A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin Number Twenty-Two Spring 2012

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THE BERLIN JOURNAL  Number 22  spring 2012

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A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

THE BERLIN JOURNAL

In this issue: Peter L. Lindseth Michael Ignatieff Elizabeth Povinelli Richard Deming Karen Russell David Remnick Katherine Boo Daniel Hobbins Nicholas Eberstadt

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Contents Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London

The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

Anthony McCall, You and I, Horizontal, 2006, installation view

Untangling the EU Crisis

Sounding the Depths

04 Of the People

18

peter l. lindseth, by way of Abraham Lincoln, examines democracy and the Eurozone, and how even those Europeans who favor integration may have difficulties experiencing it as “their own.”

08 Politics for Hard Times

michael ignatieff speaks to the challenges facing progressive politics in an age of austerity; namely, “persuading the majority who are doing well that their future depends on doing something about the large and growing minority who are doing badly.”

14

32

The World’s First Media Revolution daniel hobbins reveals the oft-ignored origins of print, and how, contrary to most historians’ assumptions, a rising demand for books came before, not after, Gutenberg’s famous invention.

36

Waning Crescent

richard deming ruminates on modern isolation through the lens of horror films and offers two of his latest poems.

N1

On the Waterfront



The American Academy’s newsletter, with the latest on fellows, alumni, and trustees, as well as recent events at the Hans Arnhold Center

25

Emergence and Exit

elizabeth povinelli theorizes neoliberalism’s collapse, the concurrent rise of radically new forms of social governance, and the increasingly multi-polar nature of the global economic engine.

On Loneliness

Setting the Record Straight

29

The Sponge Divers of New Kalymnos karen russell grants a sneak peek at her new fiction and describes the eerie nature of authorial intuition. Journalism as Literature

david remnick, joseph lelyveld, and katherine boo discuss the novel-

nicholas eberstadt explains the decline in fertility rates, traditional marriage patterns, and living arrangements currently sweeping the Muslim world.

40

A World in Process

charles bright and michael geyer 

chat about their first encounters with globalism, the curiously brief heyday of Western empires in the twentieth century, and the urgency of re-narrating modern global history.

istic tendencies of narrative reportage.

This issue was generously underwritten by Academy chairman A. Michael Hoffman, to whom we are very grateful.

2 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012 The Berlin Journal

The American Academy

A magazine from the Hans Arnhold

in Berlin

Center published by the American Academy in Berlin Number Twenty-Two – Spring 2012 Publisher Gary Smith Editor Brittani Sonnenberg image Editor R. Jay Magill Jr. Advertising Berit Ebert Design Susanna Dulkinys & Edenspiekermann www.edenspiekermann.com Printed by Ruksaldruck, Berlin Copyright © 2012 The American Academy in Berlin ISSN 1610-6490 Cover: Jenny Holzer,

Executive Director

Director’s Note

Gary Smith

Devotion’s depths

dean of fellows & programs Pamela Rosenberg CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER Andrew J. White Am Sandwerder 17–19 14109 Berlin Tel. (49 30) 80 48 3-0 Fax (49 30) 80 48 3-111 www.americanacademy.de 14 East 60th Street, Suite 604 New York, NY 10022 Tel. (1) 212 588-1755 Fax (1) 212 588-1758

TOP SECRET 21, 2012, ©Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012, Photo: Jens Ziehe, Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin/London

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ich a rd Holbrooke “wasn’t interested in foreign

policy; he was consumed by it,” writes Jacob Heilbrunn in a New York Times review of The Unquiet American, a new collection of essays on the late diplomat and Academy founder. In this issue of the Berlin Journal, we offer a selection of articles from authors who are similarly anti-dabbling in their devotions, whose work reveals the deepest of dedications. Katherine Boo, who spent four years in the slums of Mumbai researching her latest book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, describes her impatience with the self-congratulatory tendencies of narrative nonfiction; Michael Ignatieff argues for a progressive response to the financial crisis; and Karen Russell depicts a diving community whose greed drives a good man to invent bad technology. “Everything was better last year,” says one of Russell’s characters during an initiation ceremony. “The cake, the boys. The mothers looked good last year, what happened? Everybody’s fatter this year! Everybody’s choking to death on this foul cake!” While the austerity measures challenging the stability of the EU have meant less, not more, cake, Russell’s ornery character serves as a chorus for a segment of the West whose confidence, pre-crisis, was unflagging. In an interview, global his­ torians Michael Geyer and Charles Bright offer insights into the origins of such blind spots. Elizabeth Povinelli predicts the collapse of neoliberalism, and Peter Lindseth suggests that a little demos could go a long way in re-unifying the EU. And yet, as spring slowly warms Wannsee’s waters, this issue of the Journal also acknowledges the surprise and relief, each year, of a gentler season. Richard Deming points out the counterintuitively communal quality of loneliness; Nicholas Eberstadt reveals an unexpected study about plummeting birth rates in the Muslim world; and Daniel Hobbins suggests that it was a demand for books that inspired the rise of the printing press, rather than the reverse. This spring is also the Academy’s first under the helm of its new chairman, A. Michael Hoffman, who draws upon a substantial record of achievement in the financial world and a lifelong championing of non-profit organizations in the arts, academia, and international relations. As we look forward to growing with his guidance, we also take a moment to acknowledge the immeasurable contributions of our trustees over the past fourteen years, who have shown much wisdom, passion, and perseverance in building an institution from scratch.  – G.S. and B.L.S.

Mehr ZEIT für Sie!

Genießen Sie anspruchsvollen Journalismus.

el d n Ha h! Im ältlic erh

4 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

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n a recen t speech at Humboldt University, Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, noted how the Eurozone crisis had seemingly forced national leaders “to take center stage” in the EU. For many observers, this has raised fears of a “renationalization of European politics.” Van Rompuy, however, preferred to look on the bright side. This was all indicative, he said, of the deepening of the “Europeanization of national political life.” He quoted Chancellor Merkel in this regard: “In this crisis we have reached a whole new level of cooperation; we have arrived at a sort of European home affairs. Europa ist Innenpolitik.” There can be no doubt that Europe has, indeed, become domestic politics. Yet I would argue that the Eurozone crisis has merely accelerated a trend that began at least twenty-five years ago, with the Single European Act (se a) of 1986, followed by the Treaty of Maastricht of 1992. It is no coincidence that concerns over Europe’s purported “democratic deficit” began to intensify at this time, because it was then

European governance has long been afflicted by a broadly held sense that integration is a largely “bureaucratic affair run by a faceless, soulless Eurocracy in Brussels.” that increasing numbers of Europeans became aware of how much regulatory power had migrated to the supranational level. Even though the EU’s annual budget would remain miniscule (no more than 1% of total EU gdp), the EU would become a prodigious producer of regulatory norms with a major impact on domestic policymaking in its member states. There was, however, a fundamental problem with this so-called Europeanization of national political life. Joschka Fischer, then Germany’s foreign minister, identified it in his own speech at Humboldt in 2000: European governance has long been afflicted – indeed, is still afflicted – by a broadly held sense that integration is a largely “bureaucratic affair run by a faceless, soulless Eurocracy in Brussels.” No matter how much European elites have struggled against this perception, European citizens still continue to experience the increasing

Of the People Democracy, the Eurozone, and Lincoln’s threshold criterion

By Peter L. Lindseth

© Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin and The Pace Gallery. Photo: Amedeo Benestante

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Carsten Nicolai, pionier II, 2009. Site-specific installation on Piazza Plebiscito, Naples, Italy

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Europeanization of domestic politics, if not precisely as the negation of democracy on the national level, then certainly as the transfer of regulatory power to an unaccountable, distant, and ultimately foreign bureaucratic elite, dominated by national executives. This distant elite

nificant achievements along the final two of Lincoln’s dimensions. “Government by the people” refers to what academics call “input legitimacy”; that is, popular participation, most importantly via elections (the European Parliament clearly meets this criterion, as do other features

the problem in the EU is not a democratic deficit, in the sense of needing increased input legitimacy, but rather a democratic disconnect.

goes simply by the name “Brussels” – or, as the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger put it in a Spiegel essay last year, the “sanftes Monster Brüssel” – the “gentle monster that is Brussels.” The official response to this broad political perception toward the EU, beginning with the se a in 1986 and continuing with every subsequent treaty up to Lisbon in 2009, has been to increase the role of the elected European Parliament (EP) in the supranational policy process. The aim has been to reduce integration’s so-called democratic deficit, building on decisions of the European Court of Justice (ecj) in the 1980s. Very much in keeping with the constitutionalist mindset the court had established since the early 1960s, the ecj declared that the EP was the expression of “the fundamental democratic principle that the peoples [of Europe] should take part in the exercise of [supranational] power through the intermediary of a representative assembly.”

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e migh t c a ll t his “parliamentary democratization strategy,” which has been a fundamental feature of the understanding of the EU as a kind of quasi-federal constitutional polity. Alas, as subsequent events have shown, this strategy has ultimately failed to stem the negative perception of the EU as fundamentally bureaucratic and distant. This is due to the fact that the strategy itself is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what democracy is, as well as how true democratic legitimacy is realized over time. To frame the discussion, allow me to do something not particularly innovative by invoking Lincoln’s classic formulation from the Gettysburg Address – democracy is “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” The effort to “democratize” the EU has made sig-

of the EU, like the new citizens’ initiative in the Treaty of Lisbon). And, despite the many woes of the current crisis, my sense is the EU deserves significant credit in terms of “government for the people,” or what the German political scientist Fritz Scharpf has famously called “output legitimacy.” This can be measured not merely in additional points added to net gdp as a consequence of market integration (if not of the common currency), but also by such things as the removal of border controls; the broadly shared respect for human rights and the rule of law; as well as, perhaps most importantly, the overall sense of peaceful coexistence that integration has brought to this historically troubled continent. (Peace, after all, was the stated aim of the Schuman Declaration in 1950.) Thus, despite its current economic travails, the EU has much to be proud of in terms of output legitimacy as well. So what, then, is the problem with the EU’s democratic legitimacy? I would say the problem lies precisely in Lincoln’s threshold criterion: “government of the people.” This refers to the historical identity between a population and a set of governing institutions; that is, to the politicalcultural perception that the institutions of government are genuinely the people’s own, which they have historically constituted for the purpose of self-government over time. Europeans may favor integration for all sorts of instrumental reasons, but they do not yet experience it as their own. This process of self-constitution is tied to the historical sense of the existence of a “people” itself, to the sense that there exists a historically cohesive political community, shaped by broadly shared historical memories, in which it is legitimate for the majority to rule over the minority in a democratic sense (subject, of course, to the protection of human rights). When a political com-

munity gains this historically grounded sense of democratic self-consciousness, it has become a “demos” – in the sense of demos-kratia, or democracy. In other words, democratic legitimacy in the deepest sense depends not merely on democracy’s inputs or outputs. Rather, it ultimately depends on whether there exists this crucial sense of historical identity between governing institutions and a “people” self-conscious of itself as such. I would argue that this sense of demos-legitimacy is not merely essential to democracy but also to constitutionalism itself: it is on the basis of this demos-legitimacy that merely functional institutions of rule (those that might otherwise possess input and output legitimacy) are transformed into genuinely “constitutional” ones, because they have come to be understood as the institutional expressions of the right of the demos to rule itself.

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s is w ell know n today, the EU is riddled with multiple “demoi” across its various member states. This creates a great deal of democratic and constitutional legitimacy, unfortunately not for the EU, but for national constitutional bodies. (There are exceptions, of course, such as in Belgium, where the coherence of the national demos is deeply contested, thus undermining the legitimacy of national institutions.) But as is broadly recognized throughout Europe, the EU, as yet, lacks any single, overarching European demos. Without such demos-legitimacy – that is, without the sense that European institutions are genuinely the people’s own, rather than some distant bureaucratic construct – Europe will always have a great deal of difficulty overcoming its democratic deficit, no matter how much input and output legitimacy otherwise exists. Indeed, the very idea of a democratic deficit in the EU may itself reflect an elite misapprehension of the nature of the problem. As my book Power and Legitimacy describes in some detail, the problem in the EU is not a democratic deficit, in the sense of needing increased input legitimacy, but rather a democratic disconnect. European institutions are generally perceived as beyond the control of democratic and constitutional bodies in a historically recognizable sense, and this has a bearing on the scope of authority that Europeans believe supranational bodies can legitimately exercise.

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Sympathetic European commentators, not to mention judges on the ecj, have struggled for decades to reconceive the nature of democracy and constitutionalism
in the EU. They have come up with a whole range of “network-based” theories of transnational or cosmopolitan democratic and constitutional legitimacy in order to dissociate these concepts from the nation-state and thus bring supranational governance within their conceptual ambit. And yet the idea of the EU as democratic and constitutional in its own right has remained deeply suspect, at least when measured against the perceived legitimacy of institutions on the national level, with all their many flaws. I should say that there are many benefits to this sense of supranational constitutionalism, notably in the protection of the individual against the excesses of public power, wherever located. But there are also significant risks, as the Eurozone crisis may be sadly demonstrating. Constitutional interpretations of integration wrongly bracket out the no-demos problem and thus effectively assume a degree of autonomous legitimacy in supranational governance that is fundamentally lacking (or at least is still fundamentally in dispute). This leads us, then, to the key point: overestimating the legitimacy of European institutions is not merely an error of academic analysis; rather, it can lead to even more profound and dangerous errors of institutional or policy design, as the Eurozone crisis is demonstrating. As the Italian political theorist Stefano Bartolini presciently warned in 2005, in his book

and Greece – do not constitute what they call an “optimal currency area”). Rather, it was also flawed constitutionally, in terms of its lack of a foundation in demos-legitimacy. Given the downside risks that the Eurozone crisis is now revealing, the adoption of the euro presupposed a degree of centralized political power and legitimacy – most importantly relating to shared taxing and borrowing authority (Eurobonds) – that the EU, or rather the Eurozone countries collectively, simply lack.

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n his speech at Humboldt, President Van Rompuy continually pointed out the fact that total debt levels and the general fiscal position of the Eurozone as a whole were actually pretty decent, at least as compared to, say, the United States or Britain. The problem with this claim is that the “Eurozone as a whole,” aside from the fact that it shares a common currency, along with some common institutions like the European Central Bank, is otherwise a statistical artifact with no real political existence of its own. It certainly lacks shared taxing or borrowing authority that might take advantage of the overall sound position of the “Eurozone as a whole” (for example, via Eurobonds). So why not just “more Europe?” Why not just solve the problem by creating the long-sought political union to match the currency union? The answer is simply stated, even if its manifestations are complex: no demos. European elites cannot simply wave the political-cultural magic wand and create the necessary sense of democratic and constitutional self-

overestimating the legitimacy of European institutions is not merely an error of academic analysis; it can lead to even more profound and dangerous errors of institutional or policy design, as the Eurozone crisis is demonstrating.

Restructuring Europe, “the risk of miscalculating the extent to which true legitimacy surrounds the European institutions and their decisions . . . may lead to the overestimating of the capacity of the EU to overcome major economic and security crises.” The events of the last two years suggest that the European Monetary Union (emu) was built on just such an overestimation. The common currency was not just flawed economically (although economists never tire of pointing out that the countries of the Eurozone – and certainly Germany

consciousness across national borders that constructing such a union would demand. To do so without the requisite demoslegitimacy – the sense of “government of the people” – would be the institutional equivalent of pouring good money after bad. At this point in Europe’s history, it cannot get from here to there. The functional demands of this crisis may yet force Europeans to attempt to supranationalize some of its member states’ debts, at least if it wants the common currency to survive. But it is quite

unclear how stable the resulting institutional settlement would be. One might call the resulting regime a political union, but its underlying socio-cultural and sociopolitical foundations would be tenuous. Does this mean there is no legitimacy for further integration? Of course not. But when contemplating further steps in integration, Europeans must always be honest with themselves about this key question: legitimate for what? In a system where democratic and constitutional legitimacy remains fundamentally national, but significant normative

The answer is simply stated, even if its manifestations are complex: no demos.

power is increasingly supranationalized, it must be recognized that there are limits to the EU’s legitimacy, as the Eurozone crisis is unfortunately indicating. Integration is good for certain things but not others. It might be very good for harmonizing regulatory standards across borders. But denationalizing taxing and spending power to any significant degree, as some argue is the only way to solve the Eurozone crisis, may yet prove a step too far.

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espi t e t he m an y effort s to create a version of constitutionalism beyond the state in the EU, the current crisis is a further manifestation of a still basic fact in Europe: “government of the people” is still wedded to the nationstate in crucial respects. How long that will last, I cannot say. But the Eurozone crisis seems to be reminding us of an insight stressed by the French philosopher Ernest Renan in his famous lecture “What is a Nation?” in 1882, something arguably still true despite all that has changed in the intervening century and a quarter. The current crisis reminds us that, in extremis, national institutions in Europe are still looked upon, in terms of political culture, as a “guarantee of liberty” in a collective, constitutional sense, something that “would be lost if [Europe] had only one law and only one master.” Peter L. Lindseth is the Olimpiad S. Ioffe Professor of International and Comparative Law at the University of Connecticut and the spring 2012 Daimler Fellow at the Academy.

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Politics for Hard Times Who pays for austerity?

By Michael Ignatieff

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s I w ri t e, Europe’s leaders are gathering to try to save the common currency yet again. They have failed before, and failure this time may put into question the destination a continent gave itself after 1945. Instead of progress towards ever closer union, we must now envisage the possible break-up of the euro, the re-emergence of border controls, and the bubbling up of a politics of resentment and recrimination that could end in conflict between classes and even between nations. The strategic, economic, and social future of a continent is at stake. The European project was supposed to guarantee the future of Europe by creating a single market of a size to rival the Chinese and the Americans. A strong euro and a strong panEuropean economy in turn would sustain the European welfare state as an alternative to the American and Chinese social models. A continent integrated from Ireland to the borders of Russia would consign to the past the divisions of the Cold War. The euro crisis puts all of these dreams at risk. We can see now, in hindsight, that a common currency required a common fiscal and budgetary regime to constrain sovereign imprudence and political fecklessness. Yet instead of locking in a common fiscal discipline from the beginning, European governments tried to have the best of both worlds, monetary union without loss of economic sovereignty. Both weak and strong states then exploited the euro to pass their problems onto their neighbors. Strong states like France and Germany evaded their Maastricht commitment to keep their debt at three percent of gdp, while weaker ones like Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland went on borrowing sprees, convinced that the Eurozone would bail them out and that rising asset prices would cover their fiscal deficits.

Instead of transcending sovereignty, the European Union systematized the transfer of moral hazard from weaker to stronger sovereigns. But the bond markets are signaling that a limit has now been reached. The burdens of debt in weak economies are so large that no European institution can pay them except by printing money, which frightens any European, especially a German, with memories of what inflation did to Weimar democracy. There is a solution: to confer veto powers over national budgets to European institutions in return for European guarantees on the sovereign debts of all states. But this requires both strong and weak to surrender economic sovereignty, and it requires European electorates to transfer power upward to technocrats. The economic prob-

Right now, neither Brussels nor national parliaments are in charge. It is the markets that are dictating terms to European democracy. lem can be solved but only at some considerable cost to European democracy. Europe’s democratic heritage can survive upward transfer of fiscal and monetary policy only if other powers are transferred downward to the people through devolution and only if European institutions remain accountable to a pan-European electorate.

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igh t now, nei t her Brussels nor national parliaments are in charge. It is the markets that are dictating terms to European democracy. Already the bond market is charging interest rates for government debt that will make it impossible for them to dig themselves out of their hole without intervention from the ecb and the imf. Sovereigns can’t

get credit from the markets, and business credit is drying up. The continent faces a credit crunch and, if its leaders don’t act quickly, years of recession. Political solutions are within reach – in the form of fiscal and monetary union – but there may no longer be time enough for the politicians. Economic solutions also lie within reach, but they have been left so late that Europe faces a lost decade of declining productivity, unemployment, and stagnation. Crisis, as all politicians know, is an opportunity to be seized. Let us hope Europe will seize its last chance. The deeper question is why Europe and Europeans failed to act so far. Why has a concerted political response taken so long? One might have thought that a threat of systemic risk to all would coalesce the political will to act in common. Not so. Years of growth concealed the real problem – the growing inequality between nations, classes, and regions in Europe. As long as European economies were all growing, increasing inequality could be contained. As soon as the economy stopped growing, inequality and resentment at other people’s better fortune or their foolishness made a coordinated response to the common crisis more difficult.

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t h a s ta ken me a long time to appreciate something my father, a Russian immigrant to Canada who came of age in the Depression, once told me about hard times. When I asked him what it was like in the Dirty Thirties, he said that if you had a job it was like being on a train: you were in the heated parlor car up front while the unemployed were in the unheated freight cars at the back. So it is today. When the unlamented Silvio Berlusconi was asked how serious the economic crisis

© Claus Goedicke, Courtesy Galerie m Bochum, Germany

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 9

Claus Goedicke, Pflaster (from the series “Some Things”), 2008, Inkjet Print, 59,4 x 42 cm

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was in Italy, he replied, “What crisis?” The restaurants in Milan were full. The egregious Italian had a point. The patrons filling the Milanese restaurants do not feel the pain. If you are one of the fortunate few with cash in hand, you can spend and it costs nothing to borrow. In a recessionary economy, cash and liquidity are king and these monarchs confer their favors on the fortunate alone. Retailers catering to the wealthy have never done so well. The cash-rich have not only escaped the crisis but gained an increasing share of national wealth. They are not the only ones who have been insulated from hard times. Unionized workers in the public sector are better protected than non-unionized workers in the private sector. Native-born are less likely to be let go than immigrants. Skilled fare better than unskilled, educated better than uneducated. Germans are better off than Greeks, northern Europe is better off than southern. It is agreeable for Germans to indulge their schadenfreude and ressentiment towards their feckless southern partners, but these emotions may have blinded German voters to their true interest: decisive action to federate Europe and save the euro. Just as the recession creates winners and losers and fragments political consensus within Europe, it also is creating new winners and losers in the global economy at large. Just ask Brazilians. Crisis – what crisis? They have never had it so good. Just ask Canadians. Their unemployment rate is two percent below the Americans. Their banks – a heavily regulated oligopoly – did not fall for the sub-prime scam. In my country, the full burden of hard times falls squarely on a few shoulders: young people without post-secondary education, older workers in declining resource and mining sectors, recent immigrants, and aboriginals. The guilty secret about recessionary times is that hard times for the few actually mean cheap money and rising house prices for the many. Yet even those who have held on to their jobs fear for the future, and in political terms, this produces a flight to security and retrenchment. Even the economically secure understand that this recession is not just a slump in demand but a restructuring of the global economy. We are living through the first economic recession in which the developing world is gaining at the expense of the developed

world. Resource economies like Canada and Australia are dependent on Chinese demand for commodities. Cash-rich companies in the developed world are dependent on the outsourcing opportunities and the consumer markets in developing nations. Already the outlines of a new division of labor are emerging. When demand returns in Europe and North America, jobs may not come back for the millions of middle class North Americans and Europeans who grew up working in manufacturing and services.

