Berlin Journal 19

THE BERLIN JOURNAL  Number 19  FALL 2010

A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

THE BERLIN JOURNAL

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In this issue: David Abraham Brigid Cohen Stanley Corngold Rivka Galchen David Gelernter Todd Gitlin Martin Indyk

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Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 1

Contents The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

Harald Hauswald, Hans-Otto-Strasse, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, 1983, DDR

Logos Absconditus 04 Notes On The New Atheism

The Office 22

james wood takes stock of the new nonbelievers and finds them lacking in the theological subtlety of the modern novel.

08

“The Worst Book In The World” h.c. erik midelfort reveals the culture of censorship in early modern Germany and how a despised little text lived for centuries underground.

14

Bad News For The News todd gitlin reviews three major crises facing journalism today – and foretells of more trouble on the horizon.

18

The E-Book Plague

david gelernter sings the praises of that oldest of hand-held technologies: the book.

26

Closed Encounters

The Midterm Fix martin indyk reviews Barack Obama’s first year in foreign policy and proffers a preview of the Middle East challenge.

33

The Organization Man stanley corngold upturns Franz Kafka’s office writings to explore how the culture of risk insurance unaccidentally flowed through the Prague master’s pen.

36

These Labyrinths Of Terrible Differences brigid cohen recounts the efforts of German-Jewish composer Stefan Wolpe to make music beyond the nation.

40

The Price Of Entry david abraham deliberates the bifurcated paths to citizenship in Germany and the United States.

44

Outcast Eyes martin jay focuses in on a caesura in late medieval philosophy to draw out its influence on modern art and the very birth of photography.

N1

On the Waterfront



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

Uncanny Rema

rivka galchen shares an unpublished

and unheimlich outtake from her novel Atmospheric Disturbances.

2 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010 The Berlin Journal

The American Academy

A magazine from the Hans Arnhold

in Berlin

Center published by the American

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Director’s Note

Gary Smith

The Power of Ideas

CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE

Number Nineteen – Fall 2010

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ISSN 1610-6490 Cover: Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man (detail), 1530s, oil on wood. Image courtesy bpk and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Honorary Chairmen Thomas L. Farmer, Richard von Weizsäcker CO-Chairmen Karl M. von der Heyden, Henry A. Kissinger Vice Chair Gahl Hodges Burt President & CEO Norman Pearlstine Treasurer Andrew S. Gundlach Secretary John C. Kornblum Trustees Barbara Balaj, John P. Birkelund, Manfred Bischoff, Stephen B. Burbank, Gahl Hodges Burt, Caroline Walker Bynum, Mathias Döpfner, Marina Kellen French, Michael E. Geyer, Hans-Michael Giesen, Richard K. Goeltz, C. Boyden Gray, Vartan Gregorian, Andrew S. Gundlach, Franz Haniel, Karl M. von der Heyden, Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Wolfgang Ischinger, Josef Joffe, Henry A. Kissinger, Michael Klein, John C. Kornblum, Regine Leibinger, Lawrence Lessig, Nina von Maltzahn, Wolfgang Malchow, Erich Marx, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, Julie Mehretu, Christopher von Oppenheim, Norman Pearlstine, David Rubenstein, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Y. Solmssen, Fritz Stern, Kurt Viermetz, Pauline Yu Honorary Trustee Klaus Wowereit (ex officio) Trustees Emeriti Gerhard Casper, Diethard Breipohl Senior Counselors Richard Gaul, Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, Bernhard von der Planitz, Karen Roth, Yoram Roth, Victoria Scheibler

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w en t y y e a rs ago on October 3rd East and West Germany were officially reconciled after standing for 41 years as two distinct nations bound by a common history and language. The collapse of the Berlin Wall less than a year earlier had laid the groundwork for reunification, driven by Helmut Kohl’s vision of a unified political Germany, Mikhail Gorbachev’s willingness to alter decades of Soviet thinking, and the tireless efforts of Americans such as President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. These leaders and the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets of Eastern Europe turned the ideas of liberty and pluralism into political reality, ushering in the era of German – and European – unity. Ideas matter. That was the message of the great political thinker and historian Isaiah Berlin, whose writing during the dog days of the Cold War warned against the neglect of ideas “by those who ought to attend to them, by those who have been trained to think critically about them.” Berlin considered that moment unprecedented in modern history for the deep, even violent upheaval wrought upon humanity by ideas that had been taken to their fanatical extremes. It was a period, he said, of “open war being fought between two systems of ideas,” and the moral charge of the thinker or scholar was never clearer: “If professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers (and not governments or Congressional committees), can alone disarm them?” During the heady days of the early 1990s it seemed, as Martin Indyk recalls in this issue, “History had ended; democracy and free markets reigned supreme; and the United States had become the ‘indispensable nation.’” Those times are indeed past, and yet so very much has been accomplished in just two decades, including, of course, the founding of the American Academy in Berlin. Ideas flourish when nurtured in the intellectual soil of another culture, their longevity ensured by the generosity of private individuals committed to cultivating a fertile exchange across the Atlantic. This has most recently been exemplified by John Birkelund, Marina Kellen French, and Nina von Maltzahn, whose endowments of permanent fellowships in the humanities, music, and history, respectively, will ensure that this future work takes place on a firm, sustainable foundation of scholarship and ideas. The power of ideas resonates in the articles by our Fellows and Distinguished Visitors found in this present issue: Stanley Corngold’s exegesis of Franz Kaf ka’s office writings bespeak a literary figure who found reprieve from bureaucracy in the life of the mind; David Gelernter’s compelling ode to the book tells of novel ways to connect concepts across time; and Brigid Cohen’s work on the German-Jewish composer Stefan Wolpe offers insights into seeing musical ideas beyond the nation. Lastly, historians Martin Jay and H.C. Erik Midelfort approach ideas birthed in the medieval and early modern periods to follow their rippling influence – like that critical turning point twenty years ago – into the light of our own time. – Gary Smith

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Courtesy US Library of Congress, Division of Prints and Photographs

4 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

Matthew Brady, Crucifix. Between 1844 and 1860. Half-plate daguerreotype, gold-toned

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Notes on the New Atheism Does the modern novel believe in God?

By James Wood

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n t he l a st dec a de, an invigoratingly intemperate, often strident version of atheism has become extremely popular. Books like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great have sold millions of copies. Beyond the unlikely success of these books, there has also been the tentacular spread of scores of atheistical and “secularist” websites and blogs, some of them intellectually respectable, others more dogmatic and limited. The New Atheism, as it has been called, clearly has its origins in the shock of the attacks of 9/11, and the rise of both Islamic and evangelical Christian fundamentalism: in The End of Faith, Sam Harris argued, for instance, that as long as America remains mired in Christian thinking, it will never defeat militant Islamism, since one backward religious system cannot prevail over another backward religious system. Atheism would be the key to unlock this uneasy stalemate. The very title of Christopher Hitchens’s book is suggestive of similar thinking. Academics like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins have broader projects, perhaps – for them, the removal of our religious cataracts will result in a proper appreciation of the natural world, and of science’s ability to describe and decode it. But it is striking how relatively parochial even these writers are: “Religion” for all these polemicists seems to mean either fundamentalist Islam or American evangelical Christianity. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and the more relaxed or progressive versions of Christianity are not in their argumentative sights.

Now that almost a decade has passed since the events of 9/11, and the New Atheism has had time to establish itself as more than simply reactive, some of its intellectual and theological weaknesses have become more clearly apparent. The first is that the New Atheism is really the old atheism; how extraordinary, when one thinks of it, that in 2010, Richard Dawkins’s Oxford is now alive with the very battles

The New Atheism is locked into an essentially mimetic relationship to the very belief it is supposed to negate – the candle-snuffer and the candle belong together. that gripped that city in the 1860s and 1870s! (Evolution versus biblical literalism, positivism versus metaphor, science versus revelation, and so on.) After all, Bertrand Russell’s doughty essay, “Why I am not a Christian,” first written in 1927, is still the rather antique template for much of the atheism of the last ten years. I grew up in a religious household, and I remember the furtive shock of reading Russell’s essay when I was a teenager: it was like seeing an adult naked for the first time. How bold, I thought, that anyone would dare to suggest that Jesus was not especially virtuous, and was often bad-tempered (comparing poorly with the Buddha and Socrates, in this respect); that Jesus’s belief in the eternal punishment of hell is repellent; that most religious behavior has been tyrannical and punitive; that the canonical proofs of the existence of God are nonsense; and that

the earth is merely a happy accident in the larger decay of the solar system. All this seemed massively invigorating. One can easily tire, however, of the English philosopher’s insouciant empiricism (a tone eerily reproduced in the writings of Richard Dawkins). When one returns to that essay as an adult, it is Russell who seems a bit adolescent. The gleeful listing of religious idiocies and atrocities encourages a rebellious counterthought, which is that religious activity has probably been as progressive and charitable as it has been reactionary and hateful. The brittle skepticism about the terrible dangers of taking things on faith surely provokes the reasonable reply that we take all kinds of things on faith, including scientific probabilities.

T

his brings us to the second major weakness of recent atheism: its literalism. The New Atheism is locked into an essentially mimetic relationship to the very belief it is supposed to negate – the candle-snuffer and the candle belong together. Just as evangelical Christianity is marked by scriptural literalism, and an uncomplicated belief in a “personal God,” so the New Atheism, by and large, is apparently committed to combating scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The New Atheists do not quite quarrel over how much room there would be in heaven for all the saved souls, as believers (and non-believers) did three and four hundred years ago, but they are not far from such simplicities – they take creationism far more seriously than it has any right to be taken, and are quite  fi

6 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

happy to debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury (as Dawkins has done, on television) about whether the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection “actually happened.” The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be remarkably similar entities. This God is not very Jewish, nor very philosophical: He is never the bodiless, indescribable entity that Maimonides or Aquinas ceaselessly describe, intoning their fine approximations. The third weakness is related to the second. The literalist obsession with killing off a literal God, who is only ever seen as a dominating old father or elder brother up in the sky, leaves no space for more sophisticated or abstract conceptions of a deity, and brings with it a startling lack of comprehension and sympathy for what William James called “the varieties of religious experience.” Since faith is interpreted, again, on the evangelical or Islamic model, as blind – an entirely irrational, non-empirical idiocy – so no understanding or even interest can be extended to why people believe the religious narratives they follow; little or no understanding can be

logical fissures; it is dedicated to a literal conception, and literal discussion, of God; it is unable to offer a rich or meaningful account of the varieties of religious belief (within which category we should surely include religious struggle and rebellion, various shades of unbelief, devout atheism, and so on).

matic content of the belief has essentially disappeared (this is particularly true of Woolf and Beckett).

L

e t me gi v e t wo brief examples of how we might read these writers through a theological lens. Contemporary fundamentalism (and contemporary atheism) has apparently forgota m not a t heologi an, but a literary ten that an old religious tradition, evident critic. I come by my interest in theoin Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, insists logical issues through my childhood, on the indescribability of God. which was dominated by biblical belief The God of Thomas Aquinas is far and ecclesiastical language. As a literary more abstract and impersonal than, say, critic, I can see that the modern novel, the evangelical preacher Rick Warren’s. since, say, Melville and Flaubert started Aquinas calls this God the First Principle, writing in the 1850s, offers a space within or the universal cause, or “the efficacious which we might be able to explore some of principle of all things.” He is a bodiless our contemporary theological issues (espeentity outside our universe and sustains cially since our contemporary theological our existence. Aquinas argues that we can issues have turned out to be so nostalgic). only talk about God indirectly, through Returning to Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, analogy, because He is the cause and we Jens Peter Jacobsen, Woolf, Camus, are merely the effect. The best way to Beckett, and José Saramago allows us to approach God, he suggests, is by negative read them as theological writers, strugtheology – by saying what He is not, rather gling with the departure, or threatened than what He is. (Of course, on the positive departure, of a God whose late and fervent side, he also believed that we come to know return, in 2010, would have mystified Him best through Christ.) The Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was almost Aquinas’s contemporary, took a harder line, To rule out of court the category of the religious and argued that it was impossible to know robs all of us, whether believers or secularists, God by assigning Him human attributes. of some surplus of the inexpressible; it forbids the “Silence is praise to thee,” Maimonides passing of the shadow of uncertainty over our lives. wrote, quoting from Psalm 65. Herman Melville knew about the many of them. silence that Maimonides commends. For extended to what so gripped Wittgenstein – I don’t want to use such writers, ahistori- him, however, it could not be a strategy that is to say, the unthinking, relatively cally, as helpmeets and hermeneuts of our of worship, but an agony: God had disapundogmatic, embeddedness of daily relicurrent theological crises; rather, reading peared, and our prayers simply fall on gious practice. them again, historically, in their own theostony ground. “Silence, that only voice of It is not just that the New Atheism logical contexts, reveals their modernity; our God, and how can a man get a voice necessarily offers feeble accounts of why and we discover that indeed they traversed, out of silence?” he asks in his novel, Pierre. people believe in God; it also necessarily more richly and productively, much of the Melville may or may or not have known offers feeble accounts of secular intelterrain we are laboring over at present. his Aquinas and Maimonides (though lectual history, too. For the history of our These writers struggled with unbehe certainly knew his Milton, and his secularism is the history of our religioslief and doubt; as novelists, they are Pierre Bayle, and was intensely invested ity. A believer might have a conventioninterested in trying to see both sides of a in theological matters). But it is surely ally “religious experience” listening to theological argument, and thus they canthe case that Melville, driven to desperaa Bach organ fugue in Chartres, but a not do what the New Atheists do, which tion by this silence, does an ironic version non-believer might have a less classifiable is merely to caricature any form of belief of Maimonides’s theology in Moby-Dick, “visionary experience” listening to Mahler, (or unbelief, in Dostoevsky’s case) they do whereby the white whale is bombarded or Radiohead, or doing physics. To rule out not approve of. Since they are modern artwith masses of descriptions and freighted of court the category of the religious robs ists, for whom language is to some extent with allegory but remains gigantically all of us, whether believers or secularists, put in doubt, they are rarely literalists, unknowable. Scores of different metaof some surplus of the inexpressible; it and they cannot entertain a naively literal phors are used to try to picture, to contain forbids the passing of the shadow of unceridea of God. Instead, they are intensely in words, the whale; and the novel’s real tainty over our lives. interested in how we use metaphor and terror comes down to this question: what if So, in summary, our current atheism picture-making to create an idea of God; God is only a metaphor? is marked by at least three major weakand of how the forms and language of My second example is from Virginia nesses: it helplessly replicates many of religious belief persist long after the dogWoolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. There is an the nineteenth-century (and earlier) theo-

I

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 7

interesting moment in that book when Mrs. can’t paint, can’t write,” or Tennyson’s “Someone had blundered,” or the last line Ramsay, sitting thinking, looks out of the of the Grimm fairy tale that Mrs. Ramsay window towards the lighthouse. A phrase narrates to her son at bedtime (“And they comes into her head – “We are in the hands of the Lord.” She immediately repudiates it: are living still at this very time”). These phrases are all, in their different ways, “But instantly she was annoyed with herself relics; it is not clear that they will endure for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; any longer than the summer house, or Mr. Ramsay’s work, or Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s One of the novel’s central children. Yet words persist, even if they questions turns on what it do not endure forever, and many of the means to continue to need words that persist in To the Lighthouse, are or make use of a religious biblical words, some from the King James language whose content is Bible, and others that are still identifiable as “biblical” or “religious,” but which are of no longer believed in. less precise provenance. One of the novel’s central questions turns on what it means she had been trapped into saying someto continue to need or make use of a relithing she did not mean.” gious language whose content is no longer On the one hand, “We are in the hands believed in. of the Lord” thus takes its place in the nd so Mrs. R a ms ay ’s question novel with all the other flotsam of words, remains: “Who had said it?” When the bits of verse and prose, the mental and Mr. Ramsay declaims Tennyson, or spoken thoughts, that float through the Mr. Tansley complains that “women can’t novel and jostle each other. As a phrase, as write, can’t paint,” we know who has spoken a piece of language, as a formal plea, “We the words, or spoken and written them. But are in the hands of the Lord” belongs aside in the case of “We are in the hands of the Mr. Tansley’s mean-spirited “Women

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Lord,” the words speak Mrs. Ramsay, and if an unidentifiable voice says, “We are in the hands of the Lord,” perhaps that voice is the Lord’s? Why would one have need of the words if the belief is merely a lie? Just as consoling poetry? But the phrase is not really poetry. It is a belief, obscurely credited by a woman who is not “supposed” to believe anymore in such old-fangled nonsense. Melville meditates on whether language can capture God; and Woolf meditates on how language persists in capturing God, however reflexively and unthinkingly and vaguely we use it to do this. Both writers exhibit an involvement, an engagement, with the presence and absence of God that complicates any easy attempt to define our own relations with belief and unbelief. And thus both Moby-Dick and To the Lighthouse are historical texts and living texts, with plenty still to say to us.  µ James Wood, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and the fall 2010 Berthold Leibinger Fellow at the American Academy.

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8 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

“The Worst Book in the World” A censor-evading network of manuscripts circulated the German Enlightenment’s most radical – and despised – of early modern ideas.

By H.C. Erik Midelfort

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v er t he l a st fe w years I have been growing discontented with what I will call the standard picture of the German Enlightenment. Slow to get started and surprisingly conservative, the German Enlightenment, the standard picture goes, dealt with issues like religious toleration for Jews, Catholics, and various flavors of Protestants, but it avoided demands for democratic change in politics or for a frank criticism of religion, “superstition,” and the clergy. It avoided, in short, a critique that would separate religion from the affairs of state. It seemed telling for the standard picture that the great names of the early Enlightenment in Germany were Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the great librarian, mathematician, metaphysician, and polymath; and his enthusiastic vulgarizer, Christian Wolff, whose notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds was brutally ridiculed in Voltaire’s Candide. Stopping at those two figures it seemed that the prevalent interpretation of German intellectual and religious history was right: That Germany was somehow allergic to the most bracing and most radical thoughts of the age and that the Enlightenment was perhaps essentially French – clearly the more radical, more relativist, and more frankly atheistic, with major figures like Montesquieu, Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Voltaire, the Baron d’Holbach, and Rousseau; and with important parts played by Scotland, with Hume’s radical thinking jumping out of the straitjacket of Presbyterian orthodoxy

in the 1730s, and as well by the Netherlands, and then by Italy and England. In contrast, the German Enlightenment seems remarkably staid and proper, hidebound to classicism and the narrow world of the princely courts of northern Germany. In fact, many of the naughtiest, dirtiest, and most shocking classical writers were incredibly slow in getting into German

Books were burned by the common hangman, and both authors and printers might find themselves in jail for their efforts to challenge the religious or political establishment. circulation, and especially into German translation. While such improper poets as Lucretius on nature and the gods, Ovid on love, and Catullus also on love (to say nothing of Martial), were translated into Italian, French, and English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Germans did not get around to translating them before the second half of the eighteenth – and even then only in fairly bowdlerized form. What was impeding the flow of these classic and irreverent poets into German culture? Why so langsam? My first thought was that perhaps the engines of censorship were suppressing all attempts to find German for the materialistic, epicurean, and erotic speculations of the ancient Romans. But when I began

reading more on the Holy Roman Empire I found, to my surprise, that despite its dispersed and uncoordinated form of governance, the Empire could be highly effective, particularly when it came to censorship. What it required was an agreement between local authorities and the imperial center (in Vienna and in Frankfurt, where imperial censors tried to supervise the German book trade). Books were burned by the common hangman, and both authors and printers might find themselves in jail for their efforts to challenge the religious or political establishment. On a less formal level, the threat of unorthodox words (whether spoken or published) could lead to losing one’s job. Moreover, it was standard for German universities to police the orthodoxy of its students and faculty with confessional loyalty oaths, either to the Catholic Church, or to the confessions of the Lutheran or the Reformed Churches. This could be a sharp tool with which to keep boisterous intellects in line, and one could make up a long list of academics who lost their jobs over what may seem to us to be fairly minor doctrinal deviations. So, had censors objected to the printing of the naughty Greeks and Romans? Actually, no. While there were efforts to limit exposure to Hobbes, Montaigne, and Spinoza, no one truly cracked down on the ancients. Instead, it was widely assumed that the learned would read them at university, and that meant in the original. Even when Germans did develop a vernacular culture and a supple, powerful German  fi

Image courtesy bpk | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 9

Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man, 1530s, oil on wood

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language that could handle the demands of serious Greek and Roman thought, led by Johann Christoph Gottsched in the 1730s, it was careful to avoid rocking the boat. When Gottsched translated Pierre Bayle’s enormously influential Dictionnaire into German, for example, he wrote extensive notes to the most challenging entries, dissociating himself and attempting to distance the reader from Bayle’s radically skeptical thoughts. Even the reading habits of everyday Germans at the time were unadventurous. Library records for residents of Wolfenbüttel, for example, reveal the borrowing of novels, travel literature, histories, and witty tales. One did not really have to censor the ancient classics to keep their radical ideas out of the hands of readers; there just wasn’t much demand for them. That there was no radical thought in the German Enlightenment was hard for me to believe; all the ingredients were

lished by Marteau were published in Amsterdam by Elzevier, in fact printers and publishers from Germany also used that pseudonym to protect their publication of risky works, hundreds of them, some criticizing the Catholic faith, claiming that the Bible was useless for Catholics, others ridiculing religion more generally; some in a more secular mood criticized the aristocracy and especially King Louis xi v, and short novels published by Marteau provided titillating stories of lusty nuns and priests, court scandals, and the corruption and decadence of Catholic court culture in general. Even more radical, however, was an underground network of surreptitious unpublished manuscripts, most of which were anonymous and dangerous simply to possess. Here the sleuthing of Schröder and Mulsow has turned up an amazingly active market of bibliophiles and learned collectors who were willing to pay high

One of these books was called Liber de tribus impostoribus, (The Book on the Three Impostors), a notorious work that claimed the three great Western religions were all based on fraud: Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed were branded as “imposters.” there: plenty of printing presses, plenty of educated and even daring or inventive intellects, immigration, and travel. As a historian of early modern Germany, I knew that Germans certainly were aware of what was going on around them. Still, I thought, perhaps I was looking for explicit and public hints of radical thought in Germany where they simply were not to be found. But then my suspicions were confirmed by an amazing flood of recent German and Italian scholarship. Two German scholars in particular, Winfried Schröder and Martin Mulsow, have documented a dramatic spread of Spinozan ideas and of radically unorthodox, Socinian (anti-Trinitarian), Jewish, materialist, and religio-critical works of just the sort that the anti-atheists had been warning of. But these works have been nearly impossible to find because they were part of a massive, clandestine network of works that, if printed, bore false dates and false places of publication, leaving most future scholars in the dark. The most famous of these books were published by a printer who did not really exist: the mythical “Pierre Marteau, of Cologne.” While some researchers guess that many of the works supposedly pub-

sums for rare works that criticized or ridiculed the central propositions of their culture. These works were usually not printed before the mid-eighteenth century or, if printed, were immediately destroyed by government officials or by publishers who were afraid of getting caught with forbidden literature in their shops.

