Spring 2011 | Issue 20

A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Twenty | Spring 2011 

THE BERLIN JOURNAL 

Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke 

April 24, 1941 – December 13, 2010

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Spring 2011 | Number Twenty | The Berlin Journal | 1 

Contents 

The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | Spring 2011 

© Hornischer 

richard holbrooke at the American academy, 2008 

Remembering Richard Holbrooke 

5 The Gift of Conviction 

john c. kornblum 

5 The Bridge Builder 

richard von weizsäcker 

6 Friendship Forged through Film 

volker schlöndorff 

7 A Historian at Heart 

derek chollet 

8 Extravagant Laughter 

geoffrey wolff 

10 Beneath the Bluster 

gahl hodges burt 

12 Like a Western 

josef joffe 

14 A Man and His Métier 

karl m. von der heyden 

14 If Only Holbrooke Had Been in the 

Balkans in 1914 

fritz stern 

16 The House That Holbrooke Built 

frances fitzgerald 

17 A Last Breakfast 

norman pearlstine 

18 To Move the World 

henry a. kissinger 

19 Not a Quiet American 

strobe talbott 

21 Theory Versus Fact 

james der derian 

N1 On the Waterfront 

The American Academy’s newsletter, with 

the latest on fellows, alumni, and trustees, 

as well as recent events at the Hans 

Arnhold Center. 

From Our Friends and Fellows 

25 Doors Open, Doors Closed 

tamar jacoby deliberates the details of 

immigration in America and Germany. 

28 Crossing Over 

hal foster steadies the precarious art of 

Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. 

32 No Man’s Landscapes 

astrid m. eckert traipses the 

environments of the inter-German border. 

36 The Dead Letters Dept. 

peter wortsman sends up a short story 

on sorting mail and overdue revenge. 

40 Cairo’s Spring Cleaning 

roger cohen pits Egypt’s 2/11 as the 

counter to America’s 9/11. 

44 The Insurgency Within 

kirk w. johnson narrates the harrowing 

story of his Iraq War-triggered ptsd.

2 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | Spring 2011 

The Berlin Journal 

The American Academy 

A magazine from the Hans Arnhold in Berlin 

Center published by the American 

Executive Director 

Academy in Berlin 

Gary Smith 

Number Twenty – Spring 2011 

dean of fellows & programs 

Publisher Gary Smith 

Pamela Rosenberg 

Editor Brittani Sonnenberg 

CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE 

Managing Editor 

OFFICER 

R. Jay Magill Jr. 

Andrew J. White 

Advertising Berit Ebert, 

Helena Kageneck 

Am Sandwerder 17–19 

14109 Berlin 

Design Susanna Dulkinys & 

Tel. (49 30) 80 48 3-0 

Edenspiekermann 

www.edenspiekermann.com 

Fax (49 30) 80 48 3-111 

www.americanacademy.de 

Printed by Ruksaldruck, Berlin 

14 East 60th Street, Suite 604 

Copyright © 2011 

New York, NY 10022 

The American Academy in Berlin 

Tel. (1) 212 588-1755 

ISSN 1610-6490 

Fax (1) 212 588-1758 

Cover: Kabul, Afghanistan, 

November 18, 2009. Richard 

Holbrooke talks on the phone before 

the arrival of Secretary of State 

Hillary Rodham Clinton. Photo by 

Paula Bronstein/Getty Images. 

Honorary Chairmen Thomas L. Farmer, Richard von Weizsäcker 

co-Chairmen Karl M. von der Heyden, Henry A. Kissinger 

Vice Chair Gahl Hodges Burt 

President & CEO Norman Pearlstine 

Treasurer Andrew S. Gundlach 

Secretary John C. Kornblum 

Trustees Barbara Balaj, John P. Birkelund, Manfred Bischoff, 

Stephen B. Burbank, Gahl Hodges Burt, Caroline Walker Bynum, 

Mathias Döpfner, Marina Kellen French, Michael E. Geyer, Hans-Michael 

Giesen, Richard K. Goeltz, C. Boyden Gray, Vartan Gregorian, 

Andrew S. Gundlach, Franz Haniel, Helga Haub, Karl M. von der Heyden, 

Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Wolfgang Ischinger, Josef Joffe, Henry A. Kissinger, 

Michael Klein, John C. Kornblum, Regine Leibinger, Lawrence Lessig, 

Wolfgang Malchow, Nina von Maltzahn, Erich Marx, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, 

Julie Mehretu, William von Mueffling, Christopher von Oppenheim, 

Norman Pearlstine, David Rubenstein, Volker Schlöndorff, 

Peter Y. Solmssen, Kurt Viermetz, Pauline Yu 

Honorary Trustee Klaus Wowereit (ex officio) 

Trustees Emeriti Diethard Breipohl, Gerhard Casper, Fritz Stern 

Senior Counselors Richard Gaul, Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, 

Bernhard von der Planitz, Karen Roth, Yoram Roth, Victoria Scheibler 

SUPPORT 

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are doing, please contribute by making a tax-deductible donation: 

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Director’s Note 

In Pursuit of Political Ideals 

You learn a great deal about a person by spending time in their 

library. A couple of summers ago my daughters and I stayed 

in the Holbrookes’ guest apartment, which doubled as 

Richard’s study. In the shelves surrounding us, we discovered the 

library of a man whose appetite for ideas was as capacious as his 

passion for people. 

Winston Churchill and George Orwell, Reinhold Niebuhr 

and Søren Kierkegaard, Philip Rieff and Norman O. Brown, 

George Kennan and Henry A. Kissinger, Edmund Wilson and Fritz 

Stern, Paul Berman and Leon Wieseltier, Rudyard Kipling and 

William Styron, Geoffrey Wolff and John le Carré – philosophers, 

statesmen, novelists, and historians jostled one another for 

space on Holbrooke’s shelves, each volume well-thumbed and 

exhaustively employed. 

In college, Holbrooke fell under the spell of Edmund Wilson’s 

To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. 

It became an enduring leitmotif. He once wrote that “[Wilson’s] 

book excited me mostly because it described something unusual 

and extremely important: the relationship of philosophical ideas 

and practical events – the savage intersection where theories 

and personalities meet and sometimes end up changing the world, 

for better or for worse.” 

Holbrooke was passionate about the transformative power of 

ideas, and he put great stock in the erudition that comes from true 

scholarship. His idea of the Academy resembled Ortega y Gasset’s 

notion of the university: institutions whose moral duty it is to 

“intervene in current affairs, treating the great themes of the day 

from its own point of view: cultural, scientific, and professional.” 

In this special Holbrooke memorial issue, the myriad aspects 

of the man – diplomat, friend, Academy founder, provocateur, 

moralist, historian – are celebrated, by voices as varied as 

Holbrooke’s talents. Film director Volker Schlöndorff recalls 

shared jaunts through Berlin’s hidden locales; novelist Geoffrey 

Wolff describes Holbrooke’s love of laughter; Henry A. Kissinger, 

in a condolence letter to Kati Marton, recalls the lessons he and 

Holbrooke learned from history; and Secretary of State Hillary 

Rodham Clinton recounts Holbrooke’s relentless and revolutionary 

approach to diplomacy. Features in this issue by Academy fellows 

explore themes that drove Holbrooke’s own work: contested 

borders, erupting revolutions, and the personal price of trauma. 

Holbrooke’s interventions, some legendary, some untold, reflect 

a lifelong ambition to be transformative in the service of higher 

ends, and he drew on a freight of resources as variegated as the 

authors that lined the walls of that wonderful guest apartment 

those summers ago. Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Pursuit of the Ideal” 

articulates the deepest convictions of the irreplaceable “realistidealist” 

(as Roger Cohen referred to Holbrooke), someone as much 

a scholar of foreign policy as that rare person who understood how 

to turn a vision into a reality: “If we are to hope to understand 

the violent world in which we live (and unless we try to understand 

it, we cannot expect to be able to act rationally in it and on it), 

the goals and motives that guide human action must be looked at 

in the light of . . . every intellectual resource that we have.” 

– Gary Smith


© HORNischer


© Magnum Photos 

© Michel Clement/AFP/Getty Images 

NORMALIZATION talks at the VIETNAMESE EMBASSY, SAIGON, DECEMBER 19, 1977. PHAN HIEN (C, back), VIETNAMESE vice-MINISTER of FOREIGN 

AFFAIRS, facing RICHARD HOLBROOKE (R, front), US ASSISTANT SECRETARY of STATE for EAST ASIAN and PACIFIC AFFAIRS 

AMERICAN peace envoy, ASSISTANT SECRETARY of STATE for european and canadian affairs RICHARD HOLBROOKE, speaking to the press 

AT the offices of SERBIAN PRESIDENT SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC, ABBAS ERBIA, BELGRADE, AUGUST 1995

The Gift of Conviction 

A former US ambassador to Germany on the enormous achievements of his successor 


I 

have always thought 

one fact explained Richard 

Holbrooke’s success more 

than any other. People who only 

met or talked with him briefly, 

or, in many cases, never met 

him at all, feel that he touched 

their lives. The number of people 

who considered themselves 

to be his “good friends” runs 

into the thousands – more than 

he could have ever had a serious 

conversation with. Those who 

felt that he contributed to their 

well-being can be counted in 

the millions. 

All of these groups were 

somehow moved by his voracious 

desire to know who they 

were and what was important 

to them. This ability to create 

instant empathy gave him an 

unmatched talent to build 

bridges. Nations he had never 

visited were brought back from 

despair by his commitments 

to the fight against aids or his 

peace efforts in the Balkans. 

Others have made similar 

contributions, but they lacked 

the human impact of Richard 

Holbrooke. The reason? 

Richard cared so much about 

the world and its condition that 

he instinctively absorbed the 

personal messages from others 

and transformed them into 

mutual understanding. His 

prodigious intellectual and 

rhetorical skills did the rest. 

One could never forget a conversation 

with him or ignore a 

request for assistance. 

Exposure to this force of 

personality did not always win 

Richard friends and admirers. 

Those who felt bruised, 

unhappy, or just plain jealous 

of his talents were also numerous. 

But in almost every case, 

even those who were less than 

thrilled with his treatment 

could not deny the power of 

his ideas. 

Once, at a crucial meeting in 

Washington, Richard accused a 

very senior general of disloyalty 

for not following the president’s 

goals – goals which Richard 

had, of course, written. A year 

later, this general was one of 

Richard’s most loyal deputies. 

Most successful was Richard’s 

two-year massaging of Serbian 

dictator Slobodan Milosevic. 

Milosevic was a true sociopath. 

He cared little for the lives of 

others. His only goal was to 

amass as much power and control 

as possible. 

p 

Richard met Milosevic when 

the ugly Balkan war was in 

its fifth year. Several teams of 

negotiators had tried to stop the 

killing and had failed. Richard 

had decided that Milosevic and 

only Milosevic was the key to 

success. He hit him with every 

ounce of his matchless powers 

of analysis, persuasion, and 

coercion. Milosevic, being no 

slouch, gave much the same 

in return. It was a contest 

Milosevic could not win, and 

he probably knew it. Richard 

understood that he needed 

Milosevic to help implement 

the agreement. He made it 

possible for Milosevic to lose 

gracefully by ensuring that the 

interests of the Serbian people 

were also protected. By the 

time it was over, the Dayton 

Agreement had pieced back 

together a human and historic 

puzzle that had burdened 

Europe for decades. 

Richard’s other main advantage 

was his discipline. Much 

of his cajoling of Milosevic took 

place after a tragic accident on 

Mount Igman, on the road to 

Sarajevo. The American delegation 

was forced to take this 

treacherous mountain road 

because Milosevic personally 

had refused them safe passage 

through Serbian checkpoints. 

Richard said farewell to the 

three colleagues who died in 

the accident and returned to 

Belgrade within two weeks 

for the next round of debate. 

His first meeting was with 

Milosevic. 

The American Academy in 

Berlin is the most enduring 

result of Holbrooke’s “specialness.” 

It is a unique bi-national 

institution crafted from little 

more than a commitment to 

the singular relationship that 

grew between Berlin and the 

United States after 1945. But its 

foundations are more than idealistic. 

The underlying goal of 

the Academy was very practical 

in nature. It was to ensure that 

the United States and Germany 

never forget the need to build 

on the deep cooperation forged 

in divided Berlin. The seemingly 

random mixture of culture 

and politics, history and vision 

that the Academy projects has, 

for more than a decade, transmitted 

the special Holbrooke 

method to a new generation. 

Each views it in his or her own 

terms, and, in fact, the number 

of people who claim to understand 

exactly what Richard 

had in mind for the Academy 

rarely agree with one another, 

but they are still all right. The 

message is the method rather 

than the content. It is neither 

cultural, nor scientific, nor 

political – it is human. Living 

humanity is what Richard 

Holbrooke was all about. The 

American Academy is the living 

essence of his life’s work. 

By John C. Kornblum 

The Bridge Builder 

Lasting impressions from a German president 

Richard Holbrooke’s 

decisive impulse 

gave wing to the audacious 

project of the American 

Academy in Berlin. Thanks to 

the moving generosity of the 

founding family, this ambitious 

project took flight. 

He was an incomparably energetic 

friend, a bridgebuilder 

over the Atlantic to Europe, to 

the world. Make peace with 

all your might: he served this 

purpose with his temperament. 

He never lost hope for peace. He 

was restless but never spiritless. 

The suffering of innumerable 

people was eased by the new 

lives he made possible for them. 

He was a great diplomat 

and at the same time undiplomatic 

when he thought it was 

appropriate. “Speak slowly, 

think quickly, act decisively,” 

he would say. His contributions 

to our history are enormous 

and resounding. 

It is his character that founded 

our Academy. This is – and 

will remain – our guide. 

By Richard von Weizsäcker


Friendship Forged through Film 

A creative force in the company of artists 

A 

creative mind 

himself, vibrant in 

empathy and imagination, 

Richard Holbrooke always 

enjoyed the company of artists. 

Whether sports, theater, or 

cinema, he enjoyed the show, 

shared emotions, responded 

gleefully to the wit of a good 

line. The public figure had 

a private life, and he tried to 

unify them rather than practicing 

the strict separation of 

these spheres as most others 

do. He showed up backstage to 

meet the artists, often befriending 

them – John Guare, Susan 

Sarandon, Robert de Niro, 

Louis Malle, Wally Shawn, 

Mike Nichols – every one of 

them a dear friend, indeed. 

How did I, a moviemaker, 

end up on the American 

Academy’s board of trustees? 

Richard Holbrooke simply 

asked his New York friends, 

before leaving as ambassador 

for Bonn, whether they knew 

any fun people in Germany. 

Along with novelist Peter 

Schneider, I must have been on 

his list, for henceforth we were 

invited to numerous joyful dinners 

at the ambassador’s residence, 

one of them ending in a 

memorable “shouting contest” 

between Jack Valenti and me 

about the film industry, imperialism, 

and the Motion Pictures 

Association of America’s attitude 

toward subsidizing culture 

in Europe – which they felt was 

unfair to Hollywood. Rather 

than appeasing us, the ambassador 

pushed for escalation, 

albeit an intellectual one, to 

bring the conflict into the open. 

Late at night, the adversaries 

left as friends. 

He equally enjoyed taking 

me to the sidelines at the 

Olympic Stadium, where the 

Chicago Bears once played the 

Berlin Thunder, introducing 

me to the players, monuments 

RICHARD holbrooke and volker schlöNDORFF at the american academy, 2003 

of muscle and flesh, whom he 

knew personally, of course. In 

return he asked me to show 

him and Kati Marton “my 

Berlin”: the Turkish corners of 

Kreuzberg and the old harbor in 

Wedding, a location for “foggy 

London” and movie set for 

Edgar Wallace’s detective stories 

that Germans enjoyed so 

much in the 1960s. He checked 

the bullet holes and shrapnel 

scars left in the facades of so 

many buildings, not only in the 

East. He crawled through the 

labyrinth ruins of the Tacheles, 

enjoyed mezze at Oren’s, and, 

most of all, raved about the 

studios in Babelsberg, where 

Marlene Dietrich had once 

crossed her beautiful legs in 

front of Joseph von Sternberg’s 

camera. 

He was fascinated by the 

story or rather history of the 

ufa film company, created in 

1917 by the Kaiser’s General 

Ludendorff to influence the 

minds of the working class, 

prime clients of these new 

flicks, in order to win them over 

for traditional values. I’ve contemplated 

this strategy myself: 

isn’t that what we should be 

doing? How about telling How 

to End a War to a mass audience 

on television? 

Richard Holbrooke must 

have been one of the first 

clients of Netflix and the Red 

Envelope home distribution 

of dvds. During sleepless jetlegged 

nights or over his brief 

weekends, he undoubtedly 

watched hours and hours of 

films, for he knew every one of 

them. He cut through the bs, 

going straight to the “deeper 

meaning,” viewing the films’ 

content through the eyes of a 

Serbian as well as a Pakistani 

audience, ever aware of and 

eager to debate cross-cultural 

misunderstandings. 

Arts, politics, friendship, and 

history in the making were all 

one to him. No wonder his 

conversations with Arthur 

Miller (for once I had the privilege 

of introducing a luminary 

to him), with Susan Sontag, 

or with the politician in the 

then-opposition party, Angela 

Merkel, were not mere conversations 

but always had an aim, 

an urgency, such as when, one 

day before September 11, over 

lunch at my home, Richard 

insisted on the prime importance 

of Pakistan. The events of 

the next day proved him right, 

even though he had to wait the 

better part of a decade before 

he could tackle what he knew 

all along was the key to “ending 

a war,” never once considering 

the ending to his own life 

would be so poorly timed. 

By Volker Schlöndorff 

© Mike Minehan

A Historian at Heart 


A voracious reader, Holbrooke found inspiration for his public work between the pages of his favorite texts 

Richard Holbrooke 

will always be remembered 

as his generation’s 

premier diplomat and statesman 

– a doer. But he also was 

a person who had a keen sense 

of the past and the role memory 

plays in defining today’s world – 

he was a historian at heart. 

¿ 

Holbrooke loved history. He 

loved books and arguments, 

stories and sweeping narratives. 

In that sense he shared 

so much with the historiandiplomat 

he deeply admired, 

George Kennan. Holbrooke had 

little tolerance for the instant 

policy books that dominate 

Washington’s bookshelves (he 

described them as “glorified 

Foreign Affairs articles”) and 

always pushed people to write 

history; something, he would 

say, that would last. 

I learned this firsthand in 

the years I assisted him with his 

Bosnia memoir, as I watched 

him devour other great histories 

to help inspire his writing. 

In government, Holbrooke 

always infused his arguments 

with history (needless to say, 

Vietnam came up quite a bit 

in describing his most recent 

mission in Afghanistan and 

Pakistan), and he would circulate 

chapters from history books 

to his staff and colleagues. And 

history was at the core of his 

love for his wife, Kati, and 

her many books that explored 

the past in innovative and 

powerful ways. 

In my last conversation 

with him, shortly before he 

fell ill, he mentioned that he’d 

been re-reading Orwell’s 1946 

essay “Politics and the English 

Language” and intended to 

distribute copies to his team. 

“There’s so much bad writing 

in government,” he said. In 

recent months, we had started 

to talk about the next book he 

wanted to write, which I believe 

could have been the greatest 

diplomatic memoir since 

Kennan’s over forty years ago. 

I will miss so many things 

about Richard, and only with 

deep sadness can I accept 

that we will never get to read 

that book. 

By Derek Chollet 

This article first appeared in 

Foreign Policy online. 

AmercAcademie_185x124 22.03.2011 17:55 Uhr Seite 1 

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Extravagant Laughter 

A friendship nurtured by dinner-party chats, political spats, and hours of professional football 

Dick and I met in 

Washington – 1965 or 

1966 – at one of the 

many weeknight dinner parties 

for a dozen or twenty guests 

arranged by Polly Wisner, a 

legendary hostess. These occasions 

were insistently meritocratic 

and cosmopolitan. An 

Israeli defense minister might 

be at dinner, or Sir Isaiah 

Berlin visiting Washington 

from Oxford to lecture on 

Russian literature. The most 

striking feature of these occasions 

was the calculated mix of 

elders and kids, personages and 

apprentices. In my twenties, 

the hundred-dollar-per-week 

book critic of the Washington 

Post, I might be seated beside 

my boss, Katherine Graham, 

and at the same table with 

Charles Bohlen or Averell 

Harriman. Nobody at that table 

would inquire where I had 

attended boarding school or 

whether my people summered 

at Fishers Island. 

The ruling principle at these 

encounters was instructional, 

at its best educational. The 

young among us were expected 

to govern our conduct by common 

sense, but not by caution. 

Fine wines and spirits were 

served in abundance, and we 

were encouraged to enjoy them. 

The parties ended at eleven 

sharp. Sometimes grownup 

guests would be obliged to 

leave early, summoned to the 

White House or Pentagon or 

State Department, but it was 

assumed that everyone at the 

Wisners’ tables had nationally 

consequential work to do first 

thing in the morning. 

Were we expected to zip 

our lips while affairs of the 

day were debated by the best 

and brightest? There was an 

unspoken policy of speakwhen-spoken-to, 

but The Young 

(maybe one-third of the guests) 

were very frequently spoken to, 

our opinions solicited. And no 

one I met at Polly Wisner’s – or 

since 1966 anywhere else in 

the world – was more willing to 

share his opinions about anything 

at all than was my friend 

Dick Holbrooke. 

Those reading this who met 

Dick in his full flamboyant 

flower of intellect and will and 

self-certainty should know that 

he was no different when he 

was twenty-three. And because 

the subject effacing all others 

in the mid-to-late-1960s was 

of course Vietnam, and because 

Dick’s first job in the foreign 

service was in Vietnam, and 

because I first encountered 

him home from Saigon to 

report to his superiors (he did 

have notional superiors) I first 

experienced Dick’s style of 

Ciceronian discourse applied 

to his view of the proper course 

of United States policy in 

Southeast Asia. His view – relying 

on the study of captured 

enemy documents and his 

systematic study of Vietnamese 

history and culture as it had 

played out against the French 

in 1956 – called for ratcheting 

up US commitment. This was 

not my view, which was that 

Americans should come home 

and behave themselves, but 

confirming that a broken clock 

tells perfect time twice a day, I 

happened to be right. Thus 

my first exchange of opinions 

with the young diplomat: 

Me: “How can you be so sure ?” 

Dick: “Because I’m not a fool ?” 

Me: “And I am a fool.” 

Dick: “You be the judge. I’d 

call it case closed.” 

Me: “You’re a jackass.” 

We two prodigies met a few 

years later in Princeton, where 

we were living with our families 

in junior faculty housing. 

We became close: we both 

missed Washington, and our 

younger sons were born a day 

apart in Princeton Hospital. 

Dick and I watched pro football 

games on Sundays. I soon 

learned to expect that if I was 

watching an event with Dick 

something momentous was 

bound to happen. So it was that 

we were together witnessing 

the upstart Jets’ Broadway Joe 

Namath redeem his cocksure 

promise of victory over Johnny 

Unitas’s old-guard Colts in 

Super Bowl III. And we were 

watching TV together in 

Vermont on February 23, 1976 

when Franz Klammer threw 

himself down the Olympic 

downhill course at Innsbruck 

to win the Gold Medal in the 

most ferocious expression of 

reckless physical skill either of 

us had ever witnessed. 

It seemed that Dick’s passionate 

engagement with whatever 

was at hand forced a dramatic 

outcome. And his sense 

of the ridiculous – his instinct 

for the distinction between 

ambition and performance – 

was exquisitely refined. He was 

a fanatic fan – the redundancy 

is necessary – and the most 

extravagant laugher I’ve ever 

known. 

It’s losing the sound of that 

laughter that breaks my heart. 

I’ll close with a ski trip we 

two took to Sol y Nieve, in the 

mountains above Granada. 

Skiing was an important bond 

for us. I believe that it amused 

Dick that some processes and 

phenomena – gravity, say, and 

iced pistes – were resistant to 

his charms and only grudgingly 

submissive to his will. 

This spring day of 1972 the 

sun was behind clouds and 

the wind blew snow off the ice 

upon which Francisco Franco’s 

army conscripts were being 

obliged to learn the science 

and art of skiing. They were 

beginners, of course, and their 

equipment primitive. They 

stumbled and got snow down 

the necks of wool uniforms so 

manifestly uncomfortable that 

they made me itch just looking 

at them. That day we watched 

grown men cry, and Dick at 

dinner couldn’t shut up about 

the karma of it – here was the 

undisguised face of dictatorship, 

inflicting arbitrary misery, 

unable to stand on its feet, let 

alone execute a parallel turn. 

We were sharing a room at 

a parador on the mountain, and 

immediately after dinner Dick 

went to bed, determined to be 

up and at ’em at first light. I did 

not go early to bed. I went to 

the bar and drank much more 

Fundador (por favor) than I 

needed. I met some Aussies at 

the bar, two young women, and 

a sullen young man. I decided 

that I was charming, and as 

long as I paid for the brandy – 

mine and the two young 

women’s – they agreed that I 

was charming. Even hilarious. 

I told of the alpine legionnaires 

under the command of el generalissimo, 

Caudillo de España, 

por la gracia de Dios. We sang 

songs. We drank more brandy. 

And then I heard from across 

the lobby a thunderous voice: 

“Wolff! Geoffrey Wolff! You 

come to bed right this minute!” 

Our diplomat was approaching 

fast to take me by the ear. 

He was wearing pajamas. These 

were cotton flannel pajamas, 

their dominant color mustard, 

or maybe it was honey. Memory 

assures me that printed on 

those pajamas were teddy bears. 

I must misremember that 

detail, don’t you think? I do not 

misremember that Ambassador 

Holbrooke was in dictator mode, 

and that his every wish was my 

command, and that I wouldn’t 

have had it any other way. 

By Geoffrey Wolff


© nora feller/Getty Images 

ASSISTANT SECRETARY of STATE RICHARD HOLBROOKE sharing a laugh with HIS wife KATI MARTON and his sons DAVID (L) and Anthony 

AT their wedding on MAY 1, 1995 

Among those whom I like or admire, 

I can find no common denominator, 

but among those whom I love, I can: 

all of them make me laugh. 

w. h. auden


Beneath the Bluster 

Holbrooke’s aggressive demeanor belied a deep compassion for humanity 

© Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis 

at the office, NEW YORK CITY, 2009 

I 

worked for Henry 

Kissinger at the State 

Department from 1973– 

1977 and met Richard in 1977 

when he came in to serve in 

the Carter administration. We 

were just acquaintances then, 

but I got to know him better 

in Berlin, where my husband 

was the US ambassador from 

1985–1987 and where we maintain 

close ties. 

