The Berlin Journal a Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Fourteen | Spring 2007

The Berlin Journal A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Fourteen | Spring 2007

In this issue: Katherine Boo Glen Bowersock Robert Kimmitt Melvin Lasky Vali Nasr Alex Ross Amity Shlaes Michael Taussig Geoffrey Wolff ARD_Image_BerlinJournal_210x280 1

XYNIASWETZEL.DE Fernsehen ist Fernsehen ist 21.03.2007 15:49:39Uhr The Berlin Journal Contents Number Fourteen | Spring 2007

Palast, Tacita Dean, 2004 LondonGallery,Streetartist,theCourtesyMarianandof Frith Goodman York/Paris NewGallery,

When Scholars Examine Political Ideas 22 Melvin Lasky chronicles the picaresque The Writer’s Dilemma experiences of an intellectually irreverent 4 Glen Bowersock counters Huntington’s combat historian. An excerpt from his 50 Katherine Boo reflects on the empirical thesis by tracking the footprints of the unpublished World War II diary from and ethical quandaries inherent to writing Roman Empire across distant religions and the European front, accompanied by about the American poor. Also, portraits cultures. photographs by Robert Capa. by Robin Bowman of teenage life below the poverty line. 10 Vali Nasr offers a nuanced reframing of the 30 Alex Ross depicts the American attempt ongoing conflict in the Middle East. On the to reshape the musical spirit of postwar 56 Geoffrey Wolff muses on capturing the causes and implications of sectarian strife. Germany, while the artwork of Tacita Dean subtleties of the Stasi state from the vantage hints at attempts to deny a shameful past. point of the American white middle class. New German Leadership With critical works by the late gdr painter Academy News Wolfgang Mattheuer on the eightieth 14 Robert Kimmitt and Matthias Wissmann anniversary of his birth. probe the chancellor’s initiative to 37 Notebook of the Academy: The Academy strengthen economic openness across the announces two new fellowships; a regular The Currency of Color Atlantic. seminar in Baden-Württemberg; additions to the Board of Trustees; a timeline of 62 Michael Taussig swathes colonial exchange Historical Revisions Academy events; and more news and notes in the materials of desire and fear, gaiety and mystery. 16 Amity Shlaes challenges regnant from the Hans Arnhold Center. interpretations of the New Deal and 42 Life and Letters: An introduction to the 65 Donations to the Academy suggests the present-day relevance of spring 2007 class of fellows and recent Special thanks are due to the International her oppositional narrative. With little- publications of Academy alumni. known images from the Great Depression Center of Photography for opening their by graphic artist and muralist Benjamin 46 On the Waterfront: A sampling from the archives and making the Capa and Shahn Shahn. German press, including stories on writer photographs available. We are also grateful Nicole Krauss, actor and director Robert to Katherine Boo for introducing us to Robin De Niro, environmental pioneer Amory Bowman, and to Academy friend Tacita Dean Lovins, and intellectual property lawyer for generously sharing her work. Lawrence Lessig.

Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 The Berlin Journal Trustees of the American Academy A Magazine from the Hans Arnhold Center Director’s Note published twice a year by the American Honorary Chairmen Academy in Berlin Thomas L. Farmer Brushing History against the Grain Henry A. Kissinger Number Fourteen – Spring 2007 Richard von Weizsäcker Chairman All of the contributors to this issue are “brushing history Publisher Gary Smith Richard C. Holbrooke against the grain,” to cite Walter Benjamin, and challeng- Editor at Large Miranda Robbins Vice Chairman ing the way their crafts are practiced. This is as true of the Editor Rachel Marks Gahl Hodges Burt Editorial Assistant Will Byrne President unpublished war diaries of Melvin Lasky, whose vivid dis- External Affairs Director Renate Pöppel Norman Pearlstine patches during the final months of WWII were inevitably Design Susanna Dulkinys and Treasurer ill suited to the prevailing norms of military narrative, as it SpiekermannPartners Karl M. von der Heyden is of the self-criticalreflections of the journalist Katherine Original Drawings Ben Katchor Executive Director Printed by Neef + Stumme, Wittingen Gary Smith Boo, whose report from the surrendered front of the Chief Financial Officer American war on poverty eschews both sentimentalism The Berlin Journal is funded through Jens Moir and sensationalism. advertising and tax-deductible donations, Music critic Alex Ross has always defied conventional which we greatly appreciate. Trustees Contributions may be made by check John P. Birkelund ideas about the place of classical music within our culture. or by bank transfer to: Diethart Breipohl The account of postwar German musical life from his book American Academy in Berlin Gahl Hodges Burt The Rest is Noise transfers these virtues to the lengthier Berliner Sparkasse Gerhard Casper genre. Columnist and finance expert Amity Shlaes dis- Account no. 660 000 9908 Marina Kellen French putes the received view of Depression-era policies. The BLZ 100 500 00 Michael Geyer IBAN: DE 071 005 0000 660 000 9908 Vartan Gregorian included chapter from her meticulously researched, inde- BIC: BELADEBEXXX Andrew S. Gundlach pendent book brings an important new perspective to the Verwendungszweck: Berlin Journal Franz Haniel New Deal. Karl M. von der Heyden Both eminent classicist Glen Bowersock and Middle All rights reserved Richard C. Holbrooke ISSN 1610-6490 Stefan von Holtzbrinck East scholar Vali Nasr challenge the dominant concep- Josef Joffe tual leitmotifs of current political discourse. Professor Cover: Julie Mehretu, detail of Retopistics: John C. Kornblum Bowersock’s scholarly scrutiny of the notion of the “clash A Renegade Excavation, 2001 (102" x 216", Regine Leibinger of civilizations” demonstrates how both academia and the ink and acrylic on canvas). Image courtesy Nina von Maltzahn of the artist. Julie Mehretu is a Guna S. Erich Marx political sphere are susceptible to this fashionable idea. Mundheim Fellow in spring 2007. Wolfgang Mayrhuber Anthropologist Michael Taussig, for his part, eschews William von Mueffling explanation of methodology while refining Benjamin’s The American Academy in Berlin Joseph Neubauer ambition to compose material history. Am Sandwerder 17–19 Christopher von Oppenheim 14109 Berlin Norman Pearlstine Benjamin once wrote that a stay in Moscow brought Tel. (49 30) 80 48 3-0 Heinrich v. Pierer him clarity about the lineaments of living in Berlin. He Fax (49 30) 80 48 3-111 David Rubenstein was expressing a sentiment that resonates in the work of Email [email protected] Neil L. Rudenstine the many scholars, writers, and artists who come to the Web www.americanacademy.de Volker Schlöndorff Fritz Stern Hans Arnhold Center. Geoffrey Wolff’s interviews about 14 East 60th Street, Suite 604 Tilman Todenhöfer the Stasi with Berliners from both sides of the Wall at New York, NY 10022 Jon Vanden Heuvel once magnify his uncertainties about writing in a foreign Tel. (1) 212 588-1755 Kurt Viermetz culture and make him more sure-footed as he creates the Fax (1) 212 588-1758 Manfred Wennemer Klaus Wowereit, ex-officio characters of his next novel. The pieces by each of our contributors – and, indeed, the work of this spring’s entire Honorary Trustee class of fellows – are enhanced by their openness to other Otto Graf Lambsdorff fields. This fortifies the independence of their thinking and the vitality of exchange, both within the Academy’s Senior Counselors Richard Gaul Hans Arnhold Center and beyond. Bernhard von der Planitz – Gary Smith

Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 HUGO BOSS AG Phone +49 7123 940 www.hugoboss.com n 1993 Samuel P. Huntington published an article in the journal Foreign Affairs with the I apocalyptic title “The Clash of Civilizations?” This title was presented as a query since it was fol- Fresco of Dionysus and Ariadne riding in an ox-drawn chariot, accompanied by Seilenos and a pair of nymphs, lowed by a question mark, but a few years later the Pompeii, imperial Roman period same author published a whole book entitled, without any query, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington’s language and views sparked a debate that has continued for more than a decade. It has become such an integral part of historical thinking that a new book by Martin Goodman bears the challenging title Rome and Jerusalem – The Clash of Civilizations. This title is all the more remarkable since Goodman nowhere in his book mentions the Huntington thesis. It seems simply to have become common currency in historical analysis. The Roman Empire and the Clash of Civilizations by Glen Bowersock

It is hardly necessary to say that, even in Huntingtonian terms, Rome and Jerusalem were no more clashing civilizations than Athens and Jerusalem. Two thousand years ago Tertullian, the eloquent father of the Christian church, had portentously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” His own answer was nothing. He was wrong, of course, but the point he wanted to deny was influence, not conflict. A Huntingtonian might argue that Rome and Persia had been ancient civilizations that clashed, but in fact Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome all inhabited the same world and shared its cultural diversity. A Jew, a Greek, and a Roman could all watch the gladiators together, all applaud the pantomimes, all appreciate a well crafted mosaic image of the sun (Helios), and all savor a learned disputation, be it philosophical, rhetorical, or theological. It was one civilization, and there was little room for clashing. ﬁ

Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 MuseoArcheologico Nazionale Napoli,di Italy

The Berlin Journal I find the Huntington thesis completely able. Huntington claims that civilizations Western Civilization. Western Civilization untenable, yet it seems to be everywhere, are as mortal as the human beings who was a messy amalgam of Jewish, Greek, and both in contemporary political analysis and populate and promote them, but even this Roman culture as filtered through a tri- now, as with Goodman, even in the writ- is open to dispute. The cultural values of a umphant Christianity. In universities and ing of ancient history. I present it here in system can easily survive its demise or be churches the Judaeo-Christian tradition the context of the Roman Empire, both to transmuted into another system. Immanuel was expounded in terms of awe and grati- clear away the confusion and imprecision Wallerstein put it well when he wrote, tude, equally combined. that seem to me to lie at its core and to set “Civilizations have not risen and fallen. It has been the dismantling of the idea of forth a view of the empire that may offer Rather, world-empires have come into exis- Western Civilization that has provoked the some hope in the face of Huntington’s pes- tence, flourished, and declined.” kind of panic and confusion that Huntington simism. I want to suggest that the religions Wallerstein’s observation touches on the represents. A global perspective and increas- of classical antiquity may – in modern per- famous Gibbonian problem of decline and ing familiarity with alien cultures have shat- spective paradoxically – provide one of the fall. Although Edward Gibbon thought that tered the security and monolithic stability of best explanations for why civilizations did he was chronicling the decline and fall of Western Civilization. But this does not mean not clash over a period of more than one that the civilization, with all its achieve- thousand years, from the Homeric age to Huntington supposed that ments and glories, has disappeared. It has the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate we are in a new world order, not clashed as such with any other civiliza- in Damascus. tion. Its culture remains intact, but it appears The fundamental problem with but neither globalization nor now, even in Western opinion, to be neither Huntington’s analysis is his inability to strangeness is anything new unique nor manifestly superior to other distinguish civilization from culture; he civilizations. Of course thinkers in Eastern constantly defines one in terms of the other. in human history. countries knew that long ago. Even Gibbon “Civilizations are the broadest cultural enti- knew that as he worked his way through his ties; hence conflicts between groups from chapters on Islam and China. different civilizations become central to the Roman Empire, what he actually wrote global politics.” Or, “Civilizations are cul- about was the culture of the Roman Empire. here is invariably a religious tural, not political entities.” As Jack Matlock, Accordingly, contrary to his expectations, he component to Huntington’s idea of an astute analyst of the collapse of the Soviet found himself swept up in a narrative that civilization; though he chose not Union, observed in commenting on the embraced China and Islam and only came to speak of a clash of religions, he Huntington thesis, “Most might agree … to a rather open ending in 1453 with the Tclearly implied it by setting up a competi- that a ‘civilization’ is a cultural entity, but capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans. tion with Islam. Taking this stance would they would disagree about what constitutes When did the Roman Empire end? No one have been even more indefensible than a a ‘cultural entity,’ which is, after all, the knows, least of all the reader of Gibbon. clash of civilizations, as it is religion that more fundamental question.” For some When did the culture of the Roman world can illustrate why civilizations do not clash thinkers, the state itself was an integral part end? Arguably never. It permeates Europe when states and empires do. The Roman of culture. Jacob Burckhardt developed his and the Americas today. Did one civiliza- Empire is an ideal laboratory for observing interpretation of ancient Greek cultural his- tion – the Roman one – clash with another? this since its tradition of polytheistic wor- tory on precisely this premise, and it had Hardly. The clash of the Byzantines and ship spans the entire course of its history. already been an important part of his analy- the Muslims in the first decades of Islam Polytheism existed in the form of both state sis of the culture of the Italian Renaissance. was not a clash of civilizations because both cult and private cult, ethnic cult and local Neither Burckhardt nor others who reflected sides at that time shared the same civiliza- cult. This rich skein of religious diversity on this subject were so foolish as to think tion. It was, in fact, the late phase of the characterized the pre-Islamic Arabs, with that the conflict of states was a clash of civi- Roman Empire when Rome took on a new a pantheon of 365 different deities, just as lizations. conceptual life at Constantinople on the much as it did the Greeks and the Romans. Even more problematic in defining cul- Bosporus, a new (or second) Rome. Superimposed upon this polytheistic ture is the role of the environment, in the Huntington’s thesis doubtless appealed quilt were the monotheistic religions: first sense in which Fernand Braudel has accus- to Goodman, not to mention many others, Judaism, later Christianity, and finally tomed us to look at the Mediterranean as for two reasons. The first is its explicit rec- Islam. Religion proved not to be confined to a single culture. The physical landscape ognition of modern globalization, achieved one civilization or another. Although there and its relation to commerce and economic through miracles of technology and com- were antagonisms and persecutions along growth are no less essential to a culture munication, and the second is its confron- the way, it proved to be a far more effective than the spiritual and artistic values that tation with alien cultures. Huntington carrier of alien ideas and culture than any- first come to mind. Even Huntington supposed that we are in a new world order thing else. It could pass from Jerusalem to acknowledges that civilizations “have no in which distant and alien cultures can Rome, from Naples to Athens, from Syria clear-cut boundaries” and that cultures organize themselves into present and coher- to Libya. The frontiers of civilizations were “interact and overlap,” yet he believes them ent threats. But neither globalization nor always porous, but the cultures they repre- to be “meaningful entities” without ever strangeness is anything new in human sented usually moved beyond them through asking, “Meaningful to whom?” The danger history, even if the scale has been different their indigenous divinities. of solipsistic assessments makes a general in the past. Americans and Europeans are Consider Dionysus, one of the most pop- agreement difficult and a clash inconceiv- brought up on a nourishing diet of so-called ular Greek gods throughout antiquity. He

Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 was the god of the grape, wine, intoxication, The chariot of Dionysus was a vehicle that refer to Jews or gentiles espousing Judaism, ecstasy, and frenzy. He could be depicted crossed every frontier, both political and but this is clearly not the case. Many texts in a bewildering variety of mortal guises, cultural. are pagan in character, and by the fourth including an old man on a stick (with vine An even more exotic and specialized century ad the Highest God lent his leaves), a lissome youth (with vine leaves), example from the Roman Empire is the name to some exotic Christian heresies in an adolescent, or an adult of heroic propor- Highest God, or hypsistos theos. The head Phoenicia and Cappadocia that attempted to tions consorting with panthers. Just as wine of the Greek pantheon, Zeus, was there- combine Christian and Jewish rituals into was a common denominator for human- fore the Highest God, and so he appears in a single religion. The Highest God traveled kind, so too was Dionysus. The legends that classical texts. As cultures intermingled freely from Palestine to Phoenicia, from built up around him took him all the way to through conquest and empire, however, Cappadocia to the Taman Peninsula, from India and doubtless Afghanistan. His cult the Highest God acquired a multiplicity Thrace to Athens and to Italy, crossing a sprang up in new and interesting forms of references. The Greek translators of the plethora of civilizations, large and small, all over the Mediterranean, particularly in Old Testament, what scholars know as the local and international. The worshippers Greek-speaking Naples in Italy. He could Septuagint, chose to render the Hebrew across these spaces preserved their own be identified with the Roman Bacchus, and his travels took him through the Near Religion in the Roman Empire proved to be a far more effective East, where he is said to have visited Beirut carrier of alien ideas and culture than anything else. and given his name to the Syrian city of Dionysias. He was, quite simply, everywhere. When Christianity took hold in late name for God, Yahweh, by this expression individuality and, at the same time, showed antiquity, Dionysus continued his interna- and instantly created a link between the their adherence to a larger international tional triumph to such an extent that he and Hellenes of the classical age and the Jews world. They symbolized globalization and the young Christ proved indistinguishable of the Torah. Meanwhile, throughout the regionalization at the same time. in some images, and in one famous pagan Roman Empire, the expression Highest Mithras is another example of a mobile text he was explicitly identified as Christ. God served to designate the ranking international deity, a strange figure with a Euripides’ tragedy about the worshippers deity in many cities and towns across the peaked cap whose cult image depicts him of Dionysus, the Bacchae, was startlingly Mediterranean. The abundance of inscrip- in the throes of slitting the throat of a rear- rewritten by a Christian poet as an account tions with this unnamed god has even led ing bull. Devotees of his cult customarily of the suffering Christ, Christus patiens. some to speculate that all the texts must descended into a pit above which a bull ﬁ www.berlin-airport.de

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SXF_Freiheitselse_210x145_BlnJourn_28L 1 22.03.2007 16:01:45 Uhr was sacrificed so that the blood would drain suggestion of a Zoroastrian connection with containment that Rome and subsequently over them. This cult, found all over the Mithraism is exciting, utterly new, and yet Byzantium fought against the Persians had Roman Empire, was particularly associated perfectly consistent with the religious diffu- not the slightest effect in curtailing the with the Roman army and seems, with its sion in the ancient world. spread of religion from the Iranian plateau. elaborate register of initiation categories, to Alongside Rome and later Byzantium When, in the late fourth century, a tribe have functioned as a kind of freemasonry (the new Rome), Persia was one of the of Arabs in the Hadramawt in Arabia con or Shriners for middle-class Greeks and indubitably great civilizations of the verted to Judaism, the Persians used this Romans. The bloody character of the rite age. It spawned not only Zoroastrianism, peculiar situation to their own advantage. and the divine image itself have long sug- which has made its way in modern times They gave their support to the Jewish king- gested a Phrygian origin in Anatolia, even to Toronto, where it flourishes, but also dom of the Hadramawt in order to oppose though the bulk of documentation comes Manichaeism, perhaps the most influ- the Byzantine support of Christians in from the West. Yet only a few years ago an ential of the Persian dualist religions. Ethiopia. Hence the astonishing spectacle astonishing Mithraeum, a temple to the Manichaeism spread widely into the east- of an onslaught of Ethiopian Christians deity, was uncovered at Huarte in Syria, not ern Mediterranean in late antiquity as well into the Arabian peninsula in the early far from Apamea. It is conspicuously later sixth century, with the encouragement of than most other examples, dating from the Dionysus continued his the Byzantine emperor. The Ethiopians, mid-fourth century. (A Mithraeum at Dura- international triumph to on the other hand, encountered resistance Europus on the Euphrates, for example, from the Arabs, who were converted Jews dates from more than one hundred years such an extent that he and enjoying the backing of the Persian shah- earlier.) Furthermore, the Huarte shrine the young Christ proved in-shah. Never has religion so effectively contains wall paintings without parallel breached the barriers of civilization and anywhere in the world. Mithras himself is indistinguishable in some culture as in this extraordinary and little depicted with a two-headed black man in images. known story. chains, and a row of severed, grizzled heads In the Jordanian desert east of Amman on a platform appears to show a ray of sun- there is a famous chateau from late antiq- light striking each of the heads. The two- as into central Asia and China. It showed uity that appears to have been a rural retreat headed figure, representative of the dualist no respect for frontiers of any kind, and for the Umayyad caliphs in the seventh existence of divine forces of good and evil, it even infected the great Christian Saint century: Qusayr ‘Amra. Here, after the signals the practice of Zoroastrianism. The Augustine for a time. The periodic wars of Muslim conquest of the region, the follow-

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Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 from Greek mythology and Eastern politics, it was, as in South Arabia, perhaps enjoyed the the- to come to the aid of the Jews against the atrical mimes providing Christians. But this was clearly a political local entertainment. Some decision that had little to do with the reli- remained Christian, as the gious convictions of the Persians. Had they churches recently excavated been able to foresee the Islamic conquests at Umm er-Rasas in Jordan that lay so close in the future they might eloquently testify. The fusion have chosen a different policy. of Christian and pagan Although states entered often into con- culture that the Muslims flict, civilizations endured in a generous found when they invaded pattern of interaction and metamorphosis.

Image courtesy of the Abegg-StiftungtheImagecourtesyof (Photograph: ChristophViràg) von Transjordan was no impedi- They were precious because they expressed ment to the new government. a commonality of outlook and traditions; It not only tolerated but also and they were open, above all, if para- exploited it. Religion once doxically, to religions. In his paper on the again was an open frontier. Huntington thesis, Jack Matlock wrote per- In the course of time, with ceptively: “A civilization by any definition is the exigencies of an Arabic- infinitely more complex than, say, a garden. speaking administration Nevertheless, describing it is in principle and a growing Muslim pres- no different. Each garden is unique, yet ence, the same open frontier some will have common characteristics not allowed Islam to grow and shared by others. Some plants will grow Wall hanging with eventually, but slowly, to well in some soils and poorly if at all in depiction of Dionysus (detail), overtake the Hellenic tradi- others. Some plants may take over if moved Egypt, fourth century tions it inherited. Curiously, to a different environment.… Gardens, like however, this process of civilizations, can be described, analyzed ers of Muhammad relaxed in an ambience acculturation and adaptation was mutu- and interpreted. But one thing is certain. It of enchanting wall paintings of wholly ally reinforced by the two great religions of would be absurd to speak of a ‘clash of gar- Greek character. Animals and hunts are Christianity and Islam. In the eighth cen- dens.’ It is equally absurd to speak of a ‘clash shown, as well as elegant human figures, tury both undertook a theologically driven of civilizations.’” including a woman rising from her bath campaign to eliminate the representation of Over many centuries religion has been and another holding a baby. Perhaps the images. The Christian iconoclasts defiled viewed both as a foundation of civilization most remarkable among the Umayyad and removed representations of the holy as well as a threat to it. The conservative paintings at Qusayr ‘Amra is a solemn show image of Christ and the Mother of God, and right would hold to the former view, and of six kings, who are identified with labels the Muslim iconoclasts set out at virtually this is just as true of those in the American in both Arabic and Greek. It is tempting to the same time to eliminate representations Bible Belt as it is of the Muslim heirs of assume that these figures symbolize the of any creature that draws breath. What we medieval Islamic fundamentalism. The Umayyads’ perspective of the civilizations see in the simultaneous iconoclastic move- radical left inclines to the other view, and of the caliph’s world. Identification of two ment of Byzantium and Islam is a clear the Western doctrine of the separation of of the kings did not survive, but the oth- proof that religion does not fuel any one civi- church and state is a reflection of resistance ers are Caesar (the emperor at Byzantium), lization or culture. to ecclesiastical coercion and inquisition. Khusraw (the Persian shah), Roderic the It is salutary to recall that, after the But the vast breadth of the Roman Empire Visigoth (king of Spain), and the Negus of Roman emperor Hadrian’s suppression gives us valuable lessons in the mobility and Ethiopia. André Grabar conjectured that the of the revolt of Bar Kokhba in Palestine in mutability of religion. It illuminates better two kings for whom the labels are missing the 130s ad, there was no further outbreak than anything else the evanescent construct are the emperor of China and the khagan of of any consequence in the entire region of civilization. This is a construct that is the Kazars. Here the walls seem to offer a until the Persians invaded Jerusalem in the useful to historians precisely because it can- visualization of the regnant civilizations of seventh century. There had been a few epi- not explain war and violence. It is the soil the age. These civilizations, if that is what sodes of Persian aggression, a minor revolt in which the loveliest of blossoms and the they are, clearly do not clash. They are mutu- provoked by an imperial aspirant, two out- rankest of weeds both can grow. µ ally respectful of each other. breaks of internecine strife between Jews The Hellenism of late antiquity, so viv- and their brethren, the Samaritans, and Glen Bowersock is Professor Emeritus idly reflected at ‘Amra, lived on in these some violence at the hands of marauding of Ancient History at the Institute early years of Islam and brightened the lives monks but fundamentally nothing com- for Advanced Study in Princeton, of caliphs and courtiers. During the first parable with the uprising of Bar Kokhba. New Jersey. Author of Mosaics as century after the Muslims’ conquest, the Think of it: nearly five centuries of relative History. The Near East from Late new religion of the conquerors did little to peace in the Near East. Civilizations did Antiquity to Islam (2006), he joined alter the Greek way of life normal for resi- not clash. States did, and religious violence the Academy for a week this March as dents of the region. These were residents was fraternal, as it is in Iraq today. When a Distinguished Visitor. This article who had adorned their homes with scenes the Persians re-entered the arena of Near is based on his Berlin lecture.

