her, writing: “She is beautiful, you are beautiful, oh if only you were
beautiful sisters, belles soeurs” – a pun on
the French word for sisters-in-law. Later he
told Sophie that Bettine “is, except for fi
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God, the highest that a human can love,”
and pleaded with Sophie to “really love
me, so very intimately, as I hardly can do
it myself, as only Bettine has tried....” If
Bettine were not his sister, and if she were
as old as Sophie, he told the latter, he would
of course still feel desire for Sophie, but
Bettine would win him. “But since things
are otherwise, you are there and are the
only one.”
By 1803 Sophie had finally accused
Brentano of incest. He attempted to
explain and demonstrate his transition
from sister to wife:
Bettine’s connection to me is like the
connection of two friends who live
somewhere where talking is forbidden.
One of them, however, had prayed out
loud, told a woman he loved her, comforted a dying person, and called out in
the night to someone walking into an
abyss. Because of this he had his tongue
cut out. That is me. Now the other goes
around in all the joys of life, greets the
dumb one whenever they meet, but she
is fearful and does not talk and the comforting glances become more seldom,
and thus everything is ruined, with no
injustice or revenge. Oh if the dumb
one had his tongue again, he would ask
her to love him, but still without hope
and would lose his tongue again.
In perhaps the most important philosophical treatise of the early nineteenth century, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),
G.W.F. Hegel discusses the differences
between a wife and a sister – and he gives
paramount importance to the latter. The
emotional tie for a married woman, he
suggests, is to marriage itself – not to the
particular husband in question, at least
in an “ethical” household. Her relationships “are not based on a reference to this
particular husband, this particular child,
but to a husband, to children in general –
not to feeling, but to the universal.” Above
all, a woman as wife cannot know herself
and cannot be a particular self simply
by knowing and being known by her
husband.
Everything is different, however, with
respect to her brother, to whom she is
attached by blood but absent mutual desire.
This view had its roots at home. The relationship between Hegel and his younger
sister, Christiane Luise, was famously
intense and lifelong: just after Hegel’s
marriage, at age forty, she had a nervous
breakdown and went to an asylum for over
a year. And soon after Hegel died, in 1831,
Christiane wrote a letter to her brother’s
widow about his childhood and personality. Then she took a walk, jumped in a lake,
and drowned herself.
These real-life events are uncannily
foreshadowed in Hegel’s discussion of
wife and sister in the chapter on the “ethical world”:
The moment of individual self hood,
recognizing and being recognized, can
here assert its right because it is bound
up with the balance and equilibrium
resulting from their being of the same
blood, and from their being related in a
way that involves no mutual desire. The
loss of a brother is thus irreparable to
the sister, and her duty towards him is
the highest.
David Warren Sabean is a professor of
German history at the University of
California, Los Angeles. He is the German
Transatlantic Program Fellow at the
American Academy in fall 2008.
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The Power Pioneers
Exportweltmeister –
So What?
German jubilation over exports drowns out more pressing economic priorities
By Adam Posen
A
s t he world’s le a ding exporter,
Germany has spent more than
fifty years focused on promoting
exports as the primary driver of its economic growth. What has largely escaped
public notice, however, is that this focus
on exports has remained unwavering
regardless of German economic success
or decline. Instead, every year, German
commentators eagerly classify countries
according to their volume of exports
as if they were the rankings from the
Fussballweltmeisterschaft, with Germany
expected to be at the top of the list. And, as
seen on the left side of Table 1, it usually
comes close to the top of that league, an
even more impressive performance considering its size relative to the US or China.
Yet unlike the pursuit of the World Cup,
there is good reason for Germany to give
up this contest. At best, Germany’s pursuit of export competitiveness has been a
deceptive distraction from the country’s
underlying economic problems, if not a
complete waste of effort that promotes distortions at home. Neither a country’s share
of exports in gdp nor its relative rank in
world-export league tables has a significant
positive effect on its economic or productivity growth. As shown on the right side of
Table 1, Germany has been ready for relegation based on poor income growth, an even
more impressively poor performance considering its high savings and human capital.
The notion that trade openness (not just
exports) leads to growth has recently been
shown to be less convincing than previously
thought. Moreover, many of the benefits of
openness stem from the presence of generally beneficial liberal economic institutions,
which happen also to be associated with the
absence of trade protection. In any event,
the remaining beneficial effects of trade
on wealth and growth are associated with
openness, not with exports, net or total.