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ne of t hese books was called Liber de tribus impostoribus, (The Book on the Three Impostors), a notorious work that claimed the three great Western religions were all based on fraud: Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed were branded as “imposters.” The book had been reputedly written by someone at the court of Emperor Frederick II in the midthirteenth century, or perhaps by some perverse Renaissance intellectual (a Boccaccio or a Rabelais or a Giordano Bruno), or perhaps been derived from late medieval Jewish or Muslim sources. Horrified commentators from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often enough claimed that they had heard of or perhaps even seen a printed copy of this infamous work, but not one ever gave any detailed information about the work before the late seventeenth

century, not even a table of contents. When actual copies of the work did surface, in the eighteenth century, they were demonstrably the products of the late seventeenth century, and it slowly became apparent that there were in fact three different works that claimed the honor, or dishonor, of being the notorious Book on the Three Impostors: two were in French: La vie et l’esprit de Mr. Benoit de Spinosa (1719), which became known after 1768 as the Traité des trois imposteurs, and a hitherto little-known manuscript found only in Paris, the Préface du Traité sur la Religion de M***. It is, however, the third one that reveals something about the German Enlightenment: Composed in Latin in all likelihood by a German jurist in Hamburg, Johann Joachim Müller, it was written in 1688. Müller’s grandfather had been the eminent Hamburg theologian Johann Müller, who in 1672 published a work dedicated to destroying atheism entitled Atheismus devictus (Atheism Conquered). While the grandfather had attacked the Book on the Three Impostors, it was clear that he had never seen it. The grandson remedied that deficit by writing what he imagined such a work would contain. It is not clear exactly what Johann Joachim Müller’s goal might have been, for in outward respects he seems to have been an obedient and faithful Lutheran citizen of the zealously Orthodox Lutheran Hamburg. Perhaps he merely meant to tweak the noses of the hard-line pastors of his city, including Pastor Johann Friedrich Mayer, who showed a morbid and intense interest in rare “atheistical” works. Müller may even have learned much of what he knew of skeptical and unorthodox thought from Pastor Mayer’s personal library. The basic idea that runs through Müller’s work is that whatever claims Christians make for their preferred books of revelation are exactly parallel to the claims the Jews make for their scriptures and that Muslims make for the Koran: Miracles? Holy lives? Stories of inspiration? Coherent theology? Tradition? These all might count for one of these Holy Scriptures, but it seemed obvious that they could not all three be true examples of divine revelation. Some had to be false. In every case, the witness of two traditions tore down the credibility of the third, leaving the reader wondering whether reliable truth could be found anywhere. One source of this sort of relativizing skepticism was surely the awareness of the ancient history

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 11

and mythology of the Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans, whose religions seemed to have been fashioned to meet social and political needs: to keep rulers and priests in power and to promote an obedient or even submissive populace. Another source was surely the new knowledge flooding in from other parts of the world, allowing for a comparative mythology that brought Hindu and Chinese religion to Western notice and again made the biblical stories seem more fanciful and more mythical than they had earlier. One of the key terms that Müller used repeatedly in his work was comparison. If one compared stories and ideas carefully, they led to an almost total lack of conviction. Müller’s book on the Three Impostors did not depend upon claiming, as Lucretius or Spinoza claimed, that the universe was a place in which the gods had either retreated to their blissful abodes or that God was simply another word for Nature. Nor did the book announce a new metaphysics. Rather, it was content to question the supposed logic by which God held His creation responsible for the faults that He had built into it; it questioned too the logic that if there was a God, that He would “need” our worship; and it cross-examined the witnesses for one dispensation or another and found them all wanting, in a manner that was later strengthened by the arguments of David Hume on miracles. What Müller claimed was not that he knew that there was no God, but merely than no one could

logians in a mocking tone, and they note the many signs of haste in its composition, including elementary and egregious errors in the Latin.

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hen i t wa s first published (imperfectly) in 1753, it appeared without both place and publisher and with the completely misleading date of 1598. Quite apart from the author’s intentions, the work quickly spread through

deciphered as “Edelmann.” The translation is loose, picking out topic sentences or theses and then commenting, often in great detail, on the text, so much that, all told, Edelmann’s comments bulk larger than the text he translated. His comments reveal that though he shared many of the anticlerical sentiments of the author of The Three Impostors, he retained a steadfast belief in God. He explicitly objected, for example, to the very

“The religions, no mater how fraudulent they mostly are, contain nonetheless many cheerful aspects, which are a real benefit to poor mankind in its tribulations.”

a network of interested free spirits and first words of the book: “Deum esse, eum excited collectors. While some of its owners colendum esse” (God exists [and therefore] did not, evidently, take it too seriously, for he should be worshipped), which Müller had others it was “the worst book in the world,” called a non sequitur. In Müller’s text, the a blasphemous assault upon all they held mere existence of God gives mankind no holy. Well before that, it provoked fervent reason to think that He should be worrejections and counterarguments from shiped. “Why?” he asks. Is God somehow theologians and others who read the work in “need” of our worship? But Edelmann in manuscript form, starting with Pastor protests. “True enough, reason teaches us Mayer himself, who in 1702 published no sort of honor [i.e. worship] of the sort a dissertation entitled In diabolicum de one find in the [various] religions, but that’s tribus impostoribus librum (Concerning the no reason to think that God is not worthy Diabolical Book on the Three Impostors). of any honor, for we owe Him everything Atheism as a risky (and possibly blaspheand should thank Him. Before [our text] mous) game had turned into a genuine would be right in its conclusion, one would atheism. have to prove that there is no God, and that This effect explains the treatment that it is impossible.” Here breathed a very difreceived at the hands of Johann Christian ferent spirit from that of the author of the Edelmann (1698–1767), who translated Three Impostors. Far from being an athemuch of it and provided a lengthy comist or skeptic, Edelmann was a deist with While some of its owners mentary to his translation. Edelmann warm feelings toward a divinity of some did not, evidently, take it too was a notorious free thinker, a man who sort. Where he agreed with Müller was in seriously, for others it was started out under the strong influence of their common conclusion that priestcraft “the worst book in the world.” Pietism but who moved under the influhad deformed the originally pure concepence of Spinoza over into deism or (as some tion of God, usually in the interests of thought) atheism. He got into trouble with know if one tradition (Jewish, Christian, holding the rabble in check. This is what local authorities wherever he went, until Muslim, heathen) was truer than the othEdelmann thought was the core deception finally Frederick II offered him asylum ers. This may not constitute a fresh new of organized religion. But religion, for him, in 1749 on the sole condition that he stop start in philosophy or theology, but it was a did offer genuine comfort or consolation: publishing his every thought. And so, apart “The religions, no mater how fraudulent caustic solvent for many of the comfortable from his autobiography (composed 1749– beliefs of his time. they mostly are, contain nonetheless many 1752 but first published in full in 1849), and cheerful aspects, which are a real benefit This newly invented though long-feared book on the Book on the Three Impostors was some correspondence that stretches to 1759, to poor mankind in its tribulations.” With not perhaps philosophically or theologically Edelmann disappears from the historian’s this in mind, it is not surprising that view. subtle. It was not the long, careful arguEdelmann remained convinced that Jesus But he remained active, as we can see ment that might have prompted serious was innocent of all deceit, even though he theological reflection, and it did not deliber- from the fact that a manuscript recently dis- had not intended to found a new religion. covered by Miguel Benítez in Wrocław and ately advance beyond Descartes or Spinoza The responsibility for that lay with St. Paul. dated “Berlin 1761,” which represents the in any sense. The two scholars that know Similarly, for Edelmann, the Bible was not only translation of our blasphemous little the book best, Mulsow and Schröder, even the product of supernatural revelation, but book to survive from the eighteenth centhink it likely that the author meant his all the same “it contains truly many pretury. The translator identified himself as production as a kind of learned little joke, a cious and glorious truths, for which one “Euander,” a pseudonym that was quickly means of posing tough questions to theomust hold it in high esteem.”  fi

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h at migh t w e learn about the German Enlightenment from this little excursion with Müller and Edelmann? First, that radical ideas were so much in the air in the 1680s that an irreverent (or perhaps merely witty) young German jurist could quickly pull together several of them and compose the book that generations of bibliophiles and

When we ask, therefore, whether the German Enlightenment was radical, the answer continues to be basically no, but not for the reasons we have sometimes assumed. theologians would both covet and dread. Second, that he could do so right in the heart of Lutheran Orthodoxy, in Hamburg. Third, that he could not, of course, dream of publishing his Book on the Three Impostors, but that avid and curious readers were quick to make manuscript copies of the treatise, so avid that some 70 copies still survive in libraries today, mostly in Central

Europe. But fourth, by the time it seemed that Germany was “ready” for this as a published book, by the mid-eighteenth century, it could still only appear with a false date of publication and with no hint of its publisher. And when the noted theologian and Pietist-Spinozan deist, Edelmann, undertook to translate it into German, he could do so only by adding a cloud of comments that seriously weakened the conclusions toward which young Müller had driven. A deeply skeptical conclusion may thus have gone too far. Yes, Christianity was not the only religion to make faith-based claims to a unique revelation. Yes, organized Christianity, in spreading throughout the Roman world and beyond, may have made serious and debilitating compromises with wealth, power, and pagan philosophy. Yes, the Bible was now ever more widely understood to have been a human construction, not a supernatural miracle. But that was far from the last word, and Christian theology in the mid-eighteenth century was just beginning to awaken from its dogmatic slumbers. When we ask, therefore, whether the German Enlightenment was radical, the

answer continues to be basically no, but not for the reasons we have sometimes assumed. It was not that German thinkers and theologians were too timid to engage with the dissident ideas of the French, the Dutch, and the English. Indeed, the first of the three different On the Three Impostors books was both German and deliciously radical in its way. But the forces of repression in Germany were active and truly effective: if one stepped out of line, one might lose one’s job and have to flee to avoid jail, as many, many dissident intellectuals in Germany found out to their dismay. So the conservative nature of the German Enlightenment was not entirely an intellectual timidity. It was, rather, a caution born of sad and intimidated experience.  µ H.C. Erik Midelfort is the Julian Bishko Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia and the spring 2011 Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy.

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Energy for drivers with vision

14 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

Bad News for the News Never before have so many known so much about what matters so little.

By Todd Gitlin

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 urna lism is pa ssing t hrough a o commonly though imperfectly described convulsion whose end is not in sight. Its as “global warming” has been scantily and outward features are familiar: The most often misleadingly delivered. Watchdogs lucrative advertising, especially clasare not the sole prerequisites of a wise and sifieds, has migrated onto the Internet, intelligent society, but a society cannot be where it wins the attention of readers at no wise and intelligent without them. Great apparent cost to themselves. The circulafortunes and brilliant political careers will tion of terrestrial newspapers has plunged, always thrive on public ignorance. and their owners have not found a way The shortfall of news collection and dotto raise much revenue online to replace connecting analysis is obvious. Not all of what they have lost from the combination it, of course, can be attributed to the forced of ink and newsprint. These developretirement of experienced writers and ediments by themselves would have sufficed tors, the closure of foreign bureaus, and the to produce a crisis for publishers – not to literal shrinkage of the papers. Journalistic mention American journalists, of whom credulity toward authorities, one of the roughly one-fifth have lost their jobs in the abiding sins of the enterprise, was not born past decade. Magazines and book publishyesterday. In 2004, official mea culpas in ing suffer their own losses. The pity and the New York Times and Washington Post contempt in which au courant opinion acknowledged after the fact that – even holds the papers is evident in the adjective at a time predating the worst erosion of by which they are conventionally known: reportorial strength – their reporting of dead-tree. purported Saddam-Qaeda connections The damage is not only to the specialand Iraqi weapons of mass destruction ized industries themselves. Although there was sexed up during the run-up to the war, are compensations, which I shall touch on below, overall the depletion of the chief Triviality and gullibility, social means of intelligence gathering always the temptations of a weakens the nerves and sinews of the body journalism in which public politic. New online news sites, databases, service ranks second to and blog-fests are all to the good, but there profitability, have acquired is no way to sugarcoat this bitter pill: Fewer journalists mean less scrutiny of power and new channels through which to flood public life. social troubles, more liberty for irresponsible elites to steer society into catastrophe. During the last decade – ten dismal years how “the intelligence and facts were being that included abysmal campaign coverage fixed around the policy,” in the words of the (2000’s Al Gore cast as fabricator, George “Downing Street Memo,” because journalBush as moderate), a preventive war prediists for the most influential papers deferred cated on falsehoods, and the combination to government officials whose cornering of unheralded housing bubble and conseof the national security market and masquent financial meltdown – the principal tery of the manipulation of the objectivity watchdogs slept. News of the mounting fetish went unchallenged. The resolve not evidence of the climatic disturbances to repeat these errors was rapidly followed

by the financial press’s deference to Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan as he denied the housing bubble, and to the bankers, deregulators, and financial analysts whose willingness to countenance perilous derivatives and to promote the fantasy of omniscient markets were considerable. The decimation of the press is unlikely to reduce the danger of future derelictions. The consequences cannot be healthy for a putatively democratic society whose faith is that the general run of citizens can learn enough about the world to guide their governments – indirectly, through elections, and directly, by mobilizing public opinion – in the arts of managing unruly reality. Greater quantities of information circulate all the time, but the collective ability to deliberate does not grow apace. To the contrary: Triviality and gullibility, always the temptations of a journalism in which public service ranks second to profitability, have acquired new channels through which to flood public life. Never before have so many known so much about what matters so little. The contraction of authoritative news is part and parcel of a more sweeping transformation in the way Americans (and not only Americans) experience the world. Attention, the scarcest of human resources, is spread thin – or, to put it another way: there are so many more entertainments in circulation to take up one’s time, so many new ways of stirring up disposable emotions and sensations. Meanwhile, in America today, people who go to the trouble of concentrating on what is taking place in the world and how it might be improved are known condescendingly as “news junkies.” In the flux of the media torrent, what people experience as the boon of expanded choice (think of the hundreds of  fi

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December 25, 1889

January 1, 1890

The Hartford Herald (Hartford, KentuckY).

The Hartford Herald

Images courtesy the National Digital Newspaper Program and the LIbrary of Congress Chronicling America project

January 1, 1890

January 1, 1890

The Hartford Herald

The Hartford Herald

16 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

television channels now carried by ing: If this, then that. Collective reason still American cable systems, not to mention had to struggle, but the promise of undermillions of online sites) translates, in the standing was greatly – if fitfully – enlarged. large, into the fragmentation of the public. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, A hypothetically unified entity once celprinting with movable type enabled indiebrated as the public sphere, in the singular, vidual study, empowered dissidents, and is transformed into public sphericules – undermined old authorities. New elites networks of shared interest, relatively selfcould bubble up, churning up new forms enclosed, that pay attention only to subjects of public discourse. Eventually, the poputhat they are already, by interest or fancy, larization of print encouraged the developinclined to think matters to them. Our ment of a civil society in which, under the wondrous electronic linkages accentuate best circumstances, a democracy of selfthe cultural fragmentation characteristic of correction and improvement could evolve. our time. On a comparable scale, there is good The newspapers’ command over public reason to think that we are living amidst a attention did not begin shrinking yestersea change in how we encounter the world, day. American newspaper circulation has how we take in its traces and make sense of been declining, per capita, at a constant them – a shift from an ideal of concentrarate since 1960. What is new is the growing tion to the diffusion of attention. This shift pressure on small, mid-size, and even large of sensibility has been emerging for almost newspapers in metropolitan areas, coupled two centuries – from photography to telegwith widespread recognition that this raphy, phonography, film, and television decline is irreversible and that it belongs to to the Internet, in the rise of screens and a larger transformation in the way in which the relative decline of sequential text. Both people encounter the world. Although losses and gains have resulted. The newsthe youth “look at” the news online, they spend less time reading it – or long-form Eventually, the journalism, or books of any description – popularization of print than a decade, or two, or four ago. As for encouraged the development broadcasting, when they watch television of a civil society in or listen to the radio, they – as well as their which, under the best elders – can easily avoid news. circumstances, a democracy The Age of Cronkite turns out to have of self-correction and been an anomaly, a briefly Golden Age improvement could evolve. (roughly 1955–75) when national newscasters commanded the national hearth and paper was always a tool for a certain diffuwere capable, along with newspapers, of putting racial oppression, the Vietnam war, sion of attention (you don’t so much read a paper as swim around in it, McLuhan was and the crimes of the Nixon administrafond of saying) at least as much as a tool tion on national display. During the early for cognitive sequence. But the sensibility dinnertime hour, there were few choices of the Internet, mobile phones, omnipresbesides news. Today, there is nothing but ent screens, Facebook and Twitter and choices. As I write, any reader of the New so on – the media for the Daily Me, for York Times may learn on its front page, or point-to-point and many-to-many transonline, that the average wealth of white mission – portends another sea change. households is six times that of black and Attention attenuates. What has been called Latino households. But if one has a need not to know, it is easily satisfied elsewhere. “continuous partial attention” would seem to describe the texture of an evolving way he grow t h of cable television of life. over the past thirty years contributed Attention passes from slower access to mightily to the process of public faster; from the textual to the visual and the secession. So did the unleashed electronics auditory, and toward multi-media combinaof the 1990s and since. Through these and tions; from concentration to multitasking. other developments, a new cultural dispen- At work, at home, on the road, in elevasation has arguably emerged. Precedents tors, malls, and waiting rooms, we spend are not proofs, of course, but they are tanmuch of our day in a torrent of images talizing nevertheless. When the Greeks in and sounds, navigating through the snipthe time of Socrates adopted an alphabet, pets, filtering them, desirous of them, they ushered in an age of sequential thinksometimes immersed, sometimes floating,

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sometimes wading, sometimes choosing, sometimes engulfed. People devise navigational strategies to pick their way through the torrent. Among these navigational strategies is the narrowing of one’s intellectual world to a like-minded blogosphere, which reflects, in turn, the growth of likeminded neighborhoods.