The Berlin Journal Confessional Conflict and the Rise of AlfredoDagli/bpk OrtiImage© the Shiites Four Questions for Vali Nasr

Muhammad, eighteenth century

10 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 the Western church or the protestant from we have seen. This game has started because the Catholic. Put simply, the separation there is a political prize on the table to be within Islam was the consequence of a dis- won – that is the true animus – but religion pute over the prophet Muhammad’s rightful will also be radicalized in the process. successor, which led each sect to develop a different approach to law and a different ethos of religion. Although they agree on the majority of Islam’s tenets, they differ on certain aspects of practice, and these small What role does differences are much more consequential confessional What significance does than the similarities. Over the ensuing the confessional conflict 1,400-year period, they have fought over demography play in theology, power, and territory – and they maintaining political have for understanding have coexisted. As a result, the division has the current turbulence come to define the identities of both groups. stability? What defines each community? Its beliefs 2 in the Middle East? and how it differs from the other, but also a Shiites represent at best 10 to 15 percent of 1 notion of shared history within the sect. the some 1.3 billion in the Muslim world When I completed my book The Shia Revival Shared history does not necessarily have – constituting 150 to 160 million people – but two years ago, I had a tough time convincing to do with religion. In Northern Ireland, for the overwhelming number of Shiites – over agents that the Shia-Sunni conflict or the example, the struggling groups are defined 90 percent – live between India and Lebanon. Shiites’ new assertion of power was relevant as Catholic and protestant, but that does In countries like the Republic of Azerbayjan, to Middle East politics or Western interests not mean that they are fighting over Martin Iran, Bahrain, and Iraq Shiites enjoy a in the region. These concepts have since Luther. The terminology is religious, but majority, and there are significant minori- become crucial elements in the vocabulary the fight is not about religion. The confes- ties of about 20 percent in Afghanistan and of policy makers, despite the lack of clear sional designation implies your background, Pakistan, 10 percent in the United Arab understanding about what they mean. where you were born, your share of wealth, Emirates, 10 to 15 percent in Saudi Arabia, Most Westerners think about Shiites and your share of power, your attitude about the 30 percent in Kuwait, and by most esti- Sunnis in terms of the conflict in Iraq. The English occupation of Ireland, and your atti- mates about 40 percent in Lebanon, which sectarian war that is unfolding there is in tude toward Irish independence. It is about makes the Shiites Lebanon’s single largest many ways a threat, both to Middle Eastern who you are, not what you believe. That is community. and Western interests, but this rift is no lon- why it is absurd to think that the current Regardless of minority or majority status, ger confined to Iraq. The 2006 war between conflict would not be happening if Iraq were the Shiites, from their point of view, have not Lebanon and Israel signaled the moment secular. held power in equal measure to their num- when the Iraq conflict essentially went The identities of the two communities bers. This perception is causing a bloody con- regional. No sooner had the first Hezbollah clearly come from a religious sense of self- flict in Iraq; however, this does not necessarily rockets landed in Israel than something perception. But they are not fighting over mean that the struggle for power would play unprecedented in the history of Arab-Israeli religion, they are fighting over power. The out similarly elsewhere in the Middle East. conflict took place, namely that a group of fight in Iraq is not to decide who succeeded There have been peaceful transitions of power Arab voices, and particularly the more radi- the prophet; I do not believe that Sunnis between the sects, such as when the new cal ones, began to criticize an Arab force want to convert Shiites or that Shiites want Afghan constitution was put into effect in in the midst of a fight with Israel. They did to convert Sunnis, or that all of those fight- 2001. Partly because of the close collaboration so in a very sectarian way, referring in one ing are themselves necessarily believers. between Iran and the US, the Shiites were instance to Hezbollah’s name – which in The fight in Iraq is about who will control enfranchised. For the first time their religion Arabic means “party of God” – as the party the country, and those involved will use any was accepted as legitimate. According to the of Satan. In their view, a heretical organiza- instrument, be it guns or sectarian argu- new Afghan constitution a Shiite may even be tion like Hezbollah could not legitimately ments, to change minds. president – and that only a few years after the bear the flag of the Palestinian cause, and But this particular conflict, this particular 1997 massacre in which 5,000 Shiites were they therefore accused the group of trying distribution of power, is happening at a time killed by the Taliban. With a Shia population to convert Sunnis from true Islam, a Shia when religion itself matters deeply in the of only 1 percent but four Shia representatives power play on behalf of Iran. This was the Middle East. The period of Islamic revival in its cabinet, Oman is another example. moment in which the oldest violent conflict and the fundamentalist Islamism unfolding But Iraq is particularly problematic. in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, there is part of its consciousness. The con- Acutely aware of the inherent demographic converged with the newest, the sectarian fessional conflict ultimately favors the more imbalance when drawing the borders of Iraq conflict in Iraq. radical elements in each group. As a result, in 1922, the British forced Kurdish inclusion The Shiites and Sunnis represent the on the Sunni side, power will gravitate to in the hopes of creating demographic parity oldest, most important sectarian division the Abu Musab al-Zarqawis, the al-Qaeda between Shiites and Sunnis. But after the within Islam. All great religions have sec- types, and the Salafis, on the Shia side to the Iraq war in 1991, the US for all practical pur- tarian divides; in terms of Christianity it is Muqtada al-Sadrs and anti-Sunni voices. It is poses removed the Kurds from Iraq, throwing similar to the separation of the Eastern from not very different from other ethnic conflicts the Sunni-Shia balance askew. The period ﬁ

The Berlin Journal 11 that followed also began very badly when the protected by Shia militia. It seemed clear to Iraqi army, returning from Kuwait, rebelled them that the Americans either did not want out of frustration over a lost war. No matter or were not able to deal with the insurgency, its origins, it was perceived as a Shia mutiny and, in any case, they were talking about leav- and thus suppressed brutally by the primarily ing. In early 2006 the US simultaneously Sunni Iraqi Republican Guard, resulting in began to distance itself from the Shiites, criti- an ultimately sectarian phenomenon. cizing them much more vocally about secret When the US went into Iraq in 2003 not prisons and abuse of the Sunnis: in Shia eyes all Iraqis benefited equally. The Sunnis MuseumIslamischefür/bpk Image© Kunst,SMB a second betrayal of support after similar stood to lose many benefits with Saddam promises of American backing in 1991. Hussein’s deposal, and the Shiites could Secondly, after the Samara bombing, many only gain. The Shiites responded in kind, Shia politicians unofficially stated that there despite their distrust of the US. They did not would be no reconciliation of the sects, that resist the US invasion and were urged very coexistence would not happen. Shiites con- early on by Iraq’s most senior Shia spiritual cluded that the only thing to do was to grab leader to join the political process. Ayatollah as much territory and as many assets as pos- Ali al-Sistani issued a religious ruling, a sible before the divorce. Many Shiites began to fatwa, that it was the duty of every single assert that turning the other cheek simply did Iraqi man to participate in these new elec- not work; a balance of terror was needed. tions, the duty of every single Iraqi woman to participate in these new elections, even if it meant going against her husband’s wishes. Even Iran’s most senior conserva- How does tive religious leaders, including the head of Iran’s Guardian Counsel, a much-dreaded Iran fit into conservative establishment, issued a simi- the larger lar ruling. The Shiites were sure that they would benefit from any shift of balance in equation? the Middle East, any kind of political reform, any change in the existing systems. Initially, Shiites across the Middle East 3It is impossible to separate Iran from also reacted very positively. Hezbollah rou- the changing fortunes of the Shiites tinely echoed Ayatollah Sistani’s support of in the Middle East because Iran repre- American elections since a vote would get sents the region’s largest Shia population. Hezbollah and Lebanese Shiites much more Washington’s Iraq policy, too, has essentially than they had. Only because they couldn’t become inseparable from its Iran policy. secure power through the elections did they In terms of Iranian involvement in Iraq, Young man with a musket, Esfahan, Iran, 1610 try to seize it through a putsch against the Western focus is often on military issues, but Lebanese government. In many other Gulf far more important is the people-to-people countries, Shiites participated in elections a government. As a result the ministry of relationship. The opening of Iraq was cultur- much more wholeheartedly, believing that health, for example, gets twenty seats in par- ally, religiously, and emotionally very signifi- any kind of political change might help tip liament and treats it as its fiefdom. There is cant to Shiites since the most important Shia the scales in Iraq. no accountability. Consequently many of the shrines are located there. Shiites – this is Why was this all so important to the voters’ expectations have not been fulfilled, another thing that distinguishes them from Shiites? In any part of the world with ethnic largely because the promise of a transfer of orthodox Sunnis – have a very personal and conflict, being in possession of power power, transfer of wealth, and transfer of passionate attachment, particularly at the means appointing your own governors, your resources has yet to be realized. folk level, to their saints, imams, and shrines. own police, and your own teachers. One of This lack of confidence in the new gov- The Iranian government, for instance, said the Shiites’ first acts after gaining the upper ernment, along with the ferocity of the that last year 1.2 million Iranians went on hand in Iraq was to expel Sunnis from Sunni insurgency, gradually broke down pilgrimage to Iraq. Many of these pilgrims teaching positions. It is this distribution of Shia loyalty to the American political pro- simultaneously began to gravitate to Iraq’s jobs and wealth that affects the average citi- cess. The breakpoint came in Samara one religious leadership; Ayatollah Sistani has zen the most. Shiites expected these advan- year ago when a massive bomb destroyed since emerged as the single most important tages from their new government, but the the most important Shia shrine, an act religious leader among Shiites everywhere. Iraqi government has become infested with Catholics might equate with destroying The point is that even if Iranian intelligence corruption and is ineffective. This failure St. Peter’s Cathedral. The response was two- can be kept out of Iraq, it will be very difficult is largely the fault of the Iraqi constitution, fold. Many Shiites came to believe that they to keep Iranians out of Iraq. To assume other which, by mandating a two-thirds majority, could not rely on the American military to wise is a fallacy. Their interest in Iraq is not requires parties to make enormous conces- deal with the insurgency, often noting that simply about political hegemony; it is about sions to coalition partners just to maintain the Samara shrine was the only one not cultural access.

12 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Iran was the first country to recognize US and Israel and maintains its inflam- single Arab views himself as less loyal to the the Iraqi government, signing some ten matory denial of the Holocaust. But it is Arab cause than the next. agreements with it, promising billions of important to note that the Iranian claim to Within Iran, support of Hezbollah has dollars, and creating a huge volume of trade. regional power is not just the ambition of a become a test of loyalty and nationalism. The Iranians initially had many interests in wayward, hard-line president. It has also to Hezbollah and Hamas are important trump common with the US, above all guarding do with socio-economic facts in Iran, and cards in their game of power. Until the against the state’s collapse and promoting a the idea is very popular among Iranians. issues between Iran and Israel and Iran and Shia government. It was exactly along these Even Iranians who dislike Mahmoud the US are settled, Iranians are not going to lines in 2004 and 2005 that the head of Ahmadinejad and his regime believe that give up on these groups, as they have now Iran’s security council, Ali Larijani, offered Iran’s “rightful place” in the Middle East is become an important part of Iran’s strate- to meet with the American ambassador in not respected and that the country ought to gic rivalry with the Arab world. Because of Iraq, formally endorsing talks with the US exercise more influence. this Lebanon and Israel are now interwoven for the first time in 27 years. But for whatev- Iran has the industrial and scientific into Iraq, the Shia-Sunni issue, and Iranian- er reason, these talks did not happen; until capability to build a nuclear program, and is Saudi relations. Not to say sectarianism is late February of this year the Americans economically and socially very vibrant. The everything. It’s not. But sectarianism is now had actually turned the tables, saying not literacy rate in Iran is about 70 percent, in very intricately tied to everything and influ- only that there was no strategic common Tehran 86.8 percent. It is extremely well ences the decisions of every player. ground in Iraq between Iran and the US but connected and information-wise. With If the West is ever to think coherently also that Iraq would indeed be the battle- over 85,000 bloggers, Persian is now the about the Middle East, it must recognize ground between the two countries. With no third largest language on the internet after that old paradigms don’t work. The 1980s vested interest in Iraq’s failure and a fear of English and Mandarin Chinese. Every policy of containing Iran, Pakistan, and migrant Sunni radicalism, Iran then found ayatollah worth his salt in Iran has a web- Afghanistan ultimately meant funding itself in a similar situation as Syria. Neither site and blog. By all estimates, it has one radical groups like the Jihadi, Salafi, and wants Iraq to fail, but the Americans’ impli- of the highest rates of bloggers per capita al-Qaeda as well as the Taliban. It was effec- cation that Damascus or Tehran might be anywhere in the third world. These facts tive, but it proved not to be a clean weapon next gave both governments incentive to were reinforced under the reformists in the because ultimately al-Qaeda became a keep the US busy in Iraq. 1990s with a high rate of foreign investment. problem for all Middle East governments There is no doubt that Iran is on the rise, There is a dynamism in the public sector. themselves, a number of which weren’t not just as a military force but also as an eco- All this has to do with a bullishness and con- even involved in Afghanistan, such as Egypt nomic and political one. It wants to assert fidence coming not only from the Iranian and Jordan. And in terms of American fall- its position in the region. It is clear that Iran regime but from Iranian society as well. out, the example of September 11 is obvious sees itself as the Brazil of the Middle East. enough. The current sectarian rift is a strug- I don’t think Iran wants to export its revolu- gle for power, but, at the end of the day, it pro- tion; it is interested in a classical, regional duces forces that have half-lives beyond the hegemonic presence. Ever since the 1980s What must Western sectarian fight itself. Westerners must take the issue of rivalry between Iran and Saudi these sectarian divisions seriously and follow Arabia has focused on nation-state power policy take into policies that will minimize them, starting in rather than ideology. Ruhollah Khomeini, consideration in Iraq. This will require regional engagements, political leader of the 1979 Iranian revo- a framework for peace, and a political process lution, genuinely wanted to rule over all the future? – none of which actually exists now. Secondly, Muslims, but now Iran wants regional pre- it means that outside forces ought to be work- dominance. ing to bring the regional powers together in a In this regard the two wars beginning in 4The West must recognize that national- much more inclusive way rather than follow- 2001 and 2003 greatly benefited Iran. They ism in the Middle East is presently going ing a policy of confrontation. Proceeding as removed the Taliban and the Saddam regime through various permutations. In the lan- we are now will only entrench sectarianism – two Sunni bulwarks – on both sides. And guage of Hezbollah or of Iraqi Shiites, there for many more decades to come, confirming the destruction of the Iraqi army essentially is a clear attempt to redefine nationalism the strategic map of the area as Shia versus means that, for a generation, there will be no along the lines of Iranian nationalism: a Sunni. And if the US wants to contain Iran, military in the Persian Gulf region capable nation-state defined by the culture and iden- it must conceive of a strategy inclusive of the of containing Iran. The Iranians have also tity of the larger people. So far they have not country and regulate it from within the exist- concluded that Iraq has bogged down the succeeded. The obvious breakdown in Iraq ing structure. µ US, dampening the Americans’ appetite for shows that Arab identity is no longer suffi- other major military campaigns. Sitting afar cient, namely because there is no agreement This text is excerpted from a longer in Tehran and observing the Congressional about what the Arab identity is. Whom is it conversation with Vali Nasr, who elections in the US, it is very easy for defined against, Iran or Israel? Perhaps a spent a week in Berlin as a C.V. Starr Iranians to come away rather confident that new consensus will emerge. Asked twenty Distinguished Visitor. He is an adjunct they have room to maneuver. years ago if it would be thinkable for an Arab senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Iranian regional ambition is manifest- to cooperate with Israel against another Relations and a professor of national ing itself under a particularly virulent Arab, we probably would have said that it is security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate regime that is bellicose toward both the impossible. But it is now happening, and no School in Monterey, California.

The Berlin Journal 13 Inacker My impression a few months ago was that the US would be against the initiative if it were conceived as a kind of trade The Merkel Plan block against new-world competitors like China, India, and Russia. Is the project now more viable because it avoids addressing Robert Kimmitt and Matthias Wissmann on the open trade? Transatlantic Economic Partnership Initiative Kimmitt When any European Union presidency – but especially Germany’s presi n the run-up to the EU-US have produced real results in the financial dency – makes a transatlantic initiative a Summit in Washington, DC on sector. We would like to see that spread to central element in its agenda, it sends a very April 30, US Treasury Deputy other sectors. The TransAtlantic Business strong political signal. Such an initiative Secretary Robert Kimmitt met in Dialogue (tabd) is also still alive, well, and recognizes that progress in the economic- I Berlin with Matthias Wissmann, German very effective. Chancellor Merkel and I financial area improves the overall political chair of the Committee on the Affairs of met with the leaders of the tabd in Davos, relationship between Europe and America the European Union, to discuss the trans- along with EU Trade Commissioner Peter and can provide a strong foundation in atlantic market initiative. Michael Inacker, Mandelson and European Commissioner times of political difficulty. But it was never deputy editor of Germany’s leading finance for Competition Neelie Kroes, for a very intended to be the United States, Europe, weekly, WirtschaftsWoche, moderated the productive session. The Transatlantic or the United States and Europe together following conversation, organized by the Policy Network, which also brings legisla- against the world. Academy. tors into the process, has proved quite use- Bringing our two economies closer ful. We are discussing how to put in place together also benefits the global economy. Michael Inacker The idea of a transatlantic a process that integrates these successful There had indeed been some discussion last market partnership was formerly received structures from the past with new struc- year about whether this might be a trans- with much skepticism in the US. What has tures to produce results to benefit both our atlantic free-trade area. Our priority right changed to make the present US adminis- economies. now in trade is successful completion of tration favor this project? the Doha Round. But a successful launch Inacker Mr. Wissmann, it is said that you of the Merkel initiative will not only not Robert Kimmitt I was on the 1990 nego- are one of the brains behind Chancellor detract from Doha efforts, it should provide tiating team in Paris that developed the Merkel’s initiative. What gives you the con- momentum for our continuing dialogue framework under which we now hold yearly fidence that now is the right time to pursue regarding Doha. EU-US Summits. At that time some in the this idea? United States questioned whether a united Inacker Sarbanes-Oxley is becoming more Europe was in the interest of the United Matthias Wissmann The first reason for and more of an issue for German compa- States. That debate is now over; a united confidence is that the top leaders in the nies listed in New York. Some contend that Europe is in the interest of Europe, the US – President Bush, Treasury Secretary the sec’s standards overcompensate for United States, and the world, and underpin- Henry Paulson, Bob Kimmitt – and past US mistakes and are unjustly used to ning a stronger transatlantic relationship in Europe – President of the European enforce regulation in other countries. Do must be a more integrated transatlantic Commission José Manuel Barroso and, you see the transatlantic market initiative as marketplace. That is why the United States most important, Chancellor Merkel – have a means to find a middle ground in corpo- both appreciates and very much welcomes truly identified themselves with the rate governance? Chancellor Angela Merkel’s initiative. project. In the past regulatory frameworks have typically been relatively bureaucratic Wissmann Secretary Paulson said very Inacker But we have seen such ideas and with little involvement by top leaders. Our clearly in an earlier speech that he real- projects in the past: a business dialogue experience with the European internal izes what has to be done to make New York that brought business leaders together market has shown that you need top lead- more competitive as a marketplace. Prudent from both sides of the Atlantic, for example. ers to press the bureaucracies with a top- Americans and Europeans understand that Do you believe that this new idea will prove down approach to speed up any strategic their respective regulatory frameworks are more successful than past endeavors? idea of major significance. ill-suited to the world of tomorrow. Ours Secondly, leaders on both sides of the is not an initiative directed against anyone Kimmitt The chancellor’s initiative sets a Atlantic understand that we must reduce else but an affirmation of modern stan- strategic framework built upon measur- the burden of regulations. Americans today dards of corporate governance – of transpar- able tasks, against which this initiative will agree that Sarbanes-Oxley is not neces- ency, proper antitrust regulations, and real be judged. Past structures – such as the sarily the ultimate solution for regulation, market economy, all standards to which the Financial Markets Regulatory Dialogue, while we understand that some of our typi- US and Europe are more accustomed than conducted between the US Treasury and cally European over-regulations are also many other countries. If we aim to lay out European Commissioner for Internal not what tomorrow’s world will need to these standards and rules of accounting, Market and Services Charlie McCreevy strengthen transatlantic business sectors competition, and transparency for the world, and his team – have worked quite well and and stimulate jobs and growth. we should first do our own homework. If

14 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Europe and America agree on principle need to watch particularly for investor pro- financial markets area in other sectors, be standards of corporate governance, I am tection and systemic risk. Those principles it in chemicals, energy, or transportation. A sure that the rest of the world will follow. were supported by Mr. McCreevy. Again, we few key people on each side would report to I am not sure that we will have this opportu- would suggest that transatlantic dialogue senior officials, who would in turn brief the nity in another fifty years, given the size of take place within the Financial Markets leaders before annual Summits. the American and European economies in Regulatory Dialogue and the broader global It is crucial that a process be set in place relation to other parts of the world. dialogue within the G7. to ensure that the initiative’s importance continues through future US administra- Inacker Mr. Secretary, in the business Inacker Mr. Wissmann, two major issues tions. In Europe, of course, there is both the world, some leaders describe the use of you are currently facing as head of the EU EU and the individual member state level, Sarbanes-Oxley as a kind of unilateralist Council of the German Parliament are the plus the Commission. I always ask a very instrument of American economic policy. environment and energy. Do these top- practical question: who sits across the table Do you really sense a willingness in the ics belong in the overall framework of the from the US president to give him the brief- American administration to compromise transatlantic market initiative, or would you ing that will prepare him for the upcom- on issues of corporate governance? recommend addressing them separately? ing EU-US Summit? I want that person, or someone close to him, overseeing this pro- Kimmitt First, I think there has been a Wissmann In the long run, the environment cess for the US Government. I would imag- much greater use of multilateral forums to must be part of a transatlantic economic ine the same is true on the European side. address some of the most difficult issues initiative. It makes sense to find more There must be an additional mechanism to during the second Bush term, exempli- consensus on technical standards and the ensure the initiative’s continued vitality. fied by US coordination with the UN on automotive industries, not only on behalf both Iran and North Korea, the Six-Party of the environment but also on behalf of Inacker What makes you confident that, talks on North Korea, and US support of industry and the consumer. But we must be after this German EU presidency comes to a European efforts to engage Iran, if Iran is realistic and thus cannot think that we will close, there will really be a set of procedures, willing to suspend its nuclear program. On be able to reinvent the world totally anew structures, and people in place to survive the specific economic and financial issues, in 12 months. If the initiative is successful, future terms? I think we do have a very good mechanism however, we might then have a real chance already in place: the Financial Markets to address major questions not only of eco- Wissmann I am very confident because, at Regulatory Dialogue. When Commissioner nomic but also of environmental strategies. the last European Summit, the 27 leaders of McCreevy was in Washington, he met not the European Union unanimously agreed just with us at the Treasury but also with Kimmitt Let me make clear that we wel- on the initiative, obliging any future com- the Federal Reserve, the sec, and others come the fact that the chancellor took up mission to follow that route. President to discuss many of the points you men- energy security and climate change in the Barroso is very clearly convinced of its tioned. We are open to discussing anything original proposal. Though some may think worth, too; he has always worked for trans- in this expanded dialogue. I think you are otherwise, those two subjects are quite atlantic goals, and Chancellor Merkel and correct to say that American companies important to the United States. Both were others, even leaders of center-left govern- have expressed concerns about Sarbanes- addressed in the president’s State of the ments in Europe, are convinced that we Oxley, as have foreign companies. Under Union speech, and he made a number of need closer cooperation with the US and the chairmanship of Christopher Cox, who specific proposals that target carbon dioxide Canada in addition to our strategic military before taking his position had served in the emissions. We expect that these issues will and security partnerships. The initiative Congress, the executive branch, and the be part of this new dialogue, but we have aims to speed up certain processes in the economic sector, the sec is making a partic- been discussing these important issues rest of the world, from corporate gover- ular effort to listen and reach out to the for- in the G8 and other multilateral forums nance to the environment to deregulation. eign business community. The sec’s recent as well. One year ago, when we launched the idea, ruling to simplify deregistration from US Secretary Kimmitt and I both had doubts markets exemplifies this openness. Inacker Mr. Secretary, could there and about whether it would be successful. should there also be a new structural frame- Now we believe there is a high probability Inacker Is the US government interested work for American and European business- that future governments will continue in stricter regulation of transparency of economic relations, or is the initiative just a this pursuit. hedge funds? matter of memorandums of understanding and agreements? Kimmitt Our leaders are going to continue Kimmitt This is a very good example of our to meet annually. The question is, when current and future cooperation. In February Kimmitt I would say that there is already they meet, will they approach the discus- the President’s Working Group, comprised a well-established structure at the senior- sion from a tactical or a strategic frame- of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the most level. What we should consider is how work? Chancellor Merkel has put this sec, and all of our bank regulators, put to encourage the same kind of engagement important part of the relationship into a out a statement on private pools of capital, among senior officials below the level of strategic framework, into which individual which include hedge funds, private equity, heads of state and government. I would tactical components must fit. We will be and venture capital. The message was quite like to see the same kind of informal and proudest if we know that our successors will clear; we cannot have business as usual. We collaborative dialogue that we have in the also play their parts. µ

The Berlin Journal 15 PhotographsResettlement© Administration/Farm SecurityAdministration, International PhotographyCenterof

Omar, West Virginia, 1937

One November evening long ago in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a 13-year-old named William Troeller hung himself The Forgotten Man from the transom in his bedroom. The boy had watched his family slide into an increasingly desperate situation. His older A New View of the Great Depression brother, Harold, told a newspaper reporter that William “was sensitive and always felt by Amity Shlaes embarrassed” about asking for his share at mealtime. The Herbert Street police station

16 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 near the Troeller home helped to arrange times of crisis and times of stability. And shine. He allowed Cordell Hull to write the funeral. Burial would be in a Catholic that the New Deal gave us splendid leaders trade treaties that in the end would benefit cemetery. “He Was Reluctant about Asking and characters: Roosevelt himself, a crip- the US economy enormously. Roosevelt’s for Food,” read the headline in the New York pled man who bravely willed us all back into dislike of Germany, which dated from child- Times. New York that year had a Dickensian prosperity and has been called the apostle hood, predisposed him to a wariness of feel. of abundance. The Brain Trust, thoughtful Hitler and contributed to his eventual deci- William Troeller’s was just one tragedy men whose insights validated their experi- sion that the United States must come to in a city full of tragedies. The New York ments. Or so the storyline. Europe’s side. birthrate that month was one of the lowest The usual rebuttal to this from the right Still, Hoover and Roosevelt were alike in on record. A few weeks prior to William’s is that Hoover was a good man, albeit mis- several regards. Both preferred to control suicide the Dow had dropped nearly 8 per- understood, and Roosevelt a dangerous, events and people. Both underestimated cent – the day had already come to be known even an evil one. The stock market of the the strength of the American economy. as Black Tuesday. It was a dark moment 1920s was indeed immoral, too high, infla- Both doubted its ability to right itself in a for the country as well. The Brookings tionary – and deserved to crash. Another set storm. Hoover mistrusted the stock mar- Institution, a new think tank, had warned of critics focuses on Roosevelt’s early social ket. Roosevelt mistrusted it more. Roosevelt that the balance of the economy was “pre- programs. Yet a third set of critics, an angry offered rhetorical optimism, but pessimism carious.” Observing from Britain, the fringe, has argued that Roosevelt’s Brain underlay his policies. Though Americans Economist would conclude in retrospect that Trusters reported to Moscow. associated Roosevelt with bounty, his the United States seemed to have forgotten, For many years now, these have been the insistent emphasis on sharing betrayed a for the moment, “how to grow.” parameters of the debate. It is time to revisit The story sounds familiar. It is remi- the late 1920s and the 1930s. Then we see American capitalism did not niscent of the descriptions we hear of the that neither the standard history nor the break in 1929. The crash did Great Crash of 1929. But in fact these events standard rebuttal entirely captures the reali- took place in the autumn of 1937. This was ties of the period. The first reality was that not cause the Depression. a depression within the Depression. It was the 1920s was a great decade of true eco- occurring five years after Franklin Roosevelt nomic gains, a period whose strong positive conviction that the country had entered a was first elected and four and a half years aspects have been obscured by the troubles permanent era of scarcity. Both presidents after he introduced the New Deal. It was tak- that followed. Those who placed their faith overestimated the value of government plan- ing place eight years after President Herbert in laissez-faire economics in that decade ning. Hoover, the Quaker, favored the com- Hoover first made his own rescue plans fol- were not all godless. Indeed religious piety munity over the individual. Roosevelt, the lowing the 1929 stock market crash. moved some, including President Calvin Episcopalian, found laissez-faire economics The standard history of the Great Coolidge, to hold back, to pause before inter- immoral and disturbingly un-Christian. Depression is one we know. The 1920s were vening in private lives. And both men doctored the economy a period of false growth and low morals. The fact that the stock market rose high habitually. Hoover was a constitutional- There was a certain godlessness – the Great at the end of the decade does not mean that ist and took pains to intervene within the Gatsby image – to the decade. The crash was all the growth of the preceding ten years rules, but his interventions were substan- the honest acknowledgement of the break- was an illusion. American capitalism did tial. Roosevelt cared little for constitutional down of capitalism – and the cause of the not break in 1929. The crash did not cause niceties and believed they blocked progress. Depression. A dangerous inflation caused the Depression. It was a necessary correc- His remedies were on a greater scale and by speculating margin traders brought tion of a too-high stock market but not a nec- often inspired by socialist or fascist models down the nation. There was a sense of a essary disaster. The market players at the abroad. A number of New Dealers, includ- return to a sane, moral country with the time of the crash were not villains, though ing agricultural economist and later head of crash, a sense that the economy of 1930 some of them – Albert Wiggin of Chase, Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration, or 1931 could not revive without extensive who shorted his own bank’s stock – behaved Rexford Tugwell, had been profoundly intervention by Washington. Roosevelt, so reprehensibly. There was indeed an anni- shaped by Mussolini’s Italy and especially by unlike the mistaken Hoover, created the hilating event that followed the crash, one Soviet Russia. That influence was not paren- New Deal, which tided the country over. In that Hoover never understood and Roosevelt thetic. The hoarse-voiced opponents of the this way the country fended off revolution of understood incompletely: deflation. New Deal liked to focus on the connections the sort bringing down Europe. Without the Hoover’s priggish temperament, as between these men, the Communist Party, New Deal, American democracy would have much as any philosophy he held, caused and authorities in Soviet Russia. And sev- been lost. him both to misjudge the crash and to fail eral important New Dealers did indeed have The same history teaches that the New in his reaction to it. And his preference those connections, most notably Lauchlin Deal was the period in which Americans for Germany as a negotiating partner over Currie, Roosevelt’s economics adviser in learned that government spending was Soviet Russia later blinded him to the dan- later years, and Harry Dexter White, at the important to recoveries and that the con- gers of Nazism. Roosevelt by contrast had Treasury. White’s plan for the pastoraliza- sumer alone can solve the problem of what was described as a “first-class tempera- tion of Germany takes on a new aspect when “excess capacity” on the producer’s side. The ment.” His calls for courage, his Fireside we know this. attitude is that the New Deal is the best Chats, all were intensely important. “The But few New Dealers were spies or even model we have for what government must only thing we have to fear is fear itself”; in communists. The emphasis on that issue do for weak members of society, in both the darkness Roosevelt’s voice seemed to is in any case misplaced. Overall, the ﬁ

