Berlin Journal 14

In this issue:
Katherine Boo
Glen Bowersock
Robert Kimmitt
Melvin Lasky
Vali Nasr
Alex Ross
Amity Shlaes
Michael Taussig
Geoffrey Wolff
The Berlin Journal
A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Fourteen | Spring 2007
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Number Fourteen | Spring 2007
Contents
The Berlin Journal
When Scholars Examine Political Ideas
4 Glen Bowersock counters Huntingtons
thesis by tracking the footprints of the
Roman Empire across distant religions and
cultures.
10 Vali Nasr offers a nuanced reframing of the
ongoing conict in the Middle East. On the
causes and implications of sectarian strife.
New German Leadership
14 Robert Kimmitt and Matthias Wissmann
probe the chancellors initiative to
strengthen economic openness across the
Atlantic.
Historical Revisions
16 Amity Shlaes challenges regnant
interpretations of the New Deal and
suggests the present-day relevance of
her oppositional narrative. With little-
known images from the Great Depression
by graphic artist and muralist Benjamin
Shahn.
22 Melvin Lasky chronicles the picaresque
experiences of an intellectually irreverent
combat historian. An excerpt from his
unpublished World War II diary from
the European front, accompanied by
photographs by Robert Capa.
30 Alex Ross depicts the American attempt
to reshape the musical spirit of postwar
Germany, while the artwork of Tacita Dean
hints at attempts to deny a shameful past.
Academy News
37 Notebook of the Academy: The Academy
announces two new fellowships; a regular
seminar in Baden-Wrttemberg; additions
to the Board of Trustees; a timeline of
Academy events; and more news and notes
from the Hans Arnhold Center.
42 Life and Letters: An introduction to the
spring 2007 class of fellows and recent
publications of Academy alumni.
46 On the Waterfront: A sampling from the
German press, including stories on writer
Nicole Krauss, actor and director Robert
De Niro, environmental pioneer Amory
Lovins, and intellectual property lawyer
Lawrence Lessig.
The Writers Dilemma
50 Katherine Boo reects on the empirical
and ethical quandaries inherent to writing
about the American poor. Also, portraits
by Robin Bowman of teenage life below the
poverty line.
56 Geoffrey Wolff muses on capturing the
subtleties of the Stasi state from the vantage
point of the American white middle class.
With critical works by the late gdr painter
Wolfgang Mattheuer on the eightieth
anniversary of his birth.
The Currency of Color
62 Michael Taussig swathes colonial exchange
in the materials of desire and fear, gaiety
and mystery.
65 Donations to the Academy
Special thanks are due to the International
Center of Photography for opening their
archives and making the Capa and Shahn
photographs available. We are also grateful
to Katherine Boo for introducing us to Robin
Bowman, and to Academy friend Tacita Dean
for generously sharing her work.
Palast, Tacita Dean, 2004 C
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a Number Fourteen | Spring 2007
Directors Note
Brushing History against the Grain
All of the contributors to this issue are brushing history
against the grain, to cite Walter Benjamin, and challeng-
ing the way their crafts are practiced. This is as true of the
unpublished war diaries of Melvin Lasky, whose vivid dis-
patches during the nal months of WWII were inevitably
ill suited to the prevailing norms of military narrative, as it
is of the self-critical reections of the journalist Katherine
Boo, whose report from the surrendered front of the
American war on poverty eschews both sentimentalism
and sensationalism.
Music critic Alex Ross has always deed conventional
ideas about the place of classical music within our culture.
The account of postwar German musical life from his book
The Rest is Noise transfers these virtues to the lengthier
genre. Columnist and nance expert Amity Shlaes dis-
putes the received view of Depression-era policies. The
included chapter from her meticulously researched, inde-
pendent book brings an important new perspective to the
New Deal.
Both eminent classicist Glen Bowersock and Middle
East scholar Vali Nasr challenge the dominant concep-
tual leitmotifs of current political discourse. Professor
Bowersocks scholarly scrutiny of the notion of the clash
of civilizations demonstrates how both academia and the
political sphere are susceptible to this fashionable idea.
Anthropologist Michael Taussig, for his part, eschews
explanation of methodology while rening Benjamins
ambition to compose material history.
Benjamin once wrote that a stay in Moscow brought
him clarity about the lineaments of living in Berlin. He
was expressing a sentiment that resonates in the work of
the many scholars, writers, and artists who come to the
Hans Arnhold Center. Geoffrey Wolffs interviews about
the Stasi with Berliners from both sides of the Wall at
once magnify his uncertainties about writing in a foreign
culture and make him more sure-footed as he creates the
characters of his next novel. The pieces by each of our
contributors and, indeed, the work of this springs entire
class of fellows are enhanced by their openness to other
elds. This forties the independence of their thinking
and the vitality of exchange, both within the Academys
Hans Arnhold Center and beyond.
Gary Smith
The Berlin Journal
A Magazine from the Hans Arnhold Center
published twice a year by the American
Academy in Berlin
Number Fourteen Spring 2007
Publisher Gary Smith
Editor at Large Miranda Robbins
Editor Rachel Marks
Editorial Assistant Will Byrne
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Cover: Julie Mehretu, detail of Retopistics:
A Renegade Excavation, 2001 (102" x 216",
ink and acrylic on canvas). Image courtesy
of the artist. Julie Mehretu is a Guna S.
Mundheim Fellow in spring 2007.
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I
n 1993 Samuel P. Huntington published
an article in the journal Foreign Affairs with the
apocalyptic title The Clash of Civilizations?
This title was presented as a query since it was fol-
lowed by a question mark, but a few years later the
same author published a whole book entitled, without
any query, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order. Huntingtons language and views
sparked a debate that has continued for more than a
decade. It has become such an integral part of historical
thinking that a new book by Martin Goodman bears
the challenging title Rome and Jerusalem The Clash
of Civilizations. This title is all the more remarkable
since Goodman nowhere in his book mentions the
Huntington thesis. It seems simply to have become
common currency in historical analysis.
It is hardly necessary to say that, even in Huntingtonian
terms, Rome and Jerusalem were no more clashing civiliza-
tions than Athens and Jerusalem. Two thousand years ago
Tertullian, the eloquent father of the Christian church, had
portentously asked, What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
His own answer was nothing. He was wrong, of course,
but the point he wanted to deny was inuence, not conict.
A Huntingtonian might argue that Rome and Persia had
been ancient civilizations that clashed, but in fact Jerusalem,
Athens, and Rome all inhabited the same world and shared
its cultural diversity. A Jew, a Greek, and a Roman could all
watch the gladiators together, all applaud the pantomimes,
all appreciate a well crafted mosaic image of the sun (Helios),
and all savor a learned disputation, be it philosophical, rhe-
torical, or theological. It was one civilization, and there was
little room for clashing.
The Roman Empire

and the Clash of Civilizations
by Glen Bowersock
Fresco of Dionysus and Ariadne riding in an ox-drawn
chariot, accompanied by Seilenos and a pair of nymphs,
Pompeii, imperial Roman period
The Berlin Journal g
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6 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007
I nd the Huntington thesis completely
untenable, yet it seems to be everywhere,
both in contemporary political analysis and
now, as with Goodman, even in the writ-
ing of ancient history. I present it here in
the context of the Roman Empire, both to
clear away the confusion and imprecision
that seem to me to lie at its core and to set
forth a view of the empire that may offer
some hope in the face of Huntingtons pes-
simism. I want to suggest that the religions
of classical antiquity may in modern per-
spective paradoxically provide one of the
best explanations for why civilizations did
not clash over a period of more than one
thousand years, from the Homeric age to
the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate
in Damascus.
The fundamental problem with
Huntingtons analysis is his inability to
distinguish civilization from culture; he
constantly denes one in terms of the other.
Civilizations are the broadest cultural enti-
ties; hence conicts between groups from
different civilizations become central to
global politics. Or, Civilizations are cul-
tural, not political entities. As Jack Matlock,
an astute analyst of the collapse of the Soviet
Union, observed in commenting on the
Huntington thesis, Most might agree
that a civilization is a cultural entity, but
they would disagree about what constitutes
a cultural entity, which is, after all, the
more fundamental question. For some
thinkers, the state itself was an integral part
of culture. Jacob Burckhardt developed his
interpretation of ancient Greek cultural his-
tory on precisely this premise, and it had
already been an important part of his analy-
sis of the culture of the Italian Renaissance.
Neither Burckhardt nor others who reected
on this subject were so foolish as to think
that the conict of states was a clash of civi-
lizations.
Even more problematic in dening cul-
ture is the role of the environment, in the
sense in which Fernand Braudel has accus-
tomed us to look at the Mediterranean as
a single culture. The physical landscape
and its relation to commerce and economic
growth are no less essential to a culture
than the spiritual and artistic values that
rst come to mind. Even Huntington
acknowledges that civilizations have no
clear-cut boundaries and that cultures
interact and overlap, yet he believes them
to be meaningful entities without ever
asking, Meaningful to whom? The danger
of solipsistic assessments makes a general
agreement difcult and a clash inconceiv-
able. Huntington claims that civilizations
are as mortal as the human beings who
populate and promote them, but even this
is open to dispute. The cultural values of a
system can easily survive its demise or be
transmuted into another system. Immanuel
Wallerstein put it well when he wrote,
Civilizations have not risen and fallen.
Rather, world-empires have come into exis-
tence, ourished, and declined.
Wallersteins observation touches on the
famous Gibbonian problem of decline and
fall. Although Edward Gibbon thought that
he was chronicling the decline and fall of
the Roman Empire, what he actually wrote
about was the culture of the Roman Empire.
Accordingly, contrary to his expectations, he
found himself swept up in a narrative that
embraced China and Islam and only came
to a rather open ending in 1453 with the
capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans.
When did the Roman Empire end? No one
knows, least of all the reader of Gibbon.
When did the culture of the Roman world
end? Arguably never. It permeates Europe
and the Americas today. Did one civiliza-
tion the Roman one clash with another?
Hardly. The clash of the Byzantines and
the Muslims in the rst decades of Islam
was not a clash of civilizations because both
sides at that time shared the same civiliza-
tion. It was, in fact, the late phase of the
Roman Empire when Rome took on a new
conceptual life at Constantinople on the
Bosporus, a new (or second) Rome.
Huntingtons thesis doubtless appealed
to Goodman, not to mention many others,
for two reasons. The rst is its explicit rec-
ognition of modern globalization, achieved
through miracles of technology and com-
munication, and the second is its confron-
tation with alien cultures. Huntington
supposed that we are in a new world order
in which distant and alien cultures can
organize themselves into present and coher-
ent threats. But neither globalization nor
strangeness is anything new in human
history, even if the scale has been different
in the past. Americans and Europeans are
brought up on a nourishing diet of so-called
Western Civilization. Western Civilization
was a messy amalgam of Jewish, Greek, and
Roman culture as ltered through a tri-
umphant Christianity. In universities and
churches the Judaeo-Christian tradition
was expounded in terms of awe and grati-
tude, equally combined.
It has been the dismantling of the idea of
Western Civilization that has provoked the
kind of panic and confusion that Huntington
represents. A global perspective and increas-
ing familiarity with alien cultures have shat-
tered the security and monolithic stability of
Western Civilization. But this does not mean
that the civilization, with all its achieve-
ments and glories, has disappeared. It has
not clashed as such with any other civiliza-
tion. Its culture remains intact, but it appears
now, even in Western opinion, to be neither
unique nor manifestly superior to other
civilizations. Of course thinkers in Eastern
countries knew that long ago. Even Gibbon
knew that as he worked his way through his
chapters on Islam and China.
T
here is invariably a religious
component to Huntingtons idea of
civilization; though he chose not
to speak of a clash of religions, he
clearly implied it by setting up a competi-
tion with Islam. Taking this stance would
have been even more indefensible than a
clash of civilizations, as it is religion that
can illustrate why civilizations do not clash
when states and empires do. The Roman
Empire is an ideal laboratory for observing
this since its tradition of polytheistic wor-
ship spans the entire course of its history.
Polytheism existed in the form of both state
cult and private cult, ethnic cult and local
cult. This rich skein of religious diversity
characterized the pre-Islamic Arabs, with
a pantheon of 365 different deities, just as
much as it did the Greeks and the Romans.
Superimposed upon this polytheistic
quilt were the monotheistic religions: rst
Judaism, later Christianity, and nally
Islam. Religion proved not to be conned to
one civilization or another. Although there
were antagonisms and persecutions along
the way, it proved to be a far more effective
carrier of alien ideas and culture than any-
thing else. It could pass from Jerusalem to
Rome, from Naples to Athens, from Syria
to Libya. The frontiers of civilizations were
always porous, but the cultures they repre-
sented usually moved beyond them through
their indigenous divinities.
Consider Dionysus, one of the most pop-
ular Greek gods throughout antiquity. He
Huntington supposed that
we are in a new world order,
but neither globalization nor
strangeness is anything new
in human history.
was the god of the grape, wine, intoxication,
ecstasy, and frenzy. He could be depicted
in a bewildering variety of mortal guises,
including an old man on a stick (with vine
leaves), a lissome youth (with vine leaves),
an adolescent, or an adult of heroic propor-
tions consorting with panthers. Just as wine
was a common denominator for human-
kind, so too was Dionysus. The legends that
built up around him took him all the way to
India and doubtless Afghanistan. His cult
sprang up in new and interesting forms
all over the Mediterranean, particularly in
Greek-speaking Naples in Italy. He could
be identied with the Roman Bacchus,
and his travels took him through the Near
East, where he is said to have visited Beirut
and given his name to the Syrian city of
Dionysias. He was, quite simply, every-
where. When Christianity took hold in late
antiquity, Dionysus continued his interna-
tional triumph to such an extent that he and
the young Christ proved indistinguishable
in some images, and in one famous pagan
text he was explicitly identied as Christ.
Euripides tragedy about the worshippers
of Dionysus, the Bacchae, was startlingly
rewritten by a Christian poet as an account
of the suffering Christ, Christus patiens.
The chariot of Dionysus was a vehicle that
crossed every frontier, both political and
cultural.
An even more exotic and specialized
example from the Roman Empire is the
Highest God, or hypsistos theos. The head
of the Greek pantheon, Zeus, was there-
fore the Highest God, and so he appears in
classical texts. As cultures intermingled
through conquest and empire, however,
the Highest God acquired a multiplicity
of references. The Greek translators of the
Old Testament, what scholars know as the
Septuagint, chose to render the Hebrew
name for God, Yahweh, by this expression
and instantly created a link between the
Hellenes of the classical age and the Jews
of the Torah. Meanwhile, throughout the
Roman Empire, the expression Highest
God served to designate the ranking
deity in many cities and towns across the
Mediterranean. The abundance of inscrip-
tions with this unnamed god has even led
some to speculate that all the texts must
refer to Jews or gentiles espousing Judaism,
but this is clearly not the case. Many texts
are pagan in character, and by the fourth
century ad the Highest God lent his
name to some exotic Christian heresies in
Phoenicia and Cappadocia that attempted to
combine Christian and Jewish rituals into
a single religion. The Highest God traveled
freely from Palestine to Phoenicia, from
Cappadocia to the Taman Peninsula, from
Thrace to Athens and to Italy, crossing a
plethora of civilizations, large and small,
local and international. The worshippers
across these spaces preserved their own
individuality and, at the same time, showed
their adherence to a larger international
world. They symbolized globalization and
regionalization at the same time.
Mithras is another example of a mobile
international deity, a strange gure with a
peaked cap whose cult image depicts him
in the throes of slitting the throat of a rear-
ing bull. Devotees of his cult customarily
descended into a pit above which a bull

Religion in the Roman Empire proved to be a far more effective
carrier of alien ideas and culture than anything else.
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SXF_Freiheitselse_210x145_BlnJourn_28L 1 22.03.2007 16:01:45 Uhr
was sacriced so that the blood would drain
over them. This cult, found all over the
Roman Empire, was particularly associated
with the Roman army and seems, with its
elaborate register of initiation categories, to
have functioned as a kind of freemasonry
or Shriners for middle-class Greeks and
Romans. The bloody character of the rite
and the divine image itself have long sug-
gested a Phrygian origin in Anatolia, even
though the bulk of documentation comes
from the West. Yet only a few years ago an
astonishing Mithraeum, a temple to the
deity, was uncovered at Huarte in Syria, not
far from Apamea. It is conspicuously later
than most other examples, dating from the
mid-fourth century. (A Mithraeum at Dura-
Europus on the Euphrates, for example,
dates from more than one hundred years
earlier.) Furthermore, the Huarte shrine
contains wall paintings without parallel
anywhere in the world. Mithras himself is
depicted with a two-headed black man in
chains, and a row of severed, grizzled heads
on a platform appears to show a ray of sun-
light striking each of the heads. The two-
headed gure, representative of the dualist
existence of divine forces of good and evil,
signals the practice of Zoroastrianism. The
suggestion of a Zoroastrian connection with
Mithraism is exciting, utterly new, and yet
perfectly consistent with the religious diffu-
sion in the ancient world.
Alongside Rome and later Byzantium
(the new Rome), Persia was one of the
indubitably great civilizations of the
age. It spawned not only Zoroastrianism,
which has made its way in modern times
to Toronto, where it ourishes, but also
Manichaeism, perhaps the most inu-
ential of the Persian dualist religions.
Manichaeism spread widely into the east-
ern Mediterranean in late antiquity as well
as into central Asia and China. It showed
no respect for frontiers of any kind, and
it even infected the great Christian Saint
Augustine for a time. The periodic wars of
containment that Rome and subsequently
Byzantium fought against the Persians had
not the slightest effect in curtailing the
spread of religion from the Iranian plateau.
When, in the late fourth century, a tribe
of Arabs in the Hadramawt in Arabia con-
verted to Judaism, the Persians used this
peculiar situation to their own advantage.
They gave their support to the Jewish king-
dom of the Hadramawt in order to oppose
the Byzantine support of Christians in
Ethiopia. Hence the astonishing spectacle
of an onslaught of Ethiopian Christians
into the Arabian peninsula in the early
sixth century, with the encouragement of
the Byzantine emperor. The Ethiopians,
on the other hand, encountered resistance
from the Arabs, who were converted Jews
enjoying the backing of the Persian shah-
in-shah. Never has religion so effectively
breached the barriers of civilization and
culture as in this extraordinary and little
known story.
In the Jordanian desert east of Amman
there is a famous chateau from late antiq-
uity that appears to have been a rural retreat
for the Umayyad caliphs in the seventh
century: Qusayr Amra. Here, after the
Muslim conquest of the region, the follow-
FARRAR
STRAUS
GIROUX
www.fsgbooks.com
[Sterns] impressive book combines haunted childhood memories
with learned insights and reflections on German and American history.
Amos Elon, The New York Review of Books
The more personal history in this book adds power to
an argument that has been a lifetime in the making.
Tom Reiss, The New York Times Book Review
A remarkable story made more compelling by Sterns powers
of observation and analysis. David Myers, Chicago Tribune
A historically valuable document.
Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun
This brilliant and insightful volume of memories and analyses
is a treasure to teachers and students of contemporary history.
Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and author of Night
This is an important memoir, certain to become a classic.
Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany
Dionysus continued his
international triumph to
such an extent that he and
the young Christ proved
indistinguishable in some
images.
The Berlin Journal
ers of Muhammad relaxed in an ambience
of enchanting wall paintings of wholly
Greek character. Animals and hunts are
shown, as well as elegant human gures,
including a woman rising from her bath
and another holding a baby. Perhaps the
most remarkable among the Umayyad
paintings at Qusayr Amra is a solemn show
of six kings, who are identied with labels
in both Arabic and Greek. It is tempting to
assume that these gures symbolize the
Umayyads perspective of the civilizations
of the caliphs world. Identication of two
of the kings did not survive, but the oth-
ers are Caesar (the emperor at Byzantium),
Khusraw (the Persian shah), Roderic the
Visigoth (king of Spain), and the Negus of
Ethiopia. Andr Grabar conjectured that the
two kings for whom the labels are missing
are the emperor of China and the khagan of
the Kazars. Here the walls seem to offer a
visualization of the regnant civilizations of
the age. These civilizations, if that is what
they are, clearly do not clash. They are mutu-
ally respectful of each other.
The Hellenism of late antiquity, so viv-
idly reected at Amra, lived on in these
early years of Islam and brightened the lives
of caliphs and courtiers. During the rst
century after the Muslims conquest, the
new religion of the conquerors did little to
alter the Greek way of life normal for resi-
dents of the region. These were residents
who had adorned their homes with scenes
from Greek mythology and
perhaps enjoyed the the-
atrical mimes providing
local entertainment. Some
remained Christian, as the
churches recently excavated
at Umm er-Rasas in Jordan
eloquently testify. The fusion
of Christian and pagan
culture that the Muslims
found when they invaded
Transjordan was no impedi-
ment to the new government.
It not only tolerated but also
exploited it. Religion once
again was an open frontier.
In the course of time, with
the exigencies of an Arabic-
speaking administration
and a growing Muslim pres-
ence, the same open frontier
allowed Islam to grow and
eventually, but slowly, to
overtake the Hellenic tradi-
tions it inherited. Curiously,
however, this process of
acculturation and adaptation was mutu-
ally reinforced by the two great religions of
Christianity and Islam. In the eighth cen-
tury both undertook a theologically driven
campaign to eliminate the representation of
images. The Christian iconoclasts deled
and removed representations of the holy
image of Christ and the Mother of God, and
the Muslim iconoclasts set out at virtually
the same time to eliminate representations
of any creature that draws breath. What we
see in the simultaneous iconoclastic move-
ment of Byzantium and Islam is a clear
proof that religion does not fuel any one civi-
lization or culture.
It is salutary to recall that, after the
Roman emperor Hadrians suppression
of the revolt of Bar Kokhba in Palestine in
the 130s ad, there was no further outbreak
of any consequence in the entire region
until the Persians invaded Jerusalem in the
seventh century. There had been a few epi-
sodes of Persian aggression, a minor revolt
provoked by an imperial aspirant, two out-
breaks of internecine strife between Jews
and their brethren, the Samaritans, and
some violence at the hands of marauding
monks but fundamentally nothing com-
parable with the uprising of Bar Kokhba.
Think of it: nearly ve centuries of relative
peace in the Near East. Civilizations did
not clash. States did, and religious violence
was fraternal, as it is in Iraq today. When
the Persians re-entered the arena of Near
Eastern politics, it was, as in South Arabia,
to come to the aid of the Jews against the
Christians. But this was clearly a political
decision that had little to do with the reli-
gious convictions of the Persians. Had they
been able to foresee the Islamic conquests
that lay so close in the future they might
have chosen a different policy.
Although states entered often into con-
ict, civilizations endured in a generous
pattern of interaction and metamorphosis.
They were precious because they expressed
a commonality of outlook and traditions;
and they were open, above all, if para-
doxically, to religions. In his paper on the
Huntington thesis, Jack Matlock wrote per-
ceptively: A civilization by any denition is
innitely more complex than, say, a garden.
Nevertheless, describing it is in principle
no different. Each garden is unique, yet
some will have common characteristics not
shared by others. Some plants will grow
well in some soils and poorly if at all in
others. Some plants may take over if moved
to a different environment. Gardens, like
civilizations, can be described, analyzed
and interpreted. But one thing is certain. It
would be absurd to speak of a clash of gar-
dens. It is equally absurd to speak of a clash
of civilizations.
Over many centuries religion has been
viewed both as a foundation of civilization
as well as a threat to it. The conservative
right would hold to the former view, and
this is just as true of those in the American
Bible Belt as it is of the Muslim heirs of
medieval Islamic fundamentalism. The
radical left inclines to the other view, and
the Western doctrine of the separation of
church and state is a reection of resistance
to ecclesiastical coercion and inquisition.
But the vast breadth of the Roman Empire
gives us valuable lessons in the mobility and
mutability of religion. It illuminates better
than anything else the evanescent construct
of civilization. This is a construct that is
useful to historians precisely because it can-
not explain war and violence. It is the soil
in which the loveliest of blossoms and the
rankest of weeds both can grow.
Glen Bowersock is Professor Emeritus

of Ancient History at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton,
New Jersey. Author of Mosaics as
History. The Near East from Late
Antiquity to Islam (2006), he joined
the Academy for a week this March as
a Distinguished Visitor. This article
is based on his Berlin lecture.
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Wall hanging with
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Confessional Conict
and the Rise of
the Shiites
Four Questions for Vali Nasr
o Number Fourteen | Spring 2007
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Muhammad, eighteenth century
the Western church or the protestant from
the Catholic. Put simply, the separation
within Islam was the consequence of a dis-
pute over the prophet Muhammads rightful
successor, which led each sect to develop
a different approach to law and a different
ethos of religion. Although they agree on
the majority of Islams tenets, they differ on
certain aspects of practice, and these small
differences are much more consequential
than the similarities. Over the ensuing
1,400-year period, they have fought over
theology, power, and territory and they
have coexisted. As a result, the division has
come to dene the identities of both groups.
What denes each community? Its beliefs
and how it differs from the other, but also a
notion of shared history within the sect.
Shared history does not necessarily have
to do with religion. In Northern Ireland, for
example, the struggling groups are dened
as Catholic and protestant, but that does
not mean that they are ghting over Martin
Luther. The terminology is religious, but
the ght is not about religion. The confes-
sional designation implies your background,
where you were born, your share of wealth,
your share of power, your attitude about the
English occupation of Ireland, and your atti-
tude toward Irish independence. It is about
who you are, not what you believe. That is
why it is absurd to think that the current
conict would not be happening if Iraq were
secular.
The identities of the two communities
clearly come from a religious sense of self-
perception. But they are not ghting over
religion, they are ghting over power. The
ght in Iraq is not to decide who succeeded
the prophet; I do not believe that Sunnis
want to convert Shiites or that Shiites want
to convert Sunnis, or that all of those ght-
ing are themselves necessarily believers.
The ght in Iraq is about who will control
the country, and those involved will use any
instrument, be it guns or sectarian argu-
ments, to change minds.
But this particular conict, this particular
distribution of power, is happening at a time
when religion itself matters deeply in the
Middle East. The period of Islamic revival
and the fundamentalist Islamism unfolding
there is part of its consciousness. The con-
fessional conict ultimately favors the more
radical elements in each group. As a result,
on the Sunni side, power will gravitate to
the Abu Musab al-Zarqawis, the al-Qaeda
types, and the Salas, on the Shia side to the
Muqtada al-Sadrs and anti-Sunni voices. It is
not very different from other ethnic conicts
The Berlin Journal
we have seen. This game has started because
there is a political prize on the table to be
won that is the true animus but religion
will also be radicalized in the process.
2
What role does
confessional
demography play in
maintaining political
stability?
Shiites represent at best 10 to 15 percent of
the some 1.3 billion in the Muslim world
constituting 150 to 160 million people but
the overwhelming number of Shiites over
90 percent live between India and Lebanon.
In countries like the Republic of Azerbayjan,
Iran, Bahrain, and Iraq Shiites enjoy a
majority, and there are signicant minori-
ties of about 20 percent in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, 10 percent in the United Arab
Emirates, 10 to 15 percent in Saudi Arabia,
30 percent in Kuwait, and by most esti-
mates about 40 percent in Lebanon, which
makes the Shiites Lebanons single largest
community.
Regardless of minority or majority status,
the Shiites, from their point of view, have not
held power in equal measure to their num-
bers. This perception is causing a bloody con-
ict in Iraq; however, this does not necessarily
mean that the struggle for power would play
out similarly elsewhere in the Middle East.
There have been peaceful transitions of power
between the sects, such as when the new
Afghan constitution was put into effect in
2001. Partly because of the close collaboration
between Iran and the US, the Shiites were
enfranchised. For the rst time their religion
was accepted as legitimate. According to the
new Afghan constitution a Shiite may even be
president and that only a few years after the
1997 massacre in which 5,000 Shiites were
killed by the Taliban. With a Shia population
of only 1 percent but four Shia representatives
in its cabinet, Oman is another example.
But Iraq is particularly problematic.
Acutely aware of the inherent demographic
imbalance when drawing the borders of Iraq
in 1922, the British forced Kurdish inclusion
in the hopes of creating demographic parity
between Shiites and Sunnis. But after the
Iraq war in 1991, the US for all practical pur-
poses removed the Kurds from Iraq, throwing
the Sunni-Shia balance askew. The period

