Berlin Journal 23

In this issue:
Joan Acocella
John Burnside
Peter Constantine
Martin K. Dimitrov
Kelly Gallagher
Saba Mahmood
Kim Lane Scheppele
Celina Su
Hans R. Vaget
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For the city, which
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zwischen verschiedenen Fahrzeugtypen. Angebote der Daimler AG, Mercedesstr. 137, 70327 Stuttgart.
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A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Twenty-Three | Fall 2012
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
Fall 2012 | Number Twenty-Three | The Berlin Journal | 1
CONTENTS
The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Three | Fall 2012
04 From the Notebook of a County Squire
peter constantine offers a new
translation of a short, experimental piece
by Anton Chekhov, inspired by the writers
rural relocation.
07 Bloodlines
joan acocella traces Draculas history,
revealing what the Counts bloodlust says
about society then and now.
14 The Decisive Battle of Mankind
hans r. vaget describes the tensions
and affections that characterized Thomas
Manns relationships with his American
benefactor, Agnes Meyer, and his political
hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
19 To Dwell Is to Garden
john burnside scrutinizes some
hypocritical aspects of German
environmental policy.
22 The Imaginary Wall of China
kelly gallagher examines the rampant
globalization of clean energy technologies
in recent years, with China as a case in
point.
N1 On the Waterfront
The American Academys newsletter,
with the latest on fellows, alumni, and
trustees, as well as recent events at the
Hans Arnhold Center.
25 The Persistence of Authoritarianism
martin k. dimitrov compares the
events of 1989 and 2011, and draws some
unexpected conclusions.
30 Collateral Damage
kim lane scheppele outlines how
measures taken after 9/11 pose a serious
threat to the integrity of international law.
36 The Paradox of Principle
saba mahmood explains how a
comprehensive analysis of minority rights
and geopolitics is essential in grasping
how religious liberty operates in Egypt.
40 A Jarful of Stars
celina su reects on what eleven years
of working with Burmese refugees on
the Thai border has taught her, and the
theoretical knowledge it forced her to
rethink.
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Beyond the Grave Getting to Yes Its Not Easy Being Green
2 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-Three | Fall 2012
DIRECTORS NOTE
Deepening the Debate
F
or Americans living on this side of the Atlantic, the
discussions dominating the upcoming presidential elec-
tion feel more distant than ever. Europe remains mired
in debates about the euro, Chinas ever-advancing economy,
Germanys abrupt turn from nuclear power, and the ambiva-
lent results of the Arab Spring.
This fall at the Berlin Journal, we train our gaze beyond US
borders in order to gain a more subtle understanding of the
global politics shaping social and economic realities. Martin
Dimitrov researches the persistence of authoritarianism in
China, Russia, and post-Arab Spring states; Saba Mahmood,
drawing on extensive eldwork in Cairo, explains the dynam-
ics of Coptic-Muslim conict in Egypt and the boundaries
of religious freedom in a postcolonial era; and clean-energy
expert Kelly Gallagher describes how concerns about barriers
to clean energy technologies worldwide, particularly in China,
are largely overblown. Kim Scheppele argues that regulations
instituted by the UN Security Council after the 9/11 attacks
have dealt severe blows to the integrity of international law, and
Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside exposes the contra-
dictions of Germanys environmental practices. Sociologist
Celina Su, reecting on ten years of work with Burmese refu-
gees in Thailand, discusses the disjuncture between foreign-
aid policies and the nitty-gritty messiness of real life.
Literature, at its best, appeals to just this messiness in
human nature, mirroring our inscrutable desires and festering
needs, as Joan Acocella points out in Bloodlines, explaining
why Dracula has proved irresistible for readers and viewers
for over one hundred years. Peter Constantine offers a new
translation of an experimental short story by Chekhov, at a
time when the famous writer chose to reinvent himself in a
strictly rural context; and biographer Hans R. Vaget discloses
the hopes that Thomas Mann held for Franklin D. Roosevelt,
whom Mann revered as Hitlers born opponent.
In a letter to his American benefactor, Agnes Meyer, in
1941, Mann wrote, We dont feel the same about [my recent
lecture], which for me is a life and death matter, and which you
regard as mere politics. During this divisive election season,
the debates taking place at the Hans Arnhold Center provide a
fresh perspective, with the clarity that distance can afford and
the energy that the meeting of multiple disciplines can inspire.
It is our hope that the diverse contributions in this issue of the
journal will further such debates well beyond Berlin.
g. s. and b.l. s.
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
A magazine from the Hans Arnhold
Center published by the American
Academy in Berlin
Number Twenty-Three Fall 2012
PUBLISHER Gary Smith
EDITOR Brittani Sonnenberg
IMAGE EDITOR R. Jay Magill Jr.
ADVERTISING Berit Ebert,
Kathy Alberts
DESIGN Susanna Dulkinys &
Edenspiekermann
www.edenspiekermann.com
LAYOUT Karen Schramke
PRINTED BY Ruksaldruck, Berlin
Copyright 2012
The American Academy in Berlin
ISSN 1610-6490
Cover: Frederike Gross, Tisch, 2002.
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the artist
and the Bosch Group
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
IN BERLIN
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Gary Smith
DEAN OF FELLOWS & PROGRAMS
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FROM THE NOTEBOOK
OF A COUNTRY SQUIRE
Fleeing the city, Chekhov experiments with cherry orchards and a new writing style
By Anton Chekhov / Translated by Peter Constantine
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Translators Note: Early in the spring of 1892,
Anton Chekhov, a new star on the Russian
literary scene, ed Moscow life for the seclu-
sion of Melikhovo, a small country estate he
had just bought, so that like Cincinnatus I
can toil the land, as he wrote to his brother
Alexander. Unlike the aged protagonist
in From the Notebook of a Country Squire,
Chekhov was thirty-two years old and at the
height of his creative powers. He had just writ-
ten some of his greatest literary masterpieces
The Duel, Ward No. 6, Story of an
Unknown Man and had already published
over four hundred short stories, plays, and
vignettes in a decade of feverish industry. Like
the novice country squire of the story, Chekhov
was very much of a city man, and in this piece,
the rst to come out of Melikhovo, he makes
fun of his predicament as the bumbling urban
dweller who might mistake a sparrow for an
exotic migratory bird, or might try to sow
semolina in vegetable beds.
From the Notebook of a Country Squire
is part of a corpus of lesser-known stories in
which Chekhov experimented with unconven-
tional forms. In his early work, Chekhov was
particularly interested in narration using seem-
ingly haphazard fragments, and wrote stories
in an array of unexpected forms: legal deposi-
tions, announcements in lonely hearts columns,
stories in the form of intercepted telegrams, or
answers to questions in a census report.
U
pon his retirement, State
Councilor Kaprikornov bought him-
self a small country estate on which
he settled. There, in imitation partly of
Cincinnatus, partly of the mushroom spe-
cialist Professor Kaigorodov, he toiled

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he has a throat. So I said: I, too, have
a throat, and yet I do not crow! O the
mysteries of Nature! All the years I served
in St. Petersburg I often ate turkeys, but
saw my rst live one yesterday. A most
remarkable bird.
MARCH 22. The village constable came
by. We had a long talk I seated, he
standing about the virtues. As we con-
versed, he asked me: If given the oppor-
tunity, Your Excellency, would you wish to
be young again? To which I replied: No,
I would not. If I were young again, I would
not have the high rank I have attained. He
agreed with me, and, visibly moved, went
on his way.
APRIL 16. With my own hands I dug two
vegetable beds in the garden and sowed
semolina in them. I did not tell a soul
about this, as I wanted the semolina beds
to be a surprise for dear Marfa Evlampi-
yevna, to whom I owe so many happy
moments. Yesterday, as we were having
tea, she lamented the condition her gure
was in, complaining that her size no longer
allowed her to t through the pantry door.
I remarked to her: On the contrary, my
dearest, the fullness of your form frames
you most wonderfully and fans my fervor.
She blushed, and I stood up and em-
braced her with both hands (as one can no
longer reach around her with just one).
MAY 28. An old man who saw me by the
womens bathing place asked me why
I was sitting there. To which I replied:
I am keeping watch to make sure that
no young men approach. Let us both
keep watch, the old man said, and, sitting
down next to me, we began to discuss the
virtues.
Peter Constantine is a literary trans-
lator and the fall 2012 Ellen Maria
Gorrissen Fellow at the American
Academy.
the land and recorded his observations on
nature. After his death, his notes, along
with the rest of his property, were trans-
ferred by his last will and testament to his
housekeeper, Marfa Evlampiyevna, a devot-
ed old soul who had the manor house
pulled down and a sturdy tavern that sold
liquor built in its place. This tavern had a
special room for traveling landowners and
ofcials, and on the table in that room she
placed the deceaseds bundle of notes, in
case someone needed a piece of scrap paper.
One of these pieces of paper has fallen into
my hands; from what I could surmise, it
must have been from the beginning of the
deceaseds agricultural notes, and contains
the following entries:
MARCH 3. The birds of spring are now
arriving. Yesterday I saw some sparrows.
Greetings to you, O children of southern
climes! In your sweet chirping I believe I
hear you calling back to me: And a good
day to you, Your Excellency!
MARCH 14. Today I asked Marfa
Evlampiyevna: Why does our cockerel
crow so often? Her answer: Because
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The success of this work is evidenced in new med i cines for
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You need commitment, focus and passion to nd new ways to
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U
nclean, unclean! Mina
Harker screams, gathering her
bloodied nightgown around her.
In Chapter 21 of Bram Stokers Dracula,
Minas friend John Seward, a psychiatrist
in Pureet, near London, tells how he and
a colleague, having been warned that Mina
might be in danger, broke into her bed-
room one night and found her kneeling on
the edge of her bed. Bending over her was
a tall gure, dressed in black. His right
hand gripped her by the back of the neck,
forcing her face down on his bosom. Her
white nightdress was smeared with blood,
and a thin stream trickled down the mans
bare breast which was shown by his torn-
open dress. The attitude of the two had a
terrible resemblance to a child forcing a
kittens nose into a saucer of milk to compel
it to drink. Minas husband, Jonathan, lay
on the bed, unconscious, a few inches from
the scene of his wifes violation.
Later, between sobs, Mina relates what
happened. She was in bed with Jonathan
when a strange mist crept into the room.
Soon, it congealed into the gure of a man
Count Dracula. With a mocking smile, he
placed one hand upon my shoulder and,
holding me tight, bared my throat with
the other, saying as he did so: First, a little
refreshment to reward my exertions . . .
And oh, my God, my God, pity me! He
placed his reeking lips upon my throat!
The Count took a long drink. Then he drew
back and said that he wanted something
else. He wanted her in his power from then
on. A person who has had his or, more
often, her blood repeatedly sucked by
a vampire turns into a vampire, too, but
the conversion can be accomplished more
quickly if the victim also sucks the vam-
pires blood. And so, Mina says, he pulled
open his shirt, and with his long sharp
nails opened a vein in his breast. When the
blood began to spurt out, he . . . seized my
neck and pressed my mouth to the wound,
so that I must either suffocate or swallow
some of the Oh, my God! The unspeak-
able happened she sucked his blood, at his
breast at which point her friends stormed
into the room. Dracula vanished, and,
Seward relates, Mina uttered a scream so
wild, so ear-piercing, so despairing . . . that
it will ring in my ears to my dying day.
That scene, and Stokers whole novel,
is still ringing in our ears. Stoker did not
invent vampires. If we dene them, broadly,
as the undead spirits who rise, embodied,
from their graves to torment the living
they have been part of human imagining
since ancient times. Eventually, vampire
superstition became concentrated in
Eastern Europe. (It survives there today. In
2007, a Serbian named Miroslav Milosevic
no relation drove a stake into the grave
of Slobodan Milosevic.) It was presum-
ably in Eastern Europe that people worked
out what became the standard methods
for eliminating a vampire: you drive a
wooden stake through his heart, or cut off
his head, or burn him or, to be on the
safe side, all three. In the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, there were
outbreaks of vampire hysteria in Western
Europe; numerous stakings were reported
in Germany. By 1734, the word vampire
had entered the English language. In 1750
the rst scholarly treatise on the subject
appeared the work of Dom Augustin
Calmet, a French Benedictine monk who
devoutly believed in these monsters.
In those days, vampires were grotesque
creatures. Often, they were pictured as
bloated and purple-faced (from drinking
blood); they had long talons and wore dirty
shrouds and smelled terrible a descrip-
tion probably based on the condition of
corpses whose tombs had been opened by
worried villagers. These early undead did
not necessarily draw blood. Often, they
just did regular mischief stole rewood,
scared horses. (Sometimes, they helped
with the housework.) Their origins, too,
were often quaint. Matthew Beresford, in
his recent book From Demons to Dracula:
The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth
(2008), records a Serbian Gypsy belief that
pumpkins, if kept for more than ten days,
may cross over: The gathered pumpkins
stir all by themselves and make a sound
like brrl, brrl, brrl! and begin to shake
themselves. Then they become vampires.
This was not yet the suave, opera-cloaked
fellow of our modern mythology. That
gure emerged in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, a child of the Romantic movement.
I
n the summer of 1816, Lord Byron,
eeing marital difculties, was holed up
in a villa on Lake Geneva. With him was
his personal physician, John Polidori, and,
in house nearby, his friend Percy Bysshe
Shelley; Shelleys mistress, Mary Godwin;
and Marys stepsister Claire Clairmont,
who was angling for Byrons attention (with
reason: she was pregnant by him). The
weather that summer was cold and rainy.
The friends spent hours in Byrons draw-
ing room, talking. One night, they read
one another ghost stories, which were very
popular at the time, and Byron suggested
that they all write ghost stories of their own.
Shelley and Clairmont produced nothing.
Byron began a story and then laid it aside.
But the remaining members of the summer
party went to their desks and created the
two most enduring gures of the modern
horror genre. Mary Godwin, eighteen years
old, began her novel Frankenstein (1818), and
John Polidori, apparently following a sketch
that Byron had written for his abandoned
story, wrote The Vampyre: A Tale (1819).
In Polidoris narrative, the undead villain
is a proud, handsome aristocrat, fatal to
women. (Some say that Polidori based the
character on Byron.) He is interested only
in virgins; he sucks their necks; they die; he
lives. The modern vampire was born.
Innovation for better health. Our commitment is to bring to
patients around the world quality medicines for use in diag
nosing, combating and preventing disease. Every day we work
against time, researching new pathways, new molecules, new
technologies complementing our own capabilities with exper
tise of innovative partners from science and industry.
The success of this work is evidenced in new med i cines for
areas with signifcant unmet medical need such as oncology,
cardiovascular and blood diseases, as well as gynecology and
ophthalmology. Our aim is a better quality of life for all.
You need commitment, focus and passion to nd new ways to
ght the diseases of this world: innovation is at the heart of it.
www.bayerhealthcare.com
www.bayerpharma.com
29407011_BHC_Imageanzeige_210x135mm_RZ.indd 1 29.08.11 12:33
BLOODLINES
The life of the undead
By Joan Acocella
STOKER DID NOT INVENT
VAMPIRES. IF WE DEFINE THEM,
BROADLY, AS THE UNDEAD
SPIRITS WHO RISE, EMBODIED,
FROM THEIR GRAVES TO TORMENT
THE LIVING THEY HAVE BEEN
PART OF HUMAN IMAGINING
SINCE ANCIENT TIMES.

that ladies were carried, fainting, from the
theatre. Meanwhile, the lms had begun
appearing: notably, F.W. Murnaus silent
Nosferatu (1922) and then Tod Brownings
Dracula (1931), the rst vampire talkie, with
Lugosi navigating among the spider webs
and intoning the famous words I do not
drink . . . wine. (That line is not in the
book. It was written for Brownings movie.)
Lugosi stamped the image of Dracula for-
ever, and it stamped him. Thereafter, this
ambitious Hungarian actor had a hard time
getting non-monstrous roles. He spent
many years as a drug addict. He was buried
in his Dracula cloak.
From that point to the present, there
have been more than a hundred and fty
Dracula movies. Roman Polanski, Andy
Warhol, Werner Herzog, Mel Brooks,
and Francis Ford Coppola all made lms
about the Count. (I believe that Herzogs
movie Nosferatu, a modernized version
of Murnaus is by far the nest. Also the
most frightening and the most erotic.)
There are subgenres of Dracula mov-
ies: comedy, pornography, blaxploitation,
anime. After lm, television, of course,
took on vampires. Dark Shadows, in the
nineteen-sixties, and Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, in the nineties, were both big hits.
Meanwhile, the undead have had a long life
in ction. The most important example
in the late twentieth century was Anne
Rices Interview with the Vampire (1976),
with its numerous sequels. Rices heir
was Stephenie Meyer, whose series of four
Twilight novels, born in 2005, have sold
116 million copies worldwide, an astonish-
ing gure, and have generated ve movies
again, fabulously protable. A runner-up
was Charlaine Harriss collection of Sookie
Stackhouse novels (Dead Until Dark, plus
seven sequels), about the passion of a
Louisiana barmaid for a handsome rev-
enant named Bill, and what she wore on
each of their dates. This series, too, sold in
the millions, and it spawned the television
series True Blood, with ample gore. In 2008
we got the haunting Swedish movie Let the
Right One In. Here, a twelve-year-old boy,
Oskar, falls in love with a mysterious girl,
Eli, who has moved in next door. She, too,
is twelve, she tells Oskar, but she has been
twelve for a long time. Let the Right One In
was followed by an American adaptation,
Let Me In, which was almost as powerful.
Those are only the most notable entries. In
the last few decades there have been hordes
of others, some earnest but many sardonic.
Plays include Out for the Count and Im
Sorry the Bridge Is Out, Youll Have to Spend
the Night. Several Dracula ballets have
been produced. In 2004, the lm Dracula
300, set in outer space, was released. In
the same year, there was a movie about a
Vatican-sponsored Dracula-hunt, starring
Hugh Jackman. (In 2003, Dan Browns The
Da Vinci Code had set off the craze for eccle-
siastical thrillers.) Today, the Count is no
longer just a literary character. Most people
probably could not tell you what book he is
from, or even that he is from a book. He is
an item of cultural knowledge, like Bugs
Bunny or St. Peter. He now occurs in whol-
ly innocent contexts. General Mills has a
cereal named Count Chocula. On Sesame
Street, there is a Muppet, the Count, with
two cute little fangs. He teaches children
how to count.
O
utside the mass media, as well,
Dracula has had a strong following.
There is a Transylvanian Society of
Dracula, based in Bucharest, with chapters
in several other countries. If you travel to
Romania, there are several Dracula-country
tours you can take. (The Count has been
a gold mine for the post-Ceausescu tour-
ist industry.) Even if you go only as far as
Whitby, the English seaside resort where, in
Stokers book, Dracula begins his Western
campaign, you can have the Dracula
Experience, an excursion through the sites
of his malefactions there. On a blurred
borderline with the fan activity is vampire
scholarship. In the nineteen-twenties, the
English historian Montague Summers, a
Roman Catholic priest (or, some say, a man
impersonating a priest), published The
Vampire: His Kith and Kin and The Vampire
in Europe, obsessively detailed books that at
times seem aimed not so much to inform
readers as to give them bad dreams. At
one point, Summers quotes a nineteenth-
century source on how certain Australian
tribes treat their sick with the blood of the
healthy. The latter open a vein in their fore-
arms and let the blood run into a bowl: It is
generally taken in a raw state by the invalid,
who lifts it to his mouth like jelly between
his ngers and thumb. Like Calmet,
Summers believed in the existence of vam-
pires, and pitied people who didnt.
The public adored him. In England and
France, Polidoris tale spawned popular
plays, operas, and operettas. Vampire
novels appeared, the most widely read
being James Malcolm Rymers Varney
the Vampire, serialized between 1845 and
1847. Varney was a penny dreadful, and
faithful to the genre. (Shriek followed
shriek. . . . Her beautifully rounded limbs
quivered with the agony of her soul. . . . He
drags her head to the beds edge.) After
Varney came Carmilla (1872), by Joseph
Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish ghost-
story writer. Carmilla was the mother of
vampire bodice rippers. It also gave birth
to the lesbian vampire story in time, a
plentiful subgenre. Her hot lips traveled
along my cheek in kisses, the female
narrator writes, and she would whisper,
almost in sobs, You are mine, you shall be
mine. Varney and Carmilla were low-end
hits, but vampires penetrated high litera-
ture as well. Baudelaire wrote a poem, and
Thophile Gautier a prose poem, on the
subject.
T
hen came Bram (Abraham) Stoker.
Stoker was a civil servant who fell in
love with theatre in his native Dublin.
In 1878, he moved to London to become the
business manager of the Lyceum Theatre,
owned by his idol, the actor Henry Irving.
On the side, Stoker wrote thrillers, one
about a curse-wielding mummy, one about
a giant homicidal worm, and so on. Several
of these books are still in print, but they
probably wouldnt be if it were not for the
fame and the afterlife of Stokers fourth
novel, Dracula (1897). Dracula was not
an immediate success. Its star rose only
later, once it was adapted for the stage and
the movies. The rst English Dracula play,
by Hamilton Deane, opened in 1924 and
was a sensation. The American produc-
tion (1927), with a script revised by John
L. Balderston and with Bela Lugosi in the
title role, was even more popular. It is said
LUGOSI STAMPED THE IMAGE
OF DRACULA FOREVER, AND IT
STAMPED HIM. THEREAFTER,
THIS AMBITIOUS HUNGARIAN
ACTOR HAD A HARD TIME GETTING
NON-MONSTROUS ROLES. HE
SPENT MANY YEARS AS A DRUG
ADDICT. HE WAS BURIED IN HIS
DRACULA CLOAK.

THE COUNT HAS BEEN A GOLD
MINE FOR THE POST-CEAUSESCU
TOURIST INDUSTRY.

SUZANNE WOLF, NOSFERATU FIGURE, 2012. 10 INCHES. POLYMER CLAY, ACRYLIC, WOOD. MADE IN HUNGARY
C
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O
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T
Later scholars, free of Christian
orthodoxy, have bent the material to their
own uses. In the mid-twentieth century,
Freudian critics, addressing Stokers novel,
did what Freudians did at that time. More
recently, postmodern critics, intent instead
on politics race, sex, and gender have
feasted at the table. Representative essays
include Christopher Crafts Kiss Me with
Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in
Bram Stokers Dracula, Stephen D. Aratas
The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the
Anxiety of Reverse Colonization, and Talia
Schaffers A Wilde Desire Took Me: The
Homoerotic History of Dracula. There is a
Journal of Dracula Studies.
W
hat is all this about? One
could say that Dracula, like
certain other works Alice in
Wonderland, the Sherlock Holmes stories
is a cult favorite. But why does it have a
cult? Well, cults often gather around pow-
erful works of the second rank. Fans feel
that they have to root for them. What, then,
is the source of power in Dracula? A simple
device, used in many notable works of art:
the deployment of great and volatile forces
within a very tight structure.
The narrative method of Dracula is to
assemble a collage of purportedly authentic
documents, most of them in the rst per-
son. Many of the materials are identied
as excerpts from the diaries of the main
characters. In addition, there are letters to
and from these people but also from law-
yers, carting companies, and Hungarian
nuns plus telegrams, news clippings, and
a ships log. This multiplicity of voices gives
the book an excellent, jumpy liveliness.
A long horror story could easily become
suffocating. (That is one of the reasons that
Poes tales are tales, not novels.) Dracula, in
a regular, unannotated edition, runs about
four hundred pages, and it is sometimes
tedious, but at other times it is a thrill. It
opens with four chapters from the diary of
a solicitor named Jonathan Harker describ-
ing his visit, on business, to the castle of
a certain Count Dracula, in Transylvania,
and ending with Harker howling in horror
over what he found there. Then we turn
the page, and suddenly, whoosh! We are in
England, reading a letter from Mina at
the job of convincing skeptics that such
a thing is happening. No people, we are
told, were more condent than the citizens
of Victorian England. The sun, famously,
never set on their empire. They were also
masters of science and technology. Dracula
is full of exciting modern machinery the
telegraph, the typewriter, the Kodak
and the novel has an obsession with railway
trains, probably the nineteenth centurys
most crucial invention. The new world held
no terrors for these people. Still, some were
bewildered by it, because of its challenge
to religious faith, and to the soul-states
religion had taught: sweetness, reverence,
resignation.
That crisis is recorded in work after
work of late-nineteenth-century ction,
but never more forcibly than in Dracula.
In the opening pages of the novel, Harker,
on his way to Castle Dracula, has arrived
in Romania. He complains of the lateness
of the trains. He describes a strange dish,
paprika hendl, that he was given for dinner
in a restaurant. But he is English; he can
handle such things. He does not yet know
that the man he is going to visit has little
concern for timetables the Count has
lived for hundreds of years and dines on
something more peculiar than paprika
hendl. Even when the evidence is in front
of Harkers face, he cannot credit it. The
coachman driving him to Castle Dracula
is of a curious appearance. He has pointed
teeth and aming red eyes. (It is the Count,
in disguise.) This makes Harker, in his
words, feel a little strangely. Days pass,
however, before he forms a stronger opin-
ion. The other characters are equally slow
to get the point. When Professor Abraham
Van Helsing, the venerable Dutch physi-
cian who becomes the head of the vampire-
hunting posse, suggests to his colleague
John Seward that there may be a vampire
operating in their midst, Seward thinks
Van Helsing must be going mad. Surely,
he protests, there must be some rational
that point, Harkers ance bubbling
to her friend Lucy Westenra about how
shes learning shorthand so that she can
be useful to Jonathan in his work. This is
a salutary jolt, and also witty. (Little does
Mina know how Jonathans work is going
at that juncture.) The alternation of voices
also lends texture. Its as if we were turning
an interesting object around in our hands,
looking at it from this angle, then that.
And since the story is reported by so many
different witnesses, we are more likely to
believe it.
In addition, we are given the pleasure of
assembling the pieces of a puzzle. No one
narrator knows all that the others have told
us, and this allows us to read between the
lines. One evening, as Mina is returning to
a house she is sharing with Lucy in Whitby,
she sees her friend at the window, and by
her side, on the sill, something that looked
like a good-sized bird. How strange! Mina
thinks. Not strange to us. By then we know,
from the early, Transylvanian chapters,
that the bird is a bat one of the Counts
preferred incarnations. Such counterpoint,
of course, increases the suspense. When
are these people going to gure out what
is going on? Finally, most of the narration
is not just rst person but on-the-moment,
and therefore unglazed by memory. We
are to be married in an hour, Mina writes
to Lucy as she sits by Jonathans bed in a
Budapest hospital. (Thats where he landed,
with a brain fever, after escaping from
Castle Dracula.) Hes sleeping now, Mina
says. Shell write while she can. Oops!
Jonathan is waking! She must break
off. This minute-by-minute recording, as
Samuel Richardson, its pioneer (in Pamela),
discovered a century and a half earlier,
lends urgency you are there! and, again,
it seems a warrant of truth.
B
ut the narrative method is
not the only thing that provides a
tight receptacle for the story. Most
of this tale of the irrational is ltered
through minds rmly wedded to rational-
ism. Dracula has what Nol Carroll, in
The Philosophy of Horror (1990), called
a complex discovery plot that is, a
plot that involves not just the discovery
of an evil force let loose in the world but
Our commitment to enhancing the quality of life
at every age goes far beyond the boundaries of
our day-to-day business. With great can-do spirit,
our people strive to improve the living conditions
of people around the world. Here in Germany, for
example, Pzer volunteers serve as reading mentors
at a Berlin primary school. We also support organi-
zations such as the Henry Maske Foundation, which
helps provide real prospects to children and young
adults, as well as many health initiatives. And to
protect the environment, we use state-of-the-art
technology to produce our pharmaceuticals. Every
day, this is what we do to realize our vision of Working
Together for a Healthier World. www.pzer.de
P
z
e
r

D
e
u
t
s
c
h
l
a
n
d

G
m
b
H
Because convictions
can change the world
Pzer gets involved
IN THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY, FREUDIAN CRITICS, ADDRESSING
STOKERS NOVEL, DID WHAT FREUDIANS DID AT THAT TIME.