Richard became the ambassador 

in 1993, not long after 

the fall of the Berlin Wall and 

reunification. He was not considered 

a German scholar or 

even a European expert, but the 

fact that he became a very successful 

ambassador to Germany 

and then assistant secretary 

for European affairs did not 

surprise me at all. Richard 

always had a knack of knowing 

what he did not know and either 

staying away from it (i.e., the 

Middle East) or learning what 

he needed to know. So, you can 

imagine my shock, some years 

later, when he proposed the 

idea of the American Academy 

in Berlin. 

It was a very Holbrooke idea, 

replacing a military institution 

with an institute of culture, 

and it wasn’t easy to raise the 

money for yet another German/ 

American institution. But he 

We stand face-to-face 

with the terrible question 

of evil and do not even 

know what is before us, 

let alone what to pit 

against it. 

carl jung


was never one to be deterred, 

and we did it by brute force. 

Henry Kissinger liked to say 

about him, “If Richard calls you 

and asks you for something, 

just say yes. If you say no, you 

will eventually get to yes, but 

the journey will be very painful.” 

Richard was exceptionally 

bright and strategic. He 

would always place himself 

in the right place at the right 

time. You couldn’t be in his 

presence without marveling 

at how he could think outside 

the box. Shortly after he was 

named the special representative 

for AfPak, he insisted that 

both leaders, Hamid Karzai 

and Asif Ali Zardari, come to 

Washington together. He would 

not let them come separately. 

And he insisted that all of the 

cabinet-level meetings take 

place together as well. He was 

a big believer in civil society 

and institutions that could help 

these countries get on their 

feet, but he told me many times 

this was the toughest job he’d 

ever had. I sensed this summer 

that he was down, but Richard 

was not one to stay down, and 

he was never one to give up. 

Ç 

He could be very tough, it’s 

true. But once you came to 

know Richard, you realized 

that there was a big heart 

underneath the bluster. His 

impatience and insensitivity 

were often cited, but he actually 

cared more deeply about the 

human condition than almost 

anyone I know. Just ask people 

at the Asia Society or Refugees 

International, to name a few 

of the ngos that he helped 

establish or lent his considerable 

skill to. 

I don’t know of anyone else 

who could traverse so many different 

strata of people. When 

he went into the hospital, the 

calls were coming in from 

President Bill Clinton, Mick 

Jagger, and President Obama, 

and Hillary Clinton was there 

at his bedside. He could have 

friendships with all of these 

very different people and yet 

love them all and appreciate 

them all in their own way. And 

therefore his network became 

probably the most remarkable 

of anyone I have ever known. 

He loved knitting this whole 

patchwork together, and he did 

it expertly. 

On the night of December 13, 

while I was at the hospital, I 

looked around at his very 

youthful staff, and they were 

devastated, to the person. He 

had assembled the best and the 

brightest; these are kids in their 

20s and 30s. He was a wonderful 

mentor and relished the role. 

I was struck watching him 

on television one morning 

when he referenced Mika 

Brzezinski’s dad, Willie Geist’s 

dad, and Mark Halperin’s 

father. He knew the fathers, 

and now he knew the sons and 

daughters. Richard died before 

his time, but the mark he left 

on many, many institutions 

will be felt for years and decades 

to come. He will be sorely 

missed and never replaced in 

our hearts. 

By Gahl Hodges Burt 


Foreign Policy online. 

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Like a Western 

People like him just aren’t made any more 

Goodbye drinks in 

the Residence: after 

a mere nine months 

as ambassador to Germany, 

Richard Holbrooke was leaving 

in 1994 to head the European 

desk at the State Department. 

Dick took a small wooden figure 

with a bent head and bound 

hands from a glass case. It had 

been carved in a concentration 

camp by a Bosniac with a 

piece of glass and thrust into 

Holbrooke’s hands: “Please take 

this home. Tell America what is 

happening to us here.” 

This figure was a legacy. The 

European desk became the 

command post of Balkan policy, 

and Holbrooke, the “bulldozer,” 

became the conqueror of 

Slobodan Milosevic. This was 

not an exchange of diplomatic 

niceties; it was a showdown, 

something out of a Western. 

As Holbrooke wrote in his 

memoir of the Bosnian conflict, 

To End a War: “The Serbs talk 

big, but if you aim a pistol at 

them, they’re nothing but little 

troublemakers.” 

In one of the endless talks 

with Milosevic, Holbrooke 

set up a field telephone that 

connected him with the 

commander of un troops in 

Sarajevo. In another duel, the 

weapon of choice was alcohol. 

The Serb leader wanted to disable 

Holbrooke by making him 

drunk. “Therefore, we decided 

we would refuse drinks until 

we had reached a partial solution.” 

At the Dayton Air Force 

base, where, in 1995 the war 

was halted, Holbrooke placed 

the Serb delegation next to a 

cruise missile, the most potent 

symbol of American military 

might. 

L 

It was in Dayton that 

Holbrooke carved out a place 

for himself in the history 

books, even though in 1999 

cruise missiles were ultimately 

deployed during the war in 

Kosovo – for 78 days. The 

Balkans, synonymous with 

war until the last year of the 

twentieth century, had finally 

achieved peace. Yet a second 

triumph, as Obama’s man for 

Afghanistan and Pakistan, was 

not granted to Holbrooke. On 

December 14, 2010 he died, 

69 years old, in Washington, 

after a twenty-hour emergency 

operation on a torn aorta. 

They don’t make people 

like Holbrooke any more, even 

less so in Germany, where a 

civil servant remains a civil 

servant until they turn 65. It is 

almost impossible to list all of 

Holbrooke’s jobs: junior diplomat 

(at 21) in Vietnam, Peace 

Corps director in Morocco, 

editor of Foreign Policy, head of 

the East Asia desk at the State 

Department, ambassador to 

Germany, Balkan negotiator, 

author, banker, ambassador 

to the United Nations. When 

Obama named Holbrooke as 

special representative to AfPak, 

Holbrooke was working on 

Wall Street. He served four US 

presidents: Johnson, Carter, 

Clinton, and Obama. 

© Amaerican Academy Archive photograph 

richard holbrooke AdDRESSES an audience in MUNICH, 2007

VAT_39L_300_Energiemix_210x135 1 23.03.11 15:43 


He would have preferred to 

become a journalist. One of 

our colleagues called him a 

“frustrated foreign correspondent”; 

“he thinks like a journalist, 

he’s as stubborn as a journalist.” 

A friend, Frank Wisner, 

said: “He knew instinctively 

how to feed a reporter, he knew 

how to engage the press in 

order to get his agenda passed.” 

Talking with this wannabe 

journalist was not easy. 

Sometimes he gave a commentary 

on a football match on 

TV until the journalist, clearly 

unnerved, shut down his laptop. 

Our last talk, last year, took 

place in the kitchen of his New 

York apartment. Half of the talk 

was about Afghanistan, the 

other half about a giant panettone, 

a Christmas present to 

his wife, Kati Marton. The 

problem was: how to cover up 

the traces of nibbling on the 

panettone, since his wife had 

put him on a strict diet? While 

we didn’t solve the strategic 

problem of Afghanistan, we did 

achieve a tactical victory with 

the cake: we simply made it 

disappear. 

Holbrooke was larger than 

life – physically as well as 

intellectually. This bulldozer 

was driven, on the one hand, 

by unlimited ambition and 

energy and, on the other hand, 

braked by a sensitivity when he 

realized that he had gone too 

far. He then overwhelmed his 

friends and enemies with just 

as much charm and humor. For 

that reason, his friends loved 

him and his enemies forgave 

him; for that reason, the White 

House always called on him. 

Puffed-up sail, immense ego. 

It was just these undiplomatic 

qualities that gave him an inexhaustible 

stubbornness, which 

made him one of the most brilliant 

practioners of foreign policy 

in American history. Nobody 

expressed it as well as Henry 

Kissinger: “If Richard asks you 

something, just say yes. If you 

say no, you’ll eventually get 

to yes, but the journey will be 

very painful.” With Milosevic, 

Holbrooke just sat put: seven 

hours, twelve hours, in the end, 

fifty hours, until he had driven 

him mad. 

Holbrooke worked with 

Kissinger to deliver a unique 

success story, one that belongs 

to “cultural diplomacy.” Shortly 

before Holbrooke left Bonn, 

in 1994, he gathered his own 

“Henry,” former German president 

Weizsäcker, and a small 

group of committed friends 

to whom German-American 

relations were dear at Berlin’s 

Hotel Kempinski. These were 

the founding members of the 

American Academy, without 

which Berlin’s cultural fabric 

cannot be imagined. He also 

brought in the first six million 

dollars, donated by the family 

of New York German-Jewish 

banker Hans Arnhold. Without 

Holbrooke this intellectual 

lighthouse would never have 

been born. 

Let us quote, in closing, 

Hillary Clinton: “Richard 

helped shape our history, 

manage our perilous present, 

and secure our future.” 

The Washington Post called 

Holbrooke a “literary figure.” 

Just before he was anesthetized 

at George Washington 

University Hospital, he is 

supposed to have whispered 

to his Pakistani surgeon: 

“You must stop this war in 

Afghanistan.” 

By Josef Joffe 

This obituary was originally 

published in Die Zeit on 

December 15, 2010. 

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A Man and His Métier 

Investment banking was not his first love, nor his second, third, or fourth 

The date was Friday, 

September 9, 1993. The 

Berlin Brigade of the 

US Army had left Berlin for 

the last time the day before 

with a Grosser Zapfenstreich 

ceremony at the Brandenburg 

Gate. A New Traditions 

Conference was being held at 

the Kronprinzenpalais, followed 

by a gala dinner sponsored 

by Deutsche Bank. The 

name of the US ambassador 

to Germany was Richard 

Holbrooke. 

I had known Richard for several 

years, not in his capacity as 

a diplomat but in that of a businessman; 

he was a businessman 

whenever the Democrats 

were out of power. During 

the Reagan administration he 

worked for Lehman Brothers. 

Investment banking was clearly 

not his first love, and probably 

not his second, third, or fourth 

love either, but he graciously 

entertained clients such as 

me at expensive New York 

restaurants. 

But now, with Bill Clinton 

as president, he was back in 

his métier. He was considered 

an Asia expert and reportedly 

wanted to be named ambassador 

to Japan. But President 

Clinton appointed him to Bonn 

instead. If Richard was disappointed, 

he didn’t show it but 

instead threw himself into this 

unfamiliar assignment with 

typical Holbrooke abandon. 

His parents had left Hamburg 

because of the Nazis, and his 

mother had not set foot on 

German soil since. When she 

heard about Richard’s new 

job, she threw up her arms in 

disgust and exclaimed: “Auch 

das noch!” 

Getting back to the dinner 

on September 9, 1993. During 

dessert Richard went around 

the room and asked several 

of us to go to the next room, 

which served as a messy staging 

area for the dinner. He 

spoke with great passion about 

the close links between the 

US and West Berlin since the 

end of World War II. America 

had saved West Berlin repeatedly 

from falling into Russian 

hands, and Berliners knew this. 

They loved America and what 

it stood for. He told us that this 

connection shouldn’t just suddenly 

end, and that we should 

form an institution in Berlin for 

German and American intellectuals 

and leading citizens 

to meet and continue their 

special relationship. He called 

it “The American Academy in 

Berlin.” All of us mumbled our 

agreement to join the board, or 

at least we didn’t say no. The 

whole thing lasted about ten 

minutes. 

The next day, a Saturday, 

at 11 am, those of us still in 

Berlin held a constituting board 

meeting, and the American 

Academy in Berlin was officially 

born. We then dispersed in all 

directions. 

ã 

Richard didn’t stay long as 

ambassador to Germany. The 

Balkans beckoned, and his 

greatest accomplishment came 

later with the successful conclusion 

of the Dayton Peace talks. 

Making the American Academy 

in Berlin a reality had to wait. 

When the Republicans were 

back in power, Richard now had 

several new activities besides 

investment banking. Perhaps 

the one he enjoyed the most 

was chairing the American 

Academy in Berlin. A villa 

was obtained from the city of 

Berlin, and it soon had a new 

name: Hans Arnhold Center, 

thanks to a generous initial gift 

by Stephen and Anne-Maria 

Kellen, which restored the 

villa for its intended use. As 

for Richard’s mother, she was 

finally persuaded to come for 

a return visit to Germany. I 

remember her sitting graciously 

at a dinner in Berlin, looking 

happy and engaged and having 

found some peace in encountering 

the new Germany. She 

struck me as a symbol of the 

closing of the tortured twentieth 

century. 

I saw Richard for the last 

time on November 8 of last year, 

at our board dinner, hosted 

by Norman Pearlstine at the 

Beacon Restaurant in New York. 

He overheard a conversation I 

had with Jim Wolfensohn about 

Carnegie Hall. Wolfensohn 

told me that his proudest 

accomplishment and legacy 

was not the work he had done 

leading the World Bank but the 

significant role he had played in 

saving Carnegie Hall from the 

wrecking ball. Richard took me 

aside and said: “The way Jim 

feels about Carnegie Hall is the 

way I feel about the American 

Academy.” Those were the last 

words he spoke to me. 

By Karl M. von der Heyden 

If Only Holbrooke Had Been in the Balkans in 1914 

From the very beginning 

I was impressed 

by Richard’s fierce intelligence 

and burning ambition 

to understand and, if possible, 

change the world. We first met 

in 1969 in Princeton: both of us 

were opposed to the Vietnam 

War, which we thought was 

injurious to our national interests. 

He was 29 at the time 

(I was somewhat older), but 

I don’t think the gap in our 

ages ever made any difference. 

We thought of each other as 

contemporaries. 

The following year, for a 

variety of personal reasons, he 

invited me and my family to 

visit him in Morocco, where 

he had been made head of the 

Peace Corps. I came to admire 

more deeply his personality, 

the rapidity of his learning, his 

highly nuanced Francophilia 

(he was fluent in the language), 

and the way he got on with 

Peace Corps volunteers and 

with the Moroccan political 

leadership. I thought of him 

as an ideal American proconsul. 

The combination of his 

profound knowledge and his 

extraordinary analytical skill 

was accompanied by a tactical 

energy and an ability to see not 

only all aspects of a given situation, 

but all of its ramifications 

as well: a man of that talent 

and ambition doesn’t remain 

director of the Peace Corps in 

Morocco for very long. 

He was wonderfully open and at 

peace in Morocco, though. We 

spent our days talking about 

writing, which was a passion of 

his – though it was never more 

important for him than action. 

He understood, already in 1970, 

that the success of our foreign 

policy depended on building 

relationships – not just between 

countries, but between people. 

He was capable of admiration 

of other people, and he was a 

quick judge of human beings.


© Orjan F. EllingvAG/Corbis 

FORMER PRESIDENTS GEORGE H. W. BUSH and BILL CLINTON at the PRIVATE SECTOR SUMMIT for POST-TSUNAMI RECONSTRUCTION and 

REHABILITATION in may 2005. RICHARD HOLBROOKE, chairman of the ASIA SOCIETY, was moderator 

He had a particularly intuitive 

grasp of the distinction 

between capable and less capable 

colleagues and didn’t always 

disguise his views. 

ï 

Almost immediately upon his 

nomination as ambassador 

to Germany in 1993 he got in 

touch with me and asked me 

to become his senior advisor 

in Bonn. We arrived there 

at the same time in October 

1993. He quickly came to be 

perceived as quintessentially 

American in his openness, his 

energy, and his controlled candor. 

Europeans immediately 

understood him to be one of the 

most appealing, constructive 

American diplomats. I doubt 

that nato’s expansion would 

have happened had he not 

seized the initiative in those 

years. Later, of course, he went 

to the Balkans to devote his considerable 

energies to stopping 

a war. 

Once, at a celebratory occasion 

in Richard’s honor, on 

November 11, 2004, by chance 

an anniversary of the Great 

War’s Armistice Day, I speculated 

about what might have 

happened if Holbrooke as a 

young statesman might have 

been in Europe in the summer 

of 1914: 

He would have gone on alert as 

soon as the Austrian archduke 

was assassinated in Sarajevo 

on June 28, 1914. When he 

first heard rumors of the 

Austrian ultimatum on Serbia, 

he would have jumped on the 

Orient Express and gone to 

Belgrade. There he would have 

told the Serbs: “For God’s sake, 

accept the ultimatum. Cheat 

later.” Before adding sotto voce, 

“I have in my pocket evidence 

of your complicity in the crime 

at Sarajevo.” 

He then would have been on 

his way to Vienna: “You’ll 

destroy your multi-national 

empire, already attainted, if 

you allow the Germans to push 

you into war. Don’t do it.” On 

to Berlin: “You’re going to risk 

your growing strength, your 

clear ascendancy, by linking 

yourself to a living corpse, 

the Austrian Empire? For 

a Habsburg – your ancient 

enemy?” On to St. Petersburg: 

“Have you learned nothing from 

1905? Another war, another 

revolution?” He then would 

have come to London, threw 

his arms around David Lloyd 

George and said, “David, you 

mustn’t go to war. All your 

social reforms will perish and 

some future historian will write 

a book about The Strange 

Death of Liberal England.” 

Yes, the Great War could have 

been averted if only Richard 

Holbrooke had been around. 

Stretching back to those days 

in Morocco, to the last time 

I saw him, at a recent meeting 

at a dinner for the American 

Academy in Berlin (which 

he founded and which we may 

regard as his greatest lasting 

legacy: symbol and reality of 

the civilian-cultural outreach of 

the United States), he remained 

a genuine, quiet, deep-down 

patriot, ever concerned with the 

fate of the United States. His 

death is a horror and a loss 

to me of a friend, and of a much, 

much admired contemporary. 

It is a loss to the nation of a 

talent that had earned worldwide 

recognition, a talent 

that could have still done so 

much for us. 

By Fritz Stern 


Foreign Policy online.


The House That Holbrooke Built 

Divining Berlin as a future capital of culture and influence 

I 

think I was the first 

to have the Holbrooke 

Distinguished Visitorship 

at the American Academy in 

Berlin. It was a great honor, and 

it gave me enormous pleasure 

because Richard was a very 

old friend. 

We met in Saigon in early 

1966, when Richard was 

working as an assistant to 

Ambassador Cabot Lodge, and I 

was a fledging journalist. I will 

never forget the bicycle trip we 

took around the city one Sunday, 

Richard analyzing local politics 

as we made our way through 

the dense traffic of cyclo-pousses, 

motor scooters, ancient Frenchmade 

taxis, motorcycles, and 

heavy trucks. I was terrified. 

There were no stoplights 

and apparently no way to tell 

which side had the right of way 

at intersections. But Richard 

had figured out that Saigon 

drivers had a common understanding, 

and that there was an 

underlying order to the traffic. 

So we cycled on unharmed, 

he hardly drawing a breath in 

his disquisition. 

K 

I mention this because Richard, 

while always working the interests 

of his country, had fine 

antennae for the cultural patterns 

of the countries in which 

he served. 

When the American forces 

left Berlin, Richard felt they 

shouldn’t leave an absence – 

that the city should have some 

token of the continuing importance 

of US-German relations. 

While some might have chosen 

a monument, he, divining that 

Berlin would become one of 

the great cultural centers in 

Germany, thought to create the 

American Academy in Berlin. 

And Richard didn’t just have the 

idea. With all his other responsibilities, 

he worked very hard 

to make it a reality. When I had 

the privilege of a two-week stay 

at the Academy in 2006, I was 

thrilled to see that the Academy 

was all that he had envisioned: 

a major center for intellectual 

and artistic exchange – and one 

with wonderful food. 

If I had any say in it, I would 

rename the institution in his 

honor. Were he still with us, I 

would have many facetious suggestions, 

such as the Holbrooke 

Home for Wayward Americans, 

but, unbelievably, he is not. 

By Frances Fitzgerald 

© Hornischer 

THe AMERICAN academy in berlin board of trustees and spring 2007 fellows


A Last Breakfast 

The Academy’s president and CEO recalls his final meeting with the Academy’s founder 


was a founder of the 

American Academy in 

Berlin and, until his death in 

December, one of its proudest 

patrons. 

Together with Henry 

Kissinger and former German 

President Richard von 

Weizsäcker, Richard announced 

the creation of the Academy 

on September 9, 1994, one day 

after the US military withdrew 

its troops from Germany’s 

capital. He was then serving 

as America’s ambassador to 

Germany, having supervised 

the embassy’s recent move from 

Bonn to Berlin. 

Our mission statement 

embodies Richard’s belief that a 

cultural institution committed 

to scholarship and public policy 

could “foster greater understanding 

and dialogue between 

the people of the United States 

and the people of Germany 

through its presence in Berlin, 

a city with which the United 

States should maintain its 

unique cultural, social, political, 

and historical links.” 

â 

© 2003 Mike Minehan 

In the years following the 

Academy’s creation, Richard 

served as our chairman when 

he wasn’t in government – as 

an assistant secretary of state, 

as US ambassador to the United 

Nations, and, most recently, 

as President Obama’s special 

representative for Afghanistan 

and Pakistan. 

I last saw Richard in 

November 2010. Over breakfast 

at Washington’s Four Seasons 

hotel we spoke somberly 

about America’s challenges in 

Pakistan and Afghanistan. He 

told me despite the difficulty 

of his assignment and the wearying 

schedule that came with 

the job, he would stay in government 

so long as President 

AMERICAN ACADEMY in BERLIN BOARD MEETING luncheon, MAY 5, 2003 

Obama and Secretary of State 

Hillary Rodham Clinton 

required his services. 

It was only when our conversation 

shifted to the Academy 

that his spirits brightened. 

He told me of his pride in the 

Academy, saying that his expectations 

had been high and that 

the Academy had exceeded all 

of them. He also revealed his 

desire to return to the Academy 

when his latest stint in government 

ended. 

While Richard’s death has 

deprived of us his leadership, 

the Academy remains the beneficiary 

of his vision, committed 

to building on that vision in 

the years to come. 

By Norman Pearlstine


To Move the World 

In this condolence letter, provided by Kati Marton, Henry A. Kissinger reflects on Holbrooke’s life and legacy 

Dear Kati – 

I read somewhere that 

getting old means 

becoming increasingly a foreigner 

in one’s own country. 

The companions of one’s youth 

disappear one by one and those 

that remain are the product of 

different impulses. 

Richard and I took our 

impetus from the early Sixties 

when for a moment hope and 

possibility seemed conjoined 

for America. We met in that 

distillation of disillusionment 

which was the Vietnam conflict. 

Richard had gone there as a foreign 

service officer, a so-called 

provincial reporter, I as consultant 

to Ambassador Lodge. 

We both found that our goals 

were not fulfillable but also 

that the values that brought us 

to Indochina remained valid. I 

watched a Republic Day parade 

from the balcony in Richard’s 

apartment together with him – 

both saddened by the probable 

futility of what we were watching 

but committed to draw the 

lessons which would prevent 

comparable tragedies. 

Richard’s life was a testimony 

to that quest. Though 

we acted on opposite sides of 

our political contests I always 

considered Richard the most 

talented and the most relevant 

thinker on his side of the political 

dividing lines. On all the big 

issues of the day Richard saw a 

challenge not an obstacle. He 

did me the honor in September 

to invite me to meet with his 

staff. Those dedicated men 

and women elevated a forlorn 

problem into a moral adventure. 

That they did it – physically in 

the very fringes of the State 

Department – at a moment 

that required rededication is 

a tribute to Richard’s leadership. 

Tales are told about his 

ambitiousness – many of them 

true. But he was above all ambitious 

to do, not to be. So at a 

moment when America was at 

a loss about its strategy Richard 

and his team were elaborating 

a direction that has a chance of 

surviving the military phase. 

Of course the American 

Academy in Berlin will stand 

as a lasting tribute to Richard’s 

vision and consistent application. 

I contributed my name, 

Richard the dedication and 

imagination that turned the 

Academy into a permanent 

fixture of transatlantic relations, 

fulfilling the vision of an 

American presence in Berlin 

long after the American troops 

had left. 

Richard and I in those long 

ago days on Martha’s Vineyard 

would reflect how the world 

would evolve. We stayed in 

touch in the decades since 

and he leaves a big hole in our 

nation’s life. 

You of course were a principal 

enabler; you gave him the 

emotional security and the 

Archimedean point from which 

he could try to move the world. 

And in a way he achieved his 

ultimate goal: in his death he 

became a unifier who brought 

together all factions in the 

appreciation of a dedicated life. 

Warm regards, 

Henry


DOD photo by US Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley 

NAVY ADMIRAL MIKE MULLEN, chairman of the JOINT CHIEFS of STAFF, delivers the eulogy at the memorial service for AMBASSADOR 

RICHARD HOLBROOKE at the JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER for PERFORMING ARTS in WASHINGTON, DC, January 14, 2011 

Not a Quiet American 

Richard Holbrooke’s 

legacy goes well 

beyond the critical 

role he played in bringing a 

decade of fragile peace in the 

Balkans, welcoming a reunified 

Germany in an expanding 

nato, and normalizing relations 

with China. He also leaves 

a vast, multigenerational, intercontinental 

network of friends. 

Secretary of State Hillary 

Rodham Clinton spoke for many 

when she said . . . that she had 

never so admired, so depended 

on, and so cared for someone 

who drove her so crazy so often. 

Richard, like each of us, was 

a package of complicated, not 

always harmonious, qualities. 

But in his case, the combination 

allowed him to epitomize 

the very best of what a single 

American can do to improve a 

dangerous world. 

The obituaries are filled with 

words not always associated 

with eulogies: brash, aggressive, 

unyielding, exhausting. But 

put those together with effective, 

pragmatic, purpose-driven, 

indefatigable, and idealistic, 

and they’re redolent of our 

national character. Not the Ugly 

American, and certainly not the 

Quiet American, but the Can- 

Do, Must-Do, Get-the-Hell-Outof-My-Way 

American. Larry 

Summers, who knew Richard 

well, captured the sum of his 

parts in a single phrase: “the 

audacity of determination.” . . . 

