Berlin Journal 17

CELEBRATING
TEN YEARS
OF BERLIN PRIZE
FELLOWSHIPS
In this issue:
H. G. Adler
Leora Auslander
Patty Chang
Robert Finn
Kenneth Gross
Lawrence F. Kaplan
Lawrence Lessig
Daniel Mendelsohn
Sam Nunn
Adam Posen
Dennis Ross
David Warren Sabean
Volker Schlndorff
A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Seventeen | Fall 2008
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
ll you invent the car, you're alao
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Fall 2008 | Number Seventeen | The Berlin Journal | 1
CONTENTS
The Berlin Journal | Number Seventeen | Fall 2008
8 sam nunn details the strategic necessity of
working together to rid the globe of nuclear
weapons.
14 volker schlndorff offers an intimate
glimpse of a youth spent transxed in
Parisian cinmatques.
18 leora auslander explains approaching
history through domestic objects often
neglected.
22 lawrence f. kaplan argues that the
Surge plan in Iraq was honed on the
ground, years before it became ofcial
doctrine.
29 daniel mendelsohn envisions an
alternate life for his Uncle Shmiel and
Aunt Ester. An unpublished excerpt from
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.

N1 On the Waterfront
The Academys newsletter, with the
latest on fellows, alumni, and friends, as
well as happenings in and around the
Hans Arnhold Center.
34 patty chang explains her fascination
with a Chinese actress and a mistranslated
encounter with Walter Benjamin in 1928.
38 lawrence lessig stumps for sensible
copyright reform amidst booming
electronic creativity.
43 kenneth gross visits the myriad stages
of Berlin and reports on the citys dramatic
vitality.
50 dennis ross discusses both sides of
the Israeli-Palestinian conict and why
stalemate is so often the result.
57 h.g. adler (19101988), the
modernist Czech novelist who
survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz,
re-imagines a familys dark ousting. A new
translation by alumnus Peter Filkins.
64 david warren sabean probes the ways
Western kinship has oddly shifted family
bonds.
70 adam posen reframes Germanys
distracting obsession with being the
Exportweltmeister.
74 robert nn breaks open some
mysteries surrounding Central Asia
and argues for the regions incipient
geopolitical importance.
81 Donations to the Academy
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RACHEL RABHAN, DREAM WARRIORS: JACOB VS. THE ANGEL
2 | The Berlin Journal | Number Seventeen | Fall 2008
DIRECTORS NOTE
A New Optics
T
o appropriate an insight from Walter Benjamins
essay Moscow: more quickly than Berlin itself, one learns
to see America through Berlin. To someone arriving in
the German capital, the city seems calm and untroubled. More
Wings of Desire than Symphonie einer Grostadt. Its architectural
incoherence is in part the consequence of warfare, but also
of battles over building heights and cosmopolitan aesthetics
in a city rich in Schinkel and Knobelsdorff, and, meanwhile,
Scharoun, Rossi, and Piano.
What is true of the image of the city and its people,
Benjamin continues, applies also to the intellectual situation:
a new optics is the most undoubted gain from a stay. Yet Berlin
is a city in ux, always becoming, and never is, as critic Karl
Schefer observed in 1910. Berlins fondness for the unn-
ished, openness, and reinvention oft seems American, whether
in its emulation of Chelsea galleries in the Zimmerstrasse,
the splattering of grafti reminiscent of Manhattan subways
decades ago, the entrepreneurial dynamism spawning schools
of governance, universities of energy, and underground clubs.
Schefer saw in Berlins ambitious urban culture of modernity
the desire to meld the cultural conscience of Europe with
Americas sense of reality.
Americans are confronted with many Americas in Berlin;
we learn to observe and judge Europe, but also to experience
America through many optics. A stay in Berlin becomes a
touchstone for every American scholar, writer, and artist
just as Berliners are reminded by their rich diversity of the
Whitmanesque breadth of our country.
The Academy welcomed its rst class exactly ten years ago
thanks to the resourceful determination of Richard Holbrooke
and the distinguished Germans and Americans he recruited
to establish an enduring post-Cold War American cultural
and policy presence in Berlin. The Academy, both private and
independent, has become a tribute to the generosity of many
who care deeply about the Atlantic bond, none more so than the
family of the great private banker Hans Arnhold and his wife,
Ludmilla, whose magnanimous commitment has greatly con-
tributed to the Academys viability and excellence.
We were gratied when Der Spiegel recently described the
Academy as the most important center of American intel-
lectual life outside the United States. In the coming decade
we will try to do justice to that high praise, to build upon
the optimism and striving for excellence that exemplies
Americas Berlin. Gary Smith
THE BERLIN JOURNAL
A magazine from the Hans Arnhold
Center published twice a year by
the American Academy in Berlin
Number Seventeen Fall 2008
PUBLISHER Gary Smith
EDITOR R. Jay Magill Jr.
MANAGING EDITOR
Katharina Pilaski
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Laura Kolbe, Bettina Warburg
ADVERTISING
Coralie Wrner, Berit Ebert
DESIGN Susanna Dulkinys &
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PRINTED BY Ruksaldruck, Berlin
Copyright 2008 The American
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ISSN 1610-6490
Cover: Detail of a sculpture by
Berlin-based Japanese artist
Chiharu Shiota; hundreds of shoes
stuck to a building in Berlin Mitte.
Photo (from 2008-09-25) courtesy of
John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images.
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
IN BERLIN
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OFFICER
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HONORARY CHAIRMEN Thomas L. Farmer, Henry A. Kissinger,
Richard von Weizscker
CHAIRMAN Richard C. Holbrooke
VICE CHAIR Gahl Hodges Burt
PRESIDENT Norman Pearlstine
TREASURER Karl M. von der Heyden
TRUSTEES Barbara Balaj, John P. Birkelund, Manfred Bischoff,
Diethart Breipohl, Stephen Burbank, Gahl Hodges Burt,
Caroline Walker Bynum, Gerhard Casper, Mathias Dpfner,
Marina Kellen French, Michael Geyer, Richard K. Goeltz, Vartan Gregorian,
Andrew S. Gundlach, Franz Haniel, Karl M. von der Heyden,
Richard C. Holbrooke, Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Josef Joffe, Michael Klein,
John C. Kornblum, Regine Leibinger, Lawrence Lessig, Nina von Maltzahn,
Erich Marx, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, William von Muefing,
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anniversary issue of the Berlin Journal.
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THE RACE BETWEEN
COOPERATION AND
CATASTROPHE
A plea from the co-Chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative
By Sam Nunn
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ADAM BARTOS, SOYUZ TM 28, 8/13/1998, BAIKONUR COSMODROME, KAZAKHSTAN
A
t the dawn of the nuclear age,
after the devastation of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, General Omar
Bradley said, The world has achieved
brilliance without wisdom.We know
more about war than we know about peace,
more about killing than we know about
living.
It might have surprised General
Bradley, if he were alive today, to know that
we have made it sixty years without anoth-
er nuclear attack. Thousands of men and
women worked diligently on both sides of
the Iron Curtain to prevent nuclear war, to
avoid overreacting to false warnings, and
to reduce risk.
We were good we were diligent but
we were also very lucky. We had more than
a few close calls. By far the most danger-
ous was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,
but there were a number of other edge-of-
disaster moments on both sides during
the cold war. Making it through sixty
years without a nuclear attack should not,
however, make us complacent. If we are to
continue to avoid a catastrophe, all nuclear
powers today will have to be highly capa-
ble, careful, competent, rational and, if
things go wrong, lucky every single time.
We do have important global efforts
underway, and some important successes:
the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat
Reduction program, the Global Threat
Reduction Initiative, the Proliferation
Security Initiative, and the Global
Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism.
While these all mark progress and poten-
tial, the risk of a nuclear weapon being
used today is growing, not receding.
The storm clouds are gathering: ter-
rorists are seeking nuclear weapons, and
there should be little doubt that if they
acquire a weapon, they will use it. There
are nuclear weapons materials in more
than forty countries, some secured by
nothing more than a chain-link fence. At
the current pace, it will be decades before
this material is adequately secured or
eliminated. Moreover, the know-how and
expertise to build nuclear weapons is far
more available today than ever before
because of an explosion of information
and commerce.
Add to this the fact that the number of
nuclear weapons states is increasing. A
world with twelve or twenty nuclear weap-
ons states will be immeasurably more dan-
gerous than it is now. It will also increase
the likelihood that weapons or materials
will fall into the hands of terrorists with
no return address. Cyber-terrorism also
poses new threats that could have disas-
trous consequences if the command-and-
control systems of any nuclear-weapons
state were compromised.
With the growing interest in nuclear
energy, a number of countries are consid-
ering developing the capacity to enrich
uranium as fuel. Yet this would also
give them the capacity to move quickly
to a nuclear weapons program if they so
chose. Meanwhile, the United States and
Russia continue to deploy thousands of
nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles
that can hit their targets in less than
thirty minutes, encouraging both sides
to continue a prompt-launch capability
that carries an increasingly unacceptable
risk of an accidental, mistaken, or unau-
thorized launch.
With these growing dangers in mind,
former US Secretaries of State George
Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former US
Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, and I
published an op-ed in January 2007, and a
follow-up piece in 2008, in The Wall Street
Journal. It called for a different direction
for our global nuclear policy with both
vision and steps.
The four of us, and the many other
security leaders who have joined us, are
keenly aware that the quest for a nuclear-
weapons-free world is fraught with
practical and political challenges. As The
Economist wisely wrote in 2006: By sim-
ply demanding the goal of a world without
nuclear weapons without a readiness to
tackle the practical problems raised by it,
ensures that it will never happen.
We have taken aim at the practical prob-
lems by linking the vision of a nuclear-
weapons-free world with a series of con-
crete steps for reducing nuclear dangers
and carving a path towards a world free
of the nuclear threat. Without the bold
vision, the actions will not be perceived
as fair or urgent. Without the actions, the
vision will not be perceived as realistic or
possible.
While we do not believe that our
example is likely to inspire Iran, North
Korea, or al-Qaeda to drop their weapons
ambitions, we do believe that it will make
it more likely that nations will join us in
a rm approach to stop the proliferation
of nuclear weapons and materials and to
prevent catastrophic terrorism.
This will be a challenging process
that must be accomplished in stages. The
United States must keep nuclear weapons
as long as other nations do. But we will be
safer, and the world will be safer, if we are
working toward the goal of deemphasiz-
ing nuclear weapons and keeping them
out of dangerous hands and ultimately
ridding our world of them.
Strategic cooperation must become
the cornerstone of our national defense
against nuclear weapons. This is not
because cooperation gives us a warm and
fuzzy feeling, but because every other
method will fail. None of the steps we are
proposing can be accomplished by the
United States and our close allies alone:
Changing nuclear-force postures in
the United States and Russia to greatly
increase warning time and ease our
ngers away from the nuclear trigger.
Reducing nuclear forces substantially
in all states that possess them.
Moving toward developing cooperative,
multilateral ballistic-missile defense
and early-warning systems to reduce
tensions over defensive systems and
enhance the possibility of progress in
other areas.
Eliminating short-range tactical
nuclear weapons, beginning with
accountability and transparency among
the United States, NATO, and Russia.
Working to bring the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty into force in the United
States and other key states.
Securing nuclear weapons and mate-
rials around the world to the highest
standards.
Developing a multinational approach
to civil nuclear fuel production, phas-
ing out the use of highly enriched
uranium in civil commerce and halting
the production of ssile material for
weapons.
Enhancing verication and enforce-
ment capabilities and our political
will to do both.
Building an international consensus
regarding ways to deter and, when
necessary, strongly and effectively
respond to countries that breach their
commitments.
THERE ARE NUCLEAR WEAPONS
MATERIALS IN MORE THAN
FORTY COUNTRIES, SOME
SECURED BY NOTHING MORE
THAN A CHAIN-LINK FENCE.

I
believe that we cannot defend
ourselves against the nuclear threats
facing the world today without taking
these steps. We cannot take these steps
without the cooperation of other nations.
We cannot get the cooperation of other
nations without the vision and hope of a
world that will someday end these weapons
as a threat to mankind.
The most difcult and challenging step
is the need to redouble our efforts to resolve
regional conicts that give rise to new
nuclear powers. The obvious candidates
can be found readily in Asia, Africa, and
the Middle East. We also must urgently
address the security concerns that give
existing nuclear powers the reasons or
excuses to keep their nuclear weapons oper-
ationally on the front burner, which in turn
causes much of the world to believe that we
are not living up to our Nonproliferation
Treaty commitments.
There can be no coherent, effective
security strategy to reduce nuclear dangers
that does not take into account Russia its
strengths, weaknesses, aims, and ambi-
tions. So, it is remarkable and dangerous
that the United States, Russia, and nato
have not developed an answer to one of the
most fundamental security questions we
face: What is the long-term role for Russia in
the Euro-Atlantic arc? Whether caused by
the absence of vision, a lack of political will,
or nostalgia for the cold war, the failure of
both sides to forge a mutually benecial and
durable security relationship marks a col-
lective failure of leadership in Washington,
European capitals, and Moscow.
During the cold war, the United States
spent trillions of dollars containing com-
munism and preserving freedom. Our
European allies particularly Germany
devoted a large portion of territory and
national treasure for the same purpose.
While the cost was immense, it paid off. We
preserved freedom, and we avoided a war
that could have escalated to a nuclear holo-
caust. In our military defense of Western
Europe, nato was one of the most suc-
cessful alliances in history. Our members
shared the same security goals, and we
were all dedicated to containing commu-
nism even though we were not all democ-
racies. We had a clear perspective of our
vital interests, and for more than forty years
we were able to give priority to these inter-
ests over other concerns that were often in
the headlines, but not vital.
Former US Secretary of State Dean
Acheson once dened foreign policy
as just one damn thing after another.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the most
common form of human stupidity is forget-
ting what one is trying to do. nato today is
a combination of both sentiments: it faces
one damn thing after another, but unlike
during the cold war, it seems that we are
not quite sure what it is we are trying to do.
We have not developed a sustainable post-
cold war security strategy.
nato operations in Afghanistan are
crucial to the future of that country and to
the security and credibility of nato, but
WELCOME TO THE END OF THE
COLD WAR: BATTLEFIELD NUKES
ARE STILL IN VOGUE AND, FOR THE
FIRST TIME, BOTH RUSSIA AND
NATO HAVE RESERVED THE RIGHT
TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS
PREEMPTIVELY.

ADAM BARTOS, OLEG IVANOVSKYS MEMORABILIA, MOSCOW, 1996
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success is doubtful without a larger eco-
nomic, political, and military effort. nato
has many important priorities, but I believe
the priority that must be at the top of our
list is to prevent the spread of weapons
of mass destruction and to prevent cata-
strophic terrorism by keeping dangerous
nuclear weapons material out of the hands
of terrorists.
I
f we are to succeed in dealing with
the hydra-headed threats of emerging
nuclear weapons states, proliferation
of enrichment, poorly secured nuclear
material, and catastrophic terrorism, many
nations must cooperate. We must recog-
nize, however, that these tasks are virtu-
ally impossible without the cooperation of
Russia. It is abundantly clear that Russia
faces these same threats and that its own
security is dependent on cooperation with
nato and the United States. Russias ero-
sion of conventional military capability has
led it to increase dependency on nuclear
weapons, including tactical battleeld
nuclear weapons. And now Russia has
declared as nato did during the cold
war that it may use nuclear weapons rst.
Welcome to the end of the cold war:
battleeld nukes are still in vogue and, for
the rst time, both Russia and nato have
reserved the right to use nuclear weapons
preemptively. Together, are we inadver-
tently and unthinkingly headed back to the
future?
Winston Churchill once said, However
beautiful the strategy, you must occasion-
ally look at the result. I believe that nato,
the United States, and Russia must look at
both the trajectory and the results of our
current policies.
As nato prepares for its sixtieth anni-
versary, we must address a fundamental
question: In the years ahead, does nato
want Russia to be inside or outside the Euro-
Atlantic security arc? The Russians must
ask themselves that same question. If we
both answer outside, then our strategy
is simple: we both just keep doing what
we are now doing. If the answer is inside,
we and Russia must make adjustments in
strategy informed by answering, at least,
the following questions:
1. From a nato and US perspective, is the
early entry of additional members to the
alliance more important than gaining
Russias cooperation on reducing clear
and present nuclear risks including
preventing Iran from becoming a nucle-
ar state?
2. From natos perspective, does the
expansion of membership to distant
states obligate us to incur enormous
increases in defense budgets or to be
forever committed to cold war concepts
of deterrence, including the possible
rst use of nuclear weapons? Are we
really examining the security implica-
tions of expansion over the long term,
or has this become primarily a political
exercise?
3. From a Russian perspective, is it wise
to keep pressuring its neighbors so that
they hurry to join the strongest alliance
available today in the form of nato?
Ratcheting up the pressure in various
ways on Ukraine or Georgia does not
encourage those countries to work with
Moscow. Instead, it drives them to seek
natos protection. Is this what Russia
really wants?
4. Can the West, which stood together
coherently and tenaciously during the
entire cold war, manage to stand for

ADAM BARTOS, NPO ENERGOMASH, MOSCOW, 1996
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rule of law and human rights today
without giving the Russian people the
impression that we are lecturing them?
Can we accept Henry Kissingers advice
to avoid the American tendency to insist
on global tutelage while we work on
crucial issues with Russia that affect the
security of the US and our close allies?
5. Can Russia avoid the temptation to
employ its emerging energy superpower
status to achieve political ends? Will it
become a reliable and responsible mar-
ket participant following the rule of law?
6. Are we and Russia destined to con-
tinue the assumption that Russia will
always be outside the Euro-Atlantic
security arc?
T
he common interests of the
United States, Europe, Russia, China,
Japan, and many other nations are
more aligned today than at any point in
modern history. I believe that we must
seize this historic opportunity and act
accordingly.
In an age fraught with the dangers of
nuclear proliferation and catastrophic ter-
rorism, global security always depends
on regional security. Twenty years after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, establishing a
more cooperative and productive relation-
ship with Russia will require leadership in
Europe and the United States. Historically,
Germany has been at the center of the
nato alliance; today it can play a unique
bridge-building role in encouraging nato
and Russia to begin to ask and answer
these questions.
T
he use of a nuclear weapon
anywhere will affect every nation
everywhere. The reaction of many
people to the vision and steps to eliminate
the nuclear threat comes in two parts: on
one hand they say, That would be great.
And the second thought is: We can never
get there.
To me, the goal of a world free of nucle-
ar weapons is like the top of a very tall
mountain. It is tempting and easy to say,
We cant get there from here. It is true
that today in our troubled world we cant
see the top of the mountain.
But we can see that we are heading
down, not up. We can see that we must
turn around, that we must take paths lead-
ing to higher ground, and that we must get
others to move with us.
Nearly twenty years ago, President
Ronald Reagan asked an audience to imag-
ine that we were threatened by a power
from outer space from another planet.
He then asked: Wouldnt we come togeth-
er to ght that particular threat? After
allowing the scenario to sink in, President
Reagan came to his point: We now have
a weapon that can destroy the world. Why
dont we recognize that threat more clearly
and then come together with one aim in
mind: how safely, sanely, and quickly we
can rid the world of this threat to our civili-
zation and our existence.
If we want our children and grand-
children to inherit a world without the
threat of nuclear disaster, our generation
must begin to answer Reagans question
right now.
Sam Nunn is a former US Senator from

Georgia and the current co-Chairman of
the Nuclear Threat Initiative. This essay
is adapted from a speech he delivered
in Berlin at the Hotel Adlon on June 12,
2008, as a guest of the American Academy.
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210x280_SPI_Amerika.indd 1 13.10.2008 15:41:14 Uhr
A
s much as these memories
sound very La Bohme, the expe-
rience itself was as hard to live
through. Studying in Paris had nothing to
do with the sweetness of Pucini, nothing to
do with the gay Paree of American mov-
ies. The whole thing was closer to the pov-
erty of the nineteenth century to Mimis
tuberculosis and to Verlaines absinthe
than to the happy anarchy of the late 1960s.
There were no empty rooms in Cit
Universitaires student housing, the bour-
geoisie didnt rent to students, and group
living was not yet known, so we had to bunk
in cheap hotels. Or we rented cramped
quarters that used to shelter domestic ser-
vants under the roofs of Paris. Agnes Varda
made her rst movie, La Mouffe, in the run-
down old section of the city, where I had
found a room. The houses were decrepit,
held up by heavy beams leaning across the
street; the entire architecture looked like
the stage set of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Nailed onto a small door wedged
between two support beams, an enamel
sign read Entre de lHotel. In the shop
next to the entrance was a librairie Africaine.
Through its tarnished windows one
could barely make out masks and spears
lying around. A dark hall lead to a rickety
wooden staircase. An arrow pointed to an
ofce on the rst oor. There you picked up
the key from an Algerian family that was
responsible for building maintenance and
room cleaning. Only North African guest
workers lived in this hotel. Two more
staircases led to the next story. On each
oor was a squat toilet so tiny that to actu-
ally use it you had to balance yourself on
the oor, wedge your back against the pipe
behind you, and smash your knees against
the door. My room, at the end of the hall,
was furnished with an iron bed, a wash-
table with bowl and pitcher, and a small
bureau. The window, which did not close
all the way, opened to the back yard. And if
you extended your arms, you could touch
both walls of the neighboring house.
The only place I could read was in bed.
We went to the libraries to study. There
was the impressive and intimidating
Bibliothque Ste. Genevive, which was
part of the Sorbonne; the much adored
library of the Centre Culturel Amricain,
which was good for irting; and last, but
not least: the sober reading room on the
Rue dUlm, which was like being inside the
hull of a steamship, its tireless iron-piped
heating system perpetually knocking and
clamoring.
The lectures at the university were
mandatory for me: the stipend I had for
400-Deutschmarks a month required I
attend and that is what covered my living
expenses: 100 Deutschmarks went to the
hotel, the same amount went for meals in
the Israeli cafeteria at the university, and
the rest I could spend as I wished. I could
even save a little bit.
But the evenings were when my real
studies began: at 6:30, 8:30, and 10:30,
the Cinmatque Franais on Rue dUlm
showed movies. I still have copies of the
yellowed programs from 19581960 with
all the movie titles and my notes scratched
all over them. There must have been a
thousand movies I saw during those two
years. The entrance fee was about one
Deutschmark. Soon enough, though,
I wouldnt even have to pay that.
It was Lotte Eisner, the wonderful lm
historian and colleague of Henri Langlois,
the director of the lm museum, who
somehow noticed me. She introduced me to
Fritz Lang and hired me as an interpreter/
translator. This meant that I sat with my
microphone in the rst row and tried to
follow the lms dialogue. The scene titles
of German silent movies were easy; the
movies with sound were more difcult. But
Fritz Langs M and Josef von Sternbergs
Der Blaue Engel were screened so often that
I did better with each showing.
A specialty was Kurosawas movie Ikuru,
which only existed as a copy of the Japanese
original with German subtitles. This clas-
sic was screened so frequently that soon I
knew it by heart. To this day I can still recite
most of the dialogue. This story of a cancer-
ridden employee who wanted to do one last
thing became one of my favorite lms. A
few years ago I wanted to purchase the
rights to remake it, but Steven Spielberg got
there faster.
It was the silent movies I loved the most.
They emitted something magical. The
actors were the ones about whose faces
Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard says
We had faces! They ickered like abstrac-
tions, huge and silent on the screen in front
of hand-painted sets. And nearly all of them
were dead. The silence in the theater was a
deadly silence. The hum of the projectors
was like that of gears that grinded down
time. The passions and feelings of these
phantoms were thus even more intense and
eternal.
Outside scenes were just as unreal in the
overexposure of old black-and-white cop-
ies, regardless of whether they were made
A MOVIEGOER IN PARIS
Recollections from a youth awakened by the cinmatque
By Volker Schlndorff
in the birch forests, like in Gsta Berlings
Sweden, city landscapes in Brooklyn, or
on the bridges of Paris. I wasnt able to
memorize exact content or story lines;
I only remember the atmosphere, scene
sequences, various situations, and totally
disconnected views: the white in the eye of
the Andalusian dog, the deserted steppes
in Storm over Asia, the young and pudgy
Garbo who brushes her face against her fur
coat in Freudlosen Gasse, Fred McTeagues
brutal mug in Greed, the rowboat on the
Marne in Renoirs lm, a slithering and
exuous bride in Asphalt, a dew-covered
apple on a branch in Dowschenkos Earth.
Here it was: lost and rediscovered time,
immortalized in the moment, the awaken-
ing of an unquenchable desire that left a
nostalgia for some past era.
During these years I saw an average of
three movies a day. The traumatic experi-
ences occurred when I saw a movie the
rst time: On Thursday, May 21, 1959, at
10:30 in the evening: saw Faust for the rst
time. Captivating, the elegance of a resolu-
tion that permits one scene to ow visually
into the other, I noted like a smartass.
Astonishingly big close-ups, changing
with magical camera movements driving,
crane, and even ight.
Not one word about the actors, whom
I discovered much later namely, on
March 20, when Faust was screened again.
Now I noticed the tender and proud face
of Gretchen, played by Camilla Horn;
the wonderful affectation of Mephisto,
played by Emil Jannings; and the down-to-
earthness of Gsta Ekmans Faust.
Other movies impressed me more.
I wanted to discover a new world, one I
did not yet know: The New Babylon, for
example, by Kosinzew and Trauberg. Or
the artistic extreme of Stroheims Blind
Husbands, his Wedding March, or Buuels
Lage Dor. And always that deep Germanic
tragedy of fate found in Fritz Lang, the
wickedness of Pabst. But then on one hot
summer evening came Nosferatu. It was
July 2, 1960, at 10:30pm, and my blood
froze in my veins for the misery of those
poor, eternally eeing souls.
For the rst time, I was not just an
observer, but really inside the movie. I had
this feeling soon again in Letzter Mann,
regardless of Jannings histrionic perfor-
mance. What drew me in was the free-roam-
ing camera that went through the revolving
door; what moved me was the old man on
the tiled bathroom oor. He could have
been the brother of Watanabe in Ikiru, or of
I just realized this Willy Loman, Arthur
Millers salesman.
I didnt have a lot to translate in Letzter
Mann; there was just one scene title. How
literal Murnaus movie style, how true
his melodrama this is something I
understood only later. I experienced these
movies in a state somewhere between

VOLKER SCHLNDORFF CIRCA 1956
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wakefulness and dreaming. Others in the
audience must have felt the same, because
when the lights went on, their silence was
sustained. Only by low whispers and utter-
ing blinks did we slowly return to the reality
of the shabby movie theater. In the bright
light it was we who looked like ghosts.
It was a tight-knit community, but one
nonetheless divided into sects. Sitting in
the rst row with legs outstretched were
the purists, the lm historians. This group
was further divided into those that followed
the socio-political ideas of Georges Sadouls,
and those that insisted on experiencing
movies simply, according to a purely aes-
thetic criteria. A few Germans appeared
regularly: Enno Patalas, Frieda Grafe,
and Ulrich Gregor, all of whom borrowed
their criteria from the Frankfurt School,
Rudolph Arnheim, and Siegfried Kracauer.
Lotte Eisner was their idol, and it was she
who introduced us.
In the rst third of the movie theater
were the Cahiers du Cinema people, who
always arrived in a small group collars up,
closed coats, arms crossed, sitting with con-
spiratorial, dogmatic sternness. Truffaut
was there only on occasion. But Jean-Luc
Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer,
Charles Bitsch they were there quite often.
Michel Delahaye and Louis Marcorelles
were individualists, outsiders that some-
times came with the Cahiers people and
sometimes with the rival clan of the Positif
people, all centered around Pierre Rissient
and Michel Ciment. They sat with deliber-
ate coolness, sunk deep into their seats,
legs hanging over the back of the row in
front of them. They celebrated the sensual-
ity of the movie, the adventurousness of the
great Western lmmakers, and the women,
who were not just beautiful but, of course,
heavenly, sublime, eternal, fantastic, phan-
tasmagorical, otherworldly no matter if
they were Louise Brooks, Rita Hayworth,
Ida Lupino, or Gloria Graham.
As long as it was dark in the movie
theater, we were all under a spell, like the
school class in Fellinis Amarcord the
theater, a dark womb. But as soon as the
lights went on, the rude insults began
to y. They called each other troglodytes,
cavemen, lobotomized idiots, traitors, and
criminals, because they differed in their
analyses of the movies and their authors.
This intensied into show ghts and dialec-
tical theater battles whenever the director
Henri Langlois and his companion Marie
Meerson introduced esteemed guests after
a movie: Abel Gance, Fritz Lang, William
Wyler, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and, one
time, even Jean Renoir.
The great American lmmakers were
impressive because of their silence. They
didnt have to add any message, testimony,
or deeper meaning to their movies. It
took years until they took the admiration of
their French intellectual fans seriously.
At one opening, the greats Fritz Lang
and Luis Buuel were both present. Lotte
Eisner wanted so badly to introduce them.
She said to Buuel, Look, over there! Its
Fritz Lang. And standing next to Fritz
Lang, she gestured towards Buuel. But
because one of them was blind and the
other one deaf, neither one of these masters
of sight and sound could acknowledge the
other.
Volker Schlndorff, the renowned German

lmmaker, is a trustee of the American
Academy in Berlin. This adapted English
translation is from his new autobiography,
Licht, Schatten und Bewegung, (Hanser
Verlag, 2008). Translation by Tanja Maka
and R.Jay Magill, Jr.
JOHN MALKOVICH, DUSTIN HOFFMAN, VOLKER SCHLNDORFF, AND MICHAEL BALLHAUS ON
THE SET OF DEATH OF A SALESMAN
FILMING OF MICHAEL KOHLHAAS, 1968: VOLKER SCHLNDORFF, DAVID WARNER
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Wir freuen uns mit der American Academy
ber das kulturelle Miteinander.
Culture creates
the closest bonds.
ARD_AmericAcademy_B Journal_210x280_iw.indd 1 04.09.2008 17:00:26 Uhr
HISTORY FROM THINGS
How everyday objects lead one historian to her craft
By Leora Auslander
SHINIQUE SMITH, UNTITLED (RODEO BEACH BUNDLE), 2007
A
t age fifteen I wanted to become
a historian; I can still remember
why. My family lived and traveled
abroad extensively, and I keep in my minds
eye the views from various bedroom win-
dows: the beautiful oak tree I saw from
my bed in our suburban New England
home; pigeons free-falling from a neigh-
boring apartment building in Pariss 14th
arrondissement; shards of broken glass
atop the wall surrounding the house we
inhabited briey in Mexico Citys Zona
Rosa; the red roses blooming, to my amaze-
ment, in Montevideos mild winter; the feet,
wheels, and occasional hooves that passed
by our basement at in London.
With each new home not only did these
intimate views change, but so did what I
experienced as I walked to school. In some
places I followed paths through a built
environment little more than a century old;
in others, that daily route took me in front
of buildings standing for seven or eight
hundred years. In some places, the human-
made cohabited with the natural world; in
others it overwhelmed it. I came to wonder
as an adolescent about the impact of these
different views: were Europeans somehow
different from North and South Americans
because their built environment was so
old? Because there was no more wilder-
ness? How did encounters with a cathedral
inuence a persons sense of time, of place,
and of God? Did kids who grew up protect-
ed by aggressive glass or who had to look
through barred windows become different
from those who saw trees or plummeting
pigeons?
Equally striking to me then was the
salience of the passing elements of mate-
rial culture and everyday life clothing,
food, posture, gestures that would make
people either belong to or not belong to a
certain group. Some things were national:
one could identify North Americans from
a block away on the streets of Mexico City,
Tel Aviv, Paris, or Aachen. They didnt
dress, walk, stand, or gesture in the same
way as those who had grown up in those cit-
ies. Some of the afnities and boundaries
between people were transnational. Having
grown up in a Jewish household, and some-
times in neighborhoods where there were
many other Jews, I could often distinguish
Jews from non-Jews by their carriage, cloth-
ing, and speech styles, as we moved around
the world. I was also fascinated (and, of
course, hurt) by the frequently shocked
reactions of my non-Jewish friends when
they encountered my observance of a ver-
sion of Jewish dietary law. Why did how
one dressed, what one ate, whether one
shook hands or embraced (or didnt touch
at all) upon greeting and parting, silently
and unconsciously build either unity or
mistrust?
It was to answer those basic and,
I would later learn, complex questions
that I became a historian. In retrospect I
should perhaps have chosen anthropology,
but as a teenager I didnt know exactly what
that was. By the time I reached college I
was stubbornly committed to the historical
profession. And as a young Jewish woman
from suburban Boston who was fascinated
by difference, I chose to study a past that
reected that interest: medieval Christian
Western Europe. Its distance from the con-
temporary United States was one source of
attraction; another was the relative paucity
of written sources. That I found the scarcity
of documentary texts a positive feature of
the medieval period may appear perverse,
since it obviously limits the issues that can
be addressed.
When historians seek an answer to a
question, they most often turn to texts. The
nature and content of queries are also, of
course, profoundly but unconsciously inu-
enced by the primacy of the evidentiary
word. Once the research is done, the results
are also reported in prose. Historians
tend to pay relatively little attention to the
visual and spatial qualities of the texts they
generate. They may include images, but if
so, those will most often be illustrations
of the arguments made verbally; rarely are
visual materials used to convince. Graduate
students are trained to use an archive, deci-
pher challenging handwriting, and read
texts critically; they are not usually taught
how to interpret space, place, object, build-
ing, or image. While these generalizations
hold for historians who lived during the
early modern and modern periods, they do
not for historians of the ancient and

DID KIDS WHO GREW UP PROTECTED BY AGGRESSIVE GLASS
OR WHO LOOKED THROUGH BARRED WINDOWS BECOME DIFFERENT
FROM THOSE WHO SAW TREES OR PLUMMETING PIGEONS?