At least as troubling as Germany’s
misguided export focus is the associated
near-mercantilist perspective of some
German politicians and business leaders
toward European economic integration.
The blocking of integration initiatives such
as the EU Services or Takeover Directives
is justified by these officials in part by the
need to maintain German net export totals.
If anything, however, this perspective
runs contrary to the economic realities of
Germany and all developed economies: the
economic benefits of globalization arise
out of cross-border economic openness and
investment, and the competitive pressure
those relations put on domestic companies
through imports, expansion of variety, and
capital mobility. Exports, in net or absolute
terms, are far from vital to growth on their
own merits.
Rather than exports being uniformly
beneficial, then, it matters greatly what
an advanced country exports and on what
basis. A national economic strategy based
on reducing real wages to make the current mix of a country’s exports more price
competitive will not lead to sustainable
growth any more than repeated nominal
depreciations would. Germany attempted
this strategy through relative wage defla-
Table 1: Exportweltmeisterschaft
Avg % of total world exports 1997–2007
Spain
1.94%
Australia
1.02%
USA
South Korea
10.47 %
2.63%
Netherlands
3.36%
Canada
3.90%
Italy
Germany
3.92 %
9.48 %
United
Kingdom
4.23 %
France
China
Japan
4.71 %
5.44 %
6.21 %
tion in existing industries vis-à-vis the rest
of the eurozone from 2001–2005. This
yielded two years of surprisingly strong
export-led growth, now coming to a sharp
halt, declining productivity growth, and
no sustained pick-up in either domestic
investment or consumption. Export
growth achieved through increases in productivity and the creation of new products
or markets would be far more beneficial to
German workers (and thus to consumption and investment), as well as far more
lasting.
The German corporate sector desperately needs competitive pressure and reform
of its corporate governance, but it escapes
those changes by insisting that large
quantities of exports mean the fault lies
elsewhere in the economy, like with high
taxes or wages. Yet, for all their exports, the
resulting lack of consolidation or technological change in these sectors drives down
productivity growth and returns to capital
throughout the German economy.
Consequently, Germany’s successful
export industries remain largely the same
ones as forty years ago (bulk chemicals
and dyes, large electrical goods and appliances, machine tools, autos, and auto
parts), while global technological progress
and competition from emerging markets
mean that these sectors have moved down
the value chain. Horst Siebert calculated
in 2005 that these sectors have consistently comprised more than 80 percent
of German exports; most estimates are
lower, but still on the order of 50 percent.
The dysfunctions of the German corporate
sector also mean that almost no German
firms – and thus few German workers and
investors – have emerged in today’s growing high-technology and service sectors.
For example, only one German company
(s a p) is among the top 25 software and
IT service providers worldwide, and no
German companies are among the top
25 IT hardware producers. Germany’s
focus on export companies and the
preservation of their current ownership
structures also shows up in unexploited
scale economies for German companies.
Expansion would require greater external finance and thus loss of managerial
freedom from accountability. Despite the
common assumption that German multinationals dominate in both Germany and
the European Union, Germany actually
has 25 percent fewer large companies than
would be consistent with its share of the
EU economy. By focusing on export suc-
World Cup of Growth Rates
Avg % GDP growth per capita 1997–2007
Germany
0.91 %
Italy
Japan
0.25 %
1.63 %
China
France
11.07 %
2.37 %
USA
2.56 %
United
Kingdom
2.62 %
Spain
Netherlands
4.49 %
2.93 %
South Korea
3.07 %
Canada
Australia
3.49 %
3.93 %
cess rather than productivity, Germany
has brought about arrested development in
its corporate sector.
Germany needs to reconceive its foreign
economic policy to better serve the welfare
of its citizens. Such a reconception will
require some radical rethinking of the
relative importance of exports. In addition,
it necessitates adjusting the distortive protection of German businesses that results
from export misprioritization. The success
of some German companies in exporting
has blinded German citizens and policymakers to the problems of the German
corporate sector.
One result has been that policymakers
end up blaming labor markets and the
public sector for German underperformance. Simultaneously, Germany’s high
level of exports has hidden the fact that
many incumbent German Mittelstand businesses face few new competitors and little
pressure from capital markets to increase
profitability. Ultimately, the overall rate of
productivity and per capita income growth
in the German economy has declined when
compared with that of its peers over the last
25 years. That depressing outcome remains
even when averaging in the recent temporary burst of German growth (and underperformance of the US), and especially
when one considers that long-demanded
labor market reforms and fiscal consolidation have already taken place in Germany.