Sometimes his style aroused 

resistance and resentment. But 

often, he was so solidly grounded 

in his command of the facts, 

so rigorous in his logic, and so 

compelling in the essence of 

his position that any sensible 

target of his browbeating would 

have the good sense to discount 

the hyperbole and accept the 

force of his argument. And if 

the ensuing debate exposed 

a weakness in that argument, 

he’d listen, adjust, and press 

ahead for a solution to the problem 

at hand. 

A voracious reader (and writer), 

Richard was never bashful 

about enlisting history on his 

side – or, for that matter, anticipating 

what future historians 

would say. In the 1990s, during 

high-stress moments in the 

Situation Room, the Cabinet 

room, or the Oval Office, 

Richard would lecture those 

present on how future generations 

would not forgive us if we 

didn’t take decisive action to 

stop the latest outrage in the 

former Yugoslavia, in Africa, or 

in Southeast Asia. Eyes might 

roll, but the net effect was often 

agreement around the table, led 

by President Bill Clinton. As a 

result, talk would turn to action 

– an alchemy of which Richard 

was a master. 

Nothing pleased him more 

than engaging the next generation. 

As special representative 

for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 

he recruited up-and-coming 

diplomats, policymakers, aid 

specialists, intelligence analysts, 

and military officers 

to form a team of non-rivals 

unparalleled in the quality 

and diversity of its expertise 

and skill. We must hope that 

President Obama and Secretary 

Clinton find a way to maintain 

this sterling example of how 

government ought to work 

despite the loss of its captain. 

On a busy day some months 

ago, he was introduced to a 

14-year-old girl who mentioned 

that she had some sense of what 

he was doing because she had 

read The Kite Runner, a novel 

set in Kabul. Richard fixed his 

eyes on her and conducted a 

lively conversation with her for 

20 minutes. Never mind if he 

was late to his next meeting. 

He had found someone who 

understood what was at stake in 

his last mission – and someone 

whose world is the better for all 

he accomplished. 

By Strobe Talbott 

This article is excerpted 

from the Washington 

Post, where it appeared on 

December 15, 2010.

20 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty | Spring 2011 

© Bettman/Corbis 

RICHARD HOLBROOKE outside the VIETNAMESE EMBASSY in PARIS for the second round of the US-VIETNAM talks aimed at 

NORMALIZING relations between the two countries. HOLBROOKE headed the AMERICAN delegation, MAY 4, 1977

Theory Versus Fact 

Scenes from a diplomatic career 


Iconducted an oncamera 

interview with 

Richard Holbrooke at Brown 

University, my home institution 

and his alma mater (’62). At 

the time a “professor-at-large” 

at Brown, Holbrooke was a 

natural choice for our documentary 

film, Human Terrain. 

“Winning hearts and minds” 

was Holbrooke’s first mission 

when he went to Vietnam as a 

member of the Foreign Service 

in 1963; now it was part of a 

controversial program in Iraq 

and Afghanistan we were 

investigating. 

Other discomforting parallels 

emerged in the course of 

the interview. Holbrooke had 

lost three close colleagues 

when, en route to negotiations 

in Sarajevo, their armored 

personnel carrier plunged off 

the side of a mountain. We 

were struggling with the loss 

of a colleague and collaborator, 

Michael Bhatia (Brown, ’99), 

after his Humvee hit an ied on 

the way to an inter-tribal negotiation 

in Afghanistan. 

Holbrooke apologized for 

having to leave his mobile 

phone on during our interview: 

he was waiting for “a very 

important call.” He took three 

calls; judging by his mood and 

the candor of his remarks, I’d 

say he didn’t get the one he had 

hoped for. 

The interview lasted well 

over an hour, though it was 

scheduled for just fifteen minutes. 

Holbrooke spoke reflectively 

and eloquently on the use 

and abuse of historical analogies, 

the role of academics in 

foreign policy, and the continuing 

importance of public service. 

Below are some excerpts 

from the uncut interview. 

On Holbrooke’s early 

days as foreign service 

officer in Vietnam: 

I graduated from Brown in 

1962 and entered the foreign 

service, and they decided what 

they were going to do with me. 

. . . Because I was a bachelor, 

and very young . . . they decided 

to teach me Vietnamese and 

send me to Vietnam, and then 

from Vietnam I was sent to the 

Lower Mekong Delta as a civilian 

in the pacification program. 

People today would probably 

call it “nation building,” a very 

misleading phrase. It all happened 

kind of serendipitously. 

ó 

On theory versus 

practice in Vietnam and 

Afghanistan: 

The Michigan State University 

teams hired by the US government 

went into Vietnam, studied 

it carefully, and decided that 

it was a village-based society 

and the best way to deal with 

it was to strengthen villages. 

Some people wanted to defend 

each village with barbed wires 

and bamboo spikes . . . . But 

all of this depended not on the 

physical idea of defending a 

hamlet (they were called strategic 

hamlets in those days) [but 

rather on] a government that 

could provide services, security, 

and an ideology worth living for 

and risking your life for. And 

that all failed, not because the 

United States was wrong, but 

because the central government 

in Vietnam, in Saigon, 

was not up to the task. If this 

sounds familiar to people, it 

echoes exactly what’s happening 

in Afghanistan. Nobody 

wants the Taliban back – not 

nobody, but very few people. 

[Most Afghanis] remember the 

black years, the brutality, the 

abuse of women – I don’t mean 

normal abuse, which is bad 

enough, I’m talking about killing 

women who dared to get an 

education, and beating people 

who danced, and things like 

that – and yet in Afghanistan 

today, notwithstanding the 

hatred of the Taliban, you have 

a very major issue: . . . the government 

is not providing any of 

the services. 

Jerry Hickey . . . wrote a 

book called Village in Vietnam, 

which was one of the early 

books I studied, and . . . Sam 

Popkin wrote a book called 

The Rational Peasant – these 

were terrific books but they 

didn’t change the basic fact, 

which was that no matter 

how conceptually sound your 

theory was, it would rise or fall 

on the strength of the central 

government in Saigon. It’s the 

government’s ability to protect 

the people, deliver services, 

and not be corrupt, and on that 

score the government of Ngo 

Dinh Diem failed, and then the 

successor governments, the 

military governments, more or 

less failed. And meanwhile the 

Viet Cong, although they were 

brutal, had a clear ideology, and 

that ideology was based on their 

co-opting the idea of nationalism. 

Even though they were 

communists from the North, 

directed from the North, they 

presented themselves as indigenous, 

nationalist patriots, to 

drive the Americans out. 

Again, this sounds familiar 

to anyone who’s watching 

Afghanistan today. Although 

the terrain is completely different, 

the culture is completely 

different, and the technologies 

have changed a lot, the core 

equation remains the same, 

and the biggest problem for the 

United States in fighting wars 

like Vietnam and Afghanistan 

is that they risk becoming the 

cause around which opposition 

rallies. Their very presence 

becomes a problem. That’s 

what happened in many areas, 

and in every case – South 

Vietnam, Afghanistan – the 

majority of the people wanted 

the American goals to succeed 

but they did not have enough 

strength, [nor the] security to 

stand up to the communists 

in Vietnam. In the case of 

Afghanistan, it’s not too late – 

there’s plenty of room to turn 

it around: the Taliban are so 

unpopular because of their 

history. Unlike South Vietnam, 

people in Afghanistan know 

what the Taliban stand for, and 

that is something that can be 

worked on. 

On comparing Kosovo 

and Afghanistan: 

Kosovo and Afghanistan have 

nothing really in common. 

The hatred in Kosovo between 

Albanians and Serbs is actually 

deeper than anything I’ve 

seen in Afghanistan . . . . In 

Afghanistan the Taliban are all 

Pashtun, and the majority of 

Afghans are Pashtun – it’s an 

ideological religious struggle. 

The methods are brutal, as they 

were in Kosovo, but it isn’t a 

racial hatred. To put it another 

way, there’s more chance of reconciliation 

in Afghanistan than 

there is in Kosovo; on the other 

hand, Afghanistan is much, 

much bigger, it’s got other 

ethnic groups, it’s complicated, 

and let us never forget it is the 

fifth poorest country in the 

world, the other four being in 

Africa. It is an extraordinarily 

remote and ancient culture 

with proud, deep tribal traditions, 

very high illiteracy rates 

among men and even higher 

among women, so the situations 

are quite dissimilar.


On drawing the line between 

humanitarian intervention 

and imperialism: 

It is a fine line . . . between 

humanitarianism and imperialism. 

In fact, sometimes a 

humanitarian is also an unintentional 

imperialist or a neocolonialist, 

because he or she 

comes from another culture to 

bring his or her values and culture 

to the place he is going. . . . 

Now there’s no easy solution 

to this, but . . . if you’re talking 

about non-military involvement 

(I wouldn’t call it intervention) 

there’s always been inner 

changes [created by] ngos, 

government, business, church 

missionaries, missionaries for 

secular ideas; it’s always been 

that way. What was Marco Polo, 

what were the people carrying 

ideas? I’m not too troubled 

over the semantics here. On 

the other hand, it is critically 

important that we not intervene, 

in the sense of interfere, with 

local cultures and traditions. 

. . . Now there are some local 

traditions not acceptable to 

Westerners, female circumcision 

is a perfect example; it’s 

just an appalling barbaric 

thing. While it’s an ancient 

tradition, it also happens to 

increase the spread of disease, 

infant mortality, and female 

diseases. I think the world is 

right to try to put pressure on 

those societies that still practice 

it. Similar with slavery, that was 

an ancient tradition, which still 

exists, there’s twenty or thirty 

million modern slaves in the 

world, we should do everything 

we can to stop that. 

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, 

But often, in the din of strife, 

There rises an unspeakable desire 

After the knowledge of our buried life; 

A thirst to spend our fire and restless force 

In tracking our true, original course; 

A longing to inquire 

Into the mystery of this heart which beats 

So wild, so deep in us – to know 

Whence our lives come and where they go. 

matthew arnold, “the buried life” 

difficult for traditional armies 

to figure out. The United States 

is grappling with it in Iraq 

and Afghanistan, as it did in 

Vietnam, with very limited 

success. The United States is 

powerful enough to seize any 

square meter . . . of soil on the 

face of the earth . . . because we 

have helicopters, we have missiles, 

we’re heavily armed. . . . 

But you can only hold it as long 

as the troops remain there, 

and what good is that? They’re 

a sitting target. So the issue 

becomes what is your goal 

and how do you leave something 

behind when you withdraw? 

. . . When your goal is not 

to destroy a national capital, as 

in World War II, but to push 

your enemy out and then turn 

it over to local authorities, 

you’re facing a whole different 

kind of war. 

consequences. Sadaam was 

worse than Milosevic, he was 

a terrible man, we all know 

that, but to do it this way was 

beyond reckless. At the same 

time, by doing it, we let the 

Taliban and especially al-Qaeda 

escape into Pakistan, so we 

went into Afghanistan to fight 

al-Qaeda, not the Taliban. The 

Taliban were terrible but so 

were the Burmese generals, so 

is Mugabe. The Taliban had 

been in power for six years 

already, and we drove them 

into Pakistan, where al-Qaeda 

stayed. The Taliban came back, 

and now we’re fighting the 

Taliban, but the enemy that 

took us into the region is in the 

country next door, which we 

can’t fight in, aside from occasional 

predators. So history’s 

going to give very black marks 

to [the Bush] administration. 

On the tension between 

traditional and modern 

warfare: 

I think there’s a tremendous 

tension between old-fashioned 

thinking about war and modern 

conditions. I won’t even say 

battlefield conditions because 

wars are not fought on battlefields 

anymore. This is very 

On how history will remember 

the invasion of Iraq: 

The invasion of Iraq was 

supremely reckless at a level 

that’s unbelievable. . . . History 

will record this as one of the 

most grotesque mistakes of all 

time. It is true that getting rid 

of Sadaam was a good thing, 

if there hadn’t been negative 

The above answers were 

extracted from raw footage 

for the documentary film 

Human Terrain, by James 

Der Derian, a professor of 

international studies at 

Brown University and a 

spring 2011 Bosch Fellow at 

the American Academy.


© Hornischer

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Notebook of the American Academy in Berlin | Number Twenty | Spring 2011 

On the Waterfront 

News from the Hans Arnhold Center 

N2 Academy Notebook: US 

Secretary of State Hillary 

Rodham Clinton speaks 

at the Academy’s Richard 

Holbrooke Memorial 

N4 Academy Notebook: Pamela 

Rosenberg on early inspiration; 

cellist Yo-Yo Ma stops by 

the Hans Arnhold Center; 

welcoming Helga Haub 

N8 Sketches & Dispatches: Rosina 

Bierbaum on climate change; 

John Wray reads from Lowboy; 

René Pape at the Morgan 

Library & Museum 

N11 Life & Letters: The spring 

2011 fellows; obituary for 

alumna Miriam Hansen; 

Mitch Epstein’s Berlin; and 

recent alumni books 

The Internationalist 

Hillary Rodham Clinton visits the American Academy to celebrate the life of Richard Holbrooke 

Over 150 guests joined US Secretary 

of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, 

EU Foreign and Security Policy 

High Representative Catherine 

Ashton, and journalist and widow 

Kati Marton at the American 

Academy on April 15 to celebrate 

the life of veteran diplomat 

and Academy founder Richard 

Holbrooke. Vice Chair of the 

Academy, Gahl Hodges Burt, 

opened the forum of remembrances, 

followed by Kati Marton; Werner 

Hoyer, Minister of State at the 

German Foreign Ministry; columnist 

Roger Cohen; Vali Nasr, 

a senior Holbrooke advisor; Josef 

Joffe, publisher of Die Zeit; filmmaker 

Volker Schlöndorff; John 

Kornblum, former US Ambassador 

to Germany; Hillary Rodham 

Clinton; Philip D. Murphy, 

US Ambassador to Germany; 

Catherine Ashton; and Academy 

Executive Director Gary Smith. 

The following is the full text 

of Secretary Clinton’s speech: 

I 

want to start by thanking 

Gary Smith for the work 

you’ve done to realize the 

vision that the Academy represents 

and what Richard certainly 

hoped for. Gahl, thank you, for 

» continued on Page N2 

uS secretary of state hillary rodham clinton, April 15, 2011 

© Hornischer 

Theater in the Trees 

The Academy’s Dean of Fellows and Programs on how 

an avant-garde performance unveiled a new world 

Tucked into the 

Hollywood Hills are hidden 

valleys and ravines, where 

the vegetation is so thick it feels 

like stumbling into wilderness, 

although the next house is only 

five minutes away. Many celebrities 

own villas there. My boarding 

school was in one such valley. My 

parents had sent me to Beverly 

Hills to finish the last two years of 

high school while they remained 

in South America. Those years, 

from 1960–1962, turned my life 

upside down. 

One night, shortly after arriving 

in Los Angeles, friends of 

my parents, Lynette and George 

Wooliver, took me to a so-called 

underground theater. Lynette 

predicted it would be an amusing 

and dada-esque evening; I 

was 15 and had no idea what a 

dada-esque evening could pos- 

» continued on Page N8 

The Cost of Change 

Rosina Bierbaum on the environmental time bomb 

The world has no time 

to waste when it comes 

to climate protection. 

To match that pace, Professor 

Rosina Bierbaum, Dean of the 

School of Natural Resources and 

Environment at the University 

of Michigan, spoke breathlessly 

on the topic at the American 

Academy in Berlin. Her opening 

hypothesis was that while 

climate change is threatening all 

countries, it has been particularly 

hard on the developing world. 

Bierbaum knows what she is talking 

about. She has been occupied 

with the topic of climate change 

for the last twenty years, and last 

year President Barack Obama 

elected her to be one of his climate 

advisors. 

“First off, we need to understand 

that there is still time 

to pursue a different style of 

politics,” Dr. Bierbaum says. 

“Developing countries can follow 

» continued on Page N12

N2 | Academy Notebook | News from the Hans Arnhold Center 

• Academy Notebook • 

1. 

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» continued from N1 

the instrumental role you played. 

And, of course, Kati, it would not 

even have the meaning it does 

without the partnership and support 

that you gave Richard all 

those years. And I’m delighted 

that Sarah and three of Richard’s 

grandchildren, Beatrice, Kathryn, 

and William, are here as well. 

It is so fitting that we would 

have this, most likely, last memorial 

service and remembrance 

of Richard in a place that he 

loved so much, not only here 

at the Academy, but Berlin and 

Germany. It is a fitting place 

to tell these stories, and I only 

wished that we had arranged it 

so that it was somewhere relaxed 

in this beautiful building with a 

giant panettone and lots of good 

Riesling and other treats to keep 

us going, because the stories 

would never have ended. That 

was the thing about Richard, 

every story that I’ve heard has 

prompted even more in my own 

mind to come to the surface. 

Richard thrived on conversation. 

He was an absolutely relentless 

conversationalist, as any 

of us who have engaged in conversation 

with him understand 

and remember. Les Gelb, one 

of his dearest friends, said that 

a conversation with Richard 

meant listening to a breathless 

monologue, which you could only 

engage by interrupting. And the 

story that Gahl told about Richard 

following John Fuegi into the 

men’s room was so familiar. He 

followed me onto a stage as I 

was about to give a speech, he 

followed me into my hotel room, 

and on one memorable occasion, 

into a ladies room – in Pakistan. 

So these are all now very fond 

memories. 

This American Academy meant 

the world to him. He talked 

about it, along with all of his 

other passions, starting with Kati, 

endlessly. And it was, I think, 

a way for him to embody his love 

of Germany and his belief that 

Germany and the United States 

had to be indispensably linked 

together, going forward into 

the unknown future. As John 

Kornblum famously said, “living 

humanity” is what Richard 

Holbrooke was all about. The 

American Academy is a living 

example, an essence of his 

life’s work. 

When my husband asked him 

to be ambassador to Germany, 

I think he was a little disappointed 

at first; let’s be honest. I 

can remember the conversation. 

Bill said to Richard, “You know, 

Richard, we don’t know what’s 

going to happen in Europe now.” 

I think the point that Ambassador 

Kornblum made is worth remembering 

– what looks now to have 

been inevitable was not in any 

way preordinated. 

Watching Bill Clinton and 

Richard Holbrooke have a conversation 

was truly like watching 

two bull elephants circle around, 

trumpeting their positions – 

looking for openings, pawing 

the ground, and luckily, finally, 

coming to an understanding. 

1. hillary Rodham clinton 

signs the richard 

holbrooke condolence 

book 

2. Nina von Maltzahn, John 

C. KorNblum, Hillary 

rodham Clinton, Gary SMith, 

Kati marton 

3. kati Marton shows the 

Academy’s photo wall 

4. pamela rosenberg, philip 

D. murphy, tammy murphy

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Academy Notebook | N3 

All photos © Hornischer 

2. 

2. 

3. 

4. 

But what Richard so quickly and 

very importantly grasped was 

that, yes, the Cold War era was 

over and, yes, the Berlin Wall had 

come down, and yes, the last of 

the Berlin Brigade would be leaving, 

including 5,000 American 

troops. But there was nothing 

that made it at all sure that this 

relationship that had been based 

on the past would continue into 

the future. 

Richard believed we needed 

to create an entirely new relationship, 

one based not just on strategic 

necessity, but on friendship, 

shared vision, and shared values. 

He was absolutely convinced that 

the United States and Germany 

had to form the core of a permanent 

transatlantic community, 

and that led him to the extraordinary 

effort about enlarging 

nato, which, as I was listening 

to John, I thought of all of the bitter 

arguments that were held 

over those years about what that 

would mean. 

Now, there are many ways 

to describe Richard, and we’ve 

heard some wonderful descriptors. 

You can describe him by the 

many hats that he wore, not just 

hats, but caps and helmets. You 

can see him wearing a cap as a 

development officer or a Peace 

Corps director or an ambassador, 

a magazine editor, a presidential 

advisor, a peace negotiator, an 

aids activist, a banker, a diplomat, 

and someone who believed 

always in the power of ideas. He’s 

also been described by numerous 

political labels. He’s been called 

a liberal interventionist, a neoconservative, 

a multilateralist, a 

liberal hawk, and those are some 

of the nicer things that have been 

said about him. He is certainly 

referred to as a thinker, an idea 

generator, a man of serial enthusiasms, 

a voracious reader, a prolific 

writer, a prodigious intellect, 

and a great friend. 

But instead of talking about 

who he was, what we’ve heard 

today is what he stood for and 

what he did. He was, of course, a 

man of powerful convictions, but 

he was a pragmatist and he never


1. 


saw any contradiction between 

the two. He believed in doing 

what was right for America and 

right for the world, and he actually 

thought those two intersected 

more times than not. He spent 

his life grappling with two of the 

hardest questions in international 

relations. The first was when 

and how to use military force. 

Sometimes, of course, nations 

must act unilaterally to protect 

their security. 

But there are also times, 

which he knew, when nations 

are called to join together to 

defend common principles, stop 

humanitarian crises, and act on 

behalf of those shared values. 

He believed totally in building 

international coalitions. When he 

was appointed to be the special 

representative for Afghanistan 

and Pakistan, he was the first of 

a kind. By the time he finished 

there were 42. He reached out 

and included Muslim-majority 

nations, and his successor, 

someone who had worked with 

Richard, Ambassador Marc 

Grossman, went to a recent meeting 

of the special representatives 

sponsored by the Organization 

of the Islamic Conference held 

in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. And 

as Marc told me later, it was so 

clearly the work of Richard. 

He understood that at times, 

one had to use military force. But 

he also fought hard about how 

to end it and what tools were 

necessary to do so. He knew that 

you had to deal with some fairly 

unlikable characters from time 

to time. After he visited Bosnia 

as a private citizen, he came back 

totally convinced that the world 

– not just Europe – but the world 

had to act, because he watched in 

horror one day as Serbian soldiers 

rounded up Bosnian Muslims, 

and it was, for him, a terrible, 

eerie echo of what had happened 

fifty years before. 

When Richard took on the 

State Department’s European 

Bureau, in September 1994, after 

leaving Germany as ambassador, 

it was, as has been described, a 

time of a lot of uncertainty. In 

the article that was written and 

published in the spring 1995 

Foreign Affairs issue, he laid out 

so many of the concerns and suggested 

actions that we have been 

following ever since. When he 

did the extraordinary work that 

Kati has provided an inside look 

to all of us for the Dayton Peace 

Accords, he was not only professionally 

engaged, but personally 

committed. Because the part 

that Kati didn’t tell you is that 

his three colleagues died on that 

road after Milosevic had refused 

to allow them safe passage and 

made them ride that road that 

was ringed by Serbian snipers. 

And yet, despite that loss, Richard 

was relentless in his pursuit of 

peace and absolutely convinced 

he would get Milosevic to the 

final line. 

When he was asked by 

President Obama to serve in 

Afghanistan and Pakistan, he 

took on the challenge with relish. 

He was very clear-eyed, but 

he did say on more than one 

occasion, “I thought Dayton was 

pretty difficult at the time. This 

is a lot tougher.” He set to work 

the only way he knew: full-bore, 

with everything he had, relying 

on the principles that have always 

guided him. 

He mapped out three mutually 

reinforcing tracks: a military 

offensive, which he, along with 

the rest of us, were working with 

President Obama, who inherited 

a deteriorating situation in 

Afghanistan, a Taliban with an 

enormous sense of momentum. 

Waiting on the President’s desk 

that first day were requests for 

troops that had not been in any 

way discussed or acted on by the 

prior administration. 

At the same time, Richard 

was probably the most relentless 

1. gahl hodges burt (R) 

2. JOSef joffe 

3. baroneSS catherine ashton 

4. werner hoyer


All photos © Hornischer 

2. 

3. 

4.


© Hornischer 

1. 


and passionate advocate for a 

civilian campaign. When Richard 

became srap, there were 300 

American civilians, including 

the Embassy in Kabul, in all of 

Afghanistan. They were largely 

on six-month tours, and many of 

them spent a third of that time on 

R & R outside the country because 

it was really hard. 

And finally a third track was 

an intensive diplomatic push. 

Now, those who found negotiations 

with the Taliban distasteful 

got a very powerful response 

from Richard. Diplomacy would 

be easy, he would say, if you only 

had to talk with your friends. 

Negotiating with your adversaries 

wasn’t a disservice to people who 

had died, if by talking you could 

prevent more violence. 

He saw the regional implications, 

and as Vali Nasr said, he 

dove into Pakistan with all his 

Richard-ness. After the devastating 

floods that affected almost 

20 million Pakistanis last year, he 

went to visit a dusty refugee camp 

not far from Karachi. As usual, 

he arrived in a way he hated. He 

hated having security, he hated 

the armored cars, and he if could 

duck his entourage, he always did, 

and then, of course, I would get 

the phone calls. He slipped, alone, 

into a tent occupied by two refugees 

from the floods, a father and 

his young son. He just wanted to 

hear their story. 

He also loved breaking protocol. 

He may have been the first person 

who told me the joke – “What’s 

the difference between a terrorist 

and a protocol officer? You can 

negotiate with a terrorist.” And 

so the protocol officers would say, 

“Do not wear the usaid hat. If 

you go to this region, you will be 

a target and you will also be considered 

somewhat undiplomatic.” 

Well, all over The New York Times 

were pictures of Richard in his 

usaid hat. 

He did make a big impact in 

a very complex situation, and 

in two countries that no one 

should pretend to understand. 

But he built a foundation for us 

to build on. He formed friendships 

and alliances. He broke 

a lot of pottery. He brought 

together an exceptional team of 

people. Vali described them as 

sort of a Silicon company startup. 

I thought of it more as the 

bar scene in Star Wars – because 

Richard was intent upon doing 

something that all governments 

and every bureaucracy hates. 

He wanted to break down all of 

the barriers. 

So this was going to be a 

whole-of-government commitment, 

which I certainly thought 

it was and what I thought we were 

being asked to do. He wanted 

people from every agency in the 

government. So you try calling 

the Department of Agriculture 

and saying we want some agricultural 

specialists to work with 

us in the State Department on 

helping improve agriculture in 

Pakistan and in Afghanistan. 

Very tough negotiations. But in 

the end, Richard got his way. 

Now, I think that part of what 

we will miss about Richard is that 

as we have seen the actions and 

events of the last months, many 

of us have thought, “What would 

Richard have said?” We didn’t 

have Richard to advise us in Libya 

but we had his principles to guide 

us. And we did work hard to bring 

the international community 

together – and quickly. 

