Stephen Max Kellen Berlin 1914 – New York 2004 Thank You

A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Eight | Spring 2004 The Berlin Journal

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Were He Still Here If only Stephen Kellen could have experienced another semester at the Hans Arnhold Center. He would have been as engrossed as he had been during his last visit in May 2002, when he sat rapt in the ﬁrst row listening to Walter Laqueur lecture on terrorism. The breadth of his curiosity was remarkable. He relished regular contact with his vast collection of Berlin friends and followed the Academy’s program closely from a distance. This spring he would have wanted to hear every detail of the visits of three veter- an Middle East experts. I can imagine the pleasure he would have taken in hearing the Scharoun Ensemble play compositions by Lukas Foss, how he would have conversed with Michael Geyer about nationalism, and how he would have listened attentively to Tom Geoghegan’s social prognoses. We were blessed to have him as long as we did, but we wish he were still here to cheer us on. –Gary Smith

A Magazine from the Hans Arnhold Center Trustees of the American Academy 04 Remembering Stephen Kellen The Academy commemorates the life Published twice a year by the American Academy in Berlin Honorary Chairmen Number Eight – Spring 2004 of its great benefactor, friend, and mentor, Stephen Max Kellen. Our Thomas L. Farmer Henry A. Kissinger issue begins with a bouquet of memoirs by Robert Mundheim, Richard Richard von Weizsäcker Editor Gary Smith Holbrooke, Anabelle Garrett, Gary Smith, Henry Arnhold, Leslie Gelb, Co- Editor Miranda Robbins Chairman Richard C. Holbrooke Andrew Gundlach, Nina von Maltzahn, and Marina Kellen French. Design Susanna Dulkinys and United Designers Network Editorial Intern William Kee Vice Chairman 13 W. S. DiPiero “A Cold June” Gahl Hodges Burt Original Drawings Ben Katchor 14 The Prospects of Partnership: Developing Strategies for the Middle East President Advertising Renate Pöppel Robert H. Mundheim Three seasoned diplomats present their views. Printing Ruksaldruck GmbH, Berlin 16 Dennis Ross, Clinton’s chief negotiator at Camp David in 2000, applies the Treasurer lessons of Iraq to Israel’s announced withdrawal from Gaza. If you wait until Karl M. von der Heyden The American Academy in Berlin the “day after” to plan a transition of power, you have waited too long. Am Sandwerder 17–19 | 14109 Berlin 20 Edward Djerejian Tel. (+ 49 30) 80 48 3-0 | Fax (+ 49 30) 80 48 3-111 Trustees , after four decades in the diplomatic corps, is struck by [email protected] Gahl Hodges Burt the carpet of satellite dishes stretching from the Marrakesh medina to Kabul Diethart Breipohl and Karachi. Throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, America’s intentions Executive Director Gerhard Casper Gary Smith are being hotly debated on television, radio, and satellite. How can the US join Lloyd N. Cutler Deputy Director the discussion? Thomas L. Farmer Paul Stoop Julie Finley 23 Martin Indyk External Affairs Director understands the complex interdependencies among Middle Vartan Gregorian Renate Pöppel Eastern factors, the delicate balance between a whole and its parts. The former William A. Haseltine Finances / Accounting Jon Vanden Heuvel diplomat looks back upon the mistakes of the last two US administrations and Karl Beer Karl M. von der Heyden forward to a four-part strategy for positive transformation in the region. Fellows Services Director Richard C. Holbrooke Marie Unger Dieter von Holtzbrinck 27 Notebook of the Academy: News about our trustees, fellowships, programs, Program Coordinator Josef Joffe Ute Zimmermann and alumni Stephen M. Kellen † Press Coordinator 32 Henry A. Kissinger Life and Letters: People and projects at the Hans Arnhold Center Ingrid Müller Horst Köhler 36 Ofﬁce Manager, New York On the Waterfront: What they are writing about us – including a Christmas John C. Kornblum Jennifer Montemayer present from the New York Times, a short profile of Berlin-born composer Lukas Otto Graf Lambsdorff Director of Publications Nina von Maltzahn Foss, and a column by David Warsh on fellow Academy fellow Hope Harrison. Miranda Robbins Deryck Maughan Foreign Policy Forum Coordinator 40 Michael Geyer Klaus Mangold describes the catastrophic effects of German nationalism in two Philipp Albers Erich Marx world wars. Tax-deductible contributions to the Berlin Journal Wolfgang Mayrhuber may be made by check or by bank transfer to the Robert H. Mundheim 45 Thomas Geoghegan shows the connection between the collapse of unions, American Academy in Berlin , Berliner Sparkasse Joseph Neubauer healthcare, and government regulation, and America’s litigation madness. Account no. 660 000 9908, BLZ 100 500 00 Franz Xaver Ohnesorg Robert C. Pozen 49 W. S. Di Piero All rights reserved ISSN 1610-6490 “Didn’t You Say Desire Is?” Volker Schlöndorff Fritz Stern 50 Alex Ross describes the premiere that brought toute Vienne to Graz in 1906. THE Kurt Viermetz AMERICAN Alberto W. Vilar 54 Elizabeth McCracken ACADEMY “Ode to a Fifth-Grade Teacher” IN BERLIN Richard von Weizsäcker Hans Arnhold Center Klaus Wowereit, ex ofﬁcio + Work by artists Xu Bing and Reynold Reynolds Stephen Max Kellen Berlin 1914 – NewYork 2004 PhotographAnnetteHornischerby

4 Number Eight | Spring 2004

High Standards Were His Hallmark

n february 11, 2004, Stephen Kellen passed My grandfather was a great collector – of ideas, art, and cherished friends. away, and the American Academy in Berlin What my family learned on his passing was that he was also an extraordinary lost its greatest friend and supporter. collector of quotations. Much to our surprise, we found them squirreled Stephen had three great loves: his wife and away everywhere; his pockets, wallet, and drawers were ﬁlled with scraps of constant companion of nearly 64 years, paper. They never left his side. Anna-Maria, the city of his birth, Berlin, andO the city he adopted, New York. As he was fond of saying, – Anabelle Garrett »I became a very good New Yorker but have always remained a good Berliner.« The American Academy embodies these three loves. The Academy’s Berlin home is the house in which Anna-Maria grew up and where she lived when Stephen courted her. The Academy was founded on the idea that it would be a living bridge between two communities about which Stephen cared deeply. It would be a bridge for people, including, importantly young people, and for ideas bringing Germany and America closer together and enriching both. Stephen gave every encouragement for the Academy to grow quickly into the role he envisioned for it. But as it grew (some- “I believe in love times even more rapidly than he expected), he admonished us – in another of his favorite phrases – »quality, not quantity« and work, and their must be our touchstone. High standards were a hallmark for linkage. I believe all of Stephen’s activities. that we are neither Although we will miss Stephen’s energy, focus, judgment and angels nor devils, continual thoughtful help, he has left us a very lively institu- but humans, with tion which bears his stamp and keeps reminding us how for- clusters of potentials tunate we are to have had him as a great friend. in both directions. – Robert Mundheim I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist but a possibilist.”

– Max Lerner

The Berlin Journal 5 Remembering Stephen Kellen Richard Holbrooke

tephen Kellen was a great man. known to many. Allow me to recall it He would have been surprised once more. Sby this statement, because he We began with an idea: to create a per- never sought personal recognition for his manent American presence in Berlin as the achievements, and, indeed, was, by tem- storied Berlin brigade left the city it had perament and upbringing, incapable of protected throughout the cold war. Henry such thinking about himself. But, hav- Kissinger, Richard von Weizsäcker, and ing known a few people who were truly Tom Farmer joined me in announcing the great – and many who thought they were idea on September 9, 1994, the day after – I believe that Stephen fulfilled the char- the last American troops left the city. But it acteristics of greatness. While he main- was only an idea. No building. PhotographAnnetteHornischerby tained, to the very end, a lively interest No money. Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen, and Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke at the second in the affairs of the world around him, We finally found a building, a large New Traditions conference in Berlin in 1998. Stephen probably saw himself primarily villa on the Wannsee – not the Villa on the as an observer of events. Wannsee, but a beautiful old building that Well, in this respect, although in few had, in its lifetime, been taken over by Stephen was not modern in any sense vision will survive, and will succeed. New others, Stephen was wrong. In fact, in Hitler, ransacked by the Russians in 1945, of the word. Yet he was always open to Yorkers are proud that he chose to live in every area in which he took an interest, and served as the American military rec- new ideas and encouraging young people and give so much to their city. And Berlin Stephen made a real difference. His impact reation center during the cold war. The whom he well knew lived with values and is remarkably fortunate that he could see on the music world, and on the city of New German government offered it to us, but it a style completely different from the one beyond the horrors that had driven him York, was obvious and undeniable. So, too, was a run-down mess, unusable. that had been hard-wired into him early from Germany over sixty years ago, and his firm commitment to the Council on Then came the miracle moment. We in life. leave behind, in the city of his birth, some- Foreign Relations. discovered that the villa had been the And so he and Anna-Maria made thing so enduring, a symbol of his vision But it was the American Academy childhood home of Anna-Maria Kellen, the decision to support the American that will last for a very long time. This is in Berlin – the project that brought me whose father, Hans Arnhold, was one of Academy – not just in a small way but our pledge to Stephen and Anna-Maria together with him and Anna-Maria – that Germany’s leading bankers before the with a massive gift that would enable us and the family. Because of their vision turned out to be the most enduring legacy Nazis came to power. to rebuild completely the inside of Anna- and generosity, I am confident it will sur- of his philanthropic work. One of his favor- My call on the Kellens at their home Maria’s childhood home while maintain- vive us all as a permanent link between ite phrases – I can hear him saying it now in 1996 changed all of our lives. Entering ing its essential character. From that time the two cities that formed the arc of his in his precise, don’t-argue-with-me man- their Park Avenue apartment for the first on, the Kellens and the other descen- extraordinary life. ner, was “I am a good New Yorker and a time, being served those small triangular dants of Hans Arnhold have been the cen- good Berliner.” The American Academy in pieces of pumpernickel laden with smoked tral reason for the success of the American Berlin gave him and Anna-Maria a chance salmon, looking at the spectacular art, Academy in Berlin. to create a tangible link between the city of including a Salvador Dali portrait of Stephen, always a stickler for precision, Q their birth and the city that they had made Anna-Maria’s mother, surrounded by wanted to put Anna-Maria forward, since their home for over sixty years. silver-framed family portraits from another it was her childhood home, not his. So at I need to be as precise here as Stephen continent and another century, I some- the Academy’s inaugural in 1998, he insist- always was, as Stephen would expect. how felt at home immediately. Perhaps it ed that she, and she alone, speak. Stephen When he said “Berlin” he meant Berlin, was because I too had come from a family stood quietly to the side, a faint, shy smile and not, he made clear, Germany. Not background steeped in a Mitteleuropa sen- concealing a deep pleasure just showing that he opposed the long postwar effort sibility. I felt as though I was back with my on the surface, as Germans greeted him. to rebuild Germany; on the contrary, he grandparents in Zurich, or my great-grand- They were virtually speechless in the face played an important role in this effort. mother in long-ago summers in Sils Maria. of such an extraordinary gesture of recon- But he did so out of a conviction that The Kellens had been born in the 1910s, but ciliation, if not quite forgiveness, and their it was in our national interests to cre- their values and roots went back much fur- inability to express themselves masked, ate a stable and democratic Germany. ther, into the nineteenth century. Stephen’s but only slightly, their indescribably com- Berlin was something else – his home, immense dignity, his ramrod straight back, plex reaction to his generosity. Then Anna- even though it had rejected him and so his perfect manners, his discipline and Maria spoke, eloquently and movingly, of many others in the 1930s. This was clear iron will cloaked in the modesty of an old- her childhood in the rooms and gardens in a remarkable piece of symbolism – his world sensibility – all this was quite unfor- that were now so magnificently restored, insistence on always staying at the Hotel gettable in the modern world. I remember as Stephen quietly watched her, his eyes Kempinski because it was located on the once, in Berlin, the head of the Prussian glistening with emotion and pride. site of the house in which he had grown Historical Society – and you can imagine But behind Anna-Maria and the whole up. By the end, of course, Berlin had what that means – said to me, after listen- family was always this man – so stern on embraced him again and even given him ing to Stephen and Anna-Maria speaking the outside, so caring underneath, with its highest award. German, “You know, no one still speaks a vision of a future that he well knew he The circumstances that brought us German the way they do. It is an experience would not see. But as we say goodbye to together as collaborators and friends are just to listen to them.” Stephen Kellen, we should also say that his

6 Number Eight | Spring 2004

the superb cellist to fly to New York that Kellen who gave me real insight into that day, where he played Bach and Casals with milieu. Their world was shaped by an Man the Measure luminous virtuosity between the encomia appreciation, if not admiration, for the Gary Smith memorializing Stephen’s life. best of what those heady years in Berlin But this tale has a preface: In the salon- brought forth in the arts, scholarship, like gatherings in the home of Hans and industry. It became determined and Ludmilla Arnhold, where Stephen by the measure of character demanded first met and later courted his future by the vicissitudes of the trials that fol- wife Anna-Maria, another great cellist, lowed. In the case of Stephen Kellen, his Gregor Piatigorsky occasionally played, life forged a character compelling in its once even with Casals. As that story goes, probity and curiosity. ix weeks ago I sat in The Kitchen, one and success implies unflagging dyna- Piatigorsky, having arrived in Berlin, first of these dark experimental spaces mism. After lunches or lectures on the barely subsisted by playing a shabby bor- ne of the most perplexing Ssomewhere in the Chelsea district of Wannsee, Stephen would be one of the rowed instrument in a Russian bar, where questions remains why a person Manhattan, in order to see a rock “tragi- last to leave and would sit as long as possi- he was discovered by a friend of Hans Owho was forced to leave National comedy” written and illustrated by a leg- ble in quiet conversations with Academy Arnhold’s. The result was true to form: Socialist Germany would devote his life to endary, quirky cartoonist who had been fellows, staff, or other guests. Piatigorsky needed a proper cello, and rebuilding that very country and especially at the Academy. In the intermission, I sur- As so many have pointed out here, his Stephen’s future father-in-law provided devote so much philanthropic passion to veyed the list of The Kitchen’s benefac- appetite for dialogue was inexhaustible. it; all the more fitting that a Piatigorsky the re-civilization of the city of his birth. tors on the photocopied pamphlet which Every few weeks brought reports of a con- pupil, Georg Faust, should play his trib- Very few émigrés looked back in anything served as a program (admittedly a profes- versation with one or another German ute to the son-in-law at that Manhattan but anger and abhorrence. I asked one sional vice), and there they were: Anna - politician passing through, whether memorial gathering. of the few who returned, the venerable Maria and Stephen M. Kellen, the surest Joschka Fischer, Angela Merkel, or a post- 91-year old Berliner Ernst Cramer, with seal of excellence any New York cultural communist member of the Bundestag. will always cherish the feeling of déjà whom Stephen had established a fond institution could display. He inquired just as eagerly of Americans vu I experienced the first time I visit- relationship in recent years. He attributed Their interests encompassed both the returning from Berlin like Daniel I ed Stephen and Anna-Maria Kellen. the decades of his devotion to building larger-than-life Berlin Philharmonic and Libeskind or Roger Cohen. What had drawn me to Berlin was bio- the Springer publishing house in postwar the humble Third Street Music School Stephen’s curiosity was dialectical – graphically-grounded, from summer vis- Berlin to two things: a sense of gratitude Settlement on the Lower East Side. Their simultaneously probing and edifying. Its its to New York with my great aunts from and responsibility to the country he grew zeal was always for excellence and never effect on his interlocutors was as indelible Königsberg and their presents of Mörike up in. for personal recognition. Stephen’s charm as it was diplomatic. I kept running into and Heine to precious weeks spent in the Stephen was blissfully unaware of his was that of the discreet philanthropist, people whose lives he had affected. Many book-lined apartment of Gershom and greatness, and we can understand some- the respectful mentor who was generous came to the Academy, like the von der Fania Scholem in Rehavia. These were what better the character of a man who in counsel but also allowed his charges to Planitzes or Bredows, or the cultivated worlds that no longer existed in Germany exemplified Churchill’s well-known ideal: make their own mistakes. (In this respect, woman my son and I happened to meet but could still be experienced in New York “The price of greatness is responsibility.” Stephen is uncannily like Bob Mundheim, on a bus making the rounds of Berlin and in Jerusalem. It was not necessarily the Academy’s presiding mentor, even museums, whom he had impressed after Jewish – how many families had been bap- though Mundheim is from Hamburg – not only a few conversations. tized in previous generations? – and yet its yet part of greater Berlin.) Many of us will miss those weekly tele- mores were as unmistakeable as its cosmo- Stephen Kellen was that rare benefac- phone calls, Stephen’s careful and dis- politanism. The wealth of books surround- tor who is allergic to intrusiveness and crete questioning about life in Berlin. He ing the Klees and Feiningers in the Kellen thus all the more influential. He never was somehow always better informed home signified a respect for the word as tired of urging what I thought of as his about life in the city of his birth than well as love of visual art. three E’s: excellence, economy, and enthu- many Berliners. After answering all his My fainter memories of the Scholems siasm. Quality, he intimated, can only be questions, I always wanted to keep him and of my own relations are of reso- assured by keeping things manageable, on the line as long as I could in order to lute integrity (not to mention a heavily- tap into that vast store of wisdom. Berlinesque English), but it was Stephen

s the cavernous rotunda of St. John’s Cathedral on Amsterdam A and 112th Street gradually filled at last month’s memorial tribute to Stephen, it became clear once again that he had touched many lives. Present were three of four generations of bankers, industri- alists, and the politically minded, as well as artists, educators, journalists, and, not least, Germanophiles – just a fraction of the New Yorkers and Berliners who shared an admiration for Stephen Kellen. Each of those six or seven hundred who were there signified a relationship, a story or subplot in Stephen’s life. Even Georg Faust, the magnificent principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic who performed there stood for the many ways in which Stephen’s life intersected with those of others. Stephen loved the Berlin Philharmonic, and spoke admiringly of Georg Faust, which moved

The Berlin Journal 7 He had an amazing recall for all that by the results, it must have been a good mattered, with a deep understanding of recipe. I am more impulsive and some- Friendship in Partnership all aspects of the business, including each times would raise a half-baked idea. Henry Arnhold footnote in the balance sheet. Stephen would always say, “the devil is in He may have appeared very stiff and the details,” and of course he was right. strict, as he carried himself erect and was When Stephen was asked by friends and very conservative in his dress. Even on clients for advice or his opinion he would the hottest summer days he would never often say, “I am cautiously optimistic,” remove his jacket. He was always apprecia- which some thought was a clever hedged tive of good manners, and many employ- response. I have thought about it lately, ees not only respected him but were some- and I am convinced that these four words first met Stephen in 1942. He was 27, what intimidated by him. But, they soon – “I am cautiously optimistic” – actually he was married to my cousin Anna- learned that their welfare and problems characterize the secret of his success. They I Maria, he was a young father, and he considered as his problems. He would truly reflect Stephen’s character and the he was a full-fledged banker. I was twen- go out of his way to help them by apply- methodical and disciplined approach in ty, and would spend the next years in the ing the same methodical approach as was his decision making – his caution, his care- US Army. On occasion, when I had a 3- his nature to any solution. Many people ful analysis, his willingness to spend time day pass and was able to get to New York, owe him very much, certainly not least and resources to improve the odds that Anna-Maria and Stephen were my gener- the broadly dispersed Arnhold Family. he would reach the right decision, and his ous hosts at their home. Without him our firm would never have perseverance to follow up. Stephen first trained at the respected prospered as it did. Back in the early post- His concern that an error could lead Berliner Handelsgesellschaft in his native war years until the 1950s, even today’s to an unanticipated loss far exceeded his Berlin. He then spent some time at Lazard giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan eagerness for huge profit opportunities. Brothers in London. In 1936 he immigrat- Stanley had at most two hundred employ- He was never a speculator. ed to the United States and found a job at Carl M. Loeb, where he worked for two entrepreneurial young partners, Harold “The devil is in the details.” Linder and Bill Golden, both of whom ees. International communications were He enjoyed games of chance but only if became his lifelong friends. In 1940 Hans mostly coded telegrams and poor tele- he could intellectually measure the odds. Arnhold, his father-in-law, drafted him to phone connections. I remember interest- You could trust his judgment. He had a help build an investment banking busi- ing transactions in which Stephen’s friend sharp pencil, but at the same time Stephen Q ness in New York. The Arnhold Family the legendary Ben Graham and his partner was most generous when it could further had recently founded Arnhold and S. Jerry Newman joined with us. a cause or avoid a hardship to others. Bleichroeder, Inc. to keep alive its long Hans Arnhold wished that we should He gave much to so many people in his established tradition as bankers after hav- remain small – not quantity but quality leadership position in the firm and in ing been forced to abandon its banking worked fine. We always watched our over- the industry. firms, Arnhold Brothers, in Dresden and head. I can remember one occasion, when I have talked mainly about Stephen at Berlin, where it had played a leading role we had big mail bags full of Mexican Eagle work – others will describe him as a devot- in financing German industry and inter- bearer shares, we enlisted Stephen’s wife ed husband, father, grandfather and proud national trade. Anna-Maria and my wife Sissy to clip cou- great-grandfather, about his contribution After my discharge from the Army in pons – we enjoyed having them visit us in to broader society and as a philanthropist. 1946, my Uncle Hans also drafted me. the office. Being in his company was always stimu- Stephen helped me to get the needed Wall Like traditional bankers, we were always lating; his interests and knowledge were Street back-office training in the firm conscious of our reputation, our name – so manifold, and until the end, he was an of his friend, Irving Kahn. On January we considered this our most important activist and a doer. 1, 1947, 57 years ago, I joined him at asset. Stephen helped us to solidify our Stephen and I have shared a lot of good Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder. Stephen standing and to gain respect within the times and a lot of challenges over many and I shared a large room with two trad- Wall Street and banking communities by decades – gratefully, for a much longer ers, a ticking NYSE ticker tape, our econo- his stature and professionalism. Thanks time than the generations preceding us. mist, and a secretary – my learning expe- to our firm’s European background and For 64 years he served the shareholders, rience started. After three months, historic relations, we were able to build the associates and the clients of Arnhold I took a day off – I had just gotten engaged a franchise in international securities, and S. Bleichroeder with extraordinary and wanted to help my fiancée shop for which in time became a very active busi- devotion and care. We will miss his wise our forthcoming wedding. The next day ness. Stephen was a particularly skilled counsel and his strong presence, but all of Stephen sharply reprimanded me: if I and diplomatic negotiator – he loved to us can reflect fondly on his great contribu- thought that I could have extra privileges solve complex problems, which others had tion to our lives. He was my partner and just because I was a family member, I was failed to solve. He called it his hobby – a my friend. in the wrong place. For Stephen, being a typical understatement. It required a lot of member of the Family meant having extra work and ingenuity. He developed impor- responsibilities. In his long career his atti- tant relationships in particular with many tude never changed – duty and respon- leading German industrial firms, and he sibility came first. With his associates he advised them in their expansion to the US. was conscious of his position as a leader. For more than fifty years we shared a He had a disciplined approach to every- partnership based on mutual trust – both thing and, even as we grew, each day he of us could commit the firm individually, would circulate through each depart- which neither would do if the other would ment checking with both his chiefs have objected. We were very different and his clerks. He knew most individual in many respects. We often approached employees. issues from different angles. But, judging

8 Number Eight | Spring 2004

and little begging. If he said he’d get back Greenberg, and myself. Typically, Stephen Decisively Generous to you in two days, he would be on the asked, “How old are these young people?” telephone to you within 48 hours to the I said roughly 25–35 years of age. “What Leslie Gelb minute. do they do at the Council?” Listen to smart In many ways, Stephen lived more in people and discuss matters among them- the past and in the future, less so in the selves. “I’ll get back to you in two days,” present. He did not get bogged down in the and he did, and thus began a program present. Nor did he agonize intellectually that goes forward under the name of the about current political affairs. It was either Stephen M. Kellen Term Membership “That’s right,” or “That’s ridiculous,” or Program. played a very small part in Stephen’s “I don’t know,” or “Nobody knows.” Stephen used to come to the meet- T life; he loomed large in mine. I kept Stephen was not restrained by great ings of these younger people. He would Ihim abreast of foreign policy talk and doubt. The past represented culture, and sit without moving a muscle for an hour, gossip. He made possible a dream for the beauty, civilization, and standards. Yes, concentrating. Afterward, he would say Council on Foreign Relations – to involve standards. And he gave so much to main- to me things like: “They listen too much younger Americans more deeply in the tain those standards, the culture and the to Henry Kissinger and not enough to foreign policies of their country. beauty. The present was for hard work, themselves.” Or, “Many of these younger As the famous German poet Richard for fun, and for creating the wealth to help women are very beautiful, but not so beau- Holbrooke – I mean, Heinrich Heine – fund remembrances of the good things tiful as the older women.” once opined: “In the end, God will forgive past and the future. Anna-Maria reminded me the other us all. That’s his business.” For Stephen It was in the future that Stephen’s life day that Stephen believed in God. I believe Kellen, God will have little to forgive. And and mine really intermingled. The future that Stephen is in heaven and that in his God will soon discover that business with for him was about youth and hope. And ﬁrst conversation with God he will say Stephen can be conducted very quickly. the future for us at the Council on Foreign something like, “We should ﬁx things up a Stephen was a gentleman and a plea- Relations was tied to bringing about the little around here, no?” Stephen still looms sure. He was rightly known as a great greater involvement of some of our more large in our lives. philanthropist, and I might say, he made talented young Americans in thinking begging bearable. Many people and orga- about the world and about US foreign nizations owe an enormous debt to him. policy. Leslie H. Gelb is President Emeritus of the And as many of us can tell you, Stephen I went to Stephen on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations. was the easiest person to ask for help. He Council, of which he was a longtime mem- either said, “Yes,” or “No,” or “I’ll think ber. I told him of the goal to commit to about it for a couple of days and get back the young, put forward by our chairman to you.” There was no fuss, no bother, Peter Peterson, vice chairman Maurice

