The Berlin Journal

THE BERLIN JOURNAL

A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin

sp rin g 2015 Number Twenty-Eight Spring 2015 NUMBER 28

THE BERLIN JOURNAL THE BERLIN

EVGENY MOROZOV On Digital Identity

cvean we sa the internet? A Transatlantic Discussion

NEW FICTION Joshua Cohen, Tom Drury

KAREN HAGEMANN Women and the Military

S ANFORD BIGGERS Artist Portfolio

THE HOLBROOKE FORUM Authoritarianism in a Global Context

MARY JO BANG Poems Our top export: legal advice made in Germany

ALICANTE BERLIN BRATISLAVA BRUSSELS BUCHAREST BUDAPEST DRESDEN DÜSSELDORF FRANKFURT/M. LONDON MOSCOW MUNICH NEW YORK PRAGUE WARSAW

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75815009_Anzeige_TheBerlinJournal_210x280_RZ03.indd 1 30.03.15 15:08 CONTENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS

focus features notebook 4 30 64

6 Recommended for You 32 Ren the Driver 66 Welcoming Gerhard Casper by William Uricchio by Tom Drury The American Academy’s New President 10 On Encyclopedic Chaos 36 gOOD Soldiers? by Christopher D. Johnson by Karen Hagemann 67 Henry A. Kissinger Prize 2015 to Hans-Dietrich Genscher 14 Out of the Clouds 42 Being German, Becoming Muslim and Giorgio Napolitano by Evgeny Morozov by Esra Özyürek 67 New Trustee 18 wHENce “Data”? 46 Artist Portfolio George Rupp by Daniel Rosenberg Sanford Biggers 68 IN MEMORIAM 23 cAN We Save the Internet? 54 Train to Peredelkino Richard von Weizsäcker Discussion with Andrew Keen, Tomas Venclova in Conversation Thomas L. Farmer Norbert Riedel, Sandro Gaycken, with Ellen Hinsey and Christoph von Marschall 70 Book Reviews 60 Long March by Brittani Sonnenberg, 27 [From the Palo Alto Sessions] by Martin K. Dimitrov Jonathan Kahn, and Bert Rebhandl by Joshua Cohen 61 Is the Third Wave Over? 77 Poems by Stephan Haggard and by Mary Jo Bang Robert Kaufman

William Uricchio is a professor of compar is Chief Diplomatic Correspondent for the Tomas Venclova is the spring 2015 Axel ative media studies at the Massachusetts German daily Der Tagesspiegel. Joshua Springer Fellow. Poet Ellen Hinsey was a Institute of Technology. He is the spring 2015 Cohen is the author, most recently, of Book Berlin Prize Fellow in spring 2001 and is in Holtzbrinck Fellow. Christopher D. Johnson of Numbers (2015). He was an Academy Berlin as the DAAD artist-in-residence for is a research associate with the Bilderfahr visitor in fall 2014. Tom Drury is the author 2015. Martin K. Dimitrov is an associate zeuge project at the Warburg Institute in of several novels. He is the spring 2015 Mary professor of political science and director London. He is the spring 2015 Nina Maria Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellow. Karen of the Asian Studies Program at Tulane Gorrissen Fellow in History. Author and Hagemann is the James G. Kenan Distin- University. He was the spring 2012 Axel essayist Evgeny Morozov studies the political guished Professor of History at the Univer- Springer Fellow at the Academy. Stephan and social implications of technology. He is sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause the spring 2015 Bosch Public Policy Fellow. the spring 2015 German Transatlantic Distinguished Professor at the University of Daniel Rosenberg is a professor of history Program Fellow. Esra Özyürek is an associ- California, San Diego. Robert Kaufman is at Robert D. Clark Honors College at the ate professor and chair for contemporary Distinguished Professor of Political Science University of Oregon. He was the fall 2014 Turkish studies at the European Institute of at Rutgers University. Berlin-based writer Axel Springer Fellow. Andrew Keen is an the London School of Economics. She was Brittani Sonnenberg is the author of the entrepreneur, writer, and public speaker. His the fall 2006 Bosch Fellow in Public Policy novel Home Leave (2014). Jonathan Kahn is most recent book is The Internet Is Not the and returned to the Academy in spring 2015 a professor of law at Hamline University. Answer. Norbert Riedel is Commissioner for as a guest speaker. Interdisciplinary artist Bert Rebhandl is an Austrian journalist, film International Cyber Policy for Germany’s Sanford Biggers is an assistant professor at critic, and author based in Berlin. The ac- Federal Foreign Office. Sandro Gaycken is the School of the Arts at Columbia Univer- claimed poet Mary Jo Bang, a professor of Senior Researcher on Cybersecurity at the sity. He is the spring 2015 Guna S. Mundheim English at Washington University in St. Louis, European School of Management and Tech- Fellow in Visual Arts. Renowned poet, is the spring 2015 Ellen Maria Gorrissen nology in Berlin. Christoph von Marschall literary scholar, and Soviet-era dissident Fellow. the berlin journal founder Richard C. Holbrooke founding chairmen Thomas L. Number Twenty-Eight Farmer, Henry A. Kissinger, Spring 2015 Richard von Weizsäcker vice chairman & acting publisher Gahl Hodges Burt chairman Gahl Hodges Burt editors R. Jay Magill Jr., co-secretaries Stephen B. Charles Hawley Burbank, John C. Kornblum managing editor Johana Gallup trustees Manfred Bischoff, advertising Berit Ebert Stephen B. Burbank, Gahl design Susanna Dulkinys Hodges Burt, Caroline Walker & Edenspiekermann Bynum, Roger Cohen, Mathias Döpfner, Marina Kellen French, Copyright © 2015 Michael E. Geyer, Hans-Michael American Academy in Berlin Giesen, C. Boyden Gray, Vartan We are deeply ISSN 1610-6490 Gregorian, Andrew S. Gundlach, Helga Haub, Wolfgang A. grateful to Cover Image: Anthony McCall. Herrmann, Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture. Dirk Ippen, Wolfgang Ischinger, Installation View at National Josef Joffe, Michael Klein, galerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, John C. Kornblum, Regine TELEFÓNICA DEUTSCHLAND HOLDING AG Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Leibinger, Wolfgang Malchow, 2012. Photo by Sean Gallup/ Nina von Maltzahn, Kati Marton, Getty Images. Julie Mehretu, Michael Müller (ex officio), Adam Posen, George Printed by Ruksaldruck, Berlin E. Rupp, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Y. Solmssen, Kurt F. Viermetz, Christine I. Wallich, the american academy Pauline Yu in berlin chairman emeritus trustees in-residence Karl M. von der Heyden Gahl Hodges Burt, Christine I. Wallich trustees emeriti John P. chief operating officer Birkelund, Diethart Breipohl, Christian U. Diehl Gerhard Casper, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, Norman Pearlstine, Am Sandwerder 17–19 Fritz Stern and 14109 Berlin Tel. (49 30) 80 48 3-0 Fax (49 30) 80 48 3-111 americanacademy.de STEFAN VON HOLTZBRINCK 14 East 60th Street, Suite 604 New York, NY 10022 Tel. (1) 212 588-1755 for their generous support Fax (1) 212 588-1758 of this issue of The Berlin Journal.

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A New Season

Spring has arrived on the Wannsee. A season of transition School of Management and Technology, offers space for the and rebirth, a season befitting the American Academy in uniquely German perspective on online privacy and secu- Berlin, as we ourselves undergo a bit of transition. rity, among much more. As many of you know, the Academy’s celebrated exec- As always, the work of our resident fellows—present utive director of the past 17 years, Gary Smith, decided to and former—forms the core of the Berlin Journal, with a return to independent scholarship at the end of 2014. His re- new short story by novelist Tom Drury; a look at overlooked tirement from the institution he so instrumentally shaped, women in the military during World War II by historian intellectually guided, and creatively inspired has given us Karen Hagemann; former fellow Ellen Hinsey in discussion pause and necessary time for reflection. As we await the with the poet and former Soviet dissident Tomas Venclova; arrival of the Academy’s new president, Gerhard Casper— a personal essay by alumna Esra Özyürek of the London a former president of Stanford University and longtime School of Economics on researching her book on German trustee of the Academy—we have had time to evaluate how Muslims; two essays on the persistence of authoritarian- we can continue to do what we have been doing well, even ism by Martin K. Dimitrov and Stephan Haggard and Robert better. Kaufman, from the upcoming Richard C. Holbrooke Forum; Since the very beginning, when Richard Holbrooke and, not least, a stunning visual portfolio by our resident midwifed his prescient idea into existence, we have be- artist Sanford Biggers, whose materials range from sand lieved that what the American Academy could best do and tapestries to break-dance floors and the electric key- would be to provide our resident fellows and visitors, some board. of the best and brightest minds in the United States, the Over these past few months, during this time of tran- time and space to work, think, and, most paramount, talk sition, the Academy has provided space, by way of our with their German counterparts in person. The place where public-lecture series, to all of these speakers, as well as they would do this would be in this grand villa on the to Thomas Friedman of theNew York Times and Lawrence Wannsee, where once the esteemed banker Hans Arnhold Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard. and his family hosted one of the most interesting salons We continue to privilege in-person discussions, on is- of Weimar Berlin. It is both a moving and meaningful real- sues and topics that require patient untangling, and often ity that the descendants of that family, chased out of their that address topics of particular relevance to the German- home and resettled in New York, remain the prime sup- American friendship. As Gerhard Casper said of this year’s porters of our ongoing efforts. In a day and age where 140 Henry A. Kissinger Prize recipients, former Italian President characters and “likes” have become the cultural vernacu- Giorgio Napolitano and former German Foreign Minister lar, we, with the magnanimous support of the Stephen and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who will receive the prize on Anna-Maria Kellen Foundation, find it even more crucial to June 17: “They made political decisions with a view toward provide a real place for the old art of conversation, where strengthening the transatlantic relationship.” May that we new intellectual constellations take wing and the tendrils all continue to be so wise in our cognizance of the trans of slow diplomacy are left to unfurl. atlantic future, keeping the boat right and steady. This issue of the Berlin Journal takes as its critical fo- As we bid a remorseful farewell to two of our found- cus exactly the issue of technological change and its effects ing chairmen this past winter, Richard von Weizsäcker and on culture and society. Essays by fellows William Uricchio, Thomas Farmer—two men with whom I worked closely Christopher D. Johnson, and Daniel Rosenberg investigate from the very first days of the American Academy—may we the centuries-long development of information culture, heed the words of Jean Monnet, invoked so eloquently by multifunctional algorithms, and encyclopedic “data,” and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the Academy’s Evgeny Morozov looks cautiously at the privatization of twentieth-anniversary celebration, last October: “Nothing data and the Internet of Things; the novelist Joshua Cohen, is possible without people; nothing is lasting without in- author of the forthcoming and already-acclaimed Book of stitutions.” Numbers, shares a satirical diary excerpt from the “founder of the world’s most successful online search engine,” Gahl Hodges Burt and, finally, a recent panel, co-hosted with the European Vice Chairman and Acting Chairman FOCUS Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom?

Recommended for You William Uricchio 6

On Encyclopedic Chaos Christopher d. Johnson 10

Out of the Clouds Evgeny Morozov 14

Whence “Data”? D aniel Rosenberg 18

Can We Save the Internet? Andrew Keen, Norbert Riedel, S andro Gaycken, and Christoph von Marschall 23

[From the Palo Alto Sessions] Josh ua Cohen 27

Anthony McCall: Conical Solid (1974). Drawing for animation cinematography. 6 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU

Prediction, creation, and the cultural work of algorithms by William Uricchio

we tell our histories in predictable ways, particularly when relationship quite different from technologies that have it comes to technology. Looking back on the developments been used to articulate the project of the modern (the press, that litter the past, we tend to see inevitability, squeezing etc.). Yet, like these technologies, the algorithm can be read the facts, as needed, to fit the tale of our present. The uncer- as defining an emerging epistemic era. If we are indeed like tainties that necessarily abound with any new technology, those in the early fifteenth century who were poised on the when things like standards, formats, uses, and social pro- edge of a new order of things, will we, like some of them, be tocols get worked out, seem largely filtered from our recol- inclined to embrace their potentials for a new vision of our- lection of the past. Inherited technologies seem to hew to a selves in the world, a new social order? Or will we miss the narrative of progress, entering the world conceptually, like radical potentials of a new technology, retrofitting them to Venus, fully formed. serve the still-dominant interests of the old? Technologies This tendency makes the appearance of new technolo- do not, of themselves, change anything, but are rather so- gies something to be savored. For a brief moment, uncer- cially constructed and deployed. And in this sense, as we tainty looms large. A contradictory mix of anxieties and watch the possibilities of a new technology take shape in expectations, fears of disruption and hopes for salvation the hands of the highest bidder, we have good reason to swirls around—until the dust finally settles and, like its be anxious. But the algorithm is less the problem than the predecessors, the once-new technology settles into a state mentality of those it serves. of taken-for-grantedness. In this sense, the recent explosion of headlines in which the term “algorithm” figures prominently and often apocalyptically suggests that we Definitional Dynamics are enjoying such a moment, as a “new” technology appears in the full regalia of unruliness. Better, the emerging The term “algorithm” seems to conjure up responses dispro- algorithmic regime is more than “just another” temporar- portionate to the simplicity of its meaning. Formally speak- ily disruptive new technology. It offers insights into a fun- ing, an algorithm is simply a recipe, a process or set of rules damentally different way of articulating our relationship to usually expressed in algebraic notation. The actual values the world, different, that is, from the project of the mod- plugged into the algorithm are less the point than the step- ern as first formulated in the early fifteenth century and by-step formulations for their processing. They scale easily, embodied in technologies such as the printing press and whether working with the relatively thin data of the pre- three-point perspective. I realize that this “added value” computer era or the over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data gen- argument fits the usual pattern of apocalyptic expectation erated daily (as of this writing). Yet, despite their relative and anxiety regarding new and not yet familiar technolo- simplicity, algorithms today pose some significant defini- gies—but even paranoids have enemies. tional problems, mostly through a series of misapprehen- My thesis is that the algorithm, an approach to problem sions. solving that goes back at least to Euclid’s Elements (ca. 300 Communications theorist Tarleton Gillespie has not- BC) and that enjoyed significant development in the hands ed three broad uses of the term that obscure its mean- of Leibniz and Pascal, has achieved new cultural force as a ing. Algorithms are invoked as synecdoche when the technology thanks to a confluence of factors that include term stands in for a sociotechnical assemblage that in- big data, intensive processing power, and high-speed net- cludes the algorithm, model, data set, application, and so works. It embodies a configuration of the subject-object on. They function as talismans when the term implies an spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 7

“objectifying” scientific claim. And they reveal a commit than the algorithm per se, and focusing on the latter puts us ment to procedure, formalizing social facts into measure- in the position of a bull fixated with the matador’s cape. able data and clarifying problems into models for solution. But the cultural use of algorithms throws into sharp re- Indeed, one might step back and note that these three uses lief the capacities of this technology to reorder the subject- say much more about social anxieties and aspirations than object relationships at the heart of representation. Although they do about algorithms. How, for example, can one make we may still look at algorithmically enabled art the same a claim to “objectivity” with an authored protocol whose way we look at the art of the past (just as some look at operations depend on the highly variable character and algorithmically enabled tools and see another means of structure of a particular data set? old-fashioned control), it is far easier to see through the The definition of the algorithm is also complicated by representation process and find there the residue of algo- more insistent epistemological problems. Sociocultural an- rithmic capacity. The arts help us to see more clearly. thropologist Nick Seaver finds that most discussions of al- Just as algorithms have a deep history and have recent- gorithms get caught up with issues of access and expertise. ly achieved new power thanks to their changing circum- Access is an issue because many commercial algorithms, stances (big data and dramatic improvements in processing Google’s for instance, are closely guarded secrets. If only we and transmission), their use in the arts also has a long his- had access . . . , the mantra goes. But even if we did have tory and a dynamic and quite powerful present. The canon access, we would immediately face the expertise problem, form in music, essentially an algorithm, goes back at least for most individual algorithms inhabit vast interdepen- to the Middle Ages; and algorithms have appeared from the dent algorithmic systems (not to mention models, goals, Musikalisches Würfelspiel attributed to Mozart to Lejaren data profiles, testing protocols, etc.)—and making sense of Hiller’s work with the ILLIAC computer, in the 1950s. The them typically requires large teams of experts. Even more musician Brian Eno summarized the artistic stance of this troublesome is the fact that any given process usually work well when he said, has many possible algorithmic combinations (ca. ten million in the case of a Bing search), some of which might be Since I have always preferred making plans to executing uniquely deployed or used for purposes of personalization. them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems Individual algorithms and algorithmic clusters are recy- that, once set into operation, could create music with cled and appear in different settings, with pre-World War II little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend era elements still in circulation today. This means that we towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then can never be precisely sure of which set of algorithmic become an audience to the results. functions we are examining. Even if we were, the work of personalization would limit our ability to compare findings. This disaggregation of artistic process is nothing new A further twist appears in the form of disciplinary (Rodin famously relied on it for his major scuptural works), specificity. The valences of the term “algorithm” differ in but it has served as a persistent characteristic in the long mathematics, computer science, governance, predictive history of algorithmic art. analytics, law, and culture, complicating cross-disciplinary In the visual arts, the group known today as the Algorists discussion. And unlike earlier technologies, developments (Roman Verostko, Manfred Mohr, A. Michael Noll, Frieder in machine learning have enabled algorithms to self-opti- Nake, and others) began, in the 1970s, to use computer- mize and generate their own improvements. They can now driven algorithms in a similar manner, deploying them self-author and self-create. This greatly complicates no- as tools by programming instructions and watching the tions of authorship, agency, and even their status as tools, printer do the work. Just as canons demostrate the power which imply an end user. Together, these various factors of a simple melody to grow into incredible complexity, combine to render the simple definition of an algorithm as visual pieces such as Roman Verostko’s Floating Cloud a “rule set” into something quite loaded. attest to the ability of relatively small programs to generate works of striking beauty. In these works and others across media, something of the artisanal paradigm still survives. Algorithmic Culture Explicitly positioned within what the sociologist Howard Becker would term an “art world,” this work, whether mu- Given the role that algorithms currently play in shaping our sical or visual, nevertheless faced some of the same prob- access to information (Google) and the social world (Face- lems as photography in the nineteenth century and film in book), and their centrality to finance (algorithmic trading) the twentieth. Can a “machine” create art? Is the absence and governance (from predictive policing to NSA-style of the human touch a net loss to the creative act? Can the parsing of vast troves of data), looking at their cultural work so-called autographic arts (painting, for example) legiti- might seem a low priority. Each of these sectors reveals mately disaggregate design and execution? These examples some affordances of the algorithm, and their most visible— of algorit hmic art, like early film and photography before and disturbing—applications reflect the interests of the them, emulated traditional art works (display, authorship, prevailing power structure. The abusive deployment of algo- galleries, buyers) but were subject to a critique of their rithms says more about the contradictions of our social order “true” aesthetic value. 8 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

Today, in an era of the newly enabled algorithm, these its readers, and the accompanying story described the rap- (still ongoing!) historical battles seem almost quaint, ren- id growth of storytelling algorithms that have nearly cor- dered marginal by the appearance of two new deploy- nered routine sports and financial market reporting. These ments of algorithms in the cultural sector: taste prediction two domains are well-structured, with timelines and data- and text generation. Consider EchoNest’s prediction algo- points that enable easy characterization and serve as low- rithms that comb through millions of users’ behaviors as hanging fruit to an emergent industry. But the Times story well as musical texts, seeking correlations by extrapolat- gave a sense of the ambitions and the state of the game for ing from past behaviors to future desires or by searching storytelling algorithms produced by companies such as for other users’ patterns that might offer a basis for sugges- Narrative Science, and the results were impressive. tions. To the extent that users play along and offer consis- Similar developments can be found in the music intent feedback, Pandora, Spotify, or other streaming music dustry, where the customized production of music—rather services that use EchoNest’s algorithms demonstrate an than simply the selection of pre-existing music—appears uncanny ability to identify and provide access to the de- to be the next step after taste prediction; and in the film sired, the familiar, and the reassuring. The same princi- sector, where companies like Magisto claim to analyze im- ples apply to Amazon’s book recommendation service or age, sound, and their storytelling potentials, paving the Netflix’s film and video suggestions. The past is prologue, way to production armed with “Emotion Sense Technology.” as the data generated through our earlier interactions Meanwhile, interactive documentaries, often in the form of shapes the textual world selected for us. No “surprises” or textual environments that a user can navigate through, are “unwanted” encounters, just uncannily familiar themes slowly moving toward personalized “sit-back” experiences and variations. This logic extends into the informational in which an algorithm seamlessly guides the user through domain as well, where it has been the subject of a well tred the “most-relevant” elements of the data-set. Although in- but sharp critique that argues algorithms have created an teractive in principle, no choices are required from the user, informational “echo chamber,” in which our already exist- who simply experiences a personalized linear film. ing views of the world are reinforced but rarely challenged. The nearly 300 reader responses to theTimes article But taste prediction has another fast-growing dimen- amply demonstrated the provocative nature of these de- sion, in some settings effectively serving as a gatekeeper for velopments: text-generating algorithms force us to ask cultural production. Epagogix, a company that specializes what it means to be human and how that relates to artistic in risk mitigation, has found a niche in advising investors production. For most letter-writers, the answer was clear- in the film and television industry about the likely success cut: algorithmic creativity in traditional cultural sectors is of a given project. The script as well as various casting con- oxymoronic. Culture is precisely about human expression, figurations are assessed by their proprietary algorithms, and anything else is either trickery or parody. But to de- and a financial assessment provided that may (or may not) signers of algorithms, such discourse—to the extent that serve as an incentive for investment. Needless to say, long- it articulates a human je ne sais quoi—is useful in pinning time industry specialists view such developments with down precisely what is disparate between human and algo- suspicion, if not contempt, but investors, convinced by the rithmic expressions, enabling engineers to define and chip seeming objectivity of numbers and the system’s mostly away at the problem. Much like the issue of intelligence, accurate predictions, think otherwise. Investor response is the long-held assumptions regarding man-the-measur e understandable at a moment when most stock trading is are undergoing a Copernican-like decentering, and in algorithmically determined: it is a vernacular of sorts. But this sense, the coincidental appearance of developments it also confirms Gillespie’s observation of the algorithm as such as post-humanism, actor-network theory, or object- talisman, radiating an air of computer-confirmed objectiv- oriented ontology suggest that sectors of the academy are ity, even though the programming parameters and data indeed thinking seriously about a paradigm shift. construction reveal deeply human prejudices. The bot- All of this is to say that the cultural deployment of al- tom line is that decisions regarding what will and will not gorithms has different valances. An early and continuing be produced are being based on data of unknown quality strand of creativity has harnessed algorithms to the work (What do they actually represent? How were they gath- of familiar artistic paradigms, where things like author- ered?), which are fed into algorithms modeled in unknown ship and attribution are still relevant. But a new and fast- ways (with “success” often meaning calculable profit rath- emerging set of developments has seen algorithms used er than the less-measurable metric of aesthetic quality). as filters, shaping our access to the cultural repertoire; as The second breakthrough of newly empowered algo- a gatekeeper, helping to determine what will and will not rithms is textual production. According to the New York be produced; and as a semi-autonomous producerly force, Times, over one billion stories were algorithmically gen- writing texts, composing music, and constructing films. erated and published in 2014. In a quiz that appeared on And these latter developments are growing more inten- March 7, 2015, the Times asked its readers “Did a Human or a sive, driven by the biennial doubling of processing capacity Computer Write This?” with the tag, “A shocking amount of captured by Moore’s Law, the ever-more pervasive place of what we’re reading is created not by humans, but by com- computational systems in our lives, and the ability of algo- puter algorithms.” The quiz doubtless confounded many of rithms to self-improve without active human intervention. spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 9

They raise crucial questions about agency and attribution: implications, if we take thinkers like Heidegger seriously, How to negotiate the space between human designers and can be profound. Consider the contrast between Diderot’s machine learning? What is the nature of authorship and Encyclopédie and the crowd-sourced Wikipedia, or between the creative act?; about point of view: Whose values, expe- Canaletto’s painting of Piazza San Marco and the hundreds riences, and perceptions are bound up in this new order?; of differently authored photos that in the aggregate con- and about cultural access: What notion of “personalization” stitute Photosynth’s “synth” of the same. In each case, one enables or delimits our encounters with texts, and with subject/author is known, their point of view embodied, what implication? their relationship to the object clear, and their text stable. And the other subject/author is collective and diffused, the points of view multiple, the relationship to the object algo- The Bigger Picture rithmically mediated, and the text changing and mutable. These differences, grosso modo, distinguish the project of Why do these questions, and the increasing insistence the modern, the age of the Weltbild, from the enablements with which they are posed, matter? What are the stakes? of the algorithmic. To put it in the apocalyptic rhetoric-of-the-new I warned Authorship, in the algorithmic context, is both pluri- of at the outset: it is because we may well be participating form and problematic. Although mostly effaced, in the case in the death of the modern (and the birth of some as-yet- of Photosynth it is the author of the individual photos (or in unnamed epoch). Heidegger used an image, the Weltbild, to an interactive documentary, the author of the video clips); mark the modern’s birth, saying that the moment at which largely enacted, it is the author of the experience—that is, the world becomes a picture is the same moment that the the navigating user; fundamentally enabling, it is the au- human emerges as the subject in a characteristically mod- thor of the algorithm; and in terms of what we actually see ern subject-object relationship. The world as picture (Welt and select from, it is the algorithm as author. Descartes’ als Bild), he tells us, “does not mean a picture of the world triumphant subject and the Ich implied in Heidegger’s but the world conceived and grasped as picture.” Heidegger Weltbild are not eradicated, for their traces remain abun- goes on to specify that the world picture “does not change dant. Rather, they are fundamentally repositioned by the from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather algorithmic regimes that now stand between subject and the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what dis- object. tinguishes the essence of the modern age.” If we understand this, we can think through the oppor- He argues that the modern social order can be defined tunities that await, rather than panicking at the loss of the through a representational system characterized by pre- old certainties. We can explore the affordances of algorith- cisely defined subject-object relations (the world as picture), mically enabled collaboration and the new forms of collec- a metaphysics of exactitude, and an underlying spatiotem- tive creativity that might ensue, rather than tolerating the poral grid. Descartes emblematizes this order. But we can crude use of algorithmic systems to exploit and oppress. also point to earlier developments such as Gutenberg’s We can try to understand the implications of widespread press and Alberti’s notion of perspective, born in the first personalization, the challenges of a predictive economy in half of the fifteenth century, for technologies that ampli- which data trails become constitutive, and the meaning of fied the subject and her viewing position. Perspective of- a culture of radical contingency. And we can probably learn fered a formal system to represent the world as seen by the from our predecessors in the late Middle Ages, poised on subject, just as the printing press served as a resonator for the cusp of the modern, first encountering the printing the authorial self, and both technologies served the project press and three-point perspective. What did people make identified by Heidegger as the modern. of new and, in retrospect, era-defining technologies before The centuries between these early developments and that era was defined? The printing press was both a trigger Heidegger, despite countless historical undulations and for the modern (the stabilization and spread of knowledge), discoveries, demonstrate a consistent logic of attribution, and unleasher of unruly practices that accompanied its ini- of a stable self and its relationship to the object-world, a tial decades. In one case, new technologies were embraced notion of mathematics as a language of precision, calcu- and put to work as harbingers of the new, and in the other, lability, and predictability. And this order remains deeply they took form in aberrant and contradictory ways reflect- familiar to us, pervading our lives, whether through our ing the brackish waters of late-medieval thinking. financial systems, our notions of science, or the construc- The “newness” of the algorithm comes with the danger tion of our technologies of visual representation. that it will be retrofitted to sustain the excesses and contra- In contrast to the precision, calculability, and specific- dictions of the fast-aging modern. But it also offers an op- ity of the modern subject-object relationship bound up in portunity for critical thinking and an imaginative embrace the Weltbild, the algorithmic layer stands between the cal- of what just might later come to be known as the Age of the culating subject and the object calculated, and refracts the Algorithm. □ subject-centered world. It filters what we can see, produces our texts with unseen hands, and reshapes our texts, ren- dering them contingent, mutable, and “personalized.” Its 10 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