DRACULA HAS WHAT NOL
CARROLL CALLED A COMPLEX
DISCOVERY PLOT THAT IS,
A PLOT THAT INVOLVES NOT
JUST THE DISCOVERY OF AN EVIL
FORCE LET LOOSE IN THE WORLD
BUT THE JOB OF CONVINCING
SKEPTICS THAT SUCH A THING
IS HAPPENING.

explanation of all these mysterious things.
Van Helsing counters that not every phe-
nomenon has a rational explanation: Do
you not think that there are things in the
world which you cannot understand, and
yet which are? Throughout the novel,
self-assured people like Seward have to be
persuaded, with enormous difculty, that
there is something beyond their ken. This
process takes time and thus allows the
monster to compound his crimes.
According to Nina Auerbach, in Our
Vampires, Ourselves (1995), Draculas
depredations are merely symbols of the
real-life sociopolitical horrors facing the
late Victorians. One was immigration. At
the end of the century, Eastern European
Jews, in ight from the pogroms, were
pouring into Western Europe, thereby, as
some Westerners saw it, threatening to
spooked by the Wilde case, backed off from
this rich ambiguity, thereby impoverish-
ing vampire literature. After him, she says,
vampire art became reactionary. Stephen
King, who, himself, wrote a vampire novel,
Salems Lot (1975), has said that all horror
ction, by pitting an absolute good against
an absolute evil, is as Republican as a
banker in a three-piece suit.
S
ome critics believe that another
thing troubling Stoker was the New
Woman, that turn-of-the-century
avatar of the feminist. Again, there is sup-
port for this. The New Woman is referred
to in the book, dismissively, and the God-
ordained difference between the sexes
basically, that women are weak but good,
and men are strong but less good is reiter-
ated with maddening persistence. On the
other hand, Mina, the novels heroine, and
a woman of unquestioned virtue, looks, at
times, like a feminist. Before her marriage,
she works for a living, as a schoolmistress,
and the new technology, which should
have been daunting to a female, does not
faze her. Shes a whiz at typing, a standard
New Woman profession. Also, she is

dilute their pure blood. Dracula, too, is an
migr from the East. Stoker spends a lot
of words on the subject of blood, and not
just when Dracula sucks it out of womens
necks. Fully four of the books ve vampire-
hunters have their blood transfused into
Lucys veins, and this process is recorded
with grisly exactitude. (We see the incisions,
the hypodermics.) So Stoker may in fact
have been thinking of the racial threat. Like
other novels of the period, Dracula contains
invidious remarks about Jews. They have
big noses, they like money the usual.
At that time, furthermore, people in
England were forced, by the scandal of the
Oscar Wilde trials (1895), to think about
something they hadnt worried about
before: homosexuality. Many scholars
have found suggestions of homoeroticism
in Dracula. Auerbach, by contrast, nds
the book annoyingly heterosexual. Earlier
vampire tales, such as Polidoris story and
Carmilla, made room for the mutability of
desire. In those works, sex didnt have to be
man to woman. And it didnt have to be out-
right sex it might just be fervent friend-
ship. It might be kisses and endearments
and breathing. As Auerbach sees it, Stoker,
Our commitment to enhancing the quality of life
at every age goes far beyond the boundaries of
our day-to-day business. With great can-do spirit,
our people strive to improve the living conditions
of people around the world. Here in Germany, for
example, Pzer volunteers serve as reading mentors
at a Berlin primary school. We also support organi-
zations such as the Henry Maske Foundation, which
helps provide real prospects to children and young
adults, as well as many health initiatives. And to
protect the environment, we use state-of-the-art
technology to produce our pharmaceuticals. Every
day, this is what we do to realize our vision of Working
Together for a Healthier World. www.pzer.de
P
z
e
r

D
e
u
t
s
c
h
l
a
n
d

G
m
b
H
Because convictions
can change the world
Pzer gets involved
STOKER SPENDS A LOT OF WORDS
ON THE SUBJECT OF BLOOD, AND
NOT JUST WHEN DRACULA SUCKS
IT OUT OF WOMENS NECKS.

wise and reasonable male virtues.
Nevertheless, her primary characteristic,
compassion, is, by the old rules, an arche-
typal female trait. (At one point, she even
pities Dracula.) Stoker, it seems, had mixed
feelings about the New Woman.
Whether or not politics was operating
in Stokers novel, it is certainly at work
in our contemporary vampire literature.
Charlaine Harriss Sookie Stackhouse
series openly treats vampires as a perse-
cuted minority. Sometimes they are like
black people (lynch mobs pursue them),
sometimes like homosexuals (rednecks
beat them up). Meanwhile, they are try-
ing to go mainstream. Sookies Bill has
sworn off human blood, or hes trying;
he subsists on a Japanese synthetic. He
registers to vote (absentee, because he
cannot get around in daylight). He wears
pressed chinos. This is funny but also
touching. In The Vampire Chronicles,
Anne Rice also seems to regard her undead
as an oppressed group. The series is prob-
ably, at some level, about aids. All this is a
little confusing morally. How can we have
sympathy for the Devil and still regard
him as the Devil? That question seems to
have occurred to Stephenie Meyer, who is
a Mormon. Edward, Meyers featured vam-
pire, is a dashing fellow, and Bella, the her-
oine, becomes his girlfriend, but, because
of the conversion risk, they do not go to bed
together for a very long time, until they are
safely married. Neither should you, Meyer
seems to be saying to her teen-age read-
ers. They are compensated by the romantic
fever that the sexual postponement gener-
ates. The books fairly heave with desire.
B
ut in Stokers time no excite-
ment needed to be added. Sex outside
marriage was still taboo, and dan-
gerous. It could destroy a womans life a
mans, too. (Syphilis was a major killer
at that time. One of Stokers biographers
claimed that the writer died of it.) In such a
context, we do not need to look for political
meaning in Draculas transactions with
women. The meaning is forbidden sex its
menace and its allure. The baring of the
womans esh, her leaning back, the pen-
etration: reading of these matters, does one
think about immigration?
The novel is sometimes close to por-
nographic. Consider the scene in which
Harker, lying supine in a dark room in
Draculas castle, is approached by the
Counts brides. Describing the one he
likes best, Harker says that he could see
in the moonlight the moisture shining on
the scarlet lips, and hear the churning
sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth.
It should happen to us! Harker is not the
only one in Dracula who does not object
to a vampire overture. In Chapter 8, Lucy
describes to Mina her memory of how, on
a recent night, she met a tall, mysterious
man in the shadow of the ruined abbey
that looms over Whitby. (This was her rst
encounter with Dracula.) She speaks of
her experience frankly, without shame,
because she thinks it was just a dream. She
ran through the streets to the appointed
spot, she says: Then I have a vague
memory of something long and dark with
red eyes . . . and something very sweet and
very bitter all around me at once; and then I
seemed sinking into deep green water, and
there was a singing in my ears, as I have
heard there is to drowning men . . . then
there was a sort of agonizing feeling, as if
I were in an earthquake. This is thrilling:
her rushing to the rendezvous, her sense
of something both sweet and bitter, then
the earthquake. But Lucy is a ighty girl.
The crucial testimony is that of Mina, after
Draculas attack on her. I did not want
to hinder him, this honest woman says.
Her statement is echoed by the unsettling
notes of tenderness in Sewards descrip-
tion of the event: the kitten at the saucer of
milk; Minas resemblance, with her face
at Draculas breast, to a nursing baby. The
mind reels.
Dracula is full of faults. It is overfull. It
is sentimental and oratorical. Van Helsing
cannot stop making soul-stirring speeches
to his fellow vampire-hunters. Do we not
see our duty? he asks. We must go on,
he urges them. From no danger shall we
shrink. His listeners grasp one anothers
hands and kneel and swear oaths and weep
and ush and pale. To these annoying
characteristics of Victorian ction, Stoker
adds problems all his own. The on-the-spot
narration forces him, at times, into ridicu-
lous situations. In Chapter 11, Lucy has a
hard night. First, a wolf crashes through
her bedroom window, splattering glass all
over. This awakens her mother, who is in
bed with her. Mrs. Westenra sits up, sees
the wolf, and drops dead from shock. Then,
to make matters worse, Dracula comes in
and sucks Lucys neck. What does she do
when thats over with? Call the police? No.
She pulls out her diary, and, sitting on her
bed next to the rapidly cooling body of her
mother, she records the episode, because
Stoker needs to tell the reader about it.
N
one of this, however, out-
weighs the strengths of the novel,
above all, its psychological acuity.
The last quarter of the book, where the
vampire-hunters, after the attack on Mina,
go after Dracula in earnest, is very subtle,
because at that point Minas dealings with
the end have rendered her half vampire.
At times, she is cooperating with her rescu-
ers. At other times, she is colluding with
Dracula. She is a double agent. Her friends
know this; she knows it, too, and knows
that they know; they know that she knows
that they know. This is complicated, and
not always tidily worked out, but we cannot
help but be impressed by Stokers represen-
tation of the amoral contrivances of love,
or of desire. In this bold clarity, Dracula is
like the work of other nineteenth-century
writers. You can complain that their novels
are loose, baggy monsters. Still, you gasp at
what theyre saying: the truth.
Joan Acocella is a staff writer at the
New Yorker, where this essay originally
appeared, in a slightly different form,
in 2009. Acocella is the Holtzbrinck
Fellow at the American Academy in
the fall.
THE BARING OF THE WOMANS FLESH, HER LEANING BACK,
THE PENETRATION: READING OF THESE MATTERS, DOES
ONE THINK ABOUT IMMIGRATION?

ALL THIS IS A LITTLE CONFUSING
MORALLY. HOW CAN WE
HAVE SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
AND STILL REGARD HIM
AS THE DEVIL?

Alles fr Ihr Auslandsgeschft
Brcken bauen, Tren ffnen
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2012_09_18_FL_Ausland_210x280_DE.indd 1 18.09.12 10:21
THOMAS MANN SITTING IN THE GARDEN OF VILLA MONDADORI, 1952. INSCRIPTION FOR ERVINO POCAR, MANNS GERMAN TRANSLATOR AT
MONDADORI PUBLISHERS.
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to maintain that someone who had been
watching the destruction of Germany from
the front-row seats of history had no
business lecturing or judging those who
experienced the catastrophe rst-hand.
None of Manns opponents had the honesty
or fairness to acknowledge that they them-
selves had been vying to sit in the front row
to cheer the advent of Adolf Hitler and the
Third Reich.
T
his brings into focus the two
personalities who, more than any oth-
ers, put their stamp on the American
years of Manns exile: Agnes Meyer, his
great benefactor, and Franklin Roosevelt,
his political idol. For the historian, they
make an unlikely duo indeed. Agnes Meyer
was a Republican; she invariably backed
Roosevelts opponents in presidential
elections. Politically Mann was strongly
drawn to Roosevelt and his Democratic pro-
gram, which resembled that of the Social
Democratic Party in Germany the party
he had supported during the waning years
of the Weimar Republic. Culturally, how-
ever, he was drawn just as strongly to Agnes
Meyer. Her German ancestors came from
the Protestant world of Northern Germany,
the world of Buddenbrooks. And when he
read to her from his current work a dis-
tinction and privilege she apparently asked
for as compensation for her generosity he
was gratied to see that Agnes Meyer well
understood the subtle jokes woven into the
fabric of his exacting and elegant German.
She was thoroughly familiar with his
work, while Roosevelt, as Mann well knew,
was not.
Agnes Meyer was the owner and pub-
lisher, with her husband, Eugene, of the
Washington Post. They were Washington
insiders, well connected and perfectly
placed to get things done. As we know from
the autobiography of her daughter,

T
he author of Buddenbrooks,
The Magic Mountain, and Doctor
Faustus three thoroughly German
monuments of modern literature actu-
ally died as an American citizen. How
this came about, and what it entailed, is a
strange and improbable story that deserves
to be much better known than it is.
Thomas Mann the greatest living
man of letters, as he was routinely referred
to in the 1930s and 40s settled in the
United States in the fall of 1938, relocating
from Switzerland, his rst country of exile
from Nazi Germany. Having applied for
American citizenship earlier in the spring
of that year, during his rst lecture tour
across the American continent, he became
a United States citizen in 1944. Until 1941
the Manns lived in Princeton, and thereaf-
ter in Los Angeles, where the 1929 Nobel
Prize winner was widely regarded as the
uncrowned head of the German exile com-
munity, the fabled Weimar on the Pacic.
Disenchanted with developments in
postwar America, and also with its foreign
policy, Mann, in 1952, determined to return
to Europe not to Germany, to be sure, but
to Switzerland, where he was to die, shortly
after his eightieth birthday, in 1955.
In American historiography, the bio-
graphical fact of Manns American citizen-
ship was and still is considered a negligible
detail. Not so in Germany, where, imme-
diately after the war, Manns American
citizenship and his very conspicuous sid-
ing with the enemy became a viciously
contested issue. This caused Mann to
realize that many Germans notably those
who now claimed that their inner emi-
gration during the Hitler years was the
morally superior position to take did not
really wish to see Germanys most famous
exile return home. They did not want to
hear about German guilt and responsibil-
ity especially not from someone who
had become an American. Mann was
again being denounced as un-German,
an eerie echo of his experience in 1933, in
the aftermath of his famous lecture on
the Suffering and Greatness of Richard
Wagner. Warned of the likelihood of arrest,
he had been cautious enough not to return
to Munich from a foreign lecture tour in
February of 1933. This decision, it turned
out, was the beginning of his exile that
lasted to the end of his life. Seeing his cre-
dentials as a German yet again questioned,
even after the fall of the Third Reich, Mann
may be forgiven for concluding that little
or nothing had changed certainly not
enough, in any case, to satisfy him.
In the eyes of those self-styled inner emi-
grants, two aspects of Thomas Mann, der
Amerikaner were particularly irritating.
In his bbc radio addresses to Germany dur-
ing the war, Mann had regularly sung the
praises of President Franklin D. Roosevelt
the very gure who, the Germans had been
told for years, was chiey responsible for
World War II. Thus whenever Mann men-
tioned his American citizenship, he was
widely perceived as being complicit in the
ofcial American policy toward postwar
Germany, which was unabashedly punitive
and correctional.
An even greater irritant was the obvious
fact that Mann had made a great success
of his exile in America. For Frank Thiess
and his fellow inner emigrants, envious
as they were of Manns prestige, the fact
that their colleague was thriving under
the Californian sun was reason enough
THE DECISIVE BATTLE
OF MANKIND
Thomas Mann meets Franklin D. Roosevelt
By Hans R. Vaget
THE 1929 NOBEL PRIZE WINNER
WAS WIDELY REGARDED AS THE
UNCROWNED HEAD OF THE
GERMAN EXILE COMMUNITY, THE
FABLED WEIMAR ON THE PACIFIC.
Katharine Graham (Personal History, 1977),
Agnes Meyer was simply mad about Mann.
A journalist by training, she was planning
to write a monograph about the German
writer that would enable Americans bet-
ter to appreciate his books. In that project,
Mann saw the possibility for improved pub-
lic relations in a strange land, even as he
recognized the potential for damage. This
latter helps to explain the uniquely commu-
nicative character of their correspondence,
which was particularly voluminous in the
late 1930s and early 1940s and which was
published in its entirety in 1992.
Given the complexity of Manns
sexual identity Death in Venice should
have raised a ag, but apparently did
not Agnes Meyer channeled her unwel-
come libidinous energies with unfailing
devotion into various acts of patronage,
for which the recipient was grateful
to his dying day. It was Agnes Meyer
who secured, against all odds, Manns
appointment as lecturer in the humani-
ties at Princeton University, and it was
she again, in 1941, who arranged Manns
appointment as Consultant in Germanic
Literature at the Library of Congress a
prestigious sinecure sponsored generously
by her. Mann was well aware that his exile
experience differed markedly from that
of his fellow exiles and that he owed his
good fortune to the fanatic devotion of
his German-American fan. If ever Mann
enjoyed the luxury that his colleagues
in Germany imagined, it was at the
Meyers town house on Crescent Place in
Washington and at their magnicent coun-
try house in Mount Kisco, New York.
As for Roosevelt, Mann had made the
acquaintance of the president in 1935 when,
after he had been awarded an honorary
degree from Harvard, he and his wife,
Katia, were invited to a dinner en famille
at the White House. He saw the president
again, or rather, watched him perform,
at the Gridiron dinner in April of 1939.
But these brief encounters do not really
account for the extraordinary distinction
of receiving an invitation, in 1941, for a
two-day stay at the White House. It turns
out that Mann himself had sought such
a meeting, although he remained silent
about the reason for wanting to see the
president. Nor did he inform his benefactor
in Washington about it. However, in a let-
ter of remarkable forcefulness, he revealed
his impressions of fdr to Agnes Meyer.
He did so with a certain relish, driving
home a point that marked a philosophical
difference of long standing between them.
That difference surfaced once again
during Manns Town Hall lecture on the
topic of War and Democracy, which he
delivered on January 12, 1941, on the eve of
his stay at the White House. In that lecture,
Mann reiterated his rmly held belief that
art and politics are inseparable and, at that
historical hour, they could not possibly be
separated. For reasons that have as much
to do with her idealistic notions about art
as with her conservative political outlook,
Agnes Meyer constantly feared that Manns
dedication to the ght against Hitler and
Nazi Germany would prevent him from
fullling his true mission on earth, that of
writing great novels and novellas.
In his letter to Agnes Meyer, written ten
days after his meeting with the president,
Mann picks up on the discomfort she felt
during his Washington lecture and uses it
as a launching pad for a spirited declaration
of his political views that highlights more
clearly than any other document we have
his sense of purpose during his American
years.
I
n his diary Mann had character-
ized Agness suffering during his
lecture as simply foolish. In his letter
he is less dismissive and more conciliatory
but just as uncompromising. He makes
two fundamental points, both with barbs
aimed directly at Agnes Meyer. Admiration
for his literary work, if not joined to sym-
pathy for his political ght, does not really
make him happy. Furthermore, if Hitler is
not crushed, literature and the arts, as she
imagines them, will have no future in any
meaningful sense of the term.
But at heart, Thomas Mann does not
sound worried. The reason he has been
able to produce works of freedom and
gaiety, even in the dire circumstances of
exile, is that he has had boundless faith in
fdr. In writing to his Washington friend,
he actually understates his reverence for
Roosevelt, no doubt out of deference to his
friends visceral dislike of that man in the
White House. His choice of words Ich
bin ihm zugetan (I am drawn to him)
does not begin to describe the depth of his
admiration. In fact, Thomas Mann idolized
Franklin Roosevelt: he closely followed
fdrs struggle with Congress over aid to
England (Lend Lease); he railed against
the prevailing America First mentality
that was propagated by Charles Lindbergh
and that stipulated a policy of non-inter-
vention in Europe; he campaigned for
Roosevelt, after becoming a citizen, in the
election of 1944; and when Roosevelt died,
he wrote a generous and moving obituary
in Free World. Mann was by no means igno-
rant of the darker aspects of some of fdrs
political decisions, but he never criticized
him publicly, out of concern that that might
diminish the presidents standing as the
leader of the anti-Hitler front.
M
anns let ter to Agnes Meyer
is dominated by a vocabulary
of warfare and side-taking. His
voice resounds with the condence that
he is siding with the eventual victor in
the decisive battle of mankind. That con-
dence was based primarily on the seem-
ingly unlimited economic might of the
sleeping giant that was the United States.
But in almost equal measure it was based
on Roosevelts personality, specically his
capacity for leadership, which made him
a modern-style tamer of the masses. This
type of political artist held great fascina-
tion for Mann, as we see in his masterful
novella about Italian fascism, Mario and
the Magician. If Roosevelts legendary
charisma bore some ne resemblance to
the style of the fascist leaders, Mann was
not concerned: what mattered was that the
American tamer of the masses was on the
right side, our side, and that he was the
born opponent of Hitler.
As for aviator Lindbergh, the Nazis
favorite American, Manns reference to
him is perfectly congruent with the let-
ters general theme, which is the decisive
battle of mankind. Testifying before
Congress, Lindbergh had just declared that
the German war machine was unbeat-
able and that the war, even if the United
States joined in, would likely end in a stale-
mate. Mann would have none of this.

AGNES MEYER WAS SIMPLY MAD
ABOUT MANN.
MANN WAS BY NO MEANS
IGNORANT OF THE DARKER
ASPECTS OF SOME OF FDRS
POLITICAL DECISIONS, BUT HE
NEVER CRITICIZED HIM PUBLICLY,
OUT OF CONCERN THAT THAT
MIGHT DIMINISH THE PRESIDENTS
STANDING AS THE LEADER OF
THE ANTI-HITLER FRONT.
The Bedford
118 East 40
th
Street
New York
January 24, 1941
Dear friend:
I call you that with special emphasis, for, as I fully
understood only afterward, the fact that you suffered
so severely over my Town Hall lecture was precisely
sign of your friendship, closeness, and concern. . . .
I gave the lecture twice more, in Atlanta and
Athens . . . and each time the applause and the honors
were great. But I was unable to take any pleasure in
it. . . . I no longer like it and will change it. The prob-
lem, however, is whether any revision at all could
produce something you would nd acceptable. We
dont feel the same about this point, which for me
is a life and death matter, and which you regard as
mere politics for which in your kindness you
think me too good. Je fais la guerre and you want to
see me au dessus de la mle in your kindness. But
this mle is a decisive battle of mankind, and every-
thing will be decided in it, including the fate of my
lifes work. For decades, at least, my books will not
be allowed to return to Germany, into the tradition
where they belong, if the wretched rabble should
triumph . . . You dont know what I have suffered in
these eight years, and how intensely I wish that the
most repulsive baseness that has ever made his-
tory will be destroyed and that I will live to see it
happen. Have I behaved badly during these years and
permitted hatred to degrade and paralyze me? I have
written Joseph in Egypt, The Beloved Returns, and The
Transposed Heads, works of freedom and gaiety and, if
you will, of distinction. I am a bit proud that I have
brought all that off, instead of joining the ranks of
the melancholics, and I feel my friends should regard
the fact that I also go ghting as a sign of strength,
not of weakness and humiliation. Peoples regard for
my ction is not complete and in the nal analysis
cannot make me happy if it is not partly governed by
sympathy with this other cause. It is said, Who is
not for me is against me. But who is not against evil,
passionately and with his whole soul, is more or less
for it. God forbid that this should have entered into
your friendly suffering during my lecture. The deci-
sion remains: I shall not deliver it again.
What a lovely time you gave us in Washington, and
how grateful I am for your responsiveness to my sto-
rytellers jokes. The rest of our journey was interest-
ing and tiring interesting, of course, especially in
its very next stage, where we were granted astonish-
ing honors. The dizzying height was the cocktail in
the study while the other dinner guests had to cool
their heels below. And yet we had already had early
breakfast with him! He once again made a strong
impression upon me, or shall I say, again aroused
my sympathetic interest: this mixture of craft, good
nature, self-indulgence, desire to please, and sincere
faith is hard to characterize. But there is something
like a blessing upon him, and I am drawn to him as
the born opponent, so it seems to me, of the creature
that must be toppled. Here for once is a modern-
style tamer of the masses who desires the good or
at any rate the better and who takes our parts as
perhaps no one else in the world does. Why should I
not take his part? I felt strengthened afterward. Let
us hope that he has more inuence upon the people
than the aviator Lindbergh with his stalemate and
his unbeatable. If only there were many such
Americans! the Nazi press cries out. Well, there are
many; this is precisely the world civil war of which I
spoke. . . .
Regards to Eugene.
Yours,
Thomas Mann
LETTER TO AGNES MEYER
The translation above, which I have slightly abridged, is of Manns letter, from January 24, 1941, from The Letters of Thomas Mann, 18891955;
selected and translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Introduction by Richard Winston (New York: Knopf, 1971), 353355.
Lindbergh and the American Nazi sympa-
thizers merely proved to him that what was
coming was a world civil war.
Manns view of President Roosevelt as
the pivotal gure in the ght against Nazi
Germany is a remarkable manifestation
of the political and historical acumen he
had acquired over the protracted period of
his larger political education. It is all the
more remarkable in that his assessment
of Roosevelt as Hitlers born opponent
came almost a full year before Germany
declared war on the United States in the
aftermath of Pearl Harbor. This, then, pro-
vides the strongest indication of the reason
he so urgently desired to see the president.
Soon after the fall of France, in the sum-
mer of 1940, Mann himself openly joined
the ght against Hitler by committing to
make monthly broadcasts to Germany, over
the BBC, to explain and defend the Allied
cause. Over a period of ve years, he made
a total of some fty-eight broadcasts. When
Roosevelt was re-elected in November
of 1940, Mann took steps to initiate the
meeting I have outlined. He contacted his
colleague, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, who
was a friend of the Roosevelts and had been
instrumental in arranging Manns rst
visit to the White House in 1935. An invita-
tion from the ofce of the First Lady was
extended forthwith.
M
ann threw himself into his
new role as a propagandist with a
strong inner need, it would seem,
for reassurance from the most powerful
man in the world because that man had
upon him something like a blessing.
We have no record of what transpired at
the White House between the two men.
Thomas Mann neither sought nor needed
marching orders. What he needed, I believe,
is a strong sense that he was in a secret per-
sonal alliance with Franklin Roosevelt. To
build that sense of reassurance, no discus-
sion about the ultimate goal of defeating
Hitler was necessary. Mere contact with
the president would be sufcient. And here
we touch on the frankly mystical side of
Manns idolization of fdr: Contact, he
explained to Agnes Meyer in a letter a few
weeks prior to his memorable meeting
with the president, yields a familiarity that
surpasses any knowledge obtained from a
close study of a person. Armed with the
assurance that he was somehow the presi-
dents spiritual comrade in arms, however
mystical its source, Mann was eager and
ready to play his role in the decisive battle
of mankind.
Hans Rudolf Vaget is the Helen &