1
What signicance does
the confessional conict
have for understanding
the current turbulence
in the Middle East?
When I completed my book The Shia Revival
two years ago, I had a tough time convincing
agents that the Shia-Sunni conict or the
Shiites new assertion of power was relevant
to Middle East politics or Western interests
in the region. These concepts have since
become crucial elements in the vocabulary
of policy makers, despite the lack of clear
understanding about what they mean.
Most Westerners think about Shiites and
Sunnis in terms of the conict in Iraq. The
sectarian war that is unfolding there is in
many ways a threat, both to Middle Eastern
and Western interests, but this rift is no lon-
ger conned to Iraq. The 2006 war between
Lebanon and Israel signaled the moment
when the Iraq conict essentially went
regional. No sooner had the rst Hezbollah
rockets landed in Israel than something
unprecedented in the history of Arab-Israeli
conict took place, namely that a group of
Arab voices, and particularly the more radi-
cal ones, began to criticize an Arab force
in the midst of a ght with Israel. They did
so in a very sectarian way, referring in one
instance to Hezbollahs name which in
Arabic means party of God as the party
of Satan. In their view, a heretical organiza-
tion like Hezbollah could not legitimately
bear the ag of the Palestinian cause, and
they therefore accused the group of trying
to convert Sunnis from true Islam, a Shia
power play on behalf of Iran. This was the
moment in which the oldest violent conict
in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conict,
converged with the newest, the sectarian
conict in Iraq.
The Shiites and Sunnis represent the
oldest, most important sectarian division
within Islam. All great religions have sec-
tarian divides; in terms of Christianity it is
similar to the separation of the Eastern from
that followed also began very badly when the
Iraqi army, returning from Kuwait, rebelled
out of frustration over a lost war. No matter
its origins, it was perceived as a Shia mutiny
and thus suppressed brutally by the primarily
Sunni Iraqi Republican Guard, resulting in
an ultimately sectarian phenomenon.
When the US went into Iraq in 2003 not
all Iraqis beneted equally. The Sunnis
stood to lose many benets with Saddam
Husseins deposal, and the Shiites could
only gain. The Shiites responded in kind,
despite their distrust of the US. They did not
resist the US invasion and were urged very
early on by Iraqs most senior Shia spiritual
leader to join the political process. Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani issued a religious ruling, a
fatwa, that it was the duty of every single
Iraqi man to participate in these new elec-
tions, the duty of every single Iraqi woman
to participate in these new elections, even
if it meant going against her husbands
wishes. Even Irans most senior conserva-
tive religious leaders, including the head of
Irans Guardian Counsel, a much-dreaded
conservative establishment, issued a simi-
lar ruling. The Shiites were sure that they
would benet from any shift of balance in
the Middle East, any kind of political reform,
any change in the existing systems.
Initially, Shiites across the Middle East
also reacted very positively. Hezbollah rou-
tinely echoed Ayatollah Sistanis support of
American elections since a vote would get
Hezbollah and Lebanese Shiites much more
than they had. Only because they couldnt
secure power through the elections did they
try to seize it through a putsch against the
Lebanese government. In many other Gulf
countries, Shiites participated in elections
much more wholeheartedly, believing that
any kind of political change might help tip
the scales in Iraq.
Why was this all so important to the
Shiites? In any part of the world with ethnic
conict, being in possession of power
means appointing your own governors, your
own police, and your own teachers. One of
the Shiites rst acts after gaining the upper
hand in Iraq was to expel Sunnis from
teaching positions. It is this distribution of
jobs and wealth that affects the average citi-
zen the most. Shiites expected these advan-
tages from their new government, but the
Iraqi government has become infested with
corruption and is ineffective. This failure
is largely the fault of the Iraqi constitution,
which, by mandating a two-thirds majority,
requires parties to make enormous conces-
sions to coalition partners just to maintain
a government. As a result the ministry of
health, for example, gets twenty seats in par-
liament and treats it as its efdom. There is
no accountability. Consequently many of the
voters expectations have not been fullled,
largely because the promise of a transfer of
power, transfer of wealth, and transfer of
resources has yet to be realized.
This lack of condence in the new gov-
ernment, along with the ferocity of the
Sunni insurgency, gradually broke down
Shia loyalty to the American political pro-
cess. The breakpoint came in Samara one
year ago when a massive bomb destroyed
the most important Shia shrine, an act
Catholics might equate with destroying
St. Peters Cathedral. The response was two-
fold. Many Shiites came to believe that they
could not rely on the American military to
deal with the insurgency, often noting that
the Samara shrine was the only one not
a Number Fourteen | Spring 2007
protected by Shia militia. It seemed clear to
them that the Americans either did not want
or were not able to deal with the insurgency,
and, in any case, they were talking about leav-
ing. In early 2006 the US simultaneously
began to distance itself from the Shiites, criti-
cizing them much more vocally about secret
prisons and abuse of the Sunnis: in Shia eyes
a second betrayal of support after similar
promises of American backing in 1991.
Secondly, after the Samara bombing, many
Shia politicians unofcially stated that there
would be no reconciliation of the sects, that
coexistence would not happen. Shiites con-
cluded that the only thing to do was to grab
as much territory and as many assets as pos-
sible before the divorce. Many Shiites began to
assert that turning the other cheek simply did
not work; a balance of terror was needed.
3
How does
Iran t into
the larger
equation?
It is impossible to separate Iran from
the changing fortunes of the Shiites
in the Middle East because Iran repre-
sents the regions largest Shia population.
Washingtons Iraq policy, too, has essentially
become inseparable from its Iran policy.
In terms of Iranian involvement in Iraq,
Western focus is often on military issues, but
far more important is the people-to-people
relationship. The opening of Iraq was cultur-
ally, religiously, and emotionally very signi-
cant to Shiites since the most important Shia
shrines are located there. Shiites this is
another thing that distinguishes them from
orthodox Sunnis have a very personal and
passionate attachment, particularly at the
folk level, to their saints, imams, and shrines.
The Iranian government, for instance, said
that last year 1.2 million Iranians went on
pilgrimage to Iraq. Many of these pilgrims
simultaneously began to gravitate to Iraqs
religious leadership; Ayatollah Sistani has
since emerged as the single most important
religious leader among Shiites everywhere.
The point is that even if Iranian intelligence
can be kept out of Iraq, it will be very difcult
to keep Iranians out of Iraq. To assume other-
wise is a fallacy. Their interest in Iraq is not
simply about political hegemony; it is about
cultural access.
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Young man with a musket, Esfahan, Iran, 1610
Iran was the rst country to recognize
the Iraqi government, signing some ten
agreements with it, promising billions of
dollars, and creating a huge volume of trade.
The Iranians initially had many interests in
common with the US, above all guarding
against the states collapse and promoting a
Shia government. It was exactly along these
lines in 2004 and 2005 that the head of
Irans security council, Ali Larijani, offered
to meet with the American ambassador in
Iraq, formally endorsing talks with the US
for the rst time in 27 years. But for whatev-
er reason, these talks did not happen; until
late February of this year the Americans
had actually turned the tables, saying not
only that there was no strategic common
ground in Iraq between Iran and the US but
also that Iraq would indeed be the battle-
ground between the two countries. With no
vested interest in Iraqs failure and a fear of
migrant Sunni radicalism, Iran then found
itself in a similar situation as Syria. Neither
wants Iraq to fail, but the Americans impli-
cation that Damascus or Tehran might be
next gave both governments incentive to
keep the US busy in Iraq.
There is no doubt that Iran is on the rise,
not just as a military force but also as an eco-
nomic and political one. It wants to assert
its position in the region. It is clear that Iran
sees itself as the Brazil of the Middle East.
I dont think Iran wants to export its revolu-
tion; it is interested in a classical, regional
hegemonic presence. Ever since the 1980s
the issue of rivalry between Iran and Saudi
Arabia has focused on nation-state power
rather than ideology. Ruhollah Khomeini,
political leader of the 1979 Iranian revo-
lution, genuinely wanted to rule over all
Muslims, but now Iran wants regional pre-
dominance.
In this regard the two wars beginning in
2001 and 2003 greatly beneted Iran. They
removed the Taliban and the Saddam regime
two Sunni bulwarks on both sides. And
the destruction of the Iraqi army essentially
means that, for a generation, there will be no
military in the Persian Gulf region capable
of containing Iran. The Iranians have also
concluded that Iraq has bogged down the
US, dampening the Americans appetite for
other major military campaigns. Sitting afar
in Tehran and observing the Congressional
elections in the US, it is very easy for
Iranians to come away rather condent that
they have room to maneuver.
Iranian regional ambition is manifest-
ing itself under a particularly virulent
regime that is bellicose toward both the
single Arab views himself as less loyal to the
Arab cause than the next.
Within Iran, support of Hezbollah has
become a test of loyalty and nationalism.
Hezbollah and Hamas are important trump
cards in their game of power. Until the
issues between Iran and Israel and Iran and
the US are settled, Iranians are not going to
give up on these groups, as they have now
become an important part of Irans strate-
gic rivalry with the Arab world. Because of
this Lebanon and Israel are now interwoven
into Iraq, the Shia-Sunni issue, and Iranian-
Saudi relations. Not to say sectarianism is
everything. Its not. But sectarianism is now
very intricately tied to everything and inu-
ences the decisions of every player.
If the West is ever to think coherently
about the Middle East, it must recognize
that old paradigms dont work. The 1980s
policy of containing Iran, Pakistan, and
Afghanistan ultimately meant funding
radical groups like the Jihadi, Sala, and
al-Qaeda as well as the Taliban. It was effec-
tive, but it proved not to be a clean weapon
because ultimately al-Qaeda became a
problem for all Middle East governments
themselves, a number of which werent
even involved in Afghanistan, such as Egypt
and Jordan. And in terms of American fall-
out, the example of September 11 is obvious
enough. The current sectarian rift is a strug-
gle for power, but, at the end of the day, it pro-
duces forces that have half-lives beyond the
sectarian ght itself. Westerners must take
these sectarian divisions seriously and follow
policies that will minimize them, starting in
Iraq. This will require regional engagements,
a framework for peace, and a political process
none of which actually exists now. Secondly,
it means that outside forces ought to be work-
ing to bring the regional powers together in a
much more inclusive way rather than follow-
ing a policy of confrontation. Proceeding as
we are now will only entrench sectarianism
for many more decades to come, conrming
the strategic map of the area as Shia versus
Sunni. And if the US wants to contain Iran,
it must conceive of a strategy inclusive of the
country and regulate it from within the exist-
ing structure.
This text is excerpted from a longer

conversation with Vali Nasr, who
spent a week in Berlin as a C.V. Starr
Distinguished Visitor. He is an adjunct
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and a professor of national
security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate
School in Monterey, California.
The Berlin Journal 3
US and Israel and maintains its inam-
matory denial of the Holocaust. But it is
important to note that the Iranian claim to
regional power is not just the ambition of a
wayward, hard-line president. It has also to
do with socio-economic facts in Iran, and
the idea is very popular among Iranians.
Even Iranians who dislike Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and his regime believe that
Irans rightful place in the Middle East is
not respected and that the country ought to
exercise more inuence.
Iran has the industrial and scientic
capability to build a nuclear program, and is
economically and socially very vibrant. The
literacy rate in Iran is about 70 percent, in
Tehran 86.8 percent. It is extremely well
connected and information-wise. With
over 85,000 bloggers, Persian is now the
third largest language on the internet after
English and Mandarin Chinese. Every
ayatollah worth his salt in Iran has a web-
site and blog. By all estimates, it has one
of the highest rates of bloggers per capita
anywhere in the third world. These facts
were reinforced under the reformists in the
1990s with a high rate of foreign investment.
There is a dynamism in the public sector.
All this has to do with a bullishness and con-
dence coming not only from the Iranian
regime but from Iranian society as well.
4
What must Western
policy take into
consideration in
the future?
The West must recognize that national-
ism in the Middle East is presently going
through various permutations. In the lan-
guage of Hezbollah or of Iraqi Shiites, there
is a clear attempt to redene nationalism
along the lines of Iranian nationalism: a
nation-state dened by the culture and iden-
tity of the larger people. So far they have not
succeeded. The obvious breakdown in Iraq
shows that Arab identity is no longer suf-
cient, namely because there is no agreement
about what the Arab identity is. Whom is it
dened against, Iran or Israel? Perhaps a
new consensus will emerge. Asked twenty
years ago if it would be thinkable for an Arab
to cooperate with Israel against another
Arab, we probably would have said that it is
impossible. But it is now happening, and no
I
n the run-up to the EU-US
Summit in Washington, DC on
April 30, US Treasury Deputy
Secretary Robert Kimmitt met in
Berlin with Matthias Wissmann, German
chair of the Committee on the Affairs of
the European Union, to discuss the trans-
atlantic market initiative. Michael Inacker,
deputy editor of Germanys leading nance
weekly, WirtschaftsWoche, moderated the
following conversation, organized by the
Academy.
Michael Inacker The idea of a transatlantic
market partnership was formerly received
with much skepticism in the US. What has
changed to make the present US adminis-
tration favor this project?
Robert Kimmitt I was on the 1990 nego-
tiating team in Paris that developed the
framework under which we now hold yearly
EU-US Summits. At that time some in the
United States questioned whether a united
Europe was in the interest of the United
States. That debate is now over; a united
Europe is in the interest of Europe, the
United States, and the world, and underpin-
ning a stronger transatlantic relationship
must be a more integrated transatlantic
marketplace. That is why the United States
both appreciates and very much welcomes
Chancellor Angela Merkels initiative.
Inacker But we have seen such ideas and
projects in the past: a business dialogue
that brought business leaders together
from both sides of the Atlantic, for example.
Do you believe that this new idea will prove
more successful than past endeavors?
Kimmitt The chancellors initiative sets a
strategic framework built upon measur-
able tasks, against which this initiative will
be judged. Past structures such as the
Financial Markets Regulatory Dialogue,
conducted between the US Treasury and
European Commissioner for Internal
Market and Services Charlie McCreevy
and his team have worked quite well and
have produced real results in the nancial
sector. We would like to see that spread to
other sectors. The TransAtlantic Business
Dialogue (tabd) is also still alive, well, and
very effective. Chancellor Merkel and I
met with the leaders of the tabd in Davos,
along with EU Trade Commissioner Peter
Mandelson and European Commissioner
for Competition Neelie Kroes, for a very
productive session. The Transatlantic
Policy Network, which also brings legisla-
tors into the process, has proved quite use-
ful. We are discussing how to put in place
a process that integrates these successful
structures from the past with new struc-
tures to produce results to benet both our
economies.
Inacker Mr. Wissmann, it is said that you
are one of the brains behind Chancellor
Merkels initiative. What gives you the con-
dence that now is the right time to pursue
this idea?
Matthias Wissmann The rst reason for
condence is that the top leaders in the
US President Bush, Treasury Secretary
Henry Paulson, Bob Kimmitt and
in Europe President of the European
Commission Jos Manuel Barroso and,
most important, Chancellor Merkel have
truly identied themselves with the
project. In the past regulatory frameworks
have typically been relatively bureaucratic
with little involvement by top leaders. Our
experience with the European internal
market has shown that you need top lead-
ers to press the bureaucracies with a top-
down approach to speed up any strategic
idea of major signicance.
Secondly, leaders on both sides of the
Atlantic understand that we must reduce
the burden of regulations. Americans today
agree that Sarbanes-Oxley is not neces-
sarily the ultimate solution for regulation,
while we understand that some of our typi-
cally European over-regulations are also
not what tomorrows world will need to
strengthen transatlantic business sectors
and stimulate jobs and growth.
Inacker My impression a few months ago
was that the US would be against the initia-
tive if it were conceived as a kind of trade
block against new-world competitors like
China, India, and Russia. Is the project now
more viable because it avoids addressing
open trade?
Kimmitt When any European Union presi-
dency but especially Germanys presi-
dency makes a transatlantic initiative a
central element in its agenda, it sends a very
strong political signal. Such an initiative
recognizes that progress in the economic-
nancial area improves the overall political
relationship between Europe and America
and can provide a strong foundation in
times of political difculty. But it was never
intended to be the United States, Europe,
or the United States and Europe together
against the world.
Bringing our two economies closer
together also benets the global economy.
There had indeed been some discussion last
year about whether this might be a trans-
atlantic free-trade area. Our priority right
now in trade is successful completion of
the Doha Round. But a successful launch
of the Merkel initiative will not only not
detract from Doha efforts, it should provide
momentum for our continuing dialogue
regarding Doha.
Inacker Sarbanes-Oxley is becoming more
and more of an issue for German compa-
nies listed in New York. Some contend that
the secs standards overcompensate for
past US mistakes and are unjustly used to
enforce regulation in other countries. Do
you see the transatlantic market initiative as
a means to nd a middle ground in corpo-
rate governance?
Wissmann Secretary Paulson said very
clearly in an earlier speech that he real-
izes what has to be done to make New York
more competitive as a marketplace. Prudent
Americans and Europeans understand that
their respective regulatory frameworks are
ill-suited to the world of tomorrow. Ours
is not an initiative directed against anyone
else but an afrmation of modern stan-
dards of corporate governance of transpar-
ency, proper antitrust regulations, and real
market economy, all standards to which the
US and Europe are more accustomed than
many other countries. If we aim to lay out
these standards and rules of accounting,
competition, and transparency for the world,
we should rst do our own homework. If
The Merkel Plan
Robert Kimmitt and Matthias Wissmann on the
Transatlantic Economic Partnership Initiative
The Berlin Journal g
Europe and America agree on principle
standards of corporate governance, I am
sure that the rest of the world will follow.
I am not sure that we will have this opportu-
nity in another fty years, given the size of
the American and European economies in
relation to other parts of the world.
Inacker Mr. Secretary, in the business
world, some leaders describe the use of
Sarbanes-Oxley as a kind of unilateralist
instrument of American economic policy.
Do you really sense a willingness in the
American administration to compromise
on issues of corporate governance?
Kimmitt First, I think there has been a
much greater use of multilateral forums to
address some of the most difcult issues
during the second Bush term, exempli-
ed by US coordination with the UN on
both Iran and North Korea, the Six-Party
talks on North Korea, and US support of
European efforts to engage Iran, if Iran is
willing to suspend its nuclear program. On
the specic economic and nancial issues,
I think we do have a very good mechanism
already in place: the Financial Markets
Regulatory Dialogue. When Commissioner
McCreevy was in Washington, he met not
just with us at the Treasury but also with
the Federal Reserve, the sec, and others
to discuss many of the points you men-
tioned. We are open to discussing anything
in this expanded dialogue. I think you are
correct to say that American companies
have expressed concerns about Sarbanes-
Oxley, as have foreign companies. Under
the chairmanship of Christopher Cox, who
before taking his position had served in the
Congress, the executive branch, and the
economic sector, the sec is making a partic-
ular effort to listen and reach out to the for-
eign business community. The secs recent
ruling to simplify deregistration from US
markets exemplies this openness.
Inacker Is the US government interested
in stricter regulation of transparency of
hedge funds?
Kimmitt This is a very good example of our
current and future cooperation. In February
the Presidents Working Group, comprised
of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the
sec, and all of our bank regulators, put
out a statement on private pools of capital,
which include hedge funds, private equity,
and venture capital. The message was quite
clear; we cannot have business as usual. We
need to watch particularly for investor pro-
tection and systemic risk. Those principles
were supported by Mr. McCreevy. Again, we
would suggest that transatlantic dialogue
take place within the Financial Markets
Regulatory Dialogue and the broader global
dialogue within the G7.
Inacker Mr. Wissmann, two major issues
you are currently facing as head of the EU
Council of the German Parliament are the
environment and energy. Do these top-
ics belong in the overall framework of the
transatlantic market initiative, or would you
recommend addressing them separately?
Wissmann In the long run, the environment
must be part of a transatlantic economic
initiative. It makes sense to nd more
consensus on technical standards and the
automotive industries, not only on behalf
of the environment but also on behalf of
industry and the consumer. But we must be
realistic and thus cannot think that we will
be able to reinvent the world totally anew
in 12 months. If the initiative is successful,
however, we might then have a real chance
to address major questions not only of eco-
nomic but also of environmental strategies.
Kimmitt Let me make clear that we wel-
come the fact that the chancellor took up
energy security and climate change in the
original proposal. Though some may think
otherwise, those two subjects are quite
important to the United States. Both were
addressed in the presidents State of the
Union speech, and he made a number of
specic proposals that target carbon dioxide
emissions. We expect that these issues will
be part of this new dialogue, but we have
been discussing these important issues
in the G8 and other multilateral forums
as well.
Inacker Mr. Secretary, could there and
should there also be a new structural frame-
work for American and European business-
economic relations, or is the initiative just a
matter of memorandums of understanding
and agreements?
Kimmitt I would say that there is already
a well-established structure at the senior-
most level. What we should consider is how
to encourage the same kind of engagement
among senior ofcials below the level of
heads of state and government. I would
like to see the same kind of informal and
collaborative dialogue that we have in the
nancial markets area in other sectors, be
it in chemicals, energy, or transportation. A
few key people on each side would report to
senior ofcials, who would in turn brief the
leaders before annual Summits.
It is crucial that a process be set in place
to ensure that the initiatives importance
continues through future US administra-
tions. In Europe, of course, there is both the
EU and the individual member state level,
plus the Commission. I always ask a very
practical question: who sits across the table
from the US president to give him the brief-
ing that will prepare him for the upcom-
ing EU-US Summit? I want that person, or
someone close to him, overseeing this pro-
cess for the US Government. I would imag-
ine the same is true on the European side.
There must be an additional mechanism to
ensure the initiatives continued vitality.
Inacker What makes you condent that,
after this German EU presidency comes to a
close, there will really be a set of procedures,
structures, and people in place to survive
future terms?
Wissmann I am very condent because, at
the last European Summit, the 27 leaders of
the European Union unanimously agreed
on the initiative, obliging any future com-
mission to follow that route. President
Barroso is very clearly convinced of its
worth, too; he has always worked for trans-
atlantic goals, and Chancellor Merkel and
others, even leaders of center-left govern-
ments in Europe, are convinced that we
need closer cooperation with the US and
Canada in addition to our strategic military
and security partnerships. The initiative
aims to speed up certain processes in the
rest of the world, from corporate gover-
nance to the environment to deregulation.
One year ago, when we launched the idea,
Secretary Kimmitt and I both had doubts
about whether it would be successful.
Now we believe there is a high probability
that future governments will continue
this pursuit.
Kimmitt Our leaders are going to continue
to meet annually. The question is, when
they meet, will they approach the discus-
sion from a tactical or a strategic frame-
work? Chancellor Merkel has put this
important part of the relationship into a
strategic framework, into which individual
tactical components must t. We will be
proudest if we know that our successors will
also play their parts.