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n an economic crisis, everyone is in a flight from risk to security, but no, we are not all in this together. Because we are not, we are lining up behind radically different political solutions. In the United States, the Republicans defend austerity and deficit cutting to push the costs of recession onto the vulnerable, with tax cuts designed to render the new inequality permanent. This solution – class warfare if there ever was – appeals, paradoxically, to those who may pay the price for it: private sector workers who feel that their taxes are being wasted bailing out big banks and sustaining inefficient public sector jobs. The Democrats want to protect public services and the public sector through tax increases on the rich. This appeals to workers who either work for government

Germany is a case in point. As a result of high labor productivity and the welfare state’s automatic stabilizers, Germany has managed the crisis better than its European neighbors. Now it feels punished for its success by being asked to bail out the weaker brethren on the southern periphery. The German political discourse on its southern partners recalls what Victorian political economists used to say about the undeserving poor: your bad habits are to blame for your misfortune. Until you become frugal, efficient, and abstemious, the Germans tell their neighbors, there will be no Eurobonds, no bailouts, no “interest rate socialism,” no transfer union. But Germany is discovering what the rich and strong eventually have to learn: the weak can bring you down. Weak states, in a currency union, can destroy the economic prospects of the strong. If the bad news is that a recession pits strong against weak, rich against poor, the good news is that eventually the rich – whether they be nations, regions, or classes – discover that their own prosperity will be threatened unless they help those left behind. This is the deeper logic behind German moves towards further European integration: the strong are discovering their interdependence on the weak, and the weak

We are living through the first economic recession in which the developing world is gaining at the expense of the developed world. or are dependent on public services. Each party’s approach to the crisis is not so much a solution as an attempt to entrench the privileges of the groups that support them politically. Everywhere the crisis pits those who have some security – whether it be high income or protected public service jobs – against those who do not have secure pensions, employment, or prospects. Progressive politics in an age of austerity comes down to this: persuading the majority who are doing well – whether they are nations, classes, or regions – that their future depends on doing something about the large and growing minority, of weaker states, poorer regions, and lower income groups who are doing badly. A progressive politics will have to show that if we are to get out of recession, we will have to stick together. This will not be easy.

are accepting that they have to live within disciplines prescribed by the strong. Even now, it is possible to think this lesson can be learned in time. If inequality is the chief feature of the recession, as well as the chief obstacle to political action to dig us out, the question for progressives is what to do about it. After all, what defines a progressive politics, whether of a liberal or a social democratic variety, is not merely a moral concern for the disadvantaged, but the economic insight that growth requires equity in order to be sustainable. What then are the strategies that combine equity and growth and get us all out of this crisis? Here we need to understand some paradoxes. The most serious market failure since the Great Depression has not engendered a crisis of faith in markets, still less a return to Rooseveltian big government or

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 11

Pervasive economic in security among the haves does not engender solidarity towards those who have not. Greece, and Ireland have been driven from office, and the popular mood is towards conservative austerity and retrenchment. In Canada, in the federal election of May 2011, the Liberal Party and I ran on a program to freeze corporate tax cuts, eliminate tax loopholes that benefit the super-rich, invest in education, and support family care for the majority. It was a fiscally responsible, socially progressive program and we were rewarded with the worst electoral result in generations. I may not have been the best possible messenger but notice that the message also met with failure. Pervasive

economic insecurity among the haves does not engender solidarity towards those who have not. It engenders a political flight from equity towards retrenchment. It is commonly said that Occupy Wall Street has changed the conversation, placed inequality back on the political agenda and improved the prospects for progressive politics. I’m not so sure. The slogan of Occupy Wall Street, “We are the 99 percent,” encourages the illusion that “we” are all in it together, “us” against a tiny “them.” But we are not all in this together. If we were, liberals and progressives would be winning the political arguments. But we are not. Conservatives are winning because they promise stability to those who are winning. They also indulge those who want to punish the losers. That much-used phrase “moral hazard” has become a powerful alibi for a politics of resentment. As an example, one of the chief reasons why the American economy remains mired in recession is that millions of homeowners either cannot pay their mortgages or are walking away from mortgages on property that will never be worth more than their initial investment. A fed-

eral program to reduce interest payments or write down a portion of these mortgages would get the housing market functioning again and stimulate consumption among distressed homeowners. Such a measure would help Main Street, instead of Wall Street, and would be no more expensive than aid to the big banks. Interestingly, it is just as unpopular as measures to help bankers. “Your mortgage is not my problem” was one of the signs visible at a recent Tea Party rally in the US. A retributive politics, that refuses assistance to indebted mortgage holders on the grounds of moral hazard, will only prolong recession. Yet retributive politics is more popular than a politics of equality. Equally paradoxical is the resistance of lower income groups to a politics of equality that aims at redistribution of income and progressive taxation. There is anger, yes, at the unprecedented percentage of national income that the top one percent of earners have secured for themselves over the past thirty years. But even unprecedented inequality of income continues to be widely accepted. Top earners argue that their incomes are returns on effort, sala-

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12 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

ary plus bonuses tied to performance while providing employment to thousands of people, together with dividends to investors, small and large, ought not to be a morally problematic figure for a progressive politics. The company president whose compensation package does not include any penalties for failure, and whose risk-taking and profit-seeking exposes his employees to bankruptcy, while ruining investors and sending shock waves throughout the rest of the economy is another matter entirely. There is overwhelming public support for government that protects ordinary citizens, as well as their jobs and savings, from the predatory risk-taking of the few. Nothing has so weakened faith in government than government’s failure to do so. Government cannot and should not protect or compensate individuals and firms from market bets that go bad. But it should be there to protect populations at large from systemic risks. This

Instead of fulminating against free markets, a progressive politics should be arguing that what we need are markets that are actually free. function of government opens up an opportunity a progressive politics must now seize. It is time for us to bother with the detail of firm level regulation – regulating executive pay, reforming corporate governance so that Claus Goedicke, Schuhe, from the series “Some Things,” 2010, C-print boards protect share holders and employees against systemic risk, measures to force servatives to persuade them that increased those who trade large volumes in the market ried benefits that come from working long taxation of the few today will be followed by to have “skin in the game,” personal liabilihours and taking large risks. Moreover, increased taxation on the many tomorrow. ties that can be called in when their bets fail. outsized incomes are justified when they Instead of fulminating against free marare the result of innovations that create rogressi v es should not sulk in kets, a progressive politics should be argubenefits and jobs for society at large. This their tents, believing that we are losing that what we need are markets that are may be true, though it is worth noting that ing these arguments simply because actually free. Many of the worst excesses of the storied achievements of Steve Jobs are the age of greed occurred in markets that pressed into service to justify incomes from the other side is more cunning or better funded. The fact is that disparities in were anything but free, anything but transthose in finance and speculation whose income themselves, especially those that parent, markets riven by fraud, corruption, public benefit is, to say the least, equivocal. are rewards for skill, innovation, and effort insider trading, and toxic products that difClawing back some of these gains, through do not seem morally problematic to most fused risk and made it systemic. progressive taxation, it is claimed, would people. A progressive politics that attacks A progressive politics has almost forgotharm the many while eliminating valuable income inequality itself simply looks like a ten its long-standing emphasis on the role incentives for the few. The fact that one politics of envy to the very people it needs of government in promoting free market of the world’s most successful investors, to convince. competition. We need more, not less, comWarren Buffett, has refuted the claim has A progressive politics ought, I would petition in the market, and that means govnot silenced those who persist in making it. argue, to make clear that income inequality ernments prepared to use their anti-trust, The interesting political fact is that in itself is not the issue, but rather inequalanti-monopoly functions going forward to these arguments by the privileged few are ity that inflicts harm to those less fortunate. dismantle institutions that have become persuasive to the unprivileged many. The A company president who takes home sub- “too big to fail” and whose failure may latter may earn less, but they have aspirastantial personal compensation in base salexpose the whole economy to calamity. tions to earn more. It is easy work for con-

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Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 13

Higher taxation of the rich has an important place in a progressive politics but the right rationale for it needs to be restated. We do not tax the rich to punish them for their success, or to use them as a cash cow to fund social programs. We tax the rich so that they pay a fair portion of the public goods that account for so much of their private returns. Indeed, the most effective political rationale for higher taxation on those who can afford it is to reduce taxation on those who can least afford it. A progressive taxation policy is one that should be revenue neutral, i.e. it increases burdens on those who can carry them and reduces it for those who cannot. A free-market progressivism wants to reduce taxes on the hard-pressed middle class, but it can also reduce taxes by reducing the proliferating tax expenditures – in the form of rebates, credits, and reductions – in favor of simple across-the-board cuts. This gets the government out of the incentive business and leaves individuals more free to determine what incentives to give themselves. If we want a politics of equality, we need to understand also that public discontent is not just focused on the top one percent of private income earners. It is also focused on inequality between public and private sector workers, between those who receive their income through tax revenue and those who do not. Look at the relative success that US state governors have had in attacking public sector unions and their pension entitlements. A progressive response has to focus both on protecting essential public services and the workers who provide them, while also reducing the inequality between public sector and private sector pension, redundancy, and holiday entitlements. We should remember that welfare states create inequalities of their own, and these may get worse in a new age of austerity. If we don’t understand this, we will end up with a progressive politics that thinks it is attacking inequality, when it is in fact defending privilege, the pensions of public sector workers, the tenure of publicly funded professors, the subsidies of artistic and creative sectors against private sector workers, small business owners, immigrants without social protection, and other groups who do not benefit equally or in the same way from the welfare state. The primal political battle in the years ahead will be over who pays for austerity: the publicly protected or the privately exposed. A progressive politics that does not understand why retrenchment is

necessary does not understand the public finances of Europe or anywhere else. For decades European governments have been borrowing more than they could afford to sustain the welfare state. The vaunted European social model was funded on credit, and a progressive politics cannot rally support behind the defense of the welfare state unless it simultaneously embraces the need for reform. “Reform” means taking on substantial interests – public sector unions and powerful professions like doctors, teachers, and nurses, who all perform vital public work that must continue but who must reform their practices, shed some of their privileges, and become more efficient if the public goods they provide are to remain sustainable. Progressives must think through the necessary fiscal regime that allows us to safeguard equality of opportunity for all, while maintaining fiscal balance and a level of taxation that doesn’t lead to a capital strike. Yes, a capital strike is possible. In a global economy, welfare states must be tax-competitive: your own companies can always build Mercedes and Audis somewhere else. If they move production offshore, you can kiss your welfare state goodbye. In the face of a global division of labor, a progressive politics that slips into protectionism and defense of declining industries condemns itself to the margins of politics.

A Social Democrat is perhaps more trusting of the state than a liberal like myself. It would be good for a progressive politics to demystify the state and the values of social compassion it is supposed to incarnate. Twenty-five years ago, in The Needs of Strangers, I argued that the welfare state did not express solidarity and compassion so much as confiscate and bureaucratize it. We administered solidarity in the welfare state. We did not live it or express it ourselves. We need to understand this now, since the welfare state needs more than a defense in an age of austerity; it needs reform: empowerment of compassion rather than its bureaucratization, decentralization of decision-making rather than centralization, market disciplines and competition to contain costs, a service ethos that treats people as citizens not as numbers. A progressive does not want to end up defending the state. A progressive wants to end up promoting a common life and equal opportunity for all.

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e t us end w i t h this idea of a common life: the infrastructure of public goods – roads, schools, libraries, hospitals, training institutes, public transport – that taxpayers accept to provide because they understand that private welfare depends critically on an equal structure of public goods. These goods express the value of the equal worth of citizens, their

the welfare state needs more than a defense in an age of austerity; it needs reform. The only way forward is to invest in people, training, and education, from early childhood right through retirement. In an era of declining demographics and rising skill levels for all well-paying jobs, a progressive growth strategy has to bet everything on sustained investment in education for all. Equality of opportunity is the key to future growth and the core response of government to the employment challenges thrown up by a new global economy is to invest in education for all. So let’s have an economics equal to our ethics, an economics of austerity harnessed to an ethical conviction that a competitive economy absolutely requires that everyone gets an equal start by way of education and equal help when fate befalls us, whether it be illness, or unemployment, or misfortune we cannot master on our own.

right to benefit in common from facilities that each pays for, according to their ability. Let us understand the crucial role that public goods play in sustaining equal opportunity for all, and let us also understand how important equal opportunity is for growth. How are economies supposed to grow if societies entrench forms of inequality that convince millions of people – new immigrants, ethnic minorities, and working-class people – that the economic game is over for them before it starts? Michael Ignatieff teaches human rights and international politics at the University of Toronto and is a former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. This essay is adapted from a speech delivered by Ignatieff at the Einstein Forum on December 8, 2011.

14 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

Emergence and Exit The collapse of neoliberal multiculturalism

By Elizabeth Povinelli

Courtesy ARNDT Berlin and the artist

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 15

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ow do t he financi a l crisis of 2008 and the ongoing management of the euro crisis bear witness to the emergence of a new phase in European and Anglo-American liberal governance? How do these crises help us grasp what liberal governance has been and what it may be becoming? And, perhaps more cryptically, where it has been? Where are the geopolitical conditions of liberal gover-

More invested than Soviet citizens in creating families during the war, Germans had more to lose.

William Cordova, Rubber, 2006, pencil on paper, 135,5 x 179 cm

nance to be found? Are they found within the internal social and cultural logics of Europe and Anglo-America – its JudeoChristian heritage? If so, can liberal governance return to its traditions and remake the European and Anglo-American world as Other to others? Or is liberal governance otherwise to itself, such that this separation is a dangerous and futile fantasy? These are clearly huge social, historical, and philosophical questions. This much we can say with some certainty: in the immediate wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it looked as if liberal governance was heading for a significant reconfiguration. An earlier economic crisis had aided the ascendency of neoliberalism. In order to dismantle key components of Keynesian liberalism, neoliberal advocates, such as Reagan and Thatcher and their advisers, took advantage of, and deepened, a crisis in capitalism (stagflation) in the context of what seemed to be a robust alternative to capitalism (the apparently robust commu-

16 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

nist system). But although the conceptual underpinnings of neoliberalism were explicitly opposed to Keynesianism, they were not a return to the prelapsarian world of Adam Smith’s laissez-faire capitalism, no matter how often Smith was placed on the neoliberal pedestal. As I put it in Economies of Abandonment, neoliberalism sought to free the market from the confines of the market. And as Amartya Sen noted in a New York Review of Books essay, Smith never thought that the principles of the market should become universal principles of human moral sentiment and behavior. Indeed, Theory of Moral Sentiments seems to make the case that in order for the invisible hand of the market to operate effectively and efficiently, liberalism must preserve distinct domains where citizens cultivate non-selfish sentiments. The result of collapsing all social domains into a single market logic was captured in the opening scene of The Iron Lady, in which Margaret Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep, is roughly pushed aside in a convenience store. The extreme neoliberalist is literally run over by neoliberalism.

militant new social movements, the liberal governance of social difference in a national and international framework was under extreme stress.

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o understand w h at wa s at stake, we need to remember that state multiculturalism (the liberal politics of recognition) was not the goal of militant social movements or anti-imperialist movements. State multiculturalism was the response of liberal governance to the threat these movements posed to its fundamental principles. It was a politics oriented toward inclusion, not revolution. It was a multi-

announcements about the failure of state multiculturalism, liberal governance seemed to be exiting a nearly fifty-year twining of neoliberalism and multiculturalism as the solution to two aspects of liberal governance that were in crisis from the 1960s through the 1970s: economic markets and social difference. But, in hindsight, it is unclear how this twining manifests itself. Let’s look closer at the neoliberal ascendency of the market as the sole bearer of social evaluation. Celebrations of the democratic spring in North Africa have occurred almost simultaneously with global pundits lauding the ability of so-called

What if we are witnessing the final recession of democracy as the necessary sibling of neoliberal markets?

culturalism whose final horizon remained technocratic governments demanded by the basic principles of liberalism. Thus the financial markets to bypass the demoin his influential essay “The Politics of cratic function in Italy and Greece. And in Recognition,” Charles Taylor placed enorChina, the supposed inevitable merging mous emphasis on the moral worth of recof liberal market and liberal governance ognizing the cultural and social difference remains a receding horizon even as its ecoeven as he placed a limit on the transforma- nomic power suggests new possibilities of u t by t he 1990s, even the govtive potential of this difference. “The chalcapital governance. What if we are witnesserning left in the US (Clinton) and lenge” he notes, is how to deal with “the ing the final recession of democracy as the England (Blair) had embraced what substantial numbers of people who are citinecessary sibling of neoliberal markets? John Gray of the New Statesman called zens and also belong to a culture that calls v en a s t his dy na mic between the “debt-fuelled free market” as the into question our philosophical boundaries. democracy and market is being “imperative[s] of democracy . . . destined The challenge is to deal with their sense played out, the governance of social to spread universally.” It is not surprising, of marginalization without compromising difference is increasingly an idiom for then, that many public commenters saw our basic principles.” The desire of these marginalized people to be recognized by the uneven global distributions resulting the public humiliation of a befuddled Alan “us,” and “our” desire to recognize the worth from the financial crisis. In Greece we Greenspan before the US Congress as the of other cultures – where such worth was see German figureheads of the economic proven worthy – was supposedly the roué “bailout” portrayed in the idiom of national If we want to know what that would thicken the social stew. (Taylor difference. In the US, the Supreme Court liberal governance is is clear that the assumption of worth is poised to dismantle the last of the affirbecoming we need to must be then followed by an assessment mative action redoubts in higher educaof cultures. If this assessment was not tion, and Republicans are set to roll back understand what it seems part of the dynamics of recognition, then advances in feminist health and choice – or seemed – to be exiting. recognition would be a hollow gesture.) through the demonization of the sexual Like Alan Greenspan, who based an entire revolution. In France, Muslims; in England, symbolic nail in this ideological formation. career on the view of rational self-interest members of the African-Caribbean comGreenspan’s shock sounded the death knell as underlying market function only to find munity; in Germany, Turks (and those of neoliberalism as a specific conceptual himself shocked by the irrationality of selfassigned to these groups through nothing and practical relationship between capital interest, so Cameron, Merkel, and Sarkozy more then epidermal resemblance, as markets and liberal governments. Surely in Europe, and Howard in Australia, stood recently seen in Germany through the sosome new way of organizing the state’s rela- astounded that rather than the desire for called “Döner Killings”) are now subject tionship to markets was on the horizon. recognition, many “marginalized” comto new experiments in liberal governance, If 2008 spelled the seeming demise munities desired nothing more than to be having not agreed to the denuding of comof neoliberalism, on its heels was the left alone. munity through the techniques of recognidemise of “state multiculturalism.” Some If we want to know what liberal govertion. What these experiments will add up forty years after “1968,” the term we use nance is becoming we need to understand to – and how the experiments of a postto summarize the effect of a longer set of what it seems – or seemed – to be exitneoliberal market will be tallied – remains anticolonial and anti-capitalist struggles of ing. In the wake of 2008 and a series of to be seen.

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Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 17

But one thing is abundantly clear: the ing to their extension in other worlds. The transformation of liberal governance does people Merkel lambasts as living among not originate from Anglo-American or “Germans” are living there because Europe European worlds. Many political scientists and the Anglo-American worlds were made like to narrate Western liberalism in such a as a result of their living through and on way that its logic emerges from the internal the material worlds of others. civilizational dynamics of the West. And In other words, if we wish to understand yet, as I have suggested elsewhere, neolibthe internal dynamics of liberal governance eral economic theory was able to take root in the West, we must look at its external in Britain and the US precisely because stagnation gripped the Western economies Many political scientists in the 1970s. The cause of this stagnalike to narrate Western tion was, at least in large part, due to the Middle East oil embargo and the counterliberalism in such a way hegemonic power of the Soviet Union and that its logic emerges from its sphere of influence. Moreover, state the internal civilizational multiculturalism was promoted as a means dynamics of the West. of integrating national difference, not due to liberalism’s own internal dialectic. State multiculturalism was a strategic response conditions. The authors of liberalism’s to the sustained critique of Western impeOther are outside liberalism. From the rialism and colonialism and their influence 1960s through 2008, liberals could avoid on militant social movements. German the somewhat unpleasant thought that they Chancellor Angela Merkel could attempt were not the agents of history but the effect. to create an internally coherent Germany After all, the US was ascendant. West – and a Europe – with Christian roots proGermany was testimony to the resilience viding the difference of Western liberalism, of liberal democracies. Japan’s threat faded but these roots were always already reactinto series of lost decades. The South Asian

Tigers were tamed. And soon the Wall fell and a series of pundits, most notoriously Francis Fukuyama, announced the End of History.

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he West no longer has this luxury. The global economic engine is shifting and becoming multi-polar. Social protests and massive youth unemployment are the norm. Social difference is being securitized as the US Congress approves the use of drones over US cities. The forms of liberal economic and social governance emerging in the wake of the collapse of neoliberal multiculturalism are as likely to come from outside as they are from within.

Elizabeth Povinelli is a professor of anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University and was the fall 2011 German Transatlantic Program Fellow at the American Academy.

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Courtesy the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon

18 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

Nat Meade, Local Hero, 2011, gouache, watercolor on paper, 10 x 8 inches

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 19

On Loneliness The unbearable lightness of being alone

By Richard Deming

For John Lysaker

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orror films h av e t he character of dreams. The cinematic phantasmagorias hide those secret faces we do not willingly or consciously approach and yet carry within us all the time. What we see in such films is the mask projected by what we really fear. The power of a horror film – or the best ones, anyway – rarely comes from the specific events depicted onscreen. Or rather, it isn’t literally what we see that is so disturbing, but what deeper fears the figures and events allegorize in the shadow plays flitting and trembling before the audience’s eyes. Watching a horror movie is a bit like the makeshift pinhole devices people use to see an eclipse while avoiding looking directly at the event. With a movie one realizes that those unspeakable fears are not merely one’s own – merely private – terrors; we see that others have these as well. That means we need not feel so alone. Joy we tend to share, but we often keep quiet about what terrifies us. Watching a horror film provides a means of sharing darkness both literally and figuratively.