ON ENCYCLOPEDIC CHAOS

The centuries-long, unruly attempt to know it all by Christopher D. Johnson

ust as the dream of ordering all there is to know has constitute Renaissance encyclopedic writing—are now ac- long propelled the encyclopedic impulse, so, too, has cessible online, via Google Books and other digital archives, J the spectre of chaos, of chaotic, uncontrollable, het- thus obviating the need to manipulate physical books at all. erogeneous growth. An emblem for this spectre is a pas- Indeed, the last fifteen years have seen paper encyclope- sage in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928): “And just as the ivy dias try, often in vain, to compete with the digital model and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did advanced by Wikipedia, whose home page suggests at once the same fertility show itself within. The life of the aver- the Tower of Babel and the almost completed Death Star. age woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at With its astonishing growth (almost five million articles in nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time the English version alone), increasing ubiquity, debatable she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire accuracy, innumerable hyperlinks, and embrace of ama- came into existence; and thus—for there is no stopping teurization (some 70,000 “users” are active in editing its damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork— articles), Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia has become syn- sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became onymous with the encyclopedic impulse. Nevertheless, the epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long history of encyclopedism still raises critical cultural, episte- were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.” mological, and perhaps even metaphysical questions. Such That Pliny initially calls the items in his massive Natural questions can, moreover, help us parse the increasingly History (77–79 CE) “trifles” nugae[ ], that a commentary on promiscuous and nebulous use of phrases like “knowledge Martial’s epigrams, Niccolò Perotti’s Cornucopia (1489), func- society,” “Information Age,” “the digital turn,” “algorithmic tions as an encyclopedic dictionary of Roman culture and thought,” and, of course, “information overload.” history, or that any entry in Wikipedia, however trivial it may be, can lead, with a click on a link or two, to the fact In 1539, Joachim Sterck van Ringelberg published the first that by the end of 2014, the total number of articles in all printed book with “encyclopedia” in the title, Lucubratio Wikipedias (in nearly 290 languages) exceeded 21 million, nes vel potius absolutissima kyklopaideia [Lucubrations or all confirms this law of chaotic growth. rather the most complete encyclopedia]. While its fairly If you look up “encyclopedia” on the English Wikipedia conventional account of the seven liberal arts is praised by website, you are greeted by an image of six well-worn the great humanist Erasmus, Ringelberg’s book is most re- volumes from the fourteenth edition (1906) of the Brock markable for how it incorporates, as a kind of supplement, haus Konversationslexikon (later renamed the Brockhaus his 1529 book titled Chaos. Invoking there Ovid’s account Enzyklopädie). This paper monument-document, whose of creation out of chaos from the beginning of the Meta first edition was published in 1796 in the wake of the great morphoses, Ringelberg underscores the potential utility success of the Encyclopédie, was for two centuries the most and pleasing variety of the material he adduces to excuse reliable and popular German encyclopedia. his disregard of any systematic order. Insisting instead Yet the twenty-first and apparently last paper edition on the analogy between world and book, his Chaos treats of the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie appeared in 2008. Likewise, this curious sequence of subjects: Of God, Of Christ and Encyclopedia Britannica went completely digital in 2012. Mohammed, Of gods and pagan theology, On appropriate Further, many earlier editions of these works—to say justice, On military matters, Considerations on the art of nothing of almost all the Latin and vernacular texts that medicine, The order and subjects of the arts, Of philosophy, spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 11

Of study methods, Physics, Description of storms with ref- Czech philosopher Johann Amos Comenius, for example, erence to physics, Of comets, Of the rainbow, Of animals, blames the obsessive “piling up of material” [Stoffhäufung] Considerations on rural matters, Of plants, Signs of a storm, characteristic of humanist natural history. Accordingly, his Several histories and fables, Poetic similitudes, and Other pansophic books, such as the 1651 Patterne of Universall considerations on poetics. In this manner, Ringelberg’s Knowledge, sacrifice concrete detail and fact for what is “Kyklopaideia” literally and figuratively ends in “chaos,” in ultimately an otherworldly vision. Conversely, an alpha- the potentially endless play of poetic similitude. Yet even betical commonplace book like Laurentius Beyerlinck’s Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), who systematically ginormous 1631 Theatrum vitae humanae forgoes the hope completes two encyclopedias that eclectically marry nu- of structuring or synthesizing knowledge in favor of simply merous strands of Renaissance thought, left himself an out making it available to readers. with a section titled farragines disciplinarum (mishmash of All early modern encyclopedic writing tries to achieve disciplines). In this respect, even encyclopedic writers who a persuasive order [ordo or dispositio]—be it disciplinary, stress order over variety, conservation over discovery, flirt thematic, topical, inductive, synthetic, narrative, histori- with “chaos.” cal, geographic, or alphabetical. All such attempts are also Encyclopedism is a critical engine throughout much confounded, however, by the abundance [copia] and va- of Chinese and Arabic intellectual history; but it especial- riety [varietas] of the materials adduced. Such copia and ly flourishes in different “kinds” or genres of writing in varietas are the rule when it comes not only to the genres Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries— of Renaissance encyclopedic writing but also to what en- before the Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot and Jean cyclopedic texts generate internally. Encyclopedic writing, le Rond d’Alembert gives the encyclopedic impulse its fa- that is, tends centrifugally toward never-ending accumu- miliar form. More specifically, Renaissance encyclopedism lation, heterogeneity, and fragmentation—in short, toward oscillates between a conservative, retrospective, memori- the chaos, disorder, or what the literary scholar William N. ous pole, and a more heuristic, progressive, inventive pole. West, quoting Hegel, calls the “bad infinity” of the list. And This oscillation is only made possible by the enormous, of- if Renaissance writers also have difficulty distinguishing ten chaotic, variety and fungibility of encyclopedic genres between raw information and processed knowledge, this or “kinds.” Though only few early modern texts were actu- may well be because the real and conceptual lines between ally titled encyclopedias, one finds myriad species of tex- the two tend to blur. tual and material encyclopedism, all of which aimed to The same is true today. Consider the supremely dif- exhaust—or at least pretend to exhaust—the knowledge ficult exam that Black Cab drivers in London still must of a particular subject or subjects. These include: common- pass: known simply as “The Knowledge,” it demands the place book, poetic commentary, lexikon, thesaurus, critical cabbie be able to plot any route or find any landmark in dictionary, anatomy, theatrum, Kunstkammer, historia, at- London by memory. Threatened now by GPS technology, it las, emblem book, biblioteca, library, museum, epic poem, is staunchly defended by those who say that cabbies with novel, polyglot Bible, etc. No wonder, Neil Kenny observes “The Knowledge,” unlike GPS, have a far greater ability to in his book on sixteenth-century French encyclopedic deal with contingency and novelty. writing: “Renaissance encyclopedism is primarily a question of genre.” With this, the discursive and generic distinc- s we look forward to digital encyclopedism, it is tions between encyclopedic, non-encyclopedic, or even useful to keep in mind Umberto Eco’s cardinal se- anti-encyclopedic texts often prove blurry, at best. The clas- A mantic distinction between the dictionary and the sicist Pierre Hadot affirms “the very simple principle that encyclopedia. The dictionary, Eco argues, is concerned with a text should be interpreted in light of the literary genre logical and therefore finite categorizations, while the ency- to which it belongs.” But when a genre is still nascent, still clopedia eschews metaphoric, substitutive logic for me- comprised of many competing species, then interpretation tonymy, whereby the connections between things, words, must turn to extra-literary principles as well. events, etc. are essentially contingent, rhizomatic, and While there are fundamental continuities between therefore potentially endless. The dictionary, as an “impov- these genres and their medieval and Enlightenment cous- erished encyclopedia,” may be the model for certain spe- ins, and while the pathos-laden impossibility of knowing cies of philosophy, but it is anathema to the kind of writing (and writing) everything is, of course, a timeless condition, of literature that Eco values. Encyclopedic writing, he con- such encyclopedic writing responds directly to what Dan tends, be it in the Renaissance or more recently—think Rosenberg and Ann Blair have dubbed “early modern in- Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Queneau, Carlo Emilio Gadda, formation overload.” Precipitated by the discovery of new David Foster Wallace, or Eco himself—skeptically embrac- worlds and old texts, by the advent of print culture, the es the inexhaustible, generative chaos of reality rather than growth of libraries, the increase in curious readers, and by pretending it can be formally contained. the fear, Blair argues, that a time might return when learn- Further, questions concerning authorship and author- ing falls into oblivion, the generic instability and fungibility ity are complicated greatly by the rabid intertextuality that of Renaissance encyclopedism are heuristic reactions to the characterizes most encyclopedic writing. As one tries to unmanageable abundance and variety of information. The distinguish between early modern encyclopedic writing by 12 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

an individual and by a group of collaborators, it is essential contributing authors. It is achievable principally because to recall that most authors are already “crowd-sourcing” of the use of renvois, “the most important aspect of ency- their texts, even if the crowd is unaware of it. Latin encyclo- clopedic order.” Above all, it is the renvois “of things” that pedic writing is especially intertextual, as these texts cross furtively remedy the nominal, conceptual, and disciplinary political, cultural, and confessional boundaries more eas- chaos created by alphabetical order (for why should “César” ily. But encyclopedic writing in the vernacular also tends to come before “Chaos,” “Zzéune” after “Dauphin”?). Direct be wildly intertextual. To read Robert Burton’s delightfully ancestors of the hyperlinks that create rhizomatic paths vertiginous Anatomy of Melancholy (first edition, 1621) or between entries on Wikipedia, these cross-references Pierre Bayle’s subtly skeptical Dictionnaire historique et cri tique (first edition, 1697) is to enter a labyrinth of quotations. clarify the object, indicate the close links [liaisons] Easily the most capacious, influential expression of En with those things that touch immediately upon lightenment thought, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné it, and the distant links with other things which des sciences, des arts et des métiers, was published in 28 vol- one thought were isolated; they recall common umes, including 11 volumes of plates, between 1751–72. Like notions and the main analogues; they strengthen most forms of encyclopedic writing, the Encyclopédie is implications; they interlace the branch to the trunk at once conservative (tending toward the compilation of and give everything that unity so beneficial to the what has already been written) and progressive (inventing establishment of the truth and for persuasion. ways to discover new things and perspectives). In the 1765 Yet, when needed, they also produce a completely Advertisement to the eighth volume, Denis Diderot gives opposite effect. They set notions at odds; they al- expression to this acute historical consciousness: low principles to be contrasted; they secretly attack, upset, reverse some ridiculous opinions that one Our principal aim was to gather together the would not dare insult openly. If the author is impar- discoveries of preceding centuries. Without having tial, they will have the double function of confirming neglected this initial view, we would hardly be and refuting, of disturbing and reconciling. . . . exaggerating in praising the several folio volumes The entire work will gain from them an internal by which we have transported new riches to the force and a secret utility. depository of ancient knowledge. For if a revolution of which the germ is perhaps being formed in some Yet this insistence on the critical role of such liaisons is also unknown part of the world, or is being hatched marked by real ambivalence. Admitting that the “typogra- secretely in the very center of civilized countries, pher” often does more than the author to forge these links, erupts at some time, topples cities, disperses Diderot wavers between believing that the successors people once again, and brings back ignorance and to the encyclopédistes, their “nephews,” will perfect their dark times, if a single complete copy of this work labors or ruin them. is conserved, all will not be lost. As for ruination, Laurence Sterne and Gustave Flaubert both satirically figure encyclopedism as a form of delight- An extraordinary boast that, centuries later, will be ironi- ful but useless dilettantism. The “Tristra-paedia” fueling cally inverted in Borges’s short story, “T‌lön, Uqbar, Orbis Tristram Shandy (1759–67) is a part of Sterne’s larger Tertius” where an idealized encyclopedia becomes a ma- Rabelasian “cock and bull” story in which “[d]igressions, terialist nightmare, it also strongly echoes the idealism of incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul earlier encyclopedists. Specifically, Diderot and d’Alembert of reading.” Flaubert’s last and angriest novel, Bouvard and repeatedly invoke their debt to Francis Bacon’s encyclope- Pécuchet (1881), features two enthusiastic but foolish copy- dic plans detailed in the Great Instauration (1620). ists who vainly try to master each and every discipline. Following Bacon, their “Figurative System of Human Written to mock his contemporaries, this “encyclopedia of Knowledge” and “Genealogical Tree” delineate different human idiocy” ends with Flaubert becoming nearly indis- kinds of knowledge according to the faculties that produce tinguishable from his protagonists. them—memory, reason, and imagination. These diagrams As for perfection, Paul Otlet (1868–1944) and Otto together with the renvois (cross-references) that appear in Neurath (1882–1945) explicitly make the Encyclopédie the individual entries are designed to serve as the chief if per- model for their own encyclopedic plans. Detailed in Alex haps insufficient means by which accumulating knowledge, Wright’s recent book, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the pegged to the alphabetical order of the entries, acquires Birth of the Information Age, Otlet’s Mundaneum, Universal real “order” and so, ideally, the ability to change the way Bibliography, and other fantastically ambitious encyclo- readers think. As Diderot’s long entry on the “Encyclopédie” pedic projects brilliantly anticipate many elements of the insists, encyclopedic order, or the “enchaining” of subjects, World Wide Web and digital encyclopedism. Alternately, is indeed attainable; this despite our inability to perceive beginning in 1934, from his exile in the Netherlands, the or imitate God’s infinite, inimitable order, despite the mon- Austrian philosopher and sociologist of knowledge Otto strous “improportion” in the length of the articles, and de- Neurath collaborates with Niels Bohr, John Dewey, Bertrand spite the differences in the style and method of the many Russell, and Rudolf Carnap to develop a program for the “Unity of Science and the Encyclopedia Model.” Drawing on Viennese logical positivism and the Leibnizian notion of a scientia universalis, this now pragmatic, now utterly ideal- istic project is also a response to the looming catastrophe in Europe. Anti-nationalist, anti-systematic, Neurath pre- scribes the tracing of encyclopedic “clusters,” “aggregates” that would then enable “cross-connections” between scientists, thereby creating an ever-evolving “mosaic” or interdisciplinary “orchestration” of the sciences. Aiming not for “totality” but rather to establish a “framework” for science, Neurath rejects hierarchical models and offers instead an “anti-pyramid.” Such encyclopedism, in brief, encourages heuristic disorder as constitutive of non-systematic unity. This vision, though, is also marked by a keen historical consciousness, an anti-metaphysical bent, often absent in encyclopedic enterprises. Remaking Bacon’s famous image that casts his encyclopedic program as a voyage of discovery, Neurath writes:

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely new, but only by gradual reconstruction.

Given such contingency, it is all the more fitting that the International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciencepublished Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm-shiftingStructure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. For Kuhn and Neurath may be said to share Foucault’s notion that only through an archaeology of knowledge that unearths the different epistemologi- WilmerHale provides legal counsel to clients in cal assumptions of each discipline and historical period and around Germany’s key financial, political and can some understanding of the whole be won. Still, for all the “social utility” and ultimately social and political jus- industrial centers. With offices across the globe, we are tice that Neurath hoped his encyclopedia would foster, he strategically positioned to provide counsel on complex only chose writers and envisioned readers who were spe- international matters affecting your business. cialists. His encyclopedia, of which only two volumes were completed, is not written for the average Joe and Jane, nor was it peddled by salesmen going door-to-door in postwar America and the UK. And yet, tellingly, Otlet and Neurath also worked together for a while on a plan for an encyclopedic museum, Nuovo Orbis Pictus, named after Comenius’s 1658 visual encyclopedia for adolescents. Meant to be accessible to all, this never-completed encyclopedic project hoped to construct a unified vision of knowledge out of the endless variety of the world, or, more accurately, from the images, maps, diagrams, and statistics that represent the world. wilmerhale.de That it foundered even before it set sail suggests perhaps that the world had grown too big, too chaotic, for their universal, irenic vision to have succeeded. Or maybe it sug- BEIJING | BERLIN | BOSTON | BRÜSSEL | DAYTON | DENVER | FRANKFURT LONDON LOS ANGELES | NEW YORK | OXFORD | PALO ALTO | WASHINGTON DC gests, given the ever-growing reach of Wikipedia since its 2001 founding, that they were simply too far ahead of their ©2015 Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr llp times. □ 14 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

OUT OF THE CLOUDS

The case for making digital identity a public good by Evgeny Morozov

ilicon Valley, with its youthful arrogance and pen- ride on a mini-bus (each route is calculated in real-time and chant for vulgar disruption, makes for an easy depends on where the passengers are heading). There’s no S scapegoat—especially in Europe—and it’s all too reason why public transportation shouldn’t run this way. easy to conflate the rapaciousness of some technology But it would be wrong to deny that digital technologies companies with the genuine promise of digital technolo- also create political and economic challenges of their own. gies. And yet, caught between the wild extremes of cyber- They aggravate various negative tendencies of contempo- optimism and cyber-pessimism, Europe would be wise to rary society, entrench corporate interests over those of the remain agnostic and acknowledge that digital technologies public, or establish efficiency as the default value accord- are both our best hope and our worst enemy. ing to which our civic life must be optimized. For one, big problems like climate change and disease Not surprisingly, for every Helsinki, with its deploy- are unlikely to be tackled without them. The Internet of ment of sensors to promote solidarity, there’s a city-state Things shows some promising early signs that shared re- like Singapore, which aims to deploy technology to boost sources can be managed differently and more effectively, efficiency. Last year, Singapore announced that it was -go empowering smaller, local communities in an unprece- ing to cover its bus stops, parks, and traffic junctions with dented way. A world full of sensors does not have to under- above-ground boxes with sensors from various govern- mine values like fairness and solidarity or only enrich the ment agencies. The ostensible goal is to shift public services elites—even though this is how things might turn out toward an “anticipatory” model, so that common urban without any active intervention from citizens. problems are avoided altogether, with sensors and cam- Consider Finland, a country with that rare commit- eras monitoring the length of taxi queues, the cleanliness ment to both equality and innovation. In the late 1990s, the of public areas, and any instances of illegal parking. For ex- Finnish highway patrol, instead of trusting what the driv- ample, cleaners might be dispatched only to those areas ers said about their income bracket, began using mobile that actually need them (no word yet on whether the sen- phones to verify their actual income brackets in the coun- sors would report anyone caught spitting chewing gum, a try’s tax database. Rich Finnish drivers can now expect to punishable offense in Singapore). receive six-digit fines. A smart, sensors-powered road, inte- Contemporary critiques of the smart city rightly em- grated with the country’s income database, would result in phasize those aspects of urbanism—serendipity, sponta- rich drivers paying proportionately higher speeding fines neity, community—amiss in today’s debate. A truly “smart than everyone else. Likewise, Helsinki’s transportation city” is not the one that can do more with less—a great slo- board has recently released Kutsuplus, an Uber-like app, gan for the times of austerity—but the one that is conscious, which, instead of dispatching an individual car, coordi- even proud, of its own limitations and imperfections. It nates multiple requests for nearby destinations, pools pas- respects each and every harmlessly deviant minority sengers together and allows them to share a much cheaper and doesn’t violate the rights—like the right to the city— spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 15

of its inhabitants. Efficiency, productivity, and anticipatory personalized use is one of the key features of the emerg- problem-solving are laudable goals for hi-tech authoritar- ing data-centric capitalism. Its promise is the ultimate and ians in Singapore and sales managers at IBM or Cisco. But total personalization of our everyday experience based on cities have always treasured more than commerce. For ex- the preferences that are captured in our “profiles.” Such ample, they also host festivals—recreational and leisurely personalization can also increase the efficiency of resource activities antithetical to the Taylorist hyper-efficiency par- use, reduce waste, and lead to more sustainability: it’s not adigm of the “smart city.” A city open to leisure is not any just a myth of Silicon Valley. less “smart” than Singapore. We’ll regret letting technology Think of the announcement, from a few months ago, boosters convince us otherwise—if only, of course, we still about the partnership between Uber and Spotify, the music have the time for all those regrets. streaming service: from now on, you, the passenger, would be able to play your favorite Spotify songs in any Uber car. o w does one translate this humanistic attitude into This is possible precisely because our music preferences specific technologies? Here even the critics don’t have been collected into a profile—a digital identity of H have much to offer. A good way to start, perhaps, sorts—and that profile can now be shared across various is to try to define the antipode of the corporate-run “smart platforms. city.” What is its ideological opposite, which, through sharp The Uber/Spotify example might seem trivial, but think contrasts, would reveal its benefits and limitations? Is it the of the many different “profiles” that the new smart devices “dumb city”? Today, when trash cans brim with sensors, and can—and some already do—generate: smart thermostats streetlights feature sophisticated cameras, such a longing generate profiles of our preferred energy use, smartphones for analog urbanism is perfectly understandable, especial- (not to mention self-driving cars) generate profiles of our ly in the wake of the NSA scandal. Alas, such nostalgia is physical activity and movement, search engines and social historically illiterate: cities have always been feats of inge- networks generate profiles of our information needs and nious engineering, serving as testing grounds for breath- reading habits. Anybody thinking about the future provi- taking inventions, be it sewers, vaccines, or metro trains. sion of transportation, education, energy, and health ser- There’s no authenticity to be found in a technology-free city. vices cannot ignore this data—for if they do, a bunch of The same, on a broader scale, can be said of society (mostly American) entrepreneurs will emerge to disrupt at large: cyber-pessimism—and a blanket rejection of al- them. gorithms and sensors—cannot possibly be an adequate This data, once available, can lead to all sorts of socially response at a time when the world is beset by so many useful experimentation and innovation. Entire communi- problems. The political task ahead, then, is to amplify the ties might opt out for a different model of public transpor- positive uses of these digital technologies and minimize tation—along the lines of the Helsinki model—whereby a their negative ones. However, given that the very term bus service would pick up passengers on a unique route “digital technologies” spans everything from electronic that is mapped out anew every day based on actual trans- books to drones to smart thermostats, we badly need some portation needs of citizens in a given community. Cities analytical clarity. It might be helpful to focus on three im- like Seoul are experimenting with such models already. portant gateways around such technologies—sensors, fil- The same applies to energy generation and resource shar- ters, profiles—for it is this triad that shapes who exercises ing more broadly. digital power today. But this wave of social experimentation can only be- Take something as banal as doing a Google search. come possible if the community has access to the underly- Google’s search box functions as a sensor of sorts—it ing data. Without the data, communities will be stuck with captures your “intent” to find something. To deliver the the models imposed on them by the corporate providers of relevant results, Google has to rely on filters to separate rel- those services. So instead of having personalized bus ser- evant results from irrelevant ones. It determines relevance vices, we would forever be stuck with Uber’s individualis- partly by drawing on a “profile” of you that it stores it its tic model. memory—and it adds your current search (and your subse- Alas, the only level of action that technology compa- quent clicks) to that profile. But since Google is now pres- nies realize is that of the individual consumer. We are all ent in many different domains—from self-driving cars to invited to join the sharing economy, but only as entrepre- maps to books to videos—your “profile” is really a totality neurs who will put up our skills, our free time, our flats, our of all your interactions with Google. cars, our “dead capital,” as some call it, for rent on the mar- Likewise, Uber draws on sensors—our smartphones— ket. This is, after all, what today’s sharing economy is about: to understand where we are in the city; uses filters to match relying on information and communication technologies supply and demand at the most profitable price; and relies to establish efficient markets in everything and turn -ev on “profiles”—of both the driver and the passenger—to eryone into a psychotic entrepreneur. Why psychotic? Well, reduce mutual concerns about misbehavior, adding infor- because we are invited to always be anxious about our mation generated on each trip to the profile of both parties. reputation: our every interaction with various parts of the This ability to capture our behavior (in the form of sharing economy is recorded, ranked, and stored for pos- clicks or location) in real-time and to store it for future, terity, affecting all our future interactions. 16 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

It is in this sense that the sharing economy is truly neo- where clients are ranked and evaluated: one can still have liberalism on steroids: it creates markets everywhere while full personalization and anonymity.) also producing a new subjectivity in its participants. A case This does not mean that technology companies would in point is a recent episode in Britain, where a woman was simply disappear. Instead, they can offer whatever ad- told she could not use Airbnb because she had fewer than vanced and personalized bonus services they want—after 100 Facebook friends (it’s through our Facebook identity they license the use of this data. Google might offer fea- that Airbnb establishes our “authenticity” and “validity” as tures—some of them paid and desired, perhaps, just by customers). 5 percent of users—that would not be offered in the basic The end game here is easy to envision: who ever con- email service. It might also offer some advanced person- trols the most and the best sensors will eventually control alization of search, thanks to its algorithms and advanced the profiles. Ultimately, we’ll end up with just two compa- artificial-intelligence technology. Other companies—in- nies—Facebook and Google—controlling the entire field of cluding start-ups—would suddenly be able to compete “digital identity.” This means, among other things, that these with Google, as they will be able to draw on as much data two companies will become the key intermediaries in how about their customers as Google and Facebook alone can every other service—energy, health, education, transpor- do now. tation—is provided. And both of these companies, each in If things continue as they are today, we are likely to its own way, benefit from network effects: Facebook’s ser- end in a world where one or two giant technology com- vice is more valuable the greater is the number of people panies become key gateways to all other services solely who pursue their social activities within Facebook, while because they control our digital identities. Those services, Google’s service is more valuable the more of the world’s too, would be provided by ruthless technology companies knowledge it has organized. keen to disrupt everything under the sun, using the most Isn’t it obvious that Google’s search results are better brutal tactics: think Uber and Airbnb. Alternative modes of if it knows where you are, what you have searched for in social and economic organization—which would try to use the past, who your friends are, and so on? It very well may resources collectively but on a logic different from the cor- be that both search and social networking are, in fact, the porate one—would be blocked at every possible moment. kinds of activities that can only be meaningfully pursued How do we avoid this scenario and move toward some- by monopolies that draw on an extensive base of informa- thing more positive? The first step is to problematize the tion gathered from various—rather than just one—social question of data. Is data an asset? Who owns it and can it domains. really be owned? If we are moving into a data-centric and So, instead of breaking up Google into various compo- data-intensive capitalism, what does it mean for the public nents—for example, making search separate from maps or not to be able to control the key resources of the age? Can maps separate from email—a different kind of break-up is politics still maintain any effective control over the market in order. We must take the matter of digital identity com- if its key resource—data—lies beyond its reach? And what pletely out of commercial jurisdiction and instead turn it happens once we start imagining ourselves as “data entre- into a public good. Think of this is as the intellectual infra- preneurs” rather than “data citizens”? structure of data-centric capitalism. Consider the case of Shawn Buckles, a Dutch student who last year decided to auction off his most intimate heyw onl ay to ensure that citizens won’t be crushed data—his personal emails and online chats, his browsing by emerging data-centric capitalism is to guarantee history, his geolocational data, his train records, his calen- T that its main driving force—data—remains square- dar—to the highest bidder. The auction attracted 28 bids— ly in public hands. My every click on any app or site, my including the winning one of 350 euros. Buckles is an every interaction with my smart thermostat or my smart activist, not an entrepreneur; he wanted to raise awareness car, my every move in the city should accrue to me, the of how much data we are giving away to governments and citizen—not to the companies offering these services. By corporations. But his prank also raises a deeper philosophi- assuming that “click capital”—and this is what it is, a form cal question: Can we sell our data as any other commod- of capital—naturally belongs to corporations, the public ity? Or should the government step in and exercise some would eventually see its control over these corporations paternalism—as, for example, when it bans us from selling diminish completely. ourselves into slavery? Furthermore, some basic services—very simple search- The narrative pushed by proponents of data entrepre- es, basic email functionality, and so on—could and should neurship is that it is better to make a buck off our personal be provided free and as part of public infrastructure. In ex- data than let Google and Facebook exploit it for free. But change for this, some of the anonymized data in our digital there’s another implicit assumption at work here: the be- profiles could be used by public bodies—cities, municipali- lief that as long as we are not under duress when doing so, ties, utilities—to improve their service offerings, making we should be free to trade our data—and as much of it— them more sustainable and personalized. (Personalization, as we want. It is a seemingly uncontroversial assumption, by the way, does not need to lead to the kinds of reputation at least in some areas. Why, after all, stop people who want concerns that arise in the context of using Uber or Airbnb, to give away their health records to universities or hospitals to contribute to scientific discoveries? Ideally, we might want them to do so out of humanitarian reasons, but one can think of exceptions (e.g. when time is of the essence), where the promise of immediate monetary compensation might get the job done faster. People who surrender their data for research purposes do not normally expect their own lives to be transformed as a result. But most of the data we surrender to private companies has a different quality to it: it’s highly action- able and can immediately lead to changes in our own lives. For example, we allow our smartphone to access our location—and our ads become more relevant. We search for some nutritional supplement online—and ads for weight loss follow us everywhere. We shop for certain products— and the store Target infers we might be pregnant and sends us relevant promotional materials. Much of our personal data has this important life- shaping quality to it: its tight, real-time integration with commercial institutions that structure our daily life—from restaurants to travel sites to shops—is responsible not just for the particular choices that we make but also for the kinds of anxieties and aspirations that inform how we ar- rive at those choices. The problem is that the moment we reveal that we are entering this experimental space—via a search query or a Freudian slip in an email or even some random outburst of emotion detected by our smart glass- es—our autonomy is compromised. The immense plastic- ity of our environment presents us with options that seek to push our self-development in a direction favorable to advertisers (and, increasingly, to nudging regulators in the government) rather than let us travel in a direction that we would choose had such interference not taken place. To sell our intimate data in bulk is to shrink this experimental space to a minimum.

f Europe is serious about creating a digital society that adheres to the humanistic values it holds dear, it won’t I be enough to create a European Google: to think in those terms is to miss the shift to data-centric capitalism. We should not just think of new ways to regulate Google Orientation and Facebook and the rest as they exist today; we must also rethink the very basic form in which the services that they An uncompromising integrity in an currently provide are to be provided in the future. It is not ever changing world. That is what makes clear that the model with which we have ended up would DIE ZEIT the most read and largest-selling be favored by anybody concerned with public interest. quality newspaper in Germany. What’s needed is structural and institutional innovation that could reclaim data as a public good, place it www.zeit.de outside of the market, and then promote entrepreneurial activities on top of it. This won’t be easy, but the incentives, for politicians at least, could not be greater: another decade of inaction, and Google and Facebook will end up running their own quasi-state, because they could very conceivably control both our identity and our access to basic infrastructure—something already occurring in parts of the developing world. A more depressing development for human freedom can hardly be imagined. □

18199_ZANZ_EXT_BerlinJourna_ANZ [P].indd 1 10.03.15 11:38 18 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

WHENCE “DATA”?