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he modern ne wspa per dates from the first third of the nineteenth century. To understand its power, we must first look beyond the emergence of specific reports to the creation of the institutional means to generate them reliably – thus, the professionalization of reporting, the creation of specialized beats, and so on. But we must also think about the newspaper as a cultural form and a prop in everyday life. The newspaper was in the business of aggregation. It was a sort of miscellany and it catered to, and encouraged, learning through serendipity. At its best, it collected incidental and specialized readers into a functional public and extended the scope of democratic curiosity. Readers may have come to a newspaper to find out about matters of commerce, about shipping schedules and company news; or to immerse themselves in reports of the latest lurid murder; or to find more reasons to root for their political parties; or to pick up the latest about sports and celebrities; or to keep up with the comics or horoscopes, or, eventually, to do the crossword puzzles, or consult the movie, radio, and television listings. But as they grazed through the pages, they could pick up a certain rough acquaintance with the shape of the larger world, and became at least passingly familiar with the actions of governments and other prime movers. They didn’t need to care much about politics to be aware, even casually, that politics cared about them. In other words, journalism’s ability to serve the cause of enlightenment, and therefore democracy, rested heavily on the assembling of what was, in a sense, an accidental public. Readers who wanted to know their world better in order to govern themselves, and were frequently partisan, were joined in a sort of ritual collaboration by the more casually and diffusely interested. The fact that large numbers, even majorities of the population, were drawn to the news became a resource for reformers of all stripes, especially the rationalists who called themselves Progressives. The public may have been a “phantom,” as Walter

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Lippmann insisted in 1925, but still, this An increasing number of local online thereby satisfy Lippmann’s injunction that phantom assembled itself around breakfast journalism serve as an instrument of pubsites practice the unearthing of facts. For tables and on railroad cars, reading the the most part, however, like the early ninelic purpose, an effort “to bring to light the papers. This model public was progressive, teenth century press, the Internet, insofar hidden facts, to set them into relation with in that it believed that shared informaas it is concerned with public affairs at all, each other, and make a picture of reality on tion would improve the ability of public lends itself to opinionating – an occasionwhich men can act.” powers to intervene usefully. For a decade and more in the early twentieth century it An increasing number of local online sites practice dominated both major political parties. Its the unearthing of facts. For the most part, however, victories were tenuous and reversible. But like the early nineteenth century press, the Internet, as the sociologist Herbert Gans has pointed insofar as it is concerned with public affairs at all, lends out, the template for today’s journalism itself to opinionating – an occasionally useful remains the Progressive model in which but frequently parasitic activity. informed publics intervene to control the excesses to which vested interests are ally useful but frequently parasitic activity. predisposed. Here is an example from a website, This may succeed in consolidating opinion That model of journalism as an ensemTalking Points Memo (t pm), with which among those who feel the need to have ble of usable messages carries over into the I’m associated: In 2006, several United opinions; it may intensify feeling; it may more unruly but ever-evolving sphere of States attorneys were dismissed in midhelp mobilize people into political action. opinion blogs and current-affairs amalgaterm by George W. Bush’s Department of But the circulation of news bits originally mation sites, which encourage the percepJustice. These dismissals were reported gathered by dead-tree journalistic endeavtion that political discourse might have a locally. The local reports were amalgamors does not preserve reportorial jobs or new lease on life even as the traditional ated nationally by a de facto collaboration cultivate the higher forms of journalistic news organizations founder. But intense of t pm readers who in effect improvised a investigation and analysis. The new forms back-talk is not the same as illumination. national newsroom. Some volunteer t pm of aggregation, juiced up with tabloidIt remains the case that little of the nutsreporters conducted their own investigastyle titillation (see: Huffington Post) does and-bolts work of reporting is conducted tions. A pattern emerged: The US attornothing for the economic viability of the by Internet sites. Almost all current-events neys had been fired in order to prevent mainline press. The Huffington Post thrives blogs, as well as Google’s automated news investigations of Republican politicians on a business model that cannot serve the amalgamation scheme, are in the business or because they refused to initiate invesinterests of journalism in the long run: it of collecting news from newspaper sites or tigations that would damage Democrats. does not pay writers. the handful of Internet sites that commisCongressional hearings ensued. The sion actual reporting – as opposed to comupshot was that nine high-level officials e a re en t ering unknown mentary, informed or not. resigned, including the Attorney General, cultural territory, and it would The political sites can circulate untruths Alberto Gonzales. Eventually, the Justice be foolish to think it can be with unprecedented velocity – the case of Department Inspector General declared easily mapped. Ten or fifteen years into the “death panels” canard, which delayed that the process used to fire the first Gutenberg’s era, could anyone have forethe passage of health care reform for seven attorneys and two others dismissed seen the Reformation? After ten or fifteen months, is much to the point. (The curaround the same time was “arbitrary,” years of radio signals, could Hitler have rency of falsehoods via talk radio, Fox News, “fundamentally flawed,” and “raised doubts been imagined? We are less than one genand the right-wing blogosphere is remiabout the integrity of Department prosecueration into the World Wide Web. Futurists niscent of the slanderous journalism that tion decisions.” In order to produce this rush in where analysts fear to tread. prevailed in the early nineteenth century.) rectification, an assortment of scattered Enlightenment is always at risk, Golden But the best of the new Internet sites can facts had to be collected into a larger, more Ages are brief, and human initiative is also detect patterns, “connect dots,” and penetrating story. undying. As the San Francisco radio commentator Scoop Nisker used to say: If you The images presented here of Kentucky’s Hartford Herald (1875–1926) are made don’t like the news, go out and make some possible by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) and Chronicling America, of your own.  µ

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an Internet-based, searchable database of American newspapers. Millions of individual newspaper pages published between 1836 and 1922 are freely available on the Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov, where users may search the digitized pages as well as consult a national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information to identify thousands of newspaper titles from dozens of US states available in a variety of digital formats. In the coming years the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsors the Chronicling America program, aims to have every state and US territory represented in the NDNP database. Chronicling America is to be permanently housed at the Library of Congress, making as much of the American newspaper’s storied past available for future generations digitally.

Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology and Chair of the PhD program in Communications at Columbia University, is a spring 2010 Bosch Fellow in Public Policy at the American Academy.

The E-book Plague Ode to an old technology

By David Gelernter

Candida Höfer, Biblioteca do Palacio dos Marquese de Fronteira Lisboa I 2006

© Candida Höfer/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006

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lec t ronic book s, usua lly intended for reading on portable computers with screens roughly the size and shape of a typical printed page, are gaining ground in the book market. They seem unimportant, but e-books show us the technology industry’s lack of imagination, cultural obliviousness, and love of quantity over quality. They show us the passivity of conventional book publishers and suggest the public’s tendency to treat technology not as a world-widening source of ideas but as a habit-forming drug with side-effects no one worries about. In an age when art, religion, and moral seriousness are out of fashion, technology is (of course) the opiate of the people. Software can do wonderful things for the book, but only if we start with the cybersphere’s capacity to create new things, not to satisfy us with cheap imitations of old ones. In the long run, technological progress will be human progress only if technologists start by understanding the virtues of the things they are trying to replace. But they almost never do. Software can add to the traditional book but can never replace it: The book (that is, the traditional book) is not only the most perfect achievement in the long history of human design, it is also an ideal interface to software, in principle. At its best, software can turn the silent film of the traditional book into a modern movie; can turn the solo violin into a concerto. But you cannot have a movie or concerto if you start by throwing out the pictures or the soloist. You must build on those.

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oday ’s e-book s a re an attempt to replace the world of books with yet another manifestation of the Internet; e-books mean cheapness, efficiency, and gallons of information to pour down your throat instead of glassfulls to enjoy. Of course, e-books have many practical advantages. So do plastic flowers; and furry fourlegged robots are easier to care for than dogs. But unlike plastic flowers and furry robots, e-books have enormous momentum in the marketplace because large companies are behind them, and no one wants to be called a Luddite; no one wants to be against technology and in love with an obsolete past. Now that most sins have been abolished, it has been necessary to promote Luddite to the top rank of bad attitudes. Our prejudiced approach to these topics is clear in the fact that (in English) we use “Luddite” to mean someone who is against new technology just because it is

new. But we have no word for someone who is in favor of new technology just because it is new. Yet you will meet one hundred reverse-Luddites for every Luddite you come across. Reverse-Luddites are bad for society and especially bad for technology. Their easy virtue makes technologists lazy. Instead of seducing the public with masterful achievements, technology only has to ask and the public says yes.

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ost wa r A meric ans w ere briefly fascinated by the promise of “throwaways” – disposable plastic plates and tableware, throwaway paper skirts and dresses. The goal was constant novelty for bored consumers: new clothes every day!  Electronic books can’t literally be dumped in the trash, but they realize the highest ideal of the “throwaway movement”: to reduce to zero the artistic and human value of the objects we handle.  Granted, electronic books are cheap and can be stored in virtually no space. They are easy to transport: a thousand weigh no

Books fit our hands, our laps, our desks, our shelves. Their shape and heft suits us. more than one. You can search and manipulate their contents using software. But ordinary printed books are more robust and easier to repair. They are more portable because you don’t have to worry about damaging the mechanism: you can take them to the beach or the back yard, drop them on the street or let children stomp on them. They never need recharging. In a real book, the physical package is brilliantly suited to its function: the codex, sheets bound on end – the standard book – is roughly 2,000 years old and is still mankind’s greatest design achievement. Electronic books are all the same size. Real books come in many sizes, which is part of their value. Novels and poetry have smallish pages because they are all text without figures, notes, or index; textbooks are larger, with room for illustrations and captions; art books and atlases are largest, sometimes with one image covering two facing pages. I have short, wide books suited to artists whose paintings are long and low; and tall, narrow books, mainly travel guides that are easy to flip through. Children’s books are another world of shapes and sizes altogether.

Without even opening a book you can guess what it is (fiction? textbook?) and how long it is. You can recognize a book by its cover, even if you don’t remember the title or author. You can pull a book from a shelf based only on its appearance or remembered location. You can flip through the pages quickly and form a rough idea about the book, or stop at something interesting, or recognize a passage you are searching for. Books fit our hands, our laps, our desks, our shelves. Their shape and heft suits us. A tennis racket, hammer, or drinking glass is spoiled if it is too light, too heavy, not balanced or not shaped right. Why should we be less particular about the exact shape and heft of books than about tennis rackets? And books are not only useful but beautiful. Nothing warms a room like a shelf of books. Of the many small, ordinary objects we handle every day, books probably do most to soften the hard plastic surfaces of modern life. Typeface and layout can make each page beautiful – but even an e-book allows us to admire those (although not necessarily on a page of the correct size). The texture and color of the paper stock are part of the book’s appeal too. The jacket design is part. The binding is part. Granted, many old books were better produced than the average new one: leather spines and corners with marbelled boards on many nineteenth-century books; decorated cloth covers in the early twentieth century. Modern books are too likely to be cheaply made. Publishers miss the obvious point that book buyers who will spend extra money to buy a hardcover instead of a paperback would spend a little more for a well-made hardcover. But some modern books are well made; and at least the bookmaking process itself is alive. The quality of the product will improve again when readers insist on it. Real books last a long time. Books that are 150 years old are plentiful and often inexpensive. Is it likely that our descendents a century and a half from now will admire the beauty and craftsmanship of old e-books? The most important advantage of real books is that they grow up and grow old like human beings. It is easy to annotate a real book – to argue, explain, or emphasize an important passage. When you re-read the book, your notes are part of it. Your ideas and annotations change over time and make the book itself change. Gradually a book takes on the personality of its owner.  fi

20 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

My most valued possessions are books my grandfather annotated, in English and (in a beautiful, flowing hand) Hebrew; I hear his voice in those notes. God willing, my children and grand-children will hear my voice the same way. Family Bibles have notes on births, marriages, and deaths going back hundreds of years; these delicate long threads of fading ink lead us gently into the past. I have a sixteenth-century English Bible and a seventeenth-century Hebrew Bible, bought from book dealers, neither annotated; but merely turning their soft, heavy pages, so worn they feel like cloth, connects me to the past – current flows across the connection, nerve impulses travel from past to present, and we see ourselves from far overhead; catch sight for a moment of the majesty of human life. Modern computing can make books better. But publishers and the technology industry are going about it wrong. Starting with an incomparably brilliant design, they ought to improve it, not replace it. Each book might have a partner through the looking glass, in the cybersphere. Usually this virtual partner will merely be useful; sometimes it will complete and perfect a book the way a score completes a libretto. But the physical book on paper will always be a full partner in this ensemble. It is natural that when you acquire a book you should be invited into an ongoing electronic community of reader discussion

luminous tail. Books hurtling through the cybersphere leave glowing tracks behind, like the vapor trails of high-flying airplanes or the phosphorescent wakes churned up by large ships in tropical seas. When you are interested in many books, you can blend their logs (or streams) into one stream, which keeps you up-to-date on the book world from your own viewpoint. And we can go further. Often readers have comments or questions about particular passages – especially if they are students studying literature or a textbook. Over the years many students follow the same trail and pass the same points; comments and conversation accumulate around all difficult or striking passages, like initials carved in some notable old tree. When you touch a passage on the page with your book pen, you transmit information to a nearby computer, which tunes in a “conversation track” focused on exactly the word or passage you have touched. You see a list of comments, questions, and answers clustered around this passage. You might hear ongoing conversation, if readers anywhere in the world happen to have stopped to chat at the same place you have. Many such conversations proceed in parallel on every interesting street and corner of the text. The world’s book-readers suffer from an unsatisfied hunger for pictures. We have always wanted to see far-away people and places, mountains and cities and buildings.

The book exists on a human size and scale, and its length is measured in words or pages, not megabytes. Books connect us every day to human craftsmanship and history. we hold their fate in our hands. and author comment; of course you should have access to an electronic version of the text, so you can search or read online. Much informal book-discussion already occurs on the Internet. All that is needed is for publishers to give this discussion a natural form – just as the book itself is a natural form for authorship. When you scan the book’s code with your book pen (or some other device), you will join the community. A time-ordered stream in the Cloud is a natural shape for the accumulating reviews, comments, corrections, and updates that form the book’s log (like a ship’s log). The log is also a good place for authors to mention new books they are writing, or other books they like or dislike. The stream is part of the book: If the book is a comet, the stream is its

But photography is less than two hundred years old; the mass-printing of photos is newer than that; high-quality, inexpensive color printing is a generation old, and cheap, high-definition digital cameras are even younger. It’s no surprise that the world suffers from a gross shortage of images. Of course there are untold millions of photographs in the Cloud. But they are a sprinkling of buttercups in a vast green valley. The world is largely unphotographed. Videos are even scarcer: If you are looking for videos of the various species of Eclectus parrot in the wild, or the Cumbrian waterfalls of Scale Force, Moss Force and Lodore that fascinated Coleridge, good luck. This absence of images is reflected in our impoverished color vocabularies. We

have words for only a tiny fraction of the colors that occur all around us in nature and art. Art history merely asserts that certain artists were great colorists; it says little about the particular color-chords and progressions that make the twelfth-century glass of Chartres and Saint-Denis, or Titian, or de Kooning great. Some art historians still regard color pictures as a distraction in art books. In the all-important field of color, art scholarship has barely begun, because the accurate mass-reproduction of color has barely begun. Publishers and tech companies will work together to push forward the art of the book. But the genius of the book itself, the physical object, will always be the best starting point; and authors and publishers (not technologists!) will lead these collaborations – unless they lack the vision and heart for new things.

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he book is an object that is designed for the human eye and human hand that has proved its power and beauty over 2,000 years, that is an extraordinary triumph in the art of design. It exists on a human size and scale, and its length is measured in words or pages, not megabytes. Books connect us every day to human craftsmanship and history. We hold their fate in our hands. Real books will always exist – but will book-making itself? Will the world be flooded with e-books? – cheap imitations, alluring as plastic trees? Or will e-books create partnerships across the border between real space and virtual space – the most important border of the twenty-first century; between the word on paper and the supporting cast in the cybersphere? Between the soloist and the orchestra? William Blake wrote, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.” The traditional book is infinity in the palm of your hand, is eternity in an hour. Will books continue to help anchor us in the long history of human craftsmanship and thought, or will we give them up and blow away in a gust of cheap technology into a rootless future? Each time we buy a book, real or electronic, we help decide for or against humanity’s most humane art.  µ

David Gelernter is Professor of Computer Science at Yale University and was a Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in July 2010.

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22 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

the midterm fix Barack Obama’s progressive-pragmatic foreign policy meets its Middle East test.

By Martin Indyk

O

Harald Hauswald, Werbetafel eines Nähmaschinenladens, Pappelallee, BerlinPrenzlauer Berg, 1984, DDR

n Janua ry 20, 2009, a young African-American was inaugurated as the forty-fourth President of the United States. In his inaugural address, Barack Obama made clear that engaging with the world would be one of his highest priorities. He intended it to be a very different kind of engagement from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. There would be withdrawal of troops from Iraq; an outstretched hand to Iran; a reset in relations with Russia; an expanded economic partnership with China; and a commitment to pursue peace in the Middle East. Obama’s first year turned out to be an annus horribilis. The effort to engage Iran had foundered, a victim of regime hardliners who stole the elections and then brutally suppressed the opposition. Instead of a quick start to Arab-Israeli negotiations, the president found himself caught up in an argument over Israeli settlement policy. Boxed in by his generals, he reluctantly approved sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan for a war that seemed unwinnable. The near-collapse of the Copenhagen climate negotiations underscored the limits of American influence. Political polarization and gridlock in relations with Congress had bogged down the president’s domestic reform agenda, raising doubts among world leaders about his ability to deliver. Russia’s leadership stalled on negotiations for the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (sta rt), hoping to extract greater concessions. China’s newly self-confident leadership began to throw its weight around in bilateral relations. And France’s president gave voice to what his counterparts seemed to be thinking: Est-il faible? (Is he weak?) Every new president’s first year is bound to be complicated. The learning curve is always steep. The adjustment from campaign promises to dealing with the world’s complex realities is difficult. The new

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 23

president quickly discovers that things look meantime, there was transformational different from the Oval Office. work to be done at home: The rebuilding of In President Obama’s case, the degree an American economy based on renewable of difficulty was heightened by the circumenergy, the creation of new jobs, healthstances he inherited: A home-grown financare and education reform. In all this he cial crisis unlike anything since the Great declared he would seek a balance between Depression; a losing war in Afghanistan; competing priorities, refusing to set goals emerging powers in Asia and Latin “that go beyond our responsibility, our America demanding their due; a nuclearmeans, or our interests.” armed Pakistan taking on the characterisForeign policy scholar Walter Russell tics of a failing state; Iran marching toward Mead has categorized Obama’s initial nuclear weapons; a Europe seemingly losapproach as “Jeffersonian,” after America’s ing its way; and in the Arab-Israeli arena, a third president, who propounded limiting deeply divided Palestinian polity and a new- commitments abroad in order to nationly-elected right-wing government in Israel build at home. But Obama’s engagement that did not accept the two-state solution. with the world also displays, Mead observes, The America that Obama inherited was no a “Hamiltonian” urge to pursue a realist longer the Überpower it once was. Its repueffort to confront America’s adversaries. tation had been tarnished, its hard power The president’s decision to send more strained, and its pursuit of democracy and troops to Afghanistan was an expression of free markets abroad discredited. this balancing act: Adding 30,000 troops How far the United States had traveled from those heady post-Cold-War days that In this multi-pronged Bill Clinton, Obama’s Democratic predeapproach Obama can be cessor, had inherited a mere eight years seen to be attempting to earlier: The Soviet Union had collapsed; the shape a new multilateral Berlin Wall was down; Saddam Hussein’s international order. army had been evicted from Kuwait; the US economy was about to take off; all Israel’s Arab neighbors were engaged in direct but announcing that they would begin compeace negotiations; and Iran was licking ing home in the middle of 2011. Explaining its wounds after losing a debilitating eighthis decision, Obama rejected the goal of year war with Iraq. History had ended; nation-building in Afghanistan “because democracy and free markets reigned it sets goals that are beyond what can be supreme; and the United States had achieved at a reasonable cost and what we become the “indispensable nation.” It was need to achieve to secure our interests.” easy in those triumphant days to imagine He would instead focus on reconstructing that the United States could use its primacy America, “the nation that I’m most interto dictate a more free, peaceful, and open ested in building.” world order. Those days were long gone. Other instances in the president’s first year manifested this urge to balance deeply in t elligen t and competing demands: The attempt to close deliberative leader, Obama’s comGuantanamo Bay while dramatically stepmunity organizing experience in ping up drone attacks on Al-Qaeda-related Chicago seems to have bred in him a belief terrorists; promoting a nuclear-free world in human progress achieved by small but while making modest adjustments to determined steps. As he told a huge, adorAmerica’s nuclear posture; advocating ing crowd in Prague in his first speech clean energy while allowing greater offabroad as president, the change that he shore drilling. wanted them to believe in would not come This balancing act pleased few and easily or quickly. In his Nobel Peace Prize provided fodder for Obama’s critics, who speech at the end of his first year, Obama saw his compromises as signs of weakness. cited President Kennedy’s call to focus His inability to produce clean outcomes on “a more practical, more attainable quickly were taken as indications of incompeace, based not on a sudden revolution in petence. His efforts to engage competing human nature, but on a gradual evolution powers seemed to come at the expense of in human institutions.” His task was not to ignoring traditional allies. His reluctance seek transformational change abroad, but to unfurl the banner of human rights and to pursue a more modest effort to “bend democracy in Iran, the Arab world, and history in the direction of justice.” In the China indicated abandonment of values-

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based diplomacy. Above all, these moves produced questions about whether Obama had a strategy at all.