The world did not wait for 

another Srebrenica in a place 

called Benghazi. Instead, we 

came together in the United 

Nations, a place where Richard 

served as our ambassador, to 

impose sanctions, a no-fly zone, 

and an arms embargo, and protecting 

civilians. In a single week, 

we prevented a potential massacre, 

stopped an advancing army, 

and expanded the coalition. 

And as Colonel Qadhafi continues 

attacking his own people, 

we are gaining even more partners 

in our efforts. 

There will always be conflicts as 

long as there are human beings, 

as long as there are power-mad 

egomaniacs running countries 

– which, of course, never happen 

in democracies, thank goodness. 

And we will have to navigate them 

without Richard, but not without 

his insight. 

I want to finish by reading 

something he wrote not long after 

the Dayton Accords were signed: 

“There will be other Bosnias in 

our lives,” he wrote. They will 

“explode with little warning, and 

present the world with difficult 

choices – choices between risky 

involvement and potentially 

costly neglect.” He concluded: 

“Early outside involvement will be 

decisive.” 

That doesn’t mean we don’t 

need patience. It doesn’t mean 

that we don’t have to continue 

to do the hard work that tries 

to avoid conflicts. But we do need 

to remember Richard’s plea for 

principled interventionism. He 

lived those ideals, and perhaps 

better than any other diplomat 

of his generation, he made them 

real to so many of us. 

We have a lot to learn 

from Richard Charles Albert 

Holbrooke, as advisor, counselor, 

teacher, but above all else, dear 

friend. I can see in this room on 

the faces of so many of you the 

kind of memories that we all have 

of this extraordinary man. Let 

us give thanks for him. 

1. peter schneider and 

wolfgang ischinger 

2. alexandra Gräfin 

Lambsdorff, hillary 

rodham clinton, kati 

marton, werner hoyer, 

vali nasr, gabriela 

von habsburg 

3. gary smith, Gahl hodges 

burt, hillary rodham 

clinton, kati marton, 

catherine Ashton


© Sean Gallup/getty images 

© Hornischer 

2. 

3.


Theater in the Trees 


sibly entail. But I was curious 

because Lynette, a former dancer 

at the Martha Graham Dance 

Company, would take part in the 

performance. 

We drove to a villa, located 

in one of Hollywood Hills’ wild, 

overgrown ravines. The theater 

was not inside the villa but 

behind it, in the garden house. In 

my memory, it was a tree house 

on stilts, with a large room and 

an adjacent smaller room. There 

were about thirty spectators, and 

we sat on the floor, at the edges 

of the big room. As the youngest 

among them, I felt fairly nervous. 

Night had fallen outside, and 

black window shades prevented 

any mote of light from penetrating 

the interior. In this bottomless 

black, the actors began to 

move. I occasionally felt a breeze 

of body movement; I heard steps 

and breaths. Suddenly the light 

was switched on, and the actors 

froze and remained motionless 

for a couple of seconds. Then, 

without a word, through mimicry 

and gestures, they established 

relationships amongst each other. 

I had never seen theater like this. 

I longed to try it myself – to 

move like Lynette, lithesome and 

feline; to make uninhibited faces; 

to play like a child – but sensed 

that I was too self-conscious. 

After the show, the actors sat 

around with their friends and 

heatedly discussed art. They talked 

as if their lives depended on it, 

as if art was a matter of survival. 

And for them, it was. I had never 

met people before in my life for 

whom art was so essential. 

I was raised in a conservative 

household. When I was very 

young, my parents moved from 

Los Angeles to Caracas where 

my father, a former naval officer, 

worked for an oil company. I had 

always been a sensitive, serious 

girl. In Caracas I had an Armenian 

piano teacher. Once a month I was 

allowed to visit her salon where I 

met Russian emigrants who made 

music, discussed literature, and 

spoke several languages. Even 

those early salons opened another 

world to me, separate from the one 

my parents lived in, and stirred a 

deep longing in me. My parents 

led a typically upper-middle-class 

life, with dinner parties and golf 

tournaments. I realized that the 

conventional atmosphere at home 

was stifling me. 

Now I sat, cross-legged, in a 

tree house in Hollywood and felt 

understood. Not that I joined the 

actors’ conversations. I eavesdropped 

and observed. I liked 

these original spirits. I had been 

searching for them. That evening, 

I felt like a knot unraveled inside, 

and I intuited that my own path 

would lead me far from home. 

On our way back, Lynette told me 

that the performers were a steady, 

hard-working group of actors. In 

retrospect, their forms of interpretation 

were reminiscent of 

Jerzy Grotowski’s methods, who 

granted the body a significant 

role on stage. I began to look 

closer, to scrutinize the gestures 

of those around me. George, 

Lynette’s husband, also enjoyed 

the evening, even though he 

wasn’t an artist but the chief ceo 

of a large company. 

Lynette became an important 

parental figure to me. Her crazy 

home was full of people, guests 

that spontaneously dropped 

by, unlike my parents’ home, 

where you made an appointment, 

arrived punctually at 8 pm, and 

sat dutifully at the table. Artists, 

including the famous painter 

Sam Francis, came and went. 

In their passionate discussions 

I learned to question the act of 

seeing. I could watch Lynette for 

hours when she worked on one 

of her sculptures. Her house and 

garden were full of sculptures, 

and she worked on them in turns. 

Los Angeles in the 1960s was 

cutting edge: the galleries on 

Cienega Blvd set the trends. You 

could find the newest, most exciting 

art scenes, the avant-garde. 

Shortly after the tree house 

evening, Lynette organized a 

“dark theater” at her home. I also 

participated. It took me some 

time to grow unconstrained and 

free. Every now and then, a hostile 

face or sudden grimace from 

another performer startled and 

shocked me. Gradually, I sunk 

into the play. It felt as if the makepamela 

rosenberg by Monika Rittershaus


believe surrounding us simply 

dissolved. I benefited from such 

experiences, which question the 

apparent and the obvious, and 

continued to profit from them in 

the decades to come when I went 

on to work at the San Francisco 

Opera, the Oper Frankfurt, and 

the Staatsoper Stuttgart. 

My parents were happy that I 

had found a second family in Los 

Angeles with whom I could spend 

the weekends. To them, Lynette 

and George’s home was amusing 

and exotic. Their lifestyle was not 

to be taken seriously. They had no 

clue what the encounter had triggered 

within me. 

I developed a critical eye 

toward my parents’ lifestyle. It 

is not atypical for a 15-year-old 

to rebel – but my rebellion was 

not the typical one where peers 

played an important part, nor did 

it involve fashion or music. I disregarded 

all of that. My rebellion 

took the form of participating in 

L.A.’s underground scene and 

befriending Lynette and George, 

who were the same age as my 

parents. Larger conflicts with my 

parents erupted later, during my 

studies in Berkeley. My parents 

blamed my rebellion on the popular 

student movements of the 

time. But without the inspiration 

I had received at the Woolivers, 

I probably would not have been 

receptive to the spirit of the student 

movements. 

I remained friends with 

Lynette and George and visited 

them often during my studies in 

Berkeley. Over time, I witnessed 

how George became infected by 

the passion of the artists who 

spoke, night after night, in his 

home; whom he met in galleries 

and theaters. He eventually 

began painting, resigned from 

his high-paying position, and 

became a successful artist. 

When I walk through a gallery 

today or attend an avant-garde 

dance performance, I feel Lynette’s 

spirit, in whose house I learned to 

consciously look and to transgress 

boundaries by thinking. Ever since 

that night, sitting among artists in 

the dark theater, I’ve sought to surround 

myself with such original, 

passionate people. 

By Pamela Rosenberg 

Originally published in 

German in the Berliner 

Zeitung, March 5, 2011 

On January 11, 2011, an intimate circle of Academy guests and 

spring 2011 Fellows welcomed world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma 

for an informal reception and discussion. Ma was in Berlin for 

performances with the Berliner Philharmoniker, including works 

by Anders Hillborg (Cold Heat, Première) Dmitri Shostakovich 

(Cello Concerto No. 2), and Carl Nielsen (Symphony No. 5). He 

had expressed his eagerness to meet Academy fellows at the Hans 

Arnhold Center, and he did not arrive alone: “I never expected 

him to bring his cello !” said Pamela Rosenberg. The evening was 

anchored by Ma’s moving rendition of a Bach Sarabande, an homage 

to his friend and Academy founder, Richard Holbrooke. 

© cornelia peiper 

Conservationist on Board 

Welcoming Helga Haub, co-owner of the Tengelmann Group, to the American Academy Board of Trustees 


is pleased to introduce a 

new member of its Board of 

Trustees: Helga Haub, co-owner 

of the Tengelmann Group and a 

dedicated philanthropist. “We are 

delighted that Helga Haub has 

joined our board,” says Academy 

Co-Chairman Karl M. von der 

Heyden. “She is the quintessential 

Atlanticist: equally at home in 

Europe and North America, she 

understands the nuances of cultures 

on both sides of the ocean.” 

Haub helps to oversee the international, 

multi-sector retailer 

Tengelmann Group, which has 

been family-owned and managed 

for five generations. Its divisions 

include Kaiser’s and Tengelmann 

supermarkets,obi stores, and 

the discounter Kik, in addition to 

several smaller production companies, 

service providers, and 

e-commerce retailers. 

In addition to her business, 

Haub chairs the Elizabeth Haub 

Foundations for Environmental 

Law and Policy in Germany, 

Canada, and the United States. 

The foundations support the 

development and implementation 

of legislative provisions for 

the conservation and sustainable 

use of nature. She has also served 

on the board of the American 

Chamber of Commerce since 

1995 and is active with the George 

Helga Haub 

C. Marshall International Center 

at Dodona Manor, the University 

of Wyoming’s Helga Otto Haub 

School of Environment and 

Natural Resources, and the uso 

Germany, serving as longstanding 

president of its Rhein-Main 

area. Haub has received honorary 

doctorates from St. Joseph’s 

University, in Philadelphia, and 

from the University of Wyoming. 

She has also been awarded the 

Medal of Merit from the United 

States Air Force in Europe; the 

Spirit of Hope Award from uso 

World; and the Distinguished 

Public Service Medal from the 

US Department of Defense.

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

• Financial Overview of the American Academy in Berlin • 

The American Academy in Berlin 

is funded almost entirely by private 

and corporate benefactors 

and does not accept any donations 

from governments or political 

organizations. 


operates as a Charitable Private 

Corporation (gemeinnützige 

GmbH) in Germany, which is 

wholly owned by The American 

Academy in Berlin, Inc., a 501(c)3 

corporation based in New York 

City. Both organizations are registered 

charities and empowered 

to receive tax-deductible donations 

in accordance with respective 

legal codes. 

In addition to donations to our 

annual fund, certain individual 

benefactors, groups of benefactors, 

and corporations have 

established endowments – both 

multi-year or in perpetuity – 

to secure the financing of named 

fellowships, distinguished visitorships, 

or lectureships. 

The American Academy prepares 

Consolidated Financial 

Statements in accordance with 

generally accepted US accounting 

principles, which are audited by 

independent auditors. 

Sources of Income and 

Expenditure for the last 

two years 

Our sources of income can be 

broken down as shown in the 

pie charts below: 

Revenue 

2010 


Corporate unrestricted 

Private unrestricted 

Corporate restricted 

Private restricted 

Other 

expenditures 

2010 2009 

Fellows & Distinguished 

Visitor program 

Development 

General Administration 

In line with regulations governing 

charitable organizations 

and applicable tax rules, 

whenever allowable we reinvest 

income from our endowments 

to further enhance the value 

and income-generating potential 

of such benefaction. 

Abridged Financial Information 

Our Consolidated Balance 

Sheet as of December 2010 

showed net assets of $39.8m 

compared with $36.5m at the 

end of 2009. This increase 

was attributable largely to the 

Our net aSSets are categorized as follOWS: 

abridged cash flOWS: 

continuing excellent performance 

of our investment 

managers as well as further 

endowments in perpetuity 

during the year. 


$m 


$m 

Available for operations: 1.9 2.1 

Board-designated endowments 10.9 8.6 

Fixed assets 2.2 2.6 

15.0 13.3 

Temporarily restricted assets 9.3 11.3 

Permanently restricted assets 15.5 11.9 

39.8 36.5 


$m 


$m 

Net cash provided by operating activities (1.0) 1.2 

Net cash used in investment activities (2.4) (3.0) 

Cash flows from financial activity 1.9 1.9 

Exchange-rate effects 1.6 (0.4) 

Net (decrease)/increase in cash and 

cash equivalents 

0.1 (0.3) 

Outlook for 2011/2012 

The American Academy was 

fortunate in 2010, as it received 

not only continuing support 

from its lasting benefactors but 

also was able to extend its base 

of donors both in the US and 

Germany, thanks to the munificent 

generosity of its supporters. 

We are extremely grateful 

to the members of our Board 

of Trustees, who continue to 

support us unhesitatingly, as 

we are to the descendents of 

Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold, 

who from their founding gift 

onwards have continued their 

invaluable support. 

Not least are we grateful 

to the multiple corporations, 

foundations, and private individuals 

who continue to enable 

the American Academy in 

Berlin to serve as a beacon of 

intellectual and cultural life in 

the German capital. 


has changed its fiscal year end 

to June 30 in 2011 to bring it 

in line with similar institutions 

and to align it with our academic 

year. 

The stub fiscal period ending 

on June 30, 2011 will be 

in line with our expectations. 

a.w.

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

• Private Initiative – Public Outreach • 

The American Academy in Berlin is funded almost entirely by private donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations. We depend on the 

generosity of a widening circle of friends on both sides of the Atlantic and wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to those who support us. This list documents 

the contributions made to the American Academy from April 2010 to April 2011. 

FellOWShips and Distinguished 

Visitorships Established in Perpetuity 

John P. Birkelund Berlin Prize in the Humanities 

Daimler Berlin Prize 

German Transatlantic Program Berlin Prize 

supported by European Recovery Program funds 

granted through the Transatlantic Program of the 

Federal Republic of Germany 

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize 

Nina Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize in History 

Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize for Fiction 

Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize 

Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize 

Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in the Visual Arts 

Lloyd Cutler Distinguished Visitorship in Law 

Carol F. Lee, William Lee, WilmerHale 

EADS Distinguished Visitorship 

EADS 

Marina Kellen French Distinguished Visitorship 

for Persons with Outstanding Accomplishment in 

the Cultural World 

Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitorship 

Stephen M. Kellen Distinguished Visitorship 

Kurt Viermetz Distinguished Visitorship 

Richard von Weizsäcker Distinguished Visitorship 

Annually funded FellOWShips and 

Distinguished Visitorships 

Berthold Leibinger Berlin Prize 

Metro Berlin Prize 

Siemens Berlin Prize 

Axel Springer Berlin Prize 

Allianz Distinguished Visitorship 

Endowment Giving 

Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship in the 

Visual Arts 

Thomas van Aubel & Jutta von Falkenhausen, 

Deutsche Börse AG, Marie Louise Gericke, 

Lily & Klaus Heiliger, Jeane Freifrau von 

Oppenheim, Galerie Sprüth Magers, Galerie 

Thaddaeus Ropac GmbH, Victoria & Aurel 

Scheibler, Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz & 

Bernd Schultz, Peter Schwicht, Villa Grisebach 

(Berlin) 

Marcus Bierich Distinguished Visitorship in the 

Humanities 

Dr. Aldinger & Fischer Grundbesitz und 

Vermarktungs GmbH, C.H. Beck Stiftung, 

Deutsche Bank AG, Mary Ellen von 

Schacky-Schultz & Bernd Schultz, Villa 

Grisebach (Berlin) 

Individuals and Family Foundations 

CORPORATIONS AND CORPORATE FOUNDATIONS 

Founders’ Circle 

$1 million and above 

Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen 

Foundation and the descendants of 

Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold 

Chairman’s Circle 

$ 25,000 and above 

Henry H. Arnhold 

Lester Crown 

Marina Kellen French 

Werner Gegenbauer 

Richard K. Goeltz 

Helga & Erivan Haub 

Mary Ellen and Karl M. von 

der Heyden 

The Estate of Richard C. Holbrooke 

Stefan von Holtzbrinck 

Michael Klein 

Nina von Maltzahn 

Christopher Freiherr von Oppenheim 

Maren Otto 

Norman Pearlstine and Jane Boon 

Pearlstine 

Kurt F. Viermetz 

Trustees’ Circle 

$10,000 and above 

Constance and John P. Birkelund 

Wolfgang Ischinger 

Dr. Pia & Klaus Krone 

Wolfgang Malchow 

Dieter & Si Rosenkranz 

Rafael J. Roth 

Mary Ellen von Schacky-Schultz & 

Bernd Schultz 

The Fritz Stern Fund of the Princeton 

Area Community Foundation 

Barbara & Jörg Zumbaum 

Patrons 

$2,500 and above 

Henrik Aldinger, Thomas van Aubel 

& Jutta von Falkenhausen, Heinrich 

J. Barth, Kathrin Barwinek & Alexander 

Ochs, Joel Bell & Marifé Hernández, 

Volker Booten, Stephen Burbank, Gahl 

Hodges Burt, Matthias & Christa Druba, 

Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Julie 

Finley, Georg & Doris Gafron, Hans- 

Michael & Almut Giesen, Marisa & 

Carl Hahn, Jörg Menno Harms, Ina 

Vonnegut-Hartung & Wilhelm Hartung, 

Klaus & Lily Heiliger, Brigitte & Bernd 

Hellthaler, Roe Jasen, Ulrich Kissing, 

Henry A. Kissinger, Stephanie & Martin 

Korbmacher, John C. Kornblum, Renate 

Küchler, Evi & Peter Kurz, Erich Marx, 

Mehretu-Rankin Family, Jeane Freifrau 

von Oppenheim, William D. & Nancy 

Ellison Rollnick, Norman Selby, 

Peter Y. Solmssen, Paul Volcker, Will 

Foundation (Hans George Will), Roger 

M. & Jill J. Witten 

President’s Circle 

Above $25,000 

Carnegie Corporation of New York 

Cerberus Deutschland GmbH 

Daimler AG 

Daimler-Fonds im Stifterverband 

für die Deutsche Wissenschaft 

Deloitte & Touche GmbH 

Deutsche Börse AG 

Deutsche Lufthansa AG 

Deutsche Post AG 

Germanwings GmbH 

GÖRG Partnerschaft von 

Rechtsanwälten 

KPMG AG 

Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft 

Liberty Global Europe BV 

Macy’s 

Marsh GmbH 

Merrill Lynch International Bank Ltd. 

MSD Sharpe & Dohme GmbH 

Pepsico Foundation 

Pfizer Pharma GmbH 

Philip Morris GmbH 

Porsche AG 

Robert Bosch GmbH 

Siemens AG 

Susanna Dulkinys and 

Erik Spiekermann 

Edenspiekermann AG 

Telefónica O 2 

Germany GmbH & Co. OHG 

Vattenfall Europe AG 

Benefactors 

up to $25,000 

Axel Springer Stiftung, Bayer 

Schering Pharma AG, Bertelsmann 

ag, Coca-Cola Deutschland GmbH, 

Deutsche Bank AG, Deutsche 

Bundesbank, Fleishman-Hillard 

Germany/Public Affairs & Gov. 

Relations, Investitionsbank Berlin, 

Rudolf August Oetker Stiftung, 

Villa Grisebach (Berlin) 

Friends up to $2,500 Johannes Altincioglu, James Attwood, Barbara Balaj, Sid & Mercedes Bass, Jagdish Bhagwati & Padma Desai, Ronald Binks, Manfred 

Bischoff, Susan S. Braddock, Leopold Bill von Bredow, Diethart Breipohl, Eckhard Bremer, Irene Bringmann, Christian Bunsen, Stephen B. Burbank, Gahl Hodges 

Burt, Caroline Bynum, Gerhard & Regina Casper, Avna Cassinelli, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, Candia Clark, Edward E. & Betsy Z. Cohen, Georg Crezelius, Edla F. 

Cusick & Douglas Clifford, Rudolf Delius, David W. Detjen, Steven & Margrit Disman, Norma Drimmer, Walter A. Eberstadt, Gaetana Enders, Jean-Marie & Elizabeth 

Eveillard, Erika Falkenreck, Donald Fox, Robert Fribourg, Emily T. Frick, Bart Friedman & Wendy Stein, Edith & Egon Geerkens, Bärbel & Ulrich Gensch, Marie 

Louise Gericke, Michael Geyer, Vartan Gregorian, Nancy & Mark Gruett, Christian Hacke, Franz M. Haniel, John D. Hawke, Cristine & Benjamin Heineman, Gregg 

Horowitz & Ellen Levy, Isabel von Jena, Helga Kallenbach, Anke & Joachim-Friedrich Kapp, Jörg Kastl, Diana Ketcham, Marion Knauf, Donald & Christine Kursch, 

Anneliese Langner, Regine Leibinger & Frank Barkow, Abby Leigh, Michael Libal, Nina & Daniel Libeskind, Quincy Liu, Charles Maier, Jacqueline Mars, Wolfgang 

Matthies, Wolfgang & Beate Mayrhuber, Joseph & Elisabeth McLaughlin, Ronay & Richard Menschel, Thomas Menzel, Hans-Jürgen Meyer, Stephanie Moeller, 

Michael Münchehofe, Joan & David Murdoch, Jan-Daniel Neumann, Wolfram Nolte, Axel Osenberg, Frank & Geryl Pearl, Lawrence Perelman, Justin J. W. Powell, 

Lutz R. Raettig & Katherine Fürstenberg-Raettig, Susan Rambow, Christa Freifrau & Hermann Freiherr von Richthofen, Hergard Rohwedder, Henry Sapparth, 

Helmut Schäfer, Volker Schlöndorff, Harald Schmid, Pamela & Philipp Scholz, Sebastian Schwark, Kenneth Scott, Robert Silvers, Michael & Patricia Sovern, 

Manfred von Sperber, Hans-Jürgen Spiller, Immo Stabreit, Ronald Steel, Thomas von Thaden, Nikolaus Weil, Lutz Weisser, Richard von Weizsäcker, Tod & Linda 

White, Sabine & Ned Wiley, Roger M. and Jill J. Witten, Pauline Yu

N12 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center 

• Private • Sketches Initiative &– Dispatches Public Outreach • • 

The Cost of Change 


low-carbon paths while they build 

up their economies and alleviate 

poverty. Still, they are dependent 

on the financial and technical 

support of countries with high 

incomes. And these high-income 

countries have to act quickly to 

reduce their C02 emissions and 

to further the development of 

alternate energy sources to solve 

the problem of climate change.” 

Developing countries, of 

course, are not to blame for the 

crisis, and they are hardly prepared 

to face its challenges. Yet 

they must bear the financial 

and environmental burdens of 

climate change and its multiple 

dangers. They are, in fact, disproportionately 

affected by climate 

change. And so the world com- 

munity is obliged to help them 

more intensely. 

Dr. Bierbaum indicated that 

around 1.6 billion people in the 

third world do not have access 

to electricity. These developing 

countries, where the emissions 

per head are only a fraction of the 

emissions in countries with a 

high income, are in dire need of 

assistance in the fields of energy, 

transportation, urban planning, 

and agricultural production. 

Increasing access to energy and 

other facilities with a high carbon 

footprint will produce more 

greenhouse gases and thus precipitate 

climate change. 

The solution to the worrisome 

climate situation requires 

the transformation and further 

development of the world’s 

energy systems in the decades 

to come. Each year, investments 

for research and development 

amount to € 100 – 500 billion. 

No country can accomplish this 

alone. “This is why we need private 

funds,” says Bierbaum. “And 

that means more tax deductions 

for private citizens who invest in 

climate protection.” 

The financial means to fight 

climate change have to be augmented 

dramatically because 

current investments do not meet 

predicted needs. The Climate 

Investment Funds (cifs), administered 

by the World Bank in collaboration 

with local banks, are 

one such chance to engage support 

from industrial countries 

effectively, because these means 

can reduce the costs of technologies 

with low carbon footprints in 

developing countries. 

At the end of her impassioned 

talk, Dr. Bierbaum reminded 

the audience of the bygone days 

of smokers: “Forty years ago 

smoking was in fashion – there 

was not a movie where an actor 

did not have a cigarette dangling 

from their lips. Today, smoking is 

passé. The same goes for climate 

protection. We need to have the 

sense that climate protection is 

in style. We have everything at 

our hands to make this endeavor 

successful: new technologies, 

money, and determination.” 

By Peter Brinkman 

Excerpted from the 

European Circle’s Green Mag 

November 4, 2010 

Translated by Rieke Jordan 

Tunnel Vision 

Wray’s third novel goes underground 

in New 

York knows the subway 

but nobody ever “Everybody 

looks at it closely,” said John 

Henderson, alias John Wray, 

son of an American leukemia 

researcher and an oncologist 

from Kärnten, Austria. For four 

years, the 39-year-old literary star 

from Brooklyn closely observed 

an underground world that others 

had merely glanced at in passing. 

He traveled exhaustively on 

the subway, a laptop perched on 

his knees, wearing headphones, 

as he wrote Lowboy. “Maybe I 

wrote in the subway because my 

grandfather was a subway planner 

in Vienna – and because I was 

not making any progress in my 

apartment,” he explained. 

Lowboy is the story of William 

Heller, a 16-year-old schizophrenic 

who believes he is the only one 

capable of saving the world. He is 

hunted because he is considered 

to be dangerous, after pushing 

his girlfriend, Emily, onto the 

subway tracks, and because 

he fled from a mental institution. 

The Frankfurter Allgemeine 

Zeitung called Wray’s third novel 

a “piece of art destined to become 

a classic.” 

This fall, the American 

Academy invited John Wray 

to Berlin for a fellowship. On 

Wednesday, the highly praised 

author came to Göppingen to 

read excerpts from his novel in 

the local art gallery. While reading, 

Wray stood in front of 35 listeners 

and the installation “Dead 

End Lopes,” which is reminiscent 

of a subway entrance. It evoked a 

tunnel-vision effect that could not 

have been more suggestive. 

“Lowboy,” as William calls himself, 

feels free and unobstruc ted 

in the subway and its tunnels. 