Germany’s foreign economic policy
should shift from reinforcing these patterns to shattering them. A more aggressive pursuit of global economic integration rather than Exportweltmeisterschaft
would bring German foreign economic
policy closer to this goal. Challenging the
accepted German norms about the virtues
of exports becomes even more critical given
today’s integration of China, India, the
12 new EU members, and other emerging
markets into the global supply chain. That
fundamental shift in the environment
increases the competitive pressure on
lower-productivity businesses. At the same
time, for the developed world, this shift
diminishes the political support for continued international economic openness.
With the “normalization” of German
foreign policy after reunification, Germany
should play a leadership role in international economic affairs by promoting greater
economic integration, which would benefit
the world and Germany itself. Relatively
passive support for the global trading
regime – with occasional pushes fi
back against the demands of French (and
now Polish) agricultural interests whenever multilateral trade negotiations reach
impasses – has been Germany’s habitually
positive but minimal role. This will no longer suffice to assure German and European
economic well-being. In addition, the statist and neo-mercantilist values consistent
with the pursuit of the top exporter title are
contrary to the Federal Republic’s values of
multilateralism, constructive transatlanticism, and deepened European federalism.
Germany has a huge opportunity to
leverage needed productivity-enhancing
changes in its domestic economy through
more enlightened foreign economic
policies. Pursuit of greater international
economic integration at the national,
European, and multilateral levels would
benefit both Germany and potentially –
considering the German influence in the
EU and w to processes – the world. This
would require a restructuring of German
foreign economic policy from the faulty
course it has held for fifty years.
A new German foreign economic policy
would consist of the following measures:
–– Cease waiting for externally driven
export booms to stimulate growth,
whether through relative wage deflation in the eurozone, exchange-rate
depreciation outside of the eurozone, or
demand-raising productivity improvements abroad.
–– Recognize that Germany’s export success is highly concentrated in only a
few sectors of declining value and
that domestic barriers to new entrants
(foreign and domestic) have caused the
German corporate sector to stagnate;
–– Concentrate instead on productivityenhancing policies that promote highvalue-added, high-wage employment,
and emergence of new services and
sectors.
–– Utilize competitive pressures from
abroad – on product markets, investment returns, and corporate ownership – to induce restructuring of
German business.
–– Shift pursuits in Brussels from macro
economic policy rules to microeconomic integration (and support a strong
European Commission and the EU
Takeover and Services Directives as the
logical next steps in that pursuit).
–– Assert greater leadership of Europe in
transatlantic policy coordination and
multilateral economic negotiations,
thereby forestalling the damage that
overly expansive nationalist rhetoric in
the EU can have on w to trade negotiations, Chinese market access, and foreign corporate takeovers.
The underlying question for German economic policymakers henceforth should
be: Does this policy advance Germany’s
integration with the world economy? and
not, How are we doing on exports? While
the latter may be easier to say and measure, the former is more likely to produce
sustainable and sustained growth in
Germany and Europe. Rather than trying
to be the export world champion, Germany
should try to champion world economic
integration. µ
Adam S. Posen is the Deputy Director
and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson
Institute for International Economics in
Washington, DC. This essay is adapted
from Chapter Four of his forthcoming book, Why Reform a Rich Country:
Germany (Peterson Institute, 2009).
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Central Asian Redux
Central Asia has long been considered a blank space on the map. But as power,
influence, and resources converge upon the region, continued ignorance is perilous
By Robert P. Finn
O
n ei t her side of the vast inland
sea that is Central Asia, China
and Russia are cooperating and
competing for influence and access. From
Sinkiang in western China to the oil-rich
Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, the entire
region presents an array of unmatched
possibilities and problems. The European
Union and the United States, too, have
become entwined in the region’s politics,
security, and development, whose goals
and outcomes are in flux. As the new
nations of Central Asia have inherited histories, ethnicities, and religions that will
influence how they will develop, this vast
geographic neighborhood has become both
stage and player in the drama of the upcoming century.