Although it first appeared in 1999, The Sixth Sense, one of the most popular and lucrative horror movies ever made, has remained lodged in the general consciousness. There are any number of reasons why it continues to linger, but I suggest it lies in the specific anxiety that the film not only represents, but also engages. Thus, the horror of The Sixth Sense really has little to do with the ghosts that appear onscreen – these might surprise from time to time, but they aren’t that terrifying. And unlike The Exorcist or The Omen, the theology or metaphysics aren’t likely to be too unsettling or dredge up a latent dread of forces beyond our control, to which we are nonetheless subject. Instead, the horror of The Sixth Sense is born of the familiarity with loneliness that the film represents. Beyond that, perhaps the pervasive condition of loneliness represented on the screen and reflected back to the audience is not only recognizable, but we are already lost within its folds. This dread, this profound, creeping fear is worth looking at. The Sixth Sense begins with trauma, a trauma that the protagonist only learns to recognize at the very end, and yet what

Watching a horror movie is a bit like the makeshift pinhole devices people use to see an eclipse while avoiding looking directly at the event. But what if the fear that we see enacted onscreen is a projection of what, at its core, is a profound, existential dread of loneliness? What might that fear of loneliness tell us about modern life, about how we conceptualize who we are and how we stand to others?

might be more harrowing is not that moment of crisis, but rather the revelation of what his life has become. Near the beginning of the film, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (played by Bruce Willis) is gunned down in his own home after celebrating with his wife, Anna (Olivia

Williams), the fact that he had been given a prestigious award in recognition of significant contributions to his field and to the families and children in his care. Crowe’s wife makes clear to her husband, and to the

the horror of The Sixth Sense is born of the familiarity with loneliness that the film represents. audience, that the award means others had noticed all the sacrifices Crowe had made, putting everything after his work, even their marriage. Given the movie’s popular success, I will not recount the plot in its entirety, and it is sufficient to say that in the midst of this celebration, the Crowes are surprised by a former patient, now an adult, who has broken into their home and who is brandishing a pistol. The intruder fires at Crowe, wounding him, and then shoots himself. With the next scene the film jumps to some later point in time – whether it be days, weeks, or years later, we cannot say – when Crowe is seated outside on a bench reviewing his notes on a new case. What we do not yet know is that Crowe is now already dead. His new case, the one he is reviewing, concerns a little boy who – we know the famous line – “sees dead people.” The boy, Cole (played by Haley Joel Osment), will later tell Crowe that he sees the dead everywhere, and their problem is that they do not know they are dead. This information will become poignant when it is revealed in the movie’s final act that Crowe is himself one of these revenants lacking any realization of what he has become.

20 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012 Courtesy the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon

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hroughou t t he fil m, Cole and Crowe ask each other what they would most like to change about their respective lives. Crowe poses this as part of his methodology; Cole poses the question to his interlocutor. Cole wishes he did not see the dead; Crowe wishes he and his wife could communicate. Even as a ghostly counselor, however, Crowe teaches Cole that he must listen to the ghosts, as they crave acknowledgment. Cole learns to listen to the dead, and as a result they no longer attack him. He is able to do the things that provide them some measure of peace, as when he delivers a videotape to a grieving father of a murdered (by poison) little girl that incriminates the girl’s own mother. Cole not only speaks to the dead, he speaks for them as well. At some level, we might see Cole as embodying a form of wish fulfillment. Who wouldn’t want to be able to have some proxy who would deliver bad news or confront people for us? While the movie presents this as a better existence for Cole, in reality he is not given much choice. He can either not listen to the dead and be attacked by them and shunned by the living, or he can devote his life – how is this not a sacrifice? – to undertake their affairs in order to let them come to rest, a burden he cannot rightly be said to have taken up on his own. Cole becomes popular at school with his new relationship to himself and to his own burdens; he no longer avoids people – either living or dead. Is this a happy ending? Cleary, it is meant to be, but the fact that he has no real choice complicates that happiness. Cole’s insights into others, insights that come with his acknowledging the ghosts, lead him to suggest to Crowe a method of how Crowe, who as yet still hasn’t discovered he is dead, might speak with his wife. Cole suggests talking to her while she is asleep, presumably thereby permeating the boundaries between dreaming and wakefulness.

Nat Meade, Sneaker, 2012 oil on linen, 18 x 14 inches

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h at m a kes T he Six th Sense something more than just a bigbudget version of a Hollywood B movie is how it presents loneliness and isolation as a source of horror. At first, loneliness seems to be a generalized condition, an atmosphere permeating everything that happens. Throughout the movie, before it

Nat Meade builds upon historic painting genre and technique with modern references drawn from television and other entertainment sources. His character studies deliver quirky fellow humans with frailty and humor. “If Edward Hopper is presenting a scene that recalls a theatrical performance,” Meade says, “my paintings recall a televised Sunday afternoon movie. . . . My figures are sympathetic victims, victims of light and shadow, as well as victims of a scenario that exists outside the captured moment.” Meade teaches drawing and painting at the graduate and undergraduate levels at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

is revealed that Crowe himself is actually a ghost, we see a growing distance between Crowe and his wife – they do not speak, never make eye contact, never touch. In one poignant scene, he arrives late and distracted to what seems to be an annual visit to “their restaurant,” the spot where he first proposed to Anna. He misses dinner entirely and yet instead of dealing with the significance of his being late, all he can talk about is how the work with his patient Cole is not going well. She gives absolutely no response. Later, we discover why. Such missed opportunities recur throughout the film. Anna is often found asleep in front of the television, the videotape of their wedding and reception flickering on the screen. At one point, she receives and begins to return romantic

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 21 Courtesy the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon

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his iden t ific at ion be t w een Crowe and the viewer goes deep, and this is where the horror comes forth. That is to say, Crowe’s crisis is a shared one. Crowe doubles the audience in another way: just as he cannot directly engage the living world, the audience cannot disturb what happens onscreen. While it is true that films often make viewers into voyeurs, in this case, the members of the audience are not peeping toms, but ghosts haunting a world we can watch but not take part in, just like the ghosts Cole sees. In other words, our loneliness, which is the measure of distance between one’s self, sitting there in a darkened theater or at home, and the others that one sees – despite the fact that these others are, in this case, figures onscreen – becomes manifest in our relationship to the events we can observe and have feelings about, yet cannot affect. It is important to think about how we respond to Crowe and his disconnection from his wife and from Cole’s mother because this impacts how we think of the ending of the film. Crowe is able to move on once he has accepted that he is in fact dead;

Crowe’s blindness becomes our insight.

Nat Meade, Local Hero, 2012, oil on linen, 18 x 14 inches

intentions of a young man. These events are all recontextualized when we discover that the entire time Crowe is a ghost that only Cole, and the audience, can see. This revelation stuns not only Crowe, but the viewer as well. The moment Crowe realizes this, we are reminded in a voiceover that Cole had said the dead do not realize they are dead, because they only see what they want or expect to see. This is meant to be a comment about Crowe, of course, but the implications extend past the screen. Just as Crowe missed all the signals, the audience has also missed certain clues, in part because the silence and emotional distance between Crowe and his wife seem completely recognizable. Their behavior serves, we think, as evidence of any marriage that is disinte-

grating. Because the two partners cannot or simply do not know how to communicate, they lose the capacity to acknowledge one another. Most viewers will perceive the emotional distance throughout the film as being so familiar it need not be questioned, so much so that the revelation that Crowe was dead comes as a stunning surprise. How could we miss the cues? Perhaps because we are like Crowe already; we see only what we expect. This implies two things: 1) that such utter lack of acknowledgment is a kind of death; 2) we are each of us intimately knowledgeable about how such distance looks and feels; and 3) not only may things not be what we take them for, we may not be who we take ourselves to be. Crowe’s blindness becomes our insight.

he all but states as much. The movie clearly offers what is supposed to be a sentimental ending that resolves the tensions we have just witnessed. And yet what kind of resolution is this? Are we meant to think, “Ah, they weren’t unable to communicate their feelings, he was just a ghost.” It is too late to really accept such a reading of the end since the audience has to reckon with the fact that the gulf between Crowe and his wife looked just like an all too ordinary emotional gulf. The loneliness that we have seen and accepted all along, that alienation and estrangement equated to a kind of death, is only resolved when Crowe acknowledges that there is nothing more that he can do about it.

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lt im at ely w e could see Crowe’s acknowledgement as an acceptance of that which most people continually deny as much as possible – mortality. Crowe can move on when he acknowledges that there is nothing he can do about his being limited by the flesh. In a sense he becomes cured of this denial of his limitations, that which makes us human – something each of us wrestles

Courtesy the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon

22 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

Nat Meade, Study (Pantry), 2011, gouache, watercolor on paper

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 23

with or outright denies all of the time. Yet, the sentimentality of the ending doesn’t seem to offer real satisfaction. In part, the ending is not consoling because Crowe and his wife only acknowledge one another – and she not consciously because she is asleep – in order to move into further separation. Just as the film ends, the audience too is allowed to leave the haunted space of the theater and return to the waking world. Yet do we move back into the general condition of estrangement from others that we have just seen depicted? Crowe had to die in order to acknowledge his condition, to transform that isolation into a kind of solitude. The choice, the movie could suggest, might be ours. Will we be like Crowe and accept our profound alienation? Or are

a growing feeling, a building reservation that although technology can make it seem like the world is shrinking, the feeling of alienation and emotional distance increases proportionally at the same time. Some of that feeling is functional. Even if we know what friends are doing half a world away because of what is on the virtual wall of their Facebook page, we are not directly interacting with them. More often, we face screens, not the faces of other human beings. But while the reservations about all this social networking – even that trope brings people closer to thinking of themselves in technological rather than organic terms – do warrant attention, it may also be that the procreant urge towards social media also flows from a

Just as the film ends, the audience too is allowed to leave the haunted space of the theater and return to the waking world. Yet do we move back into the general condition of estrangement from others that we have just seen depicted? we meant to be like Cole and be mediators between the estranged and the situations that cause others such grief that they can neither accept a given situation of loneliness and separation or leave it? But again, what is more unsettling is that we do not know how pervasive our disconnection might be – it might have gotten to the point of being so complete that we cannot change it, but merely acknowledge it and step away from the world as Crowe does. It might already be too late. I don’t want to put this too strongly and suggest that loneliness cannot be overcome, but I do wonder about the possibility that we do not know ourselves as well as we think we do. This, of course, is the very foundation of psychoanalysis, but it is also that place where philosophical skepticism touches on psychology. We cannot know the world, so the skeptical philosopher says, and so we cannot know ourselves; because we cannot know ourselves, we cannot know the world. In any event, we cannot really know others and thus we become isolati in our field of unknowing. This seems a dread worth having and might account, in part, for the proliferation of technological tools that purport to be able to quantify our ties to others, to show that we are not only linked in to some greater network but that interactions can be itemized, relationships stored as contacts. One’s existence, so the hope runs, is affirmed by statistics. There is of course

fundamental dread of loneliness. It can be hard to see the fear for all the desire. The stand up comedian Pete Holmes explains that he is giving up Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest so that he can simplify his life and just get a service that every hour texts him the message, “You’re not alone.” The kind of loneliness that hovers at edges is not simply a form of solitude. Hannah Arendt has a powerful description of loneliness near the conclusion of her landmark work The Origins of Totalitarianism. “Loneliness is not solitude,” she insists. “Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in the company of others. . . . All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought.” Arendt argues that solitude can transform into loneliness when we become estranged from ourselves. This feels like an abandonment of the self, by the self. “What makes loneliness so unbearable” she concludes, “is the loss of one’s own self which can only be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals.” The loneliness Arendt describes is that which strikes Crowe when he realizes that he is not what he thought he was, that his isolation is more

complete than he ever knew – and that his loneliness is so recognizable, so familiar because at some level it is where we fear we might really be, cleaved even from our most fiercely held sense of reality, a faith in the existence of things and the possibility of other minds left riven. The dread of that loneliness is borne up by a deep skepticism that cannot be resolved.

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rendt ends her m a ssi v e opus with a discussion of loneliness because she believes that this emotional state, endemic in modern life, gives rise to the possibilities of tyranny. People seek the consolation of ideology so that they escape, at whatever costs, the crushing feeling of nonexistence that accompanies loneliness. The stakes are indeed high if we consider loneliness and the fears that surround it. What is called for then is a process of acknowledging these fears, of recognizing their place in modern life. Such a process would be an act of attention that neither minimizes the fears nor denies them, but that remains aware of the threat of loneliness. That threat offers a means of staying attentive to the relationship between the self and others, the self and the world. Those desperate fears

Arendt argues that solitude can transform into loneliness when we become estranged from ourselves. This feels like an abandonment of the self, by the self. and the shock of recognition activated by things like The Sixth Sense, or skepticism, or whatever shakes our faith, opens towards a deepening understanding of the self. To see the underpinnings of what we fear is to discover what and how we value. In this case, such fissures in our sense of the world can reveal to us that those private fears of individuation, of slipping away from everyone and everything, is a collectively held anxiety. Rather than evading our anxieties, we can choose the meaning of this shared, intimate fear that we are – each of us – alone, and see it as one way that we can bind ourselves together in all our fraught and fractured humanity. Richard Deming is the spring 2012 John P. Birkelund Fellow at the American Academy.

24 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

new Poems By Richard Deming

SCREEN TIME

THE WEATHER, ALMOST

And do not let the film end just yet, the final frame pulsing against the pearlescent screen: an iterant winter crosses left to right, the names scrolling between me and there, snow catches upon a Russian soldier’s epaulet. Do not strike the scene just yet. Linger like the figure in the painting who never utters a syllable from his half-opened mouth, or like a curse remembered from childhood.

(For Megan Mangum and Marianne LaFrance)

Let the unkind light of the sound stage lamps stay lit, and someone else’s vision guiding the edges of day into night. What did you expect? To live through anything other than this ending, the fantasy of the perpetual loop that recollects each splice, and the handsome stranger who enters the hallway again and again, each time the first time. Stretch me thinner and thinner to become this dark, this quiet place, become a ghost to my own papered chamber.

Somewhere, in an upper room, a light flickers, then catches. A woman rehearses the smallest glances, her voice breaking almost to song. Eyes size up the weight of boxes, books and pages, of chipped plates of cold chicken, and of the beloved’s head turned toward a distant thought. The throat thickens naming off losses, absence, the door of a house near the ocean remains locked and double-bolted. What bears its distances? A fireplace is filled with October ashes. Grapes of the late season tear or burst yet the sugared hope of autumn fruit carries the mouth, you can now believe, through the night and its early frost. Waiting, say it so, becomes a penitent wakefulness. What else can account our attention? The face, that endless city – one knows no other.

Notebook of the American Academy in Berlin | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

On the Waterfront News from the Hans Arnhold Center

N2 Academy Notebook: A. Michael N4 Academy Notebook: Photos from the launch party of Hoffman elected chairman The Unquiet American, a of the Academy, and George remembrance of Richard C. P. Shultz awarded 2012 Holbrooke, in Washington, DC Kissinger Prize

N7 Sketches & Dispatches: Kenneth Rogoff on the EU crisis, James E. Young on memorials, and the inaugural Marina Kellen French Distinguished Visitor

N11 Life & Letters: The spring 2012 fellows, recent alumni books, and Nathan Englander on his writing experience at the Academy

A. Michael Hoffman at the Helm

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o -founder and chairman of the London-based private equity partnership Palamon Capital Partners, A. Michael Hoffman, has been elected chairman of the American Academy in Berlin. Mr. Hoffman succeeds Karl M. von der Heyden and Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, who served as cochairmen since 2009, and who will remain closely associated with the Academy. Mr. Hoffman’s selection followed an exhaustive international search. Vice chair Gahl Hodges Burt called Mr. Hoffman’s election “an

excellent choice after a thorough search process. The breadth of Mr. Hoffman’s philanthropic endeavors and business experience was exactly the combination we had been seeking. The board of trustees looks forward to working with Mr. Hoffman.” Academy trustee Stephen B. Burbank, chair of the Search Committee, said that the committee had been “enormously impressed by Mr. Hoffman’s substantial record of achievement in the financial world, his experience in management at the board level of nonprofit institutions, and his very

broad interests in culture and foreign affairs.” Mr. Hoffman received a BA cum laude from the University of Texas, an MA in international affairs from Columbia University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He has extensive experience in private equity, built up over more than twenty-five years in the industry, and a history of vigorous commitment to the governance of academic and performing arts organizations. » continued on Page N2

The Unquiet American

The Memorial Arc

Celebrating a new book about the life and legacy of Richard C. Holbrooke

Tracing the articulation of loss over the last 50 years

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n Ja nua ry 24 at her Georgetown home, Academy trustee and vice chair Gahl Burt celebrated the publication of Derek Chollet and Samantha Power’s new book, The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (PublicAffairs). Chollet, a spring 2002 Bosch Public Policy fellow, and Power, now special assistant to President Obama, included in their commemorative work a smattering of essays by some of Richard

Holbrooke’s closest friends and confidants, several of who had gathered for the elegant, candlelit evening. Holbrooke’s widow, journalist Kati Marton, was joined by Rosemarie Pauli, Holbrooke’s longtime assistant and now President Obama’s assistant chief of protocol. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent a few hours in conversation before attending the State of the Union address. » continued on Page N4

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n A pr il 2003, a press conference was called at the just-repaired Winter Garden of the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan, located across the street from the gaping pit of Ground Zero, to announce an open international competition for a World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. I was one of 13 members of the design jury introduced that day, as part of the competition’s announcement. Together with jurors Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Veterans’ Monument in

Washington, DC) and Paula Grant Berry (whose husband David died in the South Tower on 9/11), among others, we implored potential entrants to this blind competition to “break the conventional rules of the monument,” to explore every possible memorial medium in their expressions of grief, mourning, and remembrance for what would become the National September 11 Memorial. Within two months, we had received 13,800 registrations » continued on Page N8

N2 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

• Academy Notebook •

» continued from N1

Before founding Palamon in 1999, Mr. Hoffman was a partner with Warburg Pincus for eleven years. Prior to joining Warburg Pincus, Mr. Hoffman had a fifteen-year career as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co, Arthur D. Little, and Booz Allen Hamilton. He served for nine years as chairman of the Advisory Board of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (sipa), and is currently a member of the International Advisory Board of the university as well as a board member of the Blinken European Institute. Mr. Hoffman also serves on the International Council of the Elliott School of International

Affairs at George Washington University and the University of Texas System’s Chancellor’s Council, chairs the board of Richmond University in London, and is a director of the Salzburg Global Seminar. Mr. Hoffman is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House). Mr. Hoffman has also served on the boards of a number of performing arts organizations in London, including the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre. He was a founding director of the Shakespeare Globe Theatre, and a trustee and chairman of the development board of the Almeida Theatre. He cur-

rently serves on the development boards of the British Library and the Museum of London (the latter as chairman); on the board of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama; and is the newly designated chairman of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Academy executive director Gary Smith noted: “I have observed Michael Hoffman’s impact on other organizations with admiration. He is a worldclass strategic thinker with impressive achievements in international business as well as in the academic and cultural worlds. The American Academy will benefit tremendously from his counsel and leadership.” An Austrian-American national, Mr. Hoffman also speaks

German and Dutch. His father, born in Vienna, was an eminent professor of geography and twice a visiting Fulbright Professor at German universities. His grandfather was a prominent Viennese musician and artist and a member of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Hoffman stated: “I am excited to have an opportunity to contribute to such a robust, entrepreneurial institution. I have been impressed by its inventiveness and impact on the transatlantic dialogue crossing professional silos including the academic, cultural, public policy, and business worlds. I look forward to working with my new colleagues as the American Academy enters a new and dynamic phase of its life.” m.m.

Second Nature An interview with the Academy’s new chairman, A. Michael Hoffman On a recent visit to Wannsee, Hoffman described his goals for the institution and how a nomadic upbringing inspired his cross-cultural career path. berlin journal: How did you first become acquainted with the Academy? hoffman: I had known about

the Academy for some years as the result of reconnecting with Gary Smith – we both come from the same town in Texas. Even though we are several years apart in age, we’ve had a chance to follow one another’s careers. I reconnected with Gary directly when I invited Ambassador Holbrooke, with whom I also had a close connection, to come and deliver a guest lecture at George

Washington University’s Elliott School, in a program I had supported for some years in honor of my father, who had been an adjunct professor there. Lo and behold, Holbrooke showed up to Washington with Gary Smith in tow! I learned he was working with the ambassador in developing the Academy. We kept in touch, and I followed his career and development at the Academy from some distance, as I was living in London.

a great deal of respect for his leadership role in diplomacy, and I felt that if he was at the center of this, it was likely to be a very interesting institution. I also knew Gary to be a very dynamic individual, and I figured the marrying of Ambassador Holbrooke’s concepts and views on international diplomacy with Gary’s drive and momentum would be an ideal mix. I have not been surprised to learn that it was a very successful partnership over many years.

berlin journal: Was there any-

thing about the Academy that spoke to you personally? hoffman: Well, for one thing, Richard Holbrooke’s involvement in the institution was very important to me, because I had

berlin journal: How would you

describe your goals for your new chairmanship? hoffman: I have been busy devel-

oping my goals since becoming chairman in November; I didn’t

arrive with any preset views. Six months ago, I set out an objective of traveling to Berlin and New York to meet with many of the trustees, at various sessions or through committee activities, and using this period to learn as much as I could about the Academy: what worked well, what issues the institution was facing, and the various opinions on these matters among both staff and trustees. As a result, it seemed to me that the fellowship and the distinguished visitorship programs were in many ways a very sensible and complementary set of activities. There was a clear desire to continue to grow and develop these programs, perhaps by modestly increasing the number of fellows, possibly

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N3

berlin journal: You’re an Austrian-American national, and have been traveling to Europe since you were a child. How has it been for you to straddle continents all these years? hoffman: I’m fairly comfortable with a cosmopolitan lifestyle. I was raised in a European environment: my father was Austrian, a political and economic geographer and professor, who

Curating Conversation A new series stages intellectual debates Photo courtesy Literaturhaus Stuttgart

wrote about and researched the Balkans (which would eventually give me insight into Holbrooke’s role there, years later). I attended seven different schools in twelve years – in five separate countries. So working in cross-cultural settings is second nature to me. When I studied at Columbia and then at Harvard Business School, I spent my summers working in Europe and Africa. As a management consultant, I traveled all over the world and was constantly on the move. I spent four years in Singapore, from 1983–87, and very much enjoyed my time in the Asia-Pacific region. I’ve been in London since the end of 1987, and after 26 years of private equity, I’ve set up over a hundred investments in nine different countries. Coming into an organization like the Academy, I find my background helps give me a relatively quick grasp of the cross-cultural dynamics at play. I always enjoy discussing and debating the politics and economics of disparate countries and regions. Given my profession, I’m intimately engaged with Eurozone issues. I’m also grateful for a return to a focus on Germany and a chance to polish my German, and particularly excited to be here at such a critical time for Germany and the rest of the world. Germany is at a crossroads, where it will be required to play a more active role in the future, as both a political and economic leader of Europe. b.l .s.

© M. Mau

raising the numbers of distinguished visitors, and making sure we achieve the right balance of arts and humanities on the one hand, and foreign policy, economics, and financial policy on the other. There is work to be done in each area. It is also crucial that we have a reasonable gender mix. I would point to development activity – establishing endowments and new programs – as my core objective. Institutions such as the Academy must be dynamic. They must continue to grow and evolve. Another goal of mine is addressing the opportunity of establishing a Richard C. Holbrooke Center for the study of governance and diplomacy. The Academy has been offered a unique chance through Kati Marton’s gift of Holbrooke’s papers and his library to the Academy; the variety of books and archive materials available are extremely impressive and well-suited for what could become an important center. It’s a very special opportunity for the Academy to honor its founder. I intend to put into place a highly professional center for senior, high-caliber research fellows to pursue issues of diplomacy. It should operate as an active intermediary for crucial issues, hosting not only fellows, but also study groups, roundtables, publications, and other programs germane to the center. This obviously will not happen overnight, and will require a range of approaches.