Wray describes Lowboy’s and 

the subway’s nature in a lengthy 

and effusive – but never tedious 

– fashion. “Even his cramped and 

claustrophobic brain felt a measure 

of affection for the tunnel. 

It was his skull that held him captive, 

after all, not the tunnel or 

the passengers or the train.” 

By Hans Steinherr 

Excerpted from the 

Südwest Presse 

December 12, 2010 

Translated by Rieke Jordan

News from the Hans Arnhold Center | Sketches & Dispatches | N13 

© Jennifer Brommer 

Pianist Brian zeger and BaSS virtuoso rené pape perform at the Morgan library on october 21, 2010 

Nostra Voce Munifico 

German opera bass René Pape delivers a benefit concert in New York for the American Academy in Berlin 


in Berlin was graced with 

the generosity of German 

bass René Pape, who delivered 

a stirring benefit recital on 

October 21, 2010 at the Morgan 

Library & Museum in New 

York City, expertly arranged by 

Academy trustee Marina Kellen 

French. Pape was accompanied 

by noted concert and chamber 

pianist Brian Zeger in a program 

that included a moving 

rendition of Robert Schumann’s 

Dicterliebe, as well as a set of 

Franz Schubert’s Lieder. 

The evening performance 

proved to be not only a musical 

tour-de-force but a fundraising 

success. The benefit was 

attended by nearly two hundred 

Academy trustees, benefactors, 

alumni, and a great many 

additional friends. Present from 

the Academy’s own board were 

co-Chairman Karl M. von der 

Heyden, Academy President 

and ceo Norman Pearlstine, 

and trustees Stephen Burbank, 

Marina Kellen French, Michael 

Klein, and Richard K. Goeltz. 

To add to the night’s musical gifts, 

Deutsche Grammophon had 

produced a special-edition CD 

of Pape singing previously unreleased 

Wagner arias. 

Dresden-native Pape, a longtime 

friend of the Academy, debuted 

at the Berlin Staatsoper Unter 

den Linden in 1988 and has been 

a member ever since. He has 

appeared with the world’s leading 

orchestras and conductors 

in major concert halls all over 

the globe. The recipient of two 

Grammys, Pape has appeared 

at the New York’s Metropolitan 

Opera every season since 1995, 

a venue he recently called “his 

second musical home.” 

Pape was in New York at the 

Metropolitan Opera during 

the fall 2010 season to sing the 

title role in a new production of 

Boris Godunov – a role that has 

won him an “Artist of the Year” 

title from the German Critics 

Association, among other accolades. 

The opera was directed 

by Stephen Wadsworth, with 

Valery Gergiev conducting. Pape 

was also honored during the 

fall 2010 season as part of the 

Metropolitan Opera Guild’s new 

series “The Met Mastersingers.” 

In February 2011 Pape and 

Zeger gave a West Coast debut 

recital at the Dorothy Chandler 

Center in Los Angeles. Without 

surprise, our voce munifico won 

resounding praise. 

m. r./r.j.m.

N14 | Sketches & Dispatches | News from the Hans Arnhold Center 

The Cult of the Word 

Authors develop 

– how could it be otherwise? 

– special relationships 

to language. Han Ong, a 

New York-based novelist and 

dramatist born in the Philippines, 

nurtures a distinct vocabulary 

fetish. The 42-year-old is the 

current Holtzbrinck Fellow at 

the American Academy, in 

Wannsee, and is working on his 

third novel. At a recent reading 

he celebrated his cult of words 

with the public. 

An ideal balance of eccentricity 

and laconic self-irony accented 

Ong’s performance, as well the 

use of single words projected 

on a screen. Using rare Anglo- 

American terms like “to transmogrify” 

and “inchoate,” Ong 

described what his new project 

was all about. 

Initially, “Burden of Dreams” 

was a self-contained short story; 

he refined the piece over months, 

read many short stories by other 

authors and then realized that 

his story lacked the essence of 

the genre’s brevity. Since then he 

has been working on expanding 

his original story about a rich 

American who supports twelve 

Philippine students financially 

and has decided to include the 

stories of the twelve students. 

“Immigration” and “assimilation” 

– expressions that have 

already found their way into 

everyday language – were the 

keywords of the evening. Ong 

was born in 1968 in Manila to 

Chinese immigrants. Sixteen 

years later the family moved to 

Los Angeles. Due to an early and 

overabundant consumption of 

English literature and Hollywood 

films, Ong’s English was hardly 

shabby before he came to the 

United States. Nonetheless he 

wanted to lose his accent – which 

he did. He coquettishly compared 

his adolescent ambition with the 

heroine of Shaw’s Pygmalion, 

who is transformed from a 

cheeky brat into an elegant lady. 

“Eliza Doolittle has nothing on 

me,” he quipped. 

In most of his books (which 

have not yet been translated into 

German), Ong tells the story of 

immigrants and their highly 

original methods to stomach 

their culture shock in America. 

The author has obviously come to 

terms with it. His dramas have 

been showered with stipends and 

prizes: his debut Fixer Chao was 

chosen as the book of the year 

2001 by the Los Angeles Times; six 

years ago his second novel The 

Disinherited was short-listed for 

the Lambda Book Award. 

Ong does not return to the fate 

of immigrants in order to critique 

society or because of his familiarity 

with their mentality. What is 

particularly alluring to him are 

the verbal possibilities. The linguistic 

clumsiness of his protagonists 

allows the English language 

to gain pliable dimensions and 

semantic versatility. There is 

nothing clumsy in Ong’s writing, 

but he exudes a childlike awe 

and delight in language. 

By Marianna Lieder 

Excerpted from Tagesspiegel 

December 12, 2010 

Translated by Rieke Jordan 

Stalinism and Genocide 

Norman Naimark delves into the ugly past of Stalin’s killing machine and the legal tribulations of its crimes 

Beginning in the 1930s, 

a Polish-Jewish attorney 

named Raphael Lemkin 

became fascinated and horrified 

by the topic of mass killings that 

had occurred throughout history. 

In all likelihood he had a premonitory 

sense of what was to happen 

in neighboring Germany, so he 

lobbied the League of Nations 

to make constituents aware of a 

phenomena he was calling “barbarism.” 

He was ignored. 

In 1939 Lemkin left Poland 

and landed in the United States, 

where he began working for 

the Carnegie Endowment, and 

then for the Department of War. 

During this time he wrote a book, 

The Axis Occupation of Europe, 

where the word “genocide” was 

used for the first time. 

On March 3, Norman 

Naimark, the Axel Springer 

Fellow this spring, discussed 

Lemkin’s work and his continued 

lobbying to punish and prevent 

genocide across the world. 

A specialist on the Stalinist 

genocide of the 1930s and early 

1940s, Naimark focused in his 

lecture on the ways that the 

Soviet Union managed to erase 

between ten and twenty million 

people in social, national, economic, 

and political slaughters 

meant to square society with 

the Communist project. These 

groups included not only ethnic, 

political, and religious minorities 

but “socially harmful” people: 

prostitutes, the homeless, alcoholics, 

drug users, political 

opponents, and former revolutionaries. 

Stalinist ideology 

was used to justify these mass 

murders, to dehumanize and 

then exterminate human beings, 

Naimark reminds, leading to 

the literal decimation of the 

Russian population still demographically 

palpable. 

Aside from the historical problems 

involved in the Stalinist 

genocide, there is also the 

problem of numbers of deaths 

unearthed in the nkdv (People’s 

Commissariat for Internal 

Affairs) archives since being 

opened after the end of the 

Cold War. You simply can’t 

believe them, Naimark says. 

Why? Because just like the Five- 

Year Plan, they always add up. 

The number of ethnic Kulaks 

eradicated in the process of 

de-Kulakization, for example, 

reads exactly 1,837,622. Crimean 

Tartars killed exactly 179,604. 

Naimark notes that these figures 

don’t include tortured victims 

who died from their injuries, people 

who were simply left to perish 

of famine, and those who were 

“deported,” many of whom simply 

died out of sight. 

After the war, in 1946, Raphael 

Lemkin went to the Nuremberg 

trials and insisted that the Nazis 

be tried for genocide. His pleas 

fell on deaf ears. No one was tried 

for genocide, Naimark points 

out, and the very idea was not 

attached to any indictments. 

Yet Lemkin’s efforts forced the 

United Nations into recognizing 

that something of extraordinarily 

horror had just occured. 

The United Nations Genocide 

Convention of 1948 successfully 

passed an international 

law prohibiting the mass killing 

of “national, ethnic, racial, or 

religious groups, as such.” By lobbying 

the un with the assistance 

of the Poles, however, the Soviets 

had prevented the legislation 

from including the words “social” 

and “political.” They would reign 

over half of Europe for another 

four decades. 

r.j.m.

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

• Life & Letters • 

Berlin via Epstein 

Academy alumnus Mitch Epstein’s book of visual odyssies through the German capital 

Photographer Mitch Epstein, who 

was awarded the presitgious Prix 

Pictet in March 2011, was a Guna 

S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual 

Arts at the American Academy in 

spring 2008. He had just completed 

his monumental photo survey 

American Power (Steidl, 2009) 

and was looking for a small respite 

in Berlin. No such luck: Epstein’s 

curiousity was piqued by the 

German capital’s quotidian and 

quirky corners, such as this defunct 

air-raid shelter in Wünsdorf. 

The result of Epstein’s rich visual 

odyssey, Berlin, will, at last, be 

available in June 2011 from 

Steidl. The following is the book’s 

Introduction. 

I 

was raised in a Jewish 

American family that refused 

to visit Germany in deference 

to lost kin who had perished in 

the Holocaust. At 49, I broke the 

family protocol and traveled to 

Göttingen to supervise the printing 

of a book of my photographs 

at the publisher Steidl. This trip 

became the first of a dozen to 

Germany in the decade that followed, 

during which I worked 

on more books at Steidl, and 

on exhibitions in Cologne with 

my gallerist, Thomas Zander. 

Then, in 2008, I was awarded 

the Berlin Prize. To my astonishment, 

Germans had become my 

staunchest allies. 

I left New York with my wife 

and daughter for a six-month residency 

at the American Academy 

in Berlin. We arrived in bonechilling 

January and I planned 

to sequester myself for a period 

of reflection and reading. But the 

city – more complicated and poignant 

than any I’d known, except 

Hanoi – could not be ignored. 

Mitch Epstein, Winkelturm Air-Raid ShelTER, Wünsdorf, 2008 

The day we arrived, a driver took 

us from Tegel airport to the 

Academy in Wannsee, the suburb 

where the Nazis plotted the Final 

Solution. As he drove, I asked 

questions, and a flood of historical 

information poured forth: What 

was that toy-like tower? “That was 

Hitler’s radio and look-out tower 

during the war. Now it’s part of 

the Berlin Convention Centre.” 

The highway we were driving 

on was Hitler’s former racetrack. 

Only a few miles down the road 

was the legendary Glienicke 

Bridge in Potsdam, where the cia 

and kgb traded captive spies only 

twenty years ago. 

It was tempting to remain in the 

comfortable Academy enclave, 

with its fireplace and brilliant 

scholars. But I was drawn to 

the Berlin that had attempted to 

annihilate my ancestors, as well 

as the Berlin that had embodied 

the Cold War division, which had 

threatened the bedrock stability 

of my American childhood. I 

looked for the remnants of those 

tormented wartime and postwar 

histories; they were often overt, 

and sometimes lay just below the 

thin skin of contemporary Berlin. 

With an 8 x 10 camera, I started 

at Sachsenhausen concentration 

camp in January and ended with 

the Dalai Lama speaking at the 

Brandenburg Gate in June. 

Berlin was reconceived with 

the reunification of East and 

West in 1990. And although it 

has to contend with the stresses 

of all modern cities, Berlin has 

come to signify a society with 

a conscience. The remnants of 

wretched histories that I found 

were not accidental. Berliners 

have chosen to leave traces of the 

worst of themselves in their architecture 

and landscape. They have 

understood what a largely amnesiac 

America has not: reform 

relies on memory. 

mitch epstein

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

A Life in Film 

The Academy mourns the death of film theorist and alumna Miriam Hansen (1949–2011) 

Since it began, film was 

made to be seen. It has created, 

in turn, unique ways 

of seeing. Miriam Hansen, an 

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow in 

spring 2004, spent her academic 

career fascinated by this filmic 

dialectic. Hansen’s intense commitment 

to film led her to found 

the now legendary Committee 

on Cinema and Media Studies 

at the University of Chicago, 

where she was the Ferdinand 

Schevill Distinguished Service 

Professor in the Humanities 

in the Department of English 

since 1990 until her death, on 

February 5, 2011. 

Born Dorothea Miriam Bratu 

in 1949 in Offenbach, Germany, 

Hansen’s parents were Jewish 

exiles who had met returning 

home after World War II. Hansen 

went on to receive a doctorate, 

in 1975, from the Johann 

Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in 

Frankfurt. Prior to her arrival 

at the University of Chicago, in 

1990, she taught at Yale and 

Rutgers. Her pioneering study, 

Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship 

in American Silent Film (Harvard, 

1991) was lauded by peers as “a 

work that has revolutionized the 

concept of spectatorship.” 

Hansen was an influential and 

subtle reader of the key cultural, 

social, and film theorists loosely 

affiliated with the city of her studies, 

including Theodor Adorno, 

Walter Benjamin, Alexander 

Kluge, and Siegfried Kracauer. 

She had completed a book manuscript 

on these monumental 

thinkers shortly before her death. 

American Academy Executive 

Director Gary Smith, who taught 

at the University of Chicago contemporaneously 

with Hansen, 

was struck by both her brilliance 

and her kindness towards rising 

scholars. “Miriam was revered 

by younger colleagues for her 

personal generosity as well as 

her scholarship. I remember her 

always having time to discuss 

Walter Benjamin and other topics, 

despite her continuing battles 

with cancer.” 

The eminent German author, 

social theorist, and film director 

Alexander Kluge, who broadcast 

several lengthy interviews of 

Miriam Hansen on German television, 

described to the Academy 

her profound influence: “Like 

a careful gardener, Miriam 

Hansen planted and interwove 

traditions of Frankfurt critical 

theory, modern film history, and 

her own critical passions and 

curiosity. She is an important 

transatlantic bridge for the traditions 

of enlightenment and film 

art. She was not only a theoretical 

mind, but someone who also 

exerted a strong, practical influence 

on filmmaking. Because of 

her, the Minutenfilm saw a rebirth, 

as well as film projected onto 

multiple screens, the Max Ophüls 

renaissance, and much more. We 

auteurs listened to her. She was – 

as she sat in her Chicago office 

and worked, occasionally glancing 

over the lake – our prophet.” 

Hansen is survived by her 

husband, Michael Geyer, the 

Samuel N. Harper Professor of 

German and European History at 

the University of Chicago and a 

trustee of the American Academy 

in Berlin. 

r.j.m. 

© Howard Helsinger 

Profiles in Scholarship 

Presenting the spring 2011 fellows 

James Der Derian 

The terrorist attacks of 

September 11, 2001 occurred a 

decade ago. Yet the preoccupation 

with terrorism continues to 

hamper the response of statesmen 

and scholars alike to global 

changes. Bosch Fellow James Der 

Derian, professor of international 

studies at Brown University, 

argues that the American unipolar 

moment has passed, succeed 

by a “heteropolarity” of networked 

forms of power. Is there 

a way to move on to a new global 

security agenda that recognizes 

and can manage these changes? 

Der Derian has been theorizing 

what such an environment would 

look like, as well as its ethical 

considerations. While at the 

Academy in spring 2011 he will 

be writing on these subjects and 

completing an e-book version of 

the documentary film Human 

Terrain. 

Der Derian received his BA at 

McGill University in Quebec and 

was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford 

University, where he completed 

his MPhil and DPhil in international 

relations. Der Derian 

has authored and edited several 

books on international relations. 

In addition to his work on Human 

Terrain, Der Derian has produced 

two documentaries, Virtual y2k 

and After 9/11. His writing has 

appeared in numerous global 

security publications, as well as 

the New York Times, The Nation, 

Washington Quarterly, and Wired. 

Astrid M. Eckert 

Since Churchill’s Fulton Speech, 

in 1946, the Iron Curtain has 

served as one of the primary 

political metaphors in Cold War 

politics. But what exactly happened 

at the Aussenrand of the 

“free world” during those tense 

decades? Daimler Fellow Astrid 

M. Eckert revisits the history 

of Cold War West Germany by 

focusing on its most sensitive 

geographical space, the border 

with its ideological adversary, 

socialist East Germany. An assistant 

professor of modern German 

history at Emory University, 

Eckert studies the borderlands 

that emerged on the eastern edge 

of the new West German state. 

Viewing borderlands as “fields 

of heightened consciousness,” as 

Daphne Berdahl observed, Eckert 

seeks to recast West German history 

from the periphery. Her new 

book project, tentatively entitled 

West Germany and the Iron 

Curtain, will be Eckert’s focus 

during her residency. 

Eckert received her PhD from 

the Free University of Berlin in 

2003. With a dissertation entitled 

Battle for the Files: The Western 

Allies and the Return of Captured 

German Archives after World War 

II, which was awarded the 2004 

Friedrich Meinecke Dissertation 

Prize of the Free University’s 

history department and the biennial 

Hedwig Hintze Dissertation 

Award of the German Historical 

Association. She also co-edited


Institutions of Public Memory: The 

Legacies of German and American 

Politicians, published in 2007. 

Hal Foster 

In Walter Benjamin’s 1933 

essay “Experience and Poverty” 

he observes, “In its buildings, 

pictures, and stories, mankind 

is preparing to outlive culture, 

if need be.” Hal Foster, the 

Townsend Martin Class of 1917 

Professor of Art and Archaeology 

at Princeton University, takes 

inspiration from Benjamin’s 

“surviving civilization” sentiment 

in his project, “Bathetic, Brutal, 

Banal: Strategies of Survival in 

20th Century Art.” While each 

of these terms refers to a specific 

Foster began writing art criticism 

for Artforum in 1978. The 

strength of this early writing 

quickly propelled him into a 

major presence in the New York 

art scene: from 1981–1987 he 

was an editor at Art in America, 

and in 1983 he edited a seminal 

collection of essays on postmodernism 

The Anti-Aesthetic: 

Essays on Postmodern Culture. 

Foster received his PhD from 

the Graduate Center at the 

City University of New York in 

1990. Foster’s books include 

Compulsive Beauty (mit, 1993), 

The Return of the Real (mit, 1996), 

Design and Crime (and Other 

Diatribes) (Verso, 2002), and 

Prosthetic Gods (mit, 2004). He 

Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, 

Straus & Giroux, 2008), was 

selected as a New York Times 

Notable Book of the Year as 

well as both a Slate and Salon 

Best Book of 2009. Galchen 

has taught creative writing at 

Columbia University, where 

she completed her own MFA in 

Fiction in 2006 and was a Robert 

Bingham Fellow. She also holds 

a medical degree in psychiatry 

from the Mount Sinai School of 

Medicine. Her medical expertise 

and psychiatric sensitivity 

reveal themselves discreetly 

in Atmospheric Disturbances 

through the leading character of 

Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist 

who believes his wife has been 

the Believer, and New York 

Magazine. In July 2010, Galchen 

was featured as one of the New 

Yorker’s “20 under 40” fiction 

writers. 

Todd Gitlin 

No fewer than three crises are 

affecting journalism today, 

claims Columbia University professor 

Todd Gitlin: the economic 

travails of newspapers; an attention 

crisis of the news-consuming 

public; and, perhaps most worrisome, 

an authority crisis that 

has led to mistrust of the news 

media generally. Journalism and 

journalists 

themselves have begun to lose 

both morale and legitimacy. 

© hornischer 

Class of spring 2011 (l to R): Hal foster, H. C. erik midelfort, david b. ruderman, dave mckenzie, p. adams sitney, ellen kennedy, 

ken ueno, astrid m. eckert, james der derian, norman naimark, pieter m. judson, rivka galchen (not pictured: todd gitlin) 

cultural moment – respectively 

Dada, Brutalist architecture, and 

Pop banality – they are unified 

in a longer view of modernism, 

specifically in a key, overlooked 

strategy that Foster calls “mimetic 

exacerbation.” Exploring what 

exactly this strategy is and how 

it continues to influence contemporary 

art will be Foster’s focus 

as a Berlin Prize Fellow at the 

American Academy. 

continues to write regularly for 

the London Review of Books, the 

Los Angeles Times Book Review, 

October (where he is also a coeditor), 

and the New Left Review. 

Rivka Galchen 

Rivka Galchen, the Mary Ellen 

von der Heyden Fiction Fellow, 

is a New York-based writer and 

a contributing editor to Harper’s 

magazine. Her debut novel, 

replaced by an almost identical 

double. 

Galchen won the 2010 

William Saroyan International 

Prize for Writing and has 

received fellowships from the 

New York Public Library’s 

Cullman Center for Scholars 

and Writers and the Rona Jaffe 

Foundation. Her work has 

appeared in the New Yorker, 

Harper’s, the New York Times, 

“To say that the atmosphere 

among journalists is troubled,” 

Gitlin says, “is an understatement. 

’Toxic’ might be a better 

adjective.” At the American 

Academy as a Bosch Fellow, Gitlin 

aims to write a concise account 

of journalism’s current predicament: 

its origins, significance, 

and the eventual effects it will 

have on both civil society and our 

shared intellectual environment.

N18 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center 

Gitlin was educated at Harvard 

University, the University of 

Michigan, and the University of 

California, Berkeley; and is the 

author of twelve books, including, 

most recently The Bulldozer and 

the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, 

Lame Democrats, and the Recovery 

of American Ideals (Wiley, 2007). 

Gitlin’s articles have appeared in 

scores of publications, including 

New York Times, Los Angeles Times, 

San Francisco Chronicle, Harper’s, 

and Mother Jones, where he is a 

contributing writer, and he has 

often appeared on television 

and radio programs. Prior to his 

position at Columbia, Gitlin was 

a professor of sociology and director 

of the Mass Communications 

Program at the University of 

California, Berkeley, and then 

a professor of culture, journalism 

and sociology at New York 

University. 

Pieter JudSOn 

For over eight centuries the 

Habsburg Monarchy alternately 

attempted, succeeded, and failed 

to unify states throughout 

Europe under a succession of 

duchys, kingdoms, and banats 

from Vienna to Carpathia. The 

policies implemented to achieve 

such grand reach did not die with 

the Empire in 1918, however, and 

it is the aim of historian Pieter 

Judson to write a new history of 

the Habsburg Monarchy and its 

successor states, one that looks 

closely at events that occurred 

as the Empire crawled to a halt. 

Judson’s Academy project during 

his Nina Maria Gorrissen 

Fellowship will consider a broad 

range of imperial campaigns 

that sought to unify the diverse 

regions and thereby offer an alternative 

to the fragmented, nationbased 

accounts that continue to 

dominate narratives about East 

Central Europe. 

A professor of history at 

Swarthmore College, and an 

award-winning author, Judson’s 

current work on modern 

European history, specifically 

on Germany and the Austro- 

Hungarian Empire between 1848 

and 1948, focuses on nationalist 

conflicts, revolutionary and 

counter revolutionary social 

movements, and European fascism. 

Judson has been awarded 

grants from the Guggenheim 

Foundation, the neh, and has 

been a Whiting, Marshall, and 

Fulbright fellow. His most recent 

book, Guardians of the Nation: 

Activists on the Language Frontiers 

of Imperial Austria (Harvard, 

2006), offers new challenges to 

traditional accounts of the rise 

of nationalism in multi-ethnic 

regions of Central and Eastern 

Europe. 

Ellen Kennedy 

In University of Pennsylvania 

political scientist Ellen 

Kennedy’s Academy project 

“The Political Theory of Market 

Governance,” she observes how 

economic and financial crises in 

Weimar Germany and the United 

States became a source of greatly 

expanded executive powers in 

both constitutions. Economic 

emergencies caused escalations 

in presidential power. These historical 

examples, Kennedy says, 

reveal the fragility of “rule of law” 

concepts in the social context of 

modern democratic constitutions. 

There is an alternative, however, 

in the theorists of Ordo liberalism 

and the soziale Rechtsstadt, 

specifically in the relatively 

obscure figure of Walter Eucken, 

an economist whose ideas helped 

create the miracle economy of 

postwar Germany – the subject 

of her work in Berlin as an Axel 

Springer Fellow. 

Kennedy’s work has long 

focused on a variety of topics 

with the fields of comparative 

political economy and the history 

of modern European political 

and legal theory. She received 

a PhD in government from the 

London School of Economics, 

and before joining the faculty at 

the University of Pennsylvania, 

Kennedy taught at the universities 

of London, York, Manchester, 

and Freiburg. Kennedy is the 

author of several books, among 

them Constitutional Failure: 

Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Duke, 

2004), The Bundesbank (Johns 

Hopkins, 1997), and Freedom 

and the Open Society: Henri 

Bergson’s Contribution to Political 

Philosophy (Garland, 1987). 

Dave McKenzie 

Brooklyn-based artist Dave 

McKenzie blazes across multiple 

media – sculpture, video, painting, 

and performance, while 

engaging in the tradition of 

public art that boldly interrogates 

society’s unspoken assumptions 

about itself. Often employing 

his own likeness, McKenzie’s 

self-ironizing, playful approach 

to art-making belies the seriousness 

of his themes: artistic and 

racial identity, social masking, 

and economic nonfunctionality, 

which he will continue exploring 

as a Guna S. Mundheim Visual 

Arts Fellow at the Academy. 

McKenzie was born in 

Kingston, Jamaica in 1977. He 

received a BFA in printmaking 

from the University of the Arts in 

Philadelphia and studied at the 

Skowhegan School of Painting 

and Sculpture. He has had 

numerous solo exhibitions, most 

recently On Premises at Susanne 

Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 

in 2009, Present Tense at the 

Atlanta Contemporary Art Center 

and Screen Doors on Submarines, 

shown at redcat Gallery in Los 

Angeles, both in 2008. Prior 

exhibitions were held at the 

Institute of Contemporary Art 

Boston in 2007, as well as 

at Gallery 40000 in Chicago 

in 2006. 