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medieval periods in Europe, nor for those
of pre-colonial Africa or South, Central,
and North America. Among Europeanists,
medievalists have tended to be far more
eclectic in their source base than most.
Studying Medieval and Renaissance
Studies at the University of Michigan as
an undergraduate, I was allowed to roam
among buildings, listen to music, enjoy
illuminated manuscripts and tapestries.
The distance from the world in which I
actually lived, however, became less appeal-
ing to me as I grew older and more political-
ly engaged. After a year of graduate study as
a medievalist, I decided to leave academia
permanently, I thought at the time to seek
more direct engagement with material cul-
ture and politics. I decided to learn a trade,
with an eye towards becoming involved in
union organizing and other forms of col-
lective action. I began working as a cabinet-
maker in a factory near Boston.
It was the early 1980s, and I assumed
that my co-workers would be contesting
hours, wages, and working conditions
through union organizing. I soon discov-
ered, however, that although they would
have appreciated improved material cir-
cumstances, they were far more distraught
about the aesthetic failure of their labor.
They found the objects we made ugly,
devoid of artistry or imagination, and use-
less. The workers response to this form of
the alienation of labor was not to organize
collectively but to stay in the factory after
hours, using the machines and stealing
wood to make things they considered
beautiful and useful. Two colleagues built
guitars one acoustic, the other electric
while another crafted a maple sled with
runner carved from bubinga, an African
wood. A fourth even redid the interior of
his 72 Ford in mahogany veneer. It was
these objects that established respect
among the workers in the factory and
gave them satisfaction, these objects that
allowed them to talk with pride about their
mastery. I eventually moved on to other
cabinetmaking jobs, but my co-workers
at F. W. Dixon left me with the question
that continues to drive my work today:
what are people really doing when they
design, make, buy, sell, use, destroy, and
write about or sketch objects of style, that
is, objects that are not purely functional?
To put it simply: what do things mean? It
was the same question I had been asking
myself for decades.
So I went back to academia. And in try-
ing to puzzle out this question over my
career, I can say that I have come the clos-
est to something resembling a satisfying
answer by studying the work of scholars
of the mind, including psychoanalysts,
psychologists, and phenomenologically-
inclined philosophers. They all start with
an assumption that there are certain traits
shared by human beings across time and
space resulting from our universal embod-
iedness. Because we are all born small and
dependent, grow and mature relatively
slowly, and eventually die, and because we
exist in three-dimensions and possess ve
senses, we share a common relation to the
material world. One crucial shared attri-
bute resulting from this form of embodied-
ness is a need for objects: human beings
need things to individuate, differentiate,
and identify; human beings need things to
express and communicate the unsaid and
the unsayable; human beings need things
to situate themselves in space and time, as
extensions of the body (and to compensate
for the bodys limits), as well as for sensory
pleasure; human beings need objects to
effectively remember and forget; we need
objects to cope with absence, loss, and
8lS ZUM 8R0 8lN
lCH SCH0N ElNMAL
UM 0lE WELT.
WK_umDieWelt_210x135+3.indd 1 27.08.2008 15:31:00 Uhr

death. These things carry such affective
weight that in virtually all societies, key
transitional moments birth and birthdays,
coming of age ceremonies, weddings, and
deaths are marked by the transmission
of objects.
Transitional objects most famously
Linus blanket in the Peanuts cartoon pro-
vide a clear and familiar example of cop-
ing with absence. These objects literally
embody absent parents until the child is
able to keep the parents securely present in
his or her minds eye. The panic generated
by even the temporary loss of these objects
is such that parents become as obsessed
with them as their children and look for-
ward to the moment when they will no
longer be needed. It is not so certain, how-
ever, that people ever outgrow their need
to transmute into objects those they love.
These materializations of love objects only
change form. Adult psyches, facing perma-
nent loss by death, often lodge the mourned
person in his or her left-behind clothing.
This is an ambivalent relation, however. We
expect things to outlive us, embodying and
carrying a trace of our physical selves into
a future in which we are no longer present.
Yet the continued existence of intimately
used objects pens, eyeglasses, jewelry,
toothbrushes can be both cruel and com-
forting. In the short-term they move us to
tears; in the long-term they provide a sen-
sory experience of continued contact. The
rings I never take off, which belonged to
my dead grandmothers, provide a daily con-
nection to them, as if our ngers could still
touch. A novelists account of a forsaken
lover taking a pair of scissors to a closet-
ful of left-behind clothes is an economical,
instantly comprehensible way to com-
municate the characters rage and despair.
The absent or dead do of course live on in
memory, but a dematerialized memory is
both fragile and unsatisfying to human
beings who are, after all, of esh and blood.
Even in literate societies, people use (and
need) three-dimensional objects, as well
as familiar sights and smells, as memory-
cues souvenirs in the most literal sense.
Historians seeking to understand the
meanings of migration, war, natural disas-
ter, and even of urban renewal may nd in
the evidence of things a guide to how such
events were lived by their protagonists.
Struggles against the loss of even terribly
dilapidated housing, claims for the restitu-
tion of lost homes and lost property, and
dangers risked by refugees to carry mere
things with them would be more accurately
interpreted if historians took the psychologi-
cal meanings of objects and homes more
seriously. In my own work, most recently on
French and German Jews reclaiming their
ransacked possessions after World War II,
I have tried to honor the memories that
objects make and contain by doing so.
Leora Auslander is a professor of
European Social History at the
University of Chicago and the fall
2008 Berthold Leibinger Fellow at the
American Academy.
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210x135_A3_BJ_4952.indd 1 11.09.2008 16:37:19 Uhr
HISTORIANS SEEKING TO UNDERSTAND THE MEANINGS OF
MIGRATION, WAR, AND NATURAL DISASTER MAY FIND IN THE EVIDENCE
OF THINGS A GUIDE TO HOW SUCH EVENTS WERE LIVED.
F
or all the euphoria that has
accompanied the elevation of General
David Petraeus and the success of his
surge strategy in Iraq, for years prior, less
senior commanders typically colonels,
commanding brigades, or battalions had
been translating the essential tenets of
his counterinsurgency manual into facts
on the ground. Yet most of these success
stories, because they ran counter to the
earlier policy of standing down (handing
over control to Iraqi forces, often without
condition and regardless of consequence),
were purposefully discounted. As Colonel
Pete Mansoor, a member of Petraeus brain
trust, summarized the era before his boss
arrived in Baghdad: Our forces were
poorly positioned, on large bases, unable to
protect the Iraqi people.
The assertion contains a kernel of truth,
but just that. Americas problem in Iraq
was never a lack of military prowess. The
problem was confusion at the top over
how to use it. The laissez-faire policies
embraced by Generals Ricardo Sanchez
and George Casey created a self-defeating
tautology in the management of the war.
On the one hand, and because it was so
entirely disconnected from reality, the
guidance to stand down all but forced
commanders to innovate. With no strategy
to guide them because no strategy had
been offered, Army colonels operated on
THE COLONELS WAR
Prior to becoming ofcial policy, the Surge plan in Iraq had been in operation for four
years but nobody in Washington was listening
By Lawrence F. Kaplan
US ARMY MEETING WITH SONS OF IRAQ LEADERS IN SOUTHERN BAGHDAD. PHOTOGRAPH BY STAFF SGT. BRENT WILLIAMS
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their own, their brigades ghting their
own wars some successfully, others
disastrously. One would patrol constantly;
another would never leave the wire; and
another would get things just right. On the
other hand, when innovations did result,
they would be minimized, ignored, or sum-
marily dismissed.
That is, until Gen. Petraeus nally
enshrined them in ofcial policy. Alas,
he did so about four years too late. Hence,
the awful question that may double as the
epitaph of the US enterprise in Iraq: What
if there was one true path all along? If there
was, historians will trace it back through
Ramadi in 2006 and Tal Afar in 2005.
These places and others Mosul, South
Baghdad, Sinjar shared this: command-
ers who walked away from Army doctrine,
becoming, in effect, strangers to their own
tradition.
T
he t wisted road to the surge
begins, even by the account of
Petraeus supporters, two years before
he assumed command, in a small city
along the Syrian border in northwest Iraq.
Until recently, the better units in Iraq mul-
tiplied in direct proportion to their distance
from the war managers in Baghdad, and
in 2005 that was very much the case in Tal
Afar, where the Third Armored Cavarly
Regiment (3d acr) had planted itself in the
center of the city.
For a glimpse of what Iraq looked like
under the stand down strategy, one
need to have looked no farther than Tal
Afar, where, in 2004, the Americans did
exactly that. The city, like Fallujah before
it, quickly descended into a horror show.
With only 400 soldiers from the 25th
Infantry Division patrolling the roughly
10,000-square-mile sector around it, police
stations across the province fell to insur-
gent attacks, and Tal Afar itself fell under
guerilla control. On the western side of
the city, tension between Sunni and Shiite
tribes escalated into open warfare. The
remnant of the Shiite-dominated police
force launched brutal reprisals against
the population. Forces loyal to Abu-Musab
Zarqawi moved into the city, mounting
their own campaign of atrocities: killing
patients in the local hospital and beheading
hostages. Then, in September 2005, the
cavalry arrived.
Police headquarters in Tal Afar is located
on the grounds of a centuries-old Ottoman
castle, which sits on a large hill in the cen-
ter of the city. From its parapets, one can
usually see the entire city, but on this par-
ticular wintry day in late 2005, it is pour-
ing rain, and even tanks slide in the mud.
The castle houses Tal Afars mayor,

CAPTION
US AND IRAQI SPECIAL OPERATIONS PREPARING FOR AN AIR ASSAULT. PHOTOGRAPH BY ARMY SPECIALIST MICHAEL HOWARD
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Najim Abdullah Jabouri. The power has
gone out, and its freezing and nearly pitch
black, but Najim seems relieved just to
be here. Only a few months ago, he says,
Zarqawi was ejecting Shia from the city
and the sky; it was raining mortars. Today,
3d acr has Tal Afar locked down, with
tanks on street corners and patrols criss-
crossing the city. The American Army is
mediator and judge, the mayor says. It
is a higher authority than any institution
in Iraq. So desperate, in fact, is the mayor
to block 3d acr from leaving that he has
penned a letter to President Bush, pleading
for the unit to stay. We are under-trained,
he explains. [Were] nowhere near the
situation where we can take care of our
own responsibilities. One hears the point
constantly. But its given fresh punctua-
tion when the Iraqi Police and the Iraqi
Army open re on each other outside the
castle gate.
Still, the violence in
Tal Afar has declined
sharply. Following 3d acrs
operation to retake the city,
attacks dropped immedi-
ately from seven per day
to one. At rst the citys
Sunni leaders refused to
cooperate with US forces,
citing the brutality of a
Shiite commando brigade
operating in the area. The
commander of 3d acr,
Col. H.R. McMaster, had
the brigade pulled back,
and he released detainees
the sheiks would vouch
for. In addition, explains
Lt. Col. Christopher Hickey,
whose Sabre Squadron
operates out of the castle
that houses police head-
quarters, I knew I needed
Sunni police to get infor-
mation from the popula-
tion. After pressing local
leaders to encourage police
recruits, Sunnis began to
sign up; eventually their
ranks swelled an exclu-
sively Shia force of 200
into a majority Sunni force
of 1700. And, as Hickey
predicted, intelligence
tips began owing in. The
regiment also poured mil-
lions of dollars into the city,
funding water, electricity,
school, and cleanup proj-
ects. At the same time, it
embedded advisers with
Iraqi army and police units.
Personnel lived among
Iraqi platoons and among
the population itself, hav-
ing fanned out across the
city and establishing 29
patrol bases including
directly between warring
Sunni and Shiite tribes.
Having melted into a once-hostile
population center, the Americans became
an essential part of the landscape their
own tribe, in effect. Seen from a helicopter
roaring above Nineveh province, telephone
wires provide the only evidence of moderni-
ty among the ancient forts, castles, and clay
huts that dot the plain below. In this primi-
tive universe, its easy to confuse the door
gunners, their aviation helmets embla-
C
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MANNED US CHECKPOINT. PHOTOGRAPH BY STAFF SGT. TONY WHITE
zoned with Superman logos, with the real
thing which some Iraqis did: the Yazedi,
a regal and persecuted people living in
Ninevah, wedged between tribes of Sunnis
Arabs, Turkomen, Shia, and Kurds, initially
confused the arrival of the Americans with
the Second Coming.
To be sure, 3d acr, which a Pentagon
review of dozens of units in Iraq rated
as the most adept at counterinsurgency,
hardly counts as a typical unit. There is,
to begin with, the commander himself,
whom, but for the fact of his existence,
only a novelist could invent. Col. McMaster
is an Army legend three-times over for
decimating a Republican Guard division
as a tank company commander during
the Gulf War, as the author of a canonical
text within the ranks (Dereliction of Duty,
a bestseller that scored the Joint Chiefs of
Staff for not challenging Lyndon Johnsons
march to war in Vietnam), and now for
pacifying Tal Afar. With his raspy voice,
profane mouth, and head shaved bald, he
bears a closer likeness to the brusque of-
cers that Robert Duvall brought to life in
Apocalypse Now and The Great Santini than
to the tweedy scholar on the book jacket
that made him famous.
When it comes to the operational realm,
McMaster freely concedes to drawing
from the Armys experience in Vietnam.
The important thing that emerges from
Vietnam is that the political, economic,
and military have to go together, he
says. You have to isolate insurgents from
external support. You have to provide
security for the population. Which is
exactly what he did in Tal Afar, having
adapted the principles of counterinsur-
gency in his units tactics well before the
term returned to favor in Washington. In
an Army that spent three years launch-
ing big-unit sweeps, hunkering down in
bases, relying heavily on repower, and
otherwise heeding then ground com-
mander Gen. Thomas Metzs admonition
not to put much energy into trying the old
saying win the hearts and minds, 3d acr
did exactly the reverse. In March 2006
President Bush devoted an entire address
to the remote outposts lessons, offering it
up as a model for his new clear, hold, and
build strategy.
Then an odd thing happened: noth-
ing. Rather than enshrine the lessons
of the city in a coherent approach to the
war, ofcials in Washington and Baghdad
argued that US forces were supposed to
be moving out of the cities, not into them.
In any case, the counterinsurgency tem-
plate in Tal Afar could never be duplicated
outside of Tal Afar. But it could and it
was. Anbar province, which Americas
Baghdad-centric policy always regarded as
something of an outlier, offered a prime
example. In August 2006, Marine colonel
Peter Devlin authored a subsequently
leaked report State of the Insurgency in
Al-Anbar which described al-Qaeda as
an integral part of the social fabric and
cautioned that nearly all government
institutions from the village to provincial
levels have disintegrated or have been
thoroughly corrupted and inltrated
by al-Qaeda in Iraq. Applying textbook
methods of counterinsurgency to Anbars
capital, the 1st Brigade Combat Team,
1st Armored Division (1-1AD) reversed
the trend.
I
ts now the second week of
December 2006, yet apart from a palm
tree strung with Christmas lights out-
side the headquarters of 1-1AD, Ramadi
shows no trace of the season. But at the
house of Sheik Abdul Sittar, nothing can
interrupt the festive spirit, or the sheik.
Waving a lit cigarette, the former al-Qaeda
ally has been advertising his fealty to the
American cause for nearly an hour now. He
insists his militia be set loose alongside the
Marine river patrols that ply the Euphrates
each night. We burn the terrorist boats
now! Sittar shouts. Army Colonel Sean
MacFarland, a lanky man from upstate New
York with an uncommonly self-effacing
demeanor for a brigade commander, gently
declines the offer. Then give me one heli-
copter, the sheik suggests. We will ght
in Baghdad! Encouraged by MacFarlands
chuckles, Sittar claps excitedly. After
that, we ght in Afghanistan, we ght in
Darfur!
Alas, Sittars military challenges run
somewhat closer to home. Even as he
offers MacFarland his transcontinental
assistance, the sheiks walkie-talkie
crackles and panicked tribesmen on
the other end relay news of insurgents
besieging them at a nearby police sta-
tion. MacFarland gestures quietly toward
a captain across the room, who hurries
outside. Well bring in air, MacFarland
assures the sheik, whos so busy shout-
ing and being shouted at that it isnt clear
he actually hears the soft-spoken colo-
nel: So, um, get your men inside so we
dont hit them. In the space of a couple
of minutes, radio antennae relay a urry
of coordinates; one of the Marine F-18s
always on station above Ramadi banks
toward the insurgents; a 500-pound bomb
incinerates them; smoke swirls. As Sittar
paces the courtyard with his walkie-talkie,
broadcasting orders for an operation his
American counterpart has already brought
to a decisive end, MacFarland surveys the
sand-blown landscape. The sheiks a little
bit of a warlord, he shrugs.
No one directed the colonel to recruit
hitherto enemy sheiks to the American
side, much less to raise a local force with
their tribesmen. He just thought up the
idea and did it. MacFarland has courted
such gures relentlessly. When 1-1AD
arrived in Ramadi in the summer of
2006, six cooperative tribes and twelve
hostile ones welcomed the brigade. By
December it boasted the support of fteen
and the enmity of just three. Of the tribal
leaders whose allegiance MacFarland
has gained, Sittar wields by far the most
power. The sheik heads up an alliance
called the Awakening, a collection of
Anbar tribes who have thrown in their
lot with the Americans. Seated beneath
the Awakenings gilded ag, which he
designed and which features a sword,
scales of justice, and less explicably, a
coffee pot, he recounts his three arrests
by the Americans. How, then, was he
converted to the cause of his one-time jail-
ers? Sittar credits al-Qaedas excesses in
Ramadi including the murder of two of
his brothers (Sittar himself was murdered
in 2007) and the fact that the old US
leadership here was a disaster, but now the
Americans work with us.
Another of Ramadis powerful sheiks,
Ahmed Bezia who, unlike Sittar, favors
Western attire and has built himself a
full-scale replica of 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue, albeit painted salmon explains
that, in a gathering of Ramadis elders, the
sheiks signed a document pledging, in
Ahmeds words, that any US losses are
tribal losses. And, indeed, later at his

AMERICAS PROBLEM IN IRAQ WAS NEVER A LACK OF MILITARY
PROWESS. THE PROBLEM WAS CONFUSION AT THE TOP
OVER HOW TO USE IT.
headquarters, MacFarland displays a map
of Ramadi color-coded to reect tribal
boundaries. Pointing to the Western out-
skirts of Ramadi, he explains, We were
hit almost every day in these places before
[the alliance], but we havent been hit
there in months. Pressed on the wisdom
of essentially handing Ramadi over to
militias with no allegiance to the central
government in Baghdad, MacFarland says
simply, There is no government here.
A
t the time, Gen. Petraeuss
yet-to-be published counterinsur-
gency manual advised recruiting
police forces from the local population,
but MacFarland had already taken the
practice to its furthest boundary in
Ramadi, where tribes even had their
own police stations. The success of the
strategy could be gleaned in the number
of recruits swelling the ranks, which
contained 140 ofcers in May and by
December boasted over 2000. To check
on their progress, Lt. Col. Jim Lechner a
squat, bulldog of a commander whom
MacFarland plucked from a tank and
installed as his deputy and chief diplo-
mat leads a patrol to Ramadis al-Jazeera
police station.
A few months ago a suicide bomber
ignited an oil-truck at al-Jazeeras gate,
drenching the station along with its
Iraqi and American tenants in burn-
ing fuel. 1-1AD would soon christen a
new station here, but, in the meantime,
Ramadis police chiefs have gathered for
a meeting down by the river, about a mile
away. Lechner sets off on foot, proceed-
ing down a dirt road that winds through
a dried-up orange grove and toward the
bank of the Euphrates, where a dozen or
so police chiefs wait in a circle of plastic
chairs. They set on Lechner, complaining
that Baghdad refuses to pay their latest
recruits. I am Sheik Sittars cousin, one
shouts. I represent him! The chiefs
crowd closer, but Lechner seems unfazed.
This is nothing, a tantrum, Lechner says.
Ive had a hundred of them throw their
weapons in the dirt. Even this low-grade
riot conceals progress: in a war where
police recruiting drives often do not gen-
erate a single applicant, the days uproar
comes as the result of a recruiting glut.
In Tom Ricks book Fiasco, 82nd
Airborne Division commander Maj. Gen.
Charles Swannack recounts how he cau-
tioned that al-Anbar province wasnt
ready for [a counterinsurgency campaign],
and may [never] be, because they didnt
want us downtown. Taking a cue from
McMaster, though, MacFarland has
upended Swannacks admonition, put-
ting nearly all of his combat forces in the
downtown of Anbars most dangerous
city. The logic is straightforward: the path
to defeating an insurgency runs through
the population, without whose support
insurgents can be forced to ght in the
open. Securing control of the population
depends, in turn, on guaranteeing its
physical security and through social pro-
grams, civic assistance, and the like its
hearts and minds.
Another patrol through Ramadi neatly
illustrates how the theory works. The
areas where 1-1AD has yet to erect combat
outposts (cops) contain no trace of life
whatsoever. En route to cop Falcon in
western Ramadi, the landscape resembles
one of those aerial photos of Berlin in
1945. Only, seen from the ground, the
devastation appears even more thorough.
Then something unreal happens: a block
of utter devastation gives way to a block
that bustles with shops, women carrying
bags of groceries the everyday vibrancy
of a living community.
cop Falcon, which consists of a couple
of abandoned homes and a row of tanks
parked in a bulldozed clearing, oversees
the avenue, guaranteeing its security and
functioning as a magnet for daily life. In
the days after the cop was rst established,
explains Captain Michael Bajema, we had
taxis full of gunmen, fty at a time, coming
at us. But the violence receded once the
next cop went up a few blocks away. Its
a familiar pattern: the insurgents contest
each new cop MacFarland has built 24 in
all but eventually fall back to areas with
no American presence. Now, says Bajema,
people tell us where ieds are, who planted
them, everything. Since 1-1ADs arrival,
enemy attacks have declined by 40 percent,
ied attacks by 60 percent. Tellingly, the
violence now centers around the only two
neighborhoods where the brigade has
yet to install cops a shrinking zone, as
Americans now control 80 percent of the
city, compared to the 15 percent when 1-1AD
rst arrived.
W
hat McMaster accomplished
in Tal Afar and MacFarland
achieved in Ramadi eventually
will become the basis for a theater-wide
counterinsurgency strategy that, by
early 2008, begins to generate indis-
putable battleeld successes. With the
operational clock in Iraq and the politi-
cal clock in Washington so badly out of
sync, however, time had nearly run out in
the United States. Where all this leads is
clear. Writing in Parameters, the journal
of the Army War College, Col. Stuart
Herrington (Ret.), notes that having
wasted more than three years (until 1968)
pursuing a awed strategy, the Pentagon
lost the support of the American popula-
tion, and was not given the time to get it
right, even when it was clear that General
Creighton Abrams pacication and
Vietnamization approach might have
worked.
Herrington does not blame the
American public, but rather the three
wasted years that collapsed its will. In Iraq,
too, the Army leadership wasted more
than three years pursuing a awed strat-
egy this, even as it refused to acknowl-
edge that commanders like McMaster
and MacFarland had been employing the
correct approach from the outset. By the
time the generals noticed, it was too late.
With the American public exhausted, the
solution to the war in Iraq could no longer
be found in the realm of technique, or any-
where else.
Lawrence F. Kaplan is the editor of World
Affairs and the author of a forthcoming
book about four US Army brigades in
Iraq. He was a David Rubenstein Foreign
Policy Forum Distinguished Visitor at the
American Academy in spring 2008.
THEN SOMETHING UNREAL HAPPENS: A BLOCK OF UTTER DEVASTATION
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CARRYING BAGS OF GROCERIES THE EVERYDAY VIBRANCY OF A
LIVING COMMUNITY.
Energy for clean air
FOR YOUR FUTURE, WE ARE
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A CUT FROM
THE LOST
An alternate ending for Aunt Ester and Uncle Shmiel
By Daniel Mendelsohn
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RACHEL RABHAN, THE GARDEN OF EDEN: ADAM + EVE
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S
hmiel, of course, we know a little
by this point. In the prime of his life
he was haughty, a bit of a show-off, a
man who liked to be noticed, who enjoys
being a somebody in the town, the head
of the butchers cartel, a man who doesnt
mind if peoples nickname for him is the
Krl, the king, a person who very likely
thought, until the very end, that returning
to Bolechow from New York was the best
decision hed ever made. He was tall, as
was (we now know) his second daughter,
Frydka. Later on, as we also know, things
became difcult, and to this difcult peri-
od belongs the Shmiel of the letters, a vivid
if perhaps a slightly less appealing gure
than the earlier, more grandiose gure, a
middle-aged and prematurely white-haired
businessman and the brother, cousin,
mishpuchah to his many correspondents
in New York, with whom he was reduced,
as time went on, to pleading, hectoring,
cajoling rather desperately and, it must
be said, a little pathetically as he tried to
nd a way to preserve his family or, indeed,
even a small part of it, the children, even
one daughter, the dear Lorka. (Why her?
Because she was the oldest? Because she
was the favorite? Impossible to know, now.)
Still, at least its possible to hear
Shmiels voice, through the letters. Of
his wife, our great-aunt Ester, very little
remains, now at least in part because
years ago, in my grandfathers Miami
Beach, I didnt want to talk to a woman
called Minnie Spieler who (as I learned by
accident, thirty years later) was Esters sis-
ter. Having now talked to every living per-
son still alive who had the opportunity to
see and know her, however obliquely, I can
now report that almost nothing remains of
this woman, apart from a handful of snap-
shots and the fact that someone had said
she was very warm and friendly; a woman
who, I cant help thinking as I contemplate
the utter erasure of her life, would, in the
normal course of things, have died of (lets
DANIEL MENDELSOHNS THE LOST:
A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION,
TRACES THE AUTHORS JOUR-
NEY OVER FOUR CONTINENTS,
THIRTEEN COUNTRIES, AND FIVE
YEARS, AS HE TRIED TO LEARN
PRECISELY WHAT HAPPENED TO
HIS GREAT-UNCLE SHMIEL JGER
AND HIS FAMILY, A FAMILY OF
JEWS LIVING IN EASTERN POLAND,
DURING THE HOLOCAUST. IN
THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE CUT
FROM THE FINAL MANUSCRIPT
AND PUBLISHED HERE FOR THE
FIRST TIME MENDELSOHN
INTERRUPTS HIS HISTORICAL
ACCOUNT OF SHMIEL AND HIS
WIFE, ESTER, TO IMAGINE, BRIEFLY,
AN ALTERNATIVE FATE FOR THE
PAIR:
I CAN NOW REPORT THAT
ALMOST NOTHING REMAINS
OF THIS WOMAN, APART FROM
A HANDFUL OF SNAPSHOTS
AND THE FACT THAT SOMEONE
HAD SAID SHE WAS VERY WARM
AND FRIENDLY.

say) colon cancer in a hospital in Lww
in Ill wont be overly generous here
1973, at the age of 77, having only once
made the long and difcult journey to the
United States, in (say) 1969, a trip made
not without certain exasperating bureau-
cratic frustrations typical of Communist
Poland, the country in which Bolechw
ended up, frustrations about which she
and Shmiel (who at 78 is a bit stooped and
quite deaf and, although nobody knows it
yet, riddled with the pancreatic cancer that
will kill him two months after they return
home to Bolechw) will have everyone
laughing uproariously at my mothers
kitchen table on Long Island during
the big family reunion that my mother
organizes, that day in 1969, to welcome
to America the storied Uncle Shmiel and
Aunt Ester, Uncle Shmiel who went back
to the old country!, my grandfather always
says of his beloved older brother, laughing
with a little incredulous shake of his head;
the big welcome that my mother hosts
that day, with the platters of smoked shes
and the glasses of whiskey and schnaps
and my grandfather and Shmiel sitting on
the sofa in the living room and choking
with laughter over some shared memory
of their childhood, or about something
poor gluttonous Uncle Julius, the nebukhl
of the family, has said as he wolfs down
stuffed cabbage in the kitchen; a visit
during which because I am only nine at
the time, because I havent yet been bar
mitzvahed and pricked by a strange curi-
osity that will, one day, change my life I
avoid these old people and their irritating
tendency to clasp and clutch me and to
remark, gasping a little stagily, that when
Shmiel was a little yingling of my age he
looked just like me; a remark that Uncle
Shmiel overhears with no little pleasure
on this particular occasion and, having
heard it, raises his white head and looks
to see where Im standing and, nding
me, gives me an indulgent, knowing look
with the eyes that are the same blue as
mine before turning his head and return-
ing to the conversation he is having with
my grandfather in a Yiddish that I do not
understand.
So there is very little that remains of
Aunt Ester on the face of the wide world
today a face much of which I have looked
at from above, during the trips I made
to nd something out about her very
little of what Aunt Ester had been during
the 46 years she lived, 46 years in which
she was born and grew up and fell in
love and married and bore four children,
46 unknown and, now, unknowable years
before she disappears from sight during
the rst few days of (almost certainly)
September, 1942, when for of course this
is what really happened she was dragged
from her home and loaded onto a cattle car
that bore her to Belzec and the gas.
Daniel Mendelsohn, a Richard C.
Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor at the
Academy in spring 2008, is the Charles
Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at
Bard College in New York.
BECAUSE I HAVENT YET BEEN
BAR MITZVAHED AND PRICKED
BY A STRANGE CURIOSITY THAT
WILL, ONE DAY, CHANGE MY LIFE
I AVOID THESE OLD PEOPLE AND
THEIR IRRITATING TENDENCY TO
CLASP AND CLUTCH ME.