Laura Shedd Professor of German
Studies at Smith College and the fall
2012 Berthold Leibinger Fellow.
CONTACT, HE EXPLAINED TO AGNES MEYER IN A LETTER A FEW
WEEKS PRIOR TO HIS MEMORABLE MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT,
YIELDS A FAMILIARITY THAT SURPASSES ANY KNOWLEDGE OBTAINED
FROM A CLOSE STUDY OF A PERSON.
Bosch worldwide. Innovative
solutions to improve quality of life.
As an international leader in tech-
nology and services, Bosch is com-
mitted to improving quality of life.
That is what Bosch employs more
than 300,000 people to do, why it
invests more than 4 billion euros
annually in research and develop-
ment, and why it applies for over
4,100patents per year. The result-
ing innovative Bosch products and
solutions have one thing in common:
they make peoples lives a little bet-
ter each day. More information at:
www.bosch.com
03-7429-7318_TheBerlinJournal_210x135_quer.indd 1 05.09.12 10:46
S
everal weeks ago, I was complain-
ing to a German friend about the
Scottish governments policies on the
environment, with particular reference
to the massive, socially unjust, and poorly
targeted subsidies currently being handed
out to big landowners, opportunistic
developers, and fat-cat energy companies
for wind turbine installations on some of
Europes most environmentally sensitive
land. I pointed out that the poorest energy
consumers were being forced to pay signi-
cant increases on their power bills, in order
to guarantee obscene prots to any land-
owner who chose to site wind turbines on
his property, which in turn meant that our
energy policy was being driven, not accord-
ing to any rational criteria (possible yield,
environmental impact, social justice), but
by the whims of the landowner class. At the
same time, not only government, but also
soi-disant environmental protection agen-
cies, both government and ngo, seemed
awfully keen to ignore reports on bird and
bat mortality coming from countries like
Spain (where a recent Sociedad Espaola de
Ornitologa study predicted mortality rates
of around six to eighteen million birds and
bats per annum from Spains 18,000 wind
turbines), and California, where some bird
species now face extinction from the dam-
age done by badly sited turbines.
As an old-style (that is, still radical)
environmentalist, I was pointing out that
the wind turbine bonanza was just one
example of how the four main principles of
the green movement ecological wisdom,
social justice, grassroots democracy, and
nonviolence had been traduced, not only
by the main political parties in Britain, but
also by a Green Party that had sold its soul
for a smidgeon of power-sharing, nancial
backing from the green business sector,
and a thin, barely examined but wonder-
fully feel-good ideology and I would have
continued berating my native land in this
way had my friend not smiled and said,
Welcome to Germany.
I am not sure why I was surprised
by this response. All my life, whatever
politics I have espoused has always taken
Emersons dictum that every actual state
is corrupt as its starting point. A few days
earlier, a physicist Id met in Berlin pointed
out the hypocrisy that allowed Germany to
buy-in (mostly cheap nuclear) electricity
from its neighbors to make up the decit
caused by the politically motivated phase-
out of its own nuclear power plants. As
Spiegel Online pointed out, Germanys
decision to phase out its nuclear power
plants by 2022 has rapidly transformed it
from power exporter to importer. Despite
Berlins pledge to move away from nuclear,
the country is now merely buying atomic
energy from neighbors like the Czech
Republic and France. I also know that,
election manifestoes excepted, no major
political party in Europe puts the environ-
ment or social justice at the heart of its
program, quite simply because no politi-
cal party could get itself elected under the
current system if it did not serve business,
banking, and land interests rst if not
exclusively. Still, a myth I had treasured
for years had been pretty well shredded by
the time my friend concluded her account
of Germanys recent energy and environ-
mental history. Maybe its just a human
foible to see the corruption and greed (not
to mention the sheer lack of environmen-
tal wisdom) on ones own doorstep, but to
ignore it elsewhere; maybe its a comfort to
think that elsewhere, the grass (genetically
modied, of course) is signicantly greener
than it is on ones home turf. Still, when my
friend pointed out that the German system,
with some variations, was just as carefully
designed to prot landowners and the rich,
while plunging others into deeper poverty,
a little piece of distant viridian faded in my
minds eye.
My friend was right, of course, at the
governmental level. The nuclear phase-out
seems not only to have increased nuclear
energy import gures; it also saw a rise in
the use of coal. Meanwhile, the cost of the
supposed renewables revolution is becom-
ing ever clearer, partly because of the mas-
sive subsidies on offer and partly because
the wind industry cannot deliver on the
extravagant promises it made in pursuit of
those subsidies. Now, as my friend pointed
out, there are those who are beginning to
criticize those costs, but the criticism is
mostly leveled at solar unit subsidies, not
at large-scale wind power, which remains
the sacred cow and the most powerful
player in Europes highly lucrative renew-
ables sector. Meanwhile, in Germany as
elsewhere, very little attention has been
paid to the impact of big wind on birds and
bats. A July 2012 report pointed out stud-
ies have already highlighted that more
than 200,000 bats are killed each year
by German wind turbines. Researchers
are convinced that such high mortality
rates may not be sustainable and [will]
lead to drastic population declines in their
breeding ranges. Sadly, to date, most of
the information about the impact of wind
turbines on wildlife has been carefully
managed to downplay the dangers. These
local pockets of skepticism aside, German
Greens seem just as complacent

A MYTH I HAD TREASURED
FOR YEARS HAD BEEN PRETTY
WELL SHREDDED BY THE TIME
MY FRIEND CONCLUDED HER
ACCOUNT OF GERMANYS RECENT
ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL
HISTORY.
TO DWELL IS TO
GARDEN
How green is Germany?
By John Burnside
Bosch worldwide. Innovative
solutions to improve quality of life.
As an international leader in tech-
nology and services, Bosch is com-
mitted to improving quality of life.
That is what Bosch employs more
than 300,000 people to do, why it
invests more than 4 billion euros
annually in research and develop-
ment, and why it applies for over
4,100patents per year. The result-
ing innovative Bosch products and
solutions have one thing in common:
they make peoples lives a little bet-
ter each day. More information at:
www.bosch.com
03-7429-7318_TheBerlinJournal_210x135_quer.indd 1 05.09.12 10:46
ALBRECHT DRER, DAS GROSSE RASENSTCK, 1503. WATERCOLOR AND OPAQUE PIGMENT
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about energy policy as their British coun-
terparts and much green thinking
among the wider public in Germany seems
just as obviously a matter of manufac-
tured consent as it is elsewhere. The word
manufactured is key here, however: key
to our failure and key to the success of the
(pseudo) green industries and politicians.
As Emerson also said, if the citizenry are
not constant in their vigilance, democracy
becomes a government of bullies tempered
by editors (perhaps for editors we should
now substitute PR people). In other
words, for democracy to work, people must
not only be free to vote, but must also be
properly informed on the issues and PR is
the means by which, not only Big Business,
but also political parties and dummy regu-
latory bodies, keep us in the dark.
Now, all of this should have been
obvious but I still couldnt accept the
conclusion that Germany was no more
environmentally aware than anywhere else
in Europe. After all, we had been talking
about government, not the people, and
what I had seen at the grassroots level dur-
ing a recent prolonged stay in Berlin had
struck me as both considered and inspiring.
Sure, ordinary people could sometimes
react irrationally to certain issues nuclear
power being the most frequent and ill-
considered but they could also come
together to build places like the Naturpark
at Sudgelnde. This park, once part of the
old Tempelhofer marshaling yard, was
created by a citizens action committee for
the benet, not only of local people, but of
a wide variety of wildlife (according to the
parks website, 30 bird species, 57 spider
species, 95 wild bee species, 15 grasshop-
per species, as well as over 350 plant and
49 mushrooms inhabit this area), and this
semi-wilderness is, indeed, a beautiful
example of how sensitive land manage-
ment can create a vital green oasis within a
city while preserving the industrial history
of the specic place. What matters most is
that the project appears to have originated
at a grassroots level: a reminder that when
people are allowed to decide environmental
policy in their own backyards, they tend to
be motivated by respect for the land and for
their nonhuman neighbors. In a perfect
world, this example would be rolled out
over all the patches of open ground that
one nds everywhere in the city, and Berlin
would become a truly wild place, the bones
and ruined arches of its industrial history
half-visible beneath birch stands and spe-
cies roses. In fact, I did think, during my
stay there, that many people would have val-
ued that, just as, on New Yorks lower West
Side, the example of the High Line (a more
cultivated garden built on the ruins of an
old elevated railway) evokes for its visitors
a surprising and deeply poignant nostalgia
for the wildness that capitalist-consumer-
ism works so hard to eliminate.
What is clear from all this is the simple
and self-evident fact that Germany is no
more or less green that its neighbors,
(under the present system of government,
to be truly green at the national, govern-
mental level is quite simply impossible, and
Germany is no more or less implicated that
any other nation). Yet when I think of what
could be done, when I think of what prop-
erly informed citizens might achieve, I am
aware of rather than actually possessed
by a shred of hope. The most urgent ques-
tions of our time are, to my mind, most
vividly presented in a city like Berlin. Those
questions, which have to do both with the
environment and social justice, are rst,
whether ordinary people can become suf-
ciently informed and sufciently well-
organized to retain those wild spaces (in
the world around us and in our own hearts
and minds), and second, how they how
we should go about making the neces-
sary changes. In Berlin, wildness is still a
possibility in ways that it is not in London
or Paris, but that wildness has to be fought
for, or it will be developed out of existence.
A paradigm of the struggle is the ght for
the Tacheles, a ght between a longtime
artists community and the blandeur of
Big Business. As an experiment on my
next-to-last day in Berlin, I took my sons
on a walk from Tacheles to the Hackescher
Hfe, and asked them which they liked
best. They chose Tacheles. A superior
shopping mall they could nd anywhere,
but the arts and crafts colony at Tacheles
even in straitened circumstances, with
its power and water switched off was a
place that beguiled and delighted them. In
many ways, that walk sets out the conict-
ing needs and wishes currently at stake in
Berlin and elsewhere in Germany. To devel-
opers, open ground means money, and the
safe way to make money is to follow the
usual formulas: malls, residential blocks,
executive ofces. To the spirit, however,
I would still contend that open ground
means a glimpse of wildness, of those other
animals which make the world companion-
able and, as Sudgelndes gardeners put it,
of the wild rose which transforms the for-
mer train station to a fairy tale landscape.
In the countryside, this battle is all too
often lost because of the huge discrepancy
in power between landowners and local res-
idents. This is probably as true in Germany
as it is in the neo-feudal efdoms of rural
Scotland; in the city, however, everything is
still up for grabs. Is Germany more green
than its neighbors? No; but I think its cities
would like to be.
To dwell is to garden, said Martin
Heidegger, providing a wonderful counter
to the nal lines of Candide. However, what
we mean by to garden is of the essence
here: it is not just a matter of growing fruit
trees and wildowers; it has just as much to
do with changing the way we generate and
use energy (if our putative replacement for
coal and oil is a land covered with hundred-
meter-tall, bird-shredding turbines, then
we have made no progress at all; all we have
done is to divert urgently needed research
funds into the pockets of the already rich).
It has to do with how diverse our dwell-
ing places are and with our own sense of
creatureliness. It has to do with whether
we think of living communities forests,
lakes, the homelands of indigenous peo-
ples as resources and whether we are
prepared to tolerate a political expediency
that shuts down safer domestic nuclear
plants to appease public opinion, only to
import energy from less well-regulated
facilities elsewhere. It has to do with say-
ing we have more than enough malls now;
what we need is another Tacheles. It has
to do with using less, sharing more, and
owning next to nothing. One of the tenets
of natural magic is that the adept owns
nothing but has the use of everything. It
might be nave of me, but I detect some-
thing of that spirit in Germany certainly
I detect far more of it than I do in my class-
ridden, semi-feudal homeland. Of course,
the spirit of subsidy-hungry, bottom-line
hucksterism still dominates, in Germany
as elsewhere, but it cannot go on forever. It
will be replaced and it would be surpris-
ing if Germany didnt make a signicant
contribution to what comes after.
John Burnside is a poet, novelist, and
a professor of creative writing at the
University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
THE MOST URGENT QUESTIONS
OF OUR TIME ARE MOST VIVIDLY
PRESENTED IN A CITY LIKE BERLIN.
THE IMAGINARY WALL
OF CHINA
Globalizing clean energy technologies
By Kelly Gallagher
EDWARD BURTYNSKY, MANUFACTURING #18, CANKUN FACTORY, ZHANGZHOU, FUJIAN PROVINCE, 2005
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Adapted from a speech delivered at the
Academy on March 13, 2012
I
n policy circles, academia, and
even in the business community, there
is a growing debate about how and why
clean energy technologies move across
international borders. This debate exam-
ines which barriers are the most difcult to
bypass and which incentives would be most
effective at spurring the most rapid deploy-
ment of these technologies.
In the US, for example, its common to
hear members of Congress fret about trade
barriers in China, which I call the Great
Wall argument. We also hear multination-
al corporations complain about the threat
of intellectual property infringement in
developing countries. And in global climate
change negotiations, weve heard a lot of
concern from developing countries about
lack of access to advanced energy technolo-
gies. They claim they have not received the
technology transfer they deserve, nor the
nancing that would allow them to adopt
cleaner technologies.
A quick word on what I mean by clean
energy technologies. Im not a purist
on this topic. Im mainly concerned with
what hinders the international transfer of
technology and what encourages it; Im less
interested in which particular technology
it is. Ive come to acknowledge that each
country will make its own political choices
about which technologies it wants to use.
I draw the line on pulverized coal technol-
ogy, which I dont think can be considered
clean by any standard.
I base my research on a few assumptions.
One is that climate change is a serious
threat. Im not engaged in the questioning
of the science. I also assume that climate
change can be mitigated there are many
technologies that would allow us to drasti-
cally reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But
its obvious that the global utilization of
these technologies is not occurring at the
scale that it should be.
Theres a general consensus that we
need to reduce emissions by 80 percent by
2050 if we are to avoid a two degree Celsius
temperature rise. In order for that to hap-
pen, all the current major users in energy,
and those that are rising in energy con-
sumption like China will have to be part
of that 80 percent reduction.
But were far from that. If we need
this global deployment of cleaner energy
technologies, why havent we done it yet?
We have technologies that exist, and most
of them are affordable, so why arent we
seeing more leapfrogging to these cleaner
technologies on the part of developing
countries?
One of the conclusions I reached in my
last book, China Shifts Gears: Automakers,
Oil, Pollution, and Development, was that
there are limits to leapfrogging for a
variety of reasons. The Chinese didnt
adopt low pollution technologies during
the development of the auto industry, even
though catalytic converters were widely
available and not expensive. Prior to 2000,
no Chinese automobile had a catalytic
converter. It wasnt until China adopted
emission standards for automobiles that
auto companies were motivated to acquire
that technology, and foreign partners were
motivated to transfer the technology.
Moving beyond the auto industry to
address the larger question of clean energy
technologies, I decided to return to the
country I knew best: China. I wanted to use
the nation as a laboratory in order to nd
empirical answers. My research method
involved conducting detailed case studies
of four technologies: advanced batteries for
clean vehicles, solar PV, coal gasication,
and gas turbines. I wanted to know how
the Chinese had acquired the technologies,
how foreigners had supplied the technolo-
gies, and the extent to which the Chinese
could go on to export the technologies.
I interviewed over 100 people in China, the
US, and Germany, and was a visiting pro-
fessor at Tsinghua University in 2010.
I chose China because it is crucial
in solving the climate change problem.
Chinas energy consumption has more
than tripled since 1990, and its now the
largest and fastest growing energy market
in the world. Most of Chinas energy supply
derives from coal. It recently surpassed the
US as the highest emitter of greenhouse
gases (though its much lower on a per-
capita basis). Yet, China has also developed
the largest renewable energy capacity in the
world.
The juggernaut of China and climate
change is two-fold: how to deal with all of
Chinas coal, and how to achieve this transi-
tion when youve got a country still trying
to bring millions of people out of poverty.
Its easy for us to forget: we tend to think of
China as an industrial powerhouse, and it
has done a great job at poverty alleviation,
but it still ranks #2 in the world in terms of
people living under $1.25 a day.
How do you achieve this transition?
How do you provide energy services to all
those who are just emerging into the lower
middle class and somehow transform the
economy so that it continues to grow and
develop?
So far, my research has led me to four
main arguments.
NO GREAT WALL
B
arriers are not nearly as
daunting as most people assume.
There is no Great Wall; instead,
technologies ow back and forth across
Chinas border very easily, with a variety
of mechanisms. Most of these are private
and market-based we see much less hap-
pening government-to-government.

Academia has played an enormous role in
training and educating overseas Chinese
who have returned to China and have taken
up leadership positions in the clean energy
industry. Increasingly, we are also seeing
contracting by Chinese rms of foreign
universities to do shared research with
joint IP (intellectual property) or IP that
the Chinese rm wholly owns after the con-
tract is nished.
CONCERNS ARE OVERBLOWN
W
idespread concerns about
intellectual property in China
are overblown. Industrialized
countries are understandably worried
about intellectual property infringement or
outright theft in developing countries. Yet
Chinese rms feel frustrated when they
have successfully developed technology but
do not know how to negotiate the complex
legislation of international patent law. The
evidence Ive gathered suggests that, while
theres been some intellectual property
infringement of energy technologies, it was
not nearly to the extent that I expected.
Why not? For one thing, energy tech-
nologies are very complex systems. Unlike
the pharmaceutical or chemical industries,
where formulas can be easily stolen or
copied, energy technologies are not easy
to reproduce or design. Some have made
the argument that Chinese capabilities
are already fairly advanced, and they have
no need to steal. This is certainly true in
the sector of coal gasication. Other rms
told me that they have a new condence in
Chinas current legal system.
I have also found little evidence to sup-
port the assertion that developing countries
have a difcult time acquiring clean energy
technology. On the contrary, case studies
have revealed ingenuity and resourceful-
ness on the part of the Chinese rms in
nding, acquiring, and further developing
clean energy capabilities. The wide variety
of methods that rms have used indicates
that there is no one-size-ts-all approach.
The only sectors where I found (albeit very
little) evidence were in hybrid vehicle tech-
nologies and in gas turbines.
COSTS CONSTITUTE BARRIERS
T
he costs to advance to clean
energy technologies and the ability
to nance these technologies can, in
fact, be a major barrier one that depends
strongly on local conditions. In Chinas
case, nance has not been a barrier. China
is willing to make as much money avail-
able to rms based in China, both foreign
and local, as is needed to expand activities
in this sector. Outside of China, however,
access to nances is often the largest prob-
lem. In the US, for example, whether its
a homeowner trying to nance an energy
retrot, or a clean energy company trying
to nance an expansion, nancing is an
overwhelming constraint. In many devel-
oping countries, especially given the cur-
rent nancial crisis, this is also true.
SENSIBLE POLICY IS IMPERATIVE
T
he biggest barrier to the
global commercialization of cleaner
energy technologies is the failure of
governments to create sensible policy and
incentive structures at all levels of govern-
ment. Because the benets of clean energy
technologies are primarily public ones, I do
not believe the private markets will ever
value them properly. Therefore, a strong
rationale exists for the government to cor-
rect the market failure.
My greatest insight on the increasingly
global nature of clean energy technologies
occurred on a solar PV factory visit near
Beijing. I noticed that much of the equip-
ment was Japanese or German. I registered
with dismay that there was no American
equipment. I was also surprised at how few
workers were present. The standard percep-
tion is that Chinas advantage lies in its low
labor costs, but I could only see a few work-
ers on the assembly line. After the tour, the
chief technology ofcer invited me to lunch
in the cafeteria. As I proceeded through the
buffet line, I realized the foreign language
around me was not Mandarin, but German.
The cafeteria was lled with German
workers, animatedly speaking auf Deutsch
in their coveralls! My host explained that
German technicians were building the fac-
torys newest assembly line. I was struck by
what a globalized process this has become.
Here was a Chinese cto, who had obtained
his degree at an Australian university,
returned to China, bought all the equip-
ment needed to produce an assembly line,
and hired German technicians to put it
together, with the ultimate aim of export-
ing the product overseas.
What has enabled this globalization? Its
very rare for a technology to be invented,
developed, demonstrated, and deployed
within a single country today. Over the
years, innovation has become regionalized.
There was a strong emphasis, for many
years, on national innovation systems, but
I believe that this national orientation is no
longer correct. Entrepreneurs, rms, stu-
dents, and faculty are now highly global in
their orientations.
In my research, I found that Chinese
rms had utilized every mechanism pos-
sible for the transfer of technology. To
explain this phenomenon, we cant rely on
the technology transfer literature of the
past. Small is beautiful has been disprov-
en. We need to get to scale, to have much
more rapid and widespread diffusion of
clean energy technologies, which the global
scope of markets would now allow. This
would also bring down the costs of these
technologies, as the Chinese have demon-
strated with solar power.
The wto has greatly facilitated the
expansion of trade and accelerated Chinas
position in the global economy. It forced
Chinese rms to become much more com-
petitive. Its true that China hasnt always
played by the rules. But theyve demonstrat-
ed what a high level of ambition can achieve
(with a good deal of money). The norms
around international property rights have
also created strong incentives for rms
to transfer technology, even in China.
International education is surely another
contributing factor. According to unesco,
between 1998 and 2010, the number of
international students nearly doubled, and
Chinas share grew from 7 to 17 percent.
In conclusion, let me offer a few specula-
tions. I believe if we get serious about the
climate change issue, were likely to rely
less on an international agreement and
more on trying to harmonize national poli-
cies. It is the creation of markets in each
country that is going to create the incentive
for the deployment of these technologies.
I think we will continue to see the accelera-
tion of international education and begin to
see more cross-border partnerships within
the private sector and research institutions.
Ive come to a pretty surprising conclu-
sion: we can live without an international
agreement on climate change if suf-
ciently strong national policy structures
could be created in the major emitting
countries.
Kelly Gallagher is an associate profes-
sor of energy and environmental policy
at the Fletcher School, Tufts University.
She was the spring 2012 eads
Distinguished Visitor at the American
Academy.
Notebook of the American Academy in Berlin | Number Twenty-Three | Fall 2012
ON THE WATERFRONT
NEWS FROM THE HANS ARNHOLD CENTER
N3 Academy Notebook: A
selection of photos featuring
highlights from the 2012
Henry A. Kissinger Prize,
honoring George Shultz
N10 Life & Letters: An
introduction to the fall
2012 fellows, alumni
books, a sneak preview,
and a call for applications
N7 Sketches & Dispatches: Dean
Moyar on Paul Ryan and Ayn
Rand, Richard Deming on the
everyday, and Annie Goselds
love of noise
N5 Academy Notebook: An art
auction in service of a new
distinguished visitorship; and
the Academy mourns the loss
of its cao, Andrew J. White
T
homas Demands
Presidency VI features an
eerily empty, blithely ele-
gant Oval Ofce, the door allur-
ingly ajar, tempting us to trespass.
In Five Series of Repetitions, Xu
Bings woodblock prints present
a lush rice eld that succumbs to
blank space in subsequent prints,
a quiet ode to erasure, both artis-
tic and seasonal.
These are just two of the art-
works on offer in an upcoming
auction, to be held pro bono by
Villa Grisebach Auction House
as part of their international fall
contemporary auction, in order to
raise support for the Academys
Max Beckmann Distinguished
Visitorship. In addition to the
two pieces mentioned, artworks
from the following artists have
been generously pledged: Richard
Artschwager, Georg Baselitz,
Max Beckmann, Andr Butzer,
Francesco Clemente, George
Seeking the Bridge
A star-studded auction to help fund a new initiative
A
fter the gdr fell apart,
East German jurists
were not recognized
as jurists by the West German
state, but instead seen as agents
of a bankrupt political system.
Justiably so? Inga Markovits,
a professor of law history, com-
parative law, and family law
at the University of Texas in
Austin, and the spring 2012
Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow
at the American Academy, is
investigating the law faculty at
Humboldt University in order
to better comprehend the role
and self-image of the gdrs legal
scholars. Were they more loyal
to the party than to the law? Or
did they emerge as agitators
for constitutional reform? Did
they under the table, so to
speak limit strict legal abuses
of power? Or did they act out of
respect for rules and precision
if not for justice, then for order?
No Revolutionaries
Fellow Inga Markovits on jurists in the GDR
CONTINUED ON PAGE N9 CONTINUED ON PAGE N5
L
adies and gentlemen,
the American Academy in
Berlin gave me an unex-
pected pleasure this spring in
asking me to deliver a citation
honoring George Shultz.
You will know, or at least
guess, George, that I was only
too happy to undertake this
duty. I am glad to have this very
ofcial opportunity, at the end of
my life, to express to you in very
personal terms my condence in
your steadiness, my trust in the
constancy of your fundamental
ethical convictions, and my con-
dence in your fairness to each and
every one of your interlocutors
and negotiating partners.
In awarding you the Henry A.
Kissinger Prize here on German
soil today, the board undoubtedly
wishes to express its appreciation
of your entire lifes work. Because
George P. Shultz, American
citizen, has served his country
in many different ways: as a sol-
dier in the Marine Corps in East
Asia during the Second World
War, as professor and dean in
Chicago, as an adviser and sec-
retary in various departments in
GEORGE P. SHULTZ AND HENRY A. KISSINGER
The Wisdom of Democracy
Helmut Schmidts Henry A. Kissinger Prize laudation
CONTINUED ON PAGE N2

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Academy Notebook
Washington, DC, then as a busi-
nessman heading the Bechtel
Group on the West coast, as secre-
tary of state for over six years, and
nally as a professor once more.
Today you are a professor-at-
large, responsible for the major,
decisive questions facing the
world and especially for the nec-
essary steps towards a nuclear-
weapon-free world. As a politician
you are a man of your party, but
your supreme loyalty has always
been to the welfare of your coun-
try. This prize recognizes your
life as an American patriot.
With just a few exceptions,
I have been able to follow my
friends career only from a great
distance. During Hitlers World
War we stood on opposite sides.
I had to become a soldier in 1937.
Because of my fathers illegiti-
macy and my Jewish grandfather,
I had not become a Nazi. With a
lot of good luck and a large mea-
sure of fear, my family succeeded
in keeping this secret right up
until my fathers death. This
notwithstanding, it was only in
the fall of 1944 that I realized the
Nazis were criminals.
But I had known since 1941
that Germany was going to lose
the war. And I also knew that
what we were ghting for was bad.
George was ghting for the right
thing, a good thing.
The end of Hitlers World War
was inevitable. But in the wake of
the ensuing chaos in Germany
and the division of my country
into four zones of occupation, the
Americans introduced monetary
reform in the three Western
zones in 1948, and this, in
combination with the Marshall
Plan, was a success. Above all,
under American aegis, the three
Western zones became the Bonn
Republic in 1949.
From that point on, things
gradually got better in Germany.
In 1990, it was once again
the energetic leadership of an
American president that made
unication with the gdr possible.
Germany owes the alliance with
the United States far more than
the US owes the Germans.
It is now forty years since
we rst met, when we were our
countries nance ministers.
Back then, your predecessor, John
Connally, told the Europeans:
The dollar is our currency, but it
is your problem. At the time, the
United States was in the process of
gradually but rapidly abandoning
the Bretton Woods system of xed
but adjustable exchange rates by
devaluing the dollar. It felt that its
public sector borrowing was more
important than maintaining a
xed-dollar exchange rate.
George Shultz shared this
opinion.
But at the same time George
understood the resistance on
the part of the Europeans and
Japanese and invited their lead-
ing nance ministers to a joint
discussion of the situation. This
was the Library Group (so called
because it met in the library of
the White House, in Washington).
Within this group there developed
a fundamental trust between
George Shultz on the one hand,
and Takeo Fukuda, Valry
Giscard dEstaing, Tony Barber,
and myself on the other. In the
The Wisdom of Democracy