The surprising origins of a ubiquitous term by Daniel Rosenberg

pen the ne wspaper on any given day and you are surprising: the seventeenth-century world was steeped likely to find one or more stories about the impor- in many kinds of data immediately recognizable as such O tance of data in our everyday lives. These stories today, from demographer John Graunt’s mortality tables are no longer clustered mainly in the business or science to the gold-clasped accounts book that Louis XIV kept in section, as they were just a few years ago, but also in the his pocket to the “weather clock” designed by Christopher sports, entertainment, and fashion pages, and very often in Wren—the architect who rebuilt London after the Great the headlines themselves. Fire of 1666—for recording temperature and barometric If the press is to be believed, Germany won the last pressure in real time. Yet the “data” being discussed at the football World Cup because of data, and Barack Obama time was distinct from any of these things, and, in general, the last two US presidential elections. The losers in these on the subject of “data,” it wasn’t a Graunt or a Wren who contests were data aficionados, too, of course. Sport is was doing the talking. now governed by the statistical rules of “moneyball,” and How do we know? These days, there are plenty of new politicians are “data guys”—to use the phrase favored by data tools for doing the research. Google, for example, of- Obama’s last electoral opponent. “Data” has acquired a fers an online device called the Google Books Ngram Viewer kind of aura, as if it unlocked a realm beyond opinion, be- to chart the frequency of words and phrases by year in the yond partisanship, beyond theory. books included in its database. With only a few keystrokes, Claims about the ubiquity of data in our environment an everyday user can perform quantitative analysis on a cor- may be more or less accurate, but even as claims they rep- pus of over five million books, a feat impossible for a scholar resent something powerful: the idea of data—“data-ism” with the best resources in the world only a few years ago. even—has become central to contemporary culture, to our For the term “data,” the Google Ngram Viewer (see understanding of the world, and ourselves. Image 1) produces a very intuitive graph, a curve that creeps Neither the idea of data nor the technical practices that along close to zero, begins to pick up in the nineteenth cen- support it are altogether new. In one way or another, we tury, and rockets skyward in the middle of the twentieth. At have inhabited data cultures since the first tax rolls were first blush, this seems right, even obvious. In the increas- inscribed and populations counted. And even as a subject ingly mechanized and bureaucratized world of the nine- of explicit discussion, the term “data” has been around for teenth century, data gathering and analysis mattered more some time. In English, we’ve been talking about “data” for and more. In the networked electronic world of the twenti- more than three centuries now. And, in important ways, eth and twenty-first centuries, data went nova. the history of the term is a history of modernity itself. But we ought to be careful about how we use these new big data tools in the arena of culture where they are Taravel b ck in time to the 1640s, and people are already mostly unfamiliar, particularly when they provide results talking about “data,” not in the arts and letters section of that reinforce what we are inclined to expect. There are a the local shipping news, granted, but in a number of spe- lot of easy mistakes to be made. Consider, for example, the cific and important contexts. In some ways, this is not diagram on the following page produced with the same spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 19

Image 1

Google tool, depicting the frequency of the term “atomic English Dictionary. But it would be a mistake to think that bombs” from 1800 to 2000 (see Image 2). The chart shows this simply reflects the virtues of old humanistic tech- a massive usage spike around the end of World War II. This niques in comparison with the data-driven approaches of is followed by a substantial fall and then a kind of steady today. A monument of pen-and-paper scholarship, the OED persistence up to the present. The result is so intuitive, it was nonetheless a highly novel project, remarkable even seems virtually unarguable: the first atomic bomb set off a now. Today, we would call its approach “crowd sourcing”: panic, which soon settled into a generalized cultural anxi- evidential quotations were contributed by ordinary read- ety. It’s a great story. If only it were true. Factor in the ad- ers, mailed to the OED’s editorial offices on paper slips, and ditional term, “nuclear weapons,” and the anxiety no longer filed in a purpose-built data collection center known as the levels off (see Image 3). scriptorium, where they were sorted and stored. From the The term “data,” too, turns out to be a good example OED, we learn that the term “data” emerged in English not for how tricky it can be to interpret big data such as that in the 1940s but in the 1640s, and the origins of “data” as behind the Google Ngram Viewer in the cultural sphere. In traced by the OED turn out to be surprising. the case of “data,” the Ngram Viewer correctly identifies When it first entered English, “data” was less the prov- the moment when the concept “data” takes off as a sub- ince of the scientist than the priest. Consider the very ject of discussion in the general culture, yet it obscures the first use of “data” cited by the OED, from a series of pub- crucial early moments in the story of “data” in the seven- lished letters between the prominent Anglican theologian, teenth and eighteenth centuries, when “data” so-called Henry Hammond, one-time chaplain to Charles I, and the first emerged as a term of intellectual importance. Presbyterian controversialist, Francis Cheynell. In the letters, Hammond defends the “set forms” of To be fair, it is hard to blame Google for stumbling over the the Anglican liturgy against Cheynell’s critique. In refuting seventeenth- and eighteenth-century data on “data.” “Data” Cheynell, Hammond paraphrases the tangle of theological is a funny term and very hard to search. One reason is that propositions posited by his rival (“that there were an ordi- many digital resources, Google Books included, are not yet nary gift of Prayer and that to be stirred up and exercised, very good for the period before the nineteenth century. But that Ministers should study to pray seasonably, . . . that he there are others, too: not least of all, the presence of the word that hath not ordinary wisdom to pray as he ought, is not “data” in Latin, a language still used extensively in the early called by Christ to be a Minister of the Gospel” . . . ) in or- modern period. Careful examination of the sources clarifies der to dismiss them with a single stroke. Hammond writes, why the real quantitative rise of the English word “data” in “Were, I say, all this granted to you, yet sure from all this the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries does not show up heap of data (if they were concessa too) it would not follow in the Google Ngram: it is offset by the decline of Latin at the that it was necessary . . . to abolish all set forms in the pub- same time, resulting in a flat curve in the Ngram Viewer. lique service of God.” An excellent indicator of what Google’s Ngram is miss- In this firstOED citation, “data” are stipulations, things ing may be found using a much older reference, the Oxford taken for granted in an argument. Though he does not agree 20 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

Image 2

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with Cheynell’s propositions, for the sake of argument, and, Latin learning, nothing was more natural than to call such because they have no bearing on the larger matter at hand, givens “data.” Hammond concedes them. They are, as he says, both data For Hammond, “data” does not name one kind of thing and concessa . . . and a heaping helping, no less. or another. It simply identifies what is given. A parallel lin- The notion that a theological proposition or directive guistic strategy was employed in mathematics in the same might be called “data” feels strange today, but to Hammond period. In math, one may posit values arbitrarily—let X = 3, and his contemporaries, it was not surprising in the least. and so forth. Such values, too, were known as “data.” Here In Latin, after all, the word “data” is nothing more than the again, it is essential to note that calling something “data” plural of the neuter past particle of the verb dare, to give. says nothing whatever about its truth. To the contrary, the For Hammond, “data,” were “givens,” facts, propositions, or appellation “data” signals that the question of reference to principles, treated as matters beyond argument because the world is at least temporarily placed out of bounds. A math they were true, as in the case of statements in the Bible, or problem may well be inspired by facts in the world. The X because they were agreed upon for the sake of argument, above might be apples or oranges, but once we decide that X as here. For an Oxford-educated clergyman steeped in is “data,” any question of counting actual fruit is off the table. spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 21

In a certain kind of situation, an early modern writer Franklin employs “data” to refer to quantitative facts might well have accepted that his or her “data” were “facts,” gathered through observation and collection and subject to but such an argument would not have meant much one mathematical analysis, much as we do today. That Franklin way or another, since the point of calling facts “data” was might use “data” so casually suggests he took his usage precisely to moot that question. And in a different kind of to be transparent. What’s more, even fifteen years earlier, case, such as that of Hammond, where the “data” were when Croker was writing, it was already possible to poke merely “concessa” for the sake of this particular argument, fun at the pseudo-scientific way that people talked about the author would certainly have rejected the equivalence “data” as in this social satire modeled on Laurence Sterne: of “data” and “facts.” A century later, the same principles were still active, but Sarah, now advanced to her seventy-sixth year, was, had typical uses of the word “data” were changing. This did not she been stretched out to her utmost length about five feet happen all at once. Take, for example, the 1761 pamphlet three inches, honest measure; and as she was generally Experimental Magnetism by another Oxford-trained scholar, seen making an obtuse angle from her middle of about the long-forgotten Temple Henry Croker. In it, Croker makes 95° 36’, it will be easy for mathematicians to compute the the following intriguing statement: “Till Experimental length of the line, they will imagine to be extended from Philosophy was introduced, All Science was founded upon the tip of her coif to the toe of her shoe. But as this is a mat Data.” ter of science, out of my reach, I can but shew my good Without some historical context, it is hard to under- will by assigning these data, little doubting that my sec stand what Croker could possibly have meant by this. In ond edition of this third volume will contain the calcula fact, from a modern perspective, Croker appears to have his tion at length to one millionth part of an hair’s breadth. terms exactly backwards. For him, the abandonment of “data” was a crucial and definitive step toward modern science. For the author, John Carr, “data” conjures empirical, quan- “Data” were not experimental facts; they were axioms given titative science in both its usual practice and its excess— prior to experimental investigation. Further scientific ad- the beachhead of the calculator in the fields of social life. vance, Croker writes, “must result, not from Fancy but from From the middle of the century, Croker’s usage was waning, Facts, not from artfully devised Systems, but from real Exper and a modern sense was catching on. iments”—from real experiments and facts, not from “data.” Alas, Croker made no great contribution to the history ata” may also be “facts,” but by using the term of science. His research into perpetual motion foundered, “ data” we are putting them in a specific rhetori- as did less grandiose plans for a horizontal windmill. Yet “D cal light, accepting them as stipulated. When his statement about data was no crank gesture. For him, as we use “facts,” we are placing emphasis elsewhere, as ety- for many in his day, from John Wesley to Tobias Smollett, mology suggests. In contrast to “data,” from dare, “to give,” “data” still meant “givens,” as it did in Latin, and as it did “fact” is from the Latin verb facere, meaning “to make” or for Hammond and Cheynell in the previous century. But at “to do.” Thus, when we call something a fact, we emphasize the time Croker was writing, and as his own argument sug- that it truly exists. In a certain kind of argument, “facts” are gests, assumptions about what constituted givenness were likely also to be treated as “givens” or “data.” In another themselves changing. Both the epistemological and the kind of argument, in algebra for example, “givens” may just linguistic ground were shifting beneath Croker’s feet. as well be arbitrary. What unites these cases, what makes A 1775 letter from Benjamin Franklin to his friend, the data “data,” is not existential truth but status as an accept- scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley, illuminates this ed premise for argument. Moreover, as often as not, in the point. Here, Franklin employs the term “data,” with some early modern period, facts and data were framed as con- irony, to describe an imaginary political calculus on wheth- traries. (In our age of “big data,” this possibility feels arrest- er or not to go to war. In suggesting that Britain reconsider ingly prescient.) its opposition to American independence, Franklin writes, Ironically, with the rise of empiricism in the eighteenth century, the terminological waters grew cloudi- Tell our dear good friend [Richard Price], who sometimes er. The term “data” grew in importance. It was employed has his doubts and despondencies about our firmness, in more arenas, and the fields of mathematics and theol- that America is determined and unanimous; a very few ogy accounted for an ever smaller fraction of total uses. At tories and placemen excepted, who will probably soon the same time, “data” came more often to be used in the export themselves.—Britain, at the expence of three mil sense of raw, unprocessed information. As “data” came to lions, has killed 150 Yankies this campaign, which is be regularly employed in empirical fields such as medicine, £ 20,000 a head; and at Bunker’s Hill she gained a mile of finance, natural history, and geography, it became usual to ground, half of which she lost again by our taking post on think that “data” could be the result of an investigation, not Ploughed Hill. During the same time 60,000 children have only its premise. Broadly speaking, this association held for been born in America. From these data his mathematical the next century and a half. head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary And then something changed again. to kill us all and conquer our whole territory. 22 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

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With the emergence of electronic computing, a new epistemological mirror, showing us what we take for terminological need arose. Just as in the seventeenth cen- granted. Without changing meaning, “data” has repeatedly tury, in the second half of the twentieth, it became impor- changed referent. It went from being reflexively associated tant to distinguish between facts and givens. This second with things outside of any possible process of discovery to time around, some term was needed to name the values the very paradigm of what one seeks through experiment upon which we calculate, independent of the question of and observation. It changed referent again in our contem- what they represent. Some term was needed to name the porary period when it came to be associated with quanti- stuff that computers work on (see Image 4). fied information structured, stored, and communicated by Like the first transformations in the term “data” when computer. it came out of Latin, this more recent change is hard to This most recent change laid the linguistic groundwork perceive from the simple quantitative data on language for a wide range of now-ubiquitous uses such as “personal alone—what linguists refer to as the “bag of words.” In the data,” “big data,” and the like. But we should be clear: from word counts produced from Google Books and other cor- the point of view of our everyday language, this recent ex- pus-based resources, the history of “data” looks like one plosion of “data” is only a revolution in that older, classical big explosion starting in the middle of the twentieth cen- sense of the term, as a circling back whence we came. And tury, cresting around its end. Of course, that’s right from our understanding of how “data” works in our language one perspective: we live in an age of data, both big and per- and culture may benefit from this perspective. sonal. And it is no accident that the word “data” shows up “Data” matters enormously in our world and the ways so frequently in our literature. What this quantitative ac- we talk about it. It is ubiquitous and powerful. For this rea- count misses is the way in which the application of “data” son, it is tempting to imagine that “data” is also new. From changed during this same period. the point of view of artifacts—mortality tables, account Yes, in strictly quantitative terms, “data” mattered books, temperature records, and the like—we would do more in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth, well to take a longer perspective. This is true, too, for lan- more in the twentieth than the nineteenth, and, toward guage. Here, a little history, and indeed a little data, taken the end of the twentieth century, more than ever before. with the correct dose of salt, may clarify matters and put But, in the realm of usage, the story is a bit more back-to- them in a different light. the-future than onward-and-upward. That is to say, the It is tempting to want to discover the essence of “data,” ways we use “data” now hark back all the way to the days to determine exactly what kind of fact it is. But this misses of Henry Hammond. the most important reason why the term “data” has proven useful in so many areas of our contemporary culture. “Data” As Hammond’s usage suggests, from the beginning, “data” first emerged as a tool for setting aside questions of ontol- was a rhetorical concept. “Data” means today, as it al- ogy. It re-emerged at the center of our general culture as it ways has, that which is given. As a consequence, for three produced ontologies of its own. □ centuries, the term has served as a kind of historical and spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 23

CAN WE SAVE THE INTERNET?

The following is an excerpt from a panel discussion held at the European School of Management and Technology on January 16, 2015, on the occasion of the German publication of Andrew Keen’s The Internet Is Not the Answer (as Das digitale Debakel), in cooperation with the German Norbert Riedel: The Internet transcends borders, and Foreign Office and Deutsche that’s why it is an issue for foreign policy, which is why it is of interest to me. I find that people are worried Verlags-Anstalt. In addition to about two different things: on the one hand, there is the entrepreneur, writer, and a fear of an omnipotent state—Big Data leading to Big broadcaster Andrew Keen, the Brother. I think the state has an important role in In- panel also included Norbert Riedel, ternet governance, but there is one precondition, and that is trust. Unfortunately, because of the revelations Commissioner for International of Edward Snowden, there has been an erosion of trust. Cyber Policy for Germany’s But governments and states, together with all stake- Federal Foreign Office, Sandro holders—with citizens, with private companies, with Gaycken, Senior Researcher on science, with international partners—have to make sure that there is Internet governance. On the other Cybersecurity at the European hand, I also sense that the public feels that the pow- School of Management and er of states and governments is limited. Searching for Technology in Berlin, and a restaurant on your iPhone, or buying a book online, Christoph von Marschall, Chief you have the feeling that Big Brother is watching you, and you’re wondering, Who really makes the rules? Is Diplomatic Correspondent for the it the state or the big companies? I think this is quite German daily Der Tagesspiegel. an important discussion. As Andrew Keen described in 24 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

his book, there are different discussions about privacy societal well-being. When I look to the German discus- here in Germany and in the US. Bringing these debates sion, it’s mainly that government is a threat, or, rather, together is the goal of the so-called “Transatlantic governments are the threat. If it is not our government, Cyber Dialogue” that German Foreign Minister Frank- then it is the governments that are spying on us, and Walter Steinmeier and US Secretary of State John Kerry so on. It’s interesting that this is mainly an accusation initiated in 2014. leveled at the United States, and the question of what Russia or China does is curiously absent. Christoph von Marschall: Sandro Gaycken, how do you So, with that as a background, from your perspec- see the net positives and net negatives of the Internet? tive, when you are dealing with threats and challenges, What’s the balance? what is uppermost on your mind?

Sandro Gaycken: I think it is still too early to tell whether Riedel: Before I address the threats, let me just say one it is a failure or not. What we are witnessing now is a thing about the positives. We have a Digital Agenda in typical historical process, in a way. If you look at tech- the German government and we also have one in the nologies of the past, with the bigger ones, like indus- European Commission, because we believe that the trialization, you always see that there is an early phase Internet and the digital revolution is creating jobs and where technology optimists, inventors, and entrepre- bringing economic growth. So, this is perceived posi- neurs have these great ideas about technologies that tively. But there are, as you say, a lot of challenges and can change the world. With industrialization, the risks—and, in my line of work, we start with the issue promise was to free us all from labor and from pover- of privacy. That is one of the outcomes of the Snowden ty. So they start building this machinery, and it gains revelations. We have to make sure that we also have traction, if it’s useful. And then you need more money, privacy on the Internet. As we say in the government, so big companies come in and investors come in with human rights must be protected online as well as off their own set of interests. Once this technology starts line. This is a challenge because the Internet is a new spreading and becoming more accessible and available field of policy. to everybody, everyone starts tinkering around with it. On the other hand, as Sandro Gaycken mentioned, That is what changes technology. we have cyber-criminality, cyber-spying, cyber-sab- We’re in a process now where we are seeing a break otage, and even maybe the problem of cyber-warfare. with this strongly utopian phase of the Internet, where So, from my point of view, the Internet is neutral, but everyone thought it was great, it would make us richer, like in the real world, you can have bad as well as good and make us all free, create one global community of come out of something neutral; the Internet can be peaceful, loving people. I grew up with this community, used for everything and anything bad. This is a chal- so I know these utopian ideas very well. This is all being lenge, because this represents a field of new risks—and changed because there are so many interests involved, perhaps we are lagging behind—because I also think which is changing the whole paradigm. There is a lot that between states and governments we need regula- of interest in state surveillance, for example—in the tions and standards and rules. We can use the existing whole Arab region, China, Russia—where the Internet rules, but they were invented without the knowledge is being turned into a machine of control and propa- of the Internet. ganda. There are a lot of problems with industrial espionage via the Internet in Europe. So, quite a few of Von Marschall: In your day-to-day work, you seem primar- these utopian ideas are being turned around because ily concerned with the threats to privacy presented by there are more players, because the whole technology governments or state actors rather than by new corpo- has become broader and more widespread, and there rate monopolies. are so many more people using it. But I think this is just an in-between step. From a historical perspective, Riedel: No, look, even if there’s an erosion of trust between it takes something like 20 or 25 years for a technology countries, we still always need each other. But it’s not to mature. only about states and governments; it’s also about big enterprises. Von Marschall: What are the special threats or challenges? It’s worrying, because we have our own society, our It seems there are certain distinctions—not only inher- own social system, but now from Silicon Valley there ent in the questions “What is the threat?” or “Who is is a wave, and we don’t have an answer. There is a rea- the enemy?” or “Who is misusing it?”—but also in a son why in Germany we don’t have Amazon, Facebook, fourth question: “What is the solution?” Andrew Keen or Google. The only big German enterprise is SAP, but writes that there is a role for the government. But he that’s totally different. So the question for the German doesn’t say the government is the enemy, the problem, government is: Who makes the rules? How should we or the threat. He says, rather, that what the free econ- answer the challenge? Just as an example, this is why omy is doing to the Internet might be a threat to our Google is such a big issue in Brussels. Can we find a solution in anti-trust law? So, yes, these companies are a concern.

Von Marschall: I’m sure we’ll come to that later, whether we should have a European consensus or not, but, first, I’d like to pose the same question to you, Sandro. From your perspective, what are the threats, what are the www.dombert.de challenges, what would you recommend we deal with?

Gaycken: Well, I come from the warfare arena, the espionage arena. But while we’re in this phase of transition from a highly utopian stage to a more realistic stage, the most dominant threats right now are the appear- DOMBERT RECHTSANWÄLTE ance of surveillance states—and I don’t mean the US and the NSA, but much more Russia, China, and the whole Middle Eastern and North African countries. These countries are really using this tool in a very bad way. So that’s a very big concern. So too, of course, is Dombert Rechtsanwälte sind bundesweit ausschließlich in everything you can do in cyber-warfare and cyber- Fragen des Verwaltungs- und Verfassungsrechts tätig. espionage, because there is a lot you can do, and there are a lot of states who are interested in carrying it out. Wir beraten private Unternehmen, Verbände und Kammern We’re seeing a global surge in activities and campaigns ebenso wie Landesregierungen, Landkreise, Gemeinden und directed mainly against Europe and the United States. Zweckverbände. A lot of the industrial espionage attacks are directed Wir sind Anwälte von Unternehmen der Ernährungs- und against Germany, and that is a systemic and str ategic threat to us, to our societies, as much as it is to our Lebensmittelindustrie, der Energie- und Entsorgungswirt- economic and political systems. schaft und sind für Planungs- und Bauträger tätig, wie für Umwelt- und Gesundheitsbehörden. Von Marschall: So let’s jump to the fourth question: Where are the solutions? Can we save the Internet and, if we Viele Kanzleien sind größer als wir, can save it, where do we start? nur wenige spezialisierter.

Gaycken: I think we can, actually. We’ve been working on trying to come up with a couple of solutions, especiall y Prof. Dr. Matthias Dombert P · Janko Geßner P now in Germany, with this whole new paradigm of Dr. Margarete Mühl-Jäckel, LL.M. (Harvard) P · Dr. Helmar Hentschke P Industry 4.0—the smart factory. That’s actually an area Prof. Dr. Klaus Herrmann P · Dr. Daniela Schäfrich P where Germany is becoming quite prominent in the whole IT world, which has never really been the case, Dr. Jan Thiele · Dr. Konstantin Krukowski · Dr. Susanne Weber apart from SAP. Now the machine world meets the IT Dr. Dominik Lück · Dr. Konrad Asemissen · Dr. Hans Christian Wilms world, and they’re both getting together. German com- in Zusammenarbeit mit Prof. Dr. iur. Dr. h.c. Franz-Joseph Peine panies, at least in a lot of the industries I’m talking to, are trying very hard to understand this, to wrap their P – Partner i.S.d PartGG minds around it. They are trying to bring some German engineering perspectives and values relating to data Tätigkeitsbereiche protection to this world. They have to first sell it on Abfallwirtschaftsrecht · Agrar-, Forst und Jagdrecht the German market, of course. But that, in itself, is the Gesundheitsrecht · Kommunalrecht · Bauordnungs-, nucleus of a little change in this field, at least. Bauplanungs- und Fachplanungsrecht It’s not as fast as the Silicon Valley stuff; it does not Recht der Erneuerbaren Energien · Energiewirtschaftsrecht have as much money as Silicon Valley, to be sure, and Emissionshandelsrecht · Immissionsschutzgesetz the whole pattern of innovation in the Valley is differ- Recht der Infrastruktur und der öffentl. Daseinsvorsorge ent. You have a good idea and you go to one of these Recht des öffentl. Dienstes · Schul-, Hochschul- und investor guys, and he gives you ten million dollars and Prüfungsrecht · Umweltrecht · Verfassungsrecht · Vergaberecht calls you back in two years. In Germany, when you have a good idea you have to go through cycles and cycles and cycles of justification and complicated processes for getting money. That takes a bit longer—a lot longer, actually—and is much more critical and much Partnerschaftsgesellschaft mit beschränkter Berufshaftung Mangerstraße 26, 14467 Potsdam · [email protected] Tel.: 0331 - 62 04 270 · Fax: 0331 - 62 04 271 26 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

more complex, but the outcome is much better. Our journalism, for example, teachers, lawyers, accoun- fail-rate is much lower, so maybe this different model tants, doctors. They are all challenged by this new of value-sensitive, slow, critical, cautious innovation world. But one of the great victims of this new world and evolution has a chance, now that Silicon Valley is is trust. No one trusts anything. We live increasingly sort of failing in some respects, and people around the in a culture of paranoia, a culture dominated increas- world are seeing that it is not good for them and that ingly more by extreme conspiracy theories—perhaps they need something new. considerably more in America than here in Europe. The Internet has not created that paranoia or those con- Von Marschall: Norbert, to you: Can we save it? And where spiracy theories, but it’s contributing to them. So as do we start? you have this disintermediation of the traditional authorities of the twentieth century—as journalists, for Riedel: First of all, the Internet needs governance, and example, have less authority and as everyone becomes this is not a task only for governments. We need all the more reliant on their own social network—we have stakeholders involved. We also need standards, and firstly a culture where we only trust people we agree that’s what we are doing in the United Nations as well with in the first place, and secondly you increasingly as in the EU. We want to find consensus in governance: have this fragmented, atomized, alienated culture. All what is allowed, what is not allowed, what we should we are left with is the self, or perhaps the selfie. do, and what we should not do—espionage, for ex- Ironically enough, everyone also always talks ample. There is also another argument involving sov- about the “attention economy,” but the other casu- ereignty. If we are not happy about what is happening, alty in this world is attention. This is a great audience. we have to find our own solutions. Sandro Gaycken Most of you are actually listening to what we’re saying. mentioned the Internet of Things, or Industry 4.0, but You’re not tweeting; you’re not on your computers. If it may be about becoming more independent from big we were in America, especially in Silicon Valley, people companies coming from the US or elsewhere. This has would be on their phones, they’d be networking. One nothing to do with protectionism; it is just a reaction to of the cultural consequences of this is a tyranny of the what is happening. present, a tyranny of the now. Jaron Lanier famously said, “I miss the future.” I agree; I miss the future, too. Von Marschall: European policy, which you deal with But I also miss the past. Alongside the economic and every day, must be very difficult, since, as you said, political problems of the Internet is the cultural prob- we are not able to find consensus inside theEur opean lem of the endless now, this tyranny of the moment. Union. Even with regard to privacy, the British and The mob runs from Twitter outrage to Twitter outrage, the French have a very different approach to that than and no one is able to concentrate on anything—a casu- we Germans do—at least the public perception is that alty of attention and trust. □ they have very different approaches. How does this difference affect your day-to-day business? Do we have consensus in Europe?