The Berlin Journal 9 n the family, my grandfather was solve them.” I asked how he managed to known as Dodo – a nickname given solve them, and he would make a slight Ito him by his sister. Dodo would have fist and say, “Determination.” Another been truly surprised and very grateful time, I asked how George Soros ended up for such a wonderful showing of love and working at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder. respect. Indeed, he might have wondered To which he responded, “I asked a friend which great man is being honored here, whom I respected to recommend some- as he sought neither fame, nor adulation, body young and with great promise.” And nor honors, nor even greatness in the com- then he added a line I have never forgot- mon sense of the word. For him, a great life ten: “I have always found that good people was being actively involved in worthwhile know good people.” causes; it was making a positive contribu- And for my grandfather, it was always tion to the world around him; it was doing about people. It was never about just things right, doing things fairly, with high making money. He knew that what made ethics and great attention to detail. Most A&SB different was the unique charac- of all, it was doing things in partnership ter of a family firm on Wall Street, and the with people whom he respected, in whom extraordinary people who put their whole he saw potential and whom he trusted. It lives into it, as he did. The very special and certainly was never his intention to make talented people who have worked at the his life an example for us all, but he did firm over the years should know that they just that. were as much a part of his family as any of First, in the business world and on Wall us. He followed their careers and families Street. For three summers in high school, as closely as he did his own. I was a summer intern at Arnhold and While Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder was S. Bleichroeder. So my grandfather was a labor of love for my grandfather, his true my first boss, and at an early age, I had a love was the young woman he met when glimpse of him at work. she was 16 in Berlin at a dinner dance For him, there was something noble about being in the investment banking and money management businesses; they were an extension of his personality and The Life God-given desire to help people, providing him a way to solve people’s strategic corpo- in His Years rate problems and to help them build and create wealth through wise investing. Andrew Gundlach When I worked at A&SB, my grandfather seemed omnipresent. I asked repeat- edly over the summers, “Does my grand- at her home on the Wannsee – the same across the Oder River in Poland. One sum- My grandfather died just short of his father always come to this part of the firm home that is today the American Academy mer, when I was in Berlin with him just ninetieth birthday. He left us quietly, on a daily basis by telephone, or is he just in Berlin. The year was 1935. Through after the Wall came down, I convinced him caringly and, as always, wanting more checking up on me?” The answer I got letters and visits, they stayed in close that we should take a car to the place of than anything else for his family to stick was always the same: “Mr. Kellen stops touch – even as she moved to Paris and his childhood memories. He remembered together through good times and bad into by every day.” On summer holidays, my he to London. In 1936, at the age of 22 he it well – especially the park and its wind- the future. Today, his children and grand- grandfather also checked in daily by tele- arrived in New York, escorted by his father ing paths through beautiful forests. It was children are trying to carry forward his phone – usually just before dinner. When who then returned to Germany. Three a very emotional moment for him, and it legacy into a future that will need both the other end picked up, he would say, years later, in 1939, my grand- prompted one of his favorite sayings. “It is his reach and his vision. His memory will “Kellen. How are you? How are we?” I mother’s family also came to New York. amazing what one can experience in one live on – not only in our minds but also in asked once why it was so important for On March 7, 1940 they were married – lifetime, if one lives long enough.” our hearts. him to call in every single day. His reply and spent the next 64 years together. was “I like keeping my finger on the pulse.” In my grandmother, he found some- My grandfather knew only one kind of one who knew his background and cul- “It is amazing what one can experience management, and that was “Hands-On ture, his sensitivities and weaknesses, and Management.” And he had little time for in whom he could confide and trust. My in one lifetime, if one lives long enough.” people who didn’t subscribe to that theo- grandmother once told me that at least Throughout his life, my grandfather was Beyond grief is our gratitude. We thank ry – and great respect for the people who once every day of their marriage, he called always devoted to the Katzenellenbogen him for giving us an example of disci- did. “Everything is management,” he liked her “mein Leben” – which translates as “my family he was born into: his older sister pline and hard work, of vision and style, of to say. Often he would buy shares in a com- Love,” or “my Life,” or “my Everything.” died in her teenage years, and he made humility and steadfast integrity. We thank pany without even looking at the numbers Over 64 years, that’s at least 23,000 times. sure her gravesite in Berlin was well tend- him for setting standards of excellence when he knew and thought highly of the The bond my grandparents shared was ed – even when he was brand new to for us and for teaching us to be generous. leadership. as strong as I’ve ever seen, showing the America and didn’t have much money. And of course, we thank him for making As an intern, admittedly, I had unusu- strength of a lifetime commitment of love Late in 1939, he helped get his parents out us so proud of him and all he managed to al access to the president of the firm – and and of caring. of Germany, first to England and shortly accomplish in his extraordinary life. I took full advantage of it. Once I asked Together, they rebuilt their lives and thereafter to Switzerland. Tragically, the Another favorite saying he borrowed how he managed to get companies like prospered in America – a culture so very war years prevented him from reuniting from Adlai Stevenson: “It’s not the years Siemens, Bosch, and Mannesmann to do different from the one they were born with his parents before my great grandfa- in your life that count, it’s the life in deals with a small firm like Arnhold and into. My grandfather had grown up in ther, Max Katzenellenbogen, died in 1944. your years.” For my grandfather, there S. Bleichroeder. His answer: “I asked them Berlin, and on weekends went to his fam- Thereafter, he supported his mother, was both a lot of life and a lot of years. to give me problems that nobody else ily’s country estate in Gross Kamin, for- Leonie, for 37 years, and we all enjoyed vis- We will miss our Dodo greatly and love had yet solved – and then I found a way to merly in Germany and today ten miles iting her in Switzerland as children. him always.

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he a good listener, he also knew how to ask I think he got better more rapidly highly pointed questions. We were fond because he so enjoyed being in Berlin. Knowledge was of saying of him that knowledge was his Berlin was his city in Germany – and hobby horse. And whenever possible, he only Berlin. his Hobby Horse would try to help young people. He would say, “Es gibt geborene Berliner Nina von Maltzahn It was one of his traditions when he und Wahl-Berliner. Ich bin beides” – There was in Berlin to visit to his old school, the are born Berliners and Berliners by choice. Französisches Gymnasium, and have a talk I am both! with the graduating class. The last time he In his last years he was very concerned tephen Kellen’s life has been Whenever he wanted to contemplate went, in 2002, the discussion lasted almost about the state of the world. “Die Welt ist described in great detail at the something someone had said, he would three hours. As a result of these exchang- aus den Fugen,” he would often say – the Smemorial services in New York and use the short phrase in English, “I see …” es he was able to bring the point of view of world is out of joint. And he would add: Berlin. He had a special way with language, It meant that he intended to return the young people into his other debates. “We’ve had ﬁfty years of paradise.” I can- both German and English, that I shall given topic soon, and he usually did. I He was grateful for his long life and not imagine a better or more succinct sum- dearly miss. admired his ability to listen, especially in always curious about what would come mary of the current state of the world. It is not only his tone of voice that I cases when I knew he held a very different next. “How much one can experience in a The American Academy meant a great miss, the way he answered the phone – opinion. single lifetime,” he would say, “and how deal to him, and it gave him great plea- “Stephen Kellen” – the way he announced I was granted the privilege of learning much I am allowed to experience.”– Was sure – because of his feelings for his native himself whenever he called. It is the way he from him for only a few short years, but man doch in einem Menschenleben alles city, and because he saw it as an impor- would always inquire about how one was I have so much to thank him for. He was erleben kann und ich noch erleben darf! tant bridge between America and Berlin. faring. That alone says so much about his there whenever I had a question. In the After his attack of pneumonia here in Here, too, Stephen and Anna-Maria Kellen character. course of our conversations he often used Berlin two years ago, he realized his life achieved so much through their efforts. Returning from the recent memorial the saying “the devil is in the details” – and would continue only with God’s will, and Speaking about my grandmother service in New York, I found myself miss- then he would proceed to analyze and dis- he often said how grateful he was to the Ludmilla Arnhold at the opening of the ing his usual telephone call. “Seid Ihr gut cuss the whole matter once more, with the Lord for this blessing. The time he spent at Hans Arnhold Center, I said “Behind every geﬂogen?” he would ask? Then, after a greatest precision. Martin Luther Hospital remains unforget- great man stands a great women.” I can say pause, “Wie ist das Wetter in Berlin?” He was a great philanthropist. The table, not just for me. Even in his frail state the same today. Behind the unforgettable He always wanted to be well-informed range of his interests has always been he thoroughly enjoyed chatting with the Stephen Kellen stands a great woman: my and constantly sought to acquire new remarkable. And he did everything with nurses in a thick Berlin accent. Very soon aunt Anna-Maria Kellen. knowledge, not just about his family but his characteristic modesty. he knew everything about the lives of the about so many other things. He loved youth and relished having dis- people taking care of him. That was truly He loved to listen and to ask questions. cussions with young people. Not only was Stephen Kellen.

Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold surrounded by their family. From left to right: Marina, Stephen, and Anna-Maria Kellen (née Arnhold), Ludmilla and Hans Arnhold, Ellen Maria Gorrissen (née Arnhold), and Nina Gorrissen (the author).

“It is amazing what one can experience in one lifetime, if one lives long enough.”

The Berlin Journal 11 New York. Often he would buy a picture and take it home under his arm. Promises I remember one incident well when we went to the Saidenberg Gallery and he fell to Keep in love with one of the three tomato plants that Picasso painted. He really wanted it Marina Kellen French but could not afford it, so every Saturday for at least six months we visited the painting, until sadly one day it was gone. When he made up his mind that he wanted a picture by a contemporary artist, hat an extraordinary human he was determined to find one and often being my father was! And how took us to their homes in Europe as well as W surprised he would be to hear in America. the kind words said about him here. He became a real mentor in my teenage Everyone knows that fathers and daugh- years and taught me to be economical. He ters have a special relationship, and I was was particularly firm about always turn- lucky to have that with him for so long. I ing the lights off when I left a room, which feel that I can remember my father every I do to this day, frequently with my hus- day of my life. The first real memories are band still in the room. He also taught me the regular Saturday and Sunday trips we to drive, and always said there was nothing made to the carousel in New York’s Central worse than a bad female driver. He worked Park. When I was at the Brearley School he especially on my driving backwards. “I am an old-fashioned man, and I also have the same wife.” walked me every day to the corner of 74th When I started dating I noticed that my Street and Park Avenue and put me on the male friends liked to talk to him as much school bus, always telling me to enjoy my as to me. He was very protective of me day of school and learn something! He because my mother told me that he knew loved father’s day at the school, and I was how men take advantage of single young always so proud of him. ladies. Once, on being introduced to Dolly People trusted him and many came to No one probably ever knew that Daddy Daddy did not like a lot of change in his Parton, he asked, “And what do you do?” him to solve their problems. He deeply cared was once a true Yankees fan. He liked to go life. He wore the same watch he received in Daddy loved people, young and old, about them and wanted to help. to Yankee Stadium and knew all the names 1936 from a friend in London and cufflinks and loved life. Partly that was because He had something very special about of the players: Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Mize, that his parents gave him at an early age. my mother was the sunshine to him and him – a twinkle in his eye, low key and bril- Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra, etc. He was born in a house in Berlin on the taught him to enjoy life to the fullest and liant, decent, honest, a vision of the world, In the summer we always traveled to Fasanenstrasse, which is now occupied by not to be a pessimist. knowledge of history, and integrity and wis- the mountains of Switzerland where we the Kempinski Hotel, and he stayed at that He loved his adopted new country and dom, and for me he was the quintessential spent time with his mother and my mater- hotel on every visit for the rest of his life. was grateful for the opportunity it gave European gentleman. nal grandparents, and when he joined us On his business trips to Zurich he always on his two weeks vacation, one of his favor- stayed a the Baur au Lac and always had the ite pastimes was to go on walks with me same meal for lunch and dinner. The wait- The woods are lovely dark and deep/But and pick baskets of berries, which we had ers did not give him a menu because they for dinner. knew it was the blue trout and boiled pota- I have promises to keep, /And miles to Daddy graduated from the College toes. In Düsseldorf it was the shrimp in Royal Français and the Handelshoch- dill sauce, and in Munich it was the veni- go before I sleep,/And miles to go before schule, and his first job was with the son. When he was asked why he had the Berliner Handelsgesellschaft. Daddy came same routine everywhere he replied “I am I sleep. – Robert Frost to New York via London in 1936. an old-fashioned man, and I also have the He shared an apartment on East 79th same wife.” him. He always said: “I am a good Berliner He loved his family, and when the grand- street with Gian Carlo Menotti and John I always made fun of my father for never but also a good New Yorker.” children came along he loved nothing more Stresemann, whose father had been Ger- enjoying good restaurants. He felt that my It is especially poignant that the villa than sitting on the floor playing games with many’s prime minister. He was a worka- mother was the best cook around and that that currently houses the Hans Arnhold them. When they got older he took them too holic, always striving for perfection and nowhere could he eat as well as at home. Center is the house in which Daddy first to the museums and galleries. questioning whether his decisions were His greatest joy was spending time in the met my mother. When he was courting her, He was the rock of Gibraltar for us all and the best ones that could be made. house in southern France, which he called as he tells the story, he would take the S- nothing was a problem. There would always Daddy felt a great responsibility to build “Paradise on earth.” He loved going to the Bahn to Wannsee and call from the station be a solution. up Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder to its for- markets to buy food and talking to the ven- before walking the short distance down the After his death we learned that on that mer eminent state. He often said that what dors and hearing the latest news about Sandwerder. This was to give them time to date he had been awarded the French Legion is needed to succeed is energy, urgency, their personal lives. lock up the German shepherds, who were d’honneur. How sad that he never knew of it. discipline, focus, and fear. In fact, he liked to conduct his own well known in the neighborhood for their Daddy, I hope that all of your descen- His love of art came from his aunt, polls everywhere to find out what people love of pantlegs. dants can live up to your standards, which Estella Katzenellenbogen, who was a were thinking, and to gauge the political You have heard a lot about his great philan- were so high, and that with the tools you well-known collector of impressionists in environment. He was particularly fond of thropy. He often quoted to me the words gave us we can exemplify your honesty and Berlin. As I grew older he took me nearly doing this in the waiting rooms of the of St. Francis of Assisi: “It is in giving that intelligence , and that you will look down every Saturday to visit art galleries in Mayo Clinic. we receive.” on us and be proud.

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Ice, dirt, and grey miraculous flesh. I can put my finger on the space debris buried all night on my window, until fog effaces it and other signs. What am I looking for? Why does comet dust that seems to burn recall the cold basilica, in June, my pious friend and I invited to the altar, the priest (sour voice, sour heart) reciting: locked in the reliquary, livid, translucent, like a flake of trapped ash, floats a slice of Christ’s heart, it’s all true, there’s medical testimony, it looks like a dragonfly’s wing but is His living blood cells. How curtly he announced it, impatient with non-belief before it shows itself, impatient with my indifference, while my friend wheezed through his mouth, awed, worshipful, and the father looked from him to me, as if to say you can’t appreciate without astonishment, the miraculous wants innocence beyond knowledge of contradiction, not the monocle of my unbelief. Yet now each night the comet somehow cuts across the relic, a coincidence easy to credit because it makes no sense, to believe in what I know is not true life.

The stars and gods have made us so that we make meaning of what resists us, and of such resistance make a consciousness, a rotund coherence of accident and law. The imagination in one stroke squeegees subway passages, manhole-cover steam cones, clouds, blowback snow when bus wheels turn, the dance of minor things sifting from or into others, momentously. I smudge an afterimage on my window to mark a juicy slice of being. What happens now? Busses and cafes explode in holy lands, in Hackensack a father kisses his son in peace, money eats dirt on Wall Street, Big Casino overdoses across the street, the Gypsy to the Werewolf sings Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night Will become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, and the moon is full and bright. Glacial dust wasting away across the sky where gods have come and gone, downstairs a student’s cello practices praise and questions for those gods. Woeful, nervous, almost content, he falters and plays the phrase again.

W. S. Di Piero was a fellow at the American Academy in the fall of 2002. This poem and the poem on page 49 are forthcoming in Brother Fire, which Knopf will publish next fall. A Cold June W. S. Di Piero © © Getty Images The Prospects of Partnership

conversations with Yasser Arafat conducted over the course of more than Developing Strategies for ten years. Edward Djerejian served eight US presidents and was asked by the current administration to chair a congressional commission on pub- the Middle East lic diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world. Martin Indyk served twice as US Ambassador to Israel under Clinton and founded two important non- Dennis Ross partisan Middle East think tanks: the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (now headed by Dennis Ross) and the Brookings Institution’s Saban Edward P. Djerejian Center for the Middle East Policy, which he continues to direct. Martin Indyk Each of our guests was struck by the seriousness of the German commitment to playing a beneficial and creative role in the region. The desire for dialogue was evident in every encounter, from high-level meetings at the The texts printed here are based on public lectures delivered at the Hans Arnhold Center in March and April of 2004. Chancellery and Foreign Ministry to roundtables organized at institutes as varied as the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the American Jewish Committee, the Aspen Institute Berlin, the German Marshall Fund, and the Stiftung Wissenschaft and Politik. hen dennis ross left his two-hour discussion with German National Security Advisor Bernd Mützelburg, we were no lon- In the course of these meetings, ideas were aired on matters such as the Wger surprised by the length or intensity of the meeting. It was the recent emphasis on the “Greater Middle East.” While differences in the last talk in a marathon of private diplomacy we had arranged for three high- American and European perception of realities were apparent, partic- level American Middle East experts – Martin Indyk, Edward Djerejian, and ularly with respect to Israel’s recently announced plan to withdraw uni- Dennis Ross – on the initiative of Academy Chairman Richard Holbrooke laterally from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, all agreed that the with- and with the support of the German Marshall Fund. The Foreign Policy drawal presents opportunities – to say nothing of enormous challenges Forum’s 54 public and private presentations, conversations, roundtables, – that could best be seized with prompt and heightened US-German con- and interviews underscored just how keen the desire for renewed bilateral sultation. Within this context, our visitors asked many pointed ques- discussion was on both sides. Each of our Distinguished Visitors stayed in tions of their European interlocutors. How can European countries best Berlin for a week, engaging in in-depth exchanges with politicians, mem- leverage their influence with Arab regimes and, in particular, induce the bers of the media, and the public. Our motives were simple: the Middle Palestinian Authority to take responsibility for security in Gaza? When East, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, are issues of tremen- should European countries be prepared to make public their private crit- dous and shared concern. An intensification of US-German dialogue and icisms of Palestinians, not least in order to strengthen reformists within closer working relations between our two countries are needed. Germany’s the Palestinian Authority? And to what extent does courting Arafat mere- relationship with key countries in the Arab world – and the high regard ly reflect the same wishful thinking that was proven wrong at Camp David Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer enjoys among both Palestinians and in 2000? Israelis – has made Berlin a fertile ground for this initiative. After three years of relatively limited dialogue, the private visits of The Academy could not have found three more seasoned former American Ambassadors Indyk, Djerejian, and Ross to Berlin hint at how much could diplomats to launch its Foreign Policy Forum. Dennis Ross’s vast experi- be achieved if diplomats in both countries make use of their vast and often ence on the ground in the Middle East is exemplified by his innumerable complementary expertise on the Middle East.

– Gary Smith

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The Berlin Journal 15 bers of civil society at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Is Peace Still Possible The result was a home-grown call for reform. The participants called for an “elected legislative body, an independent judiciary, and a government that is in the Middle East subject to popular and constitutional oversight.” It called for freedom of the press and the support of Planning for the Day After human rights, especially of women, children, and minorities. Germany, working with France, has taken the lead in being prepared to embrace something like the Alexandria statement. This fits nicely with what the Bush administration has in mind, and supporting the Alexandria statement would be a By Dennis Ross very positive step for the G-8 to take this June. Clearly, different countries will move at different paces. But we must at least be consistent in supporting broader values. And if certain friendly gov- Many believe that the Bush administration went paradoxically, the administration cannot afford to ernments or regimes are inclined to repress their into Iraq without planning for what would come lose in Iraq because of the War on Terror. While the reformers, they should know that they pay a price – the day after. In fact, the administration did plan, jihadists may not have been mainly responsible for and not only in private. but it based its planning on a series of assumptions: the insurgency, they will take great heart from, and If the situation in Iraq continues to be unsta- that the oil fields had to be protected; that there exploit the consequences of, the US being driven ble, the broader pressure for reform is going to dis- would be a major flow of refugees fleeing to the from Iraq. It is thus critical to succeed there. sipate. We all have an enormous stake in the positive North; that there would be mass starvation; that It was always naive to suggest that a success- outcome of Iraq, and it is going to have to take time. the country risked fragmentation; and, finally, that ful outcome of the war in Iraq would be a row of new The right kind of stability and change can be, in there would be mass retribution killings. All of those dominos – “dominos of democracy.” All the same, part, produced by a positive perception that change assumptions were reasonable. But as it turned out, success in Iraq would embolden reformers else- is possible. they were wrong. The US administration failed to where, help them find their voices, and give them There is a hearty group of reformers in the make security its prime concern. Saddam’s regime confidence. Moreover, regimes that repress reform- Middle East, and their voices are gaining strength. was one of the two remaining Stalinist, totalitarian ers would see the price of repression going up. That They need support from the outside and the sense regimes left in the world. Who would fill that can still happen, and it is another reason why we that they will not be abandoned. Their hope is the vacuum when it fell? We did not plan for it; we did have a stake in Iraq’s stabilization. greatest antidote to those who prey upon an absence not bring in enough forces; we did not bring in of hope. enough police. There were of course several different sources The administration did not o issue evokes more anger or a deeper sense for the insurgency. Probably well over half a million go into Iraq because of the of injustice throughout the Middle East than people had been dependent on Saddam Hussein Nthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And no issue and his totalitarian structure. Those who were part War on Terror. But because serves as a better excuse to divert attention away of the regime feared being dispossessed. The Sunni from what is needed. Resolving the Palestinian con- minority, in particular, was bound to feel at risk. of the War on Terror it can- flict would take away a major source of anger and In his last years, moreover, Saddam had set differ- grievance – and an important recruiting tool. But ent Sunni tribes against each other, and those on the not afford to lose in Iraq. it is no panacea. It is one step among many. This losing end of his manipulations had turned increas- notion of broader reform, of creating a sense of par- ingly to Sunni Islamic extremism (traditionally for- The Bush administration’s Greater Middle East ticipation, of dealing with the roots of hopelessness eign to Iraq). Finally, the Bush administration sig- initiative is something that makes an enormous and alienation is crucial. nificantly underestimated the likelihood of the US amount of sense, but even without it, we should be The Israeli-Palestinian issue is neither a func- becoming a symbol of occupation and, in turn, con- pushing the idea of reform on its own merits. tion nor a derivative of Iraq. At the same time, had tributing to the insurgency. I have worked for administrations that were we been more successful – not just in bringing about The Iraqi military, while it could never have guilty, basically, of making a Faustian bargain with the demise of Saddam’s regime but in terms of stabi- been an agent for social reconstruction, might in the our friends in the Middle East. As long as they were lizing the system more quickly – it would have great- transition period have helped to provide security. supportive of our needs – oil, in the Saudi case – we ly affected the psychology of the region. It would Before the war, the US dropped millions of leaflets didn’t pay close attention to what they did internal- have fostered a deeper sense that change is possible, on Iraq advising the Iraqi military to stay in their ly. As we found out on September 11, that did not even between the Israelis and Palestinians. barracks and promising that they would be fine if come cost free. History and geography have destined Israelis they did. Instead, the military was disbanded after There is a widespread image that the US exercis- and Palestinians to be neighbors. Israel, with all of the war. By disbanding the Iraqi military, and by not es a double standard in the Middle East. No doubt, its power, cannot extinguish Palestinian aspirations. having sufficient troops on the ground, there was lit- part of that stems from our support for Israel. But And the Palestinians, with all their anger and with tle to fill the vacuum other than chaos. This fuelled there is also the perception that we use democracy all the use of terror, cannot abolish Israel. But for the the insurgency. as a weapon against those we don’t like – and never past three years, there has been no genuine peace The insurgency in Iraq has deeper roots, unfor- against the ones we do like. The fact is, in many of process. There has been only a deepening war pro- tunately, than the administration initially imag- the regimes we are friendly to, citizens have no input cess, and with all the pain and suffering, it has pro- ined, though it is important to make clear that the in economic or political decision making. There is duced a legacy of disbelief on each side. Neither the initial insurgency had little to do with jihadists (and the sense in far too many Arab countries that noth- Israelis nor the Palestinians believe they have a part- even now their overall numbers in Iraq should not ing can change. Radical Islam preys on that hope- ner for peace. The absence of any dialogue other be exaggerated). As long as the insurgency remains lessness and frustration. than a dialogue of violence has cemented the mutual concentrated among the Sunnis it will eventually be Our promotion of the reform process must be conviction that peace is not possible. manageable. However, should the Shia join it on a done intelligently. A movement needs internal roots The “road map to peace” plan has been a seri- large scale, it will be very difficult to succeed in Iraq. for it to have authenticity. One such positive devel- ous, if flawed, effort to revive the peace process. On I do not believe that the administration opment came in mid March in Alexandria, Egypt, June 24, 2002 President Bush gave a speech declar- went into Iraq because of the War on Terror. But, during a meeting of civic organizations and mem- ing that a two-state approach would henceforth be

16 Number Eight | Spring 2004

American policy. But he also – rightly – made it clear of the settler movement – has announced the inten- scenarios, you cannot afford to wait until the day that no Palestinian state could be built on the twin tion to withdraw from Gaza and to evacuate both after. By then you’ve waited to long. The opening foundations of corruption and terror. In effect, his settlements there and at least a symbolic number being created by the Sharon initiative must be used central message was that the Palestinians are not of settlements in the West Bank. Sharon says Israel to empower the Palestinians who believe in coexis- entitled to a state – they must earn it. will not only withdraw from the territory but will tence, not those who reject it. The situation among The road map’s concept was logical enough: three also evacuate settlements unilaterally – without any Palestinians, however, is – to put it diplomatically – phases and a set of reciprocal obligations. reciprocation from the Palestinians. highly competitive. In the initial phase, the Israelis lift the siege and the Unilateral evacuation of settlements has no prec- The good news is that Israeli withdrawal allows Palestinians reform themselves and fulfill security edent. Frankly, not even the Labor party had ever spo- for a revolutionary moment, a chance to break out obligations. The second phase sets up a Palestinian ken of ending the occupation in the terms that Sharon of a completely frozen situation. The bad news is state with provisional borders. And in the third phase, now has used. What he is doing is revolutionary. that the nay-sayers are standing ready to fill the vac- that state negotiates the issues of permanent status. uum. If the Israelis simply leave Gaza and throw Its only flaw is that the members of the Quartet the keys behind them over a high fence, there is too – the US, the EU, the Russians and the UN – nego- Resolving the Israeli- high a probability that the group that catches the tiated a document in which they, understandably, Palestinian conflict would keys won’t believe in a peaceful coexistence between have no responsibility for carrying out even one of Palestinians and Israelis. The one group that has the 52 paragraphs of obligations. The Israelis and take away a major source planned most effectively for the day after has been Palestinians have those obligations, but the docu- Hamas – even before the assassination of Sheik ment was not negotiated with them. Not surpris- of anger and grievance in Yassin. Hamas is planning to dominate this process, ingly, the Israelis and the Palestinians interpret each the Arab world, but it is planning to shape governance after the Israelis are of the 52 paragraphs and their respective obliga- out, already planning how it will turn over the settle- tions differently. The road map will never have even no panacea. ments. If that is the direction in which we are head- the possibility of a life until Israelis and Palestinians ed, this potentially transformative revolutionary have a common understanding of those obligations. Even the Palestinians I talked to in late March in development will turn out decidedly for the worse. The fact is, however, that no such understand- Jerusalem and Ramallah were calling it a revolution- There is a worrisome gap in time between the ing exists, and there has been no diplomacy to pro- ary development. They realize that this is creating a Israeli declaration of the intent to withdraw and duce it, or a least a Quartet understanding of what moment and that much depends on how they take the actual withdrawal – I estimate it will be about a would constitute performance. This has ensured advantage of it. Here is a chance to prove that they year. If we don’t create a positive momentum, many that the road map would exist only on paper, while are capable of good government, of being a state, of terrible things could happen in that period, which the reality on the ground would remain frozen. taking control in Gaza and fulfilling responsibilities. might, once again, erode the chances of transform- The most recent effort to create a new open- One of the things that struck me in recent talks ing the situation. And it will make it harder to pro- ing has come not from the Quartet but from Ariel with Palestinians and Israelis was a convergence of duce the tacit cooperation that is necessary to coor- BerlJour_MoMASharon. Sharon, 4/15/04 prime minister12:59 PM of Israel Page – architect1 concern about the “day after.” Like all “day-after” dinate parallel moves unilaterally. u