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News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N3
fall of 1975 this developed into
what was to become the annual
G7 Summit, Italy and Canada
soon having joined in.
Over a year earlier, in March
1974, George had called me to
tell me he was going to resign
that day, because of Watergate.
His sense of morals transcended
party loyalty. In the summer of
1975, when President Gerald Ford
asked me in Helsinki whom he
should appoint as Sherpa for the
meeting, I said: Why dont you
take George Shultz as Sherpa?
Which he then did.
Seven years later, in June
1982 Ronald Reagan had been
in ofce for a year and a half and
had already got through one
secretary of state George told
me the president wanted him to
take up the post. I shared neither
Reagans Star Wars illusion nor
George Shultzs preference for
his conservative president. But I
knew Shultz, and so I placed my
trust in his doggedness. So all
I said in response was, In the
long run you will prevail because
President Reagan cannot afford a
third mistake.
The proof in the pudding
came ve years later, in Reykjavik,
1987. The Reykjavik Summit
between Presidents Reagan and
Gorbachev, plus their foreign sec-
retaries, was generally considered
a failure.
But in fact it became the water-
shed of the Cold War.
The two world powers had
come closer than ever before.
And George Shultz diligently
brought his president to under-
stand that Gorbachev was a trust-
worthy man. And only a little later
this mutually shared feeling led
to the inf treaty, which was the
1 GUIDO WESTERWELLE, GEORGE
P. SHULTZ, HELMUT SCHMIDT,
HENRY A. KISSINGER
2 AUDIENCE AT THE PRIZE
CEREMONY HELD AT THE
GERMAN FEDERAL FOREIGN
OFFICE
3 CHARLOTTE SHULTZ, GEORGE
P. SHULTZ, A. MICHAEL HOFFMAN,
HELMUT SCHMIDT
1.
2.
3.
very rst real disarmament treaty
between the then-two world pow-
ers. It paved the way, as much as
did Solidarnosc in Poland and
Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia, for
the great change that was to hap-
pen in Europe in 1990.
In 1988, with the end of the
Reagan Administration, George
Shultz became a private citizen
again. But he continued to serve
his country in manifold ways.
For instance, as a professor at
Stanford, he again established
an international group, which
included the Chinese. And he
particularly included Lee Kuan
Yew as an outstandingly success-
ful and at the same time knowl-
edgeable critical observer of
China on its way to regaining the
status of a world power.
Today, everybody knows that
Russia, as a successor state of
the Soviet Union, is still a world
power militarily. But China has
become an economic and nan-
cial world power and is on its way
to developing once again into a
world power in general. Nobody
has expressed the need to under-
stand this fact of life better than
Henry Kissinger. In his recent
book On China he stresses the
need to respect the more than
4000 years of Chinese civiliza-
tion, as well as the necessity of
cooperation whilst at the same
time remaining technological
and economic competitors.
I have tried to describe the
career of my friend George
Shultz from a German point of
view and from a very personal
point of view as well. For a long
time I have agreed with Henry,
who once wrote, If I had to name
an American to whom I would
entrust the nation in a crisis, it
would be George Shultz.
Let me, in conclusion, quote
another friend of mine, now long
deceased, Herbert Weichmann.
Being a Jew, Weichmann had to
After such a response, both
the compliment giver and receiver
are dragged down to a realistic
level of cheerlessness.
Berlins cultural and social
mores are always strongly inu-
enced by its immigrants. In
this sense, the Americans have
displayed a considerable civiliz-
ing effect for a few years. This
is why the American Academy
in Wannsee is such a prominent
place and a darling of Berlins
high society; it elegantly show-
cases the most beautiful forms
of American behavior and gives
one the hope that it might rub off
onto the Germans. The Academy
is renowned for the biannual
presentations of its new fellows,
where the German guests are
so captivated by the personal
introductions of the dozen pro-
fessors, artists, and writers
that they immediately want to
take up the respective eld of
R
ecently I paid a nine-
year-old a compliment on
how well her sunglasses
suited her. As she bashfully
turned her head to the side and
looked at the oor, she was
coaxed by her American au-pair
to say thank you.
I was taken aback by this
reaction, until it dawned on
me that there is a fundamental
divide between German and
American customs: while people
in the US profusely thank others
when receiving a compliment,
Germans have a strange habit of
trying to fend off the compliment
out of modesty and affectation.
If one were to comment on the
beauty of a womans necklace, she
would be embarrassed and reply
with a deep sigh, saying, Oh,
this old thing? I inherited it ages
ago from a great-aunt I dont real-
ly remember anymore, but every
now and then I just throw it on.
study. Academic style always has
something to do with wit and
enthusiasm.
Even the director of the
Academy, Gary Smith, is by
German standards an unusual
combination of Walter Benjamin
follower and socialite, esthete,
and political power-broker,
who time and again brings to
Wannsee the glorious and gray-
ing ruling elite of America. On
May 24, the Academy awarded
the Henry A. Kissinger Prize to
former Secretary of State George
P. Shultz. The ceremony was held
at the German Foreign Ofce,
where Guido Westerwelle enjoyed
playing the host, and Helmut
Schmidt was the presenter.
Another wonderful tradition
at the Academy is the dinner invi-
tations from the fellows to their
new acquaintances in Berlin. The
chef at the Academy is renowned,
and the location on Wannsee is
Style, the American Way
Bridging the transatlantic cultural divide
ee Germany, and he became
an American citizen. In 1946
he returned to his original
home country, and in the end
became the mayor of my home
city, Hamburg. In June 1982
almost exactly 30 years ago
he addressed the German
Bundestag. And in his speech,
one of the wisdoms of his
life was: Die Weisheit der
Demokratie ist schlielich die
Weisheit des Kompromisses.
(in English: Ultimately the
wisdom of democracy lies
in the wisdom of compro-
mise.) That could have been
said by George Shultz. But
George might have added: It
needs a personal relationship
and it needs trust in your
adversaries veraciousness
(Wahrheitsliebe).
The Declaration of Inde-
pendence and the founda-
tion of the United States of
America, its Constitution and
the Bill of Rights all these
globally important events took
place more than 200 years
ago. George Shultz was born
only in 1920. So far he has
lived for over 91 years but
what a life! He could not meet
George Washington or Thomas
Jefferson, nor did he meet
Abraham Lincoln. Instead he
became a contemporary of
Franklin Roosevelt, of Harry
Truman, of George Kennan, of
George Marshall, of Eisenhower,
and of Kennedy. Since then he
has served as a colleague and as
successor of Henry Kissinger.
He has served the continuity of
American grand strategy.
George, you are also one
of those American leaders
who established the friend-
ship with the Germans after
two World Wars in which we
Germans had been your ene-
mies. And for that I will ever
remain your thankful friend.
breathtaking as the sun sets over
the opposite shore. Last week the
literary critic and Nabokov expert
Leland de la Durantaye hosted the
dinner. A seat at the table was still
open for a late guest, who arrived
just before the second course. It
was Nicholas Kulish, the Berlin
correspondent of the New York
Times (and, for once, someone
who is uent in German). The
way he managed to promptly yet
smoothly join in the conversation
and immediately take on the most
casual demeanor with strangers
at the table was another example
of the superiority of American
small-talk culture. The Academy
seems to increasingly appear as a
kind of charm school for Berlin.
By Ijoma Mangold
Excerpted from Die Zeit
May 31, 2012
Translated by Matthew
Jepsen
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N5
T
he long path past the
Europa, Willy Brandt,
Adenauer, Stresemann
and Rathenau Halls at the
German Foreign Ofce, taken
by roughly 400 high-ranking
guests in politics, business, and
society, was worthy of the occa-
sion that took place on Thursday
evening. In the World Hall, the
Henry Kissinger Prize of the
American Academy was granted
to the longtime Secretary of
State George P. Shultz. It was a
meeting of key bridge-builders
in the transatlantic relations
between the US and Europe.
You were instrumental in pav-
Condo, Aaron Curry, Walter Dahn,
Tacita Dean, Mitch Epstein, Jenny
Holzer, Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer,
Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler,
Barry Le Va, Julie Mehretu, Matt
Mullican, Alice Neel, Raymond
Pettibon, Paul Pfeiffer, Jessica
Rankin, Anselm Reyle, James
Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Gnther
Uecker, and Micha Ullmann.
ing the way for the end of the
Cold War. I want to express my
heartfelt thanks to the American
people for your commitment
and support for a free and united
Germany that we live in today,
said German Foreign Minister
Guido Westerwelle (fdp) on the
work of Shultz, who pushed for
Soviet disarmament during the
Reagan administration.
Former Federal Chancellor
Helmut Schmidt (spd) also
offered words of praise for the
prizewinner. The two had met
during Shultzs time as secretary
of defense and secretary of the
treasury. Schmidt covered much
The auction will be held on
November 30, 2012.
What I want to show in my
work is the idea that hides itself
behind so-called reality. I am
seeking the bridge that leans
from the visible to the invis-
ible, Max Beckmann once said
of his own artistic process. The
Max Beckmann Distinguished
Visitorship aims to encourage
this exploration in contempo-
Applauding a Transatlantic Figure
history during his speech. From
the development of the Bretton
Woods system of monetary
management after 1945, to the
reduction of the atomic weapons
arsenal in the late 80s, Shultz dis-
played strong vision and promot-
ed the consistency of American
politics, Schmidt pointed out.
George served his country in
many ways. And he fought for
what was right, said Schmidt.
Former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger explained, In difcult
times George P. Shultz showed
strength, trust, and condence.
He was ahead of his time in many
ways. Shultz was clearly touched:
A moving moment. But thirty
percent of atomic weapons from
the Cold War era still exist. So
keep working to reduce that num-
ber. His words garnered much
applause. After the ceremony, a
dinner was held at the European
School of Management and
Technology on Schlossplatz in
Shultzs honor.
By Dirk Westphal and
Stefanie Staiger
Welt am Sonntag
May 27, 2012
Translated by Matthew
Jepsen
Seeking the Bridge
A
ndrew J. White was
the chief administrative
ofcer of the American
Academy from the fall of 2009
until his untimely death on
July 21, 2012. He had been
the Academys treasurer since
2011. White is survived by his
wife, Ursula, and their two adult
daughters and grandchildren.
White moved to Germany in
1972, and to Berlin in 2007. A fel-
low of the Institute of Chartered
Accountants in England and
Wales, he had a distinguished
international career in nan-
cial and general management,
working predominantly with
American multinational cor-
porations in the technology,
market research, and media
sectors. White also served for
many years as a board member of
Lobetalarbeit e.V., in Celle, a non-
prot organization serving the
mentally and physically handi-
capped, and the elderly.
White brought deft manage-
rial and nancial skill to the
American Academys operations,
and his collegiality and profes-
sionalism were both admired and
infectious. He was far more than
just our cao and treasurer, said
Gary Smith. He served as a role
model for all of us.
The staff and board of the
American Academy in Berlin
mourn his passing with tremen-
dous sadness. On October 6, a
memorial was held in Whites
honor for staff, family, and
Academy friends. Our deepest
condolences are forever extended
to Whites family. r.j.m.
Honoring Andrew J. White
The Academy mourns the untimely passing of its CAO
ANDREW J. WHITE
rary artists by reecting two
important commitments in
Max Beckmanns late career: his
admiration for the United States
and his deep enjoyment of teach-
ing. Through the Max Beckmann
Distinguished Visitorship, out-
standing US-based artists will be
sponsored to come to Berlin.
First and foremost, the
awarded artist will work with
a group of German students of
ne arts, philosophy, and other
elds in the humanities in the
form of a master class, which will
include studio visits, professional
critiques, and informal meetings.
The students will have an imme-
diate, rsthand understanding of
the artists particular way of see-
ing and thinking, while the artist
will get a unique chance to inter-
act with a select group of emerg-
ing German arts stakeholders
CONTINUED FROM N1
and to reect upon their percep-
tions. A second goal, inspired by
the longstanding Artists Choice
series, will have the artist curate
a cabinet exhibition in two rooms
drawn from, and in dialogue with,
the collections of the Stiftung
Preussischer Kulturbesitz. These
range from the Byzantine to
the present, including the Bode
Museum, Pergamon Museum,
Gemldegalerie, as well as the
Hamburger Bahnhof and Neue
Nationalgalerie. By selecting,
juxtaposing, and commenting
on objects from the museums
archives, the artist not only cre-
ates a personal art historical
narrative, but also challenges the
way these objects are traditionally
viewed and categorized.
The Academy is indebted to
all of the artists, donors, and
supporters of the upcoming
auction for their myriad commit-
ments and contributions.
l.y. and b.l. s.
school for talented youth. I was
given the tip to go visit the Curtis
Institute, in Philadelphia, which
impressed me from the begin-
ning, particularly the teaching.
The teachers get to be one with
the students; they never raise
their voices or speak negatively.
Its obvious that those who teach
there love what they do. I was
also impressed by the schools
small size (160 students), and by
the fact that all of these students
are provided full tuition. This is
an exceptional opportunity.
BERLIN JOURNAL: What did you
consider to be the highlight of
T
his past May, as spring
nally descended on Berlin,
a select group of students
from the Curtis Institute of Music
did, too. It was the Institutes fth
annual tour to Berlin and to the
American Academy, which con-
sisted of an invigorating series
of master classes and concerts,
thanks to the generous support
of Baroness Nina von Maltzahn,
a longtime Academy trustee.
The Berlin Journal sat down
with the baroness for a chat about
the Curtis Institute, the high-
lights of their recent visit, and her
own love of music.
BERLIN JOURNAL: What drew you
to the Curtis Institute of Music?
NINA VON MALTZAHN: Like
Julliard, Curtis has a history
of educating excellent artists,
including Samuel Barber,
Leonard Bernstein, Hilary Hahn,
and Lang Lang, among many
others. The teachers, several
of who were in Berlin during
the last visit, are fantastic, and
emphasize a learning-by-doing
style of instruction. The teachers
often perform with the students
during concerts, which I nd
fabulous.
I was inspired to begin work-
ing with Curtis because it is cru-
cial to me that my philanthropic
efforts help children. My organi-
zation [in Uruguay], Fundacin
el Retoo, supports at-risk
youth, and has been a much-
needed, wonderful project. But
I also wanted to support a music
the Curtis Institutes recent visit
to Berlin?
NINA VON MALTZAHN: For me
and for many others, the master
classes were the highlight of the
tour. I found the teachers to be
very generous and gentle, not
too didactic. One of their great
talents is how they approach the
students. In performances, the
students exhibit no stage fright,
which points to how well theyve
been trained.
Prior to their time in Berlin,
the Institute brought their entire
orchestra to Dresden to open the
Dresden Music Festival over two
evenings. It was a great success,
and the orchestra was asked to
return in 2015. I also hope to
bring the orchestra to Argentina
and Uruguay in the future.
BERLIN JOURNAL: What inspired
your own love of music?
NINA VON MALTZAHN: Ive always
loved music. I took piano les-
sons for sixteen years, and I can
remember my rst opera, Der
Rosenkavalier, which I attended
with my grandmother. It made an
enormous impression on me, and
Ive been a big fan of opera ever
since. b.l. s.
NINA VON MALTZAHN
Blossoming Talent
The Curtis Institute of Music makes its fth tour to Berlin

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News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N7
Sketches & Dispatches
get puts on the poor earned him a
recent rebuke from Catholic bish-
ops, who dispute Ryans claim
that the budget is consistent with
the Churchs teachings.
It is not hard to discover where
the motivation for these ideas
has come from, since Ryan has
been a devoted and (until very
recently) vocal apostle of the lib-
ertarian novelist and ideologist
Ayn Rand. In a 2009 campaign
video he says that her novels are
essential reading because she
explains the morality of capital-
ism. She was also a major inu-
ence on Alan Greenspan, who
presided over the deregulation
that many blame for the 2008
nancial crisis. Rand grew up in
St. Petersburg and was among
the rst women to attend the
university, where she studied his-
tory and philosophy. In her best-
selling novels The Fountainhead
and Atlas Shrugged, she advocates
an uncompromising individual-
ist and capitalist ethos. No man
is responsible to or for anyone
else, and any sympathy for the
common man is always just one
step away from communism.
Her experience of the Bolshevik
Revolution and her reading of
Nietzsche on the last man gen-
erated a full-blown contempt for
anyone who depends at all on
others for their identity. Her rst
major hero, Howard Roark, is a
modernist architect ghting the
classicist establishment and the
egalitarian welfare state. There
is a plea for authenticity in the
book that has a perennial appeal,
especially to the young. But there
is also a disturbing edge to her
non-conformism. Countering
the Marxist idea that humans
are the sum of their social rela-
tions, Rand posits that humans
absorbed in their social relations
are not actually persons at all.
Why is the Ryan-Rand pro-
gram, and the closely aligned Tea
Party movement, at all popular in
the US? Skeptics will tell you that
the phenomenon is explained by
the rich mans greed, or by the
reaction of white men to fading
dominance, or by a desire for an
easy scapegoat for problems cre-
ated by George Bush. But the fed-
eral decit and health-care fund-
ing for the poor and elderly are
real problems, so there are at least
plausible-seeming reasons to say
that major changes are neces-
sary. The Republicans like to say
that the Democrats are making
the US like Europe, in particular
like Greece, and that only the
Republican program can save the
US from a paralyzing debt crisis.
They argue against out of control
spending on programs that favor
the lazy at the expense of hard-
working taxpayers and overall
economic growth. From Rands
books we learn that our problems
will go away if we honor strong,
courageous leaders who will ght
the parasitic advocates of the col-
lective good. With the help of the
Randian ethos, the Ryan support-
ers can claim to be revolutionary,
I Versus We
The inaugural Dirk Ippen Fellow discusses scal and moral decits in the US election
T
he us presidential
election entered a new
phase with the selection
of Paul Ryan as the Republican
vice-presidential candidate.
Before the announcement, the
strategy of the Romney camp
had been to highlight the weak
US economy. The Obama camp
had spent heavily to tarnish the
image of Romney as economic
savior by calling into question his
business practices and his refusal
to release the tax returns on his
enormous personal fortune (esti-
mated at $250 million). Romney
was by most accounts losing this
phase of the race. In choosing
Paul Ryan as his VP, Romney has
shifted the debate from the econ-
omy and his personal nances to
the parties competing visions of
the principles and purposes of
government.
Who is Paul Ryan? He is a
42-year-old congressman from
Wisconsin who currently serves
as the chairman of the House
Budget Committee. He is a light-
ning rod mainly because of The
Ryan Budget, the blueprint for
federal spending that has been
passed twice by the House of
Representatives. The main ele-
ments of the budget are massive
tax cuts and the restructuring of
many government programs. To
critics, the tax cuts are a windfall
for the wealthy and an assault on
the social safety net. Ryan coun-
ters that the tax cuts will create
enormous growth by unleashing
the productive power of the busi-
ness world, and that government
programs can only be viable in
the long term if they are pared
down. The pressure that his bud-
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N8 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
W
hen it comes to lis-
tening, Annie Goseld
doesnt distinguish
between the beautiful and the
ugly. For her, all sounds are
equally compelling. As a child,
she learned that you think more
freely without stylistic pigeonhol-
ing. At home in Philadelphia, her
parents listened to all musical
genres indiscriminately: jazz,
soul, blues, rock, and experimen-
tal music.
We werent a Nutcracker kind
of family, she said, hinting that
they werent the typical bourgeois
household, in which the children
were marched to Tchaikovskys
ballet each year at Christmas.
Nonetheless or perhaps pre-
cisely due to this fact all four of
the Goseld children were seized
by artistic callings: Annies sister
plays the recorder in Milan, one
of her brothers performs Western
Swing, and the other is a photog-
rapher. Goseld herself enjoys
roaming through factories and
busy streets to collect the sounds
of the everyday. Most people
would call it a racket; I call it
inspiration is Goselds credo.
Born in 1960, Goseld is a
fellow at the American Academy
in Berlin and will present a cross-
section of her oeuvre on March 21
at the March Music Festival. The
location of her concert is well
chosen: Club Berghain is the
spot for an all-night, high-decibel
experience.
Incidentally, Annie Goseld
is not a loud person in her private
improvisation. If youre going to
play the wrong notes, at least do
it in the right way! he shouted
at her once, when she came to
class unprepared. Thats where
I learned that the most essential
thing is staying true to yourself,
regardless of what others say.
Or regardless of whether your
audience is pitching beer bottles
at you. In the punk bars of Los
Angeles, where Annie Goseld
emerged after she had quit piano,
music theory, and composition
studies at North Texas State
University, the crowd hardly
limited itself to verbal expression
when it came to showing distaste.
Sometimes the club owner
would simply pull the plug in
the middle of a gig. Performers
had to be idealists and grow a
thick skin. But I wanted to get
out of there and play, experiment
with others, if possible without
any notes, said Goseld. Roger
Kleier, the electric guitarist for
the avant-garde rock band The
Apes of God still remains by her
side.
In 1992, Annie Goseld
moved to New York and
immersed herself in the new
music scene of downtown
Manhattan, collaborating with
John Zorn, appearing in the
legendary Knitting Factory, and
working as a hat maker on the
side. Soon, however, she was able
to live from her music: she was
granted fellowships, invited to
universities as a guest professor,
and her CDs were released on the
life. She can thoroughly savor
the solitude of the Academys
Wannsee villa. In New York she
lives amidst the hubbub of the
Lower East Side; at the Academy
she has a view, from the porters
lodge, across verdant trees and
grass. But she can still turn on
her electronic piano to research
fresh new sounds whenever the
inspiration strikes even in paja-
mas. As a creative person you
only need one or two good hours
in a day, she says. But you cant
force them. So its better to sit
down without time pressure and
just let yourself drift.
Goseld intently and power-
fully describes her development
as an artist. She recalls her rst
piano teacher, for example, a
French Resistance ghter, who
had ed to the US, and who
helped inspire her passion for
Tzadik label. In addition to puls-
ing machine rhythms and archaic
ambient noise, she also enjoys
using the sound of an untuned
piano often manufactured by
an electronic sampling process.
Goselds musical inclinations
link her to a celebration at the
heart of this years March Music
Festival: the 100th birthday
of John Cage. Annie Goseld
considers the inventor of the pre-
pared piano her spiritual father:
He did a lot for the acceptance
of sounds that werent seen as
music.
She also admires Cages brav-
ery, the skills that he continually
pushed himself to develop, and
how he wasnt as detail-obsessed
as many other composers. To
trust the musics performers is
also something that Goseld
strives for.
As she continues to speak
wisely and eloquently about her
art, it slowly dawns on her inter-
locutor that Goseld, with her
ornate, teased mane and tailored
velvet jacket reminds him of
another woman, someone who
was also once very close to punk.
Annie Goseld the Vivienne
Westwood of modern music!
By Frederik Hannssen
Excerpted from
Der Tagesspiegel
March 17, 2012
Translated by Brittani
Sonnenberg
Creating Art from Noise
Composer Annie Goseld shows how its done in Berghain