The Berlin Journal 17 Post Office, Crossville, Tennessee, 1937

problem of the New Dealers on the left was he should have had the sense to block it. roeconomic problems for micro problems, not their relationship with Moscow or the He raised taxes. After 1932 New Zealand, seeking to solve the monetary challenge Communist Party in the US, if indeed they Japan, Greece, Romania, Chile, Denmark, through price setting. The stringency had one. The problem was their naïveté Finland, and Sweden began seeing indus- of nra rules perversely hurt businesses. about the economic value of Soviet- style trial production levels rise again – but the They frightened away capital, and they or European-style collectivism – and the United States did not. discouraged employers from hiring work- fact that they forced such collectivism on Roosevelt’s errors had a different quality ers. Another problem was that laws like their own country. Fear of being labeled a but were equally devastating. He created that which created the nra – and Roosevelt red-baiter has too long prevented histori- regulatory, aid, and relief agencies based signed a number of them – were so broad ans from looking into the Soviet influence on the premise that recovery could only that no one knew how they would be inter- upon American domestic policy in the be achieved through a large military-style preted. The resulting hesitation in itself 1930s. effort. Some of these were useful – the arrested growth. What then caused the Depression? financial institutions he established upon Where the private sector could help to Part of the trouble was indeed the crash. entering office. Some were inspiring – the bring the economy back – in the arena of Part was weather. Part was the defla- Civilian Conservation Corps, for example, utilities, for example – Roosevelt and his tion, unrecognized, real, and severe. But which created parks, bridges, and roads we New Dealers often suppressed it. The cre- the deepest problem was the interven- still enjoy today. Establishing the Securities ation of the Tennessee Valley Authority tion, the lack of faith in the marketplace. and Exchange Commission, enacting snuffed out a potentially successful private Government management of the late banking reform – as well as the reform of effort to light up the South. The company 1920s and 1930s hurt the economy. Both the Federal Reserve system – all had a stabi- that would have delivered that electricity Hoover and Roosevelt misstepped. Hoover lizing effect. was future presidential candidate Wendell ordered wages up when they should have But other new institutions, such as the Willkie’s company, Commonwealth and gone down. He allowed a disastrous tar- National Recovery Administration, did Southern. The New Yorker magazine’s car- iff, Smoot-Hawley, to become law when damage. The nra’s mandate mistook mac- toons of the plump, terrified Wall Streeter

18 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 were accurate; business was terrified of the The big question about the American unlike his narrow-minded Republican president. But the cartoons did not depict Depression is not whether war with opponents, understood the dangers that the consequences of that intimidation: that Germany and Japan ended it but rather Nazi Germany represented. In 1936, how- businesses decided to wait Roosevelt out, why the Depression lasted until that war. ever, the reason for victory was different. hold on to their cash, and invest in future From 1929 to 1940, government interven- That year Roosevelt won because he cre- years. Yet Roosevelt retaliated by introduction helped to make the Depression Great. ated a new kind of interest group politics. ing a tax – the undistributed profits tax – to The period was not one of a moral battle The idea that such groups might find main- press the money out of them. between a force for good – the Roosevelt stream parties to support them was not Such forays helped to bring about the presidency – and forces for evil. It was a novel; Republicans, including the Harding depression within the Depression of 1937. period of power struggle. The two sectors One of the most famous Roosevelt phrases of the economy, the public and the private, Fear of being labeled a red- in history, almost as famous as “fear competed relentlessly. At the beginning, baiter has too long prevented itself,” was Roosevelt’s boast that he would the private sector ruled. By the end, when promulgate “bold, persistent experimen- World War II began, it was the public sector historians from looking into tation.” But Roosevelt’s commitment to that dominated. the Soviet influence upon experimentation itself created fear, and Roosevelt was frank about the contest. many Americans knew this at the time. In As he put it in his second inaugural address, American domestic policy in autumn 1937, the New York Times delivered he sought “unimagined power.” He, his the 1930s. its analysis of the economy’s downturn: advisers, and his congressional allies “The cause is attributed by some to taxation instinctively targeted monetary control, and Coolidge administrations, had long and alleged federal curbs on industry; by utilities, and taxation because they were practiced interest group politics on behalf others, to the demoralization of production the three sources of revenue whose control of big business with tariffs. Roosevelt, how- caused by strikes.” Both the taxes and the would enlarge the public sector the most. ever, systematized interest group politics strikes were the result of Roosevelt’s policy; But if so much of the New Deal hurt the to include many constituencies – laborers, the strikes had been made possible by the economy, why did Roosevelt win reelection senior citizens, farmers, union workers. Wagner Act the year before. Fear froze three times? Why, especially, the landslide The president made groups where only the economy, but that uncertainty itself of 1936? In the case of the third and fourth individual citizens or isolated cranks had might have a cost was something the experi Roosevelt terms the answer is clear: the stood before, ministered to those groups, menters simply did not consider. threat of war and war itself. Roosevelt, and was rewarded for that ministry ﬁ

A Monthly Newspaper from Germany

☞www.atlantic-times.com license for perpetual experimentation and justified government spending. Spending seemed humane – and was, for some. Yet focusing on consumers meant that Washington neglected the producer. Focusing on experiments neglected the question of whether unceas- ing experimentation might frighten business into terrified inaction. The result was that two in ten were once again unemployed in the later 1930s – hardly humane. Too much attention has been paid to what political polls said about the New Deal, while too little has been paid to two other measures. One was the unemployment rate, which did not return to pre-crash levels until the war. Street Scene, Natchez, Mississippi, October 1935 The other was the stock market. Uncertainty about what to expect from international events and Washington made with votes. The first peacetime year in Almost by accident, Roosevelt happened the Dow Jones industrial average jump American history in which federal spend- on an economic theory that validated his around in a fashion not repeated through ing outpaced the total spending of the politics and his moral sense: what we now the rest of the century; seven out of the ten states and towns was that election year of call Keynesianism. Keynesianism, named biggest “up” days of the twentieth century 1936. Roosevelt’s move was so profound after John Maynard Keynes, empha- took place in the 1930s. The Dow did not that it changed the English language. sized consumers, who were also voters. return to 1929 levels until nearly a decade Before the 1930s the word “liberalism” Keynesianism said the government could after Roosevelt’s death. stood for the individual; afterward the term spend its way out of trouble. To Roosevelt increasingly stood for groups. and his administration the theory gave

The Forgotten Man I came to Roosevelt’s New Deal. From American Social that German Zweistaatlichkeit, or double statehood, was written because of a problem that exists today: entitle- Security to farm subsidy to pensions for senior citizens, was temporary and more of an accident of history than ments – what Europeans call social costs – or pending obli- the programs of the 1930s decisively stamped modern we could have ever imagined. The necessity of the more gations in regard to public pensions, public health, and edu- culture. Germans, of course, point out that Bismarck extreme aspects of the New Deal turns out likewise to cation. Entitlements threaten to drag Western nations down. first created the modern social welfare state; Roosevelt’s have been an assumption of the period of World War II They obscure the differences between political parties and New Dealers also borrowed from Britain, not to mention and the cold war. What if Roosevelt had instead reduced take the joy out of politics. No lawmaker has the license Soviet Russia and Mussolini’s Italy. But the precedent of taxes drastically, had reliably loosened the money sup- Roosevelt had. Every lawmaker must take up the heavy enti- the New Deal matters, too. ply, had confined the New Deal to the creation of the tlement burden. For many decades Westerners believed that if the US Securities and Exchange Commission? And what if he As presidential candidate John McCain, a Republican, could sustain its vibrancy even as it maintained a social had made this alternate program the subject of his told a meeting of the New York Economic Club last year, “My welfare net then other economies could do this double compelling radio Fireside Chats? The US might have children and their children will not receive the benefits we duty as well. Many of us believed that without the cre- been better off in 1939 than it was. enjoy. That is an inescapable fact, and any politician who ation of a social welfare state we would all have been I first read through the traditional Depression lit- tells you otherwise, Democrat or Republican, is lying.” vulnerable to fascism – or worse. What I learned in the erature in my months at the Academy. A good share of Continental Europe suffers from a more advanced course of my research was that all these assumptions do those books were tucked away in the dusty corners of stage of the same malady. Both Gerhard Schröder and not necessarily hold in the case of the US. New Dealers the libraries of former East Berlin. Germans, more than Angela Merkel have defended high taxes as the only exaggerated the threat of fascism in the US in the 1930s, citizens of almost any country, know that economics means of paying for entitlements. and people talked about that exaggeration at the time. matter, which is why it is such a great pleasure to debate At some point I became interested in finding the We used to believe that the division of Germany was with them. basis for these expensive social promises. In the end inevitable and, probably, interminable. Now we know Amity Shlaes

20 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Indiana wrote in 1936, “Who is the ‘forgotten man’ in Muncie? I know him as intimately as I know my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief and has been attempting the same thing since the depression that cracked down on him.” Of course the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations may have had no choice but to pursue the policies that they did. They may have spared the country something worse – an American version of Stalin’s communism or Mussolini’s fascism. But they – especially Roosevelt – may also have exaggerated extremism’s threat. The politicized New Dealers told them that European-style laws were necessary to tame Puppets for the Show, Red House, West Virginia, 1937 an electorate on the brink of revolution. But in their myopia they often overlooked the fact that Americans – even in the 1930s – were fundamentally bout half a century ting citizens into funding dubious social different from their European counter- before the Depression, a Yale projects. He wrote: “As soon as A observes parts. Class warfare was an import, not a philosopher named William something which seems to him to be homegrown activity, and often felt forced, Graham Sumner penned a lec- wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks even in the 1930s. As the European writer Ature against the progressives of his own it over with B, and A and B then propose Odette Keun reported when she came to day and in defense of classical liberal- to get a law passed to remedy the evil and the States, many Americans, even factory ism. Applying his own algebra of politics, help X. Their law always proposes to deter- workers, fully expected to become rich one Sumner warned that well-intentioned mine what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But day. “Labor in America is conservative. It social progressives often coerced unwit- what about C? There was nothing wrong is one of the most flabbergasting discover- with A and B helping X. What was wrong ies I have made.” This conservatism, she was the law and the indenturing of C to wrote, was partly “due to the temper of the the cause. C was the forgotten man, the American workingman himself.” Photographer Benjamin Shahn man who paid, “the man who never is It is not right that we permit the argu- Lithuanian-born American artist Benjamin Shahn thought of.” ment that New Deal intervention saved is best known for his work as a Social Realist in In 1932 a member of Roosevelt’s Brain US capitalism to obscure some of the con- painting and graphic design, drawing deep influ- Trust, Ray Moley, recalled the phrase, sequences of the two presidents’ policies. ence from an early apprenticeship under the although not its provenance, and he insert- Nor is it right that we overlook the failures Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Some of his more ed it into the candidate’s first great speech. of their philosophies. Glorifying the New stirring and overlooked entries in the world of If elected, Roosevelt promised, he would Deal obscures the Cs, the bystanders, the art, however, lie in the medium of photography. act in the name of “the forgotten man third parties. They spoke frequently of the At the urging of his friend Walker Evans, Shahn at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” forgotten man at the time but eventually joined the photographic team of the Farm Security Whereas C had been Sumner’s forgotten became forgotten men themselves. Going Administration in 1935 and traveled through the man, the New Deal made X the forgot- back to the Depression is worthwhile, if American south alongside two future standouts of ten man – the poor man, the old man, the only to retrieve their lost story. µ the craft, Evans and Dorothea Lange. While Shahn laborer, or any other recipient of govern- at times viewed his photography as an interme- ment help. Amity Shlaes, Academy JPMorgan diary step toward his tempera and mixed-media We have always wanted to know the Fellow in spring 2003, is a visit- renderings, the prints borne of his FSA commis- story of A, the progressive of the 1920s ing fellow at the Council on Foreign sion constitute a potent artistry in their own right. and 1930s whose good intentions inspired Relations and a syndicated colum- The works on these pages derive from a collec- the country. But it is important also to nist for Bloomberg News. Her book tion newly acquired by the International Center of consider the story of C, the American who The Forgotten Man will be published Photography in New York. was not thought of. As an editorialist in by HarperCollins in June 2007.

The Berlin Journal 21 Military History ReproductionsInternationalcourtesyof PhotographyCenterof

Stood on its Head PhotographsRobert©Capa/Capa Collection/Magnum Focus Photos/Agentur From the Lasky War Diary

22 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Near Wesel, Germany, March 24, 1945 American paratroopers spearheading the Allied invasion of Germany elvin J. Lasky – historian, [Luneville, France] journalist, and American Tuesday – 13 February 1945 expatriate – possessed one of the As someone remarked today, the historian-in-chief is “an insur- M ance salesman. And the only trouble is, we’re not selling insur- most penetrating and influential voices ance!” A few minutes later the Colonel came through. He tossed of the postwar European intelligentsia. a few hasty glances at the oddly occupied office. “I think some of Serving in Germany as editor of the you people ought to find out the unit of measure around here,” he New Leader and later founding the said. “It’s hours, not days!” Every goddammed thing takes days, weekly Der Monat, he maintained a days…” Some time later: “How many pages have you done today?” position of ethical circumspection with The number was apparently negligible and inadequate, and he regard to American policy in the wake stormed. “Let’s get the output up! For Christ’s sake, if research of the war while dedicating himself takes up 75 percent of your time, cut research out! Just write, and tirelessly to the political and moral then everything will be speeding along!” Mooney, Eggers, and Gottlieb […] all tell me they were introduced to their units with “I reconstruction of the Bundesrepublik. don’t know anything about this son-of-a-bitch. I don’t know who he Later in London, as editor of Encounter, is, what he can do. But I’m leaving him here, and see that he’s kept he would take up a crusade to unite busy. I don’t want him laying around!” The poor fate of a combat the camps of the antitotalitarian left historian! and the intellectual right against the threat of Stalinist communism; his The Historical Section itself magnum opus Utopia and Revolution (1976) seems to be the bastard exemplifies his attention to language creation of some enterprising and rhetoric in building a critical, military mind with one hand analytical sense of history. on Thucydides, one eye on the The Bronx-born Lasky’s instrumental future and the judgment of role in Germany’s cultural recovery posterity, and one foot in the has not gone unrecognized; in 1997 a next war. panel of German historians named him one of the most important Berliners in Sunday – 4 March 1945 history, placing him in the ranks of Spent some time in the evening with the “propagandists” of the Ernst Reuter and Rosa Luxemburg. Here, Psychological Warfare Branch. They are of course relentlessly busy with the kind permission of his widow pamphleteering and literally bombarding the Nazi troops with Helga Hegewisch, we provide an intimate messages, leaflets, booklets, newspapers, and a host of ingenious glimpse into two deeply formative years appeals. Their work, they confess with a little sadness, is only of for this intellect, excerpting from a “tactical nature.” Which is understandable: their disappointment, his extensive yet unpublished diary, that is. Propaganda not operating within a high strategic framework must inevitably appear to the craftsman as sabotage, a conscientious which chronicles his post as an official withdrawal of efficiency.[…] The Army had nothing to say to the war historian of the Seventh US Army German soldier. The Allies had no real substantial message for him. from 1944–1946. Lasky’s famously Whatever the stress on his political credulity (after the overwhelm- irreverent spirit often resonated in ing series of Hitler-Himmler-Goebbels disappointments and even his commissioned depictions of battle, betrayals) they could make no effort to touch, divert, reorient the leading to friction with the military Weltanschauung. The pwb output is almost solely devoted to the brass that oversaw his work. His creation of “war prisoners.” “t wo words,” the leaflet screams in German in huge red letters, will save a million lives. They are name- remembrance of one of these portrayals, ly “ei sörrender.” “a Tolstoyan account of war and peace on The language of surrender is conveniently offered in a little leaf- the Western front,” could just as well let (mysteriously titled zg 77 k): “Five Minutes of English.” The describe these private reflections. “blitz-course for German GI’s” features “Ui ssörenda,” followed ﬁ

The Berlin Journal 23 by an ingenious series of pleas – “Wen ken ai tek a bahs?” – “Wer is eye on the future and the judgment of posterity, and one foot in the ser hot wota?” – “E letta blenk, plies” – “When das se mehl liew?” – next war. […] “Gat änising tu ried?” – “Sam mor koffi, plies” – and finally “Senks (In the end, curiously, only the historian truly knows what trans- for se ssiggarets.” That, according to the propaganda theory, should pired: Mooney’s narratives have been read by commanders who convince them. learned for the first time what actually went on during their campaigns…) […] Sunday – 12 March 1945 To be sure, the military bureaucracy will allow nothing to pass What do all these sedulously precise pages amount to? True: the that threatens its shining armor. Unfortunately if you even so divisions and armies did move exactly as indicated; these engage- much as breathe vigorously you are likely to cloud that sensitive ments were fought in the following named places; advances and plate. The last few weeks I have been “editing” the manuscript of counterattacks occurred as listed; difficulties proved troublesome the 7th Army’s narrative. Quiet, dull, devitalized. All the real issues as suggested. Yet nothing ever happened as it is here recorded! The and problems of the planning (for single instance) are tenderly knit living context, the flavor, the excitement and passion and nervous- together so that all the twists and turns of the invasion and subse- ness, the vocabulary – in a word, for me the truth – has been lost quent campaign appear to be masterfully crocheted together by art- in the distillation of what is considered the significant course of ful strokes. The international intrigue involving American, British, events. But then, of all the problems of civilization the tragedy of and French prestige; the amazing conflicts of entrenched military war has always been the least known or understood. It has been uni- bureaucracies on various fronts and centers; the real character and versally and immemorially shared, yet either because of political or consequences of so-called military science – in a word, everything moral incapacities its real shape and substance has remained inac- an historian of imagination and insight would seize upon has been cessible to literature of all kinds. The man of imagination makes rendered innocuous. […] There is no excuse for indignation on this score. That, after all, is what an official history is. It matters not My worst fear was that whether the slot takes a dull or a shiny nickel; the machine will play the rubble would become the same tune. I straighten sentences out and try subtly to suggest something of the great themes of confusion, hypocrisy, and mass- “monotonous.” What if production death. But that is beside the point. The manuscript is one became callous or adjusted now clean, ready for the seal of the General. The outline is orderly, to this terrible wasteland? the notes and bibliography complete, the pages neatly typed and double-spaced. Here it is, but the real history lies in the white space between the lines. […] a contrived romance out of it or an unrelieved horror. The man of The military history that can now be casually dismissed as old- sober fact has rarely been able to see the documentary truth for all fashioned never departed from its central theme – the Commander, the dust of the archives. his strategy, his tactics, his genius. Napoleon struck so, and the “Those things in human Equity,” said Don Quixote, “might assault was victorious. The staff hit upon the great plan, and the very well have been omitted; for Actions that neither impair nor stroke of annihilation was registered. The Army and the State, alter History ought rather to be bury’d in Silence than related, if through its official leadership, remained the central characters. they rebound to the discredit of the Hero of the History. Certainly Now military history has been stood on its head. And what could be Aeneas was never so pious as Virgil represents him, nor Ulysses so more ideologically appropriate in an era when it is for the Common prudent as he is made by Homer…” Man that everything is sacrificed and it is in the name of the Little “I am of your Opinion,” continued Carrasco, disguising his own People that history is made. The hero of history is not Foch but fundamental disagreement, “but ‘tis one thing to write like a Poet, the poilu, not Pershing but the doughboy. The pamphlets are now and another thing to write like an Historian. ‘Tis sufficient for the being turned out by the dozen. And they record great victories, first to deliver Matters as they ought to have been, whereas the last unexpected and ingenious improvisations on the battlefield, feats must relate ‘em as they were really transacted, without adding or of audacity and military daring. Not Eisenhower’s, or Patton’s, or omitting any thing, upon any Pretence whatever…” Clark’s, or Patch’s. It is all the genius of some Joe in his Foxhole. How elementary, yet it is just these elementary assumptions that A sergeant shouts, “God damn those sons-a-bitches! We’ll have their need to be brought to awareness. […] asses hanging out in the breeze! Follow me!” And it is to this non- My own work here, in its largest aspect, is unfortunately not clear com, far removed from war rooms and high-level field orders, that to me nor to the historians who are supposed to organize and edit the historian has turned for his protagonist. The victory belongs to my assignments. That is by now, of course, an old Army situation. the generalship of the sergeant and the corporal. The brass is left The Historical Section itself seems to be the bastard creation of to their own privacy. Joe has his philosophers, his artists, his politi- some enterprising military mind with one hand on Thucydides, one cians. Now, in his supreme achievement, he has found his historian.

24 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Near Wesel, Germany, March 24, 1945 A German farm family seeking refuge from the fighting

Sunday – 18 March 1945 attack grew in intensity, and she scrambled regularly for the ditches Jeanne and I spent a long evening together last night; I finally man- as the divebombers came in for strafing sorties. Near Avricourt two aged an invitation. Her place is a really lovely apartment, carefully of her comrades were hit. One took a shell fragment in the shoulder, kept up during the bad years of the war and occupation with an the other just a few yards behind her was riddled with machine gun apparent tender solicitude as if there were nothing else in the world fire. She finally made her mother’s house here in Luneville. to care for. […] The ten months she spent in Germany began in November 1943. Tuesday – 27 March 1945 She was conscripted like so many other French women to work for She wasn’t home for more than a few hours when the police came the Army bureaus along the Rhine. As an Alsatian she speaks both and arrested her. The ffi [French Forces of the Interior] was French and German fluently, and she became the bureau’s chief rounding up “collaborationists,” and the prison cells were crowded interpreter. She worked faithfully and efficiently. There was noth- with men and women of all sorts. She was held there for a week. ing else to do. But this was a far cry from “collaboration!” Every She refused to eat and refused to talk. They would beat her every moment of the day brought some little conflict, a new declaration of day – “stupid, cruel boys of 17 and 18” – and then they cut her hair. war. Her blouse was a polka-dot affair, white with odd red and blue (It suddenly struck me. Of course. Her hair had been cut! That dots. “So!” the chief would scream. “You always have to exhibit your was it all the time! She had burned all her old photos, and nothing colors! You can’t sit here a moment without draping yourself in the but the memory of fond golden locks remained. She was still very flag!”[…] embarrassed about it. I was so moved and confused that I laughed. In September [1944] the bombing and strafing became massa- And she became hurt; it was no joke, and it wasn’t right for me to cres. The walls of the office shook all day and night.[…] Jeanne left make fun of her. I apologized sincerely, distressed that my helpless before daybreak and ran for hours through the countryside. The little laugh should misrepresent my feelings. I ran my fingersﬁ

The Berlin Journal 25 Mont-St.-Michel, Normandy, August 1944

gently, fumblingly, affectionately through her cropped hair, which offensive had rolled through this area a scant two weeks ago, and all in the candlelight of her apartment was becoming for me a lovely the devastation was new. Still the people were coming back and try- affecting thing. She smiled and I kissed her and all was well and ing to set up their communities in the rubble. Farmers were hoeing understood…) […] There have already been threats to recut her hair their fields around the waste heaps of old ammunition dumps and – for associating with the Americans! An embittered twisted patrio- over the heavy dug-in tracks of the tanks which had roared through tism but an indication of the explosive uncertainty and turbulence tearing up the earth. Little remnants told poignant tales. “Gasthaus of the tortured national spirit. zur Post” [“Post Office Tavern”] by a shattered front of a café.“Feind hört mit” [“The enemy is listening”] on broken walls of buildings, [Kaiserslautern, Germany] warning against street-corner gossip. […] My worst fear was that Thursday – 29 March 1945 it would become “monotonous.” What if one became callous or “Germany Straight Ahead” the improvised GI signs along the road adjusted to this terrible wasteland? I fancied that every house had read as we sped towards Sarguemines and the Saar Basin. The suffered a little differently, had its own pattern or design in ruin and

26 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 rubble. Each hearth perhaps had its own private death. At least so had been a “political prisoner” for swatting a few of the local Nazis. the sense of tragedy could be held through the endless view of walls, Temperament, too, was a crime. But in the rain one could only be windows, shutters, foundations, stone and wood and fields, strewn indifferent. Some other time Lyditchtka… over a devastated country. Every barn was a wreck, every store was smashed, only occasionally was a church found standing. After each Tuesday/Wednesday – 5/6 June 1945 village you think perhaps now the resistance had been broken and Last hours with the princess. something had been saved. But no! The next town is worse. The stillness and quiet going in. The next morning: everybody was up and around and available as a spectator. We walked down [Location, date unknown] and out. The officers and clerks were milling about. All the cham- Old woman stops me. Volunteers information about the Schreyer bermaids were out in the hall. The door was locked, and we had to family. Mother a “big Nazi.” Sons all army; the eldest an SS Lt. All in wait to make the exit. In a word, the affair was conspicuous. I was hiding upstairs. They made enough trouble. Everything should be slightly embarrassed, Lydia was vastly amused. I winced as her finished for them… Austrian traitors!… 2nd floor, No 1, Altmarkt. The Berlin café played jazz [Innsbruck, Austria] styled in New York fashions, Saturday – 2 June 1945 and intimacies were public with She wasn’t a native of Innsbruck – she was Russian – but she knew the town and ventured suggestions. She was going to headquarters. the pace of Paris. I would drive her, and then we could tour. So we went. This was the beginning of L’Affaire Princess Lydichka. She was not really a high heels rapped out in the hallways, she simply delighted in her princess, I suppose, but there was some talk about a royal Georgian proud confident stalk… Details. The high heels. The red dress. The lineage, and then she had such a commanding way. […] A Nazi upsweep hairdo. Liebling and Liebchen and liebst du mich. (And Hast convoy was coming down from the hills from somewhere to some- du das in Paris gelernt?) [Did you learn that in Paris?] The last hours. where, but who would stop and check up? One little auto she spot- Saying goodbye. Milytchka wanting to go to bed. The princess being ted and insisted that the man was one of her jailors at Dachau. She stern and throwing her out of the room. The poor sleepy girl ﬁ