Map of the seven banners of Altai Urianhai, Mongolia, 1928
If one stands in Cen t r a l A si a and
looks southward, Afghanistan provides the
break in a wall of mountains and deserts, a
route south to warm lands and the sea. For
the people of Central Asia, Afghanistan has
historically been a portal through which
the courses of empire and history have
passed. Starting with the prehistoric Aryan
invaders of India, followed by the armies of
Alexander the Great, the Moguls, and eventually of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan
has been the great highway. For the new
nations of Central Asia, Afghanistan holds
the promise of access while it raises the
sword of political strife.
Afghanistan provided two seminal
shocks that have been primary determinants of the current political atmosphere
in Central Asia. The defeat of the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan was shattering to
a nation whose mythos was based on the
heroic victory of World War II. In addition,
the Soviet movement into Afghanistan
was a step along the way Russia took in its
nineteenth-century path of imperial acquisition. The Great Game ended in a draw
with the British Empire. But the latter
dissolved after 1945, and the agreements
made with it seemed no longer binding to
the Soviets.
The peoples of Afghanistan were ethnically aligned with the Soviet Republics to
the north, which had only been Sovietized
in the 1930s. As the Russian and then
Soviet Empire pushed into Central Asia,
waves of people fled in front of them. The
subsequent rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan only aggravated the
disaster and provided an active threat for
Central Asia. The hundreds of fighters of
the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan fi
who fled south to Afghanistan and then
to Pakistan were also following ancient
routes. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan each
faced armed Islamic groups that were both
indigenous and linked to groups to the
south.
Russia’s own historic ethnic insecurities
also inform its relationship to Afghanistan.
The centuries-long Mongol rule of Russia
remains a formative element in the
Russian psyche and is demographically
expressed today in a Russia that is 20 percent Muslim. The bitter wars in Chechnya
can be read as part of the Russian reaction
to the perceived twin threats of Islamic fundamentalism and nationalism in Russia
itself, where a string of Muslim groups
inhabit the Volga River Valley and where
there are no definitive geographic boundaries between Muslims and Christians.
At the same time as Chechnya declared
independence, the far larger and more
important republic of Tatarstan was moving in the same direction. The Soviet defeat
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
started by China as a way to influence the
region, grew more substantive as Russia
and Uzbekistan joined the organization.
It extended its interests to security and
narcotics issues, and it provided a forum
for concern about the US presence in the
region, particularly as the US and European
countries began to push for enforcement of
human rights and democracy. Russia has
accused the US of fomenting the revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan.
Other countries in the region have curbed
civil liberties to make sure the same does
not happen to them.
Most of w h at Cen t r a l A si an countries know about democracy and the West
they learned from their colonial experience with imperial, and then communist,
Russia. With the exception of Kazakhstan,
the experience came late – at the end of the
nineteenth century or well into the twentieth. The resistance to the Soviets lasted
The Central Asian countries did not want to leave the
Soviet Union; it dissolved and left them behind. For years
they hoped it would reunify.
in Afghanistan caused ripples that spread
throughout Eurasia.
The second shock for modern Central
Asia was the invasion of Afghanistan by
international forces after the attacks on
September 11, 2001. Initial cooperation
from the Central Asian countries led to the
establishment of US bases in Uzbekistan
and Kyrgyzstan, a German base in
Uzbekistan, and French forces in Tajikistan.
This coalition’s failure to achieve swift victory led to a multilateral call at the 2005
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (sco)
meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, for a timetable to withdraw US troops.
Prior to 2001 the states of Central Asia
had justifiably feared that Afghanistan’s
model of strife would spread to their countries. This anxiety hastened the end of the
Tajik civil war, as both parties agreed to
an imperfectly implemented compromise
rather than copy Afghanistan’s ongoing
civil wars. To the north, Islam Karimov
used the spectre of Islamic fundamentalism to establish a police state well known
for its human rights abuses. In addition,
the Islamic threat made the states of
Central Asia renew the ties with Russia that
had slackened in the first years after the
end of the Soviet Union.
until the 1930s in Kyrgyzstan and then
moved across the border into Afghanistan
and China. For the citizens of the Soviet
Union, Russia was the West and Russian
the language of Western civilization. The
Soviets changed the alphabets of the
Central Asian countries twice to keep them
from learning from one another and from
their modernizing Turkish cousins. The
propaganda, aided by economic realities
in Asia, worked. A villager living amid
the rusting waste of ex-Soviet Tajikistan
said of visiting relatives across the river in
Afghanistan in the 1990s: “They’re living a
hundred years in the past, without electricity and water.”