Pamela Rosenberg, Ijoma Mangold, and Leland de la Durantaye

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he A mer ic a n Ac a dem y in Berlin and the Literaturhaus Stuttgart were both elated to present the new German-American series “Head to Head,” which began at the Literaturhaus Stuttgart on March 5. In the first talk of the series, which hosts an American and German expert to discuss a topic of their choosing, Academy fellow Leland de la Durantaye squared off with the literary critic of Die Zeit, Ijoma Mangold, on the nuances and novelties of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Prior to their discussion, German actor Elmar Roloff masterfully read

excerpts from Nabokov’s classic. The ensuing dialogue, which took place in front of roughly 200 guests, was moderated by Pamela Rosenberg, dean of fellows and programs at the American Academy. The “Head to Head” series, whose next event, on June 18, will see Academy fellow and human rights specialist Karen J. Alter speak with Justice Angelika Nußberger from the European Court of Human Rights, is generously supported by Berthold Leibinger Stiftung, Daimler AG, Robert Bosch Stiftung, and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH. r .j.m.

Thanks to Daimler AG, the Academy is now the proud possessor of a Smart car. The German auto company’s generous gift was arranged by Academy trustee and Daimler Supervisory Board chairman Manfred Bischoff. The vehicle is used mainly by the library runner and will save approximately $5,000 annually in car rentals.

N4 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

The Unquiet American Think-tank directors Martin Indyk, Strobe Talbott, Jane Harman, and Steve Coll were joined by White House press secretary Jay Carney and social secretary Jeremy Bernard, journalists Elisabeth Bumiller, Judy Woodruff, Walter Pincus, Leon Wieseltier, legal scholar Cass Sunstein, and Atlantic Monthly owner David Bradley, as well as by film writer/producer George Stevens, Jr. and his wife, Liz,

former Academy president and Bloomberg executive Norman Pearlstine, Academy trustees Barbara Balaj and Tom Farmer, and executive director Gary Smith. “Lacking the ability to talk or write to Holbrooke,” Chollet and Power said, “we consoled ourselves by talking and writing about Holbrooke.” Many others did did the same. “Thank you for remembering my husband,” Marton said, “and keep telling those stories, because he loved you all.” r .j.m.

All photos: James R. Brantley

» continued from N1

Gary Smith, Hillary Clinton, Kati Marton, and Derek Chollet

GaHL Burt, Liz Stevens, George Stevens, Jr., AND Jeremy Bernard Martin Indyk, David Kamenetzky, William Sadlack, Steve Coll, Gary Smith, and Barbara Balaj

Samantha Power, Leon Wieseltier, and Cass Sunstein

Norman Pearlstine and

Rosemarie Pauli and

Jane Boon Pearlstine

Gahl Burt

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N5

Derek Chollet and Vali Nasr

Gahl Burt, Hillary Clinton, Strobe Talbott, and Martin Indyk

Jay Carney and Elisabeth Bumiller

N6 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

A Force in Foreign Policy George P. Shultz receives the 2012 Henry A. Kissinger Prize

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Lufthansa generously sponsored the Shultzes’ airfare. Shultz’s career exemplifies the ideal of a statesman who seamlessly combines an academic background and business acumen to fulfill the demands of public office. Having served in three Cabinet positions as well as a variety of consulting and advisory roles, Secretary Shultz’s skilled diplomacy shaped the transatlantic political landscape and economy during the historic era leading to the end of the Cold War. Among Secretary Shultz’s many notable achievements was his deft navigation of the global economy as it broke with the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s. His initiative in founding

the Library Group developed into the creation of the G-8 summits, which continue to this day. As secretary of state he presided over the decisive period of East-West confrontation that culminated in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 and to a restoration of trust between the two superpowers, laying the foundation for a peaceful end to the Cold War. Since leaving office in 1989, Secretary Shultz has remained an important force in the formulation of public and foreign policy in the US and across the globe. Rozanne Ridgway, former US ambassador to the German Democratic Republic, who worked closely with Shultz during her subsequent years as

the assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian Affairs, said, of Shultz’s legacy: “Secretary Shultz created the diplomatic framework that sustained the Reagan-Gorbachev dialogue and gave that dialogue the broad substance that led to the end of the Cold War, while preparing the Atlantic Alliance for a new chapter in its history.” Ridgway also praised Shultz’s unfailing “commitment to human rights” and his “determined effort to ‘work’ the issue and not just make speeches about it.” Look for extensive coverage of the 2012 Kissinger Prize in the forthcoming fall issue of the Berlin Journal. h.h. a nd b.l .s. © ddp images/AP/Gero Breloer

n M ay 24, the Academy hosted over 300 guests at the 2012 Henry A. Kissinger Prize ceremony, held at Berlin’s Federal Foreign Office, to celebrate the numerous achievements of former US Secretary of State Shultz. Greetings were delivered by Minister Guido Westerwelle and Academy chairman A. Michael Hoffman, and both Helmut Schmidt and Henry Kissinger offered laudations. The event was financed by Robert Bosch GmbH, JPMorgan Chase Bank, and Cerberus Deutschland. Following the ceremony, a dinner for selected guests was held at esm t (European School of Management Technology).

George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger at the American Academy, 2010

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N7

• Sketches & Dispatches •

Europe Shares a Bank Account, Yet Refuses to Get Married A discussion between economist Kenneth Rogoff and former German finance minister Peer Steinbrück cicero: Mr. Rogoff, have you ever

considered it a possibility to put yourself forward as a possible candidate for the US presidency? rogoff: No. I think it’s an incred-

ibly difficult job to do, the pressure is huge, and I don’t possess the necessary political skills. As an economist I have been advising politicians for decades, but the way each profession works is completely different. If someone like Peer Steinbrück asks me for advice, I would spend weeks preparing for a twenty-minute meeting, while for him it would only be twenty minutes in a packed agenda.

I have the feeling that politics are discussed with more seriousness and honesty here. steinbrück : I was always a great admirer of the American system of checks and balances. But it appears to no longer be working, due to the fact that different groups within the Republican Party have hijacked Republican ideology. This state of affairs is crippling American politics. In Europe we are suffering from a different phenomenon: the voters have the impression that there are no significant differences between the political parties. cicero: Does it pose a danger to

cicero: Mr. Steinbrück, the US

elections are currently in full swing. Do you see it as problematic that presidential candidates in the US need an unbelievable amount of money in order to launch a campaign? steinbrück : Yes, that represents a huge difference between the US and Germany. In Germany we think it’s crazy that only very wealthy people can run for president in the US by collecting huge amounts of donations, which can lead to dubious political dependencies.

our Western democracies that in times of crisis only a select group of experts are capable of governing? steinbrück : This development

is above all an indication of the failure of the political classes in Italy and Greece. The voters have lost faith in the career politicians in these places. rogoff: I believe this to be only a

passing phenomenon. The technocrats have to carry out difficult financial restructuring, which no politician with plans for reelection wants to go anywhere near.

rogoff: The result of this is

cicero: The economic policies of

that the level of debate in the US elections has veered from embarrassing to alarming. None of the candidates in the US have the opportunity to say what they really think. Perhaps I have a romanticized view of Europe, but

the German Republic have also been on the receiving end of some sharp criticism. Timothy Geithner, the US secretary of treasury; David Cameron, the British prime minister; and Christine Lagarde, head of the imf; all argued at the World

Economic Forum in Davos that Germany in particular should commit more funds to ending the Euro crisis. rogoff: The situation is without

a doubt very difficult. But one should not forget that the greatest mistakes regarding Europe were made in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the introduction of the euro plan. When discussing the euro, I like to use the metaphor of a couple who are unsure whether to get married or not, and as a dry run, decide to open an account together. In the beginning everything works pretty well, but then their siblings and later their cousins are given access to the account. In fact, the euphoria is such that third cousins are also invited to join, whom no one has ever actually met, but who are apparently very nice. Just to have brought France and Germany together as a couple would have been have been very ambitious; instead, even countries whose average income was 25 percent lower than the German average were included. It was a massive mistake to adopt a shared currency without forming a real political union at the same time. cicero: We have talked a lot about Europe, but the US is also facing a massive debt crisis. Which of the two is in a worse position? rogoff: Europe’s problem cer-

tainly must be solved quicker because we are not only talking about a debt crisis, but also the

fact that the institutional deficit of the shared-currency union must be quickly remedied. Far tighter economic and political ties must exist within Europe by the end of this crisis, far tighter than anything that has so far been discussed. Europe also needs a real finance minister, someone who has control over a large part of the tax income. A powerful joint regulative authority must also be established. The ecb must also receive a mandate that enables it to ensure price stability and growth. There is no avoiding a United States of Europe. The loose connection of states that exists today has no future. In that respect, the US is in a better position. cicero: And apart from that? rogoff: Apart from that we have

buried our head deep in the sand. The level of national debt, plus the deficit of the states and the local authorities, is higher than after World War II. And we haven’t even taken into account the pension requirements. The level of personal debt is also at a frightfully high level. We are not experiencing a growth level that can check these imbalances. Excerpted from an interview led by Alexander Marguier and Til Knipper that appeared in the March 2012 issue of Cicero. Rogoff was the spring 2012 Stephen M. Kellen Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy. Translated by Oliver Frost.

N8 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

The Memorial Arc from around the world, and by the August 2003 deadline, we had received 5,201 official submissions from 62 nations, and from 49 American states (only Alaska was missing from the list). In January 2004, after six months of exhausting, occasionally tortured debate and discussion, we announced our winning selection in Federal Hall on Wall Street, where George

with a further deep void in its middle. The pools were to be surrounded by an abacus grid of trees (even rows when viewed west to east, random groves when viewed north to south), which would deepen the volumes of the voids as they grew, even as they softened the hard, square edges of the pools. This memorial would indeed “reflect absence,” even as it commemorated the lives lost with living, regenerating flora.

jury that chose Peter Eisenman’s design for the Berlin Denkmal (for Europe’s Murdered Jews), it seems that you’ve basically chosen just another Holocaust memorial. Is this true?” Surprised and somewhat offended, I replied that obviously this design had nothing to do with Holocaust memorials. Here the same reporter pressed me further: “But is it possible that Jewish architects are somehow predisposed

record in post-9/11 downtown Manhattan?” I had to concede that while I saw no direct references to Jewish catastrophe in these designs for the reconstruction of lower Manhattan, it could also be true that the forms of postwar architecture have been inflected by an entire generation’s knowledge of the Holocaust. Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s “Reflecting Absence” is not a Holocaust memorial, I said, but its formal

Washington took his oath as America’s first president. The winning design, “Reflecting Absence,” by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, proposed two deeply recessed voids in the footprints of the former World Trade Center towers, each nearly 65 square meters, with thin veils of water cascading into reflecting pools some 10 meters below, each

Until that day in January 2004, the Memorial jurors were not allowed to speak to the press. Now, for the first time since our appointment nine months earlier, we could take questions. The first question I took from a reporter caught me off-balance. “Knowing that you have written much about Holocaust negativeform monuments in Germany and that you were also on the

toward articulating the memory of catastrophe in their work? Would this explain how Daniel Libeskind (original site designer of the new World Trade Center complex), Santiago Calatrava (designer of the new Fulton Street Transit Center abutting Ground Zero in lower Manhattan), and now Michael Arad (designer of the Memorial) have become the architects of

preoccupation with loss, absence, and regeneration may well be informed by Holocaust memory. As I continued to mull my answer, I began to imagine an arc of memorial forms over the last fifty years or so and how, in fact, post-World War I and World War II memorials had evolved along a very discernible path, all with visual and conceptual echoes of their predecessors.

Courtesy James Young

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Here I recalled that countermemorial artists and architects such as Horst Hoheisel, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, and Daniel Libeskind (among many others) all told me that Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans’ Monument broke the mold that made their own counter-memorial work possible. And here I remembered that Maya Lin had also openly acknowledged her own debt to both Sir Edwin Lutyens’s “Memorial to the Missing of the Somme” (1924) in Thiepval, France; and to Georges-Henri Pingusson’s “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation” (1962) on the Île de la Cité in Paris. Both are precursors to the “negative-form” realized so brilliantly by Lin, both articulations of uncompensated loss and absence, represented by carvedout pieces of landscape, as well as by the visitor’s descent downward (and inward) into memory,

as described by Lin in her architectural memoir Boundaries. Carved into the ground, a black wound in the landscape and an explicit counterpoint to Washington’s prevailing white, neo-classical obelisks and statuary, Maya Lin’s design articulated loss without redemption, and formalized a national ambivalence surrounding the memory of American soldiers sent to fight and die in a war the country now abhorred. In Maya Lin’s words, she “imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal.” That is, she opened a space in the landscape that would open a space within us for memory. After the dedication of Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Monument in 1982, it was as if German artists had also found their own uniquely contrarian memorial vernacular for the expression of their own national shame, for

their revulsion against traditionally authoritarian, complacent, and self-certain national shrines. Preoccupied with absence and irredeemable loss, and with a broken and irreparable world, German artists and architects would now arrive at their own, counter-memorial architectural vernacular that could express the breach in their faith in civilization without mending it. In Germany, the questions had been: How to commemorate the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in the national name without redeeming this destruction? How to formally articulate this terrible loss, this terrible void, without filling it in with consoling meaning? In post-9/11 New York, our memorial question was: How to commemorate and articulate the loss of nearly 3,000 lives at the hands of terrorists and, at the same time, to create a memorial site for ongoing life and

regeneration? In Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s design, we found both the stark expressions of irreparable loss in the voids, and the consoling, regenerative forms of life in the surrounding trees. The fuller and taller the trees grow, the deeper the volumes of the voids become. In the National September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero, the memorial expressions of loss and regeneration are now built into each other. Each defines the other. James E. Young is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. On December 9, 2011, he delivered the keynote speech at “Memorial Mania,” a symposium sponsored by the American Academy and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

A Travelling Man’s America Not quite enough of Calvin Trillin

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n a recent mild March evening, an American literary legend strolled through the doors of the American Academy, one who has made over thirty appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, penned countless articles for the New Yorker, the Nation, and Time over forty years, made a name as one of America’s most beloved food writers, and who remains, of course, the only “deadline poet” in America. The venerable Calvin Trillin spoke at the American Academy as the 2012 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor, delivering an uproariously funny lecture in front of a packed house of fellow journalists, Academy fellows and trustees, and assorted fans. His talk, “A Travelling Man’s America,” ranged in topics from his poor

foreign language skills to Berlin looking pretty much the same as the last time he was here, in 1958 (“There was no Wall then and there’s no Wall now”), to the current gop race. Trillin concluded with a more serious discussion about the state of American newspapers, Internet journalism, and his long tenure through four regimes at the New Yorker (he began as staff writer in 1963), as well as his life and times at the Nation.  Trillin sprinkled the talk with vignettes from his most recent and acclaimed anthology, Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, published by Random House in September 2011. He riffed on an opening piece called “Geography,” originally penned in 1988: I think my interest in geography grew from the long automobile

trips across the country I used to take with my family as a child. I grew up in Kansas City, which is what the real estate people would call equally convenient to either coast. We usually went west. My father would be in the front seat, pointing out buttes and mesas, and my sister, Sukey, and I would be in the back, protecting our territory. We had an invisible line in the center of the seat. At least, Sukey said it was the center. There were constant border tensions. It was sort of like the border between Finland and the old Soviet Union. I played Finland. Sukey played the Soviet Union. Then my father did something that we now know was politically retrograde and maybe antifeminist. He told me, “We do not hit girls. You will never hit your sister again.” Sukey was not visited with a similar injunction. So I became

a unilaterally disarmed Finland, while she was a Soviet Union bristling with weaponry. If I hadn’t had to be on constant alert because of Sukey’s expansionist backseat policy, I might know the difference between a butte and a mesa. Trillin was in residence at the American Academy until April 1, 2012, spending time with Academy fellows, visiting Berlin’s local eateries (sampling such delicacies as Berlin’s famed döner), and continuing to observe the places and people around him with a dash of good ribbing, as he has for the last fifty years. To hear Trillin on the town, and for a vicarious taste of currywurst with the seasoned humorist, you can tune in to the Academy’s spring 2012 National Public Radio show, available for streaming from the Academy ­website. r .j.m.

N10 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

A Lasting Legacy

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n Tuesday, April 17, Earl A. Powell, III, director of the National Gallery of Art and the inaugural Marina Kellen French Distinguished Visitor, was introduced to the American Academy by French herself. An expert in nineteenth and twentieth century European and American art, Powell has been at the Gallery’s helm since 1992, subsequent to positions at the University of Texas and his directorship of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At the lecture, attended by heads of art museums from across Germany, Powell shed light on Andrew Mellon’s legacy, describing how the Pittsburgh financier and energy baron, who also served as secretary of the treasury under three presidents, conceived of and financed the National Gallery at its conceptual outset, in the 1920s. During his ambassadorship to the Court of St. James, in London, Mellon was inspired by the idea of a national gallery. He presented the idea to President Roosevelt, saying that he would donate his private collection and provide the funds to

renovate the building that would house the pieces. But Mellon also insisted that the museum should not bear his name. It was, rather, to be the people’s collection and free to the public, governed by a secret board of trustees made up of private and public figures. Roosevelt was thrilled, and the bill was approved in an Act of Congress, which still guarantees funding for all of the National Gallery’s operations. John Russell Pope then designed the Beaux-Arts building, which began construction in 1936, and is today linked via an underground tunnel to the East Wing, designed by I.M. Pei in 1978. At the main structure’s opening, in 1941, Powell said, “there were more guards than paintings.” The Gallery’s collection, after years of careful curation, traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas. When the fabric samples were delivered for the walls of the Renaissance section of the gallery, the first director, David E. Finley, wrote to

Photo: Cornelia Bohnen

The National Gallery in the new century

Marina Kellen French and Earl “Rusty” Powell

Mellon to say that the fabric was a bit on the expensive side. “I don’t care how expensive it is,” Mellon replied, “so long as it doesn’t look it.” Powell then ran through the “pretty picture part of the lecture,” as he put it, showing slides of some of the National Gallery’s most impressive holdings: works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, and Watteau, among others. Additional collections added to the National Gallery

include major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Peter Arrell Brown Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale, bringing, with the inclusion of Van Gogh and Picasso, among others, the collection into the twentieth century. These gifts form what the National Gallery calls the “founding ­collection.”  r .j.m.

Redefining German Health Care A Harvard Business School luminary on healing Germany’s ailing health policy

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e a lt h c a r e is a hot topic – and often a divisive one – in Europe and America today. Harvard University Business School professor Michael Porter’s new book, Redefining German Health Care: Moving to a Value-Based System (co-authored by Clemens Guth; Springer, 2012) lays out an action agenda to move Germany to a high-value system, including a comprehensive, coherent strategy to reform the entire system. Porter and Guth conducted their

study because, as they see it, the German health care system is on a collision course with budget realities: costs are high and rising, and quality problems are becoming increasingly apparent. In the book, Porter argues that care must be reorganized around patients and their medical conditions, providers must compete around the outcomes they achieve, health plans must take an active role in improving subscriber health, and payment must be shifted to models that

reward excellent providers. Last but not least, private insurance must be integrated in the riskpooling system. During his provocative talk at the Hotel Adlon, Porter demonstrated that moving to a valuebased health care system is the only way forward for Germany if the country wants to continue to ensure access to excellent health care for everyone. He discussed his findings with one of the most prominent experts on German health policy, Dr. Karl Lauterbach,

director of the Institute of Health Economy and Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Cologne and adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. Lauterbach is also an SPD member of the Bundestag and frequently appears as a health-care expert on the German talk-show circuit. In addition to his well-attended lecture, Porter also held a foreign policy forum luncheon at the American Academy, kindly sponsored by Daimler-Fonds. r .j.m.

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• Life & Letters •

Infinite Engagement Nathan Englander on writing in Berlin

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n m y fir s t day at the American Academy, I finished a draft of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf, 2012). Of course, I would go on to finish it many more times, in the way we “finish” any kind of writing. I also began the short story “Free Fruit for Young Widows” at Wannsee. The Holocaust themes in the book were surely informed by sitting in the Hans Arnhold Center, originally built by a Jewish banker and then taken over by the Nazi minister of finance. To be in the house with all those ghosts, both good and evil, in a place that’s so lovely

and peaceful, to be across the lake from where the Nazi conference took place . . .  I remember sitting in the library and looking out across the lake with all these thoughts. As a kid who was raised Orthodox – although I’m not religious now – it was interesting to contemplate the reasoning behind the high ideals of having an American Academy. There’s nothing more loaded than being on Lake Wannsee, and of all the museums in the world, the Wannsee Conference House was the most chilling, most intense, and the best curated of any Holocaust museum I’ve been to, because you just saw how things happened in a

beautiful room overlooking a lake. In Berlin, I felt everyone was so respectful in acknowledging the city’s history while also acknowledging the living, vibrant nature of the city. I really came to love the city deeply. I feel very connected to the place. I was constantly meeting people, other than Jews, who remembered the Holocaust the way an Orthodox traditional Jew would want it to be remembered – even though it’s nearly a hundred years later. The fact that it was living on in the heads of the young people I met, the way it was living on in my head, astonished me. It made me think, looking out at the lake, sketching the first lines

and ideas of stories – if I want to engage in these ideas, they are mine to engage with, and they can be infinitely engaged with. If this is what obsesses you, then be so obsessed. Being at the Academy really changed the way I work. I was a coffee shop writer my whole life, but at the Academy, for the first time ever, I got used to working where I lived. It was a little bit like an Edward Gorey drawing; I would pace around, and there were days and days where I didn’t leave the house. I think a whole week went by without me exiting the gates, I was working so hard, really hammering away.  a s tol d to b.l .s.