One November evening long ago
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a 13-year-old
named William Troeller hung himself
from the transom in his bedroom. The
boy had watched his family slide into an
increasingly desperate situation. His older
brother, Harold, told a newspaper reporter
that William was sensitive and always felt
embarrassed about asking for his share at
mealtime. The Herbert Street police station
The Forgotten Man
A New View of the Great Depression
by Amity Shlaes
Omar, West Virginia, 1937
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near the Troeller home helped to arrange
the funeral. Burial would be in a Catholic
cemetery. He Was Reluctant about Asking
for Food, read the headline in the New York
Times. New York that year had a Dickensian
feel.
William Troellers was just one tragedy
in a city full of tragedies. The New York
birthrate that month was one of the lowest
on record. A few weeks prior to Williams
suicide the Dow had dropped nearly 8 per-
cent the day had already come to be known
as Black Tuesday. It was a dark moment
for the country as well. The Brookings
Institution, a new think tank, had warned
that the balance of the economy was pre-
carious. Observing from Britain, the
Economist would conclude in retrospect that
the United States seemed to have forgotten,
for the moment, how to grow.
The story sounds familiar. It is remi-
niscent of the descriptions we hear of the
Great Crash of 1929. But in fact these events
took place in the autumn of 1937. This was
a depression within the Depression. It was
occurring ve years after Franklin Roosevelt
was rst elected and four and a half years
after he introduced the New Deal. It was tak-
ing place eight years after President Herbert
Hoover rst made his own rescue plans fol-
lowing the 1929 stock market crash.
The standard history of the Great
Depression is one we know. The 1920s were
a period of false growth and low morals.
There was a certain godlessness the Great
Gatsby image to the decade. The crash was
the honest acknowledgement of the break-
down of capitalism and the cause of the
Depression. A dangerous ination caused
by speculating margin traders brought
down the nation. There was a sense of a
return to a sane, moral country with the
crash, a sense that the economy of 1930
or 1931 could not revive without extensive
intervention by Washington. Roosevelt, so
unlike the mistaken Hoover, created the
New Deal, which tided the country over. In
this way the country fended off revolution of
the sort bringing down Europe. Without the
New Deal, American democracy would have
been lost.
The same history teaches that the New
Deal was the period in which Americans
learned that government spending was
important to recoveries and that the con-
sumer alone can solve the problem of
excess capacity on the producers side. The
attitude is that the New Deal is the best
model we have for what government must
do for weak members of society, in both
times of crisis and times of stability. And
that the New Deal gave us splendid leaders
and characters: Roosevelt himself, a crip-
pled man who bravely willed us all back into
prosperity and has been called the apostle
of abundance. The Brain Trust, thoughtful
men whose insights validated their experi-
ments. Or so the storyline.
The usual rebuttal to this from the right
is that Hoover was a good man, albeit mis-
understood, and Roosevelt a dangerous,
even an evil one. The stock market of the
1920s was indeed immoral, too high, ina-
tionary and deserved to crash. Another set
of critics focuses on Roosevelts early social
programs. Yet a third set of critics, an angry
fringe, has argued that Roosevelts Brain
Trusters reported to Moscow.
For many years now, these have been the
parameters of the debate. It is time to revisit
the late 1920s and the 1930s. Then we see
that neither the standard history nor the
standard rebuttal entirely captures the reali-
ties of the period. The rst reality was that
the 1920s was a great decade of true eco-
nomic gains, a period whose strong positive
aspects have been obscured by the troubles
that followed. Those who placed their faith
in laissez-faire economics in that decade
were not all godless. Indeed religious piety
moved some, including President Calvin
Coolidge, to hold back, to pause before inter-
vening in private lives.
The fact that the stock market rose high
at the end of the decade does not mean that
all the growth of the preceding ten years
was an illusion. American capitalism did
not break in 1929. The crash did not cause
the Depression. It was a necessary correc-
tion of a too-high stock market but not a nec-
essary disaster. The market players at the
time of the crash were not villains, though
some of them Albert Wiggin of Chase,
who shorted his own banks stock behaved
reprehensibly. There was indeed an anni-
hilating event that followed the crash, one
that Hoover never understood and Roosevelt
understood incompletely: deation.
Hoovers priggish temperament, as
much as any philosophy he held, caused
him both to misjudge the crash and to fail
in his reaction to it. And his preference
for Germany as a negotiating partner over
Soviet Russia later blinded him to the dan-
gers of Nazism. Roosevelt by contrast had
what was described as a rst-class tempera-
ment. His calls for courage, his Fireside
Chats, all were intensely important. The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself; in
the darkness Roosevelts voice seemed to
shine. He allowed Cordell Hull to write
trade treaties that in the end would benet
the US economy enormously. Roosevelts
dislike of Germany, which dated from child-
hood, predisposed him to a wariness of
Hitler and contributed to his eventual deci-
sion that the United States must come to
Europes side.
Still, Hoover and Roosevelt were alike in
several regards. Both preferred to control
events and people. Both underestimated
the strength of the American economy.
Both doubted its ability to right itself in a
storm. Hoover mistrusted the stock mar-
ket. Roosevelt mistrusted it more. Roosevelt
offered rhetorical optimism, but pessimism
underlay his policies. Though Americans
associated Roosevelt with bounty, his
insistent emphasis on sharing betrayed a
conviction that the country had entered a
permanent era of scarcity. Both presidents
overestimated the value of government plan-
ning. Hoover, the Quaker, favored the com-
munity over the individual. Roosevelt, the
Episcopalian, found laissez-faire economics
immoral and disturbingly un-Christian.
And both men doctored the economy
habitually. Hoover was a constitutional-
ist and took pains to intervene within the
rules, but his interventions were substan-
tial. Roosevelt cared little for constitutional
niceties and believed they blocked progress.
His remedies were on a greater scale and
often inspired by socialist or fascist models
abroad. A number of New Dealers, includ-
ing agricultural economist and later head of
Roosevelts Resettlement Administration,
Rexford Tugwell, had been profoundly
shaped by Mussolinis Italy and especially by
Soviet Russia. That inuence was not paren-
thetic. The hoarse-voiced opponents of the
New Deal liked to focus on the connections
between these men, the Communist Party,
and authorities in Soviet Russia. And sev-
eral important New Dealers did indeed have
those connections, most notably Lauchlin
Currie, Roosevelts economics adviser in
later years, and Harry Dexter White, at the
Treasury. Whites plan for the pastoraliza-
tion of Germany takes on a new aspect when
we know this.
But few New Dealers were spies or even
communists. The emphasis on that issue
is in any case misplaced. Overall, the

American capitalism did not
break in 1929. The crash did
not cause the Depression.
problem of the New Dealers on the left was
not their relationship with Moscow or the
Communist Party in the US, if indeed they
had one. The problem was their navet
about the economic value of Soviet- style
or European-style collectivism and the
fact that they forced such collectivism on
their own country. Fear of being labeled a
red-baiter has too long prevented histori-
ans from looking into the Soviet inuence
upon American domestic policy in the
1930s.
What then caused the Depression?
Part of the trouble was indeed the crash.
Part was weather. Part was the dea-
tion, unrecognized, real, and severe. But
the deepest problem was the interven-
tion, the lack of faith in the marketplace.
Government management of the late
1920s and 1930s hurt the economy. Both
Hoover and Roosevelt misstepped. Hoover
ordered wages up when they should have
gone down. He allowed a disastrous tar-
iff, Smoot-Hawley, to become law when
he should have had the sense to block it.
He raised taxes. After 1932 New Zealand,
Japan, Greece, Romania, Chile, Denmark,
Finland, and Sweden began seeing indus-
trial production levels rise again but the
United States did not.
Roosevelts errors had a different quality
but were equally devastating. He created
regulatory, aid, and relief agencies based
on the premise that recovery could only
be achieved through a large military-style
effort. Some of these were useful the
nancial institutions he established upon
entering ofce. Some were inspiring the
Civilian Conservation Corps, for example,
which created parks, bridges, and roads we
still enjoy today. Establishing the Securities
and Exchange Commission, enacting
banking reform as well as the reform of
the Federal Reserve system all had a stabi-
lizing effect.
But other new institutions, such as the
National Recovery Administration, did
damage. The nras mandate mistook mac-
roeconomic problems for micro problems,
seeking to solve the monetary challenge
through price setting. The stringency
of nra rules perversely hurt businesses.
They frightened away capital, and they
discouraged employers from hiring work-
ers. Another problem was that laws like
that which created the nra and Roosevelt
signed a number of them were so broad
that no one knew how they would be inter-
preted. The resulting hesitation in itself
arrested growth.
Where the private sector could help to
bring the economy back in the arena of
utilities, for example Roosevelt and his
New Dealers often suppressed it. The cre-
ation of the Tennessee Valley Authority
snuffed out a potentially successful private
effort to light up the South. The company
that would have delivered that electricity
was future presidential candidate Wendell
Willkies company, Commonwealth and
Southern. The New Yorker magazines car-
toons of the plump, terried Wall Streeter
Post Offce, Crossville, Tennessee, 1937
The big question about the American
Depression is not whether war with
Germany and Japan ended it but rather
why the Depression lasted until that war.
From 1929 to 1940, government interven-
tion helped to make the Depression Great.
The period was not one of a moral battle
between a force for good the Roosevelt
presidency and forces for evil. It was a
period of power struggle. The two sectors
of the economy, the public and the private,
competed relentlessly. At the beginning,
the private sector ruled. By the end, when
World War II began, it was the public sector
that dominated.
Roosevelt was frank about the contest.
As he put it in his second inaugural address,
he sought unimagined power. He, his
advisers, and his congressional allies
instinctively targeted monetary control,
utilities, and taxation because they were
the three sources of revenue whose control
would enlarge the public sector the most.
But if so much of the New Deal hurt the
economy, why did Roosevelt win reelection
three times? Why, especially, the landslide
of 1936? In the case of the third and fourth
Roosevelt terms the answer is clear: the
threat of war and war itself. Roosevelt,
were accurate; business was terried of the
president. But the cartoons did not depict
the consequences of that intimidation: that
businesses decided to wait Roosevelt out,
hold on to their cash, and invest in future
years. Yet Roosevelt retaliated by introduc-
ing a tax the undistributed prots tax to
press the money out of them.
Such forays helped to bring about the
depression within the Depression of 1937.
One of the most famous Roosevelt phrases
in history, almost as famous as fear
itself, was Roosevelts boast that he would
promulgate bold, persistent experimen-
tation. But Roosevelts commitment to
experimentation itself created fear, and
many Americans knew this at the time. In
autumn 1937, the New York Times delivered
its analysis of the economys downturn:
The cause is attributed by some to taxation
and alleged federal curbs on industry; by
others, to the demoralization of production
caused by strikes. Both the taxes and the
strikes were the result of Roosevelts policy;
the strikes had been made possible by the
Wagner Act the year before. Fear froze
the economy, but that uncertainty itself
might have a cost was something the experi-
menters simply did not consider.
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A Monthly Newspaper from Germany

unlike his narrow-minded Republican
opponents, understood the dangers that
Nazi Germany represented. In 1936, how-
ever, the reason for victory was different.
That year Roosevelt won because he cre-
ated a new kind of interest group politics.
The idea that such groups might nd main-
stream parties to support them was not
novel; Republicans, including the Harding
and Coolidge administrations, had long
practiced interest group politics on behalf
of big business with tariffs. Roosevelt, how-
ever, systematized interest group politics
to include many constituencies laborers,
senior citizens, farmers, union workers.
The president made groups where only
individual citizens or isolated cranks had
stood before, ministered to those groups,
and was rewarded for that ministry

Fear of being labeled a red-
baiter has too long prevented
historians from looking into
the Soviet influence upon
American domestic policy in
the 1930s.
Almost by accident, Roosevelt happened
on an economic theory that validated his
politics and his moral sense: what we now
call Keynesianism. Keynesianism, named
after John Maynard Keynes, empha-
sized consumers, who were also voters.
Keynesianism said the government could
spend its way out of trouble. To Roosevelt
and his administration the theory gave
license for perpetual experi-
mentation and justied gov-
ernment spending. Spending
seemed humane and
was, for some. Yet focus-
ing on consumers meant
that Washington neglected
the producer. Focusing on
experiments neglected the
question of whether unceas-
ing experimentation might
frighten business into terri-
ed inaction. The result was
that two in ten were once
again unemployed in the later
1930s hardly humane.
Too much attention has
been paid to what political
polls said about the New
Deal, while too little has been
paid to two other measures.
One was the unemployment
rate, which did not return to
pre-crash levels until the war.
The other was the stock mar-
ket. Uncertainty about what
to expect from international
events and Washington made
the Dow Jones industrial average jump
around in a fashion not repeated through
the rest of the century; seven out of the ten
biggest up days of the twentieth century
took place in the 1930s. The Dow did not
return to 1929 levels until nearly a decade
after Roosevelts death.
with votes. The rst peacetime year in
American history in which federal spend-
ing outpaced the total spending of the
states and towns was that election year of
1936. Roosevelts move was so profound
that it changed the English language.
Before the 1930s the word liberalism
stood for the individual; afterward the term
increasingly stood for groups.
The Forgotten Man
was written because of a problem that exists today: entitle-
ments what Europeans call social costs or pending obli-
gations in regard to public pensions, public health, and edu-
cation. Entitlements threaten to drag Western nations down.
They obscure the differences between political parties and
take the joy out of politics. No lawmaker has the license
Roosevelt had. Every lawmaker must take up the heavy enti-
tlement burden.
As presidential candidate John McCain, a Republican,
told a meeting of the New York Economic Club last year, My
children and their children will not receive the benefits we
enjoy. That is an inescapable fact, and any politician who
tells you otherwise, Democrat or Republican, is lying.
Continental Europe suffers from a more advanced
stage of the same malady. Both Gerhard Schrder and
Angela Merkel have defended high taxes as the only
means of paying for entitlements.
At some point I became interested in finding the
basis for these expensive social promises. In the end
Street Scene, Natchez, Mississippi, October 1935
I came to Roosevelts New Deal. From American Social
Security to farm subsidy to pensions for senior citizens,
the programs of the 1930s decisively stamped modern
culture. Germans, of course, point out that Bismarck
first created the modern social welfare state; Roosevelts
New Dealers also borrowed from Britain, not to mention
Soviet Russia and Mussolinis Italy. But the precedent of
the New Deal matters, too.
For many decades Westerners believed that if the US
could sustain its vibrancy even as it maintained a social
welfare net then other economies could do this double
duty as well. Many of us believed that without the cre-
ation of a social welfare state we would all have been
vulnerable to fascism or worse. What I learned in the
course of my research was that all these assumptions do
not necessarily hold in the case of the US. New Dealers
exaggerated the threat of fascism in the US in the 1930s,
and people talked about that exaggeration at the time.
We used to believe that the division of Germany was
inevitable and, probably, interminable. Now we know
that German Zweistaatlichkeit, or double statehood,
was temporary and more of an accident of history than
we could have ever imagined. The necessity of the more
extreme aspects of the New Deal turns out likewise to
have been an assumption of the period of World War II
and the cold war. What if Roosevelt had instead reduced
taxes drastically, had reliably loosened the money sup-
ply, had confined the New Deal to the creation of the
Securities and Exchange Commission? And what if he
had made this alternate program the subject of his
compelling radio Fireside Chats? The US might have
been better off in 1939 than it was.
I first read through the traditional Depression lit-
erature in my months at the Academy. A good share of
those books were tucked away in the dusty corners of
the libraries of former East Berlin. Germans, more than
citizens of almost any country, know that economics
matter, which is why it is such a great pleasure to debate
with them.
Amity Shlaes
A
bout half a century
before the Depression, a Yale
philosopher named William
Graham Sumner penned a lec-
ture against the progressives of his own
day and in defense of classical liberal-
ism. Applying his own algebra of politics,
Sumner warned that well-intentioned
social progressives often coerced unwit-
ting citizens into funding dubious social
projects. He wrote: As soon as A observes
something which seems to him to be
wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks
it over with B, and A and B then propose
to get a law passed to remedy the evil and
help X. Their law always proposes to deter-
mine what A, B, and C shall do for X. But
what about C? There was nothing wrong
with A and B helping X. What was wrong
was the law and the indenturing of C to
the cause. C was the forgotten man, the
man who paid, the man who never is
thought of.
In 1932 a member of Roosevelts Brain
Trust, Ray Moley, recalled the phrase,
although not its provenance, and he insert-
ed it into the candidates rst great speech.
If elected, Roosevelt promised, he would
act in the name of the forgotten man
at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
Whereas C had been Sumners forgotten
man, the New Deal made X the forgot-
ten man the poor man, the old man, the
laborer, or any other recipient of govern-
ment help.
We have always wanted to know the
story of A, the progressive of the 1920s
and 1930s whose good intentions inspired
the country. But it is important also to
consider the story of C, the American who
was not thought of. As an editorialist in
Indiana wrote in 1936, Who is
the forgotten man in Muncie?
I know him as intimately as I
know my own undershirt. He
is the fellow that is trying to get
along without public relief and
has been attempting the same
thing since the depression that
cracked down on him.
Of course the Hoover and
Roosevelt administrations
may have had no choice but to
pursue the policies that they
did. They may have spared the
country something worse an
American version of Stalins
communism or Mussolinis
fascism. But they especially
Roosevelt may also have exag-
gerated extremisms threat.
The politicized New Dealers
told them that European-style
laws were necessary to tame
an electorate on the brink of
revolution. But in their myopia
they often overlooked the fact
that Americans even in the
1930s were fundamentally
different from their European counter-
parts. Class warfare was an import, not a
homegrown activity, and often felt forced,
even in the 1930s. As the European writer
Odette Keun reported when she came to
the States, many Americans, even factory
workers, fully expected to become rich one
day. Labor in America is conservative. It
is one of the most abbergasting discover-
ies I have made. This conservatism, she
wrote, was partly due to the temper of the
American workingman himself.
It is not right that we permit the argu-
ment that New Deal intervention saved
US capitalism to obscure some of the con-
sequences of the two presidents policies.
Nor is it right that we overlook the failures
of their philosophies. Glorifying the New
Deal obscures the Cs, the bystanders, the
third parties. They spoke frequently of the
forgotten man at the time but eventually
became forgotten men themselves. Going
back to the Depression is worthwhile, if
only to retrieve their lost story.
Amity Shlaes, Academy JPMorgan

Fellow in spring 2003, is a visit-
ing fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and a syndicated colum-
nist for Bloomberg News. Her book
The Forgotten Man will be published
by HarperCollins in June 2007.
Photographer Benjamin Shahn
Lithuanian-born American artist Benjamin Shahn
is best known for his work as a Social Realist in
painting and graphic design, drawing deep influ-
ence from an early apprenticeship under the
Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Some of his more
stirring and overlooked entries in the world of
art, however, lie in the medium of photography.
At the urging of his friend Walker Evans, Shahn
joined the photographic team of the Farm Security
Administration in 1935 and traveled through the
American south alongside two future standouts of
the craft, Evans and Dorothea Lange. While Shahn
at times viewed his photography as an interme-
diary step toward his tempera and mixed-media
renderings, the prints borne of his FSA commis-
sion constitute a potent artistry in their own right.
The works on these pages derive from a collec-
tion newly acquired by the International Center of
Photography in New York.
Puppets for the Show, Red House, West Virginia, 1937
Military History
Stood on its Head
FromtheLaskyWarDiary
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Near Wesel, Germany, March 24, 1945
American paratroopers spearheading the Allied invasion of Germany
M
elvin J. Lasky historian,
journalist, and American
expatriate possessed one of the
most penetrating and influential voices
of the postwar European intelligentsia.
Serving in Germany as editor of the
New Leader and later founding the
weekly Der Monat, he maintained a
position of ethical circumspection with
regard to American policy in the wake
of the war while dedicating himself
tirelessly to the political and moral
reconstruction of the Bundesrepublik.
Later in London, as editor of Encounter,
he would take up a crusade to unite
the camps of the antitotalitarian left
and the intellectual right against
the threat of Stalinist communism; his
magnum opus Utopia and Revolution (1976)
exemplifies his attention to language
and rhetoric in building a critical,
analytical sense of history.
The Bronx-born Laskys instrumental
role in Germanys cultural recovery
has not gone unrecognized; in 1997 a
panel of German historians named him
one of the most important Berliners in
history, placing him in the ranks of
Ernst Reuter and Rosa Luxemburg. Here,
with the kind permission of his widow
Helga Hegewisch, we provide an intimate
glimpse into two deeply formative years
for this intellect, excerpting from
his extensive yet unpublished diary,
which chronicles his post as an official
war historian of the Seventh US Army
from 19441946. Laskys famously
irreverent spirit often resonated in
his commissioned depictions of battle,
leading to friction with the military
brass that oversaw his work. His
remembrance of one of these portrayals,
a Tolstoyan account of war and peace on
the Western front, could just as well
describe these private reflections.
[Luneville,France]
Tuesday 13 February 1945
As someone remarked today, the historian-in-chief is an insur-
ance salesman. And the only trouble is, were not selling insur-
ance! A few minutes later the Colonel came through. He tossed
a few hasty glances at the oddly occupied ofce. I think some of
you people ought to nd out the unit of measure around here, he
said. Its hours, not days! Every goddammed thing takes days,
days Some time later: How many pages have you done today?
The number was apparently negligible and inadequate, and he
stormed. Lets get the output up! For Christs sake, if research
takes up 75 percent of your time, cut research out! Just write, and
then everything will be speeding along! Mooney, Eggers, and
Gottlieb [] all tell me they were introduced to their units with I
dont know anything about this son-of-a-bitch. I dont know who he
is, what he can do. But Im leaving him here, and see that hes kept
busy. I dont want him laying around! The poor fate of a combat
historian!
Sunday 4 March 1945
Spent some time in the evening with the propagandists of the
Psychological Warfare Branch. They are of course relentlessly busy
pamphleteering and literally bombarding the Nazi troops with
messages, leaets, booklets, newspapers, and a host of ingenious
appeals. Their work, they confess with a little sadness, is only of
a tactical nature. Which is understandable: their disappointment,
that is. Propaganda not operating within a high strategic framework
must inevitably appear to the craftsman as sabotage, a conscientious
withdrawal of efciency. [] The Army had nothing to say to the
German soldier. The Allies had no real substantial message for him.
Whatever the stress on his political credulity (after the overwhelm-
ing series of Hitler-Himmler-Goebbels disappointments and even
betrayals) they could make no effort to touch, divert, reorient the
Weltanschauung. The pwb output is almost solely devoted to the
creation of war prisoners. t wo words, the leaet screams in
German in huge red letters, will save a million lives. They are name-
ly ei srrender.
The language of surrender is conveniently offered in a little leaf-
let (mysteriously titled zg 77 k): Five Minutes of English. The
blitz-course for German GIs features Ui ssrenda, followed

TheHistoricalSectionitself
seemstobethebastard
creationofsomeenterprising
militarymindwithonehand
onThucydides,oneeyeonthe
futureandthejudgmentof
posterity,andonefootinthe
nextwar.
by an ingenious series of pleas Wen ken ai tek a bahs? Wer is
ser hot wota? E letta blenk, plies When das se mehl liew?
Gat nising tu ried? Sam mor kof, plies and nally Senks
for se ssiggarets. That, according to the propaganda theory, should
convince them.
Sunday 12 March 1945
What do all these sedulously precise pages amount to? True: the
divisions and armies did move exactly as indicated; these engage-
ments were fought in the following named places; advances and
counterattacks occurred as listed; difculties proved troublesome
as suggested. Yet nothing ever happened as it is here recorded! The
living context, the avor, the excitement and passion and nervous-
ness, the vocabulary in a word, for me the truth has been lost
in the distillation of what is considered the signicant course of
events. But then, of all the problems of civilization the tragedy of
war has always been the least known or understood. It has been uni-
versally and immemorially shared, yet either because of political or
moral incapacities its real shape and substance has remained inac-
cessible to literature of all kinds. The man of imagination makes
a contrived romance out of it or an unrelieved horror. The man of
sober fact has rarely been able to see the documentary truth for all
the dust of the archives.
Those things in human Equity, said Don Quixote, might
very well have been omitted; for Actions that neither impair nor
alter History ought rather to be buryd in Silence than related, if
they rebound to the discredit of the Hero of the History. Certainly
Aeneas was never so pious as Virgil represents him, nor Ulysses so
prudent as he is made by Homer
I am of your Opinion, continued Carrasco, disguising his own
fundamental disagreement, but tis one thing to write like a Poet,
and another thing to write like an Historian. Tis sufcient for the
rst to deliver Matters as they ought to have been, whereas the last
must relate em as they were really transacted, without adding or
omitting any thing, upon any Pretence whatever
How elementary, yet it is just these elementary assumptions that
need to be brought to awareness. []
My own work here, in its largest aspect, is unfortunately not clear
to me nor to the historians who are supposed to organize and edit
my assignments. That is by now, of course, an old Army situation.
The Historical Section itself seems to be the bastard creation of
some enterprising military mind with one hand on Thucydides, one
eye on the future and the judgment of posterity, and one foot in the
next war. []
(In the end, curiously, only the historian truly knows what trans-
pired: Mooneys narratives have been read by commanders who
learned for the rst time what actually went on during their cam-
paigns) []
To be sure, the military bureaucracy will allow nothing to pass
that threatens its shining armor. Unfortunately if you even so
much as breathe vigorously you are likely to cloud that sensitive
plate. The last few weeks I have been editing the manuscript of
the 7th Armys narrative. Quiet, dull, devitalized. All the real issues
and problems of the planning (for single instance) are tenderly knit
together so that all the twists and turns of the invasion and subse-
quent campaign appear to be masterfully crocheted together by art-
ful strokes. The international intrigue involving American, British,
and French prestige; the amazing conicts of entrenched military
bureaucracies on various fronts and centers; the real character and
consequences of so-called military science in a word, everything
an historian of imagination and insight would seize upon has been
rendered innocuous. [] There is no excuse for indignation on
this score. That, after all, is what an ofcial history is. It matters not
whether the slot takes a dull or a shiny nickel; the machine will play
the same tune. I straighten sentences out and try subtly to suggest
something of the great themes of confusion, hypocrisy, and mass-
production death. But that is beside the point. The manuscript is
now clean, ready for the seal of the General. The outline is orderly,
the notes and bibliography complete, the pages neatly typed and
double-spaced. Here it is, but the real history lies in the white space
between the lines. []
The military history that can now be casually dismissed as old-
fashioned never departed from its central theme the Commander,
his strategy, his tactics, his genius. Napoleon struck so, and the
assault was victorious. The staff hit upon the great plan, and the
stroke of annihilation was registered. The Army and the State,
through its ofcial leadership, remained the central characters.
Now military history has been stood on its head. And what could be
more ideologically appropriate in an era when it is for the Common
Man that everything is sacriced and it is in the name of the Little
People that history is made. The hero of history is not Foch but
the poilu, not Pershing but the doughboy. The pamphlets are now
being turned out by the dozen. And they record great victories,
unexpected and ingenious improvisations on the battleeld, feats
of audacity and military daring. Not Eisenhowers, or Pattons, or
Clarks, or Patchs. It is all the genius of some Joe in his Foxhole.
A sergeant shouts, God damn those sons-a-bitches! Well have their
asses hanging out in the breeze! Follow me! And it is to this non-
com, far removed from war rooms and high-level eld orders, that
the historian has turned for his protagonist. The victory belongs to
the generalship of the sergeant and the corporal. The brass is left
to their own privacy. Joe has his philosophers, his artists, his politi-
cians. Now, in his supreme achievement, he has found his historian.
Myworstfearwasthat
therubblewouldbecome
monotonous.Whatif
onebecamecallousoradjusted
tothisterriblewasteland?
attack grew in intensity, and she scrambled regularly for the ditches
as the divebombers came in for strang sorties. Near Avricourt two
of her comrades were hit. One took a shell fragment in the shoulder,
the other just a few yards behind her was riddled with machine gun
re. She nally made her mothers house here in Luneville.
Tuesday 27 March 1945
She wasnt home for more than a few hours when the police came
and arrested her. The ffi [French Forces of the Interior] was
rounding up collaborationists, and the prison cells were crowded
with men and women of all sorts. She was held there for a week.
She refused to eat and refused to talk. They would beat her every
day stupid, cruel boys of 17 and 18 and then they cut her hair.
(It suddenly struck me. Of course. Her hair had been cut! That
was it all the time! She had burned all her old photos, and nothing
but the memory of fond golden locks remained. She was still very
embarrassed about it. I was so moved and confused that I laughed.
And she became hurt; it was no joke, and it wasnt right for me to
make fun of her. I apologized sincerely, distressed that my helpless
little laugh should misrepresent my feelings. I ran my ngers