The Berlin Journal 27 calling from the keyhole and the other side. The princess being and destroyed and returned to uneven earth? Why should this ruthless and brutal, reviling her, and sweetly proceeding to make have escaped the terrible equality and justice of total tragedy? For a love to me. A strange girl, full of violence and tenderness, coarse- moment one could almost order its demolition. […] But no. […] In ness and the greatest delicacy. We had both been tired, but if this the end, I feel sure, all the so-called ironies and accidents of War was the last night, why then – ! Unfavorable circumstances at the will piece themselves together! […] moment (Milly was wailing) (No! No! We’re not going to bed, we The ruins of Berlin. The city is unbelievable, and magnificent only want to talk and be together for a little while, so shut up and even in its destruction. There is little rubble, and strange how the for goodness’ sake be patient!), but she was still affectionate and impression persists that it is a clean city. The great avenues and even passionate. There was a fine, striking assurance to her sexual boulevards stretch flatly away on a dead level, and there is still appetite that was peculiarly her own. She was very simple and direct everywhere the sense of immense and palatial buildings, of a great about love, which in a real sense is the great mark of sophistication… and systematic metropolis. The thoroughfares were crowded with pedestrians and vehicles, and the view of massive architecture was [Heidelberg, Germany] inescapable. You look at Berlin and you see Traffic and Real Estate. Tuesday – 30 July 1945 Devastated as it has been Berlin bleibt Berlin [Berlin remains Berlin] Yesterday: a young man, who looked Jewish, stuffing books into (as one poster remarked, advertising I believe some local musical a little briefcase, and under his raincoat you could see the zebra- comedy…) Its vast area has every pattern of shambles. The varying striped jacket of the concentration camp, now neat and laundered… ruins of Darmstadt, Kassel, Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Munich So the black days return for a moment. could all be set down within the city limits of Berlin and their own patterns matched. In the north and east ends the buildings are gut- [Berlin, via Kassel, Göttingen, Braunschweig, ted and hopeless and are the very image of Darmstadt’s ghostliness. Hannover] Leipzigerstrasse has the burned-out massiveness of Ludwigstrasse Thursday 16 August – Tuesday 21 August 1945 in Munich, and here and there there are whole areas as twisted and The land bears curious witness to the character of the American broken as the stones of Nuremberg. Berlin lies before you like a tor- victory. Everywhere the lingering tokens of the Nazi epoch, ignored tured giant, limp on the wrack, a blinded, mortally wounded Cyclops. by the thoughtlessness of the new regime, which is preoccupied The face of the city is black, its eyes poked and burned out… […] with every formality of administration except those of signifi- Everywhere in Germany there is a certain feeling of age and cance and real social content. […] In Mannheim on the corner of patience, and I almost fancied that I was being told: Berlin was Leibnizstrasse: “Nie wieder ein 9 November 1918!” [Never again!] destroyed before, in the Seven Years War of Frederick the Great, in Down the avenue, in even bigger whitewash staring out from the the Napoleonic campaigns… Doch das Leben geht weiter! [But life rubble: “Führer befiehl, wir folgen!”[Führer, command us and we’ll goes on!] Cinemas all had lines of anxious movie-goers, the news- follow!] Throughout the area: Only Germany can save Europe, the papers were being sold quickly at little and for the most part regular victory is inevitable, the struggle is relentless and unending, the stands. I noted a half dozen cafés on Potsdamer Strasse, jammed loyalty of the people is undying. […] On the road to Darmstadt: the with soldiers and girls, noisy with music, laughter, the breaking of huge hakenkreuz of the nsdap Ortsgruppe headquarters… And glasses (the wine and beer were abominations). The Café Weber: then the challenges, as it were, of the American sign-painters – lemonade was the favorite, most of the girls were still alone (it was “This War is Over. No ordnance parts will be issued without a signed only nine o’clock). The Schwarzer Adler: an American flag was on and authorized requisition.” – “Slow Down! European Jaywalkers!” display, the music was jazz styled in New York fashions, and the inti- A whole host of adaptations of American highway billboards, coun- macies were public with the pace of Paris. […] On the street again a seling the wisdom of cautious driving and the innumerable advan- US traffic sign was nailed up, half covering a Stalin text. The radio tages of the nearby service station… […] was blaring (afn, Berlin): “I learned English just for you” and “If Into Frankfurt. The Main was a turbulent muddy red and the there’s a knock on your door (knock, knock) it’s not the Gestapo…” sun was brilliant over the city. The Bahnhofplatz was crowded with GIs were mimicking the German lyrics and humming along, pedestrians for all the world oblivious to the devastation which fondling the girls brashly as the chorus came up again… stretched away… But to a point. The ruins cease abruptly. At the next corner – one could pick up a shattered brick of a little house now [Berlin] gutted and almost reach it – stands the IG Farben building, its thou- [date unknown] sand windows glistening in the noon-day. The military police are I could not help thinking as I sat in the Nuremberg courtroom in kid gloves and white scarves and under apparent instructions to and heard the Tribunal’s sentences pronounced – is it really so perform as a palace guard for the US headquarters. One was some- far fetched to visualize another crowded dock, rather more mixed what embarrassed, but as the fullness of the spectacle unfolded nationally than the ill-fated 22, confronted with their enormities by deeply ashamed. Why was this not also broken from the sky, burned the prosecutors and judges of a new band of Conquerors? Streicher

28 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 said before he was hanged that one day the Russians would hang all enables him to recover himself completely. He hunts down the offi- of us. The likelihood is equally as strong that one day the Russians cer, who is now a genial family man busy converting his factory from might all be hanged. But in any event the great irony of history will steel helmets to kitchen pots for the “Aufbau.” He is tempted to kill probably be that Germans will be sitting in on the new hangings, him but finds higher release in denying revenge and leaving the whoever knots the ropes. No cry is as popular among the German poor evil man cowering in the shadows. […] masses today as “An den Galgen!” [To the gallows!] The Conquerors, And what a shock it was when the lights came on and the audi- who came in the name of free and civilized ideals, have done noth- ence filed out to the rubble of Friedrichstrasse. The movie seemed ing so well as the perpetuation of the lynch-spirit in this deca- to be make-believe illusion, an escapist world, when contrasted to dent land. the real, unarty, unsentimental, insoluble tragedy of actual Berlin streets. The Russian generals drove off in their limousines. Wilhelm Tuesday Pieck and Walter Ulbricht came out of their special box, beaming as To the Friedrichstrasse Staatsoper (elegantly rebuilt) for the pre- always at the “forward progress of the people’s movement.” Some miere of Germany’s first postwar motion-picture production and the American lieutenant gave flowers to the lovely female star and first native anti-Nazi film. Apparently all of Berlin’s high society is escorted her out briskly to his shining omgus sedan. People looked there. I see monocles, silk top hats, mink coats, editors and critics for Ernst Borcher, the male lead as anti-Nazi hero, but he was not to from all the local papers, intelligence agents of each of the powers. be found; he was languishing in jail for having failed to admit that The film is inauspiciously introduced by some grim Soviet-sector he has been a storm trooper. µ bureaucrat… Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns (The Murderers Are Among Us) had surprisingly little line of didacticism. It is a sincere, terribly If your pictures aren’t good, you aren’t close enough. earnest German story of the conflict between a war veteran and a Robert Capa understood war as only the best soldier could. Though unquestion- war criminal in the post-Nazi ruins of Berlin. It is interesting as a ably one of America’s most celebrated combat photojournalists, the Hungarian- born photographer (née Andrè Friedmann) was first granted US citizenship at the German canvas of life in the devastated city and significant as the close of World War II, after joining American convoys in 1942 as an enemy alien. […] first attempt of the Germans to confront their own past. The Capa’s fascination with battle and unflinching dedication took him back to Europe, soldier, spiritually burdened and psychologically obsessed by the where he captured on film Nazi Germany, the horrors of Normandy, and the lib- memories of front inhumanities, loses himself in the Berlin ruins. eration of France. After founding the photo agency Magnum and announcing his The love of a simple, hard-working German girl (who had been in a retirement from frontline reporting, he took up an assignment for LIFE in Hanoi, where he was killed by a land mine in 1954. The narrative power of his pictures concentration camp, of course) slowly rescues him from drink and and their straightforward aesthetic have made them indispensable in both world- promiscuity. The reunion with the officer (who had ordered the liq- political history as well as in the history of the photographic medium. uidation of men, women, and children on Christmas Eve, of course)

Paris, August 26, 1944 Celebrating the liberation of the city Tacita Dean, from Die Regimentstochter, 2005. (36 opera and theater programs, framed)

30 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 n April 30, 1945, the day adulthood. Among them were several future atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. Robert of Hitler’s suicide, “zero hour” leaders of the postwar musical scene, and Oppenheimer, the head of the American in modern German history, they would be indelibly marked by what they nuclear program, was spellbound by the the 103rd Infantry and Tenth had experienced in adolescence. Karlheinz same Donne poem and evidently had it in OArmored Divisions of the US Army rum- Stockhausen, who would become one of the mind when he named the site of the first bled into the Alpine resort of Garmisch- most influential and controversial compos- atomic test Trinity. On August 19 Britten Partenkirchen, which the war had hardly ers of the postwar period, was the son of a finished the cycle by setting Donne’s sonnet touched. Two hundred Allied bombers had spiritually tortured Nazi party member who “Death be not proud.” Above a rising scale, been prepared to lay waste to the town and went to the eastern front and never returned. the singer declaims the words “And death its environs, but the strike was called off His mother was confined for many years to shall be no more”; fixates for nine long beats at the behest of a surrendering German a sanatorium and killed in the Nazi eutha- on the word “death”; and, finally, over a soldier. Early in the morning a security nasia program. Hans Werner Henze trained clanging dominant-tonic cadence, thunders, detachment turned into the driveway of as a radio operator for Panzer battalions “Thou shalt die.” a Garmisch villa, intending to use it as a and spent the first part of 1945 riding aim- command post. When the senior officer, lessly around the ruined landscape. Bernd In 1945 Germany was a primitive soci- Lieutenant Milton Weiss, went inside the Alois Zimmermann, future composer of the ety such as Europe had not known since house an old man came downstairs to meet landmark opera Die Soldaten, fought on the the Middle Ages. The former citizens of him. “I am Richard Strauss,” he said, “the front lines of Hitler’s ill-fated invasion of the Hitler’s thousand-year Reich were living composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome.” Soviet Union. Luciano Berio was conscript- a hand-to-mouth existence, scavenging for food, drinking from drainpipes, cook- ing over wood fires, living in the base- ments of destroyed houses or in hand-built Zero Hour trailers and cabins. In 1948 a glamorous young American musician named Leonard Bernstein arrived in Munich to conduct The American Reorientation of a concert and reported back home: “The people starve, struggle, rob, beg for bread. German Music, 1945–1949 Wages are often paid in cigarettes. Tipping is all in cigarettes. It is all misery.” Millions by Alex Ross of prisoners of war lived in camps; many more millions roamed the roads, having Strauss studied the soldier’s face for signs ed into the army of Mussolini’s Republic of fled the Soviet occupation in the east or of sympathy. Weiss, who had played piano Salò and nearly blew off his right hand with been expelled from neighboring countries in a band at Jewish resorts in the Catskills, a gun that he did not know how to use. by policies of ethnic cleansing. No sooner nodded his head in recognition. Strauss In July 1945 the young English com- had Hitler made his exit than Joseph Stalin went on to recount his experiences in the poser Benjamin Britten, who had just replaced him as a threat. The collective war, pointedly mentioning the tribulations scored a triumph in London with his opera might of Anglo-American industry, which of his Jewish relatives. Weiss decided to Peter Grimes, accompanied the violinist had recently been used to obliterate one install his post elsewhere. At 11 am on the Yehudi Menuhin on a brief tour of defeated German city after another, became the same day, a squad of jeeps came up the drive, Germany. The two men visited the con- engine of reconstruction. Germany would these led by Major John Kramers, from the 103rd Division’s military-government branch. Kramers told the family that they Psychological warfare meant the pursuit of had 15 minutes to evacuate. Strauss walked out to the major’s jeep, holding documents military ends by non-military means: the promotion of that declared him an honorary citizen of jazz, American composition, international contemporary Morgantown, West Virginia, together with part of the manuscript of Rosenkavalier. music, and other sounds that could be used to degrade “I am Richard Strauss, the composer,” he the concept of Aryan cultural supremacy. said. Kramers’s face lit up; he was a Strauss fan. A precious “Off Limits” sign was placed on the lawn. In the days that followed, centration camp at Bergen-Belsen and be reinvented as a democratic, American- Strauss posed for photographs, played the performed for a crowd of former inmates. style society, a bulwark against the Soviets. Rosenkavalier waltzes on the piano, and Stupefied by what he saw, Britten proceeded Part of that grand plan was a cultural policy smiled bemusedly as soldiers inspected his to write a cycle of songs on the Holy Sonnets of denazification and reeducation, and it statue of Beethoven and asked who it was. of John Donne, the most spiritually scour- would have a decisive effect on postwar “If they ask one more time,” he muttered, ing poetry he could find. On August 6 he music. “I’m telling them it’s Hitler’s father.” set to music “Sonnet xiv,” which begins, Germany and Austria were divided into All over Europe, young veterans were “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” American, British, French, and Soviet zones. emerging from the rubble of the war into Earlier the same day, the first operational The head of the American occupation ﬁ

The Berlin Journal 31 – the Office of the Military Government, On arriving in Munich, Moseley was them.” With this two-pronged approach, the United States, or omgus, for short – was asked to “look into that whole thing going document concludes, “We shall have little an even-handed, incorruptible, and stag- on in Beulah.” By this his senior official difficulty in giving a positive international geringly efficient man named Lucius Clay. meant Bayreuth, where ideas for a possible direction to German musical life.” The Unlike those who have governed more revival of the Wagner festival were circulat- anonymous author also flagged Sibelius, recent American occupations, Clay under- ing. Moseley went to Bayreuth and walked who was deemed likely to arouse hazard- stood his responsibilities as a caretaker of up the Green Hill to the Festspielhaus. The ous feelings of Nordic supremacy; hence, German culture, and he had a clear vision of roof was leaking, and water was dripping Finlandia was banned in Germany. its future. What made him interesting was into the amphitheater. Afterward, Moseley If not Strauss, Pfitzner, and Sibelius, that his background combined strict West dropped in at Haus Wahnfried, Wagner’s which composers would be acceptable in Point training with a whiff of New Deal home, which had also been damaged by the new Germany? The first order of busi- idealism; in the Army Corps of Engineers Allied bombs. Winifred Wagner, the widow ness was to restore the repertory music he had coordinated building projects with of Wagner’s son Siegfried, had had to suf- that the Nazis had banned on racial and the wpa, and an early evaluation called him fer the indignity of a denazification hearing ideological grounds. One early strategy had “inclined to be bolshevistic.” The military and watched helplessly as the meister’s the- mixed results, as a report from August 1945 governor of Germany wanted to reshape and lift up Germany as Roosevelt had reshaped and lifted up America. At a conference in The entire Weill-ish school of composition, whether Berchtesgaden, near Hitler’s old redoubt, Clay said, “We are trying to free the German because of its leftist leanings or because of its daring mind, and to make his heart value that free- synthesis of classical and popular styles, figured little in dom so greatly that it will beat and die for that freedom and for no other purpose.” the calculations of Music Control. The project of freeing the German mind was called “reorientation.” The term originated in the Psychological Warfare ater was used for Italian opera, light enter- shows: “The rule of having to perform at Division of the Supreme Headquarters of tainment, and other “desecrations.” Soldiers least one ‘verboten’ work on each program the Allied Expeditionary Force, which was played jazz on the Wahnfried piano, and has led to a stereotyped pattern of starting led by Brigadier General Robert McClure. donuts were baked in the festival restaurant. orchestral concerts with a Mendelssohn Psychological warfare meant the pursuit of The Festspielhaus had even served as a bar- overture…. The Mendelssohn situation has military ends by non-military means, and in racks for African-American troops – a turn become critical, ridiculous, and urgent.” (The the case of music it meant the promotion of of events that Winifred noted in her recol- author of this memo, Edward Kilenyi, was jazz, American composition, international lections with four exclamation points of hor- the son of Gerschwin’s theory teacher.) contemporary music, and other sounds ror. She gave Moseley a tour of the ruins and Music Control also placed great empha- that could be used to degrade the concept of showed him the meister’s grave. More than sis on American music, promoting major Aryan cultural supremacy. five decades later, Moseley remembered works of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and With the coming of omgus, Psycho the scene clearly: “She began talking about Virgil Thomson together with such dubious logical Warfare evolved into Information ‘Unser Blitzkrieg’ – ‘our Blitzkrieg’ – and fare as Robert McBride’s Strawberry Jam Control, which took responsibility for all reminiscing fondly of the Hitler period.… Overture. Censorship departments monitor- cultural activity in the occupied areas. In I just walked away from her, feeling a defi- ing the German mail reported that on the keeping with the reorientation paradigm, nite terror in my veins.” whole American music was going down military and civilian experts were brought well, although symphonic works had less in to guide extant organizations and encour- mgus’s music policies are traction than popular songs. “I hear such age new, forward-looking ones. Many in summed up in a fascinating nice American music over the radio,” wrote Information Control’s Music Branches had document titled “Music Control a woman named Luise Kraus to her friend thorough training and a progressive outlook Instruction No. 1,” which can be George C. Avery of Philadelphia. “I really on contemporary music. The Mississippi- O found at the National Archives in College like it very much; I do not know why [we] born pianist Carlos Moseley, who had stud- Park, Maryland. “It is above all essential,” were always told that it amounts to nothing. ied alongside Leonard Bernstein, arranged this memo says, “that we should not give the The fact is, that our music is heavier and for one of Information Control’s triumphs – impression of trying to regiment culture in everlasting, but your songs and hits are so Bernstein’s startlingly successful conducting the Nazi manner.” Instead, “German musi- jolly and light.” engagement in Munich in May of 1948. It led cal life must be influenced by positive rather The extroverted, jazz-tinged music of some experienced concertgoers to exclaim than by negative means, i.e., by encouraging the Weimar era, as embodied in Weill’s that the young American knew German the music which we think beneficial and Threepenny Opera, had been condemned by music better than the Germans. In a letter crowding out that which we think danger- the Nazis; it might have qualified as “safe” home Bernstein exulted: “It means so much ous.” Only two men occupied the “danger- for the new Germany. By this time, though, for the American military Government, ous” category: Richard Strauss and Hans Weill was entrenched as a composer on since music is the Germans’ last stand in Pfitzner. “We must not allow such compos- Broadway and uninterested in returning their ‘master race’ claim, and for the first ers to be ‘built up’ by special concerts devot- to Germany; his premature death in 1950 time it’s been exploded in Munich.” ed entirely to their works or conducted by made the matter moot. Other young left-

32 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 ist composers who had thrived in 1920s in Munich, with emphasis on once verbo- him use the Kranichstein Hunting Castle, Berlin – the likes of Hanns Eisler and Paul ten modernists. The omgus file dealing a picturesque pile outside of town, and the Dessau – were evidently ruled out because with Musica Viva is marked “Reorientation American authorities warmly backed the of their Communist associations. The entire Project No. 1.” The material is held in a stiff venture. Everett Helm, the music officer for Weill-ish school of song-driven composi- gray folder that had evidently been appropri- the Hesse region and a composer himself, tion, whether because of its leftist lean- ated from a Nazi filing cabinet; under the proudly noted that at Darmstadt “contem- ings or because of its daring synthesis of American scrawl is a watermark reading porary music only is taught and performed – classical and popular styles, figured little “nsdap.” Alas, Munich music lovers did not and then only the more advanced variety. in the calculations of Music Control. The flock to Hartmann’s series. The Bavarian R. Strauss and J. Sibelius do not come into Munich-born composer and pedagogue Carl music officer John Evarts wrote, “They are consideration.” Hindemith was designated Orff, on the other hand, prospered, even extremely shy of any sort of art created in an a “natural starting point,” but Schoenberg though Carmina Burana had been a hit with idiom of a period later than, say, 1900.” One quickly emerged as the shining beacon for Goebbels. Orff misleadingly presented him- event drew fewer than thirty people. Carlos young German composers. self as an associate of the anti-Nazi resis- Moseley decided to use omgus money to Although attempts to bring Schoenberg tance, and omgus gave him a clean ideolog- purchase 350 tickets himself and then dis- to Darmstadt in person failed, his spirit ical bill of health. tributed them to young musicians and com- was everywhere during the 1949 summer The Americans placed highest confi- posers. Thus, the American occupation was season. There were performances of the dence in musical progressives who were not only providing funds for the concerts Five Pieces for Orchestra, the Variations free from both Nazi and Communist but also filling the seats – an exceptionally for Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the affiliations. The Munich composer Karl generous form of patronage. Fourth String Quartet, and the String Amadeus Hartmann, who had dedicated The city of Darmstadt, most of which Trio. Remarkably, the Trio was featured his symphonic poem Miserae to the victims had been leveled in an incendiary bomb- in an omgus-sponsored series devoted to of Dachau in 1935, was extolled by Music ing raid in September 1944, hosted another American chamber works, alongside quar- Control as “a man of the utmost integrity American-supported, modern-music experi- tets by Charles Ives and Wallingford Riegger. who possesses a musical outlook which is ment. The music critic Wolfgang Steinecke Some official observers were uneasy astonishingly sound and fresh for a man proposed to set up a summertime institute about the direction that Darmstadt was tak- who has survived the nazi [sic] occupation.” so that young composers could get to know ing. Colonel Ralph A. Burns, the chief of the

Not19577_TBJ_210x145_374.ai long after the end of the 23.03.2007 war, Hartmann 16:38:45 Uhrthe music the Nazis had banned. Steinecke Cultural Affairs Branch of the Education & organized a series of Musica Viva concerts persuaded the local city government to let Cultural Relations Division of omgus, ﬁ

CMY

observed in a June 1949 memo that the fication, and, on the other, an avant-garde asked Strauss if he had ever thought of writ- summer school had “acquired a reputation establishment that opposed itself so deter- ing a concerto for oboe. “No,” the composer for one-sidedness.” The previous summer minedly to the aesthetics of the Nazi period answered. Several months later, de Lancie the Polish-born, Paris-based composer and that it came close to disavowing the idea of was astonished to read in a newspaper that theorist René Leibowitz, author of Sibelius: the public concert. The middlebrow ideal of Strauss had indeed written an oboe con- The Worst Composer in the World, had arrived a popular modernism, as embodied in fig- certo at an American soldier’s request. It to preach the gospel of twelve-tone music ures as various as Richard Strauss, Dmitri was music of unexpected lightness, recall- and caused great excitement among young- Shostakovich, and Aaron Copland, withered ing the fleet-figured, Mendelssohnian er German composers. Leibowitz returned away, caught between extremes of revolu- scores that the composer had written in his in 1949 in the company of the equally radi- tion and reaction. youth before falling under Wagner’s spell. cal though less doctrinaire Olivier Messiaen. Strauss’s encounters with the Americans The French contingent had an unsettling Richard Strauss remained in seemed to lift his spirits. In many later pho- effect, Colonel Burns reported in his follow- Garmisch. The “Off Limits” sign on his tographs he wears a dour expression, but in up “Review of Activities for July 1949”: lawn protected his property but not his a snapshot taken by de Lancie his eyes are The majority of students and faculty felt reputation. Klaus Mann, Thomas’s son, was bright and his face is relaxed. that the idea of the school – to foster new serving as a correspondent for the US Army The long, strange career of Richard music through performances, lectures and newspaper Stars and Stripes, and in mid May Strauss came to an end with the writing of courses – is splendid, but that the execution 1945 he called on Strauss at Garmisch, iden- the Four Last Songs in 1948. “Im Abendrot,” of the idea was faulty. During the concluding four days, five concerts were given under The middlebrow ideal of a popular modernism the title “Music of the Younger Generation.” It was generally conceded that much of this withered away, caught between extremes of music was worthless and had better been revolution and reaction. left unplayed. The over-emphasis on twelve- tone music was regretted.… Leibowitz (an Austrian by birth) represents and admits as valid only the most radical kind of music tifying himself as “Mr. Brown.” He had not or “At Sunset,” out-Mahlers Mahler in the and is openly disdainful of any other. His forgotten that Strauss had fixed his signa- art of looking death in the face. The text attitude is aped by his students. ture to a denunciation of his father in 1933. paints a picture of an elderly couple walking He reported home that Strauss “happens into life’s sunset – “Through joy and need his was a sign of things to to be about the most rotten character one we have walked hand in hand” – and the E- come. The aggressive tactics of can possibly imagine – ingnorant [sic], com- flat-major music unfolds as one luminous Schoenberg’s young French aco- placent, greedy, vain, abysmally egotistic, arc above them. Friedrich Nietzsche might lytes forecast the musical divides of completely lacking in the most fundamental have been describing this greatest of Strauss Tcoming years, when Pierre Boulez, the most human impulses of shame and decency.” songs when he wrote: “openly disdainful” of composers, would The Stars and Stripes article was scarcely Masters of the very first order can be recog- declare that any composer who had not less venomous, adorned with such head- nized by the following characteristic: in all come to terms with Schoenberg’s method lines as “Strauss Still Unabashed About Ties matters great and small they know with per- was “useless.” Boulez himself did not attend with Nazis,” “His Heart Beat in Nazi Time,” fect assurance how to find the end, whether that summer, but he had studied with and “An Old Opportunist Who Heiled it be the end of a melody or of a thought, Leibowitz and had already created a stink at Hitler.” Some of the dialogue attributed to whether it be the fifth act of a tragedy or the a Stravinsky concert in Paris. Strauss sounds invented. Klaus claims, for end of a political action. The very best of David Monod, in his history of music example, that Strauss showed no awareness the second-in-rank grow restive toward the during the American occupation, writes of the destruction of German cities and end. They do not plunge into the sea with a that omgus helped to bring about a “seg- opera houses; other sources indicate that proud and measured tranquility, as do, for regation of the modern and the popular.” the composer talked of little else. Incensed, example, the mountains near Portofino Darmstadt and similar organizations were Strauss wrote a letter of complaint to Klaus’s – where the Gulf of Genoa sings its melody wholly subsidized by the state, the city, and father, but he never sent it, perhaps figuring to the end. the Americans. They had no obligation to a it would only add fuel to the fire. paying public. Meanwhile “classical music,” Other visitors, especially members of Strauss died on September 8, 1949. Three in the pejorative sense of performances of the US military, had a friendlier attitude weeks later, omgus was dissolved, and the well-known opera and symphonic reper- and were charmed by the old man’s memo- American interregnum in German musical tory, continued on much as it had during the ries of America. Several of them happened history was over. µ Nazi period, with most of the same star con- to be skilled musicians. One day an intel- ductors – Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert ligence operative named John de Lancie Holtzbrinck Fellow in fall 2002, Alex von Karajan, Hans Knappertsbusch – in showed up at Strauss’s door, not to conduct Ross here gives Journal readers a pre- charge, despite the various ceremonies an interrogation but to express his admira- view of The Rest is Noise, forthcom- of denazification to which they had been tion for the composer’s woodwind writing; ing from Farrar, Straus and Giroux subjected. So there was, on the one hand, a before the war, he had been a member of in fall 2007. The author is a music classical establishment that eluded denazi- the Pittsburgh Symphony. De Lancie boldly journalist at the New Yorker.

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WILMERHALECOM\7ILMER#UTLER0ICKERING(ALEAND$ORR,,0ISTEINEEINGETRAGENE0ARTNERSCHAFTSGESELLSCHAFTNACHDEM2ECHTDES3TAATES$ELAWARE 53! chairmanship at Manhattan- remained a staunch and gener- Gifts of Gratitude based JPMorgan; from 1996 to ous backer. As a founding mem- 2003 he led the international ber of the Academy’s Executive Financial Fellowship in Honor of Kurt Viermetz committee of the New York Stock Committee, he has helped men- Exchange. The only German tor the Academy’s unique mix of his generation still playing a of scholars, artists, and policy major role in the global finance professionals and continues to world, Viermetz embodies the forward its spirit of independence ideas and goals of transatlanti- and non-partisanship. cism, ideals that are evident not To honor Viermetz for Photograph by Mike MinehanPhotographMikeby only in his professional practice his unwavering support, the but also in his private patronage Academy has created a short-term of the American Academy in fellowship in his name. The capi- Berlin. tal endowment of 500,000 Euros Just as the name Kurt will annually bring one distin- Viermetz continues to resound guished figure from the world in financial circles, the couple of US finance, economics, or Kurt and Felicitas Viermetz have business to the German capital long stood for unflagging private for one to two weeks of lectures, philanthropy in the arts and edu- meetings, and roundtables with cation, from restoring exquisite government officials, academics, Bavarian churches to bringing and the media. In 2005 the Frankfurter ing bankers.” For many years the library of former Weimar Generous support for the Allgemeine Zeitung set to paper Viermetz’s business cards also Republic Reichskanzler Heinrich fellowship came from friends what the international finance attested to his leading position in Brüning to the University of such as the Arnhold and Kellen community had long known. the US financial community. Augsburg. families, as well as from an “With his combination of assertive- Indeed, Viermetz seems to When Richard C. Holbrooke impressive group of two dozen ness, diplomatic savvy, and inter- have lived the majority of his conceived of an institution to JPMorgan employees, who ben- national experience,” the paper professional life with one foot in strengthen German-American efited from Viermetz’s inimitable wrote, “Kurt Viermetz ranks Europe and the other in the US. relations, Viermetz contributed mentorship. among Germany’s most outstand- Through the 1990s he held a vice the very first donation and has r.m.