Riedel: We have made a big step forward in Germany and within the European Commission with the Digital Agenda. We are working on this and on data protection. I am sure we will have a solution in Europe this year. This is very important to bring the digital market forward. So, yes, it is difficult to find a common solution in Europe, but in the end it always works, it always comes to that. I am quite confident.

Von Marschall: Andrew Keen, your comments?

Andrew Keen: Yes. You brought up the trust issue a little while ago. People always talk about the “trust economy.” And what you have with the Internet is the disintermediation of traditional authority, the doing-away with gatekeepers, the idea that somehow trust would naturally form. I think that one of the cultural challenges of the Internet is that—and this is why this is sort of grand historical narrative—we have the undermining of the traditional institutions, traditional professions: spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 27

[FROM THE PALO ALTO SESSIONS]

by Joshua Cohen

The following excerpt, from the forthcoming novel Book of Numbers (Random House, June 2015), is a satirical excerpt from the dictated memoirs of “the founder of Tetration, the world’s most successful online search engine.”

was as like a dream. Or hallucination. As like and career trajectories, levels of greed and their enabling when the comp digirecorder shuts off when its inadequacies, significant degrees of gullibility too, or just IT condenser mic does not detect our speaking voice plain unadulterated stupeyness. for 1, 2, 3, 4 seconds and so the recording will become nothing but an artificially compressed memory omitting the We had set a full functionality deadline of September time in which life is lived, the times of blankness between 1996 but we were behind schedule by April so we revised the redlit sesshs just lost and irretrievable. That is how we for December, but then it was May and we were behind perceive that existence today, as like a vast unrecorded the revised schedule. If stage 2 completion was unfea- emptiness. We were not sleeping and not awake. We were sible we would redefine and make that completion stage convinced that we were writing everything wrong and had 1 so that everything was feasible. The aim was not to be gotten everything uncombobulated, that we were writing workable. Not to be presentable. But to achieve seamless the algy as like it were the businessplan, and writing the genius, no raphe. Only the rec investors say done is better businessplan as like it were the algy. The algy a sequence of than perfect. The techs say perfect is better than done. We specific commands executing specific operations, the bplan were blessed, in that we had no rec investors and were the a sequence of nonspecific goals and objectives or just sub- tech itself. We were always prodding, nudging one anoth- jective projections that would execute only if we failed to er subtle with our fists. Cull would say, “C*nts do not drip convince the VCs, or worse, if we succeeded at failing them on deadline.” Qui would say, “It is too difficult to coordi- totally. The algy used sequences of numbers to represent nate the squirts.” We talked as like this even with the girls functions, the bplan used sequences of letters to represent around, and the girls were always around, The Friends of the dysfunctionality of its intended readership, manipulat- the Trapezzi Sisters nerfing it up and tossing the frisbee in- ing prospective investors according to sociocultural filters doors and the only way to get rid of them was to send them 28 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

out on errands, or if they had a date. “No that is not the cor- appealed to Professor [?] Winhrad, who intercessed, and rect surge protector, and no we do not have exact change.” then we failed again and lost some of their admin and even Qui and Cull asked all of them out and the answer was, some faculty email and then they threatened us again and “But you never change your pants.” Cull and Qui appealed again and Professor [?] Winhrad in- Never. We shared even the undies, just took what was tercessed again and then they put us on probation, gave us folded atop the unit washer/dryer. We were all the same a second chance squared, after which, hasta la vista, baby. size back then. Fruit of the Loom was the best for extended sedation. No socks. Raffaella cooked but if she ever went had a problem but it was not us and yet aggro against our herbivorism and tried to convert us to neither were we the solution. Our prob- sausage we sent The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters to forage. WE lem was time and not because we did not Cull and Qui both ordered Greek salads but Egyptian Fuel have enough but because we had too much of space. was a mile closer, though OrganoMex had faster response We had so much of this space and all of it kept growing times despite being 2.2 miles farther away. Smoothies were but by the time we could crawl even a portion of it every- the optimum delivery system but we were never quite sat- thing had grown again so that we could not have kept up isfied with our formulas for determining whether the time even by walking or running. But that is not how to under- it took for us to make them was more or less precious than stand it. the money it cost to order them and anyway Raffaella did If the internet is the hardware and the web is the soft not have a blender. Qui and Cull stopped driving back ap- ware prox twice a week to San Francisco but still had to drive ap- If the net is the mind and the web is the body or the soft prox once a week to Stanford whenever our testsite would ware the body and the hardware the mind crash its servers and no one else could fix them or could Think about it as like knots. Shoelaces. If you tie them apologize both so well and disingenuously. To make up the but the knot is no good you can either tie another knot atop time Cull would ignore stopsigns and stoplights and Qui it or just undo it all and start over. But if you have never would ignore even the roads and once drove straight out of experienced a good knot in your life all you can do is do the parkinglot and through the condo quad and ruined the the both of them. Tie another knot and start over. Or think sprinkler system and so had to waste a weekend helping about it as like shaving your face. If you use a razor you Super Sal and Ronnie G dig up the heads and replace them. might miss a hair or not cut it completely but if you use We were so fritzed that once when we had to go to Stanford a tweezers and tweeze each hair you can bald your face to ourselves to tender our regrets for once again crashing even the follicles. But then the rash. You cannot do both. their servers and to try and retrieve the latest corrupted Forget it. Or as like losing a wallet. You can retrace your version of their financial aid site, we forget because we steps or you can, forget it. Or as like losing a button. You were passed out whether it was Qui or Cull driving the car, can either retrace your steps and try and find it or you can but one of them was passed out with us and the other got just sew on a fresh one. But to do both you have to have lost in Monta Loma or Castro City and sleepdrove instead two broken shirts or two broken pants and the needle, to the old apartment they shared in the Mission and even the thread. You have to realize the order. People wrapped sleepwent to the door but the key he had did not work and themselves in skins that fell off them before they invented the new tenants woke us up by giving us directions with a a needle and thread to sew them better before they invent- crowbar. For models of how best to present this period con- ed a button device to clinch them better, and all the fits just sult any national intelligence whitepaper on the behaviors worked. But imagine if everything was the reverse and you of terrorist cells or besieged messianic cults. had to invent a clincher before inventing the equipment to Still, the hours were no longer than at any other start- sew an animal skin before even inventing the animal. That up. The hours were no longer than life. Cull and Qui would was search invented by how to search. Invented by how to code and crash and then we would recode until crash- tailor the results to the user. Not to mention that “button,” ing. We would work on it as like online would work on us, in another context, could refer not to a clothes clasp but to which meant perpetually. In the beginning it was a site, a key pressed to launch a weapon. Not to mention that in and then it was a program to be embedded in other sites, still other contexts “needle” could mean “annoy,” or “both- and then it was a program to be tabbed in a browser. But er,” and “thread” might not be a literal string or twine but would we license it. Or sell it outright. Or just diversify it all figurative as like a “drift ” or “stream” whose speed is mea- as like our own company. Which would require which sys- sured in “knots,” “a train of thought” just “flowing,” until it tems. Requiring funding of what amount and engineering was “brought to heel.” The choice was to both needle the by whom. Was search even patentable. How to recognize a thread and thread the needle. Through its eye. In one ear, question. The appropriate time to incorporate. How to rec- out the other. To know the polysemy of tongues. We had ognize an answer. We had a title but no name. We were the to code a searchengine to check our own code for a search founding architect of nothing. engine. That should tell you everything. We kept failing, our own computers kept crashing and Or better, understand this by what we are, by what we kept crashing the servers at Stanford and then Stanford have postulated as like our axiomatic expression. Separate, threatened to banish us from the servers but Qui and Cull divide. Categories, classifications, types. Genus, species. Clades. It is history, it is historical. The world was discovered, the world was explored, and it was all so round and immense that it confused us. We reacted by formalizing ourselves into becoming botanists, zoologists, and so the plants and animals became formalized too, the botanists and zoologists arranged them. But they arranged them by how they looked, how they sounded, where they lived, when they lived, by character. How our humanity, taxon- omized at the top of the pyramid or tree, perceived them. But then the universe that could not be seen and could not be heard was discovered and explored. Cells were ob- served. Mitochondria. Genes. DNA. It appeared that not all the animals and plants were as like they appeared. A whale was biologically closer to a panda than to a herring. Turtles were biologically different than tortoises but they both were closer to being ostriches than snakes. Point is, what was important was not the organism itself but the connections among the organisms. The algy had to make the connections. We figgered if we could index all the tech links, and apply to each a rec link, whatever terminology we mortally employ, we could engineer the ultimate. The connection of connections. How a single user regarded a thing would be comp- Seit 1971 bestes Kinoprogramm, trasted by what things existed. Not only that but the comp- trasting of the two would be automated. Each time each immer noch kein Popcorn, user typed out a word and searched and clicked for what to find, the algy would be educated. We let the algy let its dafür guter Rotwein und die users educate themselves. So it would learn, so its users would be taught. All human language could be determined bequemsten Kinosessel der Stadt. through this medium, which could not be expressed in any human language, and that was its perfection. The more a thing was clicked, the more perfect that thing would be. We would equate ourselves with that. Now let us propose that everyone out of some psycho- sis suddenly tetrated for “mouse,” but chose results pertaining only to “device for menu traversal and interface,” or if everyone tetrated for “rat,” but chose results pertaining only to “snitching to the authorities.” Auxiliary metonymic or synecdochic meanings would become primary, while the displaced primaries might have their meanings rein- vested in alternative terms. It took approx millions of speakers and thousands of writers over hundreds of years in tens of countries to se- mantically switch “invest” from its original sense, which was “to confer power on a person through clothing.” Now online it would take something as like one hundred thou- sand nonacademic and even nonpartisan people in paja- mas approx four centiseconds each between checking their stocks to switch it back. The connection is basically the point. Or the motion between two points is the connection. Basically nothing exists except in motion. Nothing exists unless transitive, trans actional. Unless it joins. Unless its function is its bridging. This is what we meant by mentioning the blankspots on the recordings, the empties. The gaps, the missing Bleibtreustr. 12 | 10623 Berlin gaps. What is omitted from our recordings is all that links. Tel. 030 / 882 17 53 Relations. □ www.filmkunst66.de FEATURES New Work by Academy Fellows and Visitors

Ren the Driver Tom Drury 32

Good Soldiers? Karen Hagemann 36

Being German, Becoming Muslim Esra Özyürek 42

Artist Portfolio S anford Biggers 46

Train to Peredelkino Tomas Venclova in Conversation with Ellen Hinsey 54

Long March Martin K. Dimitrov 60

Is the Third Wave Over? S tephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman 61

Anthony McCall: Fire Cycles III (1974). Performance View. 32 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015 REN THE DRIVER

by Tom Drury

This short story is from the author’s novel-in- progress, part of his project while living and working at the American Academy this spring.

or nine years Ren had a job “I don’t know,” said Ren. “I’m not maybe he’d once wanted to be an driving up and down the East from here.” airline pilot, who handles no luggage Coast, delivering cars to sea- The ambulance people strapped except his own small roller. Fports and dealers and private Ren on a board and carried him up Ren had ridden the bus for days, buyers. His apartment and his bosses the slope to the highway and drove and he felt flexible as a gymnast to were in Massachusetts, but he was him to a hospital, where he would be off, with no plans to ever get back usually somewhere else. The job had stay for three days. He had a concus- on. He dropped his suitcase on the an undercover feeling to it that suited sion, a sprained wrist, and torn knee sidewalk and swung his arms in their his nature, but one summer it ended. ligaments. Compared to the Volvo, he sockets. His shoulders cracked and Ren was driving a bronze two- was actually in pretty good shape. The his hands shook and his ears rang, so door Volvo, known as a shooting brake, accident had not been his fault, but he he wasn’t really in top gymnast form. down to a man in Key West, when a ended up losing his job anyway, as the His hearing had never been good, and long piece of rusted ductwork fell off a Key West man really wanted that car. he thought that when he was old, he truck and struck the Volvo, sending it Ren stayed in a resort on Key would be deaf. rolling down an embankment beside Largo until he could walk without It was around six o’clock at night, the Overseas Highway. crutches. One day he went to the with the sunlight on the roofs of the This happened incredibly fast, and lounge by the tennis courts, where town. The Le Page River flowed velvet Ren had no idea what was going on. a breeze drifted down the bar like a green, as always, due to the algae that He saw streaks of light on dark, though ghost. Ren wore island clothes and a grew in the water. People came to see it was daylight, and he heard bells and knee brace and sat watching tennis. the river and the leaves in the fall. The bangs and woke some time later in a Today was his birthday—he would new marquee on the old theater said mangrove swamp at the foot of a hill. turn 34 at sundown. that the movie Whale Rider was playing. Deep pain suggested he might have Running backward in the hard Ren walked down the main street lost a leg, but when he looked they were sunlight, a tennis player hit her return to the town’s hardware store, which both there. The shooting brake was into the net, losing the set, and she his friend Kernan had inherited from a ways off, upside down and mashed, pounded her racket on the blue court his parents. Kernan greeted Ren and with the door broken open and smoke until the frame came apart and the closed the store, and they went to rising here and there from the chassis, strings fell in. Ren felt embarrassed the back room and sat on a davenport campfires in a metal village. by the violence to the racket, as if he drinking Leinenkugels. In time an ambulance came, and himself had done something wrong, Ren and Kernan had run around the medical workers gathered around and he decided then that he would go together in high school, and they the fallen Ren in papery teal scrubs home—not to Somerville but to South talked about one summer night from and white shoes. Dakota and the town where he grew up. that time. They’d gone to a party at an “What is your name?” abandoned farm, where people were “Warren England,” said Ren. In Le Page, South Dakota, the bus making a bonfire from the furniture “What day is it?” driver took the passengers’ luggage and woodwork of the farmhouse. “Mmm, Tuesday.” from the hold with the customary Someone heaved a door onto the fire, “Who is the governor?” sorrow of his occupation. Ren figured making a gust of sparks and flames. spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 33

And then a cornet player from the Le walls and dog-shaped table lamp and “I didn’t used to know that, but Page marching band took a corsage green-plaid bedspread. Ren put his now I do,” said Maisie. from the wrist of a girl and tossed that suitcase in the corner of the room and “Still.” into the bonfire as well. lay down on the bed and didn’t dream Maisie had large brown eyes and a Being drunk and courtly, Ren anything and woke up at a quarter to small, heart-shaped mouth. Some used walked into the fire and picked up the ten. He took his pills in the bathroom to say she looked like an alien, but her flowers. They were not burned, and and walked out in the rain to the face had always made Ren’s heart beat neither was Ren. And no one could Lamplighter Tavern down the road. harder. He raised the mojito quickly figure out how that was possible. With And there he sat drinking a mojito so she wouldn’t see the shaking of his a showy bow he gave the corsage and watching a Cardinals game on TV. hand. back to the girl. A waitress dropped a glass, and the “Weren’t you and Dave friends?” Now, later that same night, Kernan customers came alive at the sound of she said. and Ren drove to a different abandoned breaking. “We were arrested once, yeah,” said farmhouse and sat in Kernan’s car by After half an hour a woman named Ren. “Broke into the roller rink after the storm cellar, smoking grass and Maisie Cole came in wearing high hours.” listening to the book Moby Dick on tape. boots and a rough suede skirt and a “Why?” It was the part where Ahab is pouring green slicker that she shook out and “Just to skate.” grog for the harpoon throwers and nee- hung on a peg by the door. Maisie had “Is that a crime?” dling Starbuck. And just then a sheriff’s been an athletic star in high school, “The breaking-in is.” cruiser zipped in behind Kernan’s car throwing the discus and running the “You should go see him,” said Maisie. with the blue lights going around. hurdles. She looked more or less the “Oh, I’m sure I will.” “Now what,” said Kernan. same to Ren, with long brown hair and “How about tonight?” The cops walked up to the win- narrow shoulders, as she came over “I just got here,” said Ren. dows with their hands on their belts, and sat at the bar. “I’ve got to go out there and get the way they do. They must have Maisie asked the bartender China something anyway,” Maisie said. noticed the smoke. They might have Peterson for a Stone Fence, and Ren “Come with me.” inhaled it for all Ren knew. But luckily watched as China cocked her head Ren thought how he could just they were after someone who’d broken while listening to the sandy sound of as well stay in the tavern until they into a house, and they only wanted rum and hard cider and crushed ice turned the lights down and swept Kernan and Ren to open the trunk to mixing in a chrome shaker. everyone out onto the street. prove that they were not the burglars, “So what have you been doing?” “Where does he live?” he said. which they did very readily. The cops said Maisie. wished them a good night and left the “Driving.” aisie drove a Dodge Ram farmyard in a hurry. “Are you married?” pickup through the rain, “That’s just not the kind of thing Ren shook his head. and they rode out of town that would happen today,” Ren said. “I am,” she said. “To Dave Farmer.” listening to opera music “Oh yeah, how is he?” M “You only like that story because on the radio. The soprano flew to high you’re the hero.” “Good,” said Maisie. notes like a devastated bird, and the “Oh right. All those nice farm China Peterson poured the Stone announcer gave the song titles very things we burned.” Fence into a martini glass and tossed softly, as if speaking to someone with “We were terrible.” in a mint leaf, and Maisie lowered her a bad temper. And that was Berlioz’s “A curse upon the land,” said Ren. mouth to the rim and drank. Then she “Burning Flame of Love,” Consuela “All that’s a long time ago, though,” looked at Ren and rested her cheek Rubio and Orchestre Lamoureux, Igor said Kernan. “Le Page is getting bigger on the palm of her hand. Markevitch conducting . . . The gas and better. We have the gelatin factory, “Well, no,” she said. “Dave is not station and the fortune teller were the and we have the fireworks warehouse, good. I don’t even know why I said only places open this late in Le Page. and the airport, and the district courts. that. We’re separated. I’m living with “Dave had a girlfriend,” said Maisie. And people listen to me, believe it my sister. And, well, I don’t know “That’s why I left him. I mean, I had or not, I’m not sure why. They think how much I should tell you.” to. They weren’t careful. People knew. they’re doing what they want, but “That’s all right.” I knew. One time they were in our really they’re doing what I want. So if “I mean, everyone knows.” house and I saw them through the you need something, just ask me.” “I don’t need to.” window. Just watching TV. She had “Place to stay,” said Ren. “He tried to kill himself, Ren.” her legs folded under her. In my own Kernan dropped Ren off at the “I do wish you hadn’t told me.” house. They were sharing a blanket Treeline Cabins on the highway outside “Life is a sad thing.” over their shoulders. Watching a of town. The cabin that Ren took was “I guess.” channel we never watched. And I felt very comfortable, with beadboard like someone who was not me.” 34 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

The road to Dave Farmer’s house usic came muffled from split-level with an enclosed porch. got smaller and smaller. Pavement inside the house. Farmer “They’re American Blue Rabbits,” said gave way to cinders then dirt and the opened the door and let Farmer. “That’s Rusty, and that’s Dusty, branches of a single birch tree moved MMaisie and Ren in. He and that’s Caroline.” in the wind and the rain. What had wore a green and yellow Packers jersey One of the rabbits shook its back, seemed reasonable over drinks in the with the sleeves pushed up showing the second one hopped in a circle as tavern seemed straight foolish in the the red scars on his wrists. Perhaps it if trying to follow itself, and the third country. It was not like Farmer and was a point of honor with him not to went through a doorway into the Ren had been best friends. Yes, they cover them. Up till then Ren had not house. Light shone on their smooth had thrown the football in the empty really believed that Farmer had tried to gray fur. The one who had gone into street, and they had got arrested kill himself, because who knew what the house came slowly down a stair- together, but in senior year Farmer would happen after that? Yet Farmer way under the house and looked at had turned against Ren over a bet seemed to be in a good mood. He had Ren and Farmer. Its eyes were black they made on ice skaters in the Winter an old-fashioned turntable and Large with a ring of amber. Olympics. Advents and he played the records loud. “She loves them stairs.” “I don’t get what’s happened here,” When you’re rocked on the ocean, “Beautiful rabbits, Farmer.” said Ren. rocked up and down, don’t worry . . . “Oh thanks. I try to keep them nice.” “I’m telling you,” said Maisie. Sensitive to the music and the “You mind if I ask you something.” “Kernan talks like somebody in the medications, Ren felt the faint stitch “Maisie told you, huh.” Lions Club, Farmer tries to kill himself, of tears in his eyes. Linda Thompson “Well. I wouldn’t say you’re hiding it.” and you . . .” might have been singing about Farmer “I was pretty down, England. “I’m pretty sure Kernan is in the and Maisie and Ren, though in this Couldn’t sleep or eat. It was raining ev- Lions Club.” house—once Farmer and Maisie’s, now ery day in the spring. Christ, I couldn’t “I just kind of thought everything just Farmer’s—Ren felt like a bolt rolling even breathe right sometimes. And so would be the same.” on the floor after something compli- much fear and bad dreams. So I went “Gee, Warren, we’re not some cated is assembled. And then Farmer into the woods over south of the river. dream you’re having.” put on “Knock on Wood” by Amii Bleeding into the ground sounded sort “That’s true,” he said. Stewart, and the sadness disappeared. of natural, and nobody would have to “We have actual lives.” Farmer made horseradish vodka; clean up.” “It’s my fault.” he said it took him three weeks to “Who found you?” “It is your fault,” she said. “And me make, and they poured shots from a “Fish and Game.” what?” Mason jar and danced on a thread- “Do you still feel that way?” “What?” bare Persian carpet. At the kitchen “Well, it’s better than what it was. “You said ‘and you.’” table they played five-card stud for The psych ward is not for nothing. You “Oh,” Ren said. “It’s just you always matchsticks. They had captured that do learn. One woman had jumped out had such confidence. Winning every high-school mood in the little house, a window and landed on a car, and race. Cooling-off laughing. Skinny though there was something that she was the kindest and most intense Maisie. Hands in the pockets of your didn’t feel quite right. Once Ren caught person you could imagine. We would sweatshirt.” Farmer looking at him with wary eyes, meet up in the sitting room after lights “Well, my stride would get weird if as if he thought Ren might try to col- out. Also, I’m on pills.” somebody kept up with me,” she said. lect on their old speed-skating bet, but “Yeah, me too.” “Although I have to admit not many then Ren told him about the accident “I suppose we’re all fucked up in could keep up with me. What drugs in the Keys, and Farmer seemed more our own way.” are you on?” peaceful for having heard about that. “Seems like it.” “Nothing illegal,” said Ren. Right around midnight Farmer And soon they went back inside “Venlafaxine. A little Trazadone at night.” got a lemon-meringue pie out of the the house, where Maisie stood in the Maisie pulled the truck over and refrigerator, and they all had some kitchen with her green slicker folded took Ren by the wrists, holding his and agreed that it was good. And then over her arm. hands up in the dim orange light of the he took Ren out back, to see a rabbit “Where’s that thing?” she said. cab. Wet leaves spiraled down the lane hutch he’d built, and the two of them “What thing?” and pasted themselves to the wind- went across the grass and into a beat- “That we talked about?” shield. She closed her big eyes and up shed that was actually nice inside, Farmer went to the pantry and leaned in to kiss his hands. First one with track lighting and bales of straw brought down a slate-colored handgun then the other. Kisses of ceremony. and a framed print of a boat in a snow- and gave it to Maisie, who slipped “You’re home, Ren,” she said. storm on the ocean. it into the pocket of her coat. He sat They looked at the rabbits in down in a wooden chair. He looked their little wooden house, which was tired. He took Maisie’s arm and pressed it to his face. Ren went outside then and closed the door. He wondered why he hadn’t followed his instincts and stayed at the Lamplighter till closing time. He might be there right now, listening to the jukebox. He wondered if “Midnight Confessions” was still on it. The sky had cleared off and blades of grass shone chrome in the moonlight. Maybe Maisie had been standing right here when she saw Farmer and the girlfriend watching TV. The door opened slowly, and Maisie stepped out of the house. She took the gun from her pocket, ejected the clip, ran the slide back, and looked down the chamber. “You do that like a detective,” said Ren. “I took a course in gun safety,” she said. “Learned quite a lot, actually.”

hew next eek Ren got a used BMW coupe with six-speed transmission from a mechanic T in Le Page. It was racing green and an awfully good car for no more than it cost. People did not want German cars in Le Page, because they were considered too complicated to fix. Ren drove it nights, past the old school and the roller rink and the river with the lanterns and silhouettes of people fishing. The Lucky 13 had gone out of business but still had the sign on the roof. Ren opened the window and downshif ted through the curves above Le Page, and the town felt like his own again. One night he picked up Maisie at her sister’s house and they went to see the movie Whale Rider, in which a girl named Pai not only stands up to her grandfather but saves a school of whales stranded on the beach in New Zealand. Evidently the theater did not switch movies often. They sat close to the screen, Maisie on Ren’s left, so she could whisper into his good ear. She smelled natural, like flowers on wood shavings, and the lights and colors on the screen played in her eyes. She cried when the girl led the whales back to the ocean, because the girl might die, and Ren took her hand and held it tight till the lights came up. □ 36 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015 GOOD SOLDIERS?