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his composi t e na rr at i v e on President Obama’s first year in foreign policy, however, misses a significant subtext in the president’s approach, which is now emerging in sharper focus as it takes on greater form and substance. It is best reflected in the confluence of summitry and diplomacy that took place in the Spring of 2010: The signing of the New sta rt Treaty with Russian President Medvedev; the unveiling of the Nuclear Posture Review; the convening of the Washington Nuclear Security Summit with 43 world leaders in attendance; and the opening of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (np t) Review Conference. The president intended that this effort would find its capstone in a new UN Security Council resolution mandating tougher sanctions against Iran for its violations of the np t. In this multi-pronged approach Obama can be seen to be attempting to shape a new multilateral international order. One of its pillars is nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation: “To seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” as the president put it in his Prague speech. But to achieve this purpose, Obama believes that the United States must take the lead – hence the New sta rt Treaty with its reductions in US and Russian nuclear arsenals – and promote a rules-based system in which the “world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons.” In this new order, those who break the rules must face consequences: Sanctions that “exact a real price” and the increased pressure that “exists only when the world stands together as one.” In this context, curbing Iran’s nuclear program becomes a means to encouraging old and new powers to assume their responsibilities for the maintenance of the order. It also becomes one of the most significant challenges to that order, for if the community of nations fails to prevent Iran from abrogating its obligations as a signatory to the NonProliferation Treaty, chaos will follow – a nuclear arms race in the Middle East will likely be triggered and the np t will likely collapse. Little wonder that Obama refers to strengthening the non-proliferation regime as “a centerpiece of my foreign policy.” To have it succeed, the president has to unify the approaches of the established and emerging powers. The “reset” policy  fi

24 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

with Russia was a critical first step, yielding Moscow’s support for the principle of tougher sanctions against Iran. That, in turn, made it possible to secure Chinese support for sanctions. The give-and-take inherent in the effort to achieve unanimity is likely to produce a new sanctions regime that falls short of the “crippling sanctions” that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for: Russia wanted to avoid sanctions on arms sales; China wanted to avoid sanctions on oil trade; Brazil’s Lula wanted time to act as an intermediary; Turkey’s Erdogan seemed determined to protect his new friends in Tehran. Nevertheless, the reshaping effort proved good when a hardwon P5 consensus held in the face of lastminute maneuvering by Iran’s leadership. But unanimity in itself is likely to be inadequate to the challenge of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The Bush

Israelis; representative and transparent institutions of government; and an economy beginning to boom. In Gaza, too, we see an interesting situation: Hamas is now policing the territory and preventing attacks on Israel. For the first time since Yasser Arafat returned to Gaza, in 1994, the Palestinian authorities are actively preventing acts of violence against Israel. At the same time, in Israel there is a right-wing government that has endorsed the two-state solution and therefore accepted the idea of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. This same government has placed a moratorium on new settlement activity in the West Bank and, apparently, is now doing its best to avoid provocative actions – demolitions, evictions, and announcements of new tenders in east Jerusalem. Moreover, the Arab states, which have always been reluctant to provide political cover for Palestinian leaders who would make peace, have now What are the chances that President Obama can achieve formally endorsed Abu Mazen’s decision to a breakthrough to Israeli-Palestinian peace in his second engage in indirect peace talks with Israel. year, or ones subsequent to it? There are several reasons Israelis are beginning to see that they for cautious optimism. have a reliable partner on the Palestinian side. Palestinians are beginning to hope Administration succeeded in securing they can achieve their independence that success will have a positive effect on three unanimous UN Security Council through negotiations and compromise everything else that he is trying to do in the condemnations of Tehran, all to little effect. Greater Middle East. It may not solve all the rather than through violence and terrorThe combination of new multilateral sancism. And President Obama and Israeli problems, but it makes it easier to do so. It tions and tougher unilateral sanctions Prime Minister Netanyahu have come to makes it easier to get the Arab street, and taken by the United States and Europe therefore Arab leaders, on board to confront understand that it is more productive to may drive the Iranians back to the negowork with rather than against each other. and pressure Iran. It makes it easier to isotiating table. But there is not much hope As a consequence, direct peace negotiations late Iran and to convince it that its interests in Washington that it would be anything should soon begin, creating an opportuare better served by complying with the more than a tactical ploy to buy more time nity for Obama to forward ideas that could will of the international community. And for building a “breakout” nuclear capabilbridge the gaps between the two parties. it gives America greater credibility in this ity. Given the importance of the issue to If Obama eventually succeeds on the part of the world for the broader reshaping Obama’s vision of a new multipolar world Palestinian issue, it will impact positively process Obama is promoting. order, the trend in Washington is thus on his effort to convince Iran that its interh at a re t he chances that toward greater confrontation with Iran. ests are not well served by continuing to President Obama can achieve President Obama himself has ratcheted pursue nuclear weapons. That may yet a breakthrough to Israeliup his rhetoric on this subject. He has gone enable him to herald in a new, more stable Palestinian peace in his second year, or from saying it is “unacceptable” for Iran Middle Eastern order as the foundation for ones subsequent to it? There are several to acquire nuclear weapons to declaring the multipolar world he seeks to shape. reasons for cautious optimism. The first is he is “determined to prevent” them from But if he fails, the United States might called “Fayyadism,” after the Palestinian doing so. There is also growing talk of the well end up in a third war in the Middle Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, who is military option. Chairman of the Joint East, this time with Iran. That is where changing the cassette in the minds of Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, “progressive pragmatism” can lead when a Palestinians in the West Bank. He is showand Secretary of Defense Robert Gates no new president takes the United States into ing them that they can take their fate into longer say it would be a “bad idea.” Instead the Middle East maze.  µ their own hands; they can build their own they declare that force is “on the table.” Martin Indyk is Vice President and state from the ground up; they do not have This may be a way of signaling to Iran that to be victims. This is manifested in dramat- Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings there really could be dire consequences Institution and was a Richard C. Holbrooke ic new ways in the West Bank: A credible, if they don’t take seriously the will of the Distinguished Visitor at the American capable Palestinian security force policing international community. It also indicates Academy in spring 2010. This essay is the area and working with the Israeli army a more confrontational trend in Obama’s derived from his May 5, 2010 lecture. to ensure security for Palestinians and approach. If sanctions do not convince Iran to change course, the EU and the United States will have to choose between preventive military action and a strategy of containment and deterrence. It’s fairly obvious where the Europeans will want to go, and a year ago President Obama would have gone there with them. We would together have chosen the containment and deterrence option. That choice is no longer certain. Given this, contending with the ArabIsraeli conflict becomes all the more important for President Obama. Resolving a long-running conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors – particularly the Palestinians – has a value in itself. He believes in helping Israel, an important ally, to resolve a debilitating conflict. The president clearly feels that time is running out on the solution of “two states for two people.” But he is also motivated by a belief

W

Prof. Dr. Kurt Biedenkopf Chairman of the “Institut für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft e.V.”

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26 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

The Organization Man Franz Kafka, risk insurance, and the occasional hell of office life

By Stanley Corngold

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 27

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ost re a ders know Franz Kaf ka as the reclusive author of stories and novels that have since become monumental works of modern literature. Some readers also know him as a bureaucrat who, unhappy in his office, castigated the “hell of office life.” But few know that he rose at the end of his life to the position of Senior Legal Secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (called, after 1918, the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Czech Lands). Kaf ka was no Bartleby the Scrivener, no harmless office drudge. Rather, he was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform in “the Manchester of the Empire,” which at the time of Kaf ka’s tenure, between 1908–1922, was one of the most highly developed industrial areas of Europe. Kaf ka’s professional writings have become more and more interesting to scholars seeking the elusive patterns of his thought. Today, his relation to “the office” seems predictably conflicted but by no means entirely negative. In 1913 he wrote the comment to his fiancée Felice Bauer that has dictated the popular view: Writing and office cannot be reconciled, since writing has its center of gravity in depth, whereas the office is on the surface of life. So it goes up and down, and one is bound to be torn asunder in the process.

Steven Ahlgren, Accounting office, New Haven, CT, 1992

But Kaf ka’s being torn asunder is not the whole story. In his own words he was a “natural” official, fully aware of “the deep-seated bureaucrat” inside him, and he was not blind to its advantages. In an amazing letter written in 1922 to his friend Oscar Baum, he wrote “of our fumbling interpretations, which are powerless to  fi

28 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

Steven Ahlgren, Commercial bank, New Haven, CT, 1992

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 29

deal with the ‘evolutions,’ embellishments, or climaxes of which the bureaucracy is capable.” If the office stood in the way of his writing, he could also breathe an élan into it and even furnish it with a human gaze, as a sort of brother adversary. In a letter to his lover Milena Jesenská, Kaf ka describes the office as precisely not a machine in which workers like him might be “a little cog” or “a big wheel.” Rather, “To me,” he wrote, “the office is a human being – watching me with innocent eyes wherever I am, a living person to whom I have become attached in some way unknown to me.” The office, in his words, “is not dumb, it is phantasmal.” These remarks suggest Kaf ka’s awareness of the impact of his office life on his literary imagination. “It brought him into direct contact,” writes the Kaf ka scholar Jeremy Adler, “with industrialization, mechanization, and bureaucracy, as well as with the struggle between capital and labor, and his official writings antedate his literary breakthrough.” At the end of his life Kaf ka sought to overcome imaginatively his earlier hostility to the office. In his novel The Castle, a hero named K., Kaf ka’s “vice-exister,” struggles to enter a strange “castle,” which runs on principles reminiscent of Kaf ka’s insurance institute. The ambition of this K.-figure is something of a riddle, and readers will wonder what it can mean for Kaf ka, who did not have to struggle to enter his office, where his presence was needed and paid for. But the theme of seeking entry into a higher institution runs throughout Kaf ka’s diaries in different directions. When he writes of craving to enter another place or sphere, it is very often to come into his authentic being as a writer (he coined the German word Schriftstellersein, or “writerly being”). We will still wonder what connection can exist between creative, hotly intense imaginative writing and the life-blood of the office, the writing of briefs and filling in of forms? The answer lies in Kaf ka’s analogies.

Franz Kafka wrote his manuscripts in quarto notebooks (about A5 size) or postcardsize octavo notebooks. Today many of the manuscripts are available as facsimile prints. Therein one finds a rich handwriting style with partly pronounced calligraphic features, written not only in Roman script but also in a German script popular in Austro-Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century. The rhythm and mood of Kafka’s handwriting changes dramatically from slow and relaxed and wide to fast and tense, resulting in undulating, expressive lines and sometimes indecipherable characters. This rich material was the inspiration for the digital type family FF Mister K, by designer Julia Sysmäläinen. Her Kafka typeface draws upon the strongly varying typographic character of the original script, capturing the visual spirit of Kafka’s original manuscripts.

For him, both institutions – writing and the law – practice feats of imaginative embellishment: both reach for heights of complexity, for “climaxes,” in their procedures. In their operations and their subject matter, especially in Kaf ka’s case, both deal with concepts of fault, of standards and the failure to meet standards, of dereliction and shortcoming. “How do I excuse my not yet having written anything today?” he writes, on a typical day. “In no way. . . . I have a continual invocation in my ear: ‘If you would come, invisible court!’” And, finally, very importantly, both sorts of writing, the legal and the literary, at their best proceed impersonally. Consider Kaf ka’s great description of his fate as a writer: If there is a higher power that wishes to use me, or does use me, then I am at its mercy, if no more than as a wellprepared instrument. If not, I am nothing, and will suddenly be abandoned in a dreadful void. What is striking about Kaf ka’s last novel is that his personal castle, the “house of writing” into which he forever sought entry, wears the features of bureaucracy, so that in the end these two kinds of being become indistinguishable. In The Castle we glimpse the imaginative “reconciliation” of office and writing.

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n his day t ime office work, Kaf ka was preoccupied above all with accident insurance, a “business” that, as he wrote in an early letter, “interests me greatly.” It stands to reason that as a full-time specialist in industrial accidents, from 1908 on, he would have introduced something of the logic of accident insurance into his novels and stories. On this assumption, one of the principles of Kaf ka’s literary world could be called “culture insurance,” a concept owed to the Kaf ka scholar Benno Wagner. Kaf ka’s stories and novels bring together fragments of many different cultural discourses – family language, subjective psychology, sexuality, literature, music, artistic performance, law, political agitation, religious ideology, war, and more, always profiling the conflict of values that informs them. Kaf ka’s second novel, for example, The Trial, was written in 1914, contemporaneously with his harrowing story “In the Penal Colony.” In The Trial, a high-ranking bank official is arrested without his ever learning the grounds of his arrest and subsequent execution. “In the Penal Colony” sees  fi

30 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

Steven Ahlgren, Commercial bank, St. Paul, MN, 1992

a high-ranking officer lay a prisoner on a machine that writes into his body the text of the law he has broken. But before the story is over, it is the high-ranking officer who lays himself on the machine for punishment. The two stories vary with haunting complexity the conflict between highly placed persons and the lower-order persons they punish, while introducing these conflicts into several different cultural discourses. Together, The Trial and “In the Penal Colony” allude to historical epochs of Western law, to the bureaucratic agonies of the day, to the Old and New Testament, to Talmudic disputation, to Chinese torture gardens, to the Dreyfus case, to the Hollerith punch-card machine. In proceeding allusively and comprehensively, Kaf ka performs for his culture an operation similar to the operation that accident insurance performs for the work life. His stories identify, differentiate between, and then bundle together opposing positions within different cultural enterprises and in this way level the risk of defeat to one or the other party to the conflict. The Trial contains a literal example of this “bundling” together of the disputants: court and supplicant, once distinct, merge when, as the prison chaplain, declares, “The judg-

ment isn’t simply delivered at some point; Again, the goal of the 1917 story the proceedings gradually merge into the “Building the Great Wall of China” is to judgment.” The verdict of the court is a protect the Empire from the nomads. These judgment on the way in which the accused nomads might be identifiable in turn as any conducts his defense: The accused delivers minority population wanting to be included his own verdict. Both parties, court and vicin a nation state, but here the Chinese tim, share responsibility for the killing. Empire, threatened by irredentism, seeks to Where wider cultural enterprises are exclude them with an inevitably discontinuconcerned (empires, nations, religions), ous and porous wall. To the question, “How Kaf ka bundles risks by the strategic use of can a wall afford protection when it is not stereotypical images to create a common built continuously?” the narrator replies, ground. He invests such stigmatizing metaphors as “nomads,” “apes,” “vermin,” Indeed, not only can such a wall not proand “dogs” with features and values that are tect, but the construction itself is also in common to each of the conflicting groups; continual danger. Those sections of the in this way, a discourse of enmity and disWall left abandoned in barren regions sociation becomes a discourse of likeness can easily be destroyed, over and over, and community. Consider, for example, the by the nomads, especially since at that figure of the acculturated ape Red Peter time these people, made anxious by the in “A Report to an Academy,” who is at once construction of the Wall, changed their the trained animal, the incipient language dwelling places with incomprehensible speaker, Esau (“And the first came out red, rapidity, like locusts, and so perhaps had all over like an hairy garment,” Genesis 25), a better overview of the progress of the the adolescent experiencing orgasm, the Wall than even we ourselves, its builders. Jew venturing on “civility,” the fraternity duelist qualifying with a scar, the circus The key to the wall is its design. Its design artiste, and the “European of average is incomprehensible, except, perhaps, to the culture.” Few groups, stigmatized or not, nomads whom it is meant to ostracize. This would fail to find themselves represented in fact, taken strongly, means that the builders this figure. are dependent on the beings from whom

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 31

it is their entire purpose to obtain protection. Invaders and invaded share the risk of mutual destruction. At the same time, the paradox of the breachable wall alludes to Kaf ka’s affirming a system of comprehensive accident insurance for both on-site and off-site industrial injuries that nonetheless allows for negotiable gaps. Throughout Kaf ka’s office writings, we see him transforming materials from these documents into his literary work. Images of land surveyors, planing machines, and underground fortification wander dreamlike into his fiction; more importantly, perhaps, so do modes of legal argument. Kaf ka’s official policy might best be put as redefining the being of things and relations through the risk they constitute. An “automobile,” for example, is a factory, housing machinery capable of causing potential harm to its “workman” – the chauffeur. The automobile owner, henceforth a factory owner, would thus be required to pay insurance fees set on the basis of the fees levied on other factories harboring comparable risk. Kaf ka, as it happened, thought this idea unacceptable for the pragmatic reason that automobile owners were already

required to pay high fees merely for the “agencies”: On one hand, accident insurance, fact of owning the thing. Kaf ka’s stance of which responds to a growingly uncontroldistributing responsibility equipollently lable and impersonal event by aiming to resbetween contesting parties – a stance titute the alienated subject; and on the other, informing his fiction and generally arousthe narrative of individuals confronting ing displeasure among his readers – in fact wild accidents (waking up as a bug; being reflects the spirit of pragmatic negotiation arraigned and killed for a never-specified that he employed at the office. crime; or losing one’s way to death). Both The discourse of risk insurance suggests systems aim to contain such accidents, make another complementary view of the heroes readable the unreadable, monetize risk, gain in Kaf ka’s fiction: they are the victims of “a dear purchase” on chance. Except that accidents for which no insurance has been the fictions must do without that statistical devised and might never be devised, such norming and must instead report the failure as a policy protecting persons from the con- of individuals to discover the norming reasequences of waking up one morning as a son for the accident that has befallen them verminous beetle. It would be too difficult to in the creaturely order. Yet, “a certain truth,” monetize the risk. One has so little data. as Kaf ka wrote in his notebooks, “might lie only in the chorus [of voices],” a bundling he office prov ided Kaf ka with a together of counterpoints within the narratrove of material images (add on quar- tive between of the voice we hear with the ries, cognac, photographs, peasants) voices in other Kaf ka texts, always available that, duly transmuted, surface in his work. to be heard contrapuntally.  µ But the best connection between the legal Stanley Corngold is Professor writings and the fiction is captured only Emeritus of German and Comparative by moving one stage higher on the order of Literature at Princeton University and thought – from shared images and tropes a fall 2010 Berlin Prize Fellow at the to the plane of accident, unintelligibility, American Academy. unreadability. We have two compatible

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• Special Thanks •

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Notebook of the American Academy in Berlin | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

On the Waterfront News from the Hans Arnhold Center

N2 Academy Notebook: New York N4 Academy Notebook: Proudly announcing three new City Mayor and philanthropist Academy fellowships; Michael Bloomberg awarded Wolfgang Ischinger joins the the 2010 Henry A. Kissinger Academy Board of Trustees Prize in Berlin

N5 Sketches & Dispatches: Paul Volcker on reforming global finance, Ernst Cramer’s last editorial, Philip Murphy and Frank Langella at the Academy

N12 Life & Letters: The fall 2010 fellows, a sneak preview of the spring 2011 class, call for applications, and alumni books

Honoring Mayor Michael Bloomberg Forging transatlantic ties through visionary business and philanthropic outreach

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er l in h a s had, for all Americans who have dealt with it in the post-war period, a very special significance. And the Germany that I remember most vividly is the Germany of the postwar period that had the courage to rebuild and adopt democratic institutions and rejoin the Western community. It is the city of the airlift, of living at the end of an Autobahn, of the Soviet ultimatums, of the building of the Wall, and of transcending all of these in the coming down of the

© Hornischer

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hr ee hundr ed in v i t ed guests attended the gala evening celebration at the Hans Arnhold Center for the 2010 Henry A. Kissinger Prize on May 11, awarded to Mayor of New York City, philanthropist, and businessman Michael R. Bloomberg.   Introductory remarks were delivered by Academy co-chairmen Karl von der Heyden and Henry A. Kissinger, president and ceo Norman Pearlstine, honorary chairman Richard von Weizsäcker, and trustee Stefan von Holtzbrinck. The following remarks were delivered by Dr. Henry A. Kissinger:

American academy co-chairman Karl von der Heyden, president » continued on Page N2

NOrman Pearlstine, Henry A. Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg

The New Rules

Three Is A Charm

Paul Volcker presents new financial regulatory proposals at Schloss Bellevue

Announcing the Marina Kellen French, Nina Maria Gorrissen, and John P. Birkelund Fellowships

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his ch a l l enge is certainly global,” said two-time Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker about the future of international financial regulation, “but much depends on our two countries working together to solve the problem.” Volcker, who currently chairs President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, spoke on March 6 at Schloss Bellevue to an exclusive

audience of American Academy guests – diplomats, ambassadors, central bankers, and fiscal policy experts – from Europe and the US. The Academy’s spring 2010 Richard von Weizsäcker Distinguished Visitor was introduced by then German President Horst Köhler, former President von Weizsäcker, and by Academy trustee Peter Y. Solmssen, who » continued on Page N5

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he A mer ic a n Ac a dem y is delighted to announce that three trustees have each generously endowed two full-semester fellowships beginning in 2011. New Berlin Prizes in music scholarship, pre-twentiethcentury history, and the humanities will accentuate the Academy’s commitment to these areas of intellectual inquiry. The Academy extends its gratitude to these fellowships’ creators: Marina

Kellen French and Nina von Maltzahn – both granddaughters of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold, the couple who once lived in the American Academy villa – and John P. Birkelund, a trustee since 2006 and former chairman of the National Humanities Center, for their pioneering commitment to the Academy and the future of its programming in Berlin. » continued on Page N4

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All photos © Hornischer

• Academy Notebook •

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Honoring Mayor Michael Bloomberg » continued from N1

Wall and now being the capital of a united Germany. That is a great testimony to the human spirit. In all of this period the association with America was of central importance to both countries and this is why establishing an American Academy here and in this house has been so important. In fact, we’re meeting today on a day that perhaps will turn out to have been a seminal day in the evolution of Europe if the decisions that were made overnight about a joint European response to the Greek debt crisis lead to a greater integration of Europe. The reason I am here tonight is to say a few words about my friend Michael Bloomberg. We live in a world of enormous tran-

sition. In every part of the world upheavals are going on simultaneously. Every society faces the challenge of how to move from the familiar – which is what they know – to a future whose outline is not easy to discern. There is a Spanish proverb that says, “Roads are made by walking.” And the way to get from where we are to where we should be is via some pathfinders who have the vision and the courage to go down roads when it is not yet clear what the destination will be. I have known Michael Bloomberg for nearly two decades and we all know his tremendous achievements. But the quality that I admire most is his ability to view to the future, his willingness to go in directions that are not clear when they are undertaken.

When he decided to run for mayor, nobody could figure out how he could possibly accomplish this. I spent a weekend with him for some other purpose and he explained to me how he would act as mayor and why he wanted to be mayor. Then he carried out everything that he said he would do. He has made all of us feel that he is part of our lives. One of the guests here said to me: “Isn’t it terrific that our mayor is now here in Berlin?” That’s how we feel about him. He is our mayor, of all New Yorkers, not of one party. That is why I am convinced that he has still tremendous contributions to make to a society that is groping for a new definition and for a world that is needing men with courage and dedica-

tion. I am very proud that Mike will be given an award named after me. It is a great privilege for me to be here in this building, in this Academy, and on this occasion. Thank you very much.

1. Wolfgang Ischinger, David Knower, Henry A. Kissinger, Wolfgang malchow, Jutta ischinger 2. pre-ceremony dinner at the hans arnhold center 3. klaus wowereit, Marina Kellen French

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N3

Aboard!

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t i t s Fa l l 2009 Board meeting the American Academy in Berlin welcomed longtime friend Wolfgang Ischinger to its Board of Trustees. Ambassador Ischinger brings decades of invaluable experience in diplomacy, foreign policy, and global governance. Currently the Global Head of Government Relations at Allianz SE and chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Ischinger served as German ambassador to London from

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wolfgang ischinger

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2006 to 2008, and prior as ambassador to the United States, from 2001 to 2006. From 1998 to 2001 Ambassador Ischinger was Germany’s Deputy Foreign Minister, and as Political Director of the Federal Foreign Office, a post he assumed in 1995, he worked closely with Academy founder Richard C. Holbrooke as head of the German Delegation during the Bosnian Peace negotiations. In the 1980s Ischinger served on the private staff of Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. A key voice in global security and arms control, Ischinger noted of his coming aboard, “The American Academy has contributed more to a vibrant transatlantic relationship than any other institution in Germany.” High praise indeed from a man of such merit. r .j.m.