1/09 Current Global Economic 1/18 American Academy Lecture Recital Trends: Opportunities and Politics, Religion, and Art in Guest Appearances Pitfalls New American Opera John Snow, former US Secretary of the Scott Wheeler, Composer and Conductor, Notes from the Spring Program Treasury, and Chairman, Cerberus Emerson College, Boston, and Distinguished Capital Management Visitor at the Academy

From lectures to luncheons, from recitals to readings, A January ﬁ the Academy’s spring schedule offers a plethora of The Future of the Climate Change, Oil, and programs that complement lectures by the current class Six-Part y Talks Nuclear Proliferation Issues: of fellows. Here we present a timeline of those additional Christopher R. Hill, Assistant Secretary Profitable and Business-Led events in and around the Hans Arnhold Center. of State for East Asian and Pacific Solutions Affairs, US Department of State; mod- Amory B. Lovins, Chief Executive erated by Richard C. Holbrooke, Vice Officer, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Chairman, Perseus Consulting LLC, and C.V. Starr Distinguished Visitor at the 1/17 Chairman of the Academy 1/30 Academy

The Berlin Journal 37 German Histories, co-authored replacing his brother Dieter. Trustees on Board with Konrad Jarausch and recent- He has headed the Georg von ly released in German transla- Holtzbrinck media empire since Introducing Michael Geyer, Stefan von Holtzbrinck, tion, quickly emerged as a para- 2001 as president and chairman digm for understanding recent of the executive board; in early and Manfred Wennemer German history. Accordingly, 2007 he also took the corpora- an international jury named it tion’s newspaper subset under At its November 2006 gather- Academy’s independent selec- best historical book in 2003 for his wing. As shepherd of some ing in New York, the Academy’s tion committee, Geyer is an ideal the English edition and again in of the country’s most important board of trustees enthusiasti- candidate to act as a full-time 2006 for the German edition. In print publications – from the cally welcomed three new mem- advisor from the halls of aca- addition to his extensive studies economic daily Handelsblatt to bers: Michael Geyer, Stefan deme. The native German has of European war, civil war, and the multifaceted weekly Die Zeit – von Holtzbrinck, and Manfred taught history at the University genocide, Geyer’s intellectual Holtzbrinck stands firmly on the Wennemer. of Chicago for some twenty passions extend to the history foundation of the conglomerate’s Professor Michael Geyer years, exploring in his writings of humanitarian movements, strong presence in print media, has been closely tied to the religion, the theory and politics leading him to cofound the which has been characterized by Academy since taking up the of history, globalization, and University of Chicago’s Human very high standards. He is also DaimlerChrysler Fellowship the history of twentieth-century Rights Program. devoting more attention to online in the spring of 2004 and is Germany. The Guggenheim Stefan von Holtzbrinck media, projecting that his com- the first alum to join the board. Fellowship winner’s 2002 book joins the Academy as one of pany will soon earn one fourth of After serving two years on the A Shattered Past: Reconstructing the board’s youngest members, its profits from internet-related business. The international out- fit, which parents publishing houses like Britain’s Palgrave Macmillian, America’s Farrar,

PhotographBerlin4Funby Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, Photograph by Mike MinehanPhotographMikeby and Picador, and Germany’s S. Fischer and Rowohlt, sees the web as an opportunity, particularly in its educational and scientific branches. As the Academy reconceives its own internet presence, Holtzbrinck’s commitment to the Academy is both fortunate and timely. Since taking the wheel of German tire-maker Continental in 2001, Manfred Wennemer has made headlines as quickly he has slashed the company’s costs. The chairman of the executive board has not been shy

2/11 American Academy 2/23 Foreign Policy Luncheon 3/08 The Roman Empire and the Dialogue Anti-Americanisms in World Clash of Civilizations Robert De Niro Meets Politics: Varieties of Reacting Glen Bowersock, Professor Emeritus Volker Schlöndorff to America of Ancient History, Institute for Robert O. Keohane, Professor of Advanced Study, and Distinguished International Affairs, Princeton University Visitor at the Academy

ﬁ February March

Foreign Policy Forum The Regional Implications of the How Revolutions in Military Of Power and Destiny: The Myth Shia Revival in the Middle East Affairs Have Shaped Our World of American Isolationism Vali Nasr, Professor of Middle East and South Max Boot, Senior Fellow for National Robert Kagan, Senior Associate, Carnegie Asia Politics, Naval Postgraduate School; Security Studies, Council on Foreign Endowment for International Peace; and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies, Relations, and C.V. Starr Distinguished Constanze Stelzenmüller, Director, German Council on Foreign Relations; and C.V. Starr 3/13 Visitor at the Academy 2/21 Marshall Fund of the United States, Berlin 2/27 Distinguished Visitor at the Academy

38 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 in pursuing his goals – stream- lining operations, diversifying, and strengthening the company against global competition –

which has boosted stockholders’ PhotographBerlin4Funby confidence even while turning traditional European business practice on its head. Wennemer’s initiatives, quickly imitated by other German companies, were recently credited with giving “Europe’s largest economy a new competitive edge” by the International Herald Tribune. Among these forward-looking maneuvers was the 2006 purchase of Motorola’s automotive If advancing this unmitigated electronics division, a move that An Altruistic Legacy love of learning can be viewed as has led not only to the creation his life’s work, his dynamic daugh- of a standard-setting safety Berthold Leibinger Establishes a Fellowship ters might be counted as two of his system but also to an elevated greatest successes. Regine, an archi- corporate presence in the US. in the Humanities tect and professor in Berlin and at With over two-thirds of some Harvard, has been a trustee of the 80,000 employees working out- This spring’s launching of love lies in learning itself, regard- Academy for the past two years and side of Germany, Wennemer’s the Berthold Leibinger Fellowship less of discipline. Though visible an advocate of its scholarly func- company is dedicated to building at the Academy seems the inevi- in his chairing of the Schiller tion since its inception. His older an international-friendly busi- table communion of kindred Museum and the International daughter Nicola, who received her ness – even against the cries of forces. In his lifelong commitment Bach Academy, his passion for the doctorate with a study of Erich German laborers who bemoan not only to economics and science arts and belles lettres is perhaps Kästner’s late works, is now acting the company’s shift abroad. “We but also to literature and the arts, most poignantly expressed by the ceo at Trumpf. As chairwoman need the best Americans, the Berthold Leibinger personifies the sweeping collection of his favor- of the Leibinger Foundation, the best Chinese, the best Indians,” Academy’s purpose. The media ite poems and literature that his benefactor of the new prize, she he has said, “but we will never often highlights his legendary wife Doris published for a recent now joins her sister and father as an [attract them] if they sense presence in the world of busi- birthday. Indeed, inherent to his official partner of the Academy. The they are second-class citizens ness. Over 27 years at the Trumpf devotion to erudition is an impulse charity’s generous commitment within Continental.” It is this Corporation, he steered the trans- to share it with others, one illus- will secure a semester-long award eye for the future – and this formation of “a mid-sized business trated by many positions of eco- for excellence in the liberal arts for enthusiasm for broader hori- into the world’s leading high-tech nomic and political counselorship the next five years. Writer Geoffrey zons – that Wennemer lends corporation” and was the impetus and best typified by the Leibinger Wolff inaugurated the fellowship to the American Academy’s behind numerous awards for inno- Foundation, which supports scien- at a dinner on the Wannsee in mission. vation and fairness in the indus- tific, cultural, and religious under- Berthold Leibinger’s honor. r.m. trial arena. Yet Leibinger’s true takings across Germany. w.b.

4/01 American Academy Conversation 4/19 Who Controls the Capital? 4/25 Baden-Württemberg Seminar India and Its Futures Resistance to Integration of the American Academy in Berlin Sunil Khilnani, Starr Foundation Professor, Director of the South in Europe Inaugural Ceremony Asia Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University, and Fellow, Adam Posen, Senior Fellow, Peterson Richard C. Holbrooke, Chairman of the Academy Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President Institute for International Economics, Co-hosted by the Staatsministerium and Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and Alumnus of the Academy of Baden-Württemberg Introduction by Meera Shankar, Ambassador of the Republic of India Location: Neues Schloß, Stuttgart

April ﬁ

Breakpoint Dinner Roundtable Inaugural Richard von Weizsäcker Lecture Richard A. Clarke, Chairman, A View from the Eye of the Storm: Transatlantic Relations at a Crossroad: America and Good Harbor Consulting LLC, and Terror and Reason in the Europe in a Four-Speed World former chief counterterrorism Middle East James D. Wolfensohn, Chairman, Wolfensohn & Company LLC; adviser to the US National Security Haim Harari, Chairman of the Board, former President, World Bank Group; and Richard von Weizsäcker Distinguished Council; moderated by Otto Schily, Davidson Institute of Science Education, Visitor at the Academy former German Federal Minister 4/12 Weizmann Institute of Science Welcoming remarks by Horst Köhler, President of the Federal Republic of Germany 3/19 of the Interior 4/24 Location: Schloss Bellevue

The Berlin Journal 39 with the Heidelberg Center for ing, “The Academy’s cultural and Academic Ambassadors American Studies, which has intellectual importance has spread received generous support from well outside the borders of Berlin.” The Academy Inaugurates the Baden-Württemberg Ministry Chairman of the Academy’s board of Science, Research, and the Richard C. Holbrooke delivered the Baden-Württemberg Seminar Arts to coordinate guest events at the inaugural Baden-Württemberg various universities throughout lecture, entitled “The World Crisis: The Academy announces the philanthropic and intellectual the region. While the Academy An American Perspective,” in start of its Baden-Württemberg relationship that the Academy has has facilitated excursions beyond Stuttgart as the Journal went to Seminar, a new program that will built with Baden-Württemberg Berlin for its visitors in the past, press. Set against the springtime send fellows and Academy visitors through companies and institu- the arrangement marks the backdrop of the Neues Schloß, to partner institutions through- tions like the Bosch Foundation, first instance in which Academy the event was hosted by Minister out the German state in the spirit DaimlerChrysler, Holtzbrinck guests will be sent to Baden- President Günther Oettinger and of scholarly exchange. Initially Verlag, Literaturhaus Stuttgart, Württemberg in an official capac- introduced by Leibinger. The proposed by Berthold Leibinger, and the Schiller Museum. The ity. Academy Program Director meeting offered a fine precedent a Stuttgart-based industrialist project also embodies the col- Philipp Albers welcomes the suc- for a program that promises and the founder of a new fellow- laborative impulse at the core of cess of the initiative as evidence vibrant intellectual exchange for ship at the Hans Arnhold Center, the Academy’s mission; it will of the Academy’s broadening many years to come. the enterprise reflects the rich be undertaken in partnership prominence within Germany, not- w.b.

Berlin Prize, and George H.W. Michael Jennings, Princeton Sneak Preview Bush/Axel Springer Fellow University; Jerry Muller, Jeffrey Herf of the University Catholic University of America; The Fall 2007 Fellows of Maryland. Joining the Academy Kim Scheppele, Princeton as a Bosch Fellow in Public Policy University; Amity Shlaes, is Jason Johnston, direc- Bloomberg News; Richard The Academy looks forward University of Pennsylvania tor of the Program on Law, the Sieburth, New York University; to welcoming an outstanding musicologist Mark Butler Environment, and Economics at Ronald Steel, University group of writers and scholars to and art historian Sylvester the University of Pennsylvania of Southern California; and the Wannsee this fall. Novelist Ogbechie of the University Law School. David Wellbery, University of Gary Shteyngart will be of California, Santa Barbara Fellowship appointments Chicago. the Citigroup Fellow. Journalist will arrive in September as were made by an indepen- Serving on the art jury were Diane McWhorter, biographer DaimlerChrysler Fellows. Sidr a dent selection committee that Berlin-based photographer Robert Caro, and syndicated Stich, an independent scholar included Stephen Burbank, Thomas Demand, curators columnist Richard Reeves of architecture, has been named University of Pennsylvania Law Peter Galassi of the Museum will each take up Holtzbrinck Coca-Cola Fellow. School (chair); Joel Conarroe, of Modern Art, Brian Wallis Fellowships. Anne Carson, poet The fall’s historians are Guggenheim Foundation; of the International Center of and classicist of the University Emory University’s Elizabeth Michael Geyer, University Photography, and Sylvia Wolf of Michigan, will hold the Anna- Goodstein, recipient of the of Chicago; Dagmar Herzog, of the Whitney Museum of Maria Kellen Fellowship. German Transatlantic Program cuny Graduate Center; American Art. µ

4/25 The Great Transformation 5/08 Fritz Stern Lecture 5/14 Iraq, Afghanistan, and American in Evolution: A Story Written American-European Vistas. Military Transformation in Fossils and DNA With a Touch of Irony Stephen Biddle, Senior Fellow for Defense Neil Shubin, Professor and Chair, Wolf Lepenies, Permanent Fellow and Policy, Council on Foreign Relations, Department of Organismal Biology and Rector Emeritus, Wissenschaftskolleg and C.V. Starr Distinguished Visitor at Anatomy, University of Chicago, and zu Berlin the Academy Distinguished Visitor at the Academy

ﬁ May

American Academy Lecture Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold Lecture Internet Deliberation and Internet A Conversation with Remembrance – Responsibility – Engagement Markets (or Hayek vs. Habermas) Christopher Cox Sara Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Cass Sunstein, Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Chairman, US Securities and Memorial Museum; in conversation with Michael Service Professor of Jurisprudence, University of 4/26 Exchange Commission Naumann, former State Minister for Culture and Media Chicago, and Distinguished Visitor at the Academy; On the occasion of the exhibition Deadly Medicine in conversation with Lawrence Lessig, C. Wendell and 5/10 Location: Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, Stanford Law 5/21 School, and JPMorgan Fellow at the Academy

40 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 ble tenure in Germany’s Foreign The Communicator and the Diplomat Office. From 1996–2000 and 2003–2006, the native Berliner New Senior Counselors Richard Gaul and Bernhard von der Planitz orchestrated countless meetings of the world’s leaders on German soil, be it at a reception for Nelson Beginning in the 2006– and an equally demanding retire- nications of their fast-growing Mandela or in any number of soc- 2007 academic year longstanding ment counseling colleagues and institutions. “Every conversation cer stadiums during this past Academy friends Richard Gaul companies across Germany. To with Richard Gaul inspires a flood summer’s World Cup. In the art of and Bernhard von der Planitz say that his style is distinctive of insights and new ideas,” says bringing people together – and the have formalized their association is an understatement, and this Academy Director Gary Smith. combination of impeccable orga- with the institution by donating bold yet professional noncon- “He is an enormously gifted com- nization and spontaneity that such their time and expertise as Senior formity helped maintain the munications strategist and will a craft demands – the Academy Counselors. automaker’s flawless position in pursue any goal or idea in which has found its maestro in von der Global companies such as the public eye – and in the mar- he believes – like our project Planitz. bmw stand daily in the uncom- ket. Upon his retirement in 2006, on Atlantic partnerships in the r.m. Süddeutsche Zeitung – with relentless determination.” Bernhard von der Planitz, for- Call for Applications mer German Consul General in The American Academy will accept

Photograph by BMW AG PhotographBMWby New York and two-time Chief of applications this summer and fall Protocol in the Foreign Office, from scholars, writers, and profes- comes to the Academy not simply sionals who wish to engage in inde- as a savant of German-American pendent study in Berlin during the relations but also as a longtime 2008–2009 academic year. Most fel- friend of the late banker Stephen lowships are for a single academ- Kellen and the family of Hans and ic semester and include a monthly Ludmilla Arnhold, the institution’s stipend, round-trip airfare, par- primary benefactors. “Stephen tial board, and comfortable accom- was the most charming, the most modations at the Hans Arnhold generous, the wittiest, the warmest, Center. Only US citizens or perma- and the wisest man I ever met,” the nent residents are eligible to apply. statesman remembers. “He asked Applications are due in Berlin on promising light of media scrutiny, Der Tagesspiegel rightfully called me to follow the young Academy, Monday, October 15, 2007. After a and rarely does the communica- him “an exception” in the field and it was clear that it was becom- rigorous peer review process, Berlin tions chief of a major corpora- of communications and press, ing more than just a symbol of Prizes will be awarded by an inde- tion survive more than one or underscoring his staunch inde- friendship between Germany and pendent selection committee and two of its ceos. Richard Gaul pendence. Little wonder that the the US; it was becoming a beacon announced in the spring of 2008. For shaped bmw’s public image dur- Federation of German Industries of intellectual life in the German further information on the fellowship ing the tenure of fiveceo s over and the Academy courted the capital.” Von der Planitz can draw program, please visit the Academy’s 24 years, leaving Bavaria only maven of corporate media to upon some thirty years of diplo- website (www.americanacademy.de). recently for a villa in Potsdam mentor the change and commu- matic expertise, including his dou-

5/22 Laws of Fear. Beyond the 6/05 President Reagan’s “Tear 6/07 American Academy 6/18 Stephen Kellen Lecture Precautionary Principle Down This Wall” Speech Artist Talk Whose Culture Is It: Museums Cass Sunstein, Karl N. Llewellyn Twenty Years Later Brice Marden, Artist and the Collecting of Distinguished Service Professor George P. Schultz, former Secretary of State, Antiquities of Jurisprudence, University of Secretary of Labor, and Secretary of the Philippe de Montebello, Director, Chicago, and Distinguished Visitor Treasury; and Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York at the Academy Distinguished Fellow, Hoover Institution

June

Narratives of American Art – The US Elections: Who Will American Academy Dialogue American Academy Conference Keynote Speech Win, Who Will Lose, and Why Education and the Future of Dialogue When Was Modern Art? Richard Cohen, Columnist, the Classical Music Lou Reed, Singer and Songwriter; Hans Belting, Art Historian and Washington Post, and Distinguished Lewis Kaplan, Professor for Violin and in conversation with Norman Director, International Research 6/06 Visitor at the Academy Chamber Music, The Juilliard School; Pearlstine, Senior Advisor, The 5/24 Center for Cultural Studies, Vienna and Christhard Gössling, Rector, Carlyle Group, and President of Hochschule für Musik “Hanns 6/27 the Academy 6/10 Eisler” Berlin

The Berlin Journal 41 LIFE & LETTERS at the Hans Arnhold Center

biography” of Buczacz, a project Wai-Yee Li The Spring 2007 Fellows he hopes will uncover mysteries If there is one characteristic that left unsolved by earlier historians. sets Coca-Cola Fellow Wai-Yee Profiles in Scholarship Transcending the oversimplified Li apart from her peers at the designations of victim and per- Academy, it is the remarkable tem- petrator, bystander and collabora- poral range of her expertise; her cal, cultural, and symbolic space, tor, he will illuminate how social scholarship on Chinese culture Humanities he will present the city as many dynamics within a local space spans two millennia, from the David Barclay historians have the gdr: as a contribute to humanity’s most fourth century bce right up to the In commencing his ambitious socio-political entity in its own self-destructive act. twentieth century. One need look history, West Berlin, 1948–1994, right. no further than Li’s self-described George H. Bush/Axel Springer Susanna Elm “side project” to appreciate the Fellow David Barclay plunges Omer Bartov In Western culture today the tat- quiet tenacity with which she into what has long been a glar- During his Academy residence too functions as an expression approaches her field. She is in the ing historiographical void. JPMorgan Fellow Omer Bartov of individual freedom. In the final stages of an English trans- Overshadowed by the dramatic is setting his scholarly sights on late Roman Empire it bore just lation of the Mandarin text Zuo implosion of the German the small Eastern Galician town the opposite meaning, under- Zhuan, a several-thousand-page, Democratic Republic and the of Buczacz, compiling a two-hun- stood universally as a significa- fourth-century bce chronicle subsequent opening of gdr dred-year history of interethnic tion of slave status. Ellen Maria of Chinese history between 722 archives, an all-encompassing relations there. Now part of west- Gorrissen Fellow Susanna Elm, a and 468 bce. In its crucial and record of West Berlin – from the ern Ukraine, the town harbored professor of history and chair of monumental scope, the work is city’s 1948 division to the 1994 a diverse spectrum of Ukranians, the graduate program in ancient comparable to tomes like Livy’s departure of the Allies – has Poles, and Jews, the latter group Mediterranean history and benchmark history of the Roman yet to be put to paper. Barclay’s comprising its ethnic and reli- archaeology at the University of empire Ab Urba Condita. A pro- catalogue of accomplishments gious majority by the eighteenth California, Berkeley, has pursued fessor of Chinese Literature at more than qualifies him for the century. The multiethnic face of myriad scholarly projects during Harvard University, Li arrives on task. Chair of the history depart- the town, however, was forever her enterprising career, produc- the Wannsee to open a new chap- ment at Kalamazoo College and altered when Nazi murder squads, ing a number of texts on the ter in her studies, zeroing in on director of the German Studies assisted by Ukrainian nationalists, Christianization of ancient soci- the tortuous mid-sixteenth centu- Association, Barclay has dedicated began the virtually unmitigated eties along with a lauded body of ry, as the Qing Dynasty conquered nearly all of his scholarly energy extermination of the local Jewish work on ancient medicine. Yet the Ming. Directing her practiced to the study of Berlin, its sur- population in 1941. Bartov, John she has continually found herself powers upon the literature of the roundings, and the Prussian state P. Birkelund Professor at Brown drawn back to the role of bodily period, she will examine the wide- of which it was first named capital. University, is one of the world’s stigmata in the late antique spread renegotiations of autono- He has produced pivotal portraits leading scholars of genocide. He world, and it is this interest that my, politics, and sex engendered of some of the most meaningful argues that, while historians’ will drive her project at the Hans by the traumatic transition from names in German history, among focus upon state-level systems Arnhold Center. Using the ico- one hegemonic political power to them Frederick William IV and, of genocide has greatly enriched nography of slavery as a point the next. most recently, the vivacious mayor our understanding of the tragic of departure, the German-born of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter. Now phenomenon, it has done little to historian will undertake a study Michael Taussig Barclay will chart the idiosyncra- unearth the social fabric of the of the interrelated conceptions “If Hunter S. Thompson had been sies of the isolated territory Reuter localities that played theater to of bondage, pain, and divine trained by Boas in anthropology, once served, examining every- mass murder. In addition to work devotion during the twilight of Engels in economics, and Arendt thing from its unique city-state on his book on holocaust remem- the Roman period and the rise in philosophy, he might write political structure and its pen- brance in the Galician region, of Christianity. Ultimately she something like [Michael] Taussig,” chant for grassroots democracy to Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish hopes to pen a work that will cast remarked one breathless critic its figurative functions in the eyes Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, light on the theological implica- after reading My Cocaine Museum, of contemporaneous Americans. Bartov has begun an intimate tions of Christianity’s emergence Taussig’s book on Colombia’s Exploring West Berlin as a politi- and multiperspectival “collective within a slave culture. poor communities and the ines-

42 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 capable presence of its prime reporting achievements in the herald the web as a revolutionary He has since written for many cash crop. Routinely braiding history of the Washington Post,” platform with vast creative poten- esteemed American publications, analytical theorizing with rich the piece earned her a Pulitzer tial. In the face of intensifying including the New York Review of narrative storytelling, cultural Prize and compelled Washington efforts to privatize intellectual Books, Harper’s, the Nation, and anthropologist Michael Taussig officials to initiate reforms. More property online, he has created the Atlantic Monthly. Uniting his considers the unorthodox form recently, Boo has been exploring a coup of his own: an alternative, writing is an unwavering interest of his writing to be inseparable the global redistribution of labor, less restrictive copyright known in American intelligence opera- from its meaning. Yet the excep- looking particularly at the state- to millions as CC, or Creative tions, a focus that is visible across tional character of the Columbia supported outsourcing of jobs. In Commons. Now, in his second his prodigious list of book publi- University professor’s work is this pursuit the New Yorker writer semester of a year-long Academy cations, including The Man Who not limited to its style; his body and MacArthur Prize recipient residence, the JPMorgan Fellow Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and of writing is widely believed to has spent the past four years turns instead to fiction, meditat- the CIA (1979), Heisenberg’s War: include some of the most seminal immersed in three economies in ing on collective responsibility The Secret History of the German texts of modern-day anthropology. flux: those of South Boston, the in cases of abuse. His novel will Bomb (1993), and Intelligence Dedicating much of his adult life Texas-Mexico border region, and contest the prevalent societal prac- Wars: American Secret History to fieldwork in South America, Chemnai, India. Touching down tice of relegating guilt to a single, from Hitler to Al-Qaeda (2002). Taussig’s time there has inspired in Germany, she now expands often pathological perpetrator During April and May at the a torrent of innovative writing on her study to include a country when “the deepest transgression Academy, Powers takes a new tack a range of topics – from shaman- deeply stamped by the increas- is committed by the observer of on the topic, constructing a narra- ism to fetishism, from the com- mercialization of agriculture to the construction of terror. During his stint as Siemens Fellow at the Academy, he continues work PhotographHansGlave by on a book-length project called What is the Color of the Sacred? Probing the theory of Goethe and Benjamin, the fiction of Proust and Borroughs, and the history of the monolithic German manufacturer of artificial color, IG Farben, Taussig will reflect on the impacts of color upon representation, the body, and language Julie Mehretu, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Gary Smith in the Western world.