Meret Oppenheim. Objekt (Frühstück im Pelz) Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure). 1936. Mit Fell überzogene Tasse, Untertasse und Löffel. Tasse 10,9 cm im Durchmesser, Untertasse 23,7 cm im Durchmesser, Löffel 20,2 cm lang, Gesamthöhe 7,3 cm. Ankauf. © VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn 2004

200 Meisterwerke aus dem Museum of Modern Art, New York 20. Februar – 19. September 2004. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin

200 Masterpieces from The Museum of Modern Art, New York 20 February – 19 September, 2004. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin

www.das-moma-in-berlin.de How, then, can we affect the outcome? How Under the siege, however, it is simply impos- should be prepared to provide that help. But they can we ensure that the Palestinians assume real sible for Palestinians to lead anything resembling must take the lead. No one else can act for them. As responsibility? Palestinians in the Fatah party know a normal life. (If you have to get to a hospital, you’d long as the Palestinian mindset is that someone will how high the stakes are – that this is a competition better hope it is not an emergency. You have to do it for them, nothing will change. over the future. Will it be an Islamist future or a sec- plan a couple of extra hours in the morning and the Abu Mazen said in a speech about 18 months ular one? We, too, have a stake in having that future afternoon just to get your kids to school. And forget ago – before his brief tenure as Palestinian prime belong to Fatah. about even trying to conduct normal commerce.) minister – that it was time for a Palestinian sense But Arafat is a complicating factor. He has no Palestinians regard the siege as a kind of collective of national responsibility to become more impor- interest in a stable outcome here – not because he punishment. tant than unity. Unity had been an excuse for the wants Hamas to gain, but because chaos serves his And yet it prevents 90-95 percent of the ter- Palestinians to avoid confronting violence. If the interests. In the face of such chaos, Arafat believes ror attacks against Israel today. The problem is Europeans would say publicly that those who pur- international actors will turn back to him to bring that, a year from now, the siege will have to stop just sue violence now, in this setting, are jeopardizing order. This may not fit reality – but it is his percep- as many, if not more, such attacks. The siege fos- not only Palestinian interest but threatening the tion of reality. Arafat’s fundamental weakness is ters continuing Palestinian anger and resentment Palestinian cause, it could do much to change the that he will never foreclose an option and never against Israel. Hamas operatives may be killed, internal dynamic among Palestinians. The very close a door. To end the conflict, for him, means but so long as the siege exists, there will be an ever- notion that there are legitimate and illegitimate ending himself. Arafat has been governed by a deepening pool of new recruits. In short, the siege ways to pursue Palestinian aspirations needs to cause and a struggle for that cause. is not in Israel’s interest. It makes sense on a day- become part of the public discussion. While Arafat believes that he, personally, gains to-day basis, but as a longer-term strategy it pre- This would also change the character of their by chaos and instability, the new guard of Fatah serves Palestinian hostility and an Israeli presence relationship with the Israelis. Joschka Fischer has understands that they lose. Our critical task at this in the territories that threatens Israel’s Jewish char- had more of an impact than anyone else in Europe juncture is to create an international consensus acter. (By 2010, there may be more Arabs than Jews on the Israelis. He has demonstrated to the Israelis that can build an incentive for Palestinians to act between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. If that he takes their concerns seriously, and as a responsibly. By creating a public rather than mere- Israel remains as it is in the territories, it cannot be result, they listen to him. ly private consensus, by announcing that the whole both Jewish and democratic.) I haven’t always put such emphasis on the “col- world is watching, the Palestinians will feel obliged lective we.” But the involvement of the other mem- to demonstrate that they are up to the task of state- bers of the Quartet is especially important at a time hood. We need to let them know what kinds of when American diplomacy has been less intense. responsibilities have to be assumed. And we need The whole world is watch- The US didn’t produce the Sharon initiative. Israeli to offer our help. ing to see if Palestinians pressure has done so. Israelis support it because of That gives them no explanation to use with their concerns about demographics and their con- the Palestinian public for taking steps on securi- are up to the task of cerns over three years of war with no prospects of ty – such as acting against groups like Hamas that security. continue to promote terror. We should strength- statehood. If we do not plan now and focus on practical en Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Ala’s hand by steps on the ground soon, we won’t get there. The being public and precise about Palestinian respon- Is the barrier an alternative? The fence is a promise of the current moment is that it provides a sibilities. We should talk to Abu Ala and members more benign way of producing security for the chance to create a way-station to peace. The danger of the legislative council – an institutional base that Israelis than a siege because it does not interfere in the moment is that we may let it slip by. We can- is home to reformers among Palestinians. In every with and control all aspects of Palestinian life. not wait until the day after. possible way, we must strengthen those who are The fence being built right now is going to be on Is there a reason to be hopeful? The situation prepared to coexist with Israel. 12 percent of the West Bank. About 5 percent of it does not lend itself to optimism, but we cannot give We must also help the Palestinian Authority fill is a wall; 95 percent is a fence. It has to be built in up. Giving up will make hopelessness a self-fulfill- in and provide the social services currently being a way that reflects topographical, demographic, ing prophecy. And giving in means giving up to the provided most effectively by Hamas. One tends to humanitarian and political criteria. Partly you wrong people – those who reject the idea of a peace- forget that Hamas, though a terrorist organization, want to ensure that you have two states; partly you ful settlement. I start from a different premise: that provides a great many social services – hospitals, want to get out of Palestinian lives so that they feel there is no alternative to peaceful coexistence. o clinics, after-school programs. The outside world – freedom from Israeli control; and partly you want and this is especially true in Europe – must find bet- to send a message that the fence isn’t permanent ter ways of cutting off the flow of monies to Hamas – unless Palestinians choose to make it permanent. Ambassador Dennis Ross is director of the Washington without dismantling that social safety net. Once a way-station has been built – once both Institute for Near East Policy. He served as special Middle East coordinator under President Clinton and directed the Creating a way-station for peace need not be a sides have a kind of normality back in their lives State Department’s Policy Planning Office in the adminis- long, drawn-out process, but we are not at a point again, it will be possible to think about peacemak- tration of George H. W. Bush. His book The Missing Peace: where we can suddenly make peace. All the ground- ing and the future. The hardest thing today is for The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace will be pub- work has to be laid again. What I call “two free- both sides to accept the fact that the other has a lished this August by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. doms” must be established. The Israelis have to feel complaint or a grievance – that the other side is suf- freedom from terror, and the Palestinians have to fering. Each side is consumed by its own sense of feel freedom from Israeli control. grievance – with some legitimacy. We have to break When the Israelis withdraw from Gaza – and the cycle of grievance, break the cycle of anger, and make a symbolic step toward withdrawing from the break the cycle of revenge. West Bank – it will be crucial for Israelis in the West Given the stakes, given what can be lost, Bank to get out of Palestinian lives. Israelis are cur- this is a time to develop a much more collective rently controlling nearly every aspect of Palestinian approach. Germany and the EU have what can life in the West Bank. only be described as a special relationship with But in the face of Palestinians assuming no the Palestinians. If Europe has cultivated a spe- security responsibilities and essentially doing noth- cial relationship, this is the moment to trade on ing to stop terror, Israel has to protect itself. It has it. The regional and international friends of the two choices: a siege or a barrier. The siege has pre- Palestinians should publicly say to them “we’re vailed since the second intifada began – 160 check- going to help you, but here’s what’s required of points in the West Bank. you.” If the Palestinians need help on security, we

18 Number Eight | Spring 2004

The Berlin Journal 19 House, the National Security Council, and the A Struggle of Ideas State department. The transformation we advocate can have a profound effect on Arab and Muslim societies as US Public Diplomacy in the Middle East well. These societies are at a crossroads, with the opportunity to take the path toward greater liberty and prosperity, within the context of their own rich cultures. With effective policies and public diplomacy, we can help galvanize indigenous moderates and reformers within these societies. The overall By Edward P. Djerejian task is to expand the zone of tolerance and moder- ation in the Muslim world and to marginalize the extremists, be the extremists secular or religious. We must, moreover, be candid in our dialogue.

* * * Last year I had the honor of chairing a con- extremists will define you.” They have defined us, Americans are trapped in a dangerously reinforc- gressionally mandated public diplomacy commis- for example, as ruthless occupiers in Iraq and as ing cycle of animosity with Arabs and Muslims. The sion to address one of the most important issues bigots, intolerant to Muslims in our own country. latter respond in anger to what they perceive as US facing us since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Our 13- These depictions are absolutely wrong, but they denigration of their societies and cultures, which member United States Advisory Group on Public stick because it is rare that governments or individ- in turn prompts an American reaction of bewilder- Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World was a uals in the region are prepared to take up our side ment and resentment, and so on. A transformed bipartisan commission of regional and commu- of the story and because the US has deprived itself public diplomacy that is candid about differences nication experts. Our report, “Changing Minds, of the means to respond effectively – or even to be a but also stresses similarities – especially in values – Winning Peace” (online at www.bakerinstitute.org) significant part of the conversation. can help end this. was released on October 1, 2003. Most changes will not occur overnight, but some The attacks of September 11, 2001, required * * * steps, taken immediately, will produce short-term the United States to pursue a long-term, com- As Woody Allen says, “90 percent of life is just solutions. More importantly, however, the US gov- prehensive war on terrorism. Extending military showing up.” In terms of the Arab and Muslim ernment needs to view public diplomacy – just as it power abroad, practicing vigorous state-to-state worlds, we have not been showing up. views state-to-state diplomacy and national security diplomacy, choking off financial resources to our As the group was on the way to Cairo last year, – in a long-term perspective. It must be sustained for adversaries, and improving defense at home – these I caught a cold and had to stay in the hotel for an decades, not stopped and started as moods change steps are all necessary. But they are not all that is evening. I turned on al-Arabiyya satellite televi- in the world. Public opinion in the Arab and Muslim required. Despite our best efforts in these areas, sion and started to watch a talk show entitled “the world cannot be cavalierly dismissed. animosity toward the US has grown to unprec- Americanization of Islam.” The guests were dis- edented levels, making the achievement of our cussing what they perceived as an American “con- * * * policy goals more difficult and expensive, both in spiracy” to hijack their religion. Not a single par- Much has recently been said about the Greater dollars and in lives. ticipant on that two-hour program had a clue Middle East, but this policy is not really new. The In the National Security Strategy of the US in about America. The true American position was first Bush administration raised these issues of the fall of 2002, President George W. Bush spoke nowhere represented. No one was there to say ‘the political and economic reforms in the region. At of the importance of adapting public diplomacy to Americans are a religious people. The country has the same time, losing our common Soviet enemy meet the post-September-11 challenge: “The war Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and precipitated a kind of identity crisis. Various the- on terrorism is not a clash of civilizations. It does, other religious groups. There is freedom of reli- ories and schools of thought began to emerge however, reveal the clash inside a civilization, a gion. There is separation of church and state, but around the idea of defining the new enemy, includ- battle for the future of the Muslim world. This is a this in no way means that Americans are not a reli- ing Samuel P. Huntington’s notion of “the clash of struggle of ideas, and this is an area where America gious people.” Nothing was said to this effect. civilizations.” His thesis is, to me, a classic exam- must excel.” Instead, the discussion simply fed into a self-fulfill- ple of what I learned from my Jesuit education at But America has not excelled in the struggle of ing prophecy. Georgetown University to identify as the “falla- ideas in the Arab and Muslim world. According to Of course, Americans can’t be on every televi- cy of composition,” the extrapolation from parts the director of the Pew Research Center, attitudes sion program and every radio station. We can’t be to a whole. Reality is very wide, but if you general- toward the US “have gone from bad to worse.” in every article that runs in the Arab press. But the ize outward from one small part of it, you’ll reach According to Pew surveys, “the bottom has fall- fact is, we are simply not significantly present in a false understanding of the truth. Huntington en out of Arab and Muslim support for the United the daily debate and discussion that is taking place looked at various cultures and civilizations and States.” For example, shortly before the war against about us. The State Department has only 54 Arabic homed in on the extremist fringe. From it, he gener- Saddam Hussein, by greater than a two-to-one mar- speakers with a truly professional level of fluency. alized his theory of the clash of cultures and civili- gin, Muslims surveyed in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Of these, only a handful are able and willing to par- zations. This notion, however faulty, has received a Jordan said the US was a more serious threat than ticipate in media discussion on Arab television and great deal of attention. Iraq. Only 2 percent of British Muslims agreed radio. Our advisory group called for adding three America’s position as the world’s superpower with the statement that “the US supports democ- hundred fluent Arabic speakers within the next two may well contribute to the animosity shown toward racy around the world.” The Arab and Muslim years. There should be an additional three hundred it today, but it alone is not a satisfying explanation. world, however, cannot be addressed in isolation. by 2008. The US enjoyed the same level of relative power after Animosity toward the US is part of a broader crisis Just as the US urgently needs to transform the World War II, for example, but was widely admired worldwide. way it explains and advocates our values and poli- throughout the world. Attitudes toward the US were What is required is not merely tactical adapta- cies abroad, it also needs to transform the way it lis- important in the past, but the stakes were raised on tion but strategic, and radical, transformation. tens to what others are saying, not only in Arab and September 11, 2001. They have become a central Often, we are simply not present to explain Muslim states but throughout the world. national security concern. Hostility toward the US the context and content of national policies and Our report made a number of very specific rec- makes achieving our policy goals far more difficult. u values. As someone in Morocco told us, “if you do ommendations, including reorganizing the way pub- not define yourself in this part of the world, the lic diplomacy is managed and funded in the White

20 Number Eight | Spring 2004

Television in the Arab and Muslim world is, by be a very important step toward “showing up” in such a country grieve about their lot, they also take far, the most efficient means of disseminating ideas. the Middle East. But one has to keep in mind that account of the fact that the US is one of the major And accurate portrayals of US policies on Arab TV people simply do not trust state-run TV and radio. supporters of the regime in power. and Muslim TV in general are sadly lacking. Part The alternative we proposed was to create a foun- Separating simple opposition to policies from of our group went to Casablanca in Morocco. One dation – or a corporation for public diplomacy, like generalized anti-American attitudes is not easy. group member, Judith Milestone, described the the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the US, The Advisory Group’s mandate was not to advise on bidonvilles of Casablanca, where, amid excruciating which produces exceptional shows like the “News foreign policy itself, but rather to examine how the poverty and abysmal sanitary conditions, one could Hour with Jim Lehrer” – that would give out grants tools of public diplomacy may be used to promote see hundreds of hand-wired satellite TV dishes. to local programmers to purchase quality American US values, policies, and interests. One can say that The residents of the Moroccan slums are watching television programs such as the Discovery Channel, US policy constitutes about 80 percent of how atti- the satellite networks of al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyya, the History Channel, various PBS programs etc. This tudes and thoughts are formed in this region; public with their political slant on the news. They’re watch- mixed private, NGO, public-sector entity would diplomacy counts for only about 20 percent. But it ing film programs that show people with cars and encourage the airing to an Arab audience of objec- is a critical 20 percent, when one considers the beautiful apartments. Throughout the Middle East tive and high quality programs that show Americans stakes involved. they’re watching pre-canned American sitcoms. In debating issues, criticizing one another (even their It would, of course, be absurd to advocate fact, they are being bombarded with American tele- own president). Genuine discussion and debate – changing policies in order to become popular. We vision content, much of which distorts the percep- programs that show the freedom of the press and have to pursue our policies as any administration tions of viewers who lack the contextual background that show Americans exercising their freedom of perceives the national interest of the US. And we to understand, for example, that the lifestyles in expression – struck us as desirable alternatives to must use the tools of public diplomacy to assess the programs like “Friends,” “Dallas,” and “Seinfeld” government pronouncements and talking points. likely effects of our particular policies. are not necessarily the American norm. In This seemed a good way to bring quality con- Most importantly, we must be ever aware of the Damascus, “Seinfeld” is aired twice a day. A Syrian tent to 120 Arab TV channels and to six Arab satel- perceived gap between our principles and our poli- teacher of English asked us for help in explaining lite channels. Of course, they would not want to show cies; many people in the Muslim world say that we American family life to her students. She asked, everything, but our reasoning was that they would don’t live up to our values. “Does ‘Friends’ show a typical American family?” accept a good part of it – if it were free or affordable. American policy toward the Arab and Muslim In most of the Arab world, the 8 o’clock news world on particular issues needs to be more fully typically consists of footage of the country’s presi- * * * communicated. These include: the peaceful settle- dent, prime minister, and the foreign minister meet- The Advisory Group’s report described a dichoto- ment of conflicts between the Arabs and Israelis, ing guests – for half and hour, with music in the my throughout the whole Muslim world. American in Kashmir, and in the Western Sahara; peace and background and virtually no commentary. That’s values have a high approval rating, for Arabs reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq; region- the news. And after thirty minutes, there is the thin- and Muslims consider them to be their values as al security cooperation; and our encouragement of nest commentary. It is an insult to the intelligence well. (As an Iranian woman told us, “who could progressive economic, social, and political reforms. of the Arab people. And that is what they have been be against life liberty and the pursuit of happi- As a former American diplomat, I can say subjected to for decades. ness?”) The ideals of equality of opportunity, equal- that there’s nothing to be apologetic about in the All of a sudden something interesting hap- ity before the law, of human rights, social justice, major thrust of our policy toward this region. The pened called al-Jazeera. The satellite network broke human dignity, and individual freedom are shared American vision for the Arab and the Muslim world through all sorts of barriers. Some people in our by many. is a positive one: for it to become a peaceful, pros- group called it “electronic perestroika.” The network The value system is not the issue. We found perous region working toward participatory govern- carries live shots of what is happening in crisis sit- that the negative attitudes toward the US are largely ment. Our goal is not to impose a Jeffersonian or a uations. Now, all of a sudden an Arab family can based on perceptions about the execution of US pol- Federalist model from above, but to allow democ- watch, from its living room, an Israeli official being icies in certain areas. They may be based on percep- racy to evolve according to the cultures and the interviewed by an al-Jazeera correspondent. It was tions rather than reality, but these perceptions are structures of these societies themselves. an amazing change. I have been interviewed by the powerful forces. Of course, we will have differences with Arabs network and I therefore know al-Jazeera’s politi- on how, for example, we conduct our role in the cal prejudices first-hand. I have been in their edito- Arab-Israeli conflict. But reasoned opposition to rial room. But the fact is that the network has done The al-Jazeera satellite net- US policies need not turn into hatred and extrem- something revolutionary in the Arab World. It has work, for all its political ism. And if you look at the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is brought live news and commentary into the living only when the US – with our European allies, espe- room. And that is what we have to compete with. prejudices, has done some- cially in the current context of the Quartet – acts Our report took a nuanced stand on how to with strong leadership and political will, making use go about this. In particular, we criticized a proj- thing revolutionary; it has of a strategy and its influence, that progress can be ect being put forward by the Broadcasting Board brought live news into Arab made. It takes a US President, whether Democrat or of Governors, the US entity responsible for gov- a Republican, to move forward with commitment ernment-supported international broadcasting, to living rooms. and strategy – from Nixon and Kissinger in the dis- establish a Middle East Television Network (now engagement agreement in 1973; to Jimmy Carter in called “al-Hurra”), designed to compete with al- The three major prisms through which America 1979 and the Camp David Accords; from Bush 41 Jazeera, al-Arabiyya, and others. In our discussions is judged in the Arab and the Muslim world are: and James A. Baker III in the Madrid Conference; to in the Muslim countries, we encountered a very high the Arab-Israeli conflict; Iraq, where the US is per- Clinton and Camp David; to Bush 43 and the Road level of skepticism of state-run TV and radio chan- ceived not as a liberator but as occupier; and funda- Map and two-state solution. Political will is thus the nels in the Arab world. This was a key perception mental issues of political and economic governance essential element on the part of the Arabs, Israelis, in all the countries we went to in our talks with tele- in the Muslim countries themselves. But what does and the US. vision people, normal citizens, members of NGOs, this third point have to do with America? We have Our values and our policies are not always in and officials. It is understandable that viewers are to be honest about the fact that there is systemic agreement. The US Government often supports turned off by any state-run news outlets and, more- corruption in many of these regimes and societies. regimes in the Arab and Muslim world that are inim- over, do not trust them. This is often combined with major economic prob- ical to our values but that, in the short term, may If the US government was going to establish the lems – underemployment, a general lack of priva- advance some of our policies. Indeed, many Arabs u first ever foreign satellite TV capability in Arabic, we tization and property rights – as well as growing and Muslims believe that such support indicates that concluded, there would be an extremely high cred- demographic pressures. Levels of real political par- the US is determined to deny them freedom and polit- ibility barrier to overcome. On one hand, it would ticipation in the region are low. So when citizens of ical representation. This belief often stems from our u

The Berlin Journal 21 own ambivalence about the possibility that democracy’s first beneficiaries in the Arab and Muslim world will be Islamic extremists. It has caught us in a deep contradiction – one from which public diplomacy, as well as official diplomacy, could help extricate us. But we must take these key policy challenges in the region seriously, and we must minimize the gap between what we say (the high ideals we espouse) and what we do (the day–to-day measures we take). In general, the building up of civil society, of NGOs, of representative groups, and emerging middle classes is essential for the future of the Arab and the Muslim world. And that is the generational challenge to address. It is essential to build and support the middle and, at the same time, to abandon the perception that any change will bring the Islamists to power. At the same time, we must analyze each country individually, distinguishing Egypt from Syria, Kuwait from Morocco, etc. It is understandable that viewers in the Arab world don’t trust state-run TV and radio channels.

* * * Mainstream Islam is tolerant and moderate. Mainstream Muslims want what we all want, for ourselves and for our children: stability, ﬁnancial security, to be able to educate our children, to live in peace and security, to have a voice in government and equal economic opportunities. This is the mainstream. This is what gives me encouragement. The great challenge of our time, and the great opportunity, is to make the zone of tolerance grow and to marginalize the extremists. With those extremists and terrorists who hate us – those who consider us profane and themselves sacred – there is no dialogue. We should not be naive about that. It is absolutely essential that Europe and the US begin real substantive strategic coordination on meeting this challenge. This task is not America’s alone. It involves Europe, Japan, China, Russia, and especially the Arab countries. The dialogue must be multi-facet- ed and collaborative. We have failed to listen and failed to persuade. We have not taken the time to understand our audience, and we have not bothered to help them understand us. We cannot afford such shortcomings. The great American baseball legend Casey Stengel left us a valuable management principle: If you walk into a room and ﬁnd, in one corner, six guys who hate you – who are plotting against you and want to kill you – and, in the other corner sixty people who haven’t made up their minds yet, you’d better get to the sixty before the six get to the sixty. That is public diplomacy, and that is what our policy objective has to be in the Muslim world. o

Ambassador Edward Djerejian is founding director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. He was US Ambassador to Israel in 1993 and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Other diplomatic posts include serving as US Ambassador to Syria during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies.