The Central Asian countries did not
want to leave the Soviet Union; it dissolved and left them behind. For years they
hoped that it would reunify, sharing thenPresident Putin’s feeling that its end was a
tragedy. The ensuing social and economic
collapse broke down a system that had been
erected over generations with great difficulty, startling economic and logistical incompetence, and appalling cost in human lives.
In Kazakhstan alone an estimated 1.5 million people died in collectivization drives
in the 1930s, leaving Kazakhs a minority
in their own country. Upon the end of the
Soviet Union the proportion reversed, as
millions of Russians “returned” west and
north to a homeland many had never seen.
Another 1.5 million Volga Germans, deported to the east during World War II, moved
to Germany. The complex ethnic web of
Central Asia, as varied in its composition
as that of the United States, unraveled and
began to reweave itself.
The newly independent states quickly
replaced Soviet iconography with new
nationalist imagery. Most infamous was
Turkmenistan’s Saparmurad Niyazov,
renamed “Turkmenbashi,” literally “Head
of the Turkmen,” who erected a golden
statue of himself atop a monument that
rotated to face the sun. Tajikistan erected
monuments and pictures of the ninthcentury Tajik ruler Saman that resembled
Tajikistan’s president, Imamali Rahman;
Uzbekistan chose Tamerlane as its
national hero. Russian lost ground to
national languages, and English became
the foreign language of choice for the
young and upwardly mobile. Azerbaijan,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan began to
replace the Cyrillic alphabet with Latin letters, although as yet only Azerbaijan has
successfully made the transition. More
importantly, the social safety net of the
Soviet Union dissolved along with its political structures. Hospitals, schools, public
safety, and pension schemes became
dysfunctional as funding disappeared and
inflation ran rampant. Russia, suffering
from the same collapse, initially could do
little to mitigate the changes.
The boom in energy prices and the
spread of Islamic fundamentalism led to
a basic shift in the power relationships
within Central Asia. Russia suddenly had
the money to pay off its debts and promise
largesse to Central Asia. Tajikistan, which
had received 40 percent of its budget from
Moscow in Soviet times and was the poorest state of the former ussr, received promises of a two billion dollar aid package from
Moscow. Currently, Russia offers to pay the
Central Asian states market-level prices
for energy. This stance ensures Russia’s
monopoly on energy exports to the West
and prevents US-promoted alternate supply
routes, such as the Nabucco gas pipeline,
from being realized. However, Russia’s
aggressive policy also creates tension
with other players in the Asian oil market,
including China and India. A gas pipeline
from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan
to Pakistan and India would undermine
the Russian monopoly, but Russia’s recent
Courtesy Centre for Documentation and Area-Transcultural Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
dramatic increase in the price it offers for
Turkmen gas may doom the planned pipeline, which already faces problems with
supply and security.
R
ussi a h a s ta ken se v er a l steps
to reassert itself militarily in Central
Asia. After initially ignoring the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
attempting instead to revive its own
post-Soviet Collective Security Treaty
Organization, it eventually joined the sco.
When the United States and its coalition
allies obtained basing rights adjoining
the Manas airport in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan,
Russia set up its own base a few miles away
at Kant. In Tajikistan, the resident Russian
general reacted to coalition overtures for
use of the Dushanbe airport by announcing – to the surprise of the Tajiks – that
the base was a Russian-Tajik dual-use
facility. Eventually the French were permitted to use the airport, and the coalition
rejected Tajik offers to use another base at
Aini because of infrastructure problems.
Russia’s on-again, off-again relations with
Uzbekistan have occasionally resulted
in military cooperation between the two
nations, which see themselves as the rightful heirs to the Soviet Union’s dominant
position in Central Asia. Russia’s military
intervention in Georgia in August 2008
contained a trenchant lesson for Central
Asia as well, as President Medvedev
claimed the right to intervene anywhere to
protect Russian citizens.
China has also taken an increasingly
active role in the region for both economic
and political reasons. China’s westernmost
province, Sinkiang, is home to a Turkic
people who have ethnic, religious, and
cultural affiliations with their cousins to
the west as far as Turkey. Their Uygur language is at least partially comprehensible to
other speakers of Turkic languages. Groups
of Kyrgyz and Kazakh minorities also live
on the Chinese side of the border, while an
Uygur minority resides in Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan.