Law and Society ingly globalized economic order. a crime who has done nothing tive account of the circumstances Considering both political and to halt its continuation.” Lessig surrounding the 1877 killing of Katherine Boo corporate leaders’ efforts to com- posits that broadening account- Oglala-Sioux chief Crazy Horse. Katherine Boo has explained her pete globally as well as their effect ability from the individual abuser Inquiring into both the secret journalistic technique as a pro- on domestic citizenry, Boo hopes to the institutions often complicit maneuvers of the US government cess in which she makes herself to correct the ideological bent in such actions will more effec- and the perspective of the Native invisible, fading into the back- that she views as rampant among tively guard society against these American leaders with whom it ground in order to record the lives today’s reporting on globalization. crimes; while predicting and was in constant contact, Powers around her more perceptively. In averting the actions of an indi- is composing a timely study of the world of American journal- Lawrence Lessig vidual abuser is nearly impossible, the character of clandestine ism, however, this semester’s Discussing his latest undertak- building an environment intoler- American governmental practice Haniel Fellow has been anything ing in Berlin – a novel – Lawrence ant to such wrongdoing is fully in the face of foreign defiance to but transparent. Renowned for Lessig says, “You can get under achievable. the national interest. her nuanced portraits of life on one’s skin far more effectively by the margins of American society, telling a story than by presenting Thomas Powers Arts and Boo’s narrative-style reporting a lecture.” That may be so, but the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow has garnered a string of awards. Stanford University law profes- Thomas Powers holds a promi- Belles Lettres Her 1990 series “Invisible sor has also made some sizable nent place in American letters. Lives, Invisible Deaths” on the waves with his scholarly lectures In 1971 the historian and jour- Jonathan Safran Foer deplorable treatment of mentally and legal arguments. One of the nalist won the Pulitzer Prize for It is no surprise that conversa- retarded adults in Washington, world’s preeminent voices in national reporting for his writ- tions about Holtzbrinck Fellow DC group homes exemplifies copyright and internet law, Lessig ing on Diana Oughton, a found- Jonathan Safran Foer still the wide-reaching power of her has composed a series of ground- ing member of the radical leftist often return to his first novel. work. Called “one of the greatest breaking briefs and books that organization the Weatherman. Everything is Illuminated elec-

The Berlin Journal 43 trified the American literary Nicole Krauss cated in Dakar and Rhode Island, resist analysis.” The impossibility scene in 2002, winning among “What I do at the outset of writing the internationally renowned of summing up Laura Owens’s several other honors the Los a novel,” says Holtzbrinck Fellow artist now finds her home in New work, however, has not stunted Angeles Times Book of the Year Nicole Krauss, “is question if this York. It is then perhaps fitting widespread admiration for the Award, prompting translations enigmatic form can truly change that her paintings and drawings sheer beauty of her composi- into 29 languages, and inspir- anything. I am still not entirely reflect the ever more interrelated tions. At the age of 32, she was the ing a popular feature film. Yet, convinced.” Though she raises world of the twenty-first century, youngest artist ever to have a solo despite its impressive impact, the the question again in embarking one in which the temporal and exhibition at the reputable moca. book is just one of many diverse on her third novel at the Hans spatial limitations of the past fall Constantly oscillating between achievements from this dynamic Arnhold Center, her readers clearly away. Intrigued by the “multifac- figuration and abstraction, the talent. Before Everything had do not share her skepticism. A eted layers of place, space, and highly versatile Los Angeles graced a shelf, Foer had already look at her work’s critical recep- time that impact the formation of resident applies the mediums of logged successes in various tion proves that her writing is one a personal and communal identi- paint, textile, and embroidery to literary forms, including short of today’s most compelling argu- ty,” Mehretu uses elaborate draw- large canvases. Dubbed “at once stories published in the New ments for the power of the nov- ing and painting techniques to delicate and daring,” her work in Yorker, the Paris Review, and elistic form. Her first book,Man juxtapose human structures and many cases depicts people, flora, Conjunctions and a bestselling Walks into a Room, a story of an historical symbols with sweeping or fauna, while in other instances anthology of writing inspired amnesiac man who finds himself abstract forms. Citing a gamut of it explores non-representational by artist Joseph Cornell called unable to reconcile his fractured aesthetic inspirations, from graf- geometric elements. fiti-style calligraphy and Japanese comics to the Renaissance engrav- Geoffrey Wolff ings of Albrecht Dürer, she cre- “I am drawn to situations where ates stunning multidimensional people’s wills are systemati-

PhotographBerlin4Funby canvases that explode the possi- cally thwarted by an institution bility of a singular perspective or of some kind,” says this spring’s narrative. Interweaving recogniz- inaugural Berthold Leibinger able representations of the world Fellow, writer Geoffrey Wolff. It with more abstruse markings, her would seem that this attraction compositions speak simultane- has roots in personal experience; ously to the quotidian and the his celebrated 1979 memoir The elusive, mirroring the intercon- Duke of Deception, a finalist for nected and complex character of the Pulitzer Prize, describes his the globalized epoch. Mehretu, tempestuous childhood under a MacArthur Fellowship win- a father at once loving and abu- Geoffrey Wolff and Richard C. Holbrooke ner, has enjoyed solo exhibitions sive, an experience he has called at the Walker Art Center, the a “dictatorship.” For his Academy A Convergence of Birds. Since memory with the life he daily lives, Louisiana Museum in Denmark, undertaking, a novel, the retired publishing his acclaimed sec- was named Book of the Year by and the Hannover Kunstverein, University of California, Irvine ond novel Extremely Loud and the Los Angeles Times in 2002. Her among others. The Deutsche professor turns his attention to Incredibly Close, Foer has broad- second novel, The History of Love, Guggenheim in Berlin will pres- an authoritarian force endured ened his engagement with other was shortlisted for the prestigious ent her work in fall 2009. by an entire nation: the Stasi. The artistic mediums, writing a prose Orange Prize and was heralded by notorious intelligence organiza- poem for a book of architectural the Spectator as “an incandescent Laura Owens tion of the German Democratic photography and – through the meditation on how the testament The painting and drawing of Republic infiltrated all aspects mediation of the Academy – com- of writing to love might be the only Guna S. Mundheim Fellow Laura of daily life, routinely employing posing an opera libretto com- possible salvation for the bruised Owens has proved a conundrum civilians to spy on their peers – be missioned by the Deutsche lot of mankind.” First published as for art critics; her subject matter, they coworkers, friends, or family Staatsoper. In Berlin Foer will a poet in journals like Ploughshares, technique, and influences seem members – and ultimately amass- stay true to his adventurous spir- Double Take, and the Paris Review, in a perpetual state of change, ing files on a third of the country’s it, foraying into documentary- Krauss’s prose maintains a grace while the enigmatic Untitled she population. Fascinated by the psy- style non-fiction to craft a book and precision unexpected in the attaches to each of her pieces chological poignancy of existence that will interrogate the produc- pages of fiction, even as it provides offers no interpretive assistance. in a world where the borders of tion and consumption of meat in luminous insights into the human “[Laura] Owens’s paintings are the private sphere have collapsed, the United States. He will also condition. challenging and difficult,” writes suspicious angst is the status pursue a modern reconstruction Thomas Lawson, curator at the quo, and even naive teenage rebel- of the traditional Passover text, Julie Mehretu Museum of Contemporary Art lion can prove dangerous, Wolff the Haggadah, collaborating The biography of Guna S. in Los Angeles. “They are each will people his story with figures with other writers in the hope of Mundheim Fellow Julie Mehretu quite particular, not conforming struggling to persist amidst a cul- creating a more accessible work tells a story of transitions; born in to any notion of serial production ture of surveillance. for contemporary readers. Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, edu- of thematic development. They w.b.

44 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Henri Cole Ann Harleman Hiroshi Motomura Alumni Blackbird and Wolf: Poems by Thoreau’s Laundry Forced Migration: Law and Policy Henri Cole Southern Methodist University (co-edited) Farrar, Straus and Giroux Press Thomas West Books (March 2007) (February 2007) (March 2007)

Recent Releases Wendy Lesser Dennis Ross Room for Doubt Statecraft: And How to Restore Andrew Bacevich Pantheon America’s Standing in the World The Long War: A New History of (January 2007) Farrar, Straus and Giroux U.S. National Security Policy Since (June 2007) World War II Columbia University Press (May 2007)

Benjamin Barber Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole Gerald Feldman W.W. Norton Österreichische Banken und (March 2007) Sparkassen im Nationalsozialismus Co-authored with Oliver Rathkolb and Theodor Venus Beck C.H. Beck Evonne Levy (November 2006) Bernini’s Biographies: Critical John Philip Santos Essays Songs Older Than Any Caroline Fohlin (co-edited) Known Singer Finance Capitalism and Germany’s Penn State University Press Wings Press Rise to Industrial Power: Corporate (January 2007) (April 2007) Finance, Governance and Performance from the 1840s to the James Mann Amity Shlaes Present The China Fantasy: How Our The Forgotten Man: A New History Caroline Bynum Cambridge University Press Leaders Explain Away Chinese of the Great Depression Wonderful Blood: Theology and (January 2007) Repression HarperCollins Practice in Late Medieval Northern Viking (June 2007) Germany and Beyond Thomas Geoghegan (February 2007) University of Pennsylvania Press See You in Court: How the Right Stephen Szabo (December 2006) Made America a Lawsuit Nation W.J.T. Mitchell The Strategic Triangle: France, New Press The Late Derrida Germany, and the United States in (June 2007) (co-edited) the Shaping of the New Europe University of Chicago Press (co-edited) (April 2007) Johns Hopkins University Press (January 2007) Susanna Moore The Big Girls Christopher Wood Knopf William Powell Frith: A Painter and (May 2007) his World Sutton Publishing (January 2007)

Sander Gilman Race in Contemporary Medicine Routledge (November 2006)

The Berlin Journal 45 literature.” Your writing has been the last word? It didn’t seem right The Trouble with Writing compared to that of Philip Roth, that one should and not the other. A Conversation with Nicole Krauss I.B. Singer, and Bruno Schulz. Do Their voices were counterpoints you welcome or resent these com- to each other, and I felt they Early this spring Felicitas a single sentence that presses parisons? needed somehow to merge in the von Lovenberg of the Frankfurter into language this thing you had Krauss It would be nice not ever end. So I had their voices alternate Allgemeine Zeitung held a public always sensed but couldn’t articu- to be part of any group, but criti- pages – sometimes just a para- conversation with writer Nicole late. cism probably wouldn’t exist if graph each, sometimes just a line Krauss at the Hans Arnhold One Hundred Years of Solitude that were the case. So I suppose or two. It made both narrative and Center. The current Holtzbrinck was assigned in one of my reading if I have to be part of any group formal, almost musical, sense. Fellow is the author of Man Walks classes. I’m not sure that I fully then I should be part of the one I into a Room and, most recently, understood it, but I loved the book. can’t escape, which is being a Jew. Lovenberg You recently wrote a The History of Love. At one point my teacher asked if Setting out, I had little interest in series of biweekly columns for the anyone knew what the book was being a Jewish writer or in paying FAZ. In your final column you really about – of course everyone my respect to my origins. If writ- mention certain misunderstand- had a different idea. “Actually, ing is a means of exercising one’s ings you had about life as a writer. this book is about nostalgia,” he freedom, it also can (and should) How is being a writer different said and got a roomful of blank be an act of rebellion, of opposi- from what you had imagined? PhotographHansGlave by looks. Nostalgia, I suppose, isn’t tion, of irreverence. But my first Krauss I idolized writers when I the most common feeling at 14. novel demonstrated to me that my was younger. I had so many ideas The teacher went on to describe Jewishness was inextricable from about what such a life would be what nostalgia was, and it was a all of my other material, and, this like. But it turns out that writing is, kind of revelation to me. Even as a being so, I ought to try to define in some ways, really dreadful work. child I was aware of some lost past it myself. Since the destruction of What is the trouble with writ- that had once existed and to which the Second Temple and the begin- ing? To begin with, there is the I couldn’t ever go back. ning of the Diaspora, Judaism war it wages against one’s confi- Felicitas von Lovenberg When did could no longer rely on exterior, dence and sense of purpose. The you know that you wanted to be a Lovenberg The History of Love is political conditions and had to ever-widening ditch that being writer? dedicated to your grandparents. be internalized. Being such, it alone and in constant conversation Nicole Krauss I started to write Do you believe that certain emo- became quite malleable. There with one’s imagination seems to as a teenager, which is probably tions can be inherited through may be as many kinds of Judaism dig between oneself and others. when most writers begin. It is a generations? as there are Jews. In retrospect The shrunken idea of joy resulting time in your life when suddenly Krauss Obviously children are I think The History of Love was, in an obsession with turning out it occurs to you that you have a impressed indelibly with the partly, my attempt to describe my one good sentence. The fear that, tremendous amount to say, and moods of their families; if you own version. in entertaining the many possibil- you don’t yet have the means of grow up in a house in which one ities presented by life, one’s own making yourself understood. The of your parents is sad, you feel Lovenberg The History of Love life is languishing unused on the burden of not being understood that sadness, and you are formed looks slightly unusual, with some- shelf. The risk of public humilia- begins to weigh on you more and by it in any number of ways. But times only one sentence on a page. tion. The risk of slipping from the more. writing, for me, is not a pas- Why did you experiment with the common human rank of being sive act – perhaps it’s not even a form of the novel? only somewhat misunderstood to Lovenberg At the age of 14 you responsive act. Instead, I see it as Krauss I don’t think of it as experi- being totally and utterly misun- read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Was an exercise of my freedom. It’s an mentation. The only time I played derstood. But despite everything that a decisive moment for you? invention, not a retelling of some- with the form was when I felt I I still think it is compensation for Krauss Everyone has probably thing I inherited. It’s a willful act had no other choice; the narrative the trouble of existing. And any- had the experience of suddenly of imagination. demanded it. The book is divided way, at this point I don’t think I coming upon a book that explains emotionally equally between two have any other choice. I’m stuck yourself to you better than you Lovenberg Your work is often main characters, and their voices with it now, aren’t I, so I better were able to. Sometimes it is just categorized as “young Jewish alternate. Who was going to have make the best of it. µ

46 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Photograph by Lutz Jürgen SchmidtJürgenPhotographLutz by

endearingly innocent – if utterly Bob is the boss. The same Bob Robert De Niro in Berlin powerless – in the process. After whose performances in films The Discrete Charm of a Cinematic Icon several futile minutes he can like Taxi Driver were so singular only apologize repeatedly that that his directors could only mar- Even the famously reticent his white T-shirt peeks out of he is “not much of a talker.” But vel afterward at how their films actor and director Robert De Niro the collar of his sweater. Volker who cares! Bob speaks even when had been transformed by his could not resist the persuasive Schlöndorff sips from his mineral silent, and that is the very secret presence. powers of his friend Richard water. A beautiful Indian woman of his iconic success. From the “To prepare Matt for his scene C. Holbrooke, finding himself with large golden earrings and a greatest living actor in the world, with Joe Pesci, I told him that at the Hans Arnhold Center on furrowed brow stands next to a a wrinkle of the brow or a scratch he should imagine he was about a Sunday morning during the dejected Bruno Ganz, while Otto of the legendary nose suffices. to talk to a cockroach. And to Berlinale film festival. Norman Schily, together with wife and His presence is distinctively De Joe I said, he was about to talk Ohler chronicled the conver- bodyguards, makes his way to Niro, at once whimsical and bru- to a piece of shit.” Bob grins. sation with Academy Trustee the front. It is about to take place. tal. He looks around the room Lighthearted laughter fills the and German director Volker Everyone is eager to experience attentively, explaining casually room. Schlöndorff nods happily Schlöndorff for Die Zeit. what the handwritten invitations that he often let the cameras roll and finds a concluding thought: promised – an unforgettable the full 11 minutes during the “Directing is like making love. Snow falls softly on fir trees exchange of cinematic expertise. filming of his espionage epicThe You never know exactly how in front of the Wannsee villa. Volker Schlöndorff, desig- Good Shepherd. The rolls of film, anyone else does it.” Without say- Authorities are everywhere. Police, nated to lead the discussion, relative to the $120 million in ing much or disclosing even the private security, walkie-talkies, takes the second armchair. He total production costs, were not smallest personal secret on this armored cars, a helicopter in a finally enters in a brown blazer. all that expensive. So he could divinely snow-covered morning, pearly sky. Women gloriously The chatter immediately stops. afford to let the amiable Matt Bob nonetheless afforded the coiffed for the early Sunday morn- For a moment the audience sits Damon repeat the same sentence rapt audience a little insight. ing. The street blocked off to in admiring silence. Then sud- thirty times until it finally sound- traffic. A series of checkpoints. den applause, and Bob, as he ed just right. Matt generally had By Norman Ohler Then the luminous lobby of the is known to friends and fans, an easy go of it, Bob explains and Die Zeit American Academy, beyond the smiles and sits down in his grins. “I called him and made it February 15, 2007 French doors the majestic lake. leather chair. clear that he basically didn’t need Translated by A leather armchair for him. The Now it can begin. The to do anything. I had the film in Darin Christensen snow, however, delays the arrival question on everyone’s mind: my head. Come to the set, get in of the film idol by twenty min- what makes Bob so special? front of the cameras, and say his utes. Nonetheless, a first high- Schlöndorff tries his damned- lines.” Matt Damon blushes a light. Matt Damon has arrived; est to expose the secret, and is bit but smiles graciously. Clearly,

The Berlin Journal 47 Lovins Yes, presumably. We have advised many companies – above all in heavy industry – and have determined that 40 to 60 percent PhotographJudyHillby of energy costs can be saved with a return on initial investment in two to three years. My house 6,500 feet up in the Rocky Mountains is so well insulated that we do not need a heating system – and that’s in spite of the fact that we can have frost every day of the year.

Tagesspiegel What can one do regarding traffic? Lovins We can build far lighter cars with existing technologies. The Rocky Mountain Institute built a van with a body of modern carbon fiber and ultralight steel that consumes about 1.7 gallons notorious market barriers that of gas every 100 miles. As a diesel Pioneering Energy Efficiency obstruct this from happening. it uses even less, and as a hybrid Amory Lovins Brings Solutions to Berlin about half of a gallon. The hybrid Tagesspiegel One market failure variation costs about $2,500 more lies in energy monopolies like than a normal car; otherwise Amory Lovins, founder of fuel than to sell it. The discussion those in Germany, where four it does not differ in price from the energy conservation think should revolve around winnings, large companies divvy up the elec- other automobiles in this category. tank Rocky Mountain Institute jobs, and competitive advantages. tricity market among themselves These new materials are harder and one of the world’s leading Our energy efficiency does not and earn their money by selling as than steel and even safer than voices on energy reform, spent a need to increase drastically to pro- much electricity as possible. those that came before. busy week in the German capi- tect the environment. Economic Lovins The German structure is tal as a Distinguished Visitor at theory assumes that energy pro- very anticompetitive. This problem Tagesspiegel So Germans could the Academy. He found time to ductivity increases about 1 percent has been solved in some American continue building big cars and still speak with Dagmar Dehmer of every year. Were it 2 percent, we states through new regulations. stay true to the EU’s guidelines for Der Tagesspiegel. could stabilize carbon-dioxide There the energy companies profit carbon-dioxide output? emissions; were it 3 percent, the by assisting customers in saving Lovins Right. German engineers Tagesspiegel What can we do to climate would stabilize itself. energy. That changes their behav- are so proficient that I am convinced combat climate change? ior dramatically and means that they can again be world class. The Amory Lovins The majority of Tagesspiegel Is that possible? household electricity costs are corporations, however, must set greenhouse gas emissions world- Lovins The US has achieved that constantly going down. In the US, standards and view frugal consump- wide originate from the com- 3 percent for many years without as in Germany, three-quarters of tion as an important mission. bustion of oil in traffic – about even trying. We certainly were electricity costs could be avoided 42 percent – and the production not especially efficient when we through energy-saving techniques Tagesspiegel What makes cars so of electricity – about 40 percent. began, but since then interna from the 1980s. inefficient? If we could massively save energy tional disparities have dimin- Lovins Their weight, above all. during these processes, we would ished. For more than twenty years Tagesspiegel What are these tech- Seven-eighths of the energy used have the bulk of the climate prob- China has annually increased niques? is actually lost on the way from the lem under control. its energy productivity by more Lovins There are a few thousand. tank to the tires. It has taken us 120 than 5 percent. Many companies For example, three-fifths of elec- years of intensive engineering since Tagesspiegel What do you see as achieve 8 to 10 percent per year tric energy is used for motors, the invention of the automobile to concrete solutions? and earn good money doing so. and there are 35 possible ways to get to this point, but we could be ten Lovins A great deal of the political reduce engine consumption, in times better. Large cars can also be discussion about the climate suf- Tagesspiegel Then why is this not part through minimal technical light. Even a luxury-class Mercedes fers from a confusion of symbols. done everywhere? changes. Often only three improve- could get 74 miles to the gallon. Plus and minus signs are getting Lovins One problem is the domi- ments are applied because that mixed up. Politicians discuss costs, nance of economists who believe alone saves enormous costs. By Dagmar Dehmer losses, and trade-offs, but every that the markets are functioning Der Tagesspiegel practical person knows that this is perfectly if the prices are right. Tagesspiegel Are engineers con- February 5, 2007 not the case. It is cheaper to save There are, however, at least sixty centrating on the wrong things? Translated by Will Byrne

48 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Today, large companies hold the terms “all rights reserved” to copyrights for almost all creative their work but rather “some rights products: books, photos, videos, reserved.” Over 140 million of pieces of music. In the real world these CC-licenses have already we can pass books along at will, been assigned, and even the bbc

PhotographAnnetteHornischerby and we can hum songs from the has made the idea its own. It charts wherever we like. On the wants to offer an openly acces- internet none of this works – if sible archive of programs on the you follow the rules. You may not net, from which users can down- legally alter music by reworking load programs and further utilize the original and then putting them – provided they are not used it back on the web. And you for commercial aims and the bbc can’t remix a press conference is named as the originator. One between George W. Bush and could imagine similar practice at Tony Blair with a tearjerker pop the German broadcasting com- ballad – so that they avow their pany zdf. Endless Love – because the dig- Lessig’s detractors consider ital images, texts, and sounds in his approach “insane.” He is question are all copyrighted. treated like the Antichrist or a And yet such copyright communist, the professor asserts. infringement takes place con- To Lessig, dressed fully in black, stantly on popular internet sites with frameless glasses and a like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, round, serious face, the personal and Wikipedia, which are called conversation seems almost a bit Social Community Websites. unpleasant. He pursues his quest Their users are termed “pirates” with verve, however; his lecture by businesses; others call this is like a performance, the rap of new possibility of user-created an intellectual on a mission. content a revolution. Then again, “I am a lawyer with a guilty media corporations can see it conscience,” proclaims Lessig, this way, too. Rupert Murdoch whom everyone calls Larry. In paid $600 million for MySpace, 1993 he discovered cyberspace, and Google just bought YouTube and in 1998 he worked as a neu- for $1.6 billion. tral “special master” to the judge Lessig considers the operative on a case that the US Justice rules and regulations dealing Department brought against with intellectual property to be Microsoft, accusing it of monopo- Intellectual Property 2.0 obsolete. It is naturally illegal to listic practice. The software Lawrence Lessig Defends Creativity in the Age pull entire films and albums off giant was successful in remov- the net, but it also doesn’t make ing Lessig from the proceedings, of Cyberspace sense to prohibit users from play- making him all the more famous. ing creatively with this content In another case, Lessig represent- “Are you lawyers?” the woman a professor of law at Stanford and fashioning something new. ed a client who filed suit against at the entrance of the Academy University and a year-long fel- Lessig’s last book, Free Culture, for the extension of copyrights past asks a small group that has just low at the American Academy example, can be freely accessed the promised 75 years after publi- arrived. “No, do we look like in Berlin. The scholar is not on his website. “Today no one can cation. He lost. we are?” counters a young man merely preparing elite students do with Disney what Disney did Despite these experiences, from the bunch, a bit shocked. for well-paid jobs in economics; with the Brothers Grimm,” says Lessig hopes that the ethics of Another adds that he “deals Lessig is also one of the foremost Lessig, and thus he propagates a sharing practiced on websites with the internet,” like many authorities on creative property new culture of sharing and par- like YouTube or MySpace of the guests striding through on the internet. He leads a cam- ticipation. Lessig calls his deeply will rub off on corporations. the ample rooms of the Berlin paign that has indeed attracted democratic culture “Read-Write.” “Businesses just have to recognize villa this evening. Their name much sympathy in the internet At the moment, a “Read-Only” the potential of this approach.” tags boast institutions like “New scene. The magazine Scientific culture – one dominated by a But, “There are few signs that Media Network” or “Creative American recently named ubiquitous copyright – threatens this will happen.” Commons”; the occupation of him one of America’s “Top 50 the possibility of this idea. A few one guest reads simply “Blogger.” Visionaries.” But Lessig’s strug- years ago Lessig brought the ini- By Christian Meier The question, however, was gle – for a universally recognized tiative Creative Commons (CC) to Die Welt am Sonntag fully justified. The speaker this alternative copyright for the web life. The concept allows creators October 22, 2006 evening, Lawrence Lessig, is – seems almost hopeless. all over the world to apply not Translated by Will Byrne

The Berlin Journal 49 Staring Down Stereotypes Writing about Poverty in America by Katherine Boo

April Collins, 19, Springfield, Missouri Photographs by Robin Bowman, from * * * It’s Complicated: The American Teenager, forthcoming in fall 2007 from Umbrage

50 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 As much as I’d like to wrap my work incomes of less than $10,000 increased by book she sometimes writes poems about her in a protective skin of social purpose, most 26 percent. life. “Go home, be ashamed / food stamps of the people I write about sense, correctly, I am wary of the phrase “peculiarly and Medicaid / Poor slang hustlas / we are that journalism about poverty can be a American,” especially in an era when cul- all each others customers.” I invoke that morally dodgy business. A woman named ture is our primary export. However, when sense of stigma not because it is poignant, Ochame Riley, a resident of New Orleans I consider the data on poverty and social but because in some cases it is dispositive. whom I got to know in an evacuation shelter mobility against the fact that low-income Many poor people seem to be making the after Hurricane Katrina, put it to me baldly: people have, through the media, a vivid not-illogical calculation that it is better to “Wait, so you take our stories and put them sense of the contours of affluence, I do find struggle privately than to claim overt mem- in a magazine that rich people bership in a despised group. In read, and you get paid and we an age of frenetic, post-welfare don’t? That’s some backward-ass improvisation, the poor are hid- bluffiness, if you ask me.” den not only from the wealthy, In my work I’m interested in as is regularly and rather paradoxes and in the particular tediously pointed out. They are ways in which social and political also hidden, willfully so, from imperatives collide. The central each other. paradox of poverty in the US today is that it is statistically consistent I use the narrative form and brazenly volatile at once. In – what is called literary nonfic the last thirty years GDP almost tion – to convey the circum- tripled, and the gap between the stances of the people I inter- rich and the poor became a chasm, view. It’s a form I employ with but the poverty rate held steady ambivalence, both because at around 12 to 13 percent of the storytelling often comes at population. European critical the cost of analysis and also attention typically centers on the because stories themselves are entrenched poor – the so-called artificial, reducing as they do permanent underclass – but the the motley mess of real life into way most Americans experience something linear. But there poverty at the start of the twenty- are two reasons I use narra- first century is madly dynamic. tive. One, I believe the voices Nearly 35 percent of people who and experiences of low-income qualify as poor in any given year people are worthy of serious no longer do so the following consideration; two, the subjects year, as their slots in the territory I want to write about are things below the poverty line are claimed very few people want to read. by individuals whose fortunes Tiffany Vance, 16; husband Jason Vance, 23 Many of my subjects are in fact are declining. In the last decade the manu- Wharncliffe, West Virginia one subject: the cracks in the American facturing sector and the social safety net * * * infrastructure of opportunity. And although contracted simultaneously, and American journalism is sometimes called a free mar- family life entered an era of what I believe something striking. When I situate myself ketplace of ideas, mine is a subject that that is unprecedented viscissitude. By some esti- in a high-rise housing project, or a trailer market decreasingly bears. Too much cogni- mates, family incomes are now four to five park on the Texas-Mexico border, or some tive dissonance with the Chanel ads, people times more unstable than they were dur- other community seemingly on the receiv- tell me. ing the 1970s, and something a young man ing end of American class prerogatives, In the US there have been, speaking named Norberto said to me recently seems I find fewer and fewer people inclined to crudely, two main types of narrative writ- to typify the current condition. He said, “I identify themselves as poor. Some of this ing about the poor: the sensationalized and don’t get it when people say, ‘Your family reluctance can be racked up to loopy, long- the sentimental. I can speak of them with can’t get ahead.’ We get ahead all the time. standing American optimism; in polls, authority as I have dabbled in both. In the It’s just then the truck breaks or one of my nearly half of citizens report that they are in first school – poverty porn, you might call parents loses a job, and then we slip right the wealthiest 10 percent of the population it – the abberational qualities of low-income back down.” or expect to be there soon. But I also sense people – gang banging, drug dealing, and Statistically, stabs at getting ahead are a recent cultural shift, driven especially the like – are chronicled at the exclusion of less successful than they used to be. By by the young, that operates at a lower pitch almost everything else. The protagonists in many calculations the celebrated American than what sociologists like to call the oppo- these stories are often not the poor people social mobility rate is now roughly the sitional culture, with its celebration of sex, themselves but the heroic reporters who risk same as Germany’s. Meanwhile, the slip- drugs, and violence. their wellbeing to move among them. The down has grown deeper. Over the last five Julissa Torres lives on the periphery of prevalence of this form has something to years the number of families with annual Denver, a prospering city. In her math note- do, in the least pernicious gloss, with the ﬁ