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Three Is A Charm » continued from N1

The Marina Kellen French Fellowship in Music

Marina Kellen French

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he M a r ina K el l en French Fellowship in Music will ensure the uninterrupted presence of music and musical scholarship at the American Academy for years to come. Ms. Kellen French joined the board of the Academy in 2004. The daughter of two of the Academy’s guiding lights, AnnaMaria Kellen and the late Stephen M. Kellen, Ms. Kellen French’s extraordinary philanthropic

interests continue in the tradition of her parents and grandpar­ents: She has long been involved in the musical life of New York City as a trustee of Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, and she also serves on the boards of New York’s Channel 13 (w ne t) and the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC. Until 1969 Ms. Kellen French was the president of Keys to New York, Inc., a business she founded, which supplied interpreters and guides to major companies and the United Nations. Of her new commitment to the Academy, Executive Director Dr. Gary Smith notes, “Marina Kellen French’s deep knowledge and passionate commitment to classical music has always been a source of inspiration. She has long recognized that music must remain a cornerstone of the American Academy’s activities, one which we can now continue to build upon. Our gratitude and admiration for her generosity could not be greater.”

The Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellowship in History

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he Nina M a r i a Gorrissen Fellowship in History, endowed by Nina von Maltzhan (née Gorrissen), will focus on history prior to the twentieth century. The granddaughter of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold, Baroness von Maltzahn has been a trustee of the American Academy since 1997 – before the institution even opened its doors. She is an active supporter of music-related projects, among them the SingAkademie zu Berlin, and has for three successive years enabled students and professors from the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, to spend a summer week in residence at the Hans Arnhold Center performing and offering master classes in a variety of musical disciplines. In Uruguay, where Baroness von Maltzahn has lived for the past thirty years, she founded and still directs Fundación el Retoño, a youth development nonprofit that aims to provide children and young people with better

educational and job-training opportunities. American Academy President and ceo Norman Pearlstine says of the Baroness, “Nina von Maltzahn’s longstanding support of the American Academy has

Baroness nina von Maltzahn

been critical to the success of this unique institution from its inception. Her generosity has always been done out of the spotlight, so this named endowed fellowship at last recognizes Nina for the visionary force she truly is.”

The John P. Birkelund Fellowship in the Humanities

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he John P. Bir k elund Mr. Birkelund was recognized in Fellowship in the Humani­ 1995 by the Polish government ties brings an important with the award of Commander new level of support to humanities Order of Merit with Star for his scholarship at the Academy. contribution to the developCurrently a general ­partner ment of the Polish economy. A with Saratoga Partners, a comscholar as well as a businessman, pany he cofounded in 1984, his book Gustav Stresemann: Mr. Birkelund was a senior adviPatriot und Staatsmann (2003) sor to ubs Warburg l lc and past received positive critical attenchairman and chief executive offi- tion. Mr. Birkelund, a trustee of cer of Dillon, Read & Company, the American Academy since an investment bank. Mr. 2006, has served as a trustee of Birkelund has served as Director Brown University and continues of the New York Stock Exchange to serve as a trustee at the New and the Securities Industry York Public Library, the Frick Association, and as chair of the Collection, and the Senate of Polish-American Enterprise Fund the Phi Beta Kappa Society and

John P. Birkelund

has been elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

American Academy co-chairman Karl von der Heyden says of Mr. Birkelund and this key new fellowship, “John Birkelund has been on the forefront of supporting the humanities in America, chairing the National Humanities Center and for many years serving on the board of the New York Public Library and other cultural institutions. Importantly, John typifies the banker as the broadly educated wise counselor to corporate executives – a trait now almost nonexistent.”  r .j.m.

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• Sketches & Dispatches •

The New Rules » continued from N1

would lead to potentially greater and more frequent crises. “To put it simply,” Volcker said, “We are faced with the questions of moral hazard on a grand scale.” The beginning of a solution to these systemic problems lies in the creation of a permanent legal framework, a hard-wired mechanism built into the financial system for the regulation of financial markets that would become, ultimately, an integral part of international regulatory practice. According to Volcker, “The idea is . . . for some designated agency to take full control of a failing financial institution if of systemic importance.” Under such a model, when a significant financial institution begins to go under, the agency steps in to take control and remove management. Stockholders would lose; creditors would be at risk. This is no rescue or bailout, he explains, but

rather “a quick and painless end – and then a swift burial.” The former Federal Chairman is of course aware of the “legal and policy concerns about such a grant of authority.” But such a body is not without precedent. In fact, something like it has long existed in the United States: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, created in 1933. “Dealing with failed or failing banks is to provide a quick resolution process,” Volcker said. “I believe there is growing understanding of the need for broader authority covering non-banks in my country. An appropriate provision is likely to be made in any comprehensive financial reform package approved by the Congress. There is consideration in relevant legislative bodies in Europe as well.” r .j.m.

All photos © glave

serves on the management board of Siemens. After his lecture, Volcker sat down for an in-depth discussion with Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, Jürgen Fitschen of Deutsche Bank, moderated by Academy trustee Ambassador John Kornblum. As a sense of calm returns to world markets, Volcker observed, not a few institutions think they can get back to back to business as usual. But a variety of areas require massive reform, Volcker said, and following the Great Recession of 2008–09, government-backed financial regulation must provide a general legal framework for an international approach so that an ad hoc system does not escape oversight. Areas desperately needing tighter regulation include capital standards,

liquidity requirements, leverage restrictions, countercyclical supervisory approaches, and risk management practices in both institutions and by regulators themselves. Volcker had argued in the same spirit eight years ago when he delivered the inaugural Stephen M. Kellen lecture at the American Academy, “Preserving the Integrity of Capital Markets.” Of this prior talk he wryly noted, “I can only conclude that I failed to be persuasive.” Volcker observes that his seemingly comprehensive points did not get to the heart of the matter: Protecting financial institutions from failure. It is no longer tenable to think that “systemically significant institutions” can be saved. Nor can their practices be redeemed, their management and creditors protected, or their stockholders’ initial investments retained. Such assumptions

Jean-claude trichet and paul volcker

richard von weizsäcker introducing paul Volcker at schloss bellevue on march 6, 2010

paul volcker

N6 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

A Nuclear-Free World? Medvedev has spoken repeatedly of “nuclear disarmament,” and Russia’s role as a “trustworthy partner” in these efforts. A summit convened by Washington is to be held in April and is supposed to answer the call of nuclear demobilization. The same intention has a meeting scheduled in February at the American Academy in Berlin, attended by eight experts – among them Henry Kissinger and Richard von Weizsäcker. All of this is necessary and important. But the main threat does not hail from the countries

participating in the disarmament efforts, all of which are – to quote Medvedev again – “assessable.” Peril hails instead from the socalled rogue nations and their ruthless leaders, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, or Kim Jong-Il of North Korea. The latter in particular does not care for international agreements. Not only does he plan the shipment of strategic and other weapons to sympathetic nations – like Burma and Iran – he also encourages his scientists to engineer small tactical nuclear bombs that are both

george shultz

henry kissinger

sam nunn

william perry

easy to assemble and soon potentially available to terrorists. Last year the US already delivered a warning: ‘The dangers of a nuclear-equipped terrorism are real and deeply disturbing.’ Such weapons, in the hands of religious fanatics or suicide bombers, are the greatest menace to the future of humankind. How to avoid such a threat so far no politician can answer.” By Ernst Cramer Die Welt January 20, 2010 Translated by K. Michalek All photos © glave

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n Februa ry 3 a quartet of senior American statesmen gathered at the Academy at the urging of the Nuclear Threat Initiative to discuss nuclear non-proliferation with their German counterparts. Henry A. Kissinger, Samuel A. Nunn, William J. Perry, and George P. Shultz  engaged in a historic public discussion with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Helmut Schmidt, and Richard von Weizsäcker. (Egon Bahr was unable to attend.) Ernst Cramer, the eminent German-American journalist who died on January 19, 2010, at the age of 96, had wanted to attend. The former publisher, editor, and managing director of Axel Springer Verlag penned the following editorial, published the day after his death in Die Welt:

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he t hough t of eliminating, or at least reducing, the number of nuclear weapons in the world has been around for quite a long time. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union, spoke in Geneva last fall of “nuclear disarmament” and explained that it had been a “great illusion” that nuclear weapons had ever contributed to general safety. Now the efforts to disarm have obtained to international priority thanks to President Barack Obama’s proposal of a “world without nuclear weapons.” Even Russia’s President Dmitry

helmut schmidt

richard von weizsäcker

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

Ambassador Murphy and the Alliance © glave

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v ery A mer ic an ambassador serves “at the President’s pleasure,” some more, some less. Political appointees are closer to the Oval Office than career diplomats and can sometimes even make a phone call to the top, past all official channels. In contrast, career diplomats generally command broader political experience. Ambassador Phil Murphy has been in Berlin for 100 days. He is, as he occasionally remarks, not a career diplomat but a representative of the President. The contrast to his two predecessors appointed by George W. Bush, one a career politician, the other an industrialist, could not be more distinct. Murphy not only emanates from the financial world of Goldman Sachs and has substantially contributed to Obama’s election fund; he is also endowed with strong political talent, audibly exerts himself to speak German, and possesses a boyish charm. On Monday evening he had a grand entrance at the American Academy. Alienation and crisis in the German-American relationship? Murphy wanted none of that. No bilateral relation is – or has been since, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall – more important for American politics than that of Germany. With that he pointed to the Iron Curtain and the approxi-

US ambassador to germany philip d. murphy

mately 16 million Americans who – be it soldiers or family – have served in Germany during the Cold War. Nowadays the cooperation is important in a different manner, whether in Afghanistan – Germany deploys the third largest detachment of soldiers and provides substantial development aid – in climate change issues, or in the reinvention of nato. The disruptions during the Iraq War have been surmounted, if the

appearance of the Chancellor at a joint session of both Houses of Congress is any indication. The Ambassador also hinted at constraints – and that he did very seriously. In the Middle East, Israel must stop building settlements. Concerning Iran and its suspicious nuclear activity, there must be willingness to negotiate. Should that fail because of the mullahs, “then all options are on the table.” There’s no need to explain to anybody what that

means. No wonder it was suddenly freezing in the well-tempered American Academy. By Michael Stürmer Die Welt December 12, 2009 Translated from the German by Kristin Michalek

Welcoming “Richard Nixon”

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r ank w ho? Frank Langella belongs to those kinds of actors whose name doesn’t ring a bell with most people but whose face is instantly recognizable. His filmography comprises over 80 movie and TV titles. In most he

is striking as a distinctive supporting character. His tall build and observant eyes, beset with a certain mysteriousness, convey an aura he knows how to deploy in both thrillers and comedies. Langella is now shooting the thriller Unkown White Male,

directed by Spaniard Jaume Collet-Serra in Babelsberg. The American Academy used the opportunity to invite the actor, nominated in 2009 for an Academy Award for his role as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, to an evening talk.

Langella doesn’t look his 72 years. He talks about the profession of acting and his experiences therein with such enthusiasm that one forgets his age entirely. Without being shy, » continued on Page N8

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character. He talked to countless contemporary witnesses, spent hours in front of archive footage, increasingly perplexed as to how he should approach his interpretation. Then he accidentally pressed the slow-motion button and finally got a glimpse of

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he calls things as they are: The movie he is currently shooting with Liam Neeson is a purely commercial project, simple popcorn cinema. This doesn’t hinder his joy of working, it is just that

there’s a great deal more to tell about a movie like Frost/Nixon. Perhaps this is because Langella hasn’t played the Nixon role just in the movie, but also over 350 times on stage. He explains in a friendly, unpretentious way how he gained access to this ominous

what makes Nixon tick: fear and paranoia. “Is acting really a form of art?” asks actress Katja Riemann during the Q&A with the audience. “Oh, yes,” Langella responds. The writer simply scribbles letters on a piece of paper, but “through us, the piece reaches the people; we bring it to life.” Langella seems so serene and composed saying this, though what follows are critical remarks about the current state of film as an art form. These are not words of cultural pessimism but rather keen observations of an abiding thinker. He laments the industry’s lack of good scripts and its obsession with youth: “In the past one could see men and women in the movies. Today there are only boys and girls.” By Barbara Schweizerhof Die Welt February 27, 2010 Translated from the German by Kristin Michalek

katja riemann, rené pape, frank langella

Wannsee Jam An impromptu night of music at the Hans Arnhold Center with instructors and students from the Curtis Institute of Music performing a movement of Jean Françaix’s “Trio” for violin, cello, and viola; pianist Andrew Tyson playing a Chopin mazurka, and Curtis baritone Elliot Madore’s commanding rendition of “Soliloquy” from

the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. After lingering hours of conversation, a few ja lc orchestra musicians – one of whom does leave home without his trumpet – initiated a post-reception, impromptu jam session, which saw Wynton Marsalis and pianist © peiper

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he t emper at e evening of June 8 came to a roaring close at the Hans Arnhold Center, with musicians from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (ja lc) joining in an impromptu jam session. Members and trustees of the orchestra were at the Academy for a reception in honor of the orchestra’s founder and artistic director, Wynton Marsalis, and Sir Simon Rattle, chief conductor and music director of the Berliner Philharmoniker. The two cultural giants have been collaborating on a Marsalis project, Swing Symphony, which premiered the following evening at the Berliner Philharmoniker. The early evening reception at the Academy was attended by several trustees of New York’s Neue Galerie and started out

trading fours: Wynton marsalis, trumpet; Dan nimmer, piano

Dan Nimmer trade fours with the likes of German trumpet player Til Brönner, the ja lc’s trumpeter Marcus Printup, and jazz singer Judy Niemack-Prins of the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler. As the evening unfurled, cell-phones and digital cameras captured the atmosphere, music sweetened the air, and legendary bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff sang an unrehearsed duet of a German folk song with cabaret baritone Max Raabe, founder and director of the Palast Ochester. It was after midnight when the curtain closed on this unplanned session that brought out some of Berlin’s and America’s brightest musical stars to the fabled Hans Arnhold Center villa. r .j.m.

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N9

From Philadelphia to Berlin

D

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ur ing t he w eek of June 8 distinguished artist-teachers from the world renowned Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, were in residence at the American Academy in Berlin, a stay made possible through the generous support of Academy trustee Baroness Nina von Maltzahn. During their residency, Curtis faculty offered master classes to students at the distinguished Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler and, along with a few of their outstanding students, performed two evening concerts in Berlin: One at the Hans Arnhold Center and one at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, featuring the compositions of Beethoven, Mendelsohn, Ravel, and Jean Françaix, among others. Included on the roster of teachers were Mikael Eliasen,

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artistic director of the Curtis Opera Theatre, who led classes for voice students; Pamela Frank, a Curtis alumna, who led violin classes; viola students were coached by Curtis alumnus and current president Roberto Díaz, a former principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Curtis teachers and students also gave a private concert at the residence of Andrea Gräfin von Bernstorff and, later in the week, attended a concert by the Singakademie, also supported by Baroness Maltzahn, and a rehearsal of the Berliner Philharmoniker. This is the third consecutive year that teachers and students from the Curtis Institute of Music have graced the Hans Arnhold Center with their musical charm. Their stay each year is in fact part of the Curtis On Tour program, which brings the school’s extraor-

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The Curtis Institute of Music residency brings melody to the shores of the Wannsee

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dinary artistry to audiences throughout Europe, featuring tomorrow’s leading musicians performing alongside celebrated alumni and faculty. The American Academy extends its thanks again to Curtis faculty and students – and to Nina von Maltzahn for mak-

ing this annual visit such an anticipated gathering for lovers of music throughout Berlin.  r .j.m.

1.  trustee Nina von malTzahn 2. from curtis to the met: baritone elliot madore

N10 | Financial Overview of the American Academy in Berlin | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

• Financial Overview of the American Academy in Berlin •

The American Academy in Berlin is funded exclusively by private and corporate benefactors and does not accept any donations from governments or political organizations. We depend rather on the generosity of a widening circle of friends on both sides of the Atlantic.

The American Academy operates as a Charitable Private Corporation (gemeinnützige GmbH) in Germany, which is wholly owned by The American Academy in Berlin, Inc., a 501(c)3 organization based in New York City. Both organizations are registered charities and empowered

Sources of Income and Expenditure

Abridged Financial Information

Outlook for 2010

Our sources of income can be broken down as shown in the pie charts below:

Our Consolidated Balance Sheet as of December 2009 showed net assets of $36.5m, compared with $30.9m at the end of 2008.

Revenue

net assets by category:

The global financial crisis that swept across 2008 and 2009 has been felt by the American Academy, as we see some benefactors not renewing their pledges for subsequent years. We have responded to this situation by reducing our expense base to the extent that can be justified without impinging upon our academic program commitments. We are extraordinarily grateful to the members of our Board of Trustees, who continue to support us unhesitatingly, as we are to the descendents of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold, who from their founding gift onwards have continued their invaluable support of our young institution. Not least are we grateful to the multiple corporations, foundations, and private individuals who continue to enable the American Academy in Berlin to serve as a beacon of intellectual and cultural life in the German capital. Lastly, it should be noted that despite significant refurbishments, structural renovations, and technological upgrades due to be completed at the Hans Arnhold Center during the summer of 2010, we expect our institution to be close to break-even for this financial year.  a .w.

2009

This increase was attributable to a large extent to the recovery of global stock and bond markets during 2009.

2008

Corporate unrestricted Private unrestricted Corporate restricted Private restricted Other expenditures 2009

to receive tax-deductible donations in accordance with respective fiscal codes. In addition to donations to our annual fund, certain individual benefactors, groups of benefactors, and corporations have established endowments – both multi-year or in perpetuity – to

2008

2009 $m

2008 $m

Available for operations:

2.1

0.3

Board-designated endowments

8.6

5.8

Fixed assets

2.6

2.8

13.3

8.9

Temporarily restricted assets

11.3

11.5

Permanently restricted assets

11.9

10.5

36.5

30.9

2009 $m

2008 $m

Net cash provided by operating activities

1.2

1.5

Net cash used in investment activities

(3.0)

(3.2)

Cash flows from financial activity

1.9

1.0

Exchange-rate effects

(0.4)

0.9

Net (decrease)/increase in cash and

(0.3)

0.2

abridged cash flows:

Fellows & Distinguished Visitor program Development General Administration

In line with regulations governing charitable organizations and applicable tax rules, whenever allowable we reinvest income from our endowments to further enhance the value and incomegenerating potential of such benefaction.

cash equivalents

secure the financing of named fellowships, distinguished visitorships, or lectureships. The American Academy prepares Consolidated Financial Statements in accordance with US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which are audited by independent auditors.

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Private Initiative – Public Outreach | N11

• Private Initiative – Public Outreach •

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 Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize Nina Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize in History Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize for Fiction Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize Marina Kellen French Berlin Prize in Music Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in the Visual Arts

Stephen M. Kellen Distinguished Visitorship John W. Kluge Distinguished Visitorship Kurt Viermetz Distinguished Visitorship Richard von Weizsäcker Distinguished Visitorship

Annually funded Fellowships and Distinguished Visitorships Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy Berthold Leibinger Berlin Prize Metro Berlin Prize Siemens Berlin Prize Axel Springer Berlin Prize David Rubenstein Foreign Policy Forum

Lloyd Cutler Distinguished Visitorship in Law EADS Distinguished Visitorship Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitorship INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILY FoUNDATIONS Founders’ Circle $1 million and above Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation and the descendants of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold Chairman’s Circle $25,000 and above The Arnhold Foundation Joel Bell & Marife Hernandez Constance & John P. Birkelund Lester Crown Marina Kellen French Werner Gegenbauer Richard Goeltz C. Boyden Gray Mary Ellen & Karl M. von der Heyden Richard C. Holbrooke Nina von Maltzahn William von Mueffling Christopher Freiherr von Oppenheim Maren Otto Norman Pearlstine & Jane Boon Pearlstine David M. Rubenstein Kurt Viermetz Trustees’ Circle $10,000 and above Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation Inge Groth-Fromm & Hartmut Fromm Helga & Erivan Haub Stefan von Holtzbrinck Dr. Pia & Klaus Krone Neubauer Family Foundation

Endowment Giving Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship in the Visual Arts Deutsche Börse AG, Villa Grisebach (Berlin), Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz & Bernd Schultz Marcus Bierich Distinguished Visitorship in the Humanities Dr. Aldinger & Fischer Grundbesitz und Vermarktungs GmbH, Deutsche Bank AG, Villa Grisebach (Berlin), Mary Ellen von SchackySchultz & Bernd Schultz EADS Distinguished Visitorship EADS Lloyd Cutler Distinguished Visitorship in Law Ruben Clark, Stephen M. Cutler, Dennis M. Flannery, Carol F. Lee, Daniel & Maeva Marcus, Joseph C. Pillman, David Westin, Roger M. and Jill J. Witten, Verband der Automobilindustrie, WilmerHale