22 Number Eight | Spring 2004

Transformation in the Middle East A Four-Part Strategy

By Martin Indyk

The effort to transform the Middle East is again Unfortunately, the Clinton administration’s in the headlines, this time within the context of the strategy for transforming the Middle East failed, new US strategy toward the “greater Middle East.” But even though it had some important successes along the effort did not begin with the Bush administration. the way (the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, for exam- As we try to assess the prospects of the current strate- ple). But Bush’s current strategy is not in great shape gy, it is helpful to examine the history of either. It is worthwhile to look at why we failed, and a previous effort to transform the region, that of to learn what we can from it. the Clinton administration, which I had the honor Part of our failure had to do with our willing- to serve. That administration had, of course, ness to strike a bargain with the key Arab countries inherited a peace negotiation from the previous Bush – Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Both countries were and administration. remain our allies in the region. Egypt in 1993 was The fundamental difference between the facing a serious challenge from Islamic extremists approach of the Clinton administration and that of who were using terrorism to try to destabilize the the current Bush administration is that we thought regime. Saudi Arabia was not facing the same chal- we could transform the region through the engine lenge, but the regime was deeply religious and auto- of peace, whereas the Bush administration holds cratic. We judged that any effort to push it toward that the way to transform the region is through the democracy would in all likelihood cause instabil- engine of war – in particular, through regime change ity in a critical part of the Middle East – an area on in Iraq. which we depended for the free flow of oil at reason- Ours was a two-pronged strategy. The first able prices. In both cases, we decided to put aside was to pursue a policy of comprehensive peace the issue of reform. between Israel and its Arab neighbors: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians. The second was to contain what we called the rogue states in the The Bush Administration region: Iraq and Iran, in particular, and, to a lesser holds that the way to trans- extent, Libya. We felt there was a symbiotic relationship between the two strategies; the more success- form the region is through ful we were at containing and isolating the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the ayatollahs in the engine of war – in par- Iran, the more our efforts to promote comprehen- ticular, through regime sive peace would be supported; and the more effective we were at promoting comprehensive peace, the change in Iraq. more we would succeed in isolating the regimes in Iraq and Iran. What we failed to notice during that period was We made a very clear decision to use peace as that the Saudi and Egyptian regimes were, for the our engine of change. This meant temporarily set- sake of their own survival and stability, pursuing pol- ting aside goals such as promoting democracy icies that in effect helped to create a situation that and political and economic reform. We wanted to would hurt us severely on September 11. bring the Middle East into the twenty-first century We received modest financial assistance from the through a process of peacemaking. Once peace was Saudis for the peace process, but otherwise they kept achieved, we believed, energies and resources could their distance from the effort. The Egyptians were then be freed up within the region that would enable usually prepared to endorse Yasser Arafat’s decisions, its governments and peoples to focus on these far but they were rarely willing to press him on anything. more fundamental issues. They feared that Arafat would turn around and accuse Today the Bush administration’s approach Egypt of pressuring him, which would have had dam- essentially turns this strategy on its head. aging political consequences that President Hosni Accordingto President Bush’s explanations before Mubarak was not prepared to risk. the war, the effort to use force to bring about regime On some occasions, Cairo even opposed change in Iraq is intended to create a ripple effect – our efforts, especially when it came to promot- to create shockwaves in the region that will facilitate ing Israel’s regional integration. At the criti- the promotion of political and economic reform. cal moment in December 2000 when President Once that is achieved, the administration argues, it Clinton put forward his parameters for resolv-

The Berlin Journal 23 and the Egyptians privately signaled their acquies- ing could be done internally before the Palestinian the “axis of evil,” the Bush administration has not cence to our proposals. But they failed to provide problem was solved. It tried to forge peace with- developed an effective policy toward it. Instead, a any demonstrable support for the deal. And when out receiving any significant support from those policy vacuum prevails. This is highly problemat- Arafat said no, they ran for cover. regimes. It ignored the problems internal to the ic in terms of our overall strategy and, in particular, When it came to addressing their own inter- Saudi and Egyptian regimes, however. Those prob- the idea of promoting democracy in the region. We nal problems, the Saudis and Egyptians essentially – lems came back to bite us on September 11. saw this in the recent Iranian elections, as the US and perhaps unintentionally – deflected the opposi- But if pursuing peace without pressing for and even Europe remained silent while the Iranian tion onto the US. In the Saudi case, the regime dealt reform was a mistaken policy, so too is the current hard-liners essentially hijacked the elections and with its fundamentalist opposition by forcing into Bush administration’s effort to promote reform suppressed the reform movement. exile its extremists, who then sought refuge and set without pressing for peace. In this regard, I fear that If we stood idly by while the government in up operations outside of Saudi Arabia – in Africa, the Bush administration has learned the wrong les- Iran – which is hardly a friendly regime to the Asia, Europe, and of course the US. Saudis, more- son from our experience. We need to find the mid- US – suppressed democracy, what does this indi- over, helped to fund the al-Qaeda network through dle way between the two. German Foreign Minister cate about how we will act with regimes like Saudi their private foundations. And by exporting the Joschka Fischer is in fact suggesting such a course, Arabia and Egypt that are our friends? It suggests Wahhabi form of Islamic extremism, they helped to and his basic point is the right one. We must pro- that those people who have been looking toward create a fertile environment for the recruitment of mote political reform at the same time that we seek the US and Europe for support in their efforts to al-Qaeda terrorists. to support a viable peace process. Each should rein- promote democratic reform within their countries force the other. will not receive it. And as a consequence, they will be reluctant to stand up. I am skeptical when people As is well known, the most aggressive sup- * * * port for Palestinian terrorism comes from Iran. tell me that the reason for Effective transformation in the Middle East The terrorist organization Palestine Islamic Jihad anti-Americanism in requires a four-part strategy. George Bush began to is a creature of the Iranian intelligence services. articulate such a strategy before he launched the war Trained by the Iranian revolutionary guard corps the Arab world today is that in Iraq. Unfortunately this has now morphed into and funded by Tehran, it takes its orders direct- a two-part strategy focused on stabilizing the situ- ly from Tehran via its headquarters in Damascus. we are not doing enough ation in Iraq, on the one hand, and promoting the Tracing the course of the intifada, we can see that to solve the Palestinian idea of transformation, on the other. If the other whenever Hamas was prepared to reduce terror- two branches – containing rogues states and resolv- ism, it was Palestine Islamic Jihad that went out and problem. ing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – continue to be launched another terrorist attack, provoking an ignored, the overall strategy will fail. Israeli retaliation and renewing the cycle of attack The Egyptian government cracked down on its The first part of this four-part strategy is indeed and response. Islamic extremists, but it also excluded other, more to stabilize Iraq. The administration’s argument We are, moreover, far from achieving an effec- moderate voices from the political arena. As gener- that regime change there could create an advanta- tive means of preventing Iran from acquiring nucle- al alienation in Egypt grew with the regime’s inabil- geous ripple effect throughout the region is essen- ar weapons, although Europeans have taken the ity to meet the people’s basic needs, younger peo- tially right. But if we do not succeed in stabilizing lead in developing an approach. ple moved toward the extremist mosques and, often the situation and putting the Iraqi people on the from there, into Afghanistan. There was no room left road toward a firm, pluralistic government that can for a political center to emerge between the regime represent all of the interests of the different Iraqi If Iraq dissolves into sectar- itself and the Islamic extremists. Any criticism that communities, then the chances for any ripple effect arose was deflected from the regime onto the US and are very slim. ian conflict it will make the Israel. As a result, growing anti-Americanism founds Indeed, there is a real danger that the opposite so-called “clash of civiliza- its voice just as we were vigorously pursuing a settle- will take place, that a failure in Iraq would gener- ment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when Arafat ate instability – a negative ripple effect throughout tions” look like a tea party. was the most frequent foreign visitor to the White the region. If Iraq dissolves into sectarian conflict House. That is why I am skeptical when people tell between Sunnis and Shias it will make the so-called The third branch of this overall strategy is to me that the reason for anti-Americanism in the Arab “clash of civilizations” look like a tea party. In this promote democracy and encourage political, eco- world today is that we are not doing enough to solve case, the chances for any kind of serious political nomic, and educational reform in the Arab world. the Palestinian problem. reform would go out the window, as regimes bat- Importantly, there also needs to be a component Today, it is essential to develop a policy that ten down the hatches to protect themselves from the of religious reform, though this has yet to be artic- deals specifically with these two critically important destabilizing effects of integrating Iraq. ulated either by the Bush administration or by countries. Above all, such a policy must address the The first requirement is thus to stabilize the sit- Europeans in the current discussion of the “greater funding of extremist organizations. The Saudis have uation there, provide basic security for the Iraqi peo- Middle East.” begun to take measures, as when on March 8, they ple, and lay the groundwork for a pluralistic Iraqi The strategy requires further differentiation. introduced a new law designed to control the fund- government. It was quite heartening to see the sign- First there are the four large regional Arab powers – ing of such organizations. ing of the provisional constitution on March 8 as a Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria. In Iraq’s case, Beyond that, we have to encourage Saudi step toward that overall objective. But the situation successful democratic practices could generate pres- Arabia and Egypt to open up political space for their in Iraq currently remains very dangerous and inse- sure for reform elsewhere in the region. Syria’s regime citizens. Room for political expression needs to be cure. And it could get a lot worse, particularly in the is essentially frozen and impenetrable (at least for created between the authoritarianism of the govern- run-up to the US elections. Foreign al-Qaeda-led ele- the time being) to our efforts to encourage reform. In ments and the extremism that is cultivated in par- ments are doing their best to cause chaos in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt we need to be conscious of the ticular fundamentalist mosques. Reasonable people as a way not only to defeat the US in Iraq (as they risk of recreating the situation that prevailed under in civil society need an environment in which their defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan), but also the Shah of Iran. In that case, our attempt to move efforts can be strengthened. to defeat George Bush in the elections. the Shah’s regime toward greater political openness We must encourage these regimes to take the The second part of this strategy has to be a destabilized the country. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia lead in promoting greater tolerance in their own more effective policy for dealing with those same too much change too quickly might end up aiding the societies, in promoting educational and religious rogue states that we in the Clinton administration very people whom we are trying to keep from power: reforms. The Clinton administration was told time sought to contain – Iran, in particular, and to a less- the Islamic extremists. For they are well organized and and again by Egyptian and Saudi leaders that noth- er extent, Syria. Though it labeled Iran as part of have benefited from the regime’s suppression of the

24 Number Eight | Spring 2004 quieter, more moderate voices for political reform and essary for its own sake. Israel and the Palestinians part (probably fifty percent) of the West Bank. Such are, at present, in the best position to take advantage need a resolution of their conflict, and they cannot withdrawal would create a vacuum, a vacuum that of any kind of political opening. do it on their own. They need our help. the current Palestinian Authority is incapable of fill- To avoid undertaking crucial reforms, crit- ing. If we don’t find a way to fill that vacuum in a ics throughout the Arab world have told us that we positive way, it will be filled by gangs and warlords If we stood idly by while the need to solve the Palestinian problem first. We need and Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad extremists. to be able to respond, “We are doing that, but you If we are serious about promoting democra- government in Iran sup- have to address your problems too.” cy and peace, we – and here I mean Europe and the pressed democracy, how Reforming the systems in these countries United States together – must help responsible means enhancing the dignity of the people, but their Palestinians fill that vacuum. This is crucial to our will we act with regimes dignity is, at the moment, deeply offended by what overall strategy. It is going to require an interna- they see of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. tional intervention similar to what was carried out that are our friends? Pursuing peace will help to address the “dignity in Kosovo and East Timor, which the US has recent- deficit.” ly begun to discuss with the government of Israel. Because of these risks, we must engage the lead- The most important reason for addressing this ership of Egypt and Saudi Arabia in a serious dia- as part of our overall strategy for transformation in logue. Announcing our plans in public before talk- the Middle East is that the Palestinians could well An Israeli withdrawal from ing to them risks giving offense. In the Clinton serve as a model for political change and promotion administration we worked very closely – and with of democracy throughout the region. Gaza will create a some success – with President Mubarak on an eco- How? vacuum. We must help nomic reform program. Much of that success came At the moment there is a failed state-in-the- from the fact that Vice President Gore engaged making in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian responsible Palestinians President Mubarak directly and regularly, explain- Authority is collapsing. Arafat is a failed and dis- ing the economic reforms and supporting him as he credited leader, yet he obstructs every effort made fill that vacuum. took risks. by genuine Palestinian reformers to assert order Beyond Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the small- in the face of growing anarchy. There is a desper- I believe that there is a way to do this. Such an er Arab states: countries like Jordan, Morocco, ate need for a new Palestinian leadership to emerge, effort would require a UN-Security- Council-blessed, Tunisia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, and the without which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will US-led, European-partnered initiative to create con- United Arab Emirates. not be resolved. ditions for the emergence of a new, democratically Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, and even Qatar, My recent discussions in Europe suggest that elected Palestinian leadership. It would require lim- have new leaders from a younger generation who the issue simply does not compute here. The con- ited special forces under NATO to back up a restruc- understand very well what is needed in terms of ventional wisdom in Europe seems to be that tured and retrained Palestinian security force, which the process of introducing political and econom- because Yossi Beilin, former Israeli Minister of would have responsibility for maintaining order in ic reforms. Not surprisingly, they are already taking Justice, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, former Palestinian the areas vacated by Israel. The international pres- the kinds of steps that we want to encourage in the Authority Information Minister, solved the prob- ence could then oversee elections in accordance bigger Arab states. This has to do not only with the lem in their Geneva Accords, the US simply needs with the constitution that Palestinians have already more progressive views of these leaders but also the to impose the solution on the two parties. It is drafted, empowering their prime minister and tak- fact that their countries have less at stake than the not so simple. For, at the moment, there is no ing power away from Arafat. In this way we can help bigger Arab powers. Palestinian leadership to deal with. And until there them build democratic political institutions, trans- These smaller Arab states can serve as models of is a Palestinian leadership capable, responsible, and parent economic institutions, and an independent reform and have leaders whom we can work with. One accountable to the Palestinian people, there will not judiciary. And once a responsible, capable, and might view them as case studies that show how the be any deal – no matter how clear the outlines of a accountable Palestinian leadership is formed, it can same kinds of things might be done on a larger scale. settlement are to us or, for that matter, to the Israelis enter into negotiations with Israel for a final settle- When Qatar, for example, takes steps to give women and Palestinians (the majority of whom would sup- ment of this conflict. (See my article “A Trusteeship the vote, it has an impact on neighboring Saudi port a two-state solution on both sides). Part of our for Palestine” in the May/June 2003 issue of Foreign Arabia, where women are still denied that right. strategy for transformation in the region thus has to Affairs, pp. 51–66.) The combined effort to work with the small- focus on the question of how to promote democra- The four-part effort to transform the Middle er states, to stabilize Iraq and use it as a model cy in Palestine. How can we build a new Palestinian East described above builds on what President for the larger states, and to partner the Saudi and leadership? Bush wants to do in terms of promoting democra- Egyptian leadership in reform efforts is an ambi- cy in the region but also places it within a context of tious one. But we should not take on the task unless peacemaking. By stabilizing the situation in Iraq; we are prepared for that moment when the people Until there is a Palestinian by countering the rogue regimes; by standing up for in the region – be it in the smaller states or in the the little guy (both supporting the reform efforts of larger ones – take our efforts seriously and actual- leadership capable, smaller states in the region and by lending strength ly stand up and demand their rights. How will we responsible, and account- to those still small voices for political reform in act then? Consider a country like Tunisia, which has the larger states); and by promoting the Israeli- embarked on major economic reforms but has com- able to the Palestinian Palestinian peace process through a US-European pletely restricted any political reforms. How would intervention in Palestine, I believe we can meet this we act if a political reform movement started there? people, there will not be daunting but noble objective. And in the process, we The example of our lack of support for the reform- any deal. can help to bring both democracy and peace to the ers in Iran bodes badly. The people in the region will Middle East.o be watching very closely to see whether we are serious about such efforts. And if we are not prepared to The problem is urgent. Now more than ever, we stand with them when they are beaten up and incar- need a responsible Palestinian partner, because the Ambassador Martin S. Indyk founded and directs the Saban cerated, we should not even set forth on this course. Israeli people have decided they do not want to be in Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution The fourth and final branch of this strategy is to the West Bank and Gaza anymore and are pressing and was founding executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He served as US Assistant pursue peace between Israel and its neighbors, par- their government to withdraw. Secretary of State for Near East Affairs from 1997 to 2000 ticularly between Israel and the Palestinians. That Prime Minister Sharon has suggested there will and as US Ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and from peace is part of the effort. Of course, it is also nec- be a withdrawal unilaterally from Gaza and from 2000 to June 2001.

The Berlin Journal 25 Gillette NOTEBOOK of the ACADEMY

Dan K. Moore Distinguished Academy Trustee Charitable Counsel Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Köhler Nominated for Fellowship Honors Lloyd Cutler Motomura’s project, “Germany: a German Presidency Country of Immigration or a Nation of Immigrants?” examines current The international law firm of Wilmer in at the end of the month of May with trends in German immigration and Cutler & Pickering announced last the prestigious Boston-based law firm of citizenship law. The author, most Horst Köhler, former director of the IMF November that it will support a semester- Hale and Dorr. recently, of Americans-in-Waiting: and longtime Academy trustee, will in all long Fellowship named in honor of Dieter Lange, Wilmer Cutler’s senior the Ambivalent Story of Immigration likelihood be elected the next president trustee Lloyd Cutler for the next three European partner, practices from the and Citizenship in the United States of the Federal Republic of Germany. He years. Two partners, Dieter Lange and firm’s London, Brussels, and Berlin plans to take full advantage of the was nominated in March by the CDU, CSU, Roger Witten, were instrumental in offices. He is co-chairman of the firm’s rich comparative terrain from his and FDP, parties that will enjoy a majority making possible the fellowship, which International Practice Group. Roger vantage point in Berlin. when members of the Federal Convention Academy President Robert Mundheim Witten, the senior litigation partner in “As the first Lloyd Cutler Fellow, cast their votes on May 23. His rival, SPD greeted as a “splendid gesture.” Mr. the firm’s New York office, recently led you will be, I hope, the first in along candidate Gesine Schwan, visited the Mundheim is confident that the prize, a victorious Wilmer Cutler legal team line to honor our trustee, one of Hans Arnhold Center a week before the which gives preference to outstanding in the US Supreme Court’s decision to the most distinguished US nominations were made public, leading applicants from the field of law, will uphold the McCain-Feingold Campaign practitioners of the second half of a fellows’ seminar on her experiences “draw even better lawyers and law finance reform law. the twentieth century,” wrote Mr. as president of the Viadrina European academic applicants to the Academy’s Inaugurating the fellowships Mundheim in a congratulatory University in Frankfurt (Oder). program.” next fall will be Hiroshi Motomura, letter to Professor Motomura.o Richard von Weizsäcker, one of the Mr. Cutler, born in 1917, served as Academy’s founders, held the presidential Counsel to both the Clinton and the post for two terms between 1984 and Carter administrations and maintains an 1994. It was during the last year of his active practice in several fields, includ- tenure that the inspired idea of forging ing international arbitration and dispute a strong, private institution to promote resolution, constitutional law, appellate German and American cultural exchange advocacy, and public policy advice. was announced. Trustee Gahl Burt, who brought Mr. Mr. Köhler is the first German to head the Cutler to the Academy’s board in 1998, IMF, a post he took up in 2000. Between toasted him at a celebratory dinner in 1990 and 1993, as deputy finance minister Washington to mark the announcement. under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he was “I can think of no wiser sounding board a chief negotiator of the agreement that for our young organization than Lloyd became Maastricht and was closely Cutler. Indeed, we wouldn’t have our involved in German unification, devising, president, Robert Mundheim, were it not among other things, a way to fund the Red for him,” she said. Army’s withdrawal from the former GDR. In addition to the Academy’s board, He served as president of the German Mr. Cutler has served a number of other Savings Bank Association from 1993 to institutions, most notably as chairman 1998, the year he was appointed to head of the board of the Salzburg Seminar; the European Bank of Reconstruction and as co-chairman of the Committee on Development. the Constitutional System; as a member of the Council of the American Law Mr. Köhler joined the American Academy’s Institute; and as trustee emeritus of board in 1998 through the good offices of the Brookings Institution and mem- honorary chairmen Thomas L. Farmer and ber of its executive committee. He was a Richard C. Holbrooke and negotiated a founder and co-chairman of the Lawyers substantial gift on the part of the German Committee on Civil Rights under Law. Savings Bank Association at that critical The firm that Lloyd Cutler helped early stage. Mr. Farmer greeted the news found in Washington in 1962 now has of his nomination enthusiastically. “Horst more than five hundred international Köhler is a man of quiet determination lawyers in offices in Washington, Berlin, who has a clear concept for a revived

New York, London, Brussels, Baltimore, PhotographAnnetteHornischerby Germany in both the European and and Northern Virginia and will merge Academy trustees Lloyd Cutler and Henry Kissinger at the second New Traditions conference, 1998. transatlantic framework.”o

The Berlin Journal 27 PhotographMinehanMikeby Midtown Manhattan came to Mitte as part of the Neue Nationalgalerie’s blockbuster exhibition “MoMA in Berlin.” To mark the occasion, the Academy organized a series of discussions. “Curating Modernity” began this March with a talk between MoMA curator Ann Temkin (opposite page, upper right) and art historian Robert Rosenblum (shown above, right, with the Academy’s president Robert Mundheim). Upcoming events are listed on page 38.

Commission, to participate in the bi- the imf since 2001 and has overseen its Guest Appearances annual JP Morgan Economic Policy Briefs activities during a complex period of glob- Notes from the Spring Program in late April. The well-recognized expert al crises as well as growth. She previously on corporate and securities law presented was a professor at Stanford’s department his views on regulation in a global eco- of economics and was the World Bank’s nomic environment, a topic of consider- vice president for economics and research able interest to members of the German from 1982 to 1986. This spring the Academy welcomed five Legal expert Charles Fried, a former business community. Twentieth-century German histo- official Distinguished Visitors to the Hans Solicitor General in the Reagan admin- The ongoing discussion of the corpo- ry is always a topic of great importance Arnhold Center: Berlin-born composer istration, lectured in early March on rate oversight continues into June when at the American Academy in Berlin. Lukas Foss, SEC Corporation Finance “The Concept of Liberty Implicit in US William McDonough, chairman of the This semester, two very different schol- Director Alan Beller, and three seasoned Constitutional Law.” In his talk, the Public Company Accounting Oversight ars contributed to the discussion. Jürgen American diplomats, Martin Indyk, Harvard professor and former judge Board (pcaob), addresses “the Challenge Kocka, noted historian and president Edward Djerejian, and Dennis Ross. Other traced the origins of our contemporary of National Jurisdictions and a Global of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für speakers from the areas of economics, understanding of free speech to the Dred Economy.” After ten years as president Sozialforschung, gave the second annual history, and literature contributed the Scott Decision of 1857 and explored the and ceo of the Federal Reserve Bank of Fritz Stern Lecture in early May, address- public program as well. implications of free speech on a range of New York, Mr. McDonough was nominat- ing the theoretical “Problem of Freedom Lester Thurow’s January lecture drew today’s hot-button topics, from same-sex ed in 2003 by the SEC to chair the pcaob, in German History” before the assem- its title from his book, Fortune Favors the marriage to campaign finance reform. a private-sector, non-profit corporation bled board of trustees and special guests. Bold: Building Lasting Global Prosperity, While in Berlin, Mr. Fried also participat- created by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act Gerhard Casper, an Academy trustee and which argues that in order to prosper and, ed in a lively argument with German legal in order to oversee the auditors of public President Emeritus of Stanford University, indeed, to survive in the globalized world, experts at the Heinrich Böll Foundation on companies. moderated the discussion. states must build economic systems that the legal situation of prisoners currently in Toward the end of June, the Academy In early April Jörg Friedrich, freelance embrace globalization. The author of the US detention in Guantanamo, Cuba. will welcome Anne Krueger, managing historian and author of the controversial 1980 bestseller The Zero-Sum Society and The Academy’s president Robert director ad interim of the International and extremely successful book Der Brand Building Wealth is professor at mit’s Sloan Mundheim happily persuaded Alan Beller, Monetary Fund, who will assess the imf’s (forthcoming in an English translation) School of management. director of the Division of Corporation role in the global economy sixty years after presented a sweeping overview of war in Finance at the US Securities and Exchange its founding. Ms. Krueger has been with the twentieth century, with a focus on the

28 Number Eight | Spring 2004 practice he calls “urbicide” – the destruction of cities – with examples drawn in particular from the Allied aerial bom- bardment of Dresden, Essen, and other German cities during World War II. At the other end of the program spectrum, cultural life at the Academy has been particularly rich this spring. Fellow Elizabeth McCracken and her husband, British writer and playwright Edward Carey have been in residence all semester, as was writer Norman Manea for the month of March. The Romanian-born professor at Bard College gave readings all over Germany from his recent mem- Siemens Shows oir The Hooligan’s Return. Manea’s stay as

Writer-in-Residence at the Academy was PhotographMinehanMikeby its Support : itself a sort of return, since it was a daad Three-Year fellowship in the German capital that first The Colossus of New York, a series of takes bureau of the New York Times moderated a enabled him to leave Ceaucescu’s oppres- on his beloved native city. lively discussion about the rich tradition of Fellowship sive Romania in 1986. Manea’s numerous A week later, writer Candace Allen African-American expatriates in Europe. novels, volumes of shorter fiction, prose read from her debut novel Valaida, which German-born Composer Samuel Adler, Announced pieces, and poems have been translated recounts the life of African-American jazz who arrives at the Academy toward the end into twenty languages. trumpet virtuoso Valaida Snow. Allen of the semester, will continue his reflec- Author Colson Whitehead stayed at scoured two continents for biographi- tions on the relationship between German Siemens AG, one of the American the Hans Arnhold Center during a chilly cal material relating to her elusive subject, and American music. His extensive cata- Academy’s founding benefactors, continues February week and warmed up the house which she then supplemented with many logue includes over four hundred published its generous support by funding a Siemens with a reading from his second novel. richly imagined characters and settings. works, as well as three books. Mr. Adler cur- Fellowship at the Hans Arnhold Center for John Henry Days is the story of a hack Allen, who was the first African-American rently teaches at the Julliard School of Music the next three years. Thanks to President writer who is sent reluctantly to cover a female member of the Directors Guild of in New York. As Composer-in-Residence at and CEO Heinrich von Pierer and Senior small-town festival commemorating the America, lives in London but is a frequent the Academy, he will give a lecture-recital Vice President and Chief Economist Bernd American folk hero John Henry. Fellows visitor to Berlin, where her husband Simon on “the Second German Transformation of Stecher, the first Siemens Fellow will take and guests were also treated to passages Rattle directs the Berlin Philharmonic. After American Music, 1933–60.” o up residence at the Academy during the fall from Whitehead’s newest book, the reading, Richard Bernstein of the Berlin semester of 2004.

With 65,000 employees and 11 of its worldwide businesses based in the US, Siemens is a ﬁrm that well understands the importance of strengthening the ties between Germany and the US. Last year, the US produced approximately 21 percent of Siemens’ worldwide business and generated $15.9 billion in new orders. In the same year, Siemens USA was a major exporter, generating more than 13 percent of sales ($2.2 billion) to overseas customers.

The US is not only one of the electrical engi- neering and electronics giant’s largest markets, it is also the site of many of the company’s philanthropic activities. These include support for science research courses at top US universities and donates about $1 million annually in scholarships and awards. Last year it dedicated more than $12 million to additional corporate citizenship and community affairs activities. It is hardly surprising, then, that the company shares the Academy’s goal of promoting German- American dialogue in a wide range of cultural and academic ﬁelds.

This fall, Siemens and the Academy look forward to welcoming the inaugural Siemens Fellow, Lothar Haselberger, a professor of archaelogy at the University of Pennsylvania.o PhotographMichaelby Herrmann Writer-in-residence Norman Manea and his wife, art restorer Cella Manea.