Women and the military “ WAR DRAMA STIRS UP GERMANY,” read the German women in Generation War in World War II title page of the tabloid BILD following are presented only as caring nurses, the TV broadcast of the three-part worried soldiers’ mothers, Nazi mis- series Unsere Mütter—Unsere Väter, in tresses, or victims of Nazi persecution. by Karen Hagemann March 2013. More than seven million Counter-images were a female Red Germans, 20 percent of the total TV au- Army officer and a Polish girl who joins dience, watched the primetime series, the partisan movement. The series on the channel ZDF. Titled in English ignored the fact that women in the Generation War, the series portrays Third Reich supported World War II World War II in Germany and Eastern quite actively—and far beyond war- Europe and examines the atrocities time nursing work—through extensive committed by the German Wehrmacht deployment in the wartime economy, and its role in the Holocaust. where they increasingly replaced For German television viewers, conscripted men as the conflict pro- the Emmy-winning series seems to gressed, as well as through their in- have been quite stirring indeed. It tegration into civil aerial-defense and questioned the myth of the unsullied the military. Generation War does not Wehrmacht soldiers and demanded even hint at the fact that roughly every that viewers reflect upon their own twentieth soldier in the Wehrmacht family history. It asked who knew was a female auxiliary and that many what, who was involved, and in which of them served in the East. ways. In the subsequent contentious The same blind spots exist in media discussion, film critics, journal- recent TV shows about the two World ists, and historians criticized many Wars produced in the former Allied aspects of the series as not radical countries. They show women working enough or too stereotypical. But there on the homefront, as in the BBC series was one aspect that went unnoticed: Land Girls (2009), about the British the series reiterated old stereotypes Women’s Land Army, or the Canadian about the World War II gender order. series Bomb Girls (2012), which told the spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 37

stories of women working in a muni- similar gender trouble during and after charities, wartime nursing, and employ- tions factory. They also portray women World War II, in states and regions ment in war industries—were already as military nurses, as in the new with very divergent economic, social, extensive. The scale of women’s Australian series Anzac Girls (2014). and political systems. deployment during the Second World Movies too tend to present women War, however, far outstripped the First primarily as suffering war victims, The ability and the right to exercise in all belligerents. like in the German drama A Woman in organized armed violence have been In total, Nazi Germany deployed Berlin (2008), or as soldiers’ mothers defined as “masculine” since antiquity. nearly 1.4 million women during World and wives, working girls, and military Since the wars of the American and War II, with the proportion of women nurses, like in the Canadian movie The French Revolutions, the “power to in the armed forces reaching about War Bride (2001), the British production injure” has been associated even more 5 percent. Some 400,000 of them were Housewife, 49 (2006), and Atonement universally as “male,” and the “vulner- Red Cross nurses and nurses’ aides, (2007). At best, women feature as ability to injury” as “female.” In the and more than 500,000 female heroines of the resistance, as in the French film Female Agents (2008), or NAZI GERMANY DEPLOYED NEARLY as members of the intelligence corps, 1.4 MILLION WOMEN DURING WORLD as in the recent British movie The Imitation Game (2014). WAR II, WITH THE PROPORTION Oddly enough, most mainstream OF WOMEN IN THE ARMED FORCES historians seem to agree with such public recollections. In the majority of REACHING ABOUT 5 PERCENT. monographs and textbooks on World Wars I and II published in recent years, imagined gender order of nineteenth- Wehrmacht auxiliaries served in all women are rarely portrayed as active and twentieth-century nation states, war theaters in the army, navy, and supporters of the wars, beyond their military service, and with it the male air force; 160,000 of the latter served work in war industries and wartime right—and, in wartime, duty—to kill in direct combat as Flak-gun auxil- nursing. This omission is all the more on behalf of the state or another higher iaries in anti-aircraft defense units remarkable because today we can power, became a central marker of organized by the air force. In addition, look back on nearly three decades of gender difference. Men were sent off the civil Aerial Defense Organization research on gender, the military, to war as “defenders of the fatherland” used 500,000 female aerial-defense and war—and one of the most studied to protect and preserve a “homeland” auxiliaries. Women also voluntarily periods is the era of the two World that was embodied by women. The joined the institutions of Nazi persecu- Wars. Why did contemporaries and female complement was responsibil- tion, such as the SS (the Schutzstaffel, later generations alike find it such a ity for wartime charity and nursing. or Protection Squadron), where some challenge to recognize the increasingly During the age of the World Wars, 10,000 women were active. active participation of women in these however, a shift occurred: combat Since its implementation in the wars as auxiliaries and soldiers? replaced military service as the core fall of 1939, the supervision of the To answer this question, we need marker. Wehrmacht’s women’s auxiliary corps a comparative perspective that goes This shift was caused by a change was in the hands of the NS Women’s beyond “women’s military history.” in warfare itself. World Wars I and II League. With the aim of strengthening We need a gender perspective that were highly industrialized “total wars,” the cohesion in the corps, and obliging defines “gender” as a context-specific differentiated from earlier forms of war auxiliaries to maintain “unblemished” and relational concept and deploys it by their peculiar intensity and reach, conduct appropriate to the “reputation as both subject and method. Only then and by the abolition of boundaries of German womanhood,” they lived, can we understand the importance of between the front and the homeland. when possible, together in communal the military and combat for the gender One far-reaching consequence of this apartments outside the barracks and order, and the influence of gender abolition was the blurring of gender wore uniforms. Half of all female images and relations on military and lines: civilians became a major target Wehrmacht auxiliaries volunteered. war. Furthermore, we need to place of warfare by mass violence, and Not before the summer of 1941, when the execution and experience of women were increasingly needed for losses increased dramatically on the violence, the human “power to injure” military support. Eastern Front, did conscription for the and “vulnerability to injury,” at the During World War I, the first Wartime Auxiliary Service have to be core of the study of war. Only with industrialized total war, the number introduced for young women aged such an approach we can understand of women mobilized as auxiliaries—or 17 to 25. Auxiliaries first had to serve why female auxiliaries, soldiers, and even as soldiers, as in Russia—was still only for twelve months, but their partisans—despite their relatively small. But all other forms of female service time was gradually extended. small numbers—caused astonishingly war support—volunteering in war More and more women replaced male 38 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

soldiers and staff sergeants in the regular army, but in distinct women’s military only because of dramatic administration of the Wehrmacht units. Different than the British, the losses of male personnel. This was also at home and behind the lines, as American government decided not to the case in the Soviet Union, where well as in the aircraft, aerial defense, deploy women in mixed anti-aircraft manpower problems were most mechanical transport, ordnance, and defense units despite very good test pronounced. In total, about 2.1 million telephone units. In the final year of the results by the army, which were not Russian women were deployed for war, their service time was indefinite, published until 1968. The political lead- military purposes during World War just like that of the soldiers. ership feared fierce public opposition. II: 520,000 served in the Red Army’s The number of women deployed World War II female auxiliaries regular troops, with at least 120,000 by the military grew among the Allies, performed the same kind of jobs in of them fighting on the front lines; too. In Britain, at least 625,000 women the German, British, and American 200,000 served as combat medics; and entered military service as auxiliaries armies as they did during World War I, 80,000 served as doctors in the mobile and nurses and the proportion of but in addition were granted access to front-line hospitals. Another 300,000 women in the armed forces reached a several new positions in communica- women were enlisted in combat and high of 9 percent. The largest organization and anti-aircraft defense of an homefront anti-aircraft formations. tion by far was the Commonwealth- increasingly technical nature. Women In addition, the Russian Red Cross wide Auxiliary Territorial Service with replaced men even as engineers trained 300,000 women as nurses and 220,000 women enrolled. It was found- and pilots. In Britain and the United 500,000 as paramedics, who served in ed already in September 1938 as a States, auxiliaries became part of army all regions of the Soviet Union. Many revival of the Women’s Army Auxiliary of the mostly young and single female Corps of World War I. In addition, IN THE RHETORIC soldiers volunteered and insisted on 180,000 women joined the Women’s OF THE THIRD fighting on the frontlines. They used Royal Naval Service. Fewer women the ideology of “women’s equality,” signed up for the Women’s Auxiliary REICH, ARMED which they had grown up with in Air Force, which also organized female COMBAT WAS the Komsomol, the communist youth service in mixed anti-aircraft batteries, organization, and pointed to their where women were actually involved THE VERY CORE paramilitary and shooting training as in fighting. The members of theATS , OF MILITARY further legitimation of their demands. WRNS, and WAAF wore uniforms But the recruitment of female volun- and worked in five areas: domestic, MASCULINITY. teers was soon not enough. With the cookery, clerical, communication, and dramatic losses in 1942–43, the Soviet mechanical. In April 1941, all women’s personnel and were placed under regime had to start conscripting wom- services were brought under the Army military law and discipline. In Nazi en for the army. Roughly 3 percent of Act, which denied them the freedom Germany, they kept the status of civil Russian army personnel were women, to leave the service and allowed the employees without military status, who mainly served in mixed units. The employment of women in “operational despite doing de facto military jobs. Stalinist state hushed up the extent areas.” In December 1941, the British In legal terms, Wehrmacht auxiliaries of female military mobilization in need for manpower became so great were considered part of the “army public, despite its political rhetoric of that unmarried women ages 20 to entourage.” With this categorization, “women’s emancipation.” It anticipated 30 were conscripted by the National the Nazis tried to avoid the impression disapproval, if not outright resistance, Service Act, but they could only be that they used women as soldiers. In in society. used in direct operational roles when the rhetoric of the Third Reich, armed Extreme manpower needs also they volunteered. About 50 percent combat was the very core of military drove female inclusion in combat of the new female recruits chose masculinity. Accordingly, a secret com- positions in the partisan units fighting deployment in anti-aircraft defense. muniqué from the Supreme Command against Nazi occupation in Eastern, The United States deployed a total of the Wehrmacht instructed the Southern, and Western Europe, where of roughly 216,000 women: 150,000 as officer corps in September 1944: “The an average 10 to 15 percent of the com- volunteer auxiliaries, of whom 20,000 dominant principle of any deployment batants were women. Communication served overseas, and 66,000 volunteer of women . . . must be that ‘the female and intelligence services became other nurses, who were employed in all soldier’ is incompatible with our important female tasks, since women theaters of the war. Only 1 percent of National Socialist view of womanhood. could move more freely in occupied the US armed forces were women. The As a matter of principle, women do territories under the guise of doing auxiliaries were first organized in the not participate in armed combat, even errands. Predominantly, however, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), when threatened with being taken women in the partisan units were established in May 1942. A year later prisoner.” used for similar assignments as in the the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) was Army leadership in all World War regular armies. founded. It integrated women into the II countries accepted women in the spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 39

Recruitment Poster for the US Women’s Army Corps (WAC), 1941–1945. US National Archives and Records Administration. 40 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

A comparison of female military as the example of the Soviet Union important similarity: the cultural service in the various wartime powers demonstrates. Its official ideology of strategies that especially the American, reveals expected differences, but also “women’s equality” allowed not only British, and German armies deployed astonishing similarities. The differences for the integration of women into to maintain clear gender boundaries. are primarily in the war aims and the combat in mixed units, but also for the Women were only mobilized as “help- political ideology used to legitimate acceptance of women in command ers” of men. The recruitment posters them. The Third Reich mobilized functions. In the Red Army, female demanded that they “free men” for the German women for a war of conquest soldiers could be in charge of male army, support them in their struggle, and annihilation. Its conduct of war soldiers. This was impossible in the and become “good soldiers.” In their was characterized by a murderous will armies of its allies and enemies. illustrations, the posters emphasized for destruction and cannot be sepa- The similarities can be seen mainly the femininity of uniformed female rated from the Holocaust. Many of the in the public discourse, especially in auxiliaries while attempting to tame young female volunteers for auxiliary the cultural strategies deployed for their sex appeal to reassure parents service and nursing supported the women’s mobilization and for the and fiancés. Army regulations tightly political agenda of the Nazis. They were retention of the gender order, as well controlled the public appearance socialized by the NS youth organiza- as in the social perception. One major of auxiliaries in the American and tion Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of parallel between Germany, Britain, British armies. In the Wehrmacht, the German Girls), believed in the “superi- and the United States was the po- “Official Regulations for Female Signal ority of the Aryan race,” and wanted to litical and public rejection of female Auxiliaries in the Armed Forces,” pub- participate in the “German expansion.” participation in combat. Laws and lished in April 1942, went so far as to With defeat and retreat it became regulations reserved the duty and right demand that a “German woman must more difficult to mobilize women. In to kill for men, and political rhetoric not smoke or drink or wear make-up an “Order on the Implementation of connected it to male citizenship rights, or jewelry.” Furthermore, the army Total War” of November 1944, the NS privilege, and power. Both the Nazis leadership of all war powers attempted state declared the “final battle.” It and their Western adversaries alike to control the independence of the asked that “German women and girls strongly rejected “female soldiers,” auxiliaries by regulating their housing, do everything” in their “power to allow who symbolized for them the collapse their leisure time, and their relation- the soldiers . . . to devote themselves of the gender order and, with it, the ships. With such measures, they completely to service at the front.” social order. They did everything to hoped to counter public suspicion that For the Western Allies, by contrast, classify and present female service female auxiliaries had joined the ranks World War II was a “war of defense.” to the public as “noncombatant,” but mainly for adventurous and immoral They mobilized women in a struggle the needs of war resulted in less rigid motives—a suspicion that at the same for liberation and liberty and used the practices. This was especially so in time helped to “restrain” them. rhetoric of patriotism. In a situation of Britain and Germany, where women A third similarity involves the “national emergency” women had to were used in mixed anti-aircraft for attempts of the Western war powers “serve the fatherland,” too—by freeing mations—including in Flak batteries, and Germany to reinforce, through men in all possible ways for the which politicians and the military propaganda and popular culture— frontlines and by supporting them in sought to conceal in war propaganda. especially war movies, like the German their struggle. The Soviet Union also An exception was the Soviet movie Wunschkonzert (1940), the used patriotic rhetoric to mobilize for Union, which officially integrated British film In Which We Serve (1942), the country’s defense and liberation. women as female soldiers, but kept or the American Mrs. Miniver (1942)— But here the situation was more dire the real extent of their combatant the traditional gender order of national because of the occupation of large service hidden from the public. Four wars. One main function of these parts of the country. Furthermore, the main factors seem to have led to this attempts was to give ordinary soldiers communist ideology added a specific ambivalent practice: first, the context a cause worth fighting for, despite— dimension: the young generation’s of a dramatic military crisis, the oc- or better perhaps, because—of the vision of the “New Soviet Women” cupation of large parts of the country, opposite reality: in “total warfare” they included fighting in the event of a war and the danger of a devastating defeat; were no longer able to protect the of defense. second, a tradition of female military civilians of the “homeland.” Another In addition, the legal status and units in World War I; third, an official important function was to uphold organization of women’s service for political ideology of “women’s equal- hearts and minds, distract from the and in the military was different. ity”; and fourth, a population that was realities of war, and prepare society for Both depended mainly on the general largely conservative and more tradi- a return to the “normality” of postwar organization of the military, but also tional about gender roles. gender relations. on the extent of manpower needs. Related to the different attempts Predominant ideas about the gender to prohibit, control, or hide female order were an influential factor too, participation in combat was a second spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 41

There is much evidence that, in most A central part of the cultural de- version of the Käthe Kollwitz sculpture societies, the postwar era was a period mobilization in both the West and the Mother with Her Dead Son at its center. of intense “re-gendering” of the social East was the lasting concealment of Since 1993, it has been the “Central order. Governments sought to coun- women’s military deployment, which Memorial of the Federal Republic of teract the expansion of women’s scope had posed the ultimate challenge to Germany for the Victims of War and of action during World War II through the gender order. Memory construc- Dictatorship.” By virtue of this dedica- quick demobilization in industries and tion was thus of crucial importance for tion, it includes all victims of war. The the military. Veterans needed to be the re-ordering of the postwar gender fallen soldiers are remembered here reintegrated into society by returning regime. One especially fascinating ex- without any heroization. to their old jobs and become employed ample is the Soviet Union. Even before One forgotten group in postwar “breadwinners” again. In the West, this the war was over, Soviet propaganda commemoration are women in demobilization policy was accompa reduced women’s war participation military uniform, particularly those nied by a cultural promotion of the mainly to the role of medics, suppos- in combat positions. The fact that “breadwinner-housewife family” and edly working far from the combat they had been needed, did their duty, a politics that aimed to stabilize this zone. Military leaders officially advised and mostly did it well, has been curi- model through civil law, and labor and female veterans to remain silent about ously absent from collective memory, family policy. In the context of the their war experiences and the Soviet though remedied in part in 1997 with “economic miracle,” the 1950s became Union did not commemorate the large the US government’s Women in Military Service for America Memorial ONE FORGOTTEN GROUP IN POSTWAR at the Arlington National Cemetery, and, in 2005, with the British Monument COMMEMORATION ARE WOMEN IN to the Women of World War II, situated MILITARY UNIFORM, PARTICULARLY THOSE close to the Cenotaph in London’s center, remembering the war service IN COMBAT POSITIONS. of all British women. To this day, no monument is dedicated to female the golden age of the “breadwinner- number of female soldiers for several Soviet veterans. housewife family” in Western Europe decades. Auxiliaries also found no The odd paradox is that the more and the United States. place in the collective memory of the women had been necessary in war, Despite the socialist rhetoric of Western Allies and in the two postwar especially in combat roles, the less “women’s equality,” the trend in the Germanies. their service could be remembered Soviet Union and the new communist At the center of the national war after 1945. These memories, it seems, states of Eastern Europe was similar in memories of all Allied countries re- threatened to jeopardize social stabil- the first postwar years. The Red Army mains the fallen soldier—imagined to ity restored by the return to the prewar reverted quickly to an all-male institu- have lost his life in combat. Examples gender order. This is why collectively tion after 1945. To be able to integrate are, in Britain, the Cenotaph at remembering female military service returning soldiers into the economy, Whitehall in the center of London, the was far easier for the United States women had to vacate their jobs in the monarchy’s primary war memorial than for Britain, and certainly more war industries of the East as well. After since 1921; in the United States, the than for the Soviet Union and defeated 1944–45, the image of women as family- Arlington Memorial Amphitheater, Germany. Here, the grueling past was bound housewives and mothers came dedicated in 1920, and the national countered in the East with the myth of to dominate Soviet propaganda and, World War II Memorial in Washington, the heroic anti-fascist resistance, and due to vast losses in the population, DC, opened in 2004; and in Germany, in the West with a victimization nar- the regime now emphasized women’s the vast Soviet War Memorial in rative focused on the aerial bombing reproductive role. But this policy Berlin’s Treptower Park, commemorat- of German cities, postwar displace- started to change soon, because the ing the Russian soldiers who fell in the ment, and mass rape by the Soviets. recovering communist economies Battle of Berlin in April and May, 1945. In this narrative, women and children needed more and more women in the It opened in 1949 and served as the became the incarnation of innocent workforce. The East propagated the central war memorial of former East victims of war. As Generation War dem- model of the “double-earner family,” Germany. onstrates, even today it is challenging in stark contrast to the West. As a The sacrifice of war widows, espe- to the German memory of World War result, by 1950 the average percentage cially mothers, and the selfless work II and the Holocaust to recall the of women in the economically active of nurses are recalled as the female extensive and very active war support population was already much higher counterpart to male heroism. Civilians of German women. Such recollections in the East: in East Germany it was too were commemorated as victims of make it far more difficult to portray 40 percent and in the Soviet Union 38 air raids and war atrocities. One exam- Germans as victims of World War II. □ percent, but in Britain only 31 percent ple is the New Guardhouse in the old and in West Germany 30 percent. city-center of Berlin with an enlarged 42 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015 BEING GERMAN, BECOMING MUSLIM

An anthropologist’s oday it is estimated that there The leading question of my research, account of religious are 100,000 German converts published in book form by Princeton to Islam. It is not possible to University Press in November 2014, conversion at the know the exact number, but was the complex relationship between heart of Europe Tthat total is comparable the number of race, religion, and belonging in Europe. converts in the United Kingdom and Despite a centuries-long presence on by Esra Özyürek France. Even though there are so many the Continent, Islam is increasingly converts to Islam, and even though seen as external to Europe. It is judged Europeans have been converting to as a distinct set of values that belongs Islam for hundreds of years, today’s to newcomers who cannot integrate. converts generate deep astonishment I wanted to know what the experi- and suspicion. ences of indigenous Europeans who I spent three and a half years with embraced Islam would add to the German converts to Islam in Berlin and discussions of Islamophobia, anti- talked to close to a hundred of them— Muslim racism, and the “externaliza- male and female, from all ages and tion” of Islam taking place in Europe income groups, from a variety of prior now. I wanted to understand what religious affiliations, and with both East choosing Islam entailed in a country and West German backgrounds. I spent where more than 50 percent believe countless hours in German-speaking there are “too many Muslims” in their mosques, taking part in regular study, country. And what the consequences praying, or family fun events. I hung would be of individual conversions for out at halal restaurants, frequented German society, Muslim communities, Islamic clothing stores, and visited and their relationships to each other. German-speaking Muslims in their homes. I met a few people only once, when they ask about my research, most many others regularly at mosque people want to know why Germans events. Some of them became close convert to Islam. My answer to that friends; many made my life richer. is that it is not possible to know why spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 43

Omar Mosque in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images, 2010. they, or anyone, would convert, just as The overwhelming majority of century, German men and women, it is not possible for most of us to know converts I met reported that they young and old, rich and poor, gay why exactly we choose our partners. developed a desire to learn more about and straight, religious and atheist, Even when we feel like we know why, Islam following such an encounter, re- Christian and Jewish, Protestant and the reasons we attribute will change gardless of whether the “Muslim” they Catholic, indigenous and immigrant, throughout the decades. This is the met was religious or not, or whether have been embracing orthodox and same with the converts. they had a conversation about religion. Sufi, Shia, and Sunni interpretations What we can know, however, is Having an intimate or a meaningful of Islam. Different kinds of Germans how converts came in contact with encounter with a Muslim, many times have encountered different kinds of Islam, a necessary but not sufficient a mere nominal one, was what opened Muslims at different historical mo- condition for conversion. And in this these people’s hearts to Islam and en- ments. People involved in Muslim and case, Germans—and other Europeans couraged them to begin learning more German encounters at any particular for that matter—almost always about Islam, a religion they all told me time have largely shaped the vision convert following meaningful contact that they had heard of but knew little of Islam that German converts with Muslims. It is important to note about. This research sometimes began embraced. In the 1920s, because that, most of the time, the Muslim by asking the new Muslim friend about Muslims of Berlin were primarily they met is not a practicing Muslim. their religious beliefs but was most students, and the Ahmadiyya Society, Relationships are established during often done alone, on the Internet. which dominated the Muslim scene, holidays, at work, at school, and many Interestingly, unless the original was organizing literary meetings for times at night clubs. In the most typical Muslim contact also devoted himself open-minded intellectuals and literary account, a non-Muslim man or woman to Islam, the relationship between the types, converts came from a well- meets a Muslim man and is impressed new Muslim convert and the original educated elite—including Orientalist by some personal quality. The most Muslim contact came to an end; most scholars, aristocrats, and professionals. typically reported characteristics are often the convert continued along his German-speaking converts to Islam commitment to friendship, generosity, or her spiritual path alone. also included Jews who had come into family ties, and, sometimes, a sure The history of conversion to Islam contact with Islam during their travels stance toward the existence of God is also the history of Muslim integra- to Palestine, and sometimes through and his message. tion in Germany. For more than a their contact with Muslims in Germany. 44 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

Guest workers who arrived in perceived value of Islam decreased in promote a supposedly denationalized the 1960s to build up the German Germany over time, so did the socio- and de-traditionalized Islam that is economy changed the scene of Islam economic background of its converts. not tainted by migrant Muslims and and converts. These workers were In other words, the more marginalized their national traditions—but instead overwhelmingly single men. Despite Islam became, the more people from somehow goes beyond them. Some their isolation in factories and worker marginal segments of German society German Muslims, along with some dormitories, and their lack of access to found it attractive. But a closer look other European-born ethnic Muslims, the German language, they developed at German conversion trends leads to promote the idea that once cleansed of romantic relationships with German another, more positive interpretation. these oppressive accretions, the pure women. During this period, more Whereas in the early twentieth century Islam that is revealed fits perfectly women than men converted to Islam. there were only a handful of converts, well with German values and lifestyles. In the 2000s, the dynamic changed today the number is estimated to be Some even argue that practicing again. Even though older trends of close to 100,000. Conversion affects Islam in Germany builds on the older, conversion continue, today there is a the lived experience of both native but now-lost, values of the German new cohort of converts who are young, Germans and migrant Muslims, as Enlightenment (Aufklärung), includ- male, lower class, and often Germans well as the definitions of these terms. ing curiosity and tolerance. For East of color. These young men—and also The dramatic increase in conversion Germans who converted after the fall women—convert to Islam through over the past several decades shows of the Berlin Wall, becoming Muslim contact with native-born Muslim how much a part of German society can be a way of escaping their East friends, with whom they drink alcohol, Muslims have become. As Muslims German identity. smoke marijuana, paint graffiti, and have been transformed through their Born Muslims who grew up in listen to hip-hop music. As Islam in migration to Germany, they have also Germany increasingly adopt these dis- German society becomes further mar- transformed German society in fun- courses and promote de-culturalization ginalized and criminalized, it becomes damental ways. In the process, Islam of Islam as a way for Muslims to more attractive for marginalized non- has become one of Germany’s major integrate into German society without Muslims. German youths with diverse religions. giving up their religious beliefs. At the backgrounds who live in the affordable I conducted fieldwork between same time, a newer and more popular peripheries of big cities, like the Berlin 2006 and 2014. During this period, trend of Islamic conversion, namely districts of Neukölln and Wedding, Muslims became a larger part German Salafism, bypasses the questions of na- where I did most of my research, are society, which also became increasing- tional tradition and identity altogether wont to convert to Islam. ly Islamophobic, as witnessed in the by ostensibly going back to the earliest These neighborhoods are home recent PEGIDA movement. German roots of Islam, with converts isolating to large Turkish and Arab populations, converts to Islam thus faced the themselves not only from non-Muslim alongside poor, white native-Germans double challenge of accommodating society but also from other Muslims. and non-Muslim immigrants from Islam to German identity and carving One of my main arguments is Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, out legitimate space for Germans in that the call of many German and and Latin America. I found that Islam the Ummah, the global community of European-born converts for a purified is increasingly an integral part of Muslims. As Muslims were increasingly Islam (and the attractiveness of a new and ethnically mixed youth racialized and marginalized, both of Salafism) can be best understood in culture in Germany and throughout these proved to be difficult tasks. the context of increasing xenophobia Europe. Moreover, the significant and Islamophobia, where being increase in the number of converts ainstream German soci- Muslim is defined as antithetical to during the 2000s was conjoined with ety marginalizes German being German and European. When the global rise of Salafism, the school converts to Islam and confronted with unexpected hostility of Sunni Islam that condemns theo- questions both their from mainstream society, converts to logical innovation and advocates strict MGerman-ness and European-ness, Islam take an active role in defending adherence to shari’a law. Unlike other based on the belief that one cannot be the place of Islam in Germany by ethnically based mosques in Germany, a German or a European and a Muslim disassociating it from the stigmatized Salafi ones are eager to attract and at the same time. Converts to Islam are traditions of immigrant Muslims. accommodate new Muslims and teach accused of being traitors to European The German Muslim interpretation their interpretation of Islam in the culture, internal enemies that need to of a “purified Islam” is inspired by German language. be watched, and potential terrorists. Islamic revivalism worldwide, but The historicization of Islam in Having become new Muslims in a also by the Enlightenment ideals of Germany also demonstrates the context where Islam is seen as every rational individualism and natural religion’s democratization. One way thing that is not European, ethnic religion. While this call for a culture- of reading this history is as an index German converts disassociate them- free, tradition-free Islam that speaks of Islam’s declining value. As the selves from Muslim migrants and directly to the rational individual Get Old seems universalistic, in the contemporary German context it ends up being strictly particularistic or, more precisely, Eurocentric. It assumes that the “European” or “German” mind is truly rational—and that the “Oriental” mind is not. Free of the burden of its cultural past, the real message of Islam appears in its essential form. This is one of the reasons why the Salafi interpretation of Islam is increasingly popular among new Muslims in Germany. This puritan interpretation of Islam—conversionist, literalist, anticulturalist, antihistorical —is attractive to both converts and born-again Muslims, since it places them on equal-footing with—or even better, makes them feel superior to— all other Muslims. This is especially powerful in a context where immigrant Muslims are routinely accused of being misogynistic, violent, and uneducated. Salafism allows new converts to fully embrace their religion without having to deal with cultural traditions and ethnic groupings. It even permits them to feel superior to Muslims with immigrant backgrounds and invites them to a “true Islam,” which is not Turkish, Arab, or Pakistani. Salafi We’re getting older. mosques are the only Muslim spaces in Germany where piety matters more than ethnic or national background. And that’s good news. As Islam and Muslims become increasingly integrated into German It’s the little moments that mean so much to us. We want society, popular and state angst about to be able to cherish those moments for many tomorrows this ostensibly non-European but to come. Pfizer is working around the world to this end. well-established element is directed at For more than 160 years, we have been researching the small number of ethnic Germans and developing innovative drugs to help people improve who have embraced Islam. Converts their health and quality of life at all ages. Every day, we provoke so much anxiety not because make every effort to put our vision into action: Working they may turn Germany into a Muslim- together for a healthier world. majority country or terrorize the entire nation, but instead because simply through their (most often entirely politically unmotivated) personal choice of religion, they defy the newly established boundaries between political alliances, cultures, and civilizations. In this way, converts to Islam break ground for genuinely new ways of being and becoming Muslim, German, German-Muslim, and Muslim-German. At the same time, they provoke new anxieties about the changing realities of being European. □ www.pfizer.de

PFI_ANZ_GETOLD_BerlinJournal_105x280mm_RZ.indd 1 17.04.14 13:43

Sanford Biggers

Portfolio

What does a tree symbolize? Does it represent growth and groundedness, or is it more evocative of the gallows used to lynch runaway slaves? Perhaps it represents myths from Christianity or Greek mythology? For artist Sanford Biggers, it can represent all of the above —and his approach to communicating that complexity can be seen in his 2007 sculpture Blossom, which depicts a tree growing up through the middle of a grand piano. Biggers draws on inspiration as varied as Buddhism and Dadaism, as diverse as Beethoven and John Cage, and he has established himself as an acclaimed interdisciplinary artist whose sculpture, installations, and even music—performed with his group Moon Medicin—are in increasingly high demand. “Once you put yourself into a category,” he has said, “it’s immediately a limita- tion, and it can truncate what you’re trying to say.” Still, there are a number of themes that are frequently revisited in Biggers’ artwork, perhaps the most important of which is his ongoing effort to move as fluidly through the mediums of painting, sculpture, performance, and video as he does through the disparate themes of history, politics, high versus low culture, and humor. His work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, and the Brooklyn Museum in addition to many others both in the United States and abroad. [1]

previous page: Cheshire, 2008; Aluminum, Plexiglas, LEDs, timer; 67 × 33 × 10 in.; courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery, Miami

[1] Prayer Rug, 2005; Colored sand poured unfixed directly on floor; 40 × 20 ft.; courtesy of Triple Candie, New York; photograph courtesy of Tom Powell [2] Tamboline, 2013; Steel, tatami mat; 32 × 32 × 10 in. [3] Blossom, 2007; Silk steel, wood, MIDI player piano system, Zoopoxy; 12 × 18 × 15 ft.; courtesy of the artist and Grand Arts, Kansas City [2] [3]

[1] [2]

[3]

previous page: Still from Shuffle (The Carnival Within), 2009; Two-channel HD color video installation with sound component, 4:47 min.; courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery, Miami

[1] Hiro I, 2014; Antique quilt fragments, acrylic, glitter, spray paint, and assorted textiles; 36 × 36 in. [2] Haute Mess, 2014; Textiles, fabric, and antique quilt fragment, double-sided adhe- sive, treated acrylic paint, treated interior paint, and spray paint on archival paper; 35 × 37 in. [3] LLoottuuss, 2014; Antique quilt fragments, spray paint, and tar on antique quilt; 64 × 75 in. 54 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015 TRAIN TO PEREDELKINO

Remembering the Tomas Venclova, a poet, essayist, translator, and the Doctor Zhivago affair spring 2015 Axel Springer Fellow at the Academy, was part of the Lithuanian and Soviet literary and dissident movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1977, he became a founding member of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group and was subsequently stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Forced to emigrate, Venclova began teaching Polish and Russian literature at Yale University in 1980. This interview is excerpted from the forthcoming book Magnetic North, Venclova’s conversations with Ellen Hinsey, a spring 2001 American Academy alumna.