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even heroic, in ghting against
what they see as the established
egalitarian order.
The single-minded ferocity of
this program has created some
problems for the gop. The big-
gest issue thus far, and the one
that has recently caused Ryan
to disavow his Rand disciple-
ship, is that Rand was an athe-
ist who wanted nothing of the
conventionalism or theism of
the gops social conservative
block. Perhaps more pressingly,
though, the Ryan-Rand intensity
makes Romney look irrelevant to
his own candidacy. He may have
adopted the Ryan plan, and he
may embody big chunks of the
Randian ideal, but he just does
not have the conviction to sell
himself as the real leader of this
crusade. His beliefs seem now
like thin smoke to the libertarian
re he has chosen to play with.
Ryan has been anointed the real
leader of the party, so Romney
will either have to push back
against his own choices or smile
and hope that nobody notices that
he is just a mouthpiece for more
inuential voices.
By Dean Moyar
Excerpted from
Der Tagesspiegel
August 26, 2012
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N9
R
ichard Deming, a
poet and theorist at Yale
University whose work
explores the intersections of
poetry, philosophy, and visual
culture, thinks that the ordinary
has things to teach us about belief
and skepticism, and about hope
and despair, about our own lives
as reected in the lives of others
if we pay attention. The every-
day, he says, seeks to reveal and
engage the ongoing occasions for
interpretation and imagination
that are encountered everywhere
in daily life. Using examples
ranging from the philosopher
of lm Stanley Cavell, stand-up
comic Stephen Wright, artist
Andy Warhol, and the photogra-
pher Thomas Struth, Deming
weaves a paradoxical narrative
about how self-consciousness
enables a distance from everyday
life that is, because of its prox-
imity, at the furthest remove
from our ability to perceive and
become fully aware of it. And the
ordinary, he says, following in the
footsteps of gures such as Ralph
Waldo Emerson, is what most
needs to be discovered.
But such a perplexing position
leads to thinking not only about
what makes up what we call the
ordinary, but also about the pro-
cess by which we examine such
a condition. Deming thinks that
by paying closer attention to and
interrogating everyday situations
a stand-up comics routine, a
Brillo box (the one featured on
the left is not Warhols, but rather
Louise Lawlers 2010 photo,
Assembled) we might glimpse
the ways in which philosophy
(the kind that teaches us better
how to live) is shot through every-
thing. Seen as such, Deming says,
everything has the potential to
call for attention, engagement,
acknowledgment. r.j.m.
How to Do Things with the Ordinary
Unpacking the poetry of the everyday
No Revolutionaries
Doubtless the legal scholars
were at the service of both the
party and the state, declared
Markovits recently, during her
talk at Humboldt University. But
how did belief in socialism
operate in regards to the HU legal
scholars? How about their com-
mitment to Marxism-Leninism?
Markovits, drawing on
research from the university
archives and national archives,
pointed to the notorious
Babelsberg Conference of 1958
as the key event in grasping
the function and self-image
of Humboldts law professors
in the gdr. Up to the regimes
demise, East German legal
scholars remained tainted by an
attack from Walter Ulbricht, who
attempted to fuse state and law
at the conference and spurred a
witch-hunt to expose law profes-
sors who were not among the ser-
vants of the party and state.
But Markovits argued against
the conclusion that the HUs
jurists never again challenged
Ulbrichts appointed roles for
them as well-behaved, line-toeing
accomplices. There is too much
evidence suggesting that the
professors were perhaps only
half-heartedly engaged in mat-
ters that were important to the
party, she said. Moreover, there
is hardly any political engage-
ment or ideological enthusiasm
to be found in the recorded min-
utes of the academic board. The
regime considered the lawyers
to be slackers when it came to
teaching Marxism-Leninism.
Overall, they were seen as inept,
untalented, and often skeptical
socialists, said Markovits. Even
eager lawyers were lousy party
servants. Nor did they back con-
venient theories, above all a uni-
versal Marxist explanation of the
legal policy of the party and state,
or evidence for the historical
advantages of East German juris-
prudence. In vain, the party con-
tinually attempted to conate law
theory with Marxism-Leninism.
But if they were not ideological
torchbearers, what role did law
professors play in the gdrs his-
tory of law? They were assuredly
not revolutionaries for free gov-
ernment, pointed out Markovits.
But as skilled handlers of rules
and formal procedures who civi-
lized the usage of power, they
promoted and assisted the juridi-
cation of the gdr in the soften-
ing of the system of beliefs that
had acted as the regimes glue
an assessment that not everyone
in the crowd would have readily
agreed with.
By Katja Gelinsky
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung
May 30, 2012
Translated by Brittani
Sonnenberg
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LOUISE LAWLER, ASSEMBLED, 201011, DIGITAL DURAFLEX PRINT
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N10 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
Life & Letters
JOAN ACOCELLA
Can an extended TV show com-
mand the moral attention that we
normally give to art? Acocella
asks. Her Academy project,
which examines the hit series
The Sopranos, will tackle this
question while analyzing the
shows uninching nature. This
inquiry will serve as one chapter
in the Holtzbrinck Fellows book-
in-progress on the artistic treat-
ment of the criminal, tentatively
titled Crime and Punishment.
Other chapters look at Judas
Iscariot, the Grimm brothers
fairy tales, Dracula, Agatha
Christie, Georges Simenon, and
Stieg Larsson.
Acocella is a staff writer for
the New Yorker, where she reviews
dance and books. Her own books
include Mark Morris, a critical
biography of the choreographer;
Willa Cather and the Politics of
Criticism; and Creating Hysteria:
Women and Multiple Personality
Disorder. She edited the rst
unexpurgated edition of The
Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky and, with
Lynn Garafola, edited Andr
Levinson on Dance. Her collection
of essays Twenty-eight Artists and
Two Saints was nominated for
the National Book Critics Circle
Award in criticism, and it won
the Award in Literature from the
American Academy of Arts and
Letters. She has also written for
the New York Review of Books, Art
in America, Wall Street Journal,
Financial Times, New York Times,
Village Voice, and other journals.
She was a Guggenheim fellow
in 1983; she is currently a fellow
of the New York Institute of the
Humanities.
DANIEL ALBRIGHT
For his Academy project, Daniel
Albright has assigned himself
an epic task: to embark on a
foundational study of the theory
and practice of comparative arts
in the West. The Nina Maria
Gorrissen Fellow plans to begin
with a question that has persisted
since Aristotle: are there many
different arts, or is there one art,
which variously takes the form
of a poem, a painting, a musi-
cal composition, a building?
Albright advocates for no less
than an Auf hebung (abolishment,
annihilation, removal) of the
dichotomy that currently cripples
the comparative arts, in which
artists and critics either agree to
the separation of arts and media,
or they refute it.
Albright is the Ernst
Bernbaum Professor of Literature
at Harvard. His interests include
theories and strategies of com-
parative arts, Shakespeare
and music, and modernism in
science, philosophy, and the
arts. He also teaches courses
on opera, drama, Victorian
and modernist poetry and c-
tion, and the relation of physics
to literature. In 2000 his book
Untwisting the Serpent: Music,
Literature, and the Visual Arts
won the Susanne M. Glasscock
Humanities Book Prize for
Interdisciplinary Scholarship.
Albrights other books include
Music Speaks: On Opera, Dance,
and Song; Modernism and Music:
An Anthology of Sources, Quantum
Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and
the Science of Modernism; and
Stravinsky: The Music-Box and the
Nightingale.
DAVID A. BOLLIER
Author-activist David A. Bollier
displays an uncommon dedica-
tion to studying the global com-
mons movement: while in Berlin,
he will be composing a strategy
memorandum on evolving com-
mons-based public policies, legal
innovations, movement strate-
gies, and public education. As
Berlin and Germany at large are
home to many of the worlds key
commons thinkers, the Bosch
Fellow will also devote a signi-
cant amount of time to meeting
his German counterparts in order
to exchange information and dis-
cuss the future of the commons
movement.
Bollier is co-founder and prin-
cipal on the Commons Strategies
Group, an international consult-
ing project, and co-director of
the Commons Law Project. After
working in Washington, DC, on
a range of policy related projects
for seven years, Bollier began a
second career as an independent
policy analyst, activist, and politi-
cal writer. He has been a senior
fellow at the Norman Lear Center
at the usc Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism
since 2002. Bollier also co-
founded Public Knowledge, a
Washington advocacy organiza-
tion for the public stake in the
Internet, telecommunications,
and copyright policy. He has also
been a rapporteur for the Aspen
Institutes Communications
and Society Program for over
twenty years. Bollier has writ-
ten ten books, including Viral
Spiral: How the Commoners Built
a Digital Republic of Their Own;
Brand Name Bullies: The Quest
to Own and Control Culture; and
Silent Theft: The Private Plunder
of Our Commons Wealth. He is co-
editor with Silke Helfrich of The
Wealth of the Commons: A World
Beyond Market and State, and co-
author with Burns Weston of the
forthcoming Green Governance:
Ecological Survival, Human Rights,
and the Law of the Commons.
Bolliers blog can be found at bol-
lier.org.
PETER CONSTANTINE
Peter Constantine will spend
the fall semester coaxing fty
previously untranslated stories by
Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov
into English, in addition to com-
posing an introduction to these
stories, and compiling copious
notes to accompany the transla-
tions. Many of these stories by
Bulgakov were originally pub-
lished in the Soviet magazine
Gudok and the Berlin magazine
Nakanune, and later collected and
identied by German Slavicist
Volker Levin in the late 1970s.
Constantine is an award-
winning literary translator and
editor. The Ellen Maria Gorrissen
Fellows recent translations
include Sophocless Theban
Trilogy, The Essential Writings of
Machiavelli, and works by Gogol,
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Voltaire.
Constantine co-edited A Century
of Greek Poetry: 19002000
and the anthology The Greek
Poets: Homer to the Present. A
Guggenheim Fellow, Constantine
was awarded the pen Translation
Prize for Six Early Stories by
Thomas Mann. In 1999 he was
awarded the National Translation
Award for The Undiscovered
Proles in Scholarship
Presenting the fall 2012 fellows and distinguished visitors
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | N11
Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories.
In 2002, Constantines transla-
tion of The Complete Works of
Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie
Babel, received a Koret Jewish
Book Award and a National
Jewish Book Award citation. His
translation of the modern Greek
poet Stylianos Harkianakiss
poetry book Mother received the
2004/2005 Hellenic Association
of Translators of Literature Prize.
In 2007 Constantine was the
recipient of the Helen and Kurt
Wolff Translators Prize for his
translation of Benjamin Leberts
novel The Bird is a Raven.
RICHARD HAWKINS
Visual artist Richard Hawkins
is interested in scrapbooks as a
kind of under-recognized sidebar
to the history of collage, and
cites them as a major inuence
in his several of his projects
over the last few years. During
his time in Berlin, the Guna S.
Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow
will be writing an essay and
compiling an exhibition based
on the collection of the Schwules
Museum in Berlin.
Hawkins is a painter, sculp-
tor, and collage artist who is
currently participating in the
2012 Whitney Biennial. In 2010,
his work was the subject of the
retrospective The Third Mind
at the Art Institute of Chicago,
curated by Lisa Dorin; it traveled
to the Hammer Museum in Los
Angeles in 2011. Hawkins has
completed over thirty solo exhi-
bitions internationally, and his
works reside in many internation-
al collections, both public and
private. His next major project is
scheduled for Le Consortium in
Dijon in 2013. Hawkins received
his training at the University
of Texas and at the California
Institute of Arts in Valencia,
and he has been awarded the
Arts Matter Fellowship, the US/
Japan Creative Artist Fellowship,
and the Otis College of Design
Faculty Development Grant.
JONATHAN LAURENCE
According to Jonathan Laurence,
Turkey and Morocco offer
important but very different
visions of the coexistence of
Islam and democracy in the
twenty-rst century. Laurence
sees the two countries as two
separate models one a demo-
cratic republic and the other
a constitutional democratic
monarchy, which are especially
relevant for North African coun-
tries transitioning from the Arab
Spring since the winter of 2011.
During his time in Berlin, the
Daimler Fellow plans to examine
the increasing involvement of
Turkish and Moroccan soft power
in the political and religious
lives of immigrant diasporas in
Western Europe.
Laurence is an associate
professor of political science at
Boston College with a focus on
European politics, transatlan-
tic relations, and Islam in the
West. He is also a nonresident
senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, a term member of
the Council on Foreign Relations,
an afliate of the Center for
European Studies at Harvard,
and a regular guest researcher
at the Wissenschaftszentrum
Berlin. His PhD thesis was
awarded the 2006 Harold
D. Lasswell Prize for the best
dissertation on public policy
from the American Political
Science Association. Laurence
is author of Integrating Islam:
Political and Religious Challenges
in Contemporary France (with
Justin Vaisse), which received
an Outstanding Academic
Title Award from the American
Library Association. He is also
the author of two edited volumes,
The New French Council for the
Muslim Faith and Governments
and Muslim Communities in
the West (with Philippa Strum),
as well as extensive articles
in both policy journals and
the news media. In 2012, The
CLASS OF FALL 2012 (L TO R): DEAN MOYAR, DANIEL ALBRIGHT, HEATHER McGOWAN, RICHARD HAWKINS, JONATHAN LAURENCE, BEATRICE M.
LONGUENESSE, JOAN ACOCELLA, DANIEL TIFFANY, CELINA SU, PETER CONSTANTINE, MICHAEL A. WACHTEL, AND HANS R. VAGET

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Emancipation of Europes Muslims:
The States Role in Minority
Integration will appear with
Princeton University Press.
BEATRICE LONGUENESSE
Self-consciousness and our uses
of I rest on two quite different
kinds of self-consciousness,
explains Beatrice Longuenesse.
These include consciousness
of oneself as an embodied entity
and consciousness of oneself as
the agent of ones own mental
unity. The Siemens Fellow will
devote her time at the Academy to
her next book project: I, Me, Mine.
Back to Kant, and Back Again, an
extended investigation of the
rst-person pronoun, beginning
with contemporary discussions
of our uses of I, and going back
in time to explore both Kants and
Freuds analyses of the subject.
Longuenesse is the Silver
Professor of Philosophy at New
York University. She received
her education at the Ecole
Normale Suprieure in Paris, the
University of Paris-Sorbonne,
and at Princeton University.
Longuenesse was a fellow at the
Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin
in 2006 and was elected to the
American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 2011. She is the
author of Kant and the Capacity
to Judge, an expanded English
version of Kant et le Pouvoir
de Juger; Kant on the Human
Standpoint; and Hegels Critique of
Metaphysics, an expanded English
translation of Hegel et la Critique
de la Mtaphysique. She has
co-edited, with Daniel Garber,
Kant and the Early Moderns, and
has written over fty articles on
issues in the history of modern
European philosophy. Her cur-
rent research focuses on notions
of self-consciousness and self-
reference, drawing on both the
recent continental and the ana-
lytic traditions in philosophy.
HEATHER McGOWAN
Heather McGowans third novel,
The Black Paintings, which she
will continue composing at the
Academy, examines the intricate
web connecting actors in the ille-
gal trade of cultural artifacts and
the moral quandaries that plague
the sale and acquisition of these
objects. The novels characters
range from Afghani tomb-raiders
to New York museum curators,
and its action takes place over
the course of ve days, spanning
three continents. According to
the Mary Ellen von der Heyden
Fiction Fellow, the manuscript is
inuenced by the work of Robert
Altman, who showed, through
a restless camera and multiple
points-of-view, that varied voices
can be crafted into a cohesive
piece of art.
McGowan is the author of
the novel Schooling (Doubleday/
Faber UK), which was a Newsweek,
Detroit Free Press, and Hartford
Courant Best Book of the Year
in 2001 and was included in
the volume 1001 Books You Must
Read Before You Die, edited by
Peter Boxall. She won the Rome
Prize in Literature in 2011 for
her second novel Duchess of
Nothing (Bloomsbury/Faber UK).
Montrachet, a limited-edition
collaboration with visual art-
ist Liam Gillick, appeared in
2006. Tadpole, McGowans
original screenplay, was turned
into a lm directed by Gary
Winick and starred Sigourney
Weaver. The lm won Best
Director at Sundance in 2002
and was subsequently released
by Miramax. McGowans fellow-
ships include the Chateau La
Napoule, Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, MacDowell
Colony, Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts, and Yaddo.
DEAN MOYAR
How should we conceive of the
moral core of our political institu-
tions? Dean Moyars Academy
project, completing a book
entitled Realizing Morality in
Right: Hegels Unied Account of
Practical Rationality, explores this
question through the writings of
Fichte and Hegel. The Dirk Ippen
Fellow reports that his book-in-
progress aims not only to further
our knowledge of moral and
political norms, but also to draw
out the fertility of the idealists
dialectical methods for our over-
all understanding of rationality
and justication.
Moyar is an associate pro-
fessor in philosophy at Johns
Hopkins University, with a spe-
cic focus on Kant and German
Idealism, political philosophy,
and ethics. Moyar received his
education at Duke University
and the University of Chicago,
and was a visiting scholar at
the Philosophisches Seminar
at the Westflische Wilhelms-
Universitt in Mnster. His
essays have appeared in, among
others, the Journal of Moral
Philosophy and Hegel-Studien. He
is co-editor with Michael Quante
of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit:
A Critical Guide (Cambridge
University Press, 2007) and
author of Hegels Conscience
(Oxford University Press, 2011).
CELINA SU
Celina Su is eager to explore
new models of critical pedagogy
and community development in
the EU, at a time when, she says,
more American social change
organizations are drawing upon
[outside] models to help youth
in community development and
policy-making in new, under-
researched ways. The Bosch
Fellow believes this comparative
analysis and exploration will
help to foster dialogue about
potential cross-Atlantic lessons
regarding youth participation
in public policy-making. In
particular, Su aims to conduct
cast study research on the Youth
Empowerment Partnership
Programme (yepp), headquar-
tered at the Free University of
Berlin, to learn more of their
efforts to work with disadvan-
taged youth across segregated
and fractured landscapes.
Su is an associate professor
of political science at the City
University of New York and co-
founding executive director of
the Burmese Refugee Project.
From 2011 to 2012, Su served on
the steering committee for New
York Citys inaugural participa-
tory budgeting process, whereby
residents (rather than elected
ofcials) decided how local capi-
tal funds should be spent. Her
research, focusing on civil society
and the cultural politics of educa-
tion and health policy, has been
awarded many grants, among
them the New York University/
MasterCard Foundation Grant
(2010), four consecutive psc-
cuny Grant (2006 through
2009), the Mrs. Giles Whiting
Foundation Fellowship for
Excellence in Teaching (2007),
and the New York University/Ford
Foundation Grants (2006). She
has written numerous articles
and two books on participatory
democracy and civic engagement,
the politics of health, and educa-
tion policy: Streetwise for Book
Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and
Education Reform in the Bronx
(Cornell University Press, 2009),
and co-authored with Gaston
Alonso, Noel Anderson, and
Jeanne Theoharis Our Schools
Suck: Young People Talk Back to a
Segregated Nation on the Failures
of Urban Education (New York
University Press, 2009).
DANIEL TIFFANY
During his time at the Academy,
Daniel Tiffany plans to excavate
poetrys forgotten relationship
to the origins of kitsch. This
investigation will take the form of
a book drawing upon Baudelaires
poetic program of inventing
clichs and Kracauers theory of
the mass ornament, Tiffany says,
in order to reassess our presump-
tions about kitsch in material cul-
ture and to test modern poetrys
resistance to the values of kitsch.
The Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow
traces the origins of poetic kitsch
from the eighteenth-century
genre wars between poetry and
the emergent, bourgeois cat-
egory of literature, through the
Romantic discourse of impos-
ture (involving forgeries of poetic
texts), to the Warholian equation
of avant-garde and kitsch (contest-
ing Clement Greenbergs famous
opposition of the two categories).
His book examines a variety of
neglected eighteenth century
genres, including ballad imita-
tions, gothic verse, pet epitaphs,
and poetic melodramas. What is
at stake nally in a study of poetic
kitsch is the decay of the poems
aura of originality, which would
allow poetry to become via the
traits of its reproducibility the
impersonal expression of millions
of souls: a mass ornament.
Tiffany is a professor of
English and comparative litera-
ture at the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles. He
focuses on modern poetry and
poetics, philosophy, visual and
popular culture, creative writ-
ing, and critical theory. He
has published translations of
works by Sophocles, Georges
Bataille, and the Italian poet
Cesare Pavese. His critical works
include Radio Corpse: Imagism
and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra
Pound (Harvard University Press,
1995); Toy Medium: Materialism
and Modern Lyric (University of
California Press, 2000), named
one of the Best Books of 2000
by the Los Angeles Times Book
Review; and Indel Poetics: Riddles,
Nightlife, Substance (University
of Chicago Press, 2009), named
the best book of poetry criticism
of 2009 by Poetry magazine.
Tiffanys critical essays on
poetry and poetics have appeared
in Critical Inquiry, pml a,
Semiotexte, Modernism/Modernity,
and numerous other journals. In
addition, three volumes of his
poetry, which have been awarded
the Chicago Review Poetry Prize,
have appeared in the last decade.
His poems appear in journals
including Tin House, Boston
Review, and the Paris Review,
and he has held residencies at
the MacDowell Colony and the
Karolyi Foundation, in France,
and is a recipient of the Whiting
Fellowship.
HANS R. VAGET
Thomas Manns years in America,
an era largely neglected by liter-
ary scholars, will be the subject of
Hans R. Vagets Academy project,
covering the famous authors
fourteen years (19381952)
spent stateside. The work, says
Vaget, will shed new light on
Manns relationship to President
Roosevelt; on his efforts to con-
vince isolationist America of
the necessity of going to war; on
his rivalry with other German
exiles (notably Brecht); and on
his growing disillusionment with
Germany even after the war.
The Berthold Leibinger Fellow
will draw on Manns extensive
political commentary and on his
most important literary works
of the period, namely Joseph, the
Provider and Doctor Faustus.
Vaget is the Helen & Laura
Shedd Professor Emeritus of
German Studies at Smith College,
in Northampton, Massachusetts.
He received his academic train-
ing at the universities of Munich
and Tbingen, the University of
Wales in Cardiff, and at Columbia
University. He has published
widely in the eld of German
studies from the eighteenth cen-
tury to the present, focusing pri-
marily on Goethe, Wagner, and
Thomas Mann. Vaget has taught
at the University of California,
Irvine; Yale University; Columbia
University; Princeton University;
the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst; Middlebury College;
and the University of Hamburg.
Vaget is co-founder of the Goethe
Society of North America and its
former president. He is also one
of the editors of wagnerspectrum,
a journal of Wagner studies.
A recipient of the Thomas Mann
Medal for his edition of the cor-
respondence of Mann with his
American benefactor, Agnes E.
Meyer, Vaget is also one of the
chief editors of the new complete
edition of the works, the let-
ters, and the diaries of Thomas
Mann. Among his recent pub-
lications are Thomas Mann, der
Amerikaner: Leben und Werk im
amerikanischen Exil, 19381952
(S. Fischer, 2011); Thomas
Mann, Briefe, vol. iii: 19241932
(S. Fischer, 2011), as a co-editor;
Im Schatten Wagners. Thomas
Mann ber Richard Wagner. Texte
und Zeugnisse (S. Fischer, 3rd.
ed. 2010); Thomas Manns The
Magic Mountain A Casebook
in Criticism (Oxford University
Press, 2008); and Seelenzauber
Thomas Mann und die Musik
(S. Fischer, 2006).
MICHAEL A. WACHTEL
According to Michael A. Wachtel,
the Russian polymath Viacheslav
Ivanov was a true cosmo-
politan, home in most countries
and languages of Europe. At
the Academy, the Ellen Maria
Gorrissen Fellow intends to work
on a biography of Ivanov, the
primary theoretician of Russian
Symbolism, whose views of
modern culture were profoundly
marked by his expert knowledge
of antiquity. Ivanov had studied
ancient history for nine semes-
ters at the University of Berlin
(beginning in 1886), and then
spent three years at the German
Archeological Institute in Rome
and one year at the German
Archeological Institute in Athens.
Though he ultimately turned
away from a career in the acad-
emy, Ivanovs formidable training
in ancient (and modern) lan-
guages and cultures is reected
throughout his creative work. His
theories about theater had an
enormous impact on the Russian
avant-garde and even on early
Soviet theatrical experiments.
Wachtel is chair and pro-
fessor of Slavic Languages
and Literatures at Princeton
University, where he has taught
since 1990. His scholarship
focuses on Russian poetry
from the eighteenth century
to the present. A comparatist
by training and inclination, he
is particularly interested in
German-Russian literary and cul-
tural relations. He has received
numerous distinctions, among
them the Likhachev Foundation
Fellowship, in 2010; a grant
from the National Endowment
for the Humanities and a
Guggenheim Fellowship, in
2007; and the prize for best new
book in literary/cultural studies
by the American Association
of Teachers of Slavic and East
European Languages, in 1999,
for The Development of Russian
Verse: Meter and its Meanings
(Cambridge University Press,
1998). Wachtels other books
include Russian Symbolism and
Literary Tradition: Goethe, Novalis,
and the Poetics of Vyacheslav
Ivanov (University of Wisconsin
Press, 1994); The Cambridge
Introduction to Russian Poetry
(Cambridge University Press,
2004); and, as editor, Vjaceslav
Ivanov, Dichtung und Briefwechsel
aus dem deutschsprachigen
Nachla (Liber Verlag, 1995) and
Vyacheslav Ivanov, Selected Essays
(Northwestern University Press,
2001).
Distinguished Visitors
AVISHAI MARGALIT
During his Richard von
Weizscker Distinguished
Visitorship, the former George F.
Kennan Professor at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton
and professor emeritus of phi-
losophy at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem will provide a fresh
perspective on the Arab Spring.
DOMINIQUE NABOKOV
A photographer who divides
her time between the US and
France, the Marina Kellen
French Distinguished Visitor will
embark on a photographic redis-
covery of Berlins buildings, pop-
ulation, and ambience. Nabokov
focuses on portrait photography
and photo-reportage, and it will
be her rst time returning to the
city since 1995.
ROBERT J. SHILLER
The Arthur M. Okun Professor
of Economics at Yale University
and professor of nance at Yale
School of Management will
speak on his timely new book,
Finance and the Good Society, dur-
ing his Allianz Distinguished
Visitorship.
S
inan Antoon, an
associate professor at
the Gallatin School
of New York University, will
work on a monograph entitled
Before the Ruins: When Darwish
Met Benjamin, which imag-
ines a conversation between
Walter Benjamin and the late
Palestinian poet Mahmoud
Darwish, two unlikely inter-
locuters; J. M. Bernstein,
Distinguished Professor of
Philosophy at the New School
for Social Research, plans to
complete his book Torture
and Dignity: Reections on the
Meaning of Moral Injury, in
which Bernstein explores how
torture has again become part
of the mechanisms of power-
maintenance by even the most
progressive states; composer
and musician Gene Coleman
will create several new works
on commission for groups in
Europe and the US, as well as
collaborate on new projects with
Berlin-based musicians; visual
artist William Cordova will
explore issues of transformation
and interpretation, reecting
his own movement and displace-
ment among languages and
cultures in a range of draw-
ings, collages, and installations;
Charles Hirschkind, an
anthropologist and director of
the Religious Studies Program
at the University of California
at Berkeley, will examine how
Europes Islamic past inhabits
its present, with a special focus
on the Moorish problem and
the politics of multicultural-
ism in Spain today; Donald
Horowitz, a professor of law
and political science at Duke
University, will continue his
work on constitutional design for
severely divided societies, explor-
ing which arrangements would
be most appropriate for societies
torn by religious or ethnic dif-
ferences and conict; Thomas
DaCosta Kaufmann, pro-
fessor of art and archeology
at Princeton University, will
consider manifestations in art
and architecture of interactions
between Europeans and non-
Europeans in the time of western
voyages and empire-building; the
director of New York Universitys
Cultural Reporting and Criticism
Program, Susie Linfield, will
combine journalistic interviews,
research, and political analysis to
investigate how Israel, a country
founded by, and originally sup-
ported by, socialists, has become
a pariah of the left; New York
University philosophy professor
Beatrice Longuenesse will
continue her investigation of
self-consciousness in connection
with our use of the rst-person
pronoun I; anthropologist
Saba Mahmood, from the
University of California at
Berkeley, will be completing a
book about the promise and lim-
its of the right to religious liberty
in the Middle East, with a special
focus on Egypt, based on exten-
sive eldwork on Coptic-Muslim
relations in Cairo. Lance N.
Olson, a prolic ction writer
who divides his time between
Salt Lake City and the mountains
of Idaho, will be working on his
latest novel, Theories of Forgetting,
composed of three narrative
voices. The books experimental
structure, Nolson says, will be
a conversation with art books
and other works that form a reac-
tion against mass reproduction
and textual disembodiment
in the digital age. Historian
Ronald Suny of the University
of Michigan will explore the
question, Why genocide? as he
examines the elements that led
the Young Turks to carry out the
systematic deportation and, ulti-
mately, massacre of hundreds of
thousands of their Armenian and
Assyrian subjects; and historian
Francesca Trivell ato of
Yale University will demonstrate
the importance of studying ordi-
nary merchants books along-
side the classics of European
political economy, and reveal how
Christian ideas (and legends)
about Jewish economic life can
be analyzed in order to offer new
perspectives on important facets
of European history.
Sneak Preview
This spring welcomes another outstanding class of fellows to the Hans Arnhold Center
The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for its resi-
dential fellowships for 201415, as well as early applications for
the academic years 201516 and 201617. The deadline is Friday,
September 27, 2013. Applications may be submitted online or
mailed to the Berlin ofce.
The Academy welcomes applications from emerging and estab-
lished scholars, and from writers and professionals who wish to
engage in independent study in Berlin. Approximately 26 Berlin
Prizes are conferred annually. Past recipients have included histo-
rians, economists, poets and novelists, journalists, legal scholars,
anthropologists, musicologists, and public policy experts, among
others. The Academy does not award fellowships in the natural
sciences.
Fellowships are typically awarded for an academic semester
or, on occasion, for an entire academic year. Bosch Fellowships
in Public Policy may be awarded for shorter stays of six to eight
weeks. Fellowship benets include round-trip airfare, partial board,
a $5,000 monthly stipend, and accommodations at the Academys
lakeside Hans Arnhold Center in the Berlin-Wannsee district.
Fellowships are restricted to individuals based permanently in
the United States. US citizenship is not required; American expatri-
ates are not eligible. Candidates in academic disciplines must have
completed a PhD at the time of application. Applicants working in
most other elds such as journalism, lmmaking, or public poli-
cy must have equivalent professional degrees. Writers should have
published at least one book at the time of application. The Academy
gives priority to a proposals scholarly merit rather than any specic
relevance to Germany.
Composers are asked to visit the Academys website for details
regarding the competition in music composition. The Guna S.
Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts is an invitation-only
competition.
Following a peer-reviewed screening process, an independent
Selection Committee reviews nalist applications. The 201415
Berlin Prizes will be announced in late February 2014.
For further information and to apply online, please visit the
Academys website, www.americanacademy.de.
Call for Applications
Alumni Books
New releases by Academy fellows
NORMAN MANEA
Translated by Oana Snziana
Marian
The Lair
Yale University Press, April 2012
CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON
(TRANSLATOR)
Robert Walser (Author)
Thirty Poems
New Directions, June 2012
JOHN KOETHE
rotc Kills
Harper Perennial, August 2012
CHARLES MOLESWORTH
And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of
Counte Cullen
University of Chicago Press,
September 2012
SUSANNA MOORE
The Life of Objects
Alfred A. Knopf, September 2012
SYLVESTER OKWUNODU
OGBECHIE
with Kelechi Amadi-Obi
Making History: African Collectors
and the Canon of African Art
5 Continents Editions, April 2012
JEFFREY CHIPPS SMITH
Drer
Phaidon Press, May 2012
ANNE APPLEBAUM
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of
Eastern Europe, 19441956
Doubleday, November 2012
SVETLANA BOYM
Another Freedom: The Alternative
History of an Idea
April 2012
ANNE CARSON
(with Bianca Stone)
Antigonick
New Directions, May 2012
BRIGID COHEN
Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde
Diaspora
Cambridge University Press,
October 2012
SUSANNA ELM
Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the
Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of
Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome
University of California Press,
April 2012
CLAIRE FINKELSTEIN
with Jens David Ohlin and
Andrew Altman
Targeted Killings: Law and Morality
in an Asymmetrical World
Oxford University Press,
April 2012
DEVIN FORE
Realism after Modernism: The
Rehumanization of Art and
Literature
mit Press, September 2012
TODD GITLIN
Occupy Nation: The Roots, the
Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy
Wall Street
It Books, August 2012
JACQUELINE E. JUNG
The Gothic Screen: Space,
Sculpture, and Community in the
Cathedrals of France and Germany,
ca. 12001400
October 2012
EZRA SULEIMAN
with Antonis A. Ellinas
The European Commission and
Bureaucratic Autonomy: Europes
Custodians
April 2012
MARGARITA TUPITSYN
with Victor Tupitsyn and
Michael Buhrs
Andrei Molodkin: Liquid Black
Kehrer, June 2012
ANNE MIDDLETON WAGNER
A House Divided: American Art
Since 1955
University of California Press,
February 2012
C.K. WILLIAMS
In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest
October 2012
N16 | Private Initiative Public Outreach | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
Private Initiative Public Outreach
CORPORATIONS AND CORPORATE FOUNDATIONS
PRESIDENTS CIRCLE
Above $25,000
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
BASF SE
Bertelsmann AG
Robert Bosch GmbH
Robert Bosch Stiftung
Daimler AG
Daimler-Fonds im Stifterverband fr
die Deutsche Wissenschaft
Deutsche Lufthansa AG
Deutsche Telekom AG
Freshelds Bruckhaus Deringer LLP
GE
GIESEN HEIDBRINK Partnerschaft von
Rechtsanwlten
GRG Partnerschaft von Rechts-
anwlten
Fritz Henkel Stiftung
Hewlett-Packard GmbH
JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.
KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprfungs-
gesellschaft
Liberty Global BV
Marsh GmbH
MSD Sharp & Dohme GmbH
Pzer Pharma GmbH
Porsche AG
Susanna Dulkinys & Erik Spiekermann
Edenspiekermann
Telefnica Germany GmbH & Co. OHG
Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP
White & Case LLP
BENEFACTORS
up to $25,000
Audi AG
Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals
Cerberus Deutschland GmbH
Deutsche Bundesbank
Drr AG
Dussmann Stiftung & Co. KGaA
Fleishman-Hillard Germany / Public
Affairs & Gov. Relations
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac GmbH
Google Germany GmbH
Investitionsbank Berlin
Berthold Leibinger Stiftung
Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung
und Zukunft
Villa Grisebach Auktionen GmbH,
Berlin
INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILY FOUNDATIONS
FOUNDERS CIRCLE
$1 million and above
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen
Foundation and the descendants of
Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold
CHAIRMANS CIRCLE
$ 25,000 and above
Marina Kellen French
Werner Gegenbauer
Richard K. Goeltz
C. Boyden Gray
Helga & Erivan Haub
Mercedes & A. Michael Hoffman
Richard C. Holbrooke in Memorian
Stefan von Holtzbrinck
Michael Klein
Nina & Lothar von Maltzahn
Maren Otto
Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz &
Bernd Schultz
Kurt F. Viermetz
TRUSTEES CIRCLE
$10,000 and above
Constance & John P. Birkelund
Almut & Hans-Michael Giesen
Alfred Freiherr von Oppenheim-
Stiftung im Stifterverband fr die
Deutsche Wissenschaft
Christopher Freiherr von Oppenheim
Philipp von Randow
Barbara & Jrg Zumbaum
PATRONS
$2,500 and above
Robert Z. Aliber, Volker Booten,
Gahl Hodges Burt, Norma Drimmer,
Jutta von Falkenhausen & Thomas
von Aubel, Julie Finley, Caroline &
Cord-Georg Hasselmann, Lily & Klaus
Heiliger, Dorothee & Tessen von
Heydebreck, Erika & Jan Hummel,
August J.P. von Joest, Henry A.
Kissinger, Martin Koehler, Jutta &
Hans-Joachim Prie, Si & Dieter
Rosenkranz, Hannes Schneider,
Bernhard Speyer, Katharina & Wolf
Spieth, Gesa B. & Klaus D. Vogt, Elaine
& James D. Wolfensohn, Loretta
Wrtenberger & Daniel Tmpel
FELLOWSHIPS AND DISTINGUISHED
VISITORSHIPS ESTABLISHED IN PERPETUITY
John P. Birkelund Berlin Prize in the Humanities
Daimler Berlin Prize
German Transatlantic Program Berlin Prize
supported by European Recovery Program funds
granted through the Transatlantic Program of the
Federal Republic of Germany
Nina Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize in History
Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction
Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize
Dirk Ippen Berlin Prize
Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in the Visual Arts
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THE PERSISTENCE OF
AUTHORITARIANISM
Note to aspiring dictators: more velvet glove, less iron st
By Martin K. Dimitrov
WU YINXIAN, INSIDE THE GREAT HALL OF THE PEOPLE, 1981
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D
espite the impressive gains
made by democracy in the last
several decades, more than half of
the worlds population still lives in autoc-
racies. A few years ago, Freedom House
called attention to the global retreat of
democracy, which was expressed as a net
decline in the number of polities classied
as free. Almost two years after the Arab
Spring, democracy has yet to take root in
the Middle East: the events of 2011 led only
to Tunisias elevation from not free to
partly free, a category that also includes
Kuwait, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine.
Despite having undergone regime change
as a result of the Arab Spring, both Egypt
and Libya remain not free. What explains
this staying power of authoritarianism?
Why is it that momentous changes such
as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Arab
Spring have resulted in the emergence of
democracy only in some countries and the
persistence of autocracy in others?
I explore these questions by focusing
on two watershed years: 1989 and 2011.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to
the spectacular and unexpected spread of
democracy throughout Eastern Europe.
Almost as surprising were the events of
2011, when apparently unassailable authori-
tarian regimes in the Middle East either
collapsed or appeared exceedingly weak.
But 1989 and 2011 are also notable for
what did not happen. Several Communist
regimes survived the fall of the Wall:
Communist parties still rule China,
Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and North Korea. In
other countries, the collapse of Communist
rule did not usher in democracy: in most
successor states of the Soviet Union, new
non-democratic regimes became consoli-
dated in the 1990s and have since proven
exceedingly durable. Most troubling is the
case of post-Soviet Russia, where, despite
initial hope for a democratic turn, Vladimir
Putins ascent to power in 1999 led to the
gradual consolidation of authoritarian
rule. In the Middle East, despite regime
change in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, as well
as ongoing strife in Syria and Yemen, it
seems reasonable to expect that a number
of autocracies will survive the after-shocks
of the Arab Spring. Thus, attention to the
non-events of 1989 and 2011 provides us
with an entry point onto the broader ques-
tion of authoritarian regime resilience.
Traditional Explanations of
Authoritarian Resilience
O
ne widespread view is that
autocracies ensure their survival
by building up a strong coercive
apparatus, consisting of the army, the
police, and, most crucially, the state secu-
rity agency. This argument rings true.
Those who are familiar with the history
of the gdr would point out the Stasis role
in buttressing the East German dictator-
ship. Specialists on the Soviet Union would
focus on how the kgb was used to suppress
dissent. And Iran experts would emphasize
the coercive capacity of the fearsome Vevak.
But the very fact that the Soviet Union
collapsed despite the vast size of the kgb
and that the million-strong Egyptian army
could not preserve Mubaraks monopoly on
power underscores a basic, though highly
counterintuitive, point: when autocracies
rely on repression alone, they are more
likely to collapse. This is not to deny that
strategically deployed repression can be
employed as a stopgap measure. But the
protracted use of brute force shows weak-
ness rather than strength.
This argument can be illustrated with
two specic examples. The rst is from
Russia. As Putins popularity agged in the
second half of 2011, he began to resort to
repression more frequently. Yet protesters
interpreted such acts as signs of Putins
vulnerability. The use of repression led
to an increase in the number of protests.
A different, less repressive response to
protests was adopted in the spring of 2012.
Putins popularity had increased following
the presidential elections in March, which
meant he felt more secure in tolerating
protests. Putins new tactic has been to use
the pliant court system to target individual
high-prole protesters (such as blogger
Alexey Navalny or the punk band Pussy
Riot) rather than to indiscriminately use
truncheons against ordinary citizens pro-
testing in the square. The result has been
that the protest wave has gradually sub-
sided. The second example is from Syria,
where Bashar al-Assads regime has sur-
vived through massive repression, despite
raging protests that gathered force in early
2011. While the regime has not collapsed
yet, brute force cannot be used to ensure its
long-term survival.
The Pillars of Regime Resilience
in China after 1989
O
ne st ylized fact about 1989
is that the Communist Party in
China survived because it used
repression, whereas European Communist
regimes fell because they were unable
to repress. Although repression helped
prevent collapse in China in 1989, it can-
not account for how the regime has sus-
tained itself for another twenty-odd years.
Authoritarian survival is a difcult balanc-
ing act that involves the deployment of a
wide array of tools that generate support
among different segments of the popula-
tion and limit the need to rule through
repression. Specically, regime survival
in China has required economic reforms,
ideological change, inclusion of potential
rivals in the Chinese Communist Party,
and the creation of institutions of account-
ability. These levers, rather than massive
repression, have underpinned the long-
term survival of the party.
The importance of economic growth
for the survival of the Communist Party
in China cannot be overstated. Since Deng
Xiaoping initiated reform and opening in
the late 1970s, Chinas average growth rate
has been about 10 percent a year. No other
major economy in the world has managed
to sustain equivalent growth. Chinas
achievement is especially striking when
compared with the records of other central-
ly planned economies. Whereas the Soviet
Union was never able to reform the planned
economy, the Chinese leadership oversaw a
successful transition to the market. A retro-
spective account of Chinas rise should not
underestimate some of the problems along
the way, especially during the years follow-
ing Tiananmen, when regime commitment
to continuing market reforms was far from
certain. Despite these temporary setbacks,
the reality today is that the Communist
Party oversees a market economy that has
continuously delivered vibrant growth.
Growth has supported authoritarian
resilience through several different mecha-
nisms. First, it has created stable demand
for labor, thus keeping unemployment at
relatively low levels and preventing the
emergence of destabilizing worker discon-
tent. Examples ranging from Solidarity in
Poland to the miners strikes in Romania
and the Soviet Union provide vivid illustra-
tions of how such discontent can unravel
Communist authoritarian regimes. Second,
growth has provided central and local
THE IMPORTANCE OF ECONOMIC
GROWTH FOR THE SURVIVAL OF
THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN CHINA
CANNOT BE OVERSTATED.
governments with funds that can be used
to nance redistributive social spending
and thus limit popular discontent. Finally,
growth has sustained a class of private
entrepreneurs, who have grown rich as
a result of the economic policies of the
Communist Party, not in spite of them,
and who therefore have a vested interest in
maintaining status quo. Because growth
contributes to regime stability through
these multiple channels, the Communist
Party has made the maintenance of growth
a central policy priority.
The second tool for cementing the par-
tys monopoly on power has been ideologi-
cal exibility. In the economic realm, the
regime gradually abandoned the Marxist-
Leninist orthodoxy and adopted a more
exible approach to development that could
reconcile the dominance of the Communist
Party with the market economy. A term like
socialist market economy, which was in
vogue in the 1990s, suggests the ideologi-
cal contortions necessary to justify Chinas
embrace of the market. At the same time,
some socialist tenets were preserved, albeit
in an updated form. Although socialist-
style cradle-to-grave social service provision
is no longer available, even to privileged
urbanites, both rhetorical commitments to
building a well-off society (xiaokang she-
hui) and the enactment of policies aimed at
providing rudimentary health insurance,
pensions, unemployment benets, and low-
income housing reveal the importance the
regime attaches to maintaining social poli-
cies with broad popular appeal.
Beyond economics, ideological changes
have involved the promotion of national-
ism and populism. One example is the
patriotic education campaign that started
in the 1990s and has involved infusing
patriotic content in the school curriculum
from kindergarten through university, pro-
ducing hundreds of nationalistic movies,
publishing thousands of books, and pro-
moting mass tourism to revolutionary sites.
Another is the increasingly belligerent
rhetoric the party adopts regarding territo-
rial disputes in the South China Sea and
the complicated relationship with Japan.
A third is the harsh repression of ethnic
unrest in borderland provinces like Tibet
and Xinjiang. These nationalist activities
meet with wide approval, at least among the
Han, Chinas dominant ethnic group, who
constitute 92 percent of the population.
The cumulative effect of these ideological
changes has been to increase the levels of
tacit acceptance if not outright support
for the regime.
Another important pillar of regime
resilience in China has been the inclu-
sion of potential rivals into institutions
of power. In Poland, the inability of the
Communist Party to incorporate religious
groups and labor advocates led to the emer-
gence of Solidarity. In the 1970s, when the
kmt (then a Leninist party) ruled Taiwan,
it allowed various organized groups to
emerge outside the party. This created the
dangwai opposition movement, which
eventually played a decisive role in subvert-
ing the military dictatorship. The Chinese
Communist Party is determined to prevent
a similar emergence of organized opposi-
tion. For this reason, it uses repression
against opponents that take strong anti-
regime positions, like democracy activist
Wei Jingsheng, Uyghur entrepreneur
Rebiya Kadeer, Charter 08 leader Liu
Xiaobo, and artist Ai Weiwei. But co-option
through access to positions of privilege,
such as seats in the legislature, is far more
common and has been used both for promi-
nent but cooperative capitalists as well as
for ngo leaders. Capitalists have also been
granted seats on the Central Committee of
the Chinese Communist Party, a move that
goes against both Marxist and Maoist doc-
trine, but is an eminently sensible strategy
for incorporating powerful potential rivals
and preventing them from forming organi-
zations that might challenge the dominant
position of the Communist Party.
Finally, the Chinese regime has estab-
lished certain institutions of accountability
that, though operating in a non-democratic
context, nevertheless provide citizens with
an opportunity to demand responsiveness
from ofcials for their action or inaction.
One such institution is grassroots elections,
which enable citizens to vote unresponsive
leaders out of ofce. Another is the letters
and visits system, which allows citizens
to demand responsiveness from ofcials
by either writing a letter (or an email) or
making an in-person visit to a government
ofce. A third is microblogging (weibo).
Twitter remains banned in China, but hun-
dreds of Chinese sites offer microblogging
services and currently more than three
hundred million Chinese citizens have
weibo accounts. The censors delete some
content, of course. However, what is sur-
prising is the breadth of content that is not
deleted and that can be used to bring about
more accountable governance. A recent
high-prole example of weibo activism
is when citizens used microblogging to
demand responsiveness from the govern-
ment following a series of tragic crashes
of high-speed trains in 2011. The response
was to sack a number of high-level ofcials
within the Ministry of Railways. To the
extent that elections, letters and visits, and
microblogging are not mere window dress-
ing but serve as meaningful avenues of
accountability, they maintain resilience by
channeling and neutralizing discontent
before it assumes a form that might under-
mine regime stability.
Authoritarian Resilience
Beyond China
I
s the Chinese model of authoritar-
ian resilience applicable to other coun-
tries? Until recently, Vietnam and Laos
seemed to be the two countries most closely
following the Chinese path. In both cases,
the Communist parties maintained their
monopoly on power through a combination
of market reforms, ideological reorienta-
tion, the inclusion of rivals in the party
and the legislature, and the introduction
of some limited accountability. Cuba has
historically been resistant to emulating the
Chinese model, but since 2011, it has also
begun introducing bold market reforms
that closely resemble those implemented in
China a few decades earlier.
Until recently, North Korea alone
seemed to be pursuing a unique path of
maintaining authoritarian rule through
brutal repression and militant xenophobic
nationalism. But with Kim Jong Un in con-
trol, a new leadership style is emerging. By
North Korean standards, the young Kim is
much more liberal on social matters than
his father, having allowed women to wear
pants at public events and ride bicycles on
the streets of Pyongyang, not to mention
his endorsement of the Moranbong girl
band concerts and of Mickey Mouse dance
performances. He is also less supportive
of the military-rst policy than his father,
as revealed by the recent ring of Vice
Marshal Ri Yong Ho. Whether Kim Jong
Un is also more liberal in the economic
sphere remains to be seen, but he must be
aware that the North Korean regime