TS_City 27.08.2008 16:29 Uhr Seite 2
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MFC-8-AZ-22-RZ-AmericanAcademy-80825 25.08.2008 10:52 Uhr Seite 1
Notebook of the American Academy in Berlin | Number Seventeen | Fall 2008
ON THE WATERFRONT
NEWS FROM THE HANS ARNHOLD CENTER
N1 Academy Notebook: George
H.W. Bush is awarded the
2008 Henry A. Kissinger
Prize the personal laudatio
by Dr. Kissinger
N11 Life & Letters: Academy
Fellows and their projects,
plus a preview of the spring
2009 class, recent alumni
books, and the fall calendar
N6 Sketches & Dispatches: Reports
on visits from Bill Baker, Mitch
Epstein, Michael Stolleis, Paul
Krugman, and a celebration of
trustee Nina von Maltzahn
N5 Academy Notebook: Three
new Trustees at the American
Academy in Berlin
S
ince he came to the
American Academy as
a fellow in January, he
hasnt seen too much sun.
Instead, hes seen many other
things: the Olympic Stadium,
the Tempelhof Airport, and the
German Treasury Department,
where the Imperial Air Ministry
once sat before it became the
House of the Ministries of the
gdr and, following reunication,
the Treuhand. Places where the
Jewish-American discovers the
multiple layers of Germanys past
and present. The photographer
explored the city, read a pile of
books, did Internet research, and
talked to people. And he has done
what he didnt want to do: photo-
graph Berlin. At rst, he was just
grateful to get the opportunity to
escape the routine, to get to some
space between himself and his
M
r. President,
President von
Weizscker, distin-
guished guests, when I look at
this assemblage and see so many
friends, colleagues, and com-
rades of joint efforts, I am deeply
honored to be able to say a few
words about our honoree.
When my family left
Germany in 1938, it would have
been an impossible dream to
think that their son would one
day participate in a ceremony
honoring a former president
of the United States, whom he
knows personally and admires,
in the presence of a former presi-
dent of Germany, whom he also
greatly admires and yet it has
happened.
It is a symbol of what has been
achieved by several generations
who made their dreams become
reality. Among those people,
nobody has contributed more
than our honoree today. The task
of any national leader or the
leader of any organization is to
help move his society from where
it is to where it has never been.
This movement is often described
as the difference between ideal-
ists and realists, but the art of
leading societies depends rst
on understanding the necessities
Epsteins Berlin
A native New Yorker discovers the German capital
G
nter Blobel is out-
raged. Tonight at the
American Academy in
Berlin, the Rockefeller University
cell researcher disproves the
prejudice that scientists are dry,
calculating people with no sense
of humor.
The reason for Blobels
anger has the harmless name
Waldschlsschenbrcke, a
24-meter-long, four-lane high-
way that is supposed to relieve
the trafc on Dresdens other
bridges. As it would lead through
the idyllic Elbe river valley, how-
ever, dispute over the project is
dividing the city.
Blobel, a Nobel Prize win-
ner who immigrated to the US,
is a declared and likely the
most inuential opponent of
the planned bridge. Ever since
he witnessed the destruction
Bacteria and the Bridge
Nobel prize winner ghts for Dresdens cultural heritage
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Honoring George H.W. Bush
The 2008 Henry A. Kissinger Prize and the personal laudatio
HENRY A. KISSINGER, RICHARD C. HOLBROOKE,
GABRIELA VON HABSBURG, AND GEORGE H.W. BUSH
1. GEORGE H.W. BUSH,
HANS-DIETRICH GENSCHER,
AND KLAUS WOWEREIT
2. GEORGE H.W. BUSH,
NINA VON MALTZAHN,
AND SUE TIMKEN
3. RICHARD C. HOLBROOKE,
GEORGE H.W. BUSH,
HENRY KISSINGER,
SUE TIMKEN,
AND WILLIAM TIMKEN, JR.
4. DAVID RUBENSTEIN,
RICHARD VON WEIZSCKER,
RICHARD C. HOLBROOKE,
AND GEORGE H.W. BUSH
5. OTTO GRAF LAMBSDORFF
AND GAHL HODGES BURT
6. ROBERT M. KIMMITT
AND C. BOYDEN GRAY
7. GEORGE H.W. BUSH
AND RICHARD C. HOLBROOKE
N2 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
Academy Notebook
and then moving to goals beyond
the immediate.
I mention this because
President Bush, throughout the
decades in which I have observed
public life, has made an extraor-
dinary contribution to this task.
I heard him say once that when
he came home from school after
some sporting event and told
his mother what he had accom-
plished, his mother said that
there is no I in the word team.
He has contributed to the eleva-
tion of our society not only by the
actions which I will describe in a
moment, but also by the quality
of his personality. He described
his convictions as follows:
Everything I learned from his-
tory and from my father, Prescott
Bush, along with everything I
valued from my service in the
Navy, reinforced the words duty,
honor, and country. I believe
ones duty is to serve the country.
It was difcult for me to give dra-
matic speeches on my vision for
the nation. I was certain, however,
that results which could lead to
a more peaceful world would be
far better than trying to convince
people through rhetoric.
This conviction is exactly why
we are here tonight.
There is some discussion
among historians about who won,
or who was most responsible
for winning, the cold war. But
there can be little debate about
who led the transition from the
cold war to the world in which
we live today. When President
Bush took ofce he faced not
only the challenge of German
unication, but also a crisis over
the future of Sino-American rela-
tions. President Bush faced the
challenge of balancing the neces-
sities of a long-term relationship
with the imperative to stand for
our convictions with respect to
human rights, human dignity,
and democratic values. Without
the fortitude, patience, and wis-
dom that President Bush showed
in that period, we would not today
be in a world where we can par-
ticipate in a continuing dialogue
with a growing China.
Almost simultaneously, he
had to deal with a strange evolu-
tion in Russia strange in the
sense that nobody expected
that the Soviet system would
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disintegrate in the manner that
it did. At that moment, when
it suddenly became obvious
that Eastern Europe could be
liberated, German unication
suddenly became a possibility.
This unication had long been
our goal, though nobody knew
precisely by what road we would
reach it. Nobody could predict
how the various elements of the
international community would
react. Yet President Bush suc-
ceeded, rst by winning enough
of President Gorbachevs con-
dence to permit a dialogue about
a topic which had been inconceiv-
able, practically unmentionable,
and provocative.
And then arose the problem
of the future of Germany. In
1871, when Germany was uni-
ed, Disraeli said: This is a
greater event for the future
of Europe than the French
Revolution. Suddenly there
emerged in the center of Europe
a unied nation that was stron-
ger than many of its neighbors
and was therefore difcult to
t into the international com-
munity. But now, after the fall
of the Wall, a similar situation
arose: one had always believed
that Russia identied its security
with a physical border. It was
not clear how one would move
from the collapse of the Wall to
the unication of Germany. And
it was not clear, either to us or
to our allies, how Russia would
react. To keep all these elements
moving in the same direction,
and to do it on the basis of coop-
eration and friendship with
the German government, so
that unication became not the
action of foreign nations decid-
ing Germanys fate but rather
the action of Germans avowing
their future and integrating into
an international system that
was a unique performance in
diplomatic history.
This was followed not just by
the collapse of the satellite sys-
tem but by the disintegration of
the Soviet Union itself, leaving
us with a new problem: how to
deal with a nation that had lost
300 years of its history but at the
same time was an integral part of
the future of Europe and of trans-
atlantic relations.
President Bush could have
retired on these achievements,
but history had its own timetable.
Almost simultaneously with
those events, the disintegration
of the state system in the Middle
East began when the Iraqi dicta-
tor Saddam Hussein invaded
Kuwait. As with all these issues,
they look inevitable in retro-
spect, but they were complex
and at rst ambiguous. Under
President Bushs leadership, it
proved possible to create a coali-
tion to achieve consensus on war
aims and to end aggression in
a manner consistent with the
resolutions of the United Nations.
Almost all of history since that
time has, therefore, had its origin
in the presidency of our honoree.
As he said in the quota-
tion that I mentioned earlier,
President Bush did not choose
to encompass his presidency in
great rhetorical ourish. Indeed,
he thought that rhetorical our-
ish was a kind of derogation
of duty. But as we assembled
here know, the unication of
Germany and the unication of
Europe would have been much
more difcult without the initia-
tives taken in Bushs presidency.
The directions that were set in
our relations with China and
Russia are still those that need
to be pursued. The beginning
of the disintegration of the state
system in the Middle East cannot
and could not be rectied in
any relatively short time period,
but it remains before us as a com-
mon duty.
So, Mr. President, thank you
for giving me this opportunity to
pay tribute to a great American
and to pay tribute to a com-
mon destiny that can never be
completed. We will have to work
together, sometimes agreeing,
sometimes disagreeing, but
always convinced that the per-
petuation of our values and the
achievement of our ideals are
not simply personal tasks, but
the efforts of generations. Let
me thank you, Mr. President,
for what you have contributed to
the generations assembled here.
Please allow Mr. Holbrooke and
me to give you this award, which
is being presented by its designer,
Gabriela von Habsburg. Thank
you, Mr. President.
7.
ON JULY 3, 2008 PRESIDENT
GEORGE H.W. BUSH was
awarded the second annual
Henry A. Kissinger Prize at
the Hans Arnhold Center. The
American Academy in Berlin
would like to express its sin-
cere gratitude to Special Envoy
C. Boyden Gray, who under-
wrote the evening, and David
Rubenstein, who personally
arranged for our honorees
travel to Berlin.
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N5
A
t the spring 2008
board meeting in Berlin,
the Academy welcomed
three new members: Lawrence
Lessig, Richard Karl Goeltz, and
Pauline Yu.
Until now, just three alumni
have rejoined the American
Academy as trustees: Barbara
Balaj, Caroline Walker Bynum,
and Michael Geyer. But with the
addition of another, Lawrence
Lessig, a 2007 J.P. Morgan Fellow,
the Academys board welcomes
one of the nations preeminent
legal experts on constitutional
law, contracts, and the regula-
tion of cyberspace. A professor
at Stanford Law School, Lessig
was named one of Scientic
Americans Top 50 Visionaries
and is the founder of two ground-
breaking institutes: Stanford Law
Schools Center for Internet and
Society, which explores the evolv-
ing eld of legal doctrine sur-
rounding the technical innova-
tions of the Internet; and Creative
Commons, a nonprot organiza-
tion that seeks to promote inno-
vation and online discourse by
promoting copyright licenses that
allow others to disseminate and
expand upon a creators original
work.
Prior to coming to Stanford,
Lessig was the Berkman
New Academy Trustees
Lawrence Lessig, Pauline Yu, and Richard Karl Goeltz
Professor of Law at Harvard
Law School, the director of the
Berkman Center for Internet
and Society, and a professor at
the University of Chicago Law
School. He has contributed
regular columns to the Financial
Times, Wired, Red Herring, and
cio Insight and is the author of
four books on technology and
society, including the bestsell-
ing Free Culture: How Big Media
Uses Technology and the Law to
Lock Down Creativity (Penguin
Press, 2004). Lessig earned a
BA in economics and a BS in
management from the University
of Pennsylvania, an MA in phi-
losophy from the University of
Cambridge, and a JD from Yale
Law School. While Lessigs work
has taken him to many institu-
tions, he says of his time as an
Academy fellow: There is no
better opportunity to work and
understand, anywhere.
Pauline Yu is deeply famil-
iar with the executive work
necessary to the success of
institutions that foster human-
istic scholarship and creativity.
Since July 2003 she has been
President of the American
Council of Learned Societies
(acls), an institution estab-
lished in 1919 to support the
humanities and social sciences
through individual fellowships,
conference grants, and scholarly
exchange. Im delighted to be
joining this very distinguished
Board, Yu says of her Academy
trusteeship. Ill be especially
interested in exploring how to
bring even more outstanding
scholars particularly in the
humanities to the Academy,
where the opportunities for
unfettered yet engaged research
are extraordinary.
Immediately prior to her
assuming the lead role at
acls, Yu served as Dean of
Humanities in the College
of Letters and Science at the
University of California, Los
Angeles, and as a professor
of East Asian Languages and
Cultures. She has written and
edited ve books and dozens
of articles on classical Chinese
poetry, comparative literature,
and literary theory, and she has
received fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, acls,
and the National Endowment
for the Humanities. Having
completed her undergraduate
degree in history and litera-
ture at Harvard University, Yu
now serves on the universitys
Board of Overseers, as well
as on the Board of Trustees
of the National Humanities
Center, the Board of Directors
RICHARD KARL GOELTZ
PAULINE YU
LAWRENCE LESSIG
of the Teagle Foundation, the
Scholars Council of the Library
of Congress, and the Board of
Trustees of the Asian Cultural
Council. She received both her
MA and PhD in Comparative
Literature from Stanford
University.
The Academy is pleased to wel-
come another representative well-
versed in the world of business:
Richard Karl Goeltz, who was
Vice Chairman, Chief Financial
Ofcer, and member of the
Ofce of the Chief Executive of
the American Express Company
from 1996 to 2000. Prior to
that, he was Chief Financial
Ofcer and board member of
the NatWest Group from 1992
to 1996. An economics graduate
of Brown College and Columbia
University, Goeltz also held
various nance positions at The
Seagram Company Ltd., includ-
ing Executive Vice President of
Finance from 1986 to 1992.
Close, constructive rela-
tions between Germany and the
United States, Goeltz says of his
new role at the Academy, are
requisite not only for the two
countries but also for the global
community. The American
Academy in Berlin provides a
vital, effective forum for debate
and scholarly analysis, enhancing
mutual understanding, respect,
and cooperation along many
dimensions. Currently serving
on the Board of Governors for
the London School of Economics,
Goeltz also serves on the Board of
Directors of the Opera Orchestra
of New York, formerly as presi-
dent, and is an overseer of the
Columbia Business School. He
also serves on the boards of Delta
Air Lines, Aviva, Warnaco Group,
Inc., the Federal Home Loan
Mortgage Corp (Freddie Mac),
and the New Germany Fund.
The Academy wishes to extend
a warm welcome to all three new
members of its board.
N6 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
Sketches & Dispatches
S
he is a silent donor. Nina
Freifrau von Maltzahn
supports both the Sing-
Akademie zu Berlin and the
Curtis Institute, one of the
worlds leading music schools.
Located in Philadelphia, Curtis
has turned out greats such as
composer Leonard Bernstein and
pianist Lang Lang.
But Freifrau von Maltzahn
is a patron who does not like to
take much credit: Im rather
unobtrusive, she says. On the
evening of June 5, however, she
stood at the center of attention
at the American Academy in
Berlin, which has since 1994
been strengthening the trans-
atlantic relationship by promot-
ing intellectual and cultural
exchange. At the reception and
dinner in her honor were former
Federal President and co-founder
of the Academy Richard von
Weizscker and Brandenburgs
Secretary of the Interior, Jrg
Schnbohm, among dozens of
other Berlin luminaries.
Before the dinner and the
Curtis musicians concert, fea-
turing the music of Bernstein,
Handel, and Schumann, Frau
von Maltzahn stood on the ter-
Singing Her Praises
The American Academy honors Nina von Maltzahn
race of the American Academys
Hans Arnhold Center welcom-
ing guests. Everyone knows
each other in the house where
her mother, Ellen Maria
Gorrissen, was raised, and
which now bears the name
of her maternal grandfather,
Hans Arnhold.
Freifrau von Maltzahn was
born in New York, where she
lived for some time before
attending boarding school in
Switzerland. And while she has
been living in Uruguay for the
past thirty years, since becom-
ing involved at the Academy
as a trustee, she visits Berlin
more often.
On Thursday evening she
was honored primarily for her
generous support of the Curtis
Institute, a rst-time guest of the
Academy. Asked why she sup-
ports the Institute, Freifrau von
Maltzahn raved, I love music,
I love young people!
By Florian Hhne
Der Tagesspiegel
June 7, 2008
Translated by Sonja Janositz
DINNER GUESTS AT THE JUNE 5 CELEBRATION FLORIAN HHNE INTERVIEWING NINA VON MALTZAHN