The Berlin Journal 29 Poet C.K. Williams (fall ’98) received IV and Wanderlied will be performed Alumni Accomplishments the National Book Award for his new collec- this spring in Avignon, Strasbourg, and tion, The Singing, admired in the New York Montreal. Awards, Appointments, Activities Times Book Review for its “scorching hones- The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, a col- ty.” Williams was honored during a cere- laboration between Cartoonist Ben mony in New York. Henri Cole (spring Katchor (spring ’02) and composer ’01) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Mark Mulcahy had another successful per- for his collection Middle Earth. The award formance at The Kitchen in New York in Academy Alumni have been busy in late March. The “Tragicomedy for Music Washington. Adam Garfinkle (spring Theater” makes use of projections and ani- ’03) left the National Interest for a job at the mations by Katchor. State Department as chief speechwriter Among our academic alumni, it seems to for Secretary of State Colin Powell. Chris be an especially rich season for fellowships, Kojm (spring ’01) has been appointed honors, and appointments. James Deputy Executive Director of the National Sheehan (spring ’01) has been elected Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon president of the American Historical the United States, an independent, Association. Historian Margaret bipartisan commission created in late Lavinia Anderson (spring ’01) won an 2002. Two Academy Alumni were active acls fellowship for next year. Her article in the election-year Democratic primaries. “A German Way of War?” was published in As Derek Chollet (spring ’02) worked the January 2004 issue of German History. on the staff of candidate Senator John Psychologist Laura L. Carstensen Edwards, advising on international affairs, (spring’02) is using funds from her 2003 Benjamin Barber (fall ’01) advised Guggenheim Fellowship to research her Howard Dean’s campaign. Further afield, next book, about the sudden extension Howard m. Wachtel (fall ’99) was of life expectancy in the 20th century. appointed to a 12-person commission (spring ’02) wrote about Doris Bauer, a is the largest prize given for a single book of Anthropologist Ruth Mandel (Fall ’00) constituted by Jacques Chirac to prepare frequent late-night caller to the wfan poetry. “Middle Earth is a book of extraordi- was awarded a 2004–05 fellowship at the a report for him on global taxation for the program well known among radio sports nary grace and power,” says previous Tufts Woodrow Wilson International Center in next G8 meeting. fans; and David Rieff (spring ’03) Award winner Robert Wrigley, who chaired Washington DC to work on a critique of In the newsroom, journalist Nina contributed a portrait of UN Special the panel that chose Cole. “It’s very much international development in Central Asia, Bernstein (fall ’02) has been covering Envoy to Iraq Sergio Viera de Mello who a book about a personal voyage into self- based on recent research in Kazakhstan. US immigration policy in the post-Septem- was killed by terrorists in Baghdad last hood. It’s a very brave book. He’s a crafts- Art historian W.J.T. Mitchell (fall ’02) ber 11 climate for the New York Times. Her August. A few months later, Jeffrey man of the highest order.” Henri Cole will be back in Berlin in 2004-2005 as a two-part series on the declining pregnancy Eugenides (2000–01), whose novel is currently poet-in-residence at Smith Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg. Mitchell rates among American teenagers was Middlesex is a bestseller in German as well College. delivers the Goddard Lectures this spring launched with a lengthy front-page piece as in its English and American editions, High Art for flute and toy piano by at the University of California, Berkeley. on March 7. Belinda Cooper (fall ’02) hosted McCracken at a reading at the Martin Bresnick (spring ’01) was Another prestigious lecture series will be has published a number of articles, book Cologne Literature Festival. performed in a concert featuring con- given by Richard Sennett (spring reviews, and travel pieces in the Times Artist Sue De Beer’s 2-channel video temporary American music at the Berlin ’02), the 2003–4 Castle Lecturer in Ethics, and was recently in Israel working on a installation “Hans und Grete,” which she Philharmonic in early March. Laura Politics and Economics at Yale. documentary film. worked on during her 2002–03 year in Schwendinger’s Nonet, a 15-minute Steven Szabo (fall ’02) has been Biographical pieces by current fellow Berlin, is on view at the Whitney Biennial work in three movements will be premiered appointed the Steven Muller Chair at the Elizabeth McCracken and several in New York between March and June. and broadcast on wfmt in Chicago on Johns Hopkins Bologna Center for the Academy alumni were included in the An installation by artist Stephanie June 14. The Fromm Foundation commis- year 2004–05. Michael Meltsner December 28, 2003 issue of New York Snider “Es war einmal et. al.,” also sioned the composer (spring ’00) to write (fall ’00), currently director of the First- Times Magazine, which was devoted to worked on during a prolonged Berlin for the Chicago Chamber Musicians. Her Year Lawyering Program at the Harvard “The Lives They Lived”; McCracken residence, was on view in March and April piece Lontano, commissioned by the cube Law School, was Hengeler-Müller-Guest profiled Doris Fowler, author of Standing at the Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin. ensemble, also premiered this spring. Two Professor at the University of Freiburg in Room Only; Nicholas Dawidoff works by Betsy Jolas (fall ’00) Motet the summer of 2003. o

Two drawings from the “Landscript” series by current Coca-Cola Fellow Xu Bing (ink on nepalese paper, 2001) delineate traditional landscapes in rapid, elegant Chinese characters (for rock, tree, rain, etc.). A related series of installations transposes the same concept to the urban environment; word-masses trace the outlines of apartment blocks and other city elements onto the glass windows of the exhibition space.

30 Number Eight | Spring 2004

The Berlin Prize Fellowships 2005–2006 The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for its fellowships US citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply. (All applicants for the 2005-2006 academic year. The Academy is a private, non-profit must permanently based in the US.) Fellows are expected to be in residence center for advanced reasearch in a range of academic, cultural, and at the Academy during the entire term of the award. The Academy offers professional areas. It welcomes younger as well as established scholars, furnished apartments suitable for individuals and couples. Only very lim- artists, and professionals who wish to engage in independent study ited accommodations are available for families with children. Benefits in Berlin for an academic semester or, in special cases, for an entire include a monthly stipend, round-trip airfare, housing at the Academy, academic year. and partial board. Stipends range from $3000 to $5000 per month. The Academy, which opened in September 1998, occupies the Application forms can be downloaded from the Academy’s web site Hans Arnhold Center, a historic lakeside villa in the Wannsee district (www.americanacademy.de) or obtained upon request. Applications and of Berlin. Fellowships have been awarded to writers and poets, public accompanying materials must be received in Berlin by October 25, 2004 policy experts, journalists and cultural critics, economists, historians, (with the exception of applications in the visual arts and music, which are legal scholars, theologians, art historians, linguists, composers and due in New York by December 1, 2004). Candidates need not be German musicologists, painters and sculptors, and filmmakers. specialists, but the project description should explain how a residency in Named prizes include the Bosch Fellowship in Public Policy, the Berlin will contribute to further professional development. George Herbert Walker Bush Fellowship, the Citigroup Fellowship, the Applications will be reviewed by an independent selection committee Coca-Cola Fellowship, the Lloyd Cutler Fellowship, the DaimlerChrysler following a peer review process. The 2005–2006 Fellows will be chosen in Fellowship, the Gillette Fellowship, the Ellen Maria Gorrissen January 2005 and publicly announced in the spring. Fellowship, the Haniel Foundation Fellowship, the Holtzbrinck American Academy in Berlin Am Sandwerder 17–19 Fellowship in Journalism, the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellowship, the J.P. D-14109 Berlin, Germany THE AMERICAN Telephone +49 (30) 804 83 - 0 Morgan Prize, the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts, ACADEMY Fax +49 (30) 804 83 - 111 IN BERLIN and the Siemens Fellowship. [email protected] Hans Arnhold Center

A talented group of scholars and artists University) and Benjamin Binstock (New C. Schnackenberg will be the Coca-Cola chosen by an independed selection com- York University), the semester’s Anna- Fellow. Hiroshi Motomura (University of Sneak Preview mittee are expected at the Hans Arnhold Maria Kellen Fellow. Archaeologist and North Carolina at Chapel Hill) inaugurates The Fall 2004 Fellows Center next fall. Civil rights historian Jane ancient Rome expert Lothar Haselberger the Lloyd Cutler Fellowship. The George H. Dailey (Johns Hopkins University) and (University of Pennsylvania) inaugurates W. Bush Fellow will be political scientist Alan medievalist art historian Lawrence Nees the Siemens Fellowship. Writer Hilton Als, Wolfe (Boisi Center for Religion and Public (University of Delaware) were awarded theater critic for the New Yorker magazine, Life at Boston College). Finally, political sci- Berlin Prize Fellowships. Other art histo- will be a Holtzbrinck Fellow. Noted film- entists Jytte Klausen (Brandeis University) rians in residence will include Ellen Maria maker Hal Hartley will hold the Citigroup and Ezra Suleiman (Princeton University) Gorrissen Fellow Christopher Wood (Yale Fellowship, and independent poet Gjertrud will hold Bosch Public Policy Fellowships.o

The Berlin Journal 31 LIFE & LETTERS at the Hans Arnhold Center

The Spring 2004 Fellows Chicago-based labor lawyer and present Holtzbrinck Fellow Thomas Geoghegan Profiles in Scholarship has devoted three wry, passionately argued books to factors ailing the US By Miranda Robbins today: the collapse of unions (Which Side are you On?), the withdrawal from civic life (The Secret Lives of Citizens), and the high rate of imprisonment (In Andrew Bacevich, a military analyst and Security Council between 1994 and 1999 America’s Court). Europe, in contrast, professor of political science at Boston and as director of transnational threats enjoys strong unions, a high degree of University, is writing a broad study of there from 1998 to 1999. The New York unable to make responsible decisions civic participation, and comparatively militarism in American life from the Times called his 2002 book The Age of without aid.” Case’s study promises to low levels of incarceration. The English- Vietnam war through the present. The Sacred Terror (co-authored with Steven have an impact on abortion debates in speaking press, however, tends to focus former US Army officer is one of two Simon) “a lively – and disturbing – tale both the US and Germany. inaugural George H. W. Bush Fellows of bureaucratic vexation.” Benjamin at the Academy this spring and the is currently measuring the success DaimlerChrysler Fellow David Ferris author, most recently, of American of collaborative efforts to defeat the will look back on two centuries of Bach Empire: the Realities and Consequences of terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda reception for a book about the most US Diplomacy. Concerned by the recent and related organizations. He will illustrious of J.S. Bach’s many musical implementation in Iraq of the doctrine of explore immediate intelligence, law sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714 – preventive war and by the trend toward enforcement, and military challenges as 1788). The second son’s life is ripe for a the militarization of US foreign policy, well as longer-term issues of the “root” critical biography, one that comments demographic, environmental, political, on rather than perpetuating the various and economic problems that contribute myths that have long fueled Bach family to the spread of radical Islam. He delivers histories. These range from the myth on the continent’s problems rather than the annual Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold of divine succession to scenarios of the virtues of its social democracies, Lecture in Dresden in mid May. Romantic rebellion and Freudian failure. depicting the German social state in particular as backward, plagued by Mary Anne Case is a professor at the unemployment, and fearful of risk University of Chicago’s law school, where taking. “Even American liberals readily she teaches feminist jurisprudence, assume that our system, for all its flaws, constitutional law, European legal is superior.” Geoghegan is processing his Portraits by Mike MinehanMikePortraitsby systems, and regulation of sexuality. observations of Germany and Europe Bacevich is tracking the cultural and From Berlin as a Bosch Fellow she is into a narrative of “discovery by an societal impact of a new civil-military probing the contradictions within innocent abroad” and, doing so, will tension. The “citizen soldier” of the past German abortion law – inconsistencies state the case for “outright social has been replaced by “a professional that the German legal and political democracy” and the benefits of living in military that sees itself as culturally communities have preferred to downplay “a relatively egalitarian country.” and politically set apart from the rest since abortion law was revisited after c.p.e. himself promoted his father’s of American society.” The pro-military unification. The German constitution posthumous reputation and supervised The decision to continue war in the stance of the Christian Right; anti- guarantees the right of the fetus to life, publication of his works. In his Father’s face of obvious defeat – sometimes militarism within the American elite; the and abortions “remain characterized Image: the Historical Identity of c.p.e. even beyond defeat – is a compulsion increasingly politicization of the officer as wrongful acts.” But if a woman Bach will be more than a book about that once enjoyed the name of heroism, corps; the shifting depiction of the undergoes counseling, she may abort the anxiety of influence, however. Ferris at least in the mythic realm. Michael military in popular culture are some of in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy gives a close analysis of the music, Geyer, a military historian who is all the factors related to that tension. without risk of criminal sanctions. examining the “underlying aesthetic too familiar with the carnage inflicted Case is especially critical of mandatory affinity” as well as the vast stylistic by Germany during two world wars, Counter terrorism expert Daniel counseling. The system would not be so differences in the works of both Bachs. terms it “catastrophic nationalism.” The Benjamin, a senior fellow since 2001 at the “anomalous,” she writes, “if counseling With a trove of original manuscripts professor at the University of Chicago Center for Strategic and International were a well-established practice under on hand in the Statsbibliothek, it is an and current DaimlerChrysler Fellow is Studies in the International Security present-day German law, if persons especially inviting project to undertake writing a book on the syndrome that Program, arrives in May for a short-term seeking to engage in a wide variety of acts from Berlin. Ferris, an assistant professor draws explicitly on Germany’s bloody Bosch fellowship. The former German were required to undergo counseling of musicology at Rice University, is also example. Examples of military-political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal beforehand.” The system, however, an expert on Romantic song cycles, of decision making and the action and and TIME served on Clinton’s National “encourages a view of women as uniquely Schumann in particular. reactions of ordinary Germans will

32 Number Eight | Spring 2004

For the past six decades, Germans have period, how they saw themselves, and been engaged in the slow and painful how their upward mobility fit into that processes of Geschichtsaufarbeitung and of the middle class as a whole. From 1848 Vergangenheitsbewältigung – coming to 1878, moreover, Prussian judges were to terms with the Nazi past. Historian often fiercely independent and active in Hope Harrison will devote her next book liberal politics. Ledford heads the Max to more recent efforts in the unified Kade Center for German Studies at Case Germany to deal with the twentieth Western Reserve University in Cleveland, century’s other German extremist, where he is an associate professor of authoritarian regime: the East German history and law. Socialist Unity Party. The George H.W. be interspersed with an ambitious Bush Fellow and assistant professor Elizabeth McCracken’s novels and short respectively. Though Reynolds insists cultural and intellectual exploration of at George Washington University is stories have been published in eleven that this is a coincidence, he and Jolley various interlocking phenomena: the conducting interviews and examining countries, and though her settings are have embarked on a fourth project, culture of defeat, the quest for salvation, two sets of recent records: the 1991– decidedly American – obscure suburbs which adds the element of earth to the fear of destruction (and the parallel 2002 “Wall Trials,” connected to the and small cities like Des Moines, Iowa – quartet. “Soil,” a film about relentless appeal of self-destruction), and the rich the characters who inhabit them contain decomposition, is one of several film millenarian traditions that this tapped. continents, both figuratively and literally projects occupying the artist this spring. Perhaps most provocatively, Geyer is (they are often immigrants). This comparing Germany and France, where spring as Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow, David Warsh, who is the editor of he sees in the French Revolution and McCracken is at work on Marvellous, a EconomicPrincipals.com and this spring’s the Terror a similarly “potent linkage JP Morgan Fellow, has made a career of of self-determination, self-defense, and reporting on the impact of university virtuous citizenship.” economics on historical awareness and public policy. His weekly column, Miriam Hansen, professor of humanities, which appeared in the business section English, and film studies at the of the Boston Globe for more than 18 University of Chicago, is co-editor of infamous shootings by GDR border years, moved on-line in March 2002. EP the journal New German Critique, which guards, and the extensive volumes continues to explore “the connections effected a small revolution in German issued by two parliamentary inquiries between university economics and the studies when she and Andreas Huyssen (1992–94 and 1995–1998) devoted, rest of the world” but has taken on more founded it in 1984. Hansen, the author respectively, to getting GDR history right “peripatetic” dimensions as well. of a groundbreaking study of American and to overcoming the consequences short novel that deals very specifically silent film Babel and Babylon, is devoting of that history. Harrison has set out to with “place, from the smallest level (a her Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellowship test the quality and historical accuracy bedroom, a house, a six-house street) to to completing a book on cinema, mass of the documents and to examine their the largest (a city, a state, a country at a culture, and modernity among three sometimes divergent conclusions. particular time.)” With her second novel, thinkers of the “other Frankfurt School”: Niagara Falls All Over Again, McCracken Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Legal historian Kenneth Ledford, subjected her hero, Mose Sharp, to a life and Theodor W. Adorno. Despite as inaugural John Kluge Fellow, is of characteristically American roving their manifold differences, all three completing his major social and legal restlessness. Mose and his vaudeville critical theorists saw cinema as “key to history of the Prussian judiciary, partner travel from hardscrabble understanding modernity and mass 1848 to 1914. Ledford points out Midwestern depression-era beginnings society.” Hansen laments the “persistent that the German judiciary still has a through a period of Laurel& Hardy- Warsh’s self-styled experiment and notorious” misrepresentation of “reactionary reputation” (doubly strong like Hollywood success, followed by in independent online economic the Frankfurt School within American in Prussia), not just for its oft-cited Nazi the inevitable downward slide into journalism has come to include and British film studies (due, in part, to complicity but also for the more recent television. The book earned McCracken commentaries on current topics ranging mistranslation), which tends to telescope “spectacularly conservative rulings” a pen/Winship award. from election year machinations in the all of Critical Theory into a handful made from the bench in the Federal homeland to terrorism abroad, and Short films by Reynold Reynolds have this spring Warsh is looking closely at been shown at prestigious festivals from how economic ideas are being shaped Sundance to Rotterdam, from the New in Europe’s universities and institutes. York Underground Film Festival to the The website is powered by Warsh’s Cuban biennial. But it is the challenge belief that “fellow citizens should know of presenting his pieces as museum more about where economic ideas come installations (at places like the Tate from, and what happens to them after Modern in London) that most intrigues they leave home” – as well as by grants this spring’s Guna S. Mundheim from the Sabre Foundation and private Fellow. How do the expectations of an individuals. uu art audience differ from those of a film of the late Adorno’s most pessimistic Republic. Ledford’s project looks audience? In art venues his work takes statements on the “culture industry.” back to the nineteenth century not in on different, hypnotic qualities – with She is in a unique position to remedy order to identify the Sonderweg along sound, special effects, and even narrative the situation, having studied under which Germany marched toward Nazi content occupying a new plane. Three Jürgen Habermas, Alexander Kluge, dictatorship but simply to show “judges short films Reynolds made with Patrick and Adorno himself at the University of as specific historical actors embedded Jolley – “Burn” (2002), “The Drowning Frankfurt. in place and calling.” He has made a Room” (2000), and “Seven Days Til careful study of how judges were trained, Sunday” (1998) – take on the classic recruited, and supervised during the elements of fire, water, and air,

The Berlin Journal 33 Fellow Profile: Xu Bing Don’t Vacuum this Room

When artist Xu Bing left China for entering culture, and at the same time to take an increasingly experimental transformed a Beijing art gallery into a the US in 1990, in the wake of the I am unable to escape it.” In fact, his direction, the favor turned to irritation. pigpen – literally – where a male and a Tiananmen Square massacre, he word-based work has entered new cul- Xu spent painstaking months pre- female pig, both carefully painted with brought with him a mangled bicycle tures with impressive ease. Shown all paring his first major conceptual work, characters from his pseudo pictogram- salvaged from the day the tanks rolled over Europe, North America, and Asia, “A Book from the Sky,” which was first mar, frolicked un-self-consciously before in. Over a decade later, when disaster Xu Bing’s pieces are as likely to incorpo- exhibited in Beijing in October 1988 – a discomfited audience. In 1995, he struck his new home town on September rate advanced computer software as to just months before the student protests placed silk moths onto the pages of large 11, 2001, he would engage in another make use of stone rubbings, banners, began in Tiananmen Square. He devised blank books, watching the eggs and lar- salvage operation, this time of dust and ancient bookbinding methods – and an elaborate system of some four thou- vae form the shifting lines of an unread- from the wreckage of the World Trade as likely to poke fun at Western modes sand unintelligible “characters,” carv- able, enigmatic text – before being Center. The dust now lies in a fine layer of art installation and performance as it ing each fake word onto a wood block effaced in a web of spun silk. across the parquet floors of a museum in is to turn the Chinese calligraphic tradi- and assembling them into over five hun- Xu continues to play with notions of Cardiff, Wales, marking out the words tion on its head. dred hand-printed books and scrolls. art’s accessibility, particularly through of a Buddhist koan: “As there is nothing Xu, born 1955, is the child of pro- His patience in preparing the volumes his “Square Word Calligraphy” system, from the first/ where does the dust foundly literate parents – and of Mao’s matched his mischievous delight in the developed to combine Western words itself collect?” This fragile installation, wrenching cultural reforms. No sooner element of surprise – the moment when with Chinese calligraphic techniques. together with his entire oeuvre, has just had he memorized the first of thousands viewers would realize that the distin- The project, which often takes the form won Xu Bing the first Artes Mundi Prize, of classical Chinese characters than a guished looking texts surrounding them of interactive classroom installations, a $70,000 award for contemporary art. drastically simplified set of characters are meaningless. The work caused a sen- has built a popular bridge to Western The line of Xu Bing’s career has been a was introduced. During the Cultural sation – which morphed into uproar audiences, who learn some of the tenets curling, agitated brushstroke stretching Revolution, his historian father and after the June 1989 crackdown. His old of the Chinese art of writing – correct from the imposing Chinese tradition librarian mother were pilloried as “reac- teachers denounced it as impenetrable, posture, creative stroke, and attentive- of dissident scholar-painters (like tionaries” just as Xu himself was being inaccessible, “bourgeois liberal.” When ness to spiritual energy – by taking up the exiled early-Qing-dynasty master packed off to the countryside for a pro- a leading cultural Mandarin disparag- the brush themselves. Bada Shanren) to more recent populist gram of “rustication.” He returned to ingly compared it to “ghosts pounding The breadth of Xu Bing’s work will credos such as “art for the people.” Beijing much influenced by his time as a the wall,” Xu promptly left Beijing for be on view from May 27 through From a decidedly Chinese context, he laborer, becoming first a model student north China and, with the help of a team August 1 in a special exhibition at the has transposed his fascination with the and then a prized teacher at Beijing’s of other “ghosts,” made a full-scale rub- Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in substance and the trappings of literacy, Central Academy of Fine Art. There was bing of the Great Wall itself. The result, Berlin-Dahlem, as well as in a com- his sense of humor, and his ability to a period in which he worked in the pro- “Ghosts Pounding the Wall,” is one of panion catalogue, co-published by needle an audience to the top of the paganda factories, painting giant post- his most powerful works. Soon after its the American Academy, the Staatliche international art scene. ers. Throughout the 1980s he was a completion he left for the US. Museen zu Berlin, and the Deutsche “Throughout my life,” Xu has written, favorite of the Chinese art establish- Since leaving China, Xu’s work has Gesellschaft für Ostasiatische Kunst. o “I have always felt that I am incapable of ment, but gradually, as his work began taken on even more variety: In 1994, he

34 Number Eight | Spring 2004

On the WATERFRONT

Lie’ by Celan. I needed to imagine Certainly it provided a forum based on intellectual rather than In Berlin, a Showcase of Benn where he was in the 1920s.” for heated debates during tensions military ties,” Mr. Kissinger said in For journalists like Richard between Germany and the US over an interview. Cohen, a columnist for The the Iraq war. At the height of these Mr. Holbrooke said, “Our mis- American Talent Marks Washington Post, time at the disagreements, Mr. Schily debat- sion is to keep alive the special rela- Academy provided new sourc- ed Richard C. Holbrooke, who was tionship between Americans and an Anniversary es of information. “I thought it American ambassador to Germany the people of Berlin.” The Academy, would be good to get my head out in the early 1990s and later ambas- he said, was designed to serve as a Five Years at the Hans Arnhold Center of Washington and look at America sador to the United Nations, and continuing bridge outside govern- from abroad,” he said. was instrumental in establishing ment channels. “It has never proved BERLIN - Alvin Youngblood Hart But it has also become a place for Mr. Cohen made his mark on the Academy. its value more than during this time sidled up to the microphone in Germans and Americans to interact Berlin in October when he gave “The farsightedness of setting up of tensions in the official relation- black leather pants and a plaid and talk with, and sometimes yell his controversial speech “America, the Academy when there is such a ship, when it is serving as a bridge shirt, dreadlocks tumbling out of at, one another. the Misunderstood,” a lecture high level of tension and anger in between the two countries,” he said. his leather cap. “The whole world The informal design of the place on American values and the rea- the German-American relationship With an operating budget of $2.7 has gone mad, especially recently,” “is an imminent form of critique of sons for the Iraq war. “The reac- cannot be underestimated,” said million for 2004, the Academy has said Mr. Hart, the blues guitarist the insularity of some German insti- tion was much more hostile from John Kornblum, another former attracted about eighty private and and 2003 Grammy Award nominee. tutions,” said director Gary Smith. the Americans in the audience than American ambassador to Germany corporate donors. But the largest are Then he leaned back and used his “I don’t think the Academy should the Germans,” he said. “It made me and now the chairman of Lazard the descendants of Hans Arnhold, a guitar to make the same point. be an academic monastery.” recapitulate my thinking.” & Company GmbH, Germany, an wealthy banker who owned the villa Up front, a row of his colleagues So the fellows, chosen from Fellows can eat almost every investment bank. “It has the broad- in 1921 and was forced to leave when from the American Academy in about two hundred applicants, meal together if they choose, and est mixture of people who attend the Nazis came to power. Arnhold’s Berlin, where he was staying for a spend their days writing, travel- there are optional programs set up its events of any transatlantic cen- relatives, especially his daughter, month as a Distinguished Visitor, ing, visiting exhibitions, speaking by the Academy, like visits to the ter here.” Anna-Maria Kellen, and her hus- clapped and cheered. On this par- or sometimes just exploring Berlin Bundestag and film screenings. The Aspen Institute Berlin, band, Stephen Kellen, donated the ticular night in November, Mr. Hart in the name of the creative pro- Svetlana Boym, a professor of which is often mentioned in money to renovate the villa and start was king of the stage in the dark- cess. But important work gets done: Slavic literature at Harvard and a the same conversations as the the Academy. The result has been an ened movie theater on the west side Jeffrey Eugenides, for example, current fellow said that the group American Academy, focuses more institution that is more than just a of Berlin. But each of the 11 fellows wrote part of his novel Middlesex, has become close. “We have intel- on politics and foreign policy. policy forum. would have the chance to walk a which won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize, lectual relations and arguments It describes itself as “a transatlan- “This involves a friendship that red carpet of their choosing during during his fellowship year, and with specific people.” As she works tic marketplace of ideas” and is stands independently, that doesn’t their stay. Ward Just set a recent novel, The on a book about the tensions run by a moderately conservative simply revolve around whether a To be an American Academy fel- Weather in Berlin (2002), in an acad- among public, philosophical, and American, Jeffrey Gedmin, who has pre-emptive strike is the right secu- low means being given a platform emy suspiciously like this one, artistic freedoms, her interactions been active in the German debate rity policy,” Mr. Weizsäcker said for your work by night and an oasis where he was also a fellow. with German colleagues have also over Bush administration policies. in an interview. “The American to conduct your research by day. Pierre Joris, a Belgian-born poet, helped illuminate the relationship The American Academy was Academy stands for the values of the The American Academy, which has long studied post-World War II between art and politics, she said. created by Mr. Holbrooke, who Enlightenment, for the American just celebrated its fifth anniver- writers who wrote in German, but The German interior minister, enlisted the support of Henry A. Constitution that provides a struc- sary, held 118 cultural and politi- he had never been to Berlin. The Otto Schily, saw the Academy’s influ- Kissinger, the former secretary of ture for checks and balances, and for cal events last year. It is a tempo- city became important for him as ence as reaching beyond the elite of state, and Richard von Weizsäcker, a state under the rule of law.” o rary home for American scholars, he began to translate the works of Berlin. “When one views those who the former German president. As journalists, economists, and artists writers like Gottfried Benn and go to the American Academy as mul- the American military left Berlin in who, supported by sizable stipends, Paul Celan. tipliers in their communities, then September 1994, they announced spend a month to a year in a beau- “I walked along Berlin’s Landwehr- the Academy has changed how those plans to establish it. “There was a By Sarah Means Lohmann tiful villa on the Wannsee, a lake kanal the other day,” he said. “I need- in Berlin view America,” Mr. Schily need to create some institution that From The New York Times just outside the German capital. ed to walk the path of the poem ‘You said in an interview. symbolized the spirit of the new era December 25, 2003

string quartet, and orchestra, Lukas Foss Immerses Himself in Berlin’s Musical Life which was played at the Academy The Return of the Native by the Scharoun Ensemble. While he is in Berlin, Foss wants to immerse himself deeply Lukas Foss wrote an opera about a lit- the 81-year-old composer, one of conducting with Serge Koussevitzky become many indeed. in the city’s musical life. His tight tle devil named Griffelkin and gave Americans oldest and most influen- at Tanglewood and composition with As the longtime director of the schedule includes a film about a head start to America’s opera-lov- tial, is a Distinguished Visitor at the Paul Hindemith. In 1953, he took Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Buffalo the tenor Joseph Schmidt, Alcina ing children with The Jumping Frog of American Academy. over Arnold Schönberg’s compo- Philharmonic, and the Milwaukee at the Komische Oper, and a pre- Calaveras County. He has a great love For the Berlin-born Foss, this is sition class at UCLA. He remained Symphony, Foss has upheld both miere of a work by composer Frank of Baroque music and allows its for- a return. “I have only a few memo- there for ten years but later lived pri- the classical tradition and modern- Michael Beyer.o mal models to surface over and over ries of old Berlin, Tiergarten in par- marily in New York and Boston: “I ism. He also performs as a pianist in his work. But he was also a serial- ticular.” He and his Jewish fami- still teach there every Monday,” Foss and develops children’s programs, ist, a minimalist, and a neo-roman- ly had to emigrate in 1933; at age says, “that’s why I have so little time regarding himself as a spokesman By Manuel Brug ticist: “I don’t change my style, just 15 the child prodigy found him- to organize my papers and notes.” for his art. From the Berliner Morgenpost my techniques and means of expres- self at the famous Curtis Institute of And considering his work-intensive This time he came to Berlin March 13, 2004 sion,” Lukas Foss says. This week Music in Philadelphia. He studied life, these papers and notes have with his piece “Tashi,” for clarinet, Translated by Brian Currid

36 Number Eight | Spring 2004

AO_Anz_rz 23.04.2004 8:42 Uhr Seite 1 PhotographMinehanMikeby Alvin Youngblood Hart performs in Berlin.