Sunday 18 March 1945
Jeanne and I spent a long evening together last night; I nally man-
aged an invitation. Her place is a really lovely apartment, carefully
kept up during the bad years of the war and occupation with an
apparent tender solicitude as if there were nothing else in the world
to care for. []
The ten months she spent in Germany began in November 1943.
She was conscripted like so many other French women to work for
the Army bureaus along the Rhine. As an Alsatian she speaks both
French and German uently, and she became the bureaus chief
interpreter. She worked faithfully and efciently. There was noth-
ing else to do. But this was a far cry from collaboration! Every
moment of the day brought some little conict, a new declaration of
war. Her blouse was a polka-dot affair, white with odd red and blue
dots. So! the chief would scream. You always have to exhibit your
colors! You cant sit here a moment without draping yourself in the
ag! []
In September [1944] the bombing and strang became massa-
cres. The walls of the ofce shook all day and night. [] Jeanne left
before daybreak and ran for hours through the countryside. The
Near Wesel, Germany, March 24, 1945
A German farm family seeking refuge from the fighting
gently, fumblingly, affectionately through her cropped hair, which
in the candlelight of her apartment was becoming for me a lovely
affecting thing. She smiled and I kissed her and all was well and
understood) [] There have already been threats to recut her hair
for associating with the Americans! An embittered twisted patrio-
tism but an indication of the explosive uncertainty and turbulence
of the tortured national spirit.
[Kaiserslautern,Germany]
Thursday 29 March 1945
Germany Straight Ahead the improvised GI signs along the road
read as we sped towards Sarguemines and the Saar Basin. The
offensive had rolled through this area a scant two weeks ago, and all
the devastation was new. Still the people were coming back and try-
ing to set up their communities in the rubble. Farmers were hoeing
their elds around the waste heaps of old ammunition dumps and
over the heavy dug-in tracks of the tanks which had roared through
tearing up the earth. Little remnants told poignant tales. Gasthaus
zur Post [Post Ofce Tavern] by a shattered front of a caf. Feind
hrt mit [The enemy is listening] on broken walls of buildings,
warning against street-corner gossip. [] My worst fear was that
it would become monotonous. What if one became callous or
adjusted to this terrible wasteland? I fancied that every house had
suffered a little differently, had its own pattern or design in ruin and
Mont-St.-Michel, Normandy, August 1944
rubble. Each hearth perhaps had its own private death. At least so
the sense of tragedy could be held through the endless view of walls,
windows, shutters, foundations, stone and wood and elds, strewn
over a devastated country. Every barn was a wreck, every store was
smashed, only occasionally was a church found standing. After each
village you think perhaps now the resistance had been broken and
something had been saved. But no! The next town is worse.
[Location,dateunknown]
Old woman stops me. Volunteers information about the Schreyer
family. Mother a big Nazi. Sons all army; the eldest an SS Lt. All in
hiding upstairs. They made enough trouble. Everything should be
nished for them Austrian traitors! 2nd oor, No 1, Altmarkt.
[Innsbruck,Austria]
Saturday 2 June 1945
She wasnt a native of Innsbruck she was Russian but she knew
the town and ventured suggestions. She was going to headquarters.
I would drive her, and then we could tour. So we went. This was
the beginning of LAffaire Princess Lydichka. She was not really a
princess, I suppose, but there was some talk about a royal Georgian
lineage, and then she had such a commanding way. [] A Nazi
convoy was coming down from the hills from somewhere to some-
where, but who would stop and check up? One little auto she spot-
ted and insisted that the man was one of her jailors at Dachau. She
had been a political prisoner for swatting a few of the local Nazis.
Temperament, too, was a crime. But in the rain one could only be
indifferent. Some other time Lyditchtka
Tuesday/Wednesday 5/6 June 1945
Last hours with the princess.
The stillness and quiet going in. The next morning: everybody
was up and around and available as a spectator. We walked down
and out. The ofcers and clerks were milling about. All the cham-
bermaids were out in the hall. The door was locked, and we had to
wait to make the exit. In a word, the affair was conspicuous. I was
slightly embarrassed, Lydia was vastly amused. I winced as her
high heels rapped out in the hallways, she simply delighted in her
proud condent stalk Details. The high heels. The red dress. The
upsweep hairdo. Liebling and Liebchen and liebst du mich. (And Hast
du das in Paris gelernt?) [Did you learn that in Paris?] The last hours.
Saying goodbye. Milytchka wanting to go to bed. The princess being
stern and throwing her out of the room. The poor sleepy girl

TheBerlincafplayedjazz
styledinNewYorkfashions,
andintimacieswerepublicwith
thepaceofParis.
calling from the keyhole and the other side. The princess being
ruthless and brutal, reviling her, and sweetly proceeding to make
love to me. A strange girl, full of violence and tenderness, coarse-
ness and the greatest delicacy. We had both been tired, but if this
was the last night, why then ! Unfavorable circumstances at the
moment (Milly was wailing) (No! No! Were not going to bed, we
only want to talk and be together for a little while, so shut up and
for goodness sake be patient!), but she was still affectionate and
even passionate. There was a ne, striking assurance to her sexual
appetite that was peculiarly her own. She was very simple and direct
about love, which in a real sense is the great mark of sophistication
[Heidelberg,Germany]
Tuesday 30 July 1945
Yesterday: a young man, who looked Jewish, stufng books into
a little briefcase, and under his raincoat you could see the zebra-
striped jacket of the concentration camp, now neat and laundered
So the black days return for a moment.
[Berlin,viaKassel,Gttingen,Braunschweig,
Hannover]
Thursday 16 August Tuesday 21 August 1945
The land bears curious witness to the character of the American
victory. Everywhere the lingering tokens of the Nazi epoch, ignored
by the thoughtlessness of the new regime, which is preoccupied
with every formality of administration except those of signi-
cance and real social content. [] In Mannheim on the corner of
Leibnizstrasse: Nie wieder ein 9 November 1918! [Never again!]
Down the avenue, in even bigger whitewash staring out from the
rubble: Fhrer beehl, wir folgen! [Fhrer, command us and well
follow!] Throughout the area: Only Germany can save Europe, the
victory is inevitable, the struggle is relentless and unending, the
loyalty of the people is undying. [] On the road to Darmstadt: the
huge hakenkreuz of the nsdap Ortsgruppe headquarters And
then the challenges, as it were, of the American sign-painters
This War is Over. No ordnance parts will be issued without a signed
and authorized requisition. Slow Down! European Jaywalkers!
A whole host of adaptations of American highway billboards, coun-
seling the wisdom of cautious driving and the innumerable advan-
tages of the nearby service station []
Into Frankfurt. The Main was a turbulent muddy red and the
sun was brilliant over the city. The Bahnhofplatz was crowded with
pedestrians for all the world oblivious to the devastation which
stretched away But to a point. The ruins cease abruptly. At the next
corner one could pick up a shattered brick of a little house now
gutted and almost reach it stands the IG Farben building, its thou-
sand windows glistening in the noon-day. The military police are
in kid gloves and white scarves and under apparent instructions to
perform as a palace guard for the US headquarters. One was some-
what embarrassed, but as the fullness of the spectacle unfolded
deeply ashamed. Why was this not also broken from the sky, burned
and destroyed and returned to uneven earth? Why should this
have escaped the terrible equality and justice of total tragedy? For a
moment one could almost order its demolition. [] But no. [] In
the end, I feel sure, all the so-called ironies and accidents of War
will piece themselves together! []
The ruins of Berlin. The city is unbelievable, and magnicent
even in its destruction. There is little rubble, and strange how the
impression persists that it is a clean city. The great avenues and
boulevards stretch atly away on a dead level, and there is still
everywhere the sense of immense and palatial buildings, of a great
and systematic metropolis. The thoroughfares were crowded with
pedestrians and vehicles, and the view of massive architecture was
inescapable. You look at Berlin and you see Trafc and Real Estate.
Devastated as it has been Berlin bleibt Berlin [Berlin remains Berlin]
(as one poster remarked, advertising I believe some local musical
comedy) Its vast area has every pattern of shambles. The varying
ruins of Darmstadt, Kassel, Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Munich
could all be set down within the city limits of Berlin and their own
patterns matched. In the north and east ends the buildings are gut-
ted and hopeless and are the very image of Darmstadts ghostliness.
Leipzigerstrasse has the burned-out massiveness of Ludwigstrasse
in Munich, and here and there there are whole areas as twisted and
broken as the stones of Nuremberg. Berlin lies before you like a tor-
tured giant, limp on the wrack, a blinded, mortally wounded Cyclops.
The face of the city is black, its eyes poked and burned out []
Everywhere in Germany there is a certain feeling of age and
patience, and I almost fancied that I was being told: Berlin was
destroyed before, in the Seven Years War of Frederick the Great, in
the Napoleonic campaigns Doch das Leben geht weiter! [But life
goes on!] Cinemas all had lines of anxious movie-goers, the news-
papers were being sold quickly at little and for the most part regular
stands. I noted a half dozen cafs on Potsdamer Strasse, jammed
with soldiers and girls, noisy with music, laughter, the breaking of
glasses (the wine and beer were abominations). The Caf Weber:
lemonade was the favorite, most of the girls were still alone (it was
only nine oclock). The Schwarzer Adler: an American ag was on
display, the music was jazz styled in New York fashions, and the inti-
macies were public with the pace of Paris. [] On the street again a
US trafc sign was nailed up, half covering a Stalin text. The radio
was blaring (afn, Berlin): I learned English just for you and If
theres a knock on your door (knock, knock) its not the Gestapo
GIs were mimicking the German lyrics and humming along,
fondling the girls brashly as the chorus came up again
[Berlin]
[date unknown]
I could not help thinking as I sat in the Nuremberg courtroom
and heard the Tribunals sentences pronounced is it really so
far fetched to visualize another crowded dock, rather more mixed
nationally than the ill-fated 22, confronted with their enormities by
the prosecutors and judges of a new band of Conquerors? Streicher
said before he was hanged that one day the Russians would hang all
of us. The likelihood is equally as strong that one day the Russians
might all be hanged. But in any event the great irony of history will
probably be that Germans will be sitting in on the new hangings,
whoever knots the ropes. No cry is as popular among the German
masses today as An den Galgen! [To the gallows!] The Conquerors,
who came in the name of free and civilized ideals, have done noth-
ing so well as the perpetuation of the lynch-spirit in this deca-
dent land.
Tuesday
To the Friedrichstrasse Staatsoper (elegantly rebuilt) for the pre-
miere of Germanys rst postwar motion-picture production and the
rst native anti-Nazi lm. Apparently all of Berlins high society is
there. I see monocles, silk top hats, mink coats, editors and critics
from all the local papers, intelligence agents of each of the powers.
The lm is inauspiciously introduced by some grim Soviet-sector
bureaucrat Die Mrder Sind Unter Uns (The Murderers Are Among
Us) had surprisingly little line of didacticism. It is a sincere, terribly
earnest German story of the conict between a war veteran and a
war criminal in the post-Nazi ruins of Berlin. It is interesting as a
German canvas of life in the devastated city and signicant as the
rst attempt of the Germans to confront their own past. [] The
soldier, spiritually burdened and psychologically obsessed by the
memories of front inhumanities, loses himself in the Berlin ruins.
The love of a simple, hard-working German girl (who had been in a
concentration camp, of course) slowly rescues him from drink and
promiscuity. The reunion with the ofcer (who had ordered the liq-
uidation of men, women, and children on Christmas Eve, of course)
enables him to recover himself completely. He hunts down the of-
cer, who is now a genial family man busy converting his factory from
steel helmets to kitchen pots for the Auf bau. He is tempted to kill
him but nds higher release in denying revenge and leaving the
poor evil man cowering in the shadows. []
And what a shock it was when the lights came on and the audi-
ence led out to the rubble of Friedrichstrasse. The movie seemed
to be make-believe illusion, an escapist world, when contrasted to
the real, unarty, unsentimental, insoluble tragedy of actual Berlin
streets. The Russian generals drove off in their limousines. Wilhelm
Pieck and Walter Ulbricht came out of their special box, beaming as
always at the forward progress of the peoples movement. Some
American lieutenant gave owers to the lovely female star and
escorted her out briskly to his shining omgus sedan. People looked
for Ernst Borcher, the male lead as anti-Nazi hero, but he was not to
be found; he was languishing in jail for having failed to admit that
he has been a storm trooper.
If your pictures arent good, you arent close enough.

Robert Capa understood war as only the best soldier could. Though unquestion-
ably one of Americas most celebrated combat photojournalists, the Hungarian-
born photographer (ne Andr Friedmann) was first granted US citizenship at the
close of World War II, after joining American convoys in 1942 as an enemy alien.
Capas fascination with battle and unflinching dedication took him back to Europe,
where he captured on film Nazi Germany, the horrors of Normandy, and the lib-
eration of France. After founding the photo agency Magnum and announcing his
retirement from frontline reporting, he took up an assignment for LIFE in Hanoi,
where he was killed by a land mine in 1954. The narrative power of his pictures
and their straightforward aesthetic have made them indispensable in both world-
political history as well as in the history of the photographic medium.
Paris, August 26, 1944
Celebrating the liberation of the city
Tacita Dean, from Die Regimentstochter, 2005. (36 opera and theater
programs, framed)
O
n April 30, 1945, the day
of Hitlers suicide, zero hour
in modern German history,
the 103rd Infantry and Tenth
Armored Divisions of the US Army rum-
bled into the Alpine resort of Garmisch-
Partenkirchen, which the war had hardly
touched. Two hundred Allied bombers had
been prepared to lay waste to the town and
its environs, but the strike was called off
at the behest of a surrendering German
soldier. Early in the morning a security
detachment turned into the driveway of
a Garmisch villa, intending to use it as a
command post. When the senior ofcer,
Lieutenant Milton Weiss, went inside the
house an old man came downstairs to meet
him. I am Richard Strauss, he said, the
composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome.
Strauss studied the soldiers face for signs
of sympathy. Weiss, who had played piano
in a band at Jewish resorts in the Catskills,
nodded his head in recognition. Strauss
went on to recount his experiences in the
war, pointedly mentioning the tribulations
of his Jewish relatives. Weiss decided to
install his post elsewhere. At 11 am on the
same day, a squad of jeeps came up the drive,
these led by Major John Kramers, from
the 103rd Divisions military-government
branch. Kramers told the family that they
had 15 minutes to evacuate. Strauss walked
out to the majors jeep, holding documents
that declared him an honorary citizen of
Morgantown, West Virginia, together with
part of the manuscript of Rosenkavalier.
I am Richard Strauss, the composer, he
said. Kramerss face lit up; he was a Strauss
fan. A precious Off Limits sign was
placed on the lawn. In the days that followed,
Strauss posed for photographs, played the
Rosenkavalier waltzes on the piano, and
smiled bemusedly as soldiers inspected his
statue of Beethoven and asked who it was.
If they ask one more time, he muttered,
Im telling them its Hitlers father.
All over Europe, young veterans were
emerging from the rubble of the war into
adulthood. Among them were several future
leaders of the postwar musical scene, and
they would be indelibly marked by what they
had experienced in adolescence. Karlheinz
Stockhausen, who would become one of the
most inuential and controversial compos-
ers of the postwar period, was the son of a
spiritually tortured Nazi party member who
went to the eastern front and never returned.
His mother was conned for many years to
a sanatorium and killed in the Nazi eutha-
nasia program. Hans Werner Henze trained
as a radio operator for Panzer battalions
and spent the rst part of 1945 riding aim-
lessly around the ruined landscape. Bernd
Alois Zimmermann, future composer of the
landmark opera Die Soldaten, fought on the
front lines of Hitlers ill-fated invasion of the
Soviet Union. Luciano Berio was conscript-
ed into the army of Mussolinis Republic of
Sal and nearly blew off his right hand with
a gun that he did not know how to use.
In July 1945 the young English com-
poser Benjamin Britten, who had just
scored a triumph in London with his opera
Peter Grimes, accompanied the violinist
Yehudi Menuhin on a brief tour of defeated
Germany. The two men visited the con-
centration camp at Bergen-Belsen and
performed for a crowd of former inmates.
Stupeed by what he saw, Britten proceeded
to write a cycle of songs on the Holy Sonnets
of John Donne, the most spiritually scour-
ing poetry he could nd. On August 6 he
set to music Sonnet xiv, which begins,
Batter my heart, three persond God.
Earlier the same day, the rst operational
atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. Robert
Oppenheimer, the head of the American
nuclear program, was spellbound by the
same Donne poem and evidently had it in
mind when he named the site of the rst
atomic test Trinity. On August 19 Britten
nished the cycle by setting Donnes sonnet
Death be not proud. Above a rising scale,
the singer declaims the words And death
shall be no more; xates for nine long beats
on the word death; and, nally, over a
clanging dominant-tonic cadence, thunders,
Thou shalt die.
In 1945 Germany was a primitive soci-
ety such as Europe had not known since
the Middle Ages. The former citizens of
Hitlers thousand-year Reich were living
a hand-to-mouth existence, scavenging
for food, drinking from drainpipes, cook-
ing over wood res, living in the base-
ments of destroyed houses or in hand-built
trailers and cabins. In 1948 a glamorous
young American musician named Leonard
Bernstein arrived in Munich to conduct
a concert and reported back home: The
people starve, struggle, rob, beg for bread.
Wages are often paid in cigarettes. Tipping
is all in cigarettes. It is all misery. Millions
of prisoners of war lived in camps; many
more millions roamed the roads, having
ed the Soviet occupation in the east or
been expelled from neighboring countries
by policies of ethnic cleansing. No sooner
had Hitler made his exit than Joseph Stalin
replaced him as a threat. The collective
might of Anglo-American industry, which
had recently been used to obliterate one
German city after another, became the
engine of reconstruction. Germany would
be reinvented as a democratic, American-
style society, a bulwark against the Soviets.
Part of that grand plan was a cultural policy
of denazication and reeducation, and it
would have a decisive effect on postwar
music.
Germany and Austria were divided into
American, British, French, and Soviet zones.
The head of the American occupation

Zero Hour
The American Reorientation of
German Music, 19451949
by Alex Ross
Psychological warfare meant the pursuit of
military ends by non-military means: the promotion of
jazz, American composition, international contemporary
music, and other sounds that could be used to degrade
the concept of Aryan cultural supremacy.
the Ofce of the Military Government,
United States, or omgus, for short was
an even-handed, incorruptible, and stag-
geringly efcient man named Lucius Clay.
Unlike those who have governed more
recent American occupations, Clay under-
stood his responsibilities as a caretaker of
German culture, and he had a clear vision of
its future. What made him interesting was
that his background combined strict West
Point training with a whiff of New Deal
idealism; in the Army Corps of Engineers
he had coordinated building projects with
the wpa, and an early evaluation called him
inclined to be bolshevistic. The military
governor of Germany wanted to reshape and
lift up Germany as Roosevelt had reshaped
and lifted up America. At a conference in
Berchtesgaden, near Hitlers old redoubt,
Clay said, We are trying to free the German
mind, and to make his heart value that free-
dom so greatly that it will beat and die for
that freedom and for no other purpose.
The project of freeing the German
mind was called reorientation. The term
originated in the Psychological Warfare
Division of the Supreme Headquarters of
the Allied Expeditionary Force, which was
led by Brigadier General Robert McClure.
Psychological warfare meant the pursuit of
military ends by non-military means, and in
the case of music it meant the promotion of
jazz, American composition, international
contemporary music, and other sounds
that could be used to degrade the concept of
Aryan cultural supremacy.
With the coming of omgus, Psycho-
logical Warfare evolved into Information
Control, which took responsibility for all
cultural activity in the occupied areas. In
keeping with the reorientation paradigm,
military and civilian experts were brought
in to guide extant organizations and encour-
age new, forward-looking ones. Many in
Information Controls Music Branches had
thorough training and a progressive outlook
on contemporary music. The Mississippi-
born pianist Carlos Moseley, who had stud-
ied alongside Leonard Bernstein, arranged
for one of Information Controls triumphs
Bernsteins startlingly successful conducting
engagement in Munich in May of 1948. It led
some experienced concertgoers to exclaim
that the young American knew German
music better than the Germans. In a letter
home Bernstein exulted: It means so much
for the American military Government,
since music is the Germans last stand in
their master race claim, and for the rst
time its been exploded in Munich.
On arriving in Munich, Moseley was
asked to look into that whole thing going
on in Beulah. By this his senior ofcial
meant Bayreuth, where ideas for a possible
revival of the Wagner festival were circulat-
ing. Moseley went to Bayreuth and walked
up the Green Hill to the Festspielhaus. The
roof was leaking, and water was dripping
into the amphitheater. Afterward, Moseley
dropped in at Haus Wahnfried, Wagners
home, which had also been damaged by
Allied bombs. Winifred Wagner, the widow
of Wagners son Siegfried, had had to suf-
fer the indignity of a denazication hearing
and watched helplessly as the meisters the-
ater was used for Italian opera, light enter-
tainment, and other desecrations. Soldiers
played jazz on the Wahnfried piano, and
donuts were baked in the festival restaurant.
The Festspielhaus had even served as a bar-
racks for African-American troops a turn
of events that Winifred noted in her recol-
lections with four exclamation points of hor-
ror. She gave Moseley a tour of the ruins and
showed him the meisters grave. More than
ve decades later, Moseley remembered
the scene clearly: She began talking about
Unser Blitzkrieg our Blitzkrieg and
reminiscing fondly of the Hitler period.
I just walked away from her, feeling a de-
nite terror in my veins.
O
mguss music policies are
summed up in a fascinating
document titled Music Control
Instruction No. 1, which can be
found at the National Archives in College
Park, Maryland. It is above all essential,
this memo says, that we should not give the
impression of trying to regiment culture in
the Nazi manner. Instead, German musi-
cal life must be inuenced by positive rather
than by negative means, i.e., by encouraging
the music which we think benecial and
crowding out that which we think danger-
ous. Only two men occupied the danger-
ous category: Richard Strauss and Hans
Ptzner. We must not allow such compos-
ers to be built up by special concerts devot-
ed entirely to their works or conducted by
them. With this two-pronged approach, the
document concludes, We shall have little
difculty in giving a positive international
direction to German musical life. The
anonymous author also agged Sibelius,
who was deemed likely to arouse hazard-
ous feelings of Nordic supremacy; hence,
Finlandia was banned in Germany.
If not Strauss, Ptzner, and Sibelius,
which composers would be acceptable in
the new Germany? The rst order of busi-
ness was to restore the repertory music
that the Nazis had banned on racial and
ideological grounds. One early strategy had
mixed results, as a report from August 1945
shows: The rule of having to perform at
least one verboten work on each program
has led to a stereotyped pattern of starting
orchestral concerts with a Mendelssohn
overture. The Mendelssohn situation has
become critical, ridiculous, and urgent. (The
author of this memo, Edward Kilenyi, was
the son of Gerschwins theory teacher.)
Music Control also placed great empha-
sis on American music, promoting major
works of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and
Virgil Thomson together with such dubious
fare as Robert McBrides Strawberry Jam
Overture. Censorship departments monitor-
ing the German mail reported that on the
whole American music was going down
well, although symphonic works had less
traction than popular songs. I hear such
nice American music over the radio, wrote
a woman named Luise Kraus to her friend
George C. Avery of Philadelphia. I really
like it very much; I do not know why [we]
were always told that it amounts to nothing.
The fact is, that our music is heavier and
everlasting, but your songs and hits are so
jolly and light.
The extroverted, jazz-tinged music of
the Weimar era, as embodied in Weills
Threepenny Opera, had been condemned by
the Nazis; it might have qualied as safe
for the new Germany. By this time, though,
Weill was entrenched as a composer on
Broadway and uninterested in returning
to Germany; his premature death in 1950
made the matter moot. Other young left-
The entire Weill-ish school of composition, whether
because of its leftist leanings or because of its daring
synthesis of classical and popular styles, figured little in
the calculations of Music Control.
ist composers who had thrived in 1920s
Berlin the likes of Hanns Eisler and Paul
Dessau were evidently ruled out because
of their Communist associations. The entire
Weill-ish school of song-driven composi-
tion, whether because of its leftist lean-
ings or because of its daring synthesis of
classical and popular styles, gured little
in the calculations of Music Control. The
Munich-born composer and pedagogue Carl
Orff, on the other hand, prospered, even
though Carmina Burana had been a hit with
Goebbels. Orff misleadingly presented him-
self as an associate of the anti-Nazi resis-
tance, and omgus gave him a clean ideolog-
ical bill of health.
The Americans placed highest con-
dence in musical progressives who were
free from both Nazi and Communist
afliations. The Munich composer Karl
Amadeus Hartmann, who had dedicated
his symphonic poem Miserae to the victims
of Dachau in 1935, was extolled by Music
Control as a man of the utmost integrity
who possesses a musical outlook which is
astonishingly sound and fresh for a man
who has survived the nazi [sic] occupation.
Not long after the end of the war, Hartmann
organized a series of Musica Viva concerts
in Munich, with emphasis on once verbo-
ten modernists. The omgus le dealing
with Musica Viva is marked Reorientation
Project No. 1. The material is held in a stiff
gray folder that had evidently been appropri-
ated from a Nazi ling cabinet; under the
American scrawl is a watermark reading
nsdap. Alas, Munich music lovers did not
ock to Hartmanns series. The Bavarian
music ofcer John Evarts wrote, They are
extremely shy of any sort of art created in an
idiom of a period later than, say, 1900. One
event drew fewer than thirty people. Carlos
Moseley decided to use omgus money to
purchase 350 tickets himself and then dis-
tributed them to young musicians and com-
posers. Thus, the American occupation was
not only providing funds for the concerts
but also lling the seats an exceptionally
generous form of patronage.
The city of Darmstadt, most of which
had been leveled in an incendiary bomb-
ing raid in September 1944, hosted another
American-supported, modern-music experi-
ment. The music critic Wolfgang Steinecke
proposed to set up a summertime institute
so that young composers could get to know
the music the Nazis had banned. Steinecke
persuaded the local city government to let
him use the Kranichstein Hunting Castle,
a picturesque pile outside of town, and the
American authorities warmly backed the
venture. Everett Helm, the music ofcer for
the Hesse region and a composer himself,
proudly noted that at Darmstadt contem-
porary music only is taught and performed
and then only the more advanced variety.
R. Strauss and J. Sibelius do not come into
consideration. Hindemith was designated
a natural starting point, but Schoenberg
quickly emerged as the shining beacon for
young German composers.
Although attempts to bring Schoenberg
to Darmstadt in person failed, his spirit
was everywhere during the 1949 summer
season. There were performances of the
Five Pieces for Orchestra, the Variations
for Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the
Fourth String Quartet, and the String
Trio. Remarkably, the Trio was featured
in an omgus-sponsored series devoted to
American chamber works, alongside quar-
tets by Charles Ives and Wallingford Riegger.
Some ofcial observers were uneasy
about the direction that Darmstadt was tak-
ing. Colonel Ralph A. Burns, the chief of the
Cultural Affairs Branch of the Education &
Cultural Relations Division of omgus,

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

Ross here gives Journal readers a pre-
view of The Rest is Noise, forthcom-
ing from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
in fall 2007. The author is a music
journalist at the New Yorker.
WilmerHale ist eine der weltweit fhrenden Wirtschafssozietten mit ber 1.000 Anwlten in Europa, Asien
und den USA. In Deutschland bieten wir in unseren Bros in Berlin umfassende Beratung im privaten und
fentlichen Wirtschafsrecht.
Mit unserer Fokussierung auf regulierte Industrien und Technologiebranchen untersttzen wir unsere nationalen
und internationalen Mandanten erfolgreich bei der Erreichung ihrer unternehmerischen Ziele. Wir bieten mehr
als reine juristische Beratung: Mit unserem Public Policy Team setzen wir die Tradition unserer Soziett an der
Schnittstelle von Recht, Wirtschaf und Politik erfolgreich fort.