Ellen Hinsey: In 1958, Doctor Zhivago Hinsey: How was this letter of con- was published in Italy without Soviet gratulations transmitted to Pasternak? approval. How did it come to pass that you and a few fellow students wrote Venclova: While attending Boris Pasternak a letter of congratula- Moscow University, my friend Pranas tions regarding his nomination for the Morkus had established contact with Nobel Prize? some people close to Pasternak. As far as I know, the letter was transmitted Tomas Venclova: Everyone in our via Irina Emelyanova, the daughter of small student group in Vilnius loved Pasternak’s last love, Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak’s poetry. His nomination for who was the prototype for Lara. (After the prize was a joyous occasion (I be- the poet’s death, Irina and her mother lieve we learned about it on the radio, spent time in prison camps. I became which, in 1958, was less jammed than acquainted with Irina after she was before). During one of our meetings, released.) quite spontaneously, we composed a short letter. In it, we expressed our Hinsey: On October 23, 1958, the faith that Pasternak would receive the Nobel Committee awarded Pasternak well-deserved prize, and wished him the Nobel Prize. After first accepting good health and productive work. the award, he came under intense spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 55

pressure from the Soviet leadership trial. He politely refused, saying, “I Hinsey: Would you describe the and was forced to renounce it. How did condemned Pasternak, and I regret it.” scene at the Writers’ Union? you learn about these events? Hinsey: The storm around Venclova: The hall of the Writers’ Venclova: Again, by Western radio. Pasternak did not abate and the writer Union was full (incidentally, the Then, the Soviet media informed us was forced to make a public statement Union was located in one of the most of “the reactionary uproar raised in refusing the Nobel, which was pub- aristocratic buildings in Vilnius, a the imperialist press” because of the lished in Pravda on November 6, 1958. veritable palace). Not only were prize. In my diary, I noted that I had established writers in attendance, but eagerly joined the reactionary uproar. Venclova: I understood that the lots of young people, including my As it turned out, it was the Soviet pressure on Pasternak was unbearable, friends Judita Vaičiūnaitė and Romas response that soon developed into a and that he felt responsible not only Katilius. (Father, perhaps understand- sort of pandemonium. Several years for himself, but for the people around ably, thought it inappropriate to be earlier, Pasternak had attempted to him. More than one person, including present). Šimkus and I read samples publish the novel in the USSR. A group Pasternak himself, believed that he of our work aloud: I remember that I of highly placed writers addressed could be executed or at least impris- envied his technical deftness. Several him a letter explaining that the oned for a considerable term—not rather bland speeches followed. Then, novel was unfit for print because of long before, that had been Babel and a budding critic said that my verses its counter-revolutionary tendencies. Mandelstam’s fates, whose “crimes” were perhaps talented, but individual- Now the letter was made public. The were less serious than Pasternak’s. Still, ist and therefore hostile to the spirit phrase “an apology for treason” was I was unhappy that the great poet of Soviet society. “Such poetry could among its milder invectives. Dozens had been forced to his knees. Actually, have been written by Doctor Zhivago,” of letters soon appeared in the press, there were two public statements he concluded. After that, several older condemning Pasternak in the harshest by Pasternak, only the first of which writers attacked me in less ambiguous imaginable terms. This “voice of the struck me as dignified. terms. “The emperor has no clothes” people” was characterized by the re- was one of the milder phrases. To tell peated expression, “I haven’t read the Hinsey: In January 1959, an event the truth, it was only then that I fully novel and have no intention of reading was organized between two poets— understood that I was popular among anything so abominable, but…” The yourself and Vladas Šimkus—at the young people, and that the authorities phrase “I haven’t read the novel, but” Writers’ Union in Vilnius. You were 22 were determined to undermine that soon became an ironic catchphrase. years old. The premise of the evening popularity. My father, who was visiting Moscow was to set two young poets against When I was given the floor to at the time, recounted the reaction of each other, and to expose the decadent reply, I started by quoting a humorous some of the Russian writers he knew— nature of your work. You had previ- Lithuanian proverb: “We are all naked for example, Kornei Chukovsky, who ously publicly said that Pasternak was under our shirts.” After that, I said that supported Pasternak, and Konstantin your favorite writer. no one present in the hall, including Fedin, who denounced the writer’s myself, had actually read Zhivago and actions. General meetings of writers Venclova: This asw a typical Soviet therefore was in a position to discuss were assembled everywhere with the affair: the work of budding poets was it. (It was an obvious truth but a blas- express goal of condemning Pasternak. frequently discussed and evaluated phemy at the same time, since it went This happened in Lithuania as well. by the Writers’ Union functionaries. against the Soviet custom of slander- It was usually a prelude to their admis- ing books one was strictly forbidden Hinsey: Your father was among sion to the Writers’ Union. Member to read). I continued: “So now let’s those who condemned Pasternak— ship brought with it some privileges, forget about Pasternak’s fiction. As for the main one being the possibility of his poetry, I cannot deny that I love it Venclova: Yes. Perhaps he actually earning one’s living without official and have learned much from it, as well considered Pasternak’s stance to be employment, by royalties only. Brodsky as from Mandelstam and Akhmatova.” harmful. In any case, that was definitely was arrested as a “social parasite,” That created total consternation, and a black mark on my father’s biography. because he was unemployed and not a the meeting was immediately cut short. In his defense, I remember an incident member of the Writers’ Union. People from 1965. Father was telephoned by were sometimes allowed to make their Hinsey: Were you at all concerned a correspondent from the Moscow living as translators, but then they about the implications of such an act? newspaper Izvestiya and was asked had to belong to the Writers’ Union’s to express his disapproval of Andrei parallel bodies: all of this was mind- Venclova: Not immediately. I sim- Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two writers boggling bureaucratic stuff that ag- ply felt that it had to be said, otherwise who had published their work abroad gravated my life, and the lives of many I would have been ashamed for the rest under pseudonyms and were put on others, for years. of my life. After the crowd dispersed, 56 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

my friend Romas and I headed toward I believe we rang the bell, and a slen- listened, interrupting him from time his house, discussing the event. I told der, youthful-looking man came to the to time. I remember his words: “There him: “Well, it has something to do door and motioned for us to enter. He are two kinds of literature. Take, for with the meaning of life.” Of course greeted Natasha cordially. We sat to- instance, Thomas Mann: very wise, I understood that I had jeopardized gether in the spacious vestibule, where learned, witty, even profound, but it my admission to the Writers’ Union at one or two paintings by Pasternak’s remains what it is—just literature. the very least, and was probably now father, Leonid, hung. Leonid was a Now take Dostoyevsky or Hemingway. blacklisted for many jobs, but some- famous painter in his time, a friend They manage to create a universe how that did not worry me. of Leo Tolstoy, and Pasternak insisted that works according to its own rules. that he was a much better artist than And this is the point. My early poetry Hinsey: You have said that the himself. The poet apologized, saying belongs to the first domain; hopefully, event at the Writer’s Union was the that he had to go to Moscow in an hour my novel (he never said “Zhivago”) beginning of your “private war” with or so to attend a theater performance. belongs to the second.” His high the system. I think it was Faust, to which he had opinion of Hemingway probably had been invited by a troupe of East German something to do with the fact that Venclova: Yes, it was. I believe it actors. “What do you think—will I be The Old Man and the Sea had just been was on that day that the authorities executed afterwards or not?” he asked translated into Russian, and was im- understood that they were unlikely to half-jokingly. “We don’t think so,” we mensely popular among intellectuals. find modus vivendi with me. answered. There was also some discussion regarding Pasternak’s situation vis- Hinsey: Despite the events that Hinsey: If I remember correctly, à-vis the authorities. “You know,” he had unfolded in connection with the one of the points you had wanted to said, “it doesn’t matter to me that Nobel Prize, on December 14, 1959, you bring up with Pasternak was your some people denounced me and oth- decided to travel to Peredelkino to admiration for his early poetry, which ers refrained. No hard feelings, in any visit Pasternak with Natasha Trauberg. he had renounced. What was the case. Everything that has happened substance of your exchange? has brought me to a place where such Venclova: Peredelkino is a village matters seem totally insignificant.” ten or fifteen miles west of Moscow, Venclova: Natasha introduced When we left Pasternak’s house, I told with a small Orthodox church, next to me as a young poet who was attempt- Natasha: “He is so young and energetic which Pasternak was buried, in 1960. ing to translate Pasternak’s verses —he’ll live at least another twenty years.” It consists mainly of writers’ houses, into Lithuanian. “Don’t do it,” he said. I was wrong. He already had terminal so-called dachas, usually wooden and “It’s not worth it. My early verses are cancer, although no one, including sometimes quite spacious. Pasternak rubbish—mannered, pretentious, and Pasternak himself, was yet aware of it. was assigned his dacha in the 1930s, incomprehensible. If I have written when he was still hailed as one of the anything sensible in my life, it is my Hinsey: Pasternak died on May 30, “leading Soviet poets,” and it was there novel. Now I’m working on a play. 1960. You were present at his funeral. that he spent the last decades of his I hope it will be something that really Did you come to Peredelkino from life. makes sense—of course, only if I try Vilnius? To get to Peredelkino one takes with all my might.” a suburban train. The day of our visit I did not agree with his judgment, Venclova: No. During that period was clear, the landscape reminded me above all because I was not a fan of I visited Moscow frequently, and I was of provincial Russia (it was difficult to Doctor Zhivago. Yet I was too shy to at Natasha Trauberg’s flat when, as imagine that the capital was so close argue and just mumbled something far as I can remember, someone tele- by), and there was snow on the ground. registering my objection. (As for the phoned and told us about the poet’s Pasternak’s two-story dacha, with a play, The Blind Beauty, it remained death. For me, it was a veritable shock. glassed-in porch, was surrounded by unfinished. The first half of it, printed There was a strange coincidence, a rather large courtyard. The walkway after Pasternak’s death, proves beyond however, the full meaning of which had been cleared of snow by the poet any doubt that it was destined to be only became clear much later. On himself (he liked to perform domestic a failure.) May 30, unaware of the poet’s death, chores and, as far as I know, did not my friend Volodya Muravyov and I employ any help). There was a sign on Hinsey: What were your other visited the underground painter Oskar the gate: “Beware of the Dog.” Such im pressions of Pasternak during Rabin, who lived in a distant Moscow signs were commonplace in Russia and that visit? suburb. We looked at Rabin’s work, generally meant “Do not disturb,” which was more or less Expressionist, but here it had an ambiguous ring, given Venclova: We talked for perhaps and was critical of Soviet life, to put the epithets with which Pasternak forty minutes: that is, he talked it mildly. We then drank some vodka, had been tarred in the official press. animatedly and incessantly, and we and Volodya read aloud several verses spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 57

From Boris Pasternak’s House in Peredelkino. Photo © Igor Palmin, 1983. by a young Leningrad poet named Venclova: For the authorities, in the original charter). Incidentally, all Joseph Brodsky, including his famous Pasternak’s death created a sort of pre- the dachas in Peredelkino technically poem “Pilgrims.” I considered them dicament. Obituaries of Writers’ Union belonged to the Litfond. Pasternak to be rather weak and melodramatic, members normally appeared in the was never expelled from it; the Litfond but felt that Brodsky—previously press, yet Pasternak had been expelled was the only Soviet collective body unknown to me—possessed a sort of from the Union, and his name was that sheltered him from becoming an poetic charisma. Thus, on the very day virtually unmentionable. On the other “unperson,” to employ Orwell’s term. of Pasternak’s death, I was introduced hand, passing over the event in silence This unconventional obituary was to a different great Russian poet and was also inappropriate: it would just a formality, since the news spread future Nobel Prize winner. The next have been natural under Stalin, but instantly by word-of-mouth. Someone morning, I visited Natasha and got the Khrushchev insisted on a modicum put a handwritten note about the sad news. I went to the post office and of “liberalism,” however hypocritical upcoming funeral in the hall of the sent a telegram to our Vilnius circle that might be in reality. Therefore, a Kiyevsky railway station, from which of friends about the event. In the tele- small notice was printed on the last suburban trains ran to Peredelkino. gram, I used only the poet’s first name page of a literary periodical about “the As far as I remember, the police did not and patronymic, Boris Leonidovich, demise of B. L. Pasternak, a member remove it. Natasha’s husband Virgilijus to avoid any hitches in sending it. of the Litfond (Literary Fund).” The Čepaitis and I went to the station and Litfond was a survivor from the Tsarist boarded the train (Natasha was too Hinsey: Information about period—a self-supporting charity upset to go). All the carriages were full, Pasternak’s death was largely sup- organization. It used a percentage of and we ran into more than one of our pressed, but thousands of people its members’ royalties to help impov- Moscow friends. came to Peredelkino to pay their last erished colleagues and their families respects. (also incurable drinkers, as was stated 58 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

Hinsey: Could you describe the one of the poet’s friends, the elderly Venclova: Khrushchev was not a scene in Peredelkino? philosopher Valentin Asmus. Perhaps reader and formed his opinions about two or three other short speeches fol- books on the basis of information Venclova: The crowd was immense. lowed, but I have no memory of these. provided by his entourage. In this, he It assembled spontaneously and was Then, somebody shouted: “Glory to differed from Stalin who read widely, made up of people from every walk the deceased! He was the most honest not necessarily to the benefit of the of life. Many writers attended, even if person in Russia!” A commotion authors he acquainted himself with. It literary functionaries (many of them followed: the self-proclaimed speaker is generally believed that Khrushchev with dachas next to Pasternak’s) was silenced by people next to the was not without human feeling and were conspicuous by their absence. grave, but some young men and wom- could regret his decisions. I have reason Incidentally, Voznesensky, a young poet en (as far as I know, Irina Emelyanova to believe that he was sincere in his considered to be Pasternak’s protégé, among them) requested that people be memoirs about Pasternak. There is a also did not appear. The event was a allowed to say what they wished. Then, legend that, after Pasternak’s death, sort of litmus test. Without any prear- someone began reciting Pasternak’s he asked Tvardovsky, a fairly talented ranged plan, it developed into a dissi- famous poem “August,” written in 1953 and popular writer: “How about that dent demonstration, the first in many, and included in Zhivago. It addresses Pasternak? Is it true that he was such many years. There had been nothing the poet’s anticipated death and has a great poet?” “Do you consider me a like it in Russia since Leo Tolstoy’s strong religious overtones. Many more good poet?” Tvardovsky responded. funeral, in 1910. The comparison came poems followed. “Oh yes,” Khrushchev said. “Well, my naturally to mind, since Tolstoy was work isn’t worth a penny in comparison also a dissident in his time, and attend- Hinsey: How was the crowd finally with his.” Khrushchev supposedly ing his funeral was considered a sign dispersed? What are your other memo- exclaimed, “Oh my God, what an error of defiance. Pasternak himself, twenty ries of the day? I have made!” years old at the time, was present at Tolstoy’s coffin. The throng that filled Venclova: The crowd started to Hinsey: When you look back on the large field between Pasternak’s thin after an hour or so. Finally, these events, what is your reaction? house and the cemetery was excep- Virgilijus said to me, “Let’s go. Now, How has time changed your perception tionally dignified and silent. there are only KGB agents left, recit- of them? Given the ongoing state of ing poems to other agents.” However censorship in the world, is there any Hinsey: Apparently the funeral cynical that might sound, there was thing we can learn from this? procession did not make use of an of- probably a modicum of truth in it. ficial car that had been made available We left for the station and returned to Venclova: My opinion on the for the occasion. Instead, there were Moscow. I never heard that the crowd Pasternak affair has never changed, pallbearers? was broken up by force: it dispersed though perhaps I am now slightly on its own. more forgiving toward the people who Venclova: Neither I, nor, I think, At Natasha’s flat, we held a sort condemned him out of fear, ignorance, anybody else in the crowd, had heard of wake with some of her friends. We and other reasons. One should not about an official car. At one moment, drank wine and vodka and recited judge them too harshly: the totalitar- the coffin was simply brought out of Pasternak’s poems—from memory or ian system was still quite strong at the house and slowly carried in the di- from his books, which were abundant the time, and perfectly capable of rection of the church. It was probably in her apartment. The next day, I made mutilating human souls. But the entire a mile (a kilometer and a half) between a very long entry in my diary but did affair—the poet’s funeral included— the dacha and the uphill cemetery; not save it since it seemed chaotic and represented a watershed in the history therefore the procession lasted a long unreadable. For some time, I had been of the USSR and cultural resistance in time. I was rather far from the coffin’s keeping a diary, but I stopped on that the communist world. Such situations path and did not see the people who day—I experienced something like are bound to recur, since tyrannical re- were carrying it. There were, I think, “writer’s block,” or, to be precise, “dia- gimes of various stripes will be present a dozen or two pallbearers, mainly the rist’s block” for several years afterward. on Earth for the foreseeable future. poet’s close friends, taking turns in Still, resistance always pays off, if their duty. Hinsey: At the end of his life, in not immediately, then sometimes in his memoirs, Khrushchev said that he unpredictable ways. □ Hinsey: After Pasternak’s coffin was sorry about how he had behaved was lowered, the crowd refused to leave. toward Pasternak: that he hadn’t What was the mood at this point? supported him and had banned Doctor Zhivago. He wrote, “My only excuse Venclova: I remember a dignified is that I didn’t read the book.” if bland speech at the graveside by spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 59 THE HOLBROOKE FORUM

The Richard C. Holbrooke This year, from May 11 to May 14, by working across disciplinary and Forum for the Study of Michael Ignatieff and Harold Hongju regional boundaries. In daily presen- Koh convened a third workshop at the tations and regular exchanges with Diplomacy and Governance, American Academy in Berlin. Under the German colleagues, retreat participants established by the American title “Germany, the United States and will discuss the various strategies Academy in Berlin in memory the Emerging International Order,” a pursued by autocracies in Asia, the of its founder, Ambassador group of distinguished European and Middle East, and Eastern Europe to American scholars, policy-makers, gain popular support. Richard C. Holbrooke, has and jurists discussed recent fissures in The American Academy is likewise continued to bring together German and American approaches to planning a series of workshops, to German and international maintaining international order, as well commence in fall 2015, called “The New experts on a number of global as transatlantic efforts to confront Strategic Triangle—United States, challenges in the international arena. China, Germany—and the New World issues in 2015. The Forum Germans and Americans have struggled Order.” Designed by Ambassador John was established in December recently to find agreement on joint C. Kornblum, the Strategic Triangle 2013 with an inaugural gala responses to international crises, most is to offer a new framework for the at the Metropolitan Museum obviously in the case of Ukraine and understanding of state interaction and Russia, but also on strategies for dealing interdependence in the modernized of Art in New York City. with other actors, such as China. The and digitalized world of today. The workshop also focused on ways to re- United States, China, and Germany Since then, the American establish transatlantic cohesion and offer different examples of countries Academy in Berlin has hosted was augmented by an exchange of views that appear to have adapted their with senior German policy-makers. economies successfully to the techno- two workshops: one in June This summer, the American logical age, but which have done so in 2014 called “Statecraft and Academy will host the first Richard different ways. The first conference will Responsibility,” and another C. Holbrooke Forum retreat, entitled focus on global networks and integra- last December called “Peace “Authoritarianism in a Global Context.” tion, bringing together experts from A group of scholars, with distinct international trade, information tech- and Justice.” Both were co- regional and historical expertise in the nology, and logistics. Building on these chaired by Michael Ignatieff, field of authoritarianism, will assemble discussions, a follow-up conference, of Harvard Kennedy School, for three weeks under the chairman- planned for spring 2016, will explore and Harold Hongju Koh, of ship of Martin K. Dimitrov, a political the geopolitical and economic conse- scientist from Tulane University who quences of global networks and inte- Yale Law School. was a fellow at the American Academy gration for the Strategic Triangle states. in spring 2012. The retreat will take a The conference will bring together new approach to exploring the reasons experts with in-depth knowledge of the behind the persistence of autocracies United States, China, and Germany. □ 60 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

have typically pursued two different Novocherkassk riots in the Soviet Union. lines of inquiry. Some have empha- These protests revealed the precarious sized regime origins, arguing that state of social stability and required autocracies that emerge through a a reorientation toward governance Long March revolution are more durable than techniques that would both increase those that are established through compliance and would also allow for The persistence of coups or foreign imposition. Others discontent to be detected prior to its authoritarianism have identified various factors that expression as an overt challenge to the in a global context account for regime collapse. These regime. endpoints in the lifespans of autocra- Popular support was secured by Martin K. Dimitrov cies are important. Nevertheless, we through a three-pronged strategy. also need to pay attention to the One element of the strategy was the techniques through which autocracies deployment of what scholars of com- maintain themselves in power, some- munist regimes have referred to as The 1980s and 1990s were a time of times over multiple decades of rule. the “socialist social contract,” which optimism about the “end of history” involved an implicit bargain that the and the global spread of democracy. masses would remain politically qui- Today, the mood among scholars and Engineering Popular escent in exchange for increased social practitioners is pessimistic. Freedom Support in Autocracies spending and efforts to satisfy popular House, a think-tank that monitors consumption preferences. Another progress toward democracy, classified Although some regimes never develop was the promotion of elections with a 46 percent of countries in the world as strategies for engineering popular sup- modicum of choice and other mecha- “free” in 1998. Nearly two decades later, port, long-lasting autocracies gradually nisms of limited accountability such following momentous events like the become aware that their ongoing as letters to the editor and citizen color revolutions and the Arab Spring, survival cannot be predicated on the complaints (Eingaben). And the third the proportion of free countries has use of repression alone. Repression focused on substituting the moribund not changed: in 2015 free polities is costly because its effective deploy- Marxist-Leninist ideology for a more still constitute only 46 percent of the ment requires the maintenance of a potent ideological mix that included countries in the world. These statistics large security apparatus. But of consid- nationalist propaganda, personality indicate that authoritarianism has erably greater concern for autocrats cults, and certain types of mass cam- proven to be much more resilient than is that repression can ultimately paigns. Cumulatively, these strategies it looked in the annus mirabilis of 1989. undermine their rule by occluding the ensured the compliance of the over- Moreover, for nine consecutive years, actual state of discontent in society— whelming majority of the population. more countries have suffered declines after all, when levels of fear are high, This meant that the coercive apparatus in their aggregate Freedom House nobody dares speak the truth, even could focus on monitoring extensively scores than registered gains. These when most citizens oppose the regime. those citizens who continued to oppose indicators reveal the slow but steady This can lead to unanticipated revolu- the regime and on meting out carefully erosion of the spread of democracy. tions, which are an autocrat’s worst targeted punishments against them. What explains the global persis- nightmare. For this reason, resilient Although techniques of gover- tence of authoritarianism? Why is autocracies develop mechanisms of nance combining selective repression it that the fall of the Berlin Wall and governance that allow them to use with social spending, limited account the Arab Spring have resulted in the repression selectively. From the point ability, and nationalism were first consolidation of democracy only in of view of autocrats, the utility of the introduced in post-Stalinist commu- some countries but the persistence of strategies for engineering popular nist regimes, they have been used in autocracy in others? And, finally, why support analyzed in this essay is that a range of non-communist autocra- has a cluster of countries, key among they can generate mass compliance, cies, such as Taiwan under the KMT, them being China, survived the fall of thus allowing for the more efficient Egypt under Mubarak, and Venezuela communism in Europe, the breakup monitoring of discontent and for the under Chávez. A case that deserves of the Soviet Union, the color revolu- deployment of targeted and infrequent special note is contemporary Russia. tions in the post-Soviet republics, and repression. For the past fifteen years, Putin’s the Arab Spring without experiencing The strategies for engineering regime has survived by executing or regime collapse? popular support were pioneered by jailing its most vocal critics but also Despite their theoretical impor- communist regimes in Eastern Europe by carefully maintaining some of the tance and clear relevance to policy- following unanticipated system- social spending commitments of the makers, no definitive answers have destabilizing events like the June 1953 socialist period (l’goty), by preserv- been provided to these questions. worker uprising in East Berlin, the 1956 ing semi-competitive elections and Recent studies of authoritarianism Hungarian revolution, and the 1962 reinvigorating the institution of spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 61

citizen complaints (obrashcheniia), provided legal recourse to citizens who sustain the Chinese regime well into and by promoting a virulent brand of were wronged. the twenty-first century. However, the Orthodox anti-Western homophobic China has also introduced limited experience of other countries that Russian nationalism. These compara- accountability by promoting grass- have used similar strategies provides tive examples suggest that the strate- roots elections, by experimenting with several lessons for China. One is that gies for engineering popular support democratic consultations (minzhu these strategies are contingent on discussed in this essay are used in a ketanhui) and with public notice-and- high-level economic growth, which is wide array of autocracies. comment during legislative drafting, necessary to maintain social spending. and by allowing public interest litiga- Another is that the systems of action. The central government has also countability require the maintenance Engineering Popular promoted citizen complaints (known of consistent responsiveness. And the Support in China as letters and visits or xinfang) and third is that nationalism may eventu- has been generally accommodating to ally speed up the process of regime dis- The persistence of single-party com- citizens participating in small-scale integration, should ethnic minorities munist rule in China more than a protests, when their demands have fo- feel stigmatized by the majority. All of quarter of a century after the fall of cused on welfare and social insurance this suggests that authoritarianism in the Berlin Wall presents a puzzle for matters. At the same time, large-scale China is a lot more fragile than some social scientists. This essay argues that demonstrations have not been toler- might think. This in turn indicates that China’s survival formula involves the ated, ethnic Tibetan and Uighur unrest the ongoing global persistence of three-pronged strategies for engineer- has been ruthlessly suppressed, and authoritarianism is far from a foregone ing popular support outlined above, political activists have been subject to conclusion. □ combined with limited repression that harassment, arrest, and imprisonment. targets ethnic minorities and political The message that these tactics send activists like Nobel Prize winner Liu is clear: Chinese citizens who avoid Xiaobo or democracy activists Chen crossing the red lines can lead rela- Guangcheng and Teng Biao. tively content, ordinary lives. With regard to social spending, Beyond promoting limited ac- China learned both from the domestic countability, the regime has also en- unrest that accompanied the initial gaged in an ideological reorientation Is the Third attempts to dismantle the urban away from the precepts of Marxism- socialist social contract prior to 1989 Leninism. Some of the steps have Wave Over? and from the devastating impact of involved recovering the essential the social transition following the elements of Maoist governance by Stephan Haggard wake of the collapse of communism in practices, such as reviving elements and Robert Kaufman Europe. The dismantling of the social- of the Mao cult, resuscitating “red ist social contract for urban workers songs,” and continuing to organize only began in the late 1990s, when occasional mass-mobilization cam- various social policies were introduced paigns. The regime has also promoted In his 1992 book, Samuel Huntington to soften the transition for workers nationalism, both by taking a more coined one of the most widely rec- who were laid off. The 2000s and aggressive stand in international re- ognized metaphors in recent social 2010s saw an expansion of the social lations and by advancing the concept science. Writing in the wake of the fall safety net through the introduction of of the “Chinese Dream” (Zhongguo of the Soviet empire, he argued that policies such as the minimum-living meng), which involves national we were living through a Third Wave guarantee (dibao), which supplied rejuvenation, military modernization, of democratization. The first wave saw means-tested financial assistance to and improved standards of living. the gradual extension of the franchise those who were worst affected by the in Europe, then the late nineteenth transition; the rolling out of the New century push toward universal voting Rural Cooperative Medical System Whither China? rights for men, and with the suffrage (xinxing nongcun hezuo yiliao zhidu) movement, the incorporation of and pensions for rural residents; and The future of the global persistence women too. This wave was reversed the expansion and standardization of of authoritarianism depends to a large by the developments of the inter-war various health insurance, pension, and degree on China. If China were to period, before surging again in the unemployment insurance schemes experience regime change, this would aftermath of World War II. That second for urban residents. The promulgation have profound implications for de- wave also crested with the failure of the Labor Contract Law in 2008 mocracy promotion around the world. of democracy in a number of newly and of the Social Security Law in 2010 Thus far, the strategies for engineer- independent countries as well as a strengthened existing protections and ing popular support have worked to novel developmental authoritarianism 62 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