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News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N7
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n 2007 American newspa-
pers advertising revenues,
which constitute nearly half of
their budgets, declined 5.6 per-
cent. But Internet advertising, a
comparatively new phenomenon,
is already a $21 billion business.
And while only 43 percent of
Americans say that they read a
newspaper yesterday, the aver-
age US citizen spends between
four and ve hours daily on the
Web. This raises two related ques-
tions: have traditional forms of
media become outmoded? If so,
how can they regain a foothold in
American civic life without alter-
ing their fundamental character?
In a May 27 speech at the
American Academy, from his
peak atop the American media
landscape, Bill Baker, the long-
time head of the Educational
Broadcasting Corporation (ebc),
gave a stern forecast of the fate of
the American press. He advised
that both public and private-
sector journalism need to adapt
to the technology and economy
of the century, while looking to
the past for models of frankness,
courage, and integrity. Thomas
Jefferson once rhetorically asked
whether he would choose a gov-
ernment without newspapers
or newspapers without govern-
ment, Baker recited. Jefferson
concluded, I should not hesi-
tate to prefer the latter. Baker
would like to see Jeffersons wish
fullled that information, not
authority, be the cornerstone of
free societies.
For 21 years Baker has led the
ebc, championing public broad-
casting despite the scal chal-
lenges that surround journalism
in the twenty-rst century. At the
ebcs helm he has created a num-
ber of award-winning programs,
including the Charlie Rose Show
and the local series City Arts,
which received both a Peabody
and an Emmy. Baker is also
recognized as one of the most
prolic fundraisers in America:
he has created a $1 billion endow-
ment, the largest in public televi-
sion history.
But even this cannot stave off
the danger to free speech that
has occurred over the last decade,
Baker says. This threat comes
from a nexus of inuences: the
economic pressures of media
outlets by advertisers, the hulk-
ing expense of having a team
of reporters and bureaus, and
the fragmentation of the media
landscape: 500 cable channels,
thousands of blogs, and online
classied ads, a traditional source
of newspaper revenue. In such
an environment, he argues,
democratic fostering is lost to the
drum of ideological voices, each
vying for inuence and attention.
The days of Edward R. Murrow,
whose reasoned voice stood up to
Senator Joseph McCarthy during
the Red Scare, have given way
to partisan pundits. In such an
environment, investigative jour-
nalism has been pushed aside;
its too expensive and requires too
many resources. And so the more
that giant, deregulated media
comes to represent the interests
of shareholders and serve its cor-
porate parent companies, Baker
says, the less room for fact-based,
less entertaining investigative
journalism.
Especially in times of war,
Baker reminds, the media faces
the challenge of seeking an
appropriate balance between the
preservation of secrecy that saves
human life and the preservation
of free discourse that allows free
societies to ourish.
Jeffersons Wish
Bill Baker is out to save American media
Baker pointed out another fact
of todays media landscape that
is cause for alarm: the number
of truly different media outlets
is rapidly shrinking. In radio, for
example, the largest conglomerate,
Clear Channel, owns 1,200 sta-
tions nationwide, often nationally
syndicating content. Baker cites
the case of one AM news station in
New Haven, Connecticut, that no
longer has a single news reporter
on staff. All of its news is instead
rebroadcast from its source in
Syracuse, New York.
Bakers current work seeks to
refocus investigative journalism
to serve the public over prot. The
online news agency Pro Publica,
begun by the Wall Street Journals
former managing editor Paul
Steiger, is a model organ for doing
so. But there are others, and Baker
has been leading an online project
at Channel Thirteen to see why
Americas decline in newspaper
readership is countered by a our-
ishing reading public in Europe;
some 72.4 percent of Germans, for
example, read a newspaper each
day. Recovering true freedom,
diversity, and vitality of the press
in the US might require herculean
effort, Baker says, but its essential
role in the survival of democracy
makes the task a fundamental one
for our time.
of Dresden in February 1945
as a Silesian refugee child, the
doctor has had a strong connec-
tion to the city. He donated his
entire Nobel Prize award funds
for the reconstruction of the
Frauenkirche and for the build-
ing of a new synagogue.
Cell Culture was the title
of the lecture he gave at the
American Academy. It consisted
of two parts appropriate for a
researcher split in his passions
for both science and art. The
white-haired, bow-tied 72-year-
old rst spoke about his lecture
topic: cell research. Blobel starts
with a quote by Berlin patholo-
gist Rudolf Virchow about how
all life on earth resulted from
a primordial cell, whose
offspring have multiplied dili-
gently for the last four million
years. Everyone of us is four
million years old, Blobel says.
One might also say that the
entire planet is one single cell
culture.
Blobel then shows a few lm
vignettes to an astonished audi-
ence: a white blood cell hunts
and then devours a small bac-
teria pile like a slimy monster.
Ten times more bacteria than
cells are living in and on our
bodies, he says. Most impres-
sive is the animation of the
bacterium agellum. The end
of the microbe is formed like a
whip and consists of thousand of
proteins. It is powered by a nano-
motor, a biological machine pow-
ered by hydrogen.
Then Blobel changes from
English to German, and instead
of computer animation he
shows some old black-and-white
photos: sheep grazing upon the
Elbes meadows, behind them
the silhouette of demolished
Dresden. Germany should not
turn into a highway system
between Poland and France,
Blobel says. Building a bridge
would destroy the Elysium of
the Elbe meadows. He quotes
Saxonys former chief conserva-
tionist Heinrich Magirius: The
bell of the Frauenkirche rever-
berates so because of the vast-
ness of this river landscape.
The construction of the
bridge began in November 2007.
On July 3 unesco will decide
whether to revoke Dresdens
designation as a site of world cul-
tural heritage.
By Hartmut Wewetzer
Der Tagesspiegel
June 12, 2008
Translated by Tanja Maka
Bacteria and the Bridge
CONTINUED FROM N1
great project American Power,
which he has been working on for
ve years. But maybe, he says at
one point, and smiles with irony
and amusement, it was just a
trumped-up justication for not
having to take pictures and then
being able to take pictures. He
realized, however: now I know
enough.
Mitch Epstein is not somebody
who sets out and takes snapshots.
That wouldnt work anyway; his
camera could hardly t in any
pants pocket. The 55- year old
works with a huge plate-camera
on a high tripod, the kind that
was invented in the nineteenth
century. The bulky and expen-
sive camera forces him to con-
centrate and to be exact. Only two
pictures t onto one plate, and
when he looks through the lens,
he sees everything upside down.
Thus, he says, one pays more
attention to the formal congura-
tion. The camera forces him to
work conceptually and yet to be
simultaneously open to surprises,
like the other day when he stum-
bled upon elephants between the
Plattenbauten in Lichtenberg.
Mitch Epstein speaks the way
he photographs: with a great
deal of consideration, striving
towards accurateness, towards
honesty, as he says. He does not
give many interviews. But when
he does, he gives them properly:
he takes almost the entire day.
He used adhesive strip to tape
the 1.78 x 2.34-meter prints of
his Berlin pictures on top of each
other to the wall of his altbau
apartment in Kreuzberg, which
serves as his studio, setting up
high spotlights to illuminate
them correctly. With the help
of his assistant, he rolls out the
pictures bit by bit. From right to
left, from left to right. It is as if he
would expose the layers of Berlin,
cleaving a book, page by page.
Epsteins pictures are like mov-
ies: huge, dramatic, tragic, comic,
touching. Often the human
element, which he emphasizes
rst and foremost, is expressed
without any humans. In the Crisis
Conference Room of the German
State Department, for instance, in
the former vault of the Imperial
Bank, he was delighted by the
water bottle and the name tag in
the corner: Herr Dodi, Studiosus-
Reisen. Right between the
weathered, crooked gravestones,
overgrown by ivy at the Jewish
Cemetery Weiensee, the gnarly
trunks and branches, between
all the greens and browns, sits a
white laptop, which one discovers
only by a mere second glance; a
researcher had set up his ofce
there; here, the present, planted
in history. In Epsteins studio in
Kreuzberg the small bouquet of
buttercups on the little table in
Epsteins Berlin
MITCH EPSTEIN, TEMPELHOF INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, BERLIN, 2008
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News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N9
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here is no way
back to innocence.
At the end of a long
and lively discussion, Fritz
Stern returned to the sentence
Michael Stolleis had offered at
the very beginning of his lec-
ture Teaching International
Law under the Swastika. For an
American, this sentence today
has special meaning, noted the
German-American historian,
in times when one has to deal
under very different premises
with the question of how the law
is interpreted and misinter-
preted. Stern demurred that he
would leave out detail, but named
as an example John Yoo, the
former legal advisor in the Bush
Administration who justied the
American practice of torture.
This years Fritz Stern Lecture
at the American Academy in
Berlin lead to an enlivened debate
about the relationship between
law and politics, about the ten-
dency of lawyers to corrupt under
power, and about new beginnings
and continuities in transnational
legal developments in the twen-
tieth century. The legal histo-
rian Michael Stolleis, director of
Frankfurts Max Planck Institute
for European Legal History,
however, limited his focus to a
precisely outlined chapter in the
history of German public law. But
this limitation opened up broad
space for reection.
In 1933, Stolleis explained,
public international law in
Germany was a scholarly eld
shaped by professors, many of
whom were Jewish. They were
murdered or, like Hans Kelsen,
Erich Kaufmann, and Georg
Schwarzenberger, pressured to
emigrate. For legal scholars who
stayed in Germany, public inter-
national law became a particu-
larly attractive discipline because
it offered in the context of the
gradual dissolution of the Treaty
of Versailles and Germanys
withdrawal from the League of
Nations the possibility of practi-
cal effectiveness, of dealing with
a sequence of relevant events
in public international law and
allowed at the same time a win-
dow on the outside world.
Until the Munich Agreement,
German experts of international
law were as Stolleis responded
to an inquiry by Berlin European
constitutional law expert Ingolf
Pernice naturally part of the
universal Gelehrtenrepublik
(republic of letters). In 1934
Rostock-based constitutional
lawyer Edgar Tatarin-Tarnheyden
wrote that the welfare of the
German people can lie in respect-
ing international law. Friedrich
Berber had a very different
approach: he sought to bring pub-
lic international law into the ser-
vice of National Socialist foreign
policy, emphasizing in 1939 that
international law should no lon-
ger be the playground of interna-
tionalist and pacist ideologies.
Nevertheless, there were
islands on which the classical
tradition of the academic eld
was cultivated until the end of the
National Socialist dictatorship
outside of the law departments,
where career-focused junior
researchers had become sub-
servient to the regime. Stolleis
emphasized the role of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Foreign
Public Law and International
Law in Berlin, where men like
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke,
Hermann Mosler, and Berthold
Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg
worked as experts on humanitar-
ian law, under the leadership of
Viktor Bruns.
Stolleis concluded his lecture
by quoting from the essay Der
Streit um das Vlkerrecht, writ-
ten in the fall of 1944 by Viktor
Brunss successor, Carl Bilnger.
In the essay, Bilnger dealt in
an elegiac tone with the Allies
postwar plans. He articulated
the hope that Germany might
not be entirely excluded in a
still-dark postwar world by,
for example, being part of the
establishment of regional and
particular systems, in the sense
of Groraum systems, through
interstate institutions and coop-
eration. At that time, the extent
of the crime and the subsequent
international disparagement of
Germany were not entirely clear
to Bilnger.
It is not my intention to take
the position of a judge here, and
to judge the generation of my
father, the experts of public
international law, the direc-
tors of institutes, and editors of
scholarly journals, Stolleis said.
Historians are neither judges
nor prophets. But in hindsight,
it becomes recognizable that
with the founding of the United
Nations, with the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights,
and the Nuremberg Trials, there
has truly been a new beginning.
By Alexandra Kemmerer
From the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung
June 3, 2008
Translated by Tanja Maka
Against the Prevailing
World Opinion
A scholarly dispute in honor of trustee Fritz Stern
the oriel seem, too, like a personal
stroke of the brush, like a still life
of a working place.
His cinema gleams with
strong colors. Epstein is a fan of
Fassbinder, who worked at a time
when color print was regarded
simply as brassy and commercial.
True art showed up in black-and-
white in the 70s. Today, Epstein,
whose pictures can be seen at the
Museum of Modern Art and at
the Getty Museum, is regarded as
one of the pioneers of the genre.
Epsteins cinema has certainly
nothing to do with Hollywood. It
is too quiet. Too demanding. The
artist demands from the beholder,
as well, that he does his home-
work. The titles tell no more than
the location. To be able to read
the pictures, as Epstein says, the
beholder has to know the story
behind the motif. It is of no coin-
cidence that books are an impor-
tant medium in his photography,
which unfold sequentially. They
are as uncomfortable as his cam-
era: they dont t in any purse.
In 2001 Epstein came to
Germany for the rst time to
print a book with Gerhard Steidl,
who has published all of his books
since. He exhibits at Thomas
Zanders gallery in Cologne. What
impressed him with Germany
was the serious discussion of its
own history, but also of its art. In
Berlin, the American Academy
opened many doors for him. He
shows up at heavily secured and
sensitive locations, such as the
German Ministries, with his
archaic-looking equipment, ready
to shoot. Germans seem to regard
the bulky equipment as a sign of
the seriousness of his endeavor.
In Washington, however, he
arouses suspicion, cant even get
close to the Capitol and forget
getting inside. The impartiality
characterizing Americans atti-
tudes toward the photographer
in the 1970s has disappeared.
Today, he says, he is eyed with
great distrust, like when he was
being interrogated by the fbi:
One always has to prove his
innocence.
By Susanne Kippenberger
Der Tagesspiegel
May 4, 2008
Translated by Sonja Janositz
I
n 2006, signicantly before
widespread agreement that
the American economy was
suffering, New York Times col-
umnist and Princeton economics
professor Paul Krugman offered
what seemed a deliberately
contrarian assessment: average
Americans were on target when
they rated the American economy
as fair to poor. While the gdp
rose, the Dow oated over 12,000,
and unemployment declined,
Krugman set out to explain why
many Americans were reporting
economic discontent. He cited
troubling indicators that pointed
to the widening gap between the
nations wealthy and poor. He
concluded: Not only can few
Americans hope to join the ranks
of the rich, but no matter how
well educated or hardworking
they may be, their opportunities
to do so are actually shrinking.
This year, as the spectres of
energy, lending, and real-estate
crises haunt the American econ-
omy, Krugmans warning seems
portentous. On May 21 he joined
the American Academy in Berlin
to explain how growing inequal-
ity is affecting the future of the
US economy, and what govern-
ment can do about it. He was in
Berlin for the release of his new
book The Conscience of A Liberal
(W.W. Norton, 2007), which
had just appeared in German
as Nach Bush: Das Ende der
Neokonservativen und die Stunde
der Demokraten (Campus Verlag).
In the worlds wealthiest coun-
try, Krugman reminds, 47 mil-
lion Americans have no health
insurance. The top 1 percent of
the population owns 38 percent
of the nations wealth. And while
the ceo of Americas biggest
corporation, Wal-Mart, earns
$23 million a year, the average
wage-earner for that company
earns just $19,000. The result
of this disparity has been the
slow eradication of the American
middle class. This, Krugman
believes, is the fault of politics:
Middle-class societies dont
emerge automatically as an econ-
omy matures, he says. They
have to be created through politi-
cal action.
No other advanced industrial
nation has seen anything like
the economic disparity that has
developed in the United States
over the past three decades. And
the current gap, Krugman says,
actually looks much as it did in
the pre-New Deal economy. After
the 1920s the US experienced
what economists call the Great
Compression: the shrinking
of the rich-poor divide, or the
political creation of a middle
class the one of Krugmans
1950s childhood. But the eco-
nomic world we see today is, he
says, so vastly different that its
no longer recognizable. This,
even though the US now has
an immensely more productive
economy than it had at mid-
century. The benets of that
increased productivity, however
vast economic growth have
nearly all gone to the wealthy.
So whos to blame? Krugman
says its conservative economic
legislation. The gap between top
managerial pay and employee
compensation has skyrocketed,
he says, since the dawn of the
Reagan Revolution. Another
important factor, Krugman
believes, is the mid-century
conservative reaction to the civil
rights movement. This is because
resistance to civil rights caused
many white Southern voters to
abandon the Democratic party,
joining the Republicans while
recasting its platform around an
agenda of traditional values and
thus neglecting their own eco-
nomic class interests. While this
is the argument that has been
repeated by, among others, econo-
mist Thomas Frank in Whats the
Matter with Kansas?, President
Lyndon Johnson said to a young
aide after the he signed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, We have just
lost the South for a generation.
But that just might be chang-
ing, Krugman says. Voters
minds are now more often decid-
ed by perceptions of the economy
than by so-called questions of
values, as they were during the
1990s culture wars. Elections
are won by the economy, he says,
and this one will be no different.
Regardless of who wins the US
presidential race, Krugman fore-
sees a moratorium on liberalized
trade agreements, such as nafta,
as struggling middle-class
Americans sense that their well-
being and economic parity have
suffered because of globalization
and job outsourcing. Either can-
didate will have to do something
to get America back on an equal
economic playing eld. And this
all begins, Krugman says, with
universal healthcare.
A New Gilded Age?
Paul Krugman sees echoes of the past in todays economic crisis
drafting the Kyoto Protocol. And
in sketching the international
climate change regimes from
Kyoto, through Bali, and on to
Copenhagen, he has also charted
the progression of global deals
on climate change for what they
really signify.
While climate change policy
is a hard sell costs are incurred
today but the results would come
much later the general global
deal on climate change policy
has already been agreed upon:
a long-term goal of carbon reduc-
From Bali to Copenhagen
Climate change policy and national interests
C
limate change is
the most dire problem
mankind has ever faced,
says Thomas Heller, a professor
of international legal studies at
Stanford University and a bmw
Distinguished Visitor at the
Academy last spring. The irony of
this situation is that the negative
effects we face stem from the very
accomplishments we prize and
to which the less-developed world
still aspires. Heller has worked
on climate policy in several capac-
ities, including as an advisor in
tion by 2050 to 80 percent below
1990 levels, a 2040 percent cut
in the Annex 1 state (US and
Europe) emissions by 2020, and
the graduation of emerging
markets into making compre-
hensive caps on carbon. Further
steps include the deepening and
expansion of carbon markets, as
well as the creation of large tech-
nology innovation funds. These
would provide compensation for
poor countries that may not emit
but that need aid in adapting to
modern standards.
Still, the global deal is a
lousy deal, Heller says. He
predicts that rich countries will
take national action, creating
their own domestic legislation.
Denmark, for example, is invest-
ing heavily in wind energy in
order to dominate the market
early on. Other nations do the
same: create climate-policy incen-
tives in the national interest. But
this means that when the major
nations meet at Copenhagen in
November 2009, they will pack-
age their domestic programs,
rather than negotiate new ones.
If Copenhagen is to be effective,
Heller says, nations will have to
nd much more room for coop-
eration than they are now.
News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Life & Letters | N11
Life & Letters
Alumni Books
Recent and forthcoming releases
ANDREW BACEVICH
The Limits of Power: The End of
American Exceptionalism
Metropolitan Books
(August 2008)
DANIEL BOYARIN
Socrates and the Fat Rabbis
University of Chicago Press
(Spring 2009)
EDWARD P. DJEREJIAN
Danger and Opportunity: An
American Ambassadors Journey
Through the Middle East
Simon & Schuster Threshold
Editions
(September 2008)
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
The Poverty of The Poverty Rate:
Measure and Mismeasure of Want
in America
AEI Press
(Fall 2008)
PETER FILKINS
Translator
The Journey (by H.G. Adler)
Random House
(Fall 2008)
ARIS FIORETOS
Das Ma eines Fues: Essays
Carl Hanser Verlag
(September 2008)
JOY HASLAM CALICO
Brecht at the Opera
University of California Press
(August 2008)
MARTIN INDYK
Innocent Abroad: An Intimate
History of American Peace
Diplomacy in the Middle East
Simon & Schuster
(January 2009)
PIERRE JORIS
Aljibar II (bilingual edition, with a
French translation by Eric Sarner)
Editions PHI
(Spring 2008)
BRIAN LADD
Autophobia: Love and Hate in the
Automotive Age
(November 2008)
LAWRENCE LESSIG
Remix: Making Art and Commerce
Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
Penguin Press HC
(October 2008)
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS
W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography
Henry Holt and Co.
(December 2008)
CHARLES MOLESWORTH
(WITH LEONARD HARRIS)
Alain L. Locke: Biography of A
Philosopher
(November 2008)
THOMAS POWERS
The Military Error: Baghdad and
Beyond in Americas War of Choice
New York Review Books
(August 2008)
PAUL A. RAHE
Soft Despotism, Democracys
Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and
Tocqueville on the Modern Prospect
Yale University Press
(Spring 2009)
ELIZABETH SEARS (WITH
CHARLOTTE SCHOELL-GLASS)
Verzetteln als Methode. Der
humanistische Ikonologe William
S. Heckscher
Akademie Verlag
(June 2008)
DANA VILLA
Public Freedom
Princeton University Press
(August 2008)
HELMUT WALSER SMITH
The Continuities of German
History: Nation, Religion, and
Race across the Long Nineteenth
Century
Cambridge University Press
(April 2008)
ROSANNA WARREN
Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric
Poetry
W.W. Norton
(September 2008)
DIMITRIOS YATROMANOLAKIS
Sappho in the Making: The Early
Reception
Harvard University Press
(March 2008)
N12 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center
JOEL AGEE
Joel Agee arrived in East
Germany in 1948; he was eight
years old. He came along with his
two siblings, his mother, and his
stepfather, Bodo Uhse, a German
exile writer who would become a
leader of social reconstruction in
the Soviet sector.
Growing up in communist
East Germany was not easy for the
young Agee. He recounts in his
memoir Twelve Years: An American
Boyhood in East Germany (2000)
that school was a gray factory over-
seen by blunt Marxist doctrinaires
hostile to talent. He was truant
and failing classes. Bricklaying
soon replaced his formal educa-
tion, a change that the boy Agee
actually welcomed.
His young adulthood during
the explosive 1960s became expo-
nentially more strange: he found
himself in a baseball game with
the Castro brothers in Cuba, cry-
ing in a caf with Bob Dylan in the
East Village, getting shot, experi-
menting heavily with psychedelic
drugs, and then, temporarily, los-
ing his wife, infant daughter, and
his mind. Agees tortured, soul-
searching journey is heroically
recounted in his 2004 memoir
In The House of My Fear (2004), a
book that plunges so forcefully
back into that ecstatic decade that
critic Andrei Codrescu called it
the account of the Sixties we so
long bemoaned the lack of.
One of Americas most
cherished autobiographers and
German literary translators,
Agees essays have appeared
in, among other publications,
Harpers, The New Yorker, and
The Yale Review. He has received
a Guggenheim Fellowship
and a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts; his
translations of Heinrich von
Kleists Penthesilea and Hans
Erich Nossacks Der Untergang
respectively won the 1999 Helen
and Kurt Wolff and the 2005 Lois
Roth prizes. In 2007 Agee was a
nalist for the esteemed Oxford-
Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
While at the Academy this
fall, Agee will be working on a
novel that inhabits a land between
ction and fact: its about a boy
living in Mexico in the mid-1940s
with his expatriate German
stepfather, his American mother,
and a Mexican maid, exploring
national mythos and identity
from the childs point of view.
LEORA AUSLANDER
What will posterity make of our
hastily composed e-mails, our
scrawled notes tacked to the
refrigerator door or even the
geometry and aesthetics of the
door itself?
Implicit in Leora Auslanders
work is the assumption that there
is much indeed to be made of
such things; the acts and para-
phernalia that surround our his-
tory become our history or at
least the physical evidence of its
passing.
Auslander, a professor of
Modern European Social History
at the University of Chicago, has
embarked time and again on
novel strategies for uncovering
truth about the past through its
objects. Her 1996 book, Taste and
Power: Furnishing Modern France,
detected the latent political and
cultural values that registered in
popular French furniture, from
the age of absolutism to modern
mass-production.
Last year Auslander published
another historical investigation,
this time analyzing how goods,
habits, and rituals fostered a
spirit of republicanism in mod-
ern Britain, North America, and
France. Her forthcoming project,
which compares twentieth-cen-
tury Jewish culture in Paris and
Berlin, will deepen the material
historians acquaintance with the
German capital. Weaved through-
out the project is the theme of
an anguished loss of homeland,
particularly since home is such
a hybrid creature half material,
half ineffable. It is in that space
that Auslander will again begin
to cajole life, ideas, wishes, and
fears from the domestic artifacts
of passed European lives.
PATTY CHANG
In one of the artist Patty Changs
short lms, she French kisses
her mother and her father while
they chew a raw onion. In another,
panic streaks across the artists
face as live eels squirm inside her
blouse. In a recent work, she toys
with the idea of Shangri-La, ying
to the real city on the Chinese-
Tibetan border to reconstruct a
model fantasyland out of wood
and mirrors. Boundary crossing,
stereotypes, uneasiness, taboo,
physical and emotional discom-
fort: these are the weapons in
Changs artistic arsenal.
Schooled as a painter at
UC-San Diego, Chang moved
to New York in 1995 and began
doing performance art and lm,
such as Fountain (1999), in which
she sips water off of a mirror as if
to drink her own image, project-
ing the act into the gallery space.
Many of her early lms revolve
around Chang herself; they have
accordingly been described by
Holland Carter of The New York
Times as hair-raisingly narcis-
sistic. The Times also went
on to call her one of our most
consistently exciting young art-
ists in 2006. Her latest work,
Touch Would, is a multilayered
video project that delves into the
tangled interlace of translation,
mistranslation, interpretation,
and performance.
A 2008 nalist for the
Guggenheim Museums presti-
gious Hugo Boss Prize, Chang has
staged solo shows in cities such
as Madrid, Visby, and New York,
where she lives and works. Chang
has taught at the Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture
in Maine, and her work has
been recognized by many cul-
tural organizations, including
the Rockefeller Foundation, the
New York Foundation for the Arts,
and the Louise Comfort Tiffany
Foundation.
HEIDI FEHRENBACH
That Heidi Fehrenbach is at the
American Academy in Berlin
during the rst US presidential
campaign to include an African-
Proles in
Scholarship
The fall 2008 class of fellows
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: HA JIN, THOMAS HOLT, LEORA AUSLANDER,
American Democratic candidate
seems apt: Fehrenbach, whose
three of four grandparents were
German, has long been probing
racial ideologies and their post-
1945 incarnations in both the US
and Germany. Her book Race after
Hitler: Black Occupation Children
in Postwar Germany and America
(2005) addresses the ways in
which tense race relations among
US occupying soldiers and
black-white relationships within
the German population aided
inadvertently in shaping postwar
German notions of race.
The election of the rst black
US president, Fehrenbach has
written, would mark the end of
an American history character-
ized, from its earliest revolution-
ary days, by race-based criteria
for inclusion in, and exclusion
from, the American body poli-
tic. Whatever the outcome of the
2008 US Presidential race, then,
the swift rise of Illinois Senator
Barack Obama will be marked
as a shift in the American racial
imagination that Fehrenbach has
long studied.
Currently a professor of history
at Northern Illinois University,
Fehrenbach specializes as well
in the social and cultural effects
of Nazism and WWII, postwar
experiences of occupation and
democratization, and postwar
transitions in conceiving race and
gender in the US and Germany.
Awarded a Guggenheim fel-
lowship for 20072008 and
a Haniel fellowship at the
American Academy in fall 2008,
Fehrenbach will work on her
project From War Children to
Our Children: How World War II
Remade the Family and Fostered
Childrens Rights. The book will
comparatively study the broad
effects of racialized war and post-
war military occupation, which
impacted international child wel-
fare work and national norms of
family constitution in Europe and
the United States.
JULIET FLOYD
In an attempt to positively refute
the immaterialist philosophy
of Bishop Berkeley, Dr. Samuel
Johnson famously kicked a big
stone and exclaimed, I refute
it thus! So much for subjective
idealism.
But things were more compli-
cated than Dr. Johnson anticipat-
ed, and philosophy would contin-
ue to wrestle with the notions of
objectivity and immateriality for
the next several centuries. After
all, the number-one assumption
of science is that there is a real
world out there to study.
Juliet Floyds research picks
up Dr. Johnsons torch: her inter-
est is in the nature of objectiv-
ity how it arises, why we should
care about it, and how we are
to construe it philosophically.
Floyd has focused on the inter-
section of philosophy of logic,
language, and mathematics, as
well as on the history of twenti-
eth-century philosophy, particu-
larly on topics in epistemology
and the philosophy of logic and
mathematics.
A professor of philosophy at
Boston University since 1996,
Floyds extensive writings have
examined the unique interplay
of gures as diverse as Kant,
Frege, Wittgenstein, Gdel, and
Quine. She has also written on
the objectivity and nature of rule-
following, the fate of empiricism
in the 1950s, and on the historical
signicance of attempts at the
mathematical rigorization of
intuitive notions such as mean-
ing, truth, proof, reference, and
algorithm.
Her current project, which
she will continue while in resi-
dence at the Academy, concerns
Wittgensteins reactions to the
limitative results of Gdel and
Turing in the 1930s and 1940s.
Pursuit of this subject will aid
an even more ambitious project:
placing the history of attempts to
formalize rationality within the
context of twentieth-century intel-
lectual history. She has already
begun the effort by co-editing
(with Sanford Shieh) Future Pasts:
The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth
Century Philosophy (2001).
DEVIN FORE
By the late 1920s German artists
found themselves in a peculiar
position: Western civilization was
becoming more mechanized and
industrial, not less. Around the
Continent, artistic movements
reveling in objects, products, and
mechanical power and preci-
sion held sway. Yet images of the
human body abandoned as an
old-fashioned or pre-industrial
subject matter were steadily
returning as motifs and subjects
for German art. Critics of the time
hailed this move as a return to
order, while later scholars have
often judged this neo-realism as
mere reactionary nostalgia. Fall
2008 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow
Devin Fore begs to differ. He will
set out to prove in his monograph
Return to Order that German
Realisms devotion to the body was
new and important even more so
than its practitioners realized.

H
O
R
N
I
S
C
H
E
R
JOEL AGEE, DAVID SABEAN, DEVIN FORE, PATTY CHANG, DANIEL VISCONTI, JULIET FLOYD, HEIDE FEHRENBACH
Fores semester at the Academy
is nothing if not ambitious, as he
simultaneously undertakes a sec-
ond monograph: All the Graphs
investigates the invention of
documentary by the Russian
avant-garde. Now taken for grant-
ed as an everyday form of media,
scholarship, and entertainment,
documentary was not so much
born as detonated, rocking the
Russian art world with ever-more
vigorous and ambitious manifes-
tos and projects. Corps of artist-
factographers combed factories
and cities to document technical
culture, often glorifying their
subjects in the process.
Fore, an assistant professor
at Princeton, embarks on these
monographs with a tone of famil-
iarity: he has already translated
seven essays and manifestos of
the Russian avant-garde, with
titles like The Biography of the
Object and Art in the Revolution
and the Revolution in Art. No
stranger to Germany, Fore has
previously studied in Berlin
through a Whiting Foundation
Fellowship in 2002, a Social
Science Research Council fel-
lowship in 2001, and, prior, at
Humboldt Universitt. For Devin
Fore, then, Return to Order and
All the Graphs are a bit like the
reappearance of the Realist body
in Weimar Germany: projects
that hover a step backward while
truly moving forward.
THOMAS HOLT
In 1900 the African-American
essayist and ction writer Charles
Waddell Chesnutt predicted
that racial distinctions in the
United States would soon cease
to exist. In a miscegenated
nation, he said, there would be
no inferior race to domineer over;
there would be no superior race
to oppress those who differed
from them in racial externals.
However we rate the progress
of civil rights or the decline
of racism in the past century,
Chesnutts prediction of a race-
less America has proven incorrect,
or, at best, hasty. Race still exists
in the American consciousness,
and the spectrum of skin color on
American faces is broader than
ever. Citigroup Fellow Thomas
Holt, long a seminal gure in
the academic study of percep-
tions of race, is now investigating
what it has meant to be of mixed
race, and why this interstitial
status has been a wellspring of
racial anxiety, mythology, and
pseudoscience.
Professor Holts project,
Racial Death or the Death of
Racism: The Problem of Race
Mixture, will add to his impres-
sive academic output over a dis-
tinguished career. A former presi-
dent of the American Historical
Association, Holt now teaches
in the history department at the
University of Chicago. Before
his rst lectureship in 1972, at
Howard University Holt was
deeply involved in the politics
and policy of social equality,
having worked for several years
with the US Ofce of Economic
Opportunity and the Ofce of
Education, where he consulted
on migrant and seasonal farm-
worker programs and emergency
school aid.
History, Holt believes, is as
necessary to the human mind
as its awareness of the present.
Reading Heideggers Being and
Time as a lesson for the sociolo-
gist and historian, Holt writes:
Indeed, one cannot even concep-
tualize an individual conscious-
ness, a self continuous from one
time point to another, without
a concept of history, of memory.
To think I am requires I was,
which needs in turn a narrative
of they and/or we. The dis-
solution of racial otherness the
dissolution of we gives misce-
genation its troubled position in
the American psyche.
HA JIN
Ha Jin speaks both Chinese and
English uently. He has written
both prose and poetry stunningly.
In other words, Jin possesses at
least four different ways of com-
municating with the world. With
this enviable literary toolbox,
he has been steadily teaching
the power of literary expression
and publishing his own since
the late Eighties. Currently a
professor of English at Boston
University, Jin has most recently
authored the novels A Free Life,
War Trash, The Crazed, and a vol-
ume of poetry entitled Wreckage.
It has been eight years since
Ha Jin published a collection of
short stories, The Bridegroom,
which has been translated into
seven languages and won both
the Asian American Literary
Prize and the Townsend Fiction
Prize. This fall Jin returns to the
genre of the short story with The
Magic Fall, the working title of
a new collection of interwoven
stories set in Flushing, New York,
where nearly half of the residents
of the actual city identify them-
selves as Asian-American; many
are recent immigrants to the
United States. It is in this turbu-
lent, struggling community that
the twelve stories of The Magic
Fall will follow a varied cast of
characters, each dening his or
her race, home, and loyalties.
Until recently, most of Jins
work has been set in his native
China, from which he emigrated
permanently after receiving
his doctorate from Brandeis
University. His writings shift
to American settings mirrors
this geographic mutability. Jin
remarks that perhaps the English
word home, with its double
sense of ones origin and ones
current abode, captures this more
expressively than other languages
(such as Chinese) that make
stricter linguistic distinctions.
Now when we talk about home,
its an issue of return. Its also a
matter of arrival. If a home can
be created then home is in the
process of becoming.
DAVID SABEAN
It is difcult to imagine a research
topic that could engage civil,
criminal, and canon law, theology,
sociology, biology, politics, pop
and high culture all at once. So it
may come as a surprise that ucl a
history professor David Sabeans
capable foray through all of them
is in pursuit of such an uncom-
fortable subject: incest. His mon-
umental project, Kinship and
Incest Discourse in Europe and
America since the Renaissance,
argues that changes in social,
political, and family structures,
and attitudes toward incest move
in a synchronized interrelation-
ship: a change in any one of these
signals a change in all.
Take the early nineteenth cen-
tury, for example: with many new
ways of amassing wealth besides
patrimonial inheritances, it
became less important to protect
the integrity of the father-to-son
line and more important to net-
work with other families in coop-
erative alliance. Thus households
might have groups of siblings
and cousins brought up together;
both affection and desire could
ensue. Add to the mix the rise of
the novel and the Hegelian asser-
tion that the self could be discov-
ered by seeing ones reection in
another, mirror-like person, and
suddenly it becomes clear why
novels and tales of brother-sister
incest abounded.
In the twentieth and twenty-
rst centuries, incest in the
popular or artistic imagination
is most often synonymous with
sexual relationships between par-
ents and children. Freud provided
the background and buzzwords,
but this does not entirely explain
why the discourse about Oedipus
and Electra has hung around so
long. If primary cultural struc-
tures such as law, economy, and
religion are indeed tied to our
concept of incest, then Sabeans
scholarship on incest might pro-
vide unexpected revelations about
the assumptions and institutions
that structure our everyday lives.
ANGELA STENT
Tension between Russia and
Georgia over the separatist
enclave of South Ossetia resulted
in clashes between the two
countries armies last August.
Diplomacy soon followed, lead
by French President Nicholas
Sarkozy, and the US sent medical
supplies and monetary aid. But
the ordeal caused a renewed cold-
war-era suspicion of a revanchist
Russia anxious to ex its military
might. Further consequences for
the Russia-nato relationship are
sure to follow.
It is exactly on these sorts of
problematic situations tensions
between post-Soviet Russia and
the West which Angela Stent
has focused for her entire career
in government, academia, and the
private sector. Currently the direc-
tor of the Center for Eurasian,
Russian, and East European
Studies at Georgetown University,
Stent has held positions on the
US State Departments Policy
Planning Staff and on the
National Intelligence Council.
A specialist on both Soviet and
post-Soviet foreign policy, Stent,
a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, is specically
concerned with the European
and, above all, German relation-
ship with Russia. Her expertise
has resulted in myriad articles
and numerous books, including
the thoroughgoing Russia and
Germany Reborn: Unication, the
Soviet Collapse and the New Europe
(2000).
Stents work at the Academy
this fall will be a book project
called Dueling Narratives: How
the United States, Europe, and
Russia Interpret the Collapse of
the ussr and the Rise of the Post-
Soviet Era. The project will ana-
lyze what the West has learned
from its involvement during and
after the ussrs collapse, raise the
question of why ties are no less
strained than in 1991, and make
some cautious predictions for the
future.
DANIEL VISCONTI
Daniel Viscontis orchestral
piece Storm Windows takes its
title from a poem by Howard
Nemerov. As the orchestra
plays, a narrator reads: People
are putting up storm windows
now, / Or were, this morning,
until the heavy rain / Drove them
indoors The calming habits
that seem to show humanitys
victory over forces of nature
are halted, postponed, then
destroyed altogether. Soon lawns
are attened, window glass shat-
tered. But the storms destruc-
tion allows a new kind of com-
munication to exist: something
of / A swaying clarity.
It is this new clarity that
Viscontis compositions attempt
to bring forth, working from the
rubble, detritus, and storm-wreck
of more habitual and convention-
al forms of music. Dan Visconti,
this years Leonore Annenberg
Fellow in Music Composition,
spent years as a jazz and rock gui-
tarist, and traces of these genres
as well as blues, gospel, and other
forms remain detectable.
At 26, Visconti has already
received numerous accolades for
his work, including awards from
bmi and ascap, the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, and
the Society of Composers. In
the past three years, he has had
three major orchestral pieces
commissioned: Overdrive for
the Minnesota Orchestra, The
Breadth of Breaking Waves by the
Annapolis Symphony, and Some
Day the Sun Wont Shine by the
New York Youth Symphony. The
forcefulness and energy of his
compositions are practically pal-
pable: when describing his music,
reviewers call it bristling, daz-
zling, and an assault on the
senses.
The potency of Viscontis com-
positions demonstrates again the
power of music to communicate
uniquely among the arts. Late
in Storm Windows, Nemerovs
speaker interrupts his account
of the rainstorm with a paren-
thetical, bemused and bemusing
aside: (Unspeakable the distance
in the mind!) Should this be the
case, it is the great task of com-
posers including Dan Visconti
to express it.
T
he Academy looks
forward to welcoming
an outstanding class of
scholars, writers, and artists to
the Hans Arnhold Center this
spring. Donald Antrim,
author of Must I Now Read All of
Wittgenstein?, becomes the sec-
ond Mary Ellen von der Heyden
Fellow of Fiction. He will be
joined by Holtzbrinck Fellow
Adrian LeBl anc, author of
Give It Up and a professor at the
New York University School
of Journalism. Bosch Fellows
in Public Policy this spring are
journalist Charles Lane of
the Washington Post, and Susan
Pedersen, professor of history at
Columbia University. Edward
Dimendberg, professor of
lm and media at the University
of California, Irvine, joins the
Academy as the spring 2009
Daimler Fellow. Historians at
the Hans Arnhold Center will
be Anna-Maria Kellen Fellows
Mitchell Merback of The
Johns Hopkins University
and, continuing, Devin Fore
of Princeton University. The
Academy also welcomes Ellen
Maria Gorrissen Fellows Jed
Rasul a, professor of English
at the University of Georgia,
and Juliet Koss, profes-
sor of art and art history at
Scripps College, in Claremont,
California. The George H.W.
Bush/Axel Springer Fellow,
Donald Kommers, is a pro-
fessor of political science and
law at the University of Notre
Dame and the author of Red,
Black, and Gold: Germanys
Constitutional Odyssey. And
while Leonore Annenberg
Fellow in Music Composition,
Daniel Visconti, will con-
tinue his residency from the fall,
the new Guna S. Mundheim
Fellow in the Visual Arts will
be Amy Sillman, a New York-
based artist.
Sneak Preview
The spring 2009 fellows
Call for
Applications
The American Academy is accepting applications from scholars, writers, and profes-
sionals who wish to engage in independent study in Berlin during the 20102011 aca-
demic year. Most fellowships are for a single academic semester and include a monthly
stipend, round-trip airfare, partial board, and comfortable accommodations at the
Hans Arnhold Center. Only US citizens or permanent residents are eligible to apply.
Applications are due in Berlin on October 15, 2009. After a rigorous peer review
process, Berlin Prizes will be awarded by an independent selection committee and
announced in the spring of 2010. For further information on the fellowship program,
please visit the Academys website (www.americanacademy.de).