Aus diesem Grund arbeiten wir eng mit der American Academy in Berlin zusammen. Wie diese fhlen wir uns
dem Ziel verpfichtet, die Beziehungen zwischen den USA und Deutschland in Recht, Politik und Gesellschaf,
Wissenschaf und Kunst weiter zu strken und zu frdern. Ganz im Sinne von Lloyd N. Cutler, einem der Mitbe-
grnder unserer Soziett und Berater mehrerer amerikanischer Prsidenten. Sein rechtliches und gesellschafliches
Engagement wird uns auch in Zukunf ein Vorbild sein. Das seit 2004 vergebene Lloyd N. Cutler Fellowship der
American Academy steht fr diese Tradition.
Lloyd N. Cutler
Mitbegrnder unserer Soziett
wiIerhaIe.co | Wiluer Cutler Fickering hale and orr LLF ist eine eingetragene Fartnerschaftsgesellschaft nach deu Fecht des Staates elaware, uSA.
F L L F F 0 N A E L A h 0 N l F E K C l F F E L T u C F E M L l W
Guest Appearances
Notes from the Spring Program
From lectures to luncheons, from recitals to readings,
the Academys spring schedule offers a plethora of
programs that complement lectures by the current class
of fellows. Here we present a timeline of those additional
events in and around the Hans Arnhold Center.
A
January
The Future of the
Six- Part y Talks
Christopher R. Hill, Assistant Secretary
of State for East Asian and Pacic
Affairs, US Department of State; mod-
erated by Richard C. Holbrooke, Vice
Chairman, Perseus Consulting LLC, and
Chairman of the Academy 1/17 1/17
Current Global Economic
Trends: Opportuni ties and
Pi tfalls
John Snow, former US Secretary of the
Treasury, and Chairman, Cerberus
Capital Management
1/09 1/09 American Academy Lecture Reci tal
Poli tics, Religion, and Art in
New American Opera
Scott Wheeler, Composer and Conductor,
Emerson College, Boston, and Distinguished
Visitor at the Academy
1/18 1/18
In 2005 the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung set to paper
what the international nance
community had long known.
With his combination of assertive-
ness, diplomatic savvy, and inter-
national experience, the paper
wrote, Kurt Viermetz ranks
among Germanys most outstand-
ing bankers. For many years
Viermetzs business cards also
attested to his leading position in
the US nancial community.
Indeed, Viermetz seems to
have lived the majority of his
professional life with one foot in
Europe and the other in the US.
Through the 1990s he held a vice
chairmanship at Manhattan-
based JPMorgan; from 1996 to
2003 he led the international
committee of the New York Stock
Exchange. The only German
of his generation still playing a
major role in the global nance
world, Viermetz embodies the
ideas and goals of transatlanti-
cism, ideals that are evident not
only in his professional practice
but also in his private patronage
of the American Academy in
Berlin.
Just as the name Kurt
Viermetz continues to resound
in nancial circles, the couple
Kurt and Felicitas Viermetz have
long stood for unagging private
philanthropy in the arts and edu-
cation, from restoring exquisite
Bavarian churches to bringing
the library of former Weimar
Republic Reichskanzler Heinrich
Brning to the University of
Augsburg.
When Richard C. Holbrooke
conceived of an institution to
strengthen German-American
relations, Viermetz contributed
the very rst donation and has
Gifts of Gratitude
Financial Fellowship in Honor of Kurt Viermetz
remained a staunch and gener-
ous backer. As a founding mem-
ber of the Academys Executive
Committee, he has helped men-
tor the Academys unique mix
of scholars, artists, and policy
professionals and continues to
forward its spirit of independence
and non-partisanship.
To honor Viermetz for
his unwavering support, the
Academy has created a short-term
fellowship in his name. The capi-
tal endowment of 500,000 Euros
will annually bring one distin-
guished gure from the world
of US nance, economics, or
business to the German capital
for one to two weeks of lectures,
meetings, and roundtables with
government ofcials, academics,
and the media.
Generous support for the
fellowship came from friends
such as the Arnhold and Kellen
families, as well as from an
impressive group of two dozen
JPMorgan employees, who ben-
eted from Viermetzs inimitable
mentorship.
r. m.
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Climate Change, Oil, and
Nuclear Proliferation Issues:
Profi table and Business- Led
Solutions
Amory B. Lovins, Chief Executive
Ofcer, Rocky Mountain Institute, and
C.V. Starr Distinguished Visitor at the
Academy 1/30 1/30
Foreign Policy Luncheon

Anti- Americanisms in World
Poli tics: Varieties of Reacting
to America
Robert O. Keohane, Professor of
International Affairs, Princeton University
2/23 2/23
The Regional Implications of the
Shi a Revi val in the Middle East
Vali Nasr, Professor of Middle East and South
Asia Politics, Naval Postgraduate School;
Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies,
Council on Foreign Relations; and C.V. Starr
Distinguished Visitor at the Academy 2/27 2/27
The Roman Empire and the
Cl ash of Ci vilizations
Glen Bowersock, Professor Emeritus
of Ancient History, Institute for
Advanced Study, and Distinguished
3/08 3/08
How Revolutions in Mili tary
Affairs Have Shaped Our World
Max Boot, Senior Fellow for National
Security Studies, Council on Foreign
Relations, and C.V. Starr Distinguished
Visitor at the Academy 3/13 3/13
Foreign Policy Forum
Of Power and Destiny: The My th
of American Isol ationism
Robert Kagan, Senior Associate, Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace; and
Constanze Stelzenmller, Director, German
Marshall Fund of the United States, Berlin 2/21 2/21
February
American Academy
Di alogue
Robert De Niro Meets
Volker Schlndorff
2/11 2/11
March
Academys independent selec-
tion committee, Geyer is an ideal
candidate to act as a full-time
advisor from the halls of aca-
deme. The native German has
taught history at the University
of Chicago for some twenty
years, exploring in his writings
religion, the theory and politics
of history, globalization, and
the history of twentieth-century
Germany. The Guggenheim
Fellowship winners 2002 book
A Shattered Past: Reconstructing
German Histories, co-authored
with Konrad Jarausch and recent-
ly released in German transla-
tion, quickly emerged as a para-
digm for understanding recent
German history. Accordingly,
an international jury named it
best historical book in 2003 for
the English edition and again in
2006 for the German edition. In
addition to his extensive studies
of European war, civil war, and
genocide, Geyers intellectual
passions extend to the history
of humanitarian movements,
leading him to cofound the
University of Chicagos Human
Rights Program.
Stefan von Holtzbrinck
joins the Academy as one of
the boards youngest members,
replacing his brother Dieter.
He has headed the Georg von
Holtzbrinck media empire since
2001 as president and chairman
of the executive board; in early
2007 he also took the corpora-
tions newspaper subset under
his wing. As shepherd of some
of the countrys most important
print publications from the
economic daily Handelsblatt to
the multifaceted weekly Die Zeit
Holtzbrinck stands rmly on the
foundation of the conglomerates
strong presence in print media,
which has been characterized by
very high standards. He is also
devoting more attention to online
media, projecting that his com-
pany will soon earn one fourth of
its prots from internet-related
business. The international out-
t, which parents publishing
houses like Britains Palgrave
Macmillian, Americas Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt,
and Picador, and Germanys
S. Fischer and Rowohlt, sees the
web as an opportunity, particu-
larly in its educational and scien-
tic branches. As the Academy
reconceives its own internet pres-
ence, Holtzbrincks commitment
to the Academy is both fortunate
and timely.
Since taking the wheel of
German tire-maker Continental
in 2001, Manfred Wennemer
has made headlines as quickly
he has slashed the companys
costs. The chairman of the
executive board has not been shy
At its November 2006 gather-
ing in New York, the Academys
board of trustees enthusiasti-
cally welcomed three new mem-
bers: Michael Geyer, Stefan
von Holtzbrinck, and Manfred
Wennemer.
Professor Michael Geyer
has been closely tied to the
Academy since taking up the
DaimlerChrysler Fellowship
in the spring of 2004 and is
the rst alum to join the board.
After serving two years on the
Trustees on Board
Introducing Michael Geyer, Stefan von Holtzbrinck,
and Manfred Wennemer
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Baden-Wrt temberg Seminar

of the American Academy in Berlin
Inaugural Ceremony
Richard C. Holbrooke, Chairman of the Academy
Co-hosted by the Staatsministerium
of Baden-Wrttemberg
Location: Neues Schlo, Stuttgart
4/25 4/25 American Academy Conversation
Indi a and Its Futures
Sunil Khilnani, Starr Foundation Professor, Director of the South
Asia Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University, and Fellow,
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President
and Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
Introduction by Meera Shankar, Ambassador of the Republic of India
4/01 4/01
April
Inaugural Richard von Weizscker Lecture
Transatl antic Rel ations at a Crossroad: America and
Europe in a Four- Speed World
James D. Wolfensohn, Chairman, Wolfensohn & Company LLC;
former President, World Bank Group; and Richard von Weizscker Distinguished
Welcoming remarks by Horst Khler, President of the Federal Republic of Germany
Location: Schloss Bellevue 4/24 4/24
in pursuing his goals stream-
lining operations, diversifying,
and strengthening the company
against global competition
which has boosted stockholders
condence even while turning
traditional European business
practice on its head. Wennemers
initiatives, quickly imitated
by other German companies,
were recently credited with giv-
ing Europes largest economy
a new competitive edge by the
International Herald Tribune.
Among these forward-looking
maneuvers was the 2006 pur-
chase of Motorolas automotive
electronics division, a move that
has led not only to the creation
of a standard-setting safety
system but also to an elevated
corporate presence in the US.
With over two-thirds of some
80,000 employees working out-
side of Germany, Wennemers
company is dedicated to building
an international-friendly busi-
ness even against the cries of
German laborers who bemoan
the companys shift abroad. We
need the best Americans, the
best Chinese, the best Indians,
he has said, but we will never
[attract them] if they sense
they are second-class citizens
within Continental. It is this
eye for the future and this
enthusiasm for broader hori-
zons that Wennemer lends
to the American Academys
mission.
r. m.
This springs l aunching of
the Berthold Leibinger Fellowship
at the Academy seems the inevi-
table communion of kindred
forces. In his lifelong commitment
not only to economics and science
but also to literature and the arts,
Berthold Leibinger personies the
Academys purpose. The media
often highlights his legendary
presence in the world of busi-
ness. Over 27 years at the Trumpf
Corporation, he steered the trans-
formation of a mid-sized business
into the worlds leading high-tech
corporation and was the impetus
behind numerous awards for inno-
vation and fairness in the indus-
trial arena. Yet Leibingers true
love lies in learning itself, regard-
less of discipline. Though visible
in his chairing of the Schiller
Museum and the International
Bach Academy, his passion for the
arts and belles lettres is perhaps
most poignantly expressed by the
sweeping collection of his favor-
ite poems and literature that his
wife Doris published for a recent
birthday. Indeed, inherent to his
devotion to erudition is an impulse
to share it with others, one illus-
trated by many positions of eco-
nomic and political counselorship
and best typied by the Leibinger
Foundation, which supports scien-
tic, cultural, and religious under-
takings across Germany.
If advancing this unmitigated
love of learning can be viewed as
his lifes work, his dynamic daugh-
ters might be counted as two of his
greatest successes. Regine, an archi-
tect and professor in Berlin and at
Harvard, has been a trustee of the
Academy for the past two years and
an advocate of its scholarly func-
tion since its inception. His older
daughter Nicola, who received her
doctorate with a study of Erich
Kstners late works, is now acting
ceo at Trumpf. As chairwoman
of the Leibinger Foundation, the
benefactor of the new prize, she
now joins her sister and father as an
ofcial partner of the Academy. The
charitys generous commitment
will secure a semester-long award
for excellence in the liberal arts for
the next ve years. Writer Geoffrey
Wolff inaugurated the fellowship
at a dinner on the Wannsee in
Berthold Leibingers honor.
w. b.
An Altruistic Legacy
Berthold Leibinger Establishes a Fellowship
in the Humanities
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Dinner Roundtable
A View from the Eye of the Storm:
Terror and Reason in the
Middle East
Haim Harari, Chairman of the Board,
Davidson Institute of Science Education,
Weizmann Institute of Science 4/12 4/12
Who Controls the Capi tal?
Resistance to Integration
in Europe
Adam Posen, Senior Fellow, Peterson
Institute for International Economics,
and Alumnus of the Academy
4/19 4/19
Breakpoint
Richard A. Clarke, Chairman,
Good Harbor Consulting LLC, and
former chief counterterrorism
adviser to the US National Security
Council; moderated by Otto Schily,
former German Federal Minister
of the Interior 3/19 3/19
Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold Lecture