CORPORATIONS AND CORPORATE FOUNDATIONS

President’s Circle $25,000 and above Alcoa Inc. Bank of America, N.A. Robert Bosch GmbH Patrons Buse Heberer Fromm $2,500 and above Cerberus Deutschland GmbH Robert Z. Aliber, Heinrich J. Barth, Daimler AG Waldtraut & Günter Braun, Stephen Daimler-Fonds im Stifterverband für B. Burbank, Gahl Hodges Burt, die Deutsche Wissenschaft Dennis & Hannelore Carter, Avna Deloitte & Touche GmbH Cassinelli, Matthias & Christa Druba, Deutsche Bank AG Jean-Marie & Elizabeth Eveillard, Deutsche Lufthansa AG Julie Finley, Georg & Doris Gafron, Deutsche Post AG Egon Geerkens, Hans-Michael & Germanwings Almut Giesen, Marisa & Carl Hahn, Goldman, Sachs & Co. Ina Vonnegut-Hartung & Wilhelm GÖRG Partnerschaft von Hartung, Klaus & Lily Heiliger, Ben Rechtsanwälten W. Heinemann, Erika & Jan Hummel, Henry A. Kissinger, Martin Köhler, John KPMG AG C. Kornblum, Renate Küchler, Jürgen & Macy’s Corporate Services Inc. Marsh GmbH Serap Leibfried, Regine Leibinger & MSD Sharpe & Dohme GmbH Frank Barkow, Lawrence Lessig, Erich Pfizer Pharma GmbH Marx, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, Julie Mehretu, Jens Odewald, Jeane Freifrau Philip Morris GmbH von Oppenheim, Thomas H. Pohlmann, Porsche AG Siemens AG Annette & Heinrich von Rantzau, Susanna Dulkinys & William D. & Nancy Ellison Rollnick, Erik Spiekermann, Daniel & Joanna Rose Fund, The Sage Edenspiekermann Foundation, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Hannes & Renate Schneider, Richard E. Telefónica O2 Germany GmbH & Co. OHG Snyder, Peter Y. Solmssen, Annaliese Vattenfall Europe AG Soros, Bernhard Speyer, Gesa & Klaus Vogt, Will Foundation (Hans George Will), Roger M. & Jill J. Witten Rafael J. Roth Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz & Bernd Schultz

Benefactors up to $25,000 American International Yacht Club e.V., Axel Springer Stiftung, Bayer Schering Pharma AG, Bentley Motors Limited, Bertelsmann AG, BMW AG, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Christie’s, Deutsche Bundesbank, EAG – European Advisory Group GmbH, FleishmanHillard Germany / Public Affairs & Gov. Relations, Goldman Sachs Foundation, Hemmerling & Constantin GmbH & Co. KG, The Hermes Foundation, Hotel Adlon, Hotel Savoy, Investitionsbank Berlin, Märkischer Golfclub Potsdam, Nextstop Inc., Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future,” Robert Bosch Stiftung, Rudolf August Oetker Stiftung, Villa Grisebach (Berlin)

This list reflects contributions made to the American Academy from May 2009 to May 2010. Friends  up to $2,500  Samuel Adler & Emily Freeman Brown, Liaquat Ahamed, James Attwood, Barbara Balaj, Stefan Beiten, Bialkin Family Foundation, Jordan Bonfante, David & Katherine Bradley, Diethart Breipohl, Eckhard Bremer, Irene Bringmann, Isabella von Bülow, Christian Bunsen, Caroline Bynum, Candia Clark, Remmel T. Dickinson, Brigitte Döring, Erika Falkenreck, Donald Fox, Michael Gellert, Marie Louise Gericke, Michael Geyer, Vartan Gregorian, Christian Hacke, Helga Haftendorn, Niels Hansen Memorial Foundation, Karen Hsu, Janklow Foundation, Roe Jasen, Isabel von Jena, Marion Knauf, Michael Libal, Quincy Liu, Hans-Jürgen Meyer, Dare & Themistocles Michos, Stephanie Moeller, Michael Münchehofe, Sybille & Steffen Naumann, Jan-Daniel Neumann, Kathryn & Peter Nixdorff, Wolfram Nolte, Albert Rädler, Susan Rambow, Lawrence Ramer, Christa Freifrau & Hermann Freiherr von Richthofen, Hergard Rohwedder, Nancy & Miles Rubin, Kim Scheppele, Volker Schlöndorff, Harald Schmid, Pamela & Philipp Scholz, Philipp Semmer, Anne-Marie Slaughter & Andrew Moravcsik, Manfred von Sperber, Immo Stabreit, Ronald L. Steel, Fritz Stern, Teagle Foundation, Thomas von Thaden, James S. Tisch, Clarence & Melinda Trummel, Nikolaus Weil, Richard von Weizsäcker, Manfred & Rosa Wennemer, Hayden & Margaret Brose White, Sabine & Ned Wiley, Pauline Yu

N12 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

• Life & Letters •

Profiles in Scholarship The fall 2010 class of American Academy fellows Brigid Cohen

Contrary to its seemingly national boundaries, much modernist art is actually the work of émigrés, cosmopolitans, and refugees. This quiet fact goes too often unnoticed in theories of modernism, argues Berlin Prize Fellow Brigid Cohen, and it is particularly invisible in histories of the musical avant-garde.

Cohen, an assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina, would like to correct the oversight with her project “Sounds of Translation: Musical Modernism beyond the Nation,” which reframes the history of musical modernism, taking it beyond the nation as it is practiced by musical thinkers in response to the uprooted conditions of their times. Cohen holds a PhD from Harvard University, a Master of Music from King’s College London, and a BA from Wellesley College. She has received fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service (da a d), the Getty Research Institute, the Minda de Gunzberg Center for

European Studies at Harvard, the Paul Sacher Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Stanley Corngold

ers and thinkers as diverse as Dilthey, Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, and Adorno. Corngold received the Howard T. Behrman Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities upon retiring from Princeton. Among his books are Lambent Traces: Franz Kaf ka (2004) and The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (1986).

Franz Kaf ka was one of the greatest miners of human darkness at the fin de siècle. He also happened to work at an insurance company. Stanley Corngold, a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton Aaron Curry University, has taught Kaf ka for decades and sees some links here: Aaron Curry, the fall 2010 Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in His new project aims to adumthe Visual Arts, has repeatedly brate the aspects of European turned to some hallowed figlaw, philosophy, and the culture ures of early twentieth-century of insurance that threaded European modernism for inspirathemselves into Kaf ka’s thought. tion. His work successfully balCorngold’s book project “Franz Kaf ka: Scintillating Perspectives,” ances the search for modernist “mash-up” references with an which he aims to complete duroriginality of vision in a tight aesing his Berlin Prize Fellowship, thetic dialectic. In “Pierced Line involves the collaboration of (Brown Goblinoid)” (2008), a flat University of Siegen professor Benno Wagner, a fellow expert on plywood anthropomorphic form precariously balances on its spinKaf ka’s legal writings. dly legs like a Dali half-person A graduate of Columbia and laced with lines of spray paint; in his collages, the racy and banal semiotics of pop-culture icons meet face-to-face with African sculptures; and in “Ohnedaruth” (2009), a towering Dubuffet-like horse-form is comprised of collapsed, interlocked pieces of a mammoth steel puzzle. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Curry completed his mfa at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and has shown at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne, Cornell universities, Corngold the Michael Werner Gallery in taught at Princeton University London, and the David Kordansky from 1981 to 2009 and has pubGallery in Los Angeles. He has lished widely on German writalso been included in group exhi-

bitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. In 2009 the Vault Gallery at ucl a’s Hammer Museum hosted Curry’s first solo museum show. Laura Engelstein

Modern liberal thought is a hardwrought set of principles that cannot stand without political and institutional support. Laura Engelstein, the Henry S. McNeil Professor of Russian History and chair of the history department at Yale University, is interested in how modern liberalism became an ideology of resistance among Russian and Polish dissent intellectuals and public figures who

came of age in the decades preceding the decisive year of 1917. Caught between revolutionary violence and mob-appeal antiSemitism, these figures hewed a moderate course in defense of liberal values: individual and civic rights guaranteed by a democratically elected government under the rule of law. In her project “People Out of Place: Liberalism as a Form of Resistance” Engelstein

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

Gallagher, Eggers Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is interested in two closely related phenomena: the writing of counterfactual history and alternate history in the novel. Against common misapprehensions that the two are recent innovations, Gallagher explains that their roots go as far back

Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (2006). Co-chair of the editorial board of the journal Representations and a member of the editorial board of Flashpoints, Gallagher has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.

and Family’s Vanishing Place in Agriculture” – will tell the story of her 1970s citrus-growing family and community. Imperiled by the transformative arrival of commercialism, they were swept up in the tradeoff of the area’s identity and economy for “the false paradise of Walt Disney World.” As a national correspondent for the St. Petersburg Times

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intends to draw a group portrait of this generation and thereby focus on figures that transcended traditional boundaries – in personal histories, class and cultural expectations, and, consequently, in forced or voluntary emigration. The author of The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (1992) and, most recently,

passing the torch: the spring 2010 fellows of the american academy in berlin (from left to right): sunil khilnani, francisco goldman, camilo josé vergara, jeffrey chipps smith, david abraham, judith wechsler, andrew norman, peter wortsman, michael queenland, charles marsh, and janet gezari. (not picTured: leonard barkan, alex star, amy waldman)

Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (2009), Engelstein’s research has focused on the social and cultural history of late imperial Russia, with special focus on the role of law, medicine, sexuality, and the arts in public life. Catherine Gallagher

What would have happened if the South had won the American Civil War? Or if Vesuvius had never erupted? Catherine

as the seventeenth century. As the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the Academy, she will further detail where and why these hypothetical and speculative modes of writing originated. Gallagher’s prior work in cultural history has resulted in books such as Nobody’s Story: the Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (2004), which won the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding literary study, and The

Anne Hull

Walt Disney World is the largest recreation resort on earth, covering some 25,000 acres. But what now encompasses four theme parks, two water parks, two dozen on-site hotels, and two health spas was once pure Florida pasture. Journalist Anne Hull experienced this shift in ecology as a young girl, and her project as a Holtzbrinck Fellow – “The Bright State of Dislocation: Transformation, Racial Divides

(1985–2000), Hull covered topics ranging from welfare reform and capital punishment to immigration. Her writing at the Washington Post, where she has been for the past decade, has covered social policy, two presidential campaigns, Hurricane Katrina, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In 2008 Hull was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing the neglect and mistreatment of wounded soldiers at the Walter

N14 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

Reed Army Medical Center. The series also received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Selden Ring Award for

Investigative Journalism, the American Society of Newspapers Local Coverage Award, and the Heywood Broun Award. Tamar Jacoby

Tamar Jacoby is president and ceo of ImmigrationWorks us a, a national federation of employers working to advance better immigration law. She will transpose her research questions on US immigrant integration to Germany during her Bosch Public Policy fellowship at the Academy. Jacoby is particularly interested in how Germans have come to terms with the new face of an increasingly immigrant population: Do even the most far-sighted elites understand the transformation that is necessary? What are Germany’s most innovative approaches to integration? Can the country develop a national identity that is compelling to newcomers yet open enough to hold a diverse citizenry together? From 1989 to 2007 Jacoby was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and prior, a senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek and, from 1981 to 1987, deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page. Author of Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (2000), her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs, among other publications.

Martin Jay

Perhaps the most critical caesura between the Middle Ages and the modern era is a line of thought called nominalism. In short, nominalism assumes that the things of the world are individual and particular rather than reflections of a “real” thing that existed in the heavens – in a word, universals. Intellectual historian Martin Jay of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the world’s foremost experts on European intellectual history (Permanent Exiles, 1985), the Frankfurt School (The Dialectical Imagination, 1973), critical theory (Marxism and Totality, 1983), and visual culture (Downcast Eyes, 1993). He is now looking again at nominalism and its influence on the very birth of photography. His Academy project as the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow, “Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Reenchantment of the World,” has the rarified aim of explaining how nominalism has had an impact on twentieth-century visual culture generally. The author of scores of academic articles on German intellectual history, Marxist and post-structural theory, and visual culture, Jay has taught at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, Dartmouth College, UC Irvine, and the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Kirk W. Johnson

Kirk W. Johnson began working for us a id in December 2004. He served in Baghdad as the mission’s chief information officer and was then appointed to us a id’s senior staff as the agency’s first emissary to the city of Fallujah, in Anbar Province, and then on to other increasingly weighty positions. Throughout his time in the war zone, Johnson wondered how Iraqis who helped the US were going to rebuild their lives – whether in their own country or elsewhere. “Since returning from Iraq,” he says, “I’ve become deeply enmeshed

with the tragedy that has befallen Iraqis who risked their lives to help us.” So Johnson founded The List: Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, a leading public advocacy group for Iraqis who assisted the US government. To help people on The List, Johnson has gathered over a hundred attorneys from two leading law firms to offer thousands of hours of pro bono representation. His Bosch Public Policy fellowship at the Academy will be devoted to a book about this project, tentatively entitled Human Rubble: the Tragedy of Iraqis Who Believed in America, the first account of Iraqis whose aid to American occupying forces has cost them their country.

a feng-shui expert, unraveling a host of resentments and social tensions. The novel was selected a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and was nominated for a Stephen Crane First Fiction Award. The Disinherited is about the estranged son of a sugar magnate who leaves his teaching job at Columbia University to bury his father in the Philippines. During his Holtzbrinck fellowship at the Academy, Ong will work on a third novel: the story of an American philanthropist who decides to retire to the Philippines, where he sponsors local students and their dreams of attending college. Ken Ueno

Sets of opposites gyrate throughout composer Ken Ueno’s music: Han Ong visceral energy and contemplative Born in the Philippines, writer repose, hyperactivity and stillness, Han Ong moved to the US at tightly wound complexity and age 16. He wrote his first play sprawling expanse. Engaging in at age 17, and in 1994 moved to multiple modes of musical conNew York, where he received struction, Ueno, an assistant pronear instantaneous critical fessor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, is at once a composer of acoustic and electronic works, a performer, and a vocal improviser specializing in “extended techniques.” Such tonal and compositional variety has been infused by Ueno’s experience as an electric guitarist and overtone singer, his fascination with Japanese underground electronic music, and his awareness of late European modernism. acclaim as a playwright. Ong’s A graduate of West Point, literary preoccupations have Ueno holds degrees from concerned the immigrant Berklee College of Music, Boston and outsider experience and University, the Yale School of sometimes-resentful visitors to Music, and a PhD from Harvard “foreign” social hierarchies. At age University. During his Berlin 29 he became one of the youngPrize in Music Composition felest recipients of the prestigious lowship, Ueno intends to score a MacArthur Fellowship – and has twenty-minute solo percussion since received grants from the piece for Dame Evelyn Glennie Guggenheim Foundation and the and a thirty-minute work featurNational Endowment for the Arts. ing himself as the vocal soloist. Ong’s two novels, Fixer Chao James Wood (2002) and The Disinherited Anyone with English-language (2005), address themes of homoliterary affinities over the past sexual love and clashes of class two decades knows the work of and cultural values. In Fixer James Wood. From 1992 to 1995 Chao a male prostitute infiltrates he was the chief literary critic of New York high society posing as

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

the Guardian, then a senior editor at the New Republic, and, beginning in 2007, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Wood has focused on contemporary fiction and literary aesthetics – and their sometimes “hysterical” practitioners. Alongside his criticism in periodicals, Wood has stepped into bigger pools of literary reflection, such as in his bestselling book How Fiction Works (2008), two essay collections on criticism, The Broken Estate (1999) and The Irresponsible Self (2004), and a quasi-autobiographical novel, The Book Against God (2003). His reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, where he is a member of the editorial board. Since September 2003 Wood

has taught literary criticism at Harvard University. During his time as the Berthold Leibinger Fellow, he will work on “The Nearest Thing to Life: the Idea of Character in Fiction,” a historical, practical, and philosophical examination of the changing conception of the fictional character.

One sunny morning, Will Heller, a 16-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, gets on an uptown B-train in New York City. As the subway car rambles along, Will realizes he holds the key to saving the planet from global warming: he has to cool down his own body. But to do so he has to find a girl named Emily Wallace. What follows in John Wray’s novel Lowboy (2008) is a twisting and haunted

Announcing the spring 2011 fellows

T

al young man searches for his one great hope for contemporary America and the world. Lowboy, Wray’s third novel, has been hailed for its gripping, unsentimental account of mental illness and unstoppable narrative force.

Wray won a Whiting Writers’ Award for his first book, The Right Hand of Sleep (2001), and his second, Canaan’s Tongue (2005), led to Wray being named one of America’s Best Young Novelists by Granta. As a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Academy, Wray will work on a new work, tentatively entitled “The Lost Time Accidents,” which will follow a central European family from 1890 to the present over the course of four generations. The Toula family encounters a great many of the twentieth century’s political and social ideologies – Marxism, fascism, communism, environmentalism, neo-­conservativism – yet their great passion is decidedly non-ideological: physics, specifically the study of the nature of time.  r .j.m.

the Habsburg Monarchy’s imperial campaign for unity during the modern period; and El l en K ennedy, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, praises the macroeconomics of Walter Eucken, one of the architects of the German social market economy. Dav e McK enzie, a multi-media artist, will be the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts; and esteemed historian H.C . Er ik Midel fort delves into censorship culture in early modern Germany. Nor m a n Na im a r k, the chair of East European History at Stanford University, will study some con-

crete issues of Russia’s role in shaping post-Cold War Europe; and Dav id Ruder m a n, a professor of modern Jewish history and Director of the Center for Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, re-opens a book by an eighteenth-century Jewish mystic to trace its portals into modern philosophy; and, lastly, P. A da ms Si t ne y, a professor of humanities and visual arts at Princeton University, looks at the poetry of the cinematic sublime in the works of filmmakers Pier Paolo Pasolini and Andrey Tarkovsky and considers the influence of Jean Cocteau on American film.  r .j.m.

John Wray

Sneak Preview he incoming cl a ss of spring fellows promises yet another high-caliber lineup of intellectual and cultural programming. Ja mes Der Der i an, professor of international studies at Brown University, looks at the ethical issues of technology, social science, and war. Historian of modern Germany A s t r id Eck ert of Emory University reconsiders West Germany’s former borderland. Princeton

tale of Heller’s sometimes fantastic, sometimes terrifying odyssey through the tunnels and dead ends of Manhattan, as a delusion-

University professor of art and archaeology and one of America’s most prominent art critics, Hal Foster, reinvestigates modernity’s aeshetic gambit; novelist R i v k a Ga lchen summons a fake prophet who begins to believe her own machinations; social critic and professor of journalism Todd Gi t l in takes on the problems of the American media; Pei t er Judson, a professor of history at Swarthmore College, traces

Call for Applications The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for residential fellowships for the 2011–2012 and future academic years. The application deadline is October 1, 2010. Prizes will be awarded in February 2011 and announced in the spring of 2011. Approximately two dozen fellowships are awarded to established scholars, writers, and professionals who wish to engage in independent study in Berlin. Prizes are conferred annually for an academic semester and on occasion for an entire academic year, and include round-trip airfare, housing, partial board, and a monthly stipend of $5,000.

Fellows are expected to reside at the Hans Arnhold Center during the entire term of the award. Fellowships are restricted to candidates based permanently in the US. American citizenship is not required and American expatriates are not eligible. Candidates in academic disciplines must have completed a doctorate at the time of application. The Academy gives priority to a proposal’s significance and scholarly merit rather than its specific relevance to Germany. While it is helpful to explain how a Berlin residency might contribute to the project’s further development, candidates need not be working on German topics. Application forms may be submitted through the Academy’s website, www.americanacademy.de.

N16 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center

Alumni Books Recent releases from former fellows

Paul Berman

Flight of the Intellectuals Melville House, 2010

Ward Just

Gary Shteyngart

Exiles in the Garden Harcourt, 2009

Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel Random House, 2010

Milad Doueihi (with Jane Marie Todd)

Augustine and Spinoza Harvard University Press, 2010 Jonathan Safran Foer

Eating Animals Little, Brown and Company, 2009 W.J.T. Mitchell (Editor)

Helen Vendler

Critical Terms for Media Studies University of Chicago Press, 2010

Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts) Princeton University Press, 2010

Jerry Z. Muller

Capitalism and the Jews Princeton University Press, 2010 Benjamin Buchloh

Sigrid Nunez

(co-Author)

Salvation City Riverhead Books, 2010

Gabriel Orozco Museum of Modern Art, 2009 Richard B. Freeman Svetlana Boym

Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea University of Chicago Press, 2010

Reforming the Welfare State: Recovery and Beyond in Sweden University of Chicago Press, 2010 Thomas Geoghegan

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life New Press, 2010

Hayden V. White

John Phillip Santos

The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire: A Tejano Elegy Viking, 2010

Alexander Nagel)

Christopher S. Wood (with

Anachronic Renaissance Zone Books, 2010 Anne Carson

Nox New Directions, 2010 Henri Cole

Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982–2007 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010

Sander Gilman

Obesity: The Biography Oxford University Press, 2010

© Courtesy Luhring Augustine and White Cube

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 33

Gregory Crewdson,
Untitled
(Beneath the Roses),
2003,
Digital chromogenic print
144.8 x 223.6 cm

uncanny rema A homecoming glean

By Rivka Galchen

The following is an early draft of the opening to my novel Atmospheric Disturbances, about a man who knows that the woman who comes home one day and claims to be his wife is, in fact, no longer his wife. My narrator argued with me, altered his character, made certain prefatory and anxious throat-clearings of his no longer “in character.” but I remained fond of that alternately difficult Leo that never came to be and was sad to see him replaced.

34 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

I’

m t ry ing to in t roduce myself. The ancient Greek writings on rhetoric explain that an introduction is only appropriate, or necessary, when dealing with a “hostile” audience, or an ignorant one. I don’t know who I will have as readers – hopefully my minor prominence will gain me a sizeable audience despite allegations of my mental decline – but lacking even the briefest self-disclosing banter from you, I offer this brief intro, by way of making assumptions on the side of caution, and politeness. I am a fifty-year-old male psychiatrist with no previous hospitalizations and no relevant past medical, social, or family history. I alone know Rema is missing. I and, maybe, Tzvi Gal-Chen. This and other private knowledge leads me to behavior that seems outwardly strange, particularly to the woman living in my old apartment who calls herself “Rema.” But I would like to find Rema. And even failing that I would like to be allowed to return to my normal life – as much as is possible – among friends and colleagues. I will therefore herein attempt to set out the origins and contents of my current state of knowledge,

so that the apparent eccentricities of my words and behavior can reveal their inherent sense. And so that certain recent “natural” disasters may be more properly understood, and addressed.