Calendar
From concerts, readings, forums, and
lectures, the Academys fall semester offers
a myriad of new perspectives on American
intellectual and cultural life. Herewith,
a listing of events in and around the Hans
Arnhold Center.
SEPTEMBER
9/2 Presentation of the Fall
2008 Fellows
Introduced by the honorable
William R. Timken, Jr. US
Ambassador to Germany
9/4 Romanticism Resurgent:
Religion, Medical
Science, and the Rise of
Subjecti vi t y
Richard Sloan, Nathaniel Wharton
Professor of Behavioral Medicine,
Department of Psychiatry,
Columbia University Medical
Center, New York; moderated
by Dr. Stefan Etgeton, Head of
Department for Health and
Nutrition, Federation of German
Consumer Organisations
9/25 Blood Work: Fables of
Identi t y, Science, and Race
Thomas C. Holt, James Westfall
Thompson Distinguished Service
Professor, University of Chicago;
moderated by Patrick Bahners,
Cultural Editor, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung
OCTOBER
10/6 A Conversation wi th
Jagdish Bhagwati
Jagdish Bhagwati, University
Professor of Economics and Law,
Columbia University; moderated
by Jrgen Stark, member of the
Executive Board and the Governing
Council, European Central Bank

Location: European Central Bank,
Frankfurt am Main
10/ 7 In Defense of
Globalization
Jagdish Bhagwati, University
Professor of Economics and Law,
Columbia University
Location: Magnus-Haus Berlin
10/14 A Transatl antic Strategy
for the Greater Middle
East
Kenneth Pollack, Director of
Research and Senior Fellow, Saban
Center for Middle East Policy,
Brookings Institution; moderated by
Volker Stanzel, Political Director,
German Federal Foreign Ofce
10/15 The American Future: A
History The Campaign in
the Light of the Past
Simon Schama, University
Professor of Art History and History,
Columbia University
10/16 Wri ting about the US
Immigrant Experience
Ha Jin, Professor of English, Boston
University
10/22 Touch Would
Patty Chang, Artist, New York;
moderated by Anette Hsch,
Curator, Hamburger Bahnhof
Museum fr Gegenwart
10/27 Aesthetics, Mathematics,
and Philosophy: Is there
an Intersection?
Juliet Floyd, Professor of Philosophy,
Boston University; moderated
by Jochen Brning, Professor of
Mathematics, Humboldt-
Universitt zu Berlin, and
Executive Director, Hermann
von Helmholtz-Zentrum fr
Kulturtechnik
10/29 American Academy Guest
Malcolm McLaren, Music Manager
(Sex Pistols), Artist, Designer,
and Musician, London
10/30 Folding Enterprises
Sarah Oppenheimer, Artist, New
York
10/31 Vol. 02 The End of Oil
The Economics of A Post
Energy Era
Keynote speeches by Sigmar Gabriel,
German Federal Minister for the
Environment, Nature Conservation
and Nuclear Safety, and Matthew
R. Simmons, ceo, Simmons &
Company International; hosted by
Sddeutsche Zeitung
Location: Hamburg
NOVEMBER
11/3 Who Runs the World?
Parag Khanna, Director, Global
Governance Initiative and Senior
Research Fellow, American Strategy
Program, New America Foundation
Location: Internationaler Club im
Auswrtigen Amt, Berlin
11/4 America Votes: Die
Wahlpart y
Location: Bertelsmann Residenz,
Unter den Linden 1
In cooperation with cnn, n-tv, rtl,
Audi, and Bertelsmann
Invitation only
11/5 Business Roundtable
Adam Posen, Deputy Director,
Peterson Institute for Economics,
Washington, DC
Time and place TBA
11/6 Multi- Americanism and
the Future of Global
Governance
Parag Khanna, Director, Global
Governance Initiative and Senior
Research Fellow, American
Strategy Program, New America
Foundation
11/17 Thoughts on Incest:
Shifting Discourses since
the Renaissance
David Sabean, Professor of History,
University of California, Los
Angeles; moderated by Michaela
Hohkamp, Professor of History,
Freie Universitt Berlin
11/18 In the House of My Fear:
A Memoir of Sani t y Lost
and Recovered in the l ate
1960s, Set in Cuba, New
York, London, Ibiza, and
Some Strange Pl aces in the
Mind
Joel Agee, Writer, New York
11/20 Intimate International
Rel ations: World War,
Post war Families, and the
Humani tari an Origins of
Intercountry Adoption
Heide Fehrenbach, Presidential
Research Professor and Professor
of History, Northern Illinois
University; moderated by Gisela
Bock, Professor of History, Freie
Universitt Berlin
11/24 Russi a and the West
A Way Forward
Angela Stent, Professor of
Government and Foreign Service
and Director, Center for Eurasian,
Russian and East European Studies,
Georgetown University
11/ Energy and Geopoli tics
Daniel Yergin, Chairman,
Cambridge Energy Research
Associates (cera)
DECEMBER
12/ 8 Commemorating
Death, Obscuring Life?
Conundrums of European
Jewish History after the
Shoah
Leora Auslander, Professor
of European Social History,
University of Chicago
12/9 Russi a and the West
A Way Forward
Angela Stent, Professor of
Government and Foreign Service
and Director, Center for Eurasian,
Russian and East European Studies,
Georgetown University; moder-
ated by Brigitte Georgi-Findlay,
Professor of North American Studies,
Technische Universitt Dresden
Location: Festsaal, Rektorats-Villa
der TU Dresden
12/11 In Honor of Elliot t Carter:
A Concert marking his
100th Birthday
Gary Hoffman, Cello; Karl-Heinz
Steffens, Clarinet; and Michael
Friedlander, Piano
12/15 Guardi an of the
Consti tution
Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice,
United States Supreme Court;
moderated by Dieter Grimm, former
Justice, Federal Constitutional Court,
former Rector, Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin, and Professor of Law,
Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin
Supplementing its core programs at the
Hans Arnhold Center and downtown Berlin
is a series of several additional talks by
Academy fellows in Baden-Wrttemberg,
co-organized with partner institutions in
that German state. More information on
the Baden-Wrttemberg Seminar is avail-
able at www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de
Check the facts.
Weigh the pros and cons.
Then make a firm gut decision.
The new 911 Targa 4S with
Porsche Doppelkupplung (PDK).
Without the slightest hesitation. The optional PDK permits extremely fast
gearshifts with no traction interruption. And, thanks to the new 911 engines,
up to 13% lower fuel consumption and up to 15% less CO
2
emissions.
Visit www.porsche.com for more information.
Porsche recommends
Fuel consumption l/100 km: urban 15.8 (17.9 mpg) extra urban 7.7 (36.7 mpg) combined 10.7 (26.4 mpg) CO
2
emissions: 251 g/km
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berlin_j_210x280_fakten_gb 01.09.2008 13:10 Uhr Seite 1
S
ound film was invented in the
1920s. It became a sensation with the
1928 Warner Brothers hit, The Jazz
Singer. But new sound technology posed a
problem for studios international distribu-
tion in the new global marketplace: while
language could easily be changed in silent
lms by splicing in new inter-titles, it was
not as simple for sound lm. It would be
years before sound dubbing was perfected.
In the interim, studios had to nd a
way to stay on top of the international lm
market: they made Multiple Language
Version (mlv) lms. For these, directors
re-shot the same lm narrative in differ-
ent languages. If actors were multilingual,
they would star in the different versions of
the lms. And in 1930, Chinese-American
actress Anna May Wong starred in an
English version of the lm The Flame of
Love with an English-speaking leading
man, a German version with a German
leading man, and a French version with a
French leading man.
I imagine the three lms being pro-
jected simultaneously side-by-side in a cin-
ema, the three versions being repetitions,
but not precisely so. What is lost between
the different languages in the lms? Does
the dialogue fall into synchronicity? Or is
there an annoying repetition or uncanny
dj vu? Does the actress move differently
as a French speaker? It fascinates me that
in each lm she performs the other for that
culture, but as a trilogy she is the center.
There is a wavering energy in being ambiv-
alently both.
For a variety of reasons, I could only
locate the English version of the lm. So
to pass the time, I researched. And in one
biography, I came across some quotations
by Walter Benjamin.
In 1928 the two had actually met:
Benjamin interviewed Anna May Wong
at the time a lm starlet playing popular
melodrama for the German literary mag-
azine Die Literarische Welt.
In the article, which details their meet-
ing, Benjamin asks Wong, With what
form of representation would you express
yourself, if lm was not available to you?
TOUCH WOULD
A 1928 homonym spurs cinematic reinterpretations
By Patty Chang
C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

T
H
E

A
R
T
I
S
T
FROM TOUCH WOULDTHE PRODUCT LOVE, OR DIE WAHRE LIEBE, 2008
She answers with the expression touch
wood, as in the superstitious expression
knock on wood, to prevent an unwanted
event from occurring. In the original text,
though, touch wood is printed in English
as touch would.
What are the chances Walter Benjamin
actually believed that Anna May Wong
meant to say touch would become her form
of expression if lm were not available
to her? Moreover, why would Benjamin,
whose work has had enormous inuence
on lm theory and contemporary culture,
write about an Asian-American lm starlet
working in Berlin?
In my 2006 video A Chinoiserie Out of
the Old West, I had three scholars translate
this Benjamin article; they all translate this
touch part differently. One of them has
Wong saying that if lm were not available
to her, touch would become her form of
expression.
In wordplay, Freud speaks of the break-
down of meaning to be a relief of the con-
scious mind and a subverting of the rules
of language and meaning. He theorizes
that the unconscious takes the opportu-
nity of a word or phrase to intrude a mean-
ing that has been repressed. This slip
interrupts our everyday reality and opens
imagination to a whole other world existing
simultaneously.
After considering all the possible mean-
ings of touch wood/would, the tone of the
text changes. A break is created. I become
confused and unsure of the intentions of
the article. I become more conscious of
being deceived by the meaning presented.
I, too, question if Anna May Wong really
did mean to say touch would. Perhaps
she was purposefully enjoying the mis-
chievous distortion of her speech because
it played with the ironic inversion of the
cultural critic as witness to her otherness.
Or maybe Benjamin did it on purpose to
spite her. Having been known not to put
up with intellectual inferiors, perhaps he
was having a jab at her self-importance of
being a movie star by implying that the
lm star is only a prostitute. My response
is a physical suspicion, as confusion is

I IMAGINE THE THREE FILMS BEING PROJECTED SIMULTANEOUSLY
SIDE-BY-SIDE IN A CINEMA, THE THREE VERSIONS BEING REPETITIONS,
BUT NOT PRECISELY SO. WHAT IS LOST BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT
LANGUAGES IN THE FILMS?
C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

T
H
E

A
R
T
I
S
T
FROM TOUCH WOULDTHE PRODUCT LOVE, OR DIE WAHRE LIEBE, 2008
often physical. Like lm, the conscious and
the unconscious cohabitate, waver back and
forth, intentions unclear.
The meeting of Wong and Benjamin
and their point of contact as a Freudian slip
makes tenuous and wavering the relation-
ship of theory over medium, intentions over
coincidences, conscious over subconscious.
Another narrative is forever hovering, even
if it is not visible, as a simultaneous and
alternative narrative.
In the Chinoiserie video, the translators
confusion of touching as a form of expres-
sion brings to my mind the idea of sex
workers roles as professional touchers.
It also problematically frames Benjamins
Freudian slip as a subconscious desire
for Wong, or more generally, the Wests
subconscious desire for the East. In this
context, the use of professional touchers
in the form of sex workers could be stand-
ins for Wong, and the use of translators
could be stand-ins for Benjamin. Marx
claimed that prostitution is only a specic
expression of the general prostitution of the
laborer. From Brecht to Godard to Leftist
Chinese cinema, the prostitute has been
used as a symbol of the problems of ailing
modern society.
Touch Would: The Product Love, or Die
Wahre Liebe is my attempt at making a
pornographic lm starring the characters
Wong and Benjamin, in China. Die Wahre
Liebe was a working title of Bertoldt Brechts
play The Good Person of Szechuan (1943). In
this play, three gods come to earth to nd
out if there are any good persons left. They
meet a prostitute who is good, and they give
her a gift of money in order to continue her
good deeds. With this money, she opens
a shop and immediately discovers the dif-
culties that come with continuing her
generosity while being a business owner.
To solve this problem, she creates a male-
cousin character who arrives to do any bad
deeds she, as a good person, cannot imagine
doing becoming, in effect, two people.
An ethical question behind The Good
Person of Szechuan is how a person could
stay good in a capitalist society (or, as
they prefer to say in China, market-driven
society). The actress who plays Wong in
Touch Would is a restaurant owner in her
non-acting life. She juggles, on the one
hand, her ultimate desire in life to be an
actor, with being a business owner within
the changing economic landscape of China.
Both the characters of Wong and Benjamin
are played by Chinese television actors. By
requiring Chinese actors to perform both
the roles of Anna May Wong and Benjamin,
the video reverses the common practice in
early Hollywood of having all-white casts
portray Asian characters in yellowface. It
also situates the making of a pornographic
lm and soap opera within Wongs authen-
tic culture, thereby translating it from a
Chinoiserie into a Western.
Patty Chang is a New York-based video

and performance artist and the fall 2008
Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual
Arts at the Academy.
BY REQUIRING CHINESE ACTORS TO PERFORM BOTH THE ROLES OF
ANNA MAY WONG AND BENJAMIN, THE VIDEO REVERSES THE COMMON
PRACTICE IN EARLY HOLLYWOOD OF HAVING ALL-WHITE CASTS PORTRAY
ASIAN CHARACTERS IN YELLOWFACE.
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JAMES ROSENQUIST, THE HOLE IN THE CENTER OF THE CLOCK NIGHT NUMBERS, 2008
I
n early February 2007 Stephanie
Lenzs 18-month-old son, Holden, start-
ed dancing. Pushing a walker across
the kitchen oor, Holden started moving
to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince
(thats the current name of the artist for-
merly known as Prince), Lets Go Crazy.
Holden had heard the song a couple of
weeks before, when the family was watch-
ing the Super Bowl. The beat had obviously
stuck. So when he heard the song again,
he did what any sensible 18-month-old
would do: he accepted Princes invitation
and went crazy in the clumsy but insane-
ly cute way that any precocious 18-month-
old would.
Holdens mom, understandably, thought
the scene hilarious. She grabbed her cam-
corder and captured the dance digitally. For
29 seconds she had the priceless image of
Holden dancing to the barely discernible
Prince playing on a radio somewhere in the
background.
Lenz wanted her parents to see the lm.
But its a bit hard to e-mail a 20-megabyte
video le, even to your family. So she did
what any sensible citizen of the twenty-rst
century would do: she uploaded the le to
YouTube and e-mailed her relatives the link.
They watched the video scores of times, no
doubt sharing the link with friends and col-
leagues at work. It was a perfect YouTube
moment: a community of laughs around a
homemade video, readily shared with any-
one who wanted to watch.
Sometime over the next four months,
however, someone not a friend of Stephanie
Lenz also watched Holden dance. That
someone worked for Universal Music Group.
Universal either owns or administers some
of the copyrights of Prince. And Universal
has a long history of aggressively defending
the copyrights of its authors. In 1976 it was
one of the lead plaintiffs suing Sony for the
pirate technology now known as the vcr.
In 2000 it was one of about ten companies
suing Eric Corely and his magazine 2600
for publishing a link to a site that contained
code that could enable someone to play
a dvd on Linux. And in 2007 Universal
would continue its crusade against copy-
right piracy by threatening Stephanie Lenz.
It red off a letter to YouTube demanding
that it remove the unauthorized perfor-
mance of Princes music. YouTube, to avoid
liability itself, complied.
This sort of thing happens all the time.
Companies like YouTube are deluged with
demands to remove material from their
systems. No doubt a signicant portion
of those demands are fair and justied. If
youre Viacom, funding a new television
series with high-priced ads, it is perfectly
understandable that when a perfect copy
of the latest episode is made available on
YouTube, you would be keen to have it taken
down. Copyright law gives Viacom that
power by giving it a quick and inexpensive
way to get the YouTubes of the world to help
it protect its rights.
The Prince song on Lenzs video, how-
ever, was something completely different.
First, the quality of the recording was terri-
ble. No one would download Lenzs video to
avoid paying Prince for his music. Likewise,
neither Prince nor Universal was in the
business of selling the right to video-cam
your baby dancing to their music. There is
no market in licensing music to amateur
video. Thus, there was no plausible way
in which Prince or Universal was being
harmed by Stephanie Lenzs sharing this
video of her kid dancing with her family,
friends, and whoever else saw it. Some
parents might well be terried by how
deeply commercial culture had penetrated
the brain of their 18-month-old. Stephanie
Lenz just thought it cute.
Not cute, however, from Lenzs perspec-
tive at least, was the notice she received
from YouTube that it was removing her
video. What had she done wrong? Lenz
wondered. What possible rule assuming,
as she did, that the rules regulating culture
and her (what we call copyright) were
sensible rules could her maternal gloat-
ing have broken? She pressed that ques-
tion through a number of channels until
it found its way to the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (eff), on whose board I sat
until the beginning of 2008.
The eff handles lots of cases like this.
The lawyers thought this case would quickly
go away. They led a counternotice, assert-
ing that no rights of Universal or Prince
were violated, and that Stephanie Lenz
certainly had the right to show her baby
dancing. The response was routine. No one
expected anything more would come of it.
But something did. The lawyers at
Universal were not going to back down.
There was a principle at stake here.
Ms. Lenz was not permitted to share

DOWN BY LAW
Copyright and creativity in the age of YouTube
By Lawrence Lessig
ITS A BIT HARD TO E-MAIL A 20-MEGABYTE VIDEO FILE,
EVEN TO YOUR FAMILY. SO SHE DID WHAT ANY SENSIBLE
CITIZEN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WOULD DO:
SHE UPLOADED THE FILE TO YOUTUBE AND E-MAILED HER
RELATIVES THE LINK.
this bit of captured culture. They would
insist indeed, would threaten her with
this claim directly that sharing this home
movie was willful copyright infringement.
Under the laws of the United States, Ms.
Lenz was risking a $150,000 ne for shar-
ing her home movie.
I want you to imagine the conference
room at Universal where the decision was
made to threaten Stephanie Lenz with a
federal lawsuit: four or more participants,
most of them lawyers billing hundreds
of dollars an hour. All of them wearing
thousand-dollar suits, sitting around look-
ing serious, drinking coffee brewed by an
assistant, reading a memo drafted by a rst-
year associate about the various rights that
had been violated by the pirate Stephanie
Lenz. After thirty minutes, maybe an
hour, the executives come to their solemn
decision. A meeting that cost Universal
$10,000? $50,000? (when you count the
value of the lawyers time, and the time
to prepare the legal materials); a meeting
resolved to invoke the laws of Congress
against a mother merely giddy with love for
her 18-month-old son.
Picture all that, and then ask yourself:
how is it that sensible people, people no
doubt educated at some of the best universi-
ties and law schools in the country, would
come to think it a sane use of corporate
resources to threaten the mother of a danc-
ing infant? What is it that allows these law-
yers and executives to take a case like this
seriously, to believe theres some important
social or corporate reason to deploy the
federal scheme of regulation called copy-
right to stop the spread of these images and
music? Lets Go Crazy? Indeed! What has
brought the American legal system to the
point that such behavior by a leading corpo-
ration is considered anything but crazy?
Or to turn it around, who have we become
that such behavior seems sane to anyone?
I
n the copyright wars, of which
this scene is but a minor skirmish, right-
thinking sorts mean not the war on
copyright waged by pirates, but the
war on piracy, which threatens the sur-
vival of certain American industries. This
war has an important objective. Copyright
is, in my view at least, critically important
to a healthy culture. Properly balanced, it is
essential to inspiring certain forms of cre-
ativity. Without it, we would have a much
poorer culture. With it, at least properly bal-
anced, we create the incentives to produce
great new works that otherwise would not
be produced.
But, like all metaphoric wars, the copy-
right wars are not actual conicts of sur-
vival. Or at least, they are not conicts for
survival of a people or a society, even if they
are wars of survival for certain businesses
or, more accurately, business models. Thus
we must keep in mind the other values
or objectives that might also be affected
by this war. We must make sure this war
doesnt cost more than it is worth. We must
be sure it is winnable, or winnable at a price
were willing to pay.
I believe we should not be waging this
war. I believe so not because I think copy-
right is unimportant. Instead, I believe in
peace because the costs of this war wildly
exceed any benet, at least when you
consider changes to the current regime
of copyright that could end this war while
promising artists and authors the protec-
tion that any copyright system is intended
to provide.
I published a book called Free Culture
just as my rst child was born. And in the
four years since, my focus, or fears, about
this war have changed. I dont doubt the
concerns I had about innovation, creativity,
and freedom. But they dont keep me awake
anymore. Now I worry about the effect this
war is having upon our kids. What is this
war doing to them? Who is it making them?
How is it changing how they think about
normal, right-thinking behavior? What
does it mean to a society when a whole gen-
eration is raised as criminals?
These are not new questions. Indeed,
they are the questions that late head of the
Motion Picture Association of America,
Jack Valenti, asked again and again as
he fought what he called a terrorist war
against piracy. It was the question he
asked a Harvard audience the rst time
he and I debated the issue. In his brilliant
and engaging opening, Valenti described
another talk he had just given at Stanford,
at which 90 percent of the students con-
fessed to illegally downloading music from
Napster. He asked a student to defend this
stealing. The students response was sim-
ple: yes, this might be stealing, but every-
one does it. How could it be wrong? Valenti
then asked his Stanford hosts: What are
you teaching these kids? What kind of
moral platform will sustain this young
man in his later life?
This wasnt the question that interested
me in that debate. I blathered on about the
framers of our Constitution, about incen-
tives, and about limiting monopolies. But
Valentis question is precisely the ques-
tion that interests me now: What kind
of moral platform will sustain this young
man in his later life? For me, this young
man represents my two young sons. For
you, it may be your daughter or your neph-
ew. But for all of us, whether we have kids
or not, Valentis question is exactly the
question that should concern us most. In a
world in which technology begs all of us to
create and spread creative work differently
from how it was created and spread before,
what kind of moral platform will sustain
our kids, when their ordinary behavior is
deemed criminal? Who will they become?
What other crimes will to them seem
natural?
Valenti asked this question to motivate
Congress and anyone else who would
listen to wage an ever more effective
war against piracy. I ask this question
to motivate anyone who will listen (and
Congress is certainly not in that category)
to think about a different question: what
should we do if this war against piracy
as we currently conceive of it cannot be
won? What should we do if we know that
the future will be one where our kids, and
their kids, will use a digital network to
access whatever content they want when-
ever they want it? What should we do if we
know that the future is one where perfect
control over the distribution of copies
simply will not exist?
In that world, should we continue our
ritual sacrice of some kid caught down-
loading content? Should we continue the
expulsions from universities? The threat
of multimillion-dollar civil judgments?
Should we increase the vigor with which we
wage war against these terrorists? Should
we sacrice ten or a hundred to a federal
prison (for their actions under current law
LIKE ALL METAPHORIC WARS, THE COPYRIGHT WARS ARE NOT ACTUAL
CONFLICTS OF SURVIVAL. OR AT LEAST, THEY ARE NOT CONFLICTS
FOR SURVIVAL OF A PEOPLE OR A SOCIETY, EVEN IF THEY ARE WARS
OF SURVIVAL FOR CERTAIN BUSINESSES OR, MORE ACCURATELY,
BUSINESS MODELS.
are felonies), so that others learn to stop
what today they do with ever-increasing
frequency?
In my view, the solution to an unwin-
nable war is not to wage war more vigor-
ously. At least when the war is not about
survival, the solution to an unwinnable war
is to sue for peace, and then to nd ways to
achieve without war the ends that the war
sought. Criminalizing an entire genera-
tion is too high a price to pay for almost any
end. It is certainly too high a price to pay
for a copyright system crafted more than a
generation ago.
This war is especially pointless because
there are peaceful means to attain all of its
objectives or at least, all of the legitimate
objectives. Artists and authors need incen-
tives to create. We can craft a system that
does exactly that without criminalizing our
kids. The last decade is lled with extraor-
dinarily good work by some of the very best
scholars in America, mapping and sketch-
ing alternatives to the existing system.
These alternatives would achieve the same
ends that copyright seeks, without making
felons of those who naturally do what new
technologies encourage them to do.
It is time we take seriously these alter-
natives. It is time we stop wasting the
resources of our federal courts, our police,
and our universities to punish behavior
that we need not punish. It is time we stop
developing tools that do nothing more
than break the extraordinary connectivity
and efciency of this network. It is time we
call a truce, and gure a better way. And
a better way means redening the system
of law we call copyright so that ordinary,
normal behavior is not called criminal. We
need, in other words, more humility about
regulation.
The twentieth century changed us in
many obvious ways. But the one way were
likely not to notice is the presumption the
twentieth century gave us that government
regulation is plausibly successful. For most
of the history of modern government, the
struggle was not about what was good or
bad; the struggle was about whether it was
possible to imagine government affect-
ing any good through regulation. Fears of
inevitable corruption, in part at least, drove
our framers to limit the size of the federal
government not their idealism about lib-
ertarianism. Recognizing the uselessness
of certain sorts of rules led governments
to avoid regulation in obvious areas, or to
deregulate when they saw their regulation
failing. These are the historical expressions
of regulatory humility, a habit of mind for
most of human history.
The above essay is adapted from Remix:
Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the
Hybrid Economy (Penguin 2008),
by J.P. Morgan spring 2007 Academy
fellow and current trustee Lawrence
Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford
University and co-founder of Creative
Commons.
IT IS TIME WE STOP DEVELOPING TOOLS THAT DO NOTHING MORE THAN
BREAK THE CONNECTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY OF THIS NETWORK. IT IS
TIME WE CALL A TRUCE, AND FIGURE A BETTER WAY. AND A BETTER WAY
MEANS REDEFINING THE SYSTEM OF LAW WE CALL COPYRIGHT SO THAT
ORDINARY, NORMAL BEHAVIOR IS NOT CALLED CRIMINAL.
Ein Buch von S. FISCHER
www.fischerverlage.de
Eine umfassende und glnzend geschriebene
Geschichte des Aufbruchs in den Knsten seit Mitte
des 19. Jahrhunderts, die erstmals alle Bereiche
wie Malerei, Dichtung, Drama, Musik, Tanz,
Architektur, Design und Film einbezieht und zu
einer Gesamtdeutung der sthetischen Moderne
fhrt. Die Summe von Peter Gays Forscherleben.
608 Seiten, gebunden, (D) 24,90; sFr. 43,70 (UVP)
Peter Gays opus magnum:
Reich, gelehrt, lebendig
geschrieben. New York Times
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STAGED IN BERLIN
The author visited a variety of Berlin theaters in the spring of 2008.
Herewith, the ndings
By Kenneth Gross

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SCENE FROM DIE RATTEN AT DEUTSCHES THEATER
T
he stage is bare of furniture and
props there is only a vast, rotating
wall at the back of the stage, yellow or
suffused in yellow light. Four actors an
older and a younger woman, a shorter and
a taller man speak all the parts. There is
a chorus of old men, a Persian queen, a bat-
tleeld survivor, a kings ghost, and a king,
who enters alone at the very end of the play.
I am watching Aeschyluss The Persians,
translated by Heiner Mueller and directed
by Dimitir Gotscheff at the Deutsches
Theater. The only extant Greek tragedy on
a historical subject produced in Athens
in 472 BC, only eight years after the events
it depicts the play shows how the Persian
court awaits and then receives news of the
catastrophic defeat of King Xerxes invad-
ing Persian eet by much smaller Greek
forces at the battle of Salamis.
The actors deliver their lines with a
measured musical cadence, a choreography
of the voice, trying to catch the formality
of the original Greek but never sacricing
immediacy or emotional resonance. Most
lines are delivered with the actors stand-
ing still, gazing directly at the audience.
No voice is quite singular, transparently
individual. The older woman speaks for
the whole chorus of worried, terried
mourning elders, registering the cost of
Xerxes aggressive pride, and even hint-
ing that the shame of this defeat might
lessen the power of kings. The words of a
single messenger are spoken by both men
together, a kind of minimalist chorus.
With an impersonality that gradually lls
with rage and bitterness, they speak of the
horrors of battle, and even more of the hor-
rors of the long march home. The subtle
sharing or dividing of roles suggests how
the fate of all Persians is bound together.
And then there are moments when some
more alien impulse breaks out as when
Queen Atossa, despite the outward gravity
of her voice, gives vent to a wordless, almost
manic howl of glee (watched silently by
others) when she nds out that Xerxes is
still alive and that she will keep her crown.
Even more remarkable is when Xerxes
himself comes on stage at the end, stripped,
isolated, humiliated, an object of fear. He
speaks Aeschyluss text, in which the king
acknowledges his terrible defeat and asks
the Persians with ceremonious insistence
to mourn their dead, make lament, and
make offerings to the gods. But the actor
delivers the lines with such focused rage,
tinged with hysteria, that we see Xerxes
effort to recover, in the very moment of
defeat, his authority and his power to ter-
rify. He is a fanatic and thug in the guise of
a king, still unaware of his own hybris.
The shows opening scene is a silent,
super-added clownshow, in which the two
male actors struggle over how to place the
rotating wall between them, starting with
polite adjustments, pushing it back and
forth with increasing heat, until they nd
themselves chased and overtaken by the
speed and momentum of the wall itself. It
is less a topical reference to the Berlin Wall
than an emblem of how human beings set
in motion forces they cannot control. It is
a physical emblem of the fact that, in this
staging of the tragedy, there was no fate or
necessity other than a human one.
Xerxes at the end is no particular
political terrorist but a mirror of all: if the
moment makes him inevitably a double
for George Bush in Iraq, he is also Hitler,
Stalin, or any number of minor tyrants
indifferent to the suffering of their people.
What strikes me is how much more imme-
diate and charged such mirrorings are
when performed in Berlin as opposed to
New York or London. History presses in
more sharply here, history that is, in turn,
continually being re-interrogated, restaged,
and re-monumentalized in ways I can nd
variously fascinating and bafing.
T
he house that serves as the set-
ting for Nora (Ibsens A Dolls House,
as directed by Thomas Ostermeier at
the Schaubhne) is no claustrophobically
comfortable bourgeois box. It seems rather,
in its stylish European modernity, a place
of danger, with its sharp-edged furniture,
rail-less wooden stairs suspended in space,
sleek glass walls, and shifting oor levels.
Positioned on a rotating stage and always
glimpsed from new angles, this house has a
menacing life of its own.
Nora (played remarkably by Anne
Tismer part of the oddness of theatergo-
ing here is never to have heard the names
of obviously well-known artists) shows
her hysteria, physical energy, and anxiety
more openly than in any traditional ver-
I
Ortega y Gasset makes much fuss somewhere speculating that Goethe,
glorious Goethe, mismanaged the project of realizing his selfhood,
that he was one of those Is who arent truly at one with themselves,
who in construing themselves betray the I they could/should have been.
This is as I recall it, though possibly I, who for the greater part of my life
have been involved in an adversarial relation with myself, berating, accusing,
demanding I be someone Im not, shouldnt be wholly trusted in this:
Ortega may well have meant something entirely else, (though what?)
Anyway, put things in perspective, go back past where it all starts,
past Heraclitus, Hephaestus, Baal, the bacteria-kings, to the inception,
when there were only some dream-strings, then a cosmos stuffed like a couch
is it likely cosmos could have ever conceived of a butter-inner like I?
HISTORY PRESSES IN MORE SHARPLY HERE, HISTORY THAT IS, IN
TURN, CONTINUALLY BEING RE-INTERROGATED, RESTAGED, AND
RE-MONUMENTALIZED IN WAYS I CAN FIND VARIOUSLY FASCINATING
AND BAFFLING.
sion I have seen. Violence is sometimes a
form of play in this house. You see it in the
games with toy guns that Nora continu-
ally plays with her children, and in the
punk costume Nora wears to a fancy-dress
ball, which includes holstered pistols and
a t-shirt covered with fake blood over a
black miniskirt. Physical menace takes
more concrete forms as well. In one scene,
the couples friend Doctor Rank here no
aging professional dying of syphilis, as
in Ibsen, but a young man dying of aids
makes rough, mocking sexual advances
toward Nora. And at the end, rather than
simply leaving a bafed Torvald alone in
the house, this Nora shoots him with his
own gun. More memorable than even this
directorial reinvention is the plays close.
Ibsens iconic image of Nora walking out of
the house and slamming the door, entering
into a new, freer world offstage, is a hard
thing to make persuasive for modern audi-
ences. In Ostermeiers version, you see her
walking through the door, but then the set
rotates to show her standing on the other
side of that threshold. Stunned, as much in
shock as in triumph, she leans against the
door, slides down to a squat, and stays there
as the lights go down. The doorway marks
a house she cannot leave. It becomes a trap
rather than an escape hatch.
This production, staged rst in 2004,
has become something of a classic on the
Berlin stage. If this is directors theater,
the reshaping of the text to speak to the
present moment isnt at all gratuitous. It
takes Ibsens play seriously, making its
hidden tensions more present and physical,
even as it probes the plays dramatic limits,
the limits of Ibsens testing of the possible,
his sense of what can, or ought to, be vis-
ible and invisible. In an equally remarkable
version of Hedda Gabler, Ostermeier uses
the rotating stage to let us see what is other-
wise always hidden the body of the young,
proud, but morally trapped wife after she
shoots herself with her fathers pistol. She
is more alone even in death, since the other
characters, who cannot see her, dont even
believe she has killed herself. They mistake
the gunshot for a game. The famous last
line People dont do such things is
uttered with smugness and insouciance
rather than shock or horror.
T
he freedom and the need to
grapple with a classical repertoire is
for me part of the pleasure of theater
here. It puts the directors own will on dis-
play more nakedly. For all the excitement of
pieces like The Persians and Nora, however,
there are other cases where the updating
depends on a chilly, mechanical radicalism
even a cruel, avant-garde kitsch rather
than on a revisionary work bred into and
through the play.
Michael Thalheimers Hamlet at the
Deutsches Theater plays a game of relent-
less darkening, but in a way that often
merely displays its own proud contempt
for the original play. Claudius is a cowardly
idiot who spends most of the time groping
or having sex with Gertrude, who is usually
completely uninterested in her son. Hamlet
is often just bored and disgusted with
little antic disposition, little rage, sorrow,
wit, compulsion, even thought. The ghost,
stark naked and impassive, hauling a huge
sword, tells the story of his poisoning as
if in a dream, while Hamlet stands beside
him equally expressionless, uttering his
response like an automaton. He delivers
the To be or not to be soliloquy twice,
once in a loud, unmodulated shout, and
then in a kind of bored, rapid drone spoken
directly to the audience. The levels of vio-
lence on stage seem all but arbitrary. The
climactic duel with Laertes is a perfunctory
slapping of wooden swords. On the other
hand, in the famous scene where the prince
invites Guildenstern to play a recorder that
he doesnt know how to play, so as to frame
his attack on their poor powers of manipu-
lation, Thalheimers Hamlet forces the
instrument into both Guildensterns and
Rosencrantzs mouths with such force that
they spit blood.
There are moments of revelation.
The actress playing Ophelia shows real
wounded passion in her lines, sane and
mad. It is brilliant to make Polonius into a
sly, anxious, and manic Stasi agent trying
to keep the world under control. Equally
fascinating is the way actors move back and
forth on a deep stage, into and out of dark-
ness. At the plays opening, all the actors sit
in a line at the front of the stage, staring at
the audience in a kind of pained boredom
for perhaps ve minutes before beginning
the opening court scene. It is stupefying,
an obvious trick, yet when the actors return
to this arrangement, corpses and all, at the
plays end, the repetition makes it more
haunting. Throughout, one is reminded of
the potential emptiness of Shakespeares
Hamlet as a theatrical clich, a dead robot
of melancholy. And something more dan-
gerous: a gure whose inuence is some-
how implicated in the historical waste of a
civilization (the subject of Heiner Muellers
Hamletmaschine, whose inuence is at
work here).
Still, what continues to bafe me is the
relentless abandonment of the plays