Sinkiang is also home to an economic
and population boom as China develops
industry and builds new cities in the
area. This has brought millions of Han
Chinese, now the majority ethnic group in
the region. Uygur resistance has resulted
in some violence and the labeling of one
Uygur group as an “international terrorist
organization” by the United States. Some
Uygur fighters have joined al-Qaeda in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. Uygurs main-
Map of the territory of the banner of Dorjjav, 1909–1922
Map of the territory of the banner of Dorjjav, Mongolia, 1909–1922
tain that their resistance is against ethnic
assimilation and economic policies of
Beijing that ignore their interests.
China has taken active steps to develop
its relations with Central Asian states,
and not just because of concern over the
US presence in the region, although the
US military base in Kyrgyzstan – less than
two hundred miles from the Chinese border – and the US presence in Afghanistan
undoubtedly rankles. Border adjustments
have been made with Russia, Kazakhstan,
and Kyrgyzstan. The Kyrgyz President’s
surrender of several hundred thousand
acres of territory to China was one reason
he was overthrown in 2005. China claims
10 percent of eastern Tajikistan as well
and has opened the first road connecting
its border to the Tajik capital. Chinese
traders are omnipresent in Central Asia,
as are local merchants who go to China
and purchase cheap goods for their
markets.
E
nergy is one of t he m a in
determinants of national interests
in this century. China has moved
briskly forward to advance its energy
interests in Central Asia, purchasing an
oil field in Kazakhstan and planning the
world’s longest pipeline to bring that oil to
China. At the same time, it has signed oil
purchase agreements with Russia to multiply by several times the Russian supply
to western China. China has also become
the prime trading partner of Kazakhstan
and Iran. With the latter it has signed
deals worth $100 billion to develop
the gas and oil fields at North Pars and
Yadavaran, purchase liquefied natural gas,
extend the Tehran metro, and continue a
wide range of other projects. There is also
speculation that China will obtain docking rights on the Iranian Gulf shore, complementing the large commercial port it
is building in Gwadar, Pakistan. China
has invested nearly one billion dollars in
Turkmenistan, has obtained an interest
in a Turkmen gas field in the Caspian Sea,
and is building a pipeline to bring that
gas to China, scheduled to begin operation in 2010.
Closer to home, China has signed a
$3.4 billion deal to develop the Aynak copper mine in northeast Afghanistan, one of
the world’s largest undeveloped deposits.
The payment, roughly equal to the total
development assistance the US has expended in Afghanistan to date, will include
a railroad – Afghanistan’s first – to fi
connect the field with Chinese markets.
The estimated worth of the copper is nearly
$90 billion. In addition to the road with
Tajikistan, China is also upgrading the
transport infrastructure on its own side of
the border, including the Karakorum highway, which leads to Islamabad and the new
port at Gwadar.
Both unilaterally and through the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
China has registered its concern about the
US presence in Central Asia. Russia and
China have taken a common stance implying proprietorship over the region. Several
naval incidents, such as the last-minute
cancellation of US ship visits to Hong Kong
last year, indicate China’s discomfort with
the status quo, as does the increase in
Chinese defense spending. Joint ChineseRussian troop maneuvers have taken place
for the first time, and China’s military chief
visited Afghanistan in the fall of 2007 to
discuss mutual security issues. As well,
China is building a road that would connect
the two countries through the narrow finger of the Wakhan Corridor, which divides
Tajikistan from Pakistan, in addition to a
projected railroad through Tajikistan to
Afghanistan.
T
he most vol at ile elemen t for
Central Asia is the ongoing war in
Afghanistan, which presents two
immediate threats to the country’s northern neighbors. The first, the threat of fundamentalist Islam, is a real one, however
manipulated by Uzbekistan’s President
Karimov and, arguably, the Russian government. The failure of the current central
of Uzbekistan, has called on his followers to postpone the jihad in Central Asia
and concentrate on Afghanistan, but the
message is clear: Central Asia is still on
the list. Thus, in spite of their trepidations
about ultimate US intentions in the region,
the Central Asian countries still facilitate,
directly or indirectly, the continuation of
war in Afghanistan.
Unsure at first what to make of the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, the US opened embassies in all
post-Soviet states but continued to accept the primacy of
Russian influence.