ANOTHER IMPORTANT PILLAR
OF REGIME RESILIENCE IN CHINA
HAS BEEN THE INCLUSION OF
POTENTIAL RIVALS INTO THE
INSTITUTIONS OF POWER.
gdr and Bulgaria in the fall of 1989 and
underscores the general importance for
autocratic resilience of popular support
generated through adaptive change.
Yet some autocracies in the Middle East
either completely avoided turmoil (Iran) or
were able to use a combination of economic
and political concessions (Kuwait, Jordan,
Morocco) or concessions and repression
(Bahrain, Oman) to quell popular unrest.
The failure of ossied single-party regimes
and the success of the Arab monarchies
and of nationalistic Iran suggest that the
ability to institute adaptive change may
allow autocrats to avoid the effects of revo-
lutionary contagion even in a tightly inte-
grated region like the Middle East.
In closing, we can turn to the two over-
arching lessons from 1989 and 2011. In
the 1980s, there was widespread optimism
about the end of history and the global
triumph of capitalism and democracy. Over
the two decades that followed the fall of
the Berlin Wall, it became increasingly
apparent that market transition could
occur without a transition to democracy, as
illustrated most powerfully by China. But
2011 reinforced a second lesson: unpopu-
lar, ossied authoritarian regimes cannot
ensure their survival through repression
alone. The implications of the Arab Spring
for China are clear. If the party wants to
maintain its monopoly on power, it must
continue to deliver growth, to promote an
ideology with broad popular appeal, and to
support and expand the mechanisms for
inclusion of potential rivals and the exist-
ing institutions of accountability. If it fails
to foster these pillars of resilience, the party
will have repression as its only remaining
governance tool. We need not look farther
than Tunisia and Egypt to know what
comes next.
Martin K. Dimitrov is an assistant
professor of political science at Tulane
University and was the spring 2012
Axel Springer Fellow at the American
Academy.
cannot survive much longer through
repression and nationalism alone.
Familiarity with the sources of regime
resilience in China can help us understand
why some Middle Eastern regimes col-
lapsed in 2011 and why others survived. Let
us start with regime collapse in Tunisia
and Egypt. The available evidence indicates
that, in sharp contrast to China, these
two ossied regimes had very modest
economic growth; had lost all ideological
appeal; failed to include youth, women, and
Islamists; and were seen as unaccountable
and corrupt by the population. Scholars
had long emphasized that the strength of
the security apparatus in the Middle East
would prevent regime collapse. Yet the
events of 2011 demonstrated that the mili-
taries in Tunisia and Egypt were eventually
unwilling to back autocrats who had no
popular support. This presents a parallel
to military defections in countries like the
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2011 REINFORCED A SECOND LESSON: UNPOPULAR, OSSIFIED
AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES CANNOT ENSURE THEIR SURVIVAL THROUGH
REPRESSION ALONE.
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COLLATERAL DAMAGE
The legacy of 9/11 in international law
By Kim Lane Scheppele
A
fter 9/11, pundits pronounced
that everything had changed and
the Bush Administration declared
a global war on terror. The new war impli-
cated not only the US, but also a growing
archipelago of places, as country after coun-
try found itself either a target of terrorists,
or a producer of them, or both.
Following the attacks, the US aggres-
sively challenged international law, and
many of its actions particularly with
regard to rendition, detention, and inter-
rogation, to say nothing of the war in
Iraq were committed with reckless dis-
regard for legality. But perhaps even more
importantly, though much less recognized,
the US began devoting itself to aggressively
constructing international law.
The idea that the US was promoting
international law and not just trashing it in
the American global war on terror may
come as a surprise. After all, on December
11, 2003, when asked in a press conference
whether his Iraq policy was consistent with
international law, President George W.
Bush joked, International law? I better call
my lawyer; he didnt bring that up to me.
In fact, despite the Bush Administrations
sneering, the US government has been
busy creating a new body of international
law since the attacks: global security law. To
do this, the Bush Administration used the
worlds sympathy and its own privileged
position at the United Nations Security
Council to push through a series of resolu-
tions that have underwritten a common
international plan for ghting terrorism.
While the Bush Administration is probably
best known for its cia black sites, extraordi-
nary rendition, and defense of torture, those
policies were in fact rather short-lived, last-
ing a handful of years at most. By contrast,
global security law not only still exists but is
becoming ever more entrenched. More than
a decade after the attacks, global security law
remains one of the most persistent legacies
of 9/11.
What is global security law? Simply
put, it is a detailed body of law initiated
through UN Security Council resolutions,
picked up by regional organizations, and
then adopted by states around the world.
Creating a common global template for
ghting terrorism, global security law
mapped out a variety of actions that every
member state of the United Nations was
supposed to follow to contribute to the
effort. But this new law was not just a x for
a global problem; it undermined contrary
sources of law supporting human rights
and constitutionalism.
Ground zero for the subsequent wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan was the World
Trade Center, but ground zero for
the international legal war was located
just across town, at the United Nations
Security Council. On September 28, 2001,
as the rubble of the World Trade Center
still smoldered, the Security Council
passed Resolution 1373. Operating under
Chapter vii of the UN Charter, which
makes resolutions binding on all mem-
ber states (noncompliance is at least
theoretically subject to sanctions), the
UN Security Council required states to
change their domestic law in parallel ways
to ght terrorism. Before, the Security
Council had typically directed states
actions (e.g. dont sell arms to country X,
you must cooperate with nuclear weapon
inspectors) or urged states to sign treaties,
but it had not directed changes in coun-
tries domestic laws. But with Resolution
1373, the Security Council required states
to alter some of the most sensitive areas of
national law, like criminal law and domes-
tic intelligence law. And it made these
demands as a blanket instruction to all
192 member states of the United Nations,
even though al-Qaeda-based terrorism
only affected a subset of those countries.
What did UN member states all 192
of them have to do?
First, states were required to make
terrorism a serious crime in domestic
law, along with conspiracy to commit
terrorism, aiding and abetting terrorism,
providing material support for terrorism,
inciting terrorism, and other ancillary
offenses. Some states responded by say-
ing that they had already criminalized
everything that could count as terrorism
from garden-variety murder to hijacking
planes to poisoning water supplies. But
the Security Council insisted that all
states nonetheless had to have a crime
called terrorism. Yet the Security Council
did not provide a denition of terror-
ism that would have conned these new
crimes to either the perpetrators or the
actions implicated in the 9/11 attacks. Not
surprisingly, states proceeded to enact a
proliferation of very different terrorism
offenses, ranging from narrowly dened
crimes to political crimes so broadly
framed that they included all government
opponents in their purview.
Some states used this as an excuse to
criminalize a great many things. Without
substantial constitutional traditions,
some countries dened terrorism to be
virtually any politically motivated chal-
lenge to the state, which almost entirely
overlapped with the eld of political dis-
sent. For example, Vietnam dened a ter-
rorist as anyone who oppose(s) the peo-
ples administration and infringe(s) upon
the lives of ofcials, public employees, or
citizens. In Brunei, a terrorist is any
person who . . . by the use of any rearm,
explosive, or ammunition acts in a man-
ner prejudicial to public safety or to the
maintenance of public order or incites to
violence or counsels disobedience to

SOME COUNTRIES DEFINED
TERRORISM TO BE VIRTUALLY
ANY POLITICALLY MOTIVATED
CHALLENGE TO THE STATE.
the law or to any lawful order. Clearly,
these denitions sweep quite broadly
over activities of which the state may not
approve. Anti-terrorism campaigns have
the potential to sweep up local political
disagreement under the guise of ghting
international terrorists.
Still other states criminalized terror-
ists while exempting freedom ghters,
tying the law to the foreign policy of the
state. This was true of a number of Arab
states eager to distinguish acts designed to
resist Israeli occupation from other violent
attacks against state interests. Still other
countries dusted off old anti-subversion or
anti-communist laws, crossing out subver-
sion or communism and replacing them
with terrorism.
Even France, after 9/11, instituted a new
offense of pimping for terrorism through
an act passed in March 2003. This offense
can be charged against anyone who fails to
substantiate the source of income that sup-
ports his or her lifestyle, when that person
is closely associated with others who are
suspected of engaging in terrorist acts. The
offense does not require demonstration
that the charged person has committed or
plans to commit terrorist acts. Anyone in
the vicinity of a suspected terrorist with
suspicious amounts of money can be swept
into this net.
I could list numerous other examples,
but this small set makes the point.
Terrorism offenses multiplied after 9/11
and often in quite worrisome ways.
In addition to criminalizing terrorism,
Resolution 1373 also required states gather
information about any terrorists or ter-
rorist groups that might be operating on
their own territory and to cooperate with
the investigations of other states by shar-
ing information. Of course, states differed
widely in their administration of domestic
surveillance and investigation, and each
state determined which information to add
to the soup of global intelligence, resulting
in uneven contributions. But each state also
shared in the resulting stew.
W
ith so much inconsistent
information of inconsistent
coverage and quality circulating
through international channels, states
were constantly tempted to act on the basis
of this new data, even if the sources were
dodgy. Moreover, states that might have
had reasonable legal checks on their own
surveillance and tracking of terrorists at
home then turned their information over
to states that were not so scrupulous. For
at least ve years after Resolution 1373,
the Security Council never insisted that
countries respect human rights as they
set about nding information to share
or acting on the basis of others tips. As a
result, many states took Security Council
resolutions as legal permission (or cover)
to do many things in the name of ghting
terrorism that they might not have done on
their own.
For example, Yemen established a spe-
cial police force for the purposes of ghting
terrorism and later reported that it was
establishing a special National Security
Agency for controlling terrorism investiga-
tions as well. Spain has created a National
Counter-Terrorism Coordinating Center
for terrorism investigations, which brings
together the national police with the Civil
Guard (Spains equivalent of the National
THE SECURITY COUNCIL NEVER
INSISTED THAT COUNTRIES
RESPECT HUMAN RIGHTS AS THEY
SET ABOUT FINDING INFORMATION
TO SHARE OR ACTING ON THE
BASIS OF OTHERS TIPS.
ANTE TIMMERMANS, 10/2010 (RADAR), 2010. OIL PASTEL ON PAPER, 110 75 CM
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movements, and arresting those challeng-
ing the current government for power.
While the UN Security Council cannot
be blamed for all such abuses, the council
was surprisingly supine as these travesties
piled up. For the rst time in the history
of international law, a non-representative
body within an international organization
claimed the power to make binding law
for all member states without requiring or
even seeking the consent of the affected
states, who were not themselves doing
anything to threaten international peace
and security, as the Security Councils
remit would have it. In an unprecedented
shift, the Security Council was legislat-
ing. Only powerful countries, particularly
the P5 permanent member states of the
Security Council, had veto power over
these measures. The 15 member states
on the Security Council could require all
192 member states of the United Nations to
act within their domestic law to carry out
an international campaign.
And this was not a small campaign. The
Security Council created a new organiza-
tional structure, launching the Counter-
Terrorism Committee and later the
Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate
as subsidiary bodies within the Security
Council with the power to monitor and
insist upon enforcement. The program
created by Resolution 1373 has encouraged
the world-wide creation of new, vague, and
politically dened crimes; sanctioned
evasion of prior legal limits before state
authorities could search places and people;
launched massive new domestic surveil-
lance programs to capture electronic com-
munications; encouraged states to spy on
people within and across their borders;
moved toward preventive detention and
aggressive interrogation regimes; and
installed new barriers in international
migration. Global security law has required
fundamental changes in domestic law to
comply, and these required changes are
often deeply controversial, taking a toll on
constitutionalism, the separation of powers,
and the protection of human rights.
I have been writing as if the Security
Councils resolutions had immediate
effects. But the rst lesson of those who
want to study law empirically is this:

States were also required by Resolution
1373 to block terrorists use of their terri-
tory by suppressing recruitment of terror-
ists, eliminating their access to weapons,
and denying safe haven to any of their
members. Of course, since there was no
internationally agreed-upon denition of
terrorism, the set of groups hit by these
measures sometimes expanded to include
states general enemies lists. And because
these measures required that states ensure
that terrorists could not travel internation-
ally, states responded by stepping up border
controls, increasing the security of travel
documents, and examining claims for refu-
gee and asylum status more closely. This
meant crackdowns on those who had rights
and legitimate reasons to move.
C
ountries often insist other
states list their own domestic oppo-
sitional groups as international ter-
rorist organizations as the price for their
participation in the anti-terrorism cam-
paign. This is how the Muslim Uyghurs,
Chechen nationalists, and Palestinian
activists (among others) have come to be
added to the lists of many countries that
used to think of these groups as freedom
ghters. Sometimes a country will attempt
to list its own violent domestic opposition
as a terrorist group. Once a group is listed
as a terrorist organization, other countries
are supposed to forbid entry to members of
that group. Unfortunately, once a country
succeeds in listing its own domestic oppo-
sition as international terrorists, these ter-
rorists cannot escape the country where
they are being hunted. Applied to members
of al-Qaeda, one can see how this interdic-
tion of movement makes sense. But global
politics has meant that members of many
other groups have worked their way onto
these lists.
As if this werent enough, Resolution
1373 also added that states were to take the
necessary steps to prevent the commis-
sion of terrorist acts. This was a general
measure that permitted states to do virtu-
ally whatever they pleased in the name of
ghting terrorism. A gift to dictators every-
where, the rhetoric of ghting terrorism
surfaced worldwide to justify continuing
civil wars, repressing self-determination
Guard) and the military intelligence agency,
all with the purpose of sharing information
across their databases. New Zealand passed
the Interception Capability Act in 2004,
which requires that telecommunications
hubs for phone and internet systems main-
tain a capacity to intercept communications
and to comply with warrants for surveil-
lance. Canada passed a new anti-terrorism
bill in fall 2001, creating investigative
hearings enabling judges to collect intelli-
gence from terrorism suspects. Kyrgyzstan
assured the ctc that its general prosecu-
tor was looking into matters of religious
extremism and developing measures to
prevent the politicization of Islam in the
country and that the Kyrgyz security servic-
es had established a new database in which
to store information related to suspected
terrorists to assist in this matter. While
not all anti-terrorism units combining the
police and military automatically resulted
in abuses, they tended to remove a number
of checks that had been painstakingly put
in place.
But that wasnt all. Resolution 1373
required states to block terrorism nanc-
ing by freezing assets of individuals and
groups on Security Council watch lists,
to ensure that no funds reached terror-
ists through domestic channels (which
often meant not only using the Security
Councils watch list but also honoring other
states watch lists as well), and criminaliz-
ing any nancing of terrorist activity under
domestic law. States were pressed to initiate
automatic and comprehensive asset freez-
es against people who turned up on these
watch lists, without having the information
to check whether the listing was based
on adequate information. The Security
Council did not stipulate that any concern
for individual privacy or due process rights
to accompany these programs. Those
whose assets were frozen had no procedure,
domestically or internationally, to chal-
lenge the freezes. Individual governments
were denied access to the information used
by international bodies to list suspects, so
they could not hold reasonable hearings to
assess whether the freezes were appropri-
ately targeted. Moreover, international bod-
ies (like the Security Council itself) had no
judicial mechanisms to determine whether
individuals had been wrongly listed. The
number of suspects on these lists is quite
large. The US, for example, has frozen the
assets of more than 10,000 individuals
and groups. Few have had any sort of due
process.
WHILE THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL CANNOT BE BLAMED FOR ALL
SUCH ABUSES, THE COUNCIL WAS SURPRISINGLY SUPINE AS THESE
TRAVESTIES PILED UP.
omnibus legislation bringing their legal
system into compliance. Germany, for
example, passed two such packages that
fall and reported that it had done most of
what the Security Council had required.
Romania also enacted a major new security
regime at that time. In Romania, however,
the whole program was brought about by
executive decree, as the Romanian presi-
dent had become accustomed to proceeding
through executive ordinances without
legislative approval, a sign of the constitu-
tional weakness that has plagued the state
since independence in 1989. Vietnam,
neither a constitutional nor a democratic
state, nor one facing al-Qaeda based ter-
rorism, also hastened to comply, using the
anti-terrorism law to go after the political
opposition. In the meantime, the Hindu
nationalist government in India passed the
Prevention of Terrorism Act 2001 and set
about using it against Islamic extremism
unconnected to 9/11. Thailand passed a
series of draconian security bills and even-
tually used the new anti-terrorism laws to
arrest and jail the red shirt protestors
who campaigned for democratic reform.
Ultimately, Germany complied precisely
because Resolution 1373 was international
law, and it wanted to do the legal thing.
(Later, however, the Federal Constitutional
Court struck down many of the laws passed
in a rush right after 9/11.) Romania, howev-
er, complied because the new security pow-
ers beneted the president. Authoritarian
Vietnam complied because it got a freebie,
generating global approval even as it enact-
ed repressive legislation. India complied
because the new laws gave a domestic con-
ict between Muslims and Hindus inter-
nationally approved tools of battle. While
Thailand may have started off enacting the
new terrorism laws to ght al-Qaeda and
afliated groups that were operating on
its territory, the powers brought in by anti-
terrorism legislation proved irresistibly
tempting in the face of anti-government
protest years later.
And what was the concrete effect of
these laws? In a major study (for which I
was a consultant) to mark the tenth anni-
versary of 9/11, the Associated Press used
its worldwide network of correspondents to
nd out how many convictions for terror-
ism there had resulted from new criminal
laws. The AP found that 119,000 people
had been arrested for terrorism offenses
since 9/11 and that slightly more than
35,000 people had been convicted on ter-
rorism charges in 66 countries. But more
than half of all convictions came from just
two countries: Turkey and China. In Turkey,
the targets of terrorism investigations were
separatist Kurds. In China, the targets were
Uyghurs, a Muslim minority that has been
engaged in an uprising against the Chinese
state. Few believe that either the Kurds
or the Uyghurs are connected with global
terrorism of the sort that the Security
Councils actions were aimed at stopping.
Instead, both are groups with local griev-
ances that the anti-terrorism laws were very
helpful with capturing.
I could go on to list virtually every coun-
try in the world, but these examples show
how the one-size-ts-all mandate of the
Security Council was carried out with wild
inconsistency. In many cases, however, this
new law beneted those in power at the
time and enabled them to foil their domes-
tic political opponents in conicts that had
virtually nothing to do with 9/11. No won-
der compliance was so strong!
A
s the range of examples sug-
gests, the new landscape of inter-
national public legality now puts
extraordinary international legal pressure
on constitutionalism and on domestic
constitutional values around the world.
Of course, not all states are constitutional
democracies, and repressive states were
clearly eager to use repressive law for
repressive purposes. But this highlights
the danger of issuing a common set of com-
mands to an extremely diverse group of
states. More than a decade after 9/11, global
security law is still setting the framework
for some of the most worrisome legisla-
tion on the books of countries around the
world.
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S.

Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and
International Affairs in the Woodrow
Wilson School and the University
Center for Human Values at Princeton
University.
Never confuse a law with reality. The fact
that the Security Council passed this
resolution and set about to enforce it by
no means guaranteed compliance. Other
areas of international law from human
rights treaties to the Kyoto Protocol have
suffered from famously spotty compliance.
Yet, as it turns out, few have had the level
of compliance that global security law has
enjoyed. In reports submitted by UN mem-
ber states to the Security Council and post-
ed on the Counter-Terrorism Committees
website, virtually every country in the
world claimed it was doing something to
comply with Resolution 1373.
W
hy did compliance occur?
Obviously, the passage of resolu-
tions by the Security Council,
even under its Chapter vii powers, cannot
bring such a security regime into being
by itself. Some states will want to comply
with international law just because they are
supposed to. But other states will comply
because it is in the compliers interest to
do so.
Global security law has a specic con-
stituency; presidents and prime ministers
(sometimes with and sometimes without
legislative approval) have moved swiftly
to put the new law into practice. Moreover,
these national executives have adopted
such policies despite the effects that the
new policies might have on domestic
constitutional structures and on the
realization of rights, precisely because
these policies tend to bolster their power
relative to everyone else in their domes-
tic political sphere. In fact, in countries
where national executives were chang
at the constraints imposed on their use
of state power by human-rights-infused
constitutions, the anti-terrorism campaign
has been the device through which execu-
tives have attempted to regain the upper
hand. Transnational links among national
executives, militaries, police, and security
agencies have been strengthened with
the anti-terrorism campaign, and links
between national executives and their own
domestic parliaments and courts have been
attenuated.
States, then, had different motives to
comply, ranging from simply wanting to
follow the law to concentrating power in
the national executive of the day. This was
particularly evident in the fall of 2001,
when states were given about four months
to comply with Resolution 1373 at the start.
During that period, state after state passed
OTHER AREAS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW HAVE SUFFERED FROM
FAMOUSLY SPOTTY COMPLIANCE. YET FEW HAVE HAD THE LEVEL OF
COMPLIANCE THAT GLOBAL SECURITY LAW HAS ENJOYED.
weil wir seit ber 100 Jahren als
treibende Kraft an der Seite vieler
deutscher Unternehmen stehen.
www.ge.com/de
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THE PARADOX OF
PRINCIPLE
Religious liberty, minority rights, and geopolitics
By Saba Mahmood
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minorities of the Middle East. While the
concern for the welfare of non-Muslim
minorities is important in the face of ris-
ing sectarian strife in the region, what is
urgently needed is a critical examination
of the contested history of the right to reli-
gious liberty in the Middle East. The role
Euro-Atlantic powers and international
law have played in shaping this history is
far from benign and at times has worsened
rather than helped Muslim and non-
Muslim relations in the region.
In fact, it is impossible to track the
modern career of religious liberty in the
Middle East without accounting for the
geopolitical interests of Western power,
rst in its Christian and later in its secular
modalities. Key in this alternative geneal-
ogy of the right to religious liberty is the
gure of the minority in Middle Eastern
history that has served as a site for the
articulation and exercise of Western power.
Rather than understand this history as an
instrumentalist use of an otherwise noble
principle, in what follows I want to ask how
the very concepts of religious liberty and
minority rights their spaces of problema-
tization are indebted to this geopolitical
history. As I will show, far from being
a universally valid, stable principle, the
meaning and practice of religious liberty
have shifted historically in the Middle East,
often in response to geopolitical struggles,
the expansion of modern state power, and
local regimes of socio-religious inequality.
Rather than treat this history of the Middle
East as simply one of aberration from ideal
norms, I want to invite the reader to con-
sider how this history unsettles many of the
normative claims enfolded in the current
advocacy of the right to religious liberty
and the universal goods it is supposed to
facilitate. In offering these reections, my
intent is neither to promote nor to reject
the right to religious liberty but to force us
to think about the contradictions and para-
doxes that lie at the foundation of this much
coveted right.
Let us begin with a brief overview of
the historical trajectory of religious lib-
erty in the late Ottoman Empire, one that
contrasts with its development in Western
Europe. The modern conception of reli-
gious liberty with its attendant notion
of individual conscience and belief as the
proper locus of religion was unknown
in the Ottoman Empire until well into the
mid-eighteenth century. As is well known,
under the Ottoman millet system, people
of the book (Christians and Jews) were

T
he right to religious liberty
is widely regarded as a crowning
achievement of secular-liberal
democracies that guarantees the peaceful
coexistence of religiously diverse popula-
tions. While all members of a polity are
supposed to be protected by the right to
religious liberty, religious minorities are
understood to be its greatest beneciaries
in the protection it accords them to practice
their beliefs free of state intervention and
fear of social discrimination. Conventional
wisdom has it that religious liberty is a
universally valid principle, enshrined in
national constitutions and international
charters and treaties, whose proper imple-
mentation is stymied by such obstacles
as religious fundamentalism, cultural
norms, and authoritarian states. Insomuch
as the Middle East, and the Muslim world
in general, are supposed to be aficted
with the ills of fundamentalism and illib-
eral governments, the salvic promise of
religious liberty looms large. In the wake
of the Arab Spring and the formation
of new regimes in a number of Middle
Eastern countries, concern for the status of
religious minorities is now accompanied
by calls for the judicious application of the
right to religious liberty modeled on best
practices of Euro-Atlantic states. European
and American diplomatic pressure, along
with the human rights charter and the
US International Religious Freedom Act,
are being brought to bear upon these new
regimes as a means of protecting religious
SHIVA AHMADI, SAFE HEAVEN, 2012
granted limited collective autonomy over
certain juridical affairs (including issues
of marriage, family, and worship) but
were otherwise treated as social and politi-
cal unequals of Muslims. This juridical
autonomy was one of the primary ways
in which the Ottomans managed to rule
over an immense diversity of religious
faiths for over six centuries. Importantly,
this nonliberal model of pluralism (Will
Kymlickas term) was different from the lib-
eral model in that each religious commu-
nitys autonomy was justied not in terms
of groups versus individual rights, but in
terms of a political order in which differ-
ence was paramount. The Ottomans did
not aim to politically transform difference
into sameness as does the modern nation-
state; instead, various religious groups
were integrated through a vertical system
of hierarchy in which Muslims occupied
the highest position. Importantly, the liber-
al individualist notion of civil and political
equality that makes the modern conception
of freedom of belief possible was not the
paradigm in this pre-modern period.
With the birth of the modern state, the
terms majority and minority came to
serve as constitutional devices for resolving
differences that the ideology of nationalism
sought to eradicate, eliminate, or assimi-
late. The Ottoman Empire formally adopted
the right to religious liberty in 1856 (under
the famous Hatt-i Hmayun decree),
largely under European pressure. This
pressure was far from a benign attempt on
the part of Europeans to promote religious
tolerance in Ottoman lands: their own
record toward Christian dissidents, much
less non-Christian minorities, was hardly
tolerant at the time. Instead, the European
pressure was a product of long-standing
geopolitical struggles between Christian
European states and the Ottomans.
Christian European rulers had made
repeated attempts throughout the sixteenth
century to assert their right to protect
Christian minorities within Ottoman terri-
tories. As long as the Ottoman Empire was
strong, it was able to accommodate these
pressures without compromising its sov-
ereignty, but once Ottoman power started
to decline, it was unable to resist Western
European incursions on behalf of Ottoman
Christian groups. As early as the sixteenth
century, Ottoman rulers had granted spe-
cial privileges known as capitulations
to Western European traders that ensured
a considerable degree of self-government
in matters of criminal and civil jurisdiction
as well as freedom of religion and worship.
Eventually, as Ottoman power declined,
these privileges came to apply not only
to Western traders but also to European
missionaries and eventually indigenous
Ottoman Christian communities (what
were then called Eastern Christians). For
example, the capitulations granted to the
French in 1604 (initially meant to apply to
Western traders and missionaries) eventu-
ally brought the Christians of the Ottoman
Empire under the protection of French
kings. Notably, no parallel privileges
existed for non-Christians residing in ter-
ritories ruled by Christian empires at this
time. Later, by the mid-eighteenth century,
as colonial control of various parts of the
Middle East expanded, these capitulations
provided an important cover for European
and American missionary activity.
W
hen Ot toman rulers
adopted the modern conception
of the right to religious liberty
in 1856, the fate of non-Muslim communi-
ties in the empire was only formally but
not substantively transformed. As histo-
rians of the late Ottoman Empire point
out, for the Ottoman rulers, the right to
religious liberty served as a dual means: to
fend off increasingly powerful Christian
missionary movements, on the one hand;
and to shore up the Islamic character of
the empire on the other. The empire had
already lost large parts of its territory (one-
third by 1878), and the Ottoman reformers
were eager to bring Christians who had
become protgs of foreign states (under
the system of capitulations) back under the
jurisdiction of the Ottoman state. For many
Ottoman Christians, however, the right to
religious liberty served as a means of claim-
ing Western protection against systemic
discrimination, in the process transform-
ing their identity and self-understanding.
In contrast to the Ottoman rulers and
indigenous Christians, religious liberty
meant something quite different to the
European missionaries who had consider-
ably expanded their activities in the Muslim
world by the nineteenth century. For these
missionaries, religious liberty was a crucial
means for securing the right to proselytize
freely among Muslims and what were by
then called Oriental Orthodox Christian
without constraint from existing laws and
prohibitions against religious conversion.
In Egypt, for example, Euro-American
missionaries, who had failed to win con-
verts among Muslims, concentrated their
energies on Coptic Orthodox Christians,
whom they had long regarded with disdain
and outright contempt as practitioners of a
depraved form of Christianity. Importantly,
as the historian Heather Sharkey shows
in her work on American evangelicals,
American and European missionaries oper-
ated under the full protection of British
colonial authorities in Egypt, and the
colonial period (18821918) was the apex
of missionary activities in the region. The
advantages accorded to Westerners under
the Ottoman capitulations proved to be cru-
cial for the missionaries in gaining access
to Egyptian rural and urban populations.
These missionaries made ubiquitous use
of international diplomacy and colonial
and foreign ofces of Anglo-American
governments in their cause, internation-
ally advocating for the adoption of religious
liberty in forums as diverse as the League
of Nations, the Paris Peace Conference,
the US State Department, and the British
Foreign Ofce. The recent passage of the
International Religious Freedom Act by the
US Congress (1998) to promote the right of
religious liberty (particularly Christians) in
the Middle East must be placed within this
geopolitical history in which Western pow-
ers have often violated the principle of state
sovereignty under the guise of promot-
ing religious tolerance. No non-Western
nation-state in modern history has been
able to exert the same pressure to advocate
the rights of religious, racial, or ethnic
minorities living in the Western world.
Given the history I have tracked here,
it is important to realize that the mean-
ing of religious freedom has varied his-
torically depending on the geopolitical
position of the players in the Middle East.
Furthermore, the career of the right of reli-
gious liberty has hardly been one of secular
neutrality in the Middle East. Through
much of its modern history, the right to
religious liberty has served as a means
to either promote campaigns of religious
proselytization to win Christian converts,
or to consolidate the majoritarian ethos of
the emergent modern state. This history
forces us to consider how religious liberty
is not simply a juridical means of protect-
ing the individual believer from state
coercion. Rather, crucially, it is a technique
of national and international governance
whose proper exercise has always entailed
realpolitik and inter-state rivalries and
concerns.
At this point, one may ask: How have
the religious minorities of the Middle East
been affected by these geopolitical strug-
gles over religious liberty? The answer to
this question of course varies, depending
on the history of each nation-state in the
region. If we take the example of Coptic
Orthodox Christians in Egypt, the largest
Christian population in the Middle East,
one would need to start with the history
of the long-standing rivalry and struggle
between Western and Oriental Orthodox
Christianity (of which Coptic Christianity
is a part). Throughout much of modern
history, starting with the Roman Catholic
Church, Western Christendom has con-
tinued to view Coptic Christianity as a
primitive form of Christianity whose salva-
tion could only come from the West. This
view was further entrenched by the wave
of Protestant missionaries, initially sent
from Europe (Anglicans, Episcopalians,
and Lutherans) and later the United States
(Presbyterian Evangelicals), none of whom
had success with Muslim converts and
concentrated their energies on the Copts.
In light of this rivalry, it is not surprising
that Coptic Christians historically resisted
European offers of patronage to protect
and represent the Copts against Muslim
rule. Unlike the Maronite Christians of
Lebanon who made strong alliances with
French colonial powers, the Copts were at
the forefront of the anti-colonial struggle
against the British and were equal players
in the shaping of the nationalist project in
the 1940s and 1950s.
D
espite this distinguished
history of Coptic resistance and the
enshrinement of the right to reli-
gious liberty in the Egyptian constitution,
Coptic Christians have continued to suffer
from various forms of formal and informal
discrimination in postcolonial Egypt. In
recent years, the discourse of religious
liberty has become a dominant idiom in
the Coptic struggle against social and state
policies that marginalize Copts on the basis
of their religious identity. In this struggle,
however, religious liberty once again is not
a stable signier but means very different
things to different groups.
At the heart of the contested meaning
of religious liberty in Egypt is a political
system that has established the Coptic
Orthodox Church as the sole representa-
tive of the Coptic community and created a
church-state entente that makes it difcult
for secular-lay Copts to change the terms
of debate. As a result, the Coptic Church
tends to deploy a communitarian under-
standing of religious liberty that serves to
consolidate its authority over the religious
and social life of its followers. This concep-
tion sits in tension with an individualist
notion advocated by secular human rights
activists grounded in Article 18 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
and the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights (iccpr), both of which
privilege notions of personal conscience,
belief, and choice. The Euro-American
Coptic diaspora, in alliance with an increas-
ingly powerful Christian evangelical
global network, champions a third concept
grounded in Article 27 of the iccpr that
foregrounds a collective conception of reli-
gious freedom as a right of minority groups.
Finally, the Egyptian government promotes
its own narrow conception of religious
liberty aimed at securing the Islamic char-
acter of the Egyptian nation and national-
security interests.
It would be wrong to assume that reli-
gious liberty consists of simply protecting
certain groups or individuals from the
exercise of state power (that is, drawing
the separation between church and state
rmly and resolutely). The people who are
supposed to benet most from the modern
principle of religious liberty namely, reli-
gious minorities are not merely protected
from abuses of state power but are also
transformed by virtue of their subjection
to the calculus of state and geopolitical
power in unique and unpredictable ways.
The shift, for example, from a group-based
understanding of religious liberty to an
individualist one in international legal
discourse is more than a conceptual shift;
it also affects the substantive meaning
and practice of religious liberty as well as
the kinds of subjects who can speak in its
name.
In conclusion, let me point out that these
deployments of religious liberty are often
read as the cynical instrumentalization of
an otherwise noble principle in the service
of realpolitik or corrupt ends. Seen in this
way, the principle itself its logic, aim, and
substantive meaning remains unsullied
by the impious intentions of the empires,
states, and interest groups who promote
or subvert it. Such an argument needs to
be complicated for several reasons. As I
have shown, far from being a measure of
a cultures intolerance, religious freedom
has been tied from its very inception to the
exercise of sovereign power, regional and
national security, and the inequality of
geopolitical power relations in the Middle
East. These differential meanings must be
understood, I want to suggest, not simply
as opportunistic deployments of a single
noble principle, but as reective of the
contradictions and paradoxes internal to
the conceptual architecture of the right to
religious liberty itself and its global history.
Insomuch as the right to religious liberty
is enabled by conditions of geopolitical
inequality and differential sovereignty
between the First and Third Worlds, it
behooves us to rethink the global good its
advocates often promise to all peoples of
the world. Indeed, if the universal promo-
tion of religious liberty has been ridden
with colonial and neocolonial agendas,
then how does one grapple with the legiti-
mate and important question of providing
protections to religious minorities across
the Western and non-Western divide?
What other procedural, legal, and political
mechanisms are available in modern poli-
ties that are separable from the exercise
of geopolitical domination, interests, and
power? Is such a separation possible, given
the intractability of politics from all human
rights struggles of our times? How does
one ethically and socially create the condi-
tions for religious minorities to practice
their faith free from state regulations
that are often informed by majoritarian
religious-cultural norms? In a world where
religious freedom has become part of the
problem rather than the solution, how does
one think about these dilemmas outside of
the box?
Saba Mahmood is an associate profes-
sor of anthropology at the University
of California Berkeley and will be the
spring 2013 Axel Springer Fellow at
the American Academy. This article is
an edited version of the one published
by Mahmood in Comparative Studies in
Society and History.
HOW DOES ONE ETHICALLY AND SOCIALLY CREATE THE CONDITIONS
FOR RELIGIOUS MINORITIES TO PRACTICE THEIR FAITH FREE FROM
STATE REGULATIONS THAT ARE OFTEN INFORMED BY MAJORITARIAN
RELIGIOUS-CULTURAL NORMS?
A JARFUL OF STARS
Reections on a decade of the Burmese Refugee Project
By Celina Su
EMILY HASS, WILHELMSAUE STRASSE, 3 STAIRS 3. GOUACHE ON PAPER, 19 23 INCHES, 2011
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W
hen I met Nuan, in 2001,
she was I think seven years
old. Like others in this small
Burmese refugee community in rural
northwest Thailand, Nuan did not know
her birthday or her age. She did know,
however, the day of the week on which
shed been born. At local Buddhist temples,
there are often stupas lined with a separate
shrine for each day of the week, and I am
often the only one who doesnt know which
shrine to pray to, the one who wanders
around in circles, again and again. I am
awkward there; I sometimes feel like a
graceless American unable to read social
cues, to understand subtle body language
in a culture that discourages overt expres-
sions of disapproval, or to follow rituals that
are second nature to others.
At that time, Nuan was attending an
informal school for Shan Burmese refu-
gees, run by two local volunteers. These
Thai volunteers were barely surviving
themselves and mostly living off kale they
grew in their backyard. The school was
just a thatch roof on four poles, a chalk-
board, and some benches, situated on the
edge of a large eld with uneven grass. Yet
the volunteers had built such rapport with
the community that they achieved 100 per-
cent attendance every day for two years.
They taught all the children in the area
thirty or so, ages ve to thirteen at the
same time, relaying the fundamentals of
basic math and Thai reading and writing.
A few months before, Id received a
$1,200 personal check from Dorothy
Goodman, the mother of the slain civil
rights activist Andrew Goodman, to work
on youth empowerment. I felt honored
but did not quite know what to do with the
money. Perhaps the social workers could
use it to pay themselves and hire assistants,
so that they did not have to teach all the
students at the same time? With this seed
money, then, I cofounded the Burmese
Refugee Project (brp) with Peter Muennig,
now a professor at Columbia University
who focuses on public health issues, and
the one who had rst stumbled upon this
community in his travels.
During my rst visit, I simply tried to
give the Thai volunteer teachers a break
by teaching very basic English telling
the time, the names of animals. When I
pointed at a picture and said, Tiger, a
large group of squirming children repeated,
in unison, Tiger! When I said, Elephant,
they chimed, Eeee-la-phant! When I
said, Oooooooh, rhinoceros, they echoed,
Ooooooooorhinoceros! When I passed
out worksheets at the end of the day, they
immediately tackled the assignments with
relish, shouting, More homework! More
homework!
I was supposed to know what I was
doing as an academic, I research com-
munity organizations and attempts by
everyday citizens, especially youth from
marginalized communities, to substan-
tively participate in community develop-
ment and policy-making. Yet, as a practi-
tioner working with the brp, I had no idea
whether Nuan and her friends would be
able to further their schooling, or how they
might go about growing up, articulating
and working towards their aspirations. My
mind simmered with questions like, But
how does one operationalize dignity? What
does meaningful participation look like in
such restricted contexts?
N
uan is ethnically Shan, a
member of one of the ethnic minori-
ties in Burma/Myanmar. (The
military junta changed the countrys
long-standing English name, Burma, to
Myanmar in 1989. Nevertheless, many
political parties, organizations associated
with the ethnic minorities, and some coun-
tries continue to call the country Burma to
protest the legitimacy of the junta.) There
are now more than half a million of them
in Thailand. For the past few decades, the
military dictatorship in Burma has had a
policy of Burmanization, which bans the
Shan language from public institutions.
The military junta has also sometimes pit-
ted ethnic minorities against one another
to prevent the emergence of organized dis-
sent, conducted mass rapes along border
villages, and captured many Shan as forced
labor for the national army. The Saffron
Revolution in 2007 and news of the Nobel
Peace Prize winner Daw Aung Saan Suu
Kyis house arrests and recent triumphant
release gained worldwide attention, but
overall, relatively little on the plight of
Burmese minorities and refugees appears
in the global mainstream media and pop
culture. When Burmas ethnic minorities
are mentioned, some draw more atten-
tion than others. In Rambo 4, for instance,
Sylvester Stallone specically helps Karen
rebels, who are traditionally Christian,
ght the Burmese military junta.
Partly because they tend to be Buddhist,
like the military junta, most Shan do not
receive ofcial refugee status from the Thai
government. Instead, they are often seen as
voluntary economic migrants who choose
their marginalized status in Thailand, even
as push and pull factors blur together
for so many of them. (Push factors are typi-
cally dened as the unfavorable conditions
in home countries severe environmental
damage, violent conict, abject poverty
from which migrants ee, and pull factors
are the attractive conditions a more hos-
pitable economic climate, political and reli-
gious freedom, peace and security that
migrants seek in moving.)
Nuan, for example, is originally from
a town outside of Roi Rem, a city in Shan
State in Burma. Most of her neighbors were
Shan as well, but some hailed from Burmas
Arakan State. Her neighborhood had
around one hundred households, almost all
of which she considered middle-class. They
worked as rice and garlic farmers.
Although there were rarely Burmese sol-
diers in her neighborhood, they frequented
surrounding areas. Many military junta
training camps were stationed nearby, and
they often took villagers as forced labor-
ers in the camp. Furthermore, soldiers in
the city center demanded 30 percent of all
prots from crops sold in the market there.
Although these were called taxes, they
were known to line the pockets of the local
soldiers. Nuans family had also heard that
soldiers routinely raped women in villages
closer to the border, such as those sur-
rounding a town called Hua Muang.
When she was around four years old,
Nuans mother passed away, and her father
left the family and moved to another prov-
ince. Nuans older sister, Ying, became
Nuans guardian. At ve, Nuan was burn-
ing small bits of wood into charcoal to sell
at the market. Ying says she had heard that
Thailand had a benevolent king, that people
lived in peace and did not fear the ravages of
civil war. (When Ying told me this, I could
not tell whether she truly believed it or knew
that this was what Thais wanted to hear.)
HOW DOES ONE OPERATIONALIZE DIGNITY? WHAT DOES
MEANINGFUL PARTICIPATION LOOK LIKE IN SUCH RESTRICTED
CONTEXTS?
So at fteen, Ying decided to give
Thailand a try. She packed three outts,
dry food, and rice, and joined nine others
from her village, including Nuan, on a trek
to Thailand. They rst walked to Lankur,
a border city on the Burmese side. This
took one day. Then they walked for six days
through the jungle. At some point during
their journey, they ran into Thai soldiers,
who did not ask them for IDs. According to
Ying, back then Thai soldiers were a lot less
strict about Burmese refugees coming into
the country. In fact, they even gave the girls
rice to help them along the way.
Eventually, their group stumbled upon
a village of Lisu people, an indigenous
hill tribe in Thailand. They were not sure
whether they were really in Thailand,
however, because the Lisu people did not
look Thai to them and because they spoke
Shan. There, Ying, Nuan, and their fellow
migrants worked for ve to six days for
money. Each earned around ve hundred
baht (approximately twelve US dollars).
Before working for the Lisu, who are them-
selves considered a poor ethnic group with-
in Thailand, Nuan and Ying had only ve
hundred Burmese jaht, or approximately
seventy cents, with them.
Eventually, Ying found work at a res-
taurant in Maehongson Province and
worked there long enough to garner an
annual, renewable working permit. Less
than a year later, she met another Shan
migrant who had been living in Thailand
for quite a while. They married and moved
to his bosss garden. Nuan stayed with her
sister the whole time, living in a one-room
bungalow on stilts, with thatch walls and
roof. Soon after moving to Thailand, she
began to attend the informal school where
I met her.
M
igrants like Nuan and Ying
are at the margins of refugeehood
in several ways. First, within
Burma, they are caught in the crossre of
many political and economic groups and
interests. Some of the refugees I met also
spoke about how, back in Burma, they
were pressured to hand over earnings or
be conscripted by Shan rebels who emerge
from the jungle at night, as well as carrying
weapons over long distances for Burmese
soldiers. Even before they left Shan State,
these families did not know to whom they
should or could safely pay allegiance.
Many of the local Burmese road
signs are now in Chinese script, and the
migrants families have been displaced to
the outskirts of town. Chinese investors
funding the junta have razed villages built
in the Shan architectural style and replaced
them with newer, bigger, Chinese-style
houses. The junta also tends to give more
cooperative ethnic minorities, such as the
Wa, administrative control over resources
in Shan State. When migrants living in
Thailand manage to receive permission
from their employers to visit their families
in Burma, perhaps once every few years,
they often feel lost at home.
In some contexts, the migrants transna-
tional, uid identities could be interpreted
as a sort of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, in
popular discourse, the phrase without
borders is often construed as a good thing,
a phrase that symbolizes our interdepen-
dent and interwoven, globalized, social
fabric. There are doctors without borders,
journalists without borders, clowns without
borders. Yet many Shan are effectively state-
less refugees, yearning for the rights and
responsibilities that come with a national-
ity. To them, a secure identity and implicit
social contract with an imperfect state
whether in Thailand or Burma remains
more palatable than not being recognized
WHEN MIGRANTS LIVING IN THAILAND MANAGE TO RECEIVE
PERMISSION FROM THEIR EMPLOYERS TO VISIT THEIR FAMILIES IN
BURMA, PERHAPS ONCE EVERY FEW YEARS, THEY OFTEN FEEL
LOST AT HOME.
EMILY HASS, MAHLERSTRASSE, 8B EXTERIOR 1. GOUACHE ON PAPER, 19 23 INCHES, 2011
at all. They fear that without borders, they
belong nowhere. They keep documents
like birth certicates, which few of them
own, in ziplock bags on the body. In the rare
instances when these papers are taken out
of their bags, they are unfolded and then
refolded like exquisite, fragile onion skin.
These papers are often the most precious
objects they have, more precious than even
the gold jewelry they might possess in lieu
of cash or bank accounts.
Because Thailand signed a 2002 repa-
triation act with Burma and never signed
with the 1951 United Nations Convention
Relating to the Status of Refugees,
migrants with an indeterminate status
such as the Shan Burmese children who
were born in Thailand but have no docu-
mentation lack almost all typical means
to relay concerns, hopes, or grievances via
institutionalized channels. In practical
terms, rocking the boat as non-citizens
also renders them hypervisible and subject
to harassment and deportation. Unless
they receive exceptional permits from the
district or provincial ofces, Nuan and her
relatives are not allowed to travel or work
in another district, or in any occupation
than the one listed on their permits: rock
hauler, construction worker, share-
cropper. The migrants, attached to the
employers who sponsor the permits, some-
times become vulnerable to abuse by these
employers. When bosses refuse to pay
them for their work, for instance, the work-
ers have little recourse in recovering back
wages.
O
ne year after I met Nuan, the
informal school closed, and the
children enrolled in local public
schools. The local Thais who had taught
the students became de facto social work-
ers, cleaning blood off benches, distribut-
ing maxi pads, collecting rst bras in the
Wednesday market, distributing shoes and
uniforms, procuring birth certicates from
the District Ofce. At rst, some ofcials
disdained these efforts. One ofcer scoffed,
Did you know it is illegal to help someone
who is not in your family? There were no
lawyers around, much less ones special-
izing in human rights or immigration law.
We were far from a big city, and just far
enough from ofcial border refugee camps.
The social workers said that as an
academic and as a fund-raiser, I helped
to make the brp a real ngo, or nongov-
ernmental organization; they claimed
that, meanwhile, they were merely the
normal workers helping the children. I felt
that this was the wrong conclusion They
were doing the difcult groundwork, day to
day. I only gave the project a legitimizing
face in the larger ngo world because I had
a title and institutional afliation. I hoped
that I also made some substantive contribu-
tions beyond writing grants helping the
social workers to re-evaluate their efforts
during my month-long visits each year,
trying to help them strategically plan for
upcoming challenges and seeing beyond
that weeks emergency, and researching the
models tried elsewhere.
Besides, I wondered, what did it mean
to be a real ngo? We didnt have an ofce
or a truck with a logo emblazoned on the
doors. What we did have was a shoestring
budget of a few thousand dollars a year.
This eventually paid for school uniforms
and books for more than sixty children who
would not be in school otherwise, emergen-
cy health-care grants, and on-the-ground
workers.
The brp children thrived in school,
often placing rst, second, and third in
their respective classes. Sometimes teach-
ers lectured the Shan migrant students
that even if they were born in Thailand,
ate Thai food (a bit spicier than what their
parents typically cooked), and spoke Thai
uently, they would never be Thai. No mat-
ter that Shan folks are also predominantly
Theravada Buddhist, and that they are