An ersatz Rema appears on a temperate stormy night

O

ne unusua lly r a in y e v ening last December, when I was home early with a migraine, a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife Rema. This woman closed the door casually behind herself. Her hair was wet. Peering over the edge of Rema’s pale blue leather shoulder bag – that’s what this other woman was carrying – was a russetfaced puppy. The real Rema doesn’t like dogs. A hayfeverishly fresh scent of shampoo, of Rema’s shampoo, was filling the air yellowly, and through the brashness of that grassy scent I squinted at the doppelganger, and at that dog, acknowledging to myself only a deep sense that something – something – was extraordinarily wrong.

Yes. Extraordinarily wrong. It was those words precisely that came to me, turning up unexpectedly, like an old movie stub found in the pocket of a coat not worn for years. I remember her standing by the door. Her hair obscured her face somewhat as she leaned down to de-shoe, but I could see: same unzipping of wrinkly boots, same taking off of same baby-blue coat with oversized charcoal buttons, same tucking of dyed cornsilk-blonde hair behind ears, thus enabling me a better view of: same wide cheekbones, bite-sized nose, dove-dark eyes. Same bangs cut straight across like on those dolls done up in native costumes that live their whole lives in plastic cases held up by a metal wire around the waist. Same everything, but it wasn’t Rema. How I knew? Just a feeling. But what is a feeling but a thought groping its way towards articulation? Like the moment near the end of a dream when I am sometimes able to whisper to myself, “I am dreaming.” I remember once waking up from a dream in which my mother, dead now for decades, was sipping tea at my kitchen table, reading a newspaper on the back of which there

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Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 35

was a headline, “Wrong Man, Right Name, Convicted in Murder Trial.” I was trying to read the smaller print of the article, but my mother kept moving the paper, readjusting, turning pages. When I woke up I searched all through the house for that newspaper, and through the garbage outside as well, but I never found it. “Oh,” the simulacrum said quietly, seeming to notice the dimmed lights. “I’m sorry,” she added; her imitation of Rema’s Argentine accent was pitch-perfect. The simulacrum held that other monster, that puppy, against her chest, blocking my view of that camisole line as she began a remarkable imitation of Rema’s slightly irregularly rhythmed walk across the room, past me, into the kitchen. I heard her setting the teakettle to boil. “You look odd,” I found myself saying. “Yes, a dog,” she called out happily from the kitchen. She began to speak at length, maybe about the dog, maybe not, I couldn’t quite concentrate. She said something about Chinatown. Not seeing her, just hearing her voice, and the rhythm of her customary evasions, made it seem like she was really Rema.

But this strange look-alike woman, when covering. And when I felt a hand on my shoulder, “I feel so rainy today,” I whispered, she kissed my forehead, I blushed. “I’m sorry about yesterday,” she said with “It must be the tired.” a pout. “I’m sorry I was making theater.” y t he t ime t he water neared its Which was a Rema turn of phrase. I covboil – the ascending pitches of our teaered my eyes with my hands so I wouldn’t kettle’s tremble are so familiar to me – have to look at her. My migraine winced I was considering a diagnosis of Migraineand pulsed, as if in time with that grassy Induced Psychosis. Or if not migraine scented shampoo that always makes my psychosis then I’d settle for simply the catchhead feel tinny and that I love in an emptyall Psychotic Disorder nos (Not Otherwise stomach kind of way. I didn’t want to think Specified), which I hoped over time would what I was thinking. I was thinking: How reveal itself to be that ineffable but essentialcan I stop thinking these thoughts? I’m too old ly harmless imp, a Brief Psychotic Episode. for a schizophrenic break, I thought, trying All this oversimplified diagnostic nonto break the other inarticulate thoughts. sense I offer simply because I’d like to And too tired for this to be mania. And too emphasize that I began this investigation young for – But when something unforewith many of the same hypotheses that othseen happens it can only be realized iteraers are still considering. But now I’ve moved tively, in retrospect, gaining in reality one beyond them.  µ facet at a time. “Monster?” she whispered loudly, which Rivka Galchen is the author of is Rema’s pet name for me. Atmospheric Disturbances (2008) and “I don’t think – ” I said suddenly, surin 2010 was selected one of The New prised by my own words, “you’re Rema.” Yorker’s 20 Best Writers Under 40. “You’re mad with me?” “No,” I said, and turned to hide my face in In spring 2011 she is a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction at the the sofa’s cushions. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled American Academy in Berlin. to the small-weave wool of the cushion’s

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36 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

These Labyrinths of Terrible Differences Composer Stefan Wolpe aimed to reconcile the most heated of national identities by making music beyond the nation.

By Brigid Cohen

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n August and Sep t ember of 1938 the avant-garde émigré composer Stefan Wolpe delivered two speeches at the World Center for Jewish Music (wcjm) in Jerusalem advocating a sweeping set of agendas and programs in response to what he called “the stench of looming disasters across the world.” Founded in 1937 by the musical activist Salli Levy, a student of Wolpe’s since 1935, the wcjm realized Levy’s long-standing dream to link Jewish musicians worldwide through a central organization that would preserve and encourage Jewish musical activities through research, concert management, and publication. Wolpe’s speeches expressed even vaster ambitions. He thought the wcjm should work as a “helping hand” to facilitate a reconfiguration of music educational throughout the British Mandate of Palestine in order to promote cross-cultural understanding and a pluralism of musical practice. Delivered at the height of the Arab Riots, Wolpe’s plan assumed staggering proportions. He envisioned a corps of “flying instructors” that would teach the music of “different peoples” and diverse compositional techniques across Jewish rural settlements; advocated hiring “master-practitioners” of non-Western, especially Arab music at conservatories; suggested enlisting the Palestine Broadcasting Service to record musical traditions worldwide, including in soon-to-be Nazi-occupied parts of central Europe; proposed a national conference to debate the complex implications of appropriating “folklore” in Western notated composition; and called for a press,

a statewide magazine on musical culture, and diverse neighborhood choruses to transform musical life in the region. As the composer would later state, he sought “to heighten the energy with which the most different kinds of cultures and productiveness, such as one finds in Palestine, unite.” Wolpe’s proposals may seem dreamy and speculative, all the more so since the composer immigrated to New York only a few months after delivering his speeches at the end of 1938. Yet if aesthetic modernism is understood – in the manner of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault – as an ethic and attitude that urgently signifies the present and imagines the world otherwise, then Wolpe’s plan remains relevant as a richly theorized collection of cultural possibilities.

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olpe’s u topi anism h a d solid roots. As a young man in the early 1920s, he had studied at the Bauhaus, the utopian socialist experiment in art education that challenged boundaries between art and everyday life. Before the collapse of the Weimar republic, he had dedicated himself to antifascist, revolutionary Marxist politics, composing for agitprop theater troupes, conducting workers’ choruses, and spending a month in the Soviet Union, in May 1933. Wolpe firmly believed in music’s capacity to spur social change through transformative aesthetic experience. And he believed that such experiences of transformation, when fostered in intimate community contexts, could eventually carry across many segments of society. This belief led him to stake a particularly optimistic and affirmative posi-

tion on music and its potential for political efficacy. As he wrote in 1933: Of course I know that all music can only be heard as music. But since all music at the same time emotionally transforms in the heart and concentration of the listener and the impression in the same way is received (in the energy of its rushing movements) like a ball – the listening person transmits the movement further, that means it participates in his life, it leads him, educates him, moves, drives, and in the most extreme way it changes him. It is striking to note that Wolpe wrote these deeply affirmative words about music’s capacity for inspiring change while in flight after the Nazi takeover in 1933. Yet it was precisely this seemingly hopeless political environment that made such hopeful ideals all the more necessary as a means of surviving and finding motivation in the midst of humanitarian catastrophe. While Wolpe’s Weimar-era political activity had centered overwhelmingly on causes of class struggle and revolution, his arrival in Palestine – where he immigrated in January 1934 after his wife, the pianist Irma Schoenberg, secured him a valid visa – saw renewed commitment and a growing focus on dilemmas of human plurality. Wolpe’s political activism through music took a new turn. From 1934 to 1938 he staked out a unique place within Jerusalem’s small Western art music scene, becoming one of the most dedicated and legitimate spokes-

© Photo courtesy of Paul Sacher Foundation

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 37

their new home that they might otherwise have simply dismissed or ignored. Brün’s words vividly capture Wolpe’s style of interaction and teaching: While walking to your lesson you already heard his voice loudly proclaiming something, singing, hollering, screaming, all the time making enormous noises. Everything was significant; everything was of the greatest importance right now; and when you then entered and walked up the stairs, you entered a situation of full concern with a terrific warmth and enthusiasm and eagerness, and it didn’t make any difference whether you were in or out – you just came into it, and it immediately continued, the last sentence he was just saying; he turned his eyes on you and continued it as if you had been there all day . . . . I learned from Wolpe, although he was not a philosopher; he demonstrated, he did not philosophize, he demonstrated unmistakably that things are not interesting; you take an interest in them. You look at a thing, and it becomes.

Stefan wolpe, circa 1936

men for the city’s nascent avant-garde. He was the only composer in the Yishuv – the Jewish community in Palestine – to develop a consistent following of students, both in the city and at various kibbutzim. He also taught composition and theory at the Palestine Conservatory, and as many as sixty of his students frequented Wolpe’s home, where – as student Josef Tal recalled – they came so closely to identify with the composer that they “even assumed his physiognomy.” Many of Wolpe’s underlings in Palestine were young German-speaking refugees,

some of whom had arrived alone without parents. Many regarded Wolpe as a fatherfigure who helped them to adapt to the trauma of their displacement. In the composer’s own idiosyncratic words, he taught Zweiheimigkeit or “two-homedness,” in addition to composition and theory. Many students recalled how they were drawn to his personal warmth, unconventional pedagogy, and aspirations toward a reconstructed way of life and community in Palestine. Wolpe’s student Herbert Brün described how the composer taught them to be attentive to the cultural artifacts and practices of

In Brün’s account, the “full concern” Wolpe exhibited toward his students, in turn, inspired in them an attentiveness toward the things of their new home. This ethic of attentiveness brought the possibility of new forms of identification to compensate for their lost pre-exile relationships and secure national identity. Wolpe’s own attention was consumed by the study of what he called “musics of today,” which included post-tonal idioms and local non-Western musics, rather than the modal counterpoint, fugues, and Bachstyle chorales traditional to German music education. He interpreted Arab musics with the ear of a modernist composer encountering it for the first time; he marveled at what appeared to be breathtakingly novel approaches to form, texture, timbre, and tonality. He admired Arab classical musics for their “smallest shadow-like variations, the art of developing melodically wild ideas, fantastic instrumentation, thrilling variation of dynamic transitions and manners of playing [with a] tonality so much more richly imbued.” In response to this heritage, Wolpe sought to create new compositional idioms, combining European and Middle Eastern traditions, which he called “amalgams.” His 1936 composition Suite im Hexachord,  fi

38 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

written for oboe and clarinet, exemplifies this idea: The second movement begins with a sustained arpeggiation in the oboe and clarinet, after which the oboe breaks out in melody against the drone of the clarinet. The melodic shape of the oboe line very clearly draws from Arab musics, with its smooth, stepwise motion and its subtly altering turns, trills, and staccato figures that precede and ornament sustained tones. The oboe and clarinet also tend toward heterophonic textures at the ends of phrases – another feature surely intended to reference Arab traditions. The Suite im Hexachord does not make use of functional diatonic harmony; rather the entire piece makes use of only six pitches – the hexachord of its title. This approach reflects not only Wolpe’s modernist interest in nondiatonic pitch collections, but also the composer’s study of the Arab maqam, a system of modes that links pitch-class collections with melodic patterns and modes of ornamentation. While the Suite im Hexachord surely connects with the long European tradition of Orientalist composition, it also signified in richer and more complicated ways than mere exoticism, given Wolpe’s position in Palestine and his association of the music with a specific project of cultural reconciliation. In Jerusalem, works like the Suite im Hexachord were performed in a monthly informal public concert series organized especially for friends and students, who also premiered their own compositions. These monthly performances, held in friends’ homes and rented auditoriums, were supplemented by Wolpe’s weekly student gatherings. In this context, it is not surprising that the composer became thrilled when some of his students also became invested in the idea of creating culturally “amalgamated” musics. Wolpe would later speak admiringly of his students’ “most beautiful [musical] thoughts” that show “traces of the influences of Arab neighborly surroundings.” In the early- to mid-1930s Wolpe and his circle’s interest in local indigenous traditions was indeed unusual. The Yishuv’s Western musical performance and educational institutions were known for their repertory narrowness, which focused on German and East European national traditions. Wolpe chafed at widespread prejudices against Arab musics in the Yishuv and within the German immigrant community. His work was rather in keeping with his friend the comparative musicologist Robert

Lachmann’s call to hear Arab musics “with sympathy rather than disdain.” Wolpe encouraged this attitude among his students who composed in genres ranging from chamber music to work songs to music for kibbutzim celebrations to songs for the Yishuv’s thriving new folk-song repertory.

A

s Wolpe’s speeches at the World Center for Jewish Music reveal, such cosmopolitanism could motivate a wider national political vision. In 1938 the stakes were impossibly high. The Arab revolt brought an abrupt deterioration in Arab-Jewish relations, with Arab and Zionist leaderships hardening in their determination to cease negotiations. The period witnessed an intensification of militant nationalist discourses in the Yishuv, intensified by the mounting humanitarian catastrophe in Europe. Wolpe’s alarm at the nationalist tides in Europe and the Middle East motivated his state-wide cross-cultural education plan. He wrote: I engage [at the wcjm] in a good unified-front effort against the stupidification and coarse conformist distortion [Verblödung und Verblökung] of living cultural concepts, in a country – large like an apple tree – that in a radio commission meeting a few days ago expressed the piece of wisdom that “Music – whatever kind – from Jews – whatever kind – from the beginning of time has always been good!!” Those are the ways of a people forced to endure the derision and outright activist idiocy of some other peoples [the Germans] – oh the terrible proportions [of this]! and added to the already country-wide sum of gruesomeness which passes on a relatively dangerous stupidity.

The exemplary model of nationalism that fueled Wolpe’s fears was, of course, Nazism, with its violently enforced claims of moral superiority and racially bounded identity. After his flight from Germany, in fact, Wolpe suffered repeated nervous breakdowns in response to his violent memories of the Nazi takeover. This recent past fueled the panicked tone of Wolpe’s personal writings, in which he railed against essentialist notions of race, ethnicity, and nation – especially as they shaped concepts of musical culture and the impulse to identify a Jewish national or ethnic style in music. At the same time, he was

responding to a newly emerging compositional trend that would eventually be called the Mediterranean School of Composition, associated with composers such as Marc Lavri, Paul Ben-Haim, Eric W. Sternberg, and Alexander Boskovitch. From the late 1930s onward these composers looked eastward for sources of Jewish identity, integrating MiddleEastern and East European musical idioms marked as “Jewish” within concert works based on Romantic and classical forms. Wolpe agonized over this trend, which in some ways resembled his own search for musical amalgams that had preceded the Mediterranean movement by only a year or two. Ultimately Wolpe bitterly concluded – alongside his friend Lachmann – that the Mediterranean School of Composition showed little regard for Arab culture. In the composer’s words, it sought “to force [Arab musics] – just like the quarters where it is expressed – into dependency through a correspondingly moderate domesticated tonality.” With this judgmental assessment Wolpe compared British military and Jewish paramilitary pacification of the Arab quarters during the 1938 riots with the absorption of non-Western musical materials within a prevailingly European aesthetic. This far-flung and hyperbolic comparison speaks to Wolpe’s tendency to interpret aesthetic cultural practices and attitudes as bound up with drastic human actions. Wolpe was so disturbed by the Mediterraneanist movement in composition that he also questioned the politics of his own efforts to write “amalgamated” musics, which he worried might amount to little more than cultural thievery. Intense expressions of self-recrimination emerged in his personal writings. “There is an abundance of guilt that must be brought to account,” he wrote. To encourage a more nuanced understanding of Jewish and Arab cultural identities, “[We] must precisely fix the education through which young people are to be raised.”

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olpe’s speeches at the wcjm can be understood as a last-ditch effort to spread his ideas about national music pedagogy reform during a time when he contemplated leaving Palestine. His decision to immigrate to New York at the end of 1938 was based on several factors, including his nervous breakdowns during the Arab riots; his serious hospitalization following his car being run off the road by an Arab driver; his

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 39

wife’s fear that the Axis powers might move nation in the Middle East. Recalling the through North Africa into the Middle East; cultural-political paradoxes of his work and professional problems caused by his there, Wolpe wrote in 1944 that the exciteunpopular cultural politics and modernist ment of creating music for a new nation aesthetic and his frustration at what he per- “succeeds, and in succeeding, points to a ceived as the parochialness of the art music magical power, which always makes me scene in the Mandate. contemplative and in the joy of the encounAfter moving to the United States Wolpe ter also deeply sad. (Because of such doubts wrote a letter to his friend Salli Levi asking I left Palestine. I no longer believed in such what had become of his initiatives at the national intimacies and magic circles.)” wcjm and expressing regret that they had Wolpe apparently saw his national ambibeen met with silence. He remained in tions as having depended on forms of magiclose contact with his friends in Jerusalem, cal thinking or fantasy that were at once all the while pursuing new commuattractive and deceptive. The composer nity involvements New York’s art-music subsequently referred to his departures scenes and bebop circles, among Abstract from Germany and Palestine as his “double Expressionist artists, at Black Mountain loss.” After his immigration to America, he College, and at the Darmstadt Summer avoided characterizing his work in national Courses for New Music. terms. He no longer envisioned his work as During these years in America Wolpe transforming society at a national level, but vacillated wildly in the appraisal of his work instead recognized a potential within avantand life in Palestine. At his most self-critigarde communities to preserve and acknowlcal, in 1944, he accused himself of exploitedge vital forms of cultural plurality. ative musical imperialism. Moreover, as a Wolpe’s pedagogical and cultural ambicomposer, he had become, in his words, a tions in Mandate-era Palestine may appear “thief of a history that had become foreign failed and abortive, especially given their to him.” He despaired of his dream to parlack of implementation and Wolpe’s harsh ticipate in the creation of a new multiethnic self-judgment. In recent decades, however,

increasing support has accrued to Wolpe and Lachmann’s belief in cross-cultural education as an indispensible step toward political reconciliation. In music, this aspiration is most visibly represented in Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said’s EastWest Divan Orchestra, the high-profile project that brings together young Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian musicans in performances across the Middle East. As Wolpe’s friend and student Yohenan Boehm remarked in an interview the 1980s, his teacher was “a terribly impractical man [whose political] outlook was . . . ahead of its time.” Stefan Wolpe’s case may reveal a moment when the most seemingly necessary actions were also utterly impossible in the midst of intractable political dilemmas. But one must endure and persevere, as he said, in “these labyrinths of terrible differences, dilemmas of truths, disappointments, and adaptations.”  µ Brigid Cohen is an assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina and a fall 2010 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy.

40 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

the price of entry Whatever happened to Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl?

© Photograph Courtesy of the artist

By David Abraham

camilo josé vergara, 6 AdalbertStrasse, Berlin, 2010 

Fall 2010 | Number Nineteen | The Berlin Journal | 41

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n recen t y e a rs t he topic of immigration has become increasingly difficult and painful, particularly for the liberal left. In the prosperous, immigrantreceiving nations of the North, two paired, often unuttered questions have risen to near the top of legal and political agendas: Who belongs to the national, political, and social community of the “we”; and, What does belonging entail in the way of rights and obligations? Under the impact of unprecedented free mobility of both capital and labor, in addition to multiple crises of the welfare state, the borders and bonds of citizenship have been changing – and for the most part weakening. If we consider two countries, Germany and the United States, a general trend of immigration begins to emerge: There is an inverse relationship between the ease of access to citizenship and what that citizenship actually offers. Citizenship is easiest to acquire in the United States, but it is of less social and economic value, and it offers less of a premium over mere legal residence. “Hyphenated Americanism” – Thai-American, Mexican-American, and the like – has presented a viable integration strategy for most groups, and it fits into a dominant ideology of a weak state and pluralistic society. Germany, in turn, has until very recently had a very restrictive immigration policy, offering permanent admission and prospective citizenship on a very selective (and largely ethnic) basis and, as is well known, has had a difficult time integrating its non-EU foreign-born residents. Neither multiculturalism nor explicit integrationism has been especially successful. Yet entrance into Germany’s social-market society, on the other hand, offers a panoply of social and economic rights that could not even be contemplated in America’s freemarket liberal individualist society. The difference between the two countries’ policies has much to do with demographics, history, and ideology. When it comes to incorporating new immigrants, historic and crowded places like Europe are at a distinct disadvantage compared to America, a land whose law is libertarian and which values toleration and some trust – but is no friend to social solidarity and puts little premium on citizenship. Insofar as democratic citizenship involves, as the political scientist Jean Cohen has written, “the sovereign self-determination of a people, and the will to act in its name and make sacrifices,” a “we” to which members belong and “in whose delibera-

tions they have a voice,” American citizenship is indeed weak. To the extent that the American demos is experienced in civic and political, albeit historically embedded rather than in ethno-cultural terms, it is open and egalitarian. The combination of easy entry for newcomers, decentralized labor markets, modest social transfers, and weak democratic self-rule has prevented American citizenship from thickening culturally over time. But most unchosen, pre-political, and exclusionary elements are now marginal compared to other times and other places. “Common sympathies” and “proper patriotism” are not hard for newcomers to come by in the US. While American-style civic nationalism may have the potential to create a “level playing field” for free individuals, it is unsuited for the “solidarity” of social justice. Most American rights are negative liberties – Keep the government off my back – and they are accorded to all persons rather than just to citizens. Human-rights liberalism in its current form makes few social

Acceptance of the multicultural, or at least pluralist, composition of German society has been gaining ground in theory as well as practice. demands and thus works well as an adjustment to the American way. Ideologically, if not in perfect reality, America gives everyone a level playing field, but not a ladder. And certainly it does not fix the floor. But some thicker sense of affinity, similarity, shared identity, or social cohesion may be necessary for social-rights citizenship. Over the years Germany has indeed advanced this model. Acceptance of the multicultural, or at least pluralist, composition of German society has been gaining ground in theory as well as practice. The years 1999/2005 saw the first German Citizenship Laws embodying jus soli (birth on the soil) principles, and 2003 then saw the formulation of the first immigrantattracting immigration law in modern German history (Zuwanderungsgesetz). Naturalization in Germany is now possible after a shorter period of time and with fewer behavioral requirements. Almost everywhere in Europe, in fact, there is now a legal entitlement to citizenship for secondgeneration migrants through jus soli  fi

42 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

principles; it is no longer a matter of exception or grace. Still, while most European states and the US have come to accept dual citizenship, Germany has not. What was the central goal of German naturalization law? To ease access into German society for all those born in Germany. Legally, that meant introducing birthright citizenship to the children of long-term resident aliens and easing the naturalization process for those residents not born in the country. By thus distancing, if not divorcing, citizenship and membership from ethnicity, reformers sought to facilitate integration into a more capacious German identity and society. Immigrants would more easily and more willingly become German, while “German” itself would come to mean something broader. Naturalization provisions and citizenship criteria were symbolically moved from the Aliens Act (renamed the Residence Act) to the Citizenship and Nationality Act. The chief object of the new legislation was to institute jus soli, naturalization as a matter of right, and language-centered,

National belonging is more than rational attachment; it assumes some measure of shared pre-political community Constitution-affirming integration commitment. In so doing, Germany legislated a civic national identity open to all, including the 10-to-12 percent of the population classified as foreigners (and of whom one-fifth were German-born). But even civic national identities are culturally inherited artifacts, developing as they pass from generation to generation. National belonging is more than rational attachment; it assumes some measure of shared pre-political community arching over any agreement on legal-procedural rules and makes a nation more than a political community organized around voluntary association. Perhaps it demands integration not just mutual respect. German administrators may have been naively optimistic when they wrote in 2000, “The acquisition of nationality marks the beginning of social integration.” Legal status first, integration second. Here is where Germany has had some problems, reflected in the continued poor educational and social-economic per-

formance of immigrants and increased tensions between “secularized Christian” liberalism and Muslim self-assertion. Long term, inadequate integration threatens Germany’s high collective social-wage and solidarity principles. Social policies in the welfare state operationalized citizenship and provided a domain where it was constituted – albeit not equally for everyone – through a political economy. A much more individualized, neoliberal, “thinner” society would perhaps be in a better position to pursue integration around civic-constitutional and cultural principles.