in Latin American and Asian countries continued to march upward through economists and political scientists has such as Chile and Korea. the mid-2000s. But the cases of demo- argued that inequality might be bad Beginning in Southern Europe in cratic failure listed above do in fact for democracy, leading to outright or the mid-1970s—in Portugal, Spain, and reflect some more general patterns. subtle reversions. Greece—the Third Wave spread to ma- First, the total number of democracies The story goes like this: Democracy jor Latin American and Asian countries appears to have peaked at about 120 provides the opportunity for masses in the 1980s: Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, countries—depending on definition— to redistribute income. Since the poor Turkey, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, and has now fallen back slightly. outnumber the rich, they can—in effect and Thailand. The trend accelerated Second, while the number of —vote themselves a raise. Economic dramatically in the aftermath of the outright autocracies—regimes such elites respond by shutting down or fall of the Berlin Wall, and not only in as Sudan or North Korea—has fallen limiting competitive politics in order Eastern Europe but also in the poorer steadily, so-called “competitive au- to protect their wealth. nations of the African continent as well. thoritarian” regimes have proven This story is not implausible, and More recently, the “color revolu- surprisingly resilient. Such govern- there are both historical cases—such tions” in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, ments maintain a façade of democratic as the authoritarian installations in and Lebanon, and the Arab Spring practice, including elections, which in the Southern Cone of Latin America evoked hope that the former Soviet fact mask executive overreach, corrup- in the 1960s and 1970s—that appear Union and the Middle East would tion, and the deterioration of civil and to fit the pattern. Yet in a large study more fully participate in the world- political liberties. Rather than being including both statistical analysis wide trend. But these movements way stations in the march of history, and detailed casework, we found no sputtered, and a number of other they have survived, often enjoying relationship between inequality and countries that had seemed to cross wide public support. outright reversion to authoritarian democratic thresholds appeared to Third, the simple total of democ rule, nor evidence that distributive move backward. Nor were these cases racies in the world masks increased conflicts were implicated in the fall of trivial; they included outright rever- churning. The rate of democratic democracy. Of course there are a hand- sions to authoritarianism in Thailand, break down since 2000, roughly the ful of cases that appear to fit, such as Venezuela, and Russia and ambiguous mid-point in the Third Wave, is almost Thailand’s polarization between yellow cases of what we call “backsliding” in twice that of the rate of breakdown and red shirts, the populism of Hugo countries as diverse as the Philippines, from 1985 to 2000. Chávez, and perhaps even the events Hungary, Turkey, Kenya, and Pakistan. And finally, of course, outright in Egypt. We cannot rule out more autocracy is by no means dead. China insidious and subtle effects of inequal- potentially provides an influential alter ity on politics, including in the United End of the Third Wave? native model in many parts of the world. States. But as a general rule, high As democracy is complicated and inequality does not appear to directly Is the Third Wave over? And if so, social science is competitive, there threaten the stability of democratic rule. what accounts for the fact that it has are, of course, a plethora of theories Second, poverty is not a necessary crested? Before trying to answer this seeking to understand this trend. It is barrier to more open politics either. question, it is important to acknowl- doubtful that any one approach can In our studies, we did find a statistical edge that we actually don’t have a do it justice. But we are learning some correlation between level of income clear consensus on what we mean by things, including about the features and the likelihood of reverting to au- democratic transitions and reversals. A of the international environment, that thoritarian rule; poor countries were— minimalist definition would include might matter. on average—more vulnerable. But this the staging of competitive elections statistical generalization hid a lot of and a turnover of government, and for anomalies: poor countries—including a number of countries this is in itself Is Inequality to Blame? in Africa—that had managed more a significant accomplishment. A more open politics. Examples include Benin, robust definition would encompass First, some null findings. The concern Senegal, Indonesia, Mongolia, and, checks on the executive and, above about democracy has overlapped with somewhat more tentatively, the post- all, strong protection of political rights growing anxiety about the increase in civil war countries of Central America and civil liberties. inequality across the world. Although such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Yet by either definition, things do some large countries such as Brazil Honduras. not look good. For over a decade after have seen a decrease in inequality, the This point is extremely important it was written in 1992, Huntington’s general trend is in the other direction. because it speaks to the debate sparked book continued to be prescient. The Some countries that have reverted, by Singapore’s recently deceased collapse of state socialism did in fact including Thailand, have seen rapidly Lee Kuan Yew about developmental extend the wave of transitions, and rising income disparities. A recent authoritarianism. Poverty should not the total number of democracies body of important theoretical work by be seen as an excuse for dictatorial spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 63

rule; the poor deserve freedoms too. in larger countries, which are more the first places to start is to improve A wide body of social science research immune from outside influences. the neighborhood by robust efforts to also has demonstrated that for every Some of the impetus will need to fall bring severe civil conflicts to an end. developmental authoritarian regime on domestic political processes. We This injunction holds with respect such as the Asian cases of Singapore, know, for example, that constitutions to contagion from civil conflict and China, and Vietnam, there are an equal, have an effect. Restraints on executive terrorism in both East and West Africa if not greater, number of authoritarian discretion—from independent elec- as well. In work with Lydia Tiede, we debacles, including the Romania of toral commissions to ombudsmen and showed that the end of civil war does Ceaușescu, the Haiti of the Duvaliers anti-corruption agencies—all serve to not necessarily lead to sharp improve- or the Zaire of Mobutu. Moreover, it reduce the risk of imperial presiden- ments in the rule of law; countries is worth noting that important Asian cies. It is particularly important to tend to revert to their status quo ante. developmental states such as Korea strengthen the powers and capabilities But for countries that are wracked and Taiwan, have transited to democ- of legislatures, which often operate at with violence on the scale of Syria, racy with little ill effects on economic severe disadvantages vis-à-vis execu- that would be a marked improvement, growth. tives. Important new work by Ethan permitting the battle for democracy to A final null finding concerns the Kapstein and Stephen Fish and their be picked up another day. A number role of the military in politics. Our colleagues suggests that restraints on of post-civil war cases—from Central standard image of authoritarian rever- executives and strengthened legisla- America to African countries such as sion has long been the coup. Taming tures help. Sierra Leone—carry hopeful messages the military has been one of the most But there is also advantage in with respect to outside intervention. difficult tasks of democratic rule. simplicity. A number of new studies of A second finding of import is the Providing support for the profession- Africa have shown that rules as simple role that economic crises appear to alization of militaries has not received as term limits can have very strong play in reversions from authoritarian the attention from the international effects on the likelihood of democratic rule. The statistical analysis is not financial institutions and aid donors breakdown. completely firm on this point. But that it deserves. But despite cases In the end, however, civil society there are ample cases in which the such as Pakistan, where the military is must also act as a check on overween- prospects for democracy were dimmed currently encroaching more and more ing authority; institutional design is by daunting crises. That Greece has visibly into politics, the threat of coups not enough. “Parchment institutions” survived its wrenching experiences has actually declined dramatically, may be overridden. Despite the fail- over the last five years should not be including in Africa. ures of the mass uprisings in Egypt, taken for granted, and it can by no However, this has only meant the our studies show that peaceful mass means be assumed that democracy is rise of a new threat to democratic rule mobilization can act as a check on completely safe there. Partners, do- that is more difficult to control: the authoritarian malfeasance. We found nors and aid agencies need to evaluate erosion of democracy “from within” by that democratic transitions that took their assistance to countries such as overreaching executives. An increas- place as a result of protest from below Greece not only on economic grounds ingly common pattern is an executive had somewhat more robust democrat- but with an eye toward the long-run that exploits majoritarian features of ic histories than those that resulted risks of blowback and the erosion of democracy. These autocrats—often from bargains among elites. democratic rule. populist and increasingly nationalist What about the international com- So is the Third Wave over? As the in ideology—win not only majorities munity? A strong finding in our work debate over climate change shows, but large majorities. These allow presi- is that neighborhood effects matter. long-run inflections in complex social dents to weaken institutional checks The countries of Eastern Europe— and natural phenomena are hard to on their authority and aggressively and some beyond it—have benefited identify and predict. The very success undermine oppositions. Again, these enormously by proximity to Western of the Third Wave may partly explain patterns can be seen across the world, Europe and strong democratic norms the current stall: as more countries de- visible in countries as otherwise in the European Community. Latin mocratize, those remaining are, virtu- disparate as Turkey, Hungary, Russia, America is now developing similar ally by definition, harder nuts to crack. and Venezuela. norms and the Organization of African But the pause is real enough—and Unity has recently developed a norm worrying enough—that the advanced not to seat military governments that industrial states need to reinvigorate Tempering Aspirations have overthrown democratic prede- their thinking about democracy. The cessors. benefits it provides accrue not only What can be done looking forward? The Middle East—with the former to those that live under it but to their We should temper our aspirations; Soviet Union—are the two regions that neighbors as well. □ outsiders play only a limited role in the are most generally immune from the democratization process, particularly democratic trend. Obviously, one of NOTEBOOK News from the Hans Arnhold Center

Welcoming Gerhard Casper The American Academy’s New President 66

Henry A. Kissinger Prize 2015 to Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Giorgio Napolitano 67

New Trustee George Rupp 67

In Memoriam RICHARD VON WEIZSÄCKER THOMAS L. FARMER 68

Profiles in Scholarship 69

Book Reviews by Brittani Sonnenberg, Jonathan Kahn, and Bert Rebhandl 70

Alumni Books 75

Supporters and Donors 76

Poems by Mary Jo Bang 77

Anthony McCall. Large Notebook 4 (November 17, 2004 – July 20, 2011). Study for “Exchange,” 2005. Photo by Jason Wyche. 66 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

WELCOMING GERHARD CASPER

n this frosty January evening, everything Ois different at the American Academy. For over fifteen years, Gary Smith stood at the entrance to the small foyer, then at the lectern, to greet the guests and welcome the new class of fellows. He was the heart of this institution dedicated to German-American friendship and transformed it into a vital center of debate on transatlantic relations and a principal venue for current American literature, arts, and humanities. Last year he announced his resignation as executive director of the Academy. Christian U. Diehl, Gahl Hodges Burt, Gerhard Casper, and Christine I. Wallich. Photo by Annette Hornischer Now standing at the lectern is the new star of the American Academy, Gerhard his pleasure at the opportunity, the president of the Academy new quality. Through collabo- Casper. A prominent expert near the end of his career, to was based in New York and ration with Henry Kissinger, in US constitutional law, the take on this job in Berlin. This was responsible, above all, for Richard von Weizsäcker, and German-American is best is, after all, the city in which fundraising in the US. others, the project succeeded. known for his eight-year ten- his wife was born. Casper, Casper underscores that Since 1998, grants have been ure as president of Stanford born in 1937, has lived in the the Academy’s dual missions awarded to nearly 400 schol- University, which he guided US since the 1960s and has of fostering both academic ars, authors, artists, and jour- out of a crisis in the early become an American citizen. excellence and the German- nalists to live and work here 1990s and on to renewed pres- Nonetheless, he still speaks American dialogue are not al- for several months. […] tige and influence. The pub- English with a distinct German ways easy to pursue in tandem. The Academy strives to lisher and political commen- accent, something many He acknowledges that the insti- ensure that its fellows don’t tator Josef Joffe, who is on the Americans find charming. tution’s political work may have live at Wannsee as if in an Academy’s board of trustees, The Academy is familiar flagged slightly since the 2010 ivory tower, but that they ex- introduces the Hamburg native terrain for Casper, who served death of its founder, US diplo- plore the city of Berlin. That with glowing praise for his on its board of trustees during mat Richard Holbrooke, and leads them to have a direct in- career and his work in pre- the first years after its found- says he aims to change that. fluence on the capital’s politi- paring to take the helm at the ing in the mid-1990s. Speaking While the American cal and cultural scene, which Academy—not failing to men- to a smaller gathering in the Academy has always empha in turn leaves its imprint on tion, of course, the $2.2 billion Academy’s library, he says sized its nonpartisanship, their own work. Casper raised for Stanford that one need only consider it reflects the influence of Despite the Academy’s during his time at the univer- his age to realize that he is both Democratic Party sup- positive impact over the years, sity. At the American Academy, merely an interim solution. porters and of emigrants German-American relations this is a highly valued com- Among his most impor- from Nazi-era Germany and outside of the transatlantic plementary skill. tant tasks, he says, will be that their families, of left-leaning community’s rather closely While surely accustomed of forming a new selection liberals with an affinity for knit intellectual circle face to such accolades, Casper committee to identify a suc- Germany. As such, Casper’s formidable obstacles today. exemplifies Hanseatic mod- cessor with long-term pros- appointment also represents The imperial bearing of the esty. An example, as described pects. The efforts of the previ- a certain cultural break. He US under President George by Joffe, was his reaction to ous committee failed when left Germany thirty years W. Bush after the attacks of the students calling “Gerhard, the chosen candidate turned later than the families who September 11, 2001, the inhu- Gerhard” at his Stanford fare- down the position after fled Nazi persecution, and man abuses during the Iraq well: “Thank you for remind- months of negotiations. But he doesn’t come from the War, the Guantanamo deten- ing me of my first name,” he the new president, who will Democrats’ network. […] tion camp torture practices, said. On this evening, too, he additionally assume the role The aim [of the Academy] the surveillance methods of fends off such overt devotion. of executive director, lauds was to maintain the close the intelligence agencies, the “Terrible, terrible,” are his first the Academy as an outstand- postwar ties that had devel- government response to whis- words following Joffe’s lauda- ingly run institution on sound oped between West Berlin and tleblower Edward Snowden— tion. He prefers to talk about financial footing. Up to now, the US, and to lend these a all of this has hardened into spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 67

an image of America in the He sees this underlying trust the constructive American minds of many Germans that as having disappeared and role in overcoming the division leaves little space for friendly says that “changing this again of Germany—which inspired sentiment. is one of our greatest chal- an interest in, and commit- Gerhard Casper, 77, is well lenges.” ment to, the US in many older aware of this. “It’s awful to Casper crosses his arms. Germans—is waning among think of almost an entire gen- It is a problem that transat- a generation that can hardly eration of especially younger lantic relations are primaril y recall the Berlin Wall. It may Germans shrugging its shoul- in the hands of people with just be that Gerhard Casper, ders and saying: That’s how hair the same color as his, who has worked with young America is, just a big power he says, running his hand people all his life, can find pursuing its interests by force,” through his silver-gray thatch a new way of reaching this he says. In the past, Casper and adding, “The younger generation. □ notes, Germans often justly generation has detached itself criticized the US, but always from the USA.” — By Holger Schmale, against the background of a He is concerned that the “Amerika am Wannsee” conviction that Americans memory of America’s fight (excerpt); Berliner Zeitung, themselves wanted, and were against the Nazis, the airlift to Jan. 21, 2015; Translated working for, a better America. rescue West Berlin, and even by Michael Dills

2015 HENRY A. WELCOMING KISSINGER PRIZE A NEW TRUSTEE

he American Academy he American Academy not-for-profit organizations. in Berlin is looking for- is proud to announce He has also taken on a new Tward to awarding the T that George Erik Rupp, set of responsibilities, includ- 2015 Henry A. Kissinger Prize a leader in international ing as a senior fellow at the to both Giorgio Napolitano, development and American Carnegie Council for Ethics former President of Italy higher education, joined the in International Affairs, as (2006–2015), and Hans- board of trustees in fall 2014. the chair of the board of the Dietrich Genscher, former The Richard C. Holbrooke International Baccalaureate Federal Foreign Minister and distinguished visitor at the Organization, and as founding Vice Chancellor of Germany Academy in spring 2014, Rupp principal at NEXT, a consult- (1974–1992). serves as a member of the ing partnership for academic, The award is given in Fellows and Alumni Com cultural, and social service recognition of President mittee and the Programs and organizations. Napolitano’s outstanding Henry A. Kissinger Publications Committee. Rupp is an expert on simi- contributions to ensuring A native of New Jersey, larities and differences within further European integration President of the American Rupp has spent decades in and among religious tradi- and stability. Foreign Minister Academy in Berlin. “We owe higher education, having tions, including the relation- Genscher is being honored for both a debt of gratitude for served as president of Columbia ship of religious communities his exceptional contributions making political decisions University and Rice University. to conflict and post-conflict toward the peaceful resolu- with a view toward strength- He was the dean of Harvard development. He is the author tion of the Cold War and the ening the transatlantic rela- Divinity School from 1979 to of numerous articles and five reunification of Germany. tionship.” 1985. For 11 years, from 2002 books, including Globalization Henry A. Kissinger is de- The American Academy to 2013, Rupp served as presi Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, lighted to be able to personally awards the Henry A. Kissinger dent of the International Community (2006). His newest present the awardees with Prize every year to Europeans Rescue Committee, the aid work, Beyond Individualism: the prize on June 17, 2015, at and Americans who have group helping people whose the Challenge of Inclusive Com the American Academy in made outstanding contribu- lives have been shattered by munities, will be published in Berlin’s Hans Arnhold Center. tions to the transatlantic re- conflict. September 2015 by Columbia “These two statesmen’s lationship. Past recipients of After stepping down from University Press. □ achievements in overcoming the award include former US IRC, he continues to be an historic divisions led to a more President George H. W. Bush, adjunct professor of religion, united Europe and provided former German Chancellor public health, and interna- stability during very chal- Helmut Kohl, and former US tional affairs at Columbia lenging times,” said Professor Secretary of State James A. University and is still a board Gerhard Casper, the designated Baker, III. □ member at several additional 68 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

HONORING RICHARD VON WEIZSÄCKER AND THOMAS L. FARMER

The American Academy was saddened by the loss of two founding chairmen at the beginning of this year. Richard von Weizsäcker passed away in Berlin on January 31, at age 94, and Thomas L. Farmer passed away in Washington, DC, on February 5, at age 91. “Their deaths represent a tremendous loss and sadden us greatly,” said the Academy’s Acting Chairman, Gahl Hodges Burt. “It is fair to say that without them, there would be no American Academy in Berlin. Both were not only vital to establishing the Academy, but they also garnered widespread support and created real enthusiasm for our institution in Germany and the US. We will miss them greatly.”

Weizsäcker by his integrity, John F. Kennedy’s 1960 cam- dignity, and political wisdom paign, Farmer advised the was predestined for that of- new administration on State fice. He used the office for and Defense Department ap- what it ideally was intended: pointments. In 1961, he was as the voice of moral au- discreetly involved in the thority. The speech he gave orchestration of the release on the 40th anniversary of of a Yale economics graduate Germany’s unconditional sur- student, Frederic Pryor, who render is arguably the most had been wrongly jailed by important manifesto of the the East German police for German postwar spirit: a clear espionage. Episodes like these acceptance of the crimes of helped to establish Farmer’s the Nazi regime and a rigor- reputation in Washington as ous defense of Germany’s a pragmatic, credible, and Richard von attachment to Western-style Thomas effective behind-the-scenes democracy. That speech must negotiator. Weizsäcker be compared to Willy Brandt’s L. Farmer In 1964, President kneeling before the ghetto Lyndon Johnson appointed ichard von Weizsäcker gates in Warsaw: the spoken orn to German- Farmer general counsel to was a towering figure and the silent gestures of American parents in the Agency for International R in recent German his- Germany’s acceptance of its BBerlin on July 26, 1923, Development, where he tory. Former US Secretary of anguished past. Thomas L. Farmer was an helped to create the Asia State Henry A. Kissinger, also By reflection and char- attorney who spent much of Development Bank. a founding chairman of the acter, Weizsäcker is at once his professional life working Thomas Farmer’s decades Academy, called the former conservative and liberal, that in intelligence and public of involvement in German life, German president “one of rare and invaluable mixture of service in the US, while main- law, trade, and intelligence the great political leaders of political traditions marked by taining close ties to Germany. was known in Washington. our period.” Trustee emeritus affinity. After his presidency he Farmer and his family left In 1994, when Richard C. Fritz Stern offered the follow- has remained a patriotic peda- Germany for the US in 1933, Holbrooke was ambassador to ing words about President gogue, a mentor, at home and not long after Hitler had come Germany, he tapped Farmer, von Weizsäcker in 2007. abroad—with a strong com- to power. He entered Harvard along with Henry A. Kissinger “The Federal Republic has mitment to reconciliation College in 1940, where he was and then-Federal President been Germany’s success story with the victims of German a vocal advocate for American Richard von Weizsäcker, to and Richard von Weizsäcker injustice. He continues to intervention in Europe. He become a founding chairman has been one of the main ar- set a standard of dignity and graduated in 1943 and, after a of the American Academy chitects of that success. Born clarity. He is a superb writer, stint in the US infantry, was in Berlin. in 1920 into an old Swabian- his themes are global, he is at trained at the Pentagon in From the onset of his Protestant family, he expe- once a patriot and a citizen assessing German military initial engagement with the rienced the German catas- of the world. units. Following the end of American Academy in Berlin trophe and, after his study He was one of the first the war, Farmer helped inter- over two decades ago, Thomas of law, entered public life at persons to recognize the great view dozens of Wehrmacht Farmer remained a trusted an early age. He joined the promise of the American officers being held in POW friend, sought-after counselor, CDU and moved from being Academy and became its camps in Maryland. and continuing inspiration. a member of the Bundestag early and indispensable sup- Farmer received a degree The Academy will miss him to being elected President of porter. As co-chairman of the from Harvard Law School in and will remain ever grateful the Federal Republic in 1984, Board, he has provided the 1950 and went to work as a for his dedication, wisdom, re-elected in 1990. Academy with counsel and covert operations officer in friendship, and generosity. The President is required great help, his presence has the CIA’s Germany section. to be above parties, and made it a happier place.” Later, following his work on spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 69

PROFILES IN SCHOLARSHIP

Presenting the spring 2015 class Anna-Maria Kellen of fellows and distinguished Fellow visitors Nathaniel Levtow is associate professor of religious studies Daimler Fellow at the University of Montana Bruce Ackerman is Sterling and the author of Images of Professor of Law and Political Others: Iconic Politics in Ancient Science at Yale University Israel (2008). Levtow’s re- and an influential voice in the search integrates the study fields of constitutional law, of biblical literature with the environmental law, and po- cultural history of the ancient litical philosophy. In 2010 he world. His Academy project was named a Top 100 Global is entitled “Text Destruction Thinker by Foreign Policy mag- in the Bible and the Ancient azine. In his Academy project, World,” and will become the “A General Theory of World first book to catalogue and Constitutionalism,” Ackerman Mary Ellen von der of Friendship and Terror was explain literary and archaeo- is developing a new frame- Heyden Fellow in Fiction named a top book of the logical evidence for strategic work for understanding the Tom Drury is a writer living year by the New York Times, acts of text destruction in proliferating constitutional- in Brooklyn whose fiction the Los Angeles Times, and antiquity. isms of this century. has appeared in a wide vari- the Washington Post. At the ety of publications including Academy, he is embarking Bcos h Fellow in Public Ellen Maria Gorrissen the New Yorker, A Public Space, on a new book project on the Policy Fellow Ploughshares, and Granta. He Middle East in light of the Evgeny Morozov is a leading Mary Jo Bang is the author has written several highly presidency of Barack Obama. thinker on issues pertaining of six books of poems. Her acclaimed novels and in 2002, to technological development work has also appeared in the GQ Magazine cited his 1994 German Transatlantic and digital data. His work Paris Review, New Yorker, New novel The End of Vandalism Program Fellow has been widely published Republic, Yale Review, Denver as one of the best American Karen Hagemann is James G. and his monthly column Quarterly, Best American Poetry , novels of the past 45 years. At Kenan Distinguished Professor appears in several European and elsewhere. Her Academy the Academy, Drury is draw- of History at the University of papers. His first book, The project is entitled “The Bau- ing upon the Faust legend to North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Net Delusion: The Dark Side of haus: A Study in Balance,” for explore ambition, manipula- A scholar of modern European Internet Freedom, was a New which she is writing lyrical tion, and moral trade-offs in history, Hagemann focuses on York Times Notable Book of responses to documents, a more or less contemporary gender and women’s history, 2011. While at the Academy, photographs, and drawings setting. cultural and social history, Morozov will be looking at related to the Bauhaus and and the history of the military, the social and political im- Russian Constructivist art John P. Birkelund Fellow war, and the nation. While at plications of the “Internet of movements. She is currently a in the Humanities the Academy, Hagemann is Things” and at new models for professor of English at Wash Siyen Fei is a professor of working on a new monograph data ownership. ington University in St. Louis. history at the University of entitled Women, War, and the Pennsylvania whose primary Military in the Age of World Wars. Inga Maren Otto Fellow Guna S. Mundheim Fellow focus is on the political and in Music Composition in the Visual Arts cultural activism of sixteenth- Nina Maria Gorrissen Elliott Sharp is a composer, Sanford Biggers creates art- and early seventeenth- F ellow of History performer, and producer works that integrate film, century Ming dynasty China. Christopher D. Johnson, is based in New York City. He video, installation, sculpture, She is at the Academy to research associate for the has been active in experimen- drawing, original music, and finalize a new book,Sexuality “Bilderfahrzeuge: Aby Warburg tal music, improvisation, jazz, performance and he draws and Empire: Female Chastity and the Future of Iconology” and contemporary composi- on a wide variety of influ- and Frontier Societies in Ming project at the Warburg tion for over three decades. ences, from Buddhism to China (1368–1644), about the Institute. He has previous- Sharp leads the ensembles hip-hop. His works are in the notion of identity in China. ly taught at UCLA, Harvard Orchestra Carbon, Terraplane, permanent collection of such University, and Northwestern and Tectonics, and has pio- museums as the Museum of Dirk Ippen Fellow University. Johnson’s Academy neered ways of applying frac- Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Jeffrey Goldberg is a journal- project, “Encyclopedic Kinds tal geometry, chaos theory, and the Whitney Museum, ist, author, and staff writer for and Circles of Learning in the and genetics to musical com- and he has participated in the Atlantic. He has worked Late Renaissance,” investi- position. During his stay at shows around the world. He as a staff writer for the New gates the diverse genres that the Academy, Sharp is com- is an assistant professor in the Yorker and has reported from sought to find, order, and posing Substance, an opera School of Arts at Columbia across the Middle East. His transmit encyclopedic knowl- about the philosophy and life University. 2006 book Prisoners: A Story edge in the late Renaissance. of Baruch Spinoza. 70 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

Holtzbrinck Fellow twenty-first centuries. In his versity and a Senior Fellow Grand Cross of the Order of William Uricchio is a professor Academy project, “A History in International Economics the British Empire and Fellow of comparative media studies of Lithuania—Between East at the Council on Foreign of the British Academy. at the Massachusetts Institute and West,” Venclova continues Relations. He has served as of Technology. In his research, exploring Lithuania and its an economic advisor to the Richard C. Holbrooke he revisits the histories of old relationship to American and United Nations and the World Distinguished Visitor media when they were new, European historical events. Trade Organization. Padma Laurence Kardish spent 44 algorithmic enablements of Desai is the director of the years as the curator for film participatory cultural forms. Siemens Fellow Center for Transition Econo- and cinema at the Museum At the Academy, Uricchio will Sean Wilentz is a professor of mies at Columbia University of Modern Art. For his work continue to explore how algo history at Princeton University and is also a member of the on German Cinema, Kardish rithmic mediation is funda- and the highly acclaimed Council on Foreign Relations. was awarded a Verdienst mentally changing numerous author of several books on She has published extensively kreuz am Bande in 1999 and a domains, in particular how American cultural history and on Russian economic reform. Berlinale Kamera in 2006. In they intervene in and trans- politics, from the Revolution 2013, he received the National form the subject-object re- to the present. His book The Stephen M. Kellen Society of Film Critics Award. lationship upon which “the Rise of American Democracy: Distinguished Visitors modern” has been built. Jefferson to Lincoln(2005), was Thomas L. Friedman is an Ktur Viermetz awarded the Bancroft Prize internationally acclaimed Distinguished Visitor Axel Springer Fellow and was a finalist for the journalist and three-time Lawrence H. Summers served Tomas Venclova is a renowned Pulitzer Prize. At the Academy, Pulitzer Prize recipient. He is as US secretary of the literary scholar and Soviet- Wilentz will reevaluate the the author of The World Is treasury in the Clinton Admin- era dissident who taught po- political history of antislavery Flat: A Brief History of the istration and is a former etry and modern Lithuanian, prior to the Civil War. Twentieth Century and From chief economist of the World Russian, and Polish literature Beirut to Jerusalem, among Bank. He was director of the at Yale University. His widely others. Mervyn Allister King is National Economic Council for translated poetry is recog- Richard von Weizsäcker a former governor of the Bank the Obama Administration. nized as some of the most Distinguished Visitors of England. In 2013, he was He now holds the Charles W. influential Lithuanian writ- Jagdish N. Bhagwati is a appointed a life peer by Queen Eliot University Professor ing of the twentieth and professor at Columbia Uni- Elizabeth II. He is also a Knight ship at Harvard.