Profiles in Scholarship Presenting the spring 2012 fellows and distinguished visitors Karen J. Alter

“International law is primarily an idea,” says Karen J. Alter, “and international courts are a leap of faith.” For Alter, a professor of political science and law at Northwestern and this semester’s Bosch Public Policy Fellow, the creation of international courts “represents the belief that having a legal body to enforce international legal agreements will make these agreements more substantively meaningful. Sometimes this actually happens. I’m interested in understanding when and how this occurs.” Alter aims to complete her latest book, The New Terrain of International Law: International Courts in

International Politics, during her time at the Academy. Alter is the author of The European Court’s Political Power: Essays on the Influence of the European Court of Justice on European Politics (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Establishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2001), and has published articles in International Organization, Comparative Political Studies, and International Affairs, among others. Alter’s research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the German

Marshall Fund, the da a d, and the Bourse Chateaubriand Scientifique. She is a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, an associate scholar at the Center for Law and Globalization at the American Bar Foundation, serves on the editorial board of Law and Social Inquiry, and is co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on International Adjudication. Charles Bright and Michael E. Geyer

Over the past thirty years, Charles Bright and Michael E. Geyer have extensively published, theorized, and taught courses on the history of globalization. They’re con-

tinuing this collaboration at the Academy, in order to “re-narrate stories which no longer quite work,” according to Geyer. The two will work on a book entitled The Global Condition in the Long Twentieth Century. Charles Bright is a historian trained in European military and geopolitical history, and the director of the University of Michigan’s Residential College. The Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow has also been active in the arts, teaching on theater and politics in interwar Germany, underwriting a series of plays by Bertolt Brecht, and working with Detroit-area theater companies. He has published two books, The Powers that Punish:

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Prison and Politics in the Era of the “Big House”, 1920–1955 (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and, with Susan Harding, Statemaking and Social Movements, (University of Michigan Press, 1984), and has published widely in journals and anthologies. Michael E. Geyer is the Samuel N. Harper Professor of German and European History and the faculty director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. The Axel Springer Fellow’s recent publications include Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, edited with Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and A Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories, written with Konrad Jarausch (Princeton University Press, 2002). Geyer has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Humboldt Forschungspreis, and the American Academy in Berlin, where he was a Daimler Chrysler Fellow in spring 2004. This semester, Geyer is the inaugural senior fellow at the Academy. Nominated to the Academy’s Board of Trustees in 2004, Geyer is recused from the board during his fellowship. Leland de la Durantaye

Holtzbrinck Fellow Leland de la Durantaye, in a manner that any method actor would admire, will spend his time in Germany examining Samuel Beckett’s own affinity with the German culture and language, within de la Durantaye’s larger Academy book project, Wörterstürmerei im Namen der Schönheit, or World and Work in Samuel Beckett. More broadly, the project will examine Beckett’s art through the lens of the Irish writer’s own poetics, as enunciated most recently in the newly published Letters. De la Durantaye is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University, and has written numerous works

on the subject of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and aesthetics in a variety of publications, and his books are Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford University Press, 2009) and Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Cornell University Press, 2007). His awards, fellowships, and special recognitions include several fellowships from Cornell University, where he received his master and doctoral degrees, as well as fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, Harvard University’s Department of Comparative Literature, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the American Academy in Rome, and the Fulbright Program. Richard Deming

This semester’s John P. Birkelund Fellow is one of the enviable few who moves seamlessly between the creative and academic worlds. In his verse and theory, Deming explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. At the Academy, he will work on the completion of two books, Everyday Domain: The Ordinary in Art, Film, Philosophy and Poetry: Day for Night. The first aims to reveal the ongoing “philosophicality, interpretation, and imagination that are experienced in the ordinary and everyday.” For his second book, Deming will compile a collection of poems that raise questions central to discovering what we are doing when we attempt to express the self’s relationship to others through language and visual metaphors. Deming is the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford University Press, 2008). His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman, 2008), received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. Deming contributes to a variety of magazines, such as Artforum and the Boston Review, and his works

have appeared in Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, and the Nation among others. He teaches at Yale University. Martin Dimitrov

Martin Dimitrov is thrilled to be back in Berlin; the last time he was here was 1988, when his only view of West Berlin, as a Bulgarian citizen, was from the TV Tower. When he is not making up for lost time, the Academy’s second Axel Springer Fellow will dedicate himself to his book pro­ ject Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China, which focuses on the puzzling longevity of communist singleparty regimes. Based on archival evidence from China and Eastern Europe, Dimitrov explores how communist regimes manage the problem of information scarcity by creating institutions for collecting information. Dimitrov is an associate professor of political science at Tulane University. He is the author of Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Dimitrov received his PhD in political science from Stanford University and was previously an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College. He has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame; the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford; the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard; and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. Avery Gordon

During her time at the Academy, sociologist and Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow Avery Gordon will embark on a collaborative effort with Berlin-based artist Ines Schaber. The two will be focusing on the former monastery and prison of Breitenau, creating

a multimedia installation for ­ ocumen ta (13). Gordon will d contribute a small notebook to the publication series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts that explores imprisonment as a technology of enclosure in which unwanted people and threatening ideas are confined. Gordon is a professor of socio­ logy at the University of California Santa Barbara and visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Research Architecture at the University of London. She is the author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People (Paradigm Publishers, 2004), and the coeditor of Mapping Multiculturalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Body Politics (Westview, 1994). Recent scholarly publications have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Race & Class, PMLA, and others. Since 1997, Gordon is also the Keeper of the Hawthorne Archives.  Annie Gosfield

During her Berlin Prize in Music Composition Fellowship, Annie Gosfield will compose Messages Personnels, a concert-length piece for a large ensemble. The piece will draw inspiration from resistance groups in World War II and reference the secret messages known as “Messages Personnels,” surreal spoken texts and music broadcasts. Gosfield will conduct further research into the Resistance and German encryption and radio transmission. She will also have the opportunity to develop a new work with cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, write a piece for violinist George Kentros, and compose new work for piano and electronics in honor of the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth. Dedicated to working closely with performers, Gosfield has created new works in close collaboration with musicians including ex-Kronos cellist Joan

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | N13

cepts of time and the interaction or collision of historical and personal memory.” Working with cinematographer Bradford Young and producer Karin Chien, Hewitt plans to take advantage of her time in Berlin by exploring the African American experience in Germany and Germany’s own visual engagement with its past. Hewitt graduated from Cooper Union’s School of Art in 2000 and went on to earn an mfa

Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and Yale Art Gallery, among others. Peter L. Lindseth

Peter Lindseth studies the comparative and historical evolution of law governing public bureaucracy. He is particularly fascinated, he says, by “how to reconcile conceptions of representative government with the

“Democracy and Administration in the North Atlantic World.” Lindseth holds a JD from Cornell and PhD from Columbia in European history. His books include Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the NationState (Oxford University Press, 2010), Comparative Administrative Law (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010), Administrative Law of the European Union: Oversight (a b a Publishing, 2008),

© Annettte hornischer

Jeanrenaud, pianist Lisa Moore, cellist Felix Fan, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and the Athelas Sinfonietta. Large-scale compositions include EWA7, Floating Messages and Fading Frequencies, and Daughters of the Industrial Revolution. Her recent fellowships include the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Siemens Foundation.

The spring 2012 class of fellows (left to right): Martin Dimitrov, Avery Gordon, Richard Deming, Michael Geyer, Inga Markovits, Peter l. Lindseth, Leslie Hewitt, Charles Bright, M. Norman Wise, Annie Gosfield, and Karen Russell (not pictured: Leland de la Durantaye)

Gosfield was the Milhaud Professor of composition at Mills College in 2003 and 2005, a visiting lecturer at Princeton University in 2007, and a visiting artist at Cal Arts in 1999. Leslie Hewitt

For this semester’s Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts, photography, film, sculpture, and site-specific installations are “ways to explore con-

from Yale University in 2004. From 2001–2003, she pursued Africana studies and cultural studies at New York University. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Project Row Houses, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others. Her work is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the

reality of modern administrative governance.” The Olimpiad S. Ioffe Professor of International and Comparative Law at the University of Connecticut will be pursuing such questions over the spring semester, while aiming to elaborate a specific historiographical perspective on the relationship of legal, institutional, and social change in the modern nation-state. The Daimler Fellow’s project is entitled

and Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation: Legal Problems and Political Prospects (Oxford University Press, 2000). Lindseth has served as a visiting professor at Yale Law School, as a fellow and visiting professor at Princeton University, and as a Research Scholar and Associate Director of the European Legal Studies Center at Columbia Law School. In Europe, Lindseth has been a visiting fellow at the Max

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Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, and a lecturer at the Academy of European Law, both at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Inga Markovits

Lawyers do not make good Christians, said Martin Luther, because they were born to be doubters, not believers. For this same reason, Inga Markovits reasons, lawyers do not make good Socialists, either. Often, lawyers in the GDR were seen as “closet capitalists” by the regime. After the fall of the Wall, however, these lawyers were greeted with equal suspicion by the newly unified republic, who saw them as “aiders and abettors of a dictatorial regime.” Markovits, the Friends of Jamail Regents Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, is fascinated by what role law can play in a totalitarian system. To this end, the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow will be researching the law faculty of Berlin’s Humboldt University during the years of East German Socialism. Markovits is an internationally renowned expert in comparative law. Her research has concentrat-

ed on socialist legal regimes, law reform in Eastern Europe, and the comparison of legal cultures in general. Markovits has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a visiting scholar at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, Germany. Her books include Justice in Lüritz (Princeton University Press, 2010; German edition: Gerechtigkeit in Lüritz, C.H. Beck, 2006), Imperfect Justice (Oxford University Press, 1995; German edition: Die Abwicklung: Ein Tagebuch zum Ende der ddr-Justiz (Beck, 1993), and Sozialistisches und bürgerliches Zivilrechtsdenken in der ddr (Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1969). Karen Russell

Long before this semester’s Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellow arrived in Berlin, she was drawn to the German Wald in the dark fantasy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Russell’s home state of Florida boasts the same swampy geography that once characterized Berlin, and this landscape, she says, strongly evokes Freud’s notion of the uncanny in its “alien and familiar” nature. This semester, Russell will work on her second collection of genre-

bending short stories, in which she seeks to fuse contemporary reality with fantasy, history with myth, blood-pumping mysteries with philosophical riddles, and suspense with wonder. Karen Russell is a visiting professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope. She was featured in the New Yorker’s fiction issue and on their “20 Under 40” list, was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and was the 2005 recipient of the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award. Her first book of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006), earned her recognition as a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree. Her second book, Swamplandia! (2011), was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize. She also won the Bard Fiction Prize in 2011. Russell has taught fiction and literature at Columbia University, Bard College, and Williams College. M. Norton Wise

M. Norton Wise enjoys investigating behind the scenes of Berlin’s

great landscape gardens, focusing his attention not only on the dramatic fountains, streams, and lakes, but also on the steam engines that once powered such Wasserkunst. A study of these engines, says Wise, is also a study of industrialization over the course of the nineteenth century. Together with his collaborator, Elaine Wise, the Berthold Leibinger Fellow will continue working on his book Gardens of Steam: Projecting Industrial Culture into the Berlin Landscape. Wise is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-director of the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics. With co-author Crosbie Smith, Wise wrote Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge University Press, 1989). His series Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in 19th Century Britain developed the point further to show how the steam engine functioned as an active mediator between industrial and scientific interests. On a broader scale, the edited volume The Values of Precision explored the themes of quantification, trustworthiness of numerical data, role of the professions, and relations between science and technology.

Sneak Preview This fall welcomes another outstanding class of fellows to the Hans Arnhold Center

D

a niel A l br igh t, who teaches comparative literature, English, and music at Harvard University, will investigate a central question of the comparative arts: are there many different arts, or is there simply one art, which variously takes the form of a poem, painting, musical composition, or building? Dav id Bol l ier, co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group, will pursue a strategy memorandum, “Formulating a Template of Action for the Global

Commons Movement”; Pe t er sciousness in connection with our Cons tan t ine will translate use of the first-person pronoun fifty stories by Mikhail Bulgakov; “I”; He at her McGowa n will be Visual artist R ich a r d H aw k ins writing her third novel, about a will research historical scrapbook group of people connected by the and collage material at selected illegal trade of cultural artifacts; Berlin museums as he continues philosopher De a n Moya r from work on his own art; Jonat h a n Johns Hopkins University will L aur ence, a political scientist address a question fundamental at Boston College, will research to modern liberal democracy: German approaches to integrahow should we conceive of the tion; Bé at r ice L onguenesse, moral core of our political institua professor of philosophy at New tions? Cel ina Su from the City York University, plans to continue University of New York will highher investigation of self-conlight the performative aspects

of youth participation in policymaking and community development; Daniel Tiffa n y, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, plans to excavate poetry’s forgotten relationship to the origins of kitsch; H a ns Vage t of Smith College will write a book about the life and works of Thomas Mann during his US exile years; and Princeton University’s Mich a el Wach t el will be writing the first biography the Russian polymath Viacheslav Ivanov.

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | N15

Alumni Books New releases by Academy fellows Katherine Boo

Astrid M. Eckert

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity Random House, February 2012

The Struggle for the Files - The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War Cambridge University Press, February 2012

Myra Marx Ferree

Julie Mehretu (artist)

Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective Stanford University Press, March 2012

Poetry of Sappho (Translated by John Daley with Page duBois) Arion, November 2011 W.J.T. Mitchell

Seeing Through Race Harvard University Press, May 2012

Caroline Fohlin

Mobilizing Money: How the World’s Richest Nations Financed Industrial Growth Cambridge University Press, December 2011

Daniel Boyarin

The Jewish Gospels The New Press, April 2012 Nathan Englander Derek Chollet and Samantha Powers

The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World PublicAffairs, November 2011

Stanley Corngold

Kaf ka for the 21st Century (co-edited with Ruth V. Gross) Camden House, October 2011

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories Knopf, February 2012

Jonathan Franzen

Farther Away: Essays Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2012

Nathan Englander

Ha JiN

(translator) and Jonathan

Nanjing Requiem Pantheon, October 2011

Safran Foer (editor)

New American Haggadah Little, Brown and Company, March 2012

Susan Sontag

Edited by David Rieff, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2012

R. Jay Magill

In July 2012 W.W. Norton will publish American Academy colleague R. Jay Magill’s Sincerity: How a moral ideal born five hundred years ago inspired religious wars, modern art, hipster chic, and the curious notion that we all have something to say (no matter how dull) (Book design by Susanna Dulkinys)

N16 | Private Initiative – Public Outreach | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

• Private Initiative – Public Outreach • The American Academy in Berlin is funded almost entirely by private donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations. We depend on the generosity of a widening circle of friends on both sides of the Atlantic and wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to those who support us. This list documents the contributions made to the American Academy from April 2011 to April 2012. Fellowships and Distinguished Visitorships Established in Perpetuity John P. Birkelund Berlin Prize in the Humanities Daimler Berlin Prize German Transatlantic Program Berlin Prize supported by European Recovery Program funds granted through the Transatlantic Program of the Federal Republic of Germany Nina Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize in History Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize of Fiction Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize Dirk Ippen Berlin Prize (in course of endowment) Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in the Visual Arts Lloyd Cutler Distinguished Visitorship EADS Distinguished Visitorship Marina Kellen French Distinguished Visitorship for Persons with Outstanding Accomplishment in the Cultural World

Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitorship Stephen M. Kellen Distinguished Visitorship Kurt Viermetz Distinguished Visitorship Richard von Weizsäcker Distinguished Visitorship Annually funded Fellowships and Distinguished Visitorships Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize Berthold Leibinger Berlin Prize Metro Berlin Prize Siemens Berlin Prize Axel Springer Berlin Prize Allianz Distinguished Visitorship

Endowment Giving Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship in the Visual Arts supported by Axa Art Versicherung AG, Deutsche Börse AG, Lufthansa Cargo AG, Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz & Bernd Schultz, Villa Grisebach Auktionen GmbH (Berlin) Marcus Bierich Distinguished Visitorship supported by Robert Bierich, Robert Bosch GmbH, Deutsche Bank AG, Jürgen Förterer, Angelika & Hermann von Hatzfeldt, Stephanie & Martin Korbmacher, Hellmut Kruse, Georg Kulenkampff, Berthold Leibinger Stiftung GmbH, The Mallinckrodt Foundation, Nina von Maltzahn, Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz & Bernd Schultz, Kurt F. Viermetz, Villa Grisebach Auktionen GmbH (Berlin), Voith GmbH, Stanford S. Warshawsky, Ulrich Weiss

Individuals and Family Foundations

CORPORATIONS AND CORPORATE FOUNDATIONS

Founders’ Circle $1 million and above Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation and the descendants of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold

President’s Circle Above $25,000 BASF SE Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals Bertelsmann AG Robert Bosch GmbH Cerberus Deutschland GmbH Daimler AG Daimler-Fonds im Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft Deutsche Lufthansa AG Deutsche Post AG Deutsche Telekom AG Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP GE GIESEN HEIDBRINK Partnerschaft von Rechtsanwälten GÖRG Partnerschaft von Rechtsanwälten Fritz Henkel Stiftung Hewlett-Packard GmbH JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft Liberty Global Europe BV Marsh GmbH Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Chairman’s Circle $ 25,000 and above Henry H. Armold Marina Kellen French Werner Gegenbauer Richard K. Goeltz C. Boyden Gray Helga & Erivan Haub Mercedes & A. Michael Hoffman Richard C. Holbrooke in memoriam Stefan von Holtzbrinck Michael Klein Nina & Lothar von Maltzahn Maren Otto Jane Boon Pearlstine & Norman Pearlstine Kurt F. Viermetz Trustees’ Circle $10,000 and above Constance & John P. Birkelund Almut & Hans-Michael Giesen Mary Ellen & Karl M. von der Heyden

Pia & Klaus Krone Rudolf-August Oetker Stiftung Alfred Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung im Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft Christopher Freiherr von Oppenheim Dina & Philipp von Randow Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz & Bernd Schultz Clemens J. Vedder Patrons $2,500 and above Robert Z. Aliber, Volker Booten, Georg Graf zu Castell-Castell, Norma Drimmer, Jutta von Falkenhausen & Thomas von Aubel, Julie Finley, Clare R. & Vartan Gregorian, Caroline & Cord-Georg Hasselmann, Lily & Klaus Heiliger, Erika & Jan Hummel, Henry A. Kissinger, Martin Koehler, Alexandra Gräfin Lambsdorff, Jutta & Jens Odewald, Jutta & Hans-Joachim Prieß, Si & Dieter Rosenkranz, Hannes Schneider, Bernhard Speyer, Katharina & Wolf Spieth, Gesa B. & Klaus D. Vogt, Elaine & James D. Wolfensohn, Loretta Würtenberger & Daniel Tümpel

MSD Sharp & Dohme GmbH Pfizer Pharma GmbH Philip Morris GmbH Porsche AG Siemens Corporation Susanna Dulkinys & Erik Spiekermann Edenspiekermann Telefónica Germany GmbH & Co. OHG Vattenfall Europe AG Villa Grisebach Auktionen GmbH, Berlin Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP Benefactors up to $25,000 Audi AG Deutsche Bundesbank Dürr AG Dussmann Stiftung & Co. KGaA Fleishman-Hillard Germany / Public Affairs & Gov. Relations Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac GmbH Investitionsbank Berlin KfW Bankengruppe Axel Springer Stiftung Rudolf-August Oetker Stiftung Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft

Friends  up to $2,500  Johannes Altincioglu, American International Yacht Club Berlin, Barbara Balaj, Ronald C. Binks, Manfred Bischoff, Elaine & Michael D. Blechman, Marie Eleonore & Leopold Bill von Bredow, Diethart Breipohl, Eckhard Bremer, Irene Bringmann, Emily Freeman Brown & Samuel Adler, Isabella von Bülow, Wilfried von Bülow, Stephen B. Burbank, Gahl Hodges Burt, Caroline Walker Bynum, Georg Crezelius, Barbara & David Detjen, Astrid & Detlef Diederichs, Margrit & Steven Disman, Brigitte Döring, Walter A. Eberstadt, Elizabeth & Jean-Marie Eveillard, Erika Falkenreck, Sue & Peter J. Filkins, Bärbel & Ulrich Gensch, Marie Louise Gericke, Michael E. Geyer, Jan Groscurth, Nancy & Mark Gruett, Donald Hagan, Marisa & Carl H. Hahn, Niels Hansen Memorial Foundation (Arthur J. Collingsworth), Robert L. Harrison, Cristine & Benjamin Heineman, Christine & Ulrich von Heinz, Brigitte & Bernd Hellthaler, Roe Jasen, Isabel & Peter von Jena, Helmut Kranzmaier, Renate Küchler, Regine Leibinger & Frank Barkow, Jan Tibor Lelley, Alexander Letzsch, Ellen Levy & Gregg Horowitz, Michael Libal, Nina & Daniel Libeskind, John Lipsky, Quincy Liu, Charles Maier, Rona & Harvey Malofsky, Wolfgang Matthies, Beate & Wolfgang Mayrhuber, Stephanie Moeller, Jan-Daniel Neumann, Kathryn & Peter Nixdorff, Wolfram Nolte, Albert J. Rädler, Susan Rambow, Christa Freifrau & Hermann Freiherr von Richthofen, Alison & Jeffrey A. Rosenberg, Henry Sapparth, Ulrike & Tom Schlafly, Harald Schmid, Björn B. Schmidt, Peter Schwicht, Kenneth Scott, Michael Sovern, Manfred von Sperber, Wiete & Hans-Jürgen Spiller, Immo Stabreit, Victor Stimming, Christian Tomuschat, Verband der Automobilindustrie e.V., Lutz Weisser, Linda and Tod White Charitable Fund, Sabine & Ned Wiley, Jill J. & Roger M. Witten, Pauline Yu

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 25

The Sponge Divers Of New Kalymnos Unlidding a galaxy

By Karen Russell

The following is an excerpt from a short story in Karen Russell’s forthcoming ­collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

I

t wa s da rk and wet on the day of the Skandalopetra Ceremony. The tents sagged with puddled rain. The interior of the central tent felt like an anthill – dozens of women in black dresses and heels scurrying around holding big white pieces of cake. The Greek citizenry of New Kalymnos, Florida, got duded up for

in scalloped mail, sitting at the end of my puny arm like an Olympic graft that didn’t take. After dinner we were due to become amphibious: not just boys in our dry beds any longer, but men, divers. Everybody was nervous, jumping the tables with their knees, breathing funny, as if already we were diving off the boats into the sea. Fifty-four sons from the sponge-fishing village of New Kalymnos were receiving their skandalopetra from the sea priest that night. We had all turned thirteen in

After dinner we were due to become amphibious: not just boys in our dry beds any longer, but men, divers. a Ceremony. Even the babies were wearing pants – it was that kind of fancy. The babies frowned out of their old-style perambulators in doll-sized coats and ties and ruby loafers that looked like polished acorns, their expressions equal in confusion to those of the oldest men. Tazi elbowed me. Inside the tent you could see these blue hyphens of lightflashes. Tiny nicks in the darkness. It was just the other boys, I realized, working their knives. The initiates sat separately from their families at two long tables. We moved towards the frozen waves of our friends’ combed heads bent over their plates, the high-luster foods piled on tables: honeyed hams, black olives. A question for past generations of New Kalymnos’s moms: why so many hams? Who thought the ham:boy ratio at these functions needed to be one:one? The ceremony always seemed plenty grim to me already. What I remember about our last meal as boys was sawing at my personal ham for what felt like centuries. It looked like a big fist, covered

the past twelve months – we were all in the same grade except for Yorga, who’d been held back twice. My twin brother Tazi and I, born May 12, had just made the cut-off for this year’s Ceremony. The skandalopetra came from a local limestone quarry: a slab of greeny-white rock, 8 kilograms, that mainlanders visiting New Kalymnos frequently mistook for tombstones. These were our diving stones. Privately Tazi and I decided that we’d gotten the best two skandalopetra. Nestor Rekkis’ stone had this sort of rash-looking thing on it, like a weird blue acne. And Tony’s stone was cut as crookedly as his nose. We felt very sorry for our friends. We hallucinated shadows of blemishes on their rocks, big chips. With our eyes, we agreed not to tell the other boys. “You are divers now,” the mothers of New Kalymnos insisted, adjusting our ties. “You are not boys!” “Thank you,” Tazi and I kept belching up at them. We were drinking soda and wine. Our loafers were pinching our feet so we

removed them. Somehow I had managed to get blue cake icing on one of my big toes. I stared down at my bare, rabbity feet every time a woman approached us. In some ways the Skandalopetra Ceremony seems so very strange – how do you become a diver on land? It seemed this milestone should have been inaugurated in the sea caves themselves instead of in fairground tents next to the dull gold and purple hat of the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral. (Have you ever noticed the architectural similarity between the shape of priest’s hats and the shape of the cathedrals? All these papal guys with cones on their heads, blessing us inside the cone-shaped cupolas? It’s like a chickenand-the-egg type thing, I guess – or did one design come first?) Tomorrow, each of us would row out on a sponging boat, tie these stones around our bellies, and dive with our harvesting bags and rakes into the sea. The best sponges were off Twelve-Mile Reef, growing on a sandbar grubstaked by Captain Skupin. Divers