The Berlin Journal 51 writerly eye, which is naturally drawn to the knowledge of how most other Americans more information. It is one thing to say that anomalous: vivid difference that is thrilling live, New Orleans’s population being one 46 million Americans lack health insurance. to describe. And as a practical matter, in the of the least mobile and most isolated in the It’s another to show what happens to the inner-city, the aberrational is easier to see; country. It is those subtler deficits, deficits guy working in a chicken slaughterhouse the prostitutes and addicts are right there of opportunity, that I’m trying to capture when he discovers he has late-stage cancer. on the corner, more accessible than the lives when I do a story. Desperately ill, he will have to quit his job indoors. The problem with this sort of jour- The literary critic William Empson – which offers neither paid sick leave nor nalism is that it creates for the reader a lop- argued that the purpose of art is to allow health insurance – board a Greyhound bus, sided cosmos, a sense that that culture isn’t sympathetic access to systems of belief not and ride 11 hours each way, every week, to part of our culture. It distorts the connective our own, and I would like to think the access reach the nearest place that will give him tissue that I think remains between people he craved is sometimes possible in journal- chemotherapy. And he will have to make of different classes and races in America. ism as well. I am not looking, however, only this trip despite the fact that he lives in an In the sentimental school of poverty to give access to the thinking of the unprivi- area full of oncologists – doctors who serve reporting, by contrast, poor people are ren- leged. I am trying to interrogate the policies only people of means. I believe it is fact, as dered innocent, without volition – much as pretty prose, that ciphers subjected to horror upon speaks to the unconverted horror in a monochromatically and the uninterested, and to miserable place. You wouldn’t get the facts I have to stay with know, reading these stories, that the intricacies and avoid the violent crime and teenage births impulse toward cynicism. have declined in America in the While each story I do has last decade or that in bad neigh- its own exigencies, I typi- borhoods people sometimes cally try to position myself laugh. Material privations are to watch an unfolding situa- exaggerated, while the flaws of tion – created either by gov- individuals are elided or racked ernment policy, market up to government neglect. For force, or a combination of the writers who care deeply about, to two – in which, over a matter use a phrase I hate, “the plight of months or years, people of the poor,” this insistence on will be making choices and virtue is strategic, of course. But changing course. I start to it contradicts something most of wonder, for instance, what us know and accept in our per- really happens to Americans sonal lives: that suffering doesn’t when manufacturing jobs go always, or even usually, build overseas. Both the Clinton character. So why do we expect and Bush administrations people with fewer resources and believed in retraining workers more social isolation to find it for “forward-looking growth improving? professions,” from high tech to specialized health care, and he consequences of Texas happens to be a national the sentimental school of model for this sort of “human writing were evident in the repurposing.” So I narrow T shelters after Hurricane Richard Benjamin Jr., 19 in on the Rio Grande Valley Katrina. Within a week donated food was children Shakira and Ladarrius in that state: a place where, for a time, the rotting in the kitchens, and there were Watts Selma, Alabama world’s Levis, Carter’s baby clothes, and so many bags of secondhand clothes that * * * Fruit of the Loom Y-fronts were made. Now you couldn’t get through the hallways. the very last textile mill is closing down. Meanwhile affluent America was feeling devised by the powerful, trying in some ten- The story I want to write, in the end, isn’t pretty good about how it had helped the tative way to field test some of the regnant a requiem for the end of an era. The press- poor rebuild their lives. It was easy to for- theories about aiding the poor, from welfare ing question is whether, after the end of get that, before Katrina, even in the worst reform to the promotion of marriage as an the retraining everyone agrees about, there recesses of the New Orleans projects, peo- effective antipoverty solution. I am also are any jobs. (The answer is that the textile ple had clothes on their backs, and no one drawn to ideas that I do not understand at workers are now overeducated temp workers starved, and almost every family had a tele- the outset – issues like globalization, for and still poor.) vision. What they lacked, and continued to instance – that flat out perplex me. And what Before I ensconce myself in a place like lack after the wave of philanthropy crested, I am after isn’t certainty or a win on an ideo- the Valley, I immerse myself in government were things less easily remedied: passable logical scoreboard. Or maybe I am looking audits and statistics because I don’t believe educations, regular medical care, drug for certainty, but in any event I rarely find it. all stories are equal. I’m interested in sto- treatment, jobs with benefits, or firsthand What I want, and think I can contribute, is ries that represent, always partially and

52 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 imperfectly, something larger than them- I don’t believe that the only valid kind works, or doesn’t work, or what the social selves. As a practical matter, when I begin of commentary about poverty is that done costs and benefits really are. Take welfare to document those stories, I use a camera, with intimate knowledge, but if none of reform – the landmark 1996 law that ended a tape recorder, and a notebook. I like to the commentary has that perspective, the the right of poor families to public assis- have a pile of voices, images, and scribbled public isn’t going to understand why policy tance except for five years in their lifetimes. thoughts to wallow in later when I get to the This reform sent millions of inner-city nasty business of writing. I also want, for mothers to work and is considered one the record, a verifiable document of what I of the great domestic policy successes find. Historically, when it comes to people of recent times. But it left unreformed without means – people unlikely to sue or to all the other institutions, from day care write an eloquent letter to the editor – jour- to schools to police departments, upon nalism has been uncommonly tolerant of which inner-city children were increas- falsehood. ingly reliant. I don’t bring a car or a cell phone when So what are the day-care centers for reporting because I am trying to be as the children of welfare reform actually fully absorbed – stuck, even – in the world like? When I investigated the centers in of my subjects as I can stand to be. I don’t my hometown, Washington DC, a few want to interview people at a restaurant. years back, I saw that the government’s I want to follow them where their lives lead, own inspectors had found life-threaten- have a conversation on the bus, or in the ing hazards in 70 percent of them but Laundromat, or, better yet, have no conver- continued funneling children in, regard- sation – just listen in on their conversation less. Parents, of course, had a more inti- with other people. Silence, I think, is the mate view of the risks. They saw rooms most underused reporting tool we have. the size of closets crammed with infants The photographer Walker Evans put it visu- in baby cots and noted that the staff ally: stare. The more you stare, the more Barbara Cole, 17; Cliff Mills, 18; included their drug-addicted neighbors, your stereotypes and assumptions will be Felicia Fugate, 14; Kelly Grimes, 19 whose own children had been taken away rearranged and the more you will be able to Brookings, Oregon due to abuse. Many women subsequently challenge the assumptions of your readers. * * * concluded that the best way to protect ﬁ

At the Heart of Europe

DW-TV Deutsche Welle Germany’s international television service DW-TV broadcasts programmes www.dw-world.de around the world, 24 hours a day, in German, English, Spanish and Arabic. DW-TV: fast, reliable, precise and unmistakable. The world of politics, business, sports and the arts with a dinstinctively European profile. DW-TV helps its viewers make sense of events in Germany and Europe. DW-TV: news and information, every hour on the hour.

DW_BJ_Anz.indd 1 13.03.2007 19:26:29 Uhr their seven-year-olds was to send them But the mothers were also starving for to find mates. From the government’s home alone after school and teach them how information – how to advocate for their perspective, encouraging poor people to to work the locks on the door. If moms are children when they were sick, how to find marry off makes a lot of sense. Combine caught making that choice, they could go better-paying jobs for themselves – and the incomes of a nurse’s aide, who earns to prison – leaving a child that young alone the nurses could help them bridge a vast $12,000, and a construction worker, who is felony child endangerment – but it is a informational divide. In some instances it makes $10,000, and you remove both crime poor women are committing all the was absolutely transforming. The nurses’ of them in one fell act from the poverty time now. This is the kind of paradox cre- efforts have been studied rigorously for a rolls. Liberals and libertarians have been ated when policy fails to acknowledge the quarter century, in diverse settings across outraged by the idea of government inter- problems of poor communities as a whole America, and it is clear that both children ference in this most private business, but and focuses instead on politically congenial and parents make progress that endures the women in marriage class were more single issues. It is also the kind of unfair- long after the nurses go away: the children amused than appalled at the official inter- ness that I think any loving parent, any in language ability and school performance, est in their love lives. (Privacy, like a lot of person, is able to recognize – but only if the the mothers in employment and education. goods, is not distributed equally across the dilemmas are made plain. The program, however, has only enough economic spectrum.) They attended mar- I also try to seek out, for riage class in a spirit of hope, myself as much as anybody, but the problem they encoun- more hopeful possibilities. The tered afterward was that they possibilities I see in the cur- found the men available rent climate are real, but they to them detrimental, not are fragile. When scientifi- beneficial, to their efforts cally studied, many antipoverty to escape poverty. That view approaches – ideas that seem has a quantitative basis: an right, feel logical in situ – turn incarceration rate for black out to make little or no long- men that rose from 1 to 10 term difference. I try to balance percent in twenty years and my critical reporting with explo- an employment rate for rations of programs that in mod- low-skilled men – the kind est ways defy that discouraging of men they were likely to trend. One such strategy is a meet – at 56 percent. program in which nurses inter- The pastor who ran the vene in the lives of young moth- marriage class answered the ers and their newborn babies, women’s concerns: “For now, which I watched play out over you have to go out there and the course of a year in the Cajun teach the men to be providers.” swamps of Louisiana. It only struck me afterward By the time most low-income how this church-basement children start elementary exhortation summed up school they are already so far American poverty policy today. behind their more privileged A government that for decades counterparts that the gap is had no plan for helping poor almost unbridgeable. That black men into the socioeco- stands to reason because, in nomic mainstream was now America’s more moneyed quar- asking poor women to do the ters, parents invest an enor- Stewart McAdams, 16; Ray Mowrer, 18; job for them. This is the sort mous amount of time and energy trying to Jeremy Ball, 17; Matthew Phillips, 17 of plan the American people, including poor give their toddlers an intellectual edge. The Jolo, West Virginia people, have grown to accept in an age that nurses program tries to help acutely poor * * * fetishizes individual, as opposed to civic, mothers – often children themselves – devel- responsibility. op their babies’ minds, too. The disadvan- private and public funding to serve 20,000 Over the years, as I’ve tried to capture tages of the mothers are sometimes so great of the 2.5 million mothers who would be for the record some of the facts and experi- that the nurses run out of breath as they eligible. ences typically written out of the story, I describe them: “The mom I’m seeing tomor- The Bush administration has a differ- have come to see that poverty policy often row is a 16-year-old, unmedicated, bipolar ent strategy for poor families: promoting has very little to do with the poor themselves rape victim, crack-addicted prostitute with a marriage as an antipoverty cure. So not and a lot to do with what more privileged pattern of threatening to kill her social work- long ago I attended marriage classes in an people think about the poor. So in that sense ers, who abandoned her baby at her ex-boy- Oklahoma City housing project – the model I may be addressing the appropriate audi- friend’s sister’s – oh, and she has an attempt- of the administration’s initiative. After ence when I write for the New Yorker. I am ed murder charge in another situation – well, graduation I followed the other classmates not the person, however, to argue that jour- I think I’ve got all the risk factors.” – all women – for eight months as they tried nalism about poverty can make a long-term,

54 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 concrete difference. I will never forget call- know whether you were going to be rich or ably gifted high-school students don’t get ing a government official to demand: why poor, black or brown or white, gifted or slow, the necessary information and aid to get a didn’t you do anything to prevent all these what would you choose that would be fair? college education unless they also happen deaths from neglect and abuse at group I looked around and thought, well, I prob- to be basketball stars. Destitute 22-year-olds homes for the mentally retarded? Upon ably wouldn’t design for myself the system who bounce checks at Wal-Mart are impris- which I got back this answer: well, we had I see right here. In that system even remark- oned while surgeons who abuse narcotics go to shift all of our inspectors over to those free. The public transportation system bad day-care centers after that story you did offers door-to-door service to college foot- last year. Poverty journalism may in fact ball games but no service to poor neigh- be a zero-sum game, and, officially at least, borhoods after dark, subjecting low-wage I have no pretension that I am doing any- workers without cars to a nightly drama thing more than this: presenting to some of hitchhiking home. A sickly woman sliver of the public a readable document that raising a son and four grandchildren on is faithful to the reality lived by some steady, $4,000 a year can get a medical exam volatile 12 to 13 percent of the American only by signing up to be a guinea pig population. Secretly, though, I am having a for a pharmaceutical company testing a raging imaginary conversation with readers. new drug. When I tell about these lives, I implicitly ask readers, what if it were you? few years back I was spending Faced with an array of bad choices, how time in an inner-city housing proj- would you choose? And now what would ect when I heard that the American you design that might be fairer? µ A philosopher John Rawls had died, and being there brought back to me his Katherine Boo is a winner of a Pulitzer thought experiment, “the original position.” Prize for public service, awarded for Rawls asked how you would write the social her investigative piece “Invisible Lives, contract, design a just system of civil society, Invisible Deaths,” and current Haniel if you had to create it behind a “veil of igno- Anastaizshzia (Tash) Rains, 16 Fellow at the Academy. This article is rance” – that is, if you didn’t know what your Los Angeles, California based on her Berlin lecture “Framing Berlin Journal_192x126_Apr07 05.03.2007 12:06 Uhr Seite 1 place in that society would be. If you didn’t * * * the Poor,” delivered on March 6. Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin

Brassaï (1899–1984) – Fotografien • Die große Retrospektive • 9. März – 28. Mai 2007 Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. Eine Ausstellung des Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de Création Industrielle, Paris

Gérard Rondeau – Fotografien • 9. März – 28. Mai 2007 Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. In Zusammenarbeit mit der Botschaft der Republik Frankreich und dem Institut français in Berlin

Ré Soupault (1901–1996) • Die Fotografin der magischen Sekunde • 28. April – 13. August 2007 Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. Ermöglicht durch den Hauptstadtkulturfonds

Angkor–Göttliches Erbe Kambodschas • 5. Mai – 29. Juli 2007 Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. Eine Ausstellung der Kunst – und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn. Ermöglicht durch den Hauptstadtkulturfonds

Cindy Sherman • 15. Juni – 17. September 2007 Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. Eine Ausstellung des Jeu de Paume, Paris in Kooperation mit dem Kunsthaus Bregenz, dem Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek und dem Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin Im Zeichen des Goldenen Greifen. Königsgräber der Skythen 6. Juli – 1. Oktober 2007 Unter der Schirmherrschaft von Bundespräsident Horst Köhler und Präsident Vladimir Putin. Veranstalter: Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts und des Museums für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg und der Kulturstiftung der Hypo-Kunsthalle München.

Vom Funken zum Pixel • Oktober 2007 – Januar 2008 Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. Ermöglicht durch die Kulturstiftung des Bundes. Kurator: Richard Castelli Terminänderungen möglich Terminänderungen 2007 März Stand:

Niederkirchnerstr. 7 • www.gropiusbau.de • Mi – Mo 10 – 20 Uhr, Di geschl. • 10.4. und 29.5. geöffnet • c Anhalter Bhf/Potsdamer Pl. • e Potsdamer Pl. • a M29, M41

The Berlin Journal 55 Watching Out The Writer’s State by Geoffrey Wolff

Old Comrade at the Fence, Wolfgang Mattheuer, 1971

56 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 e Americans can’t ity, and, as they plot against the enemy in claim we haven’t been warned. time of war, so do they against the citizens As I write, early March of in time of peace.” (As Brecht had it in a 2007, the New York Times poem, the State – sick of its citizens – over- Whas just run an editorial exhorting the new throws them.) Congress to reverse the post-9/11 erosion Like most writers, I am familiar with – call it a landslide – of our civil liberties. The and discomforted by opposing temptations Images © BildarchivImages© Preussischer Kulturbesitz inventory is startling: disregard of habeas either to tell of a world I believe I know or to corpus, spurious executive claims of nation- invent a world I have never experienced. To al interest, warrentless (and unwarranted) write only what I know – what oft is spoke wiretapping, secret trials, secret prisons, and oft as well expressed – is to doom my email invasion, torture, strip searches, work to staleness; to write in ignorance and X-ray photos bagging full frontal – ungoverned hunch and fancy – seems to nudity. And that’s just the State’s side of me childish, self-indulgent. things, stateside. On the civil side: bug- I have been writing fiction and biogra- ging, identity theft, security cameras, credit phy and journalism and cultural criticism reports, paparazzi porn, gossip conveyed by for more than forty years, and my work unnamed informers published by, say, the has almost always explored the doings and New York Times in the pretense of deploring undoings of Americans, and particularly gossip conveyed by unnamed informers. those of my fellow countrymen discontent Have we forgotten Watergate? Does the with whom they have been born to be. This name J. Edgar Hoover ring a bell? Evidently is territory that I know. My father was a con- someone is keeping an eye on the warn- man, reinventing himself again and again, ings. In just the past few weeks two novels sometimes to accord with whom others by prominent writers – Walter Kirn and wished him to be and sometimes to satisfy Jonathan Raban – have been prominently his yearning to have been someone else, reviewed. In the New York Times Sunday and – restless in his fantasies – never the Book Review, Kirns’s The Unbinding is head- same someone else. I’m drawn to charac- lined “Web of Spies” (February 11, 2007); ters who demand what their genes and their the review quotes Kirns’s introduction, deploring “the plight of what people used to A novelist is a spy and an call ‘the self’ in an age of high-tech snoop- interrogator. A novelist puts ing, political paranoia, identity thievery and Internet exhibitionism.” his slanders on a ream of The New York Review of Books of paper, attaches a brick to March 15, 2007 has a chilling review by Michael Dirda of Jonathan Raban’s chill- it, throws it through your ing novel – Surveillance – which imagines window, and runs for his life. Americans’ continuing slide downhill into the condition of a police state, a slide pow- ered by the sliders, in the way that kids on social class determine that they should a sled use the flimsy power of their arms to be denied. The bully against whom these augment their pell-mell descent down an characters beat their fists is human circum- icy slope. Dirda’s review is titled “The Way stance rather than state law. This material We Live Now,” which seems like it’s a whole is quintessentially attentive to the white lot worse than Anthony Trollope’s mischie- American middle class, which is not to say vous and misled characters lived then. that I find it therefore trivial. I believe pain is where you find it, that it can hurt like I have come to Berlin to stretch crazy to be on the receiving end of a snub at myself as a novelist, to learn whether the country club or a sneer from the nine- effort alone can enable my grasp to equal year-old girl that your nine-year-old self has my reach. My ambition is to imagine how a crush on, not to mention the bad news others lived then, not in a state becom- – common as a toothache – that everyone ing a police state but already a police state. gets sooner or later at the doctor’s office. A state in which, let’s pretend, half of its But in writing specifically about the citizens spied and informed on the other American human comedy, and especially a half. Dirda quotes Spinoza on the kind of comedy of manners, I can mistake motives circumstance I have in mind: “They who or botch sentences or say what needs no can treat secretly of the affairs of a domin- saying, but I like to believe that I am not in ion have it absolutely under their author- much danger of making a fool of myself ﬁ

The Berlin Journal 57 to myself. (Making a fool of oneself to others is always, of course, on the agenda.) This is a comfort; it can also be a drag. I’m drawn now to a riskier purpose and process, a sustained attempt to see through strangers’ eyes, to inhabit strangers’ cultures, to live the lives of others. It’s my hope to insinuate myself into the ideals and ambitions, the pleasures and frustrations, the temptations and refusals, the choices and evasions, the fear and recklessness, the subtlety and coarseness of such a state of affairs as characterized daily life under the tyranny of a police state, and my inspira- tion – only this oxymoron will suffice – is the Stasi.

he title in English of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen is concise and resonant: The Lives of Others. The Tfilm begins by flashing on the screen a quotation, the declaration of an outrageous ambition attributed to Erich Mielke, the crazy-like-a-fox minister for state security, boss of bosses of the Stasi: to know everything about everybody. This nutty aspira- tion is so immodest in scope, so indifferent to the varieties of human eccentricity, so blind to the varieties of mendacity, so hun- gry and solipsistic that it could only have been uttered by a novelist. Even a biographer’s appetite is modest by comparison. Whether cocksure or shy, any biographer knows, and may admit, that sources lie or misremember, that documents – say an income tax return – are unre- liable, that letters and journals are unreli- able, that motive drives narrative, that point of view controls the apprehension of facts. Award Winner, Wolfgang Mattheuer, 1973–1974 Biographers may claim to have discovered a compelling truth about one or two people, or even about a cohort or family, but “every- unstoppable hot-air storms of confession know, how did that come about? Describe thing about everybody?” Historians would and inquisition in which interrogators, the scene. You know of course that the laugh the notion in its face. armed with microphones and cameras, are authorities have cast doubt on your claim? A novelist, though, might sympathize set upon the undefended and anguished What’s your answer to the many who don’t with Mielke’s outrageous claim. A novelist and injured, demanding to know every- believe you? is a spy and an interrogator. A novelist is thing shameful or disgraceful or hurtful – Do you have a fatal disease? No, that’s a rude boy or girl, silently asking the per- about everybody: not what I want to know: I want to know if sonal questions that nice people don’t want – Why did your wife cheat on you? you have a fatal disease other than mortal- to answer. A novelist puts his slanders on a – How did you feel when the hurricane ity? Yeah? Really! Are you scared of death? ream of paper, attaches a brick to it, throws blew away your roof and filled your unin- Well, then, how about pain? Are you scared it through your window, and runs for his sured house with rainwater and sewage? of pain? Do you think your kids will cry life. “Thought you ought to know your Your granny was washed away in the flood, when you die? Which of them will get your wife’s cheating on you with the best man or so you claim. How did that feel? And tell jazz collection? Do you think she’ll sell it to at your wedding. Gotta go, I’m too busy to me, did her wheelchair float? What’s that? a used-record dealer? How much money are hang around for your response.” Speak more clearly! And into my micro- you going to leave them? Don’t you think And of course we Americans have all phone! I wouldn’t have believed a wheel- you’re spending a bit grandly on your own watched through one-way windows the chair could float away, with a grandmother health care? Isn’t bypass surgery at your age bearbaiting of “reality” television, those in it. I have to ask, my viewers need to a little extravagant? Some might say more

58 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 than a little self-celebrating? Are those elevator down to the basement and up to days of the late 1940s and early 1950s a tears dripping down your cheeks? What are the attic of the Middle Class, sometimes good deal of injury was inflicted on anyone they about? Hey, take off your glasses so we enjoying the fruits of his extravagance and revealed to have believed and said – publicly can see! Tell me why you’re crying? Wait! sometimes enduring the consequences. or even privately – that Marx and Engels, My recorder ran out of tape! Can you let me I’ve been unemployed, but not for long. I’ve Lenin or Trotsky, had had a few good ideas. have some tape to record this? never felt there was a sturdy net below to Screenwriters lost their livelihoods, and – How am I going to use this material? catch me if I fell, and I know the elevator is some went to prison, and more than a That’s really none of your business. Why do still in business, with a down button, but handful of the persecuted lost their lives by you ask? Let’s talk about why you’d want to whether from ignorance or some cultural suicide. Academia had its share of hot seats, ask me that question. security (probably itself a dumb-but-happy – Oh, by the way, as soon as you answer pipe dream) – and despite having witnessed Members of my tribe can all my questions truthfully, as I see the the serial crimes of J. Edgar Hoover – I have be born and die without truth, I want you to shut up and listen to me never felt afraid of my country or cowed tell everybody what you’re really like. Don’t by my putative superiors in rank, wealth, ever having to confess interrupt, because when I’m through with influence, or police power. and without fearing that you I’ll know everything about you. I plan Mind you, I know enough to realize that to know everything about everybody. during these bad days of the Patriot Act I an expressed opinion will Like the Stasi? should feel suspicious of my country and ruin their future hopes or that my comfort comes in large part from ou wouldn’t know it by watch- the circumstance that I am not black nor cost their freedom. ing American television news a Muslim nor an illegal alien nor under- interviews, but people in free educated, unemployed, or uninsured nor and the obligation to swear loyalty oaths countries don’t have to answer dogged by bankruptcy or a criminal record. became epidemic under that temporary un- Yintrusive questions asked by strangers. Neither have I or mine been unlucky American madness known as the House “No comment” works, and in aggravated enough to live in the United States with a Un-American Activities Committee, all too instances, “Buzz off!” Doors are designed German name during World War I or to prophetic of Congress’s shamelessly titled to be slammed shut. Maybe an income tax have been a Japanese-American during Patriot Act. auditor or a prosecuting attorney can drill World War II. But it is also true that it was possible to close to a free citizen’s discomfort zone, but But in fact I have never feared that some- create black comedy from that mid-century even then the interrogated can always plead thing I might say or write about the nature witch hunt that Lillian Hellman famously the Fifth Amendment or direct inquiries to of the universe, mortality, human rights, titled Scoundrel Time. Hellman’s nemesis his or her lawyer. “Don’t tread on me” was weapons policy, the fbi or cia, the presi- Mary McCarthy’s short novel – The Groves revolutionary America’s proudest motto, dent, the mayor of Bath, Maine, evolution, of Academe – takes as its inspired premise blazed on the 1775 Gadsden flag carried abortion, tax policy, or free speech itself the situation of an incompetent and ridicu- by Marines fighting King George’s tyrants, would ever cause hurt to me or to my family lous professor coming up for tenure at a showing a rattlesnake coiled to strike. and friends. As a temperamental wise guy small liberal arts college – and sure not to “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is a tamer version of I have certainly felt the sting of disapproval get it – who lets it be rumored (falsely) that the sentiment. in response to my opinions. As a note- at an earlier time he had been a communist I mean that members of my tribe can be passer and too-quick-laugher in class, I was sympathizer, setting the grand machin- born and die without ever having to con- warned that I ought to learn to keep my ery of liberal counter-theology to grind- fess and without fearing that an expressed mouth shut, but I slipped into a university ing, slowly but surely protecting him from opinion will ruin their future hopes or anyway. My father was fired from jobs for denial of tenure. cost their freedom. My tribe is huge but insulting his bosses, but (until he didn’t) he I search for equivalence in my own not all-inclusive: employed, tax-paying, found new jobs with new bosses to insult. experience and find only farce. Warned benefit-receiving… Let’s call my tribe the As an adult, wishing to get by in the world by the headmaster of my high school that White Middle Class, understanding that without causing unnecessary pain, I have my reflexive sarcasm and skepticism had the boundaries of this cohort are so elastic – tried to learn and to teach my sons good made me “the weak link in an otherwise from an assembly-line welder in Dearborn manners. But – let me repeat – I have never strong Choate chain,” I became a cheer- to a retired golfer in Sarasota, from a pay- felt afraid to answer a question or offer an leader. This shames me to confess, to recol- check-to-paycheck skilled laborer clipping opinion. In fact I don’t know more than a lect roaming the sidelines during football coupons to make the monthly payments on few Americans of my skin color and with games against Deerfield, megaphone to the speedboat on a trailer in his driveway bona fide passports and Social Security my mouth, demanding – “Cho-OATE, in Biloxi to a finishing school graduate clip- numbers who have felt afraid of serious and Cho-OATE, gimme a C, gimme an H…” ping coupons on inherited bearer bonds irreversible consequences of speaking or But I had earned my evil reputation for that keep her smiling in Greenwich. writing their minds. bad citizenship, and then I’d calculated its As a member of my tribe and owing to Well, I’d better amend this declaration. repair, and now I pay the price for both my the peculiar precariousness of my child- Nobody doesn’t fear an IRS audit, a kind of wisecracks and my ass-kissing by inviting hood as the son of a father who spent great dress rehearsal for a state-sponsored inqui- laughter at my expense. No harm done to sums of money he didn’t have (as well as sition. And of course during Senator Joe others and among my friends some enter- spending time in prison), I rode the busy McCarthy’s reign of terror in the Red Scare tainment value given from my flagrantﬁ