Remembrance Responsibili t y Engagement
Sara Bloomeld, Director, United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum; in conversation with Michael
Naumann, former State Minister for Culture and Media
On the occasion of the exhibition Deadly Medicine
Location: Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden 5/10 5/10
Iraq, Afghanistan, and American
Mili tary Transformation
Stephen Biddle, Senior Fellow for Defense
Policy, Council on Foreign Relations,
and C.V. Starr Distinguished Visitor at
the Academy
5/14 5/14
May
Fri tz Stern Lecture
American- European Vistas.
Wi th a Touch of Irony
Wolf Lepenies, Permanent Fellow and
Rector Emeritus, Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin
5/08 5/08
Internet Deliberation and Internet
Markets (or Hayek vs. Habermas)
Cass Sunstein, Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished
Service Professor of Jurisprudence, University of
Chicago, and Distinguished Visitor at the Academy;
in conversation with Lawrence Lessig, C. Wendell and
Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, Stanford Law
School, and JPMorgan Fellow at the Academy 5/21 5/21
The Academy announces the
start of its Baden-Wrttemberg
Seminar, a new program that will
send fellows and Academy visitors
to partner institutions through-
out the German state in the spirit
of scholarly exchange. Initially
proposed by Berthold Leibinger,
a Stuttgart-based industrialist
and the founder of a new fellow-
ship at the Hans Arnhold Center,
the enterprise reects the rich
philanthropic and intellectual
relationship that the Academy has
built with Baden-Wrttemberg
through companies and institu-
tions like the Bosch Foundation,
DaimlerChrysler, Holtzbrinck
Verlag, Literaturhaus Stuttgart,
and the Schiller Museum. The
project also embodies the col-
laborative impulse at the core of
the Academys mission; it will
be undertaken in partnership
Academic Ambassadors
The Academy Inaugurates
the Baden-Wrttemberg Seminar
with the Heidelberg Center for
American Studies, which has
received generous support from
the Baden-Wrttemberg Ministry
of Science, Research, and the
Arts to coordinate guest events at
various universities throughout
the region. While the Academy
has facilitated excursions beyond
Berlin for its visitors in the past,
the arrangement marks the
rst instance in which Academy
guests will be sent to Baden-
Wrttemberg in an ofcial capac-
ity. Academy Program Director
Philipp Albers welcomes the suc-
cess of the initiative as evidence
of the Academys broadening
prominence within Germany, not-
The Academy looks forward
to welcoming an outstanding
group of writers and scholars to
the Wannsee this fall. Novelist
Gary Shteyngart will be
the Citigroup Fellow. Journalist
Diane McWhorter, biographer
Robert Caro, and syndicated
columnist Richard Reeves
will each take up Holtzbrinck
Fellowships. Anne Carson, poet
and classicist of the University
of Michigan, will hold the Anna-
Maria Kellen Fellowship.
Sneak Preview
The Fall 2007 Fellows
University of Pennsylvania
musicologist Mark Butler
and art historian Sylvester
Ogbechie of the University
of California, Santa Barbara
will arrive in September as
DaimlerChrysler Fellows. Sidra
Stich, an independent scholar
of architecture, has been named
Coca-Cola Fellow.
The falls historians are
Emory Universitys Elizabeth
Goodstein, recipient of the
German Transatlantic Program
Berlin Prize, and George H.W.
Bush/Axel Springer Fellow
Jeffrey Herf of the University
of Maryland. Joining the Academy
as a Bosch Fellow in Public Policy
is Jason Johnston, direc-
tor of the Program on Law, the
Environment, and Economics at
the University of Pennsylvania
Law School.
Fellowship appointments
were made by an indepen-
dent selection committee that
included Stephen Burbank,
University of Pennsylvania Law
School (chair); Joel Conarroe,
Guggenheim Foundation;
Michael Geyer, University
of Chicago; Dagmar Herzog,
cuny Graduate Center;
Michael Jennings, Princeton
University; Jerry Muller,
Catholic University of America;
Kim Scheppele, Princeton
University; Amit y Shl aes,
Bloomberg News; Richard
Sieburth, New York University;
Ronald Steel, University
of Southern California; and
David Wellbery, University of
Chicago.
Serving on the art jury were
Berlin-based photographer
Thomas Demand, curators
Peter Gal assi of the Museum
of Modern Art, Brian Wallis
of the International Center of
Photography, and Sylvia Wolf
of the Whitney Museum of
American Art.
ing, The Academys cultural and
intellectual importance has spread
well outside the borders of Berlin.
Chairman of the Academys board
Richard C. Holbrooke delivered
the inaugural Baden-Wrttemberg
lecture, entitled The World Crisis:
An American Perspective, in
Stuttgart as the Journal went to
press. Set against the springtime
backdrop of the Neues Schlo,
the event was hosted by Minister
President Gnther Oettinger and
introduced by Leibinger. The
meeting offered a ne precedent
for a program that promises
vibrant intellectual exchange for
many years to come.
w. b.
The Great Transformation
in Evolution: A Story Wri t ten
in Fossils and DNA
Neil Shubin, Professor and Chair,
Department of Organismal Biology and
Anatomy, University of Chicago, and
Distinguished Visitor at the Academy
4/25 4/25
American Academy Lecture
A Conversation wi th
Christopher Cox
Chairman, US Securities and
Exchange Commission 4/26 4/26
Narrati ves of American Art
Conference Keynote Speech
When Was Modern Art?
Hans Belting, Art Historian and
Director, International Research
Center for Cultural Studies, Vienna 5/24 5/24
President Reagans Tear
Down This Wall Speech
Twent y Years Later
George P. Schultz, former Secretary of State,
Secretary of Labor, and Secretary of the
Treasury; and Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford
Distinguished Fellow, Hoover Institution
6/05 6/05
American Academy Di alogue
Education and the Future of
Cl assical Music
Lewis Kaplan, Professor for Violin and
Chamber Music, The Juilliard School;
and Christhard Gssling, Rector,
Hochschule fr Musik Hanns
Eisler Berlin 6/10 6/10
Stephen Kellen Lecture
Whose Culture Is It: Museums
and the Collecting of
Antiqui ties
Philippe de Montebello, Director,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
6/18 6/18
American Academy
Di alogue
Lou Reed, Singer and Songwriter;
in conversation with Norman
Pearlstine, Senior Advisor, The
Carlyle Group, and President of
the Academy 6/27 6/27
Laws of Fear. Beyond the
Precautionary Principle
Cass Sunstein, Karl N. Llewellyn
Distinguished Service Professor
of Jurisprudence, University of
Chicago, and Distinguished Visitor
at the Academy
5/22 5/22
June
Beginning in the 2006
2007 academic year longstanding
Academy friends Richard Gaul
and Bernhard von der Planitz
have formalized their association
with the institution by donating
their time and expertise as Senior
Counselors.
Global companies such as
bmw stand daily in the uncom-
promising light of media scrutiny,
and rarely does the communica-
tions chief of a major corpora-
tion survive more than one or
two of its ceos. Richard Gaul
shaped bmws public image dur-
ing the tenure of ve ceos over
24 years, leaving Bavaria only
recently for a villa in Potsdam
and an equally demanding retire-
ment counseling colleagues and
companies across Germany. To
say that his style is distinctive
is an understatement, and this
bold yet professional noncon-
formity helped maintain the
automakers awless position in
the public eye and in the mar-
ket. Upon his retirement in 2006,
Der Tagesspiegel rightfully called
him an exception in the eld
of communications and press,
underscoring his staunch inde-
pendence. Little wonder that the
Federation of German Industries
and the Academy courted the
maven of corporate media to
mentor the change and commu-
nications of their fast-growing
institutions. Every conversation
with Richard Gaul inspires a ood
of insights and new ideas, says
Academy Director Gary Smith.
He is an enormously gifted com-
munications strategist and will
pursue any goal or idea in which
he believes like our project
on Atlantic partnerships in the
Sddeutsche Zeitung with relent-
less determination.
Bernhard von der Planitz, for-
mer German Consul General in
New York and two-time Chief of
Protocol in the Foreign Ofce,
comes to the Academy not simply
as a savant of German-American
relations but also as a longtime
friend of the late banker Stephen
Kellen and the family of Hans and
Ludmilla Arnhold, the institutions
primary benefactors. Stephen
was the most charming, the most
generous, the wittiest, the warmest,
and the wisest man I ever met, the
statesman remembers. He asked
me to follow the young Academy,
and it was clear that it was becom-
ing more than just a symbol of
friendship between Germany and
the US; it was becoming a beacon
of intellectual life in the German
capital. Von der Planitz can draw
upon some thirty years of diplo-
matic expertise, including his dou-
ble tenure in Germanys Foreign
Ofce. From 19962000 and
20032006, the native Berliner
orchestrated countless meetings
of the worlds leaders on German
soil, be it at a reception for Nelson
Mandela or in any number of soc-
cer stadiums during this past
summers World Cup. In the art of
bringing people together and the
combination of impeccable orga-
nization and spontaneity that such
a craft demands the Academy
has found its maestro in von der
Planitz.
r. m.
The Communicator and the Diplomat
New Senior Counselors Richard Gaul and Bernhard von der Planitz
Call for Applications
The American Academy will accept
applications this summer and fall
from scholars, writers, and profes-
sionals who wish to engage in inde-
pendent study in Berlin during the
20082009 academic year. Most fel-
lowships are for a single academ-
ic semester and include a monthly
stipend, round-trip airfare, par-
tial board, and comfortable accom-
modations at the Hans Arnhold
Center. Only US citizens or perma-
nent residents are eligible to apply.
Applications are due in Berlin on
Monday, October 15, 2007. After a
rigorous peer review process, Berlin
Prizes will be awarded by an inde-
pendent selection committee and
announced in the spring of 2008. For
further information on the fellowship
program, please visit the Academys
website (www.americanacademy.de).
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American Academy
Artist Talk
Brice Marden, Artist
6/07 6/07
The US Elections: Who Will
Win, Who Will Lose, and Why
Richard Cohen, Columnist, the
Washington Post, and Distinguished
Visitor at the Academy 6/06 6/06
Humanities
David Barclay
In commencing his ambitious
history, West Berlin, 19481994,
George H. Bush/Axel Springer
Fellow David Barclay plunges
into what has long been a glar-
ing historiographical void.
Overshadowed by the dramatic
implosion of the German
Democratic Republic and the
subsequent opening of gdr
archives, an all-encompassing
record of West Berlin from the
citys 1948 division to the 1994
departure of the Allies has
yet to be put to paper. Barclays
catalogue of accomplishments
more than qualies him for the
task. Chair of the history depart-
ment at Kalamazoo College and
director of the German Studies
Association, Barclay has dedicated
nearly all of his scholarly energy
to the study of Berlin, its sur-
roundings, and the Prussian state
of which it was rst named capital.
He has produced pivotal portraits
of some of the most meaningful
names in German history, among
them Frederick William IV and,
most recently, the vivacious mayor
of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter. Now
Barclay will chart the idiosyncra-
sies of the isolated territory Reuter
once served, examining every-
thing from its unique city-state
political structure and its pen-
chant for grassroots democracy to
its gurative functions in the eyes
of contemporaneous Americans.
Exploring West Berlin as a politi-
cal, cultural, and symbolic space,
he will present the city as many
historians have the gdr: as a
socio-political entity in its own
right.
Omer Bartov
During his Academy residence
JPMorgan Fellow Omer Bartov
is setting his scholarly sights on
the small Eastern Galician town
of Buczacz, compiling a two-hun-
dred-year history of interethnic
relations there. Now part of west-
ern Ukraine, the town harbored
a diverse spectrum of Ukranians,
Poles, and Jews, the latter group
comprising its ethnic and reli-
gious majority by the eighteenth
century. The multiethnic face of
the town, however, was forever
altered when Nazi murder squads,
assisted by Ukrainian nationalists,
began the virtually unmitigated
extermination of the local Jewish
population in 1941. Bartov, John
P. Birkelund Professor at Brown
University, is one of the worlds
leading scholars of genocide. He
argues that, while historians
focus upon state-level systems
of genocide has greatly enriched
our understanding of the tragic
phenomenon, it has done little to
unearth the social fabric of the
localities that played theater to
mass murder. In addition to work
on his book on holocaust remem-
brance in the Galician region,
Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish
Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine,
Bartov has begun an intimate
and multiperspectival collective
biography of Buczacz, a project
he hopes will uncover mysteries
left unsolved by earlier historians.
Transcending the oversimplied
designations of victim and per-
petrator, bystander and collabora-
tor, he will illuminate how social
dynamics within a local space
contribute to humanitys most
self-destructive act.
Susanna Elm
In Western culture today the tat-
too functions as an expression
of individual freedom. In the
late Roman Empire it bore just
the opposite meaning, under-
stood universally as a signica-
tion of slave status. Ellen Maria
Gorrissen Fellow Susanna Elm, a
professor of history and chair of
the graduate program in ancient
Mediterranean history and
archaeology at the University of
California, Berkeley, has pursued
myriad scholarly projects during
her enterprising career, produc-
ing a number of texts on the
Christianization of ancient soci-
eties along with a lauded body of
work on ancient medicine. Yet
she has continually found herself
drawn back to the role of bodily
stigmata in the late antique
world, and it is this interest that
will drive her project at the Hans
Arnhold Center. Using the ico-
nography of slavery as a point
of departure, the German-born
historian will undertake a study
of the interrelated conceptions
of bondage, pain, and divine
devotion during the twilight of
the Roman period and the rise
of Christianity. Ultimately she
hopes to pen a work that will cast
light on the theological implica-
tions of Christianitys emergence
within a slave culture.
Wai-Yee Li
If there is one characteristic that
sets Coca-Cola Fellow Wai-Yee
Li apart from her peers at the
Academy, it is the remarkable tem-
poral range of her expertise; her
scholarship on Chinese culture
spans two millennia, from the
fourth century bce right up to the
twentieth century. One need look
no further than Lis self-described
side project to appreciate the
quiet tenacity with which she
approaches her eld. She is in the
nal stages of an English trans-
lation of the Mandarin text Zuo
Zhuan, a several-thousand-page,
fourth-century bce chronicle
of Chinese history between 722
and 468 bce. In its crucial and
monumental scope, the work is
comparable to tomes like Livys
benchmark history of the Roman
empire Ab Urba Condita. A pro-
fessor of Chinese Literature at
Harvard University, Li arrives on
the Wannsee to open a new chap-
ter in her studies, zeroing in on
the tortuous mid-sixteenth centu-
ry, as the Qing Dynasty conquered
the Ming. Directing her practiced
powers upon the literature of the
period, she will examine the wide-
spread renegotiations of autono-
my, politics, and sex engendered
by the traumatic transition from
one hegemonic political power to
the next.
Michael Taussig
If Hunter S. Thompson had been
trained by Boas in anthropology,
Engels in economics, and Arendt
in philosophy, he might write
something like [Michael] Taussig,
remarked one breathless critic
after reading My Cocaine Museum,
Taussigs book on Colombias
poor communities and the ines-
LIFE & LETTERS at the Hans Arnhold Center
The Spring 2007 Fellows
Profiles in Scholarship
capable presence of its prime
cash crop. Routinely braiding
analytical theorizing with rich
narrative storytelling, cultural
anthropologist Michael Taussig
considers the unorthodox form
of his writing to be inseparable
from its meaning. Yet the excep-
tional character of the Columbia
University professors work is
not limited to its style; his body
of writing is widely believed to
include some of the most seminal
texts of modern-day anthropology.
Dedicating much of his adult life
to eldwork in South America,
Taussigs time there has inspired
a torrent of innovative writing on
a range of topics from shaman-
ism to fetishism, from the com-
mercialization of agriculture to
the construction of terror. During
his stint as Siemens Fellow at
the Academy, he continues work
on a book-length project called
What is the Color of the Sacred?
Probing the theory of Goethe and
Benjamin, the ction of Proust
and Borroughs, and the his-
tory of the monolithic German
manufacturer of articial color,
IG Farben, Taussig will reect on
the impacts of color upon repre-
sentation, the body, and language
in the Western world.
Law and Society
Katherine Boo
Katherine Boo has explained her
journalistic technique as a pro-
cess in which she makes herself
invisible, fading into the back-
ground in order to record the lives
around her more perceptively. In
the world of American journal-
ism, however, this semesters
Haniel Fellow has been anything
but transparent. Renowned for
her nuanced portraits of life on
the margins of American society,
Boos narrative-style reporting
has garnered a string of awards.
Her 1990 series Invisible
Lives, Invisible Deaths on the
deplorable treatment of mentally
retarded adults in Washington,
DC group homes exemplies
the wide-reaching power of her
work. Called one of the greatest
reporting achievements in the
history of the Washington Post,
the piece earned her a Pulitzer
Prize and compelled Washington
ofcials to initiate reforms. More
recently, Boo has been exploring
the global redistribution of labor,
looking particularly at the state-
supported outsourcing of jobs. In
this pursuit the New Yorker writer
and MacArthur Prize recipient
has spent the past four years
immersed in three economies in
ux: those of South Boston, the
Texas-Mexico border region, and
Chemnai, India. Touching down
in Germany, she now expands
her study to include a country
deeply stamped by the increas-
ingly globalized economic order.
Considering both political and
corporate leaders efforts to com-
pete globally as well as their effect
on domestic citizenry, Boo hopes
to correct the ideological bent
that she views as rampant among
todays reporting on globalization.
Lawrence Lessig
Discussing his latest undertak-
ing in Berlin a novel Lawrence
Lessig says, You can get under
ones skin far more effectively by
telling a story than by presenting
a lecture. That may be so, but the
Stanford University law profes-
sor has also made some sizable
waves with his scholarly lectures
and legal arguments. One of the
worlds preeminent voices in
copyright and internet law, Lessig
has composed a series of ground-
breaking briefs and books that
herald the web as a revolutionary
platform with vast creative poten-
tial. In the face of intensifying
efforts to privatize intellectual
property online, he has created
a coup of his own: an alternative,
less restrictive copyright known
to millions as CC, or Creative
Commons. Now, in his second
semester of a year-long Academy
residence, the JPMorgan Fellow
turns instead to ction, meditat-
ing on collective responsibility
in cases of abuse. His novel will
contest the prevalent societal prac-
tice of relegating guilt to a single,
often pathological perpetrator
when the deepest transgression
is committed by the observer of
a crime who has done nothing
to halt its continuation. Lessig
posits that broadening account-
ability from the individual abuser
to the institutions often complicit
in such actions will more effec-
tively guard society against these
crimes; while predicting and
averting the actions of an indi-
vidual abuser is nearly impossible,
building an environment intoler-
ant to such wrongdoing is fully
achievable.
Thomas Powers
Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow
Thomas Powers holds a promi-
nent place in American letters.
In 1971 the historian and jour-
nalist won the Pulitzer Prize for
national reporting for his writ-
ing on Diana Oughton, a found-
ing member of the radical leftist
organization the Weatherman.
He has since written for many
esteemed American publications,
including the New York Review of
Books, Harpers, the Nation, and
the Atlantic Monthly. Uniting his
writing is an unwavering interest
in American intelligence opera-
tions, a focus that is visible across
his prodigious list of book publi-
cations, including The Man Who
Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and
the CIA (1979), Heisenbergs War:
The Secret History of the German
Bomb (1993), and Intelligence
Wars: American Secret History
from Hitler to Al-Qaeda (2002).
During April and May at the
Academy, Powers takes a new tack
on the topic, constructing a narra-
tive account of the circumstances
surrounding the 1877 killing of
Oglala-Sioux chief Crazy Horse.
Inquiring into both the secret
maneuvers of the US government
and the perspective of the Native
American leaders with whom it
was in constant contact, Powers
is composing a timely study of
the character of clandestine
American governmental practice
in the face of foreign deance to
the national interest.
Arts and
Belles Lettres
Jonathan Safran Foer
It is no surprise that conversa-
tions about Holtzbrinck Fellow
Jonathan Safran Foer still
often return to his rst novel.
Everything is Illuminated elec-
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Julie Mehretu, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Gary Smith
tried the American literary
scene in 2002, winning among
several other honors the Los
Angeles Times Book of the Year
Award, prompting translations
into 29 languages, and inspir-
ing a popular feature lm. Yet,
despite its impressive impact, the
book is just one of many diverse
achievements from this dynamic
talent. Before Everything had
graced a shelf, Foer had already
logged successes in various
literary forms, including short
stories published in the New
Yorker, the Paris Review, and
Conjunctions and a bestselling
anthology of writing inspired
by artist Joseph Cornell called
A Convergence of Birds. Since
publishing his acclaimed sec-
ond novel Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close, Foer has broad-
ened his engagement with other
artistic mediums, writing a prose
poem for a book of architectural
photography and through the
mediation of the Academy com-
posing an opera libretto com-
missioned by the Deutsche
Staatsoper. In Berlin Foer will
stay true to his adventurous spir-
it, foraying into documentary-
style non-ction to craft a book
that will interrogate the produc-
tion and consumption of meat in
the United States. He will also
pursue a modern reconstruction
of the traditional Passover text,
the Haggadah, collaborating
with other writers in the hope of
creating a more accessible work
for contemporary readers.
Nicole Krauss
What I do at the outset of writing
a novel, says Holtzbrinck Fellow
Nicole Krauss, is question if this
enigmatic form can truly change
anything. I am still not entirely
convinced. Though she raises
the question again in embarking
on her third novel at the Hans
Arnhold Center, her readers clearly
do not share her skepticism. A
look at her works critical recep-
tion proves that her writing is one
of todays most compelling argu-
ments for the power of the nov-
elistic form. Her rst book, Man
Walks into a Room, a story of an
amnesiac man who nds himself
unable to reconcile his fractured
memory with the life he daily lives,
was named Book of the Year by
the Los Angeles Times in 2002. Her
second novel, The History of Love,
was shortlisted for the prestigious
Orange Prize and was heralded by
the Spectator as an incandescent
meditation on how the testament
of writing to love might be the only
possible salvation for the bruised
lot of mankind. First published as
a poet in journals like Ploughshares,
Double Take, and the Paris Review,
Krausss prose maintains a grace
and precision unexpected in the
pages of ction, even as it provides
luminous insights into the human
condition.
Julie Mehretu
The biography of Guna S.
Mundheim Fellow Julie Mehretu
tells a story of transitions; born in
Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, edu-
cated in Dakar and Rhode Island,
the internationally renowned
artist now nds her home in New
York. It is then perhaps tting
that her paintings and drawings
reect the ever more interrelated
world of the twenty-rst century,
one in which the temporal and
spatial limitations of the past fall
away. Intrigued by the multifac-
eted layers of place, space, and
time that impact the formation of
a personal and communal identi-
ty, Mehretu uses elaborate draw-
ing and painting techniques to
juxtapose human structures and
historical symbols with sweeping
abstract forms. Citing a gamut of
aesthetic inspirations, from graf-
ti-style calligraphy and Japanese
comics to the Renaissance engrav-
ings of Albrecht Drer, she cre-
ates stunning multidimensional
canvases that explode the possi-
bility of a singular perspective or
narrative. Interweaving recogniz-
able representations of the world
with more abstruse markings, her
compositions speak simultane-
ously to the quotidian and the
elusive, mirroring the intercon-
nected and complex character of
the globalized epoch. Mehretu,
a MacArthur Fellowship win-
ner, has enjoyed solo exhibitions
at the Walker Art Center, the
Louisiana Museum in Denmark,
and the Hannover Kunstverein,
among others. The Deutsche
Guggenheim in Berlin will pres-
ent her work in fall 2009.
Laura Owens
The painting and drawing of
Guna S. Mundheim Fellow Laura
Owens has proved a conundrum
for art critics; her subject matter,
technique, and inuences seem
in a perpetual state of change,
while the enigmatic Untitled she
attaches to each of her pieces
offers no interpretive assistance.
[Laura] Owenss paintings are
challenging and difcult, writes
Thomas Lawson, curator at the
Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles. They are each
quite particular, not conforming
to any notion of serial production
of thematic development. They
resist analysis. The impossibility
of summing up Laura Owenss
work, however, has not stunted
widespread admiration for the
sheer beauty of her composi-
tions. At the age of 32, she was the
youngest artist ever to have a solo
exhibition at the reputable moca.
Constantly oscillating between
guration and abstraction, the
highly versatile Los Angeles
resident applies the mediums of
paint, textile, and embroidery to
large canvases. Dubbed at once
delicate and daring, her work in
many cases depicts people, ora,
or fauna, while in other instances
it explores non-representational
geometric elements.
Geoffrey Wolff
I am drawn to situations where
peoples wills are systemati-
cally thwarted by an institution
of some kind, says this springs
inaugural Berthold Leibinger
Fellow, writer Geoffrey Wolff. It
would seem that this attraction
has roots in personal experience;
his celebrated 1979 memoir The
Duke of Deception, a nalist for
the Pulitzer Prize, describes his
tempestuous childhood under
a father at once loving and abu-
sive, an experience he has called
a dictatorship. For his Academy
undertaking, a novel, the retired
University of California, Irvine
professor turns his attention to
an authoritarian force endured
by an entire nation: the Stasi. The
notorious intelligence organiza-
tion of the German Democratic
Republic inltrated all aspects
of daily life, routinely employing
civilians to spy on their peers be
they coworkers, friends, or family
members and ultimately amass-
ing les on a third of the countrys
population. Fascinated by the psy-
chological poignancy of existence
in a world where the borders of
the private sphere have collapsed,
suspicious angst is the status
quo, and even naive teenage rebel-
lion can prove dangerous, Wolff
will people his story with gures
struggling to persist amidst a cul-
ture of surveillance.
w. b.
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Geoffrey Wolff and Richard C. Holbrooke
Alumni
Books
Recent Releases
Andrew Bacevich
The Long War: A New History of
U.S. National Security Policy Since
World War II
Columbia University Press
(May 2007)
Benjamin Barber
Consumed: How Markets Corrupt
Children, Infantilize Adults, and
Swallow Citizens Whole
W.W. Norton
(March 2007)
Caroline Bynum
Wonderful Blood: Theology and
Practice in Late Medieval Northern
Germany and Beyond
University of Pennsylvania Press
(December 2006)
Henri Cole
Blackbird and Wolf: Poems by
Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(March 2007)
Gerald Feldman
sterreichische Banken und
Sparkassen im Nationalsozialismus
Co-authored with Oliver Rathkolb
and Theodor Venus Beck
C.H. Beck
(November 2006)
Caroline Fohlin
Finance Capitalism and Germanys
Rise to Industrial Power: Corporate
Finance, Governance and
Performance from the 1840s to the
Present
Cambridge University Press
(January 2007)
Thomas Geoghegan
See You in Court: How the Right
Made America a Lawsuit Nation
New Press
(June 2007)
Sander Gilman
Race in Contemporary Medicine
Routledge
(November 2006)
Ann Harleman
Thoreaus Laundry
Southern Methodist University
Press
(February 2007)
Wendy Lesser
Room for Doubt
Pantheon
(January 2007)
Evonne Levy
Berninis Biographies: Critical
Essays
(co-edited)
Penn State University Press
(January 2007)
James Mann
The China Fantasy: How Our
Leaders Explain Away Chinese
Repression
Viking
(February 2007)
W.J.T. Mitchell
The Late Derrida
(co-edited)
University of Chicago Press
(April 2007)
Susanna Moore
The Big Girls
Knopf
(May 2007)
Hiroshi Motomura
Forced Migration: Law and Policy
(co-edited)
Thomas West
(March 2007)
Dennis Ross
Statecraft: And How to Restore
Americas Standing in the World
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(June 2007)
John Philip Santos
Songs Older Than Any
Known Singer
Wings Press
(April 2007)
Amity Shlaes
The Forgotten Man: A New History
of the Great Depression
HarperCollins
(June 2007)
Stephen Szabo
The Strategic Triangle: France,
Germany, and the United States in
the Shaping of the New Europe
(co-edited)
Johns Hopkins University Press
(January 2007)
Christopher Wood
William Powell Frith: A Painter and
his World
Sutton Publishing
(January 2007)
The Trouble with Writing
A Conversation with Nicole Krauss
Early this spring Felicitas
von Lovenberg of the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung held a public
conversation with writer Nicole
Krauss at the Hans Arnhold
Center. The current Holtzbrinck
Fellow is the author of Man Walks
into a Room and, most recently,
The History of Love.
Felicitas von Lovenberg When did
you know that you wanted to be a
writer?
Nicole Krauss I started to write
as a teenager, which is probably
when most writers begin. It is a
time in your life when suddenly
it occurs to you that you have a
tremendous amount to say, and
you dont yet have the means of
making yourself understood. The
burden of not being understood
begins to weigh on you more and
more.
Lovenberg At the age of 14 you
read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Was
that a decisive moment for you?
Krauss Everyone has probably
had the experience of suddenly
coming upon a book that explains
yourself to you better than you
were able to. Sometimes it is just
a single sentence that presses
into language this thing you had
always sensed but couldnt articu-
late.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
was assigned in one of my reading
classes. Im not sure that I fully
understood it, but I loved the book.
At one point my teacher asked if
anyone knew what the book was
really about of course everyone
had a different idea. Actually,
this book is about nostalgia, he
said and got a roomful of blank
looks. Nostalgia, I suppose, isnt
the most common feeling at 14.
The teacher went on to describe
what nostalgia was, and it was a
kind of revelation to me. Even as a
child I was aware of some lost past
that had once existed and to which
I couldnt ever go back.
Lovenberg The History of Love is
dedicated to your grandparents.
Do you believe that certain emo-
tions can be inherited through
generations?
Krauss Obviously children are
impressed indelibly with the
moods of their families; if you
grow up in a house in which one
of your parents is sad, you feel
that sadness, and you are formed
by it in any number of ways. But
writing, for me, is not a pas-
sive act perhaps its not even a
responsive act. Instead, I see it as
an exercise of my freedom. Its an
invention, not a retelling of some-
thing I inherited. Its a willful act
of imagination.
Lovenberg Your work is often
categorized as young Jewish
literature. Your writing has been
compared to that of Philip Roth,
I.B. Singer, and Bruno Schulz. Do
you welcome or resent these com-
parisons?
Krauss It would be nice not ever
to be part of any group, but criti-
cism probably wouldnt exist if
that were the case. So I suppose
if I have to be part of any group
then I should be part of the one I
cant escape, which is being a Jew.
Setting out, I had little interest in
being a Jewish writer or in paying
my respect to my origins. If writ-
ing is a means of exercising ones
freedom, it also can (and should)
be an act of rebellion, of opposi-
tion, of irreverence. But my rst
novel demonstrated to me that my
Jewishness was inextricable from
all of my other material, and, this
being so, I ought to try to dene
it myself. Since the destruction of
the Second Temple and the begin-
ning of the Diaspora, Judaism
could no longer rely on exterior,
political conditions and had to
be internalized. Being such, it
became quite malleable. There
may be as many kinds of Judaism
as there are Jews. In retrospect
I think The History of Love was,
partly, my attempt to describe my
own version.
Lovenberg The History of Love
looks slightly unusual, with some-
times only one sentence on a page.
Why did you experiment with the
form of the novel?
Krauss I dont think of it as experi-
mentation. The only time I played
with the form was when I felt I
had no other choice; the narrative
demanded it. The book is divided
emotionally equally between two
main characters, and their voices
alternate. Who was going to have
the last word? It didnt seem right
that one should and not the other.
Their voices were counterpoints
to each other, and I felt they
needed somehow to merge in the
end. So I had their voices alternate
pages sometimes just a para-
graph each, sometimes just a line
or two. It made both narrative and
formal, almost musical, sense.
Lovenberg You recently wrote a
series of biweekly columns for the
FAZ. In your nal column you
mention certain misunderstand-
ings you had about life as a writer.
How is being a writer different
from what you had imagined?
Krauss I idolized writers when I
was younger. I had so many ideas
about what such a life would be
like. But it turns out that writing is,
in some ways, really dreadful work.
What is the trouble with writ-
ing? To begin with, there is the
war it wages against ones con-
dence and sense of purpose. The
ever-widening ditch that being
alone and in constant conversation
with ones imagination seems to
dig between oneself and others.
The shrunken idea of joy resulting
in an obsession with turning out
one good sentence. The fear that,
in entertaining the many possibil-
ities presented by life, ones own
life is languishing unused on the
shelf. The risk of public humilia-
tion. The risk of slipping from the
common human rank of being
only somewhat misunderstood to
being totally and utterly misun-
derstood. But despite everything
I still think it is compensation for
the trouble of existing. And any-
way, at this point I dont think I
have any other choice. Im stuck
with it now, arent I, so I better
make the best of it.
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Even the famously reticent
actor and director Robert De Niro
could not resist the persuasive
powers of his friend Richard
C. Holbrooke, nding himself
at the Hans Arnhold Center on
a Sunday morning during the
Berlinale lm festival. Norman
Ohler chronicled the conver-
sation with Academy Trustee
and German director Volker
Schlndorff for Die Zeit.
Snow falls softly on r trees
in front of the Wannsee villa.
Authorities are everywhere. Police,
private security, walkie-talkies,
armored cars, a helicopter in a
pearly sky. Women gloriously
coiffed for the early Sunday morn-
ing. The street blocked off to
trafc. A series of checkpoints.
Then the luminous lobby of the
American Academy, beyond the
French doors the majestic lake.
A leather armchair for him. The
snow, however, delays the arrival
of the lm idol by twenty min-
utes. Nonetheless, a rst high-
light. Matt Damon has arrived;
his white T-shirt peeks out of
the collar of his sweater. Volker
Schlndorff sips from his mineral
water. A beautiful Indian woman
with large golden earrings and a
furrowed brow stands next to a
dejected Bruno Ganz, while Otto
Schily, together with wife and
bodyguards, makes his way to
the front. It is about to take place.
Everyone is eager to experience
what the handwritten invitations
promised an unforgettable
exchange of cinematic expertise.
Volker Schlndorff, desig-
nated to lead the discussion,
takes the second armchair. He
nally enters in a brown blazer.
The chatter immediately stops.
For a moment the audience sits
in admiring silence. Then sud-
den applause, and Bob, as he
is known to friends and fans,
smiles and sits down in his
leather chair.
Now it can begin. The
question on everyones mind:
what makes Bob so special?
Schlndorff tries his damned-
est to expose the secret, and is
endearingly innocent if utterly
powerless in the process. After
several futile minutes he can
only apologize repeatedly that
he is not much of a talker. But
who cares! Bob speaks even when
silent, and that is the very secret
of his iconic success. From the
greatest living actor in the world,
a wrinkle of the brow or a scratch
of the legendary nose sufces.
His presence is distinctively De
Niro, at once whimsical and bru-
tal. He looks around the room
attentively, explaining casually
that he often let the cameras roll
the full 11 minutes during the
lming of his espionage epic The
Good Shepherd. The rolls of lm,
relative to the $120 million in
total production costs, were not
all that expensive. So he could
afford to let the amiable Matt
Damon repeat the same sentence
thirty times until it nally sound-
ed just right. Matt generally had
an easy go of it, Bob explains and
grins. I called him and made it
clear that he basically didnt need
to do anything. I had the lm in
my head. Come to the set, get in
front of the cameras, and say his
lines. Matt Damon blushes a
bit but smiles graciously. Clearly,
Robert De Niro in Berlin
The Discrete Charm of a Cinematic Icon
Bob is the boss. The same Bob
whose performances in lms
like Taxi Driver were so singular
that his directors could only mar-
vel afterward at how their lms
had been transformed by his
presence.
To prepare Matt for his scene
with Joe Pesci, I told him that
he should imagine he was about
to talk to a cockroach. And to
Joe I said, he was about to talk
to a piece of shit. Bob grins.
Lighthearted laughter lls the
room. Schlndorff nods happily
and nds a concluding thought:
Directing is like making love.
You never know exactly how
anyone else does it. Without say-
ing much or disclosing even the
smallest personal secret on this
divinely snow-covered morning,
Bob nonetheless afforded the
rapt audience a little insight.
By Norman Ohler
Die Zeit
February 15, 2007
Translated by
Darin Christensen
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Amory Lovins, founder of
the energy conservation think
tank Rocky Mountain Institute
and one of the worlds leading
voices on energy reform, spent a
busy week in the German capi-
tal as a Distinguished Visitor at
the Academy. He found time to
speak with Dagmar Dehmer of
Der Tagesspiegel.
Tagesspiegel What can we do to
combat climate change?
Amory Lovins The majority of
greenhouse gas emissions world-
wide originate from the com-
bustion of oil in trafc about
42 percent and the production
of electricity about 40 percent.
If we could massively save energy
during these processes, we would
have the bulk of the climate prob-
lem under control.
Tagesspiegel What do you see as
concrete solutions?
Lovins A great deal of the political
discussion about the climate suf-
fers from a confusion of symbols.
Plus and minus signs are getting
mixed up. Politicians discuss costs,
losses, and trade-offs, but every
practical person knows that this is
not the case. It is cheaper to save
fuel than to sell it. The discussion
should revolve around winnings,
jobs, and competitive advantages.
Our energy efciency does not
need to increase drastically to pro-
tect the environment. Economic
theory assumes that energy pro-
ductivity increases about 1 percent
every year. Were it 2 percent, we
could stabilize carbon-dioxide
emissions; were it 3 percent, the
climate would stabilize itself.
Tagesspiegel Is that possible?
Lovins The US has achieved that
3 percent for many years without
even trying. We certainly were
not especially efcient when we
began, but since then interna-
tional disparities have dimin-
ished. For more than twenty years
China has annually increased
its energy productivity by more
than 5 percent. Many companies
achieve 8 to 10 percent per year
and earn good money doing so.
Tagesspiegel Then why is this not
done everywhere?
Lovins One problem is the domi-
nance of economists who believe
that the markets are functioning
perfectly if the prices are right.
There are, however, at least sixty
notorious market barriers that
obstruct this from happening.
Tagesspiegel One market failure
lies in energy monopolies like
those in Germany, where four
large companies divvy up the elec-
tricity market among themselves
and earn their money by selling as
much electricity as possible.
Lovins The German structure is
very anticompetitive. This problem
has been solved in some American
states through new regulations.
There the energy companies prot
by assisting customers in saving
energy. That changes their behav-
ior dramatically and means that
household electricity costs are
constantly going down. In the US,
as in Germany, three-quarters of
electricity costs could be avoided
through energy-saving techniques
from the 1980s.
Tagesspiegel What are these tech-
niques?
Lovins There are a few thousand.
For example, three-fths of elec-
tric energy is used for motors,
and there are 35 possible ways to
reduce engine consumption, in
part through minimal technical
changes. Often only three improve-
ments are applied because that
alone saves enormous costs.
Tagesspiegel Are engineers con-
centrating on the wrong things?
Lovins Yes, presumably. We have
advised many companies above
all in heavy industry and have
determined that 40 to 60 percent
of energy costs can be saved with
a return on initial investment in
two to three years. My house 6,500
feet up in the Rocky Mountains
is so well insulated that we do not
need a heating system and thats
in spite of the fact that we can have
frost every day of the year.
Tagesspiegel What can one do
regarding trafc?
Lovins We can build far lighter
cars with existing technologies.
The Rocky Mountain Institute
built a van with a body of modern
carbon ber and ultralight steel
that consumes about 1.7 gallons
of gas every 100 miles. As a diesel
it uses even less, and as a hybrid
about half of a gallon. The hybrid
variation costs about $2,500 more
than a normal car; otherwise
it does not differ in price from
other automobiles in this category.
These new materials are harder
than steel and even safer than
those that came before.
Tagesspiegel So Germans could
continue building big cars and still
stay true to the EUs guidelines for
carbon-dioxide output?
Lovins Right. German engineers
are so procient that I am convinced
they can again be world class. The
corporations, however, must set
standards and view frugal consump-
tion as an important mission.
Tagesspiegel What makes cars so
inefcient?
Lovins Their weight, above all.
Seven-eighths of the energy used
is actually lost on the way from the
tank to the tires. It has taken us 120
years of intensive engineering since
the invention of the automobile to
get to this point, but we could be ten
times better. Large cars can also be
light. Even a luxury-class Mercedes
could get 74 miles to the gallon.
By Dagmar Dehmer
Der Tagesspiegel
February 5, 2007
Translated by Will Byrne
Pioneering Energy Efciency
Amory Lovins Brings Solutions to Berlin
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Are you lawyers? the woman
at the entrance of the Academy
asks a small group that has just
arrived. No, do we look like
we are? counters a young man
from the bunch, a bit shocked.
Another adds that he deals
with the internet, like many
of the guests striding through
the ample rooms of the Berlin
villa this evening. Their name
tags boast institutions like New
Media Network or Creative
Commons; the occupation of
one guest reads simply Blogger.
The question, however, was
fully justied. The speaker this
evening, Lawrence Lessig, is
a professor of law at Stanford
University and a year-long fel-
low at the American Academy
in Berlin. The scholar is not
merely preparing elite students
for well-paid jobs in economics;
Lessig is also one of the foremost
authorities on creative property
on the internet. He leads a cam-
paign that has indeed attracted
much sympathy in the internet
scene. The magazine Scientic
American recently named
him one of Americas Top 50
Visionaries. But Lessigs strug-
gle for a universally recognized
alternative copyright for the web
seems almost hopeless.
Today, large companies hold
copyrights for almost all creative
products: books, photos, videos,
pieces of music. In the real world
we can pass books along at will,
and we can hum songs from the
charts wherever we like. On the
internet none of this works if
you follow the rules. You may not
legally alter music by reworking
the original and then putting
it back on the web. And you
cant remix a press conference
between George W. Bush and
Tony Blair with a tearjerker pop
ballad so that they avow their
Endless Love because the dig-
ital images, texts, and sounds in
question are all copyrighted.
And yet such copyright
infringement takes place con-
stantly on popular internet sites
like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr,
and Wikipedia, which are called
Social Community Websites.
Their users are termed pirates
by businesses; others call this
new possibility of user-created
content a revolution. Then again,
media corporations can see it
this way, too. Rupert Murdoch
paid $600 million for MySpace,
and Google just bought YouTube
for $1.6 billion.
Lessig considers the operative
rules and regulations dealing
with intellectual property to be
obsolete. It is naturally illegal to
pull entire lms and albums off
the net, but it also doesnt make
sense to prohibit users from play-
ing creatively with this content
and fashioning something new.
Lessigs last book, Free Culture, for
example, can be freely accessed
on his website. Today no one can
do with Disney what Disney did
with the Brothers Grimm, says
Lessig, and thus he propagates a
new culture of sharing and par-
ticipation. Lessig calls his deeply
democratic culture Read-Write.
At the moment, a Read-Only
culture one dominated by a
ubiquitous copyright threatens
the possibility of this idea. A few
years ago Lessig brought the ini-
tiative Creative Commons (CC) to
life. The concept allows creators
all over the world to apply not
the terms all rights reserved to
their work but rather some rights
reserved. Over 140 million of
these CC-licenses have already
been assigned, and even the bbc
has made the idea its own. It
wants to offer an openly acces-
sible archive of programs on the
net, from which users can down-
load programs and further utilize
them provided they are not used
for commercial aims and the bbc
is named as the originator. One
could imagine similar practice at
the German broadcasting com-
pany zdf.
Lessigs detractors consider
his approach insane. He is
treated like the Antichrist or a
communist, the professor asserts.
To Lessig, dressed fully in black,
with frameless glasses and a
round, serious face, the personal
conversation seems almost a bit
unpleasant. He pursues his quest
with verve, however; his lecture
is like a performance, the rap of
an intellectual on a mission.
I am a lawyer with a guilty
conscience, proclaims Lessig,
whom everyone calls Larry. In
1993 he discovered cyberspace,
and in 1998 he worked as a neu-
tral special master to the judge
on a case that the US Justice
Department brought against
Microsoft, accusing it of monopo-
listic practice. The software
giant was successful in remov-
ing Lessig from the proceedings,
making him all the more famous.
In another case, Lessig represent-
ed a client who led suit against
the extension of copyrights past
the promised 75 years after publi-
cation. He lost.
Despite these experiences,
Lessig hopes that the ethics of
sharing practiced on websites
like YouTube or MySpace
will rub off on corporations.
Businesses just have to recognize
the potential of this approach.
But, There are few signs that
this will happen.
By Christian Meier
Die Welt am Sonntag
October 22, 2006
Translated by Will Byrne
Intellectual Property 2.0
Lawrence Lessig Defends Creativity in the Age
of Cyberspace
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Staring Down
Stereotypes
Writing about Poverty in America
by Katherine Boo
April Collins, 19, Springfield, Missouri
* * *
Photographs by Robin Bowman, from
Its Complicated: The American Teenager,
forthcoming in fall 2007 from Umbrage
incomes of less than $10,000 increased by
26 percent.
I am wary of the phrase peculiarly
American, especially in an era when cul-
ture is our primary export. However, when
I consider the data on poverty and social
mobility against the fact that low-income
people have, through the media, a vivid
sense of the contours of afuence, I do nd
something striking. When I situate myself
in a high-rise housing project, or a trailer
park on the Texas-Mexico border, or some
other community seemingly on the receiv-
ing end of American class prerogatives,
I nd fewer and fewer people inclined to
identify themselves as poor. Some of this
reluctance can be racked up to loopy, long-
standing American optimism; in polls,
nearly half of citizens report that they are in
the wealthiest 10 percent of the population
or expect to be there soon. But I also sense
a recent cultural shift, driven especially
by the young, that operates at a lower pitch
than what sociologists like to call the oppo-
sitional culture, with its celebration of sex,
drugs, and violence.
Julissa Torres lives on the periphery of
Denver, a prospering city. In her math note-
As much as Id like to wrap my work
in a protective skin of social purpose, most
of the people I write about sense, correctly,
that journalism about poverty can be a
morally dodgy business. A woman named
Ochame Riley, a resident of New Orleans
whom I got to know in an evacuation shelter
after Hurricane Katrina, put it to me baldly:
Wait, so you take our stories and put them
in a magazine that rich people
read, and you get paid and we
dont? Thats some backward-ass
blufness, if you ask me.
In my work Im interested in
paradoxes and in the particular
ways in which social and political
imperatives collide. The central
paradox of poverty in the US today
is that it is statistically consistent
and brazenly volatile at once. In
the last thirty years GDP almost
tripled, and the gap between the
rich and the poor became a chasm,
but the poverty rate held steady
at around 12 to 13 percent of the
population. European critical
attention typically centers on the
entrenched poor the so-called
permanent underclass but the
way most Americans experience
poverty at the start of the twenty-
rst century is madly dynamic.
Nearly 35 percent of people who
qualify as poor in any given year
no longer do so the following
year, as their slots in the territory
below the poverty line are claimed
by individuals whose fortunes
are declining. In the last decade the manu-
facturing sector and the social safety net
contracted simultaneously, and American
family life entered an era of what I believe
is unprecedented viscissitude. By some esti-
mates, family incomes are now four to ve
times more unstable than they were dur-
ing the 1970s, and something a young man
named Norberto said to me recently seems
to typify the current condition. He said, I
dont get it when people say, Your family
cant get ahead. We get ahead all the time.
Its just then the truck breaks or one of my
parents loses a job, and then we slip right
back down.
Statistically, stabs at getting ahead are
less successful than they used to be. By
many calculations the celebrated American
social mobility rate is now roughly the
same as Germanys. Meanwhile, the slip-
down has grown deeper. Over the last ve
years the number of families with annual
book she sometimes writes poems about her
life. Go home, be ashamed / food stamps
and Medicaid / Poor slang hustlas / we are
all each others customers. I invoke that
sense of stigma not because it is poignant,
but because in some cases it is dispositive.
Many poor people seem to be making the
not-illogical calculation that it is better to
struggle privately than to claim overt mem-
bership in a despised group. In
an age of frenetic, post-welfare
improvisation, the poor are hid-
den not only from the wealthy,
as is regularly and rather
tediously pointed out. They are
also hidden, willfully so, from
each other.
I use the narrative form
what is called literary nonc-
tion to convey the circum-
stances of the people I inter-
view. Its a form I employ with
ambivalence, both because
storytelling often comes at
the cost of analysis and also
because stories themselves are
articial, reducing as they do
the motley mess of real life into
something linear. But there
are two reasons I use narra-
tive. One, I believe the voices
and experiences of low-income
people are worthy of serious
consideration; two, the subjects
I want to write about are things
very few people want to read.
Many of my subjects are in fact
one subject: the cracks in the American
infrastructure of opportunity. And although
journalism is sometimes called a free mar-
ketplace of ideas, mine is a subject that that
market decreasingly bears. Too much cogni-
tive dissonance with the Chanel ads, people
tell me.
In the US there have been, speaking
crudely, two main types of narrative writ-
ing about the poor: the sensationalized and
the sentimental. I can speak of them with
authority as I have dabbled in both. In the
rst school poverty porn, you might call
it the abberational qualities of low-income
people gang banging, drug dealing, and
the like are chronicled at the exclusion of
almost everything else. The protagonists in
these stories are often not the poor people
themselves but the heroic reporters who risk
their wellbeing to move among them. The
prevalence of this form has something to
do, in the least pernicious gloss, with the