XU BING: AS THERE IS NOTHING FROM THE FIRST I WHERE DOES THE DUST ITSELF COLLECT ? XU BING, MAY 27th – AUGUST 1st, MUSEUM FÜR OSTASIATISCHE KUNST BERLIN I FANG LIJUN, MAY 15th – JULY 3rd, GALLERY BERLIN I WIEBKE LOEPER I HAI BO, MAY 28th – AUGUST 1st, WHITE SPACE BEIJING

ALEXANDER OCHS GALLERIES BERLIN I BEIJING Sophienstr. 16, D-10178 Berlin-Mitte I Fon: +49 (0) 30 –283 91 387

JEFF MORGAN I ARTES MUNDI [email protected] I www.pruess-ochs-gallery.de the Soviets insisted remain commu- the treaty. It would be up to the US materiel and troops continued to Two Failed Walls nist at the end of World War II. So to decide whether that meant war. move the south. Announced in 1967, By David Warsh the city itself was divided into four Kennedy famously replied: “Then, the McNamara Wall was supposed sectors administered by the wartime Mr. Chairman, there will be war. to halt the southbound traffic. It allies – American, British, French It will be a cold winter.” would consist of electronic sen- berlin – There was the usual din- for European and Eurasian Affairs and Soviet – its western sectors con- Instead, the Wall went up in sors and observation posts, extend- ner here before Hope M. Harrison’s at the National Security Council in nected to West Germany by road, August. And for the next 28 years, ing deep into Laos and backed by all lecture at the American Academy 2000–01. rail, and flight paths along three the Russians kept the road open to manner of military force. in Berlin about the origins of the More to the point, Harrison is of potentially fragile rights of way. Berlin, until 1989, at which point It didn’t work. It took anoth- Berlin Wall in 1961. Chef Reinold the generation for whom the cold Thereafter Berlin remained a con- the entire Soviet-dominated system er eight years and altogether near- Kegel prepared a witty meal: first, war was not a real-time issue of constant source of tension between the collapsed. ly two million lives, but the North Rostock fish stew with mussels; science but an accomplished fact. superpowers: the scene of a famous Talking all this over with a friend Vietnamese finally entered Saigon then, “Broiler,” baked chicken on a She was born in 1963. blockade and airlift in 1948 – 49, the next day, I was startled when in 1975. The last Americans fled bed of rice and peas with lecso rel- As a graduate student, she of a short-lived rebellion crushed he made a swift connection between the country they had set out to pro- ish, both typical East German dish- flew into Berlin on November 10, by Soviet tanks in 1953, of a more East German party boss Ulbricht tect. Nguyen Van Thieu moved to es; and finally, a “Divided Dessert.” 1989 – the morning after the Wall or less constant hemorrhage of and long-time South Vietnamese Massachusetts and much of the rest That turned out to be a meager came down and spent the next talented workers to the West. By president Nguyen Van Thieu. His of his government moved to Hawaii but succulent slice of pineapple, ten days witnessing the euphoria 1961 something like 10 percent of point was the same as Harrison’s: and California. a reminder of trade with Cuba, that ensued. She spent 1991–92 in the East German population had that often allies are difﬁcult to control. What I learned from Harrison topped with whipped cream Moscow and Berlin during the gold- migrated through the city to West But Ulbricht had been the vil- was that Germany differed from (there were plenty of cows in East en age of archival research, when Germany. lain of Harrison’s story. It took a lit- Vietnam – crucially – in the Germany) separated, however, by a almost everything in the Soviet As Harrison’s book shows, the tle while before I realized that my degree of great power involve- long thin cookie wafer (decorated, records was open to inspection. East German government of Walter friend was simply reasoning back- ment. Kennedy could bargain with in turn, with delicate frosting on (Many of those filing cabinets since Ulbricht pushed the Soviets to let ward by analogy. In the point he Kruschchev over the fate of West one side to evoke the painting of the have been locked up again.) them do something to staunch the was making, the US was to South Berlin. But the US could threaten no wall) from a rich chocolate mousse And the response to her book has flow. Behind the scenes, the argu- Vietnam as the Soviet Union had one over Hanoi’s conduct of the war studded with pieces of banana. been enthusiastic: “A truly distin- ment was relatively simple: cut the been to East Germany – a superpow- – except Ho Chi Minh himself. The This banana business is a kind of guished example of new cold war city off from the West and take it er being led around by the nose by a failure to understand this cost sever- running joke among Berliners. Even scholarship,” according to John over altogether, or build a wall. repressive client-state. al million lives. before the wall went up, film direc- Lewis Gaddis of Yale University, The Soviets were reluctant But then Vietnam was supposed What I had learned from the con- tor Billy Wilder ridiculed ubiqui- who is among the leading histori- to challenge the Americans to a to have been just the other way versation with my friend is that tous shortages in the East with a ans of the period. “As a case study European war, especially after John around, at least in the view of the interpretations still differ widely as scene in his neglected classic One of how a study of how a small power F. Kennedy was elected president original decision-maker, John F. to what had happened in Vietnam in Two Three: a Potemkin bar in which can manipulate a superpower, it is in November 1960. But at the same Kennedy, and, in truth, even after the past fifty years – in Washington, an East German entertainer yodels sure to become a classic.” time, they understood Ulbricht’s all these years, in mine. (Ngo Dinh in the world. a German version of “Yes, We Have Among the current genera- problem. Diem was running South Vietnam The history of Berlin is, indeed, No Bananas,” chronicling a long list tion of Americans, and for many So in early 1961, the Soviets in those days. Kennedy soon autho- history. But, at least for the genera- of shortages. When the Wall came Europeans, Berlin’s experience is upped the ante in a bluffing game. rized a coup which led to Diem’s tion that took sides over it, the story down, the West German govern- already fading, its story something Soviet Communist party chair- assassination.) of Vietnam is anything but settled. ment handed out bananas to the that was important once but now is man Nikita Khrushchev threat- In both cases, communists were In fact, thanks to the sheer numbers throngs of celebrating Ossies in little more than a half-remembered ened to sign a treaty with the East thought to be testing American will- of the baby boom voters who furi- Potsdamer Platz. fact from a high school history book Germans that would give the small- ingness to back a client state. In ously debated the issues when they Harrison’s after-dinner talk was – a little like the Danzig Corridor of er nation the right to close Western both cases, Washington was con- were young, it is once again a divi- fascinating. Then it paid an unex- the 1930s. access to Berlin. Kennedy then met vinced that its credibility in a glob- sive issue in American politics. All pected dividend the next day. Berlin’s odd status at the cen- Khrushchev in June 1961 at a sum- al struggle was at stake. The domino the more reason, therefore, to pay Harrison is an assistant pro- ter of the cold war arose at the end mit conference in Vienna and theory was invoked. attention to the scholars.o fessor of history and internation- of World War II – a war in which gave the Soviet leader two strong Vietnam even had a wall – the al affairs at George Washington Germany had wounded Russia messages. “McNamara Wall.” The country had University and author of the newly- gravely, and which the Soviet Union The US would tolerate no inter- been partitioned north and south Warsh is J.P.Morgan Fellow in published Driving the Soviets Up the had done more than its share to ference with West Berlin. But almost in 1956 along the 17th parallel – the Economic Policy this spring. Wall: Soviet-East German Relations win. The historic capital was located anything else was okay. Khrushchev “Demilitarized Zone” as it became www.economicprincipals.com 1953-1961. She served as director deep inside the half of Germany that signaled that the USSR would sign known. But North Vietnamese February 22, 2004

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AAB_CM_Ad-BJ_RZ 1 14.04.2004 16:35:43 Uhr 38 Number Eight | Spring 2004

Advertisement The Poisoned Memory

Self Destruction and German Defeat, 1918 and 1945 By Michael Geyer

All nationalism calls upon nations to ﬁght war beyond defeat, to cast aside self-preser- vation and to continue ﬁghting war to collective death. This deadly imperative may appear outlandish, something reserved for extremists. But in German history it is rather too close for comfort. This essay (part of a larger book- in-progress on the subject) will explore what this catastrophic nationalism meant in the context of World War II and how and why it was capable of holding an entire nation in its grip. While I focus here on a single nation, Germany, it should be evident that the call for collective death in the defense of the nation is a global calamity. © Leni RiefenstahlLeni©

40 Number Eight | Spring 2004

Death Tolls spirit of war. Much has since been done to differ- Heilsversprechen. The German people would be freed entiate this image. There was no romantic desire from moral collapse, society reinstituted, fear and For most Germans and Americans today, the notion for death, no Götterdämmerung, but the fact is that loathing overcome, but only when Germans were of “fighting to death” seems pure hyperbole. It is dif- Germans soldiered on in the midst of a cataclysm ready to die and to sacrifice themselves. ficult to imagine that “fighting to death” or “war to of destruction. Had the German front – any of the This self-sacrificial pursuit of an Endkampf in the point of no return” could and did actually hap- fronts – collapsed, had German morale buckled, had the wake of World War I’s humiliations was inex- pen on a mass scale. The statistics suggest other- there been a more sustained resistance, there still tricably tied to the relentless eradication of any wise. The highest German death-tolls in the World would have been the legacy of genocidal war and of and all who were or were perceived to oppose it. War II occurred late in the war, distinctly after Allied the Holocaust to contend with. However, because The November Revolution of 1918, as the signal of victory and German defeat were assured. World Germans fought in the face of their own destruc- the nation’s unwillingness to continue war, only War II was at its most lethal not in 1942–43, that tion, Europe turned into a vast zone of death with cemented a suspicion that had much deeper roots; is Stalingrad, but from the summer of 1944 into Germans in the role of vicious torturers and mur- if Germans were unwilling to fight, then wicked April 1945. Throughout that period, German mili- derers, tenacious fighters, and hapless victims. and evil forces – freemasons, Jews, or, for that mat- tary casualties never fell below 300,000 per month. ter, Catholics, Socialists, pro-Republicans – were January and February 1945 were the deadliest Catastrophic Nationalism to blame. These conspiratorial forces could prevail months of the war – among the deadliest months of only because of the nation’s disunity and moral cor- the entire twentieth century, with German military The seeds for the seemingly unending pursuit of war ruption which they had fomented, so the argument and civilian casualties hovering somewhere around in World War II were sown in World War I. In the went. The body politic had to be purified. Endkampf 500,000 per month. Overall, more German soldiers face of defeat, the nationalist right found a language and an exclusivist nationalism found its most potent were killed in action between July 20, 1944 (the date of epic outrage that focused on the notion of an enemy in the figure of the Jew. of the failed coup against Hitler) and May 8, 1945 Endkampf – a final battle. This was the rhetoric, for It could be argued at length that this idea of (unconditional surrender) than in the entire previ- example, of the Military Supreme Command’s call a sacrificial compact drew on an older lineage of ous five years of war between 1939 and 1944. And for a popular uprising in late October 1918: “Will thought about sacrifice and the nation in Germany, during the last year of the war, the civilian casual- the German people fight for their honor not just a profoundly Protestant one, which built on the ties approximated those of the soldiers, if indeed with words, but fight to the last man, and therefore image of the German nation as the Chosen People, they did not surpass them. This is the true extent of guarantee the possibility of rebirth (Wiedererstehen), the New Israel, replacing and eliminating the old. the “destruction on a scale without historical prece- or will it be pushed into capitulation and therefore In this sense, German nationalism, especially from dent,” which writers like W.G. Sebald have come to to destruction before a last and extreme exertion?”1 Fichte on, has been eliminationist and anti-Semitic. speak of with quite an extraordinary effect on public Though it failed as a call for action, the exhor- This tendency was always linked to a second, equal- consciousness. tation expressed a widely held sentiment regard- ly Biblical strand that posited the nation’s willing- At the same time, Germans fought ferocious- ing what was proper and virtuous for a nation. ness to sacrifice (the self in the form of one’s off- ly throughout the last year and the last months of Walter Rathenau had made a similar argument in spring) as the quintessential sacrificial compact the war. Facing inexorable defeat, they fought to the point of self-destruction and lashed out at their More German soldiers were killed in enemies with extraordinary fury. Casualties among the Third Reich’s opponents reached exorbitant action between July 20, 1944 and May heights. While American casualties in the European theater were always higher than in the Pacific, the 8, 1945 than in the entire previous five American forces fought some of their deadliest bat- tles between November 1944 and February 1945 on years of war between 1939 and 1944. the entire western front and even on the southern front in Italy. But American casualties were dwarfed early October, as had Konrad Haussmann, the lib- (with God) ensuring its unity against moral corrup- by the exorbitant losses the Red Army suffered in its eral Deputy from Württemberg. Max Weber even tion (the Golden Calf ). Emblematic of this self-sac- advance across the Oder and into Berlin, as well as echoed it in 1919 when he called for a guerilla war rifice was the 1631 sack of Magdeburg during the in its sweep through Southeastern Europe. resisting the Versailles Treaty. But it was the nation- Thirty Years War, which lived on in memory as cata- Simultaneously, German security forces dec- alist right that made a war of resistance into a moral clysm, Weltuntergang; the rape and slaughter of the imated their ideological enemies in a vast wave of panacea. Adolf Hitler used it as a rhetorical set piece pure by the wicked; and the site of virtuous resis- mass murders across the shrinking space of occu- over and over again when non-violent resistance tance in defeat. Magdeburg fought to the point of pied Europe. Violence against civilians found its cat- against the French occupation of Ruhr area was self-destruction and, in doing so, redeemed the aclysmic expression both in combined Wehrmacht foiled in 1923. The following passage of a speech is Protestant German nation to come. and SS sweeps against real and imagined partisans attributed to him: But this does not fully capture the prevailing as well as in the systematic destruction of Eastern The Ruhr should have become the German sentiment. Magdeburg was not the only lieu de European cities like Warsaw and Budapest. Within Moscow! We would have had to demonstrate memoire to consider. Bible images mixed with the ambit of these “killing frenzies,” the death- that the German people of 1923 are no longer Germanic myth. The richness of catastrophic marches of concentration and death camp inmates the people of 1918!… [T]he German people is no imagination, of Weltuntergang and Weltgericht, is stand out as the most horrendous examples of mur- longer ready to bow under the yoke! And if even astounding. The idea of an Endkampf in 1918 built der. Even when the death factories were closed in worse agony came upon us! Come, Agony! The on and renewed diverse tradition. What matters late 1944 on order of Heinrich Himmler, the killing people of dishonor and shame is once again a is the ready availability of this material, which was and the dying continued unabated. The annihila- people of heroes! Behind the burning Ruhr such very much part of the German mainstream – not the tion of the victims of the Third Reich did not come a people would have organized their resistance work of cranks. to an end until Germany had surrendered and was come life or death…. Now a new hour begins. occupied. Furnace upon furnace; bridge upon bridge Poisoning the Future In short, World War II reached its lethal zenith blown up! Germany is awakening!2 after the outcome of war, victory and defeat, were Hitler’s rhetoric and that of his ilk offered a promise How does catastrophic nationalism help us under- all but certain. In a most immediate and literal of liberation in the most emphatic sense. It weighed stand Nazi war and genocide? Does it explain the cat- sense, then, annihilation and self-destruction inter- liberation against the notion of social death through astrophic death-tolls at the end of World War II? The twined during the last phase of the war. This sad oppression and enslavement – Knechtschaft. This answer is both decidedly “yes” and decidedly “no.” progression of mass death hinged on what appeared idea of war was sacrificial rather than instrumen- Nazi and military elites deliberately entered to Allied combatants to be an unflagging German tal. Importantly, it offered the promise of salvation – into the final phase of the war knowing full well that

The Berlin Journal 41 the tide had shifted irrevocably against them. As his- self-destruction was not the end, but the beginning far as the Jewish question is concerned, we are torians acknowledge, German political and military of remembrance. The Third Reich had lost the war, so distinctly committed that there is no escape leadership was keenly aware of the worsening stra- but in its active pursuit of catastrophe, the Nazi for us. And that is good. A movement and a tegic situation and of impending defeat as early as leadership was confident that it would capture the people that have burnt the bridges behind itself 1942. Following others who have studied the situa- future. will fight much more relentlessly than those tion in detail, I suggest that October 1942 be taken Fifty years after World War II, this future has who still have a chance for a retreat. as a turning point. It was then that a series of stra- not arrived. Instead, with the cultural revolution While the myth-history of Endkampf cannot explain the Holocaust, the Holocaust goes a long way The 1631 sack of Magdeburg lived on toward explaining the Endkampf that the involuntary community of Germans fought in spite of them- in memory as the rape and slaughter of selves. Goebbels’s comment was mirrored in propaganda. The mushrooming fantasies about revenge the pure by the wicked and the site of and the mushrooming propaganda that generated or seconded these fantasies ahead of the fact were virtuous resistance in defeat. By fight- pervasive. A nation that had committed atrocities and genocide was not likely to sue for peace – and ing to the point of self-destruction, it did not. There has been much debate among historians Magdeburg redeemed the Protestant regarding the question of the effect of Nazi ideology, and the entire matter should be reassessed. German nation. Nazi mobilization most successfully addressed the young and the youngest. Generations of men tegic assessments strongly suggested that, after the of the late 1950s and 1960s, most Germans chose and women rediscovered themselves through the failure of the summer offensive, Germany was on to disavow their dead. The question that remains mobilization of myth, innovative propaganda ini- the strategic defensive. is what will happen, when they start to remem- tiatives, and radicalized Nazi ideology. Here was This is the same period that saw the mobili- ber? The first step toward finding an answer is to a new vanguard pushing and cajoling a reluctant zation of the machinery of Total War. It also coin- acknowledge how deeply poisoned this memory of majority into action: battle-hardened junior offi- cided with the Propaganda Ministry’s first major the dead was and continues to be. cers, middle management, factory foremen, the campaign, officially in preparation for the 1942 There is no indication that the majority of the women who, with awe-inspiring intensity, main- Volkstrauertag (People’s Day of Mourning). Calling soldiers or, for that matter, civilians, embraced the tained the infrastructure of bureaucracy and every- upon the Germans to imitate their “heroic dead” Nazi cult of the dead. Rather, the persistence and day life in bombed-out cities. They used armies of – a central theme from that point onward – Josef intensity (one might even speak of a certain reviv- forced labor to do the dirty and dangerous work. Goebbels launched the campaign with a series al) of religious rituals of mourning is striking. More It is important to recognize how and why the sys- of articles that stand out even in a world already generally, the distance of the German people to tem worked so effectively. It worked because there engrossed in a cult of the dead: Our consolation in this hour of remembrance is our unalterable faith that one day the shin- The Nazi politics of the funeral pyre ing hour of victory will rise from the graves of our dead, our noble fallen. This victory will be sought to make the nation self-destruct crowned with the miraculous blessing of the sacrifice of these men and women, for whom we so that future generations would have no grieve today.... The heart of the dead ... continues to beat, especially in the youth of Germany, choice but to revenge the dead. who cannot wait to avenge the great sacrifice the Nazi regime grew as defeat approached. And were always enough civilians, men and women, who of your loved ones with an eye for an eye and yet, without apparently believing in what they took on ever-widening responsibilities and worked a tooth for a tooth. The hour of revenge has fought for, Germans effectively continued to do the their laborers ragged – and, often enough, worked begun! We must see inscribed over the caskets regime’s bidding. them to death; there were soldiers and officers who, of our fallen the old call to action: Germany To attempt to answer this riddle leads into by dint of circumstance, ideology, or sheer bravery, must live – even if we must die.3 treacherous terrain. Emotions are still raw. But it relentlessly pulled small units, much as large forma- The grim intent of this “sacrifice” was spelled out is important at least to try to resolve the contradictions forward – forward into self-destruction; and in Hitler’s testament: “Centuries will pass, but out tions of event, experience, and memory. in the midst of all this, there was the vast number of of the ruins of our towns and of our art the hatred security personnel, who out of fear, out of spite, and will be renewed against the people who in the last The Fear of Revenge out of loathing drove tens of thousands of people instance are responsible and whom we can thank for into death. It was the tyranny of young virtue rather all of this: international Jewry and its auxiliaries.”4 Nazi propaganda succeeded quite spectacularly in than the convictions of the old Nazi sacks that drove This was a return to the language of 1923. at least one respect. It embedded the fear of enemy Germans into the cataclysm of the last years of war. Used thus in 1942–43, it initiated a deliberate pol- revenge into German hearts, thus creating an invol- One must also consider the role of state ter- itics of the funeral pyre, aimed not only at snatch- untary German community. Indeed, if I have been ror. The sheer measure of state terror against the ing immortality from the throes of defeat through referring to “the” Germans in World War II (as a col- German population cannot be overemphasized. a heroic gesture but at inciting the mobilization lective entity), I do so for this very reason. Wars are Between 1943 and 1945, the number of convic- of generations to come. The Nazis sought to make generally capable of creating such involuntary com- tions for defeatism (Wehrkraftzersetzung) skyrock- the nation self-destruct so that future generations munities, but the Nazi leadership fostered this ten- eted, and the overall number of Germans killed by would have no choice but to revenge the dead. dency even more deliberately. After a crucial meet- the regime – approximately 300,000 – is astonish- From this point onward, Goebbels systemati- ing with Göring about total mobilization, on March ing. Especially during the last year of the war, there cally sounded the note of collective death as a bea- 2, 1943, Goebbels noted in his diary with smug sat- was an acute and very real fear of getting killed – con for future revenge. The logic of Endkampf after isfaction: not by the enemy but by the many roving death 1942 was as simple as it was poisonous: to die in war Göring is perfectly aware of what would hap- squads (for that is what the fliegende Feldgerichte, as a German soldier or civilian meant to be remem- pen to all of us if we were to become weak in this the mobile court marshal units, basically were) bered; to be remembered entailed being revenged; war. He has no illusions about it. Especially as roaming the country.

42 Number Eight | Spring 2004

Terror worked so effectively, however, because combination of compulsion and self-mobilization of winter, and the extraordinary brutality of civil- it hinged on a much more generalized compulsion: that can explain why ordinary people fight and go on, ian treks when caught between the lines led to the a “no-exit” situation for civilians and soldiers. even though they may sense that they are lost. worst German civilian carnage in the entire war. It Rather than softening German morale, the ever is often debated whether these refugees (or, for that tighter enclosure of German space and the total Fatal Strategies of Survival matter, the bombing victims) were innocent or not. vulnerability to air attacks advanced the sense of no It is the wrong question to ask. Much like the teen- escape and heightened compulsion. The leadership In the case of the Germans in World War II, the per- age conscripts, they became the sacrificial victims often designed ingenious no-exit situations. In versity of the situation becomes fully apparent when of an Endkampf that deliberately set out to destroy bombed out cities, for example, it was often only we recognize that the prevailing survival strate- and poison the future. And this being an ungodly in factory canteens that one could find food. A gies led to the worst disasters. That is to say that the war, there was no angel who stayed the slaughter- system of cleared streets leading to the factory, its very impulse to survive and the prevailing strategies ing hand. Military history suggests that flight (in contrast Goebbels noted in his diary “a peo- to capitulation) is the deadliest form of survival. The mass flight from occupied and German territories in ple that has burnt its bridges will fight the East not only proved this rule but highlights the essential reality of Endkampf in 1945. This was not much more relentlessly than those the nation of heroic Nibelungs, fighting to the last man, woman, and child, envisioned by Nazi propa- who still have a chance for a retreat.” ganda. This was a frightened and desperate mass, a nation that had lost any sense of the future, des- canteens, and temporary housing there, essentially of survival, under the conditions set by the Nazis perately desired not to know, and dearly wished to tied workers, both male and female, to work. In the on one hand and Allied war-fighting on the other, believe in a fortuitous and possibly miraculous out- military, security cordons, staffed by the much feared greatly heightened the chance of getting killed. The come of the war. It was a nation that entered the last military police, were systematically set up behind seemingly sensible idea that only collectively – as years of war, quite literally, with “eyes wide shut.”o the front to catch all those who streamed back on family, as group, as trek, as nation – could individu- the retreat in order to return them to the front. als survive proved to be calamitous. 1. Hindenburg’s telephone call to Max von Baden on October The famous elasticity of the German army, which This is certainly true of the armed forces, where 20, transmitted by the liaison, Col. Haeften. Amtliche Urkunden zur Vorgeschichte des Waffenstillstandes 1918 (Berlin: Deutsche thrived on the interchangeability of functions, was comradeship dictated that soldiers stick together. Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Gesellschaft, 1924), able to transform even cooks, drivers, and hospital Time and again, they formed viable fighting units doc. 63, p. 166. personnel into fighting cadres. that were relentlessly pushed back into the front. 2. Adolf Hitler: Sein Leben und seine Reden, ed. Adolf-Viktor von Outright state terror hinged on the institution- And the more youthful, inexperienced, and fright- Koerber (Munich, 1923), pp. 77–78. alization and systematization of compulsion. Terror ened the units, the higher their inclination to clump 3. Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 240. remained selective and often random. What was pre- together. Toward the end of the war many of the sol- 4. Sabine Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden: dictable was the way that soldiers and civilians were diers were between 14 and 16 years old. The carnage Nationalsozialistische Mythen, Riten und Symbole 1923 bis 1945 funneled into one-way streets that led invariably among the youngest was indescribable. Deserters (Vierow bei Greifswald: SH-Verlag, 1996), p. 587. toward fighting and – given the vast superiority of the ran the risk of being shot (as in the case of a cohort Allies – self-destruction. In contrast to 1918, however, of deserting Hitler Youth near Vienna). But thrown Germans did work and fight. And working and fight- into battle, these inexperienced and frightened Michael Geyer is DaimlerChrysler Fellow at the Academy ing, they propelled themselves relentlessly forward in youngsters were marked for death. this spring and Samuel N. Harper Professor of History at a system of virtuous mobilization that tied Haltung, Mass flight from the East needs to be consid- the University of Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of a sense of self worth, to the pursuit of war-fighting ered in this light as well. The deliberate and system- Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (with Konrad Hugo Jarausch, 2003) as well as numerous articles in both prowess and recognition to exceptional industry in atic delay and hindrance of civilian and military German and English on European and German history. His pursuit of war – and the forward propulsion drove officials in organizing the flight, the desperate will scholarly interests range from military history and history them into unimaginable destruction. It is only this to survive that led to collective flight in the middle of violence to globalization and human rights.