BOOK REVIEWS

MAP OF BETRAYAL collective behavior. And that’s prob- is to make him unable to write with BY HA JIN ably just the posture of the outsider.” honesty and artistic integrity.” Ha Jin’s slim 2008 work of nonfic- Seen through this lens, China has tion, The Writer as Migrant, both echoes been betraying Jin for almost 30 years, Pantheon and adjusts Le Carré’s equation. For since Tiananmen Square, when Jin November 2014, 304 pages Jin (who also uses a pseudonym; his decided he “couldn’t accept” the gov- A Review by real first name is Xuefei), to write is ernment’s brutal response and opted Brittani Sonnenberg to betray: “The ultimate betrayal is to to stay in the United States, where he choose to write in another language. . . . was pursuing graduate studies (China “A spy, like a writer, lives outside This linguistic betrayal is the ultimate has since repeatedly denied his visa the mainstream population. He steals step the migrant writer dares to take; requests). And Jin, according to his his experience through bribes and re- after this, any other act of estrange- initial definition of betrayal, has been constructs it,” said the novelist David ment amounts to a trifle.” Yet a few cheating on China since his first book Cornwell (better known by his pen sentences later, Jin bangs the gavel in English, Between Silences, a book of name, John le Carré), in a 1965 inter- again, shifting the blame. “Historically, poetry, published in 1990. His most view. Years later, in another interview, it has always been the individual who recent novel, A Map of Betrayal, posits he elaborated on this doubleness: “I is accused of betraying his country. a transitive melding of Le Carré’s think there is a theme in my work, to Why shouldn’t we turn the tables by and Jin’s formulations above: not the do with deceit, which says . . . to act accusing a country of betraying the writer as spy, or the writer as migrant, is to betray. That the individual iden- individual? . . . The worst crime the but the migrant as spy, the spy as tity is really irreconcilable with any country commits against the writer migrant. spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 71

A Map of Betrayal chronicles the late 1950s, which Gary witnesses from their nomadic desires are checked by rise and fall of Gary Shang (inspired by Washington, DC, thanks to Taiwanese China’s police state. Unable to return the real-life spy Larry Chin), whose fate intelligence; to the social unrest and to his native land during the Cold War, is revealed on page one, where Gary widespread pollution that Lillian Gary is forced to observe China from is introduced as: “the biggest Chinese observes on her teaching trip in China. a distance, fed only by intelligence spy ever caught in North America.” My favorite scene occurs during from Taiwan and a single photo of his Don’t cue the Mission Impossible theme a speech that a technocrat, Professor family. When Lillian travels to China, song: the trajectory of the novel is Wei Fang, loyal to the party, delivers she worries about the police following not how Gary will triumph, but how at a Chinese university on “Managing her activities, and her relatives receive Gary will fail. Lillian, Gary’s 54-year- China’s Cyberspace.” Jin’s physical official warnings about staying in old daughter, a historian, narrates description of the professor is down- touch with her. Unlike a breezily post- the novel, some thirty years after his right Dickensian: “A smile played on nationalist novel like Joseph O’Neill’s death. his pudgy face while his beady eyes recent The Dog, set in Dubai, China We witness Gary’s hapless journey almost disappeared. He was small- as nation state—its troubled birth, from a minor spy posing as a trans boned but heavy-fleshed. His hair, its recent economic rise, its jealous lator to a high-level mole imbedded dyed raven black, was so lustrously policing of its citizens—is the central, in the CIA in Washington, DC. Thrilled gelled that it might have been too inarguable fact in A Map of Betrayal. by Gary’s easy access to classified slippery for a fly to land on.” That said, aching passages that American documents, his higher-ups As Fang launches into a fatuous describe Gary’s homesickness evince deny his requests to return to his wife ode to China’s “glory, frustration, and a still-throbbing love for a gentle, and village in China and urge him to gratification” in “protecting our na- bucolic China (though noticeably start another family in the US. Thus, tional sovereignty in cyberspace,” the de-peopled): “Did he always remember Gary embarks on his second arranged students begin shouting insults and the streets of his village and the trails marriage: he weds Nellie, a waitress at hurling shoes and eggs onstage. Fang on the mountain slopes and along the a local diner, and they have one child: is hastily escorted offstage by guards, rivers that used to be frequented by Lillian. but not before he bellows back at his cranes, herons, mallards? And the end- In the half-Chinese, half-American detractors: “You will all face legal less chestnut groves on the hills? And Lillian, Ha Jin offers us a narrator who consequences! You’ll be kicked out of the temples and shrines on the lakes?” readily confesses her unreliability, college! Damn you, I’ll get back at you!” Moreover, the new generation of which she feels to be her inauthentic- “His voice,” Lillian tells us, “was privileged Chinese that Lillian encoun- ity: neither fully American nor Chinese, booming through the lavalier mike ters—hungry for outside knowledge with a cipher for a father. Lillian still on his lapel while he waved his and exchange, proud of China’s emerg- relies on primary documents to piece hands, giving the audience the finger ing expertise, experimental and artisti- together a picture of Gary; but we are and for some reason also the victory cally inclined—shed light on profound never presented with Gary’s diaries, sign.” The discredited professor’s change in mainland China, although only Lillian’s interpretation of them. protests along with his confused Jin himself has had to observe these Gary’s voice, muted throughout his hand-gestures, comically evoke his unfoldings, like Gary, from afar. life, has once again been appropriated: helpless hubris. Professor Fang is In the closing lines of Writer his daughter speaks for him, just as presumably being ushered to a luxury as Migrant, Jin suggests that writers his handler, Bingwen, spoke for him sedan, but his swift exit eerily echoes “rearrange the landscapes of our in China. It is precisely this voiceless- the humiliation and execution of envisioned homelands” in order to ness—which can be compared to professors during the chaos of the integrate past and present. A Map the exiled writer’s refusal to write Cultural Revolution. Since the incident of Betrayal honors this aesthetic ap- in his own tongue (though Gary’s takes place a few days before the an- proach, as a rearranged landscape silence stems from his devotion to the niversary of Tiananmen Square, Lillian of Jin’s envisioned China: reviled, Chinese government, and Jin’s literary explains, the authorities choose not beloved, and, like the most painful silence, in Chinese, stems from his re- to punish the students, unwilling to of severed family ties, ultimately jection of the same)—that represents raise tensions at such a sensitive time, unreachable. In capturing this hunger the wound that won’t heal. A Map of but there is a lingering suggestion of for home and the precarious nature Betrayal is both a searing critique of, unease and imminent violence from of mixed loyalties, Jin corrects the and a love letter to, modern China. both sides, a recurring shiver through- blithe rhetoric of cosmopolitanism, Jin holds no punches criticizing out the novel. reminding us that, for many, to leave what he sees as his native land’s grave Despite the globe-trotting tenden- home once is to leave it forever. What moral and tactical errors, as told cies of its characters A Map of Betrayal comes in its stead will be an internal through Gary’s and Lillian’s skeptical is not a cosmopolitan novel. Gary compromise, a hovering in-between, appraisals: from Mao’s stubborn, and Lillian may feel the urge to move an unmappable locale. □ disastrous agricultural policies in the between countries and cultures, but 72 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

THE GENEALOGY OF mixed (pardo) in Brazil. A change to provides the reader with a good sense A GENE: PATENTS, one’s race may only be a plane flight of the complexity of arguments about away. Yet there remains a persistent the place of race in genetic research, HIV/AIDS, AND RACE fascination with trying to find some noting that “to portray the debate as BY MYLES W. JACKSON “true” or “real” basis to race at the merely the constructivist (race is sim- molecular level of DNA. ply ideology) versus essentialist (race MIT PRESS In The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, is genetic) is too simplistic to represent February 2015, 344 pages HIV/AIDS, and Race, Myles W. Jackson accurately the debate’s complexity.” deftly explores the intersections Nearly half the book, however, A Review by between gene patenting, race, and concentrates on issues related to Jonathan Kahn the progress of scientific discovery patenting. Looking back at some of through the story of the CCR5 gene, or the fiercest arguments over gene Gene patents are odd things. First the sequence of DNA that codes for the patenting during the late 1990s and of all, they aren’t really “gene” patents. CCR5 protein, which is of central im- early 2000s, it is actually possible to Ask ten geneticists what a gene is, or portance to understanding the etiology reconfigure the debates as less about more specifically how they would of HIV/AIDS. The critical contribution whether genes should be patentable define a region of DNA that discretely of his book is to use this case study to than about when—that is, at what bounds a “gene,” and you are likely to provide a fine-grained analysis of the point in the stream of invention get 11 different answers. What really historical contingency of the devel- should they be patentable? Thus, for matters for patenting purposes (that opments that led to contemporary example, smaller biotech start-ups like is, for legal and commercial purposes) practices involving the intersection of Millennium or Incyte wanted to patent are regions of the genome—specific gene patenting, race, and biomedicine. genes as far “upstream” as possible— sequences of nucleotide Cs, As, Gs One of Jackson’s prime concerns as typically at the point where any seg- and Ts—that do something. Even here, a historian is to demonstrate for the ment of DNA could be identified that however, just what constitutes doing reader how our current situation (as might have any conceivable possible something can be a matter of conten- messy and confused as it is regarding utility to future research. In contrast, tion. These debates revolve largely matters of patents, race, and genes) big pharmaceutical companies, such around determining what is sufficient did not follow inevitably from some as Merck or Pfizer, did not want DNA to to meet the formal US Patent and logic inherent to the pursuit of science be tied up too soon by patents because Trademark Office requirement that a or its commercialization through their business was based on selling patent application demonstrate the law. Rather, in closely detailing both therapeutic interventions that were “utility” of a claimed invention. When particular scientific practices and a developed much further downstream. it comes to DNA, assertions of utility train of legal precedents that unfolded Then you had diverse groups outside have ranged widely and sometimes over the past century, he identifies of industry who were opposed to gene wildly; some going so far as to assert a number of twists and turns in the patenting altogether. that utility should be defined as a story of CCR5 where patent claims or Jackson nicely explores the function of market forces: if someone the use of race could have turned out development of the concepts of “puri is willing to pay to license a product, very differently. fication” and “isolation” of genetic then it must be useful. Jackson rightly observes that not material that have played a central Similarly, “race” is a very unstable all business was uniformly aligned role in the development of patent and contested technology of clas- along the same pro-gene-patenting doctrine regarding biological materials sification, particularly when it enters axis. He does a good job of exploring over the past century. He traces the the realm of biotechnology and the diverse interests and attitudes origin of this term in US patent law biomedicine. It is incontestable that toward gene-patenting within the in the foundational 1911 case of Park- socially defined categories of race biotechnology sector and allied actors Davis & Co. v. H.K. Mulford Co., where have played a profound role in shaping in academic research institutions. His Judge Learned Hand held that adrena- myriad disparate health outcomes tracing of the development of relevant line extracted from animal tissue and in the US and around the world. But patent doctrine is particularly useful in subsequently purified and isolated these categories change over time giving lie to the idea that the current for use as a medicine merited patent and across space. The US Census once regime of gene patents was inevitable, protection. This distinction was critical had discreet categories for such racial or at least singularly logical. because products merely discovered groups as “quadroon,” “mulatto,” and Jackson makes similar arguments in nature are not patentable. We see “Hindu.” Armenians were sometimes about the racialization of the CCR5 this latter principle in full force in the sent to segregated black schools in gene, exploring how researchers often 1980 case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the Jim Crow South. Today, an African framed the varying prevalence of the (where the US Supreme Court upheld American who codes as “black” in the critical Δ32 mutation in distinct popu- a patent on a manufactured bacterial US might be deemed white in Haiti or lations in racial or ethnic terms. He life form), which extended patent spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 73

protection to “include anything under upholding patents on “complimentary” Court’s sweeping restrictions on gene the sun that is made by man.” cDNA segments largely because the patenting, this case provides perhaps In the concept of purification latter do not exist in “nature” but are the best example of how the develop- and isolation, however, there is an solely the result of human interven- ment of legal doctrine in this area has interesting elision of scientific and tion. not progressed along some inevitable legal meaning and practice. I would With the Myriad case, Jackson trajectory toward patentability. argue that most scientists who are misses an opportunity to put a cap- Finally, Jackson provides a cau- trying to identify significant portions stone, as it were, on his argument tionary note to the reader regarding of DNA do not think of their work in about the historical contingency of the the technical complexity of some of terms of “purification and isolation.” developments he explores. Granted, the discussions of molecular biology In other words, this is a legal not a the Supreme Court decision came and supplies a useful glossary of scientific concept. For the purposes of down in June 2013, when this book technical terms at the back. A similar patent law, purification and isolation was likely nearing completion. Yet, as caution might also have been in order really means legally stripping a gene Jackson himself tells us in the epilogue, regarding discussions of aspects of any associations with the “natural” he was intimately involved in the case— of patent law. In general, however, world because nature is where patents to the point of helping the ACLU craft Jackson’s writing is clear and rela- cannot go. In this process, the labora- an amicus brief to the Supreme Court. tively easy to follow on these matters, tory becomes a critical transitional Jackson mentions the Supreme Court though a more direct statement at space, not only for scientific discovery holding and briefly integrates it into the outset in layman’s terms of just but for legal transformation. Thus, in his analysis but he does not give it the what CCR5 is and why we should care the recent critically important case of depth of meticulous analysis devoted to about its relation to race and patenting Association for Medical Pathology et al. the development of prior legal doctrine would have provided a helpful frame v. Myriad Genetics et al. the Supreme in the arena of gene patents. Given the for the general reader to more easily Court struck down patents on naturally Court’s split decision, partly uphold- follow the ensuing discussion. □ occurring segments of DNA while ing and partly striking the US District

THE CINEMA OF POETRY film, who often did not even take foot- The question of translation goes BY P. ADAMS SITNEY age, preferring instead to paint on the beyond language, of course. It also film stock straight away. But there was concerns the translatability of the one thing they had in common: both poetic experience into different media, Oxford University Press were deemed “poets” of the cinema. which is, in fact, the unifying theme of December 2014, 296 pages The meeting went famously badly, Sitney’s examinations of filmic works A Review by as P. Adams Sitney notes in his new as different as those of Pier Paolo Bert Rebhandl book, The Cinema of Poetry. Brakhage Pasolini, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Ingmar tried to show Tarkovsky his films, Bergman, Joseph Cornell, Lawrence In 1983, at the film festival in but they were met with hostility. The Jordan, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jerome Telluride, Colorado, organizers Bill famous guest refused to sit and watch Hiler, and Gregory Markopoulos. They, and Stella Pence thought it might in silence, instead making no attempt in addition to Tarkovsky and Brakhage, make sense to arrange for a meeting to conceal his disapproval. “Sheer in- are the subjects of The Cinema of Poetry, between Andrei Tarkovsky, visiting dulgence” was what he saw, according a work which can be understood the United States to present his most to Polish filmmaker Krzystof Zanussi, both as an update and as a systematic recent film Nostalghia, and Stan who took it upon himself to translate extension to his tome Visionary Film: Brakhage, the renowned experimen- Tarkovsky’s invectives. The American Avant-Garde, 1943–1978, tal filmmaker, who, early on in his The misunderstanding was all the the first edition of which appeared career, had taken up residency in more difficult to take for Brakhage, as in 1979. In that canonical work, he a cabin in the woods outside of the he considered himself to be a poet in outlined a movement of more or city of Boulder. The encounter was every sense of the word, albeit in the less loosely associated filmmakers, asymmetrical in many ways: an medium of film. Tarkovsky, for his part, whose transitions between the fields exiled, narrative filmmaker from the insisted that poetry was untranslat- of cinema, arts, and literature Sitney Soviet Union visiting the territory of able, effectively discarding Brakhage’s retraced from up close, being person- the other superpower—to which he notion that the two could share ally acquainted with many of the felt no particular attraction—and an Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam as a protagonists. American master of the handmade common source of inspiration. 74 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

It is the rogue Italian theoretician characters as neurotic representatives “lyrical film” within that avant-garde; and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini who of the bourgeoisie. “In its commitment Lawrence Jordan, who used cut-out now provides Sitney with the central to the model of poetic observation, animation for his vision of an auto- notion for his new book. Clinging to Tarkovsky’s theoretical position occu- biographical non-aligned temporality; “the fiction that he was working within pies a position between the narrative Stan Brakhage, of course, who saw the domain of semiology,” as Sitney poetry expounded by Pasolini and himself in the tradition of Ezra Pound pointedly writes, Pasolini devised a Stan Brakhage’s polemic for a cinema and Gertrude Stein; and Gregory “cinema di poesia” as a written language of visionary poetry,” Sitney writes. Markopoulos, who created a specific of reality in cinematic images. Its This is the seminal point of the site for his films, a Temenos in Greece, main interest was to claim “poetry” book. From here Sitney can return to to physically approach a hierophantic for narrative cinema, though it also Visionary Film and partly re-read his reality he drew from reading (about) aimed to insert a class perspective, own classic, now through the specific Hölderlin and other heirs to the as the fervent leftist Pasolini was filter of poetry, or what Pasolini would sublime origins of occidental culture. always looking for alternatives to a have called poesia-poesia, a cinema The notion of a “climate of poetry,” bourgeois point of view. His idea of not in the mode of prose, but of lyrical as quoted in passing from French “free indirect discourse” can be seen expression. The detailed discussions of composer Olivier Messiaen, is the last as a narrative device to heighten the Pasolini’s frequently revised attempts word of the book. It implies a physical sense of reality, and to frame it as a to find a “non-symbolic language” experience that is at the core of avant- class struggle, which might serve to without having to give up on his ideas garde sensibilities in cinema: “No reconcile poetry with ideology. Sitney of emancipatory subjectivity are one ideas, but in things.” acknowledges in passing that Pasolini of the strengths of this book. It helps Stan Brakhage often used this often puts “verbal pressure on the that Sitney is not only an expert on dictum by the poet William Carlos images,” but he is willing to make the experimental cinema, but also on Williams. It can also serve as a bridge most of his critical insights, even if Italian film history. He reads Pasolini between the two main parts of they never really add up to a coherent in his original language, which does Sitney’s book. It is not his intention theory of poetry in cinema. But he not always make things clearer—but to eliminate the differences between finds, in Pasolini, a stepping stone to his patience pays off, as it seems futile two fundamentally separate fields of consider the two postwar European to try to rigidly conceptualize the cinema: narrative, figurative film and filmmakers who contributed most associative thinking of Pasolini, which experimental film, which often has no significantly to a concept of cinematic eventually found a brilliant label in a protagonists in the orthodox sense. narration: Ingmar Bergman and Andrei book title: Empirismo eretico, heretical In looking for commonalities between Tarkovsky. In his close reading of The empiricism. these two fields, the often self- Mirror, Tarkovsky’s autobiographical The extensive second part of The contradictory Pier Paolo Pasolini is an masterpiece, Sitney manages to ex- Cinema of Poetry consists of readings excellent guide—and P. Adams Sitney tract a notion of “figurative expression” of bodies of works from American has taken his cue to make for a truly that transcends Pasolini’s class inter- avant-garde cinema: Joseph Cornell, rewarding voyage through twentieth- est and his denunciation of “poetic” who influenced a whole phase of century art. □

he Berlin Journal is an American Academy fellow drawing. Writing in the 1970s, pleased to be able to in fall 2014, first gained recog- 2011 American Academy Tpresent in this issue nition in 1973 with his semi- Fellow P. Adams Sitney wrote images from Anthony McCall: nal work, Line Describing a that Line Describing a Cone Notebooks and Conversations Cone. Since then, his work has was “the most brilliant case (Lund Humphries, 2015), a been exhibited in museums of an observation on the es- new book by Graham Ellard around the world, including sentially sculptural quality and Stephen Johnstone. In an the Museum of Modern of every cinematic situation.” effort to document the crea Art, Tate, Whitney Museum Now, the new book provides tive process behind McCall’s of American Art, Centre a unique insight into McCall’s “solid light” installations, the Pompidou, and Hamburger creative process as well as book presents a decade of Bahnhof in Berlin. McCall’s his own understanding of the conversations with the artist work, though, is difficult to effect of his artwork on the in addition to facsimile re- categorize, occupying, as it viewer. □ productions of pages from his does, the intersection be- notebooks. McCall, who was tween sculpture, cinema, and spring 2015 · twenty-eight · the berlin journal 75

ALUMNI BOOKS

Joel Agee (Transl.) Mark J. Butler Sander Gilman (Ed.) Dietrich Neumann, Sandy Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound Playing with Something that Judaism, Christianity and Isenstadt, Margaret Maile New York Review Books Runs: Technology, Impro- Islam: Collaboration and Petty (Eds.) Classics, March 2015 visation and Composition in Conflict in the Age of Diaspora Cities of Light: Two Centuries DJ and Laptop Performance Hong Kong UP, February 2015 of Urban Illumination Daniel Albright Oxford UP, July 2014 Routledge, February 2015 Putting Modernism Together: Karen Hagemann Literature, Music, and T. J. Clark and Revisiting Prussia’s Wars Geoffrey O’Brien Painting, 1872–1927 Catherine Lampert against Napoleon: History, In a Mist Johns Hopkins UP, June 2015 Frank Auerbach Culture, Memory Shearsman Books, Tate Publishing, June 2015 Cambridge UP, March 2015 March 2015 Hilton Als The Group Roger Cohen Jochen Hellbeck Susan Pedersen Farrar, Straus & Giroux, The Girl from Human Street: Stalingrad: The City that The Guardians: The League February 2015 Ghosts of Memory in a Defeated the Third Reich of Nations and the Crisis Jewish Family Translated by of Empire Mary Jo Bang Knopf, January 2015 Christopher Tauchen Oxford UP, June 2015 The Last Two Seconds: Poems PublicAffairs, April 2015 Graywolf Press, March 2015 Henri Cole Jed Rasula Nothing to Declare: Poems Myles W. Jackson Destruction Was My Beatrice: Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, The Genealogy of a Gene: Dada and the Unmaking of Marlene Laruelle (Eds.) March 2015 Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race the Twentieth Century Between Europe and Asia: The MIT Press, February 2015 Basic Books, June 2015 Origins, Theories, and Legacies Belinda Cooper (Transl.) of Russian Eurasianism Sovereignty: The Origin and Alex Katz Alex Ross, Klaus Biesenbach, University of Pittsburgh Future of a Political and Alessandra Bellavita, Séverine Nicola Dibben, Timothy Press, May 2015 Legal Concept Waelchli (Eds.), Adrien Morton, Sjón By Dieter Grimm Goetz, Suzy Menkes (Text) Björk Barry Bergdoll, Carlos Comas, Columbia UP, April 2015 Alex Katz: 45 Years of The Museum of Modern Art, Jorge Francisco Liernur and Portraits 1969–2014 New York, March 2015 Patricio del Real (Eds.) Vincent Crapanzano Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Latin America in Construction: Recapitulations Tom Sleigh Paris/Salzburg, April 2015 Architecture 1955–1980 Other Press, March 2015 Station Zed: Poems The Museum of Modern Art, Jonathan Lethem Graywolf Press, January 2015 Tom Drury New York, April 2015 Lucky Alan and Other Stories Das Stille Land: Roman Ron Grigor Suny Doubleday, February 2015 Philip V. Bohlman and Transl. by Gerhard Falkner “They Can Live in the Desert Victoria Lindsay Levine (Eds.) and Nora Matocza Evonne Levy and but Nowhere Else”: A History This Thing Called Music: Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, Tristan Weddigen (Eds.) of the Armenian Genocide Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl January 2015 Principles of Art History: The Princeton UP, April 2015 Rowman & Littlefield Problem of the Development Heide Fehrenbach and Stephen F. Szabo Publishers, May 2015 of Style in Early Modern Art Davide Rodogno (Eds.) Germany, Russia and the Rise By Heinrich Wölfflin Daniel Boyarin Humanitarian Photography: of Geo-Economics Getty Research Institute, A Traveling Homeland: A History Bloomsbury Academic, May 2015 The Babylonian Talmud Cambridge UP, February 2015 February 2015 as Diaspora James Mann Claire Finkelstein, Jens David Peter J. Wallison University of Pennsylvania George W. Bush Ohlin, Kevin Govern (Eds.) Hidden in Plain Sight: What Press, June 2015 (American Presidents Series, Cyber War: Law and Ethics Really Caused the World’s ed. by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh for Virtual Conflicts Worst Financial Crisis and Jr., Sean Wilentz) Formalism and Historicity: Oxford UP, May 2015 Why It Could Happen Again Times Books, February 2015 Models and Methods in Encounter Books, Hal Foster, Carson Chan, Twentieth-Century Art Anthony McCall January 2015 Brett Steele, Sarah Whiting, MIT Press, February 2015 Notebooks and Conversations Iwan Baan Lund Humphries Publishers, Barkow Leibinger: Spielraum March 2015 Hatje Cantz, April 2015 76 the berlin journal · twenty-eight · spring 2015

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I look back now and see buildings so thick that what I thought I was making then is nothing but interlocking angles and above them, that blot of gray sky I sometimes caught sight of. Underneath is the edge of what wasn’t known then. When I would go. When I would come back. What I would be when. I was hard working but sometimes being becomes a habit: I came on stage wearing a lavender fitted dress with a stand-up collar. He looked at me, he took a drink. He was a man examining a hothouse flower. Over and over. I clicked, then closed my eyes—the better to imagine my upcoming absence. POEMS

SELF-PORTRAIT AS A PHOTOGRAPH OF A PLATTER A platter can embody a wish to be simple. We are who we are. Wir sind. I also speak English. I married a master. I MARY JO JO BANG BY MARY taught him something. I know what I’m doing. An image stands for the thing that is taken. I am taking everything I

A STUDY IN BALANCE: IN STUDY A see. This is how I see myself. The platter is flat and somewhat lasting. I made it last. Circum/ambient: to be around. FROM FROM THE BAUHAUS THE

ME, A CHRONICLE Shapes that begin as just one solution to a common problem can go on to become an inflexible method. Take for example houses. Once a certain way of arranging walls takes hold, it’s difficult to imagine any other. Another example might be locomotion, the method and circular means of moving from one place to another. I was drawn early to the idea of other modes of seeing, especially to photography. Looking back, I see myself entering the living room. I see my difficult father, crisscrossing the room to close or open a window. My delicate musician mother, her zigzag pattern of static that moved from person to person. My sister, the new century’s picture of a perfect child. My brother, an eventual man. At one point, the idea of rebellion became a unified belief. I left. Can you imagine the impact? Who hasn’t felt that in order to breathe, she has to splinter the first self and leave it behind? I constructed a second self. I photographed myself as if I were a building. THE BERLIN JOURNAL NUMBER 28 spring 2015