Tiffany Vance, 16; husband Jason Vance, 23
Wharncliffe, West Virginia
* * *
writerly eye, which is naturally drawn to the
anomalous: vivid difference that is thrilling
to describe. And as a practical matter, in the
inner-city, the aberrational is easier to see;
the prostitutes and addicts are right there
on the corner, more accessible than the lives
indoors. The problem with this sort of jour-
nalism is that it creates for the reader a lop-
sided cosmos, a sense that that culture isnt
part of our culture. It distorts the connective
tissue that I think remains between people
of different classes and races in America.
In the sentimental school of poverty
reporting, by contrast, poor people are ren-
dered innocent, without volition
ciphers subjected to horror upon
horror in a monochromatically
miserable place. You wouldnt
know, reading these stories, that
violent crime and teenage births
have declined in America in the
last decade or that in bad neigh-
borhoods people sometimes
laugh. Material privations are
exaggerated, while the aws of
individuals are elided or racked
up to government neglect. For
writers who care deeply about, to
use a phrase I hate, the plight
of the poor, this insistence on
virtue is strategic, of course. But
it contradicts something most of
us know and accept in our per-
sonal lives: that suffering doesnt
always, or even usually, build
character. So why do we expect
people with fewer resources and
more social isolation to nd it
improving?
T
he consequences of
the sentimental school of
writing were evident in the
shelters after Hurricane
Katrina. Within a week donated food was
rotting in the kitchens, and there were
so many bags of secondhand clothes that
you couldnt get through the hallways.
Meanwhile afuent America was feeling
pretty good about how it had helped the
poor rebuild their lives. It was easy to for-
get that, before Katrina, even in the worst
recesses of the New Orleans projects, peo-
ple had clothes on their backs, and no one
starved, and almost every family had a tele-
vision. What they lacked, and continued to
lack after the wave of philanthropy crested,
were things less easily remedied: passable
educations, regular medical care, drug
treatment, jobs with benets, or rsthand
knowledge of how most other Americans
live, New Orleanss population being one
of the least mobile and most isolated in the
country. It is those subtler decits, decits
of opportunity, that Im trying to capture
when I do a story.
The literary critic William Empson
argued that the purpose of art is to allow
sympathetic access to systems of belief not
our own, and I would like to think the access
he craved is sometimes possible in journal-
ism as well. I am not looking, however, only
to give access to the thinking of the unprivi-
leged. I am trying to interrogate the policies
devised by the powerful, trying in some ten-
tative way to eld test some of the regnant
theories about aiding the poor, from welfare
reform to the promotion of marriage as an
effective antipoverty solution. I am also
drawn to ideas that I do not understand at
the outset issues like globalization, for
instance that at out perplex me. And what
I am after isnt certainty or a win on an ideo-
logical scoreboard. Or maybe I am looking
for certainty, but in any event I rarely nd it.
What I want, and think I can contribute, is
more information. It is one thing to say that
46 million Americans lack health insurance.
Its another to show what happens to the
guy working in a chicken slaughterhouse
when he discovers he has late-stage cancer.
Desperately ill, he will have to quit his job
which offers neither paid sick leave nor
health insurance board a Greyhound bus,
and ride 11 hours each way, every week, to
reach the nearest place that will give him
chemotherapy. And he will have to make
this trip despite the fact that he lives in an
area full of oncologists doctors who serve
only people of means. I believe it is fact, as
much as pretty prose, that
speaks to the unconverted
and the uninterested, and to
get the facts I have to stay with
the intricacies and avoid the
impulse toward cynicism.
While each story I do has
its own exigencies, I typi-
cally try to position myself
to watch an unfolding situa-
tion created either by gov-
ernment policy, market
force, or a combination of the
two in which, over a matter
of months or years, people
will be making choices and
changing course. I start to
wonder, for instance, what
really happens to Americans
when manufacturing jobs go
overseas. Both the Clinton
and Bush administrations
believed in retraining workers
for forward-looking growth
professions, from high tech
to specialized health care, and
Texas happens to be a national
model for this sort of human
repurposing. So I narrow
in on the Rio Grande Valley
in that state: a place where, for a time, the
worlds Levis, Carters baby clothes, and
Fruit of the Loom Y-fronts were made. Now
the very last textile mill is closing down.
The story I want to write, in the end, isnt
a requiem for the end of an era. The press-
ing question is whether, after the end of
the retraining everyone agrees about, there
are any jobs. (The answer is that the textile
workers are now overeducated temp workers
and still poor.)
Before I ensconce myself in a place like
the Valley, I immerse myself in government
audits and statistics because I dont believe
all stories are equal. Im interested in sto-
ries that represent, always partially and
Richard Benjamin Jr., 19
children Shakira and Ladarrius
Watts Selma, Alabama
* * *
At the Heart of Europe
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DW_BJ_Anz.indd 1 13.03.2007 19:26:29 Uhr
I dont believe that the only valid kind
of commentary about poverty is that done
with intimate knowledge, but if none of
the commentary has that perspective, the
public isnt going to understand why policy
imperfectly, something larger than them-
selves. As a practical matter, when I begin
to document those stories, I use a camera,
a tape recorder, and a notebook. I like to
have a pile of voices, images, and scribbled
thoughts to wallow in later when I get to the
nasty business of writing. I also want, for
the record, a veriable document of what I
nd. Historically, when it comes to people
without means people unlikely to sue or to
write an eloquent letter to the editor jour-
nalism has been uncommonly tolerant of
falsehood.
I dont bring a car or a cell phone when
reporting because I am trying to be as
fully absorbed stuck, even in the world
of my subjects as I can stand to be. I dont
want to interview people at a restaurant.
I want to follow them where their lives lead,
have a conversation on the bus, or in the
Laundromat, or, better yet, have no conver-
sation just listen in on their conversation
with other people. Silence, I think, is the
most underused reporting tool we have.
The photographer Walker Evans put it visu-
ally: stare. The more you stare, the more
your stereotypes and assumptions will be
rearranged and the more you will be able to
challenge the assumptions of your readers.
works, or doesnt work, or what the social
costs and benets really are. Take welfare
reform the landmark 1996 law that ended
the right of poor families to public assis-
tance except for ve years in their lifetimes.
This reform sent millions of inner-city
mothers to work and is considered one
of the great domestic policy successes
of recent times. But it left unreformed
all the other institutions, from day care
to schools to police departments, upon
which inner-city children were increas-
ingly reliant.
So what are the day-care centers for
the children of welfare reform actually
like? When I investigated the centers in
my hometown, Washington DC, a few
years back, I saw that the governments
own inspectors had found life-threaten-
ing hazards in 70 percent of them but
continued funneling children in, regard-
less. Parents, of course, had a more inti-
mate view of the risks. They saw rooms
the size of closets crammed with infants
in baby cots and noted that the staff
included their drug-addicted neighbors,
whose own children had been taken away
due to abuse. Many women subsequently
concluded that the best way to protect

Barbara Cole, 17; Cliff Mills, 18;
Felicia Fugate, 14; Kelly Grimes, 19
Brookings, Oregon
* * *
But the mothers were also starving for
information how to advocate for their
children when they were sick, how to nd
better-paying jobs for themselves and
the nurses could help them bridge a vast
informational divide. In some instances it
was absolutely transforming. The nurses
efforts have been studied rigorously for a
quarter century, in diverse settings across
America, and it is clear that both children
and parents make progress that endures
long after the nurses go away: the children
in language ability and school performance,
the mothers in employment and education.
The program, however, has only enough
private and public funding to serve 20,000
of the 2.5 million mothers who would be
eligible.
The Bush administration has a differ-
ent strategy for poor families: promoting
marriage as an antipoverty cure. So not
long ago I attended marriage classes in an
Oklahoma City housing project the model
of the administrations initiative. After
graduation I followed the other classmates
all women for eight months as they tried
their seven-year-olds was to send them
home alone after school and teach them how
to work the locks on the door. If moms are
caught making that choice, they could go
to prison leaving a child that young alone
is felony child endangerment but it is a
crime poor women are committing all the
time now. This is the kind of paradox cre-
ated when policy fails to acknowledge the
problems of poor communities as a whole
and focuses instead on politically congenial
single issues. It is also the kind of unfair-
ness that I think any loving parent, any
person, is able to recognize but only if the
dilemmas are made plain.
I also try to seek out, for
myself as much as anybody,
more hopeful possibilities. The
possibilities I see in the cur-
rent climate are real, but they
are fragile. When scienti-
cally studied, many antipoverty
approaches ideas that seem
right, feel logical in situ turn
out to make little or no long-
term difference. I try to balance
my critical reporting with explo-
rations of programs that in mod-
est ways defy that discouraging
trend. One such strategy is a
program in which nurses inter-
vene in the lives of young moth-
ers and their newborn babies,
which I watched play out over
the course of a year in the Cajun
swamps of Louisiana.
By the time most low-income
children start elementary
school they are already so far
behind their more privileged
counterparts that the gap is
almost unbridgeable. That
stands to reason because, in
Americas more moneyed quar-
ters, parents invest an enor-
mous amount of time and energy trying to
give their toddlers an intellectual edge. The
nurses program tries to help acutely poor
mothers often children themselves devel-
op their babies minds, too. The disadvan-
tages of the mothers are sometimes so great
that the nurses run out of breath as they
describe them: The mom Im seeing tomor-
row is a 16-year-old, unmedicated, bipolar
rape victim, crack-addicted prostitute with a
pattern of threatening to kill her social work-
ers, who abandoned her baby at her ex-boy-
friends sisters oh, and she has an attempt-
ed murder charge in another situation well,
I think Ive got all the risk factors.
to nd mates. From the governments
perspective, encouraging poor people to
marry off makes a lot of sense. Combine
the incomes of a nurses aide, who earns
$12,000, and a construction worker, who
makes $10,000, and you remove both
of them in one fell act from the poverty
rolls. Liberals and libertarians have been
outraged by the idea of government inter-
ference in this most private business, but
the women in marriage class were more
amused than appalled at the ofcial inter-
est in their love lives. (Privacy, like a lot of
goods, is not distributed equally across the
economic spectrum.) They attended mar-
riage class in a spirit of hope,
but the problem they encoun-
tered afterward was that they
found the men available
to them detrimental, not
benecial, to their efforts
to escape poverty. That view
has a quantitative basis: an
incarceration rate for black
men that rose from 1 to 10
percent in twenty years and
an employment rate for
low-skilled men the kind
of men they were likely to
meet at 56 percent.
The pastor who ran the
marriage class answered the
womens concerns: For now,
you have to go out there and
teach the men to be providers.
It only struck me afterward
how this church-basement
exhortation summed up
American poverty policy today.
A government that for decades
had no plan for helping poor
black men into the socioeco-
nomic mainstream was now
asking poor women to do the
job for them. This is the sort
of plan the American people, including poor
people, have grown to accept in an age that
fetishizes individual, as opposed to civic,
responsibility.
Over the years, as Ive tried to capture
for the record some of the facts and experi-
ences typically written out of the story, I
have come to see that poverty policy often
has very little to do with the poor themselves
and a lot to do with what more privileged
people think about the poor. So in that sense
I may be addressing the appropriate audi-
ence when I write for the New Yorker. I am
not the person, however, to argue that jour-
nalism about poverty can make a long-term,
Stewart McAdams, 16; Ray Mowrer, 18;
Jeremy Ball, 17; Matthew Phillips, 17
Jolo, West Virginia
* * *
concrete difference. I will never forget call-
ing a government ofcial to demand: why
didnt you do anything to prevent all these
deaths from neglect and abuse at group
homes for the mentally retarded? Upon
which I got back this answer: well, we had
to shift all of our inspectors over to those
bad day-care centers after that story you did
last year. Poverty journalism may in fact
be a zero-sum game, and, ofcially at least,
I have no pretension that I am doing any-
thing more than this: presenting to some
sliver of the public a readable document that
is faithful to the reality lived by some steady,
volatile 12 to 13 percent of the American
population. Secretly, though, I am having a
raging imaginary conversation with readers.
A
few years back I was spending
time in an inner-city housing proj-
ect when I heard that the American
philosopher John Rawls had died,
and being there brought back to me his
thought experiment, the original position.
Rawls asked how you would write the social
contract, design a just system of civil society,
if you had to create it behind a veil of igno-
rance that is, if you didnt know what your
place in that society would be. If you didnt
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Brassa (18991984) Fotografien Die groe Retrospektive 9. Mrz 28. Mai 2007
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. Eine Ausstellung des Centre Pompidou, Muse national dart moderne Centre de Cration Industrielle, Paris
Grard Rondeau Fotografien 9. Mrz 28. Mai 2007
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. In Zusammenarbeit mit der Botschaft der Republik Frankreich und dem Institut franais in Berlin
R Soupault (19011996) Die Fotografin der magischen Sekunde 28. April 13. August 2007
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. Ermglicht durch den Hauptstadtkulturfonds
AngkorGttliches Erbe Kambodschas 5. Mai 29. Juli 2007
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. Eine Ausstellung der Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn. Ermglicht durch den Hauptstadtkulturfonds
Cindy Sherman 15. Juni 17. September 2007
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele. Eine Ausstellung des Jeu de Paume, Paris in Kooperation mit dem Kunsthaus Bregenz, dem Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek
und dem Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin
Im Zeichen des Goldenen Greifen. Knigsgrber der Skythen
6. Juli 1. Oktober 2007
Unter der Schirmherrschaft von Bundesprsident Horst Khler und Prsident Vladimir Putin. Veranstalter: Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Archologischen Instituts
und des Museums fr Vor- und Frhgeschichte, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Museum fr Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg und der Kulturstiftung
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Berlin Journal_192x126_Apr07 05.03.2007 12:06 Uhr Seite 1
know whether you were going to be rich or
poor, black or brown or white, gifted or slow,
what would you choose that would be fair?
I looked around and thought, well, I prob-
ably wouldnt design for myself the system
I see right here. In that system even remark-
ably gifted high-school students dont get
the necessary information and aid to get a
college education unless they also happen
to be basketball stars. Destitute 22-year-olds
who bounce checks at Wal-Mart are impris-
oned while surgeons who abuse narcotics go
free. The public transportation system
offers door-to-door service to college foot-
ball games but no service to poor neigh-
borhoods after dark, subjecting low-wage
workers without cars to a nightly drama
of hitchhiking home. A sickly woman
raising a son and four grandchildren on
$4,000 a year can get a medical exam
only by signing up to be a guinea pig
for a pharmaceutical company testing a
new drug. When I tell about these lives, I
implicitly ask readers, what if it were you?
Faced with an array of bad choices, how
would you choose? And now what would
you design that might be fairer?
Katherine Boo is a winner of a Pulitzer

Prize for public service, awarded for
her investigative piece Invisible Lives,
Invisible Deaths, and current Haniel
Fellow at the Academy. This article is
based on her Berlin lecture Framing
the Poor, delivered on March 6.
Anastaizshzia (Tash) Rains, 16
Los Angeles, California
* * *
Watching Out
The Writers State
by Geoffrey Wolff
Old Comrade at the Fence, Wolfgang Mattheuer, 1971
W
e Americans can t
claim we havent been warned.
As I write, early March of
2007, the New York Times
has just run an editorial exhorting the new
Congress to reverse the post-9/11 erosion
call it a landslide of our civil liberties. The
inventory is startling: disregard of habeas
corpus, spurious executive claims of nation-
al interest, warrentless (and unwarranted)
wiretapping, secret trials, secret prisons,
email invasion, torture, strip searches,
and X-ray photos bagging full frontal
nudity. And thats just the States side of
things, stateside. On the civil side: bug-
ging, identity theft, security cameras, credit
reports, paparazzi porn, gossip conveyed by
unnamed informers published by, say, the
New York Times in the pretense of deploring
gossip conveyed by unnamed informers.
Have we forgotten Watergate? Does the
name J. Edgar Hoover ring a bell? Evidently
someone is keeping an eye on the warn-
ings. In just the past few weeks two novels
by prominent writers Walter Kirn and
Jonathan Raban have been prominently
reviewed. In the New York Times Sunday
Book Review, Kirnss The Unbinding is head-
lined Web of Spies (February 11, 2007);
the review quotes Kirnss introduction,
deploring the plight of what people used to
call the self in an age of high-tech snoop-
ing, political paranoia, identity thievery and
Internet exhibitionism.
The New York Review of Books of
March 15, 2007 has a chilling review by
Michael Dirda of Jonathan Rabans chill-
ing novel Surveillance which imagines
Americans continuing slide downhill into
the condition of a police state, a slide pow-
ered by the sliders, in the way that kids on
a sled use the imsy power of their arms to
augment their pell-mell descent down an
icy slope. Dirdas review is titled The Way
We Live Now, which seems like its a whole
lot worse than Anthony Trollopes mischie-
vous and misled characters lived then.
I have come to Berlin to stretch
myself as a novelist, to learn whether
effort alone can enable my grasp to equal
my reach. My ambition is to imagine how
others lived then, not in a state becom-
ing a police state but already a police state.
A state in which, lets pretend, half of its
citizens spied and informed on the other
half. Dirda quotes Spinoza on the kind of
circumstance I have in mind: They who
can treat secretly of the affairs of a domin-
ion have it absolutely under their author-
ity, and, as they plot against the enemy in
time of war, so do they against the citizens
in time of peace. (As Brecht had it in a
poem, the State sick of its citizens over-
throws them.)
Like most writers, I am familiar with
and discomforted by opposing temptations
either to tell of a world I believe I know or to
invent a world I have never experienced. To
write only what I know what oft is spoke
and oft as well expressed is to doom my
work to staleness; to write in ignorance
ungoverned hunch and fancy seems to
me childish, self-indulgent.
I have been writing ction and biogra-
phy and journalism and cultural criticism
for more than forty years, and my work
has almost always explored the doings and
undoings of Americans, and particularly
those of my fellow countrymen discontent
with whom they have been born to be. This
is territory that I know. My father was a con-
man, reinventing himself again and again,
sometimes to accord with whom others
wished him to be and sometimes to satisfy
his yearning to have been someone else,
and restless in his fantasies never the
same someone else. Im drawn to charac-
ters who demand what their genes and their
social class determine that they should
be denied. The bully against whom these
characters beat their sts is human circum-
stance rather than state law. This material
is quintessentially attentive to the white
American middle class, which is not to say
that I nd it therefore trivial. I believe pain
is where you nd it, that it can hurt like
crazy to be on the receiving end of a snub at
the country club or a sneer from the nine-
year-old girl that your nine-year-old self has
a crush on, not to mention the bad news
common as a toothache that everyone
gets sooner or later at the doctors ofce.
But in writing specically about the
American human comedy, and especially a
comedy of manners, I can mistake motives
or botch sentences or say what needs no
saying, but I like to believe that I am not in
much danger of making a fool of myself