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The Berlin Journal 43 Societäta Verlag

44 Number Eight | Spring 2004

Litigation Hell in America

By Thomas Geoghegan

The collapse of unions, the withdrawal from and King Alfred and the Domesday Book. But even “employment at will.” What the plaintiff must do civic life, and the seven-fold increase in the rate for America, on a mass basis, this is a new type of is show that the employer acted to harm him. The of imprisonment are just three factors that have legal regime. For decades, from the 1930s on, we point of the case is not to limn the “objective” or changed how people in America experience the rule operated under either a “contract,” or a threat of “external” but the “subjective” or “internal” – in a of law. The legal system has come to seem arbitrary, one through union organizing. Before that, we lived, sense, to peer into the human heart. unpredictable,Is and unfair. And those who arethe part overwhelmingly, in a rural economy, with the major - In other words, the issue is “motive.” But as of it have learned to act accordingly. ity of Americans working on a farm, or as trades- to “motive,” it is unclear, even now, at least at the men and craftsmen and apprentices in often tiny trial level, where working lawyers are, what a judge American “cities.” And even those who fell out- may require us to prove. Right now, on appeal, our The Movement from Contract to Tort side of farm-and-shop were in an economy that was firm has a case involving race. And the issue for the The British historian H.A. Maine proposes the thesis always desperately short of labor. appellate court is: does race have to be the factor? Or that modernity is the movement from “status” to “con- In short, until unions collapsed, America did only a factor? Surely, it is the latter. tract.” Without being quite as grandiose, I say the big- not know “employment at will” in anything like its And if it is only a factor, then what kind of fac- gest change I have seen, though it goes almost unre- current, universal, and highly arbitrary form. Far tor is it? Does it have to be a controlling factor? Or corded in legal literature, is that, with the collapse of from being the era of King Alfred, “employment at only, as the judge declared in our case, a catalytic unions, we have moved from “contract” to “tort.” will,” for us, is more like the Brave New World. It factor? Or, as we argue, does it only have to be a sub- For most working Americans, this may be the means a constant turnover, on a scale known in no stantial factor? Then there is a huge further contro- biggest change in the way the law now impacts their other country, nor at any time in our history. It is a versy: whether, even if so, the employer can still win lives. In theRule 1950s and l960s, up to 35 percent of regime that Americans experience as maddening.of if it can prove it would have made the same decision workers, especially men, were covered by collec- Any human being would. anyway. tive bargaining agreements. As a matter of “con- The bite of it is softened only by the fact that so Confused? So are the lawyers. After forty years tract,” each worker was protected, or could not be many of these jobs aren’t worth fighting to keep. and 40,000 case opinions and repeated attempts by fired except for just cause. If he were fired, his union While there is no “contract” remedy, howev- the Supreme Court to clarify – which seem to last would file a grievance, arguing that “just cause” did er, there is now a remedy in tort. Since the collapse only a short time – we are on appeal, and the case not exist under the contract. If it was not resolved at of unions, people, maddened, have flooded the fed- law is, I can assure you, still unsettled. the grievance step, an arbitrator came in and decid- eral courts with “civil rights”-type claims, analo- Second, compared to the old “contract” law, ed the case in a cheap, informal procedure, often gous to claims in tort. As labor law waned, civil the new “tort” or civil rights law is expensive. without a lawyer. The remedies? Reinstatement. rights law waxed. Indeed, this waning and this wax- “Contract” (arbitration) was cheap. Easy. Now, the Back pay. The idea was that under a contract, a ing have a faint connection. For over thirty years, fired employee has to come up with thousands – “relationship” would continue, in some way. If only unions have tried to pass labor law reform, to mod- five, ten – not to pay my legal fees, but just for costs: between the employer and the union. ify the Wagner Act, to let Americans join unions. the court reporter, depositions, photocopying. “Contract” alsoLaw permeated the non-union Freely, fairly: without being fired. Whilein coming Of course, by a court award, I have to obtain my world. The cultural norm, back in business then, close, the unions, over and over, have lost, by small fees from the other side: soon, I have a cash claim was: what the hourly worker got, the middle man- margins, in the US Senate, usually as a result of a fili- bigger than my client’s! I have just looked at my ager got. If not a contract as such, at least a contract- buster. But perhaps as a consolation prize, Congress “bill” for a single Title VII case. So far, to date, with based norm of fairness. has frequently added another “new” civil right in no trial, it’s nearly $180,000! Now, from what I can see in my own practice as employment. They include the Civil Rights Act of The old system? The whole proceeding may a labor lawyer, this world of “contract” is gone. Few 1964, as amended in 1991; the Civil Rights Act of have cost under $10,000. – under 8 percent – work under any kind of labor 1971; the Age Discrimination in Employment Act; Third, the cases settle, or never go to trial. contract. All the rest work under a rule of law known Employee Retirement and Income Security Act; the Either because the federal courts drop them through as “employment at will.” That is, anyone can be fired Occupational Health and Safety Act; the Medical one or another legal “trap door,” or because the par- for any reason, at any time. Or for no reason. Or a and Family Leave Act; the warn Act… ties, exhausted, finally settle. Of 100,000 civil cases bad reason, like the color of your tie. With no warn- Even to me, as a labor lawyer, it is very compli- in federal court, perhaps fewer than 2 percent will ing. No severance pay. Nothing. About two years cated to determine in a given firing whether any of go to trial. This December the New York Times did a ago I taught a seminar atTrouble, the Humboldt University these civil rights laws apply. front-page story on the fact that lawyers in America in Berlin. In our first session, as a preliminary, I This is the world not of “labor” law but of no longer try cases (“US Suits Multiply, But Fewer mentioned this “common-law” notion of “employ- “employment” law, not of “contract” law but of Ever Get To Trial”). The puzzle was: why settle on ment at will,” virtually as an aside. To my dismay, “tort” law. And now, in our federal legal system, at the eve of trial when the parties have already “sunk in each later session, I’d have to start at the begin- least on the civil side, it is the biggest single area of the costs” in the litigation? By the time of trial, the ning, with “employment at will” all over again. With law. Each year, in federal court in Chicago, we see big expenses are over. The trial itself, which may these young European law students, it was too hard thousands of these cases. “Forty percent of all the fil- be two or three days, is not that much more costly. to take in. Any reason? At all? The arbitrariness, ings here,” a magistrate judge, who settles many of Oddly, it may be that because the parties have paid the unfairness of it, was, to a European, shocking, them, estimated to me. But this “tort” law is quite out so much in cost, after all the deadly, destructive unnatural. different from the old kind of “contract” law. phase known as discovery, they are more risk-averse Whether or not it is “unnatural,” it is First, it is not so much about conduct as it is than ever. radically new. about state of mind. It is no longer the issue wheth- Fourth, the new “tort” law is much more In the US, we talk of “employment at will” as a er the employer fired the plaintiff for “just cause,” scorched-earth style than the old “contract” law. For common-law rule, as if it wentToo? back to the Saxons whatever that might now mean in a world of one thing, in federal court, unlike arbitration, The Berlin Journal 45 I can use the rules of discovery. And I can force you and kept us, destructively, from peering into one contribution,” a pension, Theresa Ghilarducci of to give up, to tell me, everything: what is in your another’s hearts. Notre Dame, has estimated that in 2000, at the secret heart, not to mention in your tax returns. height of the economic boom, the average 401(k) It’s hard to exaggerate how big a change this is: The Movement from the Law of Trust had no more than $20,000 in it. That is average. She in a sense, everyone in the case has to strip them- to the Law of Consumer Fraud included the top fifth, where people like me are close selves, take off their clothes – far more now than The other big area in which most of us experience to being millionaires because of their 401(k)s. was the case when I started out in law school. Look the law is in our pensions and our healthcare. Here, This world itself is wildly inegalitarian, and at what Paula Jones’s lawyers did to Clinton, as a sit- too, this legal revolution comes out of labor’s col- becoming more so. People at the top build up their ting President. It is discovery that makes the new lapse. own by taking it from the people below. I mean this “American-style” tort law so bitter, so arbitrary, each From the New Deal up to, say, 1980, we were literally. I was recently visited by a 401(k) consul- side on a rampage to swing at the other. creating a huge private pension system, governed tant, who asked me, as he asks other employers, if I Over what? Intent. Motive. A “bad” state of under the common law of trusts. These pensions might want to “restructure” our firm’s 401(k) plan, were not like today’s 401(k)s, or accounts to which to “appropriately reward” the “high-end earners.” we contribute; rather the trustees collected money In other words, we should take it from the secretar- The bite is softened from our employers and held it in trust for us. These ies and give it to ourselves. He had closed the door. trustees were our “fiduciaries.” We were the “bene- Why not? No one would know. only by the fact that ficiaries.” In this new world, there are no fiduciaries, there The trustees had duties – ancient legal duties, is no one whose role is to insure that you and I can of care, prudence, skill, of managing our money for live comfortably in retirement. We have to fund so many of these us. And this old common law became, literally, “the our own pensions. In a real sense, with a 401(k), law of the land.” In 1976, when I graduated from law the trustees are nominal – a signature on a bank jobs aren’t worth school, Congress enacted the Employee Retirement account card. There is no one, no union, no employ- Income Security Act, or erisa. It was an attempt to er to account to us. There are no trustees to look fighting to keep. codify all the law of trusts and apply it to Americans after us. In this new world, the law is: Employee who had these employer funded pensions. Beware. Behind a closed door, the top earners may mind. So that gives a legal rationale to harass, to How many Americans? Over half the work be “restructuring.” Or getting rid of the 401(k) alto- destroy, in a litigation that is disconnected from the force. gether. Or in the case of Enron, taking all the chips question of whether or not the employee was treat- This was arguably the great single piece of and betting them on red. ed fairly. social legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, So what happens? Without any legal account- Obviously, it is terrible for the employer, and perhaps greater even than Medicare, in the possibil- ability, people lose their pensions. It may be that he or she is often right to complain; after all, the ity of changing the way we lived. And people would they work for Enron. Or WorldCom. Or the employ- employer probably did not engage in a “hate crime,” experience this law as one that, in a sense, placed er simply one day stops the 401(k) entirely. In any or fire because of a factor like race. Or it was a mix their future under the care of guardians. Or trust- event, while it may lead to little litigation, this is of several motives rather than one bad motive. But ees. For these were the legal roles that corporations a major transformation of legal roles. Employers remember that the employer got rid of the older, would now play in people’s lives. Except, legally, the are no longer “trustees” in the sense envisioned cheaper system in the first place. Indeed, the more very opposite has now happened. by erisa. Employees are no longer “beneficiaries.” expensive the system, the bigger the discovery When labor collapsed, employers stopped Now the employer is more likely to be selling me his rights, the bigger the employer’s advantage. We offering pensions, at least of the “defined bene- stock; instead of trustee and fiduciary, we are in the plaintiff lawyers learned from the management law- fit” kind – a fixed sum, like $2,500 a month, which world of Enron, of seller and purchaser, the world yers how to torture people in a deposition! the employer had to pay, and it would have to pay of consumer fraud. And with the new “tort” unlike the old “contract” arbitration, there is no constraint on slash- and-burn. Because in arbitration, the remedy was to In this new world, the law is: Employee reinstate, to put the employee back. If both employer and employee had to live again, together, it made no sense to slash-and-burn. Beware. Behind a closed door, the top But in the tort system, nobody is going back. Not now. It never happens. For one thing, the litiga- earners may be “restructuring.” Or get- tion takes years. Go back and be fired again? So even if the parties could hold themselves in check, there is ting rid of the 401(k) altogether. Or in no longer any reason to do so. That is the legal system we now have in post- union America; it forces us to cast legal issues in the case of Enron, taking all the chips and the most subjectively explosive way, i.e., racial ani- mus, sexism, to get around the fact we no longer can betting them on red. deal objectively with just cause. Do I regret that I am part of it? Yes. Are my clients full of hatred? Yes. It is – whether or not the funding were there – in 15, or As we move from the old trust law to the law frightening how much power lawyers have. A lawyer, 20, or 30 years. Once the pressure of dealing with a of fraud, people in their working lives experience even a very young one, may have more power than a union vanished, employers either (1) stopped offer- the world as more arbitrary, more unpredictable. subcommittee of the US Senate! When a committee ing any pension, or (2) pushed people into 401(k)s, Indeed, in the very area where the law once protect- holds hearings, it has but a few months to subpoena, or “defined contribution.” (By “defined contribu- ed them most reliably: in their pensions, in their and the White House resists, etc. Then it’s over, with tion,” I mean one where the employee pays. The savings. The form of that savings, alas, is no longer little coughed up in the end. While in a private case, employer might or might not match.) in a defined benefit but in a 401(k) – in an amount like Paula Jones, a lawyer can subpoena, then go In a country where the savings rate today is in which may be ludicrously small, or not even there. back, then subpoena, then go back, and do it at lei- minus numbers, the idea that people – uninsured, For there is no “insured” 40l(k) and very little or no sure, for years, much as a Special Prosecutor does. house-poor, or near bankruptcy – would voluntari- transparency. Even in the case of gross fraud, the This tort-type legal system feeds on unpredict- ly fund their own pensions, is one of the most fanci- legal system here provides not much help at all. ability and rage. And it has replaced a far more ratio- ful. So today the “defined benefit” pension is disap- nal, contract-based one, which was modest, cheap, pearing, at least in the private sector. As to “defined

46 Number Eight | Spring 2004

Healthcare doctors, filed tens of thousands of suits to collect. is largely because people have the sense that the In healthcare, too, people feel vulnerable, even But not only do hospitals and doctors sue. They state, the government, is not there to protect them. preyed upon. In particular, people no longer expect sue to collect from the uninsured at two to three In many an area, a little more law – not less law – the tax-exempt hospital to be a “charitable” institu- times what they charge their insured patients. The would end the litigation. tion, as a guardian or protector, in any legal sense. reason is that Blue Cross, Humana, Medicare, etc. Example: Hospitals. Sometimes I sue for nurs- A major change in the law, or at least the cul- negotiate huge discounts from the “list” prices, es; right now, for a top nurse, a real red hot pepper ture, is that the “charitable” hospital behaves which are not real prices for most of us. No, these of a rabble-rouser, who was fired for complaining toward the uninsured as badly as many of the “for - hospitals charge their inflated prices only to the of nurse understaffing. She did not just complain. profit” hospitals. uninsured, or underinsured. She got 160 nurses to sign her petition to the State When critics of the right speak of a Legal Crisis Indeed, this litigation, by hospitals, leads to of Illinois, claiming that, due to nurse understaffing, in America, they often refer to “the trial lawyers” fil- another litigation explosion: bankruptcy. For, as this hospital was in violation of many regulations of ing suits against hospitals primarily and, to a lesser Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi point the state department of public health. out in The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class By now, my practice is deep in the discovery Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke (2003), this kind phase, digging up the facts on nurse cutbacks. All hos- If we simply count of litigation brought by the doctors and the hospi- pitals do it. How do they get away with it? Four things tals is the biggest single reason why Americans go now strike me: (1) at hospitals, terrible things happen into bankruptcy. We have a record of 1.5 million when there aren’t enough nurses, (2) the state could, up filings, the bankruptcy filings a year! but chooses not to, have nurse-patient ratios, (3) the So when patients get the chance to sue the state could, but doesn’t have the money to, enforce real source of the hospitals in return, why should they act with any existing health regulations, and (4) the hospital just restraint? Of course, it is simplistic to say that in deals with malpractice cases instead. much-talked-about medical malpractice, the patients are just dishing it This is the American model. First, we deregu- back. No, there are other causes. But the “culture” of late, or fail to regulate. For example, everyone knows Winner-Take-All has a lot to do with it. And it is the what nurse-patient ratios should be. Second, even Litigation Hell is breakdown of old legal rights, in many areas, that worse than deregulation, we defund enforcement. has led to such a culture. My old law professor Clyde Summers has kept tell- the explosion of On behalf of some uninsured plaintiffs, I am ing us over the years: “You have to understand: it currently bringing a case against a big religious chari- costs money to have rights.” There is so much twad- suits by hospitals table hospital under the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act. dle on the right, by lawyers like Phillip Howard, And I have some hope we can make headway. Already, about our rights-oriented liberalism and govern- the State of Illinois has revoked the tax-exempt status ment regulation. What rights? At the federal, or the and doctors going of one such “charitable” hospital. This is a first in the state level, there’s nothing in the budget for them. nation. But this legal battle is in a very early stage. Deregulation as a movement is a minor part of after patients. the weakening of public law. A much bigger problem The Movement from Public to Private Law is that there is nothing in the budget. In the nurse’s extent, doctors. Medical Malpractice. Lawyers like This is another reason for Litigation Hell, both in case, for example, the Illinois Department of Public Phillip Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense medical malpractice and other areas. Perhaps I Health would like very much to investigate. But there (1995), are arguing that there is “too much law” and should call it the movement from administrative law is no staff. At first, I was incredulous; but there is no that lawyers and lawsuits are ruining the nation. to tort. Consider the huge numbers of people drop- one there. Indeed, the worst part is: Republicans and Yes, of course, patients sue hospitals without ping out of public life. We have less than a majority Democrats alike cut salaries, make the jobs as bad restraint, for everything they can get. I find it appall- ing. But who started this war? Hospitals and doctors sue their patients far more – far, far more – than This is the American model. First we their patients sue them. If we simply count up filings, the real source of the much-talked-about Litigation Hell is the explo- deregulate, or fail to regulate. Second, sion of suits by hospitals and doctors going after patients. In my city, Chicago, many law firms exist even worse than deregulation, we defund just to chase patients: not only to collect bills, but also to garnish wages, to attach bank accounts, and enforcement. in some horrific cases, documented by the Wall Street Journal, even to put their patients into jail. vote. Government, or the state, is weaker. There has as possible. The result? Either a slot is abolished, or And of course, if needs be, to press them into bank- been wave after wave of deregulation: patient safety; an incompetent is hired. This only proves Summers’ ruptcy. food and drug safety; worker safety. point: it costs money to have a right. The worst offenders are the not-for-profit, reli- The collapse of public law has led to an explo- Public law collapses and then we express shock gious, charitable institutions, which have huge tax sion of private law – people taking private revenge when private law, tort, malpractice, move in this exemptions and yet proceed against patients with- for things that the “state” is no longer strong enough area instead. Not all these private cases are worthy out any self-restraint. to regulate. Call it the movement from public law to ones, or even related directly to this withdrawal of How did this happen? As unions collapsed, the folk justice. The more we deregulate, the more ran- regulation. But because the public law has collapsed, healthcare industry dealt more and more with the dom and uncontrollable the private litigation. it creates, reinforces, too much private litigation, uninsured. Or the underinsured – people whose Again, take the example of medical malpractice. folk justice, vengeance. “insurance” had deductibles of $5,000. At one time, Critics on the right blame Litigation Hell on a And all of this, understandably, makes people as late as the 1950s, charitable hospitals were expect- mindless “rights-oriented” welfare state and all-pow- cynical about the law. ed to take care of the poor. Then, with the passage of erful agencies like the Occupational Health and Safety If it’s bad on the state level, it’s even worse, the Medicare and Medicaid bills, it seemed the need Administration, or osha. But osha is toothless. almost laughably worse, on the federal level. Another for such “charity” would disappear. But with soaring If, like Europe, we had more of a welfare state, of our cases at the moment: we are suing for low- health costs and the collapse of unions, employers more of a social democracy, more “law,” we would, wage, Mexican workers at a chicken factory. Why? cut back. Now even the middle class needed “char- like Europe, have less litigation. If we have so many Because they didn’t get 60 days notice that the facto- ity.” The result? An explosion of cases, as hospitals, suits – so many people going for the jackpot – it ry was closing. This violates the warn Act. If there’s

The Berlin Journal 47 or defund. Result? Private lawyers move in instead. The collapse of public law has led to an With clients who don’t expect public law to work, and go for everything they can get. It is understandable if Americans see the law, explosion of private law – people taking and the legal system, as a kind of roulette wheel. Given the arbitrary way the law now works, it is private revenge for things that the “state” understandable that people take any chance to swing at each other’s heads. is no longer strong enough to regulate. But when Americans lose faith in the fairness of the rule of law, it makes America as a country more no notice, they get a modest amount of compensa- food safety. Do less. And there are fewer inspectors. dangerous in the world. If we are skeptical of the tion. (By the way, these workers are really poor! ) And no one takes them seriously any more. In other rule of law in our day-to-day lives, at home, we will But the company claims an exception. The words, it is “unforeseeable” as a matter of law that be even more skeptical of it abroad. Department of Agriculture “shut us down” for mas- the Department of Agriculture will take any seri- If Europeans are puzzled that Americans dis- sive health violations – rats, rat droppings, diseased ous steps to enforce its own regulations. By the way, dain their inclination toward international law and meat everywhere – and the shutdown was “unfore- this lonely doa inspector didn’t shut down the plant scoff at the European fondness for what Robert seeable” under an exception to the law. So the whole for good. He just closed until the owner could make Kagan calls “the Kantian paradise,” they should issue is: was the shutdown for massive health vio- repairs. But the owner moved his business to Iowa, remember: we’re the country from Litigation Hell.o lations “unforeseeable”? The ruling of the district where the doa inspectors would look the other way. judge – a liberal, a Clinton appointee, of Mexican This is my colleague’s case. My only role was Thomas Geoghegan, a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the Academy descent: Yes, it was unforeseeable. It could not to edit the brief, as I did by striking out the word this spring, is a partner in the Chicago law firm of Despres, be “reasonably foreseen” that the Department of “rodent” and putting in the word “rat.” But other- Schwartz & Geoghegan. His books include In America’s Agriculture would enforce its own regulations! He wise, the evidence is horriﬁc. But my point is that Court: How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes to Settle Stumbled into a Criminal Trial (2002); The Secret Lives of Citizens: Pursuing the dismissed our case! food safety – getting rat droppings off of meat – Promise of American Life (2000); and Which Side Are You On?: After all, the Department of Agriculture, under was something, once, in America, that public law Trying to be for Labor When it’s Flat on its Back (1991), to be Clinton, then Bush, has been trying to deregulate could do. Now it can’t. Why? We either deregulate, reprinted this fall with a new afterword by the author.