H. c. Erik Midelfort 

During his Ellen Maria 

Gorrissen Fellowship at the 

American Academy in Berlin, 

historian of early modern 

Germany H. C. Erik Midelfort 

will pursue his project “Fear of 

Freethinking: the Suppression of 

Dissent in Germany, 1650–1750,” 

which examines the ways in 

which the German states during 

that century, with no Inquisition 

like that of Catholic Italy or Spain 

– and with virtually no effective 

central government – managed 

to suppress radical and dissenting 

political, moral, religious or 

irreligious views. It is Midelfort’s 

aim to show how certain cultural 

dynamics led to the development 

of a surprisingly academic 

culture in which Catholics and 

Protestants (both Lutherans and 

Calvinists) could survive in their 

own separate religious niches, 

but where other thoughts were 

rigorously censored. 

Midelfort’s pioneering 

research into some uncanny 

facets of early modern Germany, 

including exorcism, witchcraft, 

and the history of madness, 

has resulted in acclaimed findings 

and in prize-winning 

books such as Mad Princes in 

Renaissance Germany (Virginia, 

1994), and A History of Madness 

in Sixteenth-Century Germany 

(Stanford, 2000). Midelfort, at 

the University of Virginia since 

1970 and since 1996 the Julian 

Bishko Professor of History, has 

been a visiting scholar at several 

universities in the US and abroad, 

including at his alma mater Yale – 

where he received his BA, MA, 

and PhD degrees – at Harvard, 

and at both Wolfson and All 

Souls College at the University 

of Oxford. 

Norman Naimark 

What was the span of Joseph 

Stalin’s plans for Europe from 

the end of World War II until his 

death, in 1953? Which European 

ideologies, social movements, 

and cultural values intersected 

with Soviet designs on Europe 

at the beginning of the Cold 

War? Norman M. Naimark, the 

Robert and Florence McDonnell 

Chair in East European History 

at Stanford University, is interested 

in the problems of radical 

politics in the Russian Empire 

and Eastern Europe. In his current 

Academy project, the Axel 

Springer Fellow aims to explore 

seven case studies that highlight 

how the shape and tenor of 

postwar Europe were decided 

by a “three-cornered historical 

relationship” between Stalin’s


policies, European social movements 

and values, and the growing 

rivalry between the US and 

Soviet Union. 

Formerly a professor of history 

at Boston University, a 

fellow of the Russian Research 

Center at Harvard, and senior 

fellow at the Hoover Institution, 

Naimark has served as Director 

of Stanford’s Center for Russian 

and East European Studies and 

chair of the history department, 

in addition to acting as director of 

Stanford’s interdisciplinary programs 

in International Relations 

and International Policy Studies. 

In 1996, Naimark was presented 

with the Distinguished Service 

Cross from the government of 

the Federal Republic of Germany. 

David B. Ruderman 

In 1797 Phinehas Elijah Hurwitz, 

a Jewish mystic who lived 

from 1765 to 1821, published an 

obscure book called the Sefer 

ha-Brit (Book of the Covenant) 

in Moravia. The book offers an 

exegesis on an older work of 

Jewish mysticism and expounds 

upon the sciences of the day 

before detailing the soul’s preparation 

for imbibing the Divine 

Spirit. David B. Ruderman, the 

Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of 

Modern Jewish History and 

the Ella Darivoff Director of 

the Center for Advanced Judaic 

Studies at the University of 

Pennsylvania, will tackle his own 

exegesis of Hurwitz’s volume in 

his project “Mysticism, Science, 

and Moral Cosmopolitanism in 

Enlightenment Jewish Thought.” 

The German Transatlantic 

Program Fellow aims to open a 

fascinating window into the processes 

of continuity and change 

in Jewish thinking at the dawn of 

the modern era. 

Ruderman was educated at 

the City College of New York, 

the Teacher’s Institute of the 

Jewish Theological Seminary 

of America, and Columbia 

University. He received his rabbinical 

degree from the Hebrew 

Union College-Jewish Institute 

of Religion in New York and 

his PhD in Jewish history from 

the Hebrew University. He has 

taught at Yale University and 

the University of Maryland, 

College Park, and at the Graduate 

School of the Jewish Theological 

Seminary of America and the 

Hebrew University in Jerusalem. 

He is the author or editor of 

eighteen books, including The 

World of a Renaissance Jew: The 

Life and Thought of Abraham b. 

Mordecai Farissol (Hebrew Union 

College Press, 1981) and Jewish 

Enlightenment in an English 

Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction 

of Modern Jewish Thought 

(Princeton, 2001). 

P. Adams Sitney 

P. Adams Sitney, Professor of 

the Council of the Humanities 

and Visual Arts at Princeton 

University, was last in Berlin in 

the bright fall of 1967. It was then 

that he met two pioneering filmmakers: 

Gregory Markopoulos 

and Robert Beavers. Both avant 

garde auteurs would come to 

occupy a large portion of Sitney’s 

critical attention over the coming 

decades, and in Sitney’s 

Academy project, “Cinema and 

Poetry,” he re-examines not only 

their work, but also that of filmmakers 

Pier Paolo Pasolini and 

Andrey Tarkovsky, both of whom 

push the subtle visual language 

of poetry into the cinematic 

dimension. 

Sitney, this spring’s Anna- 

Maria Kellen Fellow, was educated 

at Yale University, where he 

studied Greek and Sanskrit as an 

undergraduate before obtaining 

his MA and PhD in comparative 

literature. He went on to found 

the Anthology Film Archives and 

curate international film series 

and exhibitions of contemporary 

film, as well as serve as associate 

editor at Film Culture for three 

decades. He has taught at New 

York University, Bard College, 

Cooper Union, and Middlebury 

College. His book Visionary 

Film: The American Avant-Garde 

(Oxford, 1974) remains required 

reading for aspiring filmmakers. 

Sitney’s most recent work 

is Eyes Upside Down: Visionary 

Filmmakers and the Heritage of 

Emerson (Oxford, 2008). 

Ken Ueno 

Composer Ken Ueno’s music 

shirks easy categorization, drawing 

on influences as disparate 

as heavy metal and Tuvan throat 

singing. Ueno himself is not only 

a composer of acoustic and electronic 

works, but also a performer 

and vocal improviser specializing 

in “extended techniques,” such 

as growling, gurgling, humming, 

and whispering. In his second 

semester as the Berlin Prize 

in Music Composition Fellow, 

Ueno will continue work on two 

compositions. 

Currently an assistant professor 

of music at the University 

of California, Berkeley, Ueno 

has taught at the University of 

Massachusetts, where he was 

also was the director of the 

Electronic Music Studios. A 

graduate of West Point, he holds 

degrees from Berklee College of 

Music, Boston University, the 

Yale School of Music, and a PhD 

from Harvard University. 

Sneak Preview 

Announcing the fall 2011 fellows 

This fall welcomes 

another outstanding class 

of scholars and writers 

to the Hans Arnhold Center. 

Jennifer Culbert, a political 

scientist at Johns Hopkins 

University, will be studying the 

jurisprudence of Hannah Arendt; 

Leland de la Durantaye, 

who teaches English at Harvard 

University, is beginning work 

on a study of Samuel Beckett; 

James Der Derian, a 

spring 2011 fellow from Brown 

University, will fulfill the remainder 

of his Bosch Fellowship at 

work on his film, Human Terrain, 

part of his project of “Global 

Engagement through Innovative 

Media.” A professor of social 

psychology at Northwestern 

University, Alice Eagly, 

delves into the origins of malefemale 

psychology, and, tangentially, 

Adam Haslett, a San 

Francisco-based writer, is at work 

on his novel Kindness. Daniel 

Hobbins, an associate professor 

of history at Ohio State, is 

researching the medieval origins 

of print; Susan McCabe 

of the University of Southern 

California furthers her research 

on the writer Annie Winifred 

Ellerman, in her project “Bryher: 

Female Husband of Modernism,” 

and Geoffrey O’Brien, 

Editor-in-Chief of Library of 

America, is working on “America 

before the Code.” Visual artist 

Paul Pfeiffer will delve into 

new works, and Elizabeth 

Povinelli, who teaches anthropology 

and gender studies at 

Columbia University, explores 

the relationship between “new 

media and late liberalism.” Jut ta 

Schickore, a professor of history 

and philosophy of science at 

Indiana University, is studying 

three hundred years of experiments 

with snake venom (1660– 

1960); poet Tom Sleigh, of 

Hunter College, is putting down 

brave new lines while in Berlin, 

and lastly John Van Engen, 

a professor of history at Notre 

Dame, is studying the European 

twelfth century as a “turn” in 

the medieval narrative.

N20 | Life & Letters | News from the Hans Arnhold Center 

Alumni Books 

Recent releases by former fellows 

Anne Applebaum 

Gulag Voices: An Anthology 

Yale University Press, 

January 2011 

Sigrid Nunez 

Sempre Susan: 

A Memoir of Susan Sontag 

Atlas, March 2011 

Charles Lane 

Stay of Execution: Saving 

the Death Penalty from Itself 

Rowman & LittleField, 

October 2010 

Mitch Epstein 

Berlin 

Steidl, June 2011 

Francisco Goldman 

Say Her Name 

Grove Atlantic, April 2011 

Nicole Krauss 

Great House 

W. W. Norton, October 2010 

Wendy Lesser 

Music for Silenced Voices: 

Shostakovich and His Fifteen 

Quartets, March 2011 

W. S. Di Piero 

When Can I See You Again ? 

New Art Writings 

Wafer Press, September 2010 

Geoffrey Wolff 

The Hard Way Around: 

The Passages of Joshua Slocum 

Alfred A. Knopf, October 2010 

Michael Taussig 

Feldforschungsnotizbücher 

Hatje Cantz, March 2011 

Alex Katz 

Catalogue Raisonné 

Hatje Cantz, June 2011 

Leonard Barkan 

Michelangelo: A Life on Paper 

Princeton University Press, 

January 2010 

Thomas Holt 

Children of Fire: A History 

of African Americans 

Hill & Wang, October 2010 

Mitch Epstein 

State of the Union 

Hatje Cantz, March 2011 

Walter Mattli 

(with Tim Büthe) 

The New Global Rulers: 

The Privatization of Regulation 

in the World Economy 

Princeton University Press, 

March 2011 

Call for Applications 

The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for residential 

fellowships for 2012–2013 and future academic years. The 

application deadline is October 1, 2011. Prizes will be awarded 

in February 2012 and publicly announced in early spring 2012. 

Approximately two-dozen fellowships are awarded to established 

scholars, writers, and professionals who wish to engage in independent 

study in Berlin. Prizes are conferred annually for an academic 

semester – and on occasion for an academic year – and include 

round-trip airfare, housing, partial board, and a monthly stipend of 

$5,000. Fellows are expected to reside at the Hans Arnhold Center 

during the entire term of the award. 

Fellowships are restricted to candidates based long-term in the 

United States. American citizenship is not required, and American 

expatriates are not eligible. Candidates in academic disciplines 

must have completed a doctorate at the time of application. The 

Academy gives priority to a proposal’s significance and scholarly 

merit, not its specific relevance to Germany. It is helpful, however, 

to explain how a Berlin residency might contribute to the project’s 

further development. Application forms may be submitted via the 

Academy’s website, www.americanacademy.de.


Doors Opened, 

Doors Closed 

Can’t anyone get immigration right ? 

By Tamar Jacoby 

Ithought I was taking a break 

from my life as an immigration reform 

advocate in Washington during my 

stay at the American Academy in Berlin. I 

knew, of course, that immigration was a 

roiling issue in Europe, too. Even from my 

beleaguered bunker inside the Beltway, I’d 

caught wind of the murder of Dutch filmmaker 

Theo van Gogh, the Paris riots, the 

Danish Mohammad cartoon crisis. Still, 

I thought a few months of living in Europe 

and listening in on its immigration debate 

would clear my head and give me some perspective. 

After all, I reasoned, the issues – 

and our countries – are so different. 

I couldn’t have been more wrong – about 

the escape. 

Europe and the United States are certainly 

different. Germany, where I spent 

two months this winter, is an economic 

powerhouse. But to an American its stratified 

social structure feels left over from 

another era: rigid high-school tracking, 

pervasive credentialism, and workplace 

seniority systems sharply limit personal 

opportunity. Denmark, where I also visited, 

is even more different: a tiny, homogeneous 

country (population 5.5 million), 

with the world’s most developed welfare 

state. What, I asked, could it possibly have 

in common with the giant, hyper-diverse 

US, the world’s most developed free-market 

economy? 

In both Germany and Denmark, unlike 

in the US, the immigration debate is less 

about how many foreigners to admit than it 

is about how to handle those already living 

there. In the 1960s, both nations imported 

guest workers from southern Europe and 

Turkey – foreigners allowed to stay, joined 

later by their families. But for one reason or 

another – some economic, some cultural, 

some rooted in government shortsightedness 

– many of these workers and families 

failed to integrate into their new societies. 

And over the past decade, both German and 

Danish publics have become increasingly 

alarmed, calling for sometimes helpful, 

sometimes punitive and coercive integration 

policies – from government-funded 

language courses to much-resented restrictions 

on visas for foreign spouses. 

Still, for all the differences, when you 

scratch the surface, Europe and the US 

turn out to be more similar than they first 

appear. All three countries, it turns out, 

need foreign workers – both highly skilled 

and less skilled. But voters in all three 

nations are anxious about the cultural 

As the world’s second 

largest exporter, just 

behind China, Germany has a 

voracious need for foreign 

workers to do jobs Germans 

are either too educated or 

not educated enough to do. 

differences the immigrants bring. As a 

result, policymakers in all three places are 

paralyzed: caught between rationality and 

emotion, between their country’s economic 

interests and voters’ spiraling fear and 

resentment. 

As the world’s second largest exporter, 

just behind China, Germany has a voracious 

need for foreign workers to do jobs 

Germans are either too educated or not 

educated enough to do. Every summer 

300,000 Eastern Europeans and others 

come to Germany to fill seasonal agricultural 

jobs. That’s a huge number: translated 

to the US, it would amount to 1.2 million 

agricultural workers every year. In fact, we 

admit fewer than 70,000 legally, relying 

instead largely on illegal immigrants. But 

the bottom line is the same in both countries: 

the domestic workforce, hardly growing 

and increasingly educated, has less 

and less interest in outdoor, physical work. 

Neither nation can sustain its agricultural 

sector without immigrants. And in both 

countries, even in the downturn, the same 

is true in an array of other industries – hospitality, 

the personal service sector, and, 

most urgently in Germany, home healthcare 

for the elderly. 

Europe’s generous welfare 

states complicate the picture. In 

the US, the labor market self-corrects 

to synchronize with the business cycle. 

Thanks to cell phones and the Internet, 

even unskilled workers know about job 

opportunities a continent away. And when 

little work is available, fewer migrants 

make the trip – so few that during the 

downturn less than half as many Mexicans 

entered the US each year than were coming 

a decade ago, when the economy was booming. 

It doesn’t work that way in Germany 

or Denmark, where many immigrants and 

their children find it cheaper to live on the 

dole than hold a job. Still, in either case, 

what drives most migration is an economic 

calculus – individuals’ calculus about their 

opportunities in a global labor market. 

Receiving countries need to manage this 

dynamic to their advantage. 

The same is true at the skilled end of 

the job ladder. The twenty-first century is 

posing the same challenge in all developed 

countries. Innovation is our era’s key to 

business success, not just in it and communications, 

but also in traditional sectors 

from banking to manufacturing. No nation 

produces enough scientists, engineers, 

inventors, or high-end business managers 

to drive its knowledge economy. And all of 

our countries are scrambling to attract fi


© Scott Groller 

Dave McKenzie, installation from the exhibit Screen Doors on Submarines at REDcat, Los Angeles, 2008


highly skilled immigrants. This is 

the global race of our era: not for new, 

advanced weaponry – or colonies or 

natural resources – but for international 

brainpower. 

In 2005 Germany created a new visa 

to attract highly skilled immigrants. 

It’s an appealing package: the visa is 

permanent, not temporary; you can 

bring your spouse, who can also work 

legally. And there’s no test to determine 

if you’re taking a job that could 

be filled by a German worker, tests of 

a kind that often lead to red tape and 

delay. Still, even these favorable terms 

attracted fewer than 200 applications 

for the new visa last year. In the US, by 

contrast, we admit some 350,000 highly 

skilled immigrants annually, some temporary, 

some permanent, plus roughly 

five times as many foreign students as 

Germany. Yet in the US, too, employers – 

from universities to government labs to 

cutting-edge it companies – complain 

about a shortage of high-end workers. 

It’s no mystery why policymakers in 

Germany, Denmark, and the US have 

proven unable or unwilling to satisfy 

their economies’ demand for foreign 

workers. Voters in all three countries are 

skeptical of immigrants, if not hostile 

to them, blind to the economic benefits 

they bring, and worried about whether 

they will integrate. Last summer, 

establishment politician and former 

central banker Thilo Sarrazin shocked 

Germany with an incendiary, bestselling 

book claiming that immigration 

was destroying the country, more than 

likely because of foreigners’ defective 

genes. In Denmark, the Danish People’s 

Party is fixated on origins, calling for a 

halt to all immigration from non-Western 

countries. And though Denmark’s 

mainstream parties have hesitated to 

go that far, in government both left 

and right have followed the DPP’s lead, 

slowly making their tiny country less 

and less hospitable to foreigners. 

In America, we still pride ourselves 

on being a nation of immigrants, and 

we frown on talk of genetic inferiority. 

But returning to the US from Europe this 

spring, I began to feel this was perhaps a 

distinction without as much difference as I 

once thought. Rising anti-immigrant sentiment 

in Arizona and elsewhere doesn’t 

feel that far removed from the xenophobia 

surfacing in Germany and Denmark. And 

new claims, from House Republicans 

and others, that every immigrant we 

deport will open a job for an unemployed 

American, are just as misleading and ultimately 

self-defeating as the counterfactual 

anti-immigrant arguments I heard in 

Europe. Once again, in all three countries, 

the bottom line seems much the same: rising 

public anxiety, mainly about unskilled 

immigrants, is driving out all rational 

discussion and preventing policymakers 

from acting effectively to meet national 

economic needs. 

The fact that many of the immigrants in 

Germany and Denmark are Muslims only 

raises the stakes, adding to concerns about 

what their failure to integrate would mean 

for the host country – for its cultural mores 

and national security. Muslim populations 

are growing; native-born families are having 

fewer children. And it’s easy for many 

Danes and Germans to imagine the worst – 

that every headscarf and every mosque is 

a sign of surging fundamentalism. 

there is relatively little American debate about whether 

immigrants are succeeding in the United States. 

We count on the traditions of generations past – that 

mysterious alchemy we once called “the melting pot.” 

Thoughtful people in both Denmark and 

Germany recognize that radical Islam is 

a reality in their country, but many feel the 

threat is exaggerated. According to Naser 

Khader, a Danish member of parliament 

of Syrian-Palestinian descent and an outspoken 

critic of Islamic fundamentalism, 

perhaps 10 percent of Muslims in Denmark 

are anti-Western Islamists. An equal share, 

he says, are unequivocally supportive of 

Western values. The problem, in his view, 

and survey research bears him out, is that 

the majority in the middle is often hesitant 

to repudiate radicals, and no one, newcomer 

or native born, draws a sharp enough 

distinction between “religious Islam” and 

“political Islam.” This dynamic and the 

need to reverse it help put our American 

situation in some perspective. Whatever 

problems we’re facing, they look small in 

comparison to Europe’s. 

Still, standing back, I found myself struck 

by a final, haunting parallel. We Americans 

tend to think we know the answers on 

immigrant integration. We argue bitterly 

about border issues and enforcement and 

how many foreign workers to admit. But 

compared to Europe there is relatively little 

American debate about whether immigrants 

are succeeding in the United States. 

We count on the traditions of generations 

past – that mysterious alchemy we once 

called “the melting pot.” And unlike 

in Europe, we make virtually no effort to 

help newcomers make their way in the 

new country. 

But what if, like Europe a generation 

ago, we too are sowing the seeds 

of a long-term failure? True, immigrants 

in the US are still integrating more 

successfully than in Europe: labor force 

participation is higher, unemployment 

lower, language acquisition and educational 

outcomes significantly better. But what 

kinds of results can we expect over the long 

haul from eleven million unauthorized 

immigrants and their children – newcomers 

blocked by law from full participation in 

society? Workers stuck in black-market jobs 

with little opportunity for advancement; 

families discouraged from putting down 

roots; parents afraid to send their children 

to school; talented students denied college 

scholarships – it’s not exactly a recipe for 

successful assimilation. Add our angry 

debate to the mix – the unrelenting antiimmigrant 

rhetoric now a staple across 

the country – and it’s hard not to fear for 

the future. Legal and illegal, Latino young 

people are getting the message, and it is 

breeding social alienation that will create 

problems for decades to come. 

Yes, the US and Europe are different. 

But thanks to the global economy, we are 

all what Germans call “immigration countries,” 

and the challenges we’re facing are 

surprisingly similar. So instead of a needed 

respite, my time in Europe felt like a wakeup 

call. America has a glorious record as 

a nation of immigrants, but that heritage 

may be more fragile than we think. µ 

Tamar Jacoby, president of 

ImmigrationWorks USA, was a Bosch 

Public Policy Fellow at the American 

Academy in fall 2010. A version of this 

article first appeared in Zócalo Public 

Square, an online magazine.


crossing over 

The precarious practice of Thomas Hirschhorn 

By Hal Foster 

What happens when the 

avant-garde is faced with a state 

of emergency, whether real (when 

the rule of law is actually suspended) or 

imagined (when it only seems to be)? 

Modernist movements like Dada were 

marked by the chaos of world war, to be 

sure, yet in many ways our own present is 

also one of emergency. If there is a condition 

that has governed recent art, it is a 

precarious one. 

Almost any litany of the machinations 

of the last ten years will evoke this state of 

uncertainty: a stolen presidential election; 

the attacks of September 11 and the War on 

Terror; the deception of the Iraq War and 

the debacle of the occupation; Abu Ghraib, 

Guantánamo Bay, and rendition to torture 

camps; another problematic presidential 

election; Katrina; the scapegoating of 

immigrants; the healthcare crisis; the ecological 

disaster; the financial house of cards, 

and so on. For all the discussion of “rogue 

states” elsewhere, our own government 

has sometimes operated out of bounds. It 

is little wonder, then, that the concept of 

“the state of exception” (developed by Carl 

Schmitt, in the early 1920s) was revived, 

that this state once again appeared to be 

“not the exception but the rule,” as Walter 

Benjamin wrote in his 1940 essay “Theses 

on the Philosophy of History,” and that 

as a consequence one could assert that the 

camp was “the new biopolitical nomos 

of the planet,” as Giorgio Agamben did 

in 1994. 

Perhaps our political bond – whether we 

call it the “social contract” or the “symbolic 

order” – is always more tenuous than we 

think; it was certainly precarious long 

before September 11. Prior to Bush and 

Blair, Reagan and Thatcher led the charge 

of neoliberalism with the battle cry, “There 

is no such thing as society,” and the lives of 

the most vulnerable (the underclass, gays 

and lesbians, immigrants) have become 

ever more precarious since. It is this heightened 

insecurity that some art has attempted 

to manifest, even to exacerbate. This 

social instability is redoubled by an artistic 

instability, as this contemporary practice 

foregrounds its own schismatic condition, 

too, its own lack of shared meanings and 

methods. Paradoxically, then, “precarity” is 

almost constitutive of some art today. 

This “precariat” is seen as a product of the 

post-Fordist economy; though, historically, precarity might 

be more the rule, and the Fordist promise of relative job 

security and union protection the exception. 

Precarity has come to figure in sociological 

discourse, where it is used to describe 

the situation of a vast number of laborers 

in neoliberal capitalism whose employment 

(let alone healthcare, insurance, 

and pension) is anything but guaranteed. 

This “precariat” is seen as a product of the 

post-Fordist economy; though, historically, 

precarity might be more the rule, and the 

Fordist promise of relative job security and 

union protection the exception, as Gerald 

Raunig points out in A Thousand Machines 

(2010). It is a tricky category. What might 

be lost in a discursive shift from “proletariat” 

to “precariat”? Might the latter term 

normalize a specific condition, a “society 

of risk,” a condition that is subject to challenge 

and change? Can the precariat be 

pried from its victim status and developed 

as a social movement? At least one thing is 

certain: it is not a unified class. As Raunig 

argues, there are “smooth forms of precarization” 

for “digital bohemians” and 

“intellos précaires,” on the one hand, and 

“rigidly repressive forms of labor discipline,” 

for migrants and sans papiers, on the other. 

The Swiss artist Thomas 

Hirschhorn, who represents 

Switzerland in the 2011 Venice 

Biennale, has long used the term précaire, 

though its full significance was not always 

apparent. Initially the term denoted the 

insecure status and limited duration of 

his pieces, some of which, such as Travaux 

abandonnés and Jemand kümmert sich um 

meine Arbeit (both 1992), were made up of 

odds and ends left on the street to be picked 

up by others. In a conversation with Alison 

M. Gingeras, Hirschhorn stressed the 

commonality of his means: 

What I’ve got around me is some packing 

material; there’s some aluminum 

foil in the kitchen and there are cardboard 

boxes and wood panels downstairs 

on the street. That makes sense to me: 

I use the materials around me. These 

materials have no energetic or spiritual 

power. They’re materials that everyone 

in the world is familiar with; they’re 

ordinary materials. 

For a while, Hirschhorn merely distinguished 

the precarious from the ephemeral. 

He told Gingeras, 

My work isn’t ephemeral, it’s precarious. 

It’s humans who decide and determine 

how long the work lasts. The term


© Photo courtesy of Paul Sacher Foundation 

© Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London 

Stefan wolpe, circa 1936 

Thomas Hirschhorn, Europa, 1999, Mixed media wall sculpture, 181 x 221 x 6 cm 

‘ephemeral’ comes from nature, but 

nature doesn’t make decisions. 

Soon enough, however, the precarious 

came to figure less as a characteristic of his 

work than as a predicament of the people 

addressed by précaire, with ramifications 

both ethical and political. 

Is there a way to cross from our stable, 

secure, and safe space in order to join 

the space of the precarious? Is it possible, 

by voluntarily crossing the border 

of this protected space, to establish new 

values, real values, the values of the 

precarious – uncertainty, instability, and 

self-authorization? 