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urv e y ing a w ide swat h of evidence in Germany, sociologists Hermann Kurthen and Schmitter Heisler hypothesize that the market sector has been less integrated over time in Germany than in the US, “reflecting Germany’s more controlled and less flexible labor-market structures and highly institutionalized credentialism (i.e. apprenticeships),” compared to the US’s “more flexible labor market, especially in the low-wage sector, low degree of unionization, and lower degree of credentialism.” Contrariwise, they find “more integration in the welfare benefits sector in Germany, reflecting the more generous and more inclusive German welfare state, potentially compensating for the lower degree of labor market integration.” And in the cultural sector, notwithstanding a variety of barriers, Mexicans are “comparatively more integrated than (Muslim) Turks,” suffer less exclusion, and express more positive identification with their new country, though both groups continue to show poor school and language performance. In all cases, the effects of low human, social, and economic capital are hard to overcome. There is a long tradition of explaining America’s inequality and lack of redistribution by pointing to its diversity. Yet ethnic and cultural diversity may very well have the same type of negative economic impact in Europe. Over a decade’s worth of very careful work by Harvard economist Alberto Alesina and colleagues has produced some troubling findings – troubling for those who support the welfare state and who would simultaneously value liberalism’s equal desire to accept difference. In this bivalent desire they have found a rub. Among Alesina’s findings are that if those who are “different” are concentrated

among the poor, then programs that support the poor become the objects of public hostility. For example, half the gap between welfare spending in the US and Europe is explained by American heterogeneity. That is, it is possible that generalized trust, reciprocity, and loyalty are negatively related to a community’s diversity; or, the more diverse a community, the less social trust. Second, flows of foreigners are negatively related to spending on welfare state programs. Even some of the staunchest defenders of the multicultural immigration model have concluded that the typical industrial society would be spending 15 to 20 percent more than it does now on social services had it kept its foreign-born percentage where it was in 1970. In light of this, newcomers, more often than not poorer than the resident population, are easily seen as exploiting social benefits. Political and social psychologists have long concerned themselves with issues of in-group/out-group behaviors and what we now call “othering.” Opponents of discrimination and exclusion have long argued that contact with difference can create tolerance and that humans have a cosmopolitan as well as a parochial potential. Indeed, the welfare state attempts to further this possibility by creating institutions of reciprocity. Let us help each other through each of our rough times. Such altruism may be calculated over repeated encounters or predicted on the basis of a broader empathy. If I am “my brother’s keeper” I either want to be confident of reciprocity or of familial resemblance.

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de a lly, t he w elfa re stat e creates virtuous circles of reciprocity and builds the trust that would fight off political entrepreneurs who would use “weak family resemblance” to divide people. The creation of social solidarity and trust is an outcome of a successful welfare state, while the welfare state is the product of a dependence upon a society with a considerable degree of social solidarity. The feedback is such that the social rights of citizenship constitute expectations, the satisfaction of which strengthens trust in the state and the sense of social belonging that then augments trust. Either way, “the welfare state,” as political scientist Gary Freeman observed long ago, “rests on a moral and political consensus, binding members of the national community in a set of reciprocal relationships” directed toward equality on the bordered inside.

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camilo josé vergara, 18 Schlesische strasse, Berlin, 2010

Policy acknowledgement of these inconvenient facts can be seen on both sides of the Atlantic: In Germany, for one, in the limiting of jus soli benefits to children born to mothers legally or enjoying “genuine” ties to the country. There has also been an effort, in Germany but also elsewhere, to make it more difficult to access migration and citizenship through marriage. Despite the Grundgesetz’s strong commitment to family rights, the importation of “country girl” wives from the old country is widely seen as setting back integration and lan-

Chilean-born documentary photographer Camilo José Vergara has been shooting America’s ghettos and broken cities for over three decades. His photographs and accompanying stories have resulted in books such as American Ruins (1999), Unexpected Chicagoland (2001), and How the Other Half Worships (2005). At the American Academy in spring 2010 as a Berlin Fellow in the Visual Arts, Vergara took

guage acquisition. Lastly, in an effort to hold the center, as political scientist Christian Joppke describes, one increasingly sees “the attempt by states to tie citizenship more firmly to shared identities and civic competence,” thereby combating the “centrifugal tendencies” of increasingly diverse societies. As a consequence, new citizens (unlike born citizens) are called upon to consent to a contractual idea of membership; they are joining an already existing association, one with specific rules, a specific history, and maybe specific politi-

his documentary eye into the German capital, meandering through its open streets and hidden corners, through its past and present, in search of the city’s distinct personality. The result has been a stunning array of faces and façades, train-riders, shop windows, subway stations, and public spaces. The two photographs featured here are part of Vergara’s in-progress Berlin project, ongoing throughout 2011.

cal and cultural norms and values. Contra Groucho Marx: You have to want to belong to a club that would have someone like you as a member.

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i v en t hese va rious tendencies, we are impelled toward a rather unattractive conclusion: The US is more successful in integrating immigrants, and immigrants are more successful there, precisely because the US is marked by low levels of solidarity and a weak welfare state. Immigrants are on their own – along with the rest of us. In social democratic Europe, where social bonds and the welfare state are thicker, more thoroughgoing integration will remain necessary to preserve social solidarity and maintain the welfare state, with immigrants as functioning participants. The “sink or swim” of America may, perversely, be good for immigrants while impoverishing us all.  µ David Abraham is a professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law and was a Bosch Fellow in Public Policy in spring 2010.

image courtesy of the artist

44 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

Outcast Eyes The medieval philosophy of nominalism has rippled through the centuries and into our ways of making meaning out of what we see.

By Martin Jay

Dan Gluibizzi, Jr., i-lines [b], 2009, Watercolor on paper, 20 x 16 inches

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v er since i t s in v en t ion, in the 1830s, photography has posed a daunting challenge to the legion of theorists who have sought to make sense of its revolutionary implications. Variously a tool of scientific inquiry, artistic creation, and social memory, it has exploded conventional wisdom about visual experience, testing our sense of what an image is, how mimetic representation duplicates the world, and even how time itself can be frozen in a perpetual instant or captured in the flow of its movement. With the recent development of digital technologies, which seem to undermine the photograph’s function as a reliable recorder of an actual event or object in the world, many of these issues have been raised anew with no consensus yet arriving about their possible resolution. Sometimes it is useful to return to past moments in the history of thought to help us deal with present questions. In the case of photography, one possible yet rarefied resource is a tradition that emerged in medieval philosophy and that has had a lingering impact ever since: Nominalism. Beginning with the fourteenth-century Franciscan friar William of Ockham, whose celebrated razor was wielded to cut away imagined entities unnecessary to explain the world of experience, nominalism has been understood as promoting a principle of parsimony or economy. It sought to purify philosophy, in particular the reigning Scholastic orthodoxy of the medieval Church, of its excessive conceptual baggage, freeing it to confront the world as it existed in all its motley particularity. The nominalists’ favorite target was the alleged existence of supra-individual universals – abstractions – wrongly taken to be more real than the particulars that embodied them. Because it did so, nominalism has been understood as deeply anti-realist in its hostility to the essentialist Aristotelian ontology of the Scholastic tradition. For abstract universals it substituted the conventionalist linguistic name that we mere humans give to groupings of individual entities in the world that seem to share attributes – chairs, birds, oceans – thus earning the designation of “nominalism,” from the Latin word for name, nomen. Ridding the mental universe of unnecessary real universals and abstract objects, however, could open the door for something else. For when doubts about knowledge or the sufficiency of human reason were put forward, the way was opened for faith alone to be the sole source of certainty.

We may lack the means to sense or know real universals or abstract objects, but we can still believe that they exist. For Ockham, revelation was the only access we have to such entities as the soul’s immortality or the inherent attributes of God, such as His unfettered sovereign will. When it came to mundane matters, nominalism cleared the way for a less exalted source than God’s will. Nominalism says the categories we bestow upon the world are the product of human invention, an assumption which led to the self-assertion of the species in the face of a world that no longer could be read as a legible text filled with meanings written by God and available to human understanding – the socalled Great Chain of Being. The sovereign will of God unconstrained by innate ratio-

In visual culture, nominalism’s dominant exemplar has been photography, a medium that insists on capturing images of only specific things in the world. nal rules or essential forms is mimicked by the assertion of humankind producing an order that is less found than made. Modern science, for one, is indebted to this radical transformation: However much it pretends to passive discovery, its hidden corollary is the domination of pliant nature. As Ockham’s razor sliced through the building blocks of dominant medieval optics, it hit the idea of the “visible species,” which allowed an object to appear meaningful to the eyes that beheld it. Sight, in medieval optics, worked through the transmissions of these forms, from the object to the eye and vice versa. “Extramission,” as it was called, involved the sending out of species from the eye to meet those coming in through “intromission.” But Ockham rejected this idea as unnecessary, for it added an extraneous general concept, which he thought could be jettisoned in favor of understanding sight as simply an intuitive grasping of particular objects at a distance. Ockham’s razor also severed the Scholastic concept of organic aesthetic form, which, as Aquinas held, was comprised of an object’s integrity, clarity, and proportion, qualities believed to be universal norms. While subsequent efforts were made to rescue a generic metaphysics of

beauty (neo-Platonism returned during the Renaissance and the eighteenth century; neo-Aristotelianism enjoyed a twentiethcentury theoretical revival), the nominalist challenge remained. It contributed, for example, to the rise of the novel, that entirely anti-generic genre that defies virtually all of the traditional rules of beauty and form; and in musical compositions, in the works of, for example, Gustav Mahler, who denied an ontology of pre-given musical forms. In visual culture, nominalism’s dominant exemplar has been photography, a medium that insists on capturing images of only specific things in the world. But photography has done so by instantiating a version of the nominalist impulse I want to call “magical,” with a nod to the novelists who have developed a similar doctrine of “magical realism.” To make my case, let me take a detour through the work of a figure in the visual arts who carried the nominalist impulse to its extreme, the French (anti-) artist Marcel Duchamp. In inventing the brilliant provocation that came to be called “the readymade,” an object from everyday life that was selected as “art” rather than made by the skill of the artist, he denied the very idea of organic formal beauty. Duchamp himself understood his work, to cite a lapidary and cryptic note from his White Box in 1914, as “a kind of pictorial Nominalism,” a term that appeared throughout Duchamp’s writings.

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ow does Duch a mpi an nominalism fit with our understanding of photography in nominalist terms? For one, whereas mainstream modernist abstraction pursued the elusive goal of the essential purity of the medium – as Clement Greenberg never tired of reminding us – Duchamp performatively rejected that quest by giving up painting itself. Abandoning not only the mimetic task of painting – copying what was on the other side of a framed, transparent window onto the world – Duchamp also rejected the claim that the flat canvas was an opaque surface on which experiments in color, form, and a texture might be pursued. Instead, he decried all “retinal art” meant to provide pleasure to the eye, in favor of an art that was named as such by someone with the cultural capital to have his act of enunciation taken seriously. In other words, one meaning of pictorial nominalism was the idea that the intrinsic qualities of the object were less important than the act of naming it a work of art and getting  fi

image courtesy of the artist

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concept. If words are to be understood as names, it is not in the sense of a linguistic sign but rather that of the proper name, which does nothing to describe the characteristics of the person to whom it refers or to subsume him under a concept, but rather rigidly designates him or her as a unique entity. Magical nominalism has to be differentiated from its conventionalist cousin in its relative de-emphasis of the enunciative function of the artist, that moment of selfassertion ex nihilo, a critical implication of the Ockhamist critique of real universals. Duchamp sensed that it was only by diving into the nostalgic past that he could carry out his nominalist function. The readymade is something given by history, not created by the artist in the present, and is then re-named an “art object” – not a painting or a sculpture, but simply “art object.” As such, it means nothing aside from that name, no longer an object of use, not an object of formal beauty within a generic tradition. Its value, we might say, lies solely in what it is now designated.

T Dan Gluibizzi, Jr., mW i-lines, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

the legitimating institutions – museums, galleries, collectors, historians of art – to accept the act as valid. Eschewing the older ideal of creative genius in which the gifted artist somehow channeled the same innovative spirit that God has shown in willing the world into being, miraculously making the invisible visible, Duchamp effaced himself, or at least his talent as a traditional artist, and became the more modest designator – the namer – of found objects as readymade works worthy of display in museums. In this sense, pictorial nominalism was a variation of the older impulse found in Ockham, which denied that inherent qualities existed in the world that could serve as standards of beauty. It was a radical conventionalism in which the decision of the enunciator – the one who can get away with saying this bottle rack or

this urinal is a work of art and should be in a museum – trumped any intrinsic rules of formal beauty, such as proportion, organic wholeness, or integrity. There was, however, another sense in which pictorial nominalism moved beyond this conventionalist usage and gestured towards a kind of nominalism that was no longer understandable solely in terms of denial and disenchantment. It is this second kind that I want to call “magical nominalism.” Duchamp wanted to reduce words to their non-communicative status, expressing nothing of the intention of the mind that might speak them or descriptive of an external world to which they might refer. Ideally spoken by no one, they defy both interpretation into something else and their subsumption under a generic

o understand t he implications of all this for photography will require a quick glance at the writings of two critics, who at one time or another had illuminating things to say about art in general and photography in particular: Walter Benjamin and Rosalind Krauss. In Benjamin’s seminal 1916 essay “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man,” he adopted what has been called an “Adamic” view of languages: the Fall into a Babel of different tongues was preceded by an Ursprache, an original pure language. He began by expanding the word “language” beyond a tool of human communication or mental expression to include everything in animate and inanimate nature. Whereas conventional notions of language privilege communication between humans about a world of objects, the more expansive notion “knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means: in the name, the mental being of man communicates itself to God.” Although only God possesses the perfect language in which name is equivalent to thing, man approximates it through the giving of proper names: “The theory of proper names is the theory of the frontier between finite and infinite language.” Language in this expanded sense is therefore more than mere signs, more

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than arbitrary conventions invented to communicate abstract ideas or enact intersubjective performatives. After the Fall into Babel, however, the project of regaining the perfect language was thwarted by what Benjamin calls “overnaming,”

unique things to which they had been equivalent before the Fall into Babel and conventionalist pluralism of different human languages. But like Duchamp’s pictorial nominalism, Benjamin’s soughtafter restoration also dislocates objects

There was a parallel between the way readymades and photographs were produced: both were “uncoded events” that extracted signs from their contexts. which produces the melancholy of a disenchanted natural world no longer at one with its original names. For Benjamin it is the act of translation that offers hope of reunification: it aims at getting beyond the inadequacies of individual languages and approaching the Ursprache beneath them. Here, in Benjamin, we have a nominalism that fully earns the adjective “magical” in the sense that it rejects both abstract universals in the Scholastic tradition and conventional names in its Ockhamist nominalist opponent. Instead it posits the possibility of regaining original names, “true” names, as designating, indeed being at one with, the specific, qualitatively AmercAcademie_185x124

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from their functional contexts of use and resituates them in a new realm in which they are without any communicative meaning beyond their existence as qualitatively distinct things. We are, to be sure, still a far cry from photography. And here Rosalind Krauss’s influential essay of 1977, “Notes on the Index,” comes briefly to our aid. In the context of an explanation of Duchamp’s rejection of painting and his overcoming of self-depiction, she turned to the importance of the photograph’s indexical relationship – or factual trace, like tracks in the snow or handprints on a wall – to the world. Drawing on C.S. Peirce’s distinction

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of icon, symbol, and index, Krauss argued that “the photograph heralds a disruption in the autonomy of the sign. A meaninglessness surrounds it which can only be filled by the addition of a text.” She then audaciously linked Duchamps’s readymades with the photograph, writing that it was “not surprising that Duchamp should have described the readymade in just these terms. It was to be a ‘snapshot’ to which there was attached a tremendous arbitrariness with regard to meaning, a breakdown of the relatedness of the linguistic sign.” There was a parallel between the way readymades and photographs were produced: both were “uncoded events” that extracted signs from their contexts.

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i t h t hese poin t s in mind, let us return to our point of departure: William of Ockham’s nominalism may have denied the intrinsic intelligibility of the world in terms of real universals, but, as noted, it opened the door for faith. Magical nominalism can perhaps be understood as one variant of that faith, which is revived in visual terms most powerfully in the case of the photograph.  fi

„Every time I come here, it lifts my spirit.“ Eric Kandel, New York

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48 | The Berlin Journal | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

But if we see the photograph instead as a miraculous freezing of a single ephemeral moment, a moment that is utterly irreducible to what came before or after, an

The photograph, in short, is a reminder that the world is more than human projection or construction, more than the categories we impose on it, more than the meanings we impute to it. uncanny moment that somehow is present when the image is later viewed despite its absence, then perhaps it can be understood to betoken something magical. Like a fetish, wrested out of the contextual flow of linear time, the conventional time of historical narrative, it resists being absorbed into a cultural whole. Like a proper name, it refers only to one singular object at one instant of its existence. And as such, it limits the sovereign power of the constitutive subject. Although we know that photographs, even before the age of digitalization, are

amalgams of the instant of their being taken and the subsequent work on them in the developing, printing, and displaying processes, that instant is never entirely absorbed into those posterior interventions. The photograph, in short, is a reminder that the world is more than human projection or construction, more than the categories we impose on it, more than the meanings we impute to it. Rather than the humanist self-assertion that some have seen as a consequence of conventionalist nominalism, it implies what we might call the counter-assertion of the world, a world more readymade than the product of human will, a world that somehow stubbornly thwarts all of our most valiant efforts to disenchant it.  µ Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and the fall 2010 Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy.

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What precisely is the object of that faith? Why do photographs grab us and demand our attention, telling us to stop the flow of time and pause in our rush into the future? Here, of course, we can only conjecture. But if we agree that they do not affirm a world of inherent ontological universals, or even an aesthetic canon of conventional forms, we can say that photographs somehow want to be understood as the visual equivalents of the Adamic names – the “true” names – Benjamin hoped to rescue from the “overnaming” of linguistic conventionalism. They want to remain stubbornly meaningless in the sense that they resist being paraphrased in terms that reduce their singularity to an exemplar or case of a larger category or even as a metaphor of something else. More precisely, despite all efforts to saturate them with meaning, photographs insist that they always contain a measure of excess that defies paraphrastic reduction. As Roland Barthes’ classic Camera Lucida observes, photography stresses the melancholy implication of its image as memento mori, a mark of the inevitably passing of time, implying our finitude.

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THE BERLIN JOURNAL  Number 19  FALL 2010

A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Nineteen | Fall 2010

THE BERLIN JOURNAL

New York’s newest attractions are built by us. It’s not just the tourists who are pleased about the new sights in the Big Apple. So are the passengers. That’s because the urban buses from our Orion brand are equipped with low-consumption hybrid drive, meaning that they make an important contribution towards climate protection. There are more than 3,000 of these innovative buses on the road in major US cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. Another milestone on our Road to Emission-free Mobility.

In this issue: David Abraham Brigid Cohen Stanley Corngold Rivka Galchen David Gelernter Todd Gitlin Martin Indyk

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Martin Jay
 H.C. Erik Midelfort Camilo José Vergara James Wood