Or that some maundering I would come up with mind, and then words?
(oh, the prickling serifs, the barbs) and that words would be used to test cosmos,
make certain it worked correctly? Could a self-swallowed black-hole
skidding and slipping on gravitys dance-foor have ever dreamt that?
No surprise then that reality, having to know how sadly contingent it was,
would plot vengeance: a thinker, yes, whod contrive a cunning conundrum:
an I not good enough for its I, inficted on the vastest I in the stacks.
How could a barely competent, underachieving universe not applaud that?
Although, as I say and probably should repeat, this might well be all me
C.K. WILLIAMS
own resources of language, thought, and
feeling, including its own ways of articu-
lating skepticism, rage, and contempt. No
appeals to Brechts alienation-effect or
Artauds theater of cruelty, even the idea
of a post-dramatic theater would be suf-
cient to overcome my sense of wasted
means. It is as if someone were to give you
a beautifully designed weapon, equipped
with night vision, laser-guided aim, a
silencer, untraceable bullets, and fantastic
range, and you used it to club someone over
the head.
T
halheimers staging of
Gerhard Hauptmanns Die Ratten
(The Rats), also at the Deutsches
Theater, feels different. The aim to
strip down is no less at work. The set-
ting described in the original text is the
depressed, crumbling, warren-like cham-
bers of a Berlin tenement. In this version,
we have an open performance space bare of
all detail, the oor elevated several meters
above the ordinary stage platform. It has
a low, deep ceiling, a good deal less than
two meters high, so the actors are forced to
move in an unnatural crouch, appearing
and disappearing from the darkened rear
of the stage. The visual game, the literaliza-
tion of the metaphor of house and stage as
rat-hole, is clear enough. You cant mistake
the display of the director and designers
revisionary will. And yet what is more com-
pelling is the frightening ease with which
the characters live and move in that con-
strained space; they have made it a world
they belong in, stalking and searching.
And perhaps because Hauptmanns charac-
ters are already so desolate and disconsolate,
victims of poverty, madness, ambition,
even of their own virtue, so full of cruelty
and vulnerability (one plot twist is the theft
and killing of a child) that the actors are
allowed emotionally to inhabit their roles
and their blunt, working-class language
without contempt, to give heat and blood
to their words even if they also enact the
plays potential for melodrama.
A
mong several versions of
Goethes Faust I see in Berlin, by
far the strangest is Gretchens Faust,
directed by and starring Martin Wuttke. It
is staged in a long, ornate, high-ceilinged
chamber in the Berliner Ensemble, the
walls faced in tall mirrors, the audience
seated in two rows around a long wooden
table and on a balcony that runs the length
of the room. On top of that table walks a
chorus of nine actresses, appearing by
turns as jailors and sylphs, ingnues and
witches, waitresses and cleaning women.
They are all incarnations of Fausts always-
changing view of the women he desires,
SCENE FROM HEDDA GABLER AT SCHAUBHNE
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ees, and betrays, displayed as the driving
forces of his career. They move and change
roles in endless dumb show. Almost all
speech comes from Wuttke, who utters
streams of verse-fragments from the plays,
assuming the voices of both Faust and
Mephistopheles. Black-clad and white-
wigged, he is erce, gleeful, manically
persuasive, even if also, at moments, a
child and idiot. (Much of the audience, a
friend tells me, will remember Wuttkes
much-lauded performance as the gro-
tesque Hitlerian gangster in Brechts The
Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui.) The mocking
dismemberment of character and language
is even more ruthless than in Thalheimers
staging of Faust, Part I (which I dislike
for some of the same reasons I dislike his
Hamlet). What makes Wuttkes revisions
different is the shows theatrical playful-
ness, as well as ones awareness of the
actors pleasure, even ecstasy, in inhabiting
his different voices and postures.
At one moment Wuttke leaves the
chamber, calling loudly Pudel, Pudel
reminding us of the dog in whose shape
Mephistopheles rst appears in Goethes
text. We hear him off-stage, crying out for
many minutes in the hallways, on the stair-
ways, even in the theater courtyard. It is
amazing to hear his voice through the win-
dows. Faust is at large in Mitte! He nally
does return with a small, black poodle who
walks up and down the tabletop and acquits
himself brilliantly among this company.
I
came to the American Academy
not to write not about human actors but
about the aesthetics of puppet theater.
Berlin, like many cities in Germany, has
numerous professional companies per-
forming both traditional and experimental
puppet shows for adult and child audienc-
es assuming in the children an appetite
for curious invention, and in the adults a
readiness to take seriously both the pup-
pets and their own child-like appetites. It is
a smaller world than that of actors theaters,
mysterious and relentlessly idiosyncratic,
but with its own immense ambitions to
reinterpret inherited texts.
I go to see a puppet show of Tristan
und Isolde in a production by the Theater
Handgemenge, not knowing what to expect.
(The venue is a small but well-appointed
theater in east Berlin called the Schaubude
in fact a former ddr state puppet theater, a
relic of a time when puppet theater, as in
many Eastern bloc nations, received con-
siderable state support and became a home
for serious artists, partly because it was
seen as a tool for education.) The show is
not Wagners opera but a staging based on
his source, the thirteenth-century poem of
Gottfried von Strassburg. It is played both
by realistic, fully-sculpted puppets moved
with hands and rods and by smaller shadow-
gures projected on a backlit screen. The
use of the puppets brings out the legendary,
idealized, and dream-like aspects of the
story of love and adultery. But these small,
stark gures are also eloquent in conveying
the bluntness, the wordless rawness, of the
desire that drives and pulls the two lovers.
This desire is ruthless and cruel; the couple
seems to hide nothing. Isoldes husband,
King Mark, is the more touching, but also
the more frightening, for seeing everything
and yet doing nothing. In this version, any
violence remains uncommitted. Marks cru-
elty, like that of the lovers, lies in the silence
by which they try to protect one another.
Director Tristan Vogt later tells me that the
puppets themselves somehow made this
directorial interpretation inevitable. The
puppets, he says, create a world in which
there are no secrets.
Puppets have a different relation to life
and death. They do not die and have no
human past or memory; they are close to
the realm of the inanimate. Their death-
lessness gives them a closer attachment
to the demonic, to things ordinarily out of
sight. Yet it is harder to make them lie. It
puts them beyond certain genres, tragedy
perhaps being one of them.
T
he puppet company Wilde &
Vogel performs a show based on
Baudelaires book of prose poems
Paris Spleen, directed by Hendrik Mannes.
At its center is a tiny marionette frog

SCENE FROM SPLEEN AT WILDE & VOGEL
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with long legs, human breasts, and a devi-
ous, insinuating smile. There is also an imp-
ish, skeletal torso with long arms, wrapped
in gray rags; a larger, vaudevillian frog,
wielding ostrich plumes; a comic demon;
and the erce creatures of a Kasper show
all undertaking responses to Baudelaires
haunting, often grimly comical reections
and stories. The puppets are all slightly
broken, slightly ruined. They are scattered
about the stage, and all set into motion by
a single puppeteer, Michael Vogel, who
remains alone and exposed to our view.
He handles the puppets with delicacy but
also freedom, coaxing them into life, pick-
ing them up and leaving them aside as
necessary, then reanimating those hed
abandoned. Even as he moves the puppets,
he also interacts with them, part actor and
dancer. At moments he dons the mask of a
ghostly female face or of a nude female torso,
which assimilate him more fully to the
material world of the puppets, even as they
make his human sexual identity more uid.
You hear Baudelaires texts read by the
recorded voices of young children poems
that describe a poor boy gaily playing with
a rat, jealously watched by a rich boy; a poet
who cruelly breaks a glass-sellers panes;
two boys ghting in the mud over a piece of
bread; a melancholy clown standing at the
margins of a bright, noisy circus; the death
of a conspiratorial court fool; the moons
invasion of the poets sleep. The childrens
voices lend a curious impersonality and
transparency to these texts, as if the chil-
dren only sometimes know what they are
saying.
The puppets in their movements catch
the poems spirit of seductive histrionics
and violence, but never enact the texts liter-
ally. They have their own strange games
to perform: dances, songs, explorations,
ights, frights, and battles, obliquely dou-
bling the stories. Some of the most aston-
ishing moments are those when a silent
puppet stands still and seems just to listen
to the voices of the children, only half com-
prehending what they say. The puppets nd
their way mysteriously into the poems and
make a home there. You never quite know
where the soul of the puppet or actor is.
B
rechts Drei groschenoper,
directed by Robert Wilson at the
Berliner Ensemble, is the hardest
ticket to get always sold out, even when
the run is extended by months. Can this SCENE FROM HAMLET AT DEUTSCHES THEATER

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be because it is so strangely different from
everything else there is to see on stage? It
is so purely beautiful, a crystalline visual
and theatrical artifact, with the actors
in their stylish, if often grotesque, black
costumes silhouetted against backdrops
of saturated reds, blues, and greens. Only
the shifting patterns of linear white lights
dene the different spaces of the action
street, tavern, whorehouse, jail, gallows. In
their stylized make-up and perfectly cho-
reographed movements keyed to small,
insistent impulses of sound the actors are
themselves like puppets. It is a production
that is stripped down and abstract, yes, but
without the raw edges, the air of ruin, vul-
nerability, and contamination so visible in
other performances I have seen. Is that why
I feel so little sense of any historical world
of crime or coercion beyond the edges of
the play?
I
wonder about the quantit y of
stage-blood used on the Berlin stage.
I am made acutely aware here of
how fake blood can become its own kind
of empty gesture or kitsch, the more so
when it seems meant to mark some truth
about violence. So I become alert to places
where it seems used in a more calculated,
nuanced fashion. There is, for instance,
the blood on Noras fancy-dress costume,
which (a rare thing) acknowledges itself as
stage blood. One of the nastier characters
in Die Ratten, the thuggish brother Bruno,
seems to have a permanent nose-bleed
that gives him something like a red Hitler
moustache. (It makes me queasy, but I see
the point.)
Just before leaving Berlin, I see the
premier of Handels Belshazzar at the
Staatsoper unter den Linden, directed by
Christoph Nel, conducted by Ren Jacobs.
Based on the Book of Daniel, the piece
recounts how a tyrannical Babylonian king
is punished for his oppression of Jewish
captives and his deling of sacred ves-
sels stolen from the Temple in Jerusalem.
Belshazzar was originally written as an
oratorio whose action is supposed to be
imagined, but here the singers act it out.
The set and stage-action have great sim-
plicity and economy though Belshazzar
himself (Kenneth Tarver), as he stalks
about with exaggerated menace, wear-
ing an oversized crown and holding up
an iconic, single-bladed axe, looks like
a weird survivor from some German
Expressionist play of the early 1920s. One
very stark effect sticks in my mind. For
the famous handwriting on the wall, the
mysterious Hebrew words Mene mene tekel
upharsin, written by a supernatural hand
that appears to Belshazzar at his feast,
we see nothing word-like at all. Rather,
blood suddenly seeps out of horizontal
seams that run the length of the white
wall, slowly running down in a web of thin,
wavering lines. All the stranger that when
Kristina Hammarstrm, who sings Daniel,
repeats aloud the words she reads on
the wall, her notes sound not like Baroque
ornamentation, but rather like Handels
attempt to imitate the sounds of a cantor
in a synagogue, intoning the words of
scripture.
Kenneth Gross is a professor of English
at the University of Rochester and a
Shakespeare scholar. An Ellen Maria
Gorrissen Fellow at the American
Academy in spring 2008, he is currently
writing about puppetry.
www.zeit.de
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ZT_ABO_BerlinJourna_210x135.indd1 1 15.08.2008 14:19:29 Uhr
T
oday we face multiple limita-
tions that hamper peacemaking
between Israel and its neighbors.
Start with the Palestinians: the Palestinian
Authority (PA) holds sway in only part of its
territory. Hamas controls Gaza, rejects the
very idea of a two-state solution, and there
is no prospect any time soon of the PA reas-
serting its control over the area. Any agree-
ment between Israel and the PA on peace
may have to include Gaza; no Palestinian
leadership would retain any credibility if
it looked like it was ready to forsake Gaza.
But such an agreement will likely exist for
some time only on paper.
This is an obvious limitation. But its not
the only obstacle or even the most impor-
tant to peacemaking between Israelis and
Palestinians. Rather, it is the disbelief that
exists on both sides. That the Israeli and
Palestinian publics no longer believe that
peace is possible ultimately weakens their
leaders. No political head is likely to take
on the history and mythology of Jerusalem
or of the grievances of refugees if he or she
believes that the public will reject proposals
for peace and change. That does not mean
these leaders cannot lead. It means they
must have some reason to believe that the
public will follow them when they do.
Why do the publics disbelieve? In the
case of the Israelis, several factors have
contributed. First, there is the failing of
the Oslo Accords. From their standpoint,
right or wrong, Israelis saw in Ehud Barak
someone prepared to meet Palestinian
needs, rst in accordance with the Camp
David Accords, and then with the more
far-reaching Clinton parameters. Israelis
saw in Barak a readiness to make unprece-
dented concessions on both withdrawal and
the sharing of Jerusalem. The Palestinian
response was not only rejection, but also
violence. The Palestinian response or, to
be fair, Arafats rejection of Baraks stance
and his support (or at least countenancing)
of violence convinced the vast majority
of Israelis that the Palestinians were not
prepared for peace. Nothing has done
more to discredit the Israeli peace camp
within Israel than the combination of the
Intifada and the Arafat rejection of the
Clinton parameters. (In fact, most Israelis
concluded that if the Palestinians were
not prepared to accept the Clinton param-
eters, then they were not prepared to accept
anything.)
Another factor contributing to the
disenchantment of the Israeli public has
been Israels unilateral withdrawal from
Lebanon and Gaza. Though carried out
for two very different reasons, by two dif-
ferent prime ministers (Ehud Barak and
Ariel Sharon), these withdrawals have
been regarded by the Israeli public as two
of a kind. Israel departed from Lebanon in
May of 2000, and the UN conrmed that
Israel had fullled its obligations under the
Security Councils Resolution 425. Yet in
the eyes of the Israeli public, Hizbollah had
claimed a great victory: extending its power
in Lebanon. Making matters much worse,
Hizbollah provoked a conict in 2006 by
crossing the border, kidnapping Israeli
soldiers, and, in the ensuing war, hitting
Israel with four thousand rockets.
If anything, the Gaza withdrawal
has soured the Israeli public even more.
Because this withdrawal was carried out
after Arafat was no longer on the scene, its
aftermath seemed to conrm all the worst
lessons of Lebanon. Whats more, whereas
there had been no Israeli settlers in
Lebanon, Gazas settler population ercely
resisted Sharons attempt to pull them from
their homes. Many Israelis feared that this
could be a preview of what would happen in
the West Bank. Withdrawal was emotion-
ally difcult for the Israeli public, but many
took pride in accomplishing it.
They were shocked, then, that the effort
to do so was met with unabated hostility.
Palestinian rocket-re from Gaza did not
stop for a single day, making life miserable
for Israelis living in towns like Sderot and
this was even before Hamas seized control.
When Hamas subsequently did take con-
trol, the Israeli public concluded that with-
drawal from the West Bank would result in
yet another Hamas takeover. Moreover, as
every Israeli knows, Gaza lies along Israels
periphery, while the West Bank sits astride
Israels heartland. Rockets red from the
West Bank would make every Israeli com-
munity vulnerable on a daily basis an
intolerable danger.
In short, Israeli disbelief has emerged
from a number of searing lessons. And
unfortunately, their perceptions are mir-
rored on the Palestinian side equally
genuine and equally powerful. For
Palestinians, Oslos failure is just as pro-
found: the Oslo Accords were supposed
to deliver the end of occupation. Israelis
may feel that Palestinians betrayed
them by not uniting against terrorism;
Palestinians, however, counter that Oslo
actually strengthened Israeli occupation.
Settlements did not stop post-Oslo; they
increased. Palestinians believed that the
Oslo Accords would slow or stop the pres-
ence of Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza,
yet for most of Oslo they saw the opposite:
more settlements, more roads to serve
only settlers, and more limitations on
Palestinian freedom of movement.
Palestinians feel thus as betrayed as
their Israeli counterparts. While Israelis
believe they have had no choice but to
impose restrictions on Palestinians in
order to curb terrorism, Palestinians see
these restrictions as deliberately punitive
and unrelated to security. They see Oslo-
imposed obligations being aunted by
Israel: prisoners not released, withdraw-
als postponed, and territorial status

MUTUAL MISTRUST
Cynical disbelief has become the central roadblock to an IsraeliPalestinian peace
By Dennis Ross
ISRAELIS MAY FEEL THAT PALESTINIANS BETRAYED THEM BY NOT
UNITING AGAINST TERRORISM; PALESTINIANS, HOWEVER, COUNTER
THAT OSLO ACTUALLY STRENGTHENED ISRAELI OCCUPATION.

A
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S
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F
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J
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T
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,

2
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0
8
.

C
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S
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O
F

T
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E

A
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T
I
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A
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I
E

T
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P
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LISZT, OVERHEARD
Jet-lagged, half-insomniac, I lie in a dim tower
in a foreign college as piano notes ripple up
the winding stair. Its medieval here,
spliced Renaissance spliced late Victorian.
Im an emigrant from my life. Now a violin
teases the piano, a cello breathes heavily on both
an audience must be straining forward in a panelled hall.
How many years have I half-heard
a music meant for others? The chestnut trees
shrug epaulets and fringes in the night wind.
Black tulips sway. An arpeggio falls downstairs.
Your face surges, known and strange, its history drawn
by an Old Master who worked only in the dark.
ROSANNA WARREN
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080805_americanacademy.qxp 8/20/2008 1:16 PM Page 1
constantly changed to Israeli advantage.
With the collapse of the Oslo Accords dur-
ing the Bush era, Palestinians have expe-
rienced further draconian measures, with
devastating consequences for their econo-
my, mobility, and opportunity for anything
resembling a normal life.
Of course, Israelis see their security
measures including a security barrier,
checkpoints, and undercover arrest opera-
tions as natural and essential counterter-
rorism responses that have succeeded in
stopping suicide bombing attacks in Israel.
Yet Palestinians blame Israel far more than
Hamas or Islamic Jihad for their predica-
ment. With Palestinian per capita income
dropping 40 percent between 2001 and
2006 (as opposed to 25 percent during the
Great Depression), life became incredibly
difcult. For Palestinians, it was much
easier to focus on their anger and grievance
than on the possibility of coexistence. Most
concluded that Israel would never willingly
relinquish control.
Even the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza
did not impress Palestinians. Hamas, like
Hizbollah before them, claimed their vio-
lent resistance was responsible for Israels
exit. Palestinians also claimed that the
Israelis were giving up unwanted territory,
Gaza which Israel was transforming into
a besieged prison anyhow in order to keep
the West Bank. Even though the Gaza with-
drawal happened after Mahmoud Abbass
election as PA president on a platform of
non-violence, Palestinians were not see-
ing any improvements in their day-to-day
existence to reward them for their choice of
leader. Israel did little to manage the with-
drawal from Gaza in such a way that would
give Abbas implicit credit. In fact, noth-
ing was done to make withdrawal appear
to be linked to his calls for moderation or
his negotiations with Israel. Sharon had
decided to withdraw, and he did not want
Palestinians to tell him how to do so. In
Sharons eyes, his tough decisions vis--vis
his own hard-line constituency should have
been matched by similar toughness from
Abbas. Since Abbas was deemed too soft
on Palestinian extremists, Sharon refused
to shape the withdrawal in a way that
would have given him credit for the Gaza
withdrawal.
Since Sharon was unprepared to
respond to Abbas while juggling his own
very real domestic challenges, the Bush
Administration needed to intervene. It
needed to see how important it was for a
new Palestinian leader, lacking the author-
ity and charisma of the icon he had replaced,
to show results. It needed to realize that the
Gaza withdrawal was a historic moment
that should be seized to re-establish belief in
peacemaking, and it needed to realize that
both Sharon and Abbas wanted vindication
for the consequences of withdrawal. But the
Administration, still governed by its neo-
conservative disengagement instincts, was
unable to see this necessity. It squandered
the moment.
The Bush Administration sought to
create a new peacemaking dialogue, re-
engaging in the peace process in January
2007, which led to the Annapolis confer-
ence in late November of that year. But this,
too, became yet another missed opportunity
to restore popular belief in the peace pro-
cess. To be fair, US re-engagement in 2007
did not have the serendipitous timing of
2005; there was no Israeli action such as
withdrawal from Arab lands available as a
pretext for discussion. And whereas in 2005
Abbas had just been elected and had a clean
slate with the Palestinian public, by 2007
he had already lost much of his luster, hav-
ing delivered nothing on daily life or Israeli
behavior, and having been weakened by the
Hamas election in 2006. On the Israeli side,
Ariel Sharon had great standing
and

ACELA
Childhoods vanquished in clattering speed as the train
hurls through the dim, damp, befogged, waterlogged,
locked-in, locked-down coastal suburban landscape of the past
shooting by my hometown station in such a blur
the names illegible. Only in your arms do I wake up.
The city rasps below us. Two currents thrust
against each other, the East River struggles with itself,
its contradictions shoved in whorls the sun abrades.
And here, by your jungle plants, your carved black snake,
antelope horns, deer skull, statuettes, and stones,
we fall into another kind of math
where imaginary and natural numbers mate
and procreate new space, the bedclothes ung,
silvered light straining through the smudgy pane.
ROSANNA WARREN
authority in 2005; in 2007 Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert had very little of either. He had
been profoundly weakened by the mishan-
dling of the war with Hizbollah in the sum-
mer of 2006, and the Israeli public had little
condence in him.
So launching an initiative in January
2007 was bound to be far more difcult.
The circumstances should have put even
more of a premium on thinking the initia-
tive through and on achieving something
tangible. When publics have lost faith in
peacemaking for all the reasons noted above,
it is not simple to restore it. Loss of faith is
more profound than simple loss of con-
dence. It will not be restored overnight, but
only gradually and even then it takes tan-
gible demonstrations of change for it to take
credible hold. Had Secretary Rice focused
on producing groundwork for peace that
Israeli and Palestinian publics would have
noticed, she might have done much for long-
term peacemaking. Instead, she sought a
political horizon with each side signing
up to the compromises they would make
on the core issues of the conict and she
did little to affect the day-to-day realities on
the ground that might have altered the two
publics perceptions. Only when it became
clear that she could not achieve the political
horizon did she change her approach a few
weeks before the Annapolis conference and
declare that the aim was now simply to use
the conference to launch negotiations.
Problematically, the conference never
drafted a day after strategy to show that
this new negotiating process would produce
change. In fact, both sides continued to see
more of the same. In the rst two months
after Annapolis, there were several ter-
rorist attacks against Israelis in the West
Bank (actually connected to Palestinian
security forces), and Palestinians saw new
announcements of settlement construction.
Moreover, while large amounts of assistance
to Palestinians were pledged, nothing mate-
rialized as real economic improvements.
When public skepticism required some-
thing dramatic to revive belief, each public
saw more of what had made them cynical in
the rst place.
So here we are. Over the course of 2008
there have been very limited economic
improvements for Palestinians and no
meaningful changes in employment or
mobility. Though the US and the EU have
trained a few security-force battalions for
the PA, the Israeli military and security
forces see little evidence of active counter-
terrorism in the West Bank. At the same
time, political channels are slowly facilitat-
ing change. But this process takes place
in private divorced from public realities.
These talks have been serious, but they
do not translate because of the involved
leaders weaknesses and the absence of
an environment that would give them the
condence to compromise without fearing
public backlash.
The next American presidential adminis-
tration must learn these lessons and under-
stand these setbacks if it hopes to prevent
another cycle of mistrust, mismanagement,
and cynicism. Peacemaking requires a
foundation and a public context that gives
negotiations a chance to succeed; the next
administration must operate on such a basis
if it is to give peace a chance.
Dennis Ross was Middle East envoy and
the chief peace negotiator in the presi-
dential administrations of George H.W.
Bush and Bill Clinton. He is currently a
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P
aul closes the door to the apart-
ment behind him and thinks about
what he has left behind. Now Frau
Lischka no longer has any say and has to
keep quiet when her stairs are muddied.
Behind the door above, everything has
been left behind but not forgotten; its
there, simply there. No one can go back,
the stairs will not have their soundness
tested again, and who knows whether or
not these are the last steps that will be
allowed upon them. The rattle of keys
when the doors are locked sounds as famil-
iar as ever, it was the same burst of clang-
ing as ever, followed by the feeling of safe-
ty, the apartment was still there, we would
see it again, healthy and unharmed, ready
to receive us. But now the key is pointless,
you might as well leave it in the mailbox so
you wont have to take it along on the jour-
ney. How ridiculous it was when one of the
messengers advised Paul to make sure and
lock up.
Apartments left empty will gladly be
looted!
Gladly looted?
Gladly looted. But you still have to turn
in your key.
The stairwell pressed towards the doors,
it descended deeper and deeper as the
yelling came down the frightened hallway,
Down, go down! The stairs yelled out that no
one was allowed to climb them. Afraid of
break-ins, Frau Lischka had an ever watch-
ful eye. No one got past her ground oor
apartment without her noticing. Where
are you going?... Ah, to the doctor! Her
drunken husband would have let anyone
slip through, but his wife never tolerated the
door being left unlocked whenever she went
out. On Sundays the building remained
locked for the entire day, meaning that any-
one who did not have a key had to ring the
bell. That way nothing could be looted.
The streets were quiet, heartened by the
winter cold. The impact of the heavy steps
pleased them, for that stamped life into
them; otherwise the streets would have
been sunk in sadness. They were forbidden
streets meant to be avoided in order not to
violate their pavement. Thus the streets
were crossed out on the maps, no longer
existing for anyone. It was too risky, danger
lay in wait there, especially at night. But one
must not simply accept what is forbidden
once you are not worth anything. And so the
streets were there again and were much lon-
ger and more beautiful than they had ever
been before. They rejoiced at being granted
life once again and didnt ask to whom they
owed their good fortune. Zerlina said ear-
nestly to an intruder, These streets are for-
bidden. But the stranger just smirked and
rubbed his hands. Because those words, so
often repeated, no longer meant anything,
for now the forbidden was allowed.
All that had been forbidden in the world
now meant nothing, for it had never been a
law but rather an arrangement that rested
on enforced custom. What was once taken in
stride now appeared all of a piece to the law,
which had the last word and did not allow
anything to contradict it. Life was reduced
to force, and the natural consequence was
fear, which was bound up with constant dan-
ger in order to rule life through terror. You
experienced what you never had before. You
rejoiced over that which you were allowed,
but even this did not last for long, because
any such comforts only had to be noticed and
the next day they were taken away. Thus the
tender juicy meat was taken away since you
who are made of esh need no meat. Then
they banned fat, for your belly was full

THE JOURNEY
By H.G. Adler
C
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of fat. They denied you vegetables for they
stunk when they rotted. They ripped choco-
late out of your hands, fruit and wine as well.
You were told that there wasnt any more.
Highways and byways were forbidden.
The days were shortened and the nights
lengthened, not to mention that the night
was forbidden and the day forbidden as well.
Shops were forbidden, doctors, hospitals,
vehicles, and resting places, forbidden, all
forbidden. Laundries were forbidden, librar-
ies were forbidden. Music was forbidden,
dancing forbidden. Shoes forbidden. Baths
forbidden. And as long as there still was
money, it was forbidden. What was and what
could be were forbidden. It was announced:
What you can buy is forbidden, and you
cant buy anything! Since people could no
longer buy anything, they wanted to sell
what they had, for they hoped to eke out a
living from what they made off their belong-
ings. Yet they were told: What you can sell
is forbidden, and you are forbidden to sell
anything. Thus everything became sadder
and they mourned their very lives, but they
didnt want to take their lives, because that
was forbidden.
Once everything in the world was for-
bidden, and there was nothing normal left
to forbid, the height of unhappiness was
surpassed and everything became easier, no
one having to become anxious with lengthy
considerations about what to do next.
Everyone did what was forbidden without
a bad conscience, even though it was dan-
gerous and they were afraid. Yet since you
couldnt do anything without feeling afraid,
you didnt do everything that was forbidden.
Sad and fearful people suffered under these
conditions, but others hardly seem both-
ered, each following his own disposition. If
there seems no end to the danger, then it
has accomplished its goal already; anything
excessive shuts people down more quickly
than a discreet act of kindness, through
which alone the simple truths of the world
can still be perceived. Because one could not
perceive this simple truth or at least had no
respect for it, everything fell apart. Nothing
more could happen and therefore orders
were merely carried out.
Their gaze swept over the rows of houses
and the street crossings as soon as their eyes
got used to the darkness, and soon they were
ready to escape, for they knew the area well
and there were plenty of good places to hide.
An escape was possible; it would not be too
hard, since there was no one near or far who
would hear them. But steps followed the
women and the brave messengers accompa-
nying them, and thus only their gaze stole
forth, sending thoughts and memories
ahead which thwarted cowardice sooner
than weary bodies that, with the weight of
all they carried, slunk along in order to avoid
their proscribed fate.
Was such servility really due to cow-
ardice alone? Old Leopold and fragile Ida
had been taken away and were waiting for
Caroline and the children in the Technology
Museum. Ida felt helpless and Leopold con-
fused. Both were incapable of handling that
which threatened one surprise after another.
What could be done for them? There was no
clear answer, but one had to stand by them
and not leave, because that was forbidden.
Disloyalty was forbidden, also reason was
forbidden, as it belittled the will to live.
Pauls thoughts hardly went this far,
for already he had struggled too long to
vanquish the inevitable. After his battle suf-
fered its rst and, he feared, decisive defeat,
he could no longer worry about every threat
that occured. Paul was extremely tired and
smiled at Zerlina, who smiled back. Then
Caroline smiled as well. When the others
saw this, they cheered up and also began to
smile, as one of them said:
Youre right. Its not so bad there. You
can eat pretty well. Almost every day theres
meat and dumplings. But if they nd money
or jewelry or tobacco, then youre in trouble
and dont get anything to eat.
Its not so bad?
Youll see, Frau Lustig. So many have
already stuck it out. Only a few are beaten.
But nobody has been beaten to death.
Beaten...?
Yes, but it doesnt mean anything. Only
the stupid ones are beaten. Whoever doesnt
deliver or hides something forbidden. When
they get caught theyre the scum of the
earth... condemned....
The voices deled the street, therefore it
was better to keep silent and to quietly march
on with irregular steps. Legs marched now
over the bridges. Each wanted to walk along
the balustrade in order to gaze at the frozen
river. But here it was particularly dark, and
so there was hardly anything to see. Only
dirty ecks of foam ickered silver-grey
P
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among the dolorous depths, and far off by
the dam, where the water never froze, the
thundering sound of the raging water could
be heard. Here was the island on which Paul
and Zerlina had often played as children.
There had also been a swimming school
that one could visit before such things were
forbidden. There had been carts belong-
ing to vendors who had colorful drinks
for sale, as well as colorful ices and cheap
candy, all of it meant to seduce folks with
delight and requiring only a small sacrice
of money. Now the island was quiet and
empty, certainly no longer ready to receive
its regular visitors, and above all not the
forbidden ones, especially since the island
was now forbidden to everyone. It could no
longer be reached, the entrance to it was
closed, fenced in with barbed wire because
something had occurred there that was now
forbidden, and no one should know about it.
Now the island lay behind the wander-
ers, sunken, an old playground to which no
path led any longer. The travelers no longer
thought about it, and the bridge was gone
as well. Slowly the piers gave way and col-
lapsed, sinking into one another and falling
almost soundlessly onto the ice. Then the
place was gone, the trafc disappeared, after
which there was a long road and everything
melted together, and yet another road, gone,
gone, everything forbidden now nished,
no longer there, not a single memory even
attempting to assert itself with a shudder,
the forbidden now completely dead behind
the gate that was sealed tight and would last
and was there and locked the forbidden up
for good.
Some halls of the Technology Museum
that lay in the adjacent building had been
cleaned out, nothing left in them but empty
booths and whitewashed walls. That was the
gathering place for those people who were
no longer wanted and yet who nonetheless
were still there, since anyone who is con-
demned still exists before being destroyed,
just as there must be a place for it all to
occur, and so it all began here. Hundreds
of bodies lay squeezed tightly together in
the darkness which was only here and there
broken by the mufed light of an occasional
ashlight. But the night was constantly full
of the sounds of rustling and groans.
It was impossible to nd Ida and Leopold
in the darkness. In surly fashion the ner-
vous commander from the ofce in charge
of new detentions recommended waiting
until morning.
In six hours there will be enough light.
Youll nd them both then. No one gets lost
here.
But all are already lost, and it is necessary
to make ne distinctions. Whoever comes
too late and has to be taken in should be
happy to nd a little spot on which he can
rest. Now it is night and you have to make
sure to nd a place to rest. But where? It
doesnt matter, the main thing is that you
are there. The cross-eyed youth with the ser-
vice cap aslant on his head smoked one ciga-
rette after another. Wasnt that forbidden?
For a commander nothing was forbidden,
and he could run off at the mouth. He could
ll the reeking hall with orders, as well
as with the anger that unconsciously and
without restraint accompanied the power
conferred on him, and which he could vent
on the prisoners in the museum at will.
Those formerly known as human beings
now appeared made of wax, but they were
still alive. As the morning dawned its grey,
they sat upon their bundles and rocked their
upper bodies to and fro, though they did not
pray. They had no future, nor was the past
recognizable within them any longer. Here
you cant remember anything.