Asian governments to achieve any real
political or economic reforms (with the
partial exception of Kazakhstan) allows
the Islamist message of social justice
and freedom to remain resonant. In addition, the conflation of radical terrorism
with avowedly non-violent groups has
led to an overall crackdown on observant
Muslims in Central Asia, most dramatically in Uzbekistan. Fleeing militants
have taken refuge with their counterparts
in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tahir
Yoldashev, leader of the Islamic movement
Narcotics are Afghanistan’s second
threat to Central Asia. Both usage and
traffic have increased as the Afghan drug
production outstrips all competitors.
Afghanistan has been called a narcostate, and the traffickers in Afghanistan,
often connected to its government, have
close partnerships in neighboring states.
Narcotics travel through Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan to Russia and then on to
Europe. A program to stop drug production
in Afghanistan might simply move production to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, both of
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which have a history of weak, corrupt governance and entrenched poverty.
Iran casts its shadow over the region as
well. The division of control of the Caspian
Sea necessarily involves Iran. The Tehran
Declaration on the Caspian Sea in 2006
states that the littoral states guarantee not
to attack one another and that the Caspian
Sea cannot be used for the purposes of war.
One pointed addressee of this declaration
is the United States. Iran has maintained
close relations with both Russia and China.
In his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard,
Zbigniew Brzezinski predicts a catastrophic outcome for the US if these three nations
united against it. Russia’s involvement
with the construction of Iran’s nuclear
power plant at Bushehr is well known.
Reciprocally, Iran’s Shia theocracy has kept
silent about Russia’s behavior towards the
Chechens.
programs aimed at fostering civil rights
and democracy were not heavily funded
and often took a distinct second place
to highly visible commercial deals and
military visits. Nevertheless, they had an
effect, both unilaterally and in partnership
with the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (osce) and the EU.
The Color Revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine,
in the former ussr, has become even
more beleaguered in recent years. The
United States’ profitable business deals
with Central Asian oligarchs reinforces
distrust of the former enemy, as does
domestic government propaganda that
questions US motives. Russia and China
see the US as a rival in an area they consider their own.
If the US and the EU leave it to the Central Asian popular
media to influence citizens’ lifestyle and thought, the
results will largely reinforce negative preconceptions on
both sides.
and Kyrgyzstan have been ascribed, rightly
or wrongly, to these influences; as a result,
other Central Asian governments have
tightened the rules in their own countries.
Nevertheless, the US budget for programs
related to civil rights and democracy
The Uni t es Stat es h a s not y e t
decreased in 2008, with the exception of
assumed a primary position of involvement programs in Turkmenistan.
in Central Asia. Unsure at first what to
As the Afghanistan war continues and
make of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, even escalates, the initial enthusiasm of
the US opened embassies in all post-Soviet
the Central Asian states has declined. The
states but continued to accept the primacy
concept
of the US as a citadel of democFinal_Anzg_CNC_280x210+4mm 08.09.2008 9:50 Uhr Seite 1
of Russian influence in the region. The US
racy and freedom, never widely accepted
The European Union also looks to
Central Asia as a region of growth and
potential for the next century. EU energy
demands and security concerns are intertwined in a world of diminishing possibilities. Through the EU and the osce, as well
as bilaterally, European countries have
begun to explore the possibility of resource
development in the region. The EU has
already been criticized in some fora for not
approaching issues of democracy and basic
freedom with the same vigor as it seeks out
energy relationships. fi
10 Years
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D
espi t e burgeoning s t r at egic
and developmental interests in
the region, little is known about
Central Asia in the West. The languages,
culture, and history of its peoples were
subsumed into the overall fabric of Russia
and the ussr. A fresh approach is needed to
understand these countries as partners and
cooperators, one that includes an appreciation of their individuality. One size does not
fit all. An immediate concerted effort could
forge economic and political stability in the
region. The approach should be multilateral,
multi-linguistic, and inclusive. If the United
States and the EU leave it to the Central
Asian popular media to influence citizens’
lifestyle and thought, the results will largely
reinforce negative preconceptions on both
sides. For the peoples of Central Asia, their
status as citizens of a world superpower
(the ussr) is a still-fresh memory, and they
expect recognition as equals. A project that
considers the needs and abilities of all sides
would make a substantial contribution
towards creating a new equation for Central
Asia. Such a project should take the following points into consideration:
–– Russi a and China both seek economic and political influence. The
Shanghai Cooperation Organization is
a venue where Russia and China meet
and cooperate along with the other
Central Asian states, and it has already
held its first joint military exercises. But
as anti-terrorism is one of the sco’s
major concerns, an invitation for it to
cooperate militarily with the coalition
in Afghanistan and Central Asia could
bring major benefits to both sides, help
to alleviate worries about the US presence in Central Asia, and relieve some of
the war’s material and personnel pressures. Since the Central Asian states will
be primary beneficiaries of security and
peace in Afghanistan, there is no reason
why they should not substantially contribute to bringing it about.