THEORY CAN PROVIDE
GUIDELINES AS TO
POSSIBLE STRENGTHS AND
WEAKNESSES OF DIFFERENT
APPROACHES, BUT IT GIVES
NO ANSWERS.
EMILY HASS, MAHLERSTRASSE, 8B EXTERIOR 2. GOUACHE ON PAPER, 19 23 INCHES, 2011
EMILY HASS, WILHELMSAUE STRASSE, 3 STAIRS 5. GOUACHE ON PAPER, 19 23 INCHES, 2011
even often called Tai Yai, translated to
big Thai, in both Burma and Thailand.
Other teachers called the excelling brp stu-
dents to the front of the room, admonishing
the rest of the class by stating, Look at her!
Shes just Shan, and shes doing better than
all of you! This did not help the students
socially. Some local Tai Yai teachers, whose
families had lived in Thailand for genera-
tions, were much more sympathetic.
Nuan was solidly average in her aca-
demic performance, but she demonstrated
exceptional emotional resilience. Most of
the other Shan children in the community
had parents, so Nuan felt acutely alone.
Her older sister, Ying, now in her twenties,
begrudged Nuan her educational oppor-
tunities, which Ying had never received.
Sometimes Ying vocalized her envy. Why
did Nuan not have to work so many hours
hand-making hammocks, as she did? Why
was she not nancially contributing more
to the household? Like almost all the brp
communitys adults, Ying had little idea
of what school was like. At rst, Ying and
other guardians in the community did
not understand why it would be difcult
for the children to just work during the
garlic harvesting season, and then go
back to school and join in at the end of the
school year.
Ying also lamented her lack of privacy,
so Yings husband, Yo, built Nuan a cub-
byhole room, with enough space for a bed,
on the side of their bungalow. This helped,
but Nuan increasingly spent more time
with the social workers and their families.
To Nuan, a cubbyhole that was barely one-
meter tall helped tremendously, but it was
not quite truly a room of her own. There
was nowhere to do homework, to listen
to music or daydream with abandon, to
unwind, to be herself.
Life in Thailand was harder than the sis-
ters had anticipated. Ying noted that back
in their Burmese village, she had heard of
people moving to Thailand, where work
was plentiful, and when they returned to
visit, they looked like rich people, and
could buy bicycles or materials for a new
house. These people never told the villag-
ers what kinds of jobs they held in Thailand,
nor that so many worked as indentured
servants there.
I
n the larger policy eld of interna-
tional development, I listened to pleas
for community-led initiatives, and for
meaningful participation by the stakehold-
ers themselves, rather than by outsider con-
sultants and technocrats. With each round
of anti-imf and anti-wto protests, more
prominent policy experts wrote about the
futility of drive-by trips and one-size-ts-
all prescriptions for countries as varied as
Malawi, Ecuador, and Bangladesh.
The literature suggested that in prac-
tice, this increased awareness led to some
cases of substantive participation, whereby
locals explained to foreign technical
experts why some plans were better than
others that is, how and why the new
dam would displace more people than
developers claimed, that children would
not use co-ed bathrooms but would indeed
use single-gender ones, or that the new,
sophisticated water ltration system would
not survive without maintenance training
for the locals. In many cases, however, aid
ofcers implemented the participation
doctrine by hosting a single English-
language hearing on upcoming changes
and potential plans, without translations
into local languages or substantive input
from local leaders, let alone local margin-
alized groups often indigenous or ethnic
minorities, women, children, migrants,
the poorest.
A
nd what should communit y
participation look like in the brp
community? Even seemingly simple
tasks like providing potable water proved
tricky. The migrants claimed that their
water must be ne because it tasted ne,
even as our water-testing kits showed that
it was dangerous. When should the social
workers take the lead on next steps, and
when should the migrants themselves do
so? For instance, the community had no
sanitation whatsoever when the brp began
to work with them. They defecated in the
same river they bathed and worked in. We
provided money to purchase porcelain for
toilets and concrete for outhouses. We won-
dered about paying them to construct the
latrines. According to the academic litera-
ture, to not pay them could be exploitation,
but to pay them could constitute coercion.
After all, at the time they earned roughly a
dollar a day doing hard manual labor, and
werent in the position to turn down paid
work. Theory can provide guidelines as to
possible strengths and weaknesses of dif-
ferent approaches, but it gives no answers.
In this case, the migrant workers were
proud to draw upon their construction
skills, and they did not want to be paid to
improve their own homes.
Outside obvious basic infrastructural
initiatives, we soon discovered that because
most brp community members were nei-
ther ofcial refugees nor exactly voluntary
migrants, our work was affected in major
ways. For instance, the most egregious
problems and deprivations from which the
refugees suffered did not stem from overt,
state-perpetrated violent conict but from
structural violence physical and men-
tal harm that results from unjust social,
economic, and political structures. They
would complain of severe back pain, or of
blindness, or of terrible phantom pains in
their lost limbs and digits. Many of the pre-
scriptions that would treat their ailments
such as sharing a wheelbarrow so that
the refugees did not have to carry fty-kilo
bags of rice on their shoulders, or providing
sunglasses to treat pterygium (a scar on the
eyes caused by sun damage) fall outside
typical medical practice.
Beginning with a series based on her fathers (since demolished) Berlin childhood
home from which he ed in 1938, Emily Hass uses archival architectural records to
create drawings that explore the loss of three dimensional space and the passage of
time. She has expanded the work to include the former homes of other Berlin Jews
and persecuted artistic and cultural luminaries of the 1930s, including Anni Albers,
Otto Dix, Else Ury, Walter Benjamin, Johannes Itten, and Ruth Vollmer. In this series
she uses architecture as a language through which to represent identity, loss, and
place. Selections of her Berlin project were exhibited in Heimatkunde at the Jewish
Museum Berlin and are now part of the museums permanent collection. Hass is a
2012 grant recipient from the New York Foundation for the Arts and will be an artist-
in-residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts later this year, and at the Josef and Anni
Albers Foundation in early 2013. She lives and works in New York City.
WHEN SHOULD THE SOCIAL
WORKERS TAKE THE LEAD
ON NEXT STEPS, AND WHEN
SHOULD THE MIGRANTS
THEMSELVES DO SO?
WilmerHale provides legal counsel to clients in and around Germanys
key nancial, political and industrial centers. With ofces across the
globe, we are strategically positioned to provide counsel on complex
international matters affecting your business.
Locally Based.
Globally Connected.
BEIJING BERLIN BOSTON BRUSSELS FRANKFURT LONDON LOS ANGELES NEW YORK OXFORD PALO ALTO WALTHAM WASHINGTON DC
wilmerhale.com
Berlin, Friedrichstrasse 95: +49 30 20 22 64 00
Frankfurt/Main, Ulmenstrasse 37-39 : +49 69 27 10 78 000

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One recent challenge lay in tackling
mental health issues. Luckily, most of the
refugees in our community were not vic-
tims of rape or village burnings themselves,
and generally, the students were doing
well in school. We could see them holding
hands and playing together easily. Still,
when we evaluated the childrens mental
health, the results were sobering. As com-
pared to normal Thai children, while the
refugee children reported much lower rates
of attention decit disorder-related behav-
iors, they had much more difculty in peer
bonding. Interestingly, for both mental and
physical health, brp community members
have scored better than known refugee
populations, but worse than voluntary
migrant populations.
In the last six or seven years, the larger
area in which the brp community resides
has experienced a boom in tourism and
economic development. Simultaneously,
the social workers saw an increase in so-
called social pathologies, and strikingly,
they are the same sorts Ive witnessed in
other severely marginalized communi-
ties, including those in the United States:
teen pregnancy, gambling (card-playing
instead of the off-track betting commonly
seen in large American cities), and drug
abuse, especially with alcohol and yaabaa
(literally, crazy drug), a mixture of meth-
amphetamine and caffeine. One teenage
girl ran off with an older male neighbor
whod showered her with attention, and she
became pregnant while taking one birth
control pill every two days to save money,
even though a social worker had spoken to
her about family planning.
The families that remained sharecrop-
pers stayed poor, but the ones that worked
as day laborers in construction saw their
incomes rise dramatically. Few of them
have bank accounts, however, or the skills
to make long-term future plans. Instead
of saving money, they bought fancy new
motorbikes, making fun of the old ones
owned by the brp social workers.
A
fter Nuan became a teenager,
she felt less and less comfortable at
home. Eventually, because Nuans
situation rendered her one of the commu-
nitys neediest cases, the brp helped her
to enroll in a boarding school in a larger
city, where her grades improved dramati-
cally. She struggles in some subjects, such
as trigonometry, partly because the qual-
ity of her previous schooling was rather
poor. However, her conversational skills
in English and Mandarin Chinese (which
she learns alongside Thai, as is standard
in many private schools there) are quite
impressive.
After the original social workers left and
new staff came to work at the brp in 2010,
Nuan stated that I was one of the most per-
manent people in her life and began to call
me Mama. I inhaled sharply, bafed and
grateful, marveling at what, exactly, I had
done to be judged a parent. There was no
labor, there were no pains, and yet each
I INHALED SHARPLY, BAFFLED AND GRATEFUL, MARVELING AT
WHAT, EXACTLY, I HAD DONE TO BE JUDGED A PARENT.
WilmerHale provides legal counsel to clients in and around Germanys
key nancial, political and industrial centers. With ofces across the
globe, we are strategically positioned to provide counsel on complex
international matters affecting your business.
Locally Based.
Globally Connected.
BEIJING BERLIN BOSTON BRUSSELS FRANKFURT LONDON LOS ANGELES NEW YORK OXFORD PALO ALTO WALTHAM WASHINGTON DC
wilmerhale.com
Berlin, Friedrichstrasse 95: +49 30 20 22 64 00
Frankfurt/Main, Ulmenstrasse 37-39 : +49 69 27 10 78 000

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gesture I made, however small to me,
seemed to take on great emotional weight,
to signify care and possibility to her. Before
this moment, I had not fully grasped the
consequences of my trips to Thailand, the
full range of joy (and vulnerability) inher-
ent in the fact that my role there was not
dened by me alone. With each unprompt-
ed Facebook message assuring me that she
will work hard to stay in school, to deserve
my care, to be a good person, I reevaluate
what it means for me to be a good person,
a good mother however unconventionally
so to Nuan.
In some ways, because of her stunting
from early malnutrition, Nuan appears to
be much younger than she is. And when-
ever we meet and traverse city streets, even
as she adeptly protects me from careless
drivers and motorcyclists, she holds my
hand and does not let go for hours. A couple
of years ago, Nuan proudly announced
that she had a gift for me, and I feared her
splurging on something expensive. I need
not have worried. She presented me with a
glass jar lled with tiny, ornate hand-folded
origami stars, each one representing a wish
for me to make, each one to be fullled.
Usually, in research, I have a hypothesis
to test, a research question to investigate,
or a comparative analysis to conduct. At
the Burmese Refugee Project, I learned
about working with the ever-changing,
the nebulous the need for a range of out-
comes, with a variety of time ranges, and
the need for constant reection, or praxis.
I learned there was no such thing as a set
of best practices, only good ones, and that I
enjoyed conducting interviews and partici-
pant observation much more than running
statistical regressions on height and weight.
The latter is what the community needed
most sometimes, however.
I also learned that it was crucial to take
the migrants agency as seriously as their
structural constraints. The year after the
brp introduced outhouses to the com-
munity, the social workers found out that
the migrants had built additional latrines
without having asked for any money, even
for materials. At rst, the migrants had not
been sure they wanted the toilets, but their
expectations had clearly changed. Was
it because of public health reasons? For
privacy? As a status symbol? In such cases,
the process of participation diagnosing
the problem of lack of sanitation, pooling
resources, making choices on next steps,
brainstorming, and following through,
most often with nancial help and access to
experts was as important as the specic
results and content of individual endeavors.
Sometimes the community initiated plans,
such as electricity-sharing schemes with
sliding-scale payment schedules that the
staff members may not have formed on
their own.
Thus, one of the most serendipitous
surprises, and biggest challenge for us, has
been in nding and nurturing the com-
munity members sense of entitlement and
their so-called right to have rights. At
rst, abstract rights felt to them like the
intellectual playground of the privileged,
of democracy activists and dissidents liv-
ing far away in Scandinavia and North
America. Lately, however, we have been
hearing a lot more talk from the refugees
about how they want the rights afforded
to those around them. The teenagers have
asked the social workers for workshops on
drug abuse, self-esteem, and environmen-
tal issues. I have also seen the children not
only voice their dreams but make these
dreams bigger, wishing for Burma to have
a democracy, like Thailand, in explicit
ways I had not heard before.
T
he migrants repeatedly talk
about wanting to be happy, have
jobs, and get money from [their]
jobs. Years ago, when we rst began to
ask the children to write essays on what
I want to be when I grow up, the answers
were always the same: the boys wanted
to be soldiers, and the girls wanted to be
teachers. One ve-year-old boy had already
internalized popular discourse about Shan
migrants in Thailand as criminals, writ-
ing about how he wanted to grow up and
arrest all of the bad Shan drug dealers. But
this will make their mothers very, very
sad, because they know that their sons are
not really evil. More recently, the teenag-
ers have expressed a much wider range
of goals, from becoming a tour guide to
becoming a graphic designer and making
T-shirts. In some ways, these seemingly
pedestrian aspirations strike me as even
more radical than wanting to become, say,
a political activist they reect a sense of
palpable possibility, real ownership over
what one wishes to and may become.
N
uan introduces me as her
mother, without caveats or explana-
tions, wherever we go to teach-
ers at her school and to Buddhist monks
when she takes me to temples to present
offerings and pray with her. The teachers
and monks often look bewildered at rst.
Where is she from? they ask her, refer-
ring to me. Around, she answers. I have
witnessed how Nuans quiet insistence that
she belongs and that each of us belongs
with her have put to rest any further ques-
tions they might have raised. Nuan often
acts as my interpreter, since my Thai skills
remain limited, as well as my cultural
translator telling me what to write on
the envelopes with offerings at the temple,
what movements to make in the rituals.
I listen to her Mandarin teacher praise her
handwriting skills, to her English teacher
express concern over her health.
Nuan and I speak in a mishmash of
Thai-Chinglish, which to me renders us a
real, if unconventional, family. This year,
she is a senior in high school. Next year,
she will be the rst Shan Burmese migrant
in her community and, perhaps, her entire
hometown in Burma to graduate from high
school. If she passes her college entrance
exams, she will most certainly be the rst
one to attend university.
Immigration policy pundits sometimes
evoke the Swiss playwright and novelist
Max Frischs famous quip: We wanted
workers; we got people instead. They do
this to highlight disjunctures between ill-
formed policies and the nitty-gritty messi-
ness of real life. My decade of experience
with the brp (where, indeed, few of the
communitys households can be adequately
described as voluntary migrant workers)
has impressed upon me, again and again,
the extent to which this messiness is a
gift.
Celina Su is an assistant professor of
political science at the City University
of New York and the fall 2012 Bosch
Fellow at the American Academy.
I HAVE WITNESSED HOW NUANS QUIET INSISTENCE THAT SHE
BELONGS AND THAT EACH OF US BELONGS WITH HER
HAVE PUT TO REST ANY FURTHER QUESTIONS THE TEACHERS
AND MONKS MIGHT HAVE RAISED.
WE ARE GRATEFUL TO
Mercedes & A. Michael Hoffman
and the
Alfred Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung
im Stifterverband fr die Deutsche Wissenschaft
FOR HELPING TO MAKE
THIS ISSUE OF THE BERLIN JOURNAL
POSSIBLE WITH THEIR GENEROUS SUPPORT.
In support of the endowment for an annual
Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship,
American and German artists and other
friends of the American Academy have
donated artworks for an auction on
November 30, to be conducted pro bono by
Villa Grisebach Berlin. The image on the
left, Dick Bagley, by Alice Neel, is just one
of many outstanding artworks that will be
featured at this autumns auction.
ALICE NEEL, DICK BAGLEY, 1946, OIL ON CANVAS, 76.2 X 63.5 CM
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In this issue:

Hans Rudolf Vaget is the Helen &

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S.

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