This is a question that Hirschhorn has 

probed in all three of his “monuments” to 

date, which take the form of makeshift 

centers of homage, assembled with the help 

of local inhabitants, where discussions, 

readings, performances, and more casual 

encounters can occur. 

The first monument, dedicated to 

Baruch Spinoza, was set in the red-light 

district of Amsterdam, in 1999; the second, 

to Gilles Deleuze, was located in a 

mostly North African quarter of Avignon, 

France, in 2000; and the third, to Georges 

Bataille, was placed in a largely Turkish 

neighborhood in Kassel, in 2002; a fourth, 

the last, dedicated to Antonio Gramsci, is 

planned for Queens, New York, in 2012. 

This practice of “the precarious as a real 

form” has also guided Hirschhorn in his 

other projects, such as his Musée Précaire 

Albinet, set in the Aubervilliers banlieue 

of Paris, in 2004, and his Bijlmer-Spinoza 

Festival, located in the Biljmer project of 

Amsterdam, in 2009. 

What does this precarious practice entail? 

“The truth can only be touched in art in 

hazardous, contradictory, and hidden 

encounters,” Hirschhorn asserted in a text 

for his 2006 installation Restore Now. This 

suggests a first principle, an actual sharing 

in the conditions of social risk lived by a 

precariat in a particular situation; to this 

end, Hirschhorn has sometimes adopted 

the guise of a squatter on-site (in effect, 

he also “squats” the work of the artists, 

writers, and philosophers chosen for his 

altars, kiosks, and monuments). “In order 

to reach this moment I have to be present 

and I have to be awake,” Hirschhorn 

continues. “I have to stand up, I have to 

face the world, the reality, the time and I 

have to risk myself. That is the beauty in 

precariousness.” Alert to the Deleuzian 

caveat about “the indignity of speaking for 

others,” Hirschhorn does not stand in fi


place of a precariat; rather, he insists, in an 

essay for Musée Précaire Albinet, he wants 

“to engage [in] dialogue with the other without 

neutralizing him.” 

In fact, Hirschhorn does not always seek 

solidarity with this precariat, for such solidarity 

might only come of a forced union of 

very different parties. To the benign community 

imagined by relational aesthetics, 

he counters with the principle of “Presence 

and Production,” which names his double 

commitment to be present on the site 

where he produces his work and acknowledges 

that the result might be antagonism 

with residents as much as fellowship. In 

this way, Hirschhorn updates the argument 

in “Author as Producer” (1934), where 

Benjamin finds the political use-value of a 

work less in the attitude of its content than 

in the import of its production. 

the political dimension 

of the precarious shades 

into the ethical. 

Precarious derives, the oed 

tells us, “from the Latin precarius, 

obtained by entreaty, depending 

on the favor of another, hence uncertain, 

precarious, from precem, prayer.” This definition 

underscores that this state of insecurity 

is a constructed one, engineered by 

a regime of power on whose favor the precariat 

depends and which it can only petition. 

This means that to act out the precarious, 

as Hirschhorn often does, is not only 

to evoke its perilous and privative effects 

but also to intimate how and why they are 

produced, and so to implicate the authority 

that imposes this “revocable tolerance,” as 

his sometime collaborator, the French poet 

Manuel Joseph, defines précarité. The note 

of entreaty lodged in the word “precarious” 

is strong in many Hirschhorn projects, 

where it often also carries the force of 

accusation. 

Here the political dimension of the precarious 

shades into the ethical. “To give a 

form to the precarious,” Hirschhorn comments 

in his 2009 essay “Théâtre précaire 

pour ‘Ce qui vient’,” is to attest to “the 

fragility of life,” awareness of which “compels 

me to be awakened, to be present, 

to be attentive, to be open; it compels me 

to be active.” In “Precarious Life” (2004), 

her brief essay on Emmanuel Levinas, 

Judith Butler writes in a similar vein: 

“In some way we come to exist in the 

moment of being addressed, and something 

about our existence proves precarious 

when that address fails.” Here Butler 

explores the notion of “the face,” which 

Levinas posed as the very image of “the 

extreme precariousness of the other.” 

To respond to a face and to understand its 

meaning, Butler argues, “means to 

be awake to what is precarious in another 

life or, rather, the precariousness of life 

itself.” This is the face often put forward 

by the precarious art of Hirschhorn, 

who refuses to turn away. µ 

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin 1917 

Professor of Art and Architecture at 

Princeton University and the spring 2011 

Siemens Fellow at the American Academy. 

29


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Jürgen Ritter, Inner-German Border at the Junkerkuppe Hill between Lindewerra and Oberrieden, November 1, 1984 

© Ullsteinbild – Jürgen ritter 

© Ullsteinbild – Jürgen ritter 

Jürgen Ritter, Former Inner-German border at the Junkerkuppe Hill between Lindewerra and Oberrieden, September 1, 2009


No Man’s Landscapes 

The Iron Curtain stopped humans from crossing political borders for over four decades. 

In their stead, an ecosystem all its own. 

By Astrid M. Eckert 

One day in March 1982, a 

red telephone rang at the East 

German Border Control Office 

in Salzwedel. The phones had appeared 

nine years earlier, a by-product of the 1973 

inter-German Border Commission, and 

allowed for immediate communication 

between West and East German border 

guards. Conversations unfolded according 

to a strict protocol; the caller began by saying, 

“I have some information for you,” to 

which the respondent would answer with 

a single word. Not even a “Good day” crept 

into these austere exchanges. 

The call that day in March was no 

exception. A Western border guard in 

Uelzen asked his Salzwedel counterpart 

to postpone a scheduled mine detonation 

until late June. The explosion, the Western 

officer explained, would disturb the breeding 

grounds of cranes. The East Germans 

consented, and the red receiver was placed 

back in its cradle. Before returning to 

more pressing business, however, the East 

German officer mused over the peculiar 

nature of the call, making a note that 

“requests . . . pertaining to bird sanctuaries 

have not been made before.” 

In truth, no official bird sanctuary 

existed, though an accidental one was 

flourishing. By 1982 the border strip had 

already undergone more than two decades 

of enforced tranquility. East German borderland 

regulations, introduced thirty years 

earlier, had reduced legal cross-border traffic 

to a trickle. After the construction of the 

Berlin Wall, in August 1961, gdr authorities 

also escalated fortifications along the 

inter-German border. The various layers of 

border elements created a space Westerners 

commonly called “no man’s land” although 

it was part of gdr territory. It began at the 

demarcation line and extended to the first 

fence; Westerners were forbidden entry. 

Depending on the terrain, it could be 

50 to 200-plus meters deep. In the parlance 

of East German border guards, this strip 

of land lay “on the enemy side” (feindwärts). 

It was patrolled by reconnaissance troops 

(Aufklärer) known to be politically reliable; 

regular border troops remained behind the 

fence and covered the hinterland. Hence, 

this stretch of land rarely ever encountered 

foot traffic. Birds, especially ground-breeding 

ones, were the prime beneficiaries of 

the new ecological regime in the immediate 

border strip. 

What, then, do state borders 

do to nature? The inter-German 

border was, of course, a very particular 

border. Its political and social function 

was to delineate the socialist project 

the Iron Curtain was 

set up to lock people in, 

not to keep invaders 

out. Not surprisingly, 

it regularly drew 

comparisons to a prison. 

from its capitalist foe and to prevent East 

Germans from exercising a choice between 

the two. To that end, the East German 

regime invested heavily in border fortifications 

that were designed to kill. At the 

very least, 270 people, but more likely well 

over 700, lost their lives trying to cross the 

Berlin Wall and the inter-German border. 

Unlike other fortified state borders, the 

Iron Curtain was set up to lock people in, 

not to keep invaders out. Not surprisingly, 

it regularly drew comparisons to a prison. 

As the spatial theorist Karl Schlögel puts it, 

if borders are the outer skin of states, their 

appearance tells us much about the polity 

they surround. 

East Germany’s “skin” consisted of 

several generations of border fortifications 

that evolved from a simple barbed wire 

fence, in the 1950s, to an elaborate border 

control system replete with metal fences, 

walls, minefields, spring-guns, observation 

towers, flood lights, vehicle ditches, guard 

dogs, alarm wires, and border patrols in the 

1980s. In May 1952, East German authorities 

deported borderland residents deemed 

untrustworthy and created a 500-meter 

security strip and a five-kilometer-deep 

security zone characterized by access 

restrictions. All in all, the border created 

a buffer zone in the heart of Europe 

that funneled traffic through a scant few 

permissible routes. 

In view of this excessive infrastructure, 

Western commentators often referred to 

the Iron Curtain in relation to its impact on 

nature and the surrounding cultural landscapes. 

“From the air,” noted a British travel 

writer, “the border looks like earth that has 

just been prepared for a new road, much 

lighter than the surrounding ground of 

fields and forests.” Watchtowers disturbed 

the scenery “like the gibbets in a landscape 

by Breughel.” Another writer emphasized 

the border’s interventions in the landscape, 

describing the mined strip as it “runs over 

hill and dale, zigzagging through woodland 

and meadow. Trees and undergrowth 

have been cut down to minimize cover 

and provide a wide field of fire.” With the 

ground ripped up, weeds controlled with 

herbicides, and corridors cleared in thick 

forests, the idea of a “scar” in the landscape 

became a common metaphor. fi


A leading West German geographer called 

the border a Zerreißungsgrenze, a lacerated 

boundary. What incensed him in particular 

was the extent of arable land lying fallow 

in the East German security strip. For this 

geographer, the landscape on the other side 

thus took on the character of a “wasteland.” 

The Iron Curtain sliced through 

mountains, forests, lakes, wetlands, 

grasslands, fluvial ecosystems, open 

cultural landscapes, and even mining areas 

– a cross section of German landscape 

types. With the same biota often found on 

both sides of the fence, the Iron Curtain 

confirms a truism of environmental history: 

nature rarely respects man-made 

boundaries. The installations and practices 

that constituted this border, however, 

impacted nature and wildlife on both sides. 

Depending on the species, this impact 

could prove beneficial or problematic. 

Where red-listed birds eventually found a 

welcome refuge, game animals could meet 

a cruel end. Much like the recently constructed 

fence between the US and Mexico, 

the installation of a ten-foot razor wire 

fence between East and West Germany in 

the 1960s posed formidable challenges 

to mammals. Traditional deer-crossings 

became impenetrable, restricting habitats 

and interfering with genetic exchange. 

Worse still, along 800 kilometers of 

the border, minefields supplemented the 

fence. Between 1961 and 1986, well over 

one million landmines were planted. They 

were triggered frequently, and locals shuddered 

at the sound of explosions, unsure 

whether the mines had encountered beast 

or man. Clearing dead animals in the mine 

corridor was usually not worth the risk; 

an East German hunter residing in the 

security strip in the district of Schwerin 

remembers “cadaver fields” adjacent to the 

fence. By the mid-1960s, West German 

customs personnel in the Harz Mountains 

were convinced that the mines had already 

seriously reduced the population of roe 

deer. The mines were sensitive enough to 

be triggered by hares and foxes, prompting 

gdr authorities to insert holes into the wire 

mesh to serve as passages for small game – 

not out of consideration for the animals but 

because replacing mines was expensive 

and dangerous. The carnage abated along 

those stretches of border that eventually 

received a double fence, closing off the 

minefields. 

Although the East German regime did 

not intend the border to serve as a contact 

zone and tried to undercut any ties and 

unsupervised communication across the 

border, the Iron Curtain impacted the 

natural environment in a fashion that 

forced both German states to address its 

consequences. To that end, the Border 

Commission was founded in 1973. Its 

primary job was to come to an agreement 

about the exact location of the demarcation 

line in order to remove recurring irritants 

in German-German relations. Many of its 

subsequent negotiations, however, dealt 

with environmental problems, above all 

with water management. In the Harz 

Mountains, the border cut through a water 

reservoir, turning maintenance of the 

dam into a diplomatic maelstrom. Both 

sides also had a stake in the dikes along 

the Elbe River. Each and every cross-border 

stream could turn into a state affair. Some 

had been outfitted with grids to prevent 

escapes and became clogged with debris. 

Drainages in marshes could not be maintained 

because the ditches were off-limits. 

At times, the ensuing floods washed up 

landmines on the western side, turning 

farming into a dangerous occupation. 

Inter-German water management was 

probably more pressing for the Federal 

Republic than for the gdr. With 37 streams 

pointing westward and only ten flowing 

eastward, one of the overarching West 

German concerns during the 1970s and 

beyond was the pollution of border rivers 

and streams with untreated sewage, slurry, 

household waste, and chemicals. Similarly, 

the air in the western borderlands was at 

times heavy with sulfur dioxide, fly ash, 

and other dust, affecting people’s health, 

the integrity of forests, and the public 

images of borderland towns. The politically 

contentious border threw these environmental 

offenses into sharp relief. The 

history of the Iron Curtain thus confirms 

another truism of environmental history: 

if nature knows no boundaries, neither 

does pollution. 

In short, the border fortifications and all 

activities that kept them functional became 

causal (either directly or in a somewhat 

mitigated fashion) to changes in the natural 

environment adjacent to the border. The 

conditions impacting the 1393-kilometerlong 

strip on both sides of the Curtain 

The history of the Iron Curtain thus confirms 

another truism of environmental history: 

if nature knows no boundaries, neither does pollution. 

included its inaccessibility to humans in 

certain sections, and the relatively thin populations 

found in others; scant agriculture, 

forestry work, and fishing; the restriction of 

industrial development in the East and its 

subsidization to little avail in the West; and 

the presence of security structures such as 

fences, towers, and ditches. The resultant 

landscapes are probably best understood 

as having “transboundary natures,” which 

transcend a politically and socially constructed 

barrier, a barrier, however, that 

was itself an agent in their emergence. 

Landscapes with comparable transboundary 

natures emerged along the 

seams of the ideological divide in Asia. The 

1953 armistice between North and South 

Korea brought forth, in the words of historian 

Lisa Brady, “a new ecological regime 

. . . shaped by war and maintained by diplomacy.” 

A 155-mile-long and 2.5-mile-deep 

Demilitarized Zone (dmz) was designated 

as a neutral buffer to keep the two antagonists 

apart until hostilities abated. Not 

only did military activities cease in this 

stretch of land, but agriculture, logging, 

and development came to a halt as well, 

allowing the native ecosystems to recover 

without human interference. The resultant 

accidental nature preserve has become a 

haven for flora and fauna, most notably 

for migratory birds like cranes. In recent 

years, it has also turned into a destination 

for ecotourism, showcasing the once native 

natural heritage that had prevailed on the 

Korean peninsula before rapid industrial 

and urban development compromised the 

integrity of many ecosystems. Efforts are 

underway to turn this accidental oasis into 

a transboundary Peace Park or, in the yet 

unlikely event of a political status change 

in Korea, to protect the swath of land from 

sudden development. 

In Germany, too, the idea of transboundary 

nature preserves briefly flared up in the 

mid-1980s, when it had become sufficiently 

clear that red-listed species such as whitetailed 

eagles, black storks, eagle-owls and 

whinchats had withdrawn into portions 

of the sparsely developed borderlands. 

West German state officials, supported by 

environmental non-governmental organizations, 

extended feelers to persuade 

gdr authorities to help establish several


commonly protected areas on the border. 

These included parts of the Lauenburg lake 

region in the north, the Drömling wetlands 

east of Wolfsburg, and the Rhön mountain 

range straddling the border between 

the states Hesse, Bavaria, and Thuringia. 

None of these projects came to fruition, 

however. gdr officials, already forced by 

international agreements to negotiate on 

transboundary pollution, had no interest in 

getting roped into a cooperation that would 

increase unwanted contact with West 

Germans and did not promise any Western 

currency for the trouble. 

November 9, 1989 changed all that. 

At issue was no longer whether the gdr 

would agree to conservation across borders. 

Rather, the fall of the Iron Curtain 

suddenly presented both the real chance to 

protect the transboundary natures that had 

emerged along the inter-German border as 

well as the real danger of their destruction. 

Hastily opened and locally celebrated new 

border crossings sometimes led directly 

through the hatcheries of rare birds. The 

heavy equipment used to take down border 

fortifications and locate remaining landmines 

plowed through tranquil meadows. 

Bogged down by throngs of cars driven 

by excited East and West Germans who 

wanted to visit each other, politicians in 

borderland towns soon called for new roads 

across the former German divide. After 

years of controls and high fences, local residents 

yearned to swim, row, and fish in the 

border lakes, hike without stop signs, and 

take back the land. 

Alarmed by such demands, a group of 

conservationists under the leadership of 

a Bavarian environmental ngo, the Bund 

Naturschutz in Bayern, convened a meeting 

of East and West German activists in 

December 1989, calling for the preservation 

of the “Green Belt” that had developed 

in the border strip. The demise of the gdr 

and the concomitant disappearance of 

border fortifications allowed ecologists to 

conduct habitat inventories on both sides 

of the border, confirming the conservation 

value of what had become a unique string 

of habitats. Against many odds, the Green 

Belt today has become one of the flagship 

projects in German nature and wildlife 

conservation, enjoying widespread political 

and public support. Its efforts are seconded 

by the European Green Belt project that 

covers the Iron Curtain in its entirety from 

Finland to the Adriatic Sea. 

An environmental history of 

the Iron Curtain has much to tell us 

about natural spaces along fortified 

borders. It reminds us how military activities 

and installations shape environments. 

In view of the success of the Green Belt 

conservation project, it is quite tempting to 

read the Iron Curtain’s history as a “barbedwire-into-biodiversity” 

conversion. But animal 

encounters with landmines and contaminated 

rivers are as much a part of this 

tale as the resurgence of red-listed birds 

and undisturbed wetlands. This “dirty” 

side of the story makes the emergence of 

a Green Belt in the heart of Europe even 

more wondrous. What an environmental 

approach certainly contributes is a better 

understanding of the historicity of the landscape 

that the Iron Curtain occupied and 

helped create. µ 

Astrid M. Eckert is an assistant professor 

of modern German history at Emory 

University and the spring 2011 Daimler 

Fellow at the American Academy. 

Mehr ZEIT für Sie! 

Genießen Sie anspruchsvollen Journalismus. 

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25.03.2011 10:06:29 Uhr


The Dead Letters DepT. 

By Peter Wortsman 

image courtesy of the artist, www.christian-stoll.com 

christian stoll, mailroom, 2010


“Besides, 99 hundredths of 

all the work done in the 

world is either foolish and 

unnecessary, or harmful 

and wicked.” 

Herman Melville 

At 16, after my father’s repeated 

prodding to stop idling and finally 

make something of myself, I 

answered a want ad in the Sunday paper 

under the heading “Editorial,” and was, to 

my great surprise and decidedly mixed 

emotions, hired as a junior filing clerk in 

the Dead Letters Department of Selden 

& Reinhardt, an international dealer in 

obscure reference materials and arcane 

scholarly works: Uzbek-Russian dictionaries, 

Sanskrit etymologies, Finno-Ugaritic 

grammars and the like. 

In those bygone days of cheap storage 

space, before hard drives hoarded data and 

shredders devoured the detritus, Dead 

Letters was the company repository of 

the unresolved: partially completed order 

forms, letters of inquiry and the like, which, 

for one reason or another, could not be processed 

– either because the return address 

was unintelligible, the zip code inaccurate, 

incomplete, or lacking altogether, or the 

sender’s name obscured. It was company 

policy to maintain such missives for future 

reference, based on the old bromide: You 

never know. Envelopes stamped with a 

telltale finger above the words “Returned 

to Sender,” inscribed in various languages 

and shades of red, were filed and consigned 

to a state of administrative limbo. fi


My immediate superior, Leo 

Coocoo, was short, beady-eyed, 

near-sighted, stooped and squat, 

his oily black hair and leathery complexion 

mole-like, his paws girded with long fingernails 

twisted like claws, his foul breath 

reeking of mold and decay. He had worked 

his way up – or rather, strictly speaking, 

down – from company gofer to head clerk 

of Dead Letters, a position he had carved 

out for himself and from which there was 

no prospect of promotion. Still, Leo took 

unconcealed pride in his work, which he 

viewed as a wellspring of future possibilities. 

Having amassed a kind of patchwork 

erudition reading through reams of unanswered 

inquiries from, as well as returned 

Sunlight and fresh air 

never filtered down to our 

windowless precinct – 

sometimes I thought of 

it as a bunker. 

mail addressed to, scholars and librarians 

from a wide spectrum of fields, fueled with 

the conceit of the autodidact and the resentment 

of the scorned romantic, he felt woefully 

underappreciated by the higher-ups, 

who, by an inverted emotional geometry, he 

considered beneath him. 

“They see us as scavengers, but we are 

treasure hunters, Henry, archival archeologists!” 

He flashed me the semi-deranged, 

under-oxygenated smile of a happy coal 

miner in a Golden Book I pretended to be 

able to read when I was five, simultaneously 

nodding and shaking his head. Leo thought 

I had promising filing fingers and advised 

me to keep a good inch-and-a-half of nail 

on my right thumb and index if I hoped to 

make the grade. 

Sunlight and fresh air never 

filtered down to our windowless 

precinct, an oblong partitioned 

chamber – sometimes I thought of it as a 

bunker, sometimes as a submarine going 

nowhere, sometimes as the secret passageway 

of a pyramid – lined with scratched 

gray filing cabinets and illuminated only 

by a pair of flickering bare fluorescent 

bulbs forever on the blink, two flights 

below street level. Having come of age in 

the “duck-and-cover” days of the Cold War 

era, it did occur to me that I might survive 

a nuclear attack here, and so felt somewhat 

snug and cozy at first, even privileged – 

before the claustrophobia set in. 

There were a few minor annoyances I 

tolerated at first. The ceiling leaked a sticky 

black ooze and buckets had to be placed at 

strategic locations; their position changed 

in accordance with the shifting source of 

the leak and were emptied several times 

daily – part of my ill-defined job description. 

While Leo manned the helm, silently pawing 

and sorting the recently returned mail 

that dropped down the shoot, I was perched 

in an alcove adjacent to the clanking boiler 

room, in an armless olive-green metal 

office chair on wheels that badly needed 

oiling and gave off a tortured squeak. 

Despite the squeak, I even developed 

a fondness for my chair, which I dubbed 

Rosinante, Rosy for short, after the broken 

down nag of the Spanish knight errant – 

whose illustrated adventures, translated 

into Serbo-Croatian, and returned to sender, 

address unknown, I salvaged from a 

frayed Warsaw Pact paper-wrapped package 

and kept hidden at the bottom of a filing 

cabinet. I pulled it out and flipped through 

the pictures from time to time, focusing, 

in particular, on a rather racy depiction of 

Don Quixote’s lady love, Dulcinea, her torn 

dress falling off one shoulder, to distract 

from the drudgery. 

In the early days of my employment I 

liked to ride Rosy from corner to corner, 

shoving off with a spry flex of the knees 

from the cabinets assigned to the first few 

letters of the alphabet and butting the dented 

back of the chair into the x’s, y’s and z’s. 

Correspondence from foreign lands 

with unrecognizable alphabets were 

lumped together in what Leo designated 

the “Beyond-Z-Zone” – he himself had 

devised the system, of which he was very 

proud. It was my job to fetch batches of 

discarded letters and packages through 

which Leo had sifted, to be filed for future 

reference according to a roster of decipherable 

features, the first letter of a surname 

or company acronym, if that could be made 

out, or any other clue, like the city, state or 

country indicated on the rubber cancellation 

stamp. I was efficient, even avid, for 

the first two hours or so, studying each 

envelope closely, doing my best to break the 

code of unintelligibility. In time I turned it 

into a game, pretending I was at the nexus 

of a top-secret spy operation in the bowels 

of the fbi and that the future of the Free 

World depended on my precision and zeal. 

Occasionally I would break for target practice 

with rubber band and paper clips to 

simulate the firing range in the basement 

of the Bureau in Washington, which had 

profoundly impressed me on a family trip. 

On good mornings I took pains 

to weed out the obviously Asian 

letterings from the Semitic and 

the Cyrillic. But soon enough my spirit 

sagged and my energy level slumped for 

lack of stimulation and oxygen. I could 

keep filing more or less efficiently till noon, 

cheering myself on with the promise of 

light, nourishment, and communion in 

the company cafeteria and a timid peek at 

the lengthened lashes of the new recruits 

in the secretarial pool. But we were the 

company’s untouchables, the lowlifes at 

the bottom of the barrel. Leo’s oily hair 

and calcified claws drew sneers from the 

gum-clicking typists who changed hair 

color monthly and lived for their bi-weekly 

manicure. Being Leo’s underling, the scorn 

rubbed off on me too. At the water fountain 

they shrank from us. 

“Don’t let it bother you,” Leo breathed 

his foul breath on me in between bites of 

his mustard-doused Wonderbread and 

bologna sandwich, sensing my distress. 

“Deadbeats – I’ve filed more with my left 

pinky than their manicured digits ever 

It was my job to fetch batches of discarded letters 

and packages through which Leo had sifted, 

to be filed for future reference according to a roster 

of decipherable features. 

thought about.” At such times, Leo liked 

to reminisce. “Did I ever tell you about the 

time I hit pay dirt – almost?” 

“Tell me again,” I dutifully replied, 

repressing a yawn. Leo derived great pleasure 

from the storytelling, and it was a welcome 

respite from my filing duties. 

“It was a saffron-colored 9 x 12 with a 

broken red-wax seal and a rubber stamp in 

classical A-rab script I’d filed away in the 

Beyond Z-Zone,” he began. 

“I thought it was gold-sealed, Leo!” 

Leo shrugged, as if such inconsequential 

details hardly mattered. “Whatever, it 

was all Greek to me, but I kept coming back, 

trying to sniff out its secrets!” 

“Who was it from?” I asked on cue. 

“Just wait,” he winked. “Well, wouldn’t


you know it! One day, Accounts Payable 

hires this babe from Casablanca” – in 

alternate accounts, she hailed from 

Cairo, Damascus, Karachi, and Istanbul, 

sometimes she was a Kurd, sometimes a 

Chaldean, sometimes a Lebanese Maronite 

from Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn – 

“a swell gal with dark eyes and just the right 

length of nail.” – I could tell by the tone of 

his voice and the glint in his eyes when he 

spoke of her, particularly her fingernails, 

that he had been smitten in the Beyond 

Z-Zone. – “So one day I show her the letter. 