BORN IN PRAGUE IN 1910, H.G. ADLER published 26 books of
poetry, short stories, novels, philosophy, and social science,
before his death in London in 1988. A survivor of Theresienstadt
and Auschwitz, he rst drew acclaim for his encyclopedic study,
Theresienstadt 19411945, published in 1955. Adler, however,
had great difculty in gaining acceptance for his literary work,
despite the help of Elias Canetti and Heinrich Bll. The Journey
was written in 1950 but not published until 1962. It soon disap-
peared, however, having been issued by a very small publisher
unable to garner proper attention for it. The book was reissued
in 1999 to wide critical acclaim. Academy alumnus Peter Filkins
has translated this most recent version, published by Random
House in fall 2008.
JINDRICH TYRSK (18991942) was a Czech Surrealist
painter, poet, collagist, photographer, editor, and graphic art-
ist. A founding member of the Czech avant-garde artists group,
Devetsil, he directed several of the groups theater productions.
In the 1920s and 1930s tyrsk was considered a polemic and
radical critic of his generation. The vintage gelatin silver prints
reproduced here originally appeared under the then-prohibited
Edition des Surrealismus, in Prague, in 1941. Republished in
1945, On The Needles of These Days is known arguably as
tyrsks surrealist masterpiece. The images reproduced here
are from this book, are all untitled, and in the order of their
appearance from pages 16, 18, 52, 22, and 6.
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The cross-eyed youth walked back and
forth among the cowering people. He was
almost completely dressed in leather. It was
forbidden to those whose lives had been
snuffed out to wear anything upon their
heads inside the halls, but Cross Eyes wore
a leather cap. In his right hand he swung
a leather whip with which he could strike
whenever it pleased him. And yet he didnt
harm anyone, silent threats being enough
to satisfy him. Sometimes he murmured:
Soon theyll be here, so order must be kept.
No one can be sick.
An old woman next to Ida lifted herself
up and stood in front of him: What will it
be like, Herr Commander?
Cross Eyes maintained his haughty
stance: Dont worry, dont worry.
The old woman wanted to sit down
again, but she lost her balance and fell
backwards over her bags. Others also sank
down. A young woman pulled together
some whining boys and girls and distracted
them with games. They sang and clapped
their hands.
Amid the singing a mad woman howled:
Let me be! The soup scorched my tongue!
You cant eat my soup! I want to get out! The
pope ordered it! Ha!
The unhappy woman began to rant.
Since no one knew how to calm her down,
Leopold stepped in.
Ive been a general practitioner for years.
The woman is delusional. Her condition
is dangerous. She needs to be isolated and
to have a shot of camphor. She cant come
along in this condition.
Cross Eyes appeared out of nowhere.
Mind your own business, old man! Shes
coming along. Regulations say so. Listen,
old woman! Get a hold of yourself! If
anyone hears this ruckus, it could mean
trouble for you!
The soup stinks! I want to get out! Let me
go, let me go! The pope called me!
Who does the old lady belong to?
No one said a word. A stretcher was
brought out. Two young men loaded the
ranting woman onto it, though she des-
perately tried to ght them off and bit
one of their hands so badly it bled. Other
attendants rushed to help the young
men, and Cross Eyes ordered them to
strap the raving old lady down on the
stretcher.
Someone yelled: Thats an outrage!
Thats inhuman! No one declares war on
the sick!
Who says so? One cant jeopardize the
whole group.
What do you mean jeopardize? This mad-
ness is whats really jeopardizing us.
They should be quick and be done with it.
Leopold cried: Thats not right! You
should call someone who is in charge so that
order is kept!
Im in charge of order.
You dont bring any order at all!
What does it matter to you? Does she
belong to you?
Caroline took her husband by the hand
and tried to pull him away in order to appease
them, but Leopold was very upset and didnt
want to leave the site of the incident.
Its not right! This patient doesnt belong
here! She needs to be admitted!
Waves of subdued laughter erupted.
Admitted? Admitted? Tell us, are you per-
haps free to take care of it?
Caroline, this is unheard of! This case
needs to be reported to the medical authori-
ties! This is not how you treat human beings.
If I had known that such an injustice was
going to take place here I would have stayed
home and not allowed my family to take part
in this journey. The preparations for it are
simply miserable.
^ s cnc c Gcrnany's cdcsL and ncsL dsLngushcd cnLcrLanncnL hrands, havng ccnLnucusy cxLcndcd Ls narkcL
cadcrshp ancng Gcrnany's hn and Lccvscn prcduccrs. ^'s prcgranncs Lhr and nsprc ncns c vcwcrs cvcry day.
Leopold wandered off proud and angry,
Caroline leading him away as the laughter
grew behind him. Cross Eyes tapped his
head with the tip of his nger three times:
Totally nuts!
In the courtyard Cross Eyes stands in
the rst light of dawn and is wrapped up in
a heavy coat. Nearby are some helpers who
for the most part stand by quietly, but who
at a sign suddenly start running around
like raving madmen before returning to
stand motionless again. They are dressed
alike, but not as smartly as Cross Eyes, for
not as much leather clings to them. Some
policemen plod back and forth and look
up at the sky. Its not their concern. They
rub their hands. There are also three men
in full battledress with their medals and
badges of honor. They are proud men who
hold their little heads high with a decisive
air. Their legs dget with impatience. One
of them is somewhat small and yawns,
blowing a little cloud of smoke from his
throat. Another one, who is their leader,
calls over to Cross Eyes, who then stands
at attention after he has yanked his leather
cap off his head.
Begin!
Cross Eyes gives his helpers a sign, at
which the pack fans out. One runs to the
entrance and remains standing there as
he pulls a list from his breast pocket and
unfolds it with great seriousness. After
a short while the forbidden people head
through the gate in twos, bent over with the
weight of their bags. They call out a number
and their former name. The helper writes
with his pencil and sometimes waves his
list back and forth and barks at the swarm:
Faster! Move on! The forbidden gather
themselves in the courtyard and organize
themselves in rows of four. Altogether there
are a thousand who used to be known as
human beings. Cross Eyes marches in front
of the rows, turns over his whip, and strides
without a horse slowly along the length of
the front row, while with the whip handle
he gives every fourth man a light swat on
the shoulder, calling out loud: Four! Eight!
Twelve! Sixteen....
Yet not all one thousand could present
themselves, even though there was space
enough for a much larger group. Twenty-
four members of the traveling group lay on
stretchers. Between their legs and on top of
them the sick ones belongings were piled
such that they could not move. After Cross
Eyes had also counted the gures on the
stretchers, he yanked his cap off his head
and strode without a horse as fast as his
crooked legs would carry his fat body to the
mighty heroes, gathered himself together,
and stood at attention.
One thousand gathered. Twenty four of
them lying down.
Well done!
One of the mighty heroes reached for
the list and counted the number of the anx-
iously expectant once again. He hardly paid
attention to the standing, which he quickly
passed by, choosing instead to spend more
time among the stretchers.
Across the courtyard a cry rattled out:
Medical report!
Cross Eyes yelled: Medical report!
One of his assistants charged into the
Technology Museum.
Lindenstr. 914 , 10969 Berlin
Tel. +49 (0)30 25993 300
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THE FORBIDDEN GATHER THEMSELVES IN THE COURTYARD AND
ORGANIZE THEMSELVES IN ROWS OF FOUR.
The hero barked: Filthy pigs!
Cross Eyes cried: Theyll be right back
in line!
Then the hero barked: Why arent they
ready?
Cross Eyes cried: Whoevers fault it is
will pay!
Then the hero barked even louder: Shut
your trap, you pig! Its all your fault!
Cross Eyes bowed and cried: Yes, sir!
Yet the assistant had returned with the
list of the sick, wanting to hand it over to
Cross Eyes.
But then the hero yelled at him loudly:
Bring it here, or Ill smack you in the mouth!
Nussbaum, you come as well!
The assistant and Cross Eyes hurried
towards the mighty hero, who began to
review what they had written.
What a miserable typewriter ribbon!
Look at this, Nussbaum! Next time Ill break
your knees if the report is not typed more
clearly!
Sorry, we put in for a new one. But no one
sent us a new ribbon.
Disgraceful! Therell be trouble for that.
Cross Eyes read the names of the ill to
the hero, who then ordered that no one
should be allowed to lie down who did not
have a fever of 102 degrees. Nonetheless, it
was obvious that almost all of those on the
stretchers were very sick. Only two old men
over eighty and a woman who had given
birth to a stillborn the previous night were
allowed to stay. Otherwise all of the weak
and sick stood in rank and le, as well as
the old woman whose attack of madness
had so disturbed Leopold. As the hero
nished checking the list, he nodded that
he was satised. The authoritys honor had
been preserved, and only through an act of
grace had the forbidden been transformed
into the allowed.
Load it up!
It began to snow. Heavy akes fell from
above. They didnt worry themselves about
those gathered below. They blanketed
the copper green roof of the Technology
Museum. If you stuck out your tongue
between your lips you could perhaps catch
a ake, but it was dangerous to do that since
it was forbidden. Zerlina was happy when
a ake stuck to her eyelash and hung there.
How easily she could have gotten rid of it
with a nger or with a shake of her head or
with a blink of her eyelids. But Zerlina stood
still, making sure not to move. The ake
melted and ran cautiously away.
As long as the heroes are there, its for-
bidden to move, which Zerlina knew, even
if it was not underscored that often. Life is
forbidden, something which never quite
hits home, because it has not ceased to go
on. Even in the courtyard of the Technology
Museum no order has been given. They sim-
ply have forgotten to enforce what is forbid-
den, and thus life is frozen and has turned
to snow. The same akes could fall on the
heroes or be carried by the wind and drift
down outside of the museum courtyard and
onto one of the surrounding houses or onto
a street. There are no exceptions as to who
is part of the moment. There are differences
only in how fate is meted out, but not in fate
itself, everything now being frozen. One no
longer had to forbid movement, for there
was none. What you saw with your own eyes
could hardly be believed. It was null and
void and could only be believed if you closed
your eyes. Then the snow melted.
Translated by Peter Filkins, a professor of
English at Bard College at Simons Rock
and a spring 2005 Commerzbank Fellow
at the Academy.
Find a myriad of English books
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210x135_KUK Book 22.08.2008 12:55 Uhr Seite 1
AD
CLIENT
HER BROTHERS KEEPER
Not quite sibling rivalry
By David Warren Sabean
D
uring the long nineteenth
century, throughout political revolu-
tions and social upheavals, some-
thing more intimate was in the process of
being radically altered: ideas of kinship.
After remaining static for over three hun-
dred years, traditional familial structures
that had been organized around the devel-
opment and maintenance of stable prop-
erties estates, farms, tenancies, monopo-
lies, privileges, and ofces were suddenly
abandoned and replaced. In their stead
would come a new way of thinking about
family relations that would introduce some
inter-family emotional tangles to the onset
of modernity.
Prior to this shift, what mattered most
were succession, devolution, and descent
vertical genealogy. Two families or clans
would avoid making repeated marital
exchanges, partly because both the state
and church prohibited cousin marriages,
a bond that unites blood kinsmen and
makes in-laws of cousins. In such a case,
issues of inheritance would be made dou-
bly contentious. Moreover, a marriage to
a rst cousin repeats an alliance between
two families one generation after the ini-
tial tie; marriage between second cousins
amounts to the replication of the grand-
parents marriage by their grandchildren.
And so when European society began
to change and favor endogamous (inter-
group) marriage around the year 1750, it
was a sign that notions of identity, wealth,
and power were also being redened.
By 1800, marriages previously deemed
incestuous those between rst and
second cousins, and those with relatives
of a deceased spouse became frequent
among all property-holding groups
throughout Europe. Such marriages creat-
ed interlocking kindred through repeated
alliances, sometimes over many genera-
tions. Unlike earlier, Baroque Europe, the
marriage system that developed after 1750
allied individuals with the familiar (in
both senses), with same rather than other.
This massive alteration in ideas of kin-
ship arrived alongside an increasing uid-
ity in the channels of European wealth and
public ofce. More tightly coordinating
allied kin helped European society cope
with the expansive freedoms of a market
economy and the liberal state. Kinship
became socially horizontal instead of
vertical, so to speak, with alliance becom-
ing more important than inheritance.
Succession to ofce was no longer affected
by inherited property rights, but rather
through the systematic promotion of cous-
ins ones horizontally linked kin. In busi-
ness, too, monopolies dwindled and oligar-
chies ourished. The new economy could
be viewed as a vast network not unlike an
extended family.
To accommodate this immense change,
new mechanisms had to be implemented
to channel familial energies and regulate
socially sanctioned marital choices. And
while more choice was given to children
in courtship, parents still maintained a
measure of control over family destiny. But
now, importantly, families became the
focal point for developing moral sentiment,
managing cultural style, and directing
erotic desires. Socialization into the aes-
thetics of choice was all the more crucial,
given the alliance systems fundamental
problem of managing the ow of capital.
But this modication in European
society was not without its emotional
incursions into the intimate realm of the
family. From the period from 1740 to 1840
brothers and sisters schooled themselves
in sentiment and developed for each other
a language of pure affection and love.
Attachment for a future spouse grew out
of a moral style developed among siblings
and cousins who grew up together. The
incredible outpouring of correspondence
among siblings during this period offers
insight into the practices of what one
might call the new intimacy. So, too, do
the scores of novels, epic poems, plays, and
theological treatises that attempt to sort
out legitimate and illegitimate feelings
between brothers and sisters.
I
n late eighteenth- century
German literature, two once-popular
novelists display how individuals tried to
make sense of incestuous desires wrought
by changes in larger European social
life. In Friedrich Klingers 1794 novel
Geschichte Giafers des Barmeciden, set in
Persia, the caliph is obsessively in love with
his sister and rails against the laws prohib-
iting sibling marriage:
She grew up on my bosom I found
her awoke the rst sentiments of her
heart, developed with care the blossom-
ing of the beauty of her body, her spirit.

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ALAN FELTUS, BEHIND MT. SUBASIO, 2001
Mine were the rst feelings which now
ow more radiant, more beautiful in
her heart. I heard my own thoughts
again, ornamented and newly inspired.
The narrators description is a common-
place motif of the period: the selfs forma-
tion through an intimate dialectic with
a beloved in which same and other
became totally implicated in each other.
In some ways, the text is a debate about
the distinction between sexual desire and
sibling love.
The same problem is handled in
many novels of the time, including in
Frchtegott Gellerts 1739 Schwedische
Grn, by the ruse of a marriage between
siblings ignorant of their relationship.
While the feelings that rst drew them
together are understood to stem from their
blood connection their sameness the
moral or emotional issue occurs with the
restructuring of their sentiments after
they discover their true relations.
In Christoph Martin Wielands Agathon
(1794), another example, the hero rst falls
in love with Psyche: their souls recog-
nized each other immediately and seemed
at one glance to ow into one another.
Unfortunately, she turns out to be his
sister. Even when Agathon later becomes
attached to the erotically charged Danae,
Psyche continued to retain the most
important place in his heart. As Danae
replaces Psyche as his object of love, he
attempts to direct the second experience
based on the insights he acquired from the
rst: Indeed he loved [Danae] with such
an unselsh, so spiritual, so desire-free
love, that his boldest wish went no further
than to be with her in that sympathetic
union of souls that Psyche had given him
to experience. And so the entire model of
future possibility grows out of the relation-
ship of brother to sister, the relationship
that also created mans moral character.
Agathon says:
I have thought, knowing so much about
our souls, that with each of them, in
their considerable development over
time, I conceive progressively a specic
ideal beauty, which unconsciously
determines our taste and our moral
judgment and which provides the
general model by which our imagina-
tion projects those pictures that we call
great, beautiful, and splendid.
At the end of the story Psyche and Danae
themselves develop a completely fullling
friendship, the childless Danae helps raise
Psyches children so that they think they
have two mothers, and the two women
begin to call each other sister. Finally
Agathon loses all sexual desire for Danae
and begins to consider her, too, his sister.
Wielands suggestion is that the only pure
attachments are those between siblings,
not lovers.
This distinguishing of familial overlaps
impinged into hearts at the inception of
the nineteenth century, where several
commentators felt the need to explain the
difference in feelings one has towards a
sister and a wife. Some put the issue in
to Kantian terms, suggesting that with
ones wife there was always an objective
moment that instrumentalized the rela-
tionship. The theologian Carl Ludwig
Nitzsch thought that that element was sex.
For him, the sexual drive was completely
selsh, but he also thought that sexual
desire developed only after a benevolent
disposition was formed within the fam-
ily, setting up proper objects of desire. He
also believed that the tenderness between
spouses never attains the level of intensity
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characteristic of siblings. Love between
brother and sister is the model of purity,
selessness, and the relationship as an
end in itself.
Part and parcel of this new discourse
about sentiment was the assumption
that marriage takes place among people
who share the same culture, class, and
afnities; marriage was the union of true
equals and true intimates. The developing
brothersister fascination underscored
this desire for homogamy the search for
the same instead of the other. Thus the
intense structuring of new social milieus
based on allied families also made cous-
ins who were then often raised in the
same household into objects of desire.
T
he road from homogomy to
erotic desire is sometimes short.
The anthropologist Christopher
Johnson, who recently studied a large
18th century French bourgeois family
network, notes that the rise of erotically
charged sibling ties provided a new focal
point for familial dynamics. As such, the
language of cousinship, too, became
conated with the charged discourse
of siblings. One sister (whose letters of
longing for her brother bordered on the
incestuous) wrote to her brother about
his impending marriage to their cousin:
Habituated from your childhood to your
chrie as a sister, and she loving you as a
brother, you have developed an affection
that can only end with life itself. Later in
their marriage, the cousin/wife addressed
her husband in her letters as my love,
my friend, my spouse, my brother. Mary
Shelleys Frankenstein (1818), too, offers
a similar example: Dr. Frankensteins
orphaned cousin, raised in his family as a
sister, becomes his and his familys object
of choice for his wife. The cousin/sister
ambiguity was only one part of a new
eroticism that searched for sameness in
the object of erotic or spiritual love.
Desire between siblings and cousins
during this period was not merely a lit-
erary conceit. The life and work of the
writer Clemens Brentano, for example,
shows how reality and literary imagery
intersected. His novel Godwi (1801) and
his long poem Romanzen vom Rosenkranz
(180312) both dwell on sibling incest,
while his lifelong attraction to his sister,
Bettine, brought this literary preoccupa-
tion to life. Growing up in separate house-
holds, Clemens and Bettine saw little of
each other until he was twenty and she
fourteen. While writing Godwi at about the
same time, he describes his growing erotic
attraction to her, expressing pleasure at
her maturing breasts. He and Bettine
began an intense relationship, frequently
exchanging letters some of which she
later heavily edited in Clemens Brentanos
Frhlingskranz. The pairing off of two
siblings was typical of many families of
the period, but Bettine became Clemens
ideal; their relationship was the model of
love. Soon Brentano could only see her
as an extension of himself. To Bettines
future husband, Brentanos friend Achim
Von Arnim, he wrote: My love for her is
itself not genuine. I stand shyly next to
her because she shows me nothing other
than a more beautiful image of my self.
To another friend he wrote, Bettine is my
double.
Soon Brentano had a ance of his own,
Sophie Moreau. He described his love for
Bettine even to her, writing: She is beauti-
ful, you are beautiful, oh if only you were
beautiful sisters, belles soeurs a pun on
the French word for sisters-in-law. Later he
told Sophie that Bettine is, except for

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210x135_GRW_BerlinerJornal.indd 1 25.09.2008 9:41:42 Uhr
God, the highest that a human can love,
and pleaded with Sophie to really love
me, so very intimately, as I hardly can do
it myself, as only Bettine has tried.... If
Bettine were not his sister, and if she were
as old as Sophie, he told the latter, he would
of course still feel desire for Sophie, but
Bettine would win him. But since things
are otherwise, you are there and are the
only one.
By 1803 Sophie had nally accused
Brentano of incest. He attempted to
explain and demonstrate his transition
from sister to wife:
Bettines connection to me is like the
connection of two friends who live
somewhere where talking is forbidden.
One of them, however, had prayed out
loud, told a woman he loved her, com-
forted a dying person, and called out in
the night to someone walking into an
abyss. Because of this he had his tongue
cut out. That is me. Now the other goes
around in all the joys of life, greets the
dumb one whenever they meet, but she
is fearful and does not talk and the com-
forting glances become more seldom,
and thus everything is ruined, with no
injustice or revenge. Oh if the dumb
one had his tongue again, he would ask
her to love him, but still without hope
and would lose his tongue again.
In perhaps the most important philosoph-
ical treatise of the early nineteenth cen-
tury, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),
G.W.F. Hegel discusses the differences
between a wife and a sister and he gives
paramount importance to the latter. The
emotional tie for a married woman, he
suggests, is to marriage itself not to the
particular husband in question, at least
in an ethical household. Her relation-
ships are not based on a reference to this
particular husband, this particular child,
but to a husband, to children in general
not to feeling, but to the universal. Above
all, a woman as wife cannot know herself
and cannot be a particular self simply
by knowing and being known by her
husband.
Everything is different, however, with
respect to her brother, to whom she is
attached by blood but absent mutual desire.
This view had its roots at home. The rela-
tionship between Hegel and his younger
sister, Christiane Luise, was famously
intense and lifelong: just after Hegels
marriage, at age forty, she had a nervous
breakdown and went to an asylum for over
a year. And soon after Hegel died, in 1831,
Christiane wrote a letter to her brothers
widow about his childhood and personal-
ity. Then she took a walk, jumped in a lake,
and drowned herself.
These real-life events are uncannily
foreshadowed in Hegels discussion of
wife and sister in the chapter on the ethi-
cal world:
The moment of individual self hood,
recognizing and being recognized, can
here assert its right because it is bound
up with the balance and equilibrium
resulting from their being of the same
blood, and from their being related in a
way that involves no mutual desire. The
loss of a brother is thus irreparable to
the sister, and her duty towards him is
the highest.
David Warren Sabean is a professor of
German history at the University of
California, Los Angeles. He is the German
Transatlantic Program Fellow at the
American Academy in fall 2008.
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At least as troubling as Germanys
misguided export focus is the associated
near-mercantilist perspective of some
German politicians and business leaders
toward European economic integration.
The blocking of integration initiatives such
as the EU Services or Takeover Directives
is justied by these ofcials in part by the
need to maintain German net export totals.
If anything, however, this perspective
runs contrary to the economic realities of
Germany and all developed economies: the
economic benets of globalization arise
out of cross-border economic openness and
investment, and the competitive pressure
those relations put on domestic companies
through imports, expansion of variety, and
capital mobility. Exports, in net or absolute
terms, are far from vital to growth on their
own merits.
Rather than exports being uniformly
benecial, then, it matters greatly what
an advanced country exports and on what
basis. A national economic strategy based
on reducing real wages to make the cur-
rent mix of a countrys exports more price
competitive will not lead to sustainable
growth any more than repeated nominal
depreciations would. Germany attempted
this strategy through relative wage dea-
A
s the worlds leading exporter,
Germany has spent more than
fty years focused on promoting
exports as the primary driver of its eco-
nomic growth. What has largely escaped
public notice, however, is that this focus
on exports has remained unwavering
regardless of German economic success
or decline. Instead, every year, German
commentators eagerly classify countries
according to their volume of exports
as if they were the rankings from the
Fussballweltmeisterschaft, with Germany
expected to be at the top of the list. And, as
seen on the left side of Table 1, it usually
comes close to the top of that league, an
even more impressive performance consid-
ering its size relative to the US or China.
Yet unlike the pursuit of the World Cup,
there is good reason for Germany to give
up this contest. At best, Germanys pur-
suit of export competitiveness has been a
deceptive distraction from the countrys
underlying economic problems, if not a
complete waste of effort that promotes dis-
tortions at home. Neither a countrys share
of exports in gdp nor its relative rank in
world-export league tables has a signicant
positive effect on its economic or productiv-
ity growth. As shown on the right side of
Table 1, Germany has been ready for relega-
tion based on poor income growth, an even
more impressively poor performance con-
sidering its high savings and human capital.
The notion that trade openness (not just
exports) leads to growth has recently been
shown to be less convincing than previously
thought. Moreover, many of the benets of
openness stem from the presence of gener-
ally benecial liberal economic institutions,
which happen also to be associated with the
absence of trade protection. In any event,
the remaining benecial effects of trade
on wealth and growth are associated with
openness, not with exports, net or total.
EXPORTWELTMEISTER
SO WHAT?
German jubilation over exports drowns out more pressing economic priorities
By Adam Posen
GERMANY
9.48 %
JAPAN
6.21 %
CHINA
5.44 %
FRANCE
4.71 %
UNITED
KINGDOM
4.23 %
ITALY
3.92 %
CANADA
3.90%
NETHERLANDS
3.36%
SOUTH KOREA
2.63%
SPAIN
1.94%
AUSTRALIA
1.02%
USA
10.47 %
TABLE 1: EXPORTWELTMEISTERSCHAFT
AVG % OF TOTAL WORLD EXPORTS 19972007
tion in existing industries vis--vis the rest
of the eurozone from 20012005. This
yielded two years of surprisingly strong
export-led growth, now coming to a sharp
halt, declining productivity growth, and
no sustained pick-up in either domestic
investment or consumption. Export
growth achieved through increases in pro-
ductivity and the creation of new products
or markets would be far more benecial to
German workers (and thus to consump-
tion and investment), as well as far more
lasting.
The German corporate sector desperate-
ly needs competitive pressure and reform
of its corporate governance, but it escapes
those changes by insisting that large
quantities of exports mean the fault lies
elsewhere in the economy, like with high
taxes or wages. Yet, for all their exports, the
resulting lack of consolidation or techno-
logical change in these sectors drives down
productivity growth and returns to capital
throughout the German economy.
Consequently, Germanys successful
export industries remain largely the same
ones as forty years ago (bulk chemicals
and dyes, large electrical goods and appli-
ances, machine tools, autos, and auto
parts), while global technological progress
and competition from emerging markets
mean that these sectors have moved down
the value chain. Horst Siebert calculated
in 2005 that these sectors have consis-
tently comprised more than 80 percent
of German exports; most estimates are
lower, but still on the order of 50 percent.
The dysfunctions of the German corporate
sector also mean that almost no German
rms and thus few German workers and
investors have emerged in todays grow-
ing high-technology and service sectors.
For example, only one German company
(sap) is among the top 25 software and
IT service providers worldwide, and no
German companies are among the top
25 IT hardware producers. Germanys
focus on export companies and the
preservation of their current ownership
structures also shows up in unexploited
scale economies for German companies.
Expansion would require greater exter-
nal nance and thus loss of managerial
freedom from accountability. Despite the
common assumption that German multi-
nationals dominate in both Germany and
the European Union, Germany actually
has 25 percent fewer large companies than
would be consistent with its share of the
EU economy. By focusing on export suc-
cess rather than productivity, Germany
has brought about arrested development in
its corporate sector.
Germany needs to reconceive its foreign
economic policy to better serve the welfare
of its citizens. Such a reconception will
require some radical rethinking of the
relative importance of exports. In addition,
it necessitates adjusting the distortive pro-
tection of German businesses that results
from export misprioritization. The success
of some German companies in exporting
has blinded German citizens and policy-
makers to the problems of the German
corporate sector.
One result has been that policymakers
end up blaming labor markets and the
public sector for German underperfor-
mance. Simultaneously, Germanys high
level of exports has hidden the fact that
many incumbent German Mittelstand busi-
nesses face few new competitors and little
pressure from capital markets to increase
protability. Ultimately, the overall rate of
productivity and per capita income growth
in the German economy has declined when
compared with that of its peers over the last
25 years. That depressing outcome remains
even when averaging in the recent tempo-
rary burst of German growth (and under-
performance of the US), and especially
when one considers that long-demanded
labor market reforms and scal consolida-
tion have already taken place in Germany.
Germanys foreign economic policy
should shift from reinforcing these pat-
terns to shattering them. A more aggres-
sive pursuit of global economic integra-
tion rather than Exportweltmeisterschaft
would bring German foreign economic
policy closer to this goal. Challenging the
accepted German norms about the virtues
of exports becomes even more critical given
todays integration of China, India, the
12 new EU members, and other emerging
markets into the global supply chain. That
fundamental shift in the environment
increases the competitive pressure on
lower-productivity businesses. At the same
time, for the developed world, this shift
diminishes the political support for contin-
ued international economic openness.
With the normalization of German
foreign policy after reunication, Germany
should play a leadership role in internation-
al economic affairs by promoting greater
economic integration, which would benet
the world and Germany itself. Relatively
passive support for the global trading
regime with occasional pushes