–– Oil and ga s are what everyone wants
from the region. The race for resources
can result in the ongoing triumph of oligarchies or it can evolve into something
better. Responsible growth can bring
present sustenance and lasting benefits
for local populations. Kazakhstan and
Azerbaijan have set up investment funds
for the future. The other Central Asian
countries and their purchasing partners
need to do the same. In Turkmenistan,
for example, the nominal per capita
income is $8000, but any observer can
see that the standard of living is far
below. As more resources come online,
real incomes should rise across the
board.
–– Wat er is t he l a st ing problem of
Central Asia. Insufficient supply and
conflicting needs dictate better management policies, especially when a developing Afghanistan starts to demand its
share of limited resources. Salinization
of land, the need to develop increasing
hydroelectric power, and management
of supply on an annual basis are problems that need covalent and comprehensive structuring on a regional basis.
–– Tr ansportat ion must also be dealt
with regionally. The countries of the
region have called for further development of the rail lines from Istanbul to
Almaty, and regional cooperation to supply war material via the Central Asian
rail lines to Afghanistan is underway,
but a larger discussion involving connecting Central Asian lines through
Afghanistan to Pakistan and India, and
lines to China is also necessary for the
new century.
–– Succession issues will face the
nations of Central Asia. Dynastic tendencies exist, and democratic ones are
weak. Kyrgyzstan’s revolution did not
result in a net gain for democracy. The
careful nurturing of democratic organs
and civil society is a prerequisite for
improving other conditions. Local needs
and attitudes need to be an informed
part of the process, and democratic
states need to take an active role in presenting their values.
–– Economic ch ange is essential. Freemarket economies are severely limited
in most of Central Asia, with governments and oligarchs working hand-inhand to exploit and shape commerce.
Uzbekistan may be the most outstanding example, but all of the countries of
Central Asia have paradigms of control
and taxation that discourage investment
and growth. Rule of law is essential for
democracy, but it is even more essential
for a successful economy.
–– Isl a m a s a poli t ic a l and social element is both a leitmotif and active factor.
It informs daily life and attitudes to a
greater or lesser extent, depending on
circumstances. The end of the Soviet
Union led many people to look back to
the Islamic states that existed before.
Fundamentalists and some terrorists
have taken advantage of this nostalgia,
and government repression exacerbated
the problem. While moderate Islam
has been and mostly still is the norm in
Central Asia, politicization of religion
and reactive repression wear away at its
fabric. The West needs to understand
the complexity of Islam and work with
its moderate majority.
–– The US does not seem to have a
holistic and coherent policy for Central
Asia. These new nations with ancient
roots nevertheless present, in many
ways, a physical and sociological ambience familiar to residents of the US,
with their vast spaces, lack of class
structure and vibrant mix of ethnic
groups. To observers in the region, US
interest has been expressed until now
mainly in business deals that have
produced tangible benefits mainly for
the leadership or military activities that
are unclear in their ultimate intent and
unsettling in their propinquity. From
both the Russian and Chinese point
of view, a growing ring of US military
emplacements surrounds them. They
are understandably anxious. Conversely,
the Central Asian partnership these
two countries manage raises questions
as well.
–– Cen t r a l A si a is a l most another
New World, with vast resources, huge
territory and peoples and cultures that
in many ways are unfamiliar. At the
same time, there are many aspects of
life, particularly in its cities, that are
quite recognizable, and Westerners
easily adapt. Partnerships with Central
Asian states and their peoples could
result in mutually beneficial growth and
development. And while the development of democracy and economic prosperity are not guaranteed, Central Asia
has the potential for both. µ
Robert P. Finn served as US Ambassador
to Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.
Currently a lecturer in Near Eastern
Studies at Princeton University, he was a
spring 2008 Foreign Policy Visitor at the
Academy.
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