A question for past generations of New Kalymnos’s moms: why so many hams? plummeted down to the sea floor on a single breath to collect them. The stone dragged you down, and afterwards you signaled the men on the boat to haul you up. Your lungs and your sponge bag bursting. One full bag of sponges earned a diver one dollar, after the captain took his cut. I had been swimming in the waters of New Kalymnos since my infancy, practically, but I was frightened of tall waves and

© United States Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division

26 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

Anonymous photographer, Miss Bernhardt, the Ocean Express, circa 1880

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 27

liked to keep my head above them, like a paddling dog. The best sponges were seventy feet down. The orange and fluffy sponges that you can buy in druggists’ stores are actually the skeletons of the sponges. What divers harvest is the animal in its original state, gluey and black. “You’re a man now, Jason Roubalis!” “You’re a man now, Tazi Roubalis!” Drunk mothers from the town would knock into us and exclaim, “The twins!” as if they were gossiping with us about our own freckled, identical faces. Gossip gets incestuous like this in towns as small as ours – women would spread rumors all over each other, about each other’s nieces, sisters, husbands. My father, for example, had a malformed left foot and a leg that was broomstick-thin, turned inwards, a birth defect, and people would sometimes ask us how he got it. “The Curse of Hephaestus,” they called it. How had we boys escaped it? they wondered aloud, for which Tazi and I had no good reply. (Had we? Externally, we were “very lucky,” we were “able-bodied,” but as the future rolled forward, the jury was still out on whether we were cursed or not, I thought). Our friend Leo was crying under the table – he had lost his glasses and he couldn’t find them in the tent’s shadows. He bumped his head on the table, which

Drunk mothers from the town would knock into us and exclaim, “The twins!” as if they were gossiping with us about our own freckled, identical faces. sent wine leaking to the ground all around him like a curtain of blood. Leo started screaming then, shaming his quiet parents, and one of the older divers standing near me lit a cigarette and muttered that the chickenshit kid had better learn how to hold his breath before his first dive. “The Ceremony was better last year,” the old diver grumbled to no one visible. He had the yellowed eyes of a man who’s spent half his life inverted underwater. A little comma of blue icing hung underneath his nostril that perfectly matched the color of his teeth. “Everything was better last year,” he continued. “The cake, the boys. The mothers looked good last year, what happened? Everybody’s fatter this year! Everybody’s

choking to death on this foul cake! Tastes like they frosted it with gullshit – ” Tazi showed up at my side with a large olive between his teeth. The red pimento eyeballed me; my brother was looking over my shoulder. I followed his gaze to our father. Captain Skupin and a few of his muscular divers had cornered him. They were all

Olympians for being a god with a day job. Like Hephaestus, our dad was a paradox: a powerful cripple. Pity seemed to be a pointed fence from behind which all of the neighbors could crouch and admire him. “Hephaestus of the Deep!” the dock workers called out to him when he walked with us to school. “Hot enough for you at your forge today?” Smiles planking their faces.

“Everything was better last year,” he continued. “The cake, the boys. The mothers looked good last year, what happened?” gesturing, stabbing the air with cigarettes. Tazi and I exchanged glances – we knew that they were probably making a “request,” for some marine-smithing or horseshoeing job for which our dad would never be compensated. Captains bullied him into doing work on their boats with flattery, these thugs who holstered their guns in doilies: Nobody can do it but Hephaestus of the Deep, nobody else has the talent. . . And we could see our father’s weak chin lowering in a “yes.” Yes after yes after yes after yes. Old Hephaestus’ one-word biography. No request was too time-consuming, too onerous, too humiliating for him. For twenty years, our father was the blacksmith in New Kalymnos. He was known locally as “Hephaestus of the Deep.” Sometimes this got inflected as a cruel joke – our father couldn’t dive for sponges with that leg, of course. He was, in fact, slightly hydrophobic. He wouldn’t let the waves rise to his shins. When he and my mother went on their walks along the beach he stopped on his crutch at the base of the pier, peering after her, his face coppery in the gas lamps. He’d wave goodbye to her by hoisting the single crutch high above his shaggy head, which made Dad look a like a one-antlered moose. Tazi and I tried to be fair to both of them. One of us would stay under the green lamps with our father, and one of us would walk with our mother into the sea. But I don’t mean to suggest that Dad’s title around town, “Hephaestus of the Deep,” was only an insult. The town’s relationship to our father was more complicated than that. The nickname was a compliment, too. The original Hephaestus was an Olympian, after all. The Greek god of the forge. The god of fire, metallurgy, red tongs, blacksmiths. “Vulcan,” to the Romans. Uxorious, furious, intolerant of alcohol. “No ambrosia for me Zeus, thanks, I’m on the clock.” Unique among the airier

At school, I often got into fights to defend him. “What happened this time?” our dad would ask me at night, furious. He’d wince with disgust as he touched my puffy black eye. He examined my face with the same remote attention he fixed on his machinery. He was very furious with me, for putting my body “in harm’s way.” As if he had created something remarkable, something prized, and I was daily ruining it. The red anger was like a tiny satellite around a shrouded planet – I never knew what was at the center of him. “Why do you make trouble, Jason?” You are the trouble. You are the trouble. “They pick the fights.” Then I’d make a little cage over my eye. Not to cover it, exactly. I’d push my knuckles up and down over the bruised skin like a spider doing push-ups. On the night of the Skandalopetra Ceremony, I later learned, our father accepted a commission to create a special kind of machine for Captain Skupin. He drafted the plans for a prototype that very night. Our mother followed Tazi and I towards the house, yelling at the two of us for drinking too much wine, urging caution with our new skandalopetra; our

Like Hephaestus, our dad was a paradox: a powerful cripple. father, meanwhile, went limping into his workshop. Just before sleep, I remember staring across the lawn and seeing lamplight in his workshop, the night squared and cinder-black around the open door and the infernal heat flooding out of the walls, our father’s head bent in silhouette like a dead brown daisy. He was pondering, not hammering. In the morning, we saw strange shapes sparkling along the

28 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

W

hen I was a kid, I somehow got it into my head that when people said “the writing on the wall,” they were making a reference to the Amityville Horror movie. If you haven’t seen this movie, it’s a homeowner’s nightmare: newlyweds move into an obviously haunted house – the realtor knows it’s haunted, the neighbors know, even their dog, a Cassandra-like Malamute named Henry, knows. Yet the newlyweds continue to live there, blithe and good-natured in the face of mounting evidence that their fixer-upper is a supernatural house of horrors. The writing is on the wall, and it is not subtle. I saw this movie in the theater, and by the time their walls began to literally ooze the entire Miami audience was screaming at them, “Your house is haunted, fools! Gas up the Dodge! Go to a Best Western! Lady, put your contacts in, there is blood on that wall!” Of course, part of the movie’s pleasure was the agonizing tension between our ability to interpret these portents and the newlyweds’ cluelessness. It always amazes me how much our eyesight improves when we are reading the story of someone else’s life. Today I teach literature, and I find that certain fictional characters provoke an Amityville-like heckling from my students: “Look! He doesn’t really love her! She’s a liar! He’s the killer! She’s faking, Romeo, drop the poison!

Their reactions have made me appreciate the special kind of literacy that the best books offer us – Alice Munro and Virginia Woolf reveal their characters’ natures to us so completely that we turn each page with a feeling like clairvoyance. Fiction alerts us to our own blindspots. It lifts us out of our narrow lives, gives us an extraordinary, aerial view of the whole story. It’s this perspective from which the writing on the wall becomes legible. And epiphanies, I’m learning, are not only for a novel’s characters. It can take me months of drafting before I become aware of my story’s “true” subject; by which point every page of the story is usually saturated in it. Then I feel uncomfortably close to that Amityville woman, humming and vacuuming away while a glowing dispatch from the house itself seeps through the walls. Books create a space where we can achieve this spontaneous literacy – suddenly we are able to comprehend a truth that has been etched deeply within us from the very beginning. James Baldwin beautifully describes the feeling: “It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that . . . and at the same time I couldn’t doubt it. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there all day long.” The “writing on the wall” is gas-flame blue, effecting a phase change in the reader: ice to water, suspicion to revelation.

karen russell

draftsman’s paper, dotted white lines such as the ones you’ll see on star maps to limn the constellations. These blueprints were the maps of our father’s mechanical dreams, incomprehensible to us. Visions guided his big fists at the forge. His hammer erupted in a hail of orange sparks and sound. Pig squeals of fire – We New Greeks dove with stones, just as the Old Greeks in Kalymnos had done for two millennium. Skandalopetra, our future tombstones, tied around our waists

Today, the bronzed Hephaestus helmet is like the great-grandfather of the helmets worn by cosmonauts, these spacemen and spacewomen who have upstaged the old sponge divers of New Kalymnos, mining moon rocks for nasa. to speed our descent. The years came and went like steady breath, and nobody could imagine another way of doing things. And then, through an accident of genius, our dad invented a helmet.

The Hephaestus Helmet, they called it at first. Later, “the devil’s dress.” The basic fishbowl geometrics of the helmet are ubiquitous. Nowadays I see it echoed everywhere – in the sun at noon, punchbowls, girls’ knees, streetlamps, in the go-slow yellow light sliding over Chevy hubcaps, in the burgundy and pink bowling balls that modern, inland teenagers hurl down the lanes at Star Palm Alley. Today, the bronzed Hephaestus helmet is like the great-grandfather of the helmets worn by cosmonauts, these spacemen and spacewomen who have upstaged the old sponge divers of New Kalymnos, mining moon rocks for na s a. Our dad’s invention was a kind of marine dynamite. Space rained down for miles into the holes it made in the sea. In a Hephaestus helmet, hooked to the special breathing tube, divers could harvest sponges at a depth of twenty fathoms. They could walk the ocean floor for over an hour. The Twelve-Mile Reef was now “the shallow end” of our Atlantic. Huge sponge-beds were discovered two-hundred feet down, and underwater wars broke out among the divers over their dominion. Our father had unlidded a galaxy (one he could never see

for himself, sitting at his workbench, but which he would try for the rest of his short life to peer at through my eyes and Tazi’s). Less than a month after its debut, every sponging outfit had ordered the complete suit. Not just the bronze Hephaestus helmets, but the below-the-neck accoutrements: the air hoses, the breastplates, the canvas jumpers. Dad barely had time to eat. Skandalopetras were relics. One month after our ceremony, our stones leaned in corners, gathering webs. For three months our family was very rich – we bought a blue Studebaker Phaeton, drove north to see our first winter, drank Cokes and ate dark pudding in restaurants – and then we were ruined. My father, the lame blacksmith of New Kalymnos, was held responsible for the deaths and the paralysis of over a hundred boys and men. His accomplice was the ocean. But you can’t put the ocean on trial, can you? Karen Russell is an adjunct professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and the spring 2012 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellow at the American Academy.

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 29

Journalism as Literature © Wolfgang Betke / Courtesy Aurel Scheibler, Berlin

Imposing shapeliness

Wolfgang Betke, Untitled (Red Shirt in Tatters), 2008. Oil, acrylic, paper and abrasion on canvas

30 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

Former Academy fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Katherine Boo’s latest book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, is set in a slum in Mumbai. It was featured in the following discussion, which took place during a panel on “Journalism as Literature” at the Jaipur Literature Festival on ­January 22, 2012. In this edited excerpt from the hour-long talk, Boo describes her writing process and nonfiction narrative choices with the New ­Yorker’s editor, David ­Remnick, and former New York Times editor Joseph Lelyveld. The full-length video of the talk, which was moderated by Samnath ­Subramanian and included panelists ­Jason Burke and Philip Gourevitch, is available for viewing on the Jaipur Literature Festival’s website. david remnick :

About fifty years ago in the United States, a terrific reporter named Tom Wolfe decided there was something called “New Journalism,” which was being published in places like Rolling Stone and Esquire. New Journalism imposed values of shapeliness onto reporting rigor, so that people would go to professional football games, drag races, fashion shows, or war, and, having rigorously reported these things, would write about them in a way that did not seem like dispatches in a newspaper, or anything of that kind. It was not merely a service; it was not just today’s news. The interesting thing is that “New Journalism” could be dated back centuries, to Daniel Defoe, the Journal of the Plague Year, or wherever you chose to begin it; with Herodotus, for example, which is a kind of history writing.

I wouldn’t seek to define it too carefully other than that it should be true; I would instead seek to define it by example of what it is. I would bet, without having this conversation with anyone else on this stage previously, that a shared hero is George Orwell. The Orwell that matters to me most is not the novels but his essays and books on the Spanish Civil War, or poverty, or coal miners in the North of England. A new example of this is Katherine Boo’s book on poverty and life in one slum in Mumbai. The book has as much pulsating life in its 250 pages as the great novel of Mumbai, Midnight’s Children. joseph lelyveld:

I have always been a little wary of these labels. I was around when the term “New Journalism” was coined, and writers spoke of “nonfiction novels.” It seemed to me that a lot of the shapeliness they were imposing was using techniques created by fiction writers in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries and applying them to news stories, and I thought often it was very pretentious and didn’t really advance the cause of telling the story in a truthful way. There’s a limit to what the “nonfiction novel” can accomplish, because it seldom inhabits the characters, gets into their minds, and conveys their feelings. That being said, there are books we all know that we admire hugely, which might as well be called literature because they’re going to last. Orwell is an example. A book from that same era, which I always consider a model of journalism, is Michael Herr’s Dispatches, war reportage from Vietnam, by an Esquire writer whose specialty was being there with the ground troops in the meanest, most difficult combat. He inhabited them; he reported their feelings and their dialogue, and it was different from most of the war correspondents one read at the time. One of the key things about reporting that you learn after a while is that you’ve got to hang out and be patient, not just grab a quote and run and slap it onto a story. A lot of the best journalism is defined by that willingness to stay and see what will happen next. This brings me to Katherine, who stayed for four years. This book is seamless: it’s not weighted down with documentary evidence, but it feels authoritative, and at the end you know those characters.

What she brings to her subject matter is not only a quality of empathy but also of great respect for people living hard, driven lives. I’m sure it will have a great impact in journalistic circles everywhere, but it’s not the kind of thing any hack can imitate: it’s a great work of soul, discipline, and literary skill. katherine boo:

Thanks very much for everything you have said. In terms of genres, whether something is “literary” or has another title is not particularly interesting to me. Every story has its own etiology, and you’re trying to figure out that story. As a practical matter, many of the people that I write about are low-income and also semi-illiterate or illiterate. If you stick a microphone in their faces, they’re not always going to give you a pithy and eloquent sound bite. For instance, one boy I write about is named Sunil, and when I met him he was about 12 years old. His job is to collect garbage around the increasingly glamorous Mumbai airport. He’s working and trying to survive in a society that looks at him as if his life has about as much value as the garbage he collects. If I ask him, “What does that feel like? How do you preserve your self-worth in a society that doesn’t value you as a person?” he’s going to shrug. But if I follow him for a very long time, if I just shut up and watch and listen as he goes about his days, I’m going to begin to see for myself the choices and judgments he’s making, and then I can ask him about those choices and judgments. Had I only done the journalism equivalent of a driveby saying, “Tell me what the world looks like to you” – I wouldn’t be able to convey to the reader either the volatility and difficulty of his life or the rich capacity of his imagination. It takes a really long time, sometimes to my editors’ consternation! But I hope if you read the book you’ll have a sense of this kid in full, not as a representative poor person but as a real, complex human being making judgments in an increasingly volatile world. lelyveld:

And I think you do it without the first person pronoun. Does it appear anywhere in the book? boo:

Only at the end of the book, where I’ve included in an author’s note that talks about the documentary work that under-

girds what I’ve written. (In my reporting I use audiotape and videotape, and also official documents obtained under government Right To Information acts, which allow me to compare the stories I see and hear, especially about brutality and corruption, to the public record.) I agonize about a lot of choices that I make in my work, keeping myself out of the main narrative isn’t usually one of them. It seems to me now that by now the author writing about how she got her story has become almost de rigueur. There’s a lot of self-mythologizing bullshit about “Here I am, on the crowded, smelly bus on a rocky road, and it’s so difficult for me here as a reporter,” but the work I do as a reporter is nothing compared to the work of the people I’m reporting on. I feel that the weight of every sentence counts, and I want the weight of every sentence in my book to bring you closer to the people who you don’t get to read about as often as you get to read about the hardworking writer in a difficult environment. Sometimes when we writers use first person, we may make ourselves look like fools, but we never really make ourselves look scurrilous. We always have, in that first person, a sense of our own honor, and I just don’t think that’s the most interesting thing I have to say. I think I have other things to say than “I worked hard to do this book.” When I’m reporting, I’m always trying to examine the ways that either government policy or economic forces are affecting people on the so-called ground. In the slum, for example, I’m not trying to find the most virtuous, or perfect, or exceptional person and tell you about that person. I’m more interested in ordinary people as they negotiate their lives. When I had the opportunity to write a book, I had an incredible advantage of time. I wasn’t doing the story in a year; I was writing about a diverse community over the course of several years. Another thing that changes the way I write is the array of tools that I use. For instance, when I was working in Mumbai, especially in the beginning, I was totally clueless, just hapless, falling into sewage lakes and getting in trouble with the police. One of my amazing translators, Unnati Tripathi, would come home from the slum, nights, and write an imaginary graphic novel about how ridiculous we were.

© Wolfgang Betke / Courtesy Aurel Scheibler, Berlin

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Wolfgang Betke, Portrait Anna Chorese, 2010, Mixed media

But because I was using videotape, I was able to record things that I didn’t fully understand. I was able to watch them again and again, and gradually begin to understand. The use of videotape and audiotape took the pressure off; there wasn’t much doubt about what happened, what the sequence of events was, who said what. It gave me a lot more time as a reporter to go deeper and examine people’s motivations very carefully, sometimes even by showing the video I had just recorded and asking them, “What did you feel then? What was happening in your mind? What, among the limited number of choices you were making, seemed to you the best option at that time?” I think

that creates a fictionalized sense – as if the author is some clairvoyant. But it’s based on a lot of tedious work: going back to people until you think you’ve got it as close to right as you can get it. Katherine Boo is a staff writer for the New Yorker and was the spring 2007 Haniel Fellow at the American Academy. David Remnick is the editor of the New Yorker. Joseph Lelyveld is a former correspondent and editor of the New York Times.

32 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

The World’s First Media Revolution Medieval book production’s promiscuous nature

By Daniel Hobbins

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m agine t h at a monk from the great monastery of Fulda in the age of Charlemagne somehow found himself whisked ahead six centuries to the year 1400. Fresh from hand copying a Gospelbook in his scriptorium, he wonders how books have changed over time. To his astonishment, he finds them multiplying everywhere, beyond all bounds, even beyond monastery walls. A terrifying specter unfolds before his mind’s eye: great armies of scribes copying day and night without rest, as if prodded by demons. He catches his breath and steadies himself from a moment of vertigo, as if peering over the edge of a cliff. We might expect the same degree of astonishment if we were to transport a Victorian moralist to a college campus after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The comparison is a stretch, but not as much as you might think. The Victorian might use the word “promiscuous” to describe the morals of our day. The Carolingian monk might use the same word to describe late medieval book production. And with good reason. Compared to his own era, books in 1400 were cheap and easily available (not unlike sex in the 1960s). They were mixing where they shouldn’t. Not only monks, but private individuals – sometimes even laymen and laywomen – owned entire libraries. Written on a strange new material that seemed likely to decay, most of them looked cheap and felt cheap, inside and outside. Worst of all, many were now written in the vernacular tongue. We think of the Canterbury Tales and the Divine Comedy, but many new vernacular texts also encouraged the spiritual yearnings of laypeople, who hungered as never before to participate in the life of the

Church. Instead of disdaining these aspirations (as our monk certainly would have), intellectuals increasingly approved of them. We tend to think of the Middle Ages as one seamless fabric, and nowhere more so than in its writing technology. Our labels conspire with us and against us: “the Age of Scribes” evokes a timeless past of monks in sleepy monasteries dotting an empty landscape – a picture that, if it communicates any truth at all, does so only for the world before the end of the first millennium. Such labels disguise a far more interesting reality: “the Age of Scribes” had already witnessed several revolutions in book

Centuries of loss have taken a toll, but these books were scarce even in the world into which Charlemagne was born. The wealthiest monasteries in his empire could only muster collections of a few hundred volumes. The monks copied ancient texts too. The Carolingian copies of those texts are usually the earliest ones we now possess. On the eve of the Viking raids just before the year 800, much of classical literature dangled by a thread. Attitudes toward learning changed slowly over the centuries, and with them attitudes toward books. New schools attached to cathedrals appeared in urban centers in

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as one seamless fabric, and nowhere more so than in its writing technology. production during the five hundred years before Gutenberg’s invention around 1440. Our time-traveling monk from the eighth century might have spent years copying massive volumes intended for display, their bindings studded with gems, their pages painted with gorgeous illuminations. These were books meant to be carried aloft in long processions around and through the church amid a haze of smoke and incense, then placed on the high altar. They were objects of devotion and even love from their owners.

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ooks from t he C a rolingi an period are scarce today. You could probably squeeze them all into a fourbedroom house and still have room for a couch and a modern entertainment system. Just 1,800 manuscript books have survived from before the year 800, many of them mere fragments of papyrus or parchment.

the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with different needs. New disciplines appeared – theology, law, and medicine – which

Jean Gerson (1363–1429), a French scholar, educator, reformer, poet, and chancellor of the University of Paris, wrote La montagne de contemplation for his sisters in the year 1400 to provide them with a guide to the mystical life. At the work’s opening, he writes that the clergy have plenty of works in latin to choose from on this topic, But those ignorant of Latin have nothing to read. This image appears at the beginning of a copy of the work and dramatizes the moment when Gerson delivers his french text – presumably to his sisters.