‘Sulaya,’ I says,” – sometimes her name was 

anglicized as Sally – “‘who’s it from?’ 

“One glance at the sender on the back 

of the envelope and those coal black orbs 

almost popped out of their mascara-ringed 

sockets. ‘This missive, Mr. Coocoo, is from 

the private secretary to His Royal Highness, 

Mohammed V, King of Morocco!’ She 

bowed her head as she uttered the name. 

“‘Holy Moly!’ I says, ‘Open sesame! What 

does His Highness want?’ 

“Gently then, like she was handling something 

precious, or dangerous, Sulaya inserted 

the long red nail of her right thumb in 

under the break in the seal, plucked out and 

studied the gold-rimmed letter.” – Leo’s 

voice trembled each time in the telling, as if 

he himself were the letter and that long red 

nail were inserting its sharp edge beneath 

the buttons of his pinstriped Permapress 

shirt, stroking his chest hairs. – “I tell ya, 

Henry, she was breathless! ‘It is, Sir, an 

order for a thousand red leather-bound copies 

of the Holy Koran to be given as gifts to 

the members of His Highness’ entourage 

on the last day of the month of Ramadan.’ – 

it was a chance in a million, Henry . . . a 

chance in a million!” 

“Did the company fill the order?!” I asked, 

though I already knew the answer. 

And each time he told the tale, Leo 

heaved a great sigh, part moan, part groan, 

part lamentation, dramatically laying a 

hand on his chest for the inconsolable loss. 

Slowly he shook his head. – “It was too late. 

By the time the big shots upstairs finally 

got their act together to reply, the old King’d 

kicked the bucket and the new private secretary 

of his son and successor, Hassan II, 

reneged on the order.” 

“And Sulaya?” I pried. 

Leo paused, his face flushed a Vitamin- 

E-deficient shade of faded red. – “She was 

promoted to the executive typing pool, and” 

– Leo shook his head and paused again, as 

though revisiting the memory of a terrible 

tragedy – “they made her cut her nails.” The 

reminiscence always ended abruptly. “No 

point crying over spilt milk,” he tried to 

shrug it off with a half-hearted smile and a 

last gulped-down bolus of bread and baloney. 

“There’s work to be done!” 

The afternoon hours were the worst, 

the final home stretch after coffee break 

between three and five o’clock positively 

lethal. I filed for a while till my energy level 

ran dangerously low. The boiler banged, 

a sharp pair of claws would 

clasp me by the shoulder 

blades and a malodorous 

cloud would waft round my 

nostrils. “Just keeping you 

on your fingertips, kid !” 

echoing my impatience, and the ventilation 

system strained noisily, pumping in a day’s 

worth of carbon-dioxide-rich yawns from 

above. I checked the ooze buckets and spat 

in them for good measure. I kicked around 

in Rosy, tilting with my windmills of boredom, 

peered repeatedly at my wristwatch, 

but time slowed to a crawl and the squeaking 

grated on my ears. 

Initially I was cautious in my distress. 

Leo liked to creep up behind unannounced. 

Suddenly a sharp pair of claws would clasp 

me by the shoulder blades and a malodorous 

cloud would waft round my nostrils. – 

“Just keeping you on your fingertips, kid!” – 

he’d slap me on the back: “Keep up the good 

work!” and slink back off to his hole. 

One day I thought I hit pay dirt. 

The brittle brown-edged envelope 

must have slipped out the back 

of a battered cabinet drawer and landed in 

another, God knows how long ago. I happened 

upon it when trying to wrench open 

the S-drawer. “Sehr geehrter Herr/Most 

Honored Sir,” read the crisply folded note 

typed on the Gothic letterhead of the Reich 

Office for Racial Research, “We are respectfully 

seeking any and all original literature 

available on the slave trade, posters, bills 

of sale and the like, as well as bodily measurements 

and sample skulls, should they 

be available, to aid in our research. Your 

kind assistance in this matter would be 

most appreciated.” It was signed Professor 

Hans Hauptmann, Doctor of Anthropology, 

Section Head, Department of Racial 

Documentation. I dashed over to show Leo 

the letter. 

“It’s a historical find!” I cried out. 

Leo gave it the once over. “It’s historical 

alright,” he pointed out the postmark, 

August 4, 1941. “A quarter century too late, 

f & f it, kid!” 

The same command to f &f (meaning file 

and forget), which I’d heard and dutifully 

obeyed countless times before now made 

my stomach twitch. Something snapped in 

me. The drip drip drip into the ooze bucket 

drove me to distraction. The sordid truth 

of my totally useless work broke into my 

benumbed consciousness. Nothing we did 

or would ever do down here mattered. It 

was a total waste of time. 

Despondent, I cast caution to the wind. 

It started with a stray letter of the alphabet, 

a furtive f scribbled on the back of an 

envelope to be filed, and soon expanded 

to full-fledged expletives spelled out in 

ever-bolder script inscribed ever more 

audaciously on the lips of envelopes and the 

fronts of letters and unfilled order forms. 

For weeks I got away with it, though the 

curses swelled to colossal capital-lettered 

imprecations: 

F*ck THIS JOB ! F*ck SELDON 

& REINHArdt ! F*ck DEAD 

letters ! F*ck LEO COOCOO ! 

scrawled in black magic marker and circled 

in rings of red. 

I gave poor Rosy a kick and sent her 

flying with a desperate un-oiled squeal, 

denting the gray metal face of the Beyond- 

Z-Zone. I fired paperclips round the room 

and peed into the ooze bucket for good 

measure. For a while Leo didn’t notice. Or 

maybe he chose to ignore these infractions, 

hoping I’d get it out of my system, buck up 

and pull myself together. But when finally 

he did, inevitably, catch me red-handed 

stuffing curse-covered correspondence in 

the gaps between hanging files behind the 

Beyond-Z-Zone, it was with more disappointment 

than anger that he let me go. 

“You had the finger for it, Henry – ” he 

shook his head sadly, unable to finish the 

sentence. 

I raced up the stairs, stumbling on every 

second step, chest heaving, gasping for air, 

my duplicitous heart beating double-time, 

feeling a bottomless sadness coupled with 

a profound sense of relief once I reached 

street level and ran out the door, as if half of 

me had been returned to life and the other 

half buried alive. µ 

Peter Wortsman is a translator and writer 

and was the spring 2010 Holtzbrinck 

Fellow at the American Academy.


REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh 

Amr abdallah dalsh, Prayer on tahrir square, february 4, 2011


Cairo’s Spring 

Cleaning 

A new generation of young Egyptians inspires the old 

By Roger Cohen 

Watching the revolution 

unfold in Cairo and, before 

that, in Tunisia, I have come to 

believe that 2/11, the day Hosni Mubarak 

fell, may very well emerge as an important 

antidote to 9/11. 

We have been living with an Arab 

Jurassic Park. Rulers in place for decades 

turned their countries into personal fiefdoms. 

They enriched themselves and their 

offspring, groomed to succeed them as if 

by divine right. All this was justified in the 

name of the tired binary thinking whose 

For a long time a dismissive 

phrase, “the Arab Street,” 

has been used as 

the glib shorthand for 

the disenfranchised 

Arab masses. Let’s retire 

the phrase. 

core was that the only alternative to jihadist 

mayhem in the Middle East was the repression 

of Western-backed dictators as practiced 

from Benghazi to Bahrain. In fact the 

brutality of the Arab dinosaurs fed the very 

condition the West has sought to reverse. 

When the only legal place of assembly is the 

mosque, Islamist radicalization becomes 

more likely. 

For a long time a dismissive phrase, 

“the Arab Street,” has been used as the glib 

shorthand for the disenfranchised Arab 

masses. Let’s retire the phrase. The Arab 

Spring has given the lie to it. I’ve seldom 

seen such discipline and composure – and 

culture – as in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Many 

people there said to me, “This is the first 

time I’ve felt I really count for something, 

that I as a human being have my dignity 

and can have some impact on the society 

around me.” Here was another source of 

radicalization among the systems now 

crumbling: people who feel their identities 

are worthless are more likely to subsume 

those identities in violent movements 

promising eternal redemption. 

Of course, the uprisings are not a panacea. 

Remaking Arab societies in ways that 

offer freedom and representation to their 

people will be the work of generations. 

There will be setbacks; as I write, the fate 

of Libya hangs in the balance. Germany 

knows something about how painstaking 

these rebuilding processes are – but also 

how they can succeed over time. The West 

has a deep strategic interest in buttressing 

positive outcomes, particularly in Egypt, 

where it will be important to show that a 

democratic system can also bring growth, 

jobs, and education. 

After Hosni Mubarak fled, I witnessed 

remarkable encounters between an older 

generation and younger Egyptian protestors 

who were working together to clean the 

streets. One young woman in particular 

made a deep impression on me. Normally, 

Cairo is the city of dust par excellence. 

But Tahrir Square, the day after Mubarak’s 

fall, was gleaming – almost Zurich on 

the Nile. I asked why she swept. “We want 

to clean out the old and bring in the new, 

bring in what is fresh,” she said. 

A man in his sixties 

approached me and pointed 

at the young woman, 

commenting, “They did what 

we couldn’t do.” 

Her vigorous sweeping was also about 

affirmation of purpose: doing things 

to change things rather than being the 

pawn of some despot. A man in his sixties 

approached me and pointed at the young 

woman, commenting, “They did what we 

couldn’t do. This is a precious generation.” 

In other words, the Facebook-armed young 

overcame fear. Both Egypt and Tunisia 

were studies in how real-time, flat, websavvy, 

youth-driven movements could 

outmaneuver heavily armed but ponderous 

hierarchies at a loss in the world of twentyfirst-century 

politics and social media. 

While reporting on the revolution 

in Egypt, I found myself 

comparing it to the tumultuous 

2009 protests I covered in Tehran. The 

Green Movement was an important precursor 

of the Arab uprisings. The repression 

of it was brutal, as I witnessed fi


but the Iranian example of courage in confronting 

repression important. Nothing 

has been more grotesque in recent weeks 

than the attempt by the Islamic Republic to 

claim that it has been a source of inspiration 

to people in Cairo and Tunis. On the 

Iran is ready for some form 

of representative 

government that will 

at last balance freedom 

and faith, rather than 

betraying the former 

in the name of the latter. 

contrary, Iran’s hypocrisy in repressing its 

own people has been further exposed. 

I have thought a lot about Iran since 

2009. The desire for freedom that has 

existed there for more than a hundred years, 

the hunger of which Ayatollah Khomeini 

spoke in 1979, at the time of the revolution, 

remains present in Iran today. Protest 

has been pushed down but anger persists. 

Many of the friends I made have been 

through terrible times since I left. Some 

have been in prison. Many are leaving, or 

trying to leave, mainly to Canada. It is a 

terrible waste. Iran is ready for some form 

of representative government that will 

at last balance freedom and faith, rather 

than betraying the former in the name of 

the latter. 

The example of Iran’s revolution 

has been much cited by those who 

believe the Arab Spring will only 

yield some new form of repression. Israel, 

worried by change and the loss of Mubarak, 

has advanced this view. My own is more 

hopeful. The challenges are immense, but 

Egypt, always a reference point for the Arab 

I believe 2/11 may do more 

to counter 9/11 than 

all America’s recent wars. 

world, can inspire Arabs with an example 

of freedom and development, as well as 

the first example of a peace between Arab 

and Jewish democracies. That will be good 

for the peoples of the region. It will also be 

good for Western societies. They have suffered, 

in New York and Madrid and London, 

from the rage the dinosaur-despots generated 

year after year. And so I believe 2/11 may 

do more to counter 9/11 than all America’s 

recent wars. µ 

Roger Cohen is the international affairs 

columnist of the International Herald 

Tribune and the international writer-atlarge 

for the New York Times. This essay is 

derived from an interview he gave on npr 

on February 16, 2011. 

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The Insurgency 

Within 

Out of Fallujah, into the bell jar of trauma 

By Kirk W. Johnson 

There is an amusement park in 

downtown Fallujah. Jolan Park has 

not functioned or amused for years, 

since our war in Iraq began. When Zarqawi 

held sway over the city in 2004, his minions 

reportedly used the cluster of shacks 

within the park as torture cells. Some of 

the fiercest fighting occurred there when 

the Marines finally took control of the city 

later that year. A grove of trees once shaded 

the rides, but Fallujans cut them down for 

wood to heat their homes and to fire the 

ovens that baked their bread during the 

siege. Splintered foot-tall stumps remain, 

dusted pikes stabbing up through the 

weary soil. 

One of the main rides, a whirly-goround, 

is improbably aquatic themed. A 

ten-foot-tall octopus, the color of moldering 

lime, looms at the hub of the ride, extending 

his swirling tentacles outward over the 

small cars, which are made to look like severed 

heads of fish. They are all scowling as 

they bake under the Fallujah sun. 

A motorless Ferris wheel slumbers nearby, 

more of a monument now, its bucket 

seats piling up with years of dust. 

I try to wipe the dust from my brow and 

cheeks, but it turns into a film as it mingles 

with sweat and clings there. I lick my 

lips and frown as the chalky dust settles 

on my parched tongue. The sky is more 

orange than blue. I do not like this place, or 

this day. 

Across the street, renamed Route Henry 

by Marines who struggled with Arabic 

street names, the veterinarian of Fallujah 

is waiting for me. Dr. Nazar is a tall, hefty 

man, maybe sixty, with a darkly creased 

face and gold-rimmed glasses that he 

pulls from a breast pocket before running 

through a list of supplies and equipment 

he has prepared for me, with the hope that 

I might direct some usaid support his way. 

He needs incubators, vaccines to combat 

diseases like Brucellosis, refrigerators for 

the vaccines, generators for the incubators 

and refrigerators, fuel for the generators. 

Syringes, gauze, everything. 

Ihave just arrived in Fallujah as 

usaid’s first coordinator for reconstruction 

in the city, after seven frustrating 

months confined within the sixteen-foot 

blast walls encircling Baghdad’s Green 

Zone. I am 24, relieved to be in the field 

and using my Arabic again, having studied 

and lived throughout the region. I came 

to Iraq to pitch in on rebuilding efforts, 

despite my opposition to the war. I didn’t 

come to party with drunken contractors 

and jaded bureaucrats. 

I want an early success. I’m not sure 

what information I’ll need from Dr. Nazar, 

so in a pale-green US Government-issued 

Federal Supply Service notebook, I write 

down everything I can learn from the 

doctor. How many head of cattle are there 

in Fallujah and the outlying villages? 

How many animals does he treat a week? 

Which diseases are most prevalent at the 

I have just arrived in Fallujah as usaid’s first 

coordinator for reconstruction in the city, after seven 

frustrating months confined within the sixteen-foot 

blast walls encircling Baghdad’s Green Zone. 

moment? What are the farmers doing without 

these vaccines? How many chickens are 

there in the city? 

I take his list, which will take hours to 

decipher and translate (after all, I never 

learned the Arabic words for Brucellosis or 

hypodermic or hoof ) into a report with recommendations 

for my bosses in Baghdad, 

and wedge it in my notebook. I heave my 

armored body back into the tub of the 

Humvee, and Dr. Nazar calls out to me. 

Mister Kirk ? 

One of the Marines protecting me gives a 

glance, signaling that we need to move 

on, so I answer the veterinarian brusquely. 

We never spend more than a few minutes 

in each place. 

Yes, doctor, what ? We are in a rush. 

Fallujah needs a working slaughterhouse 

again. fi


The Marines had temporarily occupied the 

old slaughterhouse just a few blocks away, 

which the veterinarian wants to re-open 

with our help. He needs a generator to 

keep it cool. He points to the ground I just 

walked across, at a startling rivulet of dark 

blood running alongside the curb, which 

is also stained blood-brown. The stream 

issues from the gullets of sheep and other 

small livestock being slaughtered twenty 

feet up the street. There is enough flow 

to stretch another fifteen feet down before 

it disappears into a small heap of rubble 

and garbage. 

It’s not good, it’s not safe to handle meat 

this way, Doctor Nazar pleads. 

The butchers are staring at us, in one 

hand a blade, in the other, the napes of 

wild-eyed livestock. Over their shoulders, 

the octopus glares. 

We need to clear out, a Marine grunts, 

to my relief. 

Sweetie ? Kirkie ? 

I opened my eyes at the sound of my mother’s 

voice and Fallujah – the amusement 

park, the menacing octopus, the veterinarian, 

the Marines – evaporated. Something 

was wrong with my vision; there was a 

jagged grayish frame around the edges of 

my sight. 

Sweetie can you see me ? 

Yes, I mumbled. What is this ? 

It’s a mask, honey. They put it on you 

after the operation. The doctors said 

that you . . . 

I was in an anesthetic haze in a dimly lit 

hospital room at the Centro Medico 

Bournigal in the Dominican Republic. 

I had left Fallujah a few days earlier for a 

week-long R&R with my parents and brothers. 

I knew there had been an accident, but 

the details now evaded my drugged state 

of mind, as I struggled to orient myself. 

I glanced through the tunnel of my vision 

and caught a dusky sight of myself in the 

screen of a wall-mounted hospital television 

broadcasting my reflection. Dread 

seeped from my brain, coursing throughout 

my battered body, which I inventoried 

with alternating panic and fury. I could not 

breathe through my nostrils. I furrowed 

my brow in frustration and a punishing jolt 

of pain answered. My teeth felt missing. 

My arms felt heavy. 

I was broken all over and could not 

grab the tails of any memories from the 

morning hours of December 29, two days 

earlier. They had all fled to an undiscovered 

country in my mind, and now amnesia 

had clawed an impenetrable ocean around 

them. I stumbled around my thoughts, calling 

out futilely for something to explain 

what happened? 

The antibiotics turned my stomach. My 

jaw broken, I drank meals through a straw. 

I soon gave up trying to control the eruptions 

of my mind, which erratically spewed 

forth scenes, snippets of conversations, 

and scents, without order or mercy. In the 

span of a few seconds, I flitted from the 

memory of a midnight ride in a Humvee 

filled with mannequins (to be propped on 

rooftops by counter-sniper Marines) to the 

wail and acrid smoke of my 1969 Pontiac’s 

roasting tires during a drag race in high 

school, to the past-tense conjugation of 

a form-four Arabic verb, to the name of 

my kindergarten teacher. At first, I tried 

to make sense, to understand why one 

thought followed another, but was soon 

beaten back by a new torrent of unconnected 

thoughts and memories. My mind was 

a wasp trapped in a jar, bouncing furiously 

against its walls and ceiling. 

I spoke with quiet apprehension: if 

I opened my mouth too wide, the tear 

across my chin would slit open and the pus 

of infection colonizing its borders would 

stream watery-yellow down my chin 

and neck. 

Mom, I need to get out of here. 

I know, dear, you will, but first you 

need to heal a bit more. 

The first drops of an oncoming storm of 

depression began to fall, as I realized that 

I had failed, that my mind had stumbled, 

that Iraq had spit me out. A year of struggle, 

risk, and fatigue had resulted in a chaotic 

disorder, filed neatly under the label posttraumatic 

stress. The fugue state that piloted 

my sleeping self from my bed and out my 

hotel window (as I would subsequently 

piece together from the reports of a hotel 

watchman) was not a state but a shadow, 

from which it would take years to flee. 

I 

would not return to Iraq to finish 

my work. Doctor Nazar would not 

get his vaccines. I always knew that 

I would eventually leave Fallujah, of course, 

but I wanted to do so on my own terms. 

The potent knowledge that I could just 

leave whenever I wanted had sustained me: 

I always knew that my seat ejected when 

things got bad enough. What did the Iraqis 

have? Or the Marines? 

The first drops of an oncoming storm 

of depression began to fall, as I realized that 

I had failed, that my mind had stumbled, 

that Iraq had spit me out. 

But I was ready to stay another six months 

beyond the year I’d already spent in 

country, partly in reaction to the endless 

turnover in personnel that was dogging 

even the most basic government initiatives. 

Every other night back in the Green Zone, 

there were “hail and farewell” parties in 

the aid compound, to bid goodbye to some 

lucky soul on his or her way out and to size 

up the fools who were only just arriving. 

Those who left brought with them a year 

of accrued but erratically documented 

knowledge. 

And in time, one sensed that we had 

stumbled into a sweltering Macondo, 

amnesiacs pinning simple labels on this 

project here or that face there in a futile 

attempt to exert control over a situation 

that was well beyond our grasp. usaid 

developed a massive database of its 10,000 

projects throughout the country, but I 

never knew more than three people in the 

government other than myself who bothered 

to study it. The Marines maintained 

their own database in Fallujah with photos 

and notes, updated regularly, on each of 

the sheikhs and civilian leaders throughout 

Anbar province. This one was good. 

Trustworthy. This one funds an ied-factory. 

We gave this one money in 2005. Rumored 

al-Qaeda in Iraq. This newspaper on payroll: 

don’t arrest editor. 

We pinned these little scraps of information 

to the hide of the beast, sometimes 

with hope, more often with resignation. In 

doing so, Americans attempted to reduce 

the churning cauldron of shifting alliances, 

insurgency, corruption, blood-feuds,


criminal enterprise, and revenge to a 

consumable broth. We hoped that once we 

left Iraq and our memory faded, that these 

notes, these databases, these reports would 

aid whoever was mad enough to replace us 

and patient enough to read. It was not to 

be. Each of us came in blank, unwittingly 

made the mistakes of our predecessors, 

and left with fried or cynical brains. Our 

replacements fared little better. 

Dr. Nazar’s list of medications and 

other veterinary supplies remained folded 

inside my notebook, one of a stack that I 

left on my desk in Camp Fallujah before 

leaving for what I thought would only 

be a week-long vacation, which, after my 

accident, resulted in months of reconstructive 

surgery and rehabilitation. During 

this time, the Marines surmised that 

I wouldn’t be returning, gave my desk 

to someone else, and likely pitched my 

notebooks into the burn pit. Within a 

year, nobody working for usaid in Iraq or 

the Marines knew who I was, and I didn’t 

know who they were. Iraqis that I worked 

with were assassinated or else chased out 

of the country. 

Weeks after my fall, I realized that the 

daily tide of Vicodin, depression, and 

fatigue would soon erode the details I did 

remember. After mourning the loss of my 

Fallujah notebooks, I pulled blank ones 

from the shelf of my childhood bedroom, 

where I recuperated. 

But I could not write with a normal pen. 

Both wrists were broken, and my thumbs 

and index fingers had been imprisoned in 

blue fiberglass, just inches apart. I lurched 

my way to the basement, where I found 

a roll of duct tape and a white sock from the 

laundry room. Even this degree of effort 

left me winded, with a headache that felt as 

though my brain was swelling against the 

inner walls of my cracked skull. I worked 

my way back to my room, sat down at the 

desk and placed the duct tape next to the 

pen and sock. 

I clumsily wrapped the sock around 

the pen and spent the better part of 15 

infuriating minutes trying to free a corner 

of the tape without the capacity of opposable 

digits. Sweat issued relentlessly, and I 

barked, to no one, 

God dammit, does it have to be so hot 

in here ?! 

With great effort I managed to tear free 

a foot-long piece of tape, which I crudely 

wrapped around the sock. I lowered my 

right hand over the fattened pen and 

wedged it into the space between my 

thumb and index finger until it lodged 

tightly. I had regained the capacity to write. 

The sweat made the lacerations in my 

face sting. I looked at the clock, and realized 

that an hour and a half had passed, all 

for a sock-pen. A few weeks earlier, I was 

coordinating tens of millions of dollars 

worth of aid. People called me sir. 

I wedged the sock-pen into position 

over a blank page and began to write, in 

nervous and oversized letters. Most pages 

could hold no more than six or eight 

words. I raced against the loss of memory 

of a year that nearly destroyed me, filling 

notebook after notebook, documenting 

the recurrence of nightmares, capturing 

details from Baghdad and Fallujah, writing 

through my ptsd and my recovery. 

One morning, years later, on 

a golf trip with my brothers, I read 

about plans in Fallujah to convert 

the amusement park into a cemetery. In 

the weeks following the siege of 2004, the 

Marines warehoused the dead in a potato 

storage facility on the eastern outskirts of 

I clumsily wrapped the sock around the pen 

and spent the better part of 15 infuriating minutes 

trying to free a corner of the tape 

without the capacity of opposable digits. 

town, until the Fallujans ploughed their 

soccer field into a graveyard. They had since 

run out of room in the pitch, and were tired 

of burying their dead in backyards. 

Later that afternoon, I pull a wedge out 

of my golf bag to pitch a ball over fifty emerald 

yards of watered suburban fairway grass 

and towering oaks. 

Think you can clear ’em ? 

my brother asks. µ 

Kirk W. Johnson founded and directs 

the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies and 

formerly served as the usaid Regional 

Coordinator for the Reconstruction 

of Fallujah. He was a Bosch Public Policy 

Fellow at the American Academy in 

fall 2010. 

The List Project 

The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies 

was founded by Kirk Johnson in 2007 

in order to help resettle Iraqi refugees 

who aided the United States during 

the Second Gulf War. The project 

has brought together 250 attorneys 

from eight leading law firms to offer 

thousands of hours of pro bono representation 

for Iraqi refugees. So far 

the organization has resettled over 

sevenhundred Iraqis and cultivates 

grassroots support across the United 

States. 

The List Project was founded on 

the belief that the US government has 

a clear and urgent moral obligation to 

resettle to safety Iraqis who are imperiled 

due to their affiliation with the 

United States and who can no longer 

return to Iraq without fear of reprisal or 

death stemming from their affiliation. 

Legal volunteers have formed chapters 

across the United States and are helping 

Iraqi refugees with everything from 

retooling resumes to finding furniture. 

The List Project also provides 

recently resettled Iraqi children with 

support and material resources to 

adjust to life in the United States, 

called List Kids. This arm of the project 

sends monthly carepackages to children 

to give them a sense of belonging 

and to provide them resources to promote 

academic success. These packages 

include books, school supplies, 

ESL materials, toys, gift cards, and 

other emergency assistance. 

Never before in US history has 

there been such a vast group of refugees 

with access to their own pro bono 

representation by top American law 

firms. The project, which receives an 

average of 12 new Iraqi citizens each 

week, hopes to contribute to a new 

model of how refugees can be assisted 

and resettled with dignity. More information 

about the List Project can be 

found online at www.thelistproject.org.


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Spring 2011 | Issue 20

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