A novelist is a spy and an
interrogator. A novelist puts
his slanders on a ream of
paper, attaches a brick to
it, throws it through your
window, and runs for his life.
I
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to myself. (Making a fool of oneself to others
is always, of course, on the agenda.) This is a
comfort; it can also be a drag.
Im drawn now to a riskier purpose and
process, a sustained attempt to see through
strangers eyes, to inhabit strangers cul-
tures, to live the lives of others. Its my hope
to insinuate myself into the ideals and
ambitions, the pleasures and frustrations,
the temptations and refusals, the choices
and evasions, the fear and recklessness, the
subtlety and coarseness of such a state of
affairs as characterized daily life under the
tyranny of a police state, and my inspira-
tion only this oxymoron will sufce is
the Stasi.
T
he title in English of Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarcks Das
Leben der Anderen is concise and
resonant: The Lives of Others. The
lm begins by ashing on the screen a
quotation, the declaration of an outrageous
ambition attributed to Erich Mielke, the
crazy-like-a-fox minister for state security,
boss of bosses of the Stasi: to know every-
thing about everybody. This nutty aspira-
tion is so immodest in scope, so indifferent
to the varieties of human eccentricity, so
blind to the varieties of mendacity, so hun-
gry and solipsistic that it could only have
been uttered by a novelist.
Even a biographers appetite is modest
by comparison. Whether cocksure or shy,
any biographer knows, and may admit, that
sources lie or misremember, that docu-
ments say an income tax return are unre-
liable, that letters and journals are unreli-
able, that motive drives narrative, that point
of view controls the apprehension of facts.
Biographers may claim to have discovered
a compelling truth about one or two people,
or even about a cohort or family, but every-
thing about everybody? Historians would
laugh the notion in its face.
A novelist, though, might sympathize
with Mielkes outrageous claim. A novelist
is a spy and an interrogator. A novelist is
a rude boy or girl, silently asking the per-
sonal questions that nice people dont want
to answer. A novelist puts his slanders on a
ream of paper, attaches a brick to it, throws
it through your window, and runs for his
life. Thought you ought to know your
wifes cheating on you with the best man
at your wedding. Gotta go, Im too busy to
hang around for your response.
And of course we Americans have all
watched through one-way windows the
bearbaiting of reality television, those
unstoppable hot-air storms of confession
and inquisition in which interrogators,
armed with microphones and cameras, are
set upon the undefended and anguished
and injured, demanding to know every-
thing shameful or disgraceful or hurtful
about everybody:
Why did your wife cheat on you?
How did you feel when the hurricane
blew away your roof and lled your unin-
sured house with rainwater and sewage?
Your granny was washed away in the ood,
or so you claim. How did that feel? And tell
me, did her wheelchair oat? Whats that?
Speak more clearly! And into my micro-
phone! I wouldnt have believed a wheel-
chair could oat away, with a grandmother
in it. I have to ask, my viewers need to
know, how did that come about? Describe
the scene. You know of course that the
authorities have cast doubt on your claim?
Whats your answer to the many who dont
believe you?
Do you have a fatal disease? No, thats
not what I want to know: I want to know if
you have a fatal disease other than mortal-
ity? Yeah? Really! Are you scared of death?
Well, then, how about pain? Are you scared
of pain? Do you think your kids will cry
when you die? Which of them will get your
jazz collection? Do you think shell sell it to
a used-record dealer? How much money are
you going to leave them? Dont you think
youre spending a bit grandly on your own
health care? Isnt bypass surgery at your age
a little extravagant? Some might say more
Award Winner, Wolfgang Mattheuer, 19731974
than a little self-celebrating? Are those
tears dripping down your cheeks? What are
they about? Hey, take off your glasses so we
can see! Tell me why youre crying? Wait!
My recorder ran out of tape! Can you let me
have some tape to record this?
How am I going to use this material?
Thats really none of your business. Why do
you ask? Lets talk about why youd want to
ask me that question.
Oh, by the way, as soon as you answer
all my questions truthfully, as I see the
truth, I want you to shut up and listen to me
tell everybody what youre really like. Dont
interrupt, because when Im through with
you Ill know everything about you. I plan
to know everything about everybody.
Like the Stasi?
Y
ou wouldn t know it by watch-
ing American television news
interviews, but people in free
countries dont have to answer
intrusive questions asked by strangers.
No comment works, and in aggravated
instances, Buzz off! Doors are designed
to be slammed shut. Maybe an income tax
auditor or a prosecuting attorney can drill
close to a free citizens discomfort zone, but
even then the interrogated can always plead
the Fifth Amendment or direct inquiries to
his or her lawyer. Dont tread on me was
revolutionary Americas proudest motto,
blazed on the 1775 Gadsden ag carried
by Marines ghting King Georges tyrants,
showing a rattlesnake coiled to strike.
Dont ask, dont tell is a tamer version of
the sentiment.
I mean that members of my tribe can be
born and die without ever having to con-
fess and without fearing that an expressed
opinion will ruin their future hopes or
cost their freedom. My tribe is huge but
not all-inclusive: employed, tax-paying,
benet-receiving Lets call my tribe the
White Middle Class, understanding that
the boundaries of this cohort are so elastic
from an assembly-line welder in Dearborn
to a retired golfer in Sarasota, from a pay-
check-to-paycheck skilled laborer clipping
coupons to make the monthly payments on
the speedboat on a trailer in his driveway
in Biloxi to a nishing school graduate clip-
ping coupons on inherited bearer bonds
that keep her smiling in Greenwich.
As a member of my tribe and owing to
the peculiar precariousness of my child-
hood as the son of a father who spent great
sums of money he didnt have (as well as
spending time in prison), I rode the busy
elevator down to the basement and up to
the attic of the Middle Class, sometimes
enjoying the fruits of his extravagance and
sometimes enduring the consequences.
Ive been unemployed, but not for long. Ive
never felt there was a sturdy net below to
catch me if I fell, and I know the elevator is
still in business, with a down button, but
whether from ignorance or some cultural
security (probably itself a dumb-but-happy
pipe dream) and despite having witnessed
the serial crimes of J. Edgar Hoover I have
never felt afraid of my country or cowed
by my putative superiors in rank, wealth,
inuence, or police power.
Mind you, I know enough to realize that
during these bad days of the Patriot Act I
should feel suspicious of my country and
that my comfort comes in large part from
the circumstance that I am not black nor
a Muslim nor an illegal alien nor under-
educated, unemployed, or uninsured nor
dogged by bankruptcy or a criminal record.
Neither have I or mine been unlucky
enough to live in the United States with a
German name during World War I or to
have been a Japanese-American during
World War II.
But in fact I have never feared that some-
thing I might say or write about the nature
of the universe, mortality, human rights,
weapons policy, the fbi or cia, the presi-
dent, the mayor of Bath, Maine, evolution,
abortion, tax policy, or free speech itself
would ever cause hurt to me or to my family
and friends. As a temperamental wise guy
I have certainly felt the sting of disapproval
in response to my opinions. As a note-
passer and too-quick-laugher in class, I was
warned that I ought to learn to keep my
mouth shut, but I slipped into a university
anyway. My father was red from jobs for
insulting his bosses, but (until he didnt) he
found new jobs with new bosses to insult.
As an adult, wishing to get by in the world
without causing unnecessary pain, I have
tried to learn and to teach my sons good
manners. But let me repeat I have never
felt afraid to answer a question or offer an
opinion. In fact I dont know more than a
few Americans of my skin color and with
bona de passports and Social Security
numbers who have felt afraid of serious and
irreversible consequences of speaking or
writing their minds.
Well, Id better amend this declaration.
Nobody doesnt fear an IRS audit, a kind of
dress rehearsal for a state-sponsored inqui-
sition. And of course during Senator Joe
McCarthys reign of terror in the Red Scare
days of the late 1940s and early 1950s a
good deal of injury was inicted on anyone
revealed to have believed and said publicly
or even privately that Marx and Engels,
Lenin or Trotsky, had had a few good ideas.
Screenwriters lost their livelihoods, and
some went to prison, and more than a
handful of the persecuted lost their lives by
suicide. Academia had its share of hot seats,
and the obligation to swear loyalty oaths
became epidemic under that temporary un-
American madness known as the House
Un-American Activities Committee, all too
prophetic of Congresss shamelessly titled
Patriot Act.
But it is also true that it was possible to
create black comedy from that mid-century
witch hunt that Lillian Hellman famously
titled Scoundrel Time. Hellmans nemesis
Mary McCarthys short novel The Groves
of Academe takes as its inspired premise
the situation of an incompetent and ridicu-
lous professor coming up for tenure at a
small liberal arts college and sure not to
get it who lets it be rumored (falsely) that
at an earlier time he had been a communist
sympathizer, setting the grand machin-
ery of liberal counter-theology to grind-
ing, slowly but surely protecting him from
denial of tenure.
I search for equivalence in my own
experience and nd only farce. Warned
by the headmaster of my high school that
my reexive sarcasm and skepticism had
made me the weak link in an otherwise
strong Choate chain, I became a cheer-
leader. This shames me to confess, to recol-
lect roaming the sidelines during football
games against Deereld, megaphone to
my mouth, demanding Cho-OATE,
Cho-OATE, gimme a C, gimme an H
But I had earned my evil reputation for
bad citizenship, and then Id calculated its
repair, and now I pay the price for both my
wisecracks and my ass-kissing by inviting
laughter at my expense. No harm done to
others and among my friends some enter-
tainment value given from my agrant

Members of my tribe can
be born and die without
ever having to confess
and without fearing that
an expressed opinion will
ruin their future hopes or
cost their freedom.
cynicism. I imagine I could try to persuade
the gullible that my cheerleading was in
fact deeply subversive, a anking maneuver
against School Spirit, but rst Id have to
persuade myself.
And what is education for? I learned
from the experience not to be a running
dog for headmasters or for well-mannered
readers who dont like writers to hang dirty
laundry out in public, or to write what they
believe to be true about the errors of their
countrys ways. And it must be noted that
there is no shortfall of opinions in America
regarding what is wrong with America. My
fellow members of the Middle Class do
not suffer from low self-esteem but from a
comical ination of self-regard. Our most
conspicuous problem is not what we are
constrained from saying but what we are
obliged to listen to, and this is not blaring
from loudspeakers set in public places in
pre-Wall-fall-down Sophia or Bucharest,
Krakow or East Berlin.
This has its downside, of course.
American writers arent afraid, perhaps,
because no one much cares what we speak
or write. Being ignored can produce corol-
lary absurdities, a kind of unarticulated
tyranny-envy whereby a writer might long
for the opportunity to be a banned writer,
a Kundera or Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn.
This neurosis, different in degree but not
in kind from reunied Germanys East-
nostalgia, is akin to the unlucky position of
a writer without an unhappy childhood to
use as inspirational matter, material, as
we writers name it.
During Watergate and the infamous
Enemies List kept by Nixon and his
thugs, my friends in Washington longed
to be named among those despised by the
despised. This is a trivial version a tale
from a fools paradise of what Timothy
Garton Ash calls le envy in his extraor-
dinary study of the self as apprehended by
the state. But he laughs to stay sane in the
face of a written record of betrayal, malice,
and delusion (the delusion written not only
in his Stasi le but also in his contempo-
rary diary and journal).
Laughter comes cheaper when human
rights seem free. Our family dines out
many a chuckle at the recollection that,
while he was in grade school, many of my
younger sons telephone conversations were
wiretapped by the FBI, incidental to their
bugging of the father of his classmate, her-
self the niece of a Providence gangster nick-
named Babyshanks. Do you think Bobby
likes Jodi? I think Jodi likes Bobby. Im
watching Gilligans Island. Hey, my moms
calling me to dinner. Wait a sec, Mom! Im
on the phone (The novelist Herbert Gold
describes such jolly nuisances as happy
problems for happy people.)
B
ut there I go again, talking
about myself and my kind, show-
ing the contempt of familiarity
when I hope to study and tell a
story about the unfamiliar. So let me begin
to feel my way in the dusk, trying to read a
map of the territory I mean to explore. Lets
begin with the word security, to take seri-
ously the Stasis avowed determination to
be the Sword and Shield of the Party, itself
putatively the sword and shield of its citi-
zens, of its children.
Weve all watched children, once they
can crawl and point and grab and open and
push and unscrew lightbulbs and climb
into washing machines. I mean watched.
To keep them safe were tyrants. No! Stop!
Get down! Dont touch those scissors!
That knife will cut you! Dont throw that!
Dont do that! That will burn you! Youll
fall! Youll put out your eye with that stick!
Youll drown! Youll be hit by a car! By a bus!
A train! Youll get shocked! Electrocuted!
So no wonder that little kids push back.
Disobey. Rebel. Mock their tormentors.
Argue. Climb out of their cribs, even if they
fall out of their cribs. Insert sandwiches in
the vcr. Refuse to sleep, or to eat, or to help
put on their jackets.
This push/pull mechanism is so famil-
iar that we dont bother to marvel at its
metaphorical value as a Lego-land imita-
tion of the State in its relation to the States
charges. Perhaps less noticed is the anxiety
of children in the temporary absence of
restraint and opposition, the insecure state
of unimpeded freedom.
One afternoon at home in Maine our
grandson, not quite four at the time and
representative of kids defying limits
imposed by gravity and physics, was climb-
ing a wall or a stair banister or a bucket on
a bucket set atop another bucket. My wife
and I were upstairs, taking a load off, feet
under the comforter and reading the news-
paper. He was downstairs. He suddenly
stopped making dangerous noises.
Hey, he yelled. Whos keeping an eye
on me?
I think that hearing the urgency of that
question, and the silence that preceded
it, opened a gate just a crack that had
barred me from the foreign place I mean to
visit. Hearing that question resonate in my
minds ear has provoked other questions,
and those questions are metastasizing:
When is it generous, neighborly (leave
aside necessary), to keep an eye on oth-
ers? In Tokyo, Im told, its considered
a civic virtue that local police know the
citizens in their anthill neighborhood
intimately and drop in uninvited to have
a chat now and then, noticing whats been
added to the furnishings. A new plasma
television might occasion congratulations
on a promotion at work rather than a suspi-
cion that it fell off the back of a truck. I see
your daughter is late coming home from
school? Violin lessons? Or is she perhaps
hanging out with bad inuences at the
train station?
Everywhere, the Good Neighbor keeps
an eye on whats up next door. Unless I hate
my neighbor, whose dog barks all day and
night, or who plays Grateful Dead bootlegs
at top volume, or whose tree limbs droop
over my fence, dripping leaves into my
swimming pool, in which case Ill prob-
ably write letters to the proper authorities,
complaining. But lets assume a Friendly
Neighbor. Newspapers piling up on the
front yard next door? Maybe someones sick
in there. Whats that truck doing in the
driveway? Delivery van or burglar?
It is an article of faith that a solution to
urban American anomie is the neighbor-
hood cop walking the neighborhood beat.
Not swinging his billy club with menace
but pausing to pass the time of day on the
Baltimore stoop with Auntie, trading tips
on how best to fry a chicken or stew spa-
ghetti sauce. The Dream Cop notices when
Auntie slurs her speech (drugs or onset
Alzheimers?) and alerts the authorities,
who intervene. But these are loaded words,
no? Notices Alerts Authorities
Intervention (Spies on, informs on)
But I want to get back to the subject of
kids because if I cant remember how it was
to be one, or how it was to raise them, Im
not going to get within a country mile of the
novel I hope to imagine in Berlin.
Lets stipulate that all parents, every-
where, are bound to dictate to their chil-
dren, to circumscribe their acts, to deny
At what moment or was
there such a point in time
as a moment did child
rebellion become intolerable
because it was dangerous?
what they want. And perhaps we can agree
that many if not most of these denials
afford no luxury of justication. Dont ask
why; just do what I say! And surely kids,
everywhere, are bound to resist arbitrary
strictures, to defy their parents authority.
And perhaps parents despite their obliga-
tions to be swords and shields on behalf of
their kids security relish the determi-
nation if not impudence of their children,
their independent spirits, their sometimes
breathtaking courage in deance of large,
strong, mobile oppressors. So what then
do parents say when they have to shut the
damper on that spirit, to shut it tighter and
tighter until it is smothered?
Im not referring, of course, to those
staples of family dinners, those arguments
about hair length and nose piercings and
heavy metal music and meat eating and why
manners matter. Im wondering instead
about what was said what could be said by
parents under Stasi dominion to their kids
about the state of affairs the protocols and
labyrinthine bylaws and codicils under
which their lives were bound to be lived. At
what moment or was there such a point in
time as a moment did rebellion become
intolerable because it was dangerous?
And how indeed did the State itself
accommodate if it did the insolence of
toddlers, the laughter of kids too young
to know not to laugh? Little kids can be
brave beyond imagining maybe foolhardy
rather than courageous, but audacious in
their willingness to confront and confound
unbounded authority. That kids prefer
not to pick on someone their own size but
instead on grown people made even more
imposing by being regarded from below
this should excite in their parents awe and
pride. Suppose it excited only fear?
And was caution conveyed by inference
or right out loud: You cant say that! Or
even, You arent allowed to believe that!
And what if the conversations werent
stied? What then? How much danger
could one tolerate? Or how many mine-
elds could one navigate? What was it like
to game the system? Could it be gamed?
Could you say no when the State invited you
to join the team, their team? The one that
played against the other team? Could you
pretend to say yes? And would you teach
your kids the ropes, how to trick the State?
Or, maybe, how to say yes to this but no to
that? What happened if your kid said no?
Who asked kids to say yes? How did that
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work? Where did they do the asking? Who
was they, besides the obvious goon-agent-
bullies? Was it the Pioneer guide? The
Latin teacher? The milk deliverer? A child
molester, lets imagine.
If your kids wised off at school, when
they believed incorrectly, as kids will
that they were speaking privately, and the
next morning your Trabi had two at tires
(if youd said yes persuasively enough to
own a Trabi), was that coincidence?
And if you got a toothache that after-
noon, was that coincidence? (That you
couldnt go to the head of the line for an
appointment with the dentist was surely
not coincidence.)
What was it like to be thwarted, mufed,
betrayed, crudely seduced, and cruelly
abandoned? What was it like to believe
in the ideals of a state that didnt believe
in you? What was that like, The Lives
of Others?
As current Berthold Leibinger Fellow,

writer Geoffrey Wolff is researching
his seventh novel while in residence on
the Wannsee. He is the former direc-
tor of the graduate program in ction
at the University of California, Irvine.
pink, purple fading to palest lilac, blue of
the softest, fullest, hues, and to these there
were added the originally rich green and a
citron yellow.
As many as two thousand years ago Indian
artisans had perfected dyeing and colored
design, which, in the form of chintzes
brought to Britain by the British East India
Company as early as 1601, stimulated a
nascent hunger for color in England, a hun-
ger marked by both attraction and repulsion:
a mark of the exotic and yet a mark of the
primitive.
Color seems so innocent, so gay and
exuberant. We westerners say we love it, yet
when put to the test we decline. Real photog-
raphy spurns color for black-and-white, color
being looked down upon as the medium of
advertising and vulgarity. Clint Eastwoods
two recent lms about the World War II bat-
tle for Iwo Jima show most of the events in a
bluish tinged black-and-white, except for the
explosions. Technicolor would detract from
the gravity of war.
Color cannot easily be disassociated from
colonization and post-colonization, and
this is highlighted by the considerable yet
widely overlooked role color played in buy-
ing African slaves to sell in the New World.
Brought by Europeans from India, chintzes
were essentially as desired as rearms, per-
haps even more so. Power does not reside
only in the barrel of a gun.
Europeans bought slaves in exchange for
Indian textiles, such as the famous Guinea
cloth of beautiful, deep, Pondicherry indi-
go from the Coromandel coast of eastern
India. By monetary value, almost one-third
of the trade goods in the hold of the French
slave ship The Diligent, as it set out in 1731
from Nantes for the Slave Coast of West
Africa, was fabric from the east coast of
India. (Another third was the 7,050 pounds
of cowry shells, a West African form of
currency that also came from the Indian
Maldives.) What Europe itself supplied so as
to acquire slaves was its brandy (constitut-
ing one-quarter of the goods by value) and
its gunpowder and guns (a mere 14 percent).
A
re the walls of the room in
which you are reading this essay
white? Maybe there is a brightly
colored painting on the wall,
framed and controlled by this mass of bland-
ness? If a man, are your clothes somber in
hue? After all, what sort of men, or women,
wear loud clothing? In other words, are
Westerners by and large frightened by vivid
color, which they have for centuries associ-
ated with so-called primitive peoples or even
with the circus, prostitutes, childrens toys,
and the criminal underground? Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe certainly thought so
in his polemical book on color, but he failed
to inquire into the possibility that this fear
was and would remain composed of equal
amounts of attraction and repulsion, mak-
ing the fear ever so much more complicated,
fascinating, and unpredictable.
Until recently Europe obtained its color
whether as dyes, paints, clothing, carpets,
curtains, or coverings from the colored
parts of the world, meaning from the col-
ored people, especially Indians. The prima-
ry vehicles of color in early modern Europe
were the gorgeous chintzes colored cotton
cloths from India. It was their color, and
not just color but their play with color, that
made chintzes so special. As for the glori-
ous color of chintz, connoisseur of English
material culture Maciver Percival enthused:
Spaces which seemed one at sweep of colour
are, in fact, nothing of the sort, but that every
bit of the whole tinted surface is built up of
a wonderfully delicate patterning, though
so subsidiary to the general scheme that it
does not interfere with it at all. Every leaf,
every ower, is full of tiny markings, spots, or
shadings, sometimes corresponding to the
veinings which are found in Nature, and at
other times seemingly inconsequent and only
added to ll and break up the surface.
The play of color both makes and breaks the
claims of form.
The beauty of old Indian painted calicoes
lies rst of all in their colour, which is the
rst thing to strike the eye. Lovely rich tones
of rose, from full crimson to delicate shell
Rhapsody in Color
Opiations of the Visual Field
by Michael Taussig
Although at times the role of rearms in
this trade must have been tremendous, the
manifest of The Diligent and other vessels
suggest that pride of place from the sixteenth
through the nineteenth centuries went to the
Indian fabrics. Long into the nineteenth cen-
tury, Guinea cloth also served as a form of
currency in Senegambia, where it was used
by the French Army to buy provisions and
favor during its thrust eastwards across the
continent.
An unbelievable variety of colored cot-
ton fabric from India was used to buy slaves.
Here is the mere beginning of a list put in
alphabetical order:
allejars usually striped red and white
baffetas often blue or white
bajutapeaux striped or checked, or deep
red, blue and white, blue and red, or
fowered
birampot red, blue, or white
brawls striped blue and white
caffa painted cotton, sometimes with
foral designs
calawapores striped, checked, or pat-
terned, with red or blue predominating
calicoes white, blue, or printed
cannequins white cloth with red stripe at one
end, some dyed blue
chasselas striped or checked
chelloes striped or checked, woven
with colored threads
cherryderries brown, blue, or
white, with red or black stripes
chercolees stripes and checks
chintz printed design, often foral
cushatees striped or checked blue and white
cuttanees usually striped and sometimes
interspersed with fowers
Then there were the beads. The color
range was enormous, wrote anthropolo-
gist Stanley Alpern. White, yellow, lemon,
orange, red, blue, green, and black seem
to have been favored as solid colors; black
and white, yellow and white, red and white,
green and yellow, red and yellow, and black
and yellow in combination. It is surely no
exaggeration to say that the slave trade owed
much to the color trade and that this color
trade was an exchange intimately linking
the color-rich parts of the globe, such as
India with Africa.
Color was intimately linked to the early
medieval slave trade as well, but in this
case it was poor Europeans who were sold
as slaves so as to acquire beautiful colored
fabrics. Slaves from Saxony and Thuringa,
Brittany and Wales, England and Slavic
Europe were traded by Europeans for richly
colored Byzantine cloth from the east, nely
woven in rich brocades and often embroi-
dered with gold and silver thread. Rich
Europeans were doing what rich Africans
would do a millennium later: exchange
their people for color.
Color contains the magic often alleged to
colored people, strikingly brought home with
the so-called chintz room in old English
houses and in the classic detective mystery,
The Moonstone, written by Charles Dickenss
friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins.
According to Maciver Percival, an old
English house without a chintz room was
like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
And like Hamlet, there is a mysterious,
moody, and conicted aura in such a room,
for chintz, wrote Percival in 1923, at once
brings to mind visions of colour bright and
gay, yet soft and subdued withal, of dark
gleaming mahogany, honey-colored oak,
walnut of mysterious grain, reected in the
polished surfaces of the tints and hangings
in a word, all the surroundings of a typical
country house.
This mix of color bright and gay with
the subdued withal is a reminder of how
wrongly we recall Kipling East is East,
and West is West, and never the twain shall
meet for here they blend nicely, ever so
nicely, and generate this mix in ever subtler
tones. Just as the house had to have its chintz
room, so we might say metaphorically, the
English person, as a moral entity, and the
English body, as a material one, had to have
their chintz rooms, too. It is as if the Orient
was like one of William Burroughss color
viruses, insinuating itself into English oak
like the grain of the wood itself and becom-
ing just as inseparable. I know of no concept
which can do justice to this subtlety, for the
nal result Oh! So English, the typi-
cal English country house can only be
achieved to such perfection and splendor by
being Oh! So Indian as well.
Everything is combined so as to become
all the more separate. This I call the chro-
mophobic law of color, with its efferves-
cent charge not only of repulsion but also
of attraction engendered by color no less
than by the Orient. In my opinion Western
aversion to color, or at least to vivid color, to
which Goethe pointed, masks an illicit

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

anthropology at Columbia University
and current Siemens Fellow at the
Academy, where he is working on a
book entitled What Color Is the Sacred?
Chintzes brought to
Britain from India
stimulated a nascent
hunger marked by both
attraction and repulsion:
a mark of the exotic and yet
a mark of the primitive.
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There are many forms of mobility.
The most important one is in our heads.
There is no freedom without the freedom of
movement. The ability to move forward every
day is decisive in determining our quality of life.
The truth of this fact becomes most apparent
when one finds oneself unable to move forward:
the interplay of person, technology and organiza-
tion is rarely stable, but is itself in a continuous
process of movement and change. Since 1998,
the Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo), an
organization set up the BMW Group, has been
studying the interactions that influence mobility.
In close cooperation with politics, science and
industry, we develop new paths for a mobile
future. On water, on land and in the air, autono-
mous or with mechanical assistance. This is not
a purely theoretical exercise. It has a clear
objective: to offer the general public transparent
information about promising new developments,
unsolved problems and their potential ramifica-
tions. The benefits of our efforts extend beyond
the customers of the BMW Group the work of
the ifmo aims to enhance general awareness of
the direction that our society is heading. Because
only they who are well informed can make truly
free decisions.
More information is available here:
www.bmwgroup.com/mobility
BMWGroup
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In this issue:

The Roman Empire

Glen Bowersock is Professor Emeritus

This text is excerpted from a longer

16 Number Fourteen | Spring 2007

A Monthly Newspaper from Germany

Amity Shlaes, Academy JPMorgan

If your pictures arent good, you arent close enough.

Holtzbrinck Fellow in fall 2002, Alex

Foreign Policy Luncheon

Baden-Wrt temberg Seminar

Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold Lecture

Katherine Boo is a winner of a Pulitzer

As current Berthold Leibinger Fellow,

Michael Taussig is a professor of

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