Image courtesy Bibliothèque royale de Belgique

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Jean Gerson delivering La montagne de contemplation to two religious women. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale belgique

34 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

anchored their study to one authoritative textbook. The layout of these textbooks illustrates the changing intellectual priorities of the day. The authoritative text moved to a single column in the center of the page, while a commentary on the text crowded around it, as if threatening to swallow

Beyond clerical circles, the reading public was expanding faster than ever, putting more pressure on copyists, who must have felt as secure as Google technicians with all the demand for their services. it. Reading habits changed too. Scribes devised strategies to help readers navigate the manuscript book and to read selectively. Running headers and paragraph divisions made their first appearance. Chapter divisions now broke up the text of Holy Scripture. No longer to be adored and displayed on the communal altar, these books were objects of study. Cathedral schools slowly turned into universities, as translations of re-discovered Greek texts (some now with Muslim commentary) streamed north from Spain and Italy. By the thirteenth century, a new kind of literature appeared, geared to the training of clergy. For the first time in history, the Bible could fit into a single volume, thanks in part to thinner parchment, the distant ancestor of the lightweight paper used in Bibles today. To help meet demand from students and masters for textbooks, especially in theology, the University of Paris introduced a novel scheme. It licensed an official book dealer to rent books for copy, one gathering at a time (a group of sheets folded in half, thus doubling the number of pages), so that multiple copies could be made simultaneously. Copying had moved out of the monasteries. Monks still copied books, but so did a new generation of clergy, masters, and students. By the time of the Black Death (1348– 1350), this piece-system of copying had vanished. Another upheaval lay in store for “the Age of Scribes,” this one the most convulsive yet. One of the unexplained paradoxes of history is that despite the unfathomable mortality of the Black Death (one-third to one-half of all Western Europeans), the communication systems of Western Europe were far more complex by 1400 than they were a century or two

earlier. Some of this complexity resulted from better organization of state power. Royal archives grew larger in England and France, while princes became great patrons of literature. Driven by the urgency of the Hundred Years War, bureaucracies in France, England, and Burgundy took great effort to transmit official positions on matters of state interest. By the early fifteenth century, the dukes of Burgundy employed enough scribes to make hundreds of copies of the same text and a courier service to distribute them around France, all within days. Oral forms of communication – sermons and town criers – remained critical to the spread of news, but the written word occupied a far more important place now than in 1300. In 1423, the renowned theologian Jean Gerson even announced that there was a shortage of scribes.

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em and for book s surged like never before in the decades before print, much of it in the regions we now call Germany and Italy. Meanwhile, the costly and damaging campaigns of the Hundred Years War crippled France and England. According to our best estimate, by the 1460s manuscript production in Germany was ten times greater than in 1250. The gears and wheels of this great book-producing machine were many. Religious orders such as the Carthusians, renowned for their austerity and vows of silence, amassed huge libraries and gained a reputation as the “book order.” New semimonastic orders such as the Brethren of the Common Life made their living in towns and cities, partly through the copying of books, which they saw as a holy exercise. Universities spread to new regions. Before the Black Death, students from all over Europe traveled to universities at Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and a few others. The period after 1348 saw a wave of new foundations, then a second wave following the outbreak of the Great Schism (1378), when two men claimed the papal office. Many of the new universities were in Germany. Each one generated more demand for books and paper.

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v en t he crisis in the Church stimulated book production, as a generation of intellectuals tried to solve the Schism by writing tracts, the distant ancestors of the Reformation pamphlet. The Councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431–1449), convened to reform the Church and deal with heretics, served

also as marketplaces where intellectuals from all over Europe gathered for years to exchange ideas and to copy books. To meet the demand for books at Basel, copying took place on an almost industrial scale, anticipating the great invention of Gutenberg just two hundred miles down the Rhine at Mainz. Beyond clerical circles, the reading public was expanding faster than ever, putting more pressure on copyists, who must have felt as secure as Google technicians with all the demand for their services. They would have been crushed to learn that Gutenberg had begun conducting his first experiments in “artificial copying.” We can only guess at literacy rates for the pre-modern period. What we do know is that even modest towns had grammar schools and that more people could read than ever before, including many women, whether in Latin or in the vernacular. Soon, books began to appear in wills, a testimony to the growth of private libraries. These new lay readers drove the growth of a secular book trade in the major cities of Western Europe, entirely removed from the monasteries. Writing took other shapes besides books. Walking down the streets of a late medieval city, our time-traveling monk would have been astonished to see leaflets posted on walls and church doors, and bills passed hand to hand, spreading news and sometimes radical opinions. Exhibition catalogues tend to give us a distorted picture of this new world of writing. They show us triumphs of illumination such as the Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, the devotional toys of the wealthy. Nearly every book about medieval manuscripts privileges

most of the books produced in the century before Gutenberg are shabby productions, copied onto paper instead of parchment, often scribbled in an ugly cursive bookhand. artistic content over other considerations. In reality, most of the books produced in the century before Gutenberg are shabby productions, copied onto paper instead of parchment, often scribbled in an ugly cursive bookhand. Cheap paper begat sloppy scribes. Sometimes the handwriting is crooked because no one took the trouble to line the pages. Scribes left space for

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 35

decorated initials that no one bothered to paint. But if this is the theme of our story – if we reduce these books to a disappointing epilogue in the long history of the manuscript book – we will fail to recognize the historical evidence they present for an

ment. New cursive scripts after 1300 enabled scribes to write even more quickly. Authors began copying their own works themselves instead of dictating. The world was speeding up. Looking back across six centuries, we see a distant mirror of our own information age.

Above all, these manuscripts testify to a deep hunger for books that could not be satisfied by the methods of earlier centuries. upheaval in book production, a shift comOther labels mislead us, not just parable to the revolution of print itself, or “the Age of Scribes” but our boundary perhaps the rise of the mass paperback in between medieval and early modern, the twentieth century. Like paperbacks, which happens to coincide closely with these shabby late-medieval manuscripts Gutenberg’s invention. Both labels opened the path to book ownership for a obscure the fact that the age of mass new generation of readers, while allowing production of manuscripts, from 1350 to institutions such as monasteries to amass the late fifteenth century, bears a closer large collections. resemblance to the early centuries of print Above all, these manuscripts testify up to the year 1700 than to the period to a deep hunger for books that could not that preceded it. A more coherent historibe satisfied by the methods of earlier cencal model for understanding the world’s turies. Readers in Italy clamored for the first media revolution would require new works of Dante and Boccaccio, classical boundaries describing the period from texts, and the works of humanist authors. 1350 to 1700 as a unified whole, “the great In Germany they hungered instead for age of books.” In this new model, we can moral, spiritual, and devotional works, for see more clearly the role of print not as authors like the chancellor of the University the driver of demand for books, but as of Paris, Jean Gerson; or the Viennese the product of a demand that had been theologian Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl, or for gaining momentum for a century and Bible commentaries or bestsellers like The that would continue until books blended Imitation of Christ, which you can still find into the fabric of human life. These new in bookstores today. Everyone everywhere, boundaries would also take the pressure it seems, wanted a book of hours. off of print, which historians have someNew material conditions made all of times called upon to explain far too much. these new books possible. One of the an y histori ans righ t ly most expensive materials in a manureject narrations that give comscript book was the animal skin that plex historical developments an became the parchment page. By the late air of inevitability. Gutenberg did not “have thirteenth century, paper mills began to” invent movable type printing because spreading north from Spain and Italy, of massive demand for more books. Nor reaching northern France by around 1350 did anyone else. But looking back now, we and Nuremberg before the year 1400, can see the pressure building toward some then moving swiftly into the Rhineland. kind of breakthrough, whether more or Prices for paper fell steadily as the scale less dramatic than print itself. Gutenberg of production increased. By the fifteenth was not the only one looking for answers. century a copyist in France could buy The final solution turned out to be print. twenty-five sheets of paper for one sheet For that, he deserves credit, and for layof parchment. Purists insisted on the ing the groundwork for the real transforsuperiority of parchment, but most readmations that print would help to make ers felt that paper was just fine – especially possible. in Germany. Johann Gutenberg lived in a So is there any lesson here as we muddle world where nine out of ten manuscripts through our own media revolution, the were copied on paper. The success of his shift from print to digital books? Medieval invention would depend on it. For scribes, historians are not usually in the business of the quill could move along the surface offering lessons for the present. But I think of paper more quickly than across parch-

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that a better understanding of the historical forces that led to the first media revolution may help us to see the issues more clearly, and, if not to find any answers, then at least to ask the right questions. We can all agree that the shift to digital media has been gathering momentum for the past thirty to forty years. But is there any historical momentum driving the specific shift to the digital book, in the way that print met the demand for more books, cheaper and more swiftly copied? Why do people buy digital books? Instant gratification? Portability? Reducing clutter from their lives? The sense of being modern? No doubt all of these desires play some role in the shift to digital books. But is this all? What do we want from digital books that physical books cannot offer?

Everyone everywhere, it seems, wanted a book of hours. As for the shift itself and how to negotiate it, I fear that history has little to teach us. Early printed books look exactly like manuscripts. They were designed that way so that people would read them. Crossing the threshold from print into digital books, we enter a much different reality. When we digitize the book, we lose the very things that have constituted its boundaries for over fifteen hundred years. The length of a book is in some sense shaped and even determined by the physical properties of the codex (the ancient term for the volume itself). Images in books conform to the page. This rule applies to printed books, to manuscripts volumes, and even to scrolls. Digital books know no such limits. What are the new boundaries of our digital medium? How will books change to incorporate images and film? Ironically, it seems we face a future not unlike the distant past of our timetraveling monk. Almost no ordinary person in Charlemagne’s world owned a book. By the year 2300, perhaps we will have come full circle. Daniel Hobbins is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University and was the Academy’s Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in fall 2011.

36 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

Waning Crescent Slipping birth rates in the Muslim world

By Nicholas Eberstadt

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here rem a ins a w idely perceived notion – still commonly held within intellectual, academic, and policy circles in the West and elsewhere – that “Muslim” societies are especially resistant to embarking upon the path of demographic and familial change that

5.3 births per woman over just the last Along with the US Census Bureau, two decades; a drop of over 2.6 births per the United Nations Population Division woman per decade!) Notably, four of the ten (unpd) stands today as the authoritative greatest fertility declines ever recorded in “go-to” international source for worldwide a twenty-year period took place in the Arab demographic data. According to unpd’s world (Algeria, Libya, Kuwait, and Oman); estimates and projections, all Muslimmajority countries and territories for which adding Iran, we see that five of the “top ten” unfolded in the greater Middle East. No other data are available (48 out of 49 such spots region of the world – not highly dynamic on the map) witnessed fertility decline over Throughout the Ummah, Southeast Asia, or even rapidly modernizing the past three decades. fertility levels are falling East Asia – comes close to this showing. To be sure: for some high- or extremelydramatically, and traditional A separate but largely congruent readhigh-fertility venues in sub-Saharan Africa, marriage patterns ing can be drawn from these same unpd where six, seven, or even eight births per and living arrangements are data, ranking the “top ten” historical fertilwoman were typical a generation ago, undergoing ity declines during any twenty-year period intervening declines are believed to have tremendous change. been marginal (think of Sierra Leone, Mali, by country in terms of proportional rather than absolute drops in t frs. By this metric, Somalia, and Niger). In some other places, has transformed population profiles in “only” four of the top ten fertility drops to date where a fertility transition had already Europe, North America, and other “more have occurred in Muslim-majority countries brought childbearing down to about three developed” areas (as UN terminology – and “only” two of the top four were Muslimbirths per woman by the late 1970s, subwould have it). But such notions speak to a majority areas (Iran and the Maldives). sequent absolute declines also appear to bygone era; they are utterly uninformed by Especially noteworthy here, nonetheless, is have been somewhat limited (think of the important new demographic realities that places like Kuwait, Oman, and Iran all Kazakhstan). In most of the rest of the that reflect today’s life patterns within the effected fertility declines of over two-thirds Muslim-majority countries and territories, Arab world, and the greater Islamic world however, significant or dramatic reductions in just twenty years – and that this pace as well. of change exceeded the tempo of fertility in fertility have been registered – and in Throughout the Ummah, or worldwide decline in almost all of the Pacific Rim socimany of these places, the drops in question community of followers of Islam, fertileties; the bric economies (Brazil, Russia, have been truly extraordinary. ity levels are falling dramatically, and India, and China); and the other non-Muslim ix of t he t en largest absolute traditional marriage patterns and living emerging market economies. declines in fertility for a two-decade arrangements are undergoing tremendous Given these extraordinary fertility period recorded in the postwar era change. Indeed, this “quiet revolution” is declines, a substantial share of the Ummah have occurred in Muslim-majority counalready evident at the national and subis now accounted for by countries and territries. In fact, the four largest of these national levels for most of the world’s tories with childbearing patterns comparaabsolute declines all happened in MuslimMuslim-majority societies. My colleague ble to those contemporary affluent Western majority countries – each of these entailing Apoorva Shah and I detail this remarkable, non-Muslim populations. a decline of over 4.5 births per woman in and still strangely overlooked revolution in The figure on page 38 underscores the just twenty years. (The world record-breaka recent study for the American Enterprise similarity between contemporary fertility er here, Oman, is estimated to have seen Institute, from which the findings in this levels in much of the Ummah and those its total fertility rates (t fr) fall by over essay are drawn. of the United States. As may be seen, t frs

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© Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Courtesy of Galerie Berinson

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 37

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Expanding, 1954, Oil on hardboard

in a great many Muslim-majority populations look quite “American” these days. To go by these figures, for example, Algeria,

Tunisia’s t fr looks like Illinois’. Lebanon’s fertility level is lower than New York state’s. As for Iran, its fertility level today is compa-

Total fertility rates in many Muslim-majority populations look quite “American” these days. Bangladesh, and Morocco all have fertility levels corresponding to the state of Texas, while Indonesia’s is almost identical to Arkansas’. Turkey and Azerbaijan, for their part, are on par with Louisiana, while

rable with those of the New England states, the region in America with the lowest fertility rate. No state in the contemporary us a, however, has a fertility level as low as Albania’s.

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ll in a ll , according to these unpd numbers, 21 Muslimmajority populations would seem to have fertility levels these days that would be unexceptional for states in the us a (with the possible exception of Albania, whose fertility level might arguably look too low to be truly “American”). As of 2009, these 21 countries and territories encompassed a total estimated population of almost 750 million: which is to say, very nearly half of the total population of the Ummah. These numbers, remember, exclude hun-

38 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

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or Germ an re a ders, the question of Turkish fertility may seem, so to speak, especially pregnant. In a great deal of German-language commentary, there seems to be an impression

For German readers, the question of Turkish fertility may seem, so to speak, especially pregnant. that Turkish families – both in Germany and overseas – are extraordinarily prolific. Yet in reality, whatever the problems of Turkish integration into mainstream German society may look like today, the fact of the matter is that birth rates have been plummeting both in Turkey and for Germany’s Turkish ethnics. In Germany, for example, the fertility rate for ethnic Turks fell by more than half between the early 1970s and the late 1990s – at which time it was just above the replacement level, comparable, say, to rates for white Americans in the state of Kansas at the time. And in Turkey itself, according to estimates and projections by the US Census Bureau, the number of births per woman has dropped by more than half over the last generation, from 4.7 in 1980 to around 2.1 (the replacement level, or average number of births required for long-term population stability without immigration) today. Note, incidentally, that Turkey is “achieving” replacement fertility at a much lower level of per capita income than Germany enjoyed in the early 1970s, when German national fertility crossed the replacement threshold. And Turkey’s national fertility level, furthermore, is a nationwide average: many regions of Turkey are already well below the replacement level. According to Eurostat, for example, Istanbul’s fertility level in 2009 was 1.73 births per woman – slightly below the levels for such places as Inner London (1.77 in 2009), Oslo (1.88 in 2009), or Antwerp (1.93 in 2008) Along Turkey’s Western coast – in regions like Bati

total fertility rates in selected us states and muslim countries, circa 2007 1.5

1.7

1.9

2.1

2.3

2.5

2.7 Source: US TFR Source (2007 data): National Vital Statistics Reports, Volume 58, Number 24, May 20, 2010, www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_24.pdf

dreds of millions of Muslims in countries where Islam is not the predominant religion. Taking this into account, it could be that a majority of Muslims already live in countries where their fertility levels would look entirely unexceptional in an American mirror.

Albania Vermont Iran Massachusetts UAE Lebanon Maldives Michigan Tunesia Illinois Brunei Florida USA Turkey Azerbaiian Louisiana Indonesia Arkansas Alaska Kuwait Morocco Bangladesh Algeria Texas Qatar South Dakota Arizona Uzbekistan Idaho Turkmenistan Kazakhstan Bahrain Utah Kyrgyzstan Malaysia

Muslim-Majority TFRs as reported by the UNPD for 2005–12

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Marmara and Izmir – the total fertility rate today is down to 1.5 births per woman – not so different from such parts of Germanspeaking Europe as Saxony (1.44), Western Austria (1.45), or Zurich (1.51)! How are these remarkable demographic transformations in Muslim societies today to be accounted for? Typically, demographers and other social scientists in our era attempt to explain fertility changes in terms of the socioeconomic trends that drive (or at least accompany) them. Indeed: a century of social science research has detailed the historical and international associations between fertility decline and socioeconomic modernization (as represented by increasing income levels, educational attainment, urbanization, public health conditions, and the like). Those associations, not surprisingly, are immediately evident in simple cross-country correlations between national fertility levels and these respective socioeconomic

no observable correspondence whatsoever between these two factors in our analyses of recent data from dhs survey for lowincome countries. Socioeconomic factors, to be sure, may well affect the desired family sizes that women of childbearing ages report – in fact they surely do. But the critical determinant of actual fertility levels in Muslim and non-Muslim societies alike at the end of the day would appear to be attitudinal and volitional, rather than material and mechanistic. Why should this be so? Muslimmajority countries apparently tend to have substantially lower fertility levels nowadays than non-Muslim comparators when holding income, literacy, contraceptive use, and desired fertility constant. Muslimmajority countries also tend to have significantly lower levels of modern contraception use than non-Muslim countries at the same income levels: indeed, holding income constant, modern contraception

the critical determinant of actual fertility levels in Muslim and non-Muslim societies alike at the end of the day would appear to be attitudinal and volitional, rather than material and mechanistic. variables. But just as clearly, these broad associations between fertility change and material measures of modernization or socioeconomic development are not the whole story.

O

v er a dec a de and a half ago, a path-breaking study by Lant Pritchett made the persuasive case that desired fertility levels (as expressed by women of childbearing age in demographic and health surveys (dhs) and other such questionnaires about childbearing intentions and attitudes) were the single best predictor for actual fertility levels in the less developed regions. There is in fact roughly a 90% association between wanted fertility and actual fertility levels in the less developed countries for which such recent data were available. This finding still flies in the face of much received opinion in population policy circles. In particular, it seems to challenge the notion that family planning programs, by encouraging modern contraceptive use, may make an important independent contribution to reducing fertility levels in developing countries, especially by reducing what is called “excess fertility” or “unwanted fertility.” But there is

usage was approximately 14 percentage points lower in Muslim than in non-Muslim majority societies in the 1980s, and remained about 11 percentage points lower twenty years later. Despite such characteristically more limited use of modern contraception, the pervasive, dramatic, and in some cases historically unprecedented declines in fertility in Muslim-majority societies that we have been examining here nevertheless took place.

W

h at should be emphasized at this point is the critical role human agency appears to have played in this transformation. “Developmentalist” perspectives cannot explain the great changes underway in many of these countries and territories – in fact, various metrics of socioeconomic modernization serve as much poorer predictors of fertility change for Muslimmajority populations than for non-Muslim populations. Not to put too fine a point on it: proponents of “developmentalism” are confronted by the awkward fact that fertility decline over the past generation has been more rapid in the Arab states than virtually anywhere else on earth – while well-informed observers lament the excep-

tionally poor development record of the Arab countries over that very period. By the same token, contraceptive prevalence has only limited statistical power in explaining fertility differentials for Muslim-majority populations – and

proponents of “developmentalism” are confronted by the awkward fact that fertility decline over the past generation has been more rapid in the Arab states than virtually anywhere else on earth. can do nothing to explain the highly inconvenient fact that use of modern contraceptives remains much lower among Muslim-majority populations than among non-Muslim societies with similar income levels, despite the tremendous fertility declines recorded in the former over the past generation. It seems curious, to put it mildly, that this monumental change in human living conditions should have gone all but overlooked by well-informed scholars, researchers, and policymakers the world over. In the Middle East, to be sure, politics was, until the “Arab Spring,” essentially frozen for a generation or more: perhaps this brute fact encouraged the presumption that the societies beneath were frozen as well. Most clearly, they were not: rather, they were being recast, sometimes radically, by men and women through their own actions and on the basis of their own preferences and desires. We should see in this saga important commonalities with our own ways of life: and perhaps some underappreciated hopes for the future as well. Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and is senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. In spring 2008 Eberstadt was the Bosch Fellow in Public Policy at the American Academy in Berlin.