The Berlin Journal 59 cynicism. I imagine I could try to persuade watching Gilligan’s Island. Hey, my mom’s mind’s ear has provoked other questions, the gullible that my cheerleading was in calling me to dinner. Wait a sec, Mom! I’m and those questions are metastasizing: fact deeply subversive, a flanking maneuver on the phone…” (The novelist Herbert Gold When is it generous, neighborly (leave against School Spirit, but first I’d have to describes such jolly nuisances as “happy aside necessary), to “keep an eye” on oth- persuade myself. problems for happy people.”) ers? In Tokyo, I’m told, it’s considered And – what is education for? – I learned a civic virtue that local police know the from the experience not to be a running ut there I go again, talking citizens in their anthill neighborhood dog for headmasters or for well-mannered about myself and my kind, show- intimately and drop in uninvited to have readers who don’t like writers to hang dirty ing the contempt of familiarity a chat now and then, noticing what’s been laundry out in public, or to write what they when I hope to study and tell a added to the furnishings. A new plasma believe to be true about the errors of their B story about the unfamiliar. So let me begin television might occasion congratulations country’s ways. And it must be noted that to feel my way in the dusk, trying to read a on a promotion at work rather than a suspi- there is no shortfall of opinions in America map of the territory I mean to explore. Let’s cion that it fell off the back of a truck. I see regarding what is wrong with America. My begin with the word “security,” to take seri- your daughter is late coming home from fellow members of the Middle Class do ously the Stasi’s avowed determination to school? Violin lessons? Or is she perhaps not suffer from low self-esteem but from a be the Sword and Shield of the Party, itself hanging out with bad influences at the comical inflation of self-regard. Our most putatively the sword and shield of its citi- train station? conspicuous problem is not what we are zens, of its children. Everywhere, the Good Neighbor keeps constrained from saying but what we are We’ve all watched children, once they an eye on what’s up next door. Unless I hate obliged to listen to, and this is not blaring can crawl and point and grab and open and my neighbor, whose dog barks all day and from loudspeakers set in public places in push and unscrew lightbulbs and climb night, or who plays Grateful Dead bootlegs pre-Wall-fall-down Sophia or Bucharest, into washing machines. I mean watched. at top volume, or whose tree limbs droop Krakow or East Berlin. To keep them safe we’re tyrants. No! Stop! over my fence, dripping leaves into my This has its downside, of course. Get down! Don’t touch those scissors! swimming pool, in which case I’ll prob- American writers aren’t afraid, perhaps, That knife will cut you! Don’t throw that! ably write letters to the proper authorities, because no one much cares what we speak Don’t do that! That will burn you! You’ll complaining. But let’s assume a Friendly or write. Being ignored can produce corol- fall! You’ll put out your eye with that stick! Neighbor. Newspapers piling up on the lary absurdities, a kind of unarticulated You’ll drown! You’ll be hit by a car! By a bus! front yard next door? Maybe someone’s sick tyranny-envy whereby a writer might long A train! You’ll get shocked! Electrocuted! in there. What’s that truck doing in the for the opportunity to be a banned writer, So no wonder that little kids push back. driveway? Delivery van or burglar? a Kundera or Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. Disobey. Rebel. Mock their tormentors. It is an article of faith that a solution to This neurosis, different in degree but not Argue. Climb out of their cribs, even if they urban American anomie is the neighbor- in kind from reunified Germany’s East- fall out of their cribs. Insert sandwiches in hood cop walking the neighborhood beat. nostalgia, is akin to the unlucky position of the vcr. Refuse to sleep, or to eat, or to help Not swinging his billy club with menace a writer without an unhappy childhood to put on their jackets. but pausing to pass the time of day on the use as inspirational matter, “material,” as This push/pull mechanism is so famil- Baltimore stoop with Auntie, trading tips we writers name it. iar that we don’t bother to marvel at its on how best to fry a chicken or stew spa- During Watergate and the infamous metaphorical value as a Lego-land imita- ghetti sauce. The Dream Cop notices when “Enemies List” kept by Nixon and his tion of the State in its relation to the State’s Auntie slurs her speech (drugs or onset thugs, my friends in Washington longed charges. Perhaps less noticed is the anxiety to be named among those despised by the of children in the temporary absence of At what moment – or was despised. This is a trivial version – a tale restraint and opposition, the insecure state there such a point in time from a fool’s paradise – of what Timothy of unimpeded freedom. Garton Ash calls “file envy” in his extraor- One afternoon at home in Maine our as a “moment” – did child dinary study of the self as apprehended by grandson, not quite four at the time and rebellion become intolerable the state. But he laughs to stay sane in the representative of kids defying limits face of a written record of betrayal, malice, imposed by gravity and physics, was climb- because it was dangerous? and delusion (the delusion written not only ing a wall or a stair banister or a bucket on in his Stasi file but also in his contempo- a bucket set atop another bucket. My wife Alzheimer’s?) and alerts the authorities, rary diary and journal). and I were upstairs, taking a load off, feet who intervene. But these are loaded words, Laughter comes cheaper when human under the comforter and reading the news- no? “Notices…” “Alerts…” “Authorities…” rights seem free. Our family dines out paper. He was downstairs. He suddenly “Intervention…” (Spies on, informs on…) – many a chuckle – at the recollection that, stopped making dangerous noises. But I want to get back to the subject of while he was in grade school, many of my “Hey,” he yelled. “Who’s keeping an eye kids because if I can’t remember how it was younger son’s telephone conversations were on me?” to be one, or how it was to raise them, I’m wiretapped by the FBI, incidental to their I think that hearing the urgency of that not going to get within a country mile of the bugging of the father of his classmate, her- question, and the silence that preceded novel I hope to imagine in Berlin. self the niece of a Providence gangster nick- it, opened a gate – just a crack – that had Let’s stipulate that all parents, every- named “Babyshanks.” “Do you think Bobby barred me from the foreign place I mean to where, are bound to dictate to their chil- likes Jodi? I think Jodi likes Bobby. I’m visit. Hearing that question resonate in my dren, to circumscribe their acts, to deny

60 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 what they want. And perhaps we can agree And how indeed did the State itself work? Where did they do the asking? Who that many if not most of these denials accommodate – if it did – the insolence of was “they,” besides the obvious goon-agent- afford no luxury of justification. “Don’t ask toddlers, the laughter of kids too young bullies? Was it the Pioneer guide? The why; just do what I say!” And surely kids, to know not to laugh? Little kids can be Latin teacher? The milk deliverer? A child everywhere, are bound to resist arbitrary brave beyond imagining – maybe foolhardy molester, let’s imagine. strictures, to defy their parents’ authority. rather than courageous, but audacious in If your kids wised off at school, when And perhaps parents – despite their obliga- their willingness to confront and confound they believed – incorrectly, as kids will – tions to be swords and shields on behalf of unbounded authority. That kids prefer that they were speaking privately, and the their kids’ security – relish the determi- not to pick on someone their own size but next morning your Trabi had two flat tires nation if not impudence of their children, instead on grown people made even more (if you’d said yes persuasively enough to their independent spirits, their sometimes imposing by being regarded from below – own a Trabi), was that coincidence? breathtaking courage in defiance of large, this should excite in their parents awe and And if you got a toothache that after- strong, mobile oppressors. So what then pride. Suppose it excited only fear? noon, was that coincidence? (That you do parents say when they have to shut the And was caution conveyed by inference couldn’t go to the head of the line for an damper on that spirit, to shut it tighter and or right out loud: “You can’t say that!” Or appointment with the dentist was surely tighter until it is smothered? even, “You aren’t allowed to believe that!” not coincidence.) I’m not referring, of course, to those And what if the conversations weren’t What was it like to be thwarted, muffled, staples of family dinners, those arguments stifled? What then? How much danger betrayed, crudely seduced, and cruelly about hair length and nose piercings and could one tolerate? Or how many mine- abandoned? What was it like to believe heavy metal music and meat eating and why fields could one navigate? What was it like in the ideals of a state that didn’t believe manners matter. I’m wondering instead to game the system? Could it be gamed? in you? What was that like, The Lives about what was said – what could be said – by Could you say no when the State invited you of Others? µ parents under Stasi dominion to their kids to join the team, their team? The one that about the state of affairs – the protocols and played against the other team? Could you As current Berthold Leibinger Fellow, labyrinthine bylaws and codicils – under pretend to say yes? And would you teach writer Geoffrey Wolff is researching which their lives were bound to be lived. At your kids the ropes, how to trick the State? his seventh novel while in residence on what moment – or was there such a point in Or, maybe, how to say yes to this but no to the Wannsee. He is the former director of the graduate program in fiction timeAZ AMCham:Layout as a “moment” – 1did rebellion29.03.2007 become 16:59 that?Uhr What Seite happened 1 if your kid said no? intolerable because it was dangerous? Who asked kids to say yes? How did that at the University of California, Irvine.

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The Berlin Journal 61 Rhapsody in Color Opiations of the Visual Field by Michael Taussig

re the walls of the room in pink, purple fading to palest lilac, blue of which you are reading this essay the softest, fullest, hues, and to these there white? Maybe there is a brightly were added the originally rich green and a colored painting on the wall, citron yellow. A framed and controlled by this mass of bland- ness? If a man, are your clothes somber in As many as two thousand years ago Indian hue? After all, what sort of men, or women, artisans had perfected dyeing and colored wear “loud” clothing? In other words, are design, which, in the form of chintzes Westerners by and large frightened by vivid brought to Britain by the British East India color, which they have for centuries associ- Company as early as 1601, stimulated a ated with so-called primitive peoples or even nascent hunger for color in England, a hun- with the circus, prostitutes, children’s toys, ger marked by both attraction and repulsion: and the criminal underground? Johann a mark of the exotic and yet a mark of the Wolfgang von Goethe certainly thought so primitive. in his polemical book on color, but he failed Color seems so innocent, so gay and to inquire into the possibility that this fear exuberant. We westerners say we love it, yet was and would remain composed of equal when put to the test we decline. Real photog- amounts of attraction and repulsion, mak- raphy spurns color for black-and-white, color ing the fear ever so much more complicated, being looked down upon as the medium of fascinating, and unpredictable. advertising and vulgarity. Clint Eastwood’s Until recently Europe obtained its color two recent films about the World War II bat- – whether as dyes, paints, clothing, carpets, tle for Iwo Jima show most of the events in a curtains, or coverings – from the colored bluish tinged black-and-white, except for the parts of the world, meaning from the col- explosions. Technicolor would detract from ored people, especially Indians. The prima- the gravity of war. ry vehicles of color in early modern Europe Color cannot easily be disassociated from were the gorgeous chintzes – colored cotton colonization and post-colonization, and cloths – from India. It was their color, and this is highlighted by the considerable yet not just color but their play with color, that widely overlooked role color played in buy- made chintzes so special. As for the “glori- ing African slaves to sell in the New World. ous” color of chintz, connoisseur of English Brought by Europeans from India, chintzes material culture Maciver Percival enthused: were essentially as desired as firearms, per- Spaces which seemed one flat sweep of colour haps even more so. Power does not reside are, in fact, nothing of the sort, but that every only in the barrel of a gun. bit of the whole tinted surface is built up of Europeans bought slaves in exchange for a wonderfully delicate patterning, though Indian textiles, such as the famous Guinea so subsidiary to the general scheme that it cloth of beautiful, deep, Pondicherry indi- does not interfere with it at all. Every leaf, go from the Coromandel coast of eastern every flower, is full of tiny markings, spots, or India. By monetary value, almost one-third shadings, sometimes corresponding to the of the trade goods in the hold of the French veinings which are found in Nature, and at slave ship The Diligent, as it set out in 1731 other times seemingly inconsequent and only from Nantes for the Slave Coast of West added to fill and break up the surface. Africa, was fabric from the east coast of India. (Another third was the 7,050 pounds The play of color both makes and breaks the of cowry shells, a West African form of claims of form. currency that also came from the Indian The beauty of old Indian “painted calicoes” Maldives.) What Europe itself supplied so as lies first of all in their colour, which is the to acquire slaves was its brandy (constitut- first thing to strike the eye. Lovely rich tones ing one-quarter of the goods by value) and of rose, from full crimson to delicate shell its gunpowder and guns (a mere 14 percent).

62 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Although at times the role of firearms in Color was intimately linked to the early this trade must have been tremendous, the medieval slave trade as well, but in this manifest of The Diligent and other vessels case it was poor Europeans who were sold suggest that pride of place from the sixteenth as slaves so as to acquire beautiful colored through the nineteenth centuries went to the fabrics. Slaves from Saxony and Thuringa, Indian fabrics. Long into the nineteenth cen- Brittany and Wales, England and Slavic Image © VictoriaImage©Albertand Museum tury, Guinea cloth also served as a form of Europe were traded by Europeans for richly currency in Senegambia, where it was used colored Byzantine cloth from the east, finely by the French Army to buy provisions and woven in rich brocades and often embroi- favor during its thrust eastwards across the dered with gold and silver thread. Rich continent. Europeans were doing what rich Africans An unbelievable variety of colored cot- would do a millennium later: exchange ton fabric from India was used to buy slaves. “their” people for color. Here is the mere beginning of a list put in Color contains the magic often alleged to alphabetical order: colored people, strikingly brought home with the so-called “chintz room” in old English houses and in the classic detective mystery, The Moonstone, written by Charles Dickens’s friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins. allejars usually striped red and white According to Maciver Percival, an old baffetas often blue or white English house without a chintz room was bajutapeaux striped or checked, or deep like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. red, blue and white, blue and red, or And like Hamlet, there is a mysterious, flowered moody, and conflicted aura in such a room, birampot red, blue, or white for chintz, wrote Percival in 1923, “at once brawls striped blue and white brings to mind visions of colour bright and caffa painted cotton, sometimes with gay, yet soft and subdued withal, of dark floral designs gleaming mahogany, honey-colored oak, calawapores striped, checked, or pat- walnut of mysterious grain, reflected in the terned, with red or blue predominating polished surfaces of the tints and hangings … calicoes white, blue, or printed in a word, all the surroundings of a typical cannequins white cloth with red stripe at one country house.” end, some dyed blue This mix of “color bright and gay” with chasselas striped or checked the “subdued withal” is a reminder of how chelloes striped or checked, woven wrongly we recall Kipling – “East is East, with colored threads and West is West, and never the twain shall cherryderries brown, blue, or meet” – for here they blend nicely, ever so white, with red or black stripes nicely, and generate this mix in ever subtler chercolees stripes and checks tones. Just as the house had to have its chintz chintz printed design, often floral room, so we might say metaphorically, the cushatees striped or checked blue and white English person, as a moral entity, and the cuttanees usually striped and sometimes English body, as a material one, had to have interspersed with flowers their chintz rooms, too. It is as if the Orient was like one of William Burroughs’s color viruses, insinuating itself into English oak like the grain of the wood itself and becoming just as inseparable. I know of no concept Then there were the beads. “The color which can do justice to this subtlety, for the range was enormous,” wrote anthropolo- final result – “Oh! So English,” the “typi- gist Stanley Alpern. “White, yellow, lemon, cal” English country house – can only be orange, red, blue, green, and black seem achieved to such perfection and splendor by to have been favored as solid colors; black being “Oh! So Indian” as well. and white, yellow and white, red and white, Everything is combined so as to become green and yellow, red and yellow, and black all the more separate. This I call the chro- and yellow in combination.” It is surely no mophobic “law” of color, with its efferves- exaggeration to say that the slave trade owed cent charge not only of repulsion but also much to the color trade and that this color of attraction engendered by color no less trade was an exchange intimately linking than by the Orient. In my opinion Western the color-rich parts of the globe, such as aversion to color, or at least to vivid color, to India with Africa. which Goethe pointed, masks an illicit ﬁ

The Berlin Journal 63 attraction to color (relegated by Goethe to devilish Indian diamond… Whoever heard ex-colonies, or remote stretches of Europe’s Western children, so-called primitive people, the like of it – in the nineteenth century, periphery of snow and tundra such as and southern European women). mind; in an age of progress, and in a coun- Siberia. In their exuberance, like the stones This same law is at work in the way that try which enjoys the blessings of the British taken from India that became British crown Indian artisans were encouraged to change constitution?” As if the Moonstone is alive jewels, they stand with unparalleled power their colors so as to satisfy English taste with a mind of its own, it breaks open the as signs of the riches of colonial plunder, – such as changing red backgrounds to otherwise sealed compartments separating precisely the history that sluices through white – with the paradoxical result that the mind from matter and spirit from body. the Indian Moonstone. English devoured the Indian cloth as exotic It is not only the impressive size and authentically Indian! A heavenly, mad but more importantly the color of the ow one year later in Yorkshire circle of mutual misunderstandings whose Moonstone that endowed it with these sub- it is almost midnight. It is raining, divinity owes much to color itself. lime powers of beauty and danger, a sure just as it had that night the dia- As Percival noted, chintz is that which “at sign of the sacred that in a secular culture mond was stolen. It is quiet. The once brings to mind visions of colour bright such as the typical English country house N clock ticks. The three men watch without and gay.” This enthusiastic language of would be passed off as superstitious or talking while the man on the bed tosses and visions suggests chintz-color as an almost “Indian.” To the servant who saw it one year turns. It is a stage upon which all of British mystical force propelling persons beyond before, the “light that streamed from it was colonial fantasy is ready to explode. the confines of the chintz room itself – as like the light of the harvest moon. When And how is the scene set? It is set by in the mind-clogging The Moonstone, you looked into the stone, you looked into chintz. The opiated man tossing on the bed England’s first detective story, set in the mid- a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so is enclosed on all sides by chintz curtains. nineteenth century in a typical Yorkshire they saw nothing else.” He sleeps in a chintzed-out world. Surely country house. To be drawn in like this is to be trans- the Moonstone is a tremendous thing. But ported to realms of wonder such as Walter the exquisite box containing him, his own n this very house a magnificent Benjamin suggested was the effect of col- personal chintz room, is ever much more so. diamond had been stolen from a young ored illustrations in children’s books, over- Acting as master of ceremonies, the inheritress, a diamond with a long- coming “the illusory barrier of the book’s mesmerist draws the chintz curtain on his standing curse upon it. Known as the surface” so as to pass through color “to enter side halfway so that, by placing his chair a I Moonstone, it had been torn from its sacred a stage on which fairy tales spring to life.” little back, “I might let him see me or not location in India in 1799 by a British officer In this regard precious stones like the see me, speak to me or not speak to me, just at the battle of Seringapatam, the battle that Moonstone – or for that matter chintzes – are as the circumstances might direct.” This secured the British East India Company’s exactly the same as these illustrations in chil- is the beauty of the chintz room; by adjust- free reign in India. The thief had never been dren’s books. Like the rainbow, such stones ing one’s angle of vision one can appear or found, although for a long time suspicion are the sheer epiphany of color – indeed of disappear at will. One commands as if by had fallen upon mysterious Indians lurk- that most esteemed of colors that Goethe’s magic the visual field and can choose when ing in the neighborhood (in Yorkshire! mid- and how to let that command become visible. nineteenth century!). Chintzes brought to To be seen and not be seen, “as circum- Exactly one year after the theft, a young stances might direct”; to see and not be seen. English gentleman by the name of Franklin Britain from India Is it a coincidence that Britain’s first detec- Blake lay in an opium-induced sleep in tive novel is seeped in and framed by India, this typical English country house, closely stimulated a nascent and that what makes it such a brilliant and observed by three men: a dying mesmerist, hunger marked by both so emphatically a detective novel, with its a gruff lawyer, and the lovable head servant cliff-hanging mix of logic and superstition, of the house. The three had a hunch that, attraction and repulsion: is precisely this motif of not being seen see- under the influence of opium slipped into ing as well as of being able to manage when his drink by the real thief, he had stealthily a mark of the exotic and yet one is seen and not seen? The point is not – but unknowingly – removed the diamond a mark of the primitive. only the deception or the voyeurism but also from the sleeping heiress for safekeeping, a the opiation of the visual field, emblem- well-intentioned action which lead instead friend, the painter Philipp Otto Runge atic of the chintz-effect – the color-effect – to its theft by the spying bandit. It was their called “transparent color” – that grants to inducing trance states and doppleganger hope that on this night, thanks to the opium, precious stones their twists and turns of fate switchbacks of being. What better way to the young man would rise from his bed and, no less than of light. These stones live the recover the Moonstone – with its “yellow in a sleep-walking trance, repeat step by step life of color, prophecy, and mystery, as when deep that drew your eyes” – than with its his actions of a year before. They thus hoped Benjamin quotes from “The Alexandrite” equivalent, this chintz-effect, whose myster- to clear him of suspicion and even locate the written by Nikolai Leskov: “Look, here it is, ies lie far beyond any detective novel? µ Moonstone. the prophetic Russian stone!” screams the The Moonstone is a terrible thing. It gem cutter. “O crafty Siberian. It was always Michael Taussig is a professor of wreaks death, madness, deception, secrecy, green as hope and only toward evening was it anthropology at Columbia University and malevolence, unendingly so. In the suffused with blood.” and current Siemens Fellow at the words of the head servant, “Here was our The overwhelming majority of precious Academy, where he is working on a quiet English house suddenly invaded by a stones originate from the European colonies, book entitled What Color Is the Sacred?

64 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007 Donations to the American Academy in Berlin January 2006 – March 2007

The American Academy President’s Circle Porsche AG Krowne Communications Martin and Stephanie in Berlin depends on the $25,000 and above Procter & Gamble Holding GmbH Korbmacher generosity of a widening Allianz AG GmbH Renate Küchler Otto Graf Lambsdorff circle of friends on both sides Anonymous Elizabeth and Felix Rohatyn Claus and Hannelore Löwe Michael Libal of the Atlantic. We extend our Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Samalexa Charitable Erich Marx Andrea Lawrence and heartfelt thanks to those who Holdings Inc. Foundation Pluto Solarbeteiligungen Jerome Marak support us. Bayer HealthCare AG Schering AG GmbH Albrecht Lehmann Bank of America, N.A. Siemens AG Heinrich and Annette Regine Leibinger Founders’ Circle Constance and John P. ThyssenKrupp AG von Rantzau Charles Maier $1 million and above Birkelund T-Mobile International AG Gerhard Roggemann Wolfgang and Beate Anna-Maria and Stephen BMW Group Kurt and Felicitas Viermetz Dr. Schmidt AG & Co. Mayrhuber Kellen Foundation and the Boeing International Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP Hannes Schneider Kurt and Doris Mühlbauer descendants of Hans and Corporation Helmut Seifert Robert H. Mundheim Ludmilla Arnhold Robert Bosch GmbH Benefactors Der Tagesspiegel Werner C. Pfaffenberger Gahl Hodges Burt $10,000 and above A. Robert Towbin Friedrich von Pfeil Fellowships established Cerberus Deutschland ACS Airport Commercial Enzo Viscusi Philip Phan in perpetuity Beteiligungsberatung Services Stanford Warshawsky Robert C. Pozen DaimlerChrysler Berlin Prize GmbH Verlag C.H. Beck Richard von Weizsäcker Virginia Ridder ERP Fund (Transatlantic Citigroup Global Markets Burson-Marsteller Xu Bing Hergard Rohwedder Program) of the Federal Continental Airlines Carnegie Corporation of Christian Zügel Jeffrey and Alison Rosenberg Ministry of Economics and Deutsche Börse AG New York Neil and Angelica Rudenstine Technology Dürr AG Ernst & Young All other contributions Henry W. Sapparth Ellen Maria Gorrissen Susanna Dulkinys and Federated Department Stores Wilhelm Ahrens Henrik Schliemann Berlin Prize Erik Spiekermann, Foundation Thomas Bagger Volker Schlöndorff Richard C. Holbrooke SpiekermannPartners Roger and Susan Hertog Georg Friedrich Baur Harald Schmid Distinguished Visitorship EADS Dieter von Holtzbrinck Detlef Bindert Pamela and Philipp Scholz Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize EnBW Energie Baden- John C. Kornblum Ronald Binks Warda Schrobsdorff Anna-Maria Kellen Württemberg AG Alexander Ochs Robert Bierich Peter Schwicht Berlin Prize Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld Dr. August Oetker KG Frank Böhnke Friedemann Scriba Stephen M. Kellen GmbH Rudolf August Oetker Jordan Bonfante Norman C. Selby Distinguished Visitorship Fresenius AG Stiftung Juliane Brandes Günther Peter Skrzypek Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Freshfields Bruckhaus Rafael J. Roth Diethart Breipohl Hans Jürgen Spiller Prize in the Visual Arts Deringer René Scharf Gerhard Casper Immo Stabreit Kurt Viermetz Distinguished Werner Gegenbauer Tengelmann Group Arthur D. Clarke Ronald Steel Visitorship General Motors Europe AG Robert S. Cohen Fritz Stern Richard von Weizsäcker Germanwings Patrons Georg Crezelius Maren and Jochen Distinguished Visitorship Goldman, Sachs & Co. $2,500 and above Rudolf Delius Strüngmann Haniel Stiftung Robert Z. Aliber David Detjen David Talman Trustees’ Circle Herbert-Quandt-Stiftung – Karl-Georg Altenburg Steven Howard and Thomas von Thaden $100,000 and above Die Stiftung der ARAMARK Margrit Disman Herman Tietz Anonymous ALTANA AG The Aspen Institute Günther and Gloria Jean Villechaise Robert Bosch Stiftung Hewlett-Packard GmbH Karl Beer Drechsler Paul Peter Werhahn The Coca-Cola Company Mary Ellen and Karl M. W. Michael Blumenthal Peter and Monika von Elten Hayden White DaimlerChrysler AG von der Heyden Ernst Cramer Thomas L. Farmer Linda and Tod White DaimlerChrysler Fonds im Richard C. Holbrooke Klaus Diederichs Egon Geerkens Daniel Wolf Stifterverband für die Körber-Stiftung Hans-Michael and Harvey J. Goldschmid Philipp Zenz-Spitzweg Deutsche Wissenschaft KPMG Almut Giesen Vartan Gregorian Deutsche Bank AG Berthold Leibinger Stiftung The Goldman Sachs Jan von Haeften Deutsche Lufthansa AG Robert and Bethany Millard Foundation Donald Howard Hagan Hypo Real Estate Group MSD Sharp & Dohme GmbH GSW Gemeinnützige Carl H. Hahn The John W. Kluge William von Mueffling Siedlungs- und Wohnungs Franz Haniel Foundation Jeanette and Joe Neubauer baugesellschaft Stephen Hartke J.P. Morgan AG Heinz-Joachim Neubürger Handelsblatt Fabian K. vom Hofe David M. Rubenstein Christopher Freiherr von Klaus and Lily Heiliger Michael Inacker Axel Springer AG Oppenheim Jon Vanden Heuvel Hotel InterContinental The Starr Foundation Osterfestspiele Salzburg The Y. A. Istel Berlin Wilmer Cutler Pickering Norman Pearlstine and Foundation Inc. Roe Jasen Hale and Dorr LLP Jane Boon Pearlstine The Jewish Community Fund Helga Kallenbach Perseus LLC Henry A. Kissinger Jörg Kastl Philip Morris GmbH Andreas Kleffel 07014_Az_210x280+3_gb.qxd:06079_Az_210x280 05.03.2007 10:28 Uhr Seite 1

There are many forms of mobility. The most important one is in our heads.

There is no freedom without the freedom of a purely theoretical exercise. It has a clear movement. The ability to move forward every objective: to offer the general public transparent day is decisive in determining our quality of life. information about promising new developments, The truth of this fact becomes most apparent unsolved problems and their potential ramifica- when one finds oneself unable to move forward: tions. The benefits of our efforts extend beyond the interplay of person, technology and organiza- the customers of the BMW Group – the work of tion is rarely stable, but is itself in a continuous the ifmo aims to enhance general awareness of process of movement and change. Since 1998, the direction that our society is heading. Because the Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo), an only they who are well informed can make truly organization set up the BMW Group, has been free decisions. studying the interactions that influence mobility. In close cooperation with politics, science and industry, we develop new paths for a mobile future. On water, on land and in the air, autono- More information is available here: mous or with mechanical assistance. This is not www.bmwgroup.com/mobility

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