WORLD CUP OF GROWTH RATES
AVG % GDP GROWTH PER CAPITA 19972007
SPAIN
4.49 %
AUSTRALIA
3.93 %
CANADA
3.49 %
SOUTH KOREA
3.07 %
NETHERLANDS
2.93 %
UNITED
KINGDOM
2.62 %
USA
2.56 %
FRANCE
2.37 %
ITALY
1.63 %
GERMANY
0.91 % JAPAN
0.25 %
CHINA
11.07 %
back against the demands of French (and
now Polish) agricultural interests when-
ever multilateral trade negotiations reach
impasses has been Germanys habitually
positive but minimal role. This will no lon-
ger sufce to assure German and European
economic well-being. In addition, the stat-
ist and neo-mercantilist values consistent
with the pursuit of the top exporter title are
contrary to the Federal Republics values of
multilateralism, constructive transatlanti-
cism, and deepened European federalism.
Germany has a huge opportunity to
leverage needed productivity-enhancing
changes in its domestic economy through
more enlightened foreign economic
policies. Pursuit of greater international
economic integration at the national,
European, and multilateral levels would
benet both Germany and potentially
considering the German inuence in the
EU and wto processes the world. This
would require a restructuring of German
foreign economic policy from the faulty
course it has held for fty years.
A new German foreign economic policy
would consist of the following measures:
Cease waiting for externally driven
export booms to stimulate growth,
whether through relative wage dea-
tion in the eurozone, exchange-rate
depreciation outside of the eurozone, or
demand-raising productivity improve-
ments abroad.
Recognize that Germanys export suc-
cess is highly concentrated in only a
few sectors of declining value and
that domestic barriers to new entrants
(foreign and domestic) have caused the
German corporate sector to stagnate;
Concentrate instead on productivity-
enhancing policies that promote high-
value-added, high-wage employment,
and emergence of new services and
sectors.
Utilize competitive pressures from
abroad on product markets, invest-
ment returns, and corporate owner-
ship to induce restructuring of
German business.
Shift pursuits in Brussels from macro-
economic policy rules to microeco-
nomic integration (and support a strong
European Commission and the EU
Takeover and Services Directives as the
logical next steps in that pursuit).
Assert greater leadership of Europe in
transatlantic policy coordination and
multilateral economic negotiations,
thereby forestalling the damage that
overly expansive nationalist rhetoric in
the EU can have on wto trade negotia-
tions, Chinese market access, and for-
eign corporate takeovers.
The underlying question for German eco-
nomic policymakers henceforth should
be: Does this policy advance Germanys
integration with the world economy? and
not, How are we doing on exports? While
the latter may be easier to say and mea-
sure, the former is more likely to produce
sustainable and sustained growth in
Germany and Europe. Rather than trying
to be the export world champion, Germany
should try to champion world economic
integration.
Adam S. Posen is the Deputy Director

and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson
Institute for International Economics in
Washington, DC. This essay is adapted
from Chapter Four of his forthcom-
ing book, Why Reform a Rich Country:
Germany (Peterson Institute, 2009).
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CENTRAL ASIAN REDUX
Central Asia has long been considered a blank space on the map. But as power,
inuence, and resources converge upon the region, continued ignorance is perilous
By Robert P. Finn
O
n either side of the vast inland
sea that is Central Asia, China
and Russia are cooperating and
competing for inuence and access. From
Sinkiang in western China to the oil-rich
Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, the entire
region presents an array of unmatched
possibilities and problems. The European
Union and the United States, too, have
become entwined in the regions politics,
security, and development, whose goals
and outcomes are in ux. As the new
nations of Central Asia have inherited his-
tories, ethnicities, and religions that will
inuence how they will develop, this vast
geographic neighborhood has become both
stage and player in the drama of the upcom-
ing century.
If one stands in Central Asia and
looks southward, Afghanistan provides the
break in a wall of mountains and deserts, a
route south to warm lands and the sea. For
the people of Central Asia, Afghanistan has
historically been a portal through which
the courses of empire and history have
passed. Starting with the prehistoric Aryan
invaders of India, followed by the armies of
Alexander the Great, the Moguls, and even-
tually of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan
has been the great highway. For the new
nations of Central Asia, Afghanistan holds
the promise of access while it raises the
sword of political strife.
Afghanistan provided two seminal
shocks that have been primary determi-
nants of the current political atmosphere
in Central Asia. The defeat of the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan was shattering to
a nation whose mythos was based on the
heroic victory of World War II. In addition,
the Soviet movement into Afghanistan
was a step along the way Russia took in its
nineteenth-century path of imperial acqui-
sition. The Great Game ended in a draw
with the British Empire. But the latter
dissolved after 1945, and the agreements
made with it seemed no longer binding to
the Soviets.
The peoples of Afghanistan were ethni-
cally aligned with the Soviet Republics to
the north, which had only been Sovietized
in the 1930s. As the Russian and then
Soviet Empire pushed into Central Asia,
waves of people ed in front of them. The
subsequent rise of Islamic fundamental-
ism in Afghanistan only aggravated the
disaster and provided an active threat for
Central Asia. The hundreds of ghters of
the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan
MAP OF THE SEVEN BANNERS OF ALTAI URIANHAI, MONGOLIA, 1928
who ed south to Afghanistan and then
to Pakistan were also following ancient
routes. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan each
faced armed Islamic groups that were both
indigenous and linked to groups to the
south.
Russias own historic ethnic insecurities
also inform its relationship to Afghanistan.
The centuries-long Mongol rule of Russia
remains a formative element in the
Russian psyche and is demographically
expressed today in a Russia that is 20 per-
cent Muslim. The bitter wars in Chechnya
can be read as part of the Russian reaction
to the perceived twin threats of Islamic fun-
damentalism and nationalism in Russia
itself, where a string of Muslim groups
inhabit the Volga River Valley and where
there are no denitive geographic bound-
aries between Muslims and Christians.
At the same time as Chechnya declared
independence, the far larger and more
important republic of Tatarstan was mov-
ing in the same direction. The Soviet defeat
in Afghanistan caused ripples that spread
throughout Eurasia.
The second shock for modern Central
Asia was the invasion of Afghanistan by
international forces after the attacks on
September 11, 2001. Initial cooperation
from the Central Asian countries led to the
establishment of US bases in Uzbekistan
and Kyrgyzstan, a German base in
Uzbekistan, and French forces in Tajikistan.
This coalitions failure to achieve swift vic-
tory led to a multilateral call at the 2005
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (sco)
meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, for a time-
table to withdraw US troops.
Prior to 2001 the states of Central Asia
had justiably feared that Afghanistans
model of strife would spread to their coun-
tries. This anxiety hastened the end of the
Tajik civil war, as both parties agreed to
an imperfectly implemented compromise
rather than copy Afghanistans ongoing
civil wars. To the north, Islam Karimov
used the spectre of Islamic fundamental-
ism to establish a police state well known
for its human rights abuses. In addition,
the Islamic threat made the states of
Central Asia renew the ties with Russia that
had slackened in the rst years after the
end of the Soviet Union.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
started by China as a way to inuence the
region, grew more substantive as Russia
and Uzbekistan joined the organization.
It extended its interests to security and
narcotics issues, and it provided a forum
for concern about the US presence in the
region, particularly as the US and European
countries began to push for enforcement of
human rights and democracy. Russia has
accused the US of fomenting the revolu-
tions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan.
Other countries in the region have curbed
civil liberties to make sure the same does
not happen to them.
Most of what Central Asian coun-
tries know about democracy and the West
they learned from their colonial experi-
ence with imperial, and then communist,
Russia. With the exception of Kazakhstan,
the experience came late at the end of the
nineteenth century or well into the twen-
tieth. The resistance to the Soviets lasted
until the 1930s in Kyrgyzstan and then
moved across the border into Afghanistan
and China. For the citizens of the Soviet
Union, Russia was the West and Russian
the language of Western civilization. The
Soviets changed the alphabets of the
Central Asian countries twice to keep them
from learning from one another and from
their modernizing Turkish cousins. The
propaganda, aided by economic realities
in Asia, worked. A villager living amid
the rusting waste of ex-Soviet Tajikistan
said of visiting relatives across the river in
Afghanistan in the 1990s: Theyre living a
hundred years in the past, without electric-
ity and water.
The Central Asian countries did not
want to leave the Soviet Union; it dis-
solved and left them behind. For years they
hoped that it would reunify, sharing then-
President Putins feeling that its end was a
tragedy. The ensuing social and economic
collapse broke down a system that had been
erected over generations with great difcul-
ty, startling economic and logistical incom-
petence, and appalling cost in human lives.
In Kazakhstan alone an estimated 1.5 mil-
lion people died in collectivization drives
in the 1930s, leaving Kazakhs a minority
in their own country. Upon the end of the
Soviet Union the proportion reversed, as
millions of Russians returned west and
north to a homeland many had never seen.
Another 1.5 million Volga Germans, deport-
ed to the east during World War II, moved
to Germany. The complex ethnic web of
Central Asia, as varied in its composition
as that of the United States, unraveled and
began to reweave itself.
The newly independent states quickly
replaced Soviet iconography with new
nationalist imagery. Most infamous was
Turkmenistans Saparmurad Niyazov,
renamed Turkmenbashi, literally Head
of the Turkmen, who erected a golden
statue of himself atop a monument that
rotated to face the sun. Tajikistan erected
monuments and pictures of the ninth-
century Tajik ruler Saman that resembled
Tajikistans president, Imamali Rahman;
Uzbekistan chose Tamerlane as its
national hero. Russian lost ground to
national languages, and English became
the foreign language of choice for the
young and upwardly mobile. Azerbaijan,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan began to
replace the Cyrillic alphabet with Latin let-
ters, although as yet only Azerbaijan has
successfully made the transition. More
importantly, the social safety net of the
Soviet Union dissolved along with its politi-
cal structures. Hospitals, schools, public
safety, and pension schemes became
dysfunctional as funding disappeared and
ination ran rampant. Russia, suffering
from the same collapse, initially could do
little to mitigate the changes.
The boom in energy prices and the
spread of Islamic fundamentalism led to
a basic shift in the power relationships
within Central Asia. Russia suddenly had
the money to pay off its debts and promise
largesse to Central Asia. Tajikistan, which
had received 40 percent of its budget from
Moscow in Soviet times and was the poor-
est state of the former ussr, received prom-
ises of a two billion dollar aid package from
Moscow. Currently, Russia offers to pay the
Central Asian states market-level prices
for energy. This stance ensures Russias
monopoly on energy exports to the West
and prevents US-promoted alternate supply
routes, such as the Nabucco gas pipeline,
from being realized. However, Russias
aggressive policy also creates tension
with other players in the Asian oil market,
including China and India. A gas pipeline
from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan
to Pakistan and India would undermine
the Russian monopoly, but Russias recent
THE CENTRAL ASIAN COUNTRIES DID NOT WANT TO LEAVE THE
SOVIET UNION; IT DISSOLVED AND LEFT THEM BEHIND. FOR YEARS
THEY HOPED IT WOULD REUNIFY.
dramatic increase in the price it offers for
Turkmen gas may doom the planned pipe-
line, which already faces problems with
supply and security.
R
ussia has taken several steps
to reassert itself militarily in Central
Asia. After initially ignoring the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
attempting instead to revive its own
post-Soviet Collective Security Treaty
Organization, it eventually joined the sco.
When the United States and its coalition
allies obtained basing rights adjoining
the Manas airport in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan,
Russia set up its own base a few miles away
at Kant. In Tajikistan, the resident Russian
general reacted to coalition overtures for
use of the Dushanbe airport by announc-
ing to the surprise of the Tajiks that
the base was a Russian-Tajik dual-use
facility. Eventually the French were per-
mitted to use the airport, and the coalition
rejected Tajik offers to use another base at
Aini because of infrastructure problems.
Russias on-again, off-again relations with
Uzbekistan have occasionally resulted
in military cooperation between the two
nations, which see themselves as the right-
ful heirs to the Soviet Unions dominant
position in Central Asia. Russias military
intervention in Georgia in August 2008
contained a trenchant lesson for Central
Asia as well, as President Medvedev
claimed the right to intervene anywhere to
protect Russian citizens.
China has also taken an increasingly
active role in the region for both economic
and political reasons. Chinas westernmost
province, Sinkiang, is home to a Turkic
people who have ethnic, religious, and
cultural afliations with their cousins to
the west as far as Turkey. Their Uygur lan-
guage is at least partially comprehensible to
other speakers of Turkic languages. Groups
of Kyrgyz and Kazakh minorities also live
on the Chinese side of the border, while an
Uygur minority resides in Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan.
Sinkiang is also home to an economic
and population boom as China develops
industry and builds new cities in the
area. This has brought millions of Han
Chinese, now the majority ethnic group in
the region. Uygur resistance has resulted
in some violence and the labeling of one
Uygur group as an international terrorist
organization by the United States. Some
Uygur ghters have joined al-Qaeda in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. Uygurs main-
tain that their resistance is against ethnic
assimilation and economic policies of
Beijing that ignore their interests.
China has taken active steps to develop
its relations with Central Asian states,
and not just because of concern over the
US presence in the region, although the
US military base in Kyrgyzstan less than
two hundred miles from the Chinese bor-
der and the US presence in Afghanistan
undoubtedly rankles. Border adjustments
have been made with Russia, Kazakhstan,
and Kyrgyzstan. The Kyrgyz Presidents
surrender of several hundred thousand
acres of territory to China was one reason
he was overthrown in 2005. China claims
10 percent of eastern Tajikistan as well
and has opened the rst road connecting
its border to the Tajik capital. Chinese
traders are omnipresent in Central Asia,
as are local merchants who go to China
and purchase cheap goods for their
markets.
E
nergy is one of the main
determinants of national interests
in this century. China has moved
briskly forward to advance its energy
interests in Central Asia, purchasing an
oil eld in Kazakhstan and planning the
worlds longest pipeline to bring that oil to
China. At the same time, it has signed oil
purchase agreements with Russia to mul-
tiply by several times the Russian supply
to western China. China has also become
the prime trading partner of Kazakhstan
and Iran. With the latter it has signed
deals worth $100 billion to develop
the gas and oil elds at North Pars and
Yadavaran, purchase liqueed natural gas,
extend the Tehran metro, and continue a
wide range of other projects. There is also
speculation that China will obtain dock-
ing rights on the Iranian Gulf shore, com-
plementing the large commercial port it
is building in Gwadar, Pakistan. China
has invested nearly one billion dollars in
Turkmenistan, has obtained an interest
in a Turkmen gas eld in the Caspian Sea,
and is building a pipeline to bring that
gas to China, scheduled to begin opera-
tion in 2010.
Closer to home, China has signed a
$3.4 billion deal to develop the Aynak cop-
per mine in northeast Afghanistan, one of
the worlds largest undeveloped deposits.
The payment, roughly equal to the total
development assistance the US has expend-
ed in Afghanistan to date, will include
a railroad Afghanistans rst to

MAP OF THE TERRITORY OF THE BANNER OF DORJJAV, 19091922
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MAP OF THE TERRITORY OF THE BANNER OF DORJJAV, MONGOLIA, 19091922
connect the eld with Chinese markets.
The estimated worth of the copper is nearly
$90 billion. In addition to the road with
Tajikistan, China is also upgrading the
transport infrastructure on its own side of
the border, including the Karakorum high-
way, which leads to Islamabad and the new
port at Gwadar.
Both unilaterally and through the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
China has registered its concern about the
US presence in Central Asia. Russia and
China have taken a common stance imply-
ing proprietorship over the region. Several
naval incidents, such as the last-minute
cancellation of US ship visits to Hong Kong
last year, indicate Chinas discomfort with
the status quo, as does the increase in
Chinese defense spending. Joint Chinese-
Russian troop maneuvers have taken place
for the rst time, and Chinas military chief
visited Afghanistan in the fall of 2007 to
discuss mutual security issues. As well,
China is building a road that would connect
the two countries through the narrow n-
ger of the Wakhan Corridor, which divides
Tajikistan from Pakistan, in addition to a
projected railroad through Tajikistan to
Afghanistan.
T
he most volatile element for
Central Asia is the ongoing war in
Afghanistan, which presents two
immediate threats to the countrys north-
ern neighbors. The rst, the threat of fun-
damentalist Islam, is a real one, however
manipulated by Uzbekistans President
Karimov and, arguably, the Russian gov-
ernment. The failure of the current central
Asian governments to achieve any real
political or economic reforms (with the
partial exception of Kazakhstan) allows
the Islamist message of social justice
and freedom to remain resonant. In addi-
tion, the conation of radical terrorism
with avowedly non-violent groups has
led to an overall crackdown on observant
Muslims in Central Asia, most dramati-
cally in Uzbekistan. Fleeing militants
have taken refuge with their counterparts
in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tahir
Yoldashev, leader of the Islamic movement
of Uzbekistan, has called on his follow-
ers to postpone the jihad in Central Asia
and concentrate on Afghanistan, but the
message is clear: Central Asia is still on
the list. Thus, in spite of their trepidations
about ultimate US intentions in the region,
the Central Asian countries still facilitate,
directly or indirectly, the continuation of
war in Afghanistan.
Narcotics are Afghanistans second
threat to Central Asia. Both usage and
trafc have increased as the Afghan drug
production outstrips all competitors.
Afghanistan has been called a narco-
state, and the trafckers in Afghanistan,
often connected to its government, have
close partnerships in neighboring states.
Narcotics travel through Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan to Russia and then on to
Europe. A program to stop drug production
in Afghanistan might simply move produc-
tion to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, both of
UNSURE AT FIRST WHAT TO MAKE OF THE DISSOLUTION OF THE
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RUSSIAN INFLUENCE.
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which have a history of weak, corrupt gov-
ernance and entrenched poverty.
Iran casts its shadow over the region as
well. The division of control of the Caspian
Sea necessarily involves Iran. The Tehran
Declaration on the Caspian Sea in 2006
states that the littoral states guarantee not
to attack one another and that the Caspian
Sea cannot be used for the purposes of war.
One pointed addressee of this declaration
is the United States. Iran has maintained
close relations with both Russia and China.
In his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard,
Zbigniew Brzezinski predicts a catastroph-
ic outcome for the US if these three nations
united against it. Russias involvement
with the construction of Irans nuclear
power plant at Bushehr is well known.
Reciprocally, Irans Shia theocracy has kept
silent about Russias behavior towards the
Chechens.
The Unites States has not yet
assumed a primary position of involvement
in Central Asia. Unsure at rst what to
make of the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
the US opened embassies in all post-Soviet
states but continued to accept the primacy
of Russian inuence in the region. The US
programs aimed at fostering civil rights
and democracy were not heavily funded
and often took a distinct second place
to highly visible commercial deals and
military visits. Nevertheless, they had an
effect, both unilaterally and in partnership
with the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (osce) and the EU.
The Color Revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine,
and Kyrgyzstan have been ascribed, rightly
or wrongly, to these inuences; as a result,
other Central Asian governments have
tightened the rules in their own countries.
Nevertheless, the US budget for programs
related to civil rights and democracy
decreased in 2008, with the exception of
programs in Turkmenistan.
As the Afghanistan war continues and
even escalates, the initial enthusiasm of
the Central Asian states has declined. The
concept of the US as a citadel of democ-
racy and freedom, never widely accepted
10 Years
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Final_Anzg_CNC_280x210+4mm 08.09.2008 9:50 Uhr Seite 1
in the former ussr, has become even
more beleaguered in recent years. The
United States protable business deals
with Central Asian oligarchs reinforces
distrust of the former enemy, as does
domestic government propaganda that
questions US motives. Russia and China
see the US as a rival in an area they con-
sider their own.
The European Union also looks to
Central Asia as a region of growth and
potential for the next century. EU energy
demands and security concerns are inter-
twined in a world of diminishing possibili-
ties. Through the EU and the osce, as well
as bilaterally, European countries have
begun to explore the possibility of resource
development in the region. The EU has
already been criticized in some fora for not
approaching issues of democracy and basic
freedom with the same vigor as it seeks out
energy relationships.
IF THE US AND THE EU LEAVE IT TO THE CENTRAL ASIAN POPULAR
MEDIA TO INFLUENCE CITIZENS LIFESTYLE AND THOUGHT, THE
RESULTS WILL LARGELY REINFORCE NEGATIVE PRECONCEPTIONS ON
BOTH SIDES.
D
espite burgeoning strategic
and developmental interests in
the region, little is known about
Central Asia in the West. The languages,
culture, and history of its peoples were
subsumed into the overall fabric of Russia
and the ussr. A fresh approach is needed to
understand these countries as partners and
cooperators, one that includes an apprecia-
tion of their individuality. One size does not
t all. An immediate concerted effort could
forge economic and political stability in the
region. The approach should be multilateral,
multi-linguistic, and inclusive. If the United
States and the EU leave it to the Central
Asian popular media to inuence citizens
lifestyle and thought, the results will largely
reinforce negative preconceptions on both
sides. For the peoples of Central Asia, their
status as citizens of a world superpower
(the ussr) is a still-fresh memory, and they
expect recognition as equals. A project that
considers the needs and abilities of all sides
would make a substantial contribution
towards creating a new equation for Central
Asia. Such a project should take the follow-
ing points into consideration:
Russia and China both seek eco-
nomic and political inuence. The
Shanghai Cooperation Organization is
a venue where Russia and China meet
and cooperate along with the other
Central Asian states, and it has already
held its rst joint military exercises. But
as anti-terrorism is one of the scos
major concerns, an invitation for it to
cooperate militarily with the coalition
in Afghanistan and Central Asia could
bring major benets to both sides, help
to alleviate worries about the US pres-
ence in Central Asia, and relieve some of
the wars material and personnel pres-
sures. Since the Central Asian states will
be primary beneciaries of security and
peace in Afghanistan, there is no reason
why they should not substantially con-
tribute to bringing it about.
Oil and gas are what everyone wants
from the region. The race for resources
can result in the ongoing triumph of oli-
garchies or it can evolve into something
better. Responsible growth can bring
present sustenance and lasting benets
for local populations. Kazakhstan and
Azerbaijan have set up investment funds
for the future. The other Central Asian
countries and their purchasing partners
need to do the same. In Turkmenistan,
for example, the nominal per capita
income is $8000, but any observer can
see that the standard of living is far
below. As more resources come online,
real incomes should rise across the
board.
Water is the lasting problem of
Central Asia. Insufcient supply and
conicting needs dictate better manage-
ment policies, especially when a devel-
oping Afghanistan starts to demand its
share of limited resources. Salinization
of land, the need to develop increasing
hydroelectric power, and management
of supply on an annual basis are prob-
lems that need covalent and comprehen-
sive structuring on a regional basis.
Transportation must also be dealt
with regionally. The countries of the
region have called for further develop-
ment of the rail lines from Istanbul to
Almaty, and regional cooperation to sup-
ply war material via the Central Asian
rail lines to Afghanistan is underway,
but a larger discussion involving con-
necting Central Asian lines through
Afghanistan to Pakistan and India, and
lines to China is also necessary for the
new century.
Succession issues will face the
nations of Central Asia. Dynastic ten-
dencies exist, and democratic ones are
weak. Kyrgyzstans revolution did not
result in a net gain for democracy. The
careful nurturing of democratic organs
and civil society is a prerequisite for
improving other conditions. Local needs
and attitudes need to be an informed
part of the process, and democratic
states need to take an active role in pre-
senting their values.
Economic change is essential. Free-
market economies are severely limited
in most of Central Asia, with govern-
ments and oligarchs working hand-in-
hand to exploit and shape commerce.
Uzbekistan may be the most outstand-
ing example, but all of the countries of
Central Asia have paradigms of control
and taxation that discourage investment
and growth. Rule of law is essential for
democracy, but it is even more essential
for a successful economy.
Islam as a political and social ele-
ment is both a leitmotif and active factor.
It informs daily life and attitudes to a
greater or lesser extent, depending on
circumstances. The end of the Soviet
Union led many people to look back to
the Islamic states that existed before.
Fundamentalists and some terrorists
have taken advantage of this nostalgia,
and government repression exacerbated
the problem. While moderate Islam
has been and mostly still is the norm in
Central Asia, politicization of religion
and reactive repression wear away at its
fabric. The West needs to understand
the complexity of Islam and work with
its moderate majority.
The US does not seem to have a
holistic and coherent policy for Central
Asia. These new nations with ancient
roots nevertheless present, in many
ways, a physical and sociological ambi-
ence familiar to residents of the US,
with their vast spaces, lack of class
structure and vibrant mix of ethnic
groups. To observers in the region, US
interest has been expressed until now
mainly in business deals that have
produced tangible benets mainly for
the leadership or military activities that
are unclear in their ultimate intent and
unsettling in their propinquity. From
both the Russian and Chinese point
of view, a growing ring of US military
emplacements surrounds them. They
are understandably anxious. Conversely,
the Central Asian partnership these
two countries manage raises questions
as well.
Central Asia is almost another
New World, with vast resources, huge
territory and peoples and cultures that
in many ways are unfamiliar. At the
same time, there are many aspects of
life, particularly in its cities, that are
quite recognizable, and Westerners
easily adapt. Partnerships with Central
Asian states and their peoples could
result in mutually benecial growth and
development. And while the develop-
ment of democracy and economic pros-
perity are not guaranteed, Central Asia
has the potential for both.
Robert P. Finn served as US Ambassador
to Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.
Currently a lecturer in Near Eastern
Studies at Princeton University, he was a
spring 2008 Foreign Policy Visitor at the
Academy.
FELLOWSHIPS AND DISTINGUISHED
VISITORSHIPS ESTABLISHED IN PERPETUITY
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
Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction
Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize
Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize
Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in the Visual Arts
Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitorship
Stephen M. Kellen Distinguished Visitorship
John Kluge Distinguished Visitorship
Kurt Viermetz Distinguished Visitorship
Richard von Weizscker Distinguished Visitorship
ANNUALLY FUNDED FELLOWSHIPS AND
DISTINGUISHED VISITORSHIPS
Leonore Annenberg Berlin Prize in Music
Composition
Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy
George H.W. Bush / Axel Springer Berlin Prize
Citigroup Berlin Prize
Coca-Cola Berlin Prize
Deutsche Bank Berlin Prize
Haniel Berlin Prize
Berthold Leibinger Berlin Prize in the Humanities
Siemens Berlin Prize
David Rubenstein Foreign Policy Forum
ENDOWMENT GIVING
Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction
The von der Heyden Family Foundation
Lloyd Cutler Distinguished Visitorship in Law
Paul P. Eckert
Jutta von Falkenhausen
Jan Heithecker
Dieter Lange
William Lee
William Perlstein
Daniel H. Squire
John B. Watkins
Roger and Jill Witten
Villa Grisebach, Berlin
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP
EADS Distinguished Visitorship
EADS
John Kluge Distinguished Visitorship
The John Kluge Foundation
Kurt Viermetz Distinguished Visitorship
Axel Springer Stiftung
Deutsche Brse
Hypo Real Estate Group
FOUNDERS CIRCLE
$1 million and above
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen
Foundation and the descendants of
Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold
CHAIRMANS CIRCLE
$25,000 and above
Constance and John P. Birkelund
Lester Crown
Werner Gegenbauer
C. Boyden Gray
Mary Ellen and Karl M. von der
Heyden
Richard C. Holbrooke
Nina von Maltzahn
William von Muefing
Christopher von Oppenheim
Norman Pearlstine and Jane Boon
Pearlstine
Gladys and Raymond Pearlstine
Charitable Remainder Trust
David M. Rubenstein
Kurt Viermetz
James D. Wolfensohn
TRUSTEES CIRCLE
$10,000 and above
Erivan Haub
Roger and Susan Hertog
Stefan von Holtzbrinck
Karen and Yoram Roth
Rafael J. Roth
Kenneth Starr
PATRONS
$2,500 and above
Volker Booten
Gahl Hodges Burt
Julie Finley
Hans-Michael and Almut Giesen
Regine Leibinger and Frank Barkow
Henry A. Kissinger
Erich Marx
Heinrich v. Pierer
Hanns Winkhaus
PRIVATE INITIATIVE PUBLIC OUTREACH
Friends, Foundations, and Corporations (Donations July 2007 September 2008)
INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILY FOUNDATIONS
W
e

m
a
k
e

e
v
e
r
y

e
f
f
o
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t

t
o

b
e

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i
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s
.

P
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n
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a
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t
i
o
n
.
FRIENDS
up to $2,500
Robert Z. Aliber, Johannes Altincioglu, Barbara S. Balaj, Heinrich Barth,
Diethart Breipohl, Irene Bringmann, Gerhard Casper, Georg Crezelius,
Richard and Barbara Debs, David Detjen, Thomas L. Farmer, Donald T. Fox,
Michael Geyer, Guilford Glazer, Vartan Gregorian, Donald Howard Hagan,
Steven Howard and Margrit Disman, Carl H. Hahn, Franz and Michaela Haniel,
Robert Harrison, Roe Jasen, Josef Joffe, Peter Jungen, Anke and
Joachim-Friedrich Kapp, John C. Kornblum, Evi Kurz, Laura and Gary Lauder,
Michael Libal, Harvey Shipley Miller, Wolfram Nolte, Hergard Rohwedder,
Henry W. Sapparth, Ulrike and Tom Schlay, Volker Schlndorff, Harald Schmid,
Kerstin von Schnakenburg, Immo Stabreit, Fritz Stern, Thomas von Thaden,
William R. Timken Foundation, Enzo Viscusi, Manfred and Rosa Wennemer
CORPORATIONS AND CORPORATE FOUNDATIONS
PRESIDENTS CIRCLE
$25,000 and above
Allianz SE
Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder
Holdings, Inc.
Audi AG
Bank of America, N.A.
Bayer HealthCare AG
Buse Heberer Fromm
Cerberus Deutschland
Beteiligungsberatung GmbH
Daimler AG
Daimler-Fonds im Stifterverband
fr die Deutsche Wissenschaft
Deutsche Bank AG
Deutsche Lufthansa AG
Drr AG
EnBW Energie Baden-Wrttemberg AG
Fresenius AG
Freshelds Bruckhaus Deringer
Germanwings
Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Herbert Quandt-Stiftung
Hewlett Packard
KPMG
Marsh GmbH
MSD Sharpe & Dohme GmbH
Philip Morris
Porsche AG
Siemens AG
Susanna Dulkinys and
Erik Spiekermann,
SpiekermannPartners
TimeWarner HBO
ThyssenKrupp AG
Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP
BENEFACTORS
up to $25,000
Altria Group, Inc.
Axel Springer Stiftung
BMW AG
Ernst & Young
Fleishman-Hillard Germany / Public
Affairs & Government Relations
Goldman Sachs Foundation
Hemmerling & Constantin
GmbH & Co. KG
Macys Foundation
Foundation Remembrance,
Responsibility and Future
Robert Bosch GmbH
Rudolf August Oetker Stiftung
Tengelmann Group
Volkswagen AG
Lufthansa | Wine | 212x280+5 | The Berlin Journal | HL 13pt, URL 12,5pt | Bhne: 30 mm | DU18.3.
www.lufthansa.com
A gourmet menu created by StarChefs.
Premium wines selected by expert sommeliers.
A vintage experience prepared by Lufthansa.
All for this one moment.
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CELEBRATING

Sam Nunn is a former US Senator from

Volker Schlndorff, the renowned German

WK_umDieWelt_210x135+3.indd 1 27.08.2008 15:31:00 Uhr

Patty Chang is a New York-based video

Adam S. Posen is the Deputy Director

Super Sticky Notes.

Super Sticky Notes the super strength adhesive notes. www.clever-bilden.de

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