Tacita Dean, FILM, 2011, installation view, Tate Modern, London

© Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

40 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 41

A World in Process The global condition in the long twentieth century this interview by Brittani Sonnenberg, editor of the Berlin Journal, with current Academy fellows Michael Geyer and Charles Bright took place over email and Skype, and across oceans and time zones – True to the nature of their Academy project. The wide-ranging talk touches on childhood prayers in Chinese, a new definition of Heimweh, and how the global condition represents an “enmeshment of all with all.”

berlin journal:

You’ve both alluded to the inadequacy of traditional Western narratives of history, which now require a “re-narration” using a global lens. Can either of you remember the first moment, in childhood or later on, when it occurred to you that history is not fact, but a method of storytelling, a shifting truth dependent on the narrator? michael geyer:

Putting aside the question of “historyas-storytelling,” there are two moments that spring to mind. Neither have to do with such weighty matters as traditional Western narrative, but they are indicative of how we step in and out of narrative and explanatory conventions. The first involves the experience of growing up in southwest Germany and the daily reality of Swiss, Austrian, French, American, and regional radio stations. I grew up with Herr Pfleiderer and Patsy Cline, and a good bit of envy for the admirable Swiss. I also grew up with an entire French regiment behind our high school, though the soldiers largely kept to themselves. Still, Paris was far closer than Cold-War Berlin. There was always more than one narrative, language, and culture in the Germany I grew up in. The second moment coincided with learning to write scholarly articles in English. It was a small, practical issue: no grand insights to be had about a postmodern condition. But nothing transnationalizes your mind more than retraining it to write a simple paragraph of academic German in English. The “topical sentence” was a major epistemological revelation for me. The elision of German footnote architecture – the wonderful balance of above the line text and below the line evidence – was a genuine loss, for which the clarity of

English diction is no compensation. I am not sure if “truth” shifts with narrators, but “positionality” – how to place yourself in the context of others – came quite naturally, long before I grasped the intellectual wager. charles bright:

Like Michael, a couple of seminal moments come to mind. I grew up in the US South, during segregation, part of a large extended family that had been deeply involved in Protestant missionary work in China between the 1890s and the 1940s. I lived in a house full of Chinese things – prayers were said in Chinese – and there were endless stories told by the adults about episodes and people they

dependent on the observer. You have to ask questions if you want to know more. And a second dawning: although I grew up with daily readings of the Bible and could recite long passages of the Old Testament by heart, I knew few if any Jews in my childhood. I did have a Jewish roommate in college, however, from whom I learned a lot about customs, practices, and observances. His grandparents had immigrated to the US from the Pale of Settlement in the Ukraine. They had not kept in close touch with extended family back home, his parents shared little about their ancestry, and all had been wiped out in the Holocaust. He knew his grandparents’ names, but nothing more – and no

It was perhaps my first insight into subaltern history, or into the dilemmas of history being narrated by the “winners.”

had encountered in China, all of which I absorbed as a child. My family also had maids, gardeners, and household help who were all black. I remember the revelation (it truly dawned on me), sometime in the mid-1950s, that while I knew a lot about Chinese people whom I would never meet – one couldn’t even go there then – I knew nothing at all about the African American servants – their lives, culture, and aspirations. No stories. And they lived just next door, so to speak. There was nothing profound about history, here, though goodness knows there was a lot of history bundled into this moment of recognition. What gets recalled or made visible – and what is occluded or left uninvestigated, or is simply considered uninteresting – is very particular and

trace running further back of his family. I, on the other hand, had elaborate family trees of ancestry going back to the time of Henry VIII in England (I’ve visited the site of family origins in East Anglia), the family’s migration to the colonies in the 1660s, on down through generations of Brights – offshoots and dead ends included. Such knowledge gave me a history, or the ability to tell a history, and, through it, to have an identity of a certain sort. I knew who I was in a way my friend did not. It was perhaps my first insight into subaltern history, or into the dilemmas of history being narrated by the “winners.” Another complex bundle of histories, especially for a Southern boy raised on stories of the “lost cause” but enjoying a privileged position in a rigid racial (and gendered) hierarchy.

geyer: It is worth pointing out that our

experience of globality is of a peculiar kind. Long before we went “into the world” and actively sought out connections, the world had come to us and shaped our local lives. The world was always already there. Also, our overlapping reference was the United States, but Charlie’s Southern America was quite different from my German Amerika. bright: When we started thinking about

global history, one of the first things we realized was that we “do” globality before we think it. The global is there – and in us – before we know what to say about it. This experience is quite opposite to that of nineteenth-century practitioners of Universalgeschichte: they had to imagine the world as a whole without any real interaction with it.

Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London

42 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

berlin journal: In “re-narrating” the

twentieth century, in repositioning China, for example, from its traditional “marginalized” and “ancient” role, as Michael described, do you ever struggle with your own Western origins and identity? In other words, how do historians go about transcending their own culture in order to diligently describe the global? geyer: Historians are bound to transcend

the horizon of their own (present) reality. It is part of their skill set (how to read/lis-

When we started thinking about global history, one of the first things we realized was that we “do” globality before we think it. ten to/view evidence from different times and places) and part of their mindset (historicism: assigning special significance to the particularity of a period, place, or culture). The debate among historians is rather whether it is permissible to disappear in other times and other cultures (“antiquarianism”). My short answer is that we cannot and should not. In aiming to understand worlds different from our own, we will start out from and return to the horizon of the present  – the moment, the place, and the audiences. The challenge for all historians is to make this travelling history intelligible and reproducible.

Tacita Dean, from FILM, notebook pages, 2011 bright: You don’t – never can – entirely

transcend yourself. What we are trying to study – the condition of the global or globality – is, almost by definition, apprehensible from multiple standpoints. This is true for actors who try to engage the global condition and for historians who try to narrate its history. Comprehending the global is a mental stretch from any particular positionality, and people grasp it and narrate it from very different vantage points. There can be no single homogenized global history. Global history, like the global condition, is a dialectical process proceeding from dis-

tinct vantage points and including multiple, simultaneously coexisting histories. geyer: It is often said that globality breeds

homogeneity. But while it may be a beneficial experience to be able to find the lavatory in any airport worldwide (which requires recognizable, functional icons), this hardly indicates a convergence of narratives about being in a tightly interconnected world. What you make of that interconnection is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but the connected “beholder” may live two or three lives simultaneously. He or she may

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 43

it is also living the difference within your own multi-layered existence. geyer: Which is a source of extraordinary

tension, but less often pinpointed as a source of breakdowns. Heimweh, when taken to mean a yearning for an unequivocal identity, is an extraordinarily force in a global world. There is a powerful impulse to seize on one layer or another and make it the whole. Living difference is inherently unstable. berlin journal: Let’s return to the ques-

tion of reframing China’s role in global history. geyer: Western opinion entered the twenti-

eth century with a firm belief in a hierarchy

Heimweh, when taken to mean a yearning for an unequivocal identity, is an extraordinarily force in a global world. of races, and the question was whether or not some of them could adapt, catch up with the Western model, and what would happen with the rest. We might make a normative argument and say that this point of view is inappropriate (as Martha Nussbaum claims), because it denies the potential in all humans. Be that as it may, the argument about a racial order of the world has simply been overtaken by reality. China is a thoroughly modern nation. The question whether or not the Chinese, qua civilization, had it in themselves to industrialize is simply ridiculous. bright: The bottom line is this: when the

have a global existence (as a migrant, banker, or ngo activist) and yet live in barely commensurate local worlds (of family and social ties that define civic status and daily realities of class, ethnicity, gender, etc.). The simultaneously coexisting histories are not simply out there; they are within us. This fractured or multilayered subjectivity is the beginning of the possibility of a conversation under conditions of globality. But the fact that subjectivities are fractured in this way means that conversation in an interconnected world can hardly lead to a convergence of narratives.

bright: One of the epistemological novel-

ties of that conversation is that the subject position, the place from which you speak, is itself shaped by our multilayered existence. Freud once likened the mind to Rome, with its long and varied past in which nothing once constructed had vanished, and all earlier stages of its existence survived alongside the present iteration. Where a p ­ alazzo now stands would also be an ancient temple, and so forth – the beholder need only flip focus to “see” one or the other. Globality may be a matter of living with difference (in the presence of all others), but

global condition first took shape in the course of the nineteenth century, it was understood, narrated, and ordered according to prevailing thought conventions, all of which hinged on the surging power of Western production and destruction, on an imperial division of labor, and on notions of development and civilization that ordered racial hierarchies and treated industrialization as the desired destination. In this narrative, moreover, the “catch-up” development of “the rest” in the shadow of “the West” was seen to be a hugely challenging, if not impossible task – with China and India slipping over the horizon into backwardness and

­dependency. These narrative tropes of “divergence” do not project well into the twenty-first century. However persuasive they once were, the global condition – which initially engendered them – has moved onto new terrain. geyer: Hence, at the beginning of the

twenty-first century, we cannot act as if we were still in the nineteenth, or as if all it takes to explain our world is to spin out the conventions of thought that have now been so clearly surpassed. Rather, we have to gather the experience of that century and its globality into a history that enables us to rethink where we come from and how we got to where we are. We need new thinking, a new conversation.

Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London

44 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

berlin journal: The tentative title of

your book is The Global Condition in the Long Twentieth Century. I’m curious about your choice of phrasing. “Condition” is a word that can connote burden or struggle: “a health condition,” “the human condition”: what prompted your wording here, rather than a more predictable term like “globalism” or “global history?” bright: We make up our lives in condi-

tions not of our own making, but that are given. These givens can be contested and changed, but they also frame options and possibilities. We hold that the global is a condition of our lives – not the only condition, perhaps not the all-pervasive or determining one – but one that frames choices and challenges. Put another way, globalization is not just about expansion, whether of markets or states – a narrative that must always be anchored somewhere – and was typically centered on the West or Europe; nor is it just about connections and exchange over long distances, the webs and networks of interconnectivity that girdle the globe. At some point (when is what historians debate) we crossed a threshold, where the language of expansion (diffusion) and connection (linkage) gave way to an interior space of activity and contestation in which everyone is aware of all others – potentially engaged with all others – and increasingly so, in real time and direct encounters. We come to deal not just with expansion or connection but with the effects of connectivity. We find ourselves “inside” a common framework of reference and of action, a context of decisions and desires that applies to all. This is something that conditions us all.

Tacita Dean, from FILM, notebook pages, 2011

The images in this article are from Berlin-based British artist Tacita Dean’s FILM, a monumental 11-minute silent 35mm film. FILM was recently projected onto a 13-meter-tall white monolith at the end of the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern from October 11, 2011 to March 11, 2012. The piece celebrates the masterful yet increasingly obsolescent techniques of analogue filmmaking in the midst of the digital age. Dean’s critically acclaimed vision includes cinematic images drawn from the natural and urban worlds, and applies mechanical techniques whose poetic abilities to snatch the subtle dance of light and shade remain unsurpassed. FILM was made into an eponymous book, replete with sketches from Dean’s notebook, many of which reveal the artist’s ideas for hand-coloring and physical overlay, just two of the techniques that went into producing this masterful paean to a threatened medium.

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 45

burst of technology that is seen as both sudden and very recent. When we began working together, global studies was dominated by economists and social scientists fixated on the present, who tended to put history aside and preferred to use “rupture talk” to detach the present from the past. Needless to say, the rapid intensification and expansion of communications networks is a key feature of the late twentieth century and it both enables and constrains the process of enmeshment in our time. It is, in other words, an aspect of a more general condition. But when did this general condition fall into place? As historians entered the discussion about globalization, they tended to turn

In short, infinity is not a good cure for short-sightedness.

away from the present and go back in time – some went way back – to argue that there was nothing fundamentally new going on – that globalization or global interconnectivity has always already been happening and that continuity trumped rupture. To explain the present condition, all you needed (in English) was a string of “er” words – as things, long in place, accelerated – going faster, becoming denser, driving deeper, etc. We didn’t want our study of the present condition to come at (or as) the end of history, or to dangle it in its aftermath; we wanted to anchor globality in a history, but we also want to preserve the sense of rupture – giving emphasis to the unprecedented and untoward nature of this global condition. geyer: In short, infinity is not a good cure

geyer: Global history is what we do. It is

our “discipline.” Globalism would suggest a worldview like any such “ism” (such as nationalism) or possibly a “world picture,” which would suggest a metaphysics of our age if we follow the Heideggerian meaning of that term. Then again, the global condition is more than a sound bite. It does refer to a “way of being,” which in its most general way can be described as an enmeshment of all with all – in which potentially everyone is in the presence of others, often very far away. These others manifest themselves as persons (such as migrant

families sending home remittances or solving family problems in long-distance telephone conversations) or as enablements or constraints on your ability to act as you wish (as the Greeks have discovered lately), or as deadly force (in the case of remoteguided drones). It is a condition of limited autonomy. bright: Michael’s description of the global

condition as a “way of being” is crucial because so much of the hype about “globalization” focuses on material objects and hinges on the world coming together in a

for short-sightedness. Our solution is twofold and leaves aside the very grand questions of what is nowadays called “deep history”: the study of the shifts in human development and the rise, over eons, of the Anthropocene, or the age of humans. We suggest, first, that “globalization” is better understood as a process over several centuries of expansion and interaction, in which all parts of the world became not only keenly aware of each other and occasionally ran into and across each other, but began to share crucial information. (Is pasta Chinese? Is the gunpowder revolution Dutch?) Still, it was a process of arms-length appropriations with interlocutors and intermediaries, even when and where it cut

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deeply, as in the case of the slave trade. This Manfred Kossok once pointed out that growth of intermediation, colonization, and, we can no longer anticipate the future not least, observation (Chinese penetrations solely through reasoning by analogy or by into the far west of Central Asia are just as extrapolating from the experience of preimportant as the Western journeys of mari- vious generations. A linear continuation time “discovery”) points to the fact that the of previously existing trends or experi“global condition” is the product of a long ences is simply impossible. Western-like process of continuous conditioning. development cannot become the global We then suggest, second, that there norm, and we have yet to imagine the as yet is a moment of transition, not simply an “unthought-of” alternative. Knowing this upgrade but an overhaul of this globalizaframes how we shape a history of globality. tion-conditioning. A threshold was crossed In our view, a global condition that took when the room for maneuver had diminshape in the course of the nineteenth cenished to a point where zones of contact were tury was occasioned, in part, by the tremenno longer “out there” between autonomous dous surge in European/Western capaciregions or empires, but deep within. The ties of production and destruction and, question then becomes one of incorporatalso, in part, by the simultaneous crisis ing the world or being incorporated into of political power and social reproduction it – and this struggle over what we call the in formerly distinct regions and centers terms of global engagement becomes the around the world. The great divergence was central feature of the “global condition.” We accompanied by a parallel, equally great argue that the moment in which this global convergence – in which the histories of condition takes hold is in the latter part of all ploughed into one another, and people the nineteenth century. everywhere had to change in order to go on being who they were. And such a transberlin journal: How has your collaborative formation could only be made through a work on global history shaped your expecta- greater engagement with all others. tions for the twenty-first century? Do you In this new condition, certain convenbelieve that the trends bringing cultures tions of thought and strategies of selfinto greater contact with one another will strengthening emerged on all sides – which continue, or that there will rather be an shaped the terms of global engagement in isolationist reaction from certain nations or the century that followed. Our argument regions? is that these strategies (in which growth, expansion, and development were key words; bright: How has world history been for and developed and underdeveloped; advanced you? Has it been an upward movement and backward; civilized and barbarous were of advancement, from the slime to the key organizing principles) have run their sublime? Or has it been a story of disapcourse, and in the last quarter century new pointment and retreat – a failure to rise to terms of globality – of the engagement of

We will go into the future as if sitting in a rowboat, facing backwards and getting our bearings or direction from sight lines behind us.

possibilities or to realize potentials? One of the problems with doing global history is that teleology easily gets smuggled into the narrative. When “globalization” was discovered twenty-some years ago, world history got realigned as the long back story to that outcome; if there is some isolationist reaction – or the EU collapses – all the promise of deeper global integration will be shown to have bumps and interruptions – even to have been a chimera. It is this sort of rewriting of the narrative from the immediate present that we have to avoid, even as we try to write a history of the present.

all with all – have begun to take shape. Our job as historians is to understand how the global condition came to be ordered or organized in the last century – what happened to these terms of order in the recent past – and how they are now being renegotiated and adapted to new circumstances. We will go into the future as if sitting in a rowboat, facing backwards and getting our bearings or direction from sight lines behind us. geyer: Could we, sitting in the proverbial

rowboat, go over a cliff? Yes, for sure, and it would not be the first dark age or “time of

troubles” in history, and we would expect future historians to then tell us much later that the dark age was not so dark after all or that the trouble was ultimately worth it. But much as I wish I could tell you with historical certainty that the end of the world is coming, I would also have to concede that historians’ ability to foretell the future is about the same as that of any academic economist. However, we can tell a few things by looking at past experience, even if extrapolating the future from the past leads nowhere. For example, in the long twentieth century we have seen some very powerful global actors emerge – the British, the Americans, possibly the Chinese. Historians tend to think of them as empires, and there is a long debate about the continuities of such empires and what distinguishes them from nation states. Public opinion in the US is rather more agitated over what might appear to be an American decline – whether it is real, the effect of wrong politics, or a kind of inadvertent shift from Atlantic to Pacific or onwards to East Asian dominance. All this is well and good, and we can speculate as much as everyone else about the rise and fall of empires. But the strange thing about the twentieth century is that even the dominance of the most powerful empires was fleeting. It didn’t help the British that they had the most far-flung empire of all time at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the third quarter of the century they were barely hanging on to the Falkland Islands and the empire had come to live in the Home Counties. At the beginning of the century it could also be said that the British had the capability, beyond empire, to piece together a regime of world order that was extraordinarily capacious. It incorporated nations and peoples, commerce and production, ideas and technologies that came from many sides and that stretched across the entire world – albeit unevenly and unequally and with a nasty racial tint. Britain could aspire to be a hegemon and to promulgate rules of global order. But within a half-century they lost it. The Americans picked up the pieces, but it is inadequate to say that they continued where the British left off. For one thing, the transition was extraordinarily violent (though this was largely a matter of third parties like the Germans and the Japanese, as well as the Russians); and for another the American regime of ordering was quite profoundly different from the British one, built on the alignment and coordination

Spring 2012 | Number Twenty-Two | The Berlin Journal | 47

of nations, rather than direct rule, and enforced with far greater military power and economic resources. Yet the American ability to draw together the world was also a temporary affair. Whether it is now done for in the second decade of the twenty-first century is a matter for discussion. But what we can say with some certainty is that the capacity to order the dense interconnections that make up the global condition of the long twentieth century has exceeded even the most powerful empires and nations. What we can do is to explore the reasons for this striking discrepancy between the capacity for domination, on one hand, and the inability to order or orchestrate the global condition, on the other. bright: I would put the same point a little

differently. The emergence of a global condition in the nineteenth century put questions of order on the table: how was the whole to be ordered? Who established the terms? In whose interests? With what conventions and rules? By what means of enforcement? Several solutions were essayed in the course of the next century and a half – both Britain and the US had

the means, briefly, to try and assemble regimes of order. Both attempts hinged on the dominance of the West (a global division of labor that was basically imperial) and their (again brief) industrial edge. Both attempts were contested – by rival wannabe hegemons (Germany, the Soviet Union) and by those consigned to subordinate ranks in global ordering.

One of the problems with doing global history is that teleology easily gets smuggled into the narrative.

In short, regimes of order were never comprehensive, were built on conditions that proved temporary, and were continuously challenged and contested. But they did capture a kind of global hegemony in their day. In telling this story, I think we are arguing (perhaps I more than Michael) that such hegemonic essays in global ordering are no longer possible – that the conditions of globality and the terms of engagement that enabled the British and American

essays in ordering have changed – that the terms of global enmeshment are currently being renegotiated in ways that don’t allow a single power to pretend to anchor a global regime. But the question of order remains on the table. geyer: The global condition is an artifice

and, as such, it is easily destroyed. While our mind may be conditioned to think of such destructions as a cosmic process (as an “apocalypse”), they typically happen piecemeal – small disorientations, local vertigos reverberating globally. They are potentially dangerous precisely because they come from within. berlin journal: You’ve been writing

together for over thirty years. What prompted you to take this route? bright: We did not plan a lifelong col-

laboration. It happened. It began as we taught a course together in the 1980s at the University of Michigan – trying to sort out how to develop a global perspective on the twentieth century. In the continuing conversations that emerged from that work, we

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48 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

found we had lines of thinking and areas of profound alignment (not to say, necessarily, agreement) that proved powerful for us both. Even now, years later, we can go for months without much contact and then, in meeting again, reconnect those ligaments of conversation almost instantly. That’s a key baseline of the collaboration. The other key ingredient is that we have different strengths and we’ve found ways to draw on them collaboratively. It’s become a project that neither of us could do nearly so well by ourselves. At different times, on different projects, one or the other of us will take the lead – write first – set the direction; but before it’s done – after multiple drafts and stabs at clarity are exchanged – the final piece will combine our reciprocal strengths (and no doubt expose our collective blinkers and limitations).

vidually. It is not so much that two people know more than one, though it may well be the case that global history requires the expertise of many and, hence, requires teamwork. But amassing knowledge and skill sets is one thing. In my mind it is far more important that global history requires Urteilskraft – the ability to judge and judgment is the outcome of debate, among us, among fellow scholars across regions and disciplines (though never of everybody, because otherwise there would be no beginning), and potentially with global audiences. But, of course, you have to have the book written before you engage the latter and, hence, the colloquy of two and whoever else wants to join in is an essential prerequisite.

geyer: We write at different speeds and

bright: There are communities of scholars

under different circumstances, which makes the enterprise trying at times. We also write with different temperaments, although that’s surprisingly less of an issue. But the bottom line is that we are better doing this global history à deux than indi-

worldwide working on global history, who we hope will find this book worth reading. Finding ways to talk across cultures and languages about a predicament is as tricky for historians as it is for journalists, politicians, and ordinary folks.

The test will be if we can generate other such histories that take up the thread and spin it out from their respective end. The reception of our previous work suggests that the interest exists. If someone like Lawrence Summers, who should know better, argues that learning foreign languages is a waste of money (because everyone speaks English anyway) and discourages traveling to Berlin for six months because it is so much more efficient to work in an American university library (which it is), he provides us with the perfect recipe of how not to succeed. Negotiating differences – and that includes jostling with your own globality – is a basic skill for living in a global world and the practical and theoretical knowledge that is needed in order to act in it.

berlin journal: Do you anticipate a global

audience for the book?

Charles Bright is the Arthur J. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the spring 2012 Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the Academy. Michael Geyer is the Samuel N. Harper Professor of German and European History at the University of Chicago and the spring 2012 Axel Springer Fellow at the Academy.

The Berlin Prize • Call for Applications The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for its residential fellowships for 2o13 /14, as well as early applications for the academic years 2o14 /15 and 2o15 /16. The deadline is Friday, September 28, 2012. Applications may be submitted online (from June 2o12) or mailed to the Berlin office. The Academy welcomes applications from both emerging and established scholars, as well as from writers and policy professionals who wish to engage in independent study in Berlin. Approximately 26 Berlin Prizes are conferred annually. Past recipients have included historians, economists, poets and novelists, journalists, legal scholars, anthropologists, musicologists, and public policy experts, among others. The Academy does not grant fellowships in the natural sciences. Fellowships are typically awarded for an academic semester or, on occasion, an entire academic year. Bosch Fellowships in Public Policy are available for shorter stays of six to eight weeks. Fellowship benefits include round-trip airfare, partial board, a $5,ooo monthly stipend, and accommodations at the Academy’s lakeside Hans Arnhold Center, in Berlin’s Wannsee district.

Fellowships are awarded to US residents only. US citizenship is not required; American expatriates are not eligible. A Ph.D. is required of candidates in academic disciplines. Following a peer-reviewed screening process, an independent selection committee reviews finalist applications. The 2o13 /14 Berlin Prizes will be announced in late February 2o13.

For further information, please see: www.americanacademy.de or contact: The American Academy in Berlin Attn: Fellows Selection Am Sandwerder 17 – 19 141o9 Berlin · Germany Phone +49 (3o) 8o4 83 - 1o6 Fax +49 (3o) 8o4 83 - 111 [email protected]

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We are grateful to Alfred Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung im Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft FOR ITS GENEROUS SUPPORT OF The Berlin Journal AND THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN BERLIN.

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THE BERLIN JOURNAL  Number 22  spring 2012

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A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Twenty-Two | Spring 2012

THE BERLIN JOURNAL

In this issue: Peter L. Lindseth Michael Ignatieff Elizabeth Povinelli Richard Deming Karen Russell David Remnick Katherine Boo Daniel Hobbins Nicholas Eberstadt

We’ve just moved to Potsdamer Strasse 83, 10785 Berlin | www.edenspiekermann.com

Michael Geyer Charles Bright

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