48 Number Eight | Spring 2004

like the elephant fog shredded north a white sun going down Bessemers ﬁred through clouds horizoned on my dog-eared stack It feels good and right Didn’t You Say Desire Is to waste earnest hours of an early evening’s daylight saving time in uncertainty and want these cranky climates changing in us while we f haven’t started dinner yet. –W.S. Di Piero © Getty ImagesGetty©

The Salome Summit Mahler and Strauss in Graz, 1906

By Alex Ross

50 Number Eight | Spring 2004

hen Richard Strauss con- smiling in a boater hat, Mahler squinting in the sun. tenure. But the censors balked at an opera in which ducted his sensuously The company visited a waterfall and had lunch in Biblical characters are made to perform unspeak- savage opera Salome in an old inn, where they sat at a plain wooden table. able acts. Furious, Mahler began hinting that his May 1906, in Graz, the They must have made a strange pair: Strauss, tall days in Vienna were numbered. In March he wrote crowned heads of music and lanky, with a weak chin, a bulbous, balding fore- to Strauss: “You would not believe how vexatious gathered to witness the head, strong but sunken eyes; Mahler a full head this matter has been for me, or (between us) what occasion. The world shorter, a muscular hawk of a man, the picture of consequences it may have for me.” première of Salome had genius in the flesh. As the sun began to go down, So Salome came to Graz. The State Theater taken place five months before, in Dresden, whence Mahler became nervous about the time, and he sug- staged the opera at the suggestion of the critic Ernst Wword spread that Strauss, the master provocateur of gested that the party should head back to the Hotel Decsey, an associate of Mahler, who assured the German music, had created something beyond the Elefant, where they were staying, in order to prepare management that it would create a succès de scan- pale – an ultra-dissonant Biblical spectacle, based for the performance. “They can’t start without me,” dale. “The city was in a state of nervous excitement,” on a play by a recently deceased British degenerate Strauss said. “Let ‘em wait.” Mahler replied: “If you Decsey wrote in his autobiography, Music Was His whose name was not to be mentioned in polite com- won’t go, then I will – and conduct in your place.” Life. “Parties formed and split. Pub philosophers pany; a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent Alma assumed that Strauss was concealing his anxi- buzzed with curiosity about events at the opera necrophilia that imperial censors had banned it from ety behind a facade of nonchalance. house…. From the provinces came visitors; from the Court Opera in Vienna. Strauss was 41, Mahler was 44. They were in Vienna came critics, press people, reporters, and Gustav Mahler, the Director of the Court most respects polar opposites. Mahler was a kalei- foreigners.… Three sold-out houses – overbooked, Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful and doscope of moods – childlike, heaven-storming, actually. Porters groaned, and hoteliers reached for controversial Alma. Giacomo Puccini, the matinee- despotic, despairing. As he walked agitatedly from the keys to their safes.” The critic himself fueled the idol creator of La Bohème and Tosca, made a trip his apartment on the Schwarzenbergplatz to the anticipation with a high-flown preview article in the north to hear what “terrible cacophony” his German opera house on the Ringstrasse, cab drivers would Grazer Tagespost on May 16, acclaiming Strauss’s rival had concocted.1 The bold young composer whisper to their passengers, “Der Mahler!” Strauss “tone-color world,” his “polyrhythms and polyph- Arnold Schoenberg arrived from Vienna with his was earthy, self-satisfied, more than a little cyni- ony,” his “bursting out of the narrowness of the old brother-in-law, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and no cal, a closed book to most observers. The soprano tonality,” his “fetish ideal of an Omni-Tonality.” fewer than six of his pupils.2 One of them, Alban Gemma Bellincioni, who sat next to him at a ban- As dusk fell, Mahler and Strauss appeared at Berg, traveled with an older friend, Hermann quet after the performance in Graz, described him the opera house. They had rushed back to town Watznauer, who left a memoir of the occasion, in her memoirs as “a pure kind of German, within their chauffeur-driven car. The crowd milling describing the “feverish impatience and boundless out poses, without long-winded speeches, little gos- around beforehand had an air of nervous electricity. excitement” that all were feeling as the evening sip and no inclination to talk about himself and As Decsey recounted in the next day’s paper, the approached. Raoul Auernheimer, a protégé of his work, a gaze of steel, an indecipherable expres- orchestra played a fanfare when Strauss walked up to Arthur Schnitzler, was one of several rising literary sion.” Strauss came from Munich, a backward place the podium, and the audience applauded stormily. stars in attendance. The widow of the waltz king in the eyes of sophisticated Viennese such as Gustav Then a deathly silence descended, the clarinet played Johann Strauss, no relation to the composer of and Alma. Alma underlined this impression in her a softly slithering scale, and the curtain went up. Salome, represented old Vienna. Ordinary music- memoirs by rendering Strauss’s dialogue in a ridicu- enthusiasts filled out the crowd – “young people lous Bavarian dialect. Not surprisingly, the relation- from Vienna, whose only hand luggage consisted of ship between the two composers suffered from con- * * * the [opera’s] piano score,” Strauss noted. Among stant misunderstandings. Mahler would recoil from them may have been an Austrian teenager named unintended slights; Strauss would puzzle over the he tale of the Princess of Judaea, who danc- Adolf Hitler, who had just seen Mahler conduct sudden silences that would ensue. He was still try- es the “Dance of the Seven Veils” for her step- Tristan and Isolde in Vienna, on the night of May 8. ing to understand Mahler some four decades later father Herod and demands the head of John Hitler later told Strauss’s son and daughter-in-law when he came across Alma’s book and annotated it. the Baptist as reward, had surfaced sever- that he had borrowed money from relatives to make “All untrue,” he wrote, next to the description of his Tal times in opera, notably in Massenet’s sentimental the trip to Graz.3 behavior in Graz. epic Hérodiade. But Strauss’ version took a flamboy- There was even a fictional character present “Strauss and I tunnel from opposite sides of the antly modern view of the Biblical tale. Scrupulously – Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Thomas Mann’s mountain,” Mahler said, according to Alma. “One faithful to the Oscar Wilde play, it gave voice to some novel Doctor Faustus, a tale of a composer in league day we shall meet.” In spite of their differences, the of the most delirious and decadent fantasies of turn- with the devil. two had a common bond. They both saw music of-the-century Symbolist art. In the bohemian lexi- as a medium of conflict, a battlefield of extremes. con, the figure of Salome, who in the Book of Matthew They marshaled all the grandeur of romanti- appears as nothing more than the servant of her * * * cism, yet they questioned the heroic Beethovenian mother’s vengeance, had turned into a heroine of out- pose. They were both populists with a pessimis- law desire. The diseased atmosphere of Herod’s court, n the sixteenth of May, the weather was tic streak – they felt nostalgia for a world that had likewise, had come to reflect prevalent pseudo-sci- uncertain. There was rain in the morn- not yet been destroyed. Their shared aura of might entific conceptions of society as a degenerate mass. ing, sun in the afternoon. That morn- and melancholy may explain the fascination that Gustave Moreau produced a famous canvas in which ing’s Grazer Tagespost carried news from each one held for the other. Strauss’s first major Salome appeared as a queenly vampire, her perversity OCroatia, where a Serbo-Croat alliance was gathering act upon becoming President of the Allgemeiner muffled by extravagant style. Stéphane Mallarmé, the force, and from Russia, where the Tsar had recent- Deutscher Musikverein, or General German Music godfather of the Symbolist movement, took up the ly dissolved the Duma. The English minister of war, Association, in 1901, was to program Mahler’s legend in “Hérodiade,” making it a scene of oblique, Lord Haldane, was quoted as saying that he “knows Third Symphony for the festival the following year; esoteric decay. J.-K. Huysmans popularized Moreau Germany and loves Germany’s literature and philos- indeed, Mahler’s works dominated the Association’s and Mallarmé’s visions in À Rebours, a novel that dou- ophy” and that he could recite passages of Goethe’s programs for several years running. So much bled as a kind of how-to manual for mal vivants. Jules Faust by heart. Mahler was played under Strauss’s watch that some Laforgue both savored and mocked the Salome fad Strauss and Mahler, the titans of Austro- critics took to calling the ADMV the Allgemeiner in his Moral Tales, adding a gruesome detail that fur- German music, spent the day in the hills above Deutscher Mahlerverein. Others dubbed it the nished the climax of Strauss’ opera: when the head the city, accompanied by Alma, who recorded the Annual German Carnival of Cacophony.4 Mahler is brought to the princess on a platter, she leans over encounter in her famous memoirs. A photographer was especially impressed by Salome, which Strauss and kisses it. She is a victim, Laforgue wryly con- captured them outside the opera house, apparent- had played and sung for him the previous year. He cludes, of “the desire to live in a world of artifice and ly preparing to set out on their expedition – Strauss wanted it to be one of the main events of his Vienna not in a simple, wholesome one like the rest of us.”

The Berlin Journal 51 ilde wrote his play in 1891, saturat- Strauss was not the first to write in this way: Wagner the unspeakable. It is like a hideous face in a crowd- ing it in the rich, gnomic imagery of used similar combinations of chords to portray ed room. A moment later, the moon reemerges, illu- Symbolism. “While everything in your Hagen, in Götterdämmerung, who wishes to seize the minating the scene. Herod, poised at the top of the Salome is executed in endlessly daz- Ring and conquer the world. And in Mussorgsky’s stairs, turns around, looks, and screams, “Kill that Wzling strokes,” Mallarmé wrote to him, “there also Boris Godunov, a pendulum swing across the tritone woman!” The opera ends with eight bars of noise. arises, on each page, the unsayable and the Dream.” symbolizes the sinister splendor of the murderer Although music historians tend to sanctify the The Irishman brought his own obsessions to bear, Tsar. The lurching opening chords of Puccini’s Tosca premieres of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, notably a scandalous eroticization of the male body. show the malevolence of Baron Scarpia, who bends in 1908, and of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, in 1913, Wilde became the great unmentionable in England, the institutions of Church and State to his private as modernism’s revolutionary musical moments, but on the Continent his writing enjoyed a vogue, passion. Strauss had a penchant for such clashing Salome came first, and it foreshadowed practical- acquiring propaganda value for those who wished chords from the beginning of his career; in his tone ly everything that came after. As T. S. Eliot said of for a general loosening of bourgeois mores. Max poem Don Quixote, they blare forth at the moment Ulysses, it killed the nineteenth century. Reinhardt produced the play in Berlin in 1902; the Don takes leave of his senses and begins his tilt- Richard Strauss saw that production, and, after get- ing at windmills. ting hold of Hedwig Lachmann’s forceful German Salome maintains a sulphurous, changeable * * * translation, began setting it to music word for word. atmosphere throughout. The real tour-de-force Next to the first line, “How beautiful is the princess comes with the entrance of Herod, Salome’s degen- he crowd roared its approval – that was Salome tonight,” Strauss made a note to use the erate stepfather, halfway through the opera. He the most shocking thing. “Nothing more key of C-sharp minor,5 although it would turn out comes out on the terrace; looks for the Princess; satanic and ‘artistic’ has been seen on the to be a different sort of C-sharp minor than Bach’s gazes at the Moon, which is “reeling through the German opera stage,” Ernst Decsey wrote or Beethoven’s. clouds like a drunken woman”; orders wine, slips in Tin his review the next day. After the performance, Strauss always had a flair for beginnings. He blood, stumbles over the body of a soldier who has the composer held court at the Hotel Elefant, with wrote what may be, after the first four notes of committed suicide; feels cold, feels a wind – there a never-to-be-repeated company that included Beethoven’s Fifth, the most famous opening flour- is a hallucination of wings beating the air. It’s quiet Mahler, Puccini, and Schoenberg. When someone ish of all: the “mountain sunrise” from Thus Spake again; then more wind, more visions. The orches- declared that he would rather shoot himself than Zarathustra. That music had elemental power tra plays fragments of waltzes, expressionistic clus- memorize the part of Salome, Strauss answered to because it was grounded in basic phenomena of ters of dissonance, impressionistic washes of sound. general amusement, “Me, too” – at least according sound. The opening phrase reproduces the hierar- There is a turbulent contrapuntal episode as the to the memoirs of the conservative Austrian com- chy of “natural” harmonic tones, which Pythagoras Jews in Herod’s court dispute the meaning of the poser Wilhelm Kienzl. The following day, he wrote named the “harmony of the spheres”; out of them Baptist’s prophecies. Two Nazarenes respond with triumphantly to his wife: “It is raining, and I am sit- blazes a towering chord of C major, which has with- the Christian point of view; Strauss, a commit- ting on the garden terrace of my hotel, in order to in it all the majesty of nature. Stanley Kubrick, in his ted atheist, later commented that he intended this report to you that ‘Salome’ went well, gigantic suc- film 2001, let Strauss’ music speak for nothing less music to be as boring as possible. Salome dances her cess, people applauding for ten minutes until the than the cosmos itself. Salome, written nine years dance: it’s a little kitschy and a little gruesome. She fire curtain came down, etc., etc.” Although some after Zarathustra, whisks us away into a very different demands the head of the prophet as a reward, and dissenting voices were heard – Kienzl called the and much more artificial world. The first notes are Herod furiously tries to change her mind. She refus- opera “an almost shameless glorification of sexu- nothing more than a rising scale, but it is a very pecu- es. Soldiers prepare to behead the Baptist in his cis- al psychopathy” – no real scandal ensued.6 Salome liar scale that had probably never appeared in music tern prison. At this point, the bottom drops out of went on to be performed, in its first few years of before. The first half belongs to the key of C# major; the music altogether. A toneless bass-drum rumble existence, in some 25 different cities. The success the second to the key of G; then C# resumes, but in and strangulated cries in the double basses build was so great that Strauss was even able to laugh off the minor. What makes the combination more than to a gigantic smear of sound that covers most of the criticism from Kaiser Wilhelm II. “I am sorry that a little unnerving is the presence of the tritone inter- spectrum of available tones. Strauss composed this Salome,” the Kaiser report- val lurking at the heart of it – what medieval schol- Now the head of John the Baptist lies before edly said. “Normally I’m very keen on him, but this ars called diabolus in musica, the musical devil. For Salome on a silver platter. The harmony steadies is going to do him a lot of damage.” Strauss related centuries, composers had relied upon the tritone to itself on luminous C sharp, where the opera began. this story in his memoirs, adding with a flourish: suggest forces of darkness, to summon up an atmo- Strauss’ Hitchcockian manipulation of our expec- “Thanks to this damage I was able to build my villa sphere of fear. Something about the mutual thrum tations goes a step farther: having shocked us with in Garmisch!” Indeed, thanks to rapidly accumulat- of the notes G and C# creates an uneasy vibration, a unheard-of dissonances, he now disturbs us with ing royalties, he was able to build a beautiful house nasty, invasive edge. George Gershwin had recourse plain chords of necrophiliac bliss. For all the roil- in the Alpine resort village, beneath the Zugspitze, to it when he wrote that most devilishly charming of ing ugliness of the setting, this is still a love story, Germany’s highest mountain. Mephistophelean arias, “It Ain’t N e-c e s-sarily So….” of a perverse kind, and the composer honors his “Graz has covered itself in glory,” Mahler was Strauss went further: he juxtaposes two distinct keys heroine’s emotions. “The mystery of love,” Salome heard to say when the performance was over. And along this axis. Which is to say, each note in the C#- sings, “is greater than the mystery of death.” Herod yet, Alma recounts that on the train back to Vienna, major set is distant by a tritone from the notes of the spits out his fear and loathing of the degenerate Strauss’ colleague sounded bewildered by the G-major set. By beginning with this collision of keys, spectacle that his own incestuous lust has gener- opera’s success. He had no doubt that Salome was Strauss signals that Salome’s world is cracked down ated. “Hide the moon, hide the stars!” he rasps. a significant and daring work – “one of the great- the middle. “Something terrible is going to happen!” He turns est masterworks of our time,” he later said. Thus, he The little run of notes at once suggests a world his back and begins to walk up the great staircase of could not understand how it could have won over where bodies and ideas circulate freely, where oppo- the palace. The moon, obeying his command, goes the public. In the same carriage, Alma continues, sites meet. There is a hint of the glitter and swirl behind the clouds. An extraordinary noise emanates was the short-story writer and poet Peter Rosegger, of city life – the debonairly gliding clarinet looks in the trombones: the opera’s introductory motif whom Mahler admired intensely. The composer forward to the jazzy character who sets in motion is crunched together as one dark, glowering chord. voiced his unease, and Rosegger replied, “Vox populi, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. At the same time, this Above it, Salome’s love themes begin to blossom vox dei” – the voice of the people is the voice of God. scale suggests a collision of belief systems, a meeting again, like flowers in rubble. But, at the moment of Mahler asked whether he meant the voice of peo- of irreconcilables. Salome takes place at the intersec- the fatal kiss, something goes awry: two different ple at the present moment or the voice of the peo- tion of Roman, Jewish, and Christian societies, and a chord progressions, either of which would sound ple over time. No one seemed to know the answer violent outcome is assured. Most acutely, the Salome unremarkable on its own, unfold simultaneously in to that question. In a contemporary article about scale goes inside of the unsettled mind of one who different parts of the orchestra. A fresh nightmare Salome, Rosegger declared that Strauss had transfig- wishes to devour all the contradictions of her world. of dissonance results – a mix of the ordinary and ured a horrible, non-German, “foreign” subject with

52 Number Eight | Spring 2004 the force of his personality. Mahler seemed to feel the same: “I cannot rhyme it all together for myself, and can only surmise that it is the voice of the Erdgeist sounding from the heart of genius....” The younger musicians from Vienna were elated by what they had heard, though they were careful to temper their enthusiasm with skepticism. A group of them, Alban Berg included, talked until the early hours of the morning in the Thalia Restaurant next to the theater. They might have used the words of Adrian Leverkühn, the devil- bound hero of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, who spoke as follows: “What a talented good old boy! The happy-go-lucky revolutionary, cocky and conciliatory. Never were the avant-garde and the box office so well / Zupacken: Basel // – acquainted. Shocks and discords aplenty – then he good-naturedly herausforderungen takes it all back and assures the philistines that no harm was intend- als Chance nutzen! / ed. But a hit, a definite hit.” As for Adolf Hitler, nothing is known about his reaction at the time. (I take up this problem in another An Basel II führt kein Weg vor- chapter of my forthcoming book.) We cannot know for certain if he bei. Richten Sie Ihr Unternehmen was even there. But when Salome was banned from the stage of the Graz Opera in 1939 on the grounds that it was “too Jewish,” Strauss jetzt schon darauf aus – mit made the story of the Führer’s youthful enthusiasm known, and the commerzbank rating:coach. opera was reinstated. Schwachstellen analysieren, Empfehlungen Whether or not the Devil himself attended, Salome was a high- entwickeln, Optimierungspotenziale konse- ly charged occasion. Past and future were colliding; two centuries were passing in the night. Mahler would die in 1911, seeming to take quent ausschöpfen. So gewinnen Sie Zukunft. the entire romantic era with him. Puccini’s Turandot, unfinished at / ideen nach vorn / his death in 1924, would more or less end a glorious Italian operatic history that began in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1909, Schoenberg would inaugurate a difficult new atonal language and find himself violently at odds with the Vox populi. Hitler, who, circa 1906, was a dreamy aesthete with no known political preten- sions, would attempt the annihilation of a people and a world. And Strauss would survive to a surreal and bewildered old age – “I have actually outlived myself,” he said in 1948. At the time that he was born, Germany was not yet a unified nation and Wagner was still composing the Ring of the Nibelung. At the time of Strauss’s death, Germany had split into East and West, and American soldiers were whistling Sinatra tunes in the streets. A few years ago, I stopped for a night in Graz. Puccini’s Turandot was playing at the opera house, in a bizarre production set in a futur- istic pop-culture world of ultraviolent football games and striptease cheerleaders. The next morning, I went looking for the Hotel Elefant; I had the idea that I might be able to find an old hotel ledger in which all those famous names could still be read. But the Elefant was now the site of the local offices of the Austrian Trade Union Federation, and the ledger had disappeared. “Ja, there was a hotel here,” the ancient desk clerk told me. “Eighteenth century. Nineteenth century. Long time ago.” Standing in the parking lot where the garden used to be, I strug- gled to picture that rainy morning in 1906, when Richard Strauss said good-bye to Gustav Mahler and sat contentedly on the terrace for a while. o

1. Puccini in a letter of May 17, 1906, Puccini: 276 lettere inedite, Giuseppe Pintorno, ed. (Milan: Nuovo Edizioni, 1974), p. 130. 2. The names of ﬁve Schoenberg students – Heinrich Jalowetz, Karl Horwitz, Erwin Stein, Viktor Krüger, and Zdzislaw Jachimecki – were listed in the Grazer Tagespost’s “Fremde Liste” (list of visitors) on May 18. The sixth student was Alban Berg. 3. Manfred Blumauer asked Alice Strauss, Strauss’s daughter-in-law, whether she could conﬁrm that Hitler told her husband this story, and she said that she witnessed the conversation herself. Blumauer, Festa Teatrale: Musiktheater in Graz (Graz: Edition Strahalm, 1998), p. 77. 4. “Mahlerverein”: Bryan Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), p. 75. “Cacophony”: Musical Times, July 1, 1906, p. 486. 5. Roland Tenschert, “Strauss as Librettist,” in Richard Strauss, Salome, Derrick Puffett, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 47. 6. Wilhelm Kienzl quoted in Hans von Dettelbach, Steirische Begegnungen (Graz: Leykam Verlag, 1966), p. 207. Commerzbank AG, Filiale Berlin, Potsdamer Straße 125, 10783 Berlin Alex Ross is music critic for the New Yorker magazine and was Ansprechpartner: Hans Hagen, Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in the fall of 2003. Telefon (0 30) 26 53-39 31 His book on twentieth-century music, The Rest is Noise, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. /////////// / www.firmenkunden.commerzbank.de / ///////////

54 Number Eight | Spring 2004

he was a glamorous monument of a woman. Kids, it’s true, know fat people. Kids are like birders when it comes to fat: there’s a pleasure in an identification, especially, for instance, if your mother has not noticed the fat person. (“That man is really fat. Why is that man really fat?”) But Miss Caprietti was more puzzling. Chances were she wore larger underpants than anyone I had ever met, and yet her neck and face belonged to some thin Italian movie star. Taut. Lovely. Flawless. (Plastic surgery? Maybe so. A little fat vacuuming. If you’d described such things to me then – “they take a little plastic tube and suck out your lard” – you would have been greeted with the kind of incredulity such preposterous information deserves.) She wore a giant shellacked black hairdo that was called, she explained to her fans, i.e., all the fifth grade girls, The Artichoke. Who knew hairdos had names? Only the keels of her ears poked out from underneath The Artichoke. Her lipstick was very red. As far as her actual circumference – well, the magma at the center of the earth is very hot, but cannot be gauged in actual degrees, Centigrade, Celsius, or Kelvin. She wore floor length dresses – this was in 1986; she was the only one – that suggested a large silhou- ette without ever catching on a single angle of her body. Then she’d add a thin shawl, or a large translucent scarf, or – she had a series of these – an object of clothing that was halfway between a jacket and a wrap. She never fell for the fat lady’s folly, the vest. Sometimes S she wore short kimonos. She looked like a pitched circus tent, her strident neck the center pole. I worshipped her.

I wasn’t alone: every year Miss Caprietti held a poll, and every year she edged out Mother Teresa as the Most Admired Woman among the girls in her class. (She told us ahead of time that she always won the polls; we might not have thought of voting for her, but once she mentioned it, Of course!) She was, she said, an expert on Netsilik Eskimos, Herring Gulls, and Volcanoes, all of which we would study that year. To study Netsilik Eskimos under Miss Caprietti, we understood, was like studying electricity under Edison. It is only now that I realize that she was an expert because she read the textbooks ahead of us. Mornings, we had “assembly” on the “carpet” in the middle of the classroom. The whole place was wall-to-walled; by “carpet” Miss Caprietti meant an area in the middle free of chairs. We assembled cross-legged in front of her. Then she stood at the front and told us our plans for the day; she reported whether the Good Ship Miss Caprietti’s Fifth Grade Class was suffering from any discipline problem; then she closed her eyes and clasped her hands and said – very quietly, but aloud – the Lord’s Prayer. (Maybe she did this for my beneﬁt, poor little pagan. Everyone else was Catholic.) Afterwards, we went to our desks and she went to hers, where she applied her lipstick, peering into a red plastic sphere-shaped mirror that sat on the corner of her desk. She had all the time in the world to perfect her mouth. We had to read about Eskimos, after all, but she already knew everything. At morning assembly, watching her pray, her head even tinier from perspective, I dreamed of climbing under her skirt and warming my hands on her mysterious ankles. I talked my mother, who made my clothes, into sewing me a few ﬂoor-length skirts, so I could be as grand as her. o

Elizabeth McCracken is Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the Academy this term and author of two novels, Niagara Falls all Over Again (2001) and The Giant’s House (1996), a volume of short stories, Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry (1997) and numerous other stories and articles.

The Berlin Journal 55 Film stills from Burn (2002), by current Academy fellow Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley

56 Number Eight | Spring 2004

Donations to the American Academy in Berlin January 2003–April 2004

Through their founding gift and President’s Circle Dieter von Holtzbrinck $25,000 and above John C. Kornblum abiding support of the American American Express Company Lorie Karnath and Robert Roethenmund Academy in Berlin, Anna-Maria BASF Aktiengesellschaft Erich Marx BMW Group Robert C. Pozen and Stephen M. Kellen and the Boeing International Corporation Dieter Rosenkranz descendants of Hans and Ludmilla The Broad Art Foundation Alberto W. Vilar Citigroup Leah Zell Wanger Arnhold have enabled the Academy Commerzbank-Stiftung All other contributors to become Germany’s most visible Deutsche Bank AG Wilhelm Ahrens Deutsche Börse AG Robert Z. Aliber center for transatlantic discussion Dürr AG Busso von Alvensleben and activity. We will greatly miss Werner Gegenbauer Anthony Road Wine Company, Inc. Haniel Stiftung Hansjoachim Bauch Stephen Kellen, whose generos- Richard C. Holbrooke BMW Center for German ity and dedication to the Academy KPMG and European Studies Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau Diethart Breipohl endures as an inspiration to us all. The John D. and Virginia Brown Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Wolfgang Bühler The Academy would like to thank Marsh & McLennan Holdings GmbH Gerhard Casper the many people who donated in Sir Deryck and Lady Maughan Cerberus Deutschland GmbH Alfred Baron von Oppenheim Patricia Coggins memory of Stephen M. Kellen to Porsche AG Lloyd N. Cutler support the programs he regarded Annette von Rantzau Winfried and Ursula Degenhardt Schering AG Deutsche Bank Region Ost as a centerpiece of his effort to bring Siemens AG Serap Dolu-Leibfried together two of his passions – Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP James T. Dyke and Helen Porter Benefactors Eleanor T. Elliott Berlin, the city of his birth, and $10,000 and above Thomas L. Farmer America, the country he adopted. American Chamber of Commerce in Germany K. Georg and Margaret Gabriel BMW Stiftung Herbert Quandt Michael E. Gellert We also greatly appreciate the con- DaimlerChrysler Services AG Gesellschaft der Freunde der Dr. Schmidt AG & Co. Berliner Philharmonie e.V. tinued support from corporations, Julie Finley Helga Haftendorn foundations, and individuals who Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Joseph A. Healey The German Marshall Fund of the United States Klaus and Lily Heiliger share the Academy’s commitment Goldman, Sachs & Co. Josef Joffe to strengthening the transatlantic Claus M. Halle Marion Knauf William A. Haseltine Horst Köhler relationship and enriching the cul- Karl M. von der Heyden Renate Küchler tural and intellectual life of Berlin. Henry A. Kissinger Otto Graf Lambsdorff Klaus Mangold Barry Langman Joseph Neubauer Rosemarie B. Lombardi Rafael J. Roth Iro von Maltzan Shearman & Sterling Christof Mauch Founder’s Circle Trustees of the American Academy in Berlin to Wolfgang Mayrhuber $1 million and above endow the Stephen M. Kellen Lectureship The McGraw-Hill Companies Anna-Maria & Stephen M. Kellen and the Kurt and Felicitas Viermetz Richard and Ronay Menschel descendants of Hans & Ludmilla Arnhold Patrons Nörr Stiefenhofer Lutz Chairman’s Circle $2,500 and above Franz Xaver Ohnesorg $500,000 and above Adlon Hotel Kempinski Berlin Partner für Berlin GmbH Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Holdings, Inc. Anonymous Rudolph S. Rauch Trustees’ Circle Heinrich Joh. Barth Volker C. Schlöndorff $100,000 and above BMW Niederlassung Berlin Virginia Schulte, Culture Trip GmbH Axel Springer Verlag AG Gahl Hodges Burt Gary Smith The Coca-Cola Company Deutsche Bundesbank Michael P. Steinberg DaimlerChrysler AG Susanna Dulkinys & Erik Spiekermann Fritz Stern DaimlerChrysler Fonds im Stifterverband für United Designers Network Jon Vanden Heuvel die Deutsche Wissenschaft Hans-Michael and Almut Giesen Richard von Weizsäcker Deutsche Lufthansa AG Vartan Gregorian Hayden White THE J.P. Morgan AG Klaus Groenke Frank Zahn, Görg Rechtsanwälte AMERICAN Robert H. Mundheim Erivan Haub Henry S. Ziegler ACADEMY IN BERLIN Robert Bosch Stiftung Hewlett-Packard GmbH Alvin and Faith Zubasky Hans Arnhold Center LH_Smile_246x328_BlnJournal_IC 02.04.200411-53